‘You’re here,’ was all she said as the figure made a shape in the blackness and stepped out of the shadows. She reached out a hand instinctively; feeling the panic rising, clinging to some normality – she’d read that cats cleaned themselves furiously when they felt fear – and needing some blind reassurance, she wished she had some of the literature her group had given her to hand so that she might, even here, spread the good news, to impart his message, to feel normal again, to feel safe. But Rose knew this face, she knew this man, she knew the sound that the clattering shutter of her destiny made as it came slamming down, and yet, briefly, she felt that out here among this debris, inside her false idol (as someone had referred to the warehouse when she’d blurted out her story one evening back in the basement) she could be born again with the one good deed. That the circle would be complete: even if the building couldn’t be redeemed then she might save a soul, the one that was stalking towards her, that among these ashes there might be at least one patch of hallowed ground. Had her Lord sent her here, directed her along this path all this time just to do the right thing?
Rose felt thrilled as if she’d suddenly spotted a way out, singled out to do his bidding, until the piece of wood she’d so recently kicked skittering across the floor caught her across the temple. For a moment nothing happened, she felt lighter somehow and gently touched the side of her head and was pleased to find no wound there and then her fingers felt wet and her head pulsed like her heart sometimes did when she’d been running too fast. Her head spun around on impact and she saw the room she’d once loved go blurring by as she fell to the floor. She rolled onto her back and saw the skeletal fingers that were all that was left of the ceiling high above her. Her one eye was wet with blood, her hair felt heavy and though her throat was dry she cried out for her God, but the sky was silent and so she lay trapped under the lengthening shadow of her fate as the darkness sat heavily and acted witness as she bargained her life away while the heavens moved impassively, mutely and uselessly above.
February 1980
One night, Detective Louis Green had seen the rain fall upwards and retreat into the sky. It was late and he was young, eleven maybe twelve, he decided, thinking back on it as he often did. At first, the rain was an indifferent sheet coming out of the California sky, the light dwindling so that the rain came out of the farthest reaches of the inky black and became beams of thin light, vibrating ribbons tethered at once to both the heavens and the earth. Then they stilled, as spectacular pencils of steel and glass, and as the night advanced it somehow called the rain back. He saw the stillness, heard the quiet envelope where there had once been noise, the thrum of falling water held and then it withdrew. He saw the deluge reverse in on itself and pull back from the gutters and sloping roofs of his neighbours’ houses, revealing itself in the bent arc of the streetlights but backwards, going up instead of down. It gathered itself in, sucked hard and inhaled, the moisture going out of the air; the damp signature impressed on the sky was gone. His forehead was pressed against the glass of his bedroom window, the circle of his breath a surprised oval in the smear of his own reflection.
Green craned his neck and looked up and attempted to follow the rain to its source, to find its destination in the dark hollow above. There was still water on his street, black and impassive as if it had never known life or fallen hundreds of feet to dash itself against the blades of grass in his garden, or the impassive paving stones and tarmac, but the sheets of rain had vanished, diminished and recoiled, he’d never forgotten it, and now on days like this one when the rain fell on him and pooled in the roads he always half-expected this most impactful of weather to turn tail and flee into the sky. Not least so he could marvel at it again and share the thrill with someone else. He’d long given up on people believing him, he could hear the absurdity in his voice as he recounted it – pre-pubescent boys weren’t grounded, their imaginations weren’t yet pinned to the earth, they took flights of fancy, glided over planets where the rain fell upwards, animals and toys talked back, their lives were rich, the fantastic kingdoms rendered far below were still theirs. Reality hadn’t yet impeded on their thinking; first pets and parents still lived, marriages remained intact, love wasn’t yet ash in their hands; the future was blinding, bright with hope. But his suburban window had overlooked a magical event that night and somehow the rain had fallen back into the sky, he knew.
*
Green wondered at Rose’s dreams as she lay there; he opened his notebook, all business, little knowing that her hopes too had once been entwined with the heavens. There was blood across one side of her face, from a wound at her temple, a different shade of red to the one that spread out in a fan from the vivid hair on her head, but she looked impassive and peaceful, one arm caught behind her, the other spread out at her side, like a bird with a broken wing. Someone had called it in, a stranger’s voice reporting her cooling body under the detached rafters of the burnt-out building, the damp concrete and stone holding her forever in place.
‘Rose Henley,’ Green said aloud, her driving licence between his fingers, her face looking taut in her photograph, her pulled-back hair making her features look flat and bleached out, the outline of her nose disappearing into the rest of her face. Here, the warehouse was darkest at its corners, as if light might never reach there. Green’s flashlight beam felt blunt against the blackness. One of his officers accidentally kicked at a piece of timber and it bounced hard along the floor and came to rest up against his leg.
‘Sir, sorry,’ said the officer, but Green waved it away and looked at the other pieces of wood scattered around him. He knew that any of them could have caused the damage done to the girl’s skull, but none were flecked with blood; besides, he thought, wood burns; it wouldn’t take much to destroy a makeshift club that you’d just used to cave someone’s skull in with.
Green’s father had been a priest who wrestled, almost daily it seemed, with the hatred and sin his God had placed in the world. Though his faith remained intact, he was often defeated by the vagaries of hatred and the callousness of man: a man born in God’s image. Nicholas Gillett Green had been a teacher, a good one, before he’d found God, or, as he sometimes said, God found him. He was often to be seen at the head of his class telling his boys the same thing that he’d told Green growing up: ‘Louis, evil lives in the most innocuous places in the world – wood sheds, under bridges, in the dark in the hulls of boats, in the hearts of men.’ It was as if he couldn’t countenance or come to terms with the sheer banality of evil, the unflinching hammer blows of hatred often visited on the earth. Louis loved his father and his undiluted take on things; his old man’s belief in real goodness and innocence was very much part of why Green had become a police officer in the first place. He truly did want to serve and protect, though he too had seen that almost dormant evil come to life in the stilled faces caught stark against bloody circumstance. Faces and bodies bent double by the long shadows his father had talked about at home and in his pulpit or to the upturned faces of his pupils; the impeachable storm at the shoulder of the next hill, a ceaseless force that kept coming. Green really had once found a young man’s crumpled body under a bridge, his life sharply receding, and felt his father’s form at his shoulder, a resigned sigh; a slow shake of the head at the monotony of fate, at the evil that men inevitably do.
*
Detective Green straightened up and told his men to fan out and take another pass at the long oblong of the warehouse floor, sifting through the detritus for a potential weapon as they went. Rose was in a black plastic body bag, a zipper dividing its front and then sealing its contents; the slamming of the ambulance door would be her last note on earth as she was carried away on what she must have once dreamt would be a long and glorious journey to meet her maker. The ambulance pulled away from the warehouse and onto the on-ramp and got quickly stuck in traffic on the parkway – a drunk driver had swerved up onto the verge and caused a tailback of slowly groaning traffic; a living, breathing beast of bl
inking lights and muted horns slowly shuffling their way towards the city.
*
Her friends lit scented candles for Rose in the squat basement in the city where she had once gone to worship. The curls of smoke not having to travel far until they unfurled along the low ceiling, someone had the foresight to take the batteries from the smoke alarm before they burst into ear-shattering life. Rose had been killed on Monday night, by Tuesday they were holding a vigil, handing out flyers with her face pasted across them – she looked surprised by the camera lens, a blur of pigeons taking flight behind her – they made an unwilling martyr of her memory, when all she wanted was to belong. Her friends stood in a tight group on the street, a rectangle of candlelight and scowling faces trained on the indifference of the passers-by. Their leader, Reverend Bulley, spoke about the sins of the city, he called their God down to cleanse the streets and bring damnation down on Rose’s killer. To snuff out the one who had taken her from them, an eye for an eye.
Detective Louis Green watched them from across the street and felt their anger snaking into the air and wondered what his father would have made of them and their God constructed from fear and the promise of hell if his followers didn’t bend to his omnipotent will. They reminded him of the bullies he’d spent time with at school, the smaller boys who had bigger friends who loomed behind them like trained dogs on taut leashes, snarling and ready to strike. The threat of them was enough for people to fall in line. Years later he wished he’d stood up to those people more. More latterly, he’d spent his time making up on those earlier misjudgements – wasn’t being a cop just staring the bullies down sometime? He knew Rose had no family, but her diary had led him to these people; her apartment looked like a self-imposed sanctuary, heavy with iconic imagery, a still, beseeching wooden Jesus face down across her bed. He tried to imagine what the Lord’s eyes needed to be shielded from that she’d placed him face down against her pillow. Green stood there among her things and wondered at the girl who slept under Christ’s steady gaze; by her bed was a photo of her squinting into the camera – she looked, he guessed, about eleven years old, about his age when he’d seen the rain invert. She was dressed in a checked shirt and jeans hiked up high that were thrust into a pair of Wellington boots. Her hair was short and slicked down on one side; behind her fields and a knotted splay of bare trees, low drifting cloud visible between the spread of branches. She was smiling with a lack of self-awareness that the young have in photographs, no pose, though one hand was in her back pocket – it was just her there, the fall sunshine picked out her features and her father called out for her to smile.
*
The Reverend James Bulley spoke as if he were giving a sermon. Detective Green wondered if he thought he was. Bulley told Green about how he’d saved Rose from the streets, offered her salvation in Washington Square that day and raised her up so she could better see her Lord. How this basement room had become her sanctuary. His fist punching his palm for emphasis, his thumb crooked and long, as if he’d used it over and over to yank sin back and put it firmly in its place like an obstinate child. The Reverend felt very hands-on. He was still talking as Green was beginning not to listen; this place was somewhere she could escape the evil bubbling in the streets. Green wondered at the still city above their heads and the silent lives being lived out with no idea of the imagined brimstone and fire that ran quickening and molten beneath their feet.
‘So,’ Green asked, already tired of Bulley’s explosive rhetoric, ‘do you know what she might have been doing alone in a burnt-out building? That’s where we found her.’ In spite of himself, he enjoyed the flash of confusion on Bulley’s round face. His forehead furrowed like a freshly ploughed field and then flattened out as the surprise composed his features. His eyes were very big behind his glasses, his mouth a small circle.
‘A burnt-out building?’ Bulley’s face was slack and led into his neck, as if the image of Rose alone among the broken wood and scorched bricks was pulling the skin down. Bulley’s flock – as he referred to them – were staring unhappily at them from across the room as if they could sense the stress rising up from their leader like the first thin wisps of smoke from a man who’s yet to realise that he’s on fire.
*
Through its grand gates the thirteen-year-old Louis Green saw old Hollywood disappearing in the shape of the abandoned baroque house being pulled down. He and his friends used to play in there before the demolition men came, climbing through the hedges and past the signs warning them to keep out. Inside, red drapes caked with dust and long webs, their centres weighed down with fat spiders, waited for them, only adding to the drama of the dense shadows. Green and his friends were chased down by an imagined Dracula who was all fangs and bloody fingernails, there were monsters suddenly looming in and out of the light, their cries and cackles trailed upwards through the banisters and the contemplative silence of the stairwell, long empty rooms suddenly brimming with bursts of furious life, the thrum of youth in footfalls, pushing and jostling. You could almost hear the rooms sighing with sadness once they were vacant again, the boys long past then, rushing other parts of the house.
The roof came away with a wrench, the timber and slate giving in as Green’s father’s car was pulling out for the airport. The windows buckled inwards as if they’d been winded. Louis was barely two years old when his father had decided to give his life to his Lord. And now he was swapping his short-lived stint at his West Coast diocese for something he said he thought would be more real, something to test himself against out on the East Coast. The teenage Green was crushed, his friends were here; he liked the way the air tasted down near the water when they drove along the coastal roads. He liked the salt matting in his hair, the way his summer skin came off in thin, almost clear, mud-coloured pieces, curling at the edges like wet paper drying. He liked the endless silver-blue sky; he wanted to see the magic of the rain reversed once more before he left. He couldn’t picture the heavens above Brooklyn reclaiming the weather; in fact, he couldn’t picture a Brooklyn sky at all. He saw shades of grey brick, Batman as a caped silhouette among the towers; the imagined night was forever.
Nicholas Gillett Green came to God late. Louis was one when his mother left them both for another woman. His father’s salvation came quickly in the shape of the church. He’d been a devoted follower and now, thanks to the kindness they’d shown him when he’d been at his most vulnerable, he wanted to lead. He passed through seminary quickly under his ex-wife’s admonishing eye as Louis grew up in the sunshine, living between their houses; their indelible hatred and anger for the other pressed down hard on the boy and he wore their pain as clearly as he might a bad haircut. He saw them both sin as he slowly adjusted to living his life between them, yet never truly at home with either. He watched his father taking pride at his own reflection in his priestly garb – to Green he looked like God’s assassin: sleek, trim and bible-black, his hair swept carefully back. He half-expected a handgun concealed in the pages of his father’s Bible, rosary beads hiding a wire loop that quickly became a killer’s tool. Meanwhile, he heard his mother’s voice through the walls, her sighs mingling with another woman’s (her first girlfriend had long since left); in those moments she called on her God as much as his father did his. He wondered whose God it was, if either of them had made the right choice. If God came back then, would he be a vengeful force like the books said, and would he frown upon his father’s tight self-satisfied smile at himself in the mirror or his mother slumped happily among her sheets? Would he forgive them their sins or leave them as burnt outlines, black shadows casting an approximation of the things they once were? Louis would grow weary of any kind of God by the time he was in his twenties, but until then, the Lord was as real at his father’s home as if he were waiting in the kitchen or reading a newspaper out on the back step. A presence that was always close, but just out of sight.
*
One of the first cases Green had been assigned to when he reached detective was to appre
hend a man who posed as a priest in order to gain access to people’s homes, earn their trust and then rob them. It was a familiar con, but no less devastating to the victim because of that. He thought of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, love and hate tattooed across both hands, the supposed saviour who fell as heavily as a winter night, death trailing behind him in heavy chains of sin. Green’s so-called priest had escalated from conning bewildered mothers out of their savings to beating a sixty-eight-year-old widower called Alexandar Zivojinovich to death and cleaning out the contents of his apartment. Now Green stood in the bright living room of Alex’s home among the contents of an upturned cabinet, a worn copy of William Blake’s poetry at his feet. He looked at the horned demon sat inexpressively on its cover, giant and hugely strong, waiting to unsteady the Lord and tip the heavens out of the sky. He saw angels fall; felt their torment as their skins burned and their wings fell away, giant white plumes floating slowly to earth. Green spoke to his father about it, about the conman turned killer, the convenience of the easily identifiable cloth that stood out and let him in, but could easily be lost as part of a milling crowd.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 3