The fourth segment of my next mystery novel, now titled “A Murderer Mistaken”, follows. As previously noted, the novel involves a deceased friend, an abandoned apartment, a search for a safety deposit box, and the shame of long forgotten actions.

A Prelude

Aside from a number of other common interests, alcohol and other assorted addictions being principal sins, Quinn and Purchell both pursued the pretense of poetry. However peculiar, both had convinced themselves, a fantasy vocation which originated in high school, that they were poets, dark, brooding and sensitive as hell, personality traits they carefully played out like they were characters in unwritten dramas. Decades ago, during their spectacularly irresponsible post-university years, they continually wrote verse, free form doggerel that impressed no one but each other, their initial objective, that is the seduction of young women foolish or naïve enough to listen in a reading by either of them in the first place, was hardly ever realized, the few exemptions being women who were disposed to being persuaded anyway. Regardless of whether they ever read their poetry, they had a limited audience to be sure, most people were convinced that they were intellectuals, no longer the smart alecks they had been in adolescence. In fact, one of their mutual university friends, an acknowledged wit who always seemed to too many female friends, once remarked that all smart alecks eventually turned into intellectuals. For Quinn and Purchell, that exalted status had evaporated along with their prospects as the years wore on.

Despite their best efforts to affect an acceptable level of melancholy temperament, Quinn had a particular talent for feigning depression, they could not maintain that act forever. Fact was they could be fairly congenial when they wanted to be, even avid and sometime entertaining conversationalists as well, as least between each other. When they weren’t playing the thespian role, they would be rehearsing for roles as comedians. At such times, it seemed that they attempted to inject humour, or what they thought was humor, into practically everything. So they told predictable stories about predictable personalities and predictable experiences, sometimes shared, sometimes not, in school, both having graduated with Bachelors of Arts from different schools. Regarding the latter, Purchell would refer to his high academic achievements as a degree in drugs and rock music. They would talk sports, they both had invested considerable time and effort in various athletic endeavours. They would talk about their succession of dull and tiresome jobs, a myraid of which had bedevilled them since they were both in high school. And of course, they would review, with appropriate comic asides, their efforts to attract women. They exchanged cynical observations, past and present, sometimes dark, sometimes absurd, sometimes appropriate, sarcasm seemingly being the main if not only emollient of everything they said. They threw barbs around like they were exhaling cigarette smoke about the room. As long as they were in a crowd, the introspective poet persona did not appear.

It was doubtful that neither Quinn nor Purchell ever knew that their exasperated audiences did not always appreciate their repartee. Many years later, long after their shows had closed for good, they were surprised, if not astounded, when Purchell was told, by an acquaintence who may have had some old grievance or other to ponder, that their entertainments were usually not that funny. This acquaintance also confided, in a purportedly confidential aside — the veracity of which was doubted for a time by Purchell —- that several of their male acquaintances contemplated making their point physically. In fact, it was later recalled that one of these individuals had specifically suggested that he had wanted to eat Purchell’s glasses, an image that was mildly entertaining in itself, an irony about which Forbes and Purchell were to ruminate for weeks. Purchell also admitted, at least to himself, to being a little frightened, his doubts regarding the accuracy of the original story having evaporated, a natural outcome of his increasing paranoia about their increasingly disreputable reputation among their acquaintances. Fact was that Mark Purchell was preoccupied with the possibility that he was not as well regarded as he thought he was. It worried him for much of his life. On the other hand, his friend Jack Quinn never seemed to care about such matters. Mark Purchell could never explain his friend’s apparent lack of concern about what people thought of him. On the other hand, he remained convinced that Jack Quinn cared about what his friend Mark Purchell thought of him.

That was the basis he guessed for his unexpected acceptance of Jack’s occasional sincerity. Maybe his almost constant cynicism made any expression of sincerity from Jack all that much more credible. Mark could only remember several instances in which Jack offered anything even remotely confidential to his supposed best friend. Early to their relationship, maybe a few months after they first met, Jack informed Mark, after more than several hours of hardcore drinking at a joint across the street from the automotive parts place where they were both working, that he had fathered a child while both he and his girlfriend at the time were just out of high school. Jack said that Alison was likely no more than several months along when he escorted her to the graduation dance. By the fall, her parents had moved Alison out to the west coast to live with her mother’s sister and her husband. She eventually gave birth to a girl named Phoebe, a curious name of which Jack was unaware until one of Alison’s old neighborhood friends confided it when Jack ran into her in a downtown club several years later. The old girlfriend just knew the name, nothing else she said. No city, no address, just two names. Jack pressed her but to no avail. After that one interval, although the thought of Alison and his lost daughter would occasionally emerge, it never obsessed him, certainly not enough for him to pursue it. After Jack told him the story, Mark thought that his friend intended to ask him to assist him in some sort of search for the lost daughter. But he didn’t. Jack Quinn never mentioned again, a curious development for a man who often liked to wallow in his own self-imposed despair, even now that he was edging towards his own demise. It would be dramatically impeccable denouement, a variant of a death bed request, that is, to find his friend’s long lost daughter. But the prospective request never came. On the other hand, as Mark reflected on the narrative, he came to regard it as a cliché, the kind of story that has been the inspiration, if not the source of countless dramas, whether fictional or not.

After his second or third quart of beer that evening, Jack confessed to another regrettable act that he quietly admitted was something that he would rather not discuss, at least while he was sober. In fact, he said that he had kept his participation in a truly deplorable event that he had kept hidden for at least the previous five or six years. It wasn’t like the birth of a child out of wedlock, an accident of a romantic relationship gone wrong, but more like a criminal transgression that, if the authorities had been involved, would have resulted in an arrest, if not a jail sentence. Jack, whose voice was practically down to a whisper while he was testifying to the particular act, explained to Mark how he and two of his adolescent friends, he gave their names as Jimmy and Pete, used to break into neighborhood houses while the people living in them were away on vacation, the information on the vacancies courtesy of another boy who had a paper route and therefore was able to report on the families who had discontinued their newspaper while they were away. The gang would use the information to identify the houses they would ultimately burglarize. They would then steal the usual worthless junk that always seem to appeal to adolescent males; liquor, money, dirty magazines, records, and stereo equipment. As a final act of felonious imbecility the boys would invariably signal their escape from the house by ransacking it, for no apparent reason other than any reason that adolescent boys do anything.

Mark reacted predictably. He shrugged his shoulders and quietly snickered, acknowledging that he could remember engaging in similar adolescent hijinks although he admitted to less serious transgressions, like serial shoplifting, stealing cigarettes from the old lady, and occasionally chucking stones at trucks and cars going by on the highway. But Jack moved closer to Mark, almost as if he was kneeling in a confessional, and told him, almost whispering now, that there was an incident during one of their break-ins that effectively ended their crime spree. Jack said that the three erstwhile cat burglars were provided with faulty information on one of the houses they had planned to invade. The newspaper route informer had said that the Fagans, two elderly readers, had discontinued their newspaper subscription for two weeks in which they were not away on vacation. Apparently, the Fagans had wanted to terminate their subscription, not to suspend it. Consequently, when the three boys entered the Fagan home, they usually broke a basement window, both Mr. and Mrs Fagan were sitting in the living room watching television in the dark, there being no lights on in the rest of the house to warn the thieves. Although they tried to be quiet, the boys naturally made some noise in sneaking in the house. By the time Jack, Jimmy and Pete reached the top of the basement stairs, Harry Fagan was standing in the kitchen holding a wooden broom, his wife Doris cowering behind her husband. All three boys weren’t wearing masks —- after all, they didn’t expect anyone home to identify them. Harry made a feeble motion with his broom and Doris shrieked and immediately collapsed.

According to Jack, all three of them immediately scrambled out the backdoor, which ironically enough was unlocked, and disappeared into the night. They ran across the Fagan backyard and stood shivering behind the hedges at the rear of the property. Jack admitted that two of the miscreants, including Jack, had peed their pants. They hid out long enough to witness the arrival of an ambulance, apparently for the suddenly strickened Doris Fagan. Jimmy, who was the boldest of the three, crept around the house by the driveway and saw the ambulance leave. Jack, Jimmy and Pete sat behind the hedge behind the Fagan house for at least an hour behind they sneaked home, still trembling from the fear of being arrested. The three of them soon ascertained, based on neighborhood gossip picked up from their respective parents, that Doris had suffered but eventually survived a stroke. Although there was a short discussion as to whether they should continue breaking into houses, Jimmy being the most persistent advocate of further thievery, they decided to discontinue their felonious activities before they went home that evening. Jack told Mark that they all sweated that incident for at least a month after it happened even though Doris was released from hospital four or five days after she was admitted. He also admitted, an admission that he did not make to his partners at that time or since for that matter, that Jack was anxious for more than months. While he was frightened of being arrested, an arrest that inexplicably was never made, as they all were he assumed, Jack was also guilty about Mrs. Fagan. Sure, she had been discharged from the hospital but he was worried that she would eventually suffer from some affect of the stroke. Jack said that the three of them seldom spoke about the incident afterward. Fact was he said that they seldom spoke at all afterward. Jack told Mark that he still thought about Mrs. Fagan even though she likely died maybe ten years ago. Mark wondered whether Jack still thought about Mrs. Fagan.

His last admission, a confession of an action for which he sometimes conjured up some guilt although Mark suspected that Jack was hiding something even as he was admitting to his transgressions, involved a comparatively minor childhood prank in which Jack may have he thought inflicted permanent psychological damage on one of his classmates in the sixth grade. Jack had no way of knowing that but he had managed to convince himself that falsely accusing another boy of stealing a fountain pen belonging to the class teacher, an earnest young man named Mr. French, would have never developed into any of any significance. The prevarication was as simple as it was fateful. For reasons he had long forgotten, Jack had lifted Mr. French’s fountain pen on a dare, the challenge being proposed by a classmate named Peter Walters, a mischievous little miscreant who liked to get other kids in trouble. This time, it wasn’t Jack who got in trouble but another student, Ronald Barnes, who didn’t even know that Mr. French had a fountain pen to steal in the first place. Once Mr. French discovered that his fountain pen, a prized possession that had been a gift from his father on his son’s graduation from teachers’ school, the completion of which in those days wasn’t required, was gone, he accused pretty well every student in his grade six class of theft. When that approach didn’t work, Mr. French having spent a week staring menancingly at his grade six charges, he threatened something a little more tangible, that is, more homework for the entire class until the pen was returned. For reasons that he could never really recall, Jack removed the pen from his own locker, where it had been hidden since he lifted it from Mr. French’s desk when Jack was alone in the classroom, having crept in early from recess, and then placed it in the desk belonging to Ronald Barnes, the entire procedure completed within five minutes. As Jack related the story, he said that he had forgotten, that is if he ever knew in the first place, as to the reason they had concentrated their mischievous evident scorn on Ronald Barnes, a boy that neither he or Peter Walters knew very well. Jack did say, however, that he thought it more his friend Peter’s plan than his own but he could not be certain. In any event, Jack repeated his confusion regarding the basis for the identification of Ronald Barnes as the target of their prank.