From The Detective Novel

A Story.

BY JACOB SUGARMAN

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Illustration by John Gruen
Creative Drawing

LIME FELT EXHILARATED as he descended in the elevator, sucking down the remainder of his cigarette with his right hand while thumbing a half-formed erection through the pocket of his pants with his left. Undeniably, his encounter with Nave had provided a much-longed-for appeal to the professor's meager sense of vanity. How long had it been since he had last experienced the human touch? Lime could hardly remember. Yet the professor suspected that his sense of excitement extended beyond his mere physical attraction to Nave. Descending the cracked stairs of the apartment's stoop, Lime supposed that his fear and anticipation of meeting the man he believed to be Boulder were not dissimilar to the feelings experienced by the detective heroes he taught and idolized. Under these fantastic circumstances, the professor struggled to remind himself of his situation's reality.

The address directed him to an apartment building in alphabet city, prompting Lime to hail a taxi cab at the corner of Broadway and 113th street.

The taxi smelled of body odor, thinly masked by a pungent aftershave. Pickles and perfume, the professor postulated. The leather that covered the cushion of the back seat was torn down the middle exposing a cheese-like, foam interior. As the taxi headed east, Lime could distinguish the outline of a cockroach as it scrambled its way out of the seat's crevice, the interior reflecting the glow of the street lamps outside. In the yellow light, the professor could see the name and photograph of his cab driver. Killroy, Rocky: a white, pug-faced man with a boxer's nose and purple lips. The professor smiled thinly at the thought that a man named Rocky was taking him downtown for his impromptu meeting with the man he believed to be Boulder.

As the taxi weaved its way across the park, the city's skyline luminous above the leafless trees, the professor entertained his first doubts about the purpose of his journey. Was Nave's act with the glasses a mere ruse to get him to take care of this Boulder? What did he intend to do when he met this mystery man? His armpits hummed with violent possibilities. By the time the cab had found its way to the FDR drive, Lime had begun to relax, the fresh flame of a cigarette providing pacification.

"No smoking sir" muttered the driver.

"No need to be so hard, Rocky" the professor quipped. "Let me finish this cigarette and I'll put it out."

"No smoking."

The cab driver stared at the professor through the rear view mirror, his eyes dog-like and hostile. The professor met his glance and fearfully flicked the butt out of a crack in his window, the spark of flame fading in the blue of night. The air was pregnant with the smells of ocean salt and refuse from a passing tugboat. Lime chewed the side of his tongue.

The man the professor believed to be Boulder lived in a tenement off of Avenue D, a soot-stained building with little in the way of ornamentation. A pair of black teens walked past and eyed the professor, the smaller of the two waving his hand threateningly in the direction of Lime. The professor paid them no mind and retrieved the napkin from his pocket. On it was scrawled an apartment number with no name. Lime rang the bell and awaited a response. A nervous, static-heavy voice echoed through an intercom: "Hello?"

"Boulder, I presume."

"Who is this?"

"A friend of Ms. Nave's"

The door buzzed angrily and the professor entered a small room with wall to wall carpeting, a narrow staircase and a radiator piled high with letters and yellowed newspapers. The professor ascended the stairs, each step cracking like a stretched limb. Lime grinded his teeth in anticipation. His raps at the door of apartment 3 were answered by a spindly man with wire-framed glasses and a pointed nose. A sand-colored widow's peak stabbed the top of his forehead, the thick mass of hair tied behind his head in a narrow pony-tail. A boulder indeed, the professor mused, a sneer spreading across his face. Lime could not help but marvel that, save for the hair, the man bore a remarkable resemblance to himself.

"What do you know about Ms. Nave?"

The professor imagined himself drilling the stranger in the bridge of his nose with a tightly-clenched fist. The man staggered back and fell, blood spurting down his right nostril, his glasses knocked to the ground. Boulder tumbled to the floor of the apartment, squealing in pain. Judging from the quiver of the man's upper lip, Lime knew that he would offer no retaliation. The professor could hear him shriek: "you broke my nose you fucking lunatic."

Lime clutched his right hand reflexively, his fingers aching with a phantom pain.

"If its any consolation, my hand really smarts."

"What?" Boulder's eyes squinted in inquisition.

"May I come in?" the professor asked meekly, his fantasy momentarily dissolved. Boulder, who had been leaning against the frame of his door, raised his arm like a tollkeeper for the professor to pass.

The man's place wasn't much larger than Lime's. Bookshelves composed of wooden planks and cinder blocks leaned against the lefthand wall while a desk crouched hermit-like at the end of the apartment beneath a window. Perched atop its surface was a stack of typed pages beside an Olivetti typewriter. Unlike his own, however, the typewriter's keyboard was complete.

The professor shuttered as he dragged his fingertips along the A, D, E, R, and G keys of the Olivetti before asking "Who are you?"

"My name is Bregman. Boulder Bregman." The man's voice was even as he cleaned the frames of his glasses against his breast. The professor, meanwhile, raised his eyebrows in recognition.

"The Boulder Bregman?"

"You've heard of me?"

"No I haven't," the professor lied. Bregman's most recent collection of short stories, The San Francisco Chronicles, was the final book on The Detective Novel's syllabus. Boulder had not yet received the popular success he deserved but Lime realized that it was only a matter of time. His dystopic depiction of San Francisco was pure Chandler, yet Bregman always managed to play with the tropes of the genre in unique ways. Lime had devoted two lecture periods alone to his story "The Double," a tale that followed the rise and fall of a detective agency headed by identical twins. The man looked nothing like the photograph on his jacket cover. Those cheekbones and that chin-Christ, he looks like me, the professor pondered with disappointment.

"What do you do?"`

"I'm a writer," the man mentioned, tightening his ponytail.

"What do you write?"

"Detective stories mostly."

"What, like whodunnits?" the professor asked, his attention returning to Boulder's Olivetti.

"Sort of, yes. How do you know Ms. Nave and what has she told you?"

His back turned to the writer, Lime muttered: "She told me that you roughed her up. And that you're dangerous."

"She's the one that's dangerous," he pleaded.

"You work on this machine?" The professor slouched beneath the weight of his shoulders. He wiped away the perspiration that had been oozing from the top of his forehead with the back of his left wrist, dragging the hand across his thinning hairline. Using his thumb and middle finger, he massaged the bald spot at the back of his skull. With his right hand, the professor typed out the word 'reader' on a blank page, his skeletal fingers dancing on the typewriter's keyboard.

"I call it 'the Vet.' Everything I've ever published has been written on my Olivetti," Boulder mentioned reluctantly. In a violent motion, the professor grabbed the rickety machine by its roll, slamming it to the floor with his right hand. The pain returned to the professor's fingers but the sensation was one of stinging rather than the dull ache he had experienced moments before. Lowering his gaze, Lime found that a layer of skin had been torn off of his knuckles and a steady stream of blood was dripping onto Boulder's broken typewriter, its roll a dark red where the professor's fingers had caught. The Vet's letter keys had shattered, its fragments ricocheting against the base cinderblocks of the bookshelves. Bregman shuttered slightly at the destruction of his writing companion and dropped to his knees. As Boulder crawled in the direction of the mutilated typewriter, retrieving its metal fragments as he lurched forward, the professor shuffled towards the door. His mouth was frozen in a tightlipped grimace.

"You broke my typewriter, you fucking lunatic," Bregman exclaimed, his voice wobbling beneath the weight of his panic.

Lime exited and had descended the first two steps of the building's stair case when Boulder emerged from his apartment, his cheeks flushed, his lips damp with saliva.

"If this is about the bruise on her eye," Boulder growled, "you should know I didn't put it there. It was that damn dog."

The professor spun suddenly, his fist landing in the midsection of the gangly writer. The pain in his hand reminded Lime that he had broken a digit or two in that first punch. Boulder, meanwhile, rocked backwards, his tailbone landing on the edge of the staircase's top step. The professor continued his descent to the chorus of Boulder's coughs and gasps.

Lime continued his descent, serenaded by Boulder's threats of calling the police. He clutched his right hand in his left, the blood leaking from his middle finger like ink from a broken pen. Before Boulder could return to his apartment to dial the proper authorities, the professor had exited the building, leaving behind only a dotted trail on the staircase.

On Avenue D, Lime hailed a taxi, directing the driver to Nave's address uptown. Between the throbbing pain in his hand and the rapid decrease in his adrenaline level, Lime grew drowsy as the cab rolled its way west. Before he had traveled north of Houston street, the professor was sleeping peacefully, his cheek plastered to a window smudged with greasy fingerprints.

Jacob Sugarman B'05

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