The Memory Killer (11 page)

“Then what happened?”

“I went behind the counter to grab my phone, at least get a shot of the creep. But when I turned back around he was gone.”

I got Jonathan’s sparse description: dark hair, maybe, blue jeans, dark T-shirt. I went to the rear and elevatored back up to Ocampo’s apartment.

“I’m putting a guard on this place,” I told him. “Night and day.”

It took an hour to get surveillance outside the shop. I booked to HQ and found Gershwin back from his deposition.

“You think Donnie knows Gary is his brother?” he asked.

“He’s in Miami, and something’s pressed his button. I think Donnie’s got an agenda that somehow involves Gary.”

“So why’d Donnie wait until now to make contact?”

“Maybe he just found out an adoptive parent died and he discovered evidence while going through the estate. Maybe someone left the truth in a posthumous letter. Or maybe Donnie’s known, but only recently started obsessing. A big possible is that Donnie’s been in prison. You’re checking that angle?”

“Three pool investigators are on it: Tyler, Ruiz and Bell. They’re checking everyone fresh from prison in the past six months who has a sexual history.”

“We don’t have a name,” I muttered. “Or a past. Not a freakin’ atom’s worth of info about the guy.”

“We know his DNA. We know he’s got some kind of accent. And we know he’s six-two with blue eyes and dark hair. Not to say he looks like that now, but on that note, did you …?”

I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket. I’d had the art types manipulate a facial photo of Gary, taking off weight, adding various hair styles and colors, beards and mustaches. I handed the sheet of photos to Gershwin, who smiled and nodded.

“Cool, Big Ryde: Fifty shades of Donnie.”

Debro was pumping iron on a foam mat in his living room, the barbells rising and falling in time with his unlabored breath, the fifty-pound load for building strength, not bulk. He was naked save for a red thong and the knit cap. One windowless wall of the room was mostly mirror, so he could watch himself.

The television screen that dominated one end of the room was turned to the gay channel, LOGO, an endless procession of delicious-looking men and some lesbians. Debro liked lesbians because they had often been the target of hatred, and it had made them tough and resilient. He particularly enjoyed the young diesel dykes in their camo pants and clodhoppers, a pack of Marlboros rolled into a short-sleeved tee. It was a cool look.

Debro wasn’t interested in the television, however. He was planning an event that would allow him to continue his work. It would be challenging, but reap huge rewards.

He heard a muffled thump and held the barbell at its apex and listened. Another thump, this one loud. He cursed, set aside the weights, and headed upstairs and into the room.

Jacob Eisen sprawled on the floor in a puddle of piss. Harold Brighton was at the far side of the room, lying on the floor. He was raising his leg, then slamming it down on the floor. Wham. Raise. Wham.

You never knew the reactions, different with each one. The slut on the floor, Jacob, had settled down after a day, content to be a placid fuck. But Harold had been the hardest to subdue at the capture, and since then had spent all of his time fighting to get to his feet. Even when his mind seemed shut down he rolled and moaned.

Harold had to be replaced.

Debro opened a door at the far end of the room, revealing a small utility bathroom and the bucket and mop he used for maintenance. He pulled a reinforced plastic tarp from a cabinet and returned to the large room, flinging the tarp over Harold as if covering a mattress. He gathered the ends of the tarp and yanked Harold to the floor. Harold’s hands pressed against the plastic like flowers trying to break from the soil.

Debro returned to the bathroom for his supplies, filling a syringe from a small brown bottle. He preferred oral dosing while they slept, but Harold needed faster calming, his fingernails scratching at the tarp as his cries grew more frantic.

When Debro was within a step, Harold kicked, catching Debro’s ankle and sending him flailing to the floor. Debro hobbled back to the bathroom, searching the cabinet until he found the steel pry-bar used to open the painted-over windows when he’d bought the place. He twirled it like a baton and went back to Harold, his harsh croaks agitating Jacob, whose head was craning from the floor.

Debro felt his anger rising as he crossed to Harold, a memory regressing thirteen years, to high school, Harold Brighton practicing for a production of
Grease
, his lithe body vaulting across the stage, his shirt off in the dank heat of the auditorium, shorts rolled up his sinewy dancer’s thighs. It’s after-hours and Brighton is rehearsing alone. Debro has crept …

into the wings and crouches in the dark behind an old piano, watching Harold Brighton cross the floor repeatedly, working to get the moves correct. Debro’s hand drifts to his crotch as Brighton counts off one-two-three and again launches into his routine. Except this time Brighton doesn’t stop downstage: He runs straight to the piano and stares down at the crouching Debro.

“
I knew I saw someone. What are you doing?
”

“
I-I-I …
”
is all Debro can muster. He’s wobbling, trying to keep from fainting in terror.

Brighton leans closer.
“
You’re that pimply fat thing in Mr Kremer’s homeroom, aren’t you?
”

Debro can only nod. He feels tears welling in his eyes.

“
Why are you spying on me, you gross turd?
”
Brighton demands, arms crossed.

“
I-I-I wuh-wasn’t ssss-pying
,”
Debro says, wiping spittle from his chin.
“
I wuhwuh-was …
”

Brighton’s eyes fall to Debro’s khakis. Just below the belt buckle is a dark and spreading dampness. Brighton’s face wrinkles in disgust.

“
Oh, God … sick. You, you
monster.”

The next day all of Brighton’s friends have heard the tale. They snicker in the hall.

Debro whips the tarp from Harold and swings the pry-bar at his head.
Thud.
Harold slumps to the floor. Debro crouches and sinks the needle into Harold’s hip, pausing to note what a lovely, muscular, dancing hip it is. He looks down at the man’s legs, strident with muscle. They’re
beautiful
. But then, the man is a dancer, a special person. He’d received gifts most people could only dream of having.

But he was mean and nasty, too.

Debro’s hand lingered on the powerful leg before he stood, staring down at Brighton. The man clearly didn’t deserve his ability to dance. When he returned to the world he’d be as he always was – special – just as he’d return to being spiteful and nasty and causing pain.

I’ve been wrong,
Debro thought, nudging Brighton’s leg with his foot. Taking them, using them, throwing them back into their lives to pick up exactly where they’d left off: nasty little boys so smug and sure and perfect … never knowing the insults, the put-downs, the laughter that people like Debro had to endure. People like Harold Brighton had never known pain, only adoration.

What they really needed to know was Justice.

Debro thought a long moment, then pulled off his knit hat, set it back in the anteroom, and rolled up his sleeves. The heavy pry-bar in his hand, he stepped back into the main room and closed the door.

When he emerged five minutes later, he paused in the anteroom to strip off his clothes and shoes, red with blood spatter and pieces of pink flesh. He returned to his apartment feeling like each breath was filled with sunlight. He paused and looked down at himself. A spreading wetness across his shorts. Somehow his release had gotten lost in his time with Brighton, all part of a continuous, explosive joy.

Feeling intoxicated, Debro showered, dressed in chinos and a blue T-shirt, crossing the room to pick up his knit hat, snugging it to his head. He paused, thought for a moment, then pulled off the hat and threw it to the floor.

“Debro calling,” he said as he stomped up and down on the hat. He smiled. Debro wasn’t his real name, but it was a name he loved, a kind of joke he played on the world.

It stood for Dead Brother.

Debro kicked the hat into a corner, pivoted on his feet like a dancer, and skipped back up the stairs to return a corrected Harold Brighton to the world.

We stayed in the office. I’d put an investigative crew into checking out local herbalists, asking whether anyone had expressed an interest in toxic plants, but so far the results were a big fat zero.

“There are herbalists across the area,” Detective Ruiz had told us. “Datura’s not something they carry. When I ask, they wonder if I’ve been reading Castaneda.”

I recalled Carlos Castaneda from college, writing about supposed meetings between an anthropologist and a Mexican
brujo
or sorcerer. The brujo gives the anthropologist datura, which sends him to a dark land filled with terrifying creatures. But the brujo didn’t keep black locust and dumb cane in his medicine bag.

At two in the afternoon my phone rang, the screen showing
GARY.

“Donnie sent me a letter,” Ocampo said, his voice trembling. “It’s horrible.”

“Put the letter down, don’t touch it. I’m on my way.”

Gershwin and I split up, him heading off to interview the potentials from the Missings file, me racing to Ocampo’s shop. Jonathan was there, looking less reserved and cool than previous visits. Maybe the guy humping the window had broken the effect.

“Something’s happening,” the clerk said, rolling his eyeballs to the ceiling. “Gary’s up and pacing.”

I heard labored creaking of the floorboards and elevatored upstairs to find Ocampo in the center of the room, his legs like pink, rash-stricken phone poles. He wore a blue velvet robe that could have covered an antelope and was sipping nervously from his big red bathroom cup. For some reason I detected a slight background odor of vomit.

Ocampo pointed to his bedside table. “It’s there. I don’t want to go near it. It stinks.”

“Stinks? Why?”

“Read it.”

The letter was face up, freckled with wiped-away drips like coffee. A torn-open envelope lay beside it, one of those with the bubble lining. I leaned and read the precisely inked block lettering.

I wrote this on paper I PUKED ON after seeing you. You are a FAT SLOB and make me ASHAMED. You are WEAK. You make me SICK! Things like YOU shouldn’t be allowed to LIVE!!!

There was no signature, but I figured it was Donnie.

“Not allowed to live,” Ocampo sniffled. “He wants to kill me.”

I picked the note up in my fingernails, held my breath, and walked it to the kitchen. I returned to the living room and cranked half-open windows wide to air warm and smelling of a nearby tacquería.

“You’re safe,” I said. “There’s a surveillance team watching around the clock.”

“
He’s
watching, too. How else would he know I’m a fat slob?”

“He can’t get close. He wants to scare you.”

“Why?” Ocampo was almost in tears. “Why is he doing this?”

“He’s disturbed, Gary. Listen, I’ve got to get this to forensics as soon as possi—”

“DON’T LEAVE!” he shrieked. He sat in the huge chair and hung his head. “At least not yet. Please … my heart’s pounding. I feel sick.”

“Do you want me to call a doctor?”

“No, just hang out a bit, OK?”

I took a photo of the letter with my phone, made a call, then pulled the wooden chair from the wall and sat, figuring I might be able to get his mind off events, at least temporarily, so I initiated idle chatter to get him talking.

“How long you owned the store, Gary? Long?”

He shrugged. “For almost a decade.”

“How’d you get started? I mean, this isn’t a standard business.”

He looked to see if I was joking, saw I wasn’t, cleared his throat. “I-I collected comics when I was a kid, buying over the Internet, selling. I was … am, actually pretty good at it.”

“You must be, to have made enough to buy a store.”

“I study things, subscribe to Hollywood news sheets. I listen for whispers of superhero scripts being optioned, movies based on comics. I buy heavily in that series. If the movie hits, the prices go way up. Especially rare issues. Then I buy all the promo items associated with the movie, because they’ll become collector’s items.”

I smiled. “Buy low, sell high.”

He nodded. “I’ve bought issues for forty bucks, sold them for two thousand. I got a Japanese customer spent over twelve grand last year. My biggest customer is a member of the Saudi royal family. The dude’s sitting on, like, a billion barrels of oil but when I call and say I’ve got an early mint Marvel, he freaking flies over to get it in person.”

“How about the video games?”

“Jonathan’s better with the games. I do the comics and the magic stuff.”

“Why magic? Is it profitable?”

He reddened. “Maybe six hundred bucks in sales last year. I like magic. It’s … probably kind of ridiculous, but I was a prestidigitator of some note. A hit at children’s birthday parties. I was called the Great Campini.”

A
prestidigitator
, I thought, hearing a note of pride in his voice
.
The Great Campini.

“This was when, Gary?”

“When I was a teenager, junior high and high school.”

I had a mental picture of a chubby, fifteen-year-old Ocampo standing before a half-circle of eight-year-olds in party hats, the center of attention as he pulled a stream of pennants from his mouth or produced quarters from behind ears to squeals of delight and applause, probably the only applause he ever received.

My brother had gone through a magician phase, mail-ordering a miniature guillotine that appeared to slice through his finger, a box that seemed empty one moment, dispensing a nickel after my brother tapped it with his wand, a pencil wrapped in electrician’s tape. He learned to make a quarter seem to jump from one hand to another. Jeremy’s magic phase had lasted about two months, which I expected was typical. That Ocampo kept the trappings of his sole youthful success seemed telling, and rather sad.