So Like Sleep (6 page)

“Go ahead, ask away. Don’t worry.” He grunted. “I ain’t gonna die on you.”

Homer—“Hell of a name, huh, ‘Homer’ ”—was seventy-four years young. He had retired from the telephone company and decided to become the best runner his age. Marathons, as in 26 miles, 385 yards. The plaques and trophies, smaller in the earlier years, larger as the sport started to catch on, suggested he was nearing his goal. He was one of four older people, three men and a woman, on the cover of a three-year-old
Runner’s World
.

“It’s funny, most people would figure that the strength goes as you get on, but hell, you see stevedores and butchers and such in their sixties who can still bounce hundred-pound loads around like bean bags. No, it’s the flexibility that you lose. ’Less you keep stretching and supporting the joints and so forth.”

Linden left the rowing machine for a sit-up board slanted about thirty-five degrees off the horizontal. He straddled the floor end of the board and adjusted a dial. He then edged uphill until he could lock his feet under the bar at the top. Then he edged still higher so that his legs were bent at the knees. He started doing sit-ups.

I stopped talking and drank some beer.

“That can’t be all your questions,” he said.

“I don’t want to wreck your counting.”

“Hell, I don’t count. That doohickey I set is a timer. I just exercise till it goes off.”

I was afraid to ask how long that would be. “How did you come to be in Jennifer’s group?”

“Well, after Etta—that was my wife, Etta—after she died, I was pretty depressed. The running and so on helped, but you don’t know what it’s like to live with somebody for more’n forty years and then lose her.”

I thought I had some idea, but kept quiet about it and swallowed some more beer.

“Anyway, when Etta passed on, a guy I run with, guy about your age, was all hot about this guy Marek and his hypnosis, claimed he’d really brought my friend’s mother around after she lost her husband. So I went to see Marek. Didn’t much like him at first. My daddy would have called him a snake oil salesman. But the company benefits—old Ma Bell really takes care of her own, don’t ever let anybody tell you any different—they covered the cost, so I said, what the hell.”

“Did it help?”

“Yeah, but not so much because of Marek. I mean Marek himself doing any doctoring. The other people in the group were so fouled up, I just started realizing how well off I was.”

A book on the shelf behind him caught my eye. “That kept you going to the sessions?”

“Yeah, that and … well, you wouldn’t tell on me, wouldja?”

“Tell what?” I walked toward the shelf.

“Well, the truth is, I’m not so depressed anymore. I mean, I’m okay now. But the hypnotism stuff is terrific for concentration and relaxation, which you need for training right.”

“And if you weren’t being treated for depression, Ma Bell wouldn’t pick up the tab for it.”

“That’s right.”

I fingered the book.
The Art of Hypnosis
was printed in dark-blue letters on the yellow binding. There were two other books with similar titles around it.

“Looks like you’ve done a lot of reading on it.”

“Always do. Before I try anything. That’s how I built the library. Also how I’ve stayed alive.”

“Marek told me that he uses both drugs and hypnosis.”

“He does. On everybody but me, that is. I wouldn’t take none of that flurashit if you paid me.”

“But he does use it on the others?”

“Oh, yeah. But he shouldn’t have been using it on William, neither.”

“Why not?”

“Hell, the poor boy was tired most of the time without it, trying to better himself like he was. He looked more worn every week we’d see him.”

“Was Jennifer in the group when you joined?”

“Yeah, but not William. He joined later. She brought him into it.”

I remembered the police report said there was something between Jennifer and William. “You figure that Jennifer and William were lovers?”

“Huh, ‘figure it’? I knew it. Saw them hand in hand, making eyes at each other. Besides, that’s mostly what William talked about in group.”

“His relationship with Jennifer?”

“More like how it all got started, with the troubles he had at Goreham and all, but you probably know about that, don’t you?”

I drew down more of the beer. “Not really.”

“Well, it seems, to hear William tell it, that he was discriminated against by some of the students.”

“At Goreham? In this day and age?”

“Oh, I don’t mean race stuff in a general way. I mean more specifically. One of the white guys there was mad that William took his girl, Jennifer, away. The guy and his friends made William feel, well, like a colored kid must feel when he knows that some established white kids just can’t stand him.”

“Do you know the white boy’s name?”

“Yeah, but … ach, it’ll come to me. William and Jennifer both mentioned it. Anyway, William moved home from the school, and I guess that kinda crimped his time with Jennifer, if you know what I mean.”

“I take it her parents weren’t nuts about him, either.”

“That’s mild compared to the way she told it. She said her old man—that was the way she said it too: her ‘old man’—said her old man woulda killed William if he ever saw them together.”

“Funny, I had the impression he was pretty liberal.”

“Liberal? Hah, that’s a good one. Sam Creasey manages a TV station because his wife’s daddy owned most of it. But you ever heard him speak out on things, like I have around town, well, you’d understand why the feds are hassling him about the license. No, Sam Creasey is a very basic kind of man. Like my daddy, only born a hundred years too late. And probably a pretty tough kind of father for a girl like her to have.”

“ ‘A girl like her’?”

“One who’d want to date a colored guy, I mean.”

“Did you feel funny opening up in front of the others in the group?”

“Me? No. Not much to tell them.” The little binger went off twice, sounding like an oven timer. Linden lay out straight, letting his legs go limp; his feet, still hooked under the bar, kept him from sliding down onto the floor. “It sure was interesting, though, to listen to some of them.”

“About the night that—”

“McCatty.”

“What?”

“McCatty. Richard McCatty. That was the name of the college kid who razzed William. I told you it’d come to me.”

I finished my beer. Linden sat up, gripped the board with each hand near his buttocks, and swung his legs out and down. He stood up, grabbing a towel to wipe his face. “You want another?”

“No, thanks. About the night Jennifer was killed?”

“Yeah?”

“What happened?”

Linden shrugged, tossed the towel perfectly onto a pipe protruding from another piece of apparatus. “Pretty simple, truth to tell.” He crouched to reset the timer, then moved to a leg-lifting machine. Linden sat at the edge of it, wedged his ankles under a pad, and gripped the side of the surface as he had done at the end of the sit-up session. Then he began lifting the pad, and the weights behind him followed on a pulley device. By swinging his feet up, Linden went from lower legs perpendicular to the floor to legs parallel to the floor. He lowered the weights in twice the time it took to raise them, but didn’t continue speaking.

I said, “When did you first arrive that night?”

“About seven-fifteen. I don’t have a car, so I usually just bike over so I don’t sweat up the place from running. By that time, Lainie and Don were already there.”

I thought back to the file. “Lainie Bishop and Donald Ramelli?”

“Right. But Marek said that he hadn’t heard from Jennifer or William, so we waited for them. Marek hates to wait, he’s a nut on timing, and he was getting pissed. So Marek shoos the three of us—Lainie, Don, and me—into the session room and we start to decide who should substitute for William in the chair, when he, well, sort of bursts in.”

“William?”

“Right.”

“He was agitated?”

“And then some. Looking around wild-like, sits down, then jumps up, then sits again. No apologies about being late. Doc goes over to him, shoots him up, and we wait for the drug to calm him down. But it doesn’t seem to work. Then the doc begins to hypnotize him anyway—”

“How?”

“How?”

“How does he hypnotize people?”

“Oh, by a little penlight. He darkens the room some, then moves this little penlight back and forth. It’s really funny, you know. You say to yourself—you’re aware when you’re in the chair, aware of what he’s doing—and you say to yourself, ‘This can’t work,’ but it does. And then it’s so like sleep, you don’t remember a thing, any more than you remember a dream once you wake up. Well, anyway, so then Marek asks him—”

“Wait a minute. Marek left the lights down low?”

“No, he turned ’em up again, back at the control panel.”

I pictured the room. “Where is that?”

“On the wall, just about at the woodwork. It’s hid by the table with the medical stuff on it.”

“What’s controlled from there?”

“Oh, the lights, the TV camera—he tapes a lot of the sessions.”

“What happened next?”

“Let’s see. After he brought the lights back up, he started asking William the usual prelim stuff, like William’s name, who was in the room, that we’re all friends here, and so forth.”

“What then?”

“Marek asked William where he’d been, and William said …” Linden let the weight down and stopped exercising. The binger hadn’t sounded. “William said, ‘I just shot Jennifer, the fucking slut bitch. I just shot her in the basement.’ ” Linden looked up at me, a sad cast to his eyes.

“We all started to talk at once, but Marek talked over us and said, ‘What do you mean, you killed her?’ or something like that. And then William just sort of nods and pulls this S and W Detective’s Special out and lays it on his lap.”

“How did you know it was a Detective’s Special?”

“Huh? Oh, when I was with the telephone company, I carried one. I was an investigator for them.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I got up right away and grabbed the gun. William wasn’t really holding it or anything, but I was still scared. I took it, and Marek walked William to the bathroom. William just sat on the john with the lid down while Don and I watched him. Marek and Lainie went downstairs to check. They were back up pretty quick, and Marek said to call the police, but Don already had.”

“Where did Ramelli call them from?”

“From the doctor’s office.”

“Ramelli left you alone with William?”

“Sure. I had the gun. ’Til I gave it to Marek.”

“But it was empty. The police report said so.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that.”

Yeah, but William would have. And a former investigator who had carried that model should have been able to tell from the weight. Or at least should have swung out the cylinder to check on it. I made an effort not to look back at the hypnosis books.

“What happened next?”

“The cops came pretty fast. They questioned us and took William away.”

“William say anything more before the cops arrived?”

“No. Course, none of us were asking him any questions, either.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t think so.” Linden got off the leg lift and picked up his wipe towel again.

“Nothing else you remember or struck you as odd?”

“No, except for George Bjorkman.”

“Bjorkman? One of the cops?”

“Yeah. Him and Clay were the ones first come to the office. I was surprised how he took it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, George, he was crazy about Jennifer. Wanted to take her to his senior prom in college when she was just a freshman in high school, if you can believe what Jennifer told us in group. Anyway, Sam, her daddy, wouldn’t hear of it. I was surprised that George didn’t rough William up any, considering what he’d done.”

“The killing.”

“That and takin’ his girl, so to speak.” Linden slung the towel around his neck. “More for the takin’ maybe than for the killin’.”

“Because William was black?”

“Yup.”

I asked Linden if I could get back to him in the future, and he said sure, he knew how investigations worked. Linden walked me back upstairs, and we shook hands at his door.

I said, “I really appreciate your time.”

“My pleasure, my pleasure. It’s good to have someone to talk to, even about something like this.” Linden opened the door for me. “You talking to each of the people in the group?”

“Yes.”

“Who else you seen?”

“You’re the first.”

“Who’s next?”

“Any suggestions?”

“Well, Lainie Bishop lives only about half a mile from here. What time you got?”

I looked down. “Five-thirty.”

“You should just catch her.” He gave me directions to her house.

“Thanks.”

“Hope you got a strong zipper,” Homer Linden said, chuckling and closing the door behind me.

L
AINIE
B
ISHOP LIVED
in a development of “estate” homes. You could tell because the private sign beneath her corner’s street pole said so. I pulled up to number 18, all the addresses a full six digits apart. Very estate-like.

There was a silver Oldsmobile in the drive. The landscaping looked professional, the house large but without character. The chimes were still bonging when a woman opened the door.

“Lainie Bishop?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, passing the tip of her tongue over her top front teeth. She had dirty-blond hair, cut and fluffed the way Farrah used to wear hers. The face was plain, though her eyes were big, blue, and set wide apart. She wore a pink silk dress that clung in all the right places and ended eight inches above her knees. I guessed her at thirty-five trying hard to look twenty-eight.

“My name is John Cuddy. I’m investigating the death of Jennifer Creasey.”

Bishop rolled her head to one side. “What’s to investigate?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Well, I can’t ask you in because I’m on my way out, but”— she rolled her head, curls shaking, to the other side of her shoulders and licked the teeth again—“you’re welcome to come with me.”