A UNIFORM SHADE OF RED

Part 4

When NO REST FOR THE WICKED hit the shelves, I began my surveillance of Storm Warnings, Storm’s column. Two days passed with no mention of my new book. On the third day, there it was.

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“Well, well, well, folks. Seems Lash McGraw has changed his name and the genre of his so-called work — the two most creative things he’s done in his life. His latest, NO REST FOR THE WICKED, released by Spellbindery this week, again insults his readers with the same tepid tripe in this hackneyed horrible horror as we found in his weeping willow westerns. There is one positive note here, though. He has, for the first time, given us a reasonably believable, though dark, twisted hero in the person of Don Sanders. Don is a disgruntled postal employee who wearies of delivering mail to top floor tenants in a rural, but vertically oriented town in the central U.S. Out of frustration with the way his life is going, Don returns to medical school where he graduates in the top ten percent of his class. The conflict of this story revolves around Don’s allegiance to the Hippocratic Oath. He grapples with the oath and his inability to give up his nocturnal hobby of performing gruesome axe murders. He feels that the two are incompatible. The murders, it turns out, get committed after Don has sex with his insipid little wife, Page. The mere presence of Page tends to take whatever color this uninspired saga might have had and turns it into a uniform shade of neutral (or should that be neutered?) gray. My advice to Don is, stop sleeping with Page, it might turn your whole life around. As for McGraw, now F. Sharp (hit that one on your piano, there’s a clue in the sound), as a writer, you’d make a far better shoe salesman.”

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I can’t deny I was angry, but I was more nonplussed. Why? I set out for the Tribune’s downtown building to confront this Maxwell Storm. I wanted to find out why he had singled me out, and how he could have known McGraw and Sharp were one in the same. I mean, even the editors told me they wouldn’t have known, and they’re experts in things like that.

When I went into the main lobby at the Tribune to ask if I could see Storm, they showed me to one of the offices in the back corner by the fire exit. I couldn’t help noticing that only the name Maxwell Storm was on the frosted glass in gold. All the others were black. Ego, I thought. I stood by the door for a moment while I gathered up my courage, then tapped on the glass.

“Enter if you dare,” came the voice from inside. It was vaguely familiar.
I opened the door slowly and saw a man seated behind a huge walnut desk. Well, I didn’t actually see the man himself. He had his back to me and was looking out over the city. A bright purple beret showed above the high leather back of his chair. Smoke curled into the air from a particularly foul-smelling cigar, and a pair of the most expensive Staplegast wingtips lay heeled comfortably on the windowsill.

“Well, what is it, man? Time is money, you know, so get on with it.”

“Mr. Storm, my name is Frederick Sharp,” I said as boldly as I could. “I wrote NO REST FOR THE WICKED.” He just sat there, looking out the window and sucking on that cigar. “I have nothing to say about your opinions, that is, other than that I disagree with them. What I really want to know is, how did you know I was also McGraw?”

“Mom told me, stupid,” he said and spun around to face me.

Detective Belmont hadn’t interrupted me once during the whole story and, oddly enough, neither had Berni.

“Then what did you do, Mr. Pendergast?” Belmont asked.

“I…I ran from his office and into the fire exit with every intention of leaving the building,” I said. “I swear, all I wanted to do was get out of there. I was enraged and not thinking at all. But…but then I saw the emergency firebox on the wall.” Berni turned ashen and shrank further down into his seat.

“Is that when you took the fire axe from the box, Mr. Pendergast?”

“Yes, sir. That’s when I turned Danny’s mere presence into a uniform shade of red.”

#

“Is that it?” the wall asked.

“Well, yeah, I guess it is. Except that Berni kept getting me stays of execution, even though I asked him — begged him not to. I spent twenty-one years trying to get him to stop. He failed, finally, and that’s how I got here — wherever here is.”

“Fine, Mr. Pendergast. Do you mind waiting a few minutes while we confer?”

“No. It doesn’t look like there’s anywhere else to go and I’m not doing anything at the moment, anyway.”

After a short time, the wall filled with letters again.

“We have reached our decision, but before I let you know what it is, there are a couple of things I need to tell you. First, you really would have made a better shoe salesman. Second, you’re still stupid, Teddy. Stupid, stupid, stupid."