by Lutz, John
“So’s the real world, Ox,” Tobin said, getting in behind the steering wheel and slamming his car door. He started the engine, nodded to Oxman from behind the rolled-up window, and pulled away from the curb.
Oxman had to agree. Still, there was a difference. An important difference.
But as he lowered himself into his car to return to Jennifer, he wondered how many soap-opera fans couldn’t make the distinction.
Ernie Dickerson—12:15 A.M.
Ernie’s back hurt. The hard concrete of the alley where he lay didn’t make much of a bed for a man pushing fifty. He rolled onto his side. He remembered how comfortable he’d been when he’d first staggered into the alley, full of cheap red and looking for a pad, and let himself sink against the brick wall of one of the buildings. But now he was awake.
He realized he was still more than a little drunk, and he thanked God for that. Cold sober, he would have been in even more misery.
For the last half-dozen years, after the youngest boy had died, and the wife had left him, Ernie had lived from bottle to bottle. He’d been a boxer in his youth, and the repeated left jabs to the head he’d suffered had caught up with him along with the alcohol. He knew he didn’t sound sensible at times, but he thought sensibly, when he was sober. It was frustrating to hear his own thickened voice and rambling logic; he sometimes wanted to reach out physically and snatch the words back and reformulate them. Lots of times people assumed Ernie was drunk when he hadn’t even begun his day’s drinking.
In the corner of his vision he noticed a tall, dark form striding down the alley toward him. Ernie absently wondered what it was; vaguely, he suspected he should be alarmed but didn’t know why.
The thing was a man, wearing a long black cape that swirled gracefully around his legs as he walked. He had wild white hair. Halloween, Ernie thought. Friggin’ Halloweeen. No, it was too warm for that; Halloween was later in the year.
The dark form stopped and stood over him. Ernie clutched the hem of the cape and stared up with bleary eyes.
The black shape—he couldn’t see the man’s face—said nothing.
“Lishen,” Ernie said. “If you could spare some change, I’d be ‘ternally grateful.”
“What would you know about eternity?” the dark figure asked. There was an edge of contempt and rueful humor in the question.
“Level with you,” Ernie slurred. Then he tried to control his enunciation and spoke slowly and with deliberation. That only made things worse. “Bein’ an honesht man. I need to buy whishky, and that ish what I will do with the money. On my honor.”
“Pathetic scum, who are you even to touch my garment?” The caped form’s voice was soft yet majestic, controlled yet vicious. Angry, yet having fun. That made the thrill of horror all the wilder as it raced up Ernie’s spine. “Honor! It has nothing to do with you! If your blood weren’t thin as cheap wine I’d rip you from asshole to Adam’s apple and romp through your insides while they steamed cooling on the ground.”
Ernie gathered some part of his senses then and pulled himself almost to a sitting position, focusing his eyes with effort to stare up into the face looming above him, into the lewdly grinning mouth, the white thrust of fangs distorting the lower lip. Not Halloween … Then what the hell? Was this real?
“Oh, Jesus!” he moaned. He began to tremble and sank back onto the concrete, hugging it as if he wished he could burrow into it. “Oh, sweet Christ!”
“Hardly,” the dark figure above him remarked sardonically.
A long leg swung back, arced like a scythe, and a foot caught Ernie square in the throat. Pain cut through his alcoholic haze, grew heavy and searing in his neck. He rolled into a ball, gagging, his eyes wide and gleaming with fright, unable to unlock their gaze from that of the tall thing above him. He tried to say something but he merely retched. The warmth and stench of the vomit, spreading around his cheek that was pressed to the ground, rose from the pavement.
The figure bent over him, leaning close. “Damn you that I might end up like you!” it said. “Nothing. A wisp of nothing!”
Faint light caught the curved fangs, and the thing stood up. It seemed so tall!
Ernie, desperately sucking in air now, winced when the cape lightly brushed his face as the creature whirled and strode from the alley. Or maybe not from the alley. It seemed to get near the mouth of the alley and then suddenly become absorbed in the shadows, as if it had become a shadow itself. Something blacker than the night that moved through the night.
Ten minutes after the thing had left, Ernie, stone sober, staggered into The Bus Stop, a decrepit bar on Broadway, not far from the alley. The place was stifling and smelled of perspiration and stale beer. A dusty plastic fern that for some reason always reminded Ernie of a gigantic spider blocked any view out the front window. There was no music in here; it wasn’t the sort of place where people drank to have a good time.
The half-dozen men at the bar, dressed shabbily themselves, paid no attention to Ernie. The bartender, a huge, paunchy man named Ben, only glanced at him.
“Didn’t expect to see you till tomorrow sometime, Ernie,” Ben said.
“Listen, Ben! Christ, you gotta believe what I just seen! A fuckin’ werewolf! Big thing with fangs, wearing a black cloak, all dressed in black. It kicked me, cussed me out. It, it …” Ernie began stuttering and clamped his jaws to stop.
“Vampire,” said a flat voice from down the bar.
“Huh?”
“Vampires is what dresses in black and wears a cloak. ’Course, werewolfs has got them long teeth too.”
“Vampire, werewolf, whatever,” Ben said. “Guys that drink like you have seen worse, Ernie. Hell, half my customers have seen vampires and werewolves—sometimes in the same night.” He laughed at his own wisecrack, and most of the men at the bar managed a grin as they bent over their drinks. It didn’t do to have Ben pissed at you.
“What you need, Ernie,” one of the men said, “is a drink.”
“Got the money for a drink?” Ben asked him.
“No,” Ernie admitted. “I was putting the touch on this … thing, before I realized what it was.”
“What it was,” Ben said, “was the d.t.’s, Ernie boy. You wanna occupy a stool for a while, okay, but no booze.”
“Jesus, on the tab, eh, Ben? Please!”
“Aw, you got no tab and you know it. Last time you paid a tab was when Kennedy was president.”
Ernie slipped up onto a stool and sat trembling violently. He felt as if he might actually shake himself onto the floor.
“You’re a fuckin’ mess,” Ben said. “Upchucked all over yourself.” He laughed again. He had a wide mouth but it was very thin, and he didn’t open it much beyond a slit even when he threw back his head to laugh heartily. When he stopped laughing, he screwed up his eyes and looked closely at the quaking figure on the other side of the scarred and glass-ring-marked bar.
“Please, Ben! …”
Ben drew a beer and placed it in front of Ernie. “Not on the tab,” he said, “on the house. Truth is, you look like you need it more’n anybody I ever seen in here.”
Ernie tried to say thanks, but the glass was already at his eager lips, the foam airy and cold in his nostrils. Ben was right, he needed this bad. He thought again of the black-cloaked thing towering over him in the alley. It hadn’t been his imagination, hadn’t been the d.t.’s; he was sure of that. He was sure! Everyone down the bar was watching him somberly and a little enviously now, guy with the free beer.
He drank.
Somebody said, “Maybe you oughta call the cops, Ernie.”
Ernie decided maybe he should.
Tomorrow.
Jennifer Crane—7:00 A.M.
Music was sifting up through the building, a rhythmic throbbing conveyed by brick, concrete, and steel. One of the tenants had his stereo on too loud, even though it was early morning. It wasn’t the first time; tenants in most New York apartment buildings couldn’t choose their neighbors and usua
lly had to put up with at least one decibel-numbed maniac. Part of the modern urban scene.
But this morning Jennifer found the music relaxing. She could barely make out the tune: Talking Heads singing “We’re on the Road to Nowhere.” Where she’d been before she’d met Oxman. The music wasn’t loud in the apartment; the thoughtless stereo jockey was probably on the floor below, and across the hall.
“Want me to phone down to the super and have that noise turned off?” Ox asked behind her.
“No, I kind of like it,” she said, not looking back as she removed two slices of whole-grain toast from the pop-up toaster.
“You didn’t have to get out of bed just because I did,” Ox said. She heard his weight settle on one of the creaking wicker stools at the breakfast bar.
“Had to get up anyway. I’m working against a deadline on those ad-agency sketches.” The apartment doubled as a studio; Jennifer worked at home as a free-lance artist. Most of her work—at least the work that paid well—was for advertising agencies. She was telling the truth about the deadline; the macho diet-beer layout (“It don’t take calories to be a man”) had to be in by tomorrow afternoon. “You went out last night,” she added.
“Didn’t think you heard me leave.”
“I heard you go out and come in,” Jennifer said. She spread strawberry preserves on the two pieces of toast, then poured two cups of coffee. “Work?”
“Work,” Ox said.
Jennifer wouldn’t push for information, wouldn’t complain about his unexpected absence. His former wife, Beth, had never been able to get used to Oxman spending so much time away from home. Absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder. Or Ox’s.
Jennifer carried the toast and coffee to the breakfast bar, pulled up a stool, and sat down next to Oxman. Neither of them were much for a large breakfast; toast and coffee was all they usually had in the morning. She washed down a multiple-vitamin pill with a sip of hot coffee, grimacing.
“Think you really need those pills?” Ox asked.
“They can’t hurt me,” she said, thinking of all the Quaaludes she’d taken until she managed to get off the dark carnival ride, “and maybe they’re keeping me from catching cold.” Or maybe I need the security of swallowing some kind—any kind—of pill in the morning.
Oxman grunted and swirled his coffee in his cup. She knew he didn’t believe in taking any sort of medicine unless there was no other way, but also that he’d never try to force that point of view on her. His wife had been some kind of hypochondriac, Jennifer knew, though she and Ox never talked much about it.
She liked sitting close to Ox, catching the subtle scent of his shaving lotion, sensing the reassuring, protective bulk of the man. Jennifer remembered her own marriage, the pain, both emotional and from her frequent battering at the hands of her husband. She remembered the years here in Manhattan after the divorce, the singles bars, the desperation, the sex with virtual strangers. The road to nowhere. E. L. Oxman had been her lifesaving detour. At the time, even her work had lost its importance to her. He was the one thing substantial in her life. That was the word for Ox: substantial. What Jennifer needed.
She said, “I love you, E. L. Oxman,” for no reason other than that she felt like saying it. And she did love him.
He was preoccupied. “Ever watch soap operas?” he asked.
She grinned, a beautiful girl with green eyes and auburn hair that fell with light grace to beneath her shoulders. “That wasn’t the response I was fishing for.”
Ox smiled. “Sorry. I was thinking about the call I went out on last night.”
She was glad he wanted to talk about the case. She knew that his wife had wanted to know nothing about his work, and that she’d resented his being unexpectedly called to duty at odd hours.
“I’ve watched the soaps from time to time. Not very often, though. I rarely turn on the TV during the afternoons.”
“Ever watched ‘Shadowtown’?”
Jennifer added cream to her coffee, stirred. “A few times. It’s pretty much like all the rest of them. Sex, intrigue, sex, tragedy, sex.”
“This case involves ‘Shadowtown,’” Oxman said.
Jennifer listened as he told her about the McGreery murder.
“You actually met Lana Spence?” Jennifer asked. He’d talked about murders before; she’d picked up some of his professional detachment and kept sympathy for the dead watchman at a distance. There was so much murder in this city. It was like a backdrop to life.
Ox shook his head no and shrugged. “I don’t even know who she is.”
“She’s Delia Lane, the program’s bitch.”
“Haven’t met her, but I heard about her,” Ox said. “That’s the second time I’ve heard her referred to as a bitch. Delia Lane, that is, not Lana Spence.”
“It’s not necessarily derogatory in this context,” Jennifer told him. “Every soap opera has its stock characters: the ingénue, the eligible bachelor, the matriarch, the patriarch, the middle-aged lech, the good girl, the bitch, and so on. It’s the bitch who makes the whole thing go.”
“What do you know about the show?” Ox asked.
Jennifer thought back to the time she’d had the flu and hadn’t picked up pens and air brushes for several weeks. She’d gone almost crazy with boredom and cabin fever and had turned to the soaps to take her outside her world of prescription pills and Kleenex. “Let’s see, that’s the show that had the vampire. He was the ultimate dangerous seducer. The sort of bloodsucker women found irresistible. A good-looking guy, my kind of vampire, portrayed him.”
“The vampire’s no longer On the show,” Ox said. “They had to write him out when the actor who played him was killed in an accident.”
For a moment Jennifer thought inanely, you can’t kill a vampire. Then she said, “I didn’t know about that. I thought he was still breaking hearts and blood banks.”
“You know anybody who follows the soaps religiously?” He took a bite of toast and chewed while Jennifer thought.
She had several acquaintances who watched the soaps, though not religiously. At least, they claimed moderation.
Then she remembered Myra Deeber. She’d met Myra at a singles bar over on Forty-ninth about three years ago. The place hadn’t been exactly crawling with men; or rather, it was full of the sort that slithered. So Myra and Jennifer had struck up a conversation and found that they liked each other’s company. Myra was about ten years older than Jennifer, in her early forties, and had been single in the New York scene for years. She told Jennifer about that life, what to expect in the long run. She’d been candid, had used herself as an example of where the wrong moves could lead.
They’d visited each other’s apartments several times, browsed through baroque antique shops on Second Avenue, gossiped on the phone; now, though, Jennifer hadn’t seen or talked to Myra in at least six months.
Myra was always ensconced in front of the TV during the afternoons Jennifer had been there, always watching the soaps. She’d admitted her addiction to them once, calling them her complicated world that she could turn off with the press of a button. She said she wished she could switch off her own world like that sometimes, at least temporarily. It was oddly comforting, she’d said, to look in on people with more problems than she had. Wasn’t that why people watched the news?
“Well?” Ox had finished his toast and was brushing crumbs from his fingertips, watching her.
“Myra Deeber,” Jennifer said. She told Ox about Myra, then gave him her address in the Seventies, and her phone number.
“She home during the day?” Ox asked.
“Sure. She has to be to watch the soaps. She works evenings at the Hunan Experience over on East Fifty-seventh.”
“I’m assuming the Hunan Experience is a restaurant and not a massage parlor,” Ox said with a grin.
Jennifer sipped her coffee and gave him a level look. “Myra’s a waitress,” she said. She still felt a twinge of anger at anything that might pass as a judgmental remark a
bout how she’d lived before she’d met Oxman. She knew now what had been happening to her, what she’d been becoming. She hadn’t gone all the way down that Road to Nowhere, but far enough to have known its pitfalls and loneliness.
She was being oversensitive, she knew. Ox was a man who seldom passed judgment, a man with a passion for undeniable fact. And for simple justice.
“You mind phoning her later this morning and setting up an interview for me?” he asked. “I think that’d be better than the official approach. You know, me looming outside the door.”
“I’ll call her,” Jennifer said.
Ox took a final sip of coffee, slid off his stool, and kissed her cheek. “I love you back,” he said.
She watched him strap on his shoulder holster, then shrug into his brown sport jacket. He was developing a slight stomach paunch. For an instant she felt him getting older, and experienced the chill of the future. She was getting older, too.
When he’d gone out of the apartment, she waited a minute for him to descend in the elevator, then she walked to the window overlooking West Ninety-eighth Street.
She could see the building’s super, Richard Corales, hosing down the sidewalk in front. The trash had been picked up last night, and someone’s plastic bag had broken and there was the usual mess. She watched as Ox emerged from the building three stories below, saw him nod and exchange a few words with Corales, then saw Corales point to the wet sidewalk and wave his arms, complaining as he often did about cheap plastic trash bags. Ox listened patiently, then said something to Corales, patted his shoulder, and walked around to where he’d parked the car.
When he’d passed from sight, Jennifer continued staring out the window for a while. Then she let the curtain fall and carried her coffee into the large bedroom that was set up as her studio. She looked at the framed samples of her work hanging on the walls. She was good; she knew it and the people she worked for knew it. And she was doing okay at last, making a decent enough wage to survive comfortably in Manhattan, even alone if necessary.