Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [49]
Some 250 books later, we gave up. I turned on the TV set, expecting to see Cronkite, or as Taylor called him, Uncle Walt. We had to settle for whoever it was anchoring the Saturday news. The reports from ’Nam were as scarifying as usual.
At the commercial break, something on the TV stand caught my attention. A burst of bright yellow on a dark background. It was the illustration on The Wretched of the Earth. I blew the dust off the cover and opened the book. In the middle was a folded sheet of ordinary white paper. I opened it out and saw it had a kind of letterhead: two hammy black fists, a grenade in one, an ugly-looking bowie-type knife in the other, and underneath them, the word TURNABOUT in thick black letters.
I held it out to Cliff. “What’s that?” he said.
“I have no idea. Doesn’t exactly look like an invitation to a garden party, though.”
I refolded the paper and replaced it in the book, then took them both to my room.
“I think I found something,” Cliff called to me a few seconds later.
He was in Annabeth’s old room, picking through the few odds and ends she had left behind. He was holding a couple of sheets of typed text. The pages were messy, sentences had been partially erased, corrected, scratched out. The words didn’t make much sense at first. But then I spotted my own name. And Cliff’s name. And Annabeth’s. And the word murders.
I had to read it over again before the pieces fell into place. “Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s a story. About us.”
“Who’s writing a story about us?”
“I don’t mean a short story. It’s some kind of report—about the killings and everything else about all of us. We have our own little Hunter Thompson in residence, remember.”
“Taylor,” he said.
“Yeah. Taylor. He’s writing about us for Rising Tide. Do you love it?”
3
Taylor was wearing a shirt and tie when he came home, a marked change from his usual Army-Navy store duds. Ordinarily we might have needled him a little about the job interview threads. Not today. We pounced on him.
“You’re being a little melodramatic, Sandy. I’m writing about the commune and the murders. I’m not ‘betraying’ you guys.”
“Then how come you never told us what you were doing?” Cliff asked.
“I was going to.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“I was, man. I’m at the point now where I’d like to interview everybody. Before we all—you know. Lucky I got Annabeth to talk before she split.”
“Let’s see the rest of it,” I said.
“What?”
“Let us read what you’re saying about us.”
“Well, no.”
“Why not?”
“Look, Sandy, I’m a journalist. I’m entitled to write about what happened. Don’t get so uptight. I’m not saying anything bad about you. In fact, you’re one of the stars of the piece. Your background makes you really interesting. That, and the way you’re obsessing about Wilt.”
“Is that so? I’m glad you think I’m so fucking interesting, Taylor. Do you think Wilt’s death is interesting, too? Jesus Christ, man, he was supposed to be your friend, not your big break.”
“Do me a favor, okay?” he said. “Just wait till you read it. Maybe you won’t be so judgmental then. Hey, look—Cliff, you’re not mad, are you?”
He wouldn’t answer. He just stood there with the typewritten sheets pointing at Taylor like an accusing finger.
Taylor looked relieved when he heard the knock on the front door.
Oh, right. It was time for them to meet Sim.
Dinner was “interesting,” too, in a kind of absurd way. I cooked, so the food was pretty awful. Cliff ate nothing, but must have downed a six-pack of Heineken. Taylor kept asking if it was all right to interview Sim, whom he kept referring to as my bodyguard, which annoyed the hell out of me.
After supper, Uncle Woody phoned and asked pointedly to speak to Sim, not to me. Guess he was still