The Sleeping and the Dead (23 page)

Adam nodded sympathetically. Dave's marriage was over now. There was no way he could get through this without being outed. His marriage was important enough to him not to make a call about Endo, but not important enough to give up the closeted lifestyle.

“Tell us about Monday night. The theater was closed. What were you doing on the stage?”

“Checking the ghost light.”

I almost dropped my beer.

“We leave a light on stage when there's no one in the theater. It's an old tradition, so the ghosts can put on their own productions. It's really so anybody wandering around the stage in the dark doesn't fall off. It had gone out, a safety hazard. I was going to check on it when I stumbled over Chris's body.”

“So Endo turned off the light, knowing you'd come down to check on it and stumble over his little production. But why kill Hendricks? And what was he trying to say by staging
Edward the Second
?”

“Endo hates fags,” Dave said.

“That doesn't make any sense. Endo is gay,” I said. I took the smoldering cigarette butt from his mouth before it scorched him. His lips were so tacky some of the skin came off stuck to the butt. I dropped it in the sink.

Shaking with fear and emotional exhaustion, Dave said, “I don't know what Endo is. Whatever he is, they don't have a name for it. He wanted me, but he hates homosexuals, especially his own homosexuality. That's the only reason he killed Chris and left him there for me to find. I guess he wanted to show me he could do it.”

“You knew him well enough to know he was the killer.” Adam's voice was strained.

“I told you before, I only figured it out after he killed Chris. And even then, I didn't know for sure.” His lips were trembling, but I couldn't tell if it was grief or terror. I doubted whether he knew himself

“You might have made a phone call, just the same,” Adam said. “If you had, two people might still be alive.”

“Don't you think I know that?” Dave cried. “If I had talked after last Monday, he would have known it was me. You think I want him coming over to my house, fucking with my kids, my wife?”

“We could have provided protection.”

Dave laughed, not a little hysterically, and way too long for my comfort. I thought someone was going to have to slap him, like in the movies. “You can't stop Endo!”

“Lay off the histrionics, Dave.” Adam stood up. I thought he was going to do it, but Adam was too good a cop for that.

“You didn't even know where to start looking until he decided he was ready to be caught!” Dave shouted.

“Ready to be caught? What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means, Adam. Jesus Christ! Endo killed Michi. He's done with this shit, all this theater, all this life. He's ready to close the curtain.” Dave laughed that half-crazy giggle that sounded like he almost couldn't stop this time. Not without help.

I reached across the table and backhanded him across the face. Luckily I had taken off my wedding ring. He stopped laughing and stared at me, just as surprised as the hysterical woman in the old movie. He tongued the blood on his lip.

Somebody had to do it. I could do it because I wasn't a good cop. I wasn't a cop at all.

 

31

I
T WAS GOING TO TAKE
hours to interview everyone and while we were there, more of Michi's
boizu
kept showing up. News of the murder hadn't made it on TV yet, but they were finding out somehow. The cops held them all for questioning, lining them up in the hall downstairs. Several stood there crying in each other's arms, but I couldn't tell if it was over the loss of their sugar daddy, fear of being outed or genuine grief at the death of that demented old Japanese pervert.

Adam was desperate to learn Endo's current address. One of the cops found his car tags stuffed into the garbage can behind the garage. His Camaro was registered to a Wayne Endo at Michi's address. Other than Dave, nobody in the house would admit to knowing him. It was going to take all night to get any information. Meanwhile Billet and Wiley showed up to wave their egos around and make things infinitely worse.

I asked Adam for a ride home. He couldn't leave yet, of course, but I was so tired I didn't care. He wanted to call me a cab and put me up at a hotel, but I didn't want a hotel, I just wanted to go back to my apartment. Most of all, I didn't want to be around when he found the photos I'd sold Michi. They were tearing the house apart, looking for anything that might lead them to Endo. Only four people in the world knew where those photos came from, and one of them was dead. I knew Adam wouldn't charge me or even tell Chief Billet, but I also knew I'd probably lose him forever. Today would probably be the last day of our friendship and he didn't even know it yet. I was already grieving.

We were in the dining room. Adam watched them fingerprint the sword he'd found earlier, while one of Wiley's techs vacuumed the rug. They weren't going to discover Endo's whereabouts in the carpet. They didn't need any more fingerprints, either. Collecting trace evidence was useless at this point, but they were following procedure because procedure was all they had. Sometimes that's all you have to keep the snakes out of your brain—chickenshit routine. We'd stepped over the edge of known territory in Michi's cellar today. We were all flying on autopilot.

It was the silent efficiency of the murder that had everybody freaked, even Adam. Michi had been savagely greased, his body dismembered and scattered like Easter eggs in the cellar of a house full of people, and as far as we could tell, no one had heard a thing. Not one cry, not one meaty thunk of cleaver through flesh. How did Endo kill that shrill old eunuch, who'd scream like a baby if he chipped a nail, without anyone hearing or seeing? That a man could die that way didn't jibe with the normal order of the universe.

No one had seen Endo at the house that morning. They'd seen his car. They'd assumed he was lurking around somewhere, spying through the peepholes he'd drilled in nearly every wall and floor in the house. They were like mouse holes—everywhere you looked you'd find another one. Some had been stopped up with chewing gum or covered with pictures or lamps. But there was always another one close by, smaller and better hidden. In all the times I'd been in Michi's house, I had never noticed them. It creeped me out wondering how many of my visits Endo had secretly watched, how much he knew about me and what he might do with that information, if anything.

Adam watched the tech dusting the handles on the china cabinet. “I don't think it's a good idea for you to go home today,” he said without looking at me.

“Why not?”

“Because Endo's still out there. Until we find him, I'd rather put you up in a hotel. How's the Peabody sound? Billet will sign for it.”

“Endo doesn't want me,” I said, trying to convince myself more than anything. “He kills fags. That's his deal.” I had kept the pack of stale Winstons I'd found in Michi's kitchen. I lit one and blew smoke at a spy hole in the ceiling above my head. It was no bigger than a BB. “He'd be stupid to stay in Memphis now. Besides, what could he possibly want from me?”

“I don't know. And I don't like not knowing. It doesn't make sense that he was following you today. That's what worries me.”

“I'll lock the doors. Anybody who tries to come in will get a face full of baseball bat.” I was frosty. I was hard as nails standing there flicking ashes on the rug, dual cool, brassing it out, even though my guts were rolling around like a nest of fornicating rattlesnakes.

“Do you still have your piece?”

“Hell, no. Got rid of that after the accident.” I touched the old scar on my cheek where the bullet had gone through. I hadn't sold it for moral reasons, though—I needed the money.

Adam left off watching the techs sweep the room and walked me to the door. Several uniformed cops were standing on the front porch dicking the dog and watching it rain. They shut up as soon as we stepped outside. Someone was coming up the driveway through the rain, walking slowly and looking at all the cop cars. He stopped about halfway up. Adam nodded and the cops along the porch rail unbuttoned their holsters.

He shouted, “Come on up.” Everybody was ready to give chase. I think they were looking forward to it. The guy in the driveway looked back the way he had come. “Don't try to run!” Adam ordered.

The guy walked slowly toward us, his hands in the air. He was a she and she was a postal worker in a gray rain suit with a sack of mail on her back. “What the hell, people?” she said as he neared the porch.

“Sorry,” Adam said. The cops made room for her on the steps and she came up, shaking off the rain. Adam held out his hand. “Any mail for Michi Mori?”

“I can't give you his mail,” the postal worker said.

“This is a police investigation. There's been a crime here.”

“And the mail don't leave my hand except under the direct order of a postal inspector.” She brushed by him, walked up to the mailbox hanging from the wall by the door, and stuffed in a handful of mail. She turned and glared at Adam. “What you do with it now is your business. I got my route.”

She left, vanishing into the rain. The cops on the porch stared at Adam, snickering and elbowing each other. Somebody said, “Sheee-yit.” He ignored them and removed the mail from the mailbox, shuffled through the letters, then pulled one out and tossed it to me.

It was a bill from a property-management company, addressed to Wayne Endo.

 

32

I
RODE WITH
A
DAM
. H
E
barely spoke on the way, but I could see the anticipation written on his sweaty face. He bit his lips and swore at the people driving too slowly. We drove without flashers or siren so we wouldn't alert Endo to our arrival. There were two squad cars behind us, and five more converging on Endo's apartment as we turned off Central onto Airways Boulevard and headed south. I tapped the bill from the property-management company against the dash, nearly as impatient as Adam.

Endo's place was a little one-room hellhole at the corner of Airways and Fairbanks, across the street from the Mississippi Lounge. I'd driven by the place a hundred times and never seen it—four apartments, two up and two down, with boarded windows and gang symbols spray painted on the bricks. It looked derelict, but people still lived there. Some of them were outside, standing on the balcony as we parked by the curb. Endo lived in the bottom apartment on the far end. The door was open. A cop stepped out and lit a cigarette, then dropped it when he saw Adam.

“Y'all were supposed to wait the fuck outside,” Adam barked.

“Door was open, Sergeant. We was afraid the locals would get inside. A couple of boys was nosing around. They booked it when we pulled up.”

“Anybody in there?”

“There's no there there,” the cop said like some kind of mystic.

Adam stared at him for a moment, then entered. I switched on my Leica and followed him.

Endo's apartment was a single room about six feet by six feet, walls painted sky blue, red carpet twined with golden arabesques. A ticket booth with bulletproof glass stood out from the wall just across from the door. A hand-lettered sign hung crookedly in the window. It read, “Closed Monday.”

“See what I mean?” the cop said behind me.

Gold curtains at the back of the booth might have hidden a door. Other than the door we entered, there were no other exits. A pair of paintings hung on the left wall. One was David's
The Death of Marat
, the other was of the same scene showing the dead man hanging out of his bathtub, but from a different angle, with a woman in a blue-striped dress standing in a corner by the window.

The right wall held a different pair of paintings: one a crude clown, the other a simplistic portrait of an overweight man with startled eyes, painted in four flat colors—mauve, white, yellow and black. The signature was J. W. Gacy.

“Do you hear that?” Adam said. I heard music playing, something operatic, but distant and tinny. It was coming from behind the clown painting. As I touched my ear to the wall, my head brushed the picture frame. It tilted and a hidden door swung open about the width of a hand. The music grew louder.

Adam and the other cop drew their pieces. I stepped back to give them room. Adam kicked the door open and entered low, covering the room while the other cop followed him. They turned immediately to their left and disappeared.

Endo had torn out all the interior walls, leaving an open, warehouse space, like an artist's studio. He had painted the remaining walls black. The windows were boarded from the outside, the glass painted as black as the walls. Bare lightbulbs hung from wires stapled to the naked rafters. The floor was swept clean, but there was a raw smell of sawdust, paint and mineral spirits to go with the stacked scraps of lumber and pyramids of empty paint cans in the corners. The back door was nailed shut and braced with two-by-fours.

He had built a low stage behind the box office, like the one in Michi's basement. On it stood a small table and atop that sat an old Monkees record player from which the music came, scratchy and weak through the tiny mono speaker. I turned off the record player and looked at the faded RCA Victor Red Seal label—Puccini's opera
Turandot
. The song was “Nessun Dorma”—“None Shall Sleep.”

“He must have been here within the last twenty minutes,” Adam said. He sent the cop outside to get statements from the neighbors, find out if anyone had seen Endo leave. In this neighborhood, people made it a habit not to see anything. I started shooting pictures. I wondered if Endo had killed any of his victims here. It seemed like the perfect place, a nice, cozy, private little corner of hell for him to build his fantasy world.

The three large metal cabinets against one wall drew our attention. Adam opened the first one and found Endo's carpentry tools, boxes of nails and screws, more cans of paint, paintbrushes and paint thinner, rolls of plastic sheeting and folded drop cloths spattered with paint. The next one held hundreds of videotapes in black plastic boxes. On the bottom shelf were a video camera and a couple of Nikons, one of them missing its lens. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.