Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply these days. Mack’s thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, seemingly omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest criminal investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for nearly five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo’s bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack’s only company.
When one of Mack’s old informants goes missing and Mack’s face turns up in a dead man’s camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it’s increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for whom.
Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply these days. Mack’s thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, seemingly omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest criminal investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for nearly five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo’s bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack’s only company.
When one of Mack’s old informants goes missing and Mack’s face turns up in a dead man’s camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it’s increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for whom.
He’s an old hump, this one – sitting alone in the sewing room. Trying not to think about the heat.
Hard to do since that’s all the rusted rotary in the corner wants to talk about. Every time the fan makes another pass, it creaks, then rattles out a complaint about the heat not caring about the time. Nine o’clock in the evening and the temperature thinks it’s high noon. It’s like watching Bogart and Bergman in some old movie where the sound isn’t keeping up with the lips. Only hotter.
Nothing to be done about it except to try to pretend it’s not a problem. Try to pretend he’s not living on the surface of the sun.
So he keeps sweating and drinking and looking at the crime scene photos.
His shoulders are hunched into a pool of tired yellow light that glazes the top of the battered desk – saw-blade scars and screwdriver wounds and smears of old grease like black bloodstains – with a kind of luminous syrup. The light dribbles from a garage-sale desk lamp with a cracked plastic shade, craning its segmented silver neck obnoxiously over the back of the typewriter. Like maybe the lamp wants to see the crime scene photos too.
The desk is the same heavy, oak monstrosity. Jimmy Kline had helped him move it up two flights of stairs from the garage where it had long served as a shelter for luggage underneath and a platform for tools and a second-hand gun safe on top.
That was the last time he’d seen Jimmy, sitting on the stairs, sweating and panting as they’d downed the last two beers and traced the deep triangular sheetrock wounds they’d just punched into the wall.
They hadn’t talked much. It was a conversation of heavy breathing and grunting and swearing. Jimmy never liked him and he’d never liked Jimmy. Nothing like marriage and grief to bring people together; to get the heavy furniture where it needs to be.
And the desk – the erstwhile tool-bench, luggage-cozy – had needed to be up in the goddamned sewing room. Five years now and this guy’s no-account brother-in-law was in the wind, probably living out of his car to evade process or off scamming the daughters of the well-to-do. Florida, if he had to guess. Miami. Jimmy was Chicago-born and -raised, he and his sister both. But all Jimmy ever talked about was Miami.
Nothing quite like death to free a person.
But wherever Jimmy was, dead maybe, or in jail, or married with two kids and selling life insurance, who the hell knew or cared, wherever Jimmy was, the desk was still up here, crammed into the corner beneath the window so this guy, this miserable pathetic hump, can look out over the neighborhood after a hard day’s work and nurse an Old Forester and bang away on his vintage, dirty-turquoise Smith Corona Corsair. The desk had needed to be in the sewing room because the sewing room could no longer be a sewing room. The very sight of the sewing room would kill him. The white Singer sewing machine, and the rosewood credenza full of supplies, and the little cream-colored love seat, and the antique rocker with the hand-embroidered “I’ve Got Your Back” pillow. All that was gone now.
Because the very sight of the room full of those things, her things, would have killed him. One more glance inside as he passed down the hall to the guest bedroom where he now slept would have been a bullet to the brain. It would have killed him.
So. Just the desk, then, and the lamp and the Smith Corona and the Old Forester and the extra, suddenly worthless, dining room chair that had desperately needed to stop moping down in the dining room and come up where it could do some good. Those things and now the rusty fan too, shaking its head and bitching about the heat. The sewing room had needed to be a different kind of room. A home office.
Except that it would always be the sewing room. Her sewing room. The best he could hope for was a sewing room pretending its damnedest to be something else. A home office. It was a cheap, dime-store disguise at best. But he supposed it had worked. He was still alive.
Philippa leaps up onto his lap, purring. The fan is quick to warn against this, worried about the fur and the extra heat. But he doesn’t care. Phil always has a place. She rubs the top of her head against the back of his hand until he sets down the photos and dips a finger into his glass. Phil sniffs and takes the drop of Old Forester. He massages her soft tiny head until she closes her eyes and stretches out. Somewhere deep inside her white softness, she starts to vibrate contentment. His legs are uncomfortable. He needs to uncross and re-cross. But he holds his position. For Phil’s sake.
He gives her another drop, then takes a drink for himself and trades the glass for the photos. One at a time, he takes one off the top of the pile and brings it up to his face. He spends five, six seconds on a photo, then picks up the next.
The two dented, green garbage dumpsters jammed up against each other.
Next. The concrete loading dock behind Al’s Super Electronics.
Next. The broken metal fence running along the north end of Al’s all the way to the sidewalk.
Next. On the other side of the fence, the hulking eight stories of dirty brick that keep the tenants of the Chandler Belle Vista Apartments out of the weather, which, according to the pictures, looked to be mostly dreary with a fifty percent chance of gloom.
Next. A photo of nothing, foggy whiteness mostly. A blurry overexposure, quaintly anachronistic in today’s photo-perfect society. But incompetence never goes out of style. He wads it up and drops it in the trashcan under the desk. Phil watches, cocking her head like the discarded ball of paper might be a flying mouse or a discarded scrap of chicken.
Next. The tiny, black iron balcony on the seventh floor. That’s where the body had come from. Back when the body was still a person.
Next. Another shot of the broken fence. A closeup. Rough landing.
He spreads the photos out on the desk. He wants to look at them all in a row, so that they tell the whole story.
Not a real story. Well, partly real. Based on reality. But at the end of the day, an imagined story. The kind of story that this washed-up lump of a guy, this has-been, sad-sack hump, will spin up into a novel that he will send off to fifty agents who will each react exactly like the guy who, having opened his front door to find a burning paper bag at his feet, has started frantically stomping at the flames. And after all the fires have been put out and all the shit-covered shoes have been tossed out onto the lawn and all the front doors have been slammed, this guy will sigh and self-publish and then, inevitably, start on another story that is not real. Well. Not entirely.
Because the photos on the desk aren’t photos of an actual crime scene. This guy took them himself, one random Saturday afternoon when he was driving home from the grocery store. He picked a place that looked promising, a place that had once actually been a crime scene, pulled out his not-so-smart knock-off cellphone, waited for people to get out of the way, hauled his thick bag of bones out of the driver’s seat, snapped a dozen shots, drove home, put away the groceries, connected to Wi-Fi, queued the photos to his inkjet printer, waited, added photo paper, requeued the photos, waited, changed the ink, waited.
And then out they came.
But the question is why. Why do all this.
Because our guy here learned that the story comes easier if he worked it just like an actual case. Worked it just like he always had. Visit the scene. Stoop under the yellow tape. Take it all in, left to right, right to left, up and down, as someone in a white contamination suit busies about taking a billion photos with a real camera. Talk to people. Canvass. Press the flesh. Hand out cards. Then go back to the scene a dozen times, only without the yellow tape and without the red-and-blue lights and without the body that used to be a person. Scratch your head. Take your own damn photos with your own crappy cellphone camera because you sense something is missing that the first billion professional photos failed to capture. Go back to the landfill of a desk with your name plaque on it, pour another cup of weak coffee and make some calls. Stare at the photos. Go home, take the photos with you. Put on Billie or Ella or Sarah or Dinah and stare at the photos until your head hurts. Start in with the Old Forester. Stare at the photos some more, until you can almost bring them to life. Try to figure out what happened.
Try to answer how the person had become a body.
That’s why he took those photos.
Well, me. That’s why I took those photos.
That’s me there in the sewing room that’s trying to be a home office, bullshit writing den, sitting behind that monstrous, raggedy-ass desk. Me. Ray Mackey. Those are my photos. That’s my late wife’s cat in my lap. And that’s my half-empty glass of Old Forester that I drink these days like mother’s milk, two bottles a week easy. Because Phil, and Old Forester, and my memories of Marlo, and the latest story coalescing in my head, and this long, hellishly hot summer that will never end … these are the only things that keep me from freezing to death in Chandler, Illinois in the middle of August.
It used to be the job that saved me. The work. Figuring out how a person becomes a body. That’s how I survived for the first year-and-a-half after Marlo. I practically lived at the Chandler Police Department. No, not practically. Let’s be honest; I did live there. Slept many a night on that awful breakroom couch. Long quiet nights of working and sleeping and drinking until the sun came up and busted through those windows, splitting my melon into little painful bits. When I wasn’t out working the streets or killing time in my car, I stayed secluded in the northwest corner of the clamorous, glass-and-tile fluorescent box that was the homicide division, hooked into an IV of coat-pocket bourbon and unanswered questions about why people are dead.
No. Not why. How.
I can’t answer the why. Never could. Fuck if anyone can answer the why.
I’m retired now. Four years, two months, eighteen days. That’s a fake word, retired. It is for me. I was booted, plain and simple. Could have gone another ten years. Retired makes it sound like I’ve got a shiny gold pocket watch. Not me. What I have in my pocket is a rock with the word watch scratched into one side and the words fuck you scratched into the other.
I was a good cop. I know that even if nobody else does. They all used to know it. I know it was rough going after Marlo. I saw myself, believe me. But even then I kept my head down. Did my work. Cleared my cases. The squad was sympathetic. They let me have my space but they also kept me close. Poker night would come up on the calendar and someone – Deke or Smitty or Marty or Stretch – would always track me down, corner me in the breakroom or the elevator, and ask me if I needed a ride. Poker night and everybody is suddenly big into carpooling with sad-sack Mack. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. I tried plenty of times. They wouldn’t take no. They were a good bunch, those guys. Still are a good bunch in my book, even if they all hate me. I miss them.
I’d probably hate me too. If I thought what they thought. If I didn’t know better. I’d hate me too. A traitor to the cause of justice. A lowlife criminal with a badge. Good riddance you crazy, miserable, sad-sack, no-good criminal. I’d hate me too.
Crazy. They all think I’m crazy. Once the report leaked, that was it. It was all right there in the psych eval. Ray Mackey is not only corrupt, he’s Looney Tunes. I probably am crazy. That’s the one bad thing they think of me that’s the closest to being true. If the shrinks have a special name for you, then who are you to say you’re not crazy?
Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. That’s the special name they have for me. If it was more common, the shrink would use a snappy shortcut. DepDerDis or Triple-D or 3-D because we’re always in such a hurry to oversimplify what we’ve worked so hard to overcomplicate.
But crazy works too; it’s short and just trips off the tongue.
Triple-D. Not a bra size. I wish it was. It means I see myself as a separate person. I don’t mean I imagine myself abstractly. I mean I see myself sitting on a dining room chair behind an old oak desk petting my dead wife’s cat and looking at pretend crime-scene photos. I see it all, including the parts of me that don’t show up in the mirror. I see the back of my head. I see the sweat on my neck and the stoop of my shoulders and the roll of dough beneath my shirt that, less and less, divides my lower back from my backside. I see me, the guy in the chair, the old hump struggling in the heat to be a crime writer, all at once, as if my brain is tapping a surveillance feed from a camera that floats around me in a circle about five feet off the ground. Sometimes ten, twenty, thirty feet off the ground when I’m outside walking around in the world. There I am getting into my car after a shift at the mall. There I am eating a cheeseburger in the parking lot. There I am waiting in line at Value Liquor.
It’s everywhere, all the time. Twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five.
It’s not like I never have a normal perspective. I see what’s in front of my face just like anyone else. But my 3-D vision is always there, playing in the background. All I have to do is stop forcing my conscious brain to see things normally. When I have to work that keypad at the checkout stand, I’m like anyone else. But as soon as that’s all done and the card is back in my wallet, boom, I’m watching the guy who looks almost exactly like me pick up three bottles of Old Forester, lower them one at a time into one of Marlo’s eco-friendly cloth bags, and head for the door.
He’s almost exactly like me. Almost. Because sometimes, most of the time, there’s an aspect to that guy I’m watching walk around below me that doesn’t seem like me at all. It’s like hearing your own voice on a recording. You know it’s your voice. You remember recording it. But the sound you hear coming out of the speaker does not sound like the voice that you’ve heard coming out of your mouth your entire life. It sounds like someone else’s voice. But if it’s not your voice, then whose voice is it? Who the hell is that? Welcome to my world.
The guy at the desk empties the glass and rubs his eyes and wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He gathers the photos into a stack and pushes them away like a bad habit. He lowers Phil to the floor and stands up with a groan, stretching, hands on his hips. He looks around the room, rotating his head from left to right and back again like the fan behind him has finally taken control.
He looks in defeat at the Smith Corona. He’s got a laptop tucked away in the bottom drawer. It works perfectly fine, compared to the Corsair, which is completely missing the R. And the A and the Y barely leave any mark. He doesn’t care. Like Marlo always said, never second-guess your instincts or your inspiration. The old Corsair inspires him to write. He likes the percussive sound and feel of it. Like little gunshots. Not Smith & Wesson gunshots; Smith Corona gunshots. He uses the noisy, antiquated machine to ease himself into a new story. Once he gets going, he pushes it to the back of the desk and switches to the soft clicking sounds of digital sterility. He’s a sentimental romantic, this guy. Crazy, sad-sack Mack. He overindulges the past. He holds onto things he shouldn’t.
Still. He shakes his head in disappointment. He hasn’t written a word all night. He sighs to himself, trying to decide what to do next.
I know exactly what he’s going to do next.
Review: Message in a Bullet, by Owen Thomas
Hardboiled — a genre that I’m not really familiar with. At least until I read Message in a Bullet, by Owen Thomas. And, now, I’m a fan.
The story’s protagonist, Raymond “Mack” Mackey, is a “retired” homicide detective in Chandler, a suburb of Chicago. I say “retired” because that’s the crux of the story. After a long and distinguished career, Mack was forcibly retired under a cloud of corruption and suspicion. Now, almost five years later, he’s reluctantly drawn back into the same case — his case — and he’s still maintaining his innocence.
But there’s a twist here. Mack is suffering from a psychiatric disorder — depersonalization/derealization disorder, or 3D as he sometimes calls it — a condition where the patient, Mack, detaches from the first person actualization, and sees himself in the third person. Weird, right? It makes for some interesting narratives.
We meet Mack four-plus years since being retired. He’s got 3D, he’s working part-time as a mall cop, still mourning the death of his wife, Marlo, and his only bestie is Phil the alcohol-loving cat. He spends his time trying to write crime novels, while over-indulging in Old Forester bourbon. He is resigned to his life, although not necessarily enjoying it.
Then, two Chandler internal affairs officers knock on his door, insinuating that the case that ended his career is anything but closed. Thus starts Mack’s journey to find the truth, and clear his name.
This was an interesting read. It took me a while to become comfortable with the first person-third person transition, but it works well. The descriptions and dialogue are spot on, although, at times, a bit clichéd. But that’s the whole premise of hardboiled, right? The narrative is liberally salted with similes, metaphors, and hyperbole. Again, that’s what hardboiled is all about — the turn of phrase, and sparse dialogue.
Although a bit dark, it’s interesting to read the way Owen Thomas describes Mack’s world and the people in it. The gritty streets of Chandler, good guys who are bad guys, bad guys who are good guys, and a liberal sprinkling of the women in Mack’s life. First and foremost is Marlo, Mack’s diseased wife. In a series of flashbacks, Mack “listens” to Marlo’s advice. He claims she was the best investigator who ever lived — much like Philip Marlowe (her namesake?).
This book would be a great read for anyone who loves hardboiled, or noir novels, in particular, or if you like crime novels, in general. It isn’t an easy read, you have to pay attention, but it’s worth it. I'm looking forward to book 2 in the series.