by Jim Nisbet
“God almighty,” Lavinia said, angrily throwing a pair into our basket. “What the hell has that guy been eating?”
“Cheap wine, I’d guess.”
“What do you know about it?”
“What’s to know? You are what you eat?”
“Look. There’s a goddamn egg poacher.”
She pointed out a plasticized package containing a saucepan with lid, five shallow semi-spherical metal cups, and a flat, round flange with five holes stamped out of it.
“It looks like a hubcap.”
“It cooks eggs by steaming them in these cups.” She stood on tiptoe to pull down the package. “The cups fit into the hubcap, which covers the saucepan, half-filled with water, which you put on the stove….”
“I got it I got it—get it.”
“I can’t reach it….”
From thirty feet away came sounds not unlike those to be obtained by spitting on a hot griddle, with moaning in between.
“God almighty….”
As the woman at the cash register ran the egg poacher over the bar code scanner, she said, “First thing we sold off Six in a while.”
I nodded. “No wonder the manager’s crying in his office.”
“He said he’d turn this store around.” She scanned the sausage. “But the store’s turning him around.”
“Curly, look.”
Lavinia pointed to a San Francisco Examiner in a rack of tabloids and fashion magazines at the entrance to the check stand. Its headline read, “FAMED DRUMMER MURDERED.”
“Famed?” I said. “That guy was no more famous than road tar in the average fender well. He—”
Lavinia elbowed me sharply in the ribs. “I heard it was converting to a tabloid format.” She pulled a copy. “And sure enough. Yuck. Last I heard,” she added, holding it so I could look at it too, “they no longer publish on Saturday or Sunday.”
“They never had a Saturday edition,” the checker said. “And as soon as that Hearst tit dries up they’ll suspend Monday through Friday, too. Mark my words.”
Lavinia folded the paper. “But the guy who redesigned the Examiner redesigned The Wall Street Journal, too.”
“What are you trying to tell me,” the checker retorted with unexpected venom, “that shit stinks no matter how it’s packaged?” Lavinia laughed out loud, but the checker wasn’t amused. “I will never forgive how that ass-wipe Wall Street Journal crucified Bill Clinton. Every day for eight years.”
“They don’t publish on the weekends, either,” Livinia pointed out.
The checker vehemently totaled the register. “My uncrowned king!”
In the parking lot, Lavinia spread the Examiner over the trunk lid of the Lexus.
Acting on an anonymous tip, police discovered the body of Tenesmus drummer Stefan Stepnowksi in a Potrero District warehouse early this morning.
Few details were available by press time. Citing the confidentiality of an ongoing investigation, a police spokeswoman disclosed only that a Caucasian male had been shot at least once at close range and that be probably died instantly. The body was discovered in a pool of blood behind the unlocked door of a warehouse on De Haro Street at 12:41 A.M.
Although the police spokeswoman refused to confirm the victim’s identity, pending notification of next of kin, the Examiner night desk was able to determine through informed sources that the murdered man has been positively identified as Stefan Stepnowski, famed drummer of the short-lived thrash-metal band Tenesmus. Though releasing only one CD before disintegrating over disagreements about the band’s creative direction, the influence of Tenesmus extended far beyond the scant ten months of its existence. Music acts as diverse as Pocono Harris, Star Chamber, Robohammer, and Unclaimed Deceased often cite the band’s pioneering sound. A fan who works the night copy desk at the Examiner reports that despite their initial success none of the members of Tenesmus was able to capitalize on the notoriety of the band’s first and only recording, Scarred By Chains. That album has been out of print for at least ten years due to contractual disputes, the fan said, and Stepnowski was widely presumed to have been the sole surviving member of the band.
“What a depressing mess,” Lavinia said, as she started the car. “And what about the man’s poor wife?”
I settled the groceries in the footwell of the passenger seat. “I never heard of Unclaimed Deceased.”
“Three guys dress like morgue attendants right down to the necrotic cosmetics and perform songs about getting high on formaldehyde and necrophilia and the smell of dead Easter lilies, which act they manage quite handily to turn into a metaphor for greed in corporate America, and you never heard of them? Where the fuck have you been?”
“Re-reading The Octopus by Frank Norris,” I said.
Livinia rasied her head with a start. “Is that where—?”
“I guess they expressed something about the human condition that needed expressing,” I interrupted.
“They’ve sold millions of records, Curly.”
“Sometimes the shit works and sometimes it doesn’t,” I observed glumly.
She drove us out of the parking lot.
“Christ,” I said after a while. “The Examiner used to be a great newspaper.”
“That was then. This is now. Don’t litter.”
The sun was up but it was still early. We stopped at a red light. On a power line above us a pair of rosy finches perched, facing opposite directions, and twittered merrily.
“I can’t believe they decided to call that guy famous,” I groused as we pulled through the intersection. “He was nobody.”
“A nobody in a pool of blood,” Lavinia said.
“Are you going to start up with that again?”
“If he was shot some place else, then dumped on the loading dock, why was there so much blood?”
I rolled up the Examiner and stuffed it in the grocery bag. “I asked myself that while I was still looking at him.”
“If he was shot at close range, accurately enough to kill him, it seems logical he would have bled out on the spot.”
“So he was lounging around the warehouse with his shoes off. Somebody found him and killed him. So what?”
“I wish we’d looked for his shoes.”
“Why? What are you saying? That Stepnowski was killed somewhere else, the killer collected his blood, moved the body and redistributed the blood around it, all to confuse the police? It seems like a lot of trouble. What the hell for?”
“Exactly.” Lavinia tapped a fingernail on the steering wheel. “The killer didn’t want anybody to know where the killing happened. He or she didn’t want anybody even to suspect that it happened someplace else. So he or she went to a lot of trouble.”
“But not so much trouble as your little brain is going to. How do you collect blood from a gunshot wound? You pick the guy up and hold him over an empty bucket?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because dead people weigh too much. You ever heard the term dead weight?”
“Man, Curly, you take things too literally. I wasn’t even interested in this idea until you decided the setup was wrong. Now you’re so pissed off you think it was my idea. Don’t be such a cheap date.”
I looked out the window. I never minded staying up all night for the right reason. But staying up all night for the wrong reasons—which far outnumber the right ones—is nothing if not exasperating.
Another block passed. “Besides,” Lavinia said, “Stepnowski was a little guy. Real little.”
Ten minutes later, as we were walking around the side of the garage to Ivy’s back steps, she said, “It’s interesting to think about.”
“Personally, I’m trying to forget that guy, face down in his own blood.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his blood.”
“Maybe those weren’t his socks.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his money, either.”
“It wasn’t his money. It was our money. Wait.” She stopped. “You mean somebody moved the b
ody and planted the money on it? Because—wait, don’t tell me—because they knew we were looking for him and when we found him we would take the money and go away and not tell anybody about it, thereby implicating ourselves in the murder and ultimately muddying the identity of the true murderer into the bargain?”
“Exactly.”
Lavinia paused with one foot on the first step, turned halfway back toward me, paused again, turned forward again, and paused again. Then, abruptly, she resumed climbing the staircase.
“Maybe he wasn’t even dead.” She took a step. “Maybe he wasn’t even really there.” She took another step. “Maybe he was a hologram.”
“Now you’ve got a theory….”
Chapter Ten
IVY WAS SITTING RIGHT WHERE WE’D LEFT HIM, STARING INTO space and tapping the vinyl table top with opposite ends of his soda straw, reversing its length within his fingers between taps.
“Hi, Ivy,” Lavinia said pleasantly.
“The fuck you been?”
“Shopping.” She pulled the egg poacher from the bag I was carrying and showed it to him. “Remember?”
He took it. “I could have been jonesing, you been gone so long.”
“Hey, Grumpy, think of the alternative.” Lavinia shucked groceries out of the sack onto the kitchen counter. “Everybody could have stayed here and bled to death from having shards of glass lodged in their maxillary sinuses.”
Ivy eyed the groceries with a mixture of suspicion and disgust.
I unrolled the Examiner. “Check it out.”
He pushed it away. “I don’t read the papers.” As he stood, he retrieved his clasp knife from its belt holster and slit the plastic perimeter of the egg poacher package, spilling its contents into the kitchen sink.
Lavinia distributed her supplies over the limited counter space. “Now, then. How about a nice, hearty breakfast?”
Ivy half-filled the saucepan with water and set it on the front burner of the stove. “Get that shit out of my way.”
“Come on, Ivy. Curly and I are hungry. When’s the last time you ate?”
“I don’t eat. Make room.”
Lavinia made a face. In that moment I thought we were in for a recapitulation of a domestic argument typical of the two years Lavinia and Ivy had lived together. The setup was perfect. Neither of them liked being told what to do, and both liked to tell others what to do. But Lavinia knew it wasn’t worth it, and Ivy didn’t care. She shoved the groceries to the back of the counter and stepped aside.
Contrary to appearances, Ivy had busied himself during the first fifteen or twenty minutes of our absence. First, he’d carefully scraped all of our speedball hors d’oeuvre off the edge of the table top and onto the surface of the blue saucer. Next, he’d set about two cups of water to boiling. Then, he’d cut an eight-inch patch out of a clean tee-shirt, which he’d stretched over the mouth of a empty wide-mouthed jar and, after dimpling the cloth with his thumb, he’d secured it there with a rubber band. Then he waited.
Now Ivy half-filled the poacher’s saucepan, placed it over a lit burner, and placed egg cups into four of the five holes in the cover flange. The fifth cup he half-filled with tap water.
“Hey,” said Lavinia, nothing the setup. “You going for your own cooking show?”
“That sounds like work,” Ivy said. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Yeah,” Lavinia said thoughtfully. “Work….”
Ivy used the edge of his knife to tip an inch or two of speedball into the fifth egg cup, which he began to pass back and forth through the flame of a second burner while stirring the solution with the tip of the knife. “Turn it down a little.”
All three of us stood around the stove, watching the egg cup heat. Ivy held it by the flat metal tab that extended off its perimeter. “That’s too hot.” He cursed and set the egg cup on the stove top, waved his fingers in the air, blew on them, and finally held them under the faucet, thoughtfully watching as cold water trickled over them.
Abruptly Ivy walked out of the kitchen door and down the back steps. Lavinia and I looked at each other. Two minutes passed, then three. Lavinia turned off the cold water. The saucepan began to rattle, and Lavinia lowered the flame.
Ivy came back through the door with a straight pine twig six or seven inches long and about an inch in diameter. He quickly shaved its bark into the sink with his clasp knife, then sliced a diameter about a half inch into one end of it.
With the tip of the knife he worked one of the empty egg cups out of the five-hole flange, flipped it into the sink, and ran water over it. When the cup had cooled to the touch, he pressed its metal tab into the slot at the end of the stick, so that stick and cup became a ladle. He held it up for everybody to admire.
Lavinia nodded approvingly. “Didn’t you attend survival school in the Navy?”
“101st Airborne,” I reminded her.
“As if he’d ever let us forget it,” she retorted.
Ivy transferred the dope and water mixture from its original egg cup into the ladle, replaced the empty cup into the flange, and started over again.
He passed the wood-handled cup back and forth over the second flame and stirred it with the tip of the knife. Little bubbles began to form at the bottom of the cup. Soon enough, the mixture of powdered heroin and cocaine began to dissolve.
Lavinia and I were fascinated.
“But Ivy….” Lavinia said.
Ivy grunted.
“Are you getting set to geeze this stuff?”
“I don’t geeze,” Ivy said.
“Neither do I,” I stipulated, just in case anybody was listening.
Ivy shook his head disdainfully. “You probably weren’t even inoculated.”
I pointed at my head. “What do you call this?”
“You got a point.”
Lavinia giggled. “I know you never geeze,” she told Ivy impatiently. “That’s why I’m asking.”
To geeze is to inject directly into a vein using a needle. What Lavinia was getting at, however, is that usually a street drug which comes as a powder (though people shoot tarball too; people will shoot anything), as ours had, needs to be converted into something shootable. As a rule it’s mixed with a little water in a spoon which is heated over a flame until the powder goes into solution. Then a little piece of cotton wadding, such as is to be found cinched behind the placket by the button threads on your better brands of shirts and blouses, or, more commonly, twisted around the ends of an ear swab, is placed in the spoon. The liquefied drug is drawn through this cotton filter by a needle into the barrel of a syringe and, voilà, one more or less purified fix.
Next time you see ear swabs strewn around the sidewalk in front of one or another of your cozy local neighborhood stoops, you’ll know what you’re looking at.
By the way, while it is commonly held that the bit of cotton will filter impurities from the drug solution, it is not necessarily so. Moreover, a tiny filament of the cotton itself is likely to slip up the bore of the needle, as the piston is drawn back, and slip right back down it when the solution is injected into the bloodstream of the user. The subsequent reaction is called “cotton fever;” the symptoms are not pleasant, and their intensity is capable of exceeding any pleasure to be derived from the drug. Such is the junkies’ communal humor that, witnessing a fellow user suffering the painful jactitations of cotton fever, they almost certainly will laugh at him. Whosoever experiences its effects, however, laughs not; he may even die. Although, as junkies never tire of reminding anybody who will listen, especially each other, if impurities or embolisms killed junkies, there wouldn’t be any junkies.
“So what are you cooking it up for, then?” Lavinia persisted.
“Quiet. Let’s see if it works.”
With a final swirl of the knife blade, the contents of the egg cup went into solution. “Okay.” Ivy removed the cup from the flame and set it on the rim of the sink. “What do we have here?”
“A big spoon, is what we have here,�
�� I observed.
“True story, looks like.” We watched as the eddies in the solution, still quite transparent, slowed and nearly stopped. “There.” Ivy pointed his knife. “See those little dots?”
Tiny specks, like grains of sand, bounded along in the mild turbulence.
“And look,” said Ivy. “There.”
Lavinia leaned closer. “Where?”
“It comes and goes—there—see?”
What seemed to amount to little more than twinkles of light followed along in the wake of other, parti-colored grains.
“Glass,” Lavinia said. “The others look like sand.”
“Sand and glass are related, aren’t they?” I speculated. “I wonder which would do the most damage?” Lavinia winced. “Hey,” I pointed out, “I didn’t even mention microscopic impurities, let alone soluble ones.”
Ivy straightened up. “Those grits could be anything—including grits. But we got to work with what the good Lord has given us to work with.”
“I hate it when he brings God into the picture,” said Lavinia.
Now Ivy tipped the improvised ladle over the piece of cloth covering the mouth of the jar. The solution pooled there for a moment, then slowly began to seep away. In the end, a clear solution covered the bottom of the salsa jar, and a tiny, dirty collection of grits and bits of glass lay heaped in the bottom of the cloth dimple.
“Voilà,” Ivy said.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Lavinia said.
“So far, so good,” I agreed. “Now you’ll do the whole batch?”
“True story, Curly.”
Within fifteen minutes Ivy had brought two cups of water to a gentle boil and carefully stirred the entire saucer of speedball into solution, which he then ladled onto his cloth filter. When he was finished, larger pieces of glass lay along the bottom of the saucepan. Atop the cloth filter, there remained trash sufficient to half-fill a teaspoon. It significantly slowed seepage through the filter.
Now Ivy removed the cloth from the mouth of the jar and transferred some of its solution to a single egg cup. Then he put the cup with the speedball solution into its hole in the egg poacher and covered the flange with the saucepan lid. He turned up the heat and stared at the saucepan. “I knew a guy, once,” he said thoughtfully, “who started having headaches. When they got worse he called them migraines. Later, in the dark, he’d see flashes of light. They were very real to him, like heat lightning outside his window. But the flashes were generated inside his head.” The saucepan began to mutter. Ivy waited. When steam began to leak out of the seam between the rim of the lid and the rim of the pan, he reduced the heat until the water merely simmered.