Blackout, page 9
‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s go eat at that place you like.’
‘Lucky’s?’
‘We’ll pig out.’
She turned her face and there was a trace of a smile. ‘I’m sorry if I’m moody. I don’t mean to be. It’s just stuff, that’s all. I’ll deal with it.’
‘Sure you will.’
He drove through the stop-start traffic of downtown. Darcy fiddled with the radio, found a rock station. She was tapping her fingers on the dash, animated all at once, the funk sloughed off. Moods were like clothes she tried on, then discarded.
Beyond the city center Samsa headed north through suburban streets, passing gardens where people clipped hedges or dug out weeds, and kids played frisbee along sidewalks. Ordinary life as it was lived.
Lucky’s, formerly a branch-line railroad station, had been converted a few years back when the railroad company was going out of business. It prospered as a restaurant whose clientele was mainly young and noisy. Samsa had never felt comfortable there. Always geriatric, over the hill.
He parked in the busy lot and went inside with Darcy, and they found their way to a table overlooking the rusted old rail tracks. The floor was strewn with sawdust for a rough-hewn rustic look, and the air, stirred by huge fans, was heavy with the smell of meat charbroiling. Most of the tables were occupied. Teenagers, twentysomethings.
A waitress brought menus, talked her way through the specials – ‘Try the crab claws in lemon butter, they’re scrumptious’ – then left. Darcy studied her menu a moment before shutting it. ‘How’s the homicide business these days, Dad?’
‘There’s no danger of it slacking off. You can count on that.’
‘Anything juicy?’
He thought juicy a peculiar choice of word. ‘There’s Anthony Leeson. If you’re into blood and gore.’
‘I read about that one. You got any clues?’
‘We had a guy who said he might know something. It didn’t pan out.’ Joshua Gold hadn’t been able to remember much when it came right down to it. Too dark. Not sure about the guy’s height. Couldn’t say he’d noticed any special characteristics. But Eve, tenacious as ever, wasn’t going to let go of young Joshua just yet. She had other plans for him.
He said, ‘You slog on these cases and sometimes you don’t turn up a thing. So what happens? You become weary and frustrated, and you start wishing it was like a cop show: everything neat and tidy in the end.’
‘Bad day, too, huh?’ she asked.
What else could this day be? ‘Yeah,’ he said, and examined the menu.
When the waitress returned they ordered ribs with barbecue sauce, fries, Diet Cokes. Darcy looked out of the window at the tracks. She plucked a straw from the container and unwrapped it, rolling it back and forth across the table.
Samsa watched her for a while, then cleared his throat and asked, ‘You miss her?’
Darcy didn’t look up at him. ‘She was never really there, Dad. I don’t mean that to sound cruel or anything. She was like this presence that was always around, but that was all. Know what I mean?’
He reached for her hand and squeezed it. ‘I know,’ he said quietly.
‘It’s not like we were bosom buddies. I couldn’t sit down and talk with her about things. I couldn’t say, Hey, what do you think of this haircut? Or this shirt? Or these sneakers? What do you make of Nick? Could I?’ Darcy picked up a napkin and held it against her face. ‘I mean, really. She was just never fucking there.’
Samsa had a sensation of ice packed round his heart. This was too painful: her words, the look on her face. If he could defuse the anger and disappointment in the words and alter that expression, what fortune wouldn’t he give? He loved this child to the limits of himself. ‘She was sick, Darcy.’
‘I know she was sick. Why didn’t you send her away where trained people could look after her properly? And I don’t mean that to sound cruel, either. Why did you have to take on the burden by yourself?’
‘Because I kept thinking, one day she’s going to snap out of it. Misguided optimism. Faith. My foolish heart. Call it what you like.’
‘And all her stuff is still in the house. I mean, why are you keeping it? It’s unhealthy. Spooky.’
‘I’ll get rid of it, if that’s what you’d like,’ he said. He thought of cardboard boxes, filling them with forsaken possessions, the attachments of a life cast away. He wondered if there was any activity more emotionally brutal than sifting the belongings of the dead.
‘And you found her. You were the one that found her. Jesus Christ, I can’t even begin to imagine how you felt.’
‘I try not to dwell on it,’ he said.
Darcy blew her nose. ‘Let’s drop this subject, Dad. Why don’t we just stuff ourselves with ribs and make a really gross mess on the table?’
‘And spill stuff on the floor,’ he said.
‘And make loud chomping noises like two animals in a zoo.’
The waitress came with stacks of ribs in a glutinous dark-red sauce. Samsa stared at the food. His appetite, small to begin with, had shriveled. He watched Darcy pick up a rib and chew on it, then she let the stripped bone sink inside her finger bowl, where it left a slick of red grease. Pink water in the bathtub, he thought. Stained scissors lying on her stomach. Her hair, razored and chopped brutally short, sticking up from her scalp. He felt haunted, ghosts stalked his life. What he needed was an exorcism. But incantations and the sprinkling of holy water weren’t going to do the trick.
Darcy stared at him over the mound of ribs. ‘I have a question for you. When you go out nights, where do you actually go?’
‘Mostly it’s work,’ he answered. He chewed slowly on a fry.
‘You don’t have a woman you’re seeing, do you?’
‘No. Did you think I might?’
‘You just get up and go, you don’t say where you’re headed. It can’t be night shift all the time.’
‘Homicides happen round the clock, which is inconvenient.’
‘When it’s not work, where do you go then?’
He picked up a rib, but he couldn’t bring himself to taste it. ‘I like the feeling of solitude I get in a car at night. There. Does that answer you?’
‘I guess,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you sound so defensive, though.’
‘I wasn’t aware of it, Darcy. I get in the car and it’s dark and I look for quiet roads. It’s a peaceful sensation.’ This intricate web of fabrication. Once you’d started to spin it you couldn’t stop, because the strands would strangle you.
Was he supposed to tell her the truth? He could hear gates clang shut inside himself. He was barricaded behind his own evasions and lies. Gregory Samsa, a cop for twenty-one years, twenty-one fucking years of completely honest uninterrupted service to the inhabitants of this gritty threadbare city. Never on the pad, never on the take, never a goddam hint of graft or corruption; he slips up one time, he makes a serious error of judgement –
He crumpled his napkin with a violent gesture and pushed his plate aside briskly. I was sick to my heart with solitude, Darcy. Can you understand that? He wondered how he looked to his daughter, if she could read anything in his face. But she was staring into her food, wasn’t even looking at him. He gazed round the room, experienced a great rushing blur of sensory impressions, then he remembered the feeling he’d experienced last night when he’d stared at the street from his bedroom window.
Something bad was coming down.
Something he’d be powerless to prevent.
He picked at a couple more fries, but that was all he could manage. Darcy, too, seemed uninterested in eating. A flop, he thought. Pigging out together. There had been a breakdown of sorts. It felt like a party where all the balloons had deflated and hung wrinkled.
‘If you’re finished, I’ll get the check.’ He looked at his watch, remembered that Al Brodsky was dropping over. He raised an arm to attract the waitress. He paid the bill with a credit card. On the way out he noticed that Darcy had disappeared inside herself again. She looked distant and secretive.
We all have secrets, he thought. It’s how we handle them that matters. Or if we handle them at all.
14
Lee Boyle looked out of the window of vass’s pick-up, which was rattling down a pocked road of old row houses. This was flinty blue-collar territory. Since the steelworks had shut down and the power plant replaced half its workforce with silicon chips, most people in this neighborhood were on welfare and hard times. Politicians didn’t give a damn. That’s what politicians were for anyhow. Vote for me, I won’t do shit. But I’ll do it better than the other candidate.
‘So where does this guy live?’ Boyle asked.
‘It’s not far.’
‘And he can do the job?’
‘In his sleep. It’s nothing to him.’
‘You known him long?’
‘A few years,’ Vass said. ‘I met him through Stretch.’
‘You can vouch for him.’
‘Fuck’s sake, relax.’
Boyle thought, 92K, 92K. It was like a mantra going round in his head. He gazed at the dreary little houses. Old men, most of them black, sat on porches and read newspapers back to front, then started the whole process all over again. Boyle had a sense that there were drawers inside these houses stuffed with losing lottery tickets and unopened brown envelopes with windows.
‘We there yet?’
‘You’re like a kid who sits in the back of his Daddy’s car and can’t keep still, Lee.’
Anxiety, Lee Boyle thought. Time on whirring wings. He remembered he was supposed to meet Cassandra at the Rialto, but he’d let that slide. He might not run into her again for weeks, months, by which time she’d have forgotten the deal anyway. You could count on that.
‘This guy really calls himself Data?’
‘Thirty-seven and a Trekkie to the max. You meet him, just don’t mention Captain Kirk or that bald guy Picard, or any of those assholes, or it’s going to be a long night listening to some very tedious details about the righteousness of the Federation.’
Vass slowed the truck, turned a corner, braked outside a row house painted battleship gray and peeling like bad skin. Boyle got out and followed Rudy Vass to the front door. Vass pressed the bell. The guy who answered had a shaved head. His eyes were stone-colored.
Vass said, ‘Data, my man.’
Data had a smile like a crack in a rock. ‘You’re late, Vass.’
‘Traffic’s a nightmare,’ Vass said. ‘This is Lee. Lee, Data.’
Data’s voice was deep, out of his chest. ‘Before you come inside, you oughta know I have two strict rules in here: no smoking, and no drinking anywhere near the equipment.’
Data opened the door a little wider. Vass and Boyle went inside the house, which consisted of small interconnecting rooms, drab and dark and steamy. There was a smell of wood polish or air freshener, Boyle wasn’t sure which.
A woman’s voice, emerging from one of the tiny rooms, called out, ‘Don’t go making loud noises up there, Joe.’
‘Right, Ma,’ Data said.
Data reached the landing and opened the door to a room that burst on Boyle like a Star Trek museum. Posters depicted Spock and Kirk and others whose names were unknown to Boyle – he rarely watched TV, it was a foreign country to him – and a whole array of books, magazines, fanzines, miniature replicas of alien life forms, copies of Trekkie weapons. It was some kind of sorry shrine. Joe, aka Data, thirty-seven and still lives with his mother in a Star Trek alternative reality. All this kid stuff. Boyle had an urge to say, Look, I’m goddam serious. This isn’t some space soap baloney.
‘Rudy explain the fee?’ Data asked.
‘Twenty-five bucks,’ Boyle said.
‘That’s the going rate,’ Data said. He was wearing Osh Kosh overalls with big patchy pockets. His arms were hairy and muscular. Boyle drew crumpled notes from his jeans, counted out twenty-five dollars in fives. He wondered if he had anything left in his bank account. Fifty, sixty dollars tops. He knew he had about a hundred bucks in a coffee can stuffed at the back of a closet. His nest egg. Peanuts. All the money you spent down the drain of your veins or up your nose, and nothing to show for it but a serious taste. You’ve got a Mercedes, a speedboat, and probably a goddam Lear jet lost in your bloodstream.
Data pocketed the cash and walked to a table in the corner of the room, where a black laptop computer was located. It was attached to a box Boyle had no way of identifying. He was computer illiterate. He wasn’t one for zipping along the information autobahn.
A tangle of wires dangled from the table and out of sight. Data sat down in front of the computer and pressed a button. Boyle heard a whir and then a series of beeping sounds, followed by what seemed like a strange hoarse wind blowing out of the laptop.
‘Okay,’ Data said. ‘Rudy tells me you want some material outta the Department of Motor Vehicles?’
‘I’ve got three digits of a license-plate number, a make and a color.’
‘Shoot,’ Data said, his hands poised over the keyboard.
‘Ninety-two K. Chrysler,’ Boyle said. ‘Dark blue.’
‘Ninety-two K.’ Data’s fingers tapped quickly. Boyle watched Data lean back in his chair while the machine whined.
‘What’s that box attachment?’ Boyle asked.
‘You never seen a modem before?’ Data had a look of bewilderment, like he considered Boyle some primeval life form. ‘This box connects to the phone lines. Which means the whole wide world.’
Boyle said he saw, but he didn’t really, and, besides, he didn’t give a damn. He was nervous. Because of the crank. Because of sleeplessness. The modem’s connected to the phone line, the phone line’s connected to the phone poles, the phone pole’s connected to the exchange. He understood that in Data’s world this was a holy moment, like making contact with God.
‘Right, we’re in,’ Data said. Boyle saw what seemed to be names and numbers scrolling across the screen. Data leaned forward toward the monitor.
‘Already?’ Boyle asked.
‘I got three Chryslers here, all Le Barons, all with the same partial, all in the color specified,’ Data said. ‘Get a pen and paper and write down this info.’
Vass took from his pocket a Bic, which he handed Boyle, who couldn’t find anything to write on except for a hard-top pack of Camel Lights. He scribbled the names and addresses quickly in tiny crabbed handwriting, a kind of shorthand he hoped he’d be able to decipher later. Data pressed a key and the screen blanked.
‘I told you he was good,’ Vass said.
Boyle stuck the pack in his pocket. ‘He’s good all right.’
Data rose. Business concluded. ‘I’ll show you guys out.’
They went down the stairs and toward the front door. ‘You don’t know me,’ Data said to Boyle. ‘We never met.’ He eyeballed the street, presumably for a sign of alien life forms, then quickly shut the door.
Boyle and Vass walked back to the pick-up. When he was inside, Boyle sat with his head slumped back. ‘She vanishes inside a Le Baron and nobody’s seen her since,’ he said. ‘And that makes me feel a tad uneasy.’
‘I still say she split,’ Vass said. ‘She wanted a clean break.’
‘Hey, I know this girl. No way would she just up and vanish on me.’
The pick-up shuddered over a pothole in the road. Bumping up and down in his seat, Vass said, ‘What now?’
Boyle took a cigarette from the pack of Camel Lights and lit it, gazing at the names and addresses through strands of smoke. ‘Check out these names, what else? One of these cars is the only connection I have to Almond.’ And he thought of the small girl with the lovely Latino features, damp towels on his bathroom floor and her glistening pubic hair and the sweet honeyed taste of her kiss, and he felt bereft, as if she might somehow have slipped through a crack in the earth’s crust, forever lost to him.
15
Dr Lewis Dice was a pink-skinned individual who had a local reputation as something of an oddball on account of his hobby: taxidermy. Kids brought him dead animals – roadkill, creatures blasted by gunshot – and he restored the more salvageable specimens with a needle and surgical thread, then stuffed and mounted them in glass cases and contributed them to auctions for charitable causes. He had a squeak of a voice. At times he sounded like Mr Rogers through a flute. He wore flip-flops and Bermuda shorts and a Miami Dolphins T-shirt that revealed scrawny nut-brown arms.
People who visited his home invariably noticed such things as the severed heads of birds suspended in jars of preservative and the kitchen sink, usually filled with pale-green fluid, in which organic matter floated. His neighbors sometimes referred to him as Doc Dicenstein.
With a pack of big plastic Ziploc bags under his arm, Dice strode in his purposeful way out through the door in his cedar fence and headed for the great open field that bordered his property, where weeds and tangled thickets of long grass grew riotously. Every now and then he paused to contemplate an unusual arrangement of daisies or dandelions or wild flowers. He disturbed a red admiral on a grass stalk still moist from last night’s rain. The butterfly took flight, fluttering past his face, color in motion.
He heard in the distance the pock of a rifle. He winced. A second ping, then a third. Why did parents give their children air rifles? And why did the children use these weapons for what they called sport? Killing wood pigeons, shooting cats, crippling wildlife. Where was the sport in that?
Shielding his eyes from the setting sun, Dice watched the butterfly go. Then he stared across the meadow, his attention drawn by the sound of machinery. A truck with the sign ‘MARTIN’S 24-HOUR BREAKDOWN & RECOVERY SERVICE’ was hauling a car from the base of an old tree. The car, strangely enough, was upside down. Men were busy attaching chains to the overturned automobile. A winch began to grind.
Some gosh-darn fool had smacked into the tree, Lewis Dice thought. A drunk in all probability. He looked in the other direction, noticing flattened grass and threadbare places and seeing, at the place where the incline rose to the road, a darkened area of churned ground. The hapless driver had come off the blacktop, whoopsadiddley, and slammed several hundred yards into the tree.
