Night after night we swam in each other’s bodies. Then waded single-file out of the shallow end and lay on the cement, phosphorescent, panting—until the silhouette prints of our wet skin diminished to single drying points, satellites blinking overhead. Sirens sounded across town, but not for us, not yet. Frank and the others gone, the light extinguished—I’d float on my back in the black water listening to my heart, my breath, the breathing of distant swimmers.
Now, held under the water by Genevieve, my skin had been stripped away like a costume I’d been wearing. My face. Organs, bones and all. I was just a bright reflection like the shape of the skylight. Liquid light … becoming bubbles … becoming mist … becoming …
WOKE UP ON SATURDAY MORNING FEELING LIKE I’D LEFT my body in the back seat of a cab and had just had it returned by the day shift. I couldn’t distinguish between the dream I’d had about Genevieve and what had actually happened when I visited her—which I was certain was some kind of profoundly altered experience. Even a person of significant wealth with a real sense of theater couldn’t have pulled off what she’d done. How she’d accumulated so much info about my private past, I couldn’t even begin to imagine. But while her knowledge was devastatingly correct on several points, it was wildly off the mark on many others—with the obvious intention of riling me. She’d wanted to press my buttons and she had.
My father’s death being a murder …
I’m certain my mother would’ve never dreamt someone else was involved. She claimed he’d left a note, but I never saw it and it might well have been a fairly general thing—or something written at another time. The deal was tricky because Mom had needed the insurance money, and so the focus had been on accidental death versus suicide. As far as I was aware there hadn’t been a police investigation, which later did strike me as odd.
But it’s hard enough unraveling recent events—something in the past when you weren’t there and were too young to understand anyway—it’s impossible to be sure. And Mom purposely tried to keep things from us, for understandable reasons. Still, I had to admit, once Genevieve had set it out, I knew that she was on the right twisted track. That was the real seed of my interest in investigating murders. And I had seen Jake throw a hammer at my father. And I had put that Vaseline jar on my mother’s dresser.
She was right about Jimmie too. I hadn’t been as good a friend to him as I should’ve been. I owed him more looking after. I let him down—but I think he really did forgive me.
And she was right in some ways about Grier. Nothing could excuse what I’d done to him. It made me physically ill at the time and the memory of it made me feel that way again. But believe me when I say that she got it wrong too. If I’d been a girl, what Grier had tried to do in the Haunted House would’ve been seen very differently. Worse things happen to girls and women every day, but it wouldn’t have been viewed as an expression of “love.”
But here’s the real reason why, despite all her theatrics, I didn’t blame myself for his death. He was a suicide waiting to happen—waiting for an accomplice. He half liked the beating I gave him. That’s why I bashed him the way I did—I had to take him past the point of satisfaction. That’s the honest gut-sick truth. I don’t know what she was talking about with Frank—she was just working every angle. And her bringing up Stoakes and Whitney was more than a little rich.
What she said about Raven and the Mongoose was pure fabrication. I’m almost certain Lenny shot Raven—and for the blood simple reason that he wanted her share of the scam. He got whacked in vato loco revenge by either Freddy or one of his cholos. No mystery there.
Briannon? She was a dealer. She didn’t need to get drugs from me—and after I was shot I had no way to get in touch with her. She went into hiding. I didn’t give her any speedball—ever. And she knew her own way around a needle. As to Stacy, I’d have killed myself long before her. For her. And in a way, I did. Many times over.
She was a Tiffany earring you find in the sink trap. As soft as fur handcuffs and yet as sharp as piano wire. She knew wrestling holds and rainy day games I’d never even thought of … and sometimes when I’d least expect it, she’d laugh like a little girl and tell me some obscure fact … like about the two mile-long sausage in the Guinness Book of Records. Then I’d know I was heading into serious whitewater. Some babes like her—and there was no woman like her really—but I mean with her stretch limo looks … they’d have talked the catwalk … all about shopping sprees in Milan and Dubai … made sure I knew about the Park Avenue plastic surgeon she kept in a drawer. She told me about her jobs in a pet store and at an agricultural inspection station. Who lies about that kind of thing? And yet she did lie. All the time. One time she said she came from Wisconsin—the Land of Dairy she called it. Then it was Philadelphia … or Baltimore. But she never mentioned any other men. It was like I was the first. Like she was made for me. Every minute with her was a moment when I didn’t know what would happen next. She had a fire and forget temper—and yet she was ticklish as hell. And she had a dream. She wanted to be a singer. She certainly had some unusual ways of practicing. A real voice too. Two parts amaretto to one part diesel. Plus attitude. Like a white Millie Jackson.
Then one day she was gone. She could be in Aspen or West Palm Beach. For a long time I thought she was everywhere. One night after we’d been to the greyhounds, I asked her how long she’d been tricking, and she looked at me with Uzi eyes, and said, “I don’t do tricks, I do magic.” I figured something bad happened to her. Or something sad. It usually does.
That left Polly’s miscarriage—the loss of a fetus, not the death of a toddler in white sleepers.
And my sister Serena’s accident.
I didn’t cause either. I’d always take the rap for them in my heart, and yet I couldn’t say what I could’ve done differently that would’ve guaranteed they didn’t happen. Would that baby really have lived if I hadn’t been fooling around? Maybe Polly just miscarried. Maybe Serena just fell, epilepsy or no. Women lose babies. Kids fall out of trees. I honestly don’t remember all that was going on in the tree fort that afternoon. We were kids, new to being drunk—and I was just so grateful to be part of anything to do with sex. I shouldn’t have been cheating on Polly at any time, let alone at such a vulnerable time. I should’ve been more careful with Serena and the scene that was happening. But seeing it all from a new distance, I knew I’d be exonerated in everyone else’s mind but my own. What I was guilty of in both cases, is what happened after. Polly and I stopped trying to have kids—I about put the wedding tackle away altogether. And my grief over Serena turned into guilt. I had to be responsible because I was the male—and because I felt responsible, I let my guilt turn into anger that I vented on Grier. My assault on him did come suspiciously soon after Serena’s fall. In that sense, Genevieve and her troupe were right. On one shadow hinges many others. Not as many as she made out. But enough.
That still didn’t explain how she’d put the whole thing together.
I headed to Cheezy’s to mingle with the regulars. I thought maybe the short order morning would restore some normality. It didn’t. I sat down at my favorite seat and ordered my usual. Barb Huggins, the waitress with the retainer, looked right at me and said, “The ususal what?” I was so startled I couldn’t think what I usually ordered. I walked home and got in the car and drove to McDonald’s. Two egg and bacon McMuffins later I decided it was time to get straight back at the apartment. I needed basic menial tasks after what I’d been through. Whatever was happening to me was as serious as murder. Or birth. I needed to shift gears.
I stopped off and bought an armful of cleaning products and hefty garden-strength trash bags and started piling, packing, scrubbing, wiping and in some instances, scraping. As small as the apartment was, the filth had accumulated. What sort of woman could I have ever brought back to a mess like that? Even Pico had been put off.
I cleaned out the refrigerator, the oven and the garbage disposal. I emptied the closet, I got under the be
d. Every ketchup slop, porn rag, silverfish, blister pack, and chow mein stain got dealt with. It took four hours of the most manic cleaning I’d ever done, but the place sparkled when I finished—from the tops of the doors to the toilet bowl. I even found my old Explorer’s knife that had been missing for 35 years. I ended up with ten bags of trash and two heaps of clothes and shoes that didn’t seem to fit anymore, all neatly piled up for the St. Vincent de Paul bin. And that’s just where I took them—and I felt much better.
For a little bit. Then just empty and restless.
So, I headed over to Wetworld, cruising past the aging streetgirls, looking like dog-eared dollar bills needing to be taken out of circulation. They weren’t shaking it at this hour—just out to score—in preparation for another midnight, the only time anyone would want to seem them in fishnets and high heels anymore.
I’d barely gotten out of the ride when the Sidewinder buttonholed me. He was a North Georgia clay-eater who’d heard a whispered legend about California when he was a teenager, although he still lived at street level 20 years later, fencing iPods and dealing stuff like oxycodone—whatever would make the nut. Back when he’d hit town, someone had clocked him with a car jimmy and he’d had trouble with his balance ever since. I liked him though, and he liked me, especially since I happened to intervene when this cooker named Bucket Head was trying to shiv him over some hot cell phone cards. Old BH looked like a t-boned Hyundai when I was through, and the Winder wormed a little easier on the streets from then on because I put the word out I’d rupture spleens if I heard of him getting hassled. I admired him because although he lived near the drains, he never seemed to get much of the sludge on him. I asked him about some sleep relief.
He screwed himself up and unraveled around a corner. Wound back ten minutes later and laid a fistful of tan canoe-shaped pills on me.
“They’re clean but they’re mean, Chief. Lights out for real. If you’re doin’ ’em yourself, keep the safety on. And if you’re givin’ ’em to her, be right careful. You wanna pull the sheet up to her chin affer—not up over her haid.”
“Thanks SW,” I told him. “You watch your hillbilly ass. This is still the Coast.”
“I hear you. I miss you and Cracker Jack. You kept things square.”
“I’ll keep the safety on,” I said. “Who’s been on your case?”
“New dick. They call him DA Baby.”
“Padgett.”
“Gave me the third degree over that slant-eyed cap onna look-see yesterday. Tole him to catch a green rabbit.”
“He’s one of mine. I’ll see to it. Just a kid still. He’s good people really.”
“If you say so, Chief.”
“What’s the word on who did the shoot? The Ghost Tigers?”
“Naw!” the Sidewinder scoffed. “Wife did him! She was workin’ on the side—on her back. Pay the kid’s way to college. Hub’s chained to the register. He got wind and called an early mornin’ argument.”
“Thanks SW. Try to keep off the skyline.”
I gave him two Ben Franklins, and then decided on a third—he needed the dough and I was glad to have bumped shoulders. And sad to see him veering off. You could go to the bank on anything he said when he didn’t have the ringing in his ears.
I walked over a block to the Laotian store where the shooting had happened. My old instincts had said to go straight to someone like him when we’d done the canvass, but he’d obviously gone hidey hole on the day, only to be hassled by a less circumspect Chris Padgett when I’d gone home sick on Friday. The Sidewinder reminded me of a fundamental truth. When the cops get out of the gutter, the gutters get clogged. I went inside and saw the wife trapped behind the counter, not a soul in the place. I gave her a full five minutes to get anxious as I wandered the aisles and left all the refrigerator doors open before I made a deposit on the magazines in front of the cash register.
She had an oily smelling Smith & Wesson revolver pointed at me before I’d even zipped up. I wondered if it was the same gatt that she’d used to shoot her old man. Maybe she was smarter than that. I smiled and kept my hands at my side.
“What you do! What you doing?” she cried.
“I’ve pissed on your dream,” I answered. “Like you’ve pissed on the dreams of everyone who’s come to this town and this country to make a better life. You shot your husband in cold blood. Not some gangbanger. You. Him. A father. Word’s out.”
The fear and anger in her eyes was something to behold. I tried to think how many times someone had pulled a gun on me over the years. Of course, it’s the ones you don’t see pointed at you that you really have to worry about.
“The shame of going to jail will probably be too much for you,” I said. “My advice is to stage your own death—make it look like another murder while the gang press is on. You might—if you do it right—get some insurance money into your son’s college fund. And he might not learn the truth. That is, if he doesn’t know already. But any way it plays you’re done. Do yourself in or give yourself up. It won’t end here whether you pull that trigger or not.”
I could see in her eyes how badly she wanted to pull it. Hints of all the past traumas in her homeland, the hard road coming here, the frustrations and prejudices once settled, long boring hours in a borderland neighborhood, the drudgery of stocking shelves, trying to make a buck and buy a better life for her son. People pull triggers for pretty good reasons in my experience. She’d had hers. Now she had another one. I walked out feeling empty and light.
Sitting behind the wheel of the Electra again, looking ahead to my meeting with the recently and unexpectedly retired Jack McInnes—wondering what he had to tell me and what I could bring myself to tell him, an image of the High Five Bar came to mind. The flytrap where Mervyn Stoakes had quietly poured down a couple of straight bourbons and then slashed himself in the alley behind. I may have buried any official interest in the matter, but my private concerns were keener than ever and it had been bothering me ever since Lance pulled back the sheet. Why there?
The raptor pit of Wetworld would’ve made some sense—a place a lot of different kinds of people ended up ending up. Some of the scabies old-timers even called it the End Zone. The High Five was in an unexpected area to find someone like Stoakes at any time, let alone the last time. It wasn’t near his work or where he lived. He didn’t have a train ticket on him and his car was parked in the lot without any luggage. It wasn’t a district known for picking up girls, or boys for that matter, and not an easy place to score drugs or place bets. It was an anonymous district, where men who didn’t have credit cards took comfort in cheap draft beer and a Slim Jim.
That got me thinking again about the vista point on La Playa where Deems Whitney had gone to great lengths to blow up his expensive car with himself in it. Putting aside the sensible question of why someone would do that—what would drive them to that point. Why in the world would he have driven himself to that specific point?
I began obsessing on the faces of the two dead men. Something in their lives—they way they ended them. It spoke to me. They spoke to me. I was certain Genevieve knew more about both of them than she’d acknowledged. Much more. Both men had had some kind of psychotic break. Both had come under her influence. But in Whitney’s case there had been far too much precision, too much plain effort, for the temporary insanity argument to hold. With Stoakes, the tox scans had come back clear. That was a key dent in my theory that Genevieve was using chemicals to achieve her effects—and beyond my own residual drug worries, the reason I hadn’t subjected myself to a test. If she was using drugs, they were of a sort that slipped through the screen, and that’s not easy to do these days. Something else had happened to those men and I was afraid it was happening to me. Something that didn’t fit into any standard theories. I pondered that for quite some time—and some very wild notions passed through my mind, like boosted cars through a toll gate. And then some very creepy ones, moving the way the more seriously suspicious vehicles usually do.
A little too cautiously. As if the windows are about to roll down any minute—and weapons appear.
But old cop instincts die hard, even in the face of the seemingly unexplainable. I dragged out my city map and a pencil and started drawing lines. Stoakes owned arguably the largest, best-positioned home in Foam, but it was a fairly unpretentious neighborhood, still on the price bounce from the heavy industry days. I drew a line between his street and Cliffhaven. Whitney’s much grander residence near the Gardens I connected in the same way. I couldn’t see a link to either the High Five or the lookout on La Playa. But that gave me another thought.
Whitney’s office was in the Virginia Building—a tower shaped like a giant Remington .22 cartridge. I drew two more lines, joining up where both men worked and 4 Eyrie Street. The High Five was almost precisely halfway between Stoakes’ office in City Hall and Genevieve’s house. The same with La Playa and Whitney’s office. Both men, consciously or not, had chosen to end their existence at a point dead-on half-way between the dark playground of Eyrie Street and the hub of their old, usual lives. Neither one may have realized why he selected the locale he did. Still it was interesting to see it on a map. Something concrete.
I was willing to accept that Genevieve hadn’t in some way “willed” their deaths. It wasn’t that I doubted her capacity for mind control—I was beginning to suspend all doubts about what she was able to do. It was the way the men died that got me. They’d acted under duress, but my instincts told me that both had acted on their own volition. They’d learned something, experienced something—and they couldn’t cope. Whitney had sent up a true flare, but they both had left messages in their own ways. Both had tried to destroy the evidence of themselves—or at least a kind of evidence. I felt a sickening rush of dread and desire. Their ghosts were sending me some kind of warning—but it wasn’t one I could heed. My need to know what was happening to me was greater than my need to learn what had happened to them. Some cases you can never close.
Private Midnight Page 18