The Sleeping and the Dead (24 page)

The third cabinet contained Endo's shrine to himself. It looked like a theatrical makeup table. It was wired with a bank of lightbulbs at the back surrounding a large mirror. The lights came on by themselves, and an open laptop on the makeup table flickered to life, playing film of Endo on his stage silently pantomiming a scene. He was naked and covered in green paint. He stopped frequently to touch himself.

Adam opened all the drawers. In the first one we found a scrapbook. The book contained hundreds of loose newspaper clippings, mostly reviews of various plays around town, going back almost ten years. I guessed these were productions he had worked on. Among the clippings of reviews were several stories about Michi Mori—fundraisers, art openings, that sort of thing.

Toward the back, I found the article about the Richard Buntyn murder in which Endo was first called the Playhouse Killer. I also found several stories about the Simon twins, then the Krews murder, and finally a small article identifying Patsy Concorde's body near Elmwood Cemetery.

“You were right,” I said to Adam and showed him the clipping.

He barely looked at it. “Look at this. This drawer was locked.” He pried it open, finding a butcher knife and an old bottle of Williams Pride barbecue sauce. At the bottom of the deep drawer lay a loud yellow sports coat, neatly folded.

“I think you'll find that coat belonged to Chris Hendricks.” I had seen him wearing it the day he died.

“Trophies?” Adam asked. A menu from the Blue Monkey fell out.

“Maybe.”

I leaned over and shot a picture of the inside of the drawer. There was an old house key lying at the bottom, but something at the back caught my eye. I reached inside and pulled out a human skull. It was missing the lower jaw and several upper teeth, and there was a small hole over the left eye.

“Who do you suppose this belonged to?”

Adam took the skull and returned everything to the drawer. “We probably shouldn't touch anything else until Wiley gets here,” he said. I resumed shooting photographs.

I walked slowly around the room. Something seemed out of place, or perhaps missing. It looked like Endo had been living here for years, building his sets, putting on his one-man productions. Other than the hint of trophies in that drawer, this didn't seem like the lair of a ruthless serial killer. I don't know what I had expected. The place was meticulously organized, every tool in its place, every videotape labeled and arranged by date. No human remains rotted in the bathtub, no lampshades decorated with human fingernails. No empty pizza boxes, no dirty towels or piles of underwear. There were no towels or underwear at all, or any lamps or lampshades or bathtubs, or even a kitchen or a bathroom.

“Where did he sleep?” I asked.

Adam looked at me, then sketched a quick turn around.

“Endo doesn't live here,” Adam said, his shoulders slumping.

 

33

V
AN
H
ELSING
AND
I
DIDN'T
know yet where Dracula hid the coffin. We had only found his workshop. With Michi's money, Endo could afford dozens of apartments, spread out all over the city. It might take weeks to track them all down.

Adam secured the scene and waited for Wiley and his forensic team to arrive. He asked a female cop to drive me home. Her name was Cyntheria Waters. I said goodbye to Adam and tried not to let it show that it might be the last time he would see me as a friend. Wiley was bound to find the photos I sold to Michi. He may have been an ass, but he was a thorough ass. I'd be lucky to get away without having charges filed against me by the DA.

Officer Waters and I ran through the rain to her car. She let me sit in the front seat so I wouldn't look like a perp. It had been a long time since I sat in the front of a squad car. Her cruiser still had that new-cop-car smell.

“Where to?” she asked. I gave her my address. She looked at me like I was an actual human being, not a washed-out junkie. It felt kind of good, but I knew it wouldn't last. I was her friend for the moment because I was Adam's friend.

“Adam, that is, Sergeant McPeake said you used to be a cop.” She pulled out and headed east.

“Yeah.” As we drove away, the last car in the line parked along the curb flicked on its headlights. I watched it make a U-turn behind us.

“Glad you got out?”

“Sometimes.” She stopped for traffic, then turned north. The car—a black Nissan Murano—followed. As we neared the fairgrounds, I watched the Murano make a left turn onto Cooper. Waters glanced at me, then eyeballed the rearview mirror. I didn't tell her what I had seen.

“Are you doing all right?” she asked in a sisterly voice.

“Everything is essence.” I opened the camera case and took out the Leica, remembering that I still owed James five hundred bucks for it. The camera was on, even though I had turned it off after finishing up at Endo's workshop. There was a message on the screen—Memory Card Is Full, Do You Want to Switch to Internal Memory? I clicked yes and a second message appeared—Internal Memory Is Full. I turned the thing off.

“Can I see?” Waters asked.

“See what?”

“Your pictures.”

I looked at her for the first time. I mean really looked. I was surprised by how young she was, even though I'd been about her age when I joined the force. Mid-twenties, good skin the color of expensive dark chocolate, short-cropped curly hair, small in the chest but big in the caboose. If she was taller than me, it wasn't by much.

“Why do you want to see it?” I already knew the answer. Everybody is a rubbernecker, even the best ones. People can't help it.

“I've never…” she began, then realized how rookie she sounded. She wasn't a rookie. She may have looked soft, but I could see the nails in her eyes.

“I'll show you when we get to my place.”

“Thanks.” She smiled and drove on.

*   *   *

Waters sat behind the wheel while the engine idled and rain slid in wrinkled sheets down the windshield. She scrolled through the tiny LCD images of Michi Mori's remains, the pooled blood, the spatters on the wall and ceiling, his dismembered parts scattered like garbage in an empty lot. Every once in a while, her breath would catch and she would call on Jesus in a small voice.

“That's pretty intense.”

She started on Endo's workshop, clicking through quickly, only stopping once to examine the photo of the skull. She was close enough for me to smell her deodorant, something that was supposed to smell like a tropical breeze or morning rain. Her nails were buffed and there was an apple in the cup holder. She was trying to take care of herself, not rot behind the wheel like some cops.

“I guess you get used to it, huh?” she asked.

“If you do, you end up just as bad as they are.”

“What happened here?” She showed me a blank black image on the camera.

“I don't know.”

She passed the camera back to me. Her hand was steady but she didn't look me in the eye. The last photo at Endo's apartment was followed by about two hundred blank images that had eaten up the space on the memory card. I turned the camera off and tucked it back inside its leather case.

“I'd better go,” I said, and opened the door.

“You gonna be OK?” she asked before I could close it.

“Sure. Why?”

“I heard that old man was a friend of yours.”

My back was already soaked and I could feel the cold rain running down my thighs. “Just a perv I busted once, a long time ago.”

“Oh,” she said, and turned her head away, already moving on. Smart. I wished I could do that.

The stairs were slick from people going in and out of the rain—a lawsuit waiting to happen. A garbage can in the corner was overflowing, something inside moving around, scratching. I hadn't checked my mail since I moved in, so I opened my box and found a single letter inside addressed to me. The return address was from Reed's new office in Collierville. I tore it open:

Dear Bitch,

I think the hardest thing for me to come to terms with was the realization that after I worked so hard and so long to suppress my perfectly natural male desire to sleep with as many women as would have me, and instead devoted myself to the ideal of monogamy for your sake, it should be you who broke our sacred covenant before God. While I suffered and denied myself like a fucking monk sitting in the snow waiting for you to get in the fucking mood for our once a month, you'd been out there fucking all my friends all along, doing God knows what with them and leaving me alone on my side of the bed while another man's tadpoles wriggled through the swamp of your rotting uterus. I thank God every day now that you are barren. I thank God I'm not stuck raising a child not of my blood. When I think of all the women I could have had and all the times I prided myself on staying true to you, even though I could never tell you about those opportunities, though I could never celebrate those personal victories for Glorious Monogamy and reap the just rewards in the form of a good raunchy fuck, and instead settled for a lifeless, loveless hump, or worse, a quick, silent, sickening toss in the bathroom after you passed out on the couch. I honestly just want to throw you down a flight of stairs. But who knows. Maybe you saved me from a case of the incurable clap.

So rest assured my dearest that I am not stalking you because I honestly do not want your junkie ass back, no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise. You give yourself too much credit. The only part of you I want is your signature on the divorce papers you've had for over a year now, unless you've lost them, which wouldn't surprise me in the least. I have copies if you need them. And should our paths cross in public again, I urge you to keep a civil tongue in your head, because if you ever publicly accuse me of criminal behavior again, you'll be receiving a letter from my attorney. No doubt you have nothing of value for me to take, but I shall certainly take whatever you have left, even if it is your last pair of rotten crotch panties.

Sincerely,

Reed

The postmark was from the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I took the letter upstairs and unlocked my door, closed it and locked it behind me. My apartment was warm and dry and welcome, but all the same I crept into the bedroom and peeked under the bed like some kid checking for the boogie monster. Nothing under there except Sean's old baseball bat, which I tossed on the bed before kicking my soaked sneakers into a corner and stripping out of my wet clothes. I crumpled the letter and envelope into a ball and tossed it into the trash by the fridge—
from the bedroom door, swish, three points.
I took the bat into the head with me for a hot shower. I was shaking all over. It wasn't so much the cold or the rain, just a little bit of both and a whole lot of everything else. I turned the shower to full hot and drank a can of Tecate to steady my nerves. Steam quickly filled up the tiny room and condensed on the sides of the cold aluminum can. I set it in the sink. I let the scalding water penetrate to my bones. My nose started running and I noticed a tinge of pink in the water swirling slowly down the drain around my feet. All alone in the shower, it wasn't easy to hold it together. I wanted to ball up and cry, but I didn't allow myself that luxury. I nailed myself shut again.

It wasn't Reed's letter. As usual, he was living a delusion. Did he think I had forgotten the spouse-swapping parties during the first two years of our marriage? He was the one who introduced me to the lifestyle. Not that I was some kind of virgin saint before I met him, but I'd let Reed talk me into some weird shit in the early days of our marriage, and I'd even enjoyed some of it. Thinking back, it didn't seem so much fun. Fun for Reed, maybe. It was a miracle neither of us ended up diseased or dead.

Then he realized how wealthy and connected he could become if he got in with the suburban-megachurch crowd, but that didn't mean I had to go along with his transfiguration into a paragon of virtue. I didn't like his starchy new friends, anyway. They weren't any less sexually deranged than our old friends, but they were a hell of a lot less honest about it. How many of those suits with gold crosses on their lapels pressed their Sunday-morning wood against my hip while sharing a hug in the fellowship hall? How many times had I felt strange hands drift across my ass while eyes were closed in prayer? Church was the biggest sex club of all. Praise the Lord and pass the lube. Daddy was right—nobody screws around more than God-fearing married people.

There wasn't room in the shower to shave my legs, so after I finished I sat on the toilet with my toes clinging to the sink and ran a razor over them. I had damn good legs. I'd gone out for soccer my senior year, made goalie, lost a ton of weight, muscled up and made the boys cry just by looking at me. That was a long time ago, but I wasn't as old as I felt. I was no Leta Park, but I could still make the boys cry if I wanted to.

It was almost dark outside and the rain had let up just enough that I could see the traffic out the big window in my bedroom. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched, even though I knew there was no way in hell Endo would come after me. He was a hunted man now. His description had gone out to every cop in Memphis, plus the state authorities and the FBI. They didn't have him yet or it would've been all over the news, but it was only a matter of time before somebody caught up to him. I fully expected they'd find him dangling from a tree somewhere. Even so, I couldn't just sit in my warm, safe apartment like a goat on a chain and wait for Adam to call with the news, or for Endo to show up and add me to his list. I didn't want to be anybody's bait.

I dried my hair with the blow dryer and dressed, then called James. He sounded surprised. “I'm just watching the news,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

“I was just there.”