by Lee, Edward
Piss on the dead, Cordesman thought. I need a drink…but I’ll settle for a Coke. He yanked open the Kenmore refrigerator, reached in—
“Fuck!”
—and quailed.
Brock and Kerr burst into a round of laughter like that of psychotic trolls.
“Gotcha, Captain,” Brock celebrated.
No Cokes occupied the refrigerator, only clear, plastic evidence bags containing human body parts. One part was a nose. Another bag contained two feet. And another—the kicker—contained the severed head of a little blonde-haired girl.
Nine, maybe ten years old.
Brock and Kerr jammed; they were hooting it up.
“Always wanted to get Stone Face,” Brock laughed.
Kerr: “Hey, Captain? How’s the Coke?”
Cordesman slammed the fridge door shut, mortified. “The Coke’s great, Kerr. Almost as good as the first one you buy on Pike Street after your transfer to the Meter Unit. You people are perverse.”
“No we’re not, Captain,” Brock clarified. “We’re cops.”
Cordesman lit another Camel. “Don’t like it? Sue me. Report me to the Public Safety Director. And what’s this shit about the red hairs?”
Brock was a walking broomstick in her autopsy greens. Cordesman had to admit: skinny and close to breastless, electrocution hair, glasses thick as coasters—hell, he didn’t care, he could go for her. She’s probably a fireball in bed, he thought. The nasally, sinitic voice he could overlook.
“So the fun’s over?” Brock quelled her smile. “Okay, sir. If you ever took the time to learn how to turn your computer on, you would’ve seen the cross-reff two days ago.”
“Does this have anything to do with the 64 we had this morning? Lehrling, the Wallingford novelist?”
“No, sir, at least no accrual of evidence suggests that thus far. I’m talking about the data readout from the other three precincts. Seven from South, five from West, four from East—that’s a total of sixteen malicious homicides—all involving extreme modes of violence. You should find it interesting, Captain, that each victim had a heavy rap sheet, all ex-cons, all repeat offenders. One guy was a triple-rape-o, another guy had been in and out of Walla Walla his whole adult life on child-molestation convictions. Couple of armed robbers, bunch of dealers, and six guys with murder convictions. And they all have one major forensic common denominator.”
Cordesman couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “The red hairs…”
“Yes, Captain, the red hairs. Some ancillary, some pubic, some cranial—it doesn’t matter. I got a one-hundred-percent fusiformal match on all of them. And, incidentally, they all genetically correspond to—”
“Wire,” Cordesman droned. “The crank-head we found dead on the cabin cruiser at the Liberty Yacht Club.”
“Uh-hmm. There is absolutely no doubt. The same person did ’em all.”
Kerr smoothed the lapels of his blazer. “How’s that for a ‘candyass city,’ Captain? Looks like you’ve got something you haven’t had since you worked homicide in Maryland.”
Cordesman’s mouth gushed opaque smoke. “What’s that?”
“A serial killer,” Kerr said.
Cordesman stared though the words.
Jill Brock removed her glasses, began polishing them with a corner of her labcoat. “And there’s one more thing. Salivic and secretial Barr bodies, sir.”
“What?”
“Barr bodies. Seven-probe genetic profiles can identify them now on fifteen percent of secretors. Don’t you read the trade journals anymore?”
Cordesman sighed with a paramount weariness. “Jill,” he reminded, “I’ve only been up for about twenty-three hours. You want to help me out here, or do I have to go to med school?”
Brock put her glasses back on. The stout lenses made her eyes looks huge. “Barr bodies are cellular incipients that are exclusive to the xx-chromosomal pattern.”
Cordesman squinted at her. Does she mean—
“Your serial-killer is a woman,” Brock informed him.
(ii)
The visage could only be one of heaven…
An angel, he mused.
Locke dreamed that an angel was carrying him away from some nightmare, a charnel house. A devil’s church heaped with broken glass, used needles encrusted with blood, sperm on the floor and excrement. Subcorporeal hands seemed to reach down into his soul and show him things—the most awful things: faces stretched by incalculable pain, sizzling flesh, self-amputation. He saw a filthy man digging out chunks of his skin with a knife, then eating the chunks. He saw another man smoking like fat on a spit, one leg bent back as he took bites out of what appeared to be a rotten foot. Someone else with all his hair burned off grinned insanely as he inserted a clipped coat hanger into his own penis. One more detestable man gleefully consumed his own testicles while masturbating the gelded shaft.
Dreams.
Locke’s mind felt like a psychotic’s—make that a hungover one’s. Where could his dreaming mind dredge such sights? And still more followed: a demonness—or was it the angel?—standing silent over her wares, then pawing through their innards in search of the most choice parts…
A frenzy. A smorgasbord of feeding and abomination.
My nightmare…
Locke dragged himself out of the small bed. Did I go back to the bar last night and get drunk? He’d slept in his clothes, couldn’t remember coming home.
Think!
Back to the bar, either that or he drank here when he got home? He must have. The throbbing hangover couldn’t be denied. I got shitfaced again, he concluded. He just didn’t remember it, and the happenstance didn’t particularly shock him because things like that had happened before. All he could remember was wandering, after he’d snuck up Clare’s stairwell and taped the poem to her door. He remembered looking out off the bridge toward the Chittenden Locks past Salmon Bay and thinking he saw someone, hearing a voice which sounded disturbingly familiar and at once dismissing it as imagination or hallucination.
But that was all…
“I’m really in trouble,” he murmured to himself, shuffling to get a pot of coffee going. “I’m having blackouts…” A titter of pain brought a hand to the side of his face, which suddenly barked in pain. Christ! Did I fall down the stairs? A bruise tinted his cheek like faint lampblack.
“You’re losing it, Locke. You’re a flake, a waste product.”
The coffee burned but charged his blood. No, he couldn’t remember anything else except—
More of the dream?
The angel. Carrying him off, but it seemed more like flying, like sailing through humid clouds… She was looking down at him as he lay in bed, looking into his heart and his mind with wide eyes full of whispers, promises, full of dark light and magic, their pupils accumulated to crisp points. Hair the color of raspberry wine framed the inexplicable face in fragrant tousles. For whatever reason, Locke couldn’t see the face, he could only surmise of it, the countenance of some ineffable arcana, a magician’s spell. He could feel the pearlescent gaze slither down and caress his spirit.
“Are you the one?” she asked.
Locke couldn’t answer, his throat fallow.
“If you are, be prepared.”
“What?” Locke asked in a parched croak.
“All the truth that you can bear…is yours…”
Paralyzed, Locke shuddered. The sleek line of her throat, the shimmering hair—she was beauty incarnate, an aura of heat and skin and luscious wonder fascinating and white as moonstone. She was kissing him—this angel—tasting him, desperate for something they shared in their souls. Locke closed his eyes and reveled in this bliss—like being kissed by all the love he’d ever felt for anyone, all the love in the world. But then the kiss detached and—
Locke opened his eyes.
No woman in the room, no…angel.
Just—
A finch sat on the sill of the opened window. Locke stared.
The finch flew away.
He ground his teeth, his eyes squeezed shut at the unreckonable dream as the anxiety melted into a sharp mist. A tactile image remained, if only for a moment: the feel of the “angel’s” hand on his skin.
Symbology, he realized. What else might a poet conclude? A symbol of Clare, mixed with… Well, he couldn’t imagine what incongruities might be mixed among the flux of this dream. In the dream, though, the angel had saved him; esoterically, Clare’s love had saved him too, hadn’t it? From the uselessness of his life.
But where did that leave him now?
Just as useless.
Whatever Clare’s love had given him was gone. He’d accepted that now, in the poem he’d left on her door last night. Which meant—
She was gone.
She was with someone else now—sleeping with someone else, that prissy punk with the red Corvette—Locke’s love forgotten, a sheepshank abortion. Why shouldn’t it be? he posted the query to himself. What could I give her? A drunk, a broke poet with no ambition? An impulse, then, found him in a fog, walking toward the window. The window stood open, which seemed odd because…
Why open the window this time of year?
Another sip of scalding coffee, and he was leaning out, gazing over the street below. Something caught his eye but when the phone rang it was with such an excited startlement, he turned away before it registered. He jerked around, bolted for the counter toward the phone.
What he never had the chance to notice was this: a caramel-brown finch feather on the enameled window sill.
All reason, and everything he’d forsworn to be his purpose in what he’d done last night—vanished.
It’s her! he somehow knew. It’s Clare! She read my poem! She saw its truth and realized the verity of my love! She wants me back!
Locke nearly tripped over his own feet on the way to the phone, knocked over a floor lamp and his kitchen garbage can during the journey. Then a glass pitcher shattered to the floor. Locke didn’t care, he didn’t even hear it…
He swiped up the phone, grabbed a breath. It’s her, it’s her, I KNOW it’s her! Thank you, God! I SWEAR…I’ll even go back to church! No lie, God!
“Huh-hello?” he quavered into the phone.
Nothing. Silence.
“Clare? Honey, say something.”
There was static, rushing in waves, enlaced by a louder sound like a chorus of moans. No immediate reply at first, but then:
“It’s not Clare…”
Locke’s lips pursed. A voice, a man’s voice…
One he knew he’d heard before but was too distant to place. A voice he’d heard on the street one time, or perhaps in a shop or in the bookstore… Yes, the tone of the voice sounded familiar but what carried the tone wasn’t right at all.
“It’s me,” the voice croaked.
It sounded ruined, phlegmatic. It sounded rotten.
Locke didn’t feel real. His head spun through swirls of grain. Is this a dream? The caller continued, “‘Oh, Preceptor, forgive my grief, and kill my feelings, I beg of Thee.’”
Finally—however feebly—Locke could speak. “Who is this?”
It sounded more like bubbling over the line than static. Deep, chunky rattles seeped through with the wasted words. “You know, and you know what I told you. Love calls to things. It calls to things that are alike. Doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad. It just calls to things that are alike—”
Locke’s mouth gaped. The phone felt cold in his hand, as cold as the voice on the other end.
“It’s transposition, man. It’s metamorphosis—”
Locke’s eyes felt lidless.
The voice churned on, losing its tenor. “You saw me last night on the bridge. I guess I used up my strength finding you.” A dim chuckle. “Colorless auras are hard to see.”
“Who is this?” Locke repeated even though he already knew.
“Don’t go there. Don’t go to Lethe’s.” But now the voice was nearly inaudible, more akin to a sound like creekwater rushing over rocks. “Stay away from him…”
Then it was gone.
And so was Locke’s consciousness when he finally admitted to himself who the voice belonged to: Byers. White Shirt.
The other poet. The guy who blew his brains out in front of me.
FOURTEEN
Idolater
(i)
What picked him up the next day was a Rolls Royce White Shadow. Locke had no way of knowing that the vehicle’s date of manufacture was January, 1916. Nor could he have possibly known that its original owner was a man named Romanov, who was more popularly known as Czar Nicholas II, and the same vehicle that had been driven over another man named Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin shortly before he was dropped through a hole cut into the ice of the West Dniva River in Russia.
A car, in other words, with some history.
Had Locke known this, he might have considered the nature of the vehicle’s current owner.
The driver stood up as a raving cliché: black cap, black driving gloves, a long tuxedo. Sandy blonde hair stuck out from behind the cap, and the man had a few days’ growth of whiskers. Everybody trying to look like Mickey Rourke, Locke guessed. The young guys these days think it’s cool to look like shit.
“Mr. Locke?”
“Uh, yes,” Locke stammered once he was confronted by the driver’s reality. “I’ve been invited to—”
“Mr. Lethe is very much looking forward to your arrival. Let me get your bag.”
The man got out instantaneously, as Locke was dismissing, “Oh, that’s not necessary. It’s only a small bag—”
The driver seemed to not hear him at all, grabbing Locke’s travel bag and depositing it promptly into the truck. Christ, Locke thought. I hope this guy doesn’t expect a decent tip.
“Mr. Locke?”
Now the driver was holding open the rear door for him. Locke awkwardly nodded his thanks and slid in across a long sealskin seat. The door shut, with almost no sound.
Then they were pulling off.
Locke felt lulled in quiet and comfort. These things really do ride smooth. Before him stood a pane of smoked glass, separating Locke from the confines of the driver. Below that, mounted along the back of the front seat, was a bar cabinet which seemed to be fashioned from a genuine Hepplewhite sideboard.
What a clunker, Locke thought. I wouldn’t be seen dead in this piece of junk.
An edge of white peeked through the leather map-flap on the side of his door. Locke felt impelled to lift it out…
Thin Ice, read the cover of the small, saddle-stitched booklet. The cover-art seemed instantly familiar, and then he opened the booklet to see his name in the table of contents.
R. Locke / “Preceptor”…………………page 17
Locke couldn’t resist. He turned to the page, though it was his traditional view to never read anything he’d written once it was published.
PRECEPTOR
by Richard Locke
Once upon my love
once upon our day
once upon the
grave-dirt truth
of all that I’m
dying to say.
Back into the vale
kicked back wet from
the passion gale
my vision is futile
as my providence is dead
lamentation final smile
halo of ashes ring
round my head
Poet/Vagrant
grope for her
“I love you!” I cry
and cower
Oh, Preceptor
your son is back
with nine petals
plucked off of a flower
This is all that’s left?
in crimsoned raiments
to stand bereft?
once upon my love
once upon my glee
once upon the
resplendent promise
of all we could never be
Oh, Preceptor
for
give my grief
and kill my feelings
I beg of Thee
Kill my feelings… Locke remembered, what Byers—the guy who killed himself in the black Firebird—had said earlier to him in the bar. Locke remembered writing this poem, fairly recently, but this was the first he’d seen of it. Lethe must indeed be a fan of his work, to get a copy before the author received his complimentary contributor edition. But that wasn’t what nicked at him. Didn’t I write a frag of this poem in the bar that night? And didn’t Byers make some comment about it?
Locke felt sure.
But there wasn’t much else he could feel sure about…
“Help yourself to a drink, Mr. Locke,” said the driver.
Locke eyed the lusciously refinished antique, its intricate hand-set inlays and stiles, the burnished brass hinges and knobettes. Liquor inside, the thought thumped in his head, along with the rest of the hangover. Just what I need, huh? Just what the doctor ordered after blacking out, hallucinating, morbid dreams, and hearing dead guys on the phone.