‘I hope you’re not blaming the uniform,’ said Green’s father; he wore a half-smile as he said it, but his tone wasn’t unkind. He was quietly appalled by the turn this latest crime had taken, but he kept his pain hidden. He’d first been shocked by this new city when he and Louis had moved here. He was worried that neither of them would fit in. The people here spoke with their bodies, they were like weapons, coming in close with a whispered confidence, but their shoulders squared as if for a fight. He imagined them leaning into a strong headwind, ready for anything. As if this borough was a craft being carried in choppy waters that might dip and tilt at any moment. Green’s father learned to carry himself with the same demeanour to gain their respect, earned his metaphorical sea legs so he might fit in, but he tried to soften his impact with each step; his fight was with Satan, not these people.
Nicholas Green poured his son a drink, and tried to see beyond his boy’s evasive eyes. Green’s new role as a detective made him look tired, he was weathered, he looked very unlike the little boy who had once run along beaches, sand spilled with each hurried step. Nicholas often wondered what that boy would have turned out like had he raised him in California. In old photos, Louis had blond streaks, his matted hair stuck out at angles like TV antennae: here he had become darker, both his colouring and his manner. He was starting to not only see death, but to rummage through the remains; he was literally getting his hands dirty. He was bigger than his father had ever been, he was wide, abrupt, a stop sign, his body was right angles, his hands were wide and thick, his fingers long and robust like tree roots breaking earth, but his lips were thin like his mother’s, he had her eyes too, hazy blue and as questioning as he had become. He shared her doggedness, her persistence; his father would sometimes recoil as they argued, seeing his ex-wife’s insistence on being right reaching out at him from his son like some spectre rising from a haunted mirror. He had been proud to see Louis thrive though; at first the young man hated his father and the place he’d been brought to. He resisted physically and mentally, they’d literally fall to the floor wrestling as Louis refused to set foot inside their new home, he’d become star-shaped, his legs and arms sudden spokes of resistance. But time and environment chipped away at him. He ditched the beach clothes, the bright colours, but slept in his favourite red T-shirt. Louis dreamt that he was still in the sunshine sometimes, the cooling breeze belying his burning skin. New York summers sucked the oxygen out of the air and made your scalp sweat and your clothes damp; it was hard to believe that the glassy white light here could come from the same sun that shone down on California.
They finally caught the would-be preacher when someone heard the disturbance in a neighbour’s apartment. By the time the patrolmen burst through the door he was standing over his latest victim – Lucy Railing, eighty-three years old, suffering from emphysema, four grandchildren of whom she loved the eldest, Karl, the least – the leg of a broken chair raised above his head. The patrolmen rushed him before another blow could fall and got in a few of their own as he collapsed beneath them; they became a writhing, scrapping ball that Lucy would vaguely remember weeks later after the scar tissue had begun to heal and the black welt underneath one eye had finally started to become the colour of a raincloud.
The killer held Green’s gaze across the table and told him how he’d stolen the priest’s effects from a fancy dress store. Up until then, Green imagined the man had taken the things from a church somehow, got among the priest’s things and spirited them away while their owner wasn’t looking. He felt vaguely disappointed to find that the most obvious route was the one this man had chosen. His path from conman to brutal killer was sadly mundane too. He’d been found out by Alexandar, the old man he’d killed, who’d started questioning him closely on the scriptures and then wanted his worldview on the Church’s approach to everything from abortion to homosexuality. Alexandar had struck him across the face with his copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and ofExperience as he was reading to him from it and, as the killer told it, had made for the door. He brought Alexandar down with a crash and his head lolled cruelly sideways as it bounced off the unforgiving corner of his TV; he looked dead and so the killer made sure of it. This would-be-priest-cum-thief had worked long summers through school cleaning out battery hens, sorting through the dead bodies and the clucking drone as the eyes of the immobile yet still living chickens regarded his presence among them. Sometimes the hens would be halfway between heaven and earth, caught on the cusp of life, and with one sharp twist of their head he’d send them over into the endless abyss. That’s how he saw Alexandar, he said, waiting to fall into the infinite empty, and so he tipped his hand, gave him a little push. After that, it had been easy, he was already weary of playing the part of the preacher, but it got him through the door, and now he didn’t have to listen to their stories of how the Church had helped them, or of long-ago weddings and christenings and births and deaths, how their families had quietly abandoned them. These were lives now lived in the shadow of the Church; it had become a guiding hand helping them grope through the daily darkness. But he wasn’t their salvation; he was the end of days. There were times like these, sitting across from a man impassively detailing his litany of gruesome deeds, when Green felt like death was everywhere. He was marked and weary, like Macbeth halfway across his lake of blood, but like the doomed king, he pushed only onwards until death and loss and love became his salvation and helped him see how he could help, how he too could become someone’s saviour.
*
But even in the darkest reaches there were glimmers of light. Green often thought about Rudy Porter. It had been under a year into his career as a detective and Green had reached into the black and somehow brought Rudy Porter kicking back to life.
Rudy had been with his wife, Sarah Faust Porter, for as long as he could remember. They’d been teenagers and then lovers and then married by the time he was nineteen against the wishes of both their parents. Neither of them went to college, they were parents too by the time they reached their twenties. They had two sons, Stanley (who became known as Stan to everyone almost as soon as he could speak) and Mikey, both had graduated college, they’d been his children and he’d loved them, he still loved them. Stan lived in Boston and Mikey had moved south to Florida; Rudy still felt like the centre of their lives if only sometimes as a point on the map. The problem was Sarah. She’d fallen heavily in the kitchen four days before and hadn’t moved since. Rudy had placed her in her favourite chair, it had the best view of the TV, and waited for her to wake. He put cups of tea at her side and emptied and refreshed them as they cooled. He held her hand; the colour was running into the fingertips and making them red and purple. Her face was grey, her skull heavier than he could ever remember. He tipped it back against the chair and she sat there as if she were regarding a newly found stain on the ceiling. Rudy missed her more than he could have ever imagined; how could one fall have so irrevocably changed their lives forever? He sat with her at nights and talked about when they were young and what they both might have wanted from the world. He talked about the time she left him over his teenage jealousies and how he’d discovered a new hollowness inside of himself, that first very real feeling of his heart breaking. His breath stuttered in sharp jolts like a sudden asthma attack in once healthy lungs. The numbness of his loneliness spread through his body: ice-cold fingers splayed across his chest and then burrowing into the small of his back, down his thighs, creeping along his toes. He woke daily to the first, sharp realisation of pain. And then one day she suddenly came back with a warning for him to cool down, to trust her, and so he did. She took his hand and they walked through their city. The boys grew and left and they both cried and clung to each other, their lives moving forward in increments. He thought of her in the hat that she wore to Mikey’s wedding, pale blue: the wide brim casting half her face in shadow. He had never seen her look more beautiful and now he was crying as she sat in another shadow altogether, the life ushered out of her, her unseeing
gaze staring only upwards as if that was where she was meant to go.
Green had no idea why he was the one they called to the apartment. Later, he would think it was because of his father’s calling as a priest, that if his old man could listen and ease the minds of men then perhaps the son might have a similar aptitude, a gift, but he was never completely sure why he got the job. Patrolmen had been called to Rudy Porter’s apartment when his son Stan had started to worry about where his father and mother might be. Their phone rang uselessly; Stan imagined it sat there in their apartment trilling with life as they lay asphyxiated yards away, slumped and just out of reach. The patrolman talked to Rudy through the door, but didn’t think crashing through it would help the situation. Rudy’s nervous reassurances sounded much more weary than they were manic or dangerous. Neither son could make it into town until later that night and there was a stench starting to settle around the doorway and across the building’s landing. Something was waiting on the other side of that door and the patrolman didn’t want to meet its unwavering eye.
Green sat across from Sarah, who was now bloated and cartoon-like; her arms stuck out and her engorged calves were set wide apart. He was momentarily worried that her dress was going to rise up. Her head was tilted forward and he waited nervously for her eyes to blink open and for her to come screeching into life. He felt like the butt of an ugly joke. The chair beneath her looked sodden. She was putrefying; the smell made his throat pinch and his eyes redden with tears. Though it was Rudy who was crying. He sat across from them both, hunched over, the tears making his body convulse. Green had never heard a human being make a noise like that, he wondered if that was the sound that grief made, that one day they would all wail like a lost or abandoned animal when it came to facing down their greatest fear. The primal ghosts of all their ancestors brought to bear when they finally sensed extinction. Death, he thought stupidly, really is the end.
‘Sarah,’ said Rudy. He was looking at him now, eyes streaming, his cheeks were white; he looked wild. ‘She used to enjoy wildlife programmes, the Discovery Channel. Do you ever?’
He nodded, it was true too; he found some strange comfort in nature’s abstract approach; life really was out of your hands. It was said that it wasn’t so much that the Victorians couldn’t stomach Charles Darwin’s research that turned their world and its inherent beliefs on its head, but that they couldn’t bear how indifferent and cruel nature could really be. There was no glorious path or journey; each man’s fate wasn’t aligned to the stars. Death could be waiting at the corner as easily and absurdly as it could at a zebra’s watering hole.
‘You know the polar bears?’ Rudy was staring at him, Green nodded; sure he did. He felt as if Sarah were staring at him through her eyelids, checking that he really did too.
‘They go out on the ice and they make a hole, you know,’ said Rudy, but he wasn’t talking to Green anymore, his eyes were trained on the window, he was looking hard at the polar bear sitting alone among all that white.
‘And they wait, for days sometimes. And these beluga whales they come to the surface, they need the air, they’re white like ghosts, they look like Casper, have you seen them?’
Green nodded; he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear about a polar bear crushing and killing and then eating a beluga whale as Sarah Porter sat just feet away, her insides rotting to an indiscriminate mush; it seemed to make the scenario they found themselves in even more surreal and rank. But he had nowhere to go, he needed to leave with the assurance that Rudy would let his wife go with him, that Rudy might finally loosen his grip and let himself be free. He looked at Sarah and wondered at the woman, not this ghoulish approximation of a once living thing.
‘They come up through the ice, the whale, and they do this sort of half loop, the icy water coming off them in a sheet, it’s an incredible thing to see,’ said Rudy; he was close enough then to feel the spray of the freezing cold water.
‘And the bear reaches out to embrace them, to get a hold of them, its claws out. And he gets a hold of the whale for a moment, but I don’t know if it’s the momentum of the whale or the water or the impact, but the whale keeps going, these long cuts down its side, these claw marks, and it just keeps on going. It hits the water and is gone and the bear sits back and it looks, I don’t know, dumbfounded. Sarah used to say, I think she was teasing me, that polar bears get lonely out there on the ice and all they want when they reach out for the fish, they just want something to hold on to, that they love those whales, that it’s the only thing they’ve seen for days and the loneliness is just killing them.’
He was crying now, hard.
‘And I said to her, but when those bears catch the fish they kill them, they crush the life out of them, you know. And Sarah said …’
And he allowed himself to look up at his once beautiful wife, her cheeks bloated, her hands fat, as if you might prick her and she’d deflate like a day-old party balloon. He saw his wife completely then and then he let her go, let the air out of him and the next part of his life in.
‘And she said that the bears loved the whale so much that they couldn’t help but hug them too hard and that their feelings were so strong that they ended up killing the thing they loved. Just from the holding on …’
And then Green was across the room and he held Rudy Porter in his arms as he cried and cried and he was careful to turn the man’s head away from the sight of his dead wife, so that he might see her as he once saw her. And he held him firmly but gently, so as not to crush the life from him, but to ensure that Rudy Porter might yet go on living.
March 1980
Detective Green hated Henry Willow already. He’d been here for over an hour and he hadn’t stopped talking yet. He lived his life out loud, his words so emphatic and bulging with self-belief and zeal that Green imagined he talked in italics. He could see the words gathering around him like a hazy cloud of cartoon bees.
‘You’ve met the type, right?’ he asked, wagging a finger at Green, who did all he could not to grab and bend it until it made a snapping sound and the man went down gasping, his eyes as bulging and confused as a fish finding itself out of water. For reasons that Green couldn’t even begin to fathom, this man had once dated Rose Henley. He was still talking; Green imagined the air conditioning clogged with consonants, the plughole of the sink set at the far wall filling with the letters z and y like dead flies. The words tumbled slowly down from the ceiling like small pieces of rust and gathered in crumbling piles on the floor.
‘You know, professional, solvent, successful,’ said Henry. ‘But they can’t pin a man down, so they keep making the same mistake over and over again every Friday night.’ He paused almost triumphantly. ‘I am that mistake.
‘I’ve been the other man a few times, you know, even once in my own marriage for a while.’ That was it, one solitary note of regret that appeared and disappeared in his bullish eulogy as quickly as debris in a flash flood.
‘My first wife, my only wife, she was running around on me back there. I was no saint, you know how it is, a night here, a little romance there, some shit at the office, but she fell in love with this guy and I was gone, out of the picture.’ He slumped a little; it looked as though it was taking everything he had not to pitch forward or push the table away. But then he recovered his composure and sat up straight and held on to the knot on his tie as if for reassurance, like it might centre him; he was full of bravura, but his eyes kept darting around and giving him away; he looked like a man struggling to keep a noose off his neck. Green leaned in.
‘Henry, Hank, let me call you Hank, tell me, how did you meet Rose?’ Willow gave him an abrupt look; a fleshy line appeared above his eyes, he looked quizzical.
‘You mean Red – Rose was her real name?’ asked Henry. ‘She told me that everyone called her Red. I asked her a few times what her real name was and she wouldn’t say, she just said it was what her dad called her and that I should too, which I found pretty weird to begin with. I remember asking
her once what her mother called her, trying to catch her out, you know? And she said she didn’t want to talk about her mother. She shut down like that a lot, like women do. You get that?’
He looked up at Green as if they’d just met at a bar, one guy to another. He saw him sitting there in the half-light, perched on a stool, talking sports, telling off-colour jokes a little too loudly, trying to befriend the barmaid, letting his hand linger on hers as she took his order. Is that where he’d met Red, at a bar?
‘No, she wasn’t a big drinker,’ said Willow. ‘She wasn’t big on anything really, except the good Lord.’
Henry looked incredulous, a complete non-believer.
‘Did you go up and see her apartment, all those crucifixes and Jesus staring down at you every which way? It gave me the creeps.’
Green felt his stomach lurch at the mention of Willow being in Red’s apartment; his reaction surprised and unsettled him.
‘There was one Jesus, big fucking thing, sort of propped up on her pillow, I got the feeling she slept with it, she moved it pretty quickly when I went in there, she looked embarrassed. I came to in the night one time and there was Jesus staring across at me and another one above me pinned to his cross leaning out from the wall as if he was trying to pull away or his weight was too much for the nails in his hands and he was falling forward. I thought he was going to hit me in the face.’
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 4