Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  “His hacker buddy needed a scam. His hacker buddy has been shorting the stock market, and is currently experiencing the flexible sigmoidoscopy of the IRS.”

  “Why am I hearing about that everywhere I go, lately?”

  “You must be in your forties.”

  “So?”

  “So what about you and MacIntosh?”

  “He happened to tumble to it while I was there, that’s all. I was following the only lead I had.”

  Corrigan’s face darkened. “Which was?”

  “Which was, I got myself an HIV panel there a few months ago, and that was the only blood test I’d had since they took my tonsils out in 1954.”

  Corrigan nodded nastily. “The type O-Negative would have turned up both times, but only the recent — computerized — one counted.”

  “That had to be it. Otherwise, out of all the lushes in town, this outfit picked me by chance. Okay, maybe that’s possible. Given the amount of time I used to spend in bars, I had a lot of exposure. But the O-Negative thing couldn’t be a coincidence. You gave me the idea yourself. It’s the donor blood type most in demand, and that makes me more valuable than most other people to organ thieves. So the clinic had to be the connection, and something or somebody in the clinic had to be connected to the connection. It was simple. Anybody could have figured it out.”

  “Sure,” said Corrigan acidly. “All they needed was a little information.”

  “Yeah. And some luck.”

  “So how come you didn’t provide your local police force with this lucky bit of information?”

  “I didn’t think of it until later, and even after it checked out, I had no proof.”

  “You didn’t think of it until later, and even when it checked out, you had no proof.”

  Stanley shrugged. “Morphine dulls the senses.”

  “That’s okay, I got it all memorized. But morphine doesn’t necessarily make you stupid into the bargain.”

  “Who said anything about stupid?” Stanley said stubbornly.

  Corrigan held up one of the photos.

  After a while Stanley said, “I can’t even tell what that is.”

  Corrigan reversed the photograph and held it at arm’s length, turning it to the light. “That’s a tight shot of the inside of the kid’s abdomen with the flower removed. What they found when they undid those quick sutures in the cruciate incision, see, was nothing. A lot of severed wires. It looks like a car with the engine snatched out.” He touched the photo with the pencil. “See the vertebrae?” He dropped the picture onto the countertop, face up. “They took anything they could sell.”

  “Oh, boy,” Stanley cleared his throat.

  “Yeah,” said Corrigan, watching him. “Even his heart.”

  Stanley avoided his eyes. “So what’s that tell you?”

  “It tells me you were stupid. It tells me the kid let you sucker him. So far, he’s picking up the tab for both of you. That’s the warning. Of course,” Corrigan added, “they might not know who you are.”

  “Huh?”

  Corrigan shrugged, but he was watching Stanley. “The kid might not have talked.”

  Stanley squirmed. “I don’t get it. It was just a hunch. I just wandered over there like I was in a dream or something. I had no idea it was going to pan out. And when the kid said he’d get his friend the programmer to look into it —.”

  “Tommy Quinn.”

  “—get Tommy Quinn to look into it, I figured, well, let’s just see what happens. Really, I never in a hundred years would have thought these guys would come up with anything we could use. Let alone get themselves killed.”

  Corrigan’s lip curled. “We?” he said. “We? What the hell you think I am, a fourth for pinochle?”

  “No, no. Hell, I know this is serious. But I figured if this kid came up with something, I’d be sure to tell my friend on the force, Inspector Corrigan, all about it. I just didn’t think it would pan out, that’s all. It looked like a fluke.”

  Corrigan built a quizzical frown with his face. “What are you thinking about, Ahearn? You playing movie shamus, here?”

  “No,” Stanley shook his head. “No way.”

  “I guess not. Nobody’s that stupid. Even you. Not now, anyway.” Corrigan jabbed a finger at the photos spread over the kitchen counter. “But you must have been thinking about trying to play footsie with these guys. What for? Revenge? Get back at the guys that rummaged through your guts? They say it’s like being raped. They say it hurts in ways that sneak up on you years later in your sleep.”

  Stanley dismissed this line of reasoning with a wave of his hand, but Corrigan had the bone, and he wanted to worry it.

  “Maybe trip them up enough to reveal their whole operation? Make them so confused they turn themselves in? Maybe make them feel guilty about what they do? Haunt them until they get nightmares and give themselves up? Until they come to me and beg me to lock them in a cell, hide them from daylight, hide them from the street, from the awful, the odious, the gore-encrusted, the dripping-fanged, the vengeful destroyer Ahearn, put them where Stanley Ahearn won’t be able to get at them, won’t be able to run them over with his monster truck — for so much as thinking of harvesting a kidney from him? Him, of all the drunken jerks?”

  Stanley’s face was burning with shame. Everywhere he looked, the autopsy photos glared back at him.

  “No, Corrigan. No, I—.”

  “You’re crazy, Ahearn. It’s that simple. Should I get the bruisers in fairy slippers to come zip you up and give you a shot? You want a scrip for Prozac? How about a ten-day free all-expense paid vacation in our new panoptical jail? You get to wear an orange jumpsuit and if you’re good we’ll give you a window so you can watch the suckers walk by on the sidewalk five stories below, enjoying their freedom. You might look at it as a vacation. Or maybe you’re so fucking deluded you think on account your stellar detective work I should be hiring you to give the annual Hercule Poirot Forensic Deduction Lecture at the Police Academy?”

  “No, I—.”

  “Not you, me. I got news for you, lush. You have just fucked around and got a guy killed. Maybe by now it’s even two guys.” He threw a photo against the dishrack. “You did that. All by yourself. Get it?”

  Stanley blinked. An awful moment passed while he added it up. Two guys. It was hard to get around that. Probably impossible. But what enabled him to set his jaw and look Corrigan dead in the eye was the thought that maybe, by now…

  Maybe it’s three guys.

  “Don’t come on to me,” Corrigan continued, “about how you didn’t know what you were doing. I know you didn’t know what you were doing. But the problem is, you don’t believe it. You think you did know what you were doing. Or at least, you thought you knew what you were doing. One has hopes that these photographs might change your opinion of yourself. You knew goddamn well that HIV test was a potential lead. Yet you deliberately withheld the information from the very people who might have been able to do something with it. Now one guy — practically a kid, for chrissakes — has been gutted alive. Since you forced our friends to play for keeps — as if they weren’t already playing for keeps — they figured they might as well make some money out of it. So pour that over ice and suck on it. Moreover, if I can use a polysyllabic adverb on a fucking moron like yourself, moreover, that is to say, beyond what ugliness has already been stated, it’s very bloody likely that MacIntosh’s buddy Tommy, as you call him, was either in on MacIntosh’s dismemberment and has blown town on the proceeds, or has himself experienced the joys of the harvest. In which case not only is that two guys you’ve done for with your little deductive fling, but you’ve pissed away our only leads into the bargain.”

  Abruptly Corrigan looked at Stanley as if he had just seen him in an entirely new light. He cast a contemptuous look around the shack. “How long have you lived in this dump, Ahearn, feeling sorry for yourself? How long have you been taking advantage of a hard-working stiff who has real people to support, people
who are related to him, people who perform actual meaningful emotional and physical labor on his behalf — letting him carry up food for you, this bum on his roof, rent you wheelchairs and pay your doctor bills and even provide you a vehicle to go get your willie sucked every Friday night? Huh? How fucking long? You sorry little sack of shit, you sniveling twit, you forty-seven-year-old delivery boy, when’s the last time you did something for somebody beside yourself? I’ll tell you. It was three years ago — three and a half! Christ. The most miserable cop on the beat does more for people in an afternoon than you’ve done but once in your entire fucking life. Hasn’t your little reward thing gone on long enough? Has the booze infantilized you completely? I’ll bet there was so much ethanol in your kidney those thieves didn’t even have to sterilize it. Christ!”

  Corrigan is getting a little carried away on the question of turpitude, Stanley was thinking, as he watched the detective. So what’s this tack? In his unusually animated rage Corrigan had allowed his features to become exaggerated and distorted, cartoon-like was the term that occurred to Stanley. A cheaply produced cartoon from Hong Kong or Seoul, where they omit two cells out of three to save money, so the completed sequence has this wooden, time-lapsed quality — although, he reflected, quality has little to do with it. Inevitably, as Stanley knew from years of watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kind of self-mortification involving hangover penance, bad animation was not put there to entertain you; the purpose of bad animation is to sell you something.

  So what was Corrigan trying to sell him?

  “That’s why we got laws against withholding evidence,” Corrigan went on. Stanley started to interrupt him, but Corrigan shouted, “I’m not finished yet!” and shook a finger in Stanley’s face. “We got laws against clowns like you thinking they can sit on a piece of evidence long enough to turn it to their own advantage. I could book you right now. I could turn it into months of hassles for you, Ahearn. You hear that? Months! Shit. I go for accessory to murder, we’re talking years.”

  Corrigan paced out of the circle of light, toward the front door, exhaled raggedly, looked at the Pyramid for a moment, then paced back. “But I’m not going to do it. No, I’m not going to run you in. You want to know why, Ahearn? You care? You give a shit?”

  “Sure, Corrigan.” But Stanley was thinking, go ahead and tell me, if you have to. Spill your guts, if it’s going to make you feel better. But despite the fact that I just got one and maybe two and possibly three people killed, for some very particular reason of your own, you want to let me off the hook. “So why? How come?”

  “I’ll tell you why, Ahearn. It’s because I feel sorry for you. That’s why.”

  Stanley almost laughed.

  “You little juice-monkey, I could give you a shot to that kidney incision that would wake your mother in heaven.”

  “No mothers,” said Stanley coldly. “You were explaining my dispensation.”

  “I feel sorry for you. I really do. Sure, you saved that little girl’s life. So what if it was three years ago? It’s admirable enough. Not just any character would have done the same, either. But that was your moment, Ahearn. You’ve been living off it ever since, you’re never going to do anything else for anybody again, and that’s pathetic. That’s sad. You’ve been sitting up on this roof watching television and drinking whiskey going on four years. What a life. Your only problem is that now you’ve only got one kidney to metabolize that booze with, and that kidney’s sick. Isn’t that right? Is that what you’re afraid of? That you might have to quit all this? Isn’t the drunkard’s dream about to go up in smoke? Am I right?”

  Stanley said nothing. He was waiting for the cop’s weird reasoning to become clear, and, unlike Corrigan, he wasn’t about to let this personal stuff obfuscate the issue.

  “Then what, huh? When it’s over, when you have to get sober, what are you going to do?”

  Stanley frankly shrugged.

  “Maybe that morphine scrip can be strung out for a few months,” Corrigan suggested thoughtfully. “Maybe you can get off the booze and onto the junk.” He gestured toward the door. “The stuff’s all over out there. It might even be cheaper than the booze, initially. They say you live longer, too; though maybe that’s not your idea of a plus. Of course, there’s the social stigma involved, junkies are looked down upon, as if you care. For sure, though, you won’t like the copping scene. A major irony is that while junk will turn you into even more of a misanthrope than you already are, you will become even more dependent on certain forms of — shall we say ‘scum’? — way more dependent on certain scum-forms than when you were just a lush. That would be pretty hard on a guy with your personality. A guy who likes it easy. You get so bad off you can’t negotiate a simple junk-for-blowjob deal on the street. That’s you giving the blowjobs, now. No longer receiving them. For the money, you understand. For your habit. The contrapositive of your present Friday night which, like all your other nights, will become indistinguishably alike. They’ll all merge into a spirit of misery, haunting the desperate husk of your former self. Of course,” he dragged a palm back and forth over his day’s growth of whiskers, sandy brown mottled with white, “of course, you get strung out enough you won’t want a blowjob — on Friday or any other night. You won’t be able to get it up, and you won’t care. You won’t even think about it anymore.…”

  Corrigan smiled and chucked Stanley’s shoulder with his fist, a little harder than he needed to. “But hey,” he said, “that bum kidney and your bum life will last a lot longer on junk than they will on booze.”

  Stanley jerked his shoulder away.

  Corrigan paced to the front door and stood there, looking out over the wheelchair, as if peering into the heart of the darkened city. If so, the expression on his face suggested the metropolis was teeming with heartworms. He filled his lungs with fresh air and loudly exhaled. “And that guy, your landlord here.” He inclined his head toward Stanley without looking at him. “What’s his name?”

  “Toy,” Stanley answered quietly. He could see that Corrigan knew the name. He just wanted to get Stanley to say it himself. “Hop Toy.”

  “Hop Toy,” said Corrigan, drawing out the last syllable. “Hop Toy’s a good man. A family man. I had a long talk with him. You know Hop Toy?”

  Startled, Stanley said, “Yes. I know Hop Toy.”

  “Hop Toy,” Corrigan continued, “defends Stanley Ahearn down to the ground. There he is, in his wholesale grocery. The guy’s knee-deep in ginger bulbs, or whatever they call them, and he’s telling me he doesn’t give a fuck about what you do, or how you live your life. He’s defending you. All he knows is Stanley Ahearn comes to work most days, that Ahearn would never drive his truck while drunk, that Ahearn saved little… You saved little…”

  Corrigan inclined his head toward Stanley, again without looking at him. “What’s the little girl’s name, Ahearn?”

  “Tseng,” said Stanley, his mouth tight around the syllable. “The little girl’s name is Tseng.”

  “Tseng,” repeated Corrigan, looking out over the city. “Little Tseng. ‘Stanrey save my riddle girl’s rife,’ Hop Toy says. ‘I take care of Stanrey.’”

  “You don’t have to—,” Stanley began, his face clouding.

  “It’s the kind of thing we used to find on the walls of ruined temples in the jungles in Cambodia,” Corrigan went on, ignoring him. “Chiseled in stone, with the whole jungle crowding in, tree roots busting through the masonry. The roof gone, the floor gone, the doors gone, the priests gone, the people gone.…”

  He turned and looked at Stanley, his face in shadow. “Moral instruction chiseled in stone, instructing nobody. You saved that kid’s life, and Hop Toy’s going to take care of you till some day he hasn’t seen you for a couple days. It’s going to come. Sooner or later, it’s going to come. And so he’ll climb up here. He’ll find the door standing open, and the TV on, and something all burned up on the stove if you’re still bothering to feed yourself. And there you’ll be, st
one dead in that easy-chair, with a bottle in your hand and shit in your drawers and seagulls standing on each shoulder fighting over what’s left of your eyeballs. Then he’ll be free.”

  “Who?” said Stanley, with a start. “Who’ll be free?”

  “Hop Toy will be free, Stanley.” Corrigan had sweat gleaming on his cheek. “Who’d you think I meant? You? That you’d be free?” He laughed without mirth. “You have a point, I guess. Hop Toy won’t be as free as you, at that particular moment. I guess, metaphysically speaking, that’s true.”

  A moment of introspection passed between them.

  “But,” Corrigan abruptly continued, “Hop Toy will be free to start thinking about taking the money he’s been spending on you and putting it toward Tseng’s college education or her dowry or her first Mustang convertible or the good-luck firecrackers for her bat mitzvah — whatever. Something useful. Something important.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “Which,” Corrigan added, “Hop Toy will know would be the way you would have wanted him to deal with his new freedom — and your new freedom — with the resulting extra money. Respectively, he might even spring for your cremation.

  “Hell,” Corrigan smiled, showing teeth in the gloom. “Who else would?”

  A longer silence. Even the man two stories down and across the alley, who apparently could not pass a waking moment without his pornography, had turned it off, or turned down the sound at least. There were the continual windchimes, a foghorn or two, and a far-away siren getting further away as they listened. A drip in the sink. The smells of cold coffee and scorched milk. The dank reek of geraniums. The city was giving itself and its citizens the gift of a pause.

  Corrigan walked back to the counter. “Excuse me,” he said, shouldering Stanley aside to gather the photographs. When he had them all in a stack he paused to study the shot of the body in the sleeping bag.

  “Okay,” the detective finally said, holding the photo so they could both see it. “You got any more bright fantasies about this case?”