Ascending

by Wright, T. M.

  "Just let me through!" He pushed past Ryerson, onto the landing, stopped, and bellowed down the long, unlighted hallway, "I'm a police officer. Show yourself!"

  "Put the gun away, Dan," Ryerson pleaded. "You don't need it."

  Creed ignored him. He repeated, "I'm a police officer. Show yourself!"

  Mrs. Cobb brushed past Ryerson and Creed and started down the hallway. "Martin?" she called. "It's mommy. Don't be afraid."

  "Mrs. Cobb," Creed snapped, "for God's sake!"

  She bolted.

  Ryerson heard again, "Shit, oh, shit!" and realized that, as before, he hadn't heard the words—though they were real enough—so much as sensed them. The words were tiny whispers of desperation—I've been caught! they said.

  Mrs. Cobb disappeared into a room on the left side of the hallway. Creed went after her, his gun still drawn. Ryerson went after Creed. He had a sinking feeling in his gut, now. He followed Creed into the room Mrs. Cobb had gone into. The overhead light was on. Mrs. Cobb stood in the center of the room with her head cocked and her gaze on a dark-haired, square-faced, frightened-looking man huddled between a chest of drawers and a closet door. The man was in his early twenties, Ryerson guessed. He was dressed in faded jeans and a rumpled white shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to mid-forearm. There were what looked like grass stains at the elbows of the shirt. The man was barefooted.

  Mrs. Cobb said, "What are you doing here?"

  The man whimpered, "I didn't mean nothin'. She said I could stay here."

  Creed put his gun back in its shoulder holster. "Who said you could stay here?"

  "She did," the young man answered. "The house keeper did."

  "Her name is Flora Babbet," Mrs. Cobb explained.

  "Oh," Creed said.

  Ryerson took several steps backward, as if distancing himself from what was happening in the room. He said nothing. Humiliation was flooding through him like a sudden onslaught of nausea. This young man's high, pleading whimper was what he had heard in his hotel room—not Martin Cobb's plea for help, but this young man's pleading, diseased whimper.

  Creed ordered, "Get up out of there."

  The young man shook his head dismally.

  Mrs. Cobb said, "Do you know John?"

  Again the young man shook his head, but then he began to stand shakily, as if his legs were weak. Ryerson sensed illness in him, something chronic and debilitating. Tuberculosis, maybe. He said, his voice low, "This young man is sick."

  Creed crossed the room, took the young man by the elbow, and pulled him to his feet. The young man coughed low and deep in his chest.

  "Tuberculosis," Ryerson said.

  "Do you know John?" Mrs. Cobb asked again.

  The young man looked confused, alone, dismal. "I don't know no John," he managed. Then, to Creed and Ryerson, "That woman's nuts." He coughed again, deeply, gurglingly, spittle arching from his lips. Creed, who was still holding his arm, grimaced. "That woman's nuts," the young man repeated.

  "Do you know John?" Mrs. Cobb asked again. "And Martin?" she added, almost as an afterthought. Her words were high and strained, like a balloon whose air is being slowly released.

  The young man looked suddenly frightened. "No," he said. He shook his head, then began coughing again. This time it caught up with him. He managed several more "nos" while coughing, then lost his breath and crumpled, wheezing, to the floor. He pitched forward to all fours, still wheezing. Then his arms buckled and he lay facedown, quiet.

  Ryerson bent over him. "Hell," he whispered. He looked at Mrs. Cobb. "Is the phone hooked up?"

  "Why would the phone be hooked up?" she answered.

  Ryerson turned the young man over. His skin was a deep blue. "He's not getting any air."

  Inspector Creed said, "I know CPR."

  Ryerson shook his head. "I don't think it's necessary." He paused. The young man's color was returning. "We've got to get him to a hospital."

  Mrs. Cobb was astonished. "But what about Martin?"

  Ryerson sighed. "I'm sorry. I was wrong." He looked at Creed. "Give me a hand, would you?" Together, they lifted the young man and started out of the room with him.

  "No, you weren't wrong," Mrs. Cobb announced desperately behind them. "You were right. He's here. I know it!"

  Ryerson glanced back at her as he rounded the bedroom doorway into the corridor. She had a look of fear and pleading on her face. She looked as alone, as hurt, as dismal as the young man had. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Cobb," he said. "I'm really very sorry."

  TWO DAYS LATER

  He said, "But the article in the newspaper—"

  The old priest interrupted, "Was mostly hype, I'm afraid. It sells papers, but it's hype, it's crap. I do not do exorcisms, I do not perform them—itis not a media event that I am involved in. It is not something for show. I persuade."

  He was confused. "But isn't that the same thing, really?"

  The old priest shook his head. "I wish it were. I really wish that exorcism involved devils and demons and possession in the way that the movies depict it. But what it involves, I'm afraid, is something much more mundane. It involves disturbance, and illness. I exorcise the demons that people produce within themselves, my son. There are no other demons than those."

  He shook his head. "You're wrong."

  "Obsessive-compulsive," said the old priest. "You've heard the term, of course."

  He merely sighed.

  "Everyone's heard it," said the old priest. "This is the age of psychobabble." He smiled slyly. "Someone's doing something he shouldn't, someone's got some nasty habit he can't break, and his friends say, 'Oh, he's exhibiting obsessive-compulsive behavior.' And they say it as if they know what it means. They don't. They can't. Just as a dog can't know what it means to be a fish, people who"—he formed quotes with his fingers—" 'have it all together' can't know what it means to be totally incapable of controlling their actions. As if some outside force is maneuvering them. As if they've relegated control of themselves to someone or something else."

  "Precisely!" he said.

  "Bullshit!" declared the old priest.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson thought that it wasn't the first time he had fouled up. He shook his head. Fouled up was too kind, too friendly, too forgiving. He'd failed, and through his failure, through his pride, he had brought grief to another human being.

  Martin Cobb was dead and gone. Ryerson knew it. He felt it. He had known it and felt it ever since he'd come to Toronto. So, if there was a reason for what he--Ryerson—had done, that reason was hope. Mrs. Cobb needed hope, and he had given it to her.

  "That's a rationalization, Biergarten," he whispered. What he had given her was false hope, and in this world there was probably nothing worse. It made the inevitable onslaught of grief overwhelming. It made people crumble.

  Mrs. Cobb had crumbled finally, after the young man who had invaded her summer house had died. "Tuberculosis, yes," the attending physician confirmed. "And diabetes, which is what killed him. Insulin coma."

  She had collapsed, then. She had been taken away on a stretcher and now was recovering in the psychiatric wing of Queen's Hospital. "She'll be all right," the doctor had said. "It's the end of an ordeal for her. She saw this young man's death apparently as confirmation, in a way, that her own son will not be coming back to her. And while that may or may not be literally true, she perceives that it is true, and it's as if a great weight has been lifted from her."

  Ryerson knew well enough what the doctor had been saying, but as far as Mrs. Cobb was concerned, he thought, it may have been only half the story. Her grief had been too intense. He had felt it rising from her like waves of fever.

  But still she would recover. She would carry on with her life, and at times would find herself lost in the memory of her son, and would become mired in the memory of the psychic detective who had misled her.

  Ryerson sighed. This—his handling of the Cobb disappearance—was one of those blessedly rare events in life that he would look forwar
d to putting far, far behind him. Five years from now, he would say to himself, It was five years ago that I did that. Not long enough. And ten years later, he would say, It was fifteen years ago that I did that. The memory's beginning to fade.

  On the other side of the hotel room, Creosote growled low in his chest. Ryerson glanced at him. "Oh, for Pete's sake!" he whispered. Somehow, the dog had gotten one of Ryerson's argyle socks and was noisily reducing it to mush. Ryerson slammed shut the lid of the suitcase he'd been packing, vaulted across the room, and scooped Creosote into his arms. For several seconds they stared at each other—man condemningly at dog, dog confusedly at man. The shredded argyle sock was still in Creosote's mouth. Ryerson pointed his index finger stiffly into the air near Creosote's nose. "No!" he bellowed. "Bad dog!"

  Creosote gurgled. Like all Boston Bull terriers, he was asthmatic, so he gurgled and wheezed quite a lot. Usually, a gurgle or a wheeze from that flat, gummy, toothy face was unpleasant, at best. However, Ryerson was able to read something that might have been apology in this particular gurgle, or something that was as close to an apology as a Boston Bull terrier can get.

  So, Ryerson apologized. What was an argyle sock between friends, after all? Let Creosote have it. "Sorry, pal," he said and carried Creosote back to the corner of the room and set him down. Creosote immediately dropped the argyle sock and trotted into the bathroom. The tile floor near the toilet had become his favorite spot for a surreptitious pee. Ryerson ran after him. "No," he yelled, "bad dog. Bad dog!" But when he got there, the deed was already underway.

  ~ * ~

  On the fifty-sixth floor of the Commerce Court West Building, Inspector Creed was bent over the corpse of a man in his late fifties who was dressed in green work pants and shirt, white socks, and black shoes. The corpse had fallen through the false ceiling an hour earlier, narrowly missing a young file clerk. It was wrapped in heavy-gauge clear plastic; blue wire as thick as a coat hanger was tied, outside the plastic, around its chest and thighs. "We think it's the janitor," Creed had been told by Detective Max Tyler.

  Creed carefully pulled the plastic away from the corpse's face. He noted the large nose, the flat, open eyes, the thin white, slightly parted lips, the chipped gray teeth. He let his gaze follow the length of the body itself. "Big man," he said.

  Tyler, standing near the foot of the corpse, said, "Two-fifty, anyway. He was wired to the sprinkler system. The wires unwound and he fell. Jesus, whoever put him up there had to have been awfully damned strong." He paused. "Maybe two people did it."

  "Maybe," Creed said. He noted the football-size mass of coagulated blood at the corpse's belly. "If he'd been murdered up here, this hallway would be a godawful mess."

  "We're looking," Tyler said.

  "Yeah, well, don't look too long." He nodded at the ends of wire jutting raggedly toward the ceiling. "That wire would have held him up there forever if it had been tied right."

  "Maybe our killer wanted him to fall," Tyler shrugged. "Maybe he hoped someone would be underneath." He nodded at a slightly built woman in her early twenties; the woman had short dark hair and wore big, owlish glasses perched halfway down her small nose. She was standing at the end of the corridor, where it branched to the left and right, and she was shaking visibly. A police matron stood with her, arm comfortingly around her shoulders. Tyler continued, "Her name's Connie Beechum. She works in the building. She said when this guy fell she thought it was an earthquake and the building was coming apart and people were starting to fall through from above." He smiled. "It sure would have scared the bejesus out of me—I can tell you that." He nodded at the corpse. "Then she saw the plastic, and the wire"—he shrugged—"and here we are, trying to make sense of it."

  Creed asked, "Has someone gotten a statement from her?"

  Tyler nodded, "Yeah, Dan. I have."

  "Then why is she still here?"

  Tyler shrugged. "Beats the crap out of me, Dan. Do you want me to find out?"

  Creed gave him a flat, impatient smile. "Why don't you do that, Max."

  Tyler shrugged again. He shrugged quite a lot; it was a habit that Creed found annoying. "Whatever you say, Dan. Hell, maybe she just likes to look at dead bodies." He grinned, then went to talk to Connie Beechum.

  Creed looked up through the jagged hole in the false ceiling. The plumbing for the sprinkler system was bent from the weight of the body. At two points, the green pipe had been stripped of paint by the wire that had held up the body. Creed shook his head. God, but this was one for the books. If there turned out to be a parallel anywhere, he'd be very surprised.

  Tyler reappeared. Connie Beechum was with him, still shaking visibly. Tyler said, "Miss Beechum hassomething else she wants to tell us, Dan."

  Creed shook her hand. It was cold and moist. "I'm sorry for your ordeal here, Miss Beechum."

  She smiled quiveringly. "I thought it was an earthquake."

  "Yes," Creed said. "Thank God it wasn't." He took her arm and walked her a dozen feet down the corridor. Tyler fell in behind them.

  Creed asked, "There was something else, Miss Beechum?"

  She adjusted her glasses, which had slid down to the tip of her nose, and gave him another quivering smile. "Yes," she whispered, cleared her throat and said, in a voice that was high-pitched nearly to the point of squeakiness, "A man."

  "A man?" Creed coaxed.

  She nodded. Again her glasses slid down her nose. She adjusted them. "A man," she repeated.

  "Perhaps you could elaborate," Creed said.

  "Yes, I think so." She was clearly straining to remember. "It was several days ago. Three days ago, anyway. Friday, I think. Yes, it was Friday—I remember I had my paycheck with me." She smiled, happy that she was beginning to remember. "And I was going to lunch. No, wait. I'd had lunch. Yes. I remember. I was going… back to my office." She stopped, looked embarrassed, and went on, "No, that's not true. I was going to the ladies' room on forty-eight."

  "The forty-eighth floor?"

  "Yes. And I saw a man." She stopped.

  "You mean you saw a man in the ladies' room?"

  She shook her head quickly. "No, of course not. I would have reported that at once. No. He was walking past it."

  "And?"

  "And I didn't recognize him. I've worked in this building for three years, and I have a very good memory for faces."

  "Of course."

  "And I didn't remember his." She smiled broadly. "I thought I should tell you."

  "Could you describe him?"

  "Yes, I can describe him. He was very executive-looking."

  "Executive-looking?"

  "A management type. He had a paunch. He had exploded surface capillaries on his face from too much drinking. His hair didn't move."

  "His hair didn't move?"

  "That's right. He was walking very quickly. He was almost running. And his hair didn't move. He had short, thinning, management-length brown hair. It didn't say anything at all—it wasn't too short; it wasn't too long; it was simply there. Hair is not supposed to be important to management types, so they spend a lot of time making sure it's not noticeable. One way to do that is to be certain it's not going to move."

  "Yes." Creed smiled a little. "And how old would you say he was, Miss Beechum?"

  "How old? He was management age, naturally. That is to say, he appeared to be no particular age between thirty-eight and fifty-two or fifty-three. My guess would be that he was forty-five. But that is only a guess. It's accurate, I'd say, to within minus seven and plus eight years."

  "Which means," said Creed, realizing that he was getting precious little from her, "that he could have been between thirty-eight and fifty-three."

  "Yes. But he was probably forty-five." She glanced at the corpse. Technicians had arrived and were dusting the plastic for fingerprints. "He," she said, "is a blue-collar type." She pursed her lips. "At least he was."

  Creed said, "Could you tell us what the man you saw was wearing?"

  She nodded. "Gra
y."

  "You mean he was wearing a gray suit?"

  "Yes. And black shoes. Wing tips. They were scuffed, especially at the toe, so he wasn't a high-management-level executive."

  "Oh?"

  She smiled, pleased to get a chance to explain. "He stretches his legs out under his desk, and the toes of his shoes hit the front of the desk. So he has a smallish desk. High-management-level executives have very large desks, which they are hardly ever behind, anyway."

  Creed grinned. A budding Sherlock Holmes, he thought. "Of course," he said.

  "It's very logical, inspector."

  One of the technicians came over. "We're going to take the plastic off the body now."

  "Thanks," Creed said. "I'll be right there."

  Connie Beechum said, "I'd like to watch, if it's all right."

  SEVEN

  THE FOLLOWING DAY

  Creed handed Ryerson a check. "I'm afraid we had to deduct for the trip to Lakeville, Rye. Sorry."

  "No problem," Ryerson put the check into his coat pocket without looking at it. He cocked his head.

  After a few moments of silence, Creed said, "Is something wrong?"

  Ryerson cocked his head the other way.

  "You're getting spooky," Creed said.

  "Polypropylene," Ryerson whispered.

  "Sorry?"

  "Cocoon," Ryerson said.

  "Yes, I've seen it."

  Creed looked at him a few moments. Ryerson stayed quiet. Creed barked, "For Christ's sake, what in the hell are you staring at?"

  Ryerson cocked his head the other way.

  Creed fumed, "Will you say something, dammit?!"

  "Plastic," Ryerson whispered.

  Creed hesitated only a moment, then, "Oh, get the hell out of here!"

  "He was wrapped in plastic," Ryerson said aloud, as if to himself.

  "Yeah," said Creed, "and he had a birthday candle stuck in his belly. I don't know what you're babbling about."

  "I can dance," Ryerson whispered, his voice suddenly very low and harsh.

  Creed jumped up, came quickly around the desk, took Ryerson by the arm and lifted him from his chair. "Get the hell out of my office!" He shoved him toward the door. Ryerson stumbled, put his hand on the doorjamb, lowered his head. "I can dance," he repeated. "I have power."