Umney's last case

“Yes,” I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget revolved, and suddenly the newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two later an old DeSoto rolled jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, and both he and the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled halfway to the gutter, then froze solid again.

“You do?” He sounded surprised.

“Yeah. Peoria was the key.”

“That's right.” He laughed, then cleared his throat – nervous sounds, both of them. “I keep forgetting that you're me.”

It was a luxury I didn't have.

“I was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter One six different ways to Sunday before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.”

That made me swing around in a hurry. “The hell you say!”

“I didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all along. I don't want to convene the lit class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade – writing stories in the first person is a fu

“I never heard it called that before,” I remarked.

“…and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria Smith.”

Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken, although the sky was cloudless. The Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment there was just a hole where it had been, and then a new building filled it – a restaurant called Petit Dejeuner with a window full of ferns. I glanced up the street and saw that other changes were going on – new buildings were replacing old ones with silent, spooky speed. They meant I was ru

“I junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's death,” Landry said. “It was easy – poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it... can you guess, Clyde?”

“Sure,” I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this geek would call my “motivation” was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my world. I didn't want to watch him tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. “I suppose you called it Umney's Last Case.”

He looked faintly surprised. “You suppose right.”

I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. “I didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and “35 for nothing, you know.”

He smiled at that. “Yes. I always did like that line.”

Suddenly I hated him – hated him like poison. If I could have summoned the strength to lunge across the desk and choke the life out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The smile faded.

“Forget it, Clyde – you wouldn't have a chance.”

“Why don't you get out of here?” I grated at him. “Just get out and let a working stiff alone?”

“Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to... and I don't.” He looked at me with an odd mixture of anger and pleading. “Try to look at it from my point of view, Clyde…”

“Do I have any choice? Have I ever?”

He ignored that. “Here's a world where I'll never get any older, a year where all the clocks are stopped at just about eighteen months before World War II, where the newspapers always cost three cents, where I can eat all the eggs and red meat I want and never have to worry about my cholesterol level.”

“I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.”

He leaned forward earnestly. “No, you don't! And that's exactly the point, Clyde! This is a world where I can really do the job I dreamed about doing when I was a little boy – I can be a private eye. I can go racketing around in a fast car at two in the morning, shoot it out with hoodlums – knowing they may die but I won't – and wake up eight hours later next to a beautiful chanteuse with the birds twittering in the trees and the sun shining in my bedroom window. That clear, beautiful California sun.”

“My bedroom window faces west,” I said.

“Not anymore,” he replied calmly, and I felt my hands curl into strengthless fists on the arms of my chair. “Do you see how wonderful it is? How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad with itching caused by a stupid, undignified disease called shingles. In this world, people don't go gray, let alone bald.”

He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I saw no hope for me. No hope at all.

“In this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS and beloved wives never take overdoses of sleeping pills. Besides, you were always the outsider here, not me, no matter how it might have felt to you. This is my world, born in my imagination and maintained by my effort and ambition. I loaned it to you for awhile, that's all... and now I'm taking it back.”

“Finish telling me how you got in, will you do that much? I really want to hear.”

“It was easy. I tore it apart, starting with the Demmicks, who were never much more than a lousy imitation of Nick and Nora Charles, and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the beloved supporting characters, and now I'm removing all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug out from under you a strand at a time, in other words, and I'm not proud of it, but I am proud of the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.”

`What's happened to you back in your own world?” I was still keeping him talking, but now it was nothing but habit, like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning.

He shrugged. “Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self – a husk – sitting catatonic in some mental institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though – all of this feels too real. No, I think I made it all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer... with no idea that he's disappeared into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't care.”

“And me? What happens to me?”

“Clyde,” he said, “I don't care about that, either.”

He bent over his gadget again.

“Don't!” I said sharply.

He looked up.

“I...” I heard the quiver in my voice, tried to control it, and found I couldn't. “Mister, I'm afraid. Please leave me alone. I know it's not really my world out there anymore – hell, in here, either – but it's the only world I'll ever come close to knowing. Let me have what's left of it. Please.”

“Too late, Clyde.” Again I heard that merciless regret in his voice. “Close your eyes. I'll make it as fast as I can.”

I tried to jump him – I tried as hard as I could. I didn't move so much as an iota. And as far as closing my eyes went, I discovered I didn't need to. All the light had gone out of the day, and the office was as dark as midnight in a coalsack.

I sensed rather than saw him lean over the desk toward me. I tried to draw back and discovered I couldn't even do that. Something dry and rustly touched my hand and I screamed.

“Take it easy, Clyde.” His voice, coming out of the darkness. Coming not just from in front of me but from everywhere. Of course, I thought. After all, I'm a figment of his imagination. “It's only a check.”

“A... check?”