Blackout, page 5
Samsa went back to his desk, which was partitioned off from the hoi polloi. Three hundred and sixty-five days ago. A year almost to this very moment. He sat, gazed at some paperwork, feeling detached from his purpose in this place. Overhead, the fluorescent strip hummed. No natural light penetrated these rooms.
Eve Lassiter put her head round the door. ‘Surprised to see you this morning, Lieutenant. Shouldn’t you be taking it easy?’
‘Why? I’m functioning.’
‘I hear the car was a write-off. You look like a write-off yourself.’
She was tall and slim-hipped, thirty-three years old. She wore her red hair straight to her shoulders. She had green carefree eyes – some Irish filtered through her ancestry. You could imagine her playing a harp with those long fingers. Around the department she’d acquired a minor reputation for picking up younger men in a certain bar she frequented. Samsa considered this rumor for the most part macho talk down among the lockers. So she had a casual dalliance now and then, that didn’t make her a nymphomaniac. She was young, she had appetites.
Needs. He knew about needs. Where they led you.
‘I slept badly,’ he said.
‘You sound a little off-key,’ she said.
‘I keep thinking …’ He paused. There was a doorway here he couldn’t open in a hundred years. He wanted to, he wanted to go inside that room and say, ‘This is what happened, Eve. Try to understand. I took a very wrong turning.’ It was the same feeling he’d had with Trope.
‘Thinking what?’
‘That car. I see that car slamming off the road.’
‘Post-trauma,’ she said. ‘You’ll have flashbacks.’ She approached the desk. ‘I have a suggestion. Why don’t we have dinner at my place one night?’
‘We’ll do that,’ he said.
‘I’m not being pushy or anything. But when do you have in mind?’
He shrugged. ‘Some night next week.’
‘I’ve heard of pulling teeth. What night?’
‘Whenever –’
‘Enthusiasm would be a step forward, Greg.’
He raised a hand to his head. Pick a day. Any day from the deck.
‘Wednesday,’ he said.
‘Okay. Seven suit you?’
He nodded. She said, ‘I do good Creole. Tex-Mex, if you like that. I can cook. Really.’
‘I believe you, Eve. I look forward to it.’
She leaned across his desk. She looked very young suddenly. He imagined her as a teenager, gawky and unco-ordinated. She spoke in a quiet voice. ‘Know something, Greg? There’s this sad streak in you that really bothers me.’
‘Sad streak?’
‘I’m not saying it very well, I guess. A kind of lost quality. You’re like an explorer who’s mislaid his compass.’
‘You want to mother me, Eve?’
‘Shit, no. I’m not the mothering type. And I don’t ever fall for any of that little boy lost jazz. I only want to feed you. I think you need it.’
‘You can feed me Wednesday then.’
‘Deal.’ She turned to the door, then stopped. ‘The Leeson case, by the way. I’m meeting with a guy whose phone number we found scribbled on a scrap of paper in Leeson’s bedside drawer. I’m heading out to see him now. He didn’t sound exactly over the moon to hear from me. Why don’t you come keep me company? You look like you need just about any old excuse to get out of here.’
Samsa thought about Anthony Leeson, a retired pharmacist who’d been stabbed to death a couple of nights ago by an assailant in a frenzy. Zane, the coroner, had counted twenty-four stab wounds. The murder had all the hallmarks of a homosexual-related slaying. Leeson’s neighbors were quick, indecently eager even, to point out that he’d often been seen bringing young boys back to his apartment.
‘It’s your case, Eve,’ he said.
‘I could use some help with it.’
He was reluctant. He wanted to stay behind his desk and shuffle papers and keep his head down until kingdom come. He’d given the Leeson case to Eve because he’d been entangled in other matters, and, anyway, he knew she was capable. There had been thirty-two homicides in the city during the last four months. It didn’t compare with certain other cities, but it stretched the resources of the department.
Samsa spent too much time juggling manpower and schedules and asking the chief, Al Brodsky, for more qualified people. ‘I’ve talked to the mayor,’ was Al’s stock response. The mayor’s response was also stock: ‘I’ll look into it and get back to you, Al. It’s a matter of money we just don’t have at this point in time. We went way over budget building the new precinct house on the East Side, and refurbishing the South Side was more than we bargained for. You know how it goes, Al. The city’s impoverished.’
Yackety-yack.
The mayor’s idea had been for the bulk of the downtown cops to be moved to the new East Side precinct, but the building, incompetently constructed, had problems with the refrigeration system, the elevators were unreliable, the sewage pipes constantly backed up, and – a true brilliancy in planning – an inadequate number of phone jacks. Samsa remembered a time when the department had thirty precinct houses throughout the city, but policy – which he thought misguided – had dictated closing these houses and cramming as many cops into as few boxes as possible. Bigger boxes, sure, but better service?
A fortune spent nationwide on extra cops, on new jails. But very little of it seemed to be coming this way, to the hub downtown, this fetid basement that housed a total of 233 cops in the course of different shifts. This hell.
Eve said, ‘I could use your input. You’re sharp when it comes to assessing what people say. I’m still a little naïve.’
‘Naïve? You? I don’t really think so, Detective.’ Samsa got up anyway, took his jacket from the back of his chair and slowly followed her. Naïve wasn’t a word that came to mind in connection with Eve. She was sharp and persistent, qualities that had led to her promotion to detective only last year. Okay. She wants your company. She thinks you need to get out. And you don’t have the energy to resist.
Fogue, a plump bald figure blowing perfect thick smoke rings, looked up from behind his chaotic desk and said, ‘Hey, Lew Tenant.’ Fogue always made Samsa’s rank sound like a man’s name. ‘Heard you lost your bearings last night.’
‘I had an accident, Billy,’ Samsa said.
‘You ever hear the theory there’s no such thing as an accident? I read this guy, forget his name, says accidents are things you actually want to happen. No kidding.’ Fogue laid a hand on his heart.
‘Bullshit,’ Cullinan said. ‘All I hear in this place is bullshit. All I smell in my nostrils is this damp.’
‘Hey, it ain’t my theory, Cull. Can I help it if I’m well read?’
To the tune of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, Cullinan sang to himself, ‘Damp gets in my bones.’
Fogue said to Samsa, ‘Seems you go out actually looking for accidents. Least, according to this guy I read.’
‘The man cracks open a book and listen to what comes out,’ Samsa said. ‘One thing he hasn’t read is the No Smoking sign.’
‘Unconstitutional discrimination,’ Fogue said. ‘I belong to this group. Rights of Smokers in America. ROSA. We’re fighting back against all those puritan clean lungs suckers.’
Samsa moved toward the stairs that led out of the basement. Eve walked just ahead of him. She had a loose-limbed motion, hips swinging just a little, her ass firm under her tailored black slacks. He thought, I’ve never looked at her before from this perspective. A little surprised, he lowered his eyes.
Fogue called out. ‘Anybody searching for you, Lew Tenant, what’ll I tell them?’
‘Say I’m up to my neck,’ Samsa said.
‘In what?’
Samsa didn’t respond. He listened to the sound of his footsteps click on the old marble floor of the entrance to City Hall, with its high neo-Gothic ceiling in need of a paint job. Upstairs were courtrooms and the DA’s office and the mayor’s staff. The place was riddled with dry rot and the marble was engrained with dirt, and in winter the outmoded boiler failed to send heat through the veins of the building.
Outside on the street he felt clamminess in the sunshine. It was one of those mornings when the atmosphere would agitate asthmatics and swamp-coolers stifle rooms. Say I’m up to my neck, he thought. That would be the truth.
Eve tugged his arm. ‘You coming or not?’
He must have been standing motionless without realizing it. He had to prevent traffic jams in his head. Curtail them somehow. The plan, if he really had one, was simple: concentrate on what he was doing at any given time, rein in wayward thoughts and dispel tiny seizures of drift. It was more than just going through the motions. It had to be an act of belief. He had to get inside the memory banks and delete whatever he didn’t need.
Accidents are things you want to happen.
He didn’t believe that for a moment, because it implied some kind of ludicrous collusion between himself and a hapless jackrabbit on a highway.
He found himself moving slowly through the molasses of air. His mind was filled all at once with alternatives too late to deploy. She was a hitch-hiker I picked up. But she didn’t look like a hitch-hiker. She looked exactly what she was. There would be suspicion, innuendo.
Okay. She was a hooker. And that’s against the law.
Yeah, but why this particular hooker out of so many, Lieutenant? Why did she catch your eye?
She was somebody I was bringing in for questioning.
In connection with what, Lieutenant? What particular case? Did you suspect her of something? Let’s hear your story for the record.
‘Greg,’ Eve said. ‘Are you orbiting the planet or is there some way I can connect with you? You’re miles away.’ She unlocked her car. ‘You sure you didn’t bang your head last night?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said.
She sat behind the wheel. Samsa lowered himself into the passenger seat. He felt the car slide forward out of the parking lot. He thought, Maybe all our lives are lived through acts of dishonesty. The only way we cope is by lying to ourselves.
He turned to look at Eve. ‘I’m a good cop,’ he said.
She glanced at him. ‘Is that a question?’
‘I’ve always been a good cop. It’s all I know how to do.’
She said, ‘What is bothering you?’
‘Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis.’
‘Maybe it’s loneliness,’ she said.
He looked through the window. The city rose in a haze of towers, stacks of concrete and glass. In the downtown acre of greenery called Patriot Park, there was a birdshit-smeared monument to the man, Barnabas Sullivan, from Limerick, who’d first built a settlement here in the wilderness in 1835. All that energy and optimism only to have your effigy covered in droppings. Welcome to neglect.
It was still a fucking wilderness out there. It was just the savages that were different now.
Eve said, ‘I didn’t have any right to say that, Greg. About loneliness.’
‘It’s probably true,’ he said.
‘It’s none of my business. I’ve never lost a spouse. I can’t even imagine what that grief must feel like.’
Grief, he thought. Grief was like plugging into a connection that ripped the heart out of you. It was a demon you hadn’t summoned, but it came without invitation, a gargoyle that gatecrashed your life.
Don’t dwell on this. You don’t need it.
He continued to gaze from the window. They were driving through an area on the edge of downtown that was seedy, old warehouses and dilapidated factories. It was a grim neighborhood. Early twentieth-century signs were still barely visible in dirty brick: ‘Carstairs Mattress Manufacturing Company’. ‘McPherson’s Grain & Feed’. The area was known as Flesh Row. Sometimes Skin Street. At night this was the neighborhood where bodies were traded, boys and girls pacing round under weak street lights and cars cruising back and forth. This was the place where you came if you were lonely and your appetites had gone beyond any consideration of consequences.
‘I’d like to see all this razed,’ he said. He heard a little note of anger in his voice. ‘I’d like to see them come in with a crew of wreckers.’
‘No way. It’s historic. If anything, they might pump some money into cleaning it up and preserving it. It has character. With a little work, maybe a few cafés and bookshops, it might even have charm.’
‘Charm? I doubt it. It’s always going to be sleazy.’
‘Let’s agree to differ,’ Eve said.
She patted his knee a second. ‘And, yes, you’ve always been a good cop. In my book, the best.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Dignified and emphatic,’ she added.
‘Enough already.’
‘And honorable.’ She smiled. ‘I hope I grow up to be just like you.’
‘Yeah? Just be careful what you hope for, Eve.’
9
In Ginny Flagg’s bedroom, Darcy said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be sick.’
‘I am sick,’ Ginny said.
‘You don’t look it.’
‘I feel fluey.’
‘Sure you do. You haven’t prepared for Hump’s test, have you?’
Ginny Flagg, a tiny girl with a red-dyed streak in her cropped black hair, took off her glasses and wiped them on the edge of the bedsheet. ‘All that geography stuff is too, I don’t know, blah. Like I need to know the capital of the Ukraine? I don’t know where the Ukraine is even.’
‘It’s a former Soviet state,’ Darcy said before she could stop herself.
She had a memory that was sometimes a curse. Everything got stored automatically inside her head. She could remember the names of minor actors in forgotten B-movies. She could tell you the line-up of rock bands and who split to form another group. She remembered all the things they crammed into her at school, even when they weren’t interesting or useful. Lately she’d begun to let her mind stray in class, as if to spite this gift of recall. Besides, school had started to drag on her – the gossip, the day-after-dayness of it all. She’d found herself daydreaming and drifting, impatient to put the whole place behind her and move on to something else, even if she didn’t know what.
Something exciting. It had to be that, at the very least.
Ginny’s bedroom had black walls and glossy yellow furniture. The blinds were drawn, giving the place the feel of a cave.
‘You on your lunch break?’ Ginny asked. She ripped a pink Kleenex out of a pop-up box on her bedside table and held it to her nose.
‘Yeah. I thought I’d just drop in and catch you slacking.’
‘I am not slacking.’ Ginny smiled and put her glasses back. She had a face like a myopic pixie. ‘I was watching a video actually. Wanna see?’
‘I don’t have time.’
Darcy glanced at her watch. She supposed she could skip PE and get back for Hump’s test. Ginny zapped the remote. A videotape clicked into play. Darcy looked at the TV in the corner.
‘He’s dreamy,’ Ginny said. ‘He’s still the dreamiest babe imaginable.’
James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Darcy remembered that Ginny belonged to a group in school called The James Dean Appreciation Society, a cult of about ten girls who were enraptured by images of a dead man. They met regularly to watch the few movies Dean had made, and on the anniversary of the actor’s death they wore black clothes and mooned around sadly and held a day-long wake. She could see Dean’s appeal up to a point, but not the way Ginny did.
‘Tell me he doesn’t turn you on,’ Ginny said.
Darcy shrugged.
‘Come on. Look at those eyes. Look at that mouth.’
Darcy said, ‘He’s okay.’
‘Okay? He’s got something Brad Pitt doesn’t have. He’s got something Val Kilmer would murder to have,’ Ginny said. ‘You just want to get him in bed and make love for hours and then, when he’s hungry afterwards, you’d scramble him some eggs and bring them on a tray. Like a love slave with an offering.’
Darcy stared at the screen. She thought Dean too moody, as if he was in a place he could never be reached. Maybe that was his attraction on celluloid. He was aloof, mysterious, and his death in real life had added to this allure. Now he was truly inaccessible.
‘I’d be his love slave,’ Ginny said. ‘He’d only have to snap his fingers and boy I’d be there. Who am I kidding? He wouldn’t even need to snap his fingers. He’d only have to give me one of those real cool looks of his and I’d wither, I swear to God.’ Lips slightly parted, Ginny gazed at the picture, then pressed the remote and froze the image. ‘Look at the way he wears his jeans. The way he stands, kinda hunched like that. If that’s not a turn-on, I don’t know what is. Okay, so it’s Fiftyish, it’s ancient, but that doesn’t take anything away from the guy.’ Ginny sighed and laid a hand on her heart. ‘He’s immortal. He’s like some god. He knows something you don’t. He’s got secrets. You just wish he’d share one of them with you. He’s so goddam romantic it’s practically unbearable. It ought to be outlawed, for Christ’s sake.’
Darcy propped her elbows on her knees and leaned forward. The static image of Dean flickered a little, traversed by lines of video interference.
‘You also get the feeling he knew how to treat a girl,’ Ginny said. ‘He had to be a great lover.’
Darcy remembered reading somewhere that Dean was either homosexual or bi, but this wouldn’t have made any difference to Ginny or her fellow members of the Appreciation Society. He was beyond criticism, beyond judgement. Beyond death even. The eternal lover. The endless dream. She could see the romantic strain in this notion. The guy you could never get. The one wasted before his time. The tragic figure.
‘Is Nick a great lover?’ Ginny asked suddenly.
This question bothered Darcy. It wasn’t Ginny’s curiosity, but more the casual assumption behind it. Nick and Darcy, Darcy and Nick. They were a couple, they had to be making out on a regular basis.
‘Why don’t you ask him yourself, Ginny?’
‘Yeah. Right. I’ll just walk up to him and say, ‘“Hey, Nick, how are you in the sack?”’
‘Maybe he’d answer you.’
