by Robert White
Five cop cars, some drinking, a few cooping on company time, were instantly screeching tires and roaring off. Jack just looked at me. “Well, kiddo,” he said, “you just never know.”
At dusk, I put on a radio station playing classical music and heard Mozart’s Requiem, the Lacrimosa. A fitting end to a disastrous day. I had the briefcase, though, and it confirmed my suspicions of Gallatine. I dismissed him as the killer of John O’Reilly, but I had no doubt that he knew who the killer was; at the very least, he was himself involved enough as a co-conspirator. I had studied Booth’s VICAP profile. Gallatine didn’t fit. He was too well alibied, according to my sources at the station house. A favorite quotation of Jack’s, often trotted out at a cop’s bar where no captains or colonels were permitted, about ambitious men: He doeth like the ape. The higher he climb, the more he doth show his arse. I couldn’t see him as part of this murderous priesthood. He had been sleeping with Annaliese, and he may have handed her over to this society when she turned to Marcus Gordon, a black man.
These reasons I could only guess at; he may have incurred favors, or possibly he wanted to ingratiate himself more deeply in the secret society. I found his briefcase full of odds and ends, some of which hinted at his dark interest in the white supremacy movement; nothing however that couldn’t be explained by a sociologist. I saw a thumbed copy of the legendary tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion among school papers, the book by Hoskins, historian of the Phineas cult, Vigilantes of Christendom. A flyer that said PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS was folded in half and tucked inside the book.
There were two portions of ripped pages from the Boston Globe’s classified ads section, one dated three days before I found O’Reilly dead in his house; the second was a smaller piece of the Globe’s same ads section, ripped less evenly and showing only a portion of the personals. Most of the ads were identical to the dated one; however, there were some personal ads mixed in with the business-like ones offering appliances or looking for labor. One was a biblical quotation in the dated piece that looked to have a matching quotation in the second.
I found his appointment book in a sleeve compartment at the bottom of the briefcase, in which Gallatine had logged school business, appointments, and reminders. On the back he had a phone number and above it a quotation had been penciled in italic handwriting; it said: “Let us make game of those who make as much of us.” The number’s area code was Boston.
I waited until shift change for the Lake patrols and drove in. I pulled into a parking lot near Little Minnesota and watched the action. One of the bars that appealed to a gay-lesbian clientele featured a famous crossdresser who did Bette Davis on talk shows. I could hear him vamping over the loudspeaker: When You Swish upon a Star. The girls were already working the crowds, darting in and out of traffic, checking out drivers and asking one variation after another of the same question: “You wanna date tonight?”
I saw some veterans out tonight; these were favorites of Chief Millimaki. They would kick back a portion of the night’s earnings. The others would be hassled until they learned the system. Mostly blondes, sixteen, greasy under the neon in their make-up and tight clothes. Once happy hour commenced, the nightlife along the Strip took off. The earning hours were limited by the whore patrols. I watched one girl for a while, discarded her, chose another, and finally settled on one who seemed right.
I left my car in the lot and walked over to her. I explained to her what I wanted her to do, gave her the car keys and fifty dollars and told her I’d be in the bar across the street waiting for her. I wrote down the address and her instructions. She took the fifty, looked at the bar, and said in a whiny little girl’s voice, “You a fag, huh?”
I said, “Would it matter? My money’s still good.”
“Nah,” she said. “I’ll do it for you.”
I went inside, ordered a club soda at the bar, and sat in such a way that I hoped the body language worked, if body language can say “fuck off ” while you’re hunkered on a bar stool.
She tapped me on the shoulder twenty-five minutes later and handed me the papers and the envelope I told her was in the third drawer, right-hand side. Her own body language, when she realized she had brought me a packet of money, was a fatalistic shrug. She’d get that playing the skinflute a couple times. I gave her another fifty dollar bill, and she turned and left. I asked her if there was a patrol car across the street from my office, and she said yes, two. One unmarked. Millimaki giving me VIP treatment. Sending his best boys to bring me downtown.
I didn’t want to, but I had a vestige of regard for Booth, so I called him and explained the situation, how it looked anyhow. He said little, but his grunts were enough to tell me that Booth knew when to cut bait. I was, I suspect, very malodorous to the neat little man right now. I didn’t feel it, but I said, “I’m sorry, Booth. We don’t have the same agenda. You want a big case. Headlines. A ticket to New York. I just want the killer of Annaliese O’Reilly.”
He said without rancor: “You don’t know yourself. Those nightmares you had in prison the shrinks told you about afterwards? You were damned near catatonic at one point. You’ll never make it, Haftmann. They’ll pick you up in Boston.”
“Just don’t help them out. Stay out of it. I can hide for a while. I just need a little time, and Booth, help me with Cooney. Fix him for me. Use your juice one last time.”
“Why the hell should I, you crazy prick. I can see them cutting me a ticket to South Dakota before I get off the plane. Why should I?”
“For auld lang syne. Just do it, Booth. I can find this guy. I’ve got a lead to him.”
“Fuck you. This is a crusade for you, isn’t it? You’re a walking textbook of diseases of the mind, Haftmann. You’ve got some kind of messiah complex—”
“Booth, please.”
Long silence. Then: “A dog returneth to his vomit.” He broke the connection.
My next call was to Micah. I got her husband and asked for her. I could hear the muffled exchange of voices before she came on the line.
“What is it?”
“I need money for an emergency. A couple hundred dollars if you can spare it.”
“I thought you stopped gambling.”
“I did. This is something that came up, a real emergency. Please, Micah.”
“With you, it’s always an emergency. Your whole life.”
“I know, I know. Like old man Wallenda used to say before he tumbled off the high wire: ‘Life is lived on the high wire. The rest is waiting in the wings.’”
“Tom, this is not a good time. I’ve got a baby coming. We’re spending a lot of money these days.”
I thought of their house in Roaming Rock Shores, the yacht, the tennis club.
“I know. I’m sorry, Micah. If I weren’t desperate—”
She snorted. “When have you not been desperate whenever you’ve called me?”
“Micah, you can have the house as collateral. In fact, you can have the house. This is the sale of a lifetime. Just a couple large bills, a couple hundred, to see me through this. I won’t be needing it anymore because I’m leaving town for good.”
“I don’t want the house.”
“Micah, listen to me. I swear I’ll never bother you again. You’ll never see me again.”
“No, Tom, I can’t. I won’t.”
I could hear his voice in the background. He was urging her to hang up on me.
“Micah, if you hang up on me, I’ll be waiting for that slimefuck husband of yours—”
“You rotten sonofabitch,” she said. Click.
Jesus shit fuck, what is wrong with me?
I felt sick to my stomach. The air was greasy with the smells of frying food and cotton candy in the night air. Mixed with the offshore breeze of dying fish that kept coming ashore in suicidal waves, I felt dizzy and nauseous. My hair was slick with sweat.
One more call, one I didn’t intend to make until I dialed the number. She picked up on the first ring. “Yes?”
�
��It’s Haftmann,” I said. “I’m going to Boston. I’m going to find the man who killed your daughter.”
What she said next didn’t surprise me, but what I said did: “Take me with you.”
“All right.”
Go figure. You live your life looking for a semblance of order in the chaos, some light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t a freight train or the whole woods going up in flames. What was I thinking of— dragging this woman off to Boston on such a flimsy pretext?
I told myself, a one-eyed man driving a rattletrap Plymouth from Ohio to Boston makes as much sense as a rat copulating with a grapefruit. But, hell, she can drive.
Chapter 8
Fuck. She couldn’t drive. Not a lick.
Sat behind the wheel of a car exactly once in her life. I must have looked at her the way the woman at the state license bureau looked at me when she asked had my vision changed since my last renewal. I told her I was practically blind in my left eye and couldn’t see that well out of the right.
“What?” she asked, skewering me with a sideways look behind her own bifocals.
She thought I was joking. She wrote down “astigmatic myopia” and gave me my new laminated license without changing the information.
“I’m not kidding,” Ingrid said. “I never learned to drive a car. John didn’t want me to learn. He took me driving once and swore he’d never do it again.”
Eighteen hours, give or take an hour, is a long time to spend in a small space with another human being and not get to know them. She was a curiously beautiful woman, not to everyone’s taste, I guessed, but a white-blonde hair and skin that is so much the opposite of Micah’s olive-complexioned Jewishness. I thought my heart would stop beating the day I saw Micah for the first time. To this day, I don’t know whether I was in love with her or whether some imprint in my brain said I must have this woman and no other, I must mate with her.
Like most men of my generation, I blundered toward the American Dream, expecting that sheer persistence would get me my share and maybe a little bit more. Micah was the centerpiece, the axis of my own dream, and whichever way she tilted, I followed. I did not realize until too late that we had wholly different dreams. The job had come between us by then. It was all wrong, of course, but I thought I could make it right if I stayed true to it long enough.
Once, she dozed while we were passing the Syracuse exits, and I heard her whimpering in her sleep. I realized that her dreams were tarnished, if not broken, and that, like me, she was coming to that lonely middle-age where you find yourself companionless, childless, adrift in a strange country where you keep wondering how you got here but you can’t find anyone to stamp your visa so you can get to another country. I didn’t think that I had the strength to leave anyway.
We stopped and ate at one of those roadside franchises on the Dewey Thruway. Like me, she drank coffee stout, and I saw her wrinkle her nose in distaste at the watery brew. The compress she had put on my back was healing the infection of my back wound, but it was still oozing pus, staining my shirts and sticking to the car seat. I asked her about some names of things in German, words I recalled from my grandmother. I asked her about Berlin. Had she ever been there? What was it like? She told me that she had been there twice, but that Berliners were snobs and spoke a slangy dialect. I didn’t tell her about my mother. I wondered about her sometimes. Just a girl in a world ripped apart by a world war. Everyone dead. Having to fend for herself in a new country. I wondered what that would be like. I thought that, maybe, it wasn’t such a bad thing to be childless. How could you keep a child safe from harm in a world like this so full of monsters?
We slept at a Days Inn and drove at night. I awoke once and she was stroking my forehead. A bad dream. She was saying something in German, but wouldn’t tell me what it was. I wanted to touch her then, but I was afraid to. She moved off my bed, as if she sensed this, and lay down on her own. She wore an old-fashioned peignoir that tied across the neck. I could see her nipples under it, like eraser tips.
A moment later, I heard her say: “If you find this man, will you kill him?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then what will you do?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
I didn’t tell her that my last bad dream full of amorphous sounds and dark images and colors that bled into one another in a kaleidoscope of furious chaos was the final resistance of my will, my lifeurge to cling to being over nothingness. This life of mine which, for so many years, had become a nonlife, an existence without meaning or shape or destiny. The sexual gluttony of recent years had been a way to find something and fill up the hole in my life that was every day a yawning abyss. I couldn’t remember any of them clearly, their faces, the bedroom scenes, the positions, the dozens of ejaculations into mouths and wombs.
I doubted that Gallatine would want to press charges because he had every reason to want to distance himself from O’Reilly’s death. There was a record of his call to Boston. Otherwise, I was the only one who could implicate him.
But there was no way for me to escape jail time for what happened to the deputies back in Andover, and fleeing a felony was aggravating it. My name was already entered in the National Crime Index Computer for what happened years ago, and not even Booth had the clout it would take to whitewash this one. I knew I was in too deep; besides, he and I were quits. I hoped he was good for his word and it wouldn’t ruin things with Cooney. I was going to need Det. Sean Cooney on this one.
I knew this much, I thought: at the end of it, when I come face to face with him, I’m going to kill him. Then I’m going to do myself. One take away one is zero.
Ingrid surprised me, interrupted my interior monologue, and set my heart thumping; it was as if she had been reading my mind all the while: “Thomas, after you kill him, I want you to kill me too. I’ve never been afraid of dying. It’s life. It’s life that you have to be afraid of.” I said nothing and then we both slept the afternoon away in the curtain-dimmed room where the sun was steaming the pavements outside; inside was the faint antiseptic smell of formaldehyde and sheets that seemed to burn my skin.
She made me find a pharmacy once we exited the toll and crossed into Massachusetts. The wound on my back had begun to fester and smell a bit foul when I pulled the bandage off. I had a slight fever, but my real problems were the blurring of my vision from the night driving. I chewed aspirin by the handful for the throbbing headache.
I looked at her, “We’ll be in Boston in a few hours. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
It was the biggest lie I had told yet.
I found us a room in a two-story brownstone off Cardinal O’Connor just up the street from Massachusetts General. My head was aching from the strain of driving, and the fatigue of the last two days, so I asked Ingrid to hold the fort while I slept. “Any cops try to come in, you have to disarm them,” I said. She herself was too tired to acknowledge the stupidity of the joke. Why is it, I thought, that fictional private eyes are always cutting up and cracking wise at the worst of times and everybody thinks it’s funny? I slept like a dead man.
Ingrid awoke me gently at nightfall and held out a cup of black coffee in a McDonald’s cup as I shook off the residue of sleep. She said that I hadn’t moved the whole time, and she checked my breathing to see if I were still alive. I remembered nothing but the sweet blankness of oblivion.
“You try a feather?” I asked.
“Hunh?” she replied.
“You hold a feather to someone’s lips to see if they’re still breathing.”
She stared at me as if I were deranged.
“Forget it,” I said, “that was my last excursion into sidesplitting wit.”
I had no clean shirts, nothing to clean the gun, and I was afraid to count the money I had in my wallet. Money was one form of pressure; time the other. How much did I have before the cops pulled me in? Would Cooney sic the dogs on me once he knew I was in tow
n? Questions that would be answered. The ones that weren’t had to do with finding the man I came here to kill.
I saw Ingrid playing with the handle of a silent butler. I hadn’t seen one in years. “Look, Thomas.” Her eyes were flashing with delight.
Who could believe, seeing her at play in that moment, she was a woman resigned to dying in a city that mutilated her only child?
I told Ingrid what we were going to do. She understood the term longshot, so I didn’t explain to her what the odds were. We had the number, and if Det. Cooney of Boston’s Violent Crimes Unit didn’t get his knickers in a twist, we’d have a source of information. I’d worked with cops before; Cooney’s feelings for me were typical: a cop would rather suck shit through a straw than share with a private investigator.
Cooney was out on a case, they told me. “Who’s calling?”
I gave them a phony name; let them think I was one of his CI’s, a term that every cop considered a logical contradiction.
We went down the street. I made some clothing purchases at a store that advertized “experienced clothes.” The storeowner wanted me to haggle over the price a bit, never my strong suit, and seemed disappointed I wanted to pay the sticker price on some shirts and pants.
We hit a K-Mart on the way into town for underwear and socks. Another thing that you never see TV private eyes do: buy underwear. Ingrid bought tampons. She tried to give me some money in the checkout line.
The black dog of depression was all about me at that moment; I felt how impossible this venture was and how limited my abilities to do anything right. I get a little paranoid at times like these, so I was wearing the gun in my pants—I was afraid of getting stopped in the parking lot this close to Boston. I told her, right there in the checkout line amidst mothers and their squalling progeny, that if it came to that, I’d spend her money too. She asked what we’d do if we ran out of money first. I said nothing, unable to come up with a halfway decent lie. She nodded her blonde head a couple times and glanced at my beltline where the gun was secured. Her way, I guess, of saying she understood that failure or success was irrelevant. I looked her full in the face to see if she’d flinch. Limpid pools of washed-out blue like deeply frozen ice; she calmly held my stare.