Walker had felt their roles reversed, the sudden, unstoppable shift, like trying to reach for an already fallen object. He felt the long suppressed evil in a vengeful Green rise up before him in a ghastly wave. And then the halogen lights of the warehouse seemed to burn and dip, their outline a ghostly haze. And all the pretty girls Walker had once walked over the hill into the arms of their gruesome fate now stood before him, he imagined absolution, a slate wiped clean, but the pity, sadness and fear that had once welled up in their eyes was now turning into something unholy. He saw Rose at their head as he felt his life being choked out of him as he had once choked the life out of those girls. A faint flicker of empathy for those young bodies he’d once buried on that lonely hill swam in and out of his thinking as this parade of the damned that he’d dispatched to hell lit briefly upon him to prick the numbed ends of his conscience. Green had become a blunt instrument sent to hammer the life out of him; Walker rolled onto his back and saw the stars, and he saw the heavens, but like Rose before him he saw no God, the skies were forever empty.
Green’s breathing was laboured, the sound of a man who had pushed himself as far and as hard as he could, there was sweat stinging his eyes, blood dashed across his knuckles, two of which were now almost certainly broken. His hair was matted and his jacket and pants torn from the sharp edges of the concrete floor. Though he only lay a few feet from him, Walker was an unrecognisable mess, his features pulpy and misshapen; he looked like wet cardboard, a dirty muddle of clothes, something best left outside. Green had rolled away from him when he could barely make a fist anymore, and so now he sat up; his head felt crushed, a spasm of pain spiked through his throat; he touched his neck gingerly, imagining a piece of glass jutting out of him at an obscene angle, something he’d be forced to pull free in order that he might heal, but his gently probing fingers found nothing, just the oily smear of Walker’s spit and blood. His shoulder felt separated from the rest of his body and his knee had locked so that his right leg felt like it might never bend again. He felt, he thought, older than he had ever felt in his life before. He pushed himself slowly backwards along the floor, keeping Walker in his sight, though he knew that if Walker had suddenly come springing back to life, there would be nothing that he could do about it now, only watch as Walker bled the life out of him, pushed a hitherto unseen pool ball into his mouth, but Walker was still, practically lifeless, perhaps, Green considered, I might have actually killed him. Green grunted slowly backwards until he felt his back reach the pale, unfinished walls of the warehouse, he let his head drop back and saw and felt the loneliness of space millions of miles away above his head.
Had he seen Red, had she really warned him away? He was woozy and losing blood, he knew what the mind could create or call on when things got desperate, he knew he needed help and in that moment he’d called on Red and she’d come, or that’s what he’d tell himself if he ever felt like telling this story again. And then he was suddenly a kid again, the Californian night was above him, because wasn’t the sky that shone here the same one that had reached down to him along the beaches in California before he and his father had moved east? He was twelve and the rain was reaching upwards, retreating from the earth, and he had run outside and stretched his arms and hands high and tried to touch the cosmos and feel where the rain had disappeared to that night. He imagined travelling upwards among the spokes of rain, being lifted within the thin sheets of water, passing up towards the clouds and glancing back at his father’s home as it became a distant rectangle of lights set among hundreds and then thousands of other boxes, of other acres of subdivided homes. He saw the fields and beyond, imagined his father racing into the yard to find where his son had gone, never guessing that he’d been spirited away with the weather. And then he was beyond the clouds, chasing the rain towards the heavens, never wondering how far he might yet fall.
‘Where are you, Green, where’s your head?’ said Walker in a voice as broken as his features, his blood making an elongated black puddle around his shoulders and head, his hair sticking to the warehouse floor. ‘For God’s sake, come back,’ he hissed, ‘or we’re going to die here.’
Green heard his name and thought his father was speaking to him from somewhere, he focused suddenly, surprised to find himself here back on earth somewhere, propped up against a warehouse wall on the margins of the city. ‘My father,’ he said, as he came to. ‘I heard my father’s voice, he was calling out to me.’
‘Your old man’s upstate, he’s safe.’ The blood in Walker’s mouth was making him gurgle; he tipped himself onto his side and spat reddish drool across the floor. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, trying to raise a hand to his ribs to feel for fractures. ‘Green?’
And Detective Green was going to do what any good cop would do.
‘Call it in,’ said Green as a hacking cough slowly caught in his chest, thrummed through his newly loosened teeth and threatened to rattle the life right out of him.
December 1980
If a stranger had happened upon him, they might have thought that a group of children had been taking it in turns to colour Detective Green’s face in. There was a swirl of green here, a patch of black there; his jawline was a mute explosion of purple bruises. The nurse at the hospital had joked that it was only a shame that he’d missed Halloween and he told her she should have seen the state of the other guy and she was still laughing as his half-smile turned into wincing, unremitting pain.
The sudden ring of the phone still made him flinch, something as revelatory as it was unwelcome and new since he’d literally run into Walker, or he him. Picking up the receiver too now made Green’s hand ache; his fist felt like it would never fully unclench again. It was his father’s voice on the telephone. He normally called his son on a Sunday and so Green was surprised to hear his low hello again on a Monday.
‘They killed John Lennon.’
Green was home and had heard nothing about it: he’d been living in some kind of seclusion since that night at the warehouse. The sound of the streets unsettled him, every dark corner promised trouble, strangers glared, the sound of sirens – ironic given that it was the sound of their approach that signalled that he and Walker would live – spooked him. He felt like a skittish dog always on edge, he could hardly bear the sound of the radio now, let alone the intermittent squawk of his police transmitter. He’d hardly been back to work at all since he’d done his best to kill Walker; he was being forced to attend sessions with the squad’s therapist – did he harbour murderous thoughts or intentions? Did he have a handle on his drinking these days? Had he ever truly gotten over the death of his son and the subsequent divorce? How did he feel now that Walker’s lawyers were talking about suing him and the police department, Green had acted outside the law, he was a vigilante not a cop, that the case against their client was bullshit and Green was to blame? How did that make him feel, asked the therapist? Stressed, he guessed, he was almost always tired now, he couldn’t hold a conversation, he’d done the best he could and now it wasn’t enough, he was the bad guy and Walker the victim. And so here he was at home, staying away from the windows, rarely leaving his apartment, his knee flaring up when it got cold outside. While Walker sat in a hospital bed up at Riker’s Island as his army of lawyers coerced and complained that this was no way to treat an innocent man, the real victim in this atrocity. Part of Green wished they’d both died on the warehouse floor and had done with it, it felt like there might be a sense of dignity in that, one that was missing from this.
‘They killed John Lennon.’ It was his father, more insistent this time.
Green realised he’d drifted away from the voice on the phone, he’d felt punch-drunk and concussed for weeks, and admitted that he probably was; tuning out of conversations was just one of the symptoms. He instantly recognised the traces of grief, anger and confusion in his father’s voice, he’d heard it before in recordings of victim’s reports, as people were being attacked, the call for help from family members, someone
going into a seizure on the floor nearby, no matter the scenario, it always made him think of flecks of black and grey, he saw the white noise of sadness building up around their words.
Months later after the full story of the killing had unfolded, he’d think of Mark Chapman’s misery and madness turning into an obsession until it overflowed and became a ruddy deluge that caught John Lennon up in its filthy wave and swept him away. He knew the old man liked the music and was appalled when – as his father had it – the small-minded tyranny of the US government had tried to get Lennon thrown out of America, but he often thought that was more about the way his old man liked to rail against the system than anything to do with Lennon’s basic human rights. When his father was living in Manhattan he often said that he liked the idea of living in the same city as a Beatle, but this was more, here was his father grieving, it sounded like he was shedding real tears.
‘Who’d want to kill him, who’d want to shoot him down in the street like that?’
Green wasn’t sure if his father was asking if he knew more than the news was already telling people, but he soon realised that it was just the sound of his dad disentangling, trying to find an answer where there was none; it made no sense then and it never would. This was the old man he recognised when he’d had his crisis of confidence and began to doubt his God, began to think that his was a life wasted on an idea; that he’d really been preaching to an empty sky.
‘You don’t believe in a God, I’m not sure you ever have,’ his father had said to him earlier that summer; they were seated in his father’s study, it was Sunday and the sermon he’d delivered that morning had felt, to the old man at least, flaccid and uninspired. He used to preach with verve and passion, but he was always empathetic, he had no time for showboating, he was no Blue.
‘I know it’s still a job,’ said his father, ‘but you have to believe in your job and I’m not sure I do anymore. Look at you, this case with this man Walker and this girl, this Rose, it’s almost taken over your life and it hurts me to see you that way, so torn, but determined, but when you lost your boy …’ He looked at his only son and could never imagine the pain and grief of losing your own family, that part of you; even now he still worried about Louis every day he wasn’t at his side. ‘But the job, it was what got you through, it kept you alive.’
‘You kept me alive,’ said Green gently, placing his hand on his father’s. His father turned his hand over and they sat there for a moment, fingers linked in the quiet hush of these suburban streets, and wondered at what the other had become, what had become of themselves, these men they’d made.
‘You have always had me and you always will, I’m your father, but the job was the thing, it’s your way of helping people, it’s how you get those things you need to do done. You want to see the good in the world and the only way you think you can achieve that is by wiping out the evil. That’s the way you were made, maybe that’s the way I made you, but I can see no flaws in that or you, Louis. And no matter what it takes, you’ll bring that girl Rose some redemption, you won’t let her be lost and tossed away for nothing. I know you won’t agree with me, son, but you were put here to help and I’m proud of that and I’m proud of you.’
And his father held him hard by his shoulders and shook him a little as if he might wake him, might make him realise all the good he had done and was doing.
‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, Louis, but you’ll come through this, maybe I will too, and right now you’re hurt and you’re lost and you can’t see a way through this case, it’s all bloody dead ends, I’ve no idea of the horrors you’ve seen, but you’ve never been cowed before, only by the bottle maybe.’ He bowed his head so they were eye to eye. ‘Don’t let this beat you.’
And then he gently held Louis’ jaw the way he had the day he told him they were moving from the West Coast to the East and the boy had cried out no, that he wouldn’t go. But the old man had pushed on because then, as now, he knew that he needed his son to know it was the right and only thing to do.
*
Green thought about that now as his father was still talking on the end of the phone.
‘Dad.’ His father stopped abruptly. ‘You’re never going to stop preaching, are you?’
‘Me? Hell no, whatever gave you that idea? People need me, even more now than they ever did, how do you make sense of something like this, Lennon had a family, you know? People need guidance and help at a time like this, it’s not as if the holidays aren’t lonely enough as it is. What a fucking waste, sorry, but it really is.’
‘I’ll come and see you soon, Dad. We’ll talk it through, we’ll play some of his music, celebrate his life and try not to mourn too much.’
‘I’d like that,’ said his dad, and then before he put the phone down: ‘And how are you doing now, you still look like a clown who fell asleep in his make-up?’
Green laughed, doubling up a little. ‘Don’t make me laugh, ah. I’m okay, I guess. Walker’s people are trying to get him out and I think they might, they’re talking about a civil suit against me, but we’ve got enough on him outside of this that it won’t come to anything. They’re just making a smokescreen to hide all his other fucking atrocities. He’s evil, Dad, I’m not going to let that endure.’
‘Me neither, okay, son, but let someone else do the heavy lifting this time, yeah? You’ve done everything you can.’
Green replaced the phone and stretched out his hand and made a determined fan of his fingers. While somewhere uptown, Walker was being helped into the back of his limousine; like Green he was moving slower than he once did, both eyes were black rings and his nose had been reset, his jaw was a steel plate and he walked with a stick for support. He sat down with an audible sigh and stretched his legs out with a groan.
‘Sorry it took so long to get you out of there,’ said the lawyer seated to Walker’s left. ‘We need to go over a few papers before we decide what we’re going to do next.’
Walker was staring intently out of the window and up at the snatches of sky reflecting in the buildings overhead.
‘Where are we going?’ he said without turning his head.
‘We were going to take you home, get you settled in, make you comfortable there …’
‘Do you think it’s going to snow?’ asked Walker, cutting across the conversation. ‘It feels too early for snow, but look at the silver in the sky, like thousands of tiny needles waiting to rain down on us.’
‘I didn’t see the forecast,’ said the lawyer, but Walker stopped his words with a sudden wave of his gloved hand.
‘I want to go to the office,’ he said and then he turned to look at the man. ‘My dad used to be in that building too, did you know that? Down the hall a little, same floor; when I used to go and visit him when I was a kid I’d look out at that view and know it was where I wanted to be one day.’
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ said the lawyer, but Walker was staring out of the window again, waiting for the car to take the next turning and him to where he wanted to be.
Downtown, Green pushed himself up from his seat and walked to the window, edging the blinds back so he could take in the traffic and the greying sky. Snow, or maybe there’s a storm coming, he thought, as he reached for his coat and a scarf.
Uptown, Walker stood in his father’s old office; he could see the Hudson River off to his right and the occasional gleam of the industrial landscape beyond that, outbuildings and warehouses; he wondered if he and his men had spent any time over there. A snowflake came gently tumbling out of the steely sky and pressed itself against the window where he stood; he could briefly make out of the fine, irregular edges before the wind unpicked it from its place on the glass and made it suddenly disappear.
‘Like magic,’ said Walker.
He walked slowly down the corridor to his own office and leaned over his desk, reaching down to the bottom right-hand drawer, which he unlocked with a key he fished out of his pocket. Inside were two pool
balls, a red number three ball and a green with the number six set inside a circle on a strip that wrapped around it. He put one each in the pockets of the long coat he was wearing like a man loading himself down with rocks who’s getting ready to drown.
Green walked slowly across the park; the road was busier than he might have liked, but he’d be damned if he was going to be spooked by traffic. He was heading towards his precinct; he wanted to be around his men, he wanted to feel part of that throng, to belong. They’d caught Walker and no matter what happened now he was going to loosen his grip on this city. Green walked to the subway that would lead him across the street and hesitated at the top of the steps and peered down into the darkness and the figures moving around in there. The snow was building now, catching in his hair and settling on his face, he readjusted his scarf and stepped forward, going only down.
Walker moved some books from the shelves against the back wall of the office to reveal a safe that was hidden away there. He looked around him to make sure he was alone, opened the safe up and carefully took out the human skull that was sitting there. He kissed it softly on the crown and gently placed it in inside his leather holdall and walked to the elevator. He nodded at someone on his staff whose name he couldn’t remember or never knew and entered the elevator alone and took it to the top floor. It was one flight of stairs up to the roof, but he took them carefully, afraid that he might slip and break the girl’s skull he now carried under his arm. He pushed opened the door to the roof against a strong headwind that was carrying the snow in juddering waves up here and walked steadily towards the roof’s perimeter. He stood alone for a moment and held up the skull as if to take it all in.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 21