The Killer Is Dying (12 page)
WHAT YOU WOUND UP REMEMBERING, what kept coming back to you, were not the whacked-out, bizarre crimes, the hatchet murders, double homicides, bunco and bank jobs, but simple things. The look in a father’s eye when you told him that his son had been killed while buying a Pepsi at the AM/PM on the corner. The trumpet case that had sprung open when its owner got shot in a drive-by, and you stood there noticing the way the bell of the horn was crumpled in on itself. The half-finished castle of building blocks in an abused child’s room. The suicide letter of words and phrases cut and pasted from favorite books, a crazy quilt of fonts and sizes, the books themselves put back in their places on the shelves.
Some years back he’d gone on a call to Maryvale. Caller said he was worried about his neighbor but wouldn’t give any details, wondered if the police could just go by and check on him.
Man’s name was Morris Hibley, and he came to the door in pajamas, blue slippers and an apron.
“If you don’t mind …,” he said, beckoning. Sayles followed him to the kitchen, where Hibley plucked a skillet off the flame and gave the contents a quick roll clockwise. “Pulling breakfast together for my wife. Coffee should be ready”—he turned his head to glance at the coffeemaker—“if you’d like some, Officer.”
Sayles accepted, and sat on a stool at the counter drinking it as Hibley went on with his cooking. He explained why he was there.
“Can’t imagine why any of them would do that,” Hibley said, sliding an omelet onto a plate. “Good to have neighbors watching out for you, though. Doesn’t happen a lot anymore, does it?” He wiped the plate’s rim with a hand towel, though it looked fine to Sayles. Alongside the omelet went sliced tomato, sauteed mushrooms, an English muffin.
Nothing was out of place. Skillet and pans square on the burners, countertop spotless, canisters for dry goods an inch apart. Even the coupons and photos on the refrigerator were straight and evenly spaced.
“I’ll just run this up to Patricia and be right back,” Hibley said. Minutes later he returned. The contents of the plate were untouched. Hibley made no mention of that, simply walked to the sink and scraped it all into the trash bin beneath, after which he turned and asked if Sayles would like more coffee.
Sayles thanked him and declined. “But I do need to have a quick word with your wife before I head back to the station.”
“Certainly, go right up. Second door on the right. I’ll just get her bath things together.”
Everything, of course, was in order. The room smelled mysteriously of powders and fragrances. Pale blue drapes matched the bedspread and area rugs, as well as towels, washcloths, and wallpaper glimpsed through the open bathroom door. Darker blue candles on bureau and bedside table. Slippers like Hibley’s own peeking out from beneath the bed skirt.
The bed was empty.
His wife, it turned out, had died eight months earlier. All this time, Hibley had been—in his mind—still taking care of her. Food, baths, medications. He never gave it up. They carted him off to the hospital for observation, then to court, and finally let him go, and he was still asking about her, insisting he needed to be with her. For all Sayles knew, he was over there in Maryvale fixing Patricia’s breakfast right now.
WHERE WAS HE?
He had been dreaming. Squeezing his strange body through narrow spaces, standing outside a half-open door, looking down the line of people ahead of him marching toward—something.
Then he was in a jungle, with what looked to be hundreds of monkeys all chattering at him angrily from the trees, the sour smell of his own body washing up to him in waves.
And when he woke, it was beneath a ceiling that was not his, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds, the bed’s headboard scraping at the wall as he turned to look out a window showing the grayness of early dawn, then back at the ceiling across which a beetle with a crushed wing case solemnly marched.
Jimmie closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he was back in his room, but elsewhere still in his thoughts.
His
thoughts?
No way.
Walking streets where tables filled with wares, books, CDs, watches, jewelry, glassware, had been set up outside all the shops. Germany, judging from snatches he caught of the language.
Then cobblestones, and twisting, narrow corridors between houses.
An old man wandering, head down, about the front yard.
And faces. Dozens of them, some distinct, set against walls, framed in windows, peering down from high places and out of passing cars, others floating up from the gray of sleep without surround or context.
Gray in the window, gray in his head.
He swung his feet off the bed and sat. The nail of the big toe on his right foot was broken into the quick, the others badly needed cutting. Which reminded him—the pain in his hand? He lifted it, feeling nothing at first, a dull throb slowly starting up as he put it back down on the bed.
Someone was knocking at the front door.
He made his way to the window, peered out. Two twentyish, well-dressed men in identical black pants, white shirt, and tie, carrying books close to their chests. Bibles, he assumed. Kind of early for that. Or was it?
Not according to the clock, which informed him he’d slept through till noon.
He switched on the computer, grabbed a Coke, and got back in the saddle just as the computer finished booting up. Looked at the string of headlines his search parameters had found crawling along the Web. Three, he sent to a save file. Quite a collection building up in there.
Dog Hair May Be Clue to Cancer Cure
Nude Arrested at Museum
Suicidal Planet Spiraling Toward Star
Deleting the rest of the headlines, he started a quick swing through his regulars, first the general sites, then the ones he cruised for plunder (flagging four items to keep watch on, buying a stoneworker’s chisel inlaid with the Masonry emblem), finally setting down at the Traveler site. He hadn’t been on for some time, and there were lots of fresh postings, most of them familiar territory. Interpretations of the canon, nitpicking and condemnations, cries in the wilderness. Then, near the end—it had been posted shortly before—he found:
Things have changed here.
I want to come back.
They will not allow it.
Someone’s twisted notion of humor, right? Almost certainly. But the posting’s simplicity and seeming candor, the spareness of it, took root in his imagination and wouldn’t let go, left him wondering. There’d be months of back-and-forth about the posting, of course, on the site; he suspected that for a time there’d be little else.
But he had work to do.
He got supplies from the closet, brown paper, collapsed boxes, tape, bubble sheets, and spent the next hour wrapping items for shipment. He had run off labels on the computer earlier. He stacked the packages on the hall table, e-mailed FedEx for pickup tomorrow.
Now if he didn’t hurry he’d be late to the hospital.
He always came in and put the book he was reading to them on the hall table, but
Candles for Chance
wasn’t there. As he dressed, he tried to think what he might have done with it. Then, glancing at the clock (
he could just make it
), Jimmie picked a book at random off the shelf on his way out.
Pedalling hard, he remembered the dream of an endless line of people plodding forward, and how strange it had been to wake so disoriented, unsure where he was, unable at first to feel or control his own body. Scary, true. But kind of cool too.
A larger group than usual today, the line of parked walkers extending fully half the length of the far wall. Jimmie pulled the book out of his backpack as Mrs. Drummond in her pocket-sprung black suit was saying what a fine boy he was and that he had something special for them today as always. This should be interesting, Jimmie thought. Reading a book to them that he had not read himself, and knew nothing about.
His Monkey Wife
, by John Collier. He took a long breath and started.
If thou be’st born to strange sights and if you don’t mind picking your way through the untidy tropics of this, the globe, and this, the heart, in order to behold them, come with me into the highly colored Bargain Basement Toy Bazaar of the Upper Congo. You shall return to England very shortly.
THERE WERE PICTURES SOMEWHERE, photographs of the two of them happy together and young, or happy and healthy at least, but he couldn’t find them. He hadn’t been one to care for photos, never saw the point of taking them, all those people showing off endless snapshots and slides of their vacation, or their kid throwing up for the first time, or their dog. If he didn’t have the memory in
here
, he’d say, and point to his head, it wasn’t a memory at all, and had no value. But now he found himself at two o’clock in the morning looking for photos.
Something was fading, something was going away from him, something he couldn’t put a name to and didn’t want to lose.
Sayles tried to remember when he’d last slept. Two nights back, he’d finally passed out around dawn, exhausted, but you could hardly call that sleep, and what he remembered of it was like a huge room with bodies, faces, and objects of every sort crashing about everywhere, so that you could never take any of it in, never get a hold on it. He woke drenched in sweat, pulled off his clothes, and draped them across a chair back. He turned on the box fan by the couch, lay there with it blowing on him. Feeling a familiar tug and tightness, he looked down to see an erection.
He laughed.
What a sad old fart I’ve turned into.
So he had showered and made a thermos of coffee, then sat out on the porch watching lights straggle on in neighbors’ houses as they eased into the new day.
Now more of the same.
Throughout those early hours and for much of the following day, pieces of his dreaming, patches, splinters, corners and edges, had come back to him. These would swim up out of nowhere, assert themselves, fall away again. In one he had been in a room lined with statues. They were stepping forward and back, turning their heads one to another, moving hands about, but they were statues. When he came into the room, they all held their hands out to him. That’s all he remembered.
Last he’d seen them, years ago, the photos had been in one of those corrugated file boxes. Josie was forever into projects. She’d plan them, get everything together, be right there on the lip ready to jump, but then something else would come along and the project would never get done. In the closets were bolts of material for the drapes she’d planned to sew, along with curtain rods and hangers. A box or two of shelving bought at least eight years ago and still unassembled. Cushions for chairs snug in store wrappings, neat but ever-growing stacks of paid bills, insurance papers and correspondence fully meant to be filed away, skirts for beds and stick-on pads for furniture legs. The photos, she had sorted into envelopes according to some taxonomy all her own, time or place or subjects; they’d gone into the file box along with corner mounts, double-sided tape, scissors, a scrapbook or two.
And the box had gone … where?
Not in the bedroom closet, or in the hallway catch-all closet, or out in the garage where the stacks were so high and long-established that boxes on the bottom had been compressed to half their original height.
He found textbooks from the criminal science classes he’d taken at Phoenix College, stacks of old case notes, library law books he had failed to return, expired passports, X-rays and lab reports with column after column of numbers, copies of his safety records and firing range qualifications, a Bible with his name and hers in gilt letters on the inside front page, tax files and documentation going back at least twenty years, a manila envelope of programs from plays and musicals they’d attended, a lot of old clothes, a surprising quantity of new clothes still with store tags on them or in gift boxes.
And finally, under her bed, he found the photos, two fat scrapbooks full, all of them sorted chronologically and expertly affixed to the pages.
He was partway through the second scrapbook when the phone rang, Graves offering to swing by and pick him up this morning. Why the hell not? They stopped at Denny’s for coffee on the way in. Sitting there watching a young couple bedecked with tattoos and piercings two booths over, Sayles told Graves about Dollman.
Typically Graves said nothing, but followed Sayles’s gaze to the young couple.
“You remember that?”
“Being young?”
Graves nodded.
“And stupid?”
“And not caring that you were—that too. But I was talking about being in love.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
“Maybe. Maybe it is.”
Graves waited as the server refilled their cups and again asked if there would be anything else before swinging off down the line holding the pot out in front of him like a lantern.
“You know I’ve never much believed in telling others how to live their lives …,” Graves said.
“Then now’s not a good time to start, is it?”
He looked away and drank coffee. “Yeah, I guess it isn’t. This stuff’s nasty.”
“First cup wasn’t as bad.”
“Always the way it is. Isn’t. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, Graves, I do. Damned near every time.”
“Right.”
They sat without speaking as the young couple got up to leave. Sayles couldn’t help but notice that the woman paid, and that the man followed her out the door, wondering what that said about the nature of their characters, of their relationship, and of the world they thought they lived in. As the couple passed by on the sidewalk outside the window, the man turned to look in at them. At some point, presumably, he’d become aware of being watched. Sayles tried to read his expression: Annoyance? Defiance? More like puzzled, he thought. What was the word? Quizzical.
“Dollman, huh?” Graves said.
“I don’t have a name for him. Not that it matters much, now that he’s gone to ground.”
“This guy has information, looks right to have information, but he doesn’t want to give it up. Yet he got in touch with you.”
Sayles nodded.
“What the hell’s that about?”
“I gave up trying to figure.”
“So whatever he claims, we have to assume that he’s directly involved.”
“Chances are good.”
“They’re a hundred percent. And we know he has to want something. But what? He’s not a suspect, there
are
no suspects—and no one even knows who he is.”
“And not a joyrider,” Sayles said, “or he’d have been out in the open with this from the get-go. I’ve been through it a hundred times. Hitchhike, minute-of-fame, self-styled Good Samaritan … Nothing fits.”
“Something does.”
The server was back. Graves’s hand shot out and hovered palm down an inch above the cup. The server, Donnie according to the name tag, glanced at Sayles. Sayles looked at his watch and shook his head. “We’re twenty minutes late.”
“They’ll start without us,” Graves said, then: “Vinegar and honey. You have a snake in a hole, a kid under a table, there’s two ways to go with it. You smoke him out. Or you make him think you’re going to give him what he wants.”
“This isn’t a snake or a kid, Graves. This guy’s a ghost.”
“Yeah. Well, ghosts want something too—or they wouldn’t still be around.”
