by Lee Lamothe
He stood with the phone in his hand, looking at the painting he’d made. A painting that hadn’t existed before he’d applied the brush to the acrylic and the acrylic to the cheap canvas and opened himself up like a tin can, and went to a place.
Who knew what you’d find when you opened that tin can? How did you know when to stop? When it was done?
Who but himself could judge its value, its honesty? If it said what he’d meant to say, even if he didn’t consciously mean to say it, then it was successful, it had a value. There were mistakes, he could clearly see, where he’d layered too thick, thinned too much, shaken uncontrollably from inner tension when he should have been precise. But it was his, it was honest, and it was a step to somewhere. What more could you ask for?
He realized he wasn’t thinking about the painting any longer, he was thinking about Djuna Brown, about himself.
He dressed fast in a clean sweatshirt and jeans.
There was, really, he knew, nothing else he could do.
She didn’t answer when he knocked. He pressed his ear to the door. Nothing. He rode the elevator down to the lobby and had the receptionist call security. It was a different guy, a beefy barbered guy, and he had the mark of the fake cop. Ray Tate badged him and said he had to get into the suite.
“You got a warrant?”
“This is in-house stuff. Job stuff.”
“Is there going to be something heavy in there?”
“No. Naw. I think she’s just fallen asleep.” He read the guy as a wannabe. He had to be careful. Middle-aged wannabes took easy umbrage. “We were in Stonetown all last night. A lot of weird shit. You know how it is.” He shrugged and, as if told everything, he shook his head and said, “We need her at the Jank. She’s a Statie. Probably grabbing a nap.” Like: a Statie, what do you expect?
In the elevator the security guy said he’d been caught in a riot when he worked private for a chemical company downstate. “If last night was anything like that … Man, you saw shit.”
“Oh, yeah, there was shit to see, no question.”
At the suite the security guy tapped at the door. He tapped harder, longer. “Maybe she went out?”
“Dunno. Let’s take a peek.” He felt a deep dread.
“Look, I’ll do the peeking, okay? We’ve got procedures, just like you guys.” He cracked the door. “Miss? Miss? House security. Anybody home?” He peeked inside and ducked his head back. “She’s in the shower. I hear the water.”
“Staties. A little city riot and they fall apart.”
The security guy, a pal in the rugged landscape of law enforcement, nodded wearily, “Tell me about it.”
She didn’t open the shower curtain to his call. The room was full of steam. He went to the minibar and mixed himself a double gin and taps and carried it back into the washroom. She turned off the water but made no sound.
He sat on the toilet seat and took his time. He thought back through time, looking for something she could relate to, something that was his, something he could give her.
“After I got shot, Djun’, remember? You went and saw my kid, Alexis? She told me you guys met. A great kid, right? My kid? A gentle good kid. But how about this. When she was in the finals for the baseball team at school she came into home plate cleats first. She didn’t have to. Her coach was calling that it was okay, windmilling her in. The shortstop was still juggling the ball. But Ax just flew from third into home. She was fast, I remember that, she was flying. I felt good, seeing that. There was no way she wasn’t going to come in there and get the run. She could’ve hopped on one foot, and she was crossing. But for some reason, that catcher was in her way, in the way of what she wanted to do. So she came in in the dirt. And she took about a pound of meat out of that catcher’s calf. It was the winning run. I didn’t like what I saw, I didn’t like what she did. But it was her moment, she was in her moment, she was primitive. I talked to her about it, afterwards. She said she was lost in the sound of her own heartbeat, the screaming from the bleachers. She didn’t even think of mercy. It wasn’t about the run or the ball or anything. She had to take out the catcher because she, the catcher, was interfering with who she was, what she was going to do. She never went out for baseball again. She was ashamed of herself and I was more proud of her for that than the winning run.”
“So, what, Ray? You proud of me, the things I did?”
“No. Out there, in Stonetown, I don’t know what happened to you. I can’t imagine. It was a you I’d never seen, never imagined. But nobody died from anything we did, you or me or Marty or Brian. It was bad, but it was what it was. You’re going to have to wear what you did. Maybe baseball isn’t your game.”
He sat for a while sipping.
Her voice echoed in the silent room. “Ray? Ray? I’m so ashamed. I don’t do that. I didn’t think I was capable of that.” She pulled back the shower curtain. She was naked and her hair was flat to her skull. She was brown and beautiful and shivering from something other than cold. She wore the single dangly earring. She stepped out and sat back on the rim of the tub, her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. “He shot me, Ray. That young cop. I thought … I thought I was nothing, I could have died, right there, killed by a kiddie cop. In front of you. We’re not supposed to die in front of each other. I almost lost everything. I saw you, there, in the flash, alone in Paris, without me. Is there a Paris for you if I’m not in it? If you saw me dead on the road? Could you paint?”
He handed her the drink and watched her sip. He waited. It was her time.
She said, “It’s so … it’s so thin, what is and what could be.” She looked into his eyes. “I’m not the same anymore, am I, to you?”
“You have to take time. You have to go through what you did, those things, to those people.” He got up and sat beside her on the rim of the tub and took a swallow from the glass. “I’ve done the worst, Djuna. After the first guy I shot, I thought, that’s it. I’ve done it. I won’t have to do it again. I’ve crossed over. I know the answer: I can. But then, then there was the second guy. I’m not sure on that one, if I could have handled it differently. I’ve examined it every which way. I don’t know. I’ll never know if that guy died because he had to, or because I fucked it up and I couldn’t control him. So I shot him dead. You might never know what happened, what came out of you. But you’ll have to deal with it, you’ll have to try to resolve it.”
“But not if I quit, right? If we go to Paris?”
“You’ll still have to know.” He took her hand and stood her up. “I’ll have to know.”
“Can we go to bed? Not do anything if you don’t want to. Just lie down for a while.”
“Only,” he said, “only if these slippers I got fit your feet.”
Chapter 18
The chief’s squad strategic room on four contained two dozen workers from the Wallpaper, the secretive part of Sally Greaves’ Strategic Policy Analysis, the chief’s mildly named dirty tricks unit. From the back of the room, where Ray Tate and Djuna Brown stood, forbidden from seeing their faces full on, the Wallpaper was a broad civic mix: they were young and old, black and white, Asian and Hispanic in various blends. Two were in wheelchairs, one had one leg.
By their posture, they all seemed pretty fresh and alert, as if the riots had happened in some faraway foreign land they never expected to visit but might have seen on television and might have found mildly interesting. Two were dressed in black, with hoodies up, wearing combat boots. Only those two looked tired, as if they’d been out running the streets in a riot. From the back of the room, Ray Tate and Djuna Brown could smell the tear gas off them. A young woman with a collapsed Mohawk turned to say something to her companion, an elderly woman with a collapsible walker. Ray Tate saw she had shrapnel in her face and a tattoo on the side of her neck. The old lady nodded and knitted with rhythmic clicks of her needles. It was as though the entire bland city had been brought to a conference to bore one another to death.
A furtive-looking middle-
aged woman with tiny round eyeglasses, a severe overbite, and a slumping shuffle came into the room and walked to the front. Everyone straightened up. The woman had tragically bad skin that she didn’t bother to cover with makeup, an artificially red patchy buzz cut, and she wore a man’s suit coat with wide lapels over a T-shirt. She was braless and droopy and stocky. It seemed there was no effort she wouldn’t undertake to display her unattractiveness; she’d given up or didn’t care to begin with or she was just internal. Waiting for the room to quiet, she dug the nail of her right-hand baby finger deeply into her mouth, probing between her molars. When she took her finger out, she examined something on the nail, then flicked it to the floor.
Djuna Brown shivered. “Who’s that creature?”
“The Graveyard. Sally Greaves. She runs SPA. Strategic Policy Analysis. Where Intelligence goes to die. Until it might be needed to fuck somebody up. She keeps the files for the Chief. Kind of nutty, but I like her.”
Sally Greaves was the only person Pious Man Chan truly trusted, because she terrified everyone and wasn’t terrified of him. She went from traffic cop to the Jank in record time after she provided a roadside alibi for Willard Wong when a lot of people said he was killing two Vietnamese gangsters visiting from Toronto.
Sally Greaves stared over the assembled heads at Ray Tate and Djuna Brown and made a small nod. “Okay, shut up, kids. At the back of the room we have … ah,” she consulted some writing on the back of her hand, “we have Ray Tate, the bearded one there, from the city, and that little thing, there, Djuna Brown, from the State. Don’t gaze your eyes upon them, lest they gaze theirs upon you.” Her voice was startlingly beautiful, deep but melodic, a little breathy; it was stunning dichotomy, like flushing a toilet and hearing a full symphony come up in acoustic perfection and wash over you in goosebumps and tingles. “And should they gaze upon you, children, your employment turns into a pillar of salt. You get fired and they get executed.” She allowed her buckteeth to show in a little smile at this morsel of Intelligence wit. “Okay, we’ve got the take from five rez knocks, we’ve got five streams of product. Each rez is linked to the Volunteers. We want to sew the Volunteers up into body bags for conspiracy, but those two at the back like one of the homeowners, now deceased, for some murders.” She smirked and shook her head disdainfully. “Murders.” She consulted some writing on her other hand. “Some black women were beaten to death. No molestation, no robbery. Just beat downs. The only connector is they were all black, they were all beaten. They think it’s about race. Does that about say it, dear?”
Djuna Brown said, “Yes. One was found dead on the riverbank, one comatose, when the Volunteers were manning patrols to keep the immigrant boats from Canada out. We’re looking at race crime, hate crime. These were pulverizations of the victims. It was brutal.”
Sally Greaves said, “If you say so, dear. So, kids, when you go through the boxes for conspiracy stuff, anything that might have to do with their case, put it aside, flag it. This is a favour for that Wishbone guy, Hambone, whatever, guy from Homicide. Any questions? And there better not be. Okay, go, next door, two to a take. We’re not looking just for evidence, we’re looking for intelligence. These two officers are going to hang around the building in case you turn something up. So, go ye forth and succeed.”
The take from the raids had been separated onto five tables, most of it in clear-plastic stencilled evidence bags. Black markers noted the original bag number, the badge numbers of the cop who seized it, the location, the time of seizure, and the time of emptying. As the Graveyard’s minions slowly went through it, scraps of paper were separated and assigned smaller bags of their own. Beside each table was a green metal cart where the small evidence bags were collected.
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown stood for a while, again at the back of the room where they wouldn’t penetrate the anonymity of the Wallpaper, watching the green cart numbered Three. It was their house. Home of the hanging handyman, Corey Garnett.
They wandered over to the table, their hands carefully linked behind their backs, and looked over the searcher’s shoulder at the take. The girl with shrapnel in her nose put her hand over her face, looked up shyly, and glanced behind them at the door where Sally Greaves had disappeared. She went back to work.
They could see six handguns and four scoped rifles had been tagged through the trigger guards, the tags reading FIREARMS COMPARISON. Some gaudy boxes of straight bodacious hetero porn, white on black, man on woman, were stacked in a bag. Hand-written labels on a half-dozen VHS boxes were a series: FUCK THEM WHITE, VOLUMES ONE THROUGH SIX. It was niche market porn. There were stapled tracts with swastikas stamped on them and thick red lettering calling white men to arms. There were maps, some hand-scrawled of the river, some of a compound with watchtowers on the corners showing lines of fire, escape routes, tunnels, fences. House-shaped symbols were marked HOME SCHOOL, CHAPEL OF WORSHIP, PANTRY, WORKSHOP, and DETENTION. Silhouette targets from a shooting range were perforated with bullet holes.
If those belonged to Corey Garnett, Ray Tate thought, he was a fine marksman.
“Too bad our guy didn’t shoot the ladies,” Ray Tate told Djuna Brown. “This guy’s got the deadeye. I’d definitely go for him, if they’d been sniped off.”
“And he didn’t bang them, either. All this stuff.” Djuna Brown shook her head. “A sex nut, no doubt, but does this add up to anything for us?”
“Here comes Hambone. We’ll find out if there’s anything else we can use from the interrogations if this washes.”
They went down to the cafeteria. A metal grid screen was pulled down and locked over the service area. There were a dozen food and beverage machines beside it. Except for some maintenance workers eating sandwiches from bags, only Sally Greaves was there, sitting with a thermos, china cup, and a peeled banana in front of her. In spite of the cafeteria having long rows of empty tables, she sat only two away from the workers and was watching them surreptitiously. Occasionally, one of the workers, a thick potbellied Irishman with red hair, would look in her direction and make a comment to his colleagues. They snickered and she looked away shyly.
Hambone Hogarth fed coins into a coffee machine, then stepped back to let them make their selections. “Look at Sally, there. Always working.” He had admiration on his face.
Djuna Brown glanced over. “What? Eating a banana?” She stared past Hambone in fascination. Sally Greaves seemed to have no gender, or to be of both. She wondered what kind of time of it she’d had, how she endured her life without going homicidal or suicidal. Had she ever tried to pretty herself up, got her teeth fixed, got contact lenses, done something about her skin? Shopped for flattering clothing or taken up sports? And that voice. Where had that voice come from? Did she sing in the dark when she was alone and imagine she looked as perfect as she sounded? As she’d often felt while working among the sad and angry faces in Indian country, Djuna Brown knew she was blessed being born attractive, desired.
“She’s reading their lips,” Hambone Hogarth said. “They’re dissing her and she’s getting most of it. They have absolutely no fucking idea who she is, what she can do to their lives. One of those guys, very, very soon, is going to be either fired for cause, or he’ll be bringing the contents of other people’s office waste buckets to her and thanking her for the opportunity to serve municipal law enforcement.” Hambone Hogarth shook his head. “One of those bigmouthed guys has no idea that his life, as he knows it, is over.”
They carried their coffees over to Sally Greaves’s table. As if addressing a grand dame, Hambone stood back a little and politely asked if they could join her.
“Please.” She waved her hand, her left hand, gently over the table. Even in the single word, Djuna Brown was entranced. If she’d been blind she would have fallen in love with the voice, male or female. It was full and seemed to go on for a long time, entering through her ear and reverberating pleasantly around her emotions. But it was the left hand, with the ring on it, that caught her attention. She g
lanced at Ray Tate.
“Sit here, Hogarth, and you, Tate? Here. I like to have attractive men on each side of me.” She made her voice thespian and mocked a glare at the table of maintenance men. “Like my ruthless palace guard.”
Djuna Brown sat directly opposite Sally Greaves, realizing this was the actual purpose of the arrangement. She knew a woman like Sally Greaves was always testing. Not judging so much as deciding. It would be very easy to look like Sally Greaves and pack a heart full of hatred and to lay waste in her wake.
“I’ll bet your parents named you after Djuna Barnes.”
Djuna Brown was surprised. Djuna Barnes was a relatively minor player in the Paris literary circles that had fascinated her dad, particularly the black Americans who travelled there to create, to live the bon vie away from an America that didn’t mean them well. Everyone knew Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, and Alice Toklas, even to a lesser extent A.J. Liebling and Waverley Root, but Djuna Barnes was mostly a footnote in books written about the bigger players. She nodded and made a small smile of appreciation, “Yes. My father. I’m glad he wasn’t a fan of Gertrude Stein.”
Sally Greaves made a melodious laugh. She was a people person, perhaps by necessity, perhaps by trade. In any event, she drew Djuna Brown in. “These guys don’t know what we’re talking about, do you think? Except Hemingway. All the tough men know Hemingway.” She looked past Djuna Brown’s ear with the little crust of blood on the lobe. “My big strong Irish lover likes you. He’s saying he’d break you open like a shotgun and horse-fuck you. Verbatim. I haven’t heard, well, lip-read, actually, the word jigaboo since I was a youngster.” She looked at Hambone Hogarth. “Sometimes I really like my job.” She watched the maintenance workers get up and walk out, leaving their refuse in a mess on the table. They went out a stairway door. She blew a kiss in that direction and stared at it for several seconds.