Walker cut him off, silenced the voice filling his skull.
‘Detective Green, join us. Do you play?’ Walker was impassive, his hands set on both knees, legs splayed, he sat forward; he was all business.
Green felt spotlit and hopelessly exposed, but walked unstintingly forward, head slightly bowed as if expecting the sudden crack of a cue stick against his skull. Walker pretended not to notice, he was seated on a long, low black box; for a moment Green mistook it for a small coffin and imagined himself bunched up in there fighting for air and light.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Walker stood up, he was elegant, almost straitlaced, a stickler for formalities even here in this dust and gloom. He opened the lid to the dark wooden cabinet and indicated a row of heavy glass bottles and tumblers nestled in individual cubbyholes, neat rows of whiskey, a bucket of misty-looking ice set off to one side. It looked absurd in this setting, though no more than Walker, who was dressed as if for the opera even down to his white gloves. Preposterous, thought Green.
‘But you don’t drink, do you?’ said Walker, dropping a handful of ice into a glass and then half-filling the tumbler with tea-coloured liquid; the ice cubes cracked loudly on contact with the whiskey. Walker waved the glass towards a motionless Green, the only movement as his eyes followed the ice tumbling down into the whiskey.
‘What was it with you?’ said Walker. ‘This stuff …’ He swirled the glass around, admired it in what little light came in through the factory’s soot-covered windows and then gulped it greedily down.
‘Or were you more the end-of-the-bar-with-a-beer kind of guy? A few brews with your friends from the station and then they’d all drift away and there you’d be pooled in light, one bottle after another, never wanting to go home, maybe a chaser to go with the beer to take the edge off, just to put off the inevitable last order. Not that you had too many friends at the place.’
Walker cracked some more ice into his glass and refilled it nearly to the brim. The cloudy ice cubes jostling each other, intermittently breaking the surface. Green followed their lazy journey around the glass, but didn’t meet Walker’s gaze.
‘Or were you brown-bagging it at work, bottle in the bottom drawer – we’ve had a few of those at my place, not least me.’ Walker cackled and smiled warmly at Green and seemed dismayed when Green didn’t smile back. That’s not just his second drink, thought Green, and started to look around the interior of the redundant factory. Walker’s men stood as silhouettes behind him, the now vacant pool table beyond them, and in the half-light there was someone sitting quietly behind that. Walker couldn’t ever imagine this as a once working building filled with life; now it was airless and soulless, strangely pristine, but ultimately dead, he could smell cleaning fluid and whiskey and the unstinting musk of unhappiness. And what of Walker, what did he want? This was like being coerced by a drunk when sober, something he’d experienced many times once he’d let the booze go but had still haunted bars trying to reignite that feeling of sleepy contentment before the paranoia and self-loathing hit.
That was the voice Walker was using now; the soft edge, the slight whine, certain words almost indistinguishable, he was listing slightly, rising and falling gently on the balls of his feet, he had the insistence of a man convinced that he had something important to say and someone should listen intently to him, take him in and understand the gravity of his story. It had been Green’s voice too once when he’d slowly moved from stool to stool, booth to booth and bar to bar; he imagined his movements were deft and enthralling, that people must be staring, but he kicked more tables than he could count, spilt more drinks, broke more glasses, enraged more people than he enlightened. He’d slide in next to a stranger and explain how his life, any life, was mere steps from the edge. His grasp on what the edge was exactly was an ugly mixture of metaphors and elusory language that usually ended with him drinking someone else’s drink by mistake. He’d done that once and after a tortuous and protracted apology he’d gone to the bar to replace the beer he’d drunk and then returned to the wrong booth, where he gave a bemused father and son two cold bottles of Rolling Rock and clapped them both heartily on the back with a stirring, cheerleading welcome to New York. The thought of it now, of weaving through crowded bars, overstaying his welcome, blundering into people, made him bunch his fist involuntarily; the still tangible embarrassment crept up the back of his neck as a blushing spray of pink and red.
‘Do you know how much this bottle cost, Green?’ said Walker, who had been happily topping his glass up in the silence. ‘I don’t, I don’t even know how much I’m worth. Is that shocking to you?’
Green shook his head, the only thing shocking about that was that he never imagined Walker to be crass enough to talk about his wealth, inherited or otherwise – he thought it boorish, he imagined Walker a much slicker proposition; he knew how dangerous and calculating he could be. He wondered if the drink tapped into Walker’s own reserve of self-hatred and guilt, as it did him, if booze eventually turned all men into self-reproaching idiots who could only stare blankly inside of themselves and loathe the real emptiness they found there. Measure out their worth in markers in the road they’d made for themselves – wives, money, property, cars, even the kind of fucking dog they owned. He looked at Walker, who was leaning too far forward, as if one more inch would see him upended, sprawling on the floor; the idea didn’t upset him. Walker’s head was moving gently – if I took a photo of him now, thought Green, it would be just out of focus, like the subject itself.
‘So if you didn’t invite me here for a drink, then what?’ said Green. He tried to see beyond Walker’s swaying head as he said it, he didn’t know if they were uptown or downtown or far beyond the city anymore. He needed a landmark to pin them to.
‘You’ve been talking to people about me,’ said Walker tonelessly, staring beyond Green’s shoulder; he seemed less drunk suddenly, as if he’d found a new sense of purpose. He looked directly at Green.
‘I don’t know, I thought you might have taken a drink. To me, you seem like a man who might be swayed. You left your wife pretty damn quick after the kid died.’ He looked at Green without pity or reproach. ‘Not so much left her as ignored her, let her sit nights at home wondering where you were. It’s fair to say, I think, that you only added to her pain in order to offset your own. You couldn’t deal with what you were feeling and to cope with that you simply shut down, blocked everyone and everything out, including her. That’s pretty unforgiveable, don’t you think?’
He didn’t give Green time to answer.
‘Probably best the kid died, you’d have only ended up raising a boy like me.’ One eyebrow went up into an arch. ‘Treacherous, the kind who’d chop off his old man’s head or get someone to sneak into his hospital room after dark and switch off his life support to get where he wanted to go, and no one bests you in a power struggle, do they, Detective Green? I mean, look at you, you’re strong, you’ve got a jaw like Superman, for Christ’s sake, I bet you’ve had those big old fists around a few throats in your time, I bet you found it hard to let go more than once. I’d go as far as to say that some of your guys had to wrestle you off some guy’s back when you lost it and saw red …’
In spite of himself, Green couldn’t help but respond as soon as Walker had said the word; his head barely flinched, but he felt his skin shift, knew that his eyes flashed sidewards, and all the while Walker was watching him as intently as a snake waiting to strike. One movement and Death was there, darting suddenly forward, all-consuming, inevitable.
‘Red,’ said Walker again, but this time purely for effect, like someone sending a charge of electricity through a man tied to a gurney, for fun, just to see what he might do.
‘Rose,’ said Walker, but more softly this time. ‘That was her real name, she hated it, but I guess you knew that. Her old man drained all the joy from Rose early on, took the colour out of it and her. He didn’t like women much, just like you and me.’
Green looked sq
uarely at Walker and imagined his hands on his face, his thumbs deep in both eye sockets, pushing hard until he screamed out for Green to please stop. The idea made him happy.
‘Bulley,’ said Walker, reaching for a fresh glass, ‘thinks we’re all on fire – no, not thinks, he actually believes we’re all aflame, he sees it – did he tell you about his sack of sins, the one he carries sloshing around on his back? His life is caught somewhere between fire and water, which I think has a certain sort of poetry to it, wouldn’t you agree? Are you sure you won’t have a drink, what harm could just one drink do? Did he tell you about the commune? That place was …’
He swirled his drink around and then dipped slightly as if he were on springs; he was moving around now, enjoying the space in which to perform. His men stood unblinking, it was nothing they hadn’t seen before.
‘Such a trip. Blue, his old man – hell, you must know all about Blue, you’ll have read the police report, you’re the inquisitive kind, you’re dogged, tenacious.’ Walker drew the word out; you could tell that he didn’t mean it kindly; he didn’t think it was an asset. ‘No stone unturned, all that shit, that’s you. Blue though, oh, he could raise the roof with his words, when he spoke people really listened, he was like Dr King when he turned it on; he could have changed lives. Hell, I’d have hired him just to do a sales shtick for us. But he had that dream about building his own utopia out in the countryside, he couldn’t see the difference between a refuge for the great unwashed, society’s fucking detritus piling up at his gates, and a gleaming city built on faith, pure fantasy, but you had to admire his ambition. I’m all for ambition.’
‘He saved you, he took you in,’ said Green.
‘James took me in,’ said Walker, bridling slightly. ‘Blue was in the house at the time fucking some girl, that was his weakness, pussy. He used to preach and they’d literally flock around him, ha, they wanted to touch the hem of his garment, I guess.’
‘I thought James was your friend?’
Green was already bored of this petulant, preening man-child; he wore his moods as fitfully and nakedly as a teenage boy. Arrested development, thought Green, little prick. He wanted to bang his head against the drinks cabinet until it cracked. Walker ignored his question; he had one of his own.
‘Your dad preaches, right?’
He looked at Green until Green conceded that he did with a tight nod; Walker knew all about him anyway.
‘He took you out of California and brought you to New York, that was against your will, right?’ Green was mute on the subject.
‘Why the hell would you want to leave the beach for this dump?’ said Walker. ‘And even he’s abandoned the city now, gone upstate, I bet you miss him; you should visit him more; he misses you. Do you ever think about leaving the city, Green? I do, but where would I go? I could literally be anywhere in the world and look at me …’ He sighed, resting his chin on the rim of his glass. ‘Here in an old bottling factory with you, you’re not even any fun, you won’t even have a drink with me. What do you do to relax, Green? Working girls? Drugs? Beat up innocent men in custody? You don’t though, do you? I checked, you’re spotless – reckless temper, sure, alcoholic, absolutely, but they’re old problems, you’ve transcended them, how dull.’ He snorted derisively. ‘You date, but they don’t stick, do they? You keep everyone at arm’s length, even the guys at work, now that you don’t go out drinking anymore they never see you out of hours, no one says a word against you though, I think they’re scared of you and I think you like it.’
Walker gently closed the lid of the cabinet, cradling the tumbler of whiskey close to his chest, as if to keep it from harm’s way. He sat down with a gentle sigh.
‘Some people say my family are self-made, some that we’re gifted, and there is a strange aura around the old man, or there was, I’ll admit that much,’ said Walker; his voice had softened; he looked at the glass as if he wasn’t sure how he had come to be holding it. ‘He knew things before they happened, that’s how he created a whole new language, they call it being part of the zeitgeist now, but it was more than that, he created things, he made a whole new world out of words, it was powerful stuff to be around. Apparently, it was stronger still in his old man and his before him; by the time it got to me it was the run-off, the dregs, the last drops at the bottom of the glass. If I had a kid now, he’d be pretty normal, I guess. Which isn’t so bad – it’s a blessing and curse, knowing what people want to hear and then finding the words to say it.’
Green regarded him, he recognised the maudlin aspects of alcohol taking hold, the dismay and the regret, the self-pity. He was surprised to see Walker so down-at-heel, so very human.
‘Did Rose ever come to you in Washington Square?’ he asked Green.
‘I never met her,’ said Green; he was almost effusive in spite of himself. ‘I saw the corpse, read her story, saw the photos, tried to piece it all together, to catch whoever did that to her. And I will – what was it you said, I’m tenacious, dogged, right?’
‘You met her once,’ said Walker. ‘You walked right by her; she touched your hand.’
Green knew when he was being lied to and as he realised he was hearing the truth something unbuckled inside of him until it jarred somewhere against his ribs.
‘She gave you a flyer for her church group, Bulley’s bunch, when you were walking through SoHo one day, you were kind enough not to toss it away in front of her, she held on to that. She’d seen a lot of madness and shit in this city and you seemed like some sort of hope, that’s how innocent she could be, she was actually turned on, and I mean mentally, by your civility and manners. She used to go looking for you in Washington Square after that, she was looking for you when she found all those other men – Alejandro, Hank, even me. She thought we might be the path to her destiny, that we might be a …’
For once, Walker couldn’t find the words. Perhaps, he thought, my magic has finally run dry; this is what it is to be like all other men? His dismay was profound, he felt like a light bulb diminishing. Finally ordinary, he thought, just like his father had always told him he was.
‘I don’t know – that we were a through street to get to you,’ said Walker quietly. ‘That anyone who showed her some sort of kindness might be on the same path as you were. She was so innocent and brave and stupid, I guess.’
There was no malice in Walker’s words, he was thinking about destiny and how Red had never been his and how Green was never hers. He was sure Red prayed to her God to give her Green, a God Green never gave a damn about, never saw, would never consider letting into his life. Walker wondered what would have happened if Green had gone down into that SoHo basement one day, if the church flyer had somehow piqued his interest, if the loneliness had drawn him down those stairs, how different things would be now. Either way, thought Walker, Rose would never be his. She stayed for a while, he even thought she might have loved him for a moment, but she was only ever trying to save him and then one day she told him she had to go, that being with him was like always standing in a shadow, and with his arrogance and pride, Walker thought she meant the ever-reaching shadow of his success, but, no, she told him, her hand on his forearm, being with him was like always being in the dark when all she ever wanted to see was the light.
‘If you’d just gone down to that basement then you could have saved her,’ said Walker, attempting to shift the blame one final time.
‘From what,’ said Green, his heart beating out of his chest, his right hand a tight fist. ‘A fucking ghoul like you? Someone who’s never known what it is not to have power; not be the one who wields the stick, who calls the shots. Her and Henry I couldn’t really understand, that fucking hard-ass, but people get lonely I guess, but you, you’re some kind of malevolent force, you’re poison in the well, a rain of napalm, you’re death …’ Green sat back and made a sound like air coming out of an old tyre.
‘You’re impeccably dressed death, Walker, I’ll give you that. Red was doomed from the moment she met you �
�� no, the moment she left you. What did you do, track her movements like you’ve tracked mine? Compile a dossier on her the way you might a company you want to take over and drain the resources from? Crush the competition, is that what she became, was Red suddenly the competition? No, all those other men, they were the competition, that’s why they were snuffed out, fucked over, wiped out.’
Green braced himself as if ready for a fight.
‘So if she and I …’ He stopped, he was thinking what he would do now if he had his gun – push it hard into Walker’s face, scraping the barrel against his teeth, maybe knock one loose? He shook the thoughts away, he focused on his father; he needed composure and clarity. Walker was dressed in three-hundred-dollar shoes, but they were still filled with blood; he wore the faces of other men, bones as rings on his fingers, he was decaying before Green’s eyes, his flesh was rank, there were chunks of skin in his otherwise perfectly groomed hair, but he couldn’t see it.
‘Then what, Mr Walker – would one of your goons have forced a pool ball into my mouth and watched me stagger around …’
‘Making ceaseless revolutions to a certain death,’ said Walker quietly.
‘What?’ said Green, fighting to stop the white noise in his head. He knew where he went from here and it would only end with Walker broken against the pool table, his men on Green’s back. He slowed his breath like a therapist had once taught him, and counted silently backwards. If Walker felt the advantage sliding back towards him he didn’t show it.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 16