Rose Madder (29 page)

To Norman there was no such thing as “a little rekky”; to Norman there was only trolling. When you were stumped, you went somewhere that had a bearing on the case, you looked at it with your mind perfectly open, not junked up with a lot of worthless ideas and half-baked suppositions, and when you did that you were like a guy sitting in a slow-moving boat, casting your line out and reeling it in, casting out and reeling in, waiting for something to grab hold. Sometimes nothing did. Sometimes you got nothing but a submerged tree-limb or an old rubber boot or the kind of fish not even a hungry raccoon would eat.

Sometimes, though, you hooked a tasty one.

He put on the hat and the sunglasses, then turned left onto Harrison Street, now on his way to Durham Avenue. It was easily a three-mile hike to the neighborhood where Daughters and Sisters was located, but Norman didn't mind; he could use the walk to empty out his head. By the time he reached 251, he would be like a blank sheet of photographic paper, ready to receive whatever images and ideas might come, without trying to change them so they would fit his own preconceptions. If you didn't
have
any preconceptions, you couldn't do that.

His overpriced map was in his back pocket, but he only stopped to consult it once. He had been in the city less than a week, but he already had its geography much more clearly
fixed in his mind than Rosie did, and again, this was not so much training as it was a gift.

When he had awakened yesterday morning with his hands and shoulders and groin aching, with his jaws too sore to open his mouth more than halfway (the first attempt at a wakeup yawn as he swung his feet out of bed had been agony), he had done so with the dismaying realization that what he had done to Peter Slowik—aka Thumperstein, aka The Amazing Urban Jewboy—had probably been a mistake. Just how bad a mistake was hard to say, because a lot of what had happened at Slowik's house was only a blur to him, but it had been a mistake, all right; by the time he had reached the hotel newsstand, he'd decided there was no probably about it. Probably was for the dinks of the world, anyway—this had been an unspoken but fiercely held tenet of his life's code ever since his early teens, when his mother had left and his father had really started to crank up the beatings.

He had bought a paper at the newsstand and leafed through it rapidly in the elevator as he went back up to his room. There was nothing in it about Peter Slowik, but Norman had found that only a minor relief. Thumper's body might not have been discovered in time for the news to make the early editions; might, in fact, still be lying where Norman had left it (where he
thought
he had left it, he amended; it was all pretty hazy), crammed in behind the basement water-heater. But guys like Thumper, guys who did lots of public-service work and had lots of bleeding-heart friends, didn't go undiscovered for long. Someone would get worried, other someones would come around looking for him at his cozy little rabbit-hole on Beaudry Place, and eventually some someone would make an exceptionally unpleasant discovery behind the water-heater.

And sure enough, what had not been in the paper yesterday morning was there today, on page one of the Metro section:
CITY SOCIAL WORKER SLAIN IN HOME
. According to the piece, Travelers Aid had been only one of Thumper's after-hours activities . . . and he hadn't exactly been poor, either. According to the paper, his family—of which Thump had been the last—had been worth a pretty good chunk of change. The fact that he had been working in a bus station at three in the morning, sending runaway wives to the whores at Daughters and Sisters, only proved to Norman
that the man was either short a few screws or sexually bent. Anyway, he had been your typical do-gooding shitbug, trundling here and there, too busy trying to save the world most days to change his underpants. Travelers Aid, Salvation Army, Dial
HELP
, Bosnian Relief, Russian Relief (you'd have thought a Jewboy like Thump would have had at least enough sense to skip that one, but nope), and two or three “women's causes” as well. The paper didn't identify these last, but Norman already knew one of them: Daughters and Sisters, also known as Lesbo Babes in Toyland. There was going to be a memorial service for Thumper on Saturday, except the paper called it a “remembrance circle.” Dear bleeding Jesus.

He also knew that Slowik's death could have had to do with any of the causes the man worked for . . . or none of them. The cops would be checking into his personal life as well (always assuming a walking Room to Rent like Thumper
had
a personal life), and they would not neglect the possibility that it had been the ever more popular “motiveless crime,” committed by some psycho who maybe just happened to walk in. A guy looking for a bite, you could say.

None of these things, however, were going to matter much to the whores at Daughters and Sisters; Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. He'd had a fair amount of experience with women's halfway houses and shelters in the course of his job, more as the years went by and the people Norman thought of as New Age Fern-Sniffers really started to have an effect on the way people thought and behaved. According to the New Age Fern-Sniffers, everyone came from a dysfunctional family, everyone was sublimating the child inside, and everyone had to watch out for all the mean, nasty people out there who had the nerve to try going through life without whining and crying and running off to some Twelve-Step program every night. The Fern-Sniffers were assholes, but some of them—and the women in places like this Daughters and Sisters were often prime examples—could be extremely
cautious
assholes.
Cautious?
Shit. They gave an entirely new dimension to the term
bunker mentality.

Norman had spent most of yesterday in the library, and he had found out a number of interesting things about Daughters and Sisters. The most hilarious was that the woman who ran the place, Anna Stevenson, had been Mrs. Thumper until
1973, when she had apparently divorced him and taken her maiden name back. It seemed like a wild coincidence only if you were unfamiliar with the mating rites and rituals of the Fern Folks. They ran in pairs, but were hardly ever able to run in harness, not for the long haul. One always ended up wanting to gee while the other
wanted
to haw. They were unable to see the simple truth: politically correct marriages didn't work.

Thumper's ex-wife didn't run her place along the lines of most battered-women shelters, where the motto was “only women know, only women tell.” In a Sunday-supplement article about the place which had been published a little over a year ago, the Stevenson woman (Norman was struck by how much she looked like that cunt Maude on the old TV show) had dismissed that idea as “not only sexist, but stupid as well.” A woman named Gert Kinshaw was also quoted on this subject. “Men aren't our enemies unless they prove they're our enemies,” she said. “But if they hit, we hit back.” There was a picture of her, a big old nigger bitch who reminded Norman vaguely of that Chicago football player William “Refrigerator” Perry. “You ever try to hit me, sweetheart, I'll use you for a trampoline,” he had murmured.

But that stuff, interesting as it might be, was really beside the point. There might be men as well as women in this city who knew where the place was and were allowed to make referrals, and it might be run by just one New Age Fern-Sniffer instead of a committee of them, but in one respect he was sure they would be exactly the same as their more traditional counterparts: the death of Peter Slowik would have them on red alert. They wouldn't make the assumptions the cops would make; unless and until proved otherwise, they would assume Slowik's murder had to do with them . . . specifically with one of the referrals Slowik had made during the last six or eight months of his life. Rosie's name might already have surfaced in that respect.

So why did you do it?
he asked himself.
Why in God's name did you do it? There were other ways of getting to where you are now, and you know what they are. You're a cop, for Christ's sake, of course you do! So why did you put their wind up? That fat slob in the newspaper article, Dirty Gertie What's-Her-Face, is probably standing in the parlor window of the goddam place, using binoculars to examine
every swinging dick who goes by. If she hasn't dropped dead of a Twinkie-assisted stroke by now, that is. So why did you do it? Why?

The answer was there, but he turned away from it before it could do more than begin to surface in his conscious mind; turned away because the implications were too grim to look at. He had done Thumper for the same reason he had strangled the redheaded whore in the fawn-colored hotpants—because something had crawled up from the bottom of his mind and
made
him do it. That thing was there more and more now, and he wouldn't think of it. It was better not to. Safer.

Meantime, here he was; Pussy Palace dead ahead.

Norman crossed to the even-numbered side of Durham Avenue at a leisurely amble, knowing that any watchers would feel less threatened by a guy on the far side of the street. The specific watcher he kept imagining was the darkie tubbo whose picture had been in the paper, a giant economy-sized bag of works with a pair of hi-resolution field glasses in one hand and a melting clump of Mallow Cremes in the other. He slowed down a little more, but not much
—red alert,
he reminded himself,
they'll be on red alert.

It was a big white frame house, not quite Victorian, one of those turn-of-the-century dowagers that's three full stories of ugly. It looked narrow from the front, but Norman had grown up in a house not so different from this and was willing to bet it went almost all the way back to the street on the far side of the block.

And with a whore-whore here and a whore-whore there,
Norman thought, being careful not to change his walk from its current slow amble, and being careful to swallow the house not in one long stare but in small sips.
Here a whore, there a whore, everywhere a whore-whore.

Yes indeed. Everywhere a whore-whore.

He felt the familiar rage begin to pulse at his temples now, and with it came a familiar image, the one which stood for all the things he could not express: the bank card. The green bank card she had dared to steal. The image of that card was always close now, and it had come to stand for all the terrors and compulsions of his life—the forces he raged against, the faces (his mother's, for instance, so white and doughy and somehow sly) that sometimes slipped into his mind while he was lying in bed at night and trying to sleep,
the voices that came in his dreams. His father's, for instance. “Come on over here, Normie. I've got something to tell you, and I want to tell you up close.” Sometimes that meant a blow. Sometimes, if you were lucky and he was drunk, it meant a hand creeping in between your legs.

But that didn't matter now; only the house across the street mattered. He wouldn't get another look this good at it, and if he wasted these precious seconds thinking about the past, who was the monkey then?

He was directly opposite the place. Nice lawn, narrow but deep. Pretty flowerbeds, flushed with spring blooms, flanked the long front porch. There were metal posts dressed in ivy standing in the center of each bed. The ivy had been pruned away from the black plastic cylinders at the tops of the posts, though, and Norman knew why: there were TV cameras inside those dark pods, giving overlapping views up and down the street. If anyone was looking at the monitors inside right now, they would be seeing a little black-and-white man in a baseball hat and sunglasses moving from screen to screen, walking hunched and slightly bent-kneed so that his six-feet-three would look quite a bit shorter to the casual observer.

There was another camera mounted over a front door for which there would be no keyhole; keys were too easy to duplicate, tumblers too easy to tickle, if you were handy with a set of picks. No, there would be a keycard slot, a numerical keypad console, or maybe both. And more cameras in the back yard, of course.

As he walked past the house, Norman risked one final look into the side yard. Here was a vegetable garden, and two whores in shorts sliding long sticks—tomato-stakes, he supposed—into the ground. One looked like a taco-bender: olive skin and long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Dynamite body, looked about twenty-five. The other was younger, maybe not even out of her teens yet, one of these punky-grungy scumbuckets with her hair dyed two different colors. There was a bandage covering her left ear. She was wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, and Norman could see a tattoo on her left bicep. His eyes weren't quite good enough to make out what it was, but he had been a cop long enough to know it was probably either the name of a rock group or a badly executed drawing of a marijuana plant.

Norman saw himself suddenly rushing across the street,
ignoring the cameras; saw himself grabbing Little Miss Hot Snatch with the rock-star hair; saw himself sliding one of his big hands around her thin neck and running it up until it was stopped by the shelf of her jaw. “Rose Daniels,” he would say to the other one, the taco-bender with the dark hair and the dynamite bod. “Get her out here right now or I'll snap this spermbucket's neck like a chicken-bone.”

That would be great, but he was almost positive Rosie was no longer here. His library research told him that almost three thousand women had availed themselves of the services offered by Daughters and Sisters since Leo and Jessica Stevenson had opened the place in 1974, and the average length of stay was four weeks. They moved them out into the community at a pretty good pace, breeders and disease-spreaders, pretty mosquitoes. Probably gave them dildos instead of diplomas when they graduated.