Blackout, page 11
17
It was a long haul from one side of the darkening city to the other, and Lee Boyle felt a persistent jumpy urgency and the occasional haphazard skip of his heart. It was weird how the mind had a wayward life all its own and thoughts roared around in a carousel of graphics and bizarre sound effects that eventually distilled themselves in the repetition of one word, one picture – Almond, Almond, Almond. She left me at the silent time. Yes indeed, Percy. She left me.
Only I don’t believe that. I don’t believe she’d ever do that. So where the hell is she?
Vass slowed the pick-up, checking street signs. ‘This is Oakleigh,’ he said. ‘What number are you looking for, Lee?’
Boyle flicked on the interior light and studied his cigarette pack. ‘Eight three six,’ he said. ‘Guy’s name is Silas Goba. Or Gora. I can’t make out my own goddam handwriting.’
Vass drove slowly along the street of frame houses. This was one of the city’s older neighborhoods, circa 1950. Dense trees camouflaged the homes, and great branches reached out luxuriantly, blocking street lights. A phantas-magorical effect, a jungle suburb. Trippy, Boyle thought. He half expected neon parrots to come screaming out of the leaves, like beasts from some acid flashback occurrence.
‘Let’s hope this is a better candidate than that last one,’ Vass remarked. ‘She must’ve been pushing a hundred, man. She’d never driven that Le Baron further than the local mall, for Christ’s sake.’
Boyle pondered Mrs Clyde Fodor, whose Chrysler – license plate 92KB67 – had been parked in the driveway of her home out in Stanhope on the eastern edge of the city. Mrs Fodor, all glassy old skin and liver spots and knobby bone, had bought into Boyle’s story that he and Vass were landscapers – well, artists, to be frank – scouting commissions. Boyle, who’d pitched his floral notions with extravagant enthusiasm, had an expression he could do in his sleep. It was one of wide-eyed purity, and it charmed birds from their nests and had old ladies wet-eyed and reaching for photographs of sons who’d vanished in the vastness of the continent, with new wives, new jobs, grandkids who existed only in color snapshots, phone calls at Thanksgiving. You okay, Ma? I’ve been kind of busy. Boyle touched their hearts in a mysterious way.
Picture this, Mrs Fodor, a whole bed of azaleas over here, maybe a fine array of marigolds there. The whole thing kind of bound together with a charismatic carpet of, shall we say, snowdrops? Babble babble, envisage the flowery magnificence.
It was bullshit, but he’d even begun to believe it, which was the real secret of any con. He’d put a slight fag spin on his words: I can just imagine a tiny pond, too, lily pads, a frog or two croaking. How very bucolic, Mrs Fodor. While the old lady had considered Boyle’s panoramic concept, Vass had sneaked off to check out the Chrysler, whose odometer had a grand total of 905 miles on it.
Mrs Fodor, a lonely soul, enjoyed company. She offered tea and a whole family history to go with it. She was a widow. Dear Clyde had died last year of complications arising from diabetes. Their only son lived in Europe. She didn’t get out much. Didn’t do a whole lot of driving. Eyesight failing. In an innocent way Boyle had asked if she’d ever loaned the car to anyone, a neighbor, say, or a friend, but the old lady told him she’d never done that. End of story. Come back soon and talk to me about begonias, Mrs Fodor had said when they were leaving. I just love begonias.
Right, Mrs Fodor. We’ll be back.
One down, two to go.
Vass parked the pick-up. ‘This is the place. You want to do the landscape shit again?’
Boyle opened his door, stepped down. The sticky night air had the stealthy feel of a mugger’s breath. ‘Let’s play it by ear until we get a sense of this guy.’
He walked under a canopy of branches toward the pathway. Vass, hitching his jeans, followed. Number 836 Oakleigh, a somber brown house, was surrounded by garden gnomes. Jesus Christ, there must have been thirty-five of the squat fuckers on the lawn. Plaster-of-Paris elves skulked in the poor light, bearded leprechauns with pipes. Cute, if you liked little stone squadrons. Boyle found it unsettling, those expressionless eyes watching him as he moved in the direction of the porch. He half expected sudden animation, elves creaking to life, leprechauns deciding to form a debating society. Speed made you imagine all sorts of stuff out of the corners of your eyes.
A Chrysler was parked in the covered carport. Boyle was about to step toward it when a porch light came on and a man appeared behind the screen door. Boyle couldn’t quite make out his features.
‘Help you fellas in some way?’ the man asked.
Boyle, trying to think on his feet, detected unmistakable hostility flowing out toward him. He moved a couple of yards toward the porch. ‘Mr Goba?’
The guy said nothing. He pushed the screen door open a few inches. A hinge squeaked. Boyle considered the idea of saying he was a lover of garden gnomes and had heard about this amazing collection, which he simply had to see for himself, but there were some kinds of bullshit that just coagulated in your throat. In any event, he didn’t feel like going through another faggoty act, swishing and swooning over the clay figures like a queen of kitsch.
‘I understand you have a Chrysler for sale,’ Boyle said.
‘I don’t know where you heard that, fella,’ the guy said, ‘but you got the wrong information.’
‘This is eight three six Oakleigh, and you’re Silas Goba, right?’
‘You got that right. But I don’t have any car for sale.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘You hard of hearing, fella?’ The man stepped out under the porch light. He wore a white T-shirt. He was big, beef-bellied, no neck. His hair was marine-style crew-cut. He had the look of a man who ate light bulbs for breakfast and then, still hungry, chomped on razor blades. ‘You know what I think? I think you and your buddy there come round thinking this place might be empty, might be an easy score.’
‘No way,’ Boyle said.
‘I had this house burgled two times before, jack. And I swore to God I wasn’t gonna be ripped off a third time, because I had it up to here with thieves. Take a hike, get the fuck off my property.’
Boyle didn’t move. The air was alive with atoms of potential violence. He tried to imagine Goba picking up Almond. He pictured this: Almond steps inside Goba’s Chrysler. Her neat little body settles in the passenger seat. A transaction is discussed, terms agreed. Does Goba fondle her knee? Slip a hand under her skirt? Delve inside her panties? Is he businesslike about it? Does he slobber? Is there the strained desperation of a rock-solid hard-on? Can’t wait to get Almond to spread her legs, show him her cunt? Does she go down on him in the car, her beautiful little face in his fat lap, and his fly undone and his boxer shorts open?
Boyle had an awful moment, a sharp racket in his head, a small steel ball rattling through a variety of hooped circuits, as in one of those noisy Japanese pachinko arcade games. He drew a hand over his face. His fingertips were numb and his scalp tingled. Rush this guy, he thought. Rush him and bring him down and stomp the truth out of him.
‘What you’re telling me is the car’s not for sale,’ he said.
‘You’re real quick on the uptake,’ Goba said. ‘Lookit. Just get the fuck off my property. Don’t make me come down these steps to you, fella. I got a short fuse.’ He moved in an off-center way to the edge of the porch. He’d clearly been drinking. Boyle pegged him as the kind of solitary sociopath you sometimes saw sitting alone in bars, whispering menacingly to themselves.
Boyle glanced toward the Chrysler, which gleamed dully in the carport. If he opened the car and scoped it out would he find some evidence of Almond? A heart-draining trace of her perfume, say? A cigarette butt of the brand she smoked? An earring on the floor? Something tangible. He heard Rudy Vass sigh, a let’s-blow-this-place sound. But Rudy, old friend that he might be, didn’t have a vested interest in Almond, didn’t worry about her the way Boyle did, didn’t have bad feelings of the kind Boyle was beginning to experience just about now.
She’s hurt.
And then he thought, This goon Goba fucked her and murdered her. This sick sack of shit maybe choked the life out of her and stashed her in the trunk of this fucking Chrysler in the carport. Her lithe body twisted, her face bloodless, her dress crumpled.
Suddenly these possibilities took on the patina of absolute certainty, and Boyle, who didn’t give a damn about Goba’s threats, walked directly to the car.
‘Hey,’ Goba said, and came down from the porch to intercept. ‘Don’t you listen, fuckface? Ain’t you heard a goddam thing I been saying?’
She’s in the trunk, Boyle thought. She’s under a threadbare plaid travel rug. She’s entombed alongside a spare tire and a jack and cans of oil and all the other greasy crap people store in their cars. He’d never been so sure of anything. He saw the license plate number. 92KC700.
Goba shoved him in the chest with the flat of his fat hand and said, ‘You’re outta line here, fella.’
‘Don’t touch me again,’ Boyle said.
‘Don’t touch you? Don’t touch you? You’re trespassing, shithead. I got rights.’ Goba pushed a second time.
Boyle couldn’t stop thinking about the trunk. It consumed him. It became a vast space inside his head. He stepped to the side, tried to pass Goba, who grabbed him by the arm and twisted it at a painful angle. Boyle, smelling a serious stench of whisky on the man’s breath, made a huge effort and wrenched himself free.
‘Where is she, Goba?’
‘Where’s who?’
‘I want to see inside the trunk of that goddam car.’
Goba looked at Vass, who was standing back from the situation. ‘Your pal outta his mind or what?’
Vass took out his handkerchief, coughed into it and said nothing.
Boyle reached for the trunk lid and Goba, coming up from behind, seized him, wrapped his thick arms around his ribs and squeezed. Lee Boyle felt air being forced out of his lungs and dizziness descend on him. He slammed his elbows with as much force as he could gather into Goba’s ribs and the big guy slackened his hold and Boyle spun around to face him.
‘You picked her up and you fucked her, and then something snapped in your sick fucking head and you stashed her in the goddam trunk –’
‘Jesus, Lee,’ Vass said.
Goba took a step back from Boyle and asked, ‘What’n hell you talking about?’
‘Absolutely no way she’d have vanished without saying anything to me,’ Boyle said, vaguely aware of slippage inside, like he was sluicing down a water slide with no bottom in sight. ‘She wouldn’t have left her clothes behind. She liked the stuff I bought her. She liked those goddam clothes. You understand what I’m saying?’
Goba looked at Vass again. ‘What is this guy on, for Christ’s sake?’
Vass looked slightly tubercular in the poor light. ‘He’s worried sick,’ he said.
‘I don’t know about worried, but sick, yeah, I grant you sick,’ Goba said.
‘I’m opening the trunk,’ Boyle said.
‘You think there’s a body in there?’
‘That’s exactly what I think,’ and Boyle turned back to the car. He couldn’t get the trunk to budge and wondered if maybe it only opened if you pressed a button or pulled a lever inside the car. He beat the palm of his hand on the lid.
‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying I picked up some chick and then …’ Goba tossed back his head, and when he laughed his belly shook. ‘Is this some kind of put-on, buddy?’
Boyle hated the sound of that laugh. He glared at Silas Goba. ‘Open the trunk,’ he said.
‘Piss off.’ Goba looked at Vass. ‘Why don’t you do your pal a favor and drive him down to the psycho ward at St Dominic’s? Because if you don’t I’m gonna rip his goddam face off.’
Boyle noticed a wrench lying on the floor of the carport, and he stooped, picked it up and held it out in front of Goba. The tool was rusty and brittle and might snap if he struck Goba with any force, but since it was the only possible weapon to hand what choice did he have? Unless he hefted one of the gnomes and used it to launch an assault on Silas Goba, a notion that struck him as only slightly plausible. MAN STRUCK BY GNOME-SHAPED MISSILE.
Goba smiled at the wrench and said, ‘Hotshot, huh? Tough guy, huh? Come on. Come on. What you waiting for, asshole?’ He made beckoning gestures, inviting Boyle forward even as he struggled to maintain his own balance.
Vass said, ‘Lee. Let’s get out of here.’
Goba said, ‘Yeah, Lee, why don’t you listen to your friend?’
‘I want that fucking trunk opened,’ Boyle said.
Goba took up the stance of a prizefighter and feinted to one side, tossing out a telegraphed punch that flicked past Lee Boyle’s face. Boyle swung the wrench and missed, thinking how all of a sudden this little outburst of violence had the dreamy feel of a quiet foxtrot to it. Each movement might have been plotted by a choreographer on ludes. Goba, an adherent of the Marquess of Queensberry rules, sneaked in a stiff uppercut that went whooshing close to Boyle’s chin, creating a warm updraft of air. Boyle raised the wrench, brought it down, caught the back of Goba’s wrist. Goba grunted, shadowboxed a few moments, shuffling his feet back and forth like a sand dancer in a ridiculous old vaudeville routine, but he was visibly losing energy.
Boyle considered the diversity of violence. Sometimes it was hard and sharp and brutal. Sometimes it just iced the breath in your throat. Other times it was almost hallucinogenic. This situation between himself and Goba belonged in the dreamlike category, slow slow slow, elementary box-steps at the Arthur Murray School of Terpsichorean Violence. This was burlesque.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Vass said, stepping between Boyle and Goba, who was breathing hard. Boyle shoved Rudy aside, thinking, Goba is all huff and puff and threat. He doesn’t have the stuff it really takes. He’s a drunk windbag.
Boyle swung the wrench again, this time in an angular fashion, and it struck deep into Goba’s ribcage. The big man moaned and went down on one knee, clutching his side. Boyle had the urge to drive the wrench into the guy’s head and feel the sweet smack of metal on bone, but he was going through a dip in energy, and all he really wanted was access to the goddam trunk. Goba was staring up at him, mouth open.
‘The keys,’ Boyle said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘The keys, man,’ Vass said to Goba. ‘Just give him the keys.’
‘You can take a runnin’ fuck, too,’ Goba said. ‘My goddam rib’s probably broken. Sweet God.’
‘You want your brain stoved in?’ Boyle said.
Vass said, ‘Best give him the keys. Don’t push him.’
Goba said, ‘If I was younger, by Christ –’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ Boyle said and held out his hand. This humidity was wilting him.
Goba said, ‘One time I coulda had you for a snack between meals, shithead.’
‘The fucking keys!’
‘Crazy bastard,’ Goba said, and dug in the back pocket of his blue jeans. He groaned and tossed a set of keys to Boyle. ‘Go ahead. Open the trunk. You’ll find this chick you’re missing all wrapped up in a roll of linoleum under a pile of oil rags and old newspapers.’
Boyle walked to the Chrysler, unlocked the trunk, hesitated.
He felt the full cold terror of awful expectation.
He flipped the trunk open.
The interior light came on, illuminating thick volumes of drapery samples. He reached in, rummaged, threw the books out, yanked the carpet up, saw the jack neatly tucked away, the spare tire in the well, examined the space in the manner of a demented forensic scientist hunting minuscule clues – a pubic hair, a smudge of dirt, anything at all. He saw nothing, no sign of Almond, no tube of lipstick, earring, errant shoe, discarded panties, sweet fuck all. He slammed the lid shut and lowered his face until his forehead touched metal.
‘You satisfied now?’ Goba said. ‘Huh? You happy now?’
Boyle experienced a strange zero condition. The night was collapsing about him, like he was coming undone in various stages, flesh peeling from bone, his gut falling and falling. Speed wearing off. He was crashing like a machine-gunned hot-air balloon.
He heard Vass at his side. ‘Let’s split this scene, Lee.’
Lee Boyle raised his face, looked at Rudy. ‘Maybe he buried her some place. Maybe it was like that. Killed her, dug a hole.’
‘Come on, Lee. This guy’s done nothing. Look at him, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Fucking right I’ve done nothing,’ Goba said. He was hunched among his gnomes and leprechauns, rubbing his rib area and looking fat and pathetic. Spit flecked the corners of his slack lips.
Vass said, ‘Come on. We’ll go back to the truck. Check out this last address.’
Boyle walked to where Goba crouched and stood over him. ‘I’m not crossing you off my list, Goba. Understand that. You’re still a candidate.’
‘I see you back here, it’s shotgun time,’ Goba said. ‘No questions asked. I blast at the first sign of the whites of your goddam eyes.’
‘Yeah yeah.’
‘I’m fucking serious, fella,’ Goba said. ‘A twelve-gauge right in the breadbasket.’
Boyle threw the car keys away among the plaster figures, went to the truck and climbed in on the passenger side.
From his shirt pocket he removed the baggie, laid a tiny mound of crank on the back of his thumb and tried to keep his hand still as he inclined his face toward it. He closed one nostril with the tip of a forefinger and snorted up the other, then repeated this with the second nostril. The crystal hit his throat like a rasp of buckshot and his eyes smarted and he tilted his face back and waited for the familiar acceleration, the quick-quick tango of his heart.
18
Eve Lassiter leaned toward the guy in the car. He was middle-aged, paunchy, looked respectable. He could have been a store clerk. You could imagine him ringing up your haberdashery items on an old-fashioned cash register in a room smelling of sawdust and kerosene. She saw herself through his eyes, thigh-length boots and a criminally short skirt and her nipples visible through her blouse.
