The Sleeping and the Dead (15 page)

“Stop,” James breathed.

“I want you take my picture while I blow you.” I unzipped him and reached my hand inside his pants. He grabbed my wrist and I grabbed his dick. It was limp and cold as a dead fish.

“Please don't.”

“You want to screw instead?”

“I can't do this.” He extracted my hand and stepped back, zipped and buckled, a look of profound betrayal on his face.

“I thought you wanted to. I thought you wanted dessert.”

“I just can't. Not like this.”

“How then?” It really was cold in the apartment. The heat was busted again, but I didn't care. I could heat things up eventually. “What do you like to do?”

“Not this. It's not right.” He was scared now, backing toward the door.

“How can I make it right?” I felt like a used-car salesman.

“I don't know.” He was just a kid after all. He was scared. Of me. I wasn't the woman he thought I was. Well screw that, that's what he gets for thinking. Maybe he was old-fashioned or something. But I never met a man who wouldn't take a hummer if offered freely, no strings attached. Even old-fashioned men, even preachers. Especially preachers. And there was no way he was gay.

“Maybe you'd better just give me the other part of the money and I'll go,” he said.

I walked over to the table and grabbed a cigarette. I lit it while he watched, turned and rested my ass on the edge of the table so he could get a good look at what he was missing. I didn't have his money. I had spent it all on my bender, or lost it, or been robbed. Maybe all three. I couldn't remember. All I had was twenty-seven cents.

“I don't have your money,” I said.

“You said you did.”

I took a drag, held it, then let the smoke out through my nose. “Something came up.”
Now he really knows what kind of bitch I am.
He was easy to read. I didn't need a sixth sense.

He walked to the door, then stopped. “Can you get it?”

“Eventually.” I took another long, crackling drag. He looked like I'd told him he had cancer. I felt bad for the guy. This wasn't his fault. I was a scary bitch, no doubt about it, scary, unreliable, irresponsible, an all-too-willing accomplice to the worst angels of my nature. “Give me a few days,” I said, relenting.

“I don't have a few days.” He left and closed the door. I listened to his footsteps going down the stairs. I went to the bedroom window and after a couple of minutes watched his car turn onto Summer Avenue.

“To hell with this,” I said to no one.

 

Black Friday

 

18

I
WOKE UP WHEN MY
cell phone started ringing under the cushions of the couch. My blood felt like day-old gravy pushing through my veins. I was naked and the apartment was frigid as a morgue. I knew who was calling without looking, but I dug it out anyway and answered it. I deserved that much penance.

“Don't you answer your phone anymore?” Adam asked.

“I answered it this time, didn't I?”

“I've been calling for two days. Stopped by last night about seven.”

“I had a date.”

“With who?”

“Whom with,” I corrected his grammar. This conversation sounded sickeningly familiar. “I had dinner with the guy who sold me the Leica.” Or almost sold me the Leica. His camera was still on the table. He hadn't taken it with him.

“Well grab your shit and get over here. We got another body. Playhouse Killer for sure this time.”

*   *   *

I stood beside Adam, looking at the pair of naked feet sticking out of a rolled-up tapestry lying on a stage. We were at the public amphitheater known as the Overton Park Shell, located behind the Brooks Museum of Art, near the golf course and the zoo. A sword was pinned through the tapestry like a cocktail skewer through a roll of ham; all that was missing was a giant olive. The body lay at the back of the stage beneath an enormous faded rainbow painted across the inside of the acoustic concrete shell.

It was the brightest, sunniest, coldest November morning in living memory. The air made my lungs hurt. The sky was so blue, the inside of my skull ached. The tapestry and the sword hilt were white with frost. The victim had been lying there awhile. I lit a cigarette and started snapping photos.

“Hamlet stabbed Polonius through the arras,” Adam said. I paused long enough to watch a couple of officers exchange some money. There wasn't much to see other than the rolled-up body. No footprints across the concrete stage, no pool of frozen blood, not even a cigarette butt or cigar ash or dull penknife. Nothing but the barren semicircle of painted concrete, the frosty barefoot pig in a blanket, and the arched and peeling rainbow above him. At least it wasn't the side of a road. At least he wasn't dragged behind a pickup to mask the cause of death and left in a ditch somewhere for the possums and dogs to tear to pieces. The killer cared enough to make a spectacle.

I slung the Leica behind my back and knelt beside the body to get some close-ups with my Canon. The sword hilt looked like some kind of cavalry saber, with an ivory grip and worn silver guard and quillons. The roll of tapestry wasn't much larger than if there'd been no one in it at all.

Dr. Wiley arrived with his cohort of grim technicians, all lugging tackle boxes. He looked like we had interrupted his Christmas shopping. News vans were parked along the street running beside the art museum. The air was so cold and thin, you could hear the zoo's siamang gibbons tuning up with their distinctive
mo-mo-mo
calls, while lions and tigers roared over their morning beef. “The jungle is restless,” Adam observed.

“
Ungawa, simba.
” The zoo noises made for an atmosphere infinitely more surreal than any of the killer's previous stagings.

Without Chief Billet running interference for me, Dr. Wiley's arrival made it impossible to continue my work. Billet was in Chicago visiting relatives for the weekend, so Wiley quickly ran me off. I moved to the edge of the stage and lit another cigarette to try and kill the hot tickle at the back of my throat.

The Overton Park Shell had been closed three years for renovations. They were ripping out the old bench seating and replacing it with landscaped lawn on which midtown's finest would one day nibble pre-cubed cheese and sip boxed Chardonnay from plastic glasses, pretending they were actually in Central Park. Right now it looked like a bomb crater. I scanned it through the Leica's viewfinder and snapped off a few pictures of the rubble and the line of trees at the top of the hill.

Dr. Wiley withdrew the sword from the body and bagged it. He needed a big bag, like a bread sleeve. While we watched him do his thing from a safe distance, Adam asked, “Did you go out Wednesday night, too?”

“Yeah. For a while.”

“To the Square?”

“You know I don't have money for that.” I didn't look at him, but I could feel his eyes trying to peel me apart. “Why do you ask?”

“A woman fitting your description assaulted another woman in the parking lot behind Playhouse on the Square.”

Oh yeah. How could I have forgotten.
I tried to appear professionally curious and asked, “Robbery?”

“Nothing taken.”

“How's the vic?”

“Couple of broke ribs and a concussion. Nothing serious.”

“That's good.”

He stepped in front of me and looked down at my face with his brown eyes. He looked so disappointed, but honestly I don't know what he expected. I always let him down. It wasn't his job to save me. I didn't hire him for that.

“Something's not right,” I said.

“I know.”

“The killer has never done two murders this close together.”

“Hamlet thought it was his uncle Claudius eavesdropping.”

“Revenge?”

“Maybe. Or punishment.”

“For what?”

Wiley and his goons slowly unrolled the body, stopping at every turn to shoot photographs and lint-roll the tapestry for evidence.

“Maybe this one really is a copycat,” I suggested. “Any idiot can do Hamlet. Even Mel Gibson.” Adam laughed, his mouth a straight line under his nose. He looked worse than I did, but he came by his death mask honest. He was one hell of a cop. He'd been busting his balls on this case for five straight days. All he needed now was a copycat killer chumming the waters. I could tell he was dreading the news cameras this morning.

“I'm hoping we'll find a print,” he said. I didn't bother pointing out that they already had plenty of prints, but maybe he was hoping a fingerprint would definitively tie this victim to the previous murders and eliminate the possibility of a copycat. Or maybe he was just hoping for a fresh break.

“So what's his name?” he asked.

“Whose name?”

“Your date. Last night.”

“James St. Michael.”

“Isn't he on television or something?”

“That's what everybody says. Actually, he flies crop dusters.”

“I didn't know people still did that.” He looked up at the sky as though he expected to see one. The air was so cold, I could barely breathe.

“They do. Are we done here?”

“You got another date?”

“With my parents.”

“That's good. I'm glad you're going home. Only, go back to your apartment first and clean up because you look like shit, Jackie.”

“Thanks for noticing. Can I borrow forty bucks for gas?”

Adam took out his wallet and passed me a couple of twenties, with the unspoken understanding that I wouldn't go and stick it in my arm. He was paying me to go to an NA meeting. Clever boy, that Adam. He knew how to play me. I noticed several of his cop friends watching our exchange, so I smiled at them with my unshaved teeth. They pretended to be looking at something else.

“Sergeant!” Wiley barked. Adam hurried over. He and Wiley were still on speaking terms, because Adam was good at being everybody's friend, even friends with swinging dicks like Wiley. I dropped my cig and ground it out under my shoe, because I liked making enemies. It was the only thing I was any good at. I was free to go, but I waited to thank Adam.

He walked back while they were still zipping up the body. He didn't look at me. He didn't look at anything. He looked like somebody had opened a vein in his neck. I grabbed his arm before he walked off the edge of the stage.

“What's wrong?”

“It's Cole Ritter,” he said.

 

19

I
PUT THIRTY OF
A
DAM'S
forty in the tank and bought two packs of cigarettes, a can of Mountain Dew, and a scratch-off. I won two dollars and that's all the money I had in my pocket when I sat down in a room at the adult learning school to hear people talk about staying off the junk. I tried to care and they pretended to understand my backsliding twice just since my last meeting on Sunday. I also tried not to notice the two men sitting at the back of the room, weeping and chewing their hands, doomed to pay for the sin of their mortal addictions in the eternal hell of Narcotics Anonymous.

I promised I would show up for next Sunday afternoon's meeting, and as shitty as I felt at the moment, I really meant it. I put my life in the hands of a higher power and drove over the Hernando DeSoto Bridge a little after lunch time. Despite days of rain, the river was low, the muddy water beige with the sand bars standing out like an old man's ribs. There were dead people walking on the waters—a whole continent's worth of mob hits, flood victims, suicides and boating accidents. The clear blue of the sky had given over to high gray clouds. At least it wasn't raining, but now they were talking on the radio about snow to the north.

In West Memphis, Arkansas, I took I-55 north and was soon driving through farm country, the river delta, the rice and cotton and soybean fields shaved naked and brown, the land as flat and featureless as the sky, and a sharp north wind blustering across the barren land, rippling the rain puddles and knocking my little Nissan around like a punk in a locker room. My throat felt acid raw and hot. The highway was lined with shuffling pedestrians from the other side. They tried to wave me down as I drove by. Maybe they were trying to stop me, warn me, hop a cab to heaven, I don't know. I ignored them.

The old two-lane Highway 67 had been supplanted by a vast stretch of Nazca-straight four-lanes atop which you could land whole fleets of bombers when the Russkies invaded. I drove past rotting barns and abandoned school buses slowing rusting in untilled meadows, past the fields and farms of my youth where we used to throw empty beer bottles at mailboxes for fun. The landscape seemed smaller and meaner than the last time, the poverty a little deeper, the dilapidation a little more advanced. Nothing had changed except to fall into ruin. I thought I might have to pull over and puke. I was shaking so bad I could barely hold the wheel.

The road rose and it began to snow as I crossed the bridge over the Black River and drove up into Pocahontas, my own private Mayberry. My grandfather's dental office had been on the square for forty years by the time I was born. Our house, my parents' house, was on Schoonover Street, about five blocks from the square. The house had belonged to my grandfather. When I was a little girl, he still lived in a smelly room off the back and wore a waistcoat and a pocket watch and walked to work at his dentist office every day except Sunday. He died one June afternoon the summer of my tenth birthday. They found him on Bland Street with a half-eaten peach in one hand and an old newspaper in the other.

I drove by the Masonic Cemetery where he was buried beside his wife, a woman unknown to me save in grainy photographs, with all around them the graves of all the Pastors, except Uncle Dexter, the hero of the Great War, whose lost and shattered bones still lay beneath the buttercups in some unknown Flanders field.

The Pastors populated an entire corner of the cemetery—Pastor Corner; the earliest of them spelled his name
Pasteur
. My grandfather was thirty-one years in the ground now, yet I could still smell the dirty yellow ashtray breath of him, the mothball reek of his woolen winter suits, and the soapy taste of his clean dentist's fingers crawling around inside my mouth. In the years following his death, my brother and I believed his ghost was still wandering, like Hamlet's father, through all the precincts of the third-floor attic of our Victorian manse. Sometimes at night I'd wake up and hear the ticking of his pocket watch, as though he were leaning over my bed in the pitch dark.