Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

  While he was distracted by his bowl of gourmet cat food, she inspected the doors to a maple armoire, one of the few pieces of custom-made furniture that she had brought with her from Chicago. The cat hair in the lock opening had not been disturbed in her absence. She inserted the key, and the paneled doors opened to rows of shelves, cubbyholes and a desktop littered with newspaper clippings on the men and women who had died in fear and violence and those who were still in the game. Her journal lay open to a blank page, and she penned a few lines about Bunny’s message from the late Timothy Kidd. Then she tidied up the desktop, sorting papers for the jurors who had survived. Material on the dead was consigned to the drawers below the desktop, and Timothy had a drawer all to himself.

  She was so in tune with him tonight, almost paranoid enough. Johanna slowly revolved, taking in the entire room. Everything was in neat order, no objects added or taken away, no obvious signs of trespass. The only disturbance was a pile of mail knocked to the floor, and she credited this to the cat’s revenge on the maid and her water pistol. All was as it should be, but she could never lose the sense of something tall and wobbly teetering on the verge of a crash. Even within the perfect silence of these thick walls, peace was a rare thing. She lived every day in a heightened state of readiness—waiting.

  Mugs padded away from his empty bowl and paused to stretch on the way to his basket, where he completed three turns on a red pillow, never fewer, never more, then curled up for a postprandial nap. His eyes closed on an expression of sweetness which lured strangers into the deception that he could be petted and stroked. Johanna lay back in a reclining chair, dry-mouthing pain pills and watching the evening news on television.

  All the major networks had developed the macabre murder spree into a miniseries format, replete with original theme music for the Reaper’s segment. The serial killer, not trusting his name and fame to the vagaries of tabloid reporters, had christened himself with the crude sketch of a scythe drawn in blood on the walls of every crime scene. It was also his habit to write the score in blood, keeping the tally of murdered jurors current. His last message had figured nine down—

  “—and three to go,” said the smiling broadcaster on the screen.

  His guest for the evening was a retired federal judge railing against the incompetence of the FBI to stop this assault on the American judicial system. “If we cannot guarantee the safety of every juror, then the law becomes impotent.”

  The broadcaster listened with mock sympathy, then broke in on the judge’s tirade to complain that “It’s been nearly a month since the last murder—”

  And his story was getting stale. Tonight’s program gave Johanna no new information. It was rather like a tired rerun, repeating old encounters with the bereaved friends and families of the dead. Some of these people had become inadvertent players, giving up clues to the whereabouts of runaway jurors, and others had taken money for this information. Several family members had settled for fame as payment, becoming media personalities over the past six months, always good for an interview on a slow news day.

  Johanna closed her tired eyes for a brief nap, one of the most underrated luxuries of life. Soon she would be delivered from angst and pain. Her concept of heaven was not a place of eternal peace, but a small window in time, a few tranquil moments between consciousness and sleep, blessed sleep.

  Mallory’s present was tucked under one arm as Riker strolled past the old men’s social club, a small gathering that convened in Ned’s parking lot every night. Four old fellows with their folding chairs sat in a circle with a jug of wine to fortify them against the cold air. They nodded to him in passing, then turned up the volume of a portable radio and rocked their chair legs to a Spanish rhythm. Riker’s feet weighed less and less, then nothing at all, walking him back to a warmer season.

  The summer of his seventeenth birthday, he had left his father’s house and run two thousand miles. He had made it all the way to Mexico, past the tourist traps of the borderland and farther south along roads that had no names or signposts, only piles of sand to trap the rusty old Volkswagen van. He had bought the vehicle for next to nothing, a necessary expense: in those days, he would go nowhere without the giant amplifiers for his electric guitar. Every ten miles, he had climbed out of the van to dig his bald tires out of foreign sand, every ten miles all the way to Cholla Bay. He had found that place under a sky of a billion brilliant stars. Until that moment, he had not known that they were up there, for the stars of city skies had been stingy and few. By the close of that summer, the Brooklyn boy, barefoot and sun brown, had learned some new words and another kind of music that went into his blood, swimming backward to the heart, and lying there in wait for a day like today.

  He had spent the best part of his life trying to forget that place—or was it a time?—when he had been happy. Riker walked on in dreams of Mexico, knowing that he would never get back to Cholla Bay. Happiness had not been on his wish list when he had decided to become a cop.

  Could he ever make his way back to the police force?

  The Latin beat of the old men’s social club was blocks behind him when he stopped to look up at the sky.

  No stars.

  He turned left instead of right, taking a different route home, one that would lead him by a bar where he could run a tab, drink all night and clear his head of music.

  It seemed that only seconds had passed before Johanna Apollo started awake. Mugs’s front paws were kneading her chest as he licked her face with a sandpaper tongue. She looked past the cat to the clock on the mantelpiece. So much time had been lost, hours and hours. She rose from her chair to switch off the television set, and Mugs was dumped from her lap to the floor. Deeply offended and tail held high, he returned to his basket pillow.

  Johanna reached out to the radio by her chair and tuned in to the familiar voice of Ian Zachary. The game master was recapping the life-and-death plight of twelve human beings. The surviving jurors had fled from Chicago, where their verdict had been so unpopular that three of them had been put to death within the city limits. The rest had peeled away from their government bodyguards after a fourth juror had died while under the protection of the FBI. The fifth kill had occurred on an isolated farm in Kansas. Other jurors had gone to hide among family in small towns, and now only three of them remained alive and at large. One of the shock-jock’s callers had sighted a live one hiding in San Francisco, but no contest prize had been awarded for lack of photographic evidence. The game had strict rules.

  “Who’s next?” asked Ian Zachary, called Zack by his fans. The Englishman’s voice was deep-throated, and the tenor was seductive. “Come on, all my idiot children, retard bastards every one of you, talk to me. Daddy loves you.”

  Riker unlocked the door to his apartment, flicked on the light switch and stepped over the notes pushed under his door by well-wishers who could never find him at home or in his favorite cop bar. He spent his evening hours supporting a different saloon in a neighborhood where he would not encounter detectives from Special Crimes Unit. One of the notes on his floor was an invitation in Charles Butler’s handwriting. His old friend and new landlord had not yet grasped the fact that Riker preferred to drink his dinner alone, ungrateful as that might seem.

  This SoHo apartment was bigger than anything he could afford, and Charles had insisted on chopping off more than half the rent. Riker knew it was a better place than he deserved, and so he compensated for this by turning every surface into a trash magnet. His dirty laundry had been scattered to four corners and the ashtrays filled to overflowing.

  He entered the generously proportioned sit-down kitchen, a collection dump for his unopened mail. He had no other use for this room except as an additional storage area for the empty Chinese take-out containers, pizza cartons, crushed beer cans and bottles. With one hand, he swiped a pile of envelopes from the table, then set down his gift from Mallory, a radio. She had accurately guessed that his own had worn out and that this damage had gone unnoticed for yea
rs. The television had also been broken, or he had assumed as much since the screen had been cracked by a bullet. The TV set had been left behind in his old apartment in Brooklyn, where he had lain bleeding and shaking, hearing the distant scream of sirens and believing that he would die. He believed it still, though all the bloody holes in his body had been neatly closed and stitched.

  He walked through the rooms turning on all the lights.

  It was not yet midnight, and there was still time to catch the last twenty minutes of Ian Zachary’s program. He returned to the kitchen and set up the antenna per Mallory’s advice for the best reception. She had already tuned in the station for him, and then, distrustful brat, she had fixed the position of the dial with tape. Contrary to her style of complex electronics, this was a very simple appliance, only a few knobs to work. He could tell that a good deal of thought had gone into Mallory’s selection of this model; she had wanted something that a drunk could easily operate. Plugging it in was a problem; his hand wavered back and forth, always missing the wall socket. Finally, he rammed the plug home, turned on the radio and recognized the voice of a transplanted Englishman dabbling in American slang. This was the man who had telephoned him six times to request an interview with Jo.

  “No, you imbecile!” yelled the talk-show host. “The Reaper is not an escaped mental patient. He only kills on the weekends. That means he’s a working stiff with a regular job and a leisure-time avocation of justice.”

  “You mean murder!” This second voice revealed a genuine Bronx pedigree. “I’m tellin’ you the guy’s a nutcase. So I figure—”

  “The Reaper’s not crazy,” said Ian Zachary. “He’s a man on a mission to cull the brain dead from the judicial system. And you don’t win any prizes for your damn opinion, fool. I want hard information—facts and proof.”

  Zachary tapped a button to cut off the caller, then lowered his voice to speak to the wider audience. “All right, this is my fault. Too many big words. We’ll review the rules one more time, people. While I go to the next commercial break, get out your damn crayons so you can take notes.” He looked up at the window separating his dark studio from the well-lit booth of his sound engineer. The young woman behind the glass gave him a cutthroat signal to say he was off the air.

  His eyes darted to the next booth window, the one where the light never shone, though he doubted that it was always empty. His producer, an abject coward, had yet to show his face, but that was not to say that the man did not occasionally look in on the radio show. Zachary used the reflective dark glass as a mirror, and his fingers combed back unruly strands of long black hair to expose a widow’s peak. This was a sign of the black arts in his grandmother’s lexicon. And his ears tapered down to the skin, no lobes, another granny omen that he would turn out badly. Yet he had evolved into God or God the Son. The station manager told him so every day when the man answered each telephone call with the words, Oh, God, it’s you, oh, Jesus freaking Christ.

  But women liked him.

  His full lips and a bad-boy smile promised the ladies a roller-coaster ride of a real bad time. Women were also attracted to the hazel eyes that changed color depending upon ambient light or his mood: dark as bullet holes if he was angry; greenish brown when he was merely sardonic; and sunshine brought out the bits of blue, though he was only awake in the daylight for staff meetings and pretaped interviews. Ian Zachary had a preference for vampire hours, and his skin tone bordered on prison pallor. Slouching deep in his chair, lean and languid, he propped his cowboy boots on the console. His black shirt and jeans had designer chic and the tightness of a second skin. He was that new creature—Cool Goth.

  A polar opposite was that lump of girl in the control booth. She obviously cut her own hair over the bathroom sink, and her shapeless clothes were more appropriate to the prairie town she hailed from. This homely youngster with thick ankles and prissy thin lips was his new sound engineer, call screener, personal assistant and whipping girl. Zachary had chosen her from a lineup of less ugly mutts with more experience. He had found her fragile personality . . . appealing.

  His new pet sat in her cage of glass and steel, electronics and blinking ruby call buttons. Each red light represented a fool who actually believed he had a chance of getting on the air, though only one would make the cut in the final segment. On his own side of the window, best described as a cave, darkness was alleviated only by the glow of his control panel and the screen on his laptop computer. In the next room, his engineer sat shell-shocked beneath fluorescent lights that faded her freckles and leached the healthy farm-girl glow from her skin. After hours of being ridiculed on the air, her eyes were no longer bright, and gone was that smile of eagerness to do good on the first day of her brand-new job.

  Zachary checked the digital clock on his panel as it counted down the seconds before live air. The commercial break was almost done. “Babe?” All employees of both sexes were called babe. What was the point of remembering names when so many did not last an entire shift? “Prep the next caller. We’ll take the moron with the lisp.”

  She looked down at her phone board, suddenly frightened, and then she shook her head to tell him that the lisping caller’s light had gone dark. Zachary left his chair and crossed the room, walking toward her window, saying, “No, babe, don’t tell me you lost that one.” Ah, but she had. This incompetence was the downside of hiring the tender mental cases. He returned to his panel to check the screen for the most overt flaws of call-in fans. “Okay, babe, we’ll take the next one—that guy who squeaks like a girl.” And if the next caller did not squeak as promised, he was going to fire the engineer as a finale to the show.

  He sat back in his chair, glaring at her until she cued him to pick up line six. The commercial interlude was over. He hit the button for the next caller, saying, “So you’re Randy from SoHo.”

  “Hi,” said a small reedy voice almost lost in the dark. “I’m waiting to talk to Zack.”

  “You’re talking to me now, you fool. When you hear my voice, that means you’re on the air. My idiot engineer never mentioned that?” He heard a sudden intake of breath, then dead silence from the stagestruck Randy of SoHo.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Zachary to the caller. “Daddy loves you, you useless twit. What’ve you got for me? It better be damn good. If you’re as lame as the last one, I’ll have to fire the little girl who screened you.” He imagined the caller’s sweaty hands worming round a telephone receiver. “That’s right, you geek. Her job is hanging on you. Randy? Still there, sport? Yes, I hear you breathing. And now, for the listening pleasure of my audience, I’ll describe my engineer’s reaction to her impending redundancy while we all do a slow countdown from ten. If Randy can’t get his little dick up in time to save her, she’s history. Ten. Did I mention that she was young? Oh, yes, fresh off the farm—just a little lost girl a thousand miles from home. Nine. She’s wearing shiny new shoes and an outfit she bought for her first trip to New York City. She must’ve thought we all dressed like Catholic schoolgirls.”

  He swiveled around to face the plate glass. “She’s just sitting there so pale and still—so exposed. Can you see her? Every pimple, every pucker of cellulite? Oh, and that hairy patch on one knee, a spot she missed with her razor this morning. Eight! She seems quiet. But you just know inside her head, she’s running round in circles, flapping like a duck and screaming.”

  Her shoulders slumped as she died a little. They all did that. She was probably wondering if she should risk a nervous laugh. Could she risk not laughing? What if he was serious? He could see all of this flashing through her mind.

  “Well, people, so far, this isn’t much fun. She’s about as animated as a corpse.”

  Stupid, boring cow.

  “Seven. Randy? You think her parents are listening tonight? Of course they are. Six. She would’ve told all her friends and relatives to tune in for her first big break in show business. Five seconds to go, people. Will our hero on the phone make it in time? Four. Will the
little girl lose her job and take the next bus back to the farm?”

  She snapped.

  Finally.

  “Our girl’s not dead yet. Her chair is spinning round and round. Her eyes are glazing over as she stares at the ceiling. Looking for flights of angels, babe? Her chair just came to a dead stop. Her head is slowly swiveling. Oh—scary. I swear to God, people, it’s like a scene from a horror movie. Her eyes are bulging, going medieval on me. She’s raising a fist—extending her middle finger—a suggestion that I commit a physically impossible sexual act on myself. Wait. There’s more. She could’ve let it go at that, a simple elegant gesture that pretty much said it all. But she just mimed a well-known slang word for the anal orifice. I’m guessing that’s my new name. Is that right, babe?”

  She mouthed the words, Die, you bastard.

  He liked that. He liked it a lot. Ah, and now the angry tears. She was shredding all the careful notes written at the start of the day, making confetti of pages lined with her schoolgirl penmanship.

  “Uh, Zack?” Randy the timid caller had found his voice. “I got a photograph of a live juror right here in Manhattan. So . . . what do I win?”

  3

  JOHANNA APOLLO RAISED HER FACE TO THE LOW-RIDING sun as she strolled toward Bleecker Street. The morning air was cold, but early risers got company vans with four good tires. This would be the happy side effect of changing her hours and her route to avoid any more contact with Bunny. His habits were nocturnal and his home was a patch of sidewalk on another block.