Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  One of the derelicts in the phlegmy hotel where Rombo slept had died on the lobby's curling linoleum floor. Nobody cared. Rombo thought he'd probably stepped over the body himself that night, maybe. And then the ratlike little man in his ashtray of a cage where you paid for your room told Rombo the pile of stinking rags on the floor had once been a teacher. A high school math teacher, according to the sister whose name and phone number the cops found in the guy's room. In the acidic haze of his own breath Rombo saw the future, panicked, and did the one thing for which his father would have spit in his face. At thirty, he called his mother.

  A social worker in Gary, Indiana, she drove over to Chicago, picked him up, and dumped him at the best detox program she could pay for.

  "Your father's love and approval are never going to happen," she told him at the admitting desk. "You've always had mine, for what it's worth. But the important thing is to earn your own. Go for it!"

  He'd slipped a couple of times after that, but picked himself up and climbed back on. When his AA sponsor in Gary offered him the chance to drive a U-HAUL truck full of furniture to San Diego for a niece in the navy, Rombo grabbed it. And loved San Diego. The airy, sunlit city seemed to promise a new life. Clean and sober. And free. Within the year Rombo had moved. Within another year he'd met Martin St. John, at whose good-natured devotion Rombo marveled. It was the life he'd always wanted. Calm. Orderly.

  And an even greater miracle was that neither of them had AIDS. Tested twice in two years, they'd both been negative. Rombo hadn't been able to think about that, about how he'd been spared that and the other deaths he'd courted while dancing with his father's hatred. Now he couldn't think about anything else. The image of a frail woman hanging by the neck from a bedsheet kept asking questions he knew it was time to answer.

  By 11:00 Martin had delivered the last of the rolls to a beachfront restaurant where a hundred and fifty people would gather at dusk to raise funds for a women's shelter.

  "Ready to visit mama dog?" he asked Rombo. "Or ready to tell me what it is about this woman's suicide that's got you reciting Hamlet's soliloquy in the shower?"

  "I didn't know you heard." Rombo cringed. "And I don't know why this thing's hit a nerve. It just rips it, you know? We have everything, the best life there is, and that pitiful, little woman had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Some walking pustule with his brain in his dong guts her kid, and she's gone. They're both just gone. It's over. And that's not right, Martin. It's too unfair."

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting on Maxwell Grasic's enclosed rear deck, watching a golden retriever shred the L.A. Times in a wooden box with six-inch-high slats over its entry. The slats and box had been sanded smooth.

  "She's gonna blow tonight. I just know it," their friend announced the obvious, pacing. "I've called the vet three times today already. She told me to stop calling until something happens. I've got everything ready—towels, weak tea with sugar, sterilized scissors, a Brahms tape so they'll feel relaxed. Kevin and Barry sent flowers already—yellow roses and baby's breath in a Wedgewood dog dish. The suspense is killing me."

  When the dog rested briefly from nesting, Rombo sat beside her on the gray tweed outdoor carpeting and stroked her swollen sides. Tiny movements were palpable beneath the long fur. Little kicks and nudges, and something that felt like hiccups. Leonor panted and resumed her work in the box.

  "I really feel that I haven't done enough, Martin," he said when Max went inside to answer the phone. "I've spent so much time hauling myself out of the sewer that I've forgotten to live in the world. This wad of worm snot rapes little girls and all I care about is us and our house and our dog and our life. I want to do something. Something to help."

  "Got any ideas?" Martin smiled.

  "Yeah." Rombo smiled back. "I do."

  Chapter 21

  By 8:00 Sunday morning John D. Litten had completed the careful packing necessary for his camera equipment, TV, VCR, and sound system. Those things and his clothes would fit in the car, registered to Craig Alan Sanford, a boy who had died in a Florida water-skiing accident when he was eight. Everything else would be left behind.

  Outside his ninth-story window sailboats rode the gray-blue swells of the bay beneath overcast skies as tourists queued up for cruises. The sun struggling through a weak haze both warmed him and hurt his eyes. He'd been up most of the night. And he felt strange, as though parts of him were missing. One minute the back of his head, then his left shoulder, then the muscle and connective tissue inside his right hand. His right hand was hollow. And then it was just a hand again, and his dick was gone. But when he touched it, it was there and his nasal passages seemed to evaporate in his skull. A creepy parade of empty spaces probably caused, he judged, by the two lines of coke he'd blown last night. The coke and what had happened. The way he'd felt killing that woman, even though he'd meant to do the other one, the social worker. Like glass. He'd felt like a man made of frozen glass. Like a light you'd see through a telescope, blazing with cold. His dick had stayed hard all night.

  Everything was different now, that was for sure. Everything changed. Like finding out a secret that's been there all along, waiting. Out of habit John Litten had prepared to leave quickly. Just leave town before there was the slightest chance of getting caught. The old, regular part of him said that was the thing to do. But something else said to wait before starting on the trip that would take him away from San Diego, away from the amazing thing he'd learned. That to become Superman, all he had to do was kill.

  Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt adorned with a printed portrait of somebody named Wittgenstein, he looked like a student at any university in the country. Nobody would remember seeing some college student walking around in downtown San Diego. And even if they did, so what? Nobody was looking for him. They didn't know what to look for. They were too stupid. Locking his apartment door carefully behind him, John D. Litten bounded down eight flights of stairs and headed into the street.

  In the haze things looked strange, shimmery. Like the city, knowing who he was, had polished itself for him. Beneath his feet a brick sidewalk, its basketweave mortared lines clean and new, led toward a future John Litten could scarcely imagine. A future in which he alone knew the secret of transformation. A future in which he would play with them, all the stupid ones who knew nothing, and then kill them. He didn't know why he hadn't seen it before. It had been there, all along.

  In an orange, recessed doorway something moved on the ground. Litten looked at it and for several seconds could not identify it. Something long and foul-smelling, stirring beneath damp slabs of cardboard torn from a large box. One of the slabs had the name of a San Francisco importer printed on it. And the thing under it was a man. Litten looked at the sign over the orange doorway—DICK'S LAST RESORT. It was just a

  darkened restaurant with a wino sleeping in its doorway. Across the street a Cost Plus dumpster revealed the source of the cardboard slab. Litten wondered why it had taken him so long to piece together the ordinary scene. And then he knew why. He'd crossed over, finally, become something completely different from the creature on the ground. So different that at first he hadn't recognized it as human. That was because he was superhuman now. A superhuman walking, almost invisibly, on the misty streets of a sleeping city. It was like something he'd read in a comic book, years ago.

  On Island Avenue he crossed to an old brick hotel refurbished in a downtown development project. The Horton Grand, a plaque told him, had been built in 1886. The date meant nothing. Why would anyone care when an old building was built? It was strange. Two men in white shirts and black pants lounged against the hotel's gleaming facade. They would park cars for tips, Litten remembered.

  "Pretty good breakfast," one of them mentioned. "Pricey, but good."

  "Yeah?" Litten answered. Why had the man told him that? Gradually it made sense. They thought he was a tourist looking for someplace to eat breakfast. In his college-boy clothes he looked their age. The man was operating on assu
mptions to which John Litten would have to accommodate. He went inside, feeling like a puppet. It would be okay to eat, he guessed. Probably a good idea. But things were so strange. Why would Superman have to do what a parking attendant said?

  The hotel lobby had a green tile floor and a bunch of white furniture made out of sticks. And big white birdcages lined with the edges of computer paper. John Litten had torn these edges off miles of paper in the navy. Their presence was familiar and comfortable, but he would never have thought of using them for anything. Why hadn't he thought of birdcage lining? Because there were no birds around in the navy, he decided. If there had been birds he would have thought of it. Anybody as smart as he was would have thought of it. Except nobody was as smart as he was. Not anymore.

  "Breakfast, sir?" a tired-looking woman in a ruffled blouse asked. Her smile seemed to go right through his face and stick somewhere behind his head. She couldn't see what he was, couldn't really see him at all. That was good.

  The hotel's restaurant was dimly lit and almost empty as he followed the woman to a wooden booth with some kind of rough, flowered pad to sit on. The same material padded the back of the booth, where your head hit. Litten looked at the fabric, the tens of thousands of little sewing stitches that made flowers and leaves, vines and birds in different colors. It looked hard to do, complicated. Why would anybody bother? Something about the fabric irritated John Litten, but he didn't know what.

  A man and woman seated at a round table nearby both ordered coffee with smoked salmon and onion omelettes. Nervous, Litten gave an identical order even though he hated coffee. What was wrong with him? Why didn't he feel good, now that he'd found the secret?

  Some kind of music drifted from the restaurant's speakers.

  "Mozart would have enjoyed this place," the man at the table told his companion. "It's so Baroque."

  "I think Salieri would have liked it better." she answered, and they both laughed.

  John Litten stared into his omelette, which smelled like fish. Not spoiled fish like Gramma got sometimes from a grocery in Estherville that gave it away on Saturday nights because they were closed on Sunday. But still fish. He couldn't understand why the man and woman were laughing. What were they talking about? He felt himself frowning at them, but they didn't see. They didn't see him. They didn't know he was there.

  John Litten wondered if he was there. Something wrong. Lots of things he didn't understand, couldn't name. Were the people talking about music? How could you talk about music? Why couldn't he understand what they were saying, if he was Superman? Superman would understand everything, probably even make designs with a million little sewing stitches if he wanted to. But John Litten didn't even know what to call it once it was made.

  An impossible realization began to form like a half-circle cloud between his ears. An awareness of difference that had always been there, ever since he could remember. A difference nobody could see, that was now complete. He wasn't like the people at the table, not at all. He couldn't understand them and they couldn't see him. He wasn't like anybody. He'd learned how to become frozen glass, and he was alone. He would always be alone.

  Leaving a twenty-dollar bill on the table he rose and swiftly left the hotel. In the vacant Cost Plus parking lot he vomited behind the dumpster. Sour, fishy coffee spewing from his throat. It felt good to get rid of it. Only stupid people drank coffee, he realized. People, period. He was no longer one of them, if he ever had been.

  A somber rage, like a pillar of white granite, filled him as he straightened his torso in the shadows behind the dumpster. He hated them, that was all. And he could kill them, and become glass. A painful erection throbbed behind the button fly of his denim pants. Pulling out his cock he gasped as he ejaculated to a memory of blood, and death. It was so easy. And so good. He would never need anything else.

  Chapter 22

  By 10:30 Bo was toying with a cup of coffee on the patio from which Eva Broussard studied a particularly inept surfer in an overlarge wetsuit who tumbled off his board with each wave.

  "I'm sure nobody was following me," Bo explained, "but I drove way inland and came down through Encinitas, just in case. Sharp turns, hiding in parking lots, backtracking. Nobody could have stayed with me. I had to talk to you."

  The older woman kneaded her temples with the fingertips of both hands. "Yes," she nodded, turning from the sea after Bo explained the decision she had made. The alarming risk she would take in court tomorrow. "It's a dangerous but courageous step. If you're really ready, I'm sure it's the right one for you. And the situation has become even more complex. Do you believe there is any danger to Hannah from the man who killed Cynthia Ganage? Do you think there is really any connection at all between these two killings?"

  Eva Broussard seemed distant, lost in thought. Bo couldn't read the woman's mental state at all.

  "It may be that Ganage was killed by someone unconnected to this case," Bo began. "We don't know anything about Ganage. She was from L.A. The police are checking her contacts there. Maybe she had an enemy, a rejected boyfriend, somebody who wanted her dead and just used the bloody message on her wall to mislead the investigation. But ..."

  "I don't think so," Eva Broussard said, her voice barely audible, "and neither do you." Bo leaned forward in a canvas deck chair, curious. Broussard seemed anxious to complete a troubling train of thought. "There are aspects of this murder that lead me to a different conclusion. A very different conclusion. But first I must hear all that you know." The graceful Iroquois woman pulled a matching chair close to Bo's and sat. Even though the dark eyes were unfocused, Bo felt the woman's concentration like a palpable force. Eva Broussard was taking the murder of Cynthia Ganage very seriously.

  "At the daycare center where Samantha stayed while Bonnie worked part-time," Bo said quietly, "I've discovered a sort of cave dug in the wall of the canyon behind the property, carefully shored with two by fours. A cave painted pink and decorated with Christmas tree lights. There's a man suffering from schizophrenia who lives in the canyon. He showed me the cave. He knew that the perp called himself Goody. I think Samantha's killer was connected to the daycare center in some way. I think he went there and took children to this place down in the canyon, and ... did things to them. There was a battery pack in the cave—"

  "A battery pack?" The raven-black eyes widened.

  "Yeah. He used it to power the lights and a tape recorder. Children's music ..."

  "And perhaps a video camera as well," Eva Broussard breathed. "Have you told the police?"

  Bo glanced through the picture window of the studio apartment across the patio. Hannah Franer lay on the floor playing with a huge assortment of Legos. Now and then she flipped her long hair from her face in a gesture oddly adolescent, as if an older personality were already framing itself in the childlike visage. Flute music drifted from stereo speakers through two screened windows flanking the picture window.

  "Only this morning," Bo admitted. "Dar Reinert called. I'd asked him to check out the registration for the center. He told me the house is rented in the name of somebody who died in Texas eighteen years ago. A phony name, in other words. The property owner lives in Oregon, pays a management service to rent and maintain the house. The management service is actually a bankrupt realtor named Brock Mulvihill who runs his business out of his garage up in San Marcos. Mulvihill says he never saw the guy who rented the Kramer Street property; it was all done over the phone and through the mail. He says the guy's checks were good, and that he paid for a new chain-link fence around the backyard so his wife could run a playschool on the property. Mulvihill drove by the house once, three months ago on a weekend, found it well kept up, and left. No questions. The market's rotten. He was thrilled to have a responsible, solvent tenant. The center isn't licensed by the county. A Hispanic woman who ran the place has vanished, although I've got a coworker who speaks Spanish checking this morning to see if the woman's come back. It's obvious that the perp set the whole thing up to have access to chil
dren, but there's no way to learn more until tomorrow when parents start showing up to drop off kids. I told Reinert about the cave, and about Zolar, the man who took me to it. Reinert's been out there already. Zolar's vanished, but the cave's still there. The police are checking it out now, but they don't expect to find much. Reinert, of course, now thinks Zolar is our perp. Meanwhile the media are 'cautiously exploring' the possibility of a Satanic takeover of San Diego. Ganage was their pet."

  Eva Broussard sighed and remained silent for some time.

  "I trust your judgment on Zolar," she said. "And even if I didn't, the elaborate preparations you describe—the construction and shoring of the cave, the paint and lights—it's all too calculated and consistent for an individual with untreated schizophrenia. No, from what you've told me, I feel safe in predicting that our killer is scarcely delusional. But more significantly, I think he's an isolate. To do what he does successfully, he can have no real contact with other people. His entire existence is a sequence of performances designed to disguise what he is inside."

  "A child molester?" Bo filled in. "That's what he is inside. I've had a lot of contact with child molesters. This guy's not your typical—"

  "No," Eva Broussard answered, "he isn't typical and that's not what he's hiding. He's hiding the fact that inside, he's nothing."

  "Huh?"

  "It will be almost impossible for you to comprehend, Bo," Broussard went on, the pace of her speech accelerating slightly. "You are ... how can I say this? ... uniquely equipped to understand the experiences of the living—joy and passion, despair and hopelessness. You are the masks of drama—comedy and tragedy. But this man is nowhere in that world your brain magnifies. This man is devoid of all emotional capability with the possible exceptions of anger and fear, which are in him one thing. His experience is not accessible to most people, but least of all to you. Don't even try."