Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  I shut the door on her. I looked at the grainy peeling surface of the wood for a while. In bad fiction, the women stay good-looking even when they’re dead. Missy hadn’t. She looked the opposite of good. She was a splayed effigy. She was driftwood in the shape of a person. She was rag and bone. I didn’t want to look at her again, ever. But I had to. There was no getting around it. For one thing, I’d already started to doubt she was there.

  I opened the door again. This time I went into the room. There were a few things I had to check out in there. Her face wasn’t one of them. I let myself look as high as her throat, but no higher. The skin there was the colour of a foul sky. She had been strangled, with wicked force. I didn’t think it had happened here, on the bed. The sheets looked thrashed, but no more thrashed than usual. There was no blood. There was nothing wrong with the bed except that she was on it. Her pose was flagrantly familiar, and it was meant to be. Someone was messing with my mind. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted cherry-red. The bite marks I’d seen the other day were still there, high on the inside of her left thigh. They had faded to yellow, like stains on an old book. She had healed fast. She was still young, or she had been. Near the top of her other thigh were two additional marks, blood-red and new. Her killer had given her a couple of fresh ones for the road. She didn’t smell yet, according to my shattered nose, but maybe that fat and sated fly on her shin knew better.

  Light-years behind me, back in the other room, those idiot birds left their perch again. I heard them smack a wall or two before making a screeching inevitable swerve for the open bedroom door. I went to slam it shut but got there too late. So now they had joined the party too, the idiot birds, flailing around the bed in pointless circles. I tried slapping them back out but they wouldn’t go. That gave me another reason to leave the room for good. But I had one more piece of business in there. Under the bed was a ripped and sagging cardboard box stuffed with all my drafts and cuttings and cast-offs: the story of my life, the sorry codex of my collected works. Also, somewhere in that casket of shame, lay dead Jade’s dead panties, and her retired sex toy. And right at the bottom of that nasty carton I had stashed the flash drive – the only hard evidence I’d ever had, the only proof of my innocence, if that’s what it was, that wasn’t in my head. If the drive was gone, if he’d found it and taken it, I was finished. I might as well turn myself in today. The box was around on Missy’s side, naturally. It was right under her. If I didn’t check it now I would have to check it later, when I would dig the ambience even less. So I skirted the bed, pointing my head at the wall, and knelt down to take delivery of my future, if I still had one. And it turned out that I did. The drive was still there. I put it in my pocket, feeling heavy and tired and old. A lot of me had wanted it to be over there and then.

  Head averted, I stood back up. As long as I was there, I opened the window behind her head. Hitting her with a fresh breeze – so far it was my only plan. It wouldn’t cut it for long. While I was at it, I shoved the flyscreen out into the yard. Maybe those idiot birds would have the wit to fly out, although I’d be a fool to bet on it. With my luck more birds would fly in. I went out the door without looking back and shut it behind me and left them to it.

  Back on the couch, I felt something close to panic. No doubt that was the proper thing to feel. I wanted a drink, but not as much as I wanted to be sober. I wanted to have a normal man’s head. I wanted to feel clean, cloudless, mentally scrubbed, fully present in time and space. I was working on a theory. It was unpalatable, but all the available theories were going to be that. She’d been killed somewhere else, by somebody who wasn’t me, and she’d been brought in here dead. But when? Yesterday, when I was out of the house? No. That didn’t fit with what I’d woken up to: the open side door, the closed bedroom, the missing page of my pad. It had to have happened last night, while I was sleeping on the couch, if sleeping is the right word for what I do there. He’d entered through the door that was four feet from my head, and he’d carried her body right on past me. If I’d flung out a slumbering arm at the wrong moment I’d have touched his depraved balls, or her dead white panda face. In the bedroom he had taken his time, laying her out, posing her, exhuming my poor novel from under the bed and dumping it sadistically in the bin. So he was a critic too, or maybe a publisher. On his way out, still taking his time, he’d stood over me and read my open notebook. Whatever he’d seen on the top page had made him rip it out and take it with him. And when he went he left the door open, and the birds had come flying in.

  How would this theory go down with Ted Lewin? I wasn’t about to run it by him. I could hardly swallow it myself. But somebody had laid her out on that bed, and it hadn’t been me. I was meant to think it had been, but the man who wanted me to think it had a cheap imagination. He was the Dallas Fingle of sex crime. Like Fingle, he had the raging pointless stamina of the imbecile. He’d strangled her, dumped her in his car, driven her here, lugged her up to the house, smuggled her in past me, posed her. All that labour for one cheap effect. I wondered which way he’d brought her in. Not through the front gate, past the TV people. He must have parked up on the hill and hauled her in the back way, through the bush. And what about the pose? How did he know she’d struck it for me? Had he watched us through the window? I doubted it. He’d made a lucky guess, that was all. It wasn’t an unusual pose, especially for her. She must have struck it for him too, and not just once. On at least two different nights he had moved his head up her, or down her, and sunk his teeth into her body’s crux. On at least one of those nights it hadn’t bothered her.

  He’d put us into the endgame now, whether he’d meant to or not. He was coming out of the shadows. He was taking risks. What would he have done if I’d woken up as he dragged her past me? Killed me? Why hadn’t he done that anyway? Maybe there was method in his madness, or maybe he’d gone clean off the fucking rails. Either way, my current life was not going to last much longer. If the façade held for long enough to let me bank Jill Tweedy’s advance, it would now be a miracle. At a minimum, there was the question of Missy’s corpse. Some decision would have to be made about her soon. Not today, but soon. Her use-by date loomed. To ignore that would be unthinkable, even for me. And getting her off the bed had been hard enough when she was alive. There was bad stuff in my near future, all right, no matter how things played out.

  The birds had stopped flailing around in the bedroom. They’d landed on something. For what it was worth, I hoped it wasn’t her. I looked at the bottle near my knees. Not drinking from it had got me about as far as it was going to get me, for today. Anyway, I had an obligation, sort of, to drink one to Missy. I owed her that much. I wished I’d been nicer to her, within reason. She’d deserved her chance to grow older and less obstreperous. She was still making her plans. I’m still making mine, and I’m forty-five. What would my life have added up to if he’d snuffed me out on the couch last night, while I slept? Nothing. Nothing at all. A prelude to a washout, foreplay to a non-event. My payoff or redemption, if I’m ever going to get one, has not come yet.

  Uncapping the bottle, I resolved to chase my dreams harder. Revenge for Missy was suddenly a big part of them. I craved a rematch with the man who had done that to her. I wanted to be alone with him one more time – one last time. That was about all I still wanted out of life. Finding him, taking him down – that was something to drink to.

  I drank to it.

  *

  I didn’t get to drink to it for long. About an hour later, just as the short day started to wane, I heard a car come crunching up the drive. I hadn’t drunk nearly enough to make this seem acceptable. I heard a handbrake crank on. I heard the slam of a door. The world won’t leave you alone, no matter how grimly you shut it out. It will always track you down. Beyond the mottled glass of the front door, a dark and stolid male shape came up my front steps, rising like smoke. I watched the shape blur and fatten until it filled the panes. The shape was wearing a fedora, a Jack
Ruby hat. There is only one man in my world who wears a hat like that.

  He knocked. I moved to the door. Getting there seemed to take a long time, as if I was wading through thigh-deep water. The figure on the door’s far side had not stopped looking like Ted Lewin. This horrified me less than it should have. Maybe it didn’t horrify me at all. Let the rest of it get taken care of by Lewin, and by solemn experts in latex gloves and paper shoes: the processing of the scene, the shrouding and removal of the body. That way I’d never have to go back in there again.

  I opened the door. Lewin looked at me without expression. Then he was inside, removing the Ruby hat, drifting across to my armchair, sitting down there, rotating the hat’s brim in his fingers. He looked all slack somehow; his eyes had gone all rheumy and old. If he was here to arrest me, he was hiding it well. He glanced around the room without rigour. The closed bedroom door didn’t interest him. With mild disapproval he contemplated the survival kit on the coffee table: the bottle that was no longer very full, the curled blister packs that no longer contained many pills. For a second I thought I saw him cock his head at the empty air, as if he smelt something that I still couldn’t. But the moment evaporated. His senses had lost their acuity, their threat. I half-wished they hadn’t. He breathed out hard and said, ‘They’re taking me off the case.’

  I was back on the couch now, facing him, waiting for him to say more. He didn’t. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Who for, Ray? Me or yourself?’ He looked exhausted, beaten, out of his element. His poignant singlet showed through his short-sleeved shirt. His cricket club tie was badly knotted.

  ‘Both,’ I said.

  ‘You should be. You’ll find things are about to change.’

  But things had changed already, and he didn’t know it. For once I was ahead of him. He was a corpse behind the times. Maybe he didn’t even know she was missing. If he did, he didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Nor was I about to raise the topic myself: not any more. My chance had been and gone. There are only two good times to tell a cop about a dead girl on your bed: straight away or not at all.

  ‘This next bloke won’t be as nice as I am.’ Lewin looked at me with his mismatched eyes. The bad one was an egg fried over way too much heat. ‘He thinks you did it, for starters.’

  ‘And you don’t, do you, Ted? You never have.’

  He looked at me with something like disgust and said nothing. My heartbeat had steadied. This wasn’t, after all, going to be the end. It was just one more scene to be ridden out on the way.

  After a while he said, ‘They reckon I gave you too much slack. I’m starting to think they’re right.’

  In the bedroom, the open window let in a blast of wind. The door bumped softly against the jamb. Lewin looked at it briefly, then back at me.

  ‘That TV thing was the last straw,’ he said.

  ‘I had to defend myself.’

  ‘It wasn’t smart. It made us look bad. It made me look bad.’

  ‘Yeah, but it made me look good. And I’ve got to look after myself, Ted. If I don’t, who will?’

  ‘This next bloke won’t, I’ll tell you that much. He’ll go in hard. He’ll put the dogs on you. He’ll tap your phone. You’ll have company wherever you go. In your car. On foot.’

  ‘I don’t go out much anyway.’ He was talking about abstract threats, nightmares for a future I no longer had.

  ‘He’ll be out to break you, whether you did it or not. And he’ll be wasting his time, won’t he? Because you didn’t.’

  ‘No, Ted, I didn’t. But how do you know that? You knew it before I did. How?’

  ‘Now why should I tell you that,’ Lewin tiredly said, ‘when you’ve never told me nothing? This whole time I’ve had to wring things out of you, drop by drop. You’ve never given more than you had to. I’ve never understood it. You’re a smart guy. You know I don’t give a bugger about your secrets. I just wanted to catch the bastard who killed her. I could have been done with you in a day. It’s like you wanted to stay in the frame.’

  I hated seeing him like this: perturbed, hat in hand, clueless on an away pitch. Outside his miked-up room he was just an old man whose old wife dressed him, badly.

  ‘I’m in love with her,’ I said. ‘But you already know that. You worked that out before I did too. I didn’t love her until she was dead. Maybe because she was dead, I don’t know. And maybe because I hardly knew her. These are dark themes, Ted. Some of them I don’t even understand myself. Can you blame me for not wanting them in the papers? Plus, I’ve started to lose her. I’ve only got one or two solid memories of her left. If I talk them away, I’ll have lost everything. That enough truth for you?’

  Not even close. He did the thing where he looks at you and says nothing and waits for the silence to break you. This time I decided not to let it. I waited for it to break him first. And then, in my bedroom, those idiot birds reared up screeching off their perch, and started rattling around the walls like dice in a cup.

  Lewin looked at the door.

  ‘Birds,’ I told him.

  ‘Eh?’ His eyes were on the door still.

  ‘A couple of birds flew in there. I can’t get them out.’

  He pondered that claim without much interest. He was free to walk over there and open the door, if he really wanted to know a secret. Instead he just looked wearily back at me. His fingers resumed their workout on his hat, running lap after lap of its brim.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said flatly, as if already aware he was wasting his breath, ‘that you broke into her house the other night?’

  ‘What other night?’

  ‘The night you got that big red lump on your head.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well. Somebody did. There’s glass all over the floor. And blood. They’re testing it. If it’s yours, I think you might finally have ruined yourself.’

  Again he spoke of a future that wasn’t coming. I sat there, waiting for him either to speak again or leave. Our whole relationship had flipped. Now I was the one who could just sit there, and let the other man drown in silence. I tasted power, and didn’t like its flavour much: not if its victim had to be Lewin.

  ‘I came here to give you one last chance,’ he said. ‘There’s still things you’re not telling me. We both know it. Whatever you haven’t given me, give it to me now. Off the record, man to man. No cameras, no tapes. It’s still not too late. I’ve got one more day. After that, you’ll have this other joker to deal with.’

  ‘And he won’t understand me like you do.’

  ‘I can assure you that he won’t.’

  I was starting to want the old man gone. He was an irrelevance now. He was cramping my style. What was he here for? Friendship? I had nothing left to give him. All my leads had been abject red herrings. Skeats, Vagg . . . It was all just literary politics that meant nothing and led nowhere. And Lewin didn’t police the literary world. Nobody did. So what else could I tell him about? The girl on my bed? The voice on my phone? The flash drive? No. The end was going to be hot and nasty and violent, and I wanted it all to myself. I had earned that.

  ‘She had somebody young,’ I offered.

  Lewin said nothing.

  ‘He’s a biter,’ I said. ‘He bites people.’

  ‘I know that. You know I know that. Give me something I don’t know.’

  ‘Look at her job. I think he had something to do with that.’

  ‘Last chance,’ Lewin said.

  But we’d hit bedrock, at long last. I had nothing left to give, apart from the whole truth. Were his powers of empathy subtle enough to forgive that? Were anybody’s?

  I said nothing. Lewin shook his head and put his hat back on. And that was that. One last disappointment for the road.

  ‘You’re a prick, Ray,’ he sadly said.

  I’d reduced him to saying that. For some
reason it felt like my most shameful failure yet.

  10

  As soon as he’d gone I wanted him back. You haven’t been alone until you’ve been alone with a dead body. It tests your taste for solitude. You start to crave company, no matter how sick of life you thought you were. Those birds were still back there, squawking around in the bedroom with her, but they didn’t count. I wanted the human touch, for once. I even picked up The Tainted Land for a while, in the hope of getting some spark of animation or fellowship from Fingle. But I had as much chance of finding life in there as Missy had of bursting into song. Say this much for Missy: at least she’d been alive once. Fingle wrote like a mannequin. Even by accident he couldn’t write a breathing sentence. And yet something he’d written had stirred me last night. Somewhere on the featureless salt flat of his dud epic, some shred of pertinence had caught my eye: a dropped stitch in the vast flaccid tapestry of his irrelevance. If I’d found it once, maybe I would find it again. Or maybe it was the freakish absence of any such stitch that had got me thinking. Maybe his utter worthlessness was the key.

  The phone rang. I picked it up. I knew who I wanted it to be.

  ‘You find her?’ his voice said.

  I had my wish. It was him: my semblable, my frère.

  ‘How could I miss her?’ I said. ‘Not much subtlety there, even by your standards.’

  ‘Dealt with her yet?’

  ‘Why don’t you drop round and find out? I think it’s time we met again.’

  ‘We will,’ he said, ‘but not yet.’

  ‘I almost know who you are.’

  ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘I know you’re young. I know you’re not that bright. This is what Jade used to tell people. She told them she had this boyfriend who wasn’t that bright.’

  ‘What people, Saint? You don’t know any people.’

  ‘She told them there was something wrong with you. She was on the money there.’