Shimmer

by Hilary Norman

‘Go on,’ David said, rubbing his right temple, willing away his headache.

  Grace hit the speed dial number.

  Sam heard his cell phone ringing.

  Not out here in the hallway.

  He turned, realized it was coming from behind him, from a room at the back of the house. ‘You stay here,’ he told Claudia softly.

  ‘Be careful,’ she whispered.

  He opened the door cautiously, saw a kitchen, lighter than the hallway but still drab with sludge green linoleum on the floor, formica and plastic all over.

  The ringing was coming from the waste bin.

  Sam opened the lid, plunged his hand through coffee grounds, damp paper and unwashed cans, found the phone, saw it was home calling, answered. ‘Grace?’

  ‘Thank God,’ her voice said, breaking a little.

  ‘We’re both safe,’ he told her, his voice low, ‘but I’m going to have to call you back.’

  ‘Sam, I can’t—’

  He cut off the call, stuck the phone in his pocket, turned and saw Claudia in the doorway, eyes following him like a scared puppy’s.

  ‘Honey,’ he said softly, ‘I want you to go wait by the front door while I take a look around, but if I tell you to get out, you go straight to any neighbour’s house and call the cops.’

  They heard another moan.

  From upstairs. No doubt.

  Sam went to a drawer, opened it, winced as it creaked, saw nothing he could use, opened the next drawer down and took out a long, sharp knife.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Claudia said. ‘Sam, be careful.’

  ‘I guess you never got to see the layout upstairs?’ he asked her.

  Claudia shook her head.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now go to the front door.’

  He waited until she was in position, then looked up the staircase.

  No lights on up there.

  Whoever had been doing that moaning hadn’t sounded dangerous, but Sam knew better than to take anything at face value – and just because Claudia hadn’t seen Jerome Cooper since her arrival did not mean he wasn’t up there waiting.

  He raised his left index finger to his lips to keep her silent, gripped the knife firmly in his right hand, and began to make his way up the staircase.

  The fourth stair creaked.

  Sam paused, waited, moved on, hesitated again as the seventh step groaned, then made it up to the half landing. Outside, beyond the narrow window that had, from the street, seemed like a nose in the face of the house, it was raining, the external light of minimal help to him.

  He heard no more moans, no other sounds of life.

  And took the last few stairs.

  The upstairs hallway was rectangular with four closed doors, two to the left, two to the right.

  The moaning began again, softer, weaker sounding than before.

  It came from the left, Sam thought, from behind the farthest door.

  Moving slowly, silently, he opened the first door which led to a bathroom, pushed the door wide open, scanned to left, right, up and ahead, took two steps in to check behind the door, then moved all the way inside and pulled back the shower curtain to see into the empty bathtub.

  He moved back out into the hall, silent again now, and crossed to the door opposite.

  A single room with a narrow bed, double wardrobe and posters on the walls. One from a Seventies movie that Sam remembered, The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie in profile, and facing that two more Bowie posters, one from the Ziggy Stardust era, one of the Thin White Duke.

  Jerome’s room, Sam supposed, swiftly opening and scanning the wardrobe, seeing a single pair of jeans, one plain white cotton T-shirt, about a dozen naked wire coat hangers and a well-trodden pair of sneakers, all suggesting that Cooper had left home altogether, not just gone to Seattle and Florida on a round-trip blackmailing excursion.

  He glanced back at the posters, explored for a few seconds any possible significance in the admiration of that weak-faced, mean-eyed young man for an iconic rock-movie star.

  Something jabbed at Sam’s mind, something lodged in his memory.

  No time to think about it now, he told himself. Move on.

  The second room on that side of the hall was presently unoccupied, but plainly lived in, its bed a small double, neatly covered with an old-fashioned beige candlewick bedspread. Two pine wardrobes and a chest of drawers, a white-painted dressing table with a large circular mirror on a stand, a heart-shaped scented candle, a few jars and tubes of cosmetics and a box of Kleenex on the surface – and Sam knew he’d come back later for a closer look at Roxanne Lucca’s belongings, but not yet.

  He had the last room to check out first.

  The moaner’s room.

  Someone either in trouble or lying in wait.

  Sam stood outside the door, gripped the knife more tightly, listened.

  Nothing.

  He tried the handle.

  The door was locked.

  He crouched low, took a look through the keyhole, saw only vague grey shapes, but the acrid smell seemed stronger here, and the connection he’d made when he’d checked out his own wounds was becoming more jarring, more impossibly startling, by the second.

  His call to the Sheriff’s office was long overdue.

  The moaning began again, louder than before.

  Male, and intensely distressed.

  Someone in need of help, now.

  Sam used the knife to slide the lock open, heard and felt the blade snap.

  But the door opened.

  And Sam saw Frank Lucca for the first time.

  The Epistle of Cal the Hater

  In the beginning, the dressing up was just for her.

  For Jewel, the white witch-bitch.

  I did it to please her, too scared I’d make her mad if I refused.

  Anything to stop the pain.

  Then later, after I’d started getting a buzz out of the make-up and all that jazz, we kept on going – that and the other, sicko stuff too, but just between the two of us, because she said that the old guy wouldn’t like it. And then, later still, after he got sick – and she wouldn’t let him go to the hospital, said she was going to ‘nurse’ him herself – oh, man . . . But after that, she started doing those ‘things’ to him too, and from there on everything spun way out of control. Our life inside the walls of that place was Fruitcake Alley, real Loony Tunes mixed up with a touch of Rocky Horror.

  Only without any laughs.

  64

  ‘Dear God.’

  Aghast was the only word for how Sam felt.

  And filled with pity.

  His father-in-law might have been a prize dirt-bag in his day, but he looked now as if he might have fared better serving twenty to life in Cook County Jail.

  ‘Claudia,’ Sam called from the doorway. ‘Call 911, honey. We need an ambulance.’

  He walked slowly back into the room.

  Frank Lucca sat in a wheelchair, his bare and wasted upper body and arms restrained with bandages, his legs immobile, possibly paralyzed. There was no blanket to cover him, and no clothes except for a pair of stained and stinking off-white shorts.

  He had no hair on his head, nor eyebrows. His face was greyish, his skin looking pasty in texture with deep sores on his nose and cheeks and over his lips. His eyes, bloodshot and dark, like Claudia’s, were pleading.

  He did not speak.

  His whole body – all that Sam could see – was covered with scars and raw wounds. Lines of them, most running vertically or diagonally over his torso, the greatest number crossing his chest.

  And one of the sick, shocked feelings bombarding Sam as he took this first, long look at Grace’s father, was the suspicion that when he had time to take a closer look at his own injuries, there might be similarities . . .

  Though that was not all that was striking those chords of such horrific familiarity in his mind.

  That string of thoughts kept moving on, dots continuing to connect.

  The Bowie characte
r portrayed in one of the posters in that other room was the gin-guzzling alien who fell to earth named Thomas Jerome Newton – and Sam remembered that because a girl he’d dated at college had been wild for Bowie; and Ziggy Stardust, he thought, had come before the alien – not that chronology counted here – but what did seem to matter right now to Sam, bewilderingly, chillingly, was that character’s metallic fashion and high-heeled boots.

  Like Mildred’s skinny silver angel without wings.

  Wearing shoes that she’d told Sam had made the guy look like he was walking ‘up on the mezzanine’.

  Christ almighty.

  ‘Sir?’ Sam addressed his father-in-law for the first time, unsure if the man was even capable of answering.

  ‘Sam?’ Claudia called from below. ‘They’re coming.’ Her voice wavered, as if she hadn’t wanted to ask the question before. ‘Is it for my father?’

  ‘It is,’ Sam called back. ‘Better bring a blanket, honey.’

  Another of those moans, awful in its helplessness, issued from Frank Lucca’s throat, and tears leaked from his eyes.

  Sam pulled a handkerchief from his own pocket, knelt down on the linoleum beside the wheelchair, and gently wiped the old man’s cheeks.

  Never thought this day would come.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, softly. ‘I’m Sam Becket, Grace’s husband, and we’re going to help you.’

  Claudia came into the room, holding a blue blanket, which fell out of her hands as she saw her father, the wicked old man of her girlhood nightmares, reduced to this.

  ‘Papa,’ she said, and began to cry too.

  Frank Lucca stared at her, made no further sound, his own tears stalled in his throat. He looked frozen by the sight of his long-lost daughter.

  ‘Cut him free,’ Claudia said.

  ‘I will,’ Sam said quietly and calmly, taking out his cell phone, glancing down at it, preparing its camera function, ‘just as soon as I’ve taken some photos.’

  ‘Evidence,’ Claudia said, understanding.

  ‘Right,’ Sam said.

  Two questions, first, that he knew he needed to ask.

  ‘Who did this to you, sir?’

  They waited to hear if the old man could speak.

  ‘My wife.’ Lucca’s voice was faint. ‘Roxanne.’

  The dots went on connecting. A whole host of suspicions, all still unsustainable, still incredible, yet forming something that Sam knew was far more compelling than a hunch.

  Ask the second question.

  ‘Can you tell me, sir,’ Sam said, ‘if your wife ever ill-treated her son?’

  Lucca’s eyes seemed to burn, holding on to horrors, keeping them locked in.

  And then he spoke again, a single word:

  ‘Mostro.’

  Monster.

  The Epistle of Cal the Hater

  So it all comes down to this. A thousand resentments building up over years like boils in your brain, erupting one at a time whenever you blow your lousy godforsaken mind. And then suddenly, there he is. This one man, this perfect target.

  The prototype of everyone Jewel ever taught me to hate.

  Samuel Lincoln Becket.

  A whole shitload of presumption – of arrogance – in that middle name.

  Middle names are important, according to Jewel, which was why she says she gave me the middle name of her favourite Bowie character. She said she didn’t like his first name, Thomas, because he was the apostle who doubted Jesus, and Saint Jerome was the guy who translated the Bible into Latin. (And also, according to her, Jerome is one of Clark Kent’s middle names.)

  Mostly, though, Jewel was crazy about Bowie.

  Mostly, she’s just crazy.

  65

  The first thing Sam did, after he’d taken some shots of Frank Lucca’s bandage bonds, then untied the poor old guy and left him to Claudia’s care – was to call Grace again and put her in the picture.

  ‘Your stepmother seems to be some piece of work,’ he said. ‘Though her son, I’m guessing, may have turned out even worse.’

  Grace was finding it all too hard to believe.

  ‘You can’t really think Jerome could be this killer?’

  ‘I don’t have a shred of hard evidence yet,’ Sam said, ‘but I’m about to organize a watch on our house, just in case he decides to pay another visit.’

  ‘Surely that’s the last thing he’d do now, especially if you’re right,’ Grace said, then paused. ‘Though if his mother’s told him you and Claudia came to her house, I guess he might be angry.’

  ‘Whatever the case,’ Sam said, ‘I’m not prepared to take any chances.’

  His next call was to the Sheriff’s office, then to Martinez back home.

  ‘Whole lot happening here.’ Martinez jumped in soon as he heard Sam’s voice. ‘Eddie Lopéz walked in to the office a couple of hours back.’

  ‘He’s not our guy,’ Sam said. ‘Eighty per cent probability, maybe more.’

  He filled in his partner fast, told him that subject to a conversation perhaps now taking place between the Cook County Sheriff and Chief Hernandez, the plan was for enough departmental cooperation to allow Sam to catch the eight p.m. flight home.

  ‘They’ll take my preliminary statement, photograph my wounds—’

  ‘You OK, man?’ Martinez jumped in. ‘You said scratches before.’

  Sam had been trying to forget just how much those damned rips in his flesh were hurting. ‘Nothing a little iodine won’t fix.’ He forced his mind back to the job. ‘I found a photo of Cooper, which I’ll ask Cook County to send to the Chief, so you might want to get a hold of that.’

  ‘No problem,’ Martinez said. ‘How’s Claudia holding up?’

  ‘She’s shaky, but up to taking care of the old man till the paramedics get here.’ Arrest warrants, he went on, were being issued in Miami Beach for Jerome Cooper, and in Cook County for Roxanne Lucca.

  ‘Nice family,’ Martinez said.

  ‘Did you find Mildred?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Not yet, not with Lopéz showing up – though at least now we can spare her the John Doe shots. Cut straight to having her ID Cooper’s photo.’

  ‘Mildred’s a witness to the pick-up on Washington,’ Sam said. ‘We need to find her fast.’

  ‘We’re on it,’ Martinez said.

  Sam could hear sirens approaching in Melrose Park, allowed himself a last consideration for the gracious old lady who had put her trust in him.

  ‘Try calling her cell phone,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone scaring her.’

  The Epistle of Cal the Hater

  The thing Jewel liked best, I think, was the two of us getting whiter together.

  If I’d been ‘good’, she used talcum after she’d shaved me, and then she made me help with her own whitening, make sure she’d dusted herself everywhere, and I can tell you I hated that more than anything, having to touch her private places, and even now just thinking about that makes me squirm.

  When she married Frank, things got a little easier for a while, and I guess she chose him because he owned a house, but plenty of men have plain old ordinary houses like his, so I never really figured how come Jewel could stand being with an ugly old bald wop with a hairy body. I guess the fact was, the Thin White Duke types wouldn’t have looked twice at her. And of course it helped that Frank was like-minded when it came to race – especially because one of his traitor daughters had married a black Jew, so at least they had that in common. I know the old man slapped her sometimes – and maybe she liked that, and I was never sure if it made me hate him or respect him, because Christ knew I’d never had the guts to do that to Jewel.

  The trouble was, Frank went out a lot to play scopone with his buddies, and the games began in the afternoons, and he never came home till the early hours, drunk as a skunk. Which wouldn’t have bothered me one bit, except those were the times, while he was out, that Jewel turned into the white witch-bitch, wanting to play ‘dress-up’ with her boy.

&nb
sp; Talcum not good enough anymore. She wanted to experiment with real skin-whiteners, tried everything from her good old trusty Clorox to hydrochloric acid to fucking lye, which all hurt so damned much I truly believed I was going to die.

  I was still screaming one night when Frank came home and went crazy when he saw what she’d done, which was when he had his second stroke.

  And after that, she did it to both of us.

  I’m not sure if my mom is racist and evil.

  Or just plain insane.

  Like me.

  ‘I do it because I love you so much,’ she used to say sometimes when I was younger, after she’d cut me or whipped me and then poured her goddamned bleach on me and made me cry or worse.

  She did love me.

  I never doubted that.

  66

  ‘I only have a moment –’ Claudia said to Grace on the phone, while the paramedics were tending to their father, and Sam was downstairs talking to two Cook County detectives – ‘but I need to explain why I lied to you.’

  ‘You didn’t exactly lie,’ Grace said. ‘I assumed you were going home.’

  ‘I as good as lied,’ Claudia insisted. ‘I just felt that this one time, I needed to stand up for myself, clear up my own mess.’

  ‘You could have told me that, sis.’

  ‘You’d never have wanted me to come here alone.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Grace admitted.

  ‘I wanted to come by myself to confront Papa, to make sure he and Roxanne both got to know what Jerome is really like.’ Claudia lowered her voice. ‘But dear God, Grace, you should just see him, see what that terrible woman has done to him – and please don’t think I’m forgetting the things he did to me in the past, I’m not. But no one deserves what she did.’

  Grace was silent, letting the words percolate, waiting for the fact that her father had apparently been tortured by his wife to impact on her fully, as it ought, she supposed, to impact on a daughter.

  There was nothing. Nothing, at least, more than a distant kind of pity and disgust, the remote grade of feelings that stirred after reading tales of cruelty in the newspaper. Less than that. And that admission seemed to affect her more than the shocking facts about Frank, making her feel ashamed, but angry too, because it was her father’s fault, not her own, that she had ceased caring about him so long ago.