Jack of Spades Read Online Free Page A

voice was raw and aggrieved.
    I was thinking— I am the one who will sue. This is outrageous.
    Thinking— But I have never stolen anything. Have I?
    Since the previous day, when my dear daughter Julia had innocently picked up a copy of Jack of Spades’s A Kiss Before Killing and begun leafing through it, I had been feeling that something further would happen, out of my control. If there is one thing that frightens me, and infuriates me, it is losing control.
    As if Jack of Spades had come to crouch in a corner of my life, unbidden by me, dragging all the light to him, and into him, like a black hole.
    I could envision Irina overhearing me on the phone in another part of the house, startled and concerned. Though of the two of us Irina was the more emotional, the more easily upset, it sometimes happened that she heard me speaking intensely when I was alone in my study on the second floor of the house, over the garage—“Pleading, it sounds like”—when I am sure that I am not speaking at all, even on the phone; several times a week Irina will wake me out of a deep, turbulent sleep in the middle of the night, claiming that I’d been talking in my sleep, grinding my back teeth—“Calling for help.”
    At such times, so taken by surprise, it requires some seconds before I recognize Irina, my dear wife. More than once I’ve been concerned that, when Irina has shaken me to wake me from sleep, I’ve had an impulse to shove her away.
    Already I was plotting how to keep this upsetting news from Irina, and from my family. I did not want to think that any “hearing” in the Harbourton Municipal Court must be publicly accessible, and might be reported in the Harbourton Weekly .
    The phone rang. Eagerly I answered thinking it might be a repentant Ms. Flaherty, taking pity on me, calling back with helpful information, but instead it was Irina, on the downstairs extension, asking if something was wrong.
    “Wrong? What could be wrong, darling? I’ve been having some difficulty with this new novel—that’s all.”
    And it was so. I’d been having difficulty preventing my new mystery from continually metamorphosing into a more complicated, even imbricated structure than I’d planned, which I knew to be imprudent given the restrictions of the mystery genre. The title was Criss-Cross and its structure had been meant to be simple: a contrasting of “hero” and “villain” in alternating chapters until, in the final chapter, the “hero” prevails over the “villain.” Readers of this genre have every right to expect that a contract of some implicit sort exists between them and the mystery authors—that “evil” will be punished sufficiently, and the usual chaos of the world will be radically simplified, to allow for an ending that is both plausible and unexpected.
    Those intellectual-literary snobs who mock the restrictions of our genre—(including even dear Julia, whom I adore)—would find it very difficult to replicate a successful mystery themselves: one in which evil is pursued until it has been captured, and dealt with; and in which there is a clear and unambiguous ending .
    The endings of Jack of Spades’s mysteries were crueler, as they were more primitive. There was too much evil spilling over everything to be tidily mopped up and mostly, everybody died, or rather was killed. Often I had no idea how a novel by Jack of Spades would end until the last chapter which came rushing at me like a speeding vehicle; mysteries by Andrew J. Rush were models of clarity carefully outlined months in advance, and rarely surprised the author.
    This was good. For the author, as for my readers. No one likes surprises, essentially.
    Irina was asking if I wanted her to come up to my study, if I was feeling anxious, and I thanked her but told her no, that wasn’t necessary. There was only one cure for anxiety—work.
    By dinnertime, I told her, I’d have worked myself out of the morass I was in. As I always did.
    “If you’re