Blackout, page 15
What a divine young thing.
Ripe.
Primo.
23
Samsa didn’t like the loft, the huge unfurnished space, ceilings twenty feet high, the brilliant white glossy walls that reflected light from a series of recessed bulbs of various colors – pinks, oranges, mauves. He had a sense of being dwarfed, as if he were shedding inches, diminishing until finally nothing would be left of him except for a pile of clothing and a pair of shoes.
Fogue and Rebb circled the woman, who sat in the only chair in the room. She was unflustered by the cops’ presence. She rolled a cigarette carefully, filling black paper with tobacco. She stuck the cigarette between her lips and leaned toward Fogue, anticipating a light, which he supplied with a parsimonious flick of his lighter. According to what Rebb had said in the car on the way over, this woman had a track record: prostitution, operating a house of ill-repute, a couple of dope misdemeanors. Like Boyle, she was somebody who didn’t stay in any one place too long, and Rebb had tracked her through a series of increasingly threatening phonecalls to his network of night animals – a porn-flick merchant, a crack dealer, a guy who specialized in sending pictures of naked infants over the Internet.
‘Fatima –’ Rebb said.
‘You’re behind the times. I’m not calling myself that these days,’ she said.
‘Oh, beg your pardon,’ Rebb said.
‘Cassandra to you, Rebb.’
‘Cassandra, huh.’
‘Names are limiting, I find. You get one at birth you didn’t ask for. Who says you have to keep it for the rest of your life?’
Rebb said, ‘There’s no law.’
‘Au contraire, there are too many laws,’ she said. ‘We are drowning in laws. There’s a fucking tidal wave of laws. Traffic. Vice. Drugs. Let’s have some anarchy about the place, for Christ’s sake. Let’s tear down the structures before they choke us to death.’ She stared across the room at Samsa. She had eyes too pale to be described as blue. They had a bleached quality. They might have been fashionable contact lenses with a slick marketing name – Arctic Dawn, Cobalt Innuendo.
‘Who’s your friend, Rebb?’
‘This is Lieutenant Samsa. Excuse my manners.’
‘A big wheel,’ she said.
‘He’s the Man,’ Rebb said.
‘Hey, the Man,’ she said to Samsa. ‘Do I consider this like an honor?’
Samsa stepped forward a few paces. She blew a stream of smoke in his direction, her head tilted back a little. He noticed discarded black pantyhose under her chair.
‘Take it any way you like,’ he said.
‘That’s generally how I take things,’ she said.
Rebb said, ‘You got to understand, Lieutenant. Fatima here – excuse me, Cassandra – she’s got this self-image of a free spirit. Back in the old days she’d have called herself a hippy. I got other names for her, though. Whore comes charging to mind.’
‘Tut-tut,’ she said, pointing her cigarette at Rebb. She looked back at Samsa. ‘You ought to demand a refund from whatever charm school you sent Rebb to.’
‘Also a jester,’ Rebb said.
Samsa said, ‘Rebb’s style doesn’t include charm.’
She smiled and got up from her chair. Trailing smoke, she walked to a big powerful stereo set against the wall in the corner. She pressed a button and the room filled up with the frantic angry sound of rap. The speakers thudded. The walls shook. Cassandra lowered her head, shut her eyes, clicked her fingers in time to the hefty bass beat, sashayed a few steps across the floor.
‘I hate that shit music,’ Fogue shouted.
She smiled too bad at Fogue, waltzed past him, approached Samsa with a flirtatious look. The music, a deafening series of staccato phrases, thumped in Samsa’s head, which was already delicate. He watched the woman dance in a circle around him, the cigarette stuck in her mouth. Fogue walked to the stereo and killed it with a hasty gesture, and the room was suddenly silent.
Cassandra said, ‘You’re a fettered little fart, aren’t you, baldy?’
Fogue said, ‘I’m not listening to that kill-a-honky-cop crap.’
She took her cigarette from her mouth. ‘Why? Does it scare you? What would you prefer? Garth Brooks? Maybe Henry Mancini? I got “Moon River” somewhere.’
Fogue scowled at her. ‘My taste in music is irrelevant, lady.’
Samsa had a sense of things going out of focus, the real purpose of being here diffused in assorted squabbles and insults. If you could describe it as real. If anything could be described that way any more. He laid his hands against the back of the chair and said, ‘We’re looking for Lee Boyle.’
‘You’re not alone,’ she said.
Rebb asked, ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I’d like to see him.’
‘I’m hearing irritation,’ Rebb said. ‘He owes you? Left you holding the bag or something?’
‘I didn’t say that. I only said I’d like to see him. Sort of for old times’ sake.’
‘You know where he can be found?’ Samsa asked.
‘The Man speaks,’ she says. ‘I hear the voice of authority.’
Rebb said, ‘Drop the attitude, Fatima.’
‘Cassandra.’
‘Whoever. The lieutenant asked a question. Give the man an answer.’
‘What’s your problem? Lost track of Lee? Why don’t you look him up in the phone book?’
‘Because he ain’t in the phone book, honey,’ Rebb said. ‘Not under Boyle anyhow.’
Samsa intervened again. ‘If you know where he can be found, it’s in your best interest to tell us.’
‘Why? What’s he done now?’
‘We want to talk with him,’ Samsa said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’
‘He’s a persecuted soul,’ she said.
‘Also a shit,’ Rebb said.
‘So he’s a persecuted shit. He’s tormented.’
‘Aw, fuck’s sake,’ Rebb said. ‘Don’t yank my chain, honey.’
‘Tormented and misunderstood.’
‘Look, he’s a fucking junkie and low-rent pimp, who screwed up his chances in life. You know it, I know it, so skip the crap and just tell us where he lives.’
‘What are you hounding him for?’ she asked.
Samsa said, ‘He’s not being hounded. He might be able to help us in certain inquiries. That’s all.’
‘Ooh, what a phrase that is, covers a multitude of sins.’
‘She’s got a soft spot for Lee. Screw it. Let’s just book her,’ Rebb said.
‘For what?’ she asked.
Rebb said, ‘Possession of narcotics. Posing for porno pics. We’ll think of something.’
‘Your aura’s the color of dishwater, Rebb. You know that? You’re like a coin: you got two sides. One side works for the heat, flip it and you get total sleaze. You’d have made a great pimp. Also you want to brush your teeth now and then.’
‘You got me down pat,’ Rebb said.
Samsa didn’t like Rebb’s confrontational approach. He never had. He said, ‘You know where he lives or don’t you? It’s a simple question.’
She fingered the cross that hung from her neck. ‘Am I throwing Lee to the lions if I tell you?’
‘Yes or no, Cassandra.’
‘There’s a kindness in your voice that’s noticeably absent from Rebb’s,’ she remarked.
‘Which means what? You’ll tell me?’
She walked back to the stereo and switched it on again, then returned to the spot where Samsa stood. She must have been very good-looking at one time, even beautiful. Her bone-structure was exquisite, but little lines spread from the corners of her mouth and her powder-white make-up didn’t conceal the tiny incisions of age at the corners of her eyes.
‘Is this loud enough for you?’ she asked.
‘Do you want it to be?’
She touched his arm. ‘I don’t want to hear what I’m going to say, Samsa. Sometimes I just don’t like the sound of my own voice. And sometimes I don’t like the infernal noise of my own thoughts. Do you understand that?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think I do.’
24
The telephone on Darcy’s bedside table rang, and she reached for it, expecting to hear her father’s voice. Maybe he was calling to say he was on his way. He’d sounded rushed when they’d talked before. She wished he would come home. She was still thinking about the noise of the trash-can lid falling. Her first thought was that it had been the wind, but the night was perfectly still. Okay, a cat, a dog, maybe even one of those raccoons people said they saw scavenging every now and then. And then the word prowler had popped into her head. Somebody out there in the dark.
The voice on the phone wasn’t her father’s. It was deep and rich, a smooth baritone, an actor’s voice. It reminded her of one she’d heard on a hot-chocolate commercial. ‘Who am I speaking with?’
‘First tell me who you are,’ she said. She’d been trained by her father, who worried about the possibilities of threats from the criminal community, never to talk on the phone to people she didn’t know, especially if they didn’t state their name. The number wasn’t unlisted, because he had the belief – civic-minded but wrong-headed, she thought – that anyone on the taxpayer’s dollars should be accessible.
‘You wouldn’t know me,’ he said.
‘Then I’m hanging up.’
‘No, don’t do that. Don’t hang up.’
‘Give me one good reason.’ Breaking her father’s rule: always cut the connection. Don’t get involved if you’re not sure. But the voice had a pleasing quality, and wasn’t menacing.
‘Is this Gregory Samsa’s home?’
She said, ‘Yes. But he’s sleeping.’ She wasn’t about to say he wasn’t home. She didn’t know this caller and she didn’t want him to think she might be alone. You don’t take that kind of risk.
‘I don’t suppose you can wake him up.’
‘You suppose right.’
‘Too bad,’ he said.
‘You want to leave a message or call back again?’
‘Are you his daughter?’
Hang up, she thought. Just don’t get into this. ‘I don’t like questions from strangers in the dead of the night.’
‘I was only curious.’
She thought she could hear voices in the background. ‘I’m hanging up,’ she said.
‘Before you sever the connection, do me a favor.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me your name.’
She stuck the handset down. She lay without moving for a time. Then, a little disturbed by the lateness of the call and the way the guy had asked for her name, she went downstairs. She stared through the kitchen window, which faced the side of the house where the trash was stored.
Darkness. Only darkness.
She flipped the switch for the outside light. In the driveway she saw the unfamiliar car her father had borrowed from the work pool, saw light fall against it and fade out in a feeble fashion among the shrubbery that surrounded the house next door, where the Petersons lived, prissy George the bank manager, wife Millie the social psychologist, their brat twins Leonard and Leonora – those names, really – nine years old and always spying on her. She hated the brightly colored plastic dental braces they wore. When they smiled they looked like a pair of stupid stunted clowns.
In the living room she helped herself to a drop of her father’s cognac. She liked the way it burned. She gazed at the drawn curtains. She thought about the Italian film and Nick sleeping through it, even snoring at one point.
What she hadn’t told her father about the date, what she couldn’t tell him, was that Nick had detoured on the way home from the cinema and parked his car up near the Purchase property and suggested, with some urgency in his voice, that they do it. She’d walked with him into the meadow under a white quarter-moon blurry with moths and mosquitoes. She’d lain on the grass and he’d pushed her skirt up over her thighs and kissed her with such ferocity she felt nauseous, gagging on the deep reaches of his tongue and his fingers roughly inserted in her vagina. And she’d wanted to fuck him, but it had all gone wrong because she became dizzy with that awful throw-up feeling, and in the end she’d said, I’m sorry, Nick, this isn’t the time. I’m truly sorry. She’d felt like a bitch-wife with a prophylactic headache. She hadn’t meant to come off that way.
The phone was ringing again.
She picked it up.
‘Just your name,’ he said. ‘That’s all I ask.’
She slammed the handset back in place, finished her cognac and wished her father would come home.
25
When Boyle didn’t answer his buzzer, Billy Fogue picked the front-door lock with a pocket knife and said, ‘Easy does it,’ and the door opened, revealing a narrow staircase that led to the apartment. Fogue worked his trick a second time on the apartment door. Samsa didn’t tell him to stop, that rules were being transgressed, the rights of the citizenry ignored.
Rules. Rules were what you made them. You break one, the rest collapse, the whole damn locomotive comes off the tracks at speed. He stood in the center of Boyle’s living room and watched through the bedroom doorway as Rebb and Fogue prowled around, opening and closing drawers and closets.
Rebb found a couple of dresses and held one against his body. ‘You think this is me, Billy?’ he asked.
‘Polka dots, nah,’ Fogue said.
‘Just put it back, Rebb,’ Samsa said, a little sharply, and turned away from the skimpy polka-dot number and tried not to think of the girl dressing and undressing in this apartment, mirror-gazing, applying make-up, brushing her hair, all her little vanities past and dead.
Rebb hung the dress in the closet and shut the door and hummed a few bars of ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, sounding vaguely like a guy playing a trombone. ‘Hey, panties,’ he said, dipping his fingers inside a drawer and pulling out scant filmy things in an assortment of colors.
Samsa said, ‘This isn’t a goddam department store, Rebb.’
Rebb stuffed the lingerie back where he’d found it and said, ‘I’ve always been intrigued by the mysteries of female underwear. Bras especially. Hooks and clips and such.’
Billy Fogue said, ‘This place is real clean. You notice that?’
‘Speed-freaks have a lot of time and energy to kill,’ Rebb remarked.
Samsa watched them go inside the kitchen. Fogue shuffled through the drawers of a cabinet and Reb peered inside the refrigerator, which contained only a few cans of Coors and a bunch of shriveled green grapes.
Rebb said, ‘Another thing about speed-heads is they’re not famous for having a whole load of food on hand. They got no appetite.’
A herb chart hung on the kitchen wall. Samsa gazed at it. Marjoram, Thyme, Basil. How to Use Them. It was a chart he’d seen in many kitchens. There was also a Bart Simpson clock: 2:20.
He worked his tongue against the edge of his broken tooth. The absence of Lee Boyle somehow reinforced an illusion of his presence. He was missing, and yet he wasn’t. He was everywhere in this apartment, among the books on the shelves, the toiletries in the bathroom, the towels placed neatly on the rack.
Samsa wandered toward the books and found himself thinking about the distance between his smashed car and where the girl’s body had been found, and he was assailed by the notion that somebody would eventually start to think how strange it was that the lieutenant had wrecked his car at roughly the same time the girl was killed, and only a few hundred yards from where her body was found. An unhappy proximity.
Coincidence. The world was filled with coincidence. Brodsky had accepted that without any problem, Brodsky hadn’t been troubled by it at all.
Just tell them, he thought. Kill this travesty. It cuts against the grain of your whole belief system. If you ever really had one.
Who are you, Samsa?
He looked at the stereo and Boyle’s eclectic collection of CDs. A little jazz, some classical music by composers unfamiliar to him – Schoenberg, Alban Berg – as well as Bach, Beethoven. Eighties pop, Dylan Thomas reading his own poetry. One odd item, a collection of Christmas favorites sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Was Lee Boyle, pimp, a closet sentimentalist?
He felt like a trespasser, a home-invader. He stared at the coffee table, seeing, under the soft glow of an angular lamp, circular streaks where the wood surface had been cleaned.
He listened to Rebb and Fogue clattering around inside the bathroom, the sound of a shower curtain being slipped along the rail, the chink of tiny plastic hoops. What the hell do they expect to find in the shower? he wondered. This was like a recreational outing for them, where they could poke among the stuff of another person’s life. They enjoyed being snoops. He understood he should put a stop to it, tell them to cool it until Boyle showed up. They weren’t here to ransack his property, they were here to ask him some questions, that was all. But they had a momentum going now and he felt removed from whatever they were doing.
He heard Fogue say, ‘Now lookee here, Rebb. You suppose he has a permit for this?’
‘Nice little gun,’ Rebb said. ‘A Lama forty-five. Compact Frame model. The idea of him having a permit is highly implausible, I got to say. A guy like Boyle, he wouldn’t be big on paperwork. He’s an outlaw. Or he likes to think he is anyway.’
Fogue appeared in the bathroom doorway with the gun, the handle wrapped in tissue. He had a cheroot hanging from his mouth and the smell was beginning to drift through the rooms. A heavy sickening odor.
‘Item. One gun,’ Fogue said. ‘Too bad the little hooker wasn’t blown away by this very weapon. Then we’d have something straightforward.’
‘I suggest you put it back where you found it.’
‘Anything you say, Lew Tenant. Back in the tampon box it goes.’
Samsa strolled the room. He walked to the window and peered into the drab street below. He saw the pawnbroker’s sign and wondered what effect it might have on somebody to live above a business that dealt in desperation and poverty, wedding rings hocked, war medals traded away for a few bucks and never reclaimed. Maybe despair seeped through the building like a gas.
