Shifters

by Lee, Edward

  But then Anna’s lips closed on his throat.

  NINE

  Party

  (i)

  Lehrling stopped out front, the rather infamous building on Third Avenue. “You go on in, I’ll park the car and wait for you in the waiting room.”

  Locke nodded. His head ached with each nod. “What do you think this is all about?”

  “It’s nothing, man. Go on in.”

  Locke got out of the Volante and closed the door. He walked up to the Public Safety Building stepping past the trio of winos who sat passing a 40-ouncer of Rainer Ale on the steps in the futile hope that they’d be picked up for vag by one of the passing patrolmen and wind up with three hots and a cot for a few days. Locke took the elevator to the 4th floor and wandered down the hall till he came to a small sign that read in white tactile letters: SEATTLE POLICE DEPT., HOMICIDE /ASSAULT UNIT—NORTH PRECINCT, with an arrow indicating a right turn down the hall.

  Locke felt weird. Walking into a police station. Just upstairs was the City jail. It was something he’d never done before. Images from TV surfaced: cops striding back and forth from the booking room, stray banter, phones ringing, typewriters clacking. A bald sergeant with a mole like the end of a finger looked blankly up from the desk.

  “I’m here to see a Captain Cordesman,” Locke said.

  “Locke, the suicide?”

  Locke didn’t like the way he’d worded it. “Yes, I witnessed a suicide last night.”

  “Down the hall to the left,” the sergeant said, looking back down at some papers.

  Locke was surprised they hadn’t searched him, or at least signed him in. He could be a nut for all they knew. He could have a gun or a bomb or something.

  CAPTAIN J. CORDESMAN, a plaque read on a milky glass door. HOMICIDE. “Come on in,” a voice invited before Locke could even knock. No doubt the room’s occupant had seen his outline in the glass.

  Locke entered a cramped office. A slim figure rose behind a dented desk heaped with reports. Coffee bubbled on a burner.

  “I’m Cordesman,” the guy said. “Thanks for coming down. Have a seat.”

  Locke sat, distracted. This guy was a cop? He was skinny and had hair to his shoulders, hadn’t shaved this morning, either. A crumpled tie adorned a crumpled dress shirt. “Want some coffee?”

  It looked like pitch percolating on the burner. “No thanks,” Locke said.

  “So you’re a poet, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Interesting.” Cordesman lit a Camel, cocked a brow. “You all right? You sick?”

  “I’m hungover.”

  The cop seemed to smile, as though remembering something. “How many did you throw back?”

  “I don’t know, eight beers, ten. I wasn’t driving or anything.”

  “Always drink that much?”

  Locke frowned. “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “Just curious. I guess all poets drink.”

  What was he getting at? “You called me down here to ask me how many beers I had?”

  Cordesman sucked smoke. “I’m just trying to determine how accurate your sense of observation was last night. How come you didn’t have a bar tab?”

  “Huh?”

  “A bar tab, you didn’t have one. We checked.”

  Why would they check that? Locke hadn’t done anything wrong. “A friend of mine paid.”

  “Lehrling. The novelist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he didn’t see the guy kill himself?”

  “No, he’d already left.”

  Cordesman nodded and tapped an ash. A Glenfiddich ashtray on the desk sat clogged with butts. “How well did you know Roderick Byers?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy, you know. The guy who killed himself.”

  White Shirt, Locke associated. “I never knew his name. Never saw him before.”

  “So you were just walking out of the lot and you happened to look and see this guy do it? At night? No lights in the lot?”

  Locke was beginning to dislike the sound of this. “The streetlights were on. Didn’t you check that too? And, no, I didn’t just happen to notice the guy. He called me over.”

  “Called you over? To his car? But you just said you’d never seen him before. Didn’t you say that? Just now?”

  Why is this guy grilling me? Locke wondered.

  “You nervous, Mr. Locke? You’re sweating.”

  Was he? Yes, suddenly he felt icky, stuck in his own heat. “I’m hung over, like I said,” Locke excused. “And I’m a little shaken up.”

  Cordesman tittered without smiling. “Understandable. Who wouldn’t be, I mean, after seeing a friend commit suicide?”

  “He wasn’t a friend. And when I said I hadn’t seen him before, I meant I hadn’t seen him before last night.”

  “Ah.” Cordesman crushed out the Camel and fired up another. He pushed strings of his long brown hair off his brow. “Just tell me everything that happened.”

  It felt grueling to replay the scene to himself. He told Cordesman how he’d noticed White Shirt and the girl arguing in the parking lot, and later how White Shirt had told him that the girl broke off their engagement. “So after the bar closes, I’m walking across the lot to go home, and he calls me over to his car. That’s when he killed himself.”

  “That’s all, Mr. Locke?”

  “He said some weird things. And at first he was holding the gun on me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He try to rob you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did he hold the gun on you?”

  “I don’t know!” Locke shouted.

  A clock was ticking. Cordesman laxed back in his chair, smoking, looking at Locke. In the window behind him, clouds engulfed the sun. “Relax, Mr. Locke. I’m not interrogating you, I’m just—”

  “I know. Trying to determine the accuracy of my state of observation. Sounds like interrogation to me.”

  “What ‘weird things’?”

  “I don’t know. He was drunk.” But what did Locke remember, like exactly? White Shirt had said… Transposition, man. Metamorphosis. What could he have meant?

  You still love her, don’t you? White Shirt had asked.

  It must’ve been his imagination. “He said something about portents, warnings. He was drunk, and I don’t remember it all too well. I was drunk too.”

  “Portents. Warnings.” Cordesman seemed to fix something to that. “What kind of gun did he have?”

  Locke rolled his eyes. “Look, Captain, I’m a poet, not a gunsmith. All I know is it was a gun. And it looked big, bigger than the ones in the movies.”

  “It was big, all right,” Cordesman explained. “A Webley .455, an antique. The British manufactured them for their officers in the Boer War, they wanted a sidearm that could take out a drug-crazed native with one shot. Fires a bullet half an inch wide.”

  “I’m edified in knowing that,” Locke said.

  Cordesman then laughed mirthlessly. “I guess if you’re going to kill yourself, that’s the piece of hardware for the job.”

  Locke felt cruxed, irritated. Sweat trickled at his armpits.

  “Parity,” Cordesman said. “Do you know what parity means?”

  Locke eyed him. “It’s a connotative noun that means equivalence or resemblance, in status, nature, amounts, things like that.”

  “Exactly. Similitude, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s a parity here, Mr. Locke, a similitude. There often is when a violent death is involved. And I think you’re aware of this parity, but you’re not mentioning it for some reason.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Captain,” Locke said.

  “Byers was a poet.”

  Byers. Locke still had trouble with the association. His name wasn’t Byers to Locke, it was White Shirt. But—

  A poet?

  “I didn’t know that,” Locke event
ually said.

  “No?” Cordesman lit yet another Camel. If he didn’t get to the point shortly, he’d die of lung cancer right here in the office. “He was a professor of English at Evergreen State. Had several dozen books of poetry published. Hardbacks.”

  Locke kind of crinkled his nose. Probably just little college hardcover house, and small-press publishers.

  “Random House,” Cordesman added. “For a poet, this guy Byers was a big gun. No pun intended. Big reviews in the New York Times, the Post’s Bookworld, all that. Gotta $50,000 advance for his last book. Sounds like pretty good money to me. You get that kind of money for your poetry, Mr. Locke?”

  Locke crinkled his nose some more. “No.”

  Cordesman nodded. “Strange, though, isn’t it? The guy’s a big-name poet, and you’ve never even heard of him.”

  “What’s a big name? Poetry is poetry.” Locke couldn’t help but add, “And $50,000 advances for poetry books are very atypical.”

  “Still, it’s weird. You didn’t know him, yet he called you to the car to tell you something. How do you account for that?”

  “I can’t account for it.”

  “It’s almost like he waited for you. He waited for you specifically. To tell you ‘weird things.’ My question is this, Mr. Locke. Why? Why you?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. And what’s this got to do with parity?”

  “Byers was a poet. You’re a poet. Byers’ girlfriend recently broke up with him. Didn’t your girlfriend recently break up with you?”

  Locke stared at him.

  “I’m an investigator,” Cordesman replied to Locke’s stare. “I investigate death, and any potential detail surrounding death. It’s my job, Mr. Locke. I ask around.”

  Locke, at once, felt trespassed upon, molested.

  “Clare something, right?” the policeman continued. “A paralegal?”

  “What’s my private life got to do with the suicide?”

  “Parity, remember?”

  Locke continued to stare.

  “You and Byers have a lot in common.”

  “So what?”

  Cordesman gave a shrug. His crumpled tie had an embroidered halfmoon on it, flecked with ashes. He smiled crookedly. “I don’t know, I just have this feeling that Byers was specifically drawn to you, via similitude. Kind of weird, huh?”

  “Yeah, kind of weird.” Similitude, the thought returned to Locke’s mind. His mind felt clogged, like the ashtray. Now Cordesman seemed to be looking at him in some sort of precision. “Two poets. Two jilted lovers.” The cop held up a small photo of White Shirt. “Hell, you two guys even look alike.”

  Did they? Bullshit, Locke thought, and even if they did, what was the big deal? “I don’t know what you’re grabbing at.”

  Cordesman’s lips pursed, as if sucking on something, a thought, perhaps. Or a conjecture. He got up, walked around behind Locke, closed the office door, and returned to the desk. A sheet of blank paper had been pinned to a cork board beside the window. The policeman lit another cigarette and returned his gaze to Locke.

  “You know the old phrase. Opposites attract? Well, in my business, that’s almost never true. In my business—”

  “Parities attract,” Locke guessed.

  “Yes, and why? I think people, and their interactions, are sort of…magnetic. In lots of ways. About ninety percent of the homicides in this country are committed by perpetrators who have things in common with the victim. Same for rape. Same for most violent crimes.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “Oh, there’s a point,” Cordesman continued without pause. “There’s something in the human psyche, I think, that has a mutual effect. If you’d been investigating murders for as long as I have, you’d probably know what I was talking about.”

  “This wasn’t a murder. It was suicide.”

  “Well, suicide is murder. The murder of oneself. It’s still a crime. And what is crime really about? It’s about the failure of personal interactions, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I think that people are called to commit crimes. Does that sound absurd? I think people are summoned.”

  Locke’s throat felt parched. Hadn’t White Shirt said something about a calling, a summons?

  “Why did you do it?” Cordesman asked.

  “If you’re accusing me of murder, I think I better call a lawyer.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry. Byers killed himself. We n/a/a’d his hands last night, our TSD people. We’ve proved that he killed himself.”

  “Then why did you ask me why I did it?”

  Smoke gushed out of Cordesman’s smile. “I meant why did you write that word on the inside of Byers’ windshield?”

  “What word?”

  “Come on, Mr. Locke. There was writing on the inside of the windshield, in blood. In Byers’ blood.”

  “Well, I didn’t write it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did?”

  “He must’ve written it himself.”

  Cordesman laughed. “What? After he shot himself?”

  “Why not? He could’ve written it before he died.”

  “That would be clinically impossible,” Cordesman countered. “Death was instantaneous. The Webley slug created what forensic people call a counter-cou-vacuum. It sucked his entire brain out the opposite side of his head. Byers couldn’t have written it. He was dead.”

  “Someone else must have, then. Between the time he killed himself and when the ambulance arrived.”

  “In five minutes? Christ, the hospital’s just a couple of miles away from the Concannon’s parking lot.”

  “Then when I went back inside to have the keep call,” Locke guessed.

  “Unlikely. We’re talking minutes here, Mr. Locke. Somebody just happened to be walking by at two o’clock in the goddamn morning when you just happened to be back inside having the barkeep call the ambulance? And this somebody just says hey, that dude just blew his brains out in his car so what the hell I think I’ll just write some funny word on his windshield? In his blood?”

  Locke could not assess this. It was too fast, and there was too much he didn’t know. “Listen, Captain, I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I didn’t write any word on the guy’s windshield. I wasn’t even aware of it.”

  Cordesman’s keen, analytical gaze went suddenly flat. Was he disappointed? “No, Mr. Locke, I guess you didn’t. Maybe you didn’t. But I’d really like to know who did.”

  Locke sat in the silence, trying to untie the knot of feelings and questions. “What was the word?” he finally asked.

  The gaunt policeman turned to the cork board, where he’d posted the blank sheet of paper. He picked up a red magic marker, which squeaked as he hastily wrote:

  SCIFTAN

  TEN

  Encounters

  (i)

  It goes on forever. Why?

  I’m a monster. I’m hideous. I ate a man’s brains last night and I liked it. There’s something—some gravitation, some force—that wields us in some way. It’s not fair, I don’t understand it.

  Why am I like this? Why do I do the things that I do?

  I guess I’m just in one of those moods. Women get that way sometimes—ha—Maybe it’s that time of the month. I’m a bitch. I want to kill.

  Good and bad. Beauty and ugliness. They’re words, they’re relativities. Why can’t I be like everybody else? I’m not allowed to be, it’s my providence. We all have a providence, don’t we?

  The man on the boat—whose brains I ate like a rich meal—he had some money on him. I bought some clothes at a store called The Gap. Do I look pretty now? Will people look at me and say “There’s a pretty girl”? Maybe. But beauty’s skin deep. What a trite phrase! They wouldn’t think I was pretty if they could see what I look like underneath.

  I almost wish that they could.

  ««—»»

  I know what I’m looking fo
r now. I’ve always been looking for it—something true, something real. It’s my only salvation, and it never ends. Never, never… It’s like the Sartre story: what we need the most—to be happy, to be free—is the one thing we can never have. Vicious cycles. I want you, you want somebody else, somebody else wants me.

  I want to be loved. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Sometimes I laugh about it, my hands outstretched to the moon at midnight, with some peon’s blood running over my breasts and down my legs, making myself come with my own fingers in this black chasm that’s my life. I want to be loved. But the only man on earth who loves me is the only man who has the power to destroy me. And he will. Someday he will. Because the closest feeling to love is hate.