First Daughter (11 page)

"So what brings you back? Nowhere else to go on a rainy December night?" Schiltz gestured at the wall of cadaver containers. "Since
I'm not full up, I could give you an overnight berth in my Japanese hotel. It's quiet as the grave and a gourmet continental breakfast is served in the autopsy room starting at eight. Would you like an upper or a lower berth?"

Jack laughed. Egon had the uncanny ability to dislodge his depressions.

"I'm interested in whichever berths the two Secret Service men are in."

"Ah, yes," Egon said. "The men in black."

Having a sense of humor—the darker the better—was essential for an ME, Egon once told Jack. "Professional detachment only gets you so far, because eventually someone gets under your skin," his friend had once told him. "After that, it's every macabre jokester for himself."

Schiltz moved Jack along the rows of gleaming stainless steel containers, opened two side by side at waist height. "In my fascination with your floating island, I forgot all about them. Maybe it's because I didn't do the original autopsies. The law now mandates that in cases of deaths of federal officials, pathologists from the Army Forces Institute of Pathology do the work." He shrugged. "Idiotic, if you ask me, but that's the government for you."

The two cadavers lay on their backs, even features waxy, doll-like, their chests cut and sewn back up in the autopsy T-scar that went from just beneath the collarbone to the lower intestine. "The pathology is yesterday's paper so far as your new compadres are concerned. They came, they saw, they were dead-ended."

"Nothing at all?" Jack said.

"I performed my own autopsies just to make certain. Not so much as a partial print, a stray hair, a scrap of skin, paint or dirt under the nails. No hint of anything that might lead you to ID the perps." Schiltz shrugged again. "Not much to see, either. One stab apiece—hard, direct,
no hesitation whatsoever—interstitial, between the third and fourth dorsal ribs, straight into the heart." He paused. "Well, sort of."

Jack's own heart had begun a furious tattoo. "What d'you mean?"

Schiltz turned the first cadaver onto one side, shoved it to the far side of the deathbed, turned it on its stomach. As he performed the same procedure with the second body, Jack peered at the entry wound.

"See here. I peeled back the muscle so I could get a closer look at the interior wounds. Smooth as silk, so the assailant didn't use a serrated blade, but there was a slight curve to them. I can't quite make out what sort of blade would leave that signature."

But I can,
Jack thought. He'd seen that odd, slightly arced wound before, once, twenty-five years ago. His subsequent investigation, all on his own, both dangerous and difficult, had unearthed the murder weapon: a thin-bladed knife, known as a paletta. It was used by professional bakers to spread batter or apply frosting. The truly odd part was this: A paletta had a rounded end. It was totally useless for a stabbing attack. This one, however, was unique among palettas: the murderer had ground the end into a mercilessly sharp point.

"You okay?" Schiltz peered into Jack's frozen face.

"You bet," Jack said in a strangled voice.

"Stole up behind them and bingo! No fuss, no muss." Schiltz's slightly bored tone indicated he'd been over this terrain numerous times in the past twenty-four hours. "Most professional, not to say impressive, especially in light of the victims' training. In fact, I would venture to say the stabs were surgical in their precision. To tell you the truth, I couldn't have done a better job of it myself."

Jack hardly heard his friend's last sentence. He was frozen, bent over in the space between the deathbeds, his gaze flickering back and forth between the two wounds. His galloping heart seemed to have come to an abrupt and terrifying halt inside his chest.

It's absolutely stone-cold impossible,
he told himself.
I shot Cyril Tolkan
while he was trying to escape over the rooftop where I'd trapped him. He's dead, I know he is.

And yet, the evidence of his own eyes was irrefutable. These stabs were the hallmark of a killer Jack had gone after twenty-five years ago, after a murder that had left him devastated, sick with despair.

J
ACK, AT
fifteen, often cannot sleep. It might be a form of insomnia, but most likely not. He has good reason to stay awake. He lives in a slope-shouldered row house so close to the border of Maryland, it seems as if the District wants it exiled. At night, bedeviled by a fog of anxious stirrings, he lies in bed, staring at the traffic light at the junction of New Hampshire and Eastern Avenues. He lives, eats, and breathes by the rhythm of its changing from red to green. Outside his window, at the eastern border of the District, the city roars, barks, whines, squeals, growls like a pack of feral dogs, glassy-eyed with hunger. Inside the row house, the darkness is filled with dread. It seems to grip his head like a vise squeezed tighter and tighter until he gasps, shoots up in a fountain of bedclothes. This moment is crucial. If the light is green, everything will be okay. But if it's red . . . His heart pounds; the roaring in his ears dizzies him. Disaster.

When he could bear to look back on those nights, he understood that the color of the traffic light didn't matter. The reliance on the pattern set by unknown city workers is an illusion of control over the
parts of his life he dreads. But like all children, he relies on illusion to keep his terrors in Pandora's box.

Between the hours of one and three in the morning, his ears are attuned to the heavy tread of his father's footsteps as he returns from work. This particular night is no different. It is June and stifling, not even the smallest squares of laundry stir on the line. A dog lies wheezing asthmatically in the ashy buttocks of the empty lot next to the auto chop shop. An old man wheezes, coughs so long and hard, Jack is afraid he'll hawk up a lung.

The sounds creep in, as if the apartment itself is protesting his father's weight. Every one of the tiny but separate noises that mark his father's slow progress through it sends a squirt of blood into Jack's temples, causing him to wince in pain.

Sometimes that was all that happened, the sounds would gradually ebb, Jack would lie back down, his heartbeat would return to normal, and eventually, he'd drift into a restless sleep. But at other times, the first bars of "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas and the Papas creep into his room, and his heart starts to pound and he has to force himself not to vomit all over the sheets.

"I'd be safe and warm . . ."

The three slices of pepperoni pizza Jack had for dinner rise as if from a magician's wand.

". . . if I was in L.A. . . ."

Stomach acid burns his throat, and he thinks,
Oh God, he's coming
.

The melody takes on a life of its own. Like the notes of a snake charmer, it's filled with an ominous meaning at odds with its original sunny disposition. And like the cobra that hovers and strikes at will, digging its fangs deep into flesh, his father stalks him, the thick black belt he bought in a biker shop in Fort Washington, Maryland, held loosely in his left hand.

It was a time-honored ritual in the McClure household, this whipping. It would have been so much better if the cause had been alcohol
because then it wouldn't have been Jack's fault. But it
is
Jack's fault. How many times has his father browbeaten the fact into him?

And Jack's mother, what is her part in this ritual? She stays in her bedroom, behind a tightly closed door that leaks "California Dreamin' " every time her husband wraps the belt around the knuckles of his left fist. Jack, a living example of Skinnerian psychology, prepares himself for the pain when he hears the first bars of flower power sweetly, innocently sung.

Fists aren't what frighten Jack, though his father possesses the big, knuckly rocks of a bricklayer or an assassin. By adult standards, his father isn't particularly big, but with his dark eyes, sullen mouth, and broken nose, he seems like a colossus to Jack. Especially when he's swinging the belt. Following Neanderthal instincts, he turned the biker belt into an ugly, writhing thing. Its armor of metal studs, its crown a buckle big as two fists are not enough. He filed the corners to points one sunny Sunday when Jack was out playing softball.

"Tell me a story, read me a book," his father says as he opens the door to his son's room. He looks around at the unholy mess of clothes, comics, magazines, records, bits of candy bars and chocolate. "Books, books, where are the friggin' books?" He bends down, swipes up a comic. "Batman," he says with a sneer. "How the fuck old are you?"

"Fifteen," Jack answers automatically, though his mouth is dry.

"And all you can read is this junk?" He shoves the comic in his son's face. "Okay then, brainiac, read to me."

Jack's hands tremble so badly, the comic slips through his fingers.

"Open it, John."

Dutifully, Jack flips the pages of the comic. He wants to read, he wants to show his father that he can, but his emotions are in turmoil. He's filled with fear and anxiety, which automatically extinguish what progress he's made in decoding English. He stares down at the comic panels. The speech balloons might as well be written in Mandarin. The letters float off like spiky sea creatures with a will of their own.
He sees them, but he cannot make heads or tails of what they might be. It's garbage in, garbage out.

"God almighty, it's a fucking comic. A six-year-old could read it, but not you, huh?" His father rips the comic from him, flips it into a corner.

"Hey, watch it," Jack says, leaping up.

His father sticks out his right hand, shoves him back onto the bed.

"That's issue number four."

"How the hell would you know?" His father stomps over to the corner, rips up the comic. Batman and his bat-cape are parted.

His father carefully removes his prized gold-and-diamond cuff links from his shirt, knocks a pile of comics off Jack's dresser with a backhand swipe, lays them down on the open space. Then the beating starts. The belt uncoils from his father's fist like an oily viper. It whips up, then down, striping Jack's rib cage. And as the lashing commences in earnest, his father punctuates each singing strike with a litany of words.

"You don't talk right."
Crack!
"You act like a goddamn zombie when I ask you to do something."
Crack!
"You fidget and procrastinate because you're too stupid to understand me."
Crack!
"Christ, fifteen years old and you can't read."
Crack!
"I was already hauling garbage when I was fifteen."
Crack!

He is breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly. "Where the fuck did you come from?"
Crack!
"Not from me, that's for damn sure!"
Crack!
"A hole in the ground, that's it."
Crack!

His rage is immense, as large as the Lincoln Memorial, as large as the sky. He is a man who looks upon his son and is diminished. As if something in his seed is defective. He can't bear the thought. Having a son like Jack fills him with rage; the rage fuels his violence.

"Your mother must've fucked some sideshow freak—"
Crack!
"—while I was out trying to make ends meet, John."
Crack!
"John. They call the losers who go to whores johns."
Crack!
"You're a pinhead."
Crack!
"A half-wit!"
Crack!
"You give morons a good name."
Crack!
"Stupid would be a big step up for you."
Crack! Crack! Crack!

Jack's body absorbs the excruciating pain with its usual indifference. In fact, it grows hard and tough under the abuse. It's the words that penetrate to his inner gyroscope, fragile, delicately balanced in the best of times. The litany of hate knocks the pins out from under the gyroscope, the heavy machinery flattens Jack's tattered self-esteem, burying it in the muddy flats at the depths of his being. Belief is as ephemeral as a cloud, shape-shifted by invisible forces. How easily other people's beliefs masquerade as our own. The enemy outside invades, and we, young and impressionable, are vulnerable; the enemy is so insidious that we're changed without even being aware of it. Our cloud shape is altered as we are propelled onward through life.

A
FTERWARDS
, J
ACK
lies on the blood-smeared sheets. His room is invaded by the howls at the edge of the city. The traffic light at the intersection of Eastern and New Hampshire blinks from red to green and back again. Once again, it has predicted his fate. But now the light is ignored. Jack's mind is busy continuing the punishment his father has meted out. He straddles a widening fault line. This fault line is his; he has manufactured it out of his dim brain, he has spun it from all the things he can't do, all the things he tried to do and failed. His father is right. His fault, his fault line, growing bigger and wider every day.

I
NSTEAD OF
lying in a pool of sweat, waiting for the constellation of dreaded sounds, Jack takes to wandering the flyblown streets. Night shreds like smoke, manhandled by streetlights, neon signs blinking and buzzing like wasps, aggressive arc lights setting filling stations afire in blinding auroras. Shiny faces move in and out of his vision, crossing streets at a cocaine-induced angle, shuffling past him in a bog of alcohol fumes. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against wind or rain, he leans against a lamppost on Eastern Avenue, watches the world spin by without him.

It seems as if he has lost himself in the haze of the city. In shop-windows, he looks blurred, as if he is out of focus with the rest of the world. He realizes just how badly out of focus when he is taken behind the local discount electronics store by members of the local gang and beaten senseless for no particular reason save that he's white.

"Yo disrespected us, coming onto our turf." The gang leader spits into Jack's face as Jack sprawls in the filth of the back alley. He is tall—at least a head taller than Jack—and rangy. His eyes are buggy. "We find you here again, we pin yo pale mutherfuckin' ass to the rear end of a garbage truck." He kicks Jack insolently in the groin. "You listenin' t'me, whitey?"