ARC D’X

by Steve Erickson

  It was stupid of Mallory, really. Every time Wade thought maybe he shouldn’t underestimate him, Mallory did something silly. “You’ve done fine,” Wade said to the rookie.

  “You won’t tell Mallory that I—” the rookie started, but Wade was already walking away through headquarters, narrowly missing its low ceilings and brass pipes that coiled from the walls. If Mallory worked fast enough, he could have sold the TV on the black market last night at the Arboretum, assuming he was there to check out the Fleurs d’X business and there weren’t a lot of other cops around. For a few minutes Wade was feeling pleased that he had something on Mallory, to balance out whatever Mallory had on him, but the maze of paranoia through which his mind wandered led to another possibility, that Central let Mallory work his black-market scam as a reward for being an informant. Of course, if Mallory was caught red-handed, Central would deny any knowledge of it and Mallory would be on his own. When Mallory walked by his desk Wade, studying the file on the hotel murder, said casually, “Heard you found a dish,” to which someone with a little imagination or humor might have answered something cute along the lines of, You mean the little dark one with the huge tits or the blonde with the long legs and funny accent? Instead Mallory sputtered just long enough for Wade to change the subject and wave the file at him. “So what do you have?”

  “Have?” Mallory said, flummoxed.

  Wade leaned back in his chair. “From the hotel yesterday,” he said. “What did you think I meant?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “We didn’t find anything.”

  “What did the concierge say?”

  “About what?” Mallory nearly shouted.

  “The murder, Mallory,” Wade answered slowly, “there was a body, remember? Blood everywhere?”

  Mallory read from a note pad he took from his pocket. He was rattled, the way Wade had brought up the TV and then dropped it. “Concierge says Mrs. Hurley checked into the hotel two nights before.”

  “Under what name?”

  “Sally Hemings.”

  “What was she doing checking into a hotel in the middle of the night?”

  “I didn’t say it was the middle of the night.”

  “All right. What was she doing checking into—”

  “Domestic dispute. Told her husband she was leaving. Or, actually, the husband says she just left.”

  “What’s the husband do?”

  “He’s an actor in the Arboretum.”

  “Did he say what the argument was about?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “Sure I asked him,” Mallory answered.

  “She was upset enough to check into a hotel for two days.”

  Mallory said, as though it explained something, “They’re broke.”

  “They’re not living off anything he’s doing in the Arboretum, that’s for sure.”

  “She makes jewelry and sells it. Necklaces and earrings and shit.”

  Wade looked at the file. “She ever clear this jewelry with Central?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You search their place?”

  “I thought we were investigating a murder.”

  “They live off the sale of this jewelry?”

  “A couple years ago she inherited some money. One of those things that happens out of the blue, a dead relative she never knew existed.” Mallory checked the note pad again. “Madison Hemings. Anyway, that money’s gone now.”

  “Where was Hurley the night before last?”

  “Arboretum, he says.”

  “Was anyone with Miss Hemings when she checked into the hotel?”

  “The concierge didn’t see anybody. She was up there alone the whole time he knew of. She went out the day before yesterday and came back and told the concierge she’d be leaving. Yesterday he goes up to her room to see if she’s checking out and the door’s open. He takes one look inside and sees everything and calls us.”

  “And he never saw anyone else coming or going?”

  “He sleeps behind the front desk at night.”

  When he’s not watching his felonious TV, Wade thought. “There’s still no ID on the body,” he said, opening the file again. “Did you dust?”

  “Of course we dusted. She left prints on the door knob and the knife, about what you’d expect.”

  “No prints from the dead man.”

  “No.”

  “And you checked out the premises entirely, the streets outside the hotel and in back.”

  “Yeah,” Mallory said impatiently.

  “That other door that was in the room, where’s that go outside?”

  “We couldn’t find any other door outside.”

  “Did you look—”

  “We looked fucking everywhere. There was no damned door outside. That door’s been sealed up a long time, like the concierge said.”

  “Miss Hemings said something—”

  “Mrs. Hurley you mean,” Mallory said.

  Wade licked his lips. “Mrs. Hurley said something when she woke. Did you catch it? It was only a word or two.”

  Mallory looked at his note pad. “ ‘A miracle.’”

  “ ‘A miracle’? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what I’ve got down here. ‘A miracle.’”

  Wade kept looking at the file. “And you found nothing—”

  “Give me a hint, Wade. What is it we’re supposed to have found?”

  “A murder weapon.”

  “Excuse me, but there was a knife with blood all over it—”

  “You read this file? Guy wasn’t stabbed.” For a while Wade and Mallory looked at each other. “Not a stab wound on his body. He died from a blow to the skull.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Hard enough for his brains to run out his ears.”

  “The handle of the knife,” Mallory suggested.

  “The handle of the knife? The woman goes to kill this guy with a knife and beats him over the head with it?”

  “You know,” Mallory leaned across Wade’s desk and into his face, “I get tired of you making me feel stupid. There’s nothing complicated about this. A woman’s in bed with a stiff and a knife has blood all over it.”

  “I apologize, Mallory. It may not be complicated to you but I’m confused, because if the knife isn’t the murder weapon, then—”

  “She got rid of the fucking weapon.”

  “Let me make sure I’ve got your theory straight. She beats the man over the head. She leaves the hotel in the middle of the night with the murder weapon while the concierge sleeps behind the front desk. She must have gone some ways from the hotel to dispose of the weapon because you searched the hotel and you searched the area around the hotel and you didn’t find anything. She gets rid of the weapon and then returns to the hotel. She comes back through the hotel lobby past the front desk where the concierge is still sleeping and goes back up the stairs. She comes back into the room where she’s murdered a man and leaves the door open, the way the concierge found it, so that people can walk by and get a good look inside and see she’s murdered someone. Just to make sure somebody finds her there, she crawls into bed with a knife and goes to sleep next to the murdered man while he bleeds all over her.”

  Mallory was still leaning over Wade’s desk. “I just knew you were going to find some way to get her off,” he said. “I could see it all over that big black face of yours yesterday, you licking your chops for some of that black—”

  “You should be careful right now,” Wade said quietly.

  “Yeah, well, we should all be careful, shouldn’t we?” Mallory answered. “Woman in bed with a dead body and you’re telling me she had nothing to do with it. Well, sure, it’s your call. We’ve all got our secrets and I guess this one’s yours. But, you know, somebody up there,” and he pointed over his shoulder in the direction of Church Central, “might wonder just who killed this guy if she didn’t.”

  “It won’t be the first murde
r that’s gone unanswered in this city.”

  “It’ll be the first one,” Mallory said, “where the killer was lying in bed next to the fucking body.”

  In fact, it hadn’t been Wade’s intention at all to release Sally Hemings. The discussion with Mallory just sort of evolved that way. Whether Wade liked it or not. Mallory wasn’t half wrong: Sally was the only person at the scene of a crime that didn’t have any other suspects, except for perhaps the husband if by chance his alibi didn’t check out. The fact was that Sally acted like a woman who had killed a man. From the beginning Wade had assumed she did it, though he might have hoped she had an excellent reason; the fact that they hadn’t found a weapon only meant Mallory had been too busy working his TV scam with the concierge to do a proper search. Now his petty little political struggle with Mallory had put Wade in the position of having to let her go, at least for the time being. He walked to her cell, turning everything over in his mind.

  He almost expected not to find her there. He almost expected to walk into the jail and find her cell empty, a lapse among the city’s incarcerated. He thought she might have just disappeared as peculiarly as she’d appeared, that he’d walk back to his desk and find her file vanished with no trace of her having existed for the twenty-four hours she’d existed. But inside her cell she sat on the small bench staring at her hands in her lap the same way she had in the hotel room the day before, appearing only somewhat less dazed at the end of the twenty-four hours than she was at the beginning. Wade watched her awhile before she looked up at him.

  “You said something yesterday,” he finally spoke, “when you woke in the hotel. Do you remember?” He said, “Something about a miracle.” She licked her lips and seemed to think about it very hard, terrified that there might be still another thing she couldn’t account for. Wade signaled to the jailer at the end of the hall, who pulled the lever that opened Sally’s cell. Nothing was so sophisticated in this city, Wade thought, as the levers that opened and closed cells. “I’m going to take you home,” he said, and she looked at him with the hushed alarm of someone who might be expected to know where home was.

  He tried to explain things to her on the way to Redemption. They took the same outer road bordering the city that he’d driven the previous night coming back from the Arboretum. “You’re not clear of this,” he said to her next to him in the front seat, “not by a long shot. You and your family are going to be watched. There’s only so much we have the authority to do in this particular zone, but keeping an eye on you is one of them and arresting you again is another, since the crime was committed in the city proper.” He paused. “I’m sticking my neck out for you.” It only really occurred to him as he said it. Maybe, he thought angrily, she didn’t give a flying fuck. “But my neck’s not that long,” he almost snarled, “not for you, not for anyone.” He still had trouble talking to her. It didn’t help that she said nothing in return. “You know,” he blurted, “if there’s anything you’d like to tell me, this would be a fine time to do it,” and he looked at her to see that he wasn’t talking to thin air.

  She was still there, all right; the thin air hadn’t claimed her. She was still there, mute, unaware, and it made him furious. He wanted to stop the car and reach over and shake her, but he was afraid of himself, of what he’d do if he actually touched her and held her in his hands. He wanted just to wrest her from her transfixed attention, until he realized she was transfixed not with her memories or her dreams but something very real beyond the windshield of the car.

  She was looking at the volcano. She looked at its flat peak and the smoke that rose into the sky. She watched it a long time, it seemed to Wade, and then for a moment she turned to him, something expectant in her eyes and on her lips. She craned her neck to keep the mountain in view long after they passed it and after Wade had turned the car toward the sea. In the white light of the circle, when he parked the car and she got out, she continued watching the volcano until her attention was interrupted by the redhaired two-year-old child who ran from the third unit into her baffled mother’s arms.

  It may not have been until that moment that Wade knew for certain he was going back to the Fleurs d’X. Even driving Sally back from police headquarters he believed he could resist returning to the Arboretum. But when the small child ran to Sally’s arms, and the mother grabbed her daughter to her breast, Wade reeled where he stood, a huge wavering black blot on the blinding circle beneath his feet. He staggered back to his car. Gann Hurley, tall and thin with long brown hair, stood in the doorway of the third unit watching his wife and daughter.

  In the afternoon light the Arboretum was an aberration, something that should have been invisible until darkness fell.

  The entrance was obscure, indifferent. At the end of one of the neighborhood’s jutting extensions, cut in a grungy wooden wall about a foot off the ground so Wade had to step up, it was by chance or intention the neighborhood’s single doorway, wide enough for only one person to go through at a time. There was no actual door that opened or closed. Wade walked down a long narrow corridor as the light from outside grew dimmer. Soon there was nothing but blackness.

  For a man as large as Wade the claustrophobia was uncompromising. The corridor wound slowly downward and then back up as the distant sounds of the inner Arboretum became more distinct. Through the walls Wade could feel vibrations from far away, the churning of machinery and the hum of unknown music punctuated by garbled profanities, violent outbursts, high female moans. Then the corridor made a U-turn, opening onto a small chamber where a dirty bulb burned high on one wall, revealing two doorways to the left and one to the right, and another directly on the other side of the chamber. The doors on the left and right opened to other corridors to other intersections, eventually leading to the theater, TV arcade, artists’ grottoes and bars, and units where people lived.

  The doorway directly in front of him revealed a spiral stairway. Descending the stairs Wade passed any number of other doors; he’d never gone far enough to be sure how many. It had been two or three trips before he realized the sound he heard from the bottom of the stairwell was water, not like a river but a tide that rolled in and out, lapping at the subterranean walls. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum its sensual history was told in the smells of the people who had been there, floors and walls soaked with wine and the juice of lovers’ couplings. There was also the Vog that had drifted in when the Arboretum was layers younger, before its labyrinth had crept inexorably across Desire’s terrain, the belch of the volcano’s most ancient ambitions caught in the Arboretum’s inner sancta and frantically drifting from hall to hall in search of the way out. The same panicked search was shared by the lost ones Wade met as he made his way through the neighborhood, their confusion compounded by the narrowness of corridors that wouldn’t let more than two people pass: anyone crossing Wade’s path, for instance, found he wasn’t inclined to back up. Thus the Vog Travelers, as they were called, spent as much time going backward in the passageways as forward. Sometimes one would mutter to Wade, asking where “the door” was. But usually they said nothing, concealing their plight because thieves in the Arboretum preyed on the Vog Travelers who wandered perpetually until they found exhaustion or delirium.

  In all the times Wade had been in the Arboretum he’d never seen a single sign. One learned to count and remember. Deep in the heart of the Arboretum were the drawings of artists who scurried from corridor to corridor looking for bare walls, since honor dictated that no one vandalized the work of others. No one wrote graffiti because graffiti was the propaganda of authority. In the final corridor that ran to the Fleurs d’X, a short squat painter without a shirt, grim colors splattered across his chest, rendered with dimensional exactitude the image of another corridor, which had the effect of providing Fleurs d’X its ultimate camouflage, particularly since elsewhere in the Arboretum was a corridor where the artist had rendered the image of this one, complete with two naked girls leaning in one of the doorways. So Wade, who had been to the c
lub just twenty hours before, couldn’t be sure it was real until he actually stepped into it.

  Once again it was almost empty. Three stages were open; no bodies waited in the dressing room. Wade sat down and Dee, who was watching him, motioned one of her girls over to his table. She was small and dark, with breasts too large for her body. “Where’s Mona?” he said. Mona, she answered, didn’t come on for another three hours. Wade considered the political ramifications of whiskey and ordered one anyway, and then another; after an hour a fourth stage opened and after another hour a fifth and sixth. The Fleurs d’X began to fill. Wade was aware he should have been back at headquarters some time ago. But each time he thought of Sally Hemings standing in the white circle with the small child whose hair was the color of fire, he’d call over the small dark girl and order another whiskey as he contemplated her disproportionate breasts, shrinking them in his mind. He waited.

  When Mona finally appeared from the back of the club, she didn’t acknowledge Wade at all; she didn’t acknowledge anyone. For a while she served drinks and stood in the doorway where it was cooler, waiting to give her first performance: all the stages were now operating. Wade got up from his table, staggering a bit because he’d had many whiskeys. He went over to Mona’s stage where the seats were full of other men; randomly he tapped one on the shoulder. “You’re in my seat,” he said.

  The sailor looked up at Wade. “Fuck off,” he answered.

  Wade picked the man up and dropped him on the floor. He sat in the chair while the man thrashed painfully on the ground. Mona smiled at Wade with her little baby teeth; on the floor the sailor continued seething, mumbling obscene comments. Mona laughed. Wade laughed too. He ordered another drink.