by Ed Gorman
Now, in the moonlight, it lay silent like a great rusted artifact of some alien species gone off to another world.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs that ran up the west side of the place. It was here Richard Coburn's father had crouched the other night, looking at the place with a familiarity that meant he probably came here often.
I went up ten steps to the first landing and tried the door: locked. I went up ten more steps to the second landing and tried the next knob: locked. On the thirtieth step, on the third landing, the knob yielded. I opened the door on a wide, shadowy floor that smelled of engine oil and dust and cold. Moonlight fell pale through smashed and grimy windows. From my pocket, I took my flashlight and began shining it around. In ten minutes I had covered the entire floor without finding anything other than giant turbines that had been allowed to remain here, rusting and providing hidey-holes for rats that chittered now at my passing.
I went down to the second floor on a set of creaking interior stairs. I had just shone my light into a corner piled high with grease-stained cardboard boxes when a voice behind me said, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger."
Spinning around, more startled and afraid than I cared to admit, my light picked him out in relief against a massive gray turbine that almost reached the murky ceiling.
He looked no less mad tonight—the bald head knobby, the cheeks gaunt, the eyes nearly phosphorescent under the shelf of his brow—though he at least wore an overcoat tonight, a shabby piece of threadbare fabric that hung on him scarecrow-fashion.
He stood pinned in my light and said, "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him."
"I'd like to help you," I said.
If he understood my words, he did not let on.
I said, "Smiley died, didn't he?"
At the name Smiley, recognition flickered in his eyes. He backed up a little as if he might cut and run.
I moved forward a step, slowly, slowly. "A few days ago, Gwen Daily at the shelter told me that the bouncers at the Avanti had beaten up a friend of yours named Smiley and that Smiley had probably gone off on a bender but nobody had seen him since."
He said, there in the gloom, in the circle of flashlight beam, "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats of me will live because of me."
"He came here, didn't he, Smiley I mean?"
Nothing.
"He came here and died from the beating and the cold and when you found him, you got very angry, didn't you?" Still he said nothing. I said, "I'm not your enemy, old man."
"Smiley," he said. "Died."
Speaking ordinary words, instead of Bible quotations, he sounded slow, almost retarded.
"Smiley was dead and you blamed your son Richard and that's why you started doing it, wasn't it?"
"Smiley," he said. "Dead."
He looked left and right again, giving the impression that he was about to bolt.
"That's why you started sneaking into the restaurant, wasn't it? You'd cut-off pieces of Smiley and then put them into the goulash and you thought nobody would know. It would be your secret from your son and from the rich people who despised the homeless like you and Smiley."
He said, "On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and broke it, and said, 'This is my body."
"Communion," I said.
"Communion," he said. "Smiley."
That's what they'd all been afraid of—Richard had figured it out and so had Brian Ingram in his lab and he'd told Jackie. Eating human flesh at a fashionable restaurant was likely to put the restaurant out of business.
And then he ran.
He was much faster than I would have thought. In seconds, he was beyond the range of my flashlight, running in the shadows, his slapping shoes echoing in the darkness, little sobs exploding from him as he moved. Then the texture of the sounds changed—he was on metal stairs suddenly, clanging down a floor into the gloom below. I followed, pulling my .38, shouting for him to stop. I wanted to get him help of some kind; at this point, nearly any kind would do.
When I reached the first floor, I realized I'd lost him.
I tried left, I tried right. Nothing. I went down a corridor of office doors, shining my light in each room but finding nothing. I found a conference room filled with cobwebs and a walk-in closet. But nothing; nothing. I went all the way up front, to the large double doors through which the workers had entered, shining my light in every corner and cranny but he was gone. All I could figure was that he knew a quick and secret way out of here.
I went back to the center of the floor, where the skeletal remains of an assembly line ran like latticework across the middle of a vast room. In the dusty silence then, I heard him crying. All I could liken the sound to was that of a dying animal; those guttural, frightened sounds a kitten or a puppy make in your lap there at the last of their little lives.
I found him in a room stacked high with shipping crates. At first I couldn't see him, only hear him.
When I shone my light, it rested on the blue and somewhat bloated face of a derelict who had obviously been dead for some time. Smiley. But the coldness of the building had preserved him pretty well. He wore a red and black checkered hunting jacket and filthy brown trousers and a blue 7-Eleven cap. On a dead man, the cap looked funny, endearing in some stupid human way, and I almost smiled. The jacket was open and shot up the right sleeve all the way to the biceps. He had taken the flesh from the stomach and arms. Raw knife-cut gouges lay in the human meat, bloody holes ripped into the flesh. He had been smart enough to cut the meat up into small pieces so nobody could be sure what they were eating.
But a few customers had complained to Coburn and the chef and when they looked into things, they'd learned the truth.
"Come on, old man," I said, reaching down to take his elbow. "Why don't we go back to the shelter and talk to Gwen. All right?"
He remained for a time on his knees, next to his dead friend. "Smiley," he said. "Dead."
"Yes," I said, "Smiley's dead."
He looked up at me and then back down at his friend.
I took him gently by the arm and together we walked back to the shelter.
Chapter 25
On the way back from the airport, I told Donna what I'd learned. . .
Richard was seven years old the day Karl finally deserted them. Richard never forgot how he'd held on to his father's pocket so hard that the pocket itself ripped out, infuriating Karl to the point where he bent down and slapped the boy hard across the mouth. The mother stepped in then and one of their terrible arguments ensued. No matter where Richard went in the three-room apartment he could hear arguing always; always. Cover his ears, bury his head; it made no difference. But on this day there was a special fury because this time his father had packed his bags and each of them knew he would be back no more. So Richard was on their bed when the front door was opened by the father and then slammed shut in rage by the mother, the father's footsteps already quick and retreating down the stairs.
Richard's mother died when he was eight. Heart disease. He was raised from then on by his aunt and uncle. He asked them constantly to try and find his father. But one day his uncle—his mother's brother—said, "If there's any justice, Richard, that sonofabitch died long before your mother did."
By rights, he should have hated his father. But he could never quite bring himself to this. Even later on when he escaped the factory neighborhood of his aunt and uncle, when he was already riding around in his first sports car and dating his first rich woman, he still felt bereft and deserted, and longed to see his father.
All this time, Karl was in California, seeking those golden women and golden moments that the sun and beach and starry nights seem to hold for midwesterners in particular. He sought the work he'd always sought—clothing salesman or car salesman or jewelry salesman—the sort of job where a three-piece suit and a keen line of patter could hide both poverty and relative ignorance. In 1973, when he was
forty-one years old, Karl had his first breakdown. He had no idea what it was about. After a week of depression, he woke up in the middle of the night and went into the bathroom and got a double-edge razor blade and slashed his left wrist into a little bleeding mouth. His woman at the time—a cocktail hostess—got him to a psych ward. Over the years, he would have more than sixty electroshock treatments and remain institutionalized for a total of more than ten years. Schizophrenia was the easy, rote answer. In fact, the shrinks could never quite agree about what troubled Karl. He had good periods when he could work and function well; but always the bad periods returned.
In 1988, during a good period, he phoned long distance the woman who had raised Richard. He had never liked her—a Slav of almost desperate frugality and niggling meanness—and argued her into telling him where he could find Richard. So from California, he returned. He had little money and spent most of it on the Greyhound ticket. But somewhere in Wyoming he'd had another breakdown. The police, not knowing for sure what they were up against, took him off the bus in handcuffs as the other passengers gawked excitedly.
In one more year—another stay in a state hospital where the inmates shit themselves and the guards were known to rape the women—Karl came to the city where Richard lived.
By now of course Richard could not afford to see his father. His social circles were too refined. His father was too unpredictable. They had two meetings, one of which ended in rage (Richard screaming like a child about how bad his mother's last years were) and one in tears (Richard holding his father tightly and telling him again and again how much he loved him).
Karl then had another breakdown. Without realizing exactly what was wrong with him, Gwen took him into the shelter. He befriended Smiley and began to write his son threatening letters. He blamed his son's employees for the death of Smiley and that was why he began carving up his friend and serving him as communion. He did not seem to understand that Richard no longer cared about his social circle—that he wanted to go away and take his father somewhere and start again. But then Jackie killed him and it no longer mattered.
"So what's going to happen to Karl?" Donna asked after I told her everything Karl had told me after I'd taken him back to the shelter.
"Another institution. Probably permanent this time."
"I'm sorry, Dwyer. I wish I'd been here with you."
I smiled at Donna and leaned over and kissed her. We were in my bed in my little apartment and between us now was the kitten. Donna was going to take her home, saying she was a better mom than I was. About that I couldn't argue.
I lay back and thought about Richard and Karl. The kitty got on my chest and started nuzzling my jaw.
"Boy, does she like you," Donna said.
I laughed. "Boy, do I like her."
Donna leaned in and started scratching the kitty. "She's as crazy about you as I am, Dwyer."
The night wind rattled the windows and I wasn't sure why, but a great sorrow came over me then and for a time I could say nothing at all—just look at Donna and the kitty and feel how lucky I was and how unlucky Richard and his father had been.
Then I put the kitty in the chair and turned out the light and started to tell Donna how much I'd missed her.