Deadeye Dick Page 0,59

since it could hear only my half of the conversation.

So this disinherited young homosexual at the other end of the line laughed and laughed. Bunny wouldn’t make any specific comments on his mother’s poor health. His laughter was a terrible thing to hear. He sure hated her.

But then he settled down some, and he told me that maybe I should spend more time worrying about my own relatives.

“What do you mean by that?” I said. The little ears of the mouse were fine-tuning themselves to my voice, not wishing to miss a syllable.

“Your brother’s just been canned by NBC,” he said.

I said that that was just gossip.

He said it wasn’t gossip anymore. He had just heard it over the radio. “It’s official,” he said. “They finally caught up with him.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

“He’s just another big fake from Midland City,” he said. “Everybody here is fake.”

“That’s a nice thing to say about your own hometown,” I said.

“Your father was a fake. He couldn’t paint good pictures. I’m a fake. I can’t really play the piano. You’re a fake. You can’t write decent plays. It’s perfectly all right, as long as we all stay home. That’s where your brother made his mistake. He went away from home. They catch fakes out in the real world, you know. They catch ’em all the time.”

He laughed some more, and I hung up on him.

But then the phone rang right away, and it was my brother calling from his penthouse in Manhattan. It was absolutely true, he said. It was official: He had been canned. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

“If that’s the case, I’m glad for you,” I said. I was standing there, with broken eyeglasses and gold pieces crunching under my feet. The police had come and gone so quickly that I hadn’t had a chance to tell them about the gold.

Gold! Gold! Gold!

“For the first time in my life,” said Felix, “I have the opportunity to find out who I really am. From now on, women can see me as a real human being, instead of a high-ranking corporate executive who can make them big shots, too.”

I told him that I could see how that might be a relief. His wife at that time was named Charlotte, so I asked him how Charlotte was taking things.

“She is what I am talking about,” he said. “She didn’t marry Felix Waltz. She married the president of the National Broadcasting Company.”

I had never met Charlotte. She had sounded nice enough, the few times I had talked to her on the phone— maybe just a touch insincere. She was trying to treat me like family, I guess. She thought she had to be warm, no matter what I really was. I don’t know whether she ever found out I was a murderer.

But now Felix was saying that she was insane.

“That’s putting it a little strong, I expect,” I said.

It turned out that Charlotte was so mad at him that she had cut all the buttons off his clothes—every coat, every suit, every shirt, every pair of pajamas. Then she had thrown all the buttons down the incinerator.

People can sure get mad at each other. They are liable to do anything.

“What’s Mom’s reaction?” he said.

“She hasn’t heard yet,” I said. “I guess it’ll be in the paper in the morning.”

“Tell her I’ve never been happier,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“She’s going to take it pretty hard, I guess,” he said.

“Not as hard as she might have a few months ago,” I said. “She’s got some exciting problems of her own, for a change.”

“She’s sick?” he said.

“No, no, no,” I said. Of course, she was sick, but I had no way of knowing that. “She’s been appointed to the board of directors of the new arts center—”

“You told me,” he said. “That was certainly very nice of Fred T. Barry to appoint her.”

“Well—now she’s fighting him tooth and nail about modern art,” I said. “She’s raising hell about the first two works of art he’s bought, even though he paid for them with his own money.”

“That doesn’t sound like Mother,” said Felix.

“One of them’s a statue by Henry Moore—” I said.

“The English sculptor?” said Felix.

“Right. And the other one is a painting by somebody named Rabo Karabekian,” I said. “The statue is already in the sculpture garden, and Mother says it’s nothing but a figure eight on its side. The picture is supposed to go up just inside