Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 Read Free Page B

Americans today have never
in their livee ridden a train. Without our much realizing it —and without the
academics yet having discovered it as a thesis topic — we have grown accustomed
to adapting ourselves to the time of a story's creation as well as to its
characters and plot and themes.
                  Besides which, updating is hardly ever really
successful. The assumptions of the moment run deep; removing them from a
generation-old story isn't a simple matter of taking the hero out of a
Thunderbird and putting him into a Honda. It's root-canal work; the moment of
composition runs its traces through the very sentence structure, like gold ore
through a mountain.
                   And if it isn't possible to bring
twenty-year-old stories blinking and peering into the light of today as though
they were newborn infants, it is equally unlikely for me to erase the last
twenty years from my own mind and write as though it were 1962 in this room, I
am twenty-nine, and most of my children aren't alive yet. If I write a story
now, this moment will exist in it, no matter what I try to do.
                   I have written that final story, czilled
"After I’m Gone." I have as much as possible tried to make it a story
without obvious temporal references, neither then nor now. I have tried to make
it a story that could be read in a magazine in 1983 without the reader
thinking, "This must be a reprint," and at the same time I've tried
to make it flow naturally from the Levine stories that preceded it. No one
could succeed completely straddling such a pair of stools; certainly not me.
But if I have at least muted my failure and made it not too clamorous, I'll be
content.
                   As for Abe Levine, we are old friends. He's
been there all along, inside my head, waiting for the next call. I had no
trouble getting to know him again, and it's my fond belief that he is clearly
the same person in the last story that he was in the first, however much time
may or may not have gone by. I would like to introduce him to you now, and I
hope you like him.
                   Donald E. Westlake
     

THE BEST FRIEND MURDER
     
                   Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn 's Forty-Third Precinct chewed on his pencil
and glowered at the report he'd just written. He didn't like it, he didn't like it at all. It just didn't feel right, and the more he thought
about it the stronger the feeling became.
                   Levine was a short and stocky man,
baggily-dressed from plain pipe racks. His face was sensitive, topped by
salt-and-pepper gray hair chopped short in a military crewcut. At fifty-three,
he had twenty-four years of duty on the police force, and was halfway through
the heart-attack age range, a fact that had been bothering him for some time
now. Every time he was reminded of death, he thought worriedly about the aging
heart pumping away inside his chest.
                   And in his job, the reminders of death came
often. Natural death, accidental death, and violent death.
                   This one was a violent death, and to Levine it
felt wrong somewhere. He and his partner, Jack Crawley, had taken the call just
after lunch. It was from one of the patrolmen in Prospect Park , a patrolman named Tanner. A man giving his
name as Larry Perkins had walked up to Tanner in the park and announced that he
had just poisoned his best friend. Tanner went with him, found a dead body in
the apartment Perkins had led him to, and called in. Levine and Crawley , having just walked into the station after
lunch, were given the call. They turned around and walked back out again.
                   Crawley drove their car, an unmarked '56 Chevy, while Levine sat beside him and worried
about death. At least this would be one of the neat ones. No knives or bombs or
broken beer bottles. Just poison, that was all. The victim would look as