From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  Frank sighed. “Look. We all know what you were doing down there.”

  “I—”

  “Please. Let me finish, Mr. Fisher. Believe me, we appreciate your coming into talk to us and we have absolutely no interest in pursuing what you were doing in the Zone beyond how it relates to our case. But you have to understand: If you bullshit us on this, then how are we supposed to believe anything you tell us?”

  Fisher looked down at his lap. “She … she looked like a prostitute … .”

  “That’s right. She did. And you were looking to conduct some business with a person in her line of work, weren’t you?”

  Fisher nodded.

  “Okay. Did you approach her?”

  “No. I … I was still working up my … you know …”

  “Your nerve.”

  Fisher nodded again.

  “Okay. So you’re following her, walking west on Lambton—about how far behind were you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a block. Just under a block.”

  “And were you walking more quickly at this point—trying to catch up to her so that you could talk to her, or were you still just following her?”

  “Just following her, I guess. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t know what to say.”

  “So this was your first time?”

  Fisher still had not lifted his gaze from his lap. “I guess. It’s …” He looked up at Frank, then dropped his gaze again. “I saw the other girls—you know the ones that are standing out on Palm Street—but they just looked, cheap. Like you could catch a disease from them or something.”

  “But Miss Wilson was different.”

  Fisher nodded. He looked miserable. Thomas didn’t doubt that Fisher had long since regretted stepping forward.

  “I didn’t know that she wasn’t a prostitute then,” he said. “She just looked … nice.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “So you’re both walking down Lambton, you’re trailing maybe a block behind her. What happened then, Mike?”

  Thomas smiled to himself. It was good interrogation technique. You started out formal, but then dropped into the familiarity of a first-name basis. You were pals. You were on his side. When it came to the penny-ante perps, it usually made them say or do something stupid. When it came to an interview subject like Fisher here, it put him at his ease.

  “Well, I was still trying to figure out what I was going to say to her, when all of a sudden she just stops dead in her tracks and turns to look at this doorway.”

  The detectives exchanged glances.

  “What doorway was this?” Brewer asked.

  “I don’t know. I never went any further, because that’s when—that’s when this guy stepped out of the doorway. I’d already ducked into that alley beside the pawnshop, you see, because I thought she’d heard me following her and maybe I was making her nervous.”

  “Didn’t you think,” Brewer went on, “that it would have been in her best interest—considering the business she was in—to talk to you?”

  Fisher’s eye started its double-time twitching again. “I … I was just nervous … .”

  “It’s okay, Mike,” Frank said, his voice soothing. “So you ducked into this alley beside the pawnshop. What happened then?”

  “Well, I … I sort of peeked around the corner to see if she was looking my way.”

  “Was she?”

  “No.”

  “And you were both alone on the street at that point?”

  “I guess. I didn’t see anyone else. She was standing there, looking at the doorway, and then all of a sudden this guy stepped out and he—he grabbed her by the throat.” Fisher’s gaze lifted to focus on Frank. “I should’ve done something then. I should’ve gone to help her. But I got scared.”

  “What’d you do then, Mike?”

  “I ducked back into the alley and—I was shaking, you know? It was like I knew I should be helping her, but I couldn’t move.”

  “Could you describe the man?” Thomas asked. He had his ballpoint poised over the notepad.

  Fisher shook his head. “I didn’t see much. It was dark—there were a couple of streetlights out.”

  Frank nodded encouragingly.

  “But he was a big guy—fat, I guess. Taller than her by maybe a head, and wide.”

  “Hair color?”

  “It was dark—I mean too dark to see,” he added as Thomas began to write down the word “dark” on his pad.

  Thomas crossed out the word.

  “How was he dressed?” he asked.

  “I … I’m not sure.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “So you’re in the alleyway. What did you do then?”

  “I just sort of stood there, trying to get my courage up.”

  “And then?” Frank prompted when Fisher fell silent. “What happened then, Mike?”

  “I … I looked around the corner again and she … she was just lying there on the ground. I guess she was dead.”

  “What happened to the man?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t come down the street in my direction.”

  “How did you know the girl was dead?”

  “I didn’t. I just panicked and ran, I guess.”

  Frank nodded to Thomas, who pushed the play button of a tape recorder that was sitting on the table.

  “There’s been a terrible accident,” a tinny voice said from the recorder’s speaker. “On … on Lambton Street, near … near the corner of Norton.”

  “Is that your voice?” Frank asked.

  Fisher nodded.

  “So you didn’t just run—you called in to report what had happened?”

  “Well, I couldn’t … I couldn’t just leave her lying there.”

  Frank nodded. “If everyone could be as conscientious as you’ve been, Mike, we’d have a hell of a lot better handle on the crimes in this city.”

  Fisher gave him a grateful look, but studying him, Thomas couldn’t help but feel that Fisher hadn’t told them everything yet. There was something else lying in the back of his eyes, something that ran deeper than his nervousness.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell us about what you saw that night, Mr. Fisher?” he asked.

  Fisher’s twitch grew more pronounced. “I … it’s just that I can’t seem to get him out of my mind. That man … Whenever I think of him, I feel … cold, and I can almost feel him … I don’t know. It’s like he’s watching me.”

  “You think the man saw you?” Brewer asked. “That he’s following you?”

  Fisher shook his head. “It’s like he’s inside my head … whispering … .”

  The detectives exchanged puzzled glances.

  “Okay,” Frank said. “Let’s just go back. What time did you say it was when you left the office … ?”

  They took him over his statement a half-dozen times, but came up with no real discrepancies. They all agreed after he was gone that Fisher hadn’t told the story as if he’d prepared it, but as if it had happened. But there were still problems with it.

  “There was no doorway where we found the body,” Thomas said.

  Brewer nodded.

  “And the ME said the body hadn’t been moved,” Frank said. “She died where we found her.”

  “Fisher must have been mistaken,” Brewer said. “Probably the perp came up to her from a doorway further up the block.”

  Thomas shook his head. “There’s no entrance from the alleyway where Fisher was hiding all the way to the end of the block. That’s the side of the old Lawson Insurance Building. There’s a foyer around the block and a back door in the alleyway. The way Fisher tells it, Leslie Wilson stopped and turned to look at the bare wall. If that’s the truth, she saw something there.”

  “Maybe the guy was hiding in the shadows against the wall,” Frank tried.

  Thomas shook his head. “Think about the crime scene.”

  The other two men did, then Brewer nodded.

  “No shadows,” he said. “Not big enough to hide a man. The wh
ole street was dimly lit, but there weren’t any shadows.”

  “I don’t think Fisher was lying,” Thomas said.

  Frank and Brewer nodded in agreement.

  “He must have been mistaken,” Brewer said. “We’ll talk to him again in a day or so. In the meantime, I’m putting a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him while you two start digging. I want to know everything there is to know about Michael Richard Fisher, Jr.”

  “We’ll get right on it,” Thomas said. “Anything else?”

  Brewer dug out a fresh cigarette and lit up. “Yeah. Jordin over at headquarters told me that Detective Joe Kelsey asked to see the Slasher files this morning and he made copies. I want to know why—but I don’t want him knowing that we’re looking into it.”

  That was a job for Internal Affairs, Thomas thought, but he knew better than to question the order. Brewer always had a good reason for what he wanted done—even if you couldn’t figure out what it was when he first gave you the order.

  “Kelsey,” Frank said. “He’s working Vice, isn’t he?”

  Brewer nodded. He scooped up his cigarette package, stuffed it into the side pocket of his jacket and stood up.

  “We’ve got work to do,” he said.

  As they followed him out of the interrogation room, a uniformed officer took Thomas aside.

  “Your wife called,” she said.

  “Did she want me to return her call?”

  The officer shook her head. “She said she was going out, but she wanted to leave the message that your brother called your house soon after you left. He asked her to tell you that you’ve got a meeting tonight with Jack Whiteduck.”

  “Whiteduck?” Thomas repeated.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Thanks,” Thomas said.

  “Who’s Jack Whiteduck?” Frank asked.

  Thomas turned to him. Brewer had already left, and the two of them had the doorway of the interrogation room to themselves. Only the smell of Brewer’s cigarette smoke remained.

  “Whiteduck’s one of the tribal elders—on the reserve,” Thomas explained.

  “You look kind of stunned,” Frank said. “Is this going to be a new look for you?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I just can’t figure out why he’d want to see me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s a die-hard traditionalist,” Thomas said. “He lives way back up in the hills—won’t have anything to do with whites or anybody who deals with them. I didn’t even know that he knew I existed.”

  But even as he spoke the words, he knew they weren’t true. It wasn’t just that he was the eldest son of the reserve’s elected chief and so known, at least by sight, to just about everyone on the reserve. He could remember a day …

  He couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the time, playing a pickup game of baseball with his brother and some other kids on the lot behind the reserve’s school. He was standing in left field, slapping his fist into the worn leather pocket of his hand-me-down Rawlings glove, waiting for the next batter to step up to the flat stone that served as their makeshift home plate, when he was suddenly aware that he was no longer alone.

  He turned slowly to find Jack Whiteduck standing not six feet away from him.

  Even then Whiteduck was an old man. His skin was wrinkled, his braids gray, but he stood straight-backed with not an ounce of fat on his lean frame. Thomas’s father had told him once that Whiteduck lived alone, up back in that part of the reserve that was as untouched now as it had been when the Europeans first landed on these shores. He still ran his own trap lines in winter, fished and hunted in the summer. He wore clothes he’d made himself: buckskin leggings, shirt and moccasins, elaborately decorated with beadwork, quills, and shells. On anyone else, it would have looked as if he were wearing a costume; on Whiteduck it simply appeared natural.

  Even as a boy, Thomas had known that when he was old enough, he’d be leaving the reserve. He simply hadn’t told anyone yet. Knowing what his father’s reaction would be, he couldn’t speak of it, but he had known. He also knew that to many of the reserve’s older residents, it would appear that he was shirking his responsibilities. Although Big Dan Morningstar had been elected chief by the tribal council, his position could almost be considered hereditary. A Morningstar had been chief for as long as anyone on the reserve could remember.

  It was tradition. Thomas’s neighbors all expected that he would become chief when his father stepped down from the position. But Thomas didn’t want to be chief. His future wasn’t tied to the reserve. He’d heard how he was to be chief all his life—from his father and uncles and neighbors--but he was determined to follow his own path through life, not have it laid out for him.

  He had thought that this knowledge was his own secret until that afternoon when Whiteduck approached him.

  “Wabinose,” Whiteduck said.

  It was Thomas’s Kickaha name, the one he had been given at birth. It meant “Walks all night till dawn.” Like most people on the reserve, however, Thomas used his Anglo name.

  “Hello, Mico’mis,” he replied.

  While others called Whiteduck by his Anglo name, Whiteduck himself never used it. Since Thomas couldn’t remember Whiteduck’s Kickaha name, he settled for the honorific grandfather, not wishing to antagonize the old man. For all Thomas’s need to leave the reserve and his life there behind him, he still respected the beliefs of others. He was not rude, even as a boy.

  He waited expectantly for the old man to go on, but Whiteduck simply regarded him steadily for a long while. The baseball game, the lot behind the school, and the other boys on the field with him just seemed to disappear for Thomas. There were only the two of them, standing in a timeless place, locked in a moment that stood outside ordinary reality. To this day, Thomas could remember the power that had seemed to lie there in the old man’s dark eyes as Whiteduck studied him, and the odd surreal sensation of being elsewhere. The memory of it was what kept him listening when his brother John spoke of the old ways.

  “There is a war inside you,” Whiteduck said finally. “It pulls your spirit in opposite directions.”

  He knows, Thomas had realized with panic. He knows that I want to leave. What was he going to do?

  As though reading his mind, Whiteduck merely shook his head.

  “I have known this war myself,” he said. “One day you and I will talk of it.”

  “I … I …”

  Whiteduck didn’t smile as Thomas stuttered, but his features softened.

  “Not now,” he said. “The time will choose itself.”

  He turned and walked away then. Suddenly Thomas’s ears filled with sound again—the cries of the boys on the field, birdcalls from the forest beyond the lot, the sound of a car rattling over the washboard ruts of the dirt road on the far side of the school building. The feeling of disorientation fled like a dream before the morning’s light.

  Though it felt as if he’d been away with Whiteduck in that other place for at least a half hour, time didn’t seem to have passed at all on the lot behind the school. Jimmy Clearwater was still just coming up to bat. The sun hadn’t moved at all in the sky. No one appeared to have noticed the old man talking to Thomas out there in left field.

  Thomas played badly for the rest of the afternoon. He missed a fly ball that should have been right in his glove, and he struck out twice when his team came up to bat. He knew it wasn’t his fault. His brief conversation with the shaman had shaken him, but he didn’t speak of it. Even at that age, he didn’t make excuses.

  He hadn’t seen Whiteduck again since that day.

  “You figure he’s planning to take up on where your dad’s lectures leave off?” Frank asked.

  Thomas blinked as he returned from that memory. It took him a moment or two to work out what it was that Frank had just said. Partners didn’t keep much from each other; Frank knew all about the problems that Thomas had with his father.

  “I don’t know what he wants,” Thomas sa
id.

  “But you’ll go see him? You don’t have to, you know. You’ve made your choice—nobody’s got the right to tell anybody how they should live. That’s something everybody’s got to decide for themselves.”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Thomas said. “It’s like having the mayor call you up for a meeting, even though you didn’t vote for him, maybe you can’t even stand him or his politics. But how can you not go to find out what he wants?”

  Frank shrugged. “I guess.”

  What Thomas didn’t add to his explanation was that Whiteduck being one of the reserve’s elders wasn’t really the big deal. It was the fact that he was the Kickaha’s oldest shaman that made him one of the most important figures on the reserve. Not even Thomas’s father as elected chief or the head of the militant Warrior’s Lodge had as much clout, because everyone respected Jack Whiteduck and listened to what he had to say.

  He was their spiritual leader, perhaps their conscience.

  “If you want some company on the ride up to the reserve,” Frank said, “I’ve got nothing on tonight.”

  “I appreciate that,” Thomas told him. “But didn’t you tell me you finally got a date with Tanya Lederman?”

  “Well, yeah … .”

  “I’ll be okay, Frank. I’m due for a visit to the reserve anyway. You just enjoy your date.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  Thomas nodded. “I’m sure. But thanks.”

  “Okay. Well, like the Loot said: We’ve got work to do. What do you want to tackle first? Fisher’s background, Kelsey, or the interviews from last night?”

  What he wanted and the case’s priorities were two different things, Thomas thought.

  “The interviews,” he said.

  Frank sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  NINE

  “This is good,” Billy Ryan said after skimming through the photocopied police reports of the Slasher case that Joe Kelsey had brought him.

  They were sitting at a table in the MacDonald’s on Williamson out near the Expressway overpass. Ryan had the remains of a Big Mac and Coke on the table in front of him, a cigarette burning in the ashtray. Kelsey was still nursing his coffee.