Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  When she turned she had tears in her eyes. “Fuck, Ray, you got me, man. You got who I was.” She lay down beside him on the futon. “You ever think, Ray, of living up north?”

  He felt grief. He’d found her and lost her. He felt like a kid who’d made a perfect snowman and had to stand there, himself frozen, watching it walk away. “You can have anyplace you want, Djuna. You could get posted down here. We could have … something.”

  “We have something now. It’s portable, you know?” She stretched. “You should see the mornings up there, in my Spout, even the winter. There’s a coldness so cold that it makes you realize you’re a warm creature. There’s a lot of blacks and whites, especially in winter, but there’s colours, too, people to be captured down on canvas. They need stuff up there, they need police, they need a soft hand, they need artists.”

  “You’re going?”

  “I’ve gone. Trooper sergeant in the Spout. Boy, were they ever pissed off when I insisted.” She hugged him. She was crying; he could feel it hot on his neck. “Come with me, Ray, take some leave and give it a month. Like a holiday. And there’s lots and lots of birds, all the time up there.”

  He thought about it. Fishing, which he’d never done. Hunting, which he’d never done. There would, of course, be birds. There were birds everyfuckingplace, although he didn’t actually care about birds at all. The way she described the dancing smoke of dawn, the silver skin of morning dew, he could find use for the oranges and yellows smeared on his pallet with the thumbhole in it.

  But he knew that for him it wasn’t the time of the artist and might never be. It was still the time of the cop. “I can’t. There’s people down here that need police. There’s kiddy cops that are about fourteen years old and there’s no one to grow them into real cops. Some of them are going to die, some are going to fuck up and somebody else is going to die.”

  “Like me, eh, Ray? Father Ray. Fix the busted, find the cop inside and bring her out.”

  She put her round hat on the floor and sat to tug off her boots. She took off her uniform. She was careful of his tubing and bag, of the wadding covering his shoulder. Out of the uniform she was tiny. They snuggled down under the duvet. Her toes found the buttery calluses on his cop feet. They couldn’t do much but they did what they could.

  Afterwards she said, “It’s only a four or five hour drive to up there. Maybe eight, the way you city guys drive.”

  He said: “Let’s just play it loose, Djun’.”

  “Free-form jazz, right, Ray?”

  He smelled her hair. “Cool-ee-oh.”

  * * *

  In Djuna Brown’s rented house on the far northern edge of Widow’s Corners the telephone rang. She took it on the first ring. She listened and said she was rolling, looking at the clock beside the bed, and said: “Okay, I’m notified at oh-four-nineteen. ETA: thirty minutes. Black, no sugar. Major crime scene requested.”

  She rubbed her face vigorously with both palms to warm it. Her own hands on her own face reminded her of being a little girl, trying to rub the colour off. She brushed her hair, blind, and clipped it back. She pulled on woollens and her uniform and her parka and her mukluks. She glanced out the window where the marked four-by-four, backed in beside the house, was covered by the night’s snowfall, and tucked her uniform trousers into the boots. The room was cold and she thought she could see her pewter breath. She took a moment to shake out her Arctic sleeping bag and dress the single bed with it.

  She went to sleep at night thinking of Ray Tate, hoping to entice him into her dreams. But she always woke up with her impulse to shove her Statie sniper down, out of her way, so she’d have a clear shot at the fat fuck. She mourned Harv in a detached cop way. She mourned the lost possibility of what Harv might have become if he’d explored the roots kept hidden underground. When Agatha Burns told her how Harv hadn’t killed her, but instead made her kick and had talked about lives missed, ideas and concepts, and home building and codes of behaviour, Djuna Brown mourned his opportunities, untested.

  She’d never given the wrinkled tube of vitamin E cream to Tommy. It sat by her bedside. One day, she thought, I’ll snare a man and bring him back here.

  And after I’ve fucked him stupid, he’ll go, What’s with that tube of stuff?

  I’ll go: persistent crabs, I can’t kick ’em. So he wouldn’t be there in the morning when Ray, she dreamed, would show up with his easel over his shoulder, released somehow from his duty that kept him on the city streets.

  Ray would like it up here, she thought. It was a place of real policing, of gin and taps beside the potbellied stove, of whispers of beatnik dreams of Paris, and paints and pots. There was life here, she believed, there was love, even if it was a sad love that manifested itself in peculiar and savage ways. Things got crazy with the cabin shut-ins, the alcoholic depressions and tremens, the beaten children and the domestic bloodbaths. Crazy but not insane. You could find a reason, you could find a cause for it all. There were answers and you could learn from it. It was crazy, maybe, but it wasn’t madness. It had a gospel.

  Me and Ray, that beatnik pal o’ mine. We’ve both been there, we’ve both crossed over. Maybe to careless murder, maybe not. We both found whatever it is we’re good for. We were summoned and we weren’t found wanting. We stood and delivered it up. We did what we had to do. I believe I know this. I wonder if Ray, my city guy, does.

  Outside she unplugged the block heater, started the truck, fired the heater, and climbed out. As her dad had taught her she brushed every bit of snow off the body and glass. She boarded the big four-by-four and rolled it down the driveway, the heater blasting still cold and the window open a bit so she could hear the exquisite pain of the tires crunching the snow’s reluctant crust. She went on the air as she drove out, pushing her headlights ahead of her, out into an undulating, white, new world she felt she had ownership of and responsibility for. She voiced out: “Trooper Sergeant Brown en route …” she looked at her watch, “four forty-four a.m.”

  The dispatcher came back with a synopsis. Five children had lived in the trailer she’d been directed to and now there would be none living. There would be two grandparents hanging like winter pods from rotting rafters. There would be a man, once both a father to five and a son to two, now neither to any living, in the snow in front of the trailer, his shotgun between his knees and his head innards on the trailer door.

  It’s a heartbreak place, all of it, this white world, she thought, flicking on the overhead rack lights but leaving the siren silent so the living could sleep.

  And the real benefit to the heartbreak was it told you had a heart.

  As if in revenge for her contentment, it began to snow heavily.

  “Snow away,” Djuna Brown laughed, a girl again, Ray’s bohemian girl, once and maybe again, or maybe not. “It’s all just free-form jazz.”

  Prelude

  The woman lay buried in leaves and twigs on the marshy margin of the wide river through the night and wondered if she appeared dead enough that, after someone discovered her and the coroner took her away, they’d re-bury her alive, thinking she was already dead.

  Her left eye was dislodged and twisted, looking blindly, impossibly, away. The right eye was frozen open, a fixed lens on a fresh blue sky cut with arcing seagulls. She felt her throbbing cheekbones swelling against her gums. There were teeth in her throat, and she was afraid to swallow her pooling blood and saliva in case she choked.

  The logic of her senses told her she was alive. For her, sight was the most important and because there’d been no stars in the clouded night she’d feared she was blind and perhaps dead, until the eastern light began to glow on the periphery of her right eye. Scent and sound returned in that order; first the fecund odour of the river and of the musty cracked leaves over her face. Then the screaming madness of the gulls and the creaking of boat hulls, and in her ears the slow but lazy pulse of her indifferent heart.

  Live interment was a basic human terror. When she was a girl down
in Missouri, some schoolmates, experimenting to determine if it was possible to turn her black skin white from terror, had locked her in a root cellar that was so dark and absolutely still and warm that she didn’t know where her skin ended and the dank air began. They’d covered her with a tarp and she couldn’t tell if she was face up or face down. Until she gave up hope that someone would come to the cellar, she had tried to still herself, tried to keep away the thoughts of black snakes and spiders. She’d lain frozen, humming gospel songs her grandma had taught her. She was freed several hours later when her dad came down to the cellar to get a wooden barrel of pickles to sell at the family’s roadside stand.

  It would be like that to be alive in a buried coffin: an atmosphere humid with her own breath, strumming with her own sounds. When she’d done a student documentary at the city morgue, though, a hale and hearty attendant listened to her spooky concerns and laughed into her wide eyes. “If you weren’t already dead, the autopsy would finish you off anyway.” He shrugged, adding that he’d heard tales of caskets being opened years after interment and fingernail gouges found engraved inside the lids. “So, what do I know?” His morbidity was friendly. When he saw he’d spooked her, he said, kindly, “Best thing, Missy? Check off the organ donor box on your driver’s licence. That’ll do it.”

  Had life been at all real since she’d been in that cellar? Was she still under that tarp twenty years later, and all her life a dream delivered between two impossibly long, final heartbeats? There’d been no college over in Chicago, none of the boyfriends had been born or even existed, her cat hadn’t lived and died, she hadn’t met Quentin Tarantino at a West Coast film festival. She wondered in a series of abstract thoughts whether maybe this was what everybody’s life was like: a dream in a wet womb of a woman who might have never existed in a place that never was. She wanted to examine that but the thought skidded away.

  She knew the survival value of an active mind, but didn’t think too much about the man who’d beaten her, methodically taking her apart until … Horace acted and there was yelling and cursing and the man was just gone, not there any longer.

  She’d studied film and video and knew her eye had now become a fixed lens and that a world of moments would pass in front of it, be recorded in the pixels of her grey brain. She thought of Michelangelo Antonioni’s beautiful seven-minute tracking hotel scene. She’d rather look at a blurry photograph of Antonioni in a magazine than have drinks in person with Tarantino. She’d never met Luciano Tovoli but she knew from the moment the film closed that she’d love his eyes without reserve.

  She studied the birds slicing around the sky. It was a perfect sky. For her graduation project à la Antonioni, she’d set up an old 8mm camera on a set of sticks and had her actors wander slowly across the frozen scene, talking or making love, or just standing a moment, then moving out of the frame as if their appearance was a sprocket in a longer journey.

  For her new documentary she’d wandered the banks of the river looking for beaching points used by migrant smugglers who ran little canvas dinghies and rowboats across from Canada, depositing Chinese families in the land known in China as Gold Mountain. America. There had been deaths, bodies found the previous winter in their inadequate coats, an ice sculpture of mother and daughter together, hugging each other, a pair of young boys a month later a mile downriver, their malnourished bodies twisted and trapped and frozen in the rocks. And a week ago a sailor on a lake freighter spotted the floating body of an elderly woman with photographs in a fanny pack of grandchildren she’d never meet and a telephone number of a local East Chinatown restaurant.

  The river was spooky at night. For comfort and companionship she’d brought Horace with her. The visit was taken without any equipment except her eyes and intuition. Before she had her mood, her vantage point, her voice, she wouldn’t lug equipment; she was a previsualizer, panning her boxed fingers through the trees, feeling properly pretentious. Once she had her research done and some funding in place, she’d film, hopefully with a full winter moon in the froth of grey cloud. Some wind to make a sinister rustling, although the trees would then be bare. Now there was only her own breathing and her faint footfalls in the dark. She had some rippling piano music in mind, a score she was composing. A little Keith Jarrettish, maybe. She would do nothing so cliché as blending a track of scripted migrants’ cries for salvation before death to interplay with the cresting ripple of noir piano. She had been thinking of owls, loud warning hoots, maybe an explosion of one out of a tree that would bring first shock and then laughing relief to the migrants. There were ethical issues; she didn’t want to do re-enactment, she didn’t want to do dramatization. She wanted to document. She’d have to research if there were owls along the riverbank in winter.

  When she’d seen flashlights bobbing on the water, she’d stopped. The Volunteers, come to defend the shoreline from Chinese migrants carrying all manner of disease and communism. When the lights were past she shook a cigarette from a pack, turned her back to the river to screen the flame, and lit it with a lighter in the cup of her hands. Before she could exhale she felt a huge mass slam into her. She was overwhelmed and her inner organs and her eyes and her breath and pulses seized in shock. She was rushed right out of her shoes and hoisted by the throat and held against a tree.

  As the man grunted, she grunted, each in turn. He was measured, as if she was a punching bag and he was a boxer in training or he was a workman getting a chore of rote done. It seemed to go on for a long time. A punch and a grunted word, a punch and a grunted word and a punch and a grunted word, and she thought, Horace Horace Horace. Confusion then, as she went out, returning to being dragged by the hair down to the riverbank, him swearing, calling her a fucking dog, then dropping her into a depression in the ground. The sting of dirt and pebbles as he kicked at her. And then he was gone.

  Alone in the aftermath she realized night wasn’t quiet at all. There were hums of insects, faint stirrings of shrubbery, the lap of nearby water, and later as the sun rose, the screaming of birds that she thought would drive her mad in their intensity and pitch.

  She hated those noisy birds.

  She loved those noisy birds.

  They spoke to her and validated that she was at least alive in some of her senses. A ship heading out into the lake hooted from the direction of the river; there were faint voices and boats were close enough that she could hear them creak at moor. There was a snatch of laughter. There was life and it wasn’t far away. She had merely to attract it and plead her case to rejoin it.

  He’d almost completely covered her with a kicking of leaves and stones and twigs. There’d been a rage in him as if he were kicking her entire existence off the surface of his planet.

  Her left thigh was suddenly shot with feeling and she sighed happily at the pain, that she wasn’t totally paralyzed. A girl in high school had fallen only a very short distance off a root shed and became paraplegic. Her classmates explored in that morbid but human indulgence how they would handle being in a wheelchair for life. Some said they’d kill themselves. She herself had reserved judgement. In a wheelchair she could still operate her camera off a tripod of sticks, could direct her actors, could edit her video. A quadriplegic, now that was another set of problems she’d have to deal with if it came to that. She’d seen quadriplegics operate their motorized chairs by blowing into a tube. She could do that. A tube for panning, a tube for zooming, a tube for dissolve. All was doable, if you didn’t surrender.

  She believed. God had repainted black sky blue for her, had populated it with those beautiful noisy birds to make her senses jump.

  She believed. God had planted the seed that grew the tree that was butchered into timber and fashioned into a boat that had a hull that groaned and creaked nearby for her to hear.

  She believed. God had made the clouds that made the rain that made the ice that melted and made the river that she could smell.

  She believed God had let her keep this single lens in her face and let life pan
itself across it so that she could record it for something.

  And he’d created Horace, as if only to have him save her. She wondered if the man had taken Horace away with him. God wouldn’t do all that unless there was a purpose to the recording of it.

  I’m going to live, she told herself.

  She closed her eye and died.

  But then, with the day alight and alive again, she heard a faraway voice calling, “Hey, Picasso. Yo. You got a reason for being here, Pablo?”

  Chapter 1

  The city was besieged.

  An invisible and sinister mist had ridden in on a vicious breeze. The source of the deadly fog was the elusive Patient Zero, suspected to be an illegal migrant from China, a night horse spewing disease and spraying phlegm in a fifty-dollar dinghy, run across from Canada by a snakehead. At first no one had cared much: it was a vicious flu bug that seemed to only be attracted to Asians. But when the bug jumped races and whites, young and old, were infected, there were beatings and riots and arsons in East Chinatown. The Volunteers, formerly mere ad-hoc bands of crackpot racists, suddenly became prominent, more organized. They had a visible and public focus. A crude leadership emerged, and they manned the city airport, looking for international transfer passengers on flights from Chicago or Detroit. Night patrols ran up and down the waterway at the top of the city.

  You could catch the bug by not washing your hands, or it was conducted through intimate contact, or it was in the ethnic foods, or it had an indefinite shelf life on banisters, telephone receivers, elevator buttons, or it was airborne and it gathered in pockets of clear vapour throughout the city, waiting to practise osmosis on hapless passersby. The conflicting information made a city of paranoia, of surgical masks and latex gloves and soap dispensers. People shook hands by touching elbows. Husbands and wives kissed each other near the ear.