“I wonder if Albert has something to do with it. He has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork.”
“I’ve thought the same thing.”
We looked at each other. I walked up on the porch and opened the door slightly. “Albert, could you step out here, please?” I said.
He came outside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and corduroy trousers with a wide leather belt outside the loops and sandals with rope soles, the way a Spanish peasant might. He was smiling, his small blue eyes buried inside his face.
“Is there any reason Asa Surrette would want to do you harm?” I said.
“Maybe he doesn’t like my books.”
“Any other reason?” I said.
“Maybe he didn’t like my film adaptations. No one did.”
“This isn’t funny,” Clete said.
“That’s what the producers said when they lost their shirts.”
“Think,” I said. “Did you ever have contact with this guy? Or anyone who could have been him?”
“I don’t think he’d be someone I’d forget. I spent four weeks in Wichita and loved the people there. I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone. They’re the best people I’ve ever met. What I’ve never understood is why they live in Kansas.”
“You were in Wichita?” I said.
“I was writer-in-residence in their MFA program. I taught a three-hour seminar one night a week for a month. They were all nice young people. You’re barking up the wrong stump, Dave.”
“What year?” I said.
“The winter term of 1979.”
“Surrette was a student at Wichita State University then.”
“Not in my class, he wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” Clete asked.
“I still have my grade sheets. I checked them. He’s not on there.”
“Was anyone auditing the class, sitting in without formally enrolling?” I said.
“Two or three people came and went. I never checked roll.”
“Surrette told Alafair he had a creative writing professor who claimed to be a friend of Leicester Hemingway.”
Albert’s eyes had been fixed on the north pasture and the horses drinking at the tank. They came back on mine. “He did?”
“Surrette accused this creative professor of name-dropping,” I said. “He seemed to bear him great resentment.”
“I knew Les many years,” Albert said. “I fished with him in the Keys and visited his home in Bimini. He always said he was going to start up his own country on an island off Bimini. It was going to be a republic made up of writers and artists and jai-alai players and musicians. He even had a flag.”
“Surrette said this professor wouldn’t read his short story to the class,” I said. “Do you remember anything like that?”
Albert’s gaze roved around the yard, as though he saw realities in the shadows that no one else did. He was breathing hard through his nose, his mouth pinched. “I don’t recall the exact content of the story, but I thought it was an assault on the sensibilities rather than an attempt at fiction. It was genuinely offensive. He was older than the others. I think I told him it was too mature a story for some of the younger people in the seminar. He seemed to take it well enough, at least as I recall. Maybe we’re talking about a different fellow.”
“Surrette also said he wrote a note on the evaluation, something to the effect that he understood your objection to a story about boys chewing on each other’s weenies.”
I saw the color drain from Albert’s face. He started to speak, then looked up at the hillside and the dark conical shapes of the trees that hid the cave where Asa Surrette had camped. “I’ll be,” he said.