A Dark Matter (23 page)

“Don, do you think Keith Hayward deserved to die?”

“Probably. Hootie and your wife thought he did.”

I nodded. “I asked Lee about it once, and she said that Hayward wasn’t all bad.”

“The Eel
said
that?”

“She also said that she didn’t think anyone, if you looked inside them, was ever really all bad. But she added that she still thought Keith Hayward deserved to die. I think so, too … Look. If Cooper was right about that kid, Hayward’s death probably saved the lives of a lot of young women.”

Olson nodded. “I’ve thought about that.”

“So this force comes out of nowhere, out of another dimension, or out of the
ground
, I don’t know, and rips this guy to pieces. Can that force be evil? I’d say it was neutral.”

“Neutral.”

“Maybe one of the women Hayward would have killed, had he lived, would have done a great thing someday. Maybe she, or her daughter, or her son, would have made some great medical or scientific breakthrough, or been a great poet. Maybe it’s more remote than that. What if one of the women Hayward would have murdered, or one of her descendants, however far in the future, was going to do something apparently insignificant that would eventually have a huge ripple effect? Killing Hayward would be the means to protect whatever that effect might be.”

“So these creatures are protecting us?”

I considered that for a second. “Maybe they’re protecting our ignorance. Or maybe we’re both completely wrong, and something else altogether killed Hayward, some demonic creature Mallon managed to call up.”

“I didn’t see any demonic creature,” Olson grumped. “And I don’t think there was one. What happened to your detective, this Cooper? Seems to me like he dug himself a big hole and jumped in.”

I laughed. “Yeah, not that there was anything funny about it. He broke the law, destroyed evidence, and interfered with the entire process. All that was left for him to do was keep an eye on Keith Hayward, which he did, and he let the kid know he was watching him, but he knew he had wrecked his own life. He had come to the end. He couldn’t keep an eye on Keith Hayward twenty-four hours a day, and he’d never live long enough to watch the kid’s children. That twisted gene, or whatever, was out of reach. He couldn’t put an end to it. All his skills had failed him.”

“What did he do? Eat his gun?”

“Drank himself to death. Resigned from the department, of course. Turned his weapon back in with his badge. He had another one, a pistol he took off a bad guy, but he never carried it around, never used it. He just liked the idea that it was
there
. Cooper lived in a neighborhood off Vliet Street, and there were bars at both ends of his block. For a couple of years, he basically went back and forth between them.”

“He put that in his
book?”

“For him, that was the end of the Ladykiller case, with the detective who carried the whole thing around in his head going back and forth between these joints named The Angler’s Lounge and Ted & Maggie’s. He
wanted
to write about that. And he had some pretty interesting things to say about it. Sort of totally bleak. It was like living in absolute darkness. If he’d been anything like a good writer, it could have been amazing.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“The only way to approach some of that stuff is to realize that he was drunk when he wrote it.”

“Can you remember some of it?”

“I’m no Hootie, but some of it stuck, yeah.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Okay. He wrote,
It has taken me nearly sixty years to learn that in this life, if it ain’t shit, it ain’t nothing at all
.”

I managed to summon up another of the old detective’s darkness arrows. “In another place, he wrote,
What isn’t pain is just a wire hanger. I prefer the pain.”

I smiled at the ceiling, remembering something, then turned the smile toward Olson. “Toward the end, he said,
Who was I working for, all those years? Was my real boss a wire hanger? The way I live wears reality down.”

“What was he talking about, wire hangers?”

“All I can think of, there isn’t much
to
a wire hanger. It’s more like an outline than a real thing.”

Our check had come. I surrendered a credit card and signed the slip, and at long last it was time to walk back around the square and return to the hotel. We stood up, waved thanks to the waiter, nodded at the grinning sushi chefs, and began to move toward the door.

We went out into the night’s warm darkness, pierced above by millions of stars, and on sloping King Street by the lights in the windows of bars and the illuminated prow of a theater marquee.

Chips of mica glittered in the sidewalk. I waited for Don to come up beside me, then almost sighed.

“I think the lounge is still open,” Olson said.

“We’ll see.” I glanced at my companion. “After all that, I hope I never have to hear another word about Keith Hayward or his god-awful uncle. I’m glad they’re dead.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

By this time, Don had lost most of his prison swagger. The crude assertiveness that must have protected him in Menard but made him an annoyance on Cedar Street had faded so thoroughly that I felt I had spent the previous ninety minutes doing nothing more complicated than gabbing with a friend. Olson was even walking almost normally now, with only a trace of the old menacing swerve-and-dip. How, I wondered, had he managed to shake five thousand dollars out of people he barely knew anymore?

11:00 p.m.–3:30 a.m.

A door chosen; a door unchosen and untouched; a question unanswered. These matters, along with others like them, floated through my mind as I undressed and
hung up my clothes and brushed my teeth and washed my hands and face and slid into my comfortable hotel-room bed
.

I stopped my hand on its way to switch off the tall bedside lamp, then lowered it to the creamy folded sheet, and let my head find the waiting pillow
.

The Eel had walked into that meadow without me, and now I could never undo the choice I had made, never untie that knot
.

Just now, the light could stay on
.

“It’s a simple business, really,” I had said to Don Olson in the Governor’s Lounge late that night. We sat at a table next to the big windows, and lights burned in windows near and distant. Alone in his goldfish bowl, the friendly bartender (who had requested, and been gratified by, our evaluations of the restaurant he had recommended) seemed to have lapsed into a deeply meditative state. On the long sofa at the front of the room, a young couple facing the fireplace leaned whispering to each other shoulder to shoulder, like spies in love.

“I doubt that,” Olson said. “Look at you.”

“Don’t you ever get obsessed with a weird story? Play it in your head, over and over?”

“You’re tap dancing. Start with the easy stuff. When did this whatever-it-was happen?”

“In 1995,” I had said, surprised to have recovered the date so clearly and so swiftly. “Autumn. October, I think. Lee was called away to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on an odd mission, almost as a detective. In the end, she
was
a detective, and she caught the bad guy!”

Lying in my bed, hands folded on my chest, the light spilling into half of the room, I went over the conversation with Olson, word by word by word
.

—Called away? Who called her?

—The ACB. The American Confederation of the Blind. Your old buddy, the Eel, is very close to the Delaware chapter. In Rehoboth Beach
.

It sometimes seemed to me that beautiful Lee Truax had been one of the founders of the ACB’s Delaware chapter, but of course she was not. She just knew everybody there. How had that happened? She had helped organize that chapter, that’s how, she had worked with the first generation of members to establish their structure, someone had invited her, an old friend from New York, Missy Landrieu, a name I of course remembered only fifty percent of the time, sometimes I barely noticed her friends, it seemed. So although neither she nor they had ever lived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (and in fact being self-absorbed and work-obsessed, I had never so much as visited the place), the former Eel had deep roots in that pleasant beachside community where the chapter often met. There she was loved and respected, perhaps even more greatly than she was loved and respected everywhere else in ACB-land. And of course it meant everything to this little local chapter in a small, little-regarded state, the Rhode Island of the Eastern Shores, to have a good friend who was on the board of the national organization. Or a trustee. One of the two, unless they were the same thing, which I thought they were not. The friend from New York, Missy, another trustee or board member, though sighted, not blind, and as fantastically wealthy as a heroine in Henry James, had reached out to the former Eel for assistance in a sticky matter that concerned her particular pet chapter—apart, of course, from Chicago, her own.

This sticky matter had to do with funds that had been disappearing, at the rate of a couple of hundred dollars a month, from the chapter’s account. The officers had noticed only when the missing dollars added up to just over ten thousand.

It was then an oddity of the Delaware chapter of the ACB that nearly all its officers were women. They decided not to call in the police, but first to turn to the national office for advice. By way of answer, the national office had sent Lee Truax, loved, respected, and wise, out from Chicago to solve this problem before it became public
.

They knew the names of everyone who had access to that account. Nine women, scattered all over the region, but most of them in the Baltimore area. What the Eel did, I told Donald Olson in words recalled as I lay in my twelfth-floor bed, was to invite the nine women to the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, located on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach. By virtue of often hosting ACB conferences both local and national, the Golden Atlantic Sands was familiar to all
.

—Which is important to the blind, I remembered saying
.