The Sleeping and the Dead

by Jeff Crook

  “You always were a paranoid bitch.” He tried to laugh and move past me, but I shoved him into the corner. He was easy to push around, even though he was a good eighteen inches taller than me.

  “I’m not paranoid,” I said. “I just want to know if you’re following me. Did you send one of your sisters over to my apartment last night?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jacqueline!”

  “Excuse me,” said an old lady who had come up behind me. She was about five feet tall and looked like the woman who used to babysit me and my brother. She was the official Cracker Barrel house detective, there to keep an eye on the kitsch so the rednecks wouldn’t walk off with a refrigerator pig. “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem.” I stepped back from Reed. “Except this jackass is following me.”

  “I’m not following her. She’s my wife.” Reed smiled, turning on the salesman charm. The old woman almost flushed. She had probably seen his commercials on television.

  “We’re separated, asshole!” I shouted at him.

  “Ma’am, this is a family restaurant. If you don’t lower your voice, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the old biddy warned in a pleasant voice.

  “I’m just waiting for the pumpkin pie I ordered,” Reed told her.

  “I was leaving anyway. If he follows me, call the cops,” I said to the old woman. She looked soft and grandmotherly, but she had the eyes of somebody who’d seen it all. She wasn’t about to take any shit off me.

  James exited the bathroom and spotted us in the corner. He sidled up beside me and took my hand. “Are you OK?” he asked in a low voice.

  “This is my estranged husband, Reed Lyons.”

  “I know who he is.” He didn’t sound especially friendly, either.

  Reed turned up his thin, supercilious nose. “Is this your date?” he asked me.

  “Him? Not exactly. He’s my john. He bought me dinner. I’m going to blow him for dessert.”

  Reed rolled his eyes, and the old lady shouted “Ma’am!” in a schoolteacher voice that brought everybody up short. She grabbed my elbow with her marshmallow fingers.

  “I’m leaving.” I tried not to look at James. I didn’t want to see the mortification on his face. “If I catch you following me again, Reed, I’ll have you busted. I still have friends in the department.”

  “One friend, from what I hear, Jacqueline. Just one.”

  “One is enough to pop your buttons. Come, James.” I pulled my arm out of Grandma’s death grip and headed for the door.

  17

  WE WALKED TO JAMES’S CAR, dodging the traffic still circling the parking lot, and climbed in without either of us saying a word. He backed out of the parking space, though they barely gave him room to back up, and we drove away to the sound of angry honking as some interloper dove into our empty spot.

  We were on the interstate before I was cool enough to speak. I tried to apologize.“’S OK.” He shrugged.

  “No really. I’m sorry, Reed just…” Slow down. Slow down. Not too much. This guy was still damaged merchandise. He didn’t need me adding to his troubles. “He gets to me,” I finally said.

  “I could see that.” He drove awhile. There wasn’t much traffic, but it was slow going because of the rain. “You want to talk about what happened?”

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “I just thought…”

  “I left him about four years ago. Maybe five. I don’t remember. He won’t let me go.”

  “What happened? Did you catch him cheating?”

  “He caught me cheating.”

  “You left him because he caught you cheating?”

  “No, I left him because he wouldn’t let it go. He didn’t want a divorce, but he wouldn’t let me forget what I did, either. Every time I’d complain that he forgot to set out the hamburger for dinner, or he hadn’t paid the lawn service, or whatever, he’d say, Well, at least I wasn’t fucking your best friend behind your back.”

  “I can see how that would get old,” James said.

  “No shit.” We pulled into the parking lot behind my apartment. He turned off the engine and twisted in his seat to face me. I couldn’t look at him. Sometimes this black rage would well up, from where I don’t know. It was tooth-bared, nostrils-flared, lurking along the jungle trail down to the water hole. I wanted to get back at Reed. I wanted to see him wither.

  I tried to put on a nice face and make a joke. “I’ve had a wonderful evening,” I said. “But this wasn’t it.”

  “Groucho Marx?” he asked. I shrugged. It wasn’t very funny and he was being way too nice about it.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  Christ. “So I could have been your babysitter.”

  “I’d have liked that.”

  “You wouldn’t have liked me then. I was fat. You want to come upstairs?”

  “For dessert?”

  “You’re hilarious.” I put my hand on the door handle, but he didn’t move. He just sat there, looking at me. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”

  “You didn’t. Honestly, I thought it was pretty funny.”

  “What was funny?”

  “You’re like some kind of little fice or something.”

  “What’s a fice?”

  “It’s a type of a little dog that isn’t afraid of anything.”

  “So I’m a bitch,” I said.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “I know I’m a bitch. I’m a Cunt with a capital C. If you were me, you’d be one, too.” I tried to open the door but it was locked. I couldn’t find the button to unlock it. I pressed one and the window went down.

  “That’s not what I said,” he repeated. He unlocked the doors from his side. “I thought I was going to have to pull you off his face.”

  “Or maybe you thought it was cute. Do you think it’s cute when I’m confronting my stalker?” What was I trying to do, run this guy off? That’s what the police department counselor would have said. I opened the door and got out. It was pouring now, the hardest I’d seen it rain in a long time. I was soaked through in about three seconds. He sat in the car and looked at me through the windshield, his face distorted by the rain sheeting down the glass, like a portrait by Salvador Dalí, melted by time.

  “Are you coming up or what?” I shouted.

  He followed me inside. We stood soaked and dripping in the entryway under the yellow bug light, looking like drowned tourists. The entry was no bigger than a closet. I stood on the bottom step and my eyes were even with his. He shook the water out of his hair. I wanted to grab him and kiss him, rip off his wet clothes, but it smelled like an alley in there, so I started up.

  At the top of the stairs I heard music playing. It wasn’t the usual Tejano music from the mercado. It took me a minute to recognize it. I stopped at my door, because the sound was coming from my apartment—a grinding heavy-metal beat, and someone crying “No! No!” in a high-pitched voice. James’s face was utterly inscrutable. I wondered if I was the only one hearing it.

  But as I opened the door, Rob Halford loosed a primordial glass-shattering castrato scream in our faces. After an echoing pause, my stereo launched into the first metal-up-your-ass riff of the next track.

  I hurried inside and grabbed the remote off the kitchen table. On the third push of the power button, the music shut off midscream. “What was that?” James asked as he closed the door.

  “Old CD.” I tossed the remote on the table.

  “Do you always go off and leave your music playing?”

  I hadn’t turned on my stereo in nearly two years. I didn’t even know it was plugged in. It was a nice Pioneer system, not too big, with a five-disk changer, purchased during one of my flush periods when I was trying to get my shit together. For some reason, I had never pawned it.

  “It must have turned itself on,” James said. “My garage door does that sometimes. I’ll come home and it’s
standing wide open.”

  As he looked around my little apartment, I began to see it with his eyes, how shabby it must look to somebody who drives a Lexus, even if it is five years old. The ratty old couch and the kitchen table with its chipped Formica and rusting legs, and the way the bathroom door wouldn’t close all the way. I suddenly remembered I had left my clothes in the shower that morning and hoped he wouldn’t ask to use the bathroom before I had a chance to bag them.

  But what did I care? This is my life. It sucks, but it’s all I have. If he doesn’t like it, too bad. Like he never crawled into the shower to wash the vomit from his hair. Well, maybe not, but we all have our moments.

  “Is it always this cold in here?” he asked.

  “Only when it’s this cold outside. You want to get out of those wet clothes?”

  “Do you have something I can wear?”

  “Not really.” I went in the bathroom and stripped and threw my wet clothes in the shower with the others. I toweled off as best I could with a cold damp towel I found on the floor. When I came out, he didn’t look surprised by my nakedness.

  I went in the bedroom to get the Leica. When I came out again, he was still standing there in his wet polo and dockers shivering. “Here.” I gave him the camera he’d sold me, or almost sold me.

  “I thought you said you had the money.” There was a crack of panic in his voice.

  I walked over to the couch and bent over with my elbows resting on the back, then looked at him over my shoulder. “Take a picture of me.”

  “I’m not a photographer.” He set the Leica on the kitchen table, gently, almost reverently.

  “You don’t have to be a photographer. Just push the button on top.” I moved up close to him and started unbuckling his pants. “I want you to take my picture so I can send it to that husband of mine.”

  “Stop,” James breathed.

  “I want you take my picture while I blow you.” I unzipped him and reached my hand inside his pants. He grabbed my wrist and I grabbed his dick. It was limp and cold as a dead fish.

  “Please don’t.”

  “You want to screw instead?”

  “I can’t do this.” He extracted my hand and stepped back, zipped and buckled, a look of profound betrayal on his face.

  “I thought you wanted to. I thought you wanted dessert.”

  “I just can’t. Not like this.”

  “How then?” It really was cold in the apartment. The heat was busted again, but I didn’t care. I could heat things up eventually. “What do you like to do?”

  “Not this. It’s not right.” He was scared now, backing toward the door.

  “How can I make it right?” I felt like a used-car salesman.

  “I don’t know.” He was just a kid after all. He was scared. Of me. I wasn’t the woman he thought I was. Well screw that, that’s what he gets for thinking. Maybe he was old-fashioned or something. But I never met a man who wouldn’t take a hummer if offered freely, no strings attached. Even old-fashioned men, even preachers. Especially preachers. And there was no way he was gay.

  “Maybe you’d better just give me the other part of the money and I’ll go,” he said.

  I walked over to the table and grabbed a cigarette. I lit it while he watched, turned and rested my ass on the edge of the table so he could get a good look at what he was missing. I didn’t have his money. I had spent it all on my bender, or lost it, or been robbed. Maybe all three. I couldn’t remember. All I had was twenty-seven cents.

  “I don’t have your money,” I said.

  “You said you did.”

  I took a drag, held it, then let the smoke out through my nose. “Something came up.” Now he really knows what kind of bitch I am. He was easy to read. I didn’t need a sixth sense.

  He walked to the door, then stopped. “Can you get it?”

  “Eventually.” I took another long, crackling drag. He looked like I’d told him he had cancer. I felt bad for the guy. This wasn’t his fault. I was a scary bitch, no doubt about it, scary, unreliable, irresponsible, an all-too-willing accomplice to the worst angels of my nature. “Give me a few days,” I said, relenting.

  “I don’t have a few days.” He left and closed the door. I listened to his footsteps going down the stairs. I went to the bedroom window and after a couple of minutes watched his car turn onto Summer Avenue.

  “To hell with this,” I said to no one.

  Black Friday

  18

  I WOKE UP WHEN MY cell phone started ringing under the cushions of the couch. My blood felt like day-old gravy pushing through my veins. I was naked and the apartment was frigid as a morgue. I knew who was calling without looking, but I dug it out anyway and answered it. I deserved that much penance.

  “Don’t you answer your phone anymore?” Adam asked.

  “I answered it this time, didn’t I?”

  “I’ve been calling for two days. Stopped by last night about seven.”

  “I had a date.”

  “With who?”

  “Whom with,” I corrected his grammar. This conversation sounded sickeningly familiar. “I had dinner with the guy who sold me the Leica.” Or almost sold me the Leica. His camera was still on the table. He hadn’t taken it with him.

  “Well grab your shit and get over here. We got another body. Playhouse Killer for sure this time.”

  * * *

  I stood beside Adam, looking at the pair of naked feet sticking out of a rolled-up tapestry lying on a stage. We were at the public amphitheater known as the Overton Park Shell, located behind the Brooks Museum of Art, near the golf course and the zoo. A sword was pinned through the tapestry like a cocktail skewer through a roll of ham; all that was missing was a giant olive. The body lay at the back of the stage beneath an enormous faded rainbow painted across the inside of the acoustic concrete shell.

  It was the brightest, sunniest, coldest November morning in living memory. The air made my lungs hurt. The sky was so blue, the inside of my skull ached. The tapestry and the sword hilt were white with frost. The victim had been lying there awhile. I lit a cigarette and started snapping photos.

  “Hamlet stabbed Polonius through the arras,” Adam said. I paused long enough to watch a couple of officers exchange some money. There wasn’t much to see other than the rolled-up body. No footprints across the concrete stage, no pool of frozen blood, not even a cigarette butt or cigar ash or dull penknife. Nothing but the barren semicircle of painted concrete, the frosty barefoot pig in a blanket, and the arched and peeling rainbow above him. At least it wasn’t the side of a road. At least he wasn’t dragged behind a pickup to mask the cause of death and left in a ditch somewhere for the possums and dogs to tear to pieces. The killer cared enough to make a spectacle.

  I slung the Leica behind my back and knelt beside the body to get some close-ups with my Canon. The sword hilt looked like some kind of cavalry saber, with an ivory grip and worn silver guard and quillons. The roll of tapestry wasn’t much larger than if there’d been no one in it at all.

  Dr. Wiley arrived with his cohort of grim technicians, all lugging tackle boxes. He looked like we had interrupted his Christmas shopping. News vans were parked along the street running beside the art museum. The air was so cold and thin, you could hear the zoo’s siamang gibbons tuning up with their distinctive mo-mo-mo calls, while lions and tigers roared over their morning beef. “The jungle is restless,” Adam observed.

  “Ungawa, simba.” The zoo noises made for an atmosphere infinitely more surreal than any of the killer’s previous stagings.

  Without Chief Billet running interference for me, Dr. Wiley’s arrival made it impossible to continue my work. Billet was in Chicago visiting relatives for the weekend, so Wiley quickly ran me off. I moved to the edge of the stage and lit another cigarette to try and kill the hot tickle at the back of my throat.

  The Overton Park Shell had been closed three years for renovations. They were ripping out the old bench seating and replacing it with l
andscaped lawn on which midtown’s finest would one day nibble pre-cubed cheese and sip boxed Chardonnay from plastic glasses, pretending they were actually in Central Park. Right now it looked like a bomb crater. I scanned it through the Leica’s viewfinder and snapped off a few pictures of the rubble and the line of trees at the top of the hill.

  Dr. Wiley withdrew the sword from the body and bagged it. He needed a big bag, like a bread sleeve. While we watched him do his thing from a safe distance, Adam asked, “Did you go out Wednesday night, too?”

  “Yeah. For a while.”

  “To the Square?”

  “You know I don’t have money for that.” I didn’t look at him, but I could feel his eyes trying to peel me apart. “Why do you ask?”

  “A woman fitting your description assaulted another woman in the parking lot behind Playhouse on the Square.”

  Oh yeah. How could I have forgotten. I tried to appear professionally curious and asked, “Robbery?”

  “Nothing taken.”

  “How’s the vic?”

  “Couple of broke ribs and a concussion. Nothing serious.”

  “That’s good.”

  He stepped in front of me and looked down at my face with his brown eyes. He looked so disappointed, but honestly I don’t know what he expected. I always let him down. It wasn’t his job to save me. I didn’t hire him for that.

  “Something’s not right,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “The killer has never done two murders this close together.”

  “Hamlet thought it was his uncle Claudius eavesdropping.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Maybe. Or punishment.”

  “For what?”

  Wiley and his goons slowly unrolled the body, stopping at every turn to shoot photographs and lint-roll the tapestry for evidence.

  “Maybe this one really is a copycat,” I suggested. “Any idiot can do Hamlet. Even Mel Gibson.” Adam laughed, his mouth a straight line under his nose. He looked worse than I did, but he came by his death mask honest. He was one hell of a cop. He’d been busting his balls on this case for five straight days. All he needed now was a copycat killer chumming the waters. I could tell he was dreading the news cameras this morning.