The Sleeping and the Dead (3 page)

“He promised to sponsor an exhibition of my photography.”

“Is that why you were here today?”

“Yeah.” I couldn't tell him the truth, so I pushed the glowing yellow doorbell button.

“Did you hear about that cop?” he asked as we waited for someone to answer.

“Which one?”

“That accident over on Union.”

“What about him?” I knew the one he was talking about, and I knew what Adam was going to say before he said it.

“Died at the scene. Damn shame. He had three kids. He was a good cop.” He checked his cell phone for messages. “I guess the lawyers will be all over it.”

“I took some pictures of the accident.” I didn't tell him I had seen his dead cop. What was the point? He'd only use it as another excuse to hassle me about coming to meetings.

He said, “Ring the doorbell again.” He pointed at the Leica hanging around my neck. “Is that new? Looks expensive.”

“It is.”

“Where'd you get that kind of money?”

“I got a good deal on it.”

“Stolen?”

“No, it isn't stolen. You think I'd buy a hot camera?”

“Just asking.”

“Well don't.”

The door finally opened and we were greeted by an elderly gentleman, about five feet tall, with a thick wavy pompadour of ivory-white hair sweeping back from his tanned and botoxed forehead. He blinked his dark, almost-Chinese eyes slowly and smiled just with his lips. “May I help y'all?” he drawled.

Adam gave a surprised little suck of air and said, “Jesus! You're Cole Ritter!”

“My reputation precedes me.” He wore a red silk smoking jacket, but his legs were naked, bandy as a flyweight boxer's legs, deeply tanned and utterly hairless. His feet were bare, the trimmed nails shiny and healthy. He held a martini glass between the index and middle fingers of his bejeweled left hand.

Adam turned to me. “Jesus, Jackie, this is Cole Ritter! Do you know who he is?”

“Cole Ritter, I presume.”

“On the button,” Cole said.

Adam grabbed his hand and shook it, almost upsetting his martini. “I've loved your work since
I Can't Remember When!
”

“Much obliged, I'm sure.” Cole gradually extracted his hand from Adam's fist. He took a sip of his martini and glanced at me.

“I was a theater major in college,” Adam said. “My senior year, I played Sonny in
Forrest Park
.”

“Ah yes,” Cole smiled at me. “I wrote that play when I was in high school.”

“That's what's so incredible about it! Such maturity of style, such depth of characterization! Jackie, do you have any idea who this man is?” Adam was giving a disgusting fanboy performance. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

“I've heard of him,” I admitted.

“High praise indeed,” Cole said.

“He's only like the American Edward Bond!”

“Thank you ever so much for not calling me the American Tom Stoppard.” Cole smiled at me again. “I get that all the time, you know.”

“But I rather liked
Cahoot's Macbeth
,” I said.

He snorted and nearly dropped his martini. “Dinner theater!”

“Cole's from Memphis,” Adam continued. “He went to East High School, and now he's world-famous!”

“Marvelous.” I turned on the Leica and looked at him in the viewscreen.

Cole leaned against the doorframe, faux casual, posing as though in one of his own plays. “Do you know, I can hardly walk down the street in Paris without a dozen people stopping me, but in Memphis I can't even get a table at Paulette's.”

“It must be tough being you,” I said.

He shrugged. “Prophets are not without honor, except in their own country.”

Adam took his notepad out of his pocket. “I had no idea you were in town.”

“I try not to let the press know my whereabouts,” Cole said. He probably called the newspaper from the airport to let them know he had arrived. He took a sip of his martini and looked me up and down once, his eyes lingering momentarily over the camera in my hand; then he turned his moist gaze on Adam. “But I like to come home a couple of times a year just to catch up on the gossip. You're obviously not here for the party, though I'm sure you'd be welcome.” His eyes never left Adam as he said this. “Are y'all from the newspaper?”

“No,” I said.

“Because I don't sign autographs.”

“I'm Detective Sergeant Adam McPeake.” The fanboy vanished, quick as that, and I wondered if he hadn't been playing it up just to put this supercilious old pouf off his guard. “We're here to see Mr. Mori.”

“Oh my!” Cole drolly exclaimed, one hand quivering over his lips in mock surprise. “A policeman! I had no idea.”

“This is Jackie Lyons.”

“Michi-san's little photographer?” His teeth were too perfect, a façade of gleaming white caps behind paper-thin lips. “It seems I've heard of you, too.”

“Isn't it marvelous how famous we all are?” I said.

“Don't you try to steal my lines.”

“May we come in?” Adam asked.

“Of course.” Cole stepped back and allowed the door to swing open. “Far be it from me to stand in the way of the police.”

We entered and Cole closed the door behind us before continuing, “You'll have to excuse Michi-san. He's entertaining.” He took another sip of his martini. A hard driving techno-beat thumped through the ceiling. “I'll see if I can drag him away from his guests. Y'all make yourselves comfortable in the parlor.” He pointed to a small, dark room just off the hall, then sauntered away in none too great a hurry.

Adam wandered down the hall without removing his shoes. I stripped off my wet jacket and hung it on the hall tree, then kicked my shoes into the corner beside a wet pair of black high-top sneakers. The walls of the entry hall were grotesque, the trim and crown molding carved into phantasmagoric scenes of orgies between men and animals, the antique wallpaper dripping with scarlet and gold foil, every surface swirled and feathered and coraled. What the Romans called
horror vacui
—the fear of unadorned spaces.

I found Adam standing thunderstruck just inside the parlor door, staring at a hideous clutter of Victorian furnishings and glass curios. Shelf after shelf lined the walls, Lenox and Baccarat figurines sharing space with glass porpoises and seagulls picked up on the Mississippi Riviera. They seemed chosen with absolutely no sense of taste or even apparent consciousness of value.

“Nobody actually lives here, do they?” he asked.

“It's not all this bad. The kitchen's OK. I haven't seen the upstairs.” I plopped down on the antique settle.

“I always thought my grandmother's house was a creep show. She collected those realistic, life-size porcelain dolls. But this…” He ran a hand over the top of his smooth, shiny brown head. “Whoever put this together, there's something not right with his head.”

“I think all this belonged to his wife.” I wasn't sure if it did, but sometimes when I visited I saw her sitting in here, polishing her nails. It seemed to be her room.

“Michi was married?” He sat on a Casanova loveseat across from me.

“He's a widower.”

We waited in silence, looking at the carpet. I was struck, as always, by the smell of Michi's house. It smelled like money, piles of it, obscene wealth mixed with the spicy odor of ancient lacquer, damp bricks, musty fabric and desertous old carpets, grease and rot and dust and sex and death.
Behind every great fortune there is a crime,
somebody once said. It took me a minute to remember who.

Balzac.

The driving, thumping techno beat never let up the whole time we sat there. It reminded me of that Poe story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”—the ancient dying house rotting beneath the weight of the family's sins, its dark and secret heart bump-bump-bumping to the natural rhythm of a good hard rogering. It occurred to me then, but not for the first time, that Adam and I had never done it, never even made out at a Christmas party. It was strange. Although he was my junior by several years, he was good-looking and certainly desirable enough, but every time I thought about him that way, it gave me the heebs, like wanting to kiss your brother. He'd never shown any interest in me, either, never hit on me, never gave me any vibes at all.

“Sorry about tonight,” I said.

He looked up from his wet brogans. “For what?”

“For stepping on your toes with the whole Christopher Marlowe thing. I wanted to say I'm sorry. I just blurted it out.”

“You saved my ass from a major rug dance in front of the chief. Just imagine if some reporter had made the connection instead of you.” He was being very gracious, more gracious than I ever would have been in his position. Adam was the MPD's expert on the Playhouse Killer. His theater major from Rhodes College had come in handy when all the criminal-justice graduates were scratching their asses for answers. That jumped him in front of a bunch of more experienced detectives on the investigation. If he could break this case, he'd make captain. He knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it. What was more, he looked good on camera, so they had him on
This Morning Memphis
now and then to talk about the case, and after the last victim, they'd done a cover story on Adam in the
Memphis Flyer
. There was talk of a national news television show doing a special with him. They were hoping to get a Playhouse Killer episode, but our boy never obliged their shooting schedule.

“You're a better person than me,” I said as I stood up. I couldn't sit still.

“We already knew that.”

I was no longer a passive observer in this investigation. I was part of it now—a witness. For the last four years I had been photographing the Playhouse Killer's crime scenes. I had photographed his first victim before we knew we had a serial killer. Adam got me the gig when I was literally as low as I could get, and he'd broken any number of rules—personal and professional—to do it. At the time, I hadn't worked in months and was almost to the point of hooking for dope money. He got my Canon out of hock at the pawn shop. I still hadn't paid him back for that, four years later. He'd never asked. One more person I owed, one more person I could never repay.

 

4

A
LMOST FIVE HOURS EARLIER
, I had pulled up to the curb in front of Michi-san's house and parked under the same dripping sycamore trees. I had known Michi for nearly fifteen years and had been mooching money off him for the last three. If it hadn't been for Michi's generous employment, I don't know if I'd still be around to pollute the earth. He was a sugar daddy who demanded no sugar, daddy to dozens of human derelicts just like me. He had given me the money for the Leica in the first place, but that was before I had been obliged to pay first and last month's rent on a new apartment. I needed more money and I knew just how to get it. So I was a leech, but I had learned a long time ago how to live with that.

I leaned over the backseat of my Nissan and dug through the garbage on the floorboard until I found a plastic grocery bag full of dried-up Kleenex. I rolled down the window and shook the bag out in the rain, and then wrapped it around the camera. The leather camera case alone was worth three hundred dollars and it didn't even belong to me yet. I had to show the Leica to Michi-san if I wanted to get more money. I tucked a thin manila folder under my windbreaker, climbed out and had to slam the rusty door twice to get it shut.

The wide lawn was gray and the house hidden by veils of rain. A couple of cars were parked in the driveway—a white Saab and an old baby-blue Camaro with a faded rainbow apple sticker peeling from the back window. As I ran up the drive through the rain, the house slowly resolved from the mists, a looming pile of rock and timbers, with high mansard roofs steepled by dripping gothic ironwork, beetling windows and a forest of stone chimneys. A broad Italianate porch, deep as a cave, wrapped around the front and north sides of the house. I cut across the yard, splashing through deep puddles that soaked me to the knees, and hurried up the steps.

All the porch furniture was shrouded with white oilcloth, even the tables. Dead ferns hung in plastic flowerpots from the rafters, quietly dripping. A glass ashtray swimming with cigarette soup sat on the porch rail beside the steps. I thumbed the softly glowing doorbell. The door opened while it was still ringing.

“I'm here to see Michi Mori,” I said to the young black man who answered it. He looked about twenty, boyishly thin with narrow hips, long wrists and curly black hair that he shook out of his brown eyes when he smiled. His smile glowed and his lips were dark, like an Ethiopian. I had never seen him here before, but he seemed perfectly at home, greeting me at the door in his gym shorts, white socks and naked chest. He looked like a catalog model for boys' underwear, and in less than five hours, he would be dead.

“Come on in,” he said. I stepped into the entry hall and onto a thick rubber mat. “You'd better take off your shoes. You can hang your coat up here.”

I set the Leica and the manila folder on a table behind the door, then shrugged out of my dripping jacket. “This weather is ruining the floors,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I'll see if I can find him.” He left, singing “Michi-san!” all the way down the hall. I sat on the edge of a Rococo Revival slipper chair and peeled off my wet socks. The hall tree opposite the chair had five pairs of men's shoes of various sizes tucked neatly underneath it, and three umbrellas hanging from the coat hooks, all dry. I draped my wet socks over the two remaining hooks.

“She didn't tell me her name,” the young man said as he returned.

A second voice, reedy and slightly nasal like an oboe, whined, “You let a
strange-ah
into my
hay-youse
?” The owner of that voice tottered around the corner behind his young companion, leaning heavily on a bone-white cane. He was short, round as a boule, with a flat bald head like a rotting pumpkin.