by Jeff Crook
His façade cracked with yellow teeth. “Not!” he shrieked hysterically as he tied a nylon stocking around his left bicep. He pulled it tight with his teeth. “God, you are so easy. I made that up. Michi was a pervert but he was a decent one. He had no interest in little boys and he didn’t trade them. That bit about kidnapping and the White House was something I read on the internet. Michi’s only interest was himself. But isn’t that enough to make him a monster? Did he have to bugger children and sell them into slavery before you people would try to stop him?”
“I did try to stop him.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “You did try. I owe you a debt of gratitude.” He held up the syringe and squeezed a drop from its point, then stuck it in his arm and pushed about 5cc’s into his vein. He undid the knot in the hose. I watched the muscles of his face relax, the smiling mask fall slack.
“That’ll take the edge off,” he sighed. He scooted his naked butt across the floor until he was behind me. I felt him push the stocking between my arm and back. Then he pulled my spit-soaked panties down over my face. I couldn’t see until he tugged the leg hole around and uncovered my right eye. He said, “False face must hide what false face doth know. So this is comedy. But for you, it’s tragedy. This will have to do for a tragic mask. Faceless, you can be whoever I want you to be. Tonight, you are Lady Macbeth.”
“The cops are looking for you. We were at your apartment today,” I said through my mask.
“Yes, I know. I saw you there.”
“Someone probably heard that gun shot downstairs.”
“In this storm?” The thunder was so loud, we were almost shouting.
“Killing me won’t change anything.”
“No, it won’t change anything. But how am I going to set up the scene properly without Lady Macbeth? I have Banquo there on the floor. There lies Duncan on the bed—he was a goodly king. I myself will play the role of Macbeth.” He twisted my arm around to get at a good vein. “Historically, Macbeth is the last play a theater will show before it goes bankrupt or burns down. The play is cursed. So let the police come. If it must be done, let it be done swiftly. Macbeth will be my last performance.”
I barely felt the needle go into my arm. There had been so many there before it, what was one more? So what if Endo killed me? How many times had I tried to kill myself? How many more times had I been too scared to do it but hoped the junk would get me. Yet now, at the end of all things, I clung to my pathetic life, casting about for a bit of flotsam, all my rescuers floating facedown around me. But there I was, bobbing up again, trying one more time for a gulp of air.
“This isn’t your style, Wayne. Lady Macbeth dies offstage by her own hand. She wasn’t murdered. All the others were perfectly staged. They were works of art. You don’t want to do me this way.”
“Oh, but I do.”
“Please don’t. Please please don’t.”
“It’s the only way.”
He loosed the nylon and released his load into my arm, then broke the needle off and left it in my vein. He pulled me to my feet and shook me, then showed me the butcher knife. I don’t know where he’d been hiding it. He stood me up in front of him as the drug found my brain and curled around it like a purring cat. He seemed to recede while his arms grew impossibly long. “Please don’t,” I repeated, though I was already starting not to care. “It’s not too late.”
“Nay, m’lady. I am in blood; stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as to go o’er.”
I struggled with the demon throb of the drug dulling all the sharp feeling places. I fought to remain myself, clinging to the needle in my arm, which had begun to burn like a lit cigarette into my flesh. “But this isn’t a theater. It’s just an apartment over a store.”
He smiled. His smile seemed to stretch across the thundering pillars of the sky. The tempest had come inside the room and was clashing over our very heads. “Oh, but it was a theater, once upon a time. They used to show gay porn in a little shop downstairs. My first boyfriend, Richard Buntyn, brought me here one night and let five of his friends rape me on stage. I paid him back for that one with a red hot rod up his ass.”
“But that wasn’t Buntyn, that was Chris,” I said thickly. The rain hissed on the roof, passing in waves like an avant-garde a cappella chorus whispering wish-wish-wish-wish-wish.
“Doesn’t matter.” He sliced up through the bra binding my arms and down through the ones wrapped around my legs. “But enough about me. This moment belongs to Lady Macbeth.” I leaned back against the glass window and banged it with my head, hoping to break through and fall to the sidewalk below. I was so weak, I couldn’t even do that. He jerked me away and dragged me to the center of the room.
“You must let the blood spurt upon your hands, m’lady, so the audience can see. Hold them close to your throat, like this.” He took both of my wrists in one hand and pulled them up to my chest, then touched the edge of the butcher knife to my throat under my right ear.
The room vanished. We stood in an empty black box, in the center of a single spot of brutal red light. We were both naked, me with my tragic panties, he with his clown mask of blackened flesh. He lowered his head and began to speak, no longer in his weird castrato, but in a deep, roaring howl that merged with the storm, invoking the monster within the rattling cage of his own monstrous heart:
Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it!
The storm outside ceased, and I wondered if there ever had been a storm. I wondered if anything had ever happened before this moment, if I were not merely one of Endo’s spirits conjured from his mind to act upon his stage, say my lines, and disappear.
Another voice, a woman’s voice began to speak. I was frozen with horror, because she sounded like me. Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry ‘Hold, hold!’
There was a flash of light from the kitchen. Endo glanced over his shoulder at the interuption and shouted “No cameras!” at our unruly audience of grim and silent critics. The theater drew back from around us like a curtain, but not completely. I could still smell the murderously sweet smoke of cooked heroin hanging in the air, feel the velvet black horsemen of the drug galloping through my veins and the rough wooden planks of the floor slick with blood beneath my naked feet. There were people surrounding us, an audience of grim, pale, disembodied faces. Seven white masks and three black masks and one little yellow one like an uncarved jack-o’-lantern. The twelfth member of the jury is missing, I thought, but I didn’t know who or why. Something cold and hard touched my foot and I recoiled.
Another flash, then a thousand, like someone had turned on a strobe. Endo shoved me onto the bed and swung around, the knife gripped low against his thigh, the muscles of his naked legs trembling. “Shake not thy gory locks at me!” he bellowed through clenched teeth and charged from the bedroom.
I rolled off the bed and fell on Adam’s pistol. I was losing myself in the rush of dusty cobwebs blowing through the attic of my skull. My fingers closed around the checkered grip of the pistol, and I tugged the mask from my face. Our audience of faceless faces moved closer, gathering into a chorus, whispering with the rain List! List! O, list!
Two came forward, light and black, day and night, and sang softly the conscience of the chorus into my numb ears, Let no human pity stay thy hand. If thou didst ever love me …
Revenge? I began to laugh. My laughter uncapped a well of blood in my chest. It stained my comic smile, spilled down my chin onto my naked breasts, and dripped to the floor
between my trembling knees. The spirits withdrew, gravely silent once more, and disappeared into the reemerging walls of my bedroom. The room had gone utterly dark, even the traffic light outside the window. The storm had knocked out the electricity. I looked at the door. Flashes of lightning created the illusion of a series of still photographs:
Endo enters the bedroom, the Leica in his hands, his face a puzzled frown of concentration.
A woman stands before him, fiercely gripping the camera to her breast, frozen in a pose of frantic and impotent struggle to tear it from his grasp.
The camera flashes, the whole thing, like a ball of lightning birthed in their four hands by a magician’s spell. His shadow leaps up on the wall behind him, huge, monstrous and armless.
Ashley turns, her face now a pale reflection of her life, horrible in its beauty, her mouth gaping.
Then there was darkness. The thunder paused, the storm quieted and the waters stilled as though Jesus had spoken—Peace, be still. I lifted the gun in my shaking fist and pulled the trigger, blindly. In the muzzle’s flash, I saw the hilarious surprise on Endo’s face. The bullet drove the camera’s glass and metal guts into his chest.
He fell beside me and the storm resumed, redoubled in its fury, shaking the floor. I lay down beside Endo, he and I together. I drifted apart like a burning kite. It felt like hours and like no time at all. The storm bore down upon us in all its fury, but we were immune, watching from a distance. The rain misting through the bullet hole in the window made dew upon my cheeks and trickled into my eyes like tears going home, time in reverse.
A banshee siren began to wail. Endo opened his eyes one last time and looked up at the hail rattling like boney fingers against the window, a rictus smile on his bloodless, black kabuki face. “Air raid!” he sighed.
Another Monday
44
When shall we three meet again,
in thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done,
when the battle’s lost and won.
—MACBETH, ACT I, SCENE I
I HEARD WALGREENS BOUGHT WALTER’S old building and was going to tear it down. The mercado had already closed and as I drove by students were moving training equipment out of the tae kwon do school. The For Rent sign had been removed from the door of the empty bay, leaving its rectangular ghost on the dusty glass. A coin-operated washing machine sat on the sidewalk in front of the stripped-out Laundromat. In three hours I was supposed to be at a church in Frayser taking photos of Mynor’s daughter’s wedding.
I pulled into the parking lot and entered by the open back door, my shadow preceding me up the stairs. The air inside was hot and reeked from the fresh turd sitting in the corner behind the door, buzzing with flies. All the mailboxes had their doors pried open and the floor was littered with old bits of junk mail and grocery-store ads.
My old apartment door was open, strips of crime-scene tape hanging around like old party streamers. The elevator at the end of the hall stood open, the elevator Walter had been so proud of, the one he died under, black and gutted by fire.
My apartment had been cleaned out. The door was still broken, the wood splintered around the dead bolt from Adam’s kick. They hadn’t even tried to clean up the blood in the bedroom. Homeless people had busted most of the windowpanes. The floor crunched with bits of glass under my feet. The only thing left was the old wooden bed frame, still in its original position against the wall.
I had been clean for four months. I told myself I didn’t want to be high again, but truthfully I was scared. Scared I would return to that stage Endo had constructed in his fevered brain. Whenever I used, all my ghosts came crowding around again—Adam, James, Ashley, Michi, Cole, laughing at me, always laughing. The only one who never appeared was the one I really wanted to see again, but like my brother he never showed his pale, transparent face. Like Sean, Endo moved on, I didn’t know where, but I hoped it was hell, if hell would have him.
There was no longer any peace for me. No comfort, only pain. Which was how it had always been, only I was too blinded by need to see it. The need for heroin was still gnawing at my bones. It never went away. But I wasn’t sick anymore, and the fear kept me clean.
Adam tried to save me that night. He’d been trying for years and he finally managed, the sorry bastard. He had to die tragically to do it.
But then again, it wasn’t really tragic. It was comic. Ridiculous, like Endo. Endo was right. The only difference between comedy and tragedy was your point of view. The only difference was the mask you wore, and who was holding the knife. Oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths. That’s what old Bill Shakespeare had been trying to tell us in the play whose name we dared not mention. Bad things happen, but evil isn’t just bad things.
I heard a crunch of glass behind me. Chief Billet stood in the doorway, a plain brown box clamped under one arm. He was smiling. Not patronizing. Just smiling like a man who had moved on with his life. He tugged at his suit collar with one gold-ringed pinky. Even with the windows broken out, it was hot in here. Hot for May.
“Once again you’ve managed to get on the bad side of this town,” he said to me.
“What?”
“That Japanese boy took some very incriminating photographs of a few of Memphis’ finest citizens.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“A bunch of important people spent a nervous Christmas wondering what would come of this case.” He switched the box to his hand. Nothing had come of the case. The killer was dead. There was no need to look for evidence.
“You did a fine job covering things up,” I said.
“Thank you kindly.” He fanned his face with his hand. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“You can buy me lunch.”
* * *
Billet pushed back his plate of stripped-bare pork ribs and loosened his belt. He’d taken me to Cozy Corner, off North Parkway near Jackson, a real nice part of town, almost as nice as my old place on Summer. As I slid into the booth, a strip of duct tape stuck to my jeans and peeled off the seat. The air conditioner above the next booth was padlocked to a steel staple bolted to the wall.
Billet stuck a toothpick in his mouth and looked at me across the wreckage of the feast he’d purchased on the city’s American Express. “The weakest point in the St. Michael case was the lack of fingerprints,” he said. “The only prints we got were from the victim and her husband. The bedroom and the front door had been wiped clean. You may not know this, but Adam never thought James did it. He always said if St. Michael had killed his wife, why wipe off the prints? He lived there. Of course we’d find his prints. But killers do stupid shit all the time. That’s what makes my job easy.”
He tapped his front tooth with the toothpick, waiting for me to say something. I ignored him, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke across the table into his face. He coughed slightly and set the toothpick on the edge of his plate. “What I don’t get is how you figured out the deal with that spare key.”
“I already told you.”
“I know, I know. You found it because you looked for it. Little Miss Sherlock fucking Holmes.” Billet swallowed a drink of iced tea. The air conditioner sounded like an old tractor trying to start after a long winter.
“It wasn’t just that,” I said. “There was also the key in the bottom of Endo’s trophy drawer. At the time I didn’t make the connection.”
Billet nodded and sucked at a piece of meat stuck between his teeth. “Well, it doesn’t matter. You found it and guessed right on the rest. The key in Endo’s drawer fit the locks at the victim’s house.”
There was more that I didn’t tell Billet, things Endo had said to me during our brief time on stage, things I’d never told anyone. From them I was able to build a picture of what happened that night. Maybe it was the right picture. I’d never know for sure.
Endo caught Ashley St. Michael at Playhouse on the Square after she took his picture stuffing
Dick Buntyn into a wine barrel. He strangled her, then drove her body home. He knew where she lived because her house had belonged to Cole Ritter’s mother. He used to play there as a kid. In particular, he liked to play behind the garage. It was a good place to hide things, he said, meaning he’d found that key frog years ago. He set the scene up to look like her husband had killed Ashley, not knowing James was a thousand miles away at the time, then locked the door behind him. He didn’t stage her in his usual theatrical manner, first because it wasn’t personal, she was just someone who was in the wrong place at the right time to get killed. But more importantly, he didn’t want anyone to connect the Playhouse Killer to Ashley’s murder, because her society photographs might link him to Richard Buntyn.
Next, he took the memory card from the Leica and set the camera on the top shelf in the closet. If he had taken the whole camera, the cops might have guessed Ashley had taken a picture of her murderer and tracked that back to him somehow. But by that time, Ashley’s spirit had entered the camera, or attached itself to it, or possessed it, or something. I don’t know what. Deiter was better at explaining this part.
So Endo only took the memory card and left the camera, but as he bent over her body to arrange the running shoes around her neck, the Leica snapped a photo of him. That photo went into the camera’s internal memory.
As soon as the camera came into my possession, Ashley started taking pictures trying to lead me to her killer—the photos backstage at the Orpheum, the ones at the Overton Park Shell, and the dark ones at Endo’s studio. Maybe she was trying to lead me to the camera’s memory—her memory, really. That was why Trey’s diving rods kept pointing at me that night—because I was wearing her ghost around my neck, inside the Leica.
One thing that took me a long time to understand was why Ashley had waited to show her deadly secret to me. Why hadn’t she shown herself to her husband? I realized that James probably never touched her camera until the day he sold it to me. That’s why he hadn’t known the memory card was missing. More importantly, she couldn’t show herself without destroying him utterly. He was barely holding his life together as it was. Seeing her ghost would have killed him. She could show herself to me, because I was used to ghosts. I wouldn’t fall apart. I couldn’t fall apart, because I was already in pieces.