Fires That Destroy Read online

  Begin reading

  Contents

  Newsletter

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  If you would like to use material from the eBook (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher: [email protected].

  Contents

  Harry Whittington, Paperback Ace: An introduction by Joe R. Lansdale

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Newsletter

  Copyright

  Harry Whittington, Paperback Ace

  He could plot like the very devil. He wrote well, and he certainly cared about characterization, and that’s what gave his plots weight, but it was the mechanisms of his stories that made them so interesting.

  Unlike some writers, Whittington had to know where everything was going, how it was going to happen, and how people were going to react to it. This may make it sound as if those mechanisms were robotic, but that is far from the case. Sure, Whittington wrote a little too fast much of the time, and there are places in his books that are not as on the money as others, but there was a pure storytelling drive inside Whittington and he was burning to get it on paper; and he did.

  I don’t know the exact number of books he wrote during his lifetime, but it was in the ballpark of 200. He started in the pulps, and was at the birth of the paperback revolution. He was made for that revolution, and was one of the most important writers in it. Along with a few others, he pretty much created the original paperback novel, fast-paced stories, shootings and killings and sexual titillation, and all the things that those seeking entertainment couldn’t find in films and other mediums; cheap entertainment for the masses, mostly male.

  Whittington had started out to be what some call a “serious” novelist. And then he decided making a living telling stories was more to his taste. Still, he started out poorly. He had a hard time selling his work, but when it did click, he was off and running. He was able to bring the better aspects of literary fiction to his crime novels and westerns, and for that matter most everything he wrote. It was a combination that worked.

  One of the things he wrote is the book you're about to read.

  FIRES THAT DESTROY is a favorite of mine. It owes something to James Cain, one of my favorite writers of all time, primarily for two novels, DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. Raymond Chandler once compared Cain to a Billy Goat, I believe. Whittington in many ways took Cain’s ideas of carnality and murder to a new level. He wasn’t as slick as Cain, but he damn sure knew how to slum in the best possible way. If Cain was a Billy Goat, Whittington, in some of his novels, at least, could be a Billy Goat on Viagra. And hey, that had yet to be invented when he wrote this.

  FIRES THAT DESTROY is very much of the Cain school, the Viagra added. It’s a third person novel, but it feels as if it is mostly told from the viewpoint of its main character, Bernice Harper. Whittington has many moments when he dips into her thoughts, her point of view. Bernice is a common person living day to day, and unlike the usual women in these sorts of stories, is not a voluptuous knock-out, or at least she isn’t from her own point of view. She is just an average office worker with nothing particularly interesting about her, until she meets up with a blind business man named Lloyd Deerman. He meets her where she works and where he is a consultant from time to time, and though he can’t see her, he takes to her. He convinces her to go to work for him as his private, live-in secretary, with side benefits for him, of course.

  Bernice likes the attention and the possibility of a better income, but is simultaneously humiliated, certain the attention he’s giving her is due to him being blind, unable to see how unattractive she is. Coupled with this she makes a discovery. Her blind suitor and employee has a large sum of money in his home, and something inside of Bernice Harper is awakened and snaps firmly into focus.

  Greed.

  Before discovering the money she felt worthless and without hope. Just an unattractive woman surrounded by people with power, beauty, and money. The possibility of being in a financial condition that will allow her to live more the way she would like to live is too strong a compulsion to ignore. Money, she feels, will give her prominence, opportunities, and hope.

  She makes plans, and soon Deerman has what appears to be an accident, and Bernice pockets the money. A detective isn’t so sure. He sees something in Bernice that others do not; a predator hiding behind banality. But the problem is, he can’t prove it.

  I don’t want to go into much more than that, the book should be your pleasure and I shouldn’t spoil it for you. But the power of this book for me isn’t so much the plot, it’s the escalation of the rotten drive inside of Bernice Harper that is so compelling, and the fact that rotten seeks rotten. And Bernice finds just that.

  FIRES THAT DESTROY is like so many of the best noir novels, the sort where you see the main character climb on a fast train with a straight track and no detours, even though like all noir characters of this sort, they should be able to look far enough ahead to realize that the track falls off into an abyss. Bernice should sense that just past the bright city lights and the chattering voices, way out there in the shadowed country land, the bridge is out and the train has nowhere to go but over a cliff, and into that aforementioned abyss.

  But the needy noir character, which Bernice is, stays on anyway. It’s the immediate thrill of the train ride she wants, and like a child, she can’t observe far enough down the track to see the doom that waits. She’s just too empty. Too hungry for something she can’t identify. She wants so desperately to have her moment, to fill that emptiness, she’s not only riding that train to certain destruction, she is in fact pushing down on the throttle, trying to get there way too fast. Like a child, it’s hard for her to understand there are consequences for her actions.

  Here’s a powerful quote from the novel, and one that gives you a feeling for what gives the book its power. This is from Bernice’s point of view, reveals how she feels around other people, how she feels about herself:

  “You become sensitive. You become so sensitive that two people cannot whisper across the room without causing you to be ill. You’re sure they’re talking about you. You want to run. You spend your entire life running from people. And all the time all you want inside is to run toward them and find them waiting, smiling, and their arms outstretched.”

  Ouch.

  That’s a sadly beautiful and revealing passage. With it we actually have the opportunity to reach out and touch the heart of noir, which this novel personifies, and stir our fingers about in a darkness that seems to have form but can’t be gripped; it’s that grim but not entirely recognizable emptiness the characters in these sorts of stories are always trying to fill, only to find that at the bottom of their emotions is a hole, and any sort of pleasure they put into themselves leaks out, allowing satisfaction, pride, success, to be nothing more than a fleeting sensation, leaving only need and greed and disappointment, and those whirling and insubstantial shadows.

  Another interesting aspect of this novel, and the modern reader might not snap to it immediately, but the women of this era were thought horribly vulgar if they were open about sexual needs and gratification. Of course, deep
down, even then, both women and men knew this was true, but it was not something that was open to polite discussion, and any woman who wanted or enjoyed sex was usually branded as a vixen at best, and more commonly a whore. It was like a truth everyone knew, that both men and women had “urges” and could enjoy sex, but it was hidden under layers of culture, like cheap paint over rotten wood. When that sort of lust was tied to greed and nihilism, you had the perfect 1950’s paperback-noir cocktail.

  FIRES THAT DESTROY is indeed that cocktail.

  Drink up.

  Joe R. Lansdale

  Nacogdoches, Texas

  December 2013

  One

  Bernice stood at the head of the darkened stairs. A swath of light reached out almost to her feet from the doorway of Lloyd’s bedroom. The downstairs foyer was brightly lighted and the shaded desk lamp was on over Bernice’s typewriter in Lloyd’s study. The rest of the house was in darkness. Below her at the foot of the wide stairs, Lloyd Deerman lay dead.

  For the moment she was unable to move. Bernice stood and stared down at him. His head on its broken neck twisted back on his left shoulder, his unseeing eyes stared back up at her.

  Her angular face was pale and her insides were tied in an icy knot. Her brown eyes behind thick-lensed glasses were dry and wide. Bernice was exhausted. She felt tired all over; so tired that she had to force herself toward the steps. Her legs trembled under her and she was afraid that she was going to fall.

  The grandfather clock began to chime. The sound struck her like a fist in the small of her back. She stretched out her hand to steady herself against the newel post. She stood rigidly while the chimes reverberated eleven eternal times through the silent house.

  Finally, when the sound was gone, she was able to move and she started down the stairs. Such a little thing, she thought. The sound of a clock and I’m paralyzed. How will I stand the rest of it?

  She steadied herself against the wall, feeling the roughness of it against her hand, withdrawing from the sight of the twisted body below her. She descended each step singly, trying to delay until she could gather up enough courage to step around the dead man.

  At the step above his head she stopped. She thought that he didn’t even look like a man any more. His right leg twisted oddly up under his body. He’d been big, weighing a hundred and ninety pounds. But he was bunched together now like a bundle of soiled clothes.

  His hand slid off the step. Bernice caught her breath. He isn’t dead, she thought. He isn’t dead at all.

  She bent down over him and held her head against his thick chest. She pressed her ear tightly into the crisp whiteness of his dress shirt. There was not even a tremor from his heart.

  She straightened and placed her cheek close to his mouth. There was the odor of whisky. It was strong about him. But there was no warmth, no sign that he was breathing.

  She stood up and backed away from the stairs. She kept looking at him, her teeth sunk into her underlip. She bumped against the foyer telephone on the end table.

  Without taking her eyes from Lloyd’s body, she lifted the telephone and pressed her hair away from her ear with the receiver. Her fingers were cold and stiff. Her hands shook so badly it was a full minute before Bernice could dial the doctor’s familiar number.

  Bernice stood, listening to the insistent buzz of the telephone across the wires. Finally a man’s irritable voice answered. “Dr. Mundy’s residence.” He laid particular stress on the word “residence.” “Dr. Mundy speaking.”

  “Hello,” Bernice said. Her voice shook. “This is Bernice Harper, Doctor. I am Lloyd Deerman’s secretary.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, Miss Harper.” The doctor’s voice lightened slightly. “What is it?”

  “Mr. Deerman has fallen down the stairs. I wish you would hurry over. There may still be a chance to save him.”

  “Damn!” the doctor said. “I’ve warned him a hundred times! I’ll be right over, Miss Harper. Don’t try to move him. Don’t even try to do anything for him. Just leave him alone. I’ll call an ambulance from here.”

  “Yes, Doctor. Please hurry.” She replaced the receiver.

  She ran her long fingers through her brown hair, brushing it back from her high-cheeked face. It was brown, stringy hair, showing the crisp ends of futile curling, and she hated it.

  She sat on the three-legged straight chair and stared at the body of her dead employer.

  She was still sitting there when the doorbell rang. She stood up then and jabbed her fingers into her eyes. For a moment the room swam in the water that brimmed her eyelids, and comets and prisms burst behind her eyeballs.

  Dabbing at her eyes with a damp handkerchief, Bernice went along the foyer to the thick front door. This was an old house, built in the late nineties, with gables, scrolls, and bay windows. It had been built to endure. And that’s what it had done. Its narrow front porch opened on a wide busy cross street. It faced swank new apartment houses and backed against a drugstore, a delicatessen, and a pawnshop in buildings all erected since the First World War.

  Bernice opened the door. It was a warm night, but the doctor was wearing a lightweight topcoat. It was turned up about his neck. He barely nodded and brushed past her into the foyer, digging a stethoscope from his black bag as he hurried.

  He removed his topcoat and Bernice saw why he had worn it in the warm night. He was still wearing scuffed carpet slippers, and had stuffed his pajama shirt into his trousers and shrugged his suit coat over it. Bernice’s mouth twisted in a wry grimace.

  Dr. Mundy tossed his topcoat and hat on a straight chair. He was a gray-haired man of medium height. His ruddy face looked well fed. He wore pince-nez pinched across the bridge of his thin nose.

  “He’s dead,” Mundy said. “I don’t even have to touch him to know that. He would have to be. His neck is broken, and I imagine his spine is broken too, from the way he is sprawled.”

  He fixed his stethoscope and bent over Deerman’s body.

  Bernice sat on a straight chair. She heard the faint wailing of the ambulance sirens.

  “Phew!” the doctor said. “He must have drunk half a bottle of whisky. He smells as if he’d rubbed it in his hair. And knowing him as I do, I wouldn’t doubt that he had.”

  Bernice didn’t answer. The doctor came over to her.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. He got a sedative from his bag and gave it to her. “Get some water, Miss Harper, and take this. I’m afraid there’s a lot ahead for you.”

  “More?” Bernice said. Her brown eyes flickered behind her thick lenses.

  “The police will come with the ambulance.”

  “Police?”

  “I explained that it was an accident. An emergency. That would be reported to the police. It’s entirely routine, my dear. If it weren’t for your overwrought condition, it shouldn’t bother you too much. But I think it would be a good idea if you would go now and take the sedative. It’ll quiet you.”

  The ambulance was screaming up the avenue. In a moment it would swing into the street before the house. The doctor flicked on the front porch light and left the foyer door standing open.

  Bernice hesitated until the doctor looked at her again. He motioned with his head for her to leave the foyer. She nodded and went across the study into the private lavatory beyond it. The light fixed on the unfinished letter she had been transcribing made a painful glare that hurt behind her eyeballs like little demons jabbing with pins. She jerked her gaze away.

  She closed the lavatory door behind her and then twisted the small lock. She crossed to the washbowl and with her thumb flipped open the paper container. She was going to sift it into the drain. To hell with a sedative. But glancing up, she met her face in the mirror. There was something in her eyes. It wasn’t shock, and it wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t hysteria. Her hands began to shake.

  She reached out for a glass, filled it with water, and poured the sedative out on her tongue. She drank the water, draining the glass.

 
She unlocked the door and opened it. She left the light burning and went back across the study to the foyer. Passing her desk, she again glanced at the letter, and again had to turn her head away.

  Two ambulance attendants were standing in the hallway with Dr. Mundy. Their stretcher was still folded. One of the attendants was young and blond. He was smoking a cigarette. He glanced at Bernice and then turned back to Dr. Mundy. The other man was young, too. He was short, stocky. He looked Bernice over carefully.

  A third man, stringily built and cheaply clad, was talking on the telephone.

  Dr. Mundy spoke to Bernice. “We’re not going to move Lloyd’s body. Obviously he’s dead. The detective who followed the ambulance is making his report to police headquarters. There’s nothing to do now but await the medical examiner. There are a few things you might do, Miss Harper, if you feel well enough.”

  “I’d rather be doing something than just sitting,” Bernice said. The ambulance men looked at her again. She saw the stocky one glance appraisingly at the bundle Lloyd’s body made on the floor. She felt a slow flush creeping upward from her throat.

  “There are some calls to be made,” Dr. Mundy said. “You are undoubtedly more familiar with them than I am. You’d better call Lloyd’s partner, Joseph Sanders, and his lawyers and his family. By that time the police will be here and you can tell them what you know.”

  Bernice stared. The light glinted on the face of her glasses. “What I know?” Her voice rose slightly.

  “Just keep calm, Bernice,” Dr. Mundy said. “It’s all routine. Naturally, the police will want to know what happened. Since you were the only one in the house, you’ll have to tell them. Don’t worry. As soon as the detective is through, why don’t you start making those calls?”

  “All right,” Bernice said.

  “We might as well pull out, Doc,” the stocky driver said.

  “I think it would be best if you stayed,” Mundy answered. “You know more about these things than I do. But it seems to me the police will want a statement from you both. The time you arrived, the appearance of the body.”