Of Mice and Murderers

by John Stockmyer

Withdrawing his finger, shining the flashlight on what he'd raked out, he found it to be a gob of gunk.

  Puzzled, he smeared the goop between thumb and forefinger; saw that his first impression had been correct. Thick. Oily.

  Bringing his fingers to his nose, Z sniffed the substance ... the sticky mess smelling like the goo that congeals at the bottom of rancid lard cans.

  No doubt about what this stuff was doing in the chimney slots. Someone had smeared it there to plug the pipe.

  Sobered, picking up his glove where he'd tossed it beside him, Z tried to imagine how it must have been. ... Could only come to one conclusion. Someone had attempted to murder him by smoke inhalation!

  This very night, an unknown assailant had climbed on the roof -- probably gone up the same trellis Z had used. Standing where he was now, this person had poured something down the chimney pipe; probably set this "something" on fire by dropping a wad of flaming rags down the flue.

  After that, the "great unknown" had deliberately clogged the vent slots to force smoke into the apartment down below.

  Shivering for the first time (and from more than the cold,) it was beginning to sink in just how close Z's intended killer had come to succeeding. Except for great, good luck, Z might still be in bed, breathing in the smoke until he was unconscious, until he suffocated.

  Something had awakened him. .... What? ..... Popping noises. Popping? .......

  Then, he knew! It was the ticking the fireplace rivets made when warming up. Rivets, expanding as the "gunk" fire heated the firebox.

  Lucky!

  Lucky to have installed a cheap steel fireplace rather than one of expensive, brick ones. Lucky because, while sleep wiped out your sense of smell, a sleeping man could hear. The reason a smoke detector's alarm would wake you, when the smoke that set off the alarm, wouldn't. (Time to install a smoke alarm. Or two. Or three.)

  Fifteen minutes later -- a thorn scratch on his naked wrist to show for his trip down the trellis, a second puncture received on the way back up -- this time with an empty jelly jar and a kitchen knife in his coat pocket -- Z used the knife to scrape the goo out of the chimney slots, scooping the oily gunk into the jar.

  His body, his bones freezing solid -- up-drafts no joke without pants and underwear -- it was time to get off the roof.

  Pocketing the jar and knife, the final descent gave him one more ankle scratch before Z could get back inside the apartment and slam the door.

  Shivering in spite of his heavy coat, he unpocketed the sample jar and knife to set them on the table.

  Putting the flashlight back in its drawer in the kitchenette, getting another jar and a second knife, he returned to the living room to dig a sample of the smoke-producing substance out of his fireplace, scraping that specimen in the second jar.

  Comparing containers, it was easy to see that the stuff that had been set on "smolder" in the fireplace was the same as the goop used to plug the chimney. Both thick. Both sticky.

  Holding first one jar, then the other to the ceiling light, Z found that the material used to clog the chimney and to smoke up the place was laced with thin streaks of several colors. ... Odd.

  Still cold to the bone -- in spite of his fireplace almost killing him -- Z decided to light a fire. First scooping the rest of the gunk out of the firebox, put in some kindling and a split, oak log, lighting paper, kindling, and oak to produce both warmth and properly scented, skyward bound smoke.

  Warmed up at last, he doused the remaining embers and twisted shut the damper. (For the rest of the night, at least, he wanted to be certain that nothing else could be poured down the chimney to the fireplace box.)

  Satisfied that a similar "trick" could not be played on him again, Bob Zapolska took off his coat and hung it in the closet, after that -- careful to lock the front door -- he returned to his bedroom.

  Deciding, as an extra precaution, to leave the bedroom window open, Z dug extra blankets out of the dresser to spread on his bed to compensate for the open window's draft.

  All defenses complete, hanging up his robe, he got back in bed.

  But not to sleep.

  Z had to face it. Someone had tried to murder him.

  "What goes around comes around," his Mom had always said, the climate of murder "going around" Bateman College, now "coming around" him.

  Lying in the dark, straining to hear sounds that weren't there, Big Bob Zapolska felt ... good; was surprised to discover that, for the first time that day, he was ... optimistic.

  Why?

  Because the murderer -- surely the same person who'd done in either the janitor or Beth Ogden (or both) -- thought Z was so close to the truth that the killer wanted ... Z ... dead. (Attracting the attention of your target in the late stages of an investigation was one of the hazards you had to expect in the P.I. business.)

  It could even be that Z already knew enough to solve both Bateman murders -- just hadn't recognized the facts as clues.

  No question about it, Big Bob Z was in danger because he was a threat to someone.

  Trying to review what he'd found out about the killings, Z still thought there must be pieces missing. Or that the reverse was true. Perhaps the problem was that he had extraneous puzzle pieces, some of them needing to be eliminated before the genuine clues fell neatly into place. (Nothing would screw up a jigsaw puzzle freak like slipping in extra pieces from a puzzle other than the one being put together.)

  No problem. The solution to something was at hand -- provided he could keep himself alive.

  As for loose ends that might be getting in the way of the solution, Z must eliminate them as soon as possible, meaning he had to check again with Johnny Dosso.

  This time, face-to-face.

  The best way to separate truth from fiction.

  If the Dosso possibility came to nothing -- as Z expected -- and if Z could remember where he'd smelled something similar to the poisonous goop that had produced that choking smoke -- he'd be back in the detective business with a vengeance!

  A few more days was all he'd need -- staying alive that long, his immediate goal.

  His course of action laid out, Z raced through all the ways he could increase security, deciding that the best survival strategy was to relocate at one of the city's "hot sheet" motels. Something he'd check into tomorrow, perhaps getting a deal on a weekly rather then an hourly rate.

  Feeling safe at least for the night, he found that, like his grudging respect for the "guard" who'd stolen the Monet, he was developing a reluctant admiration for the Bateman murderer.

  Relaxing toward much-needed sleep, Z realized he'd even come to admire the murderer; most of all, for the killer's judicious use of fire.

  To be completely fair about it, he'd have to say "well done" when, at long last, he caught that slippery son of a bitch!

  * * * * *

  Chapter 18

  Calder was right. The Wednesday night light in the third-floor northwest turret room of Bateman could best be described as a glow.

  Calder had also described the "ghost light" correctly as the only sign of "life" in the entire building.

  Z Keeping his collar turned up against the raw wind that always seemed to slice across the Bateman Campus hill, he'd been around the building. Twice – the cold at least keeping his bruised back from aching.

  Again in front of the grotesque monstrosity that was Bateman Hall, standing in the dark near the northwest edge of the brooding building, he was convinced he saw a dim luminescence coming from the third-floor corner room. So faint it would be invisible to anyone but a superstitious professor and a tipped-off detective.

  Just to triple-check, he went back to the front sidewalk. Moved to the right. Then to the left. Once more to make sure the light remained the same from any angle, making it unlikely it was a reflection from the institution's streetlights bordering the front of the campus down below. No. There was a "glow" seeping from the turret windows. As for a ghost causing it -- you had to be a child to believe in ghosts. (Just
as you had to be an adult to imagine how many forms of authentic evil stalked the world.)

  The chubby psychologist had said to meet him in front of Bateman Hall at eleven. By then, Calder said, they'd have the campus to themselves.

  What about security, Z asked?

  Just one man who was more night watchman than guard, was Calder's reply, an older gentleman who was unlikely to venture outside the security building on cold nights. The Z/Calder meeting to take place later that same night.

  Returning to the Bateman porch, peeling down his glove, Z looked at his watch, angling the dial until there was enough star shine on the hands for him to guess at eleven-ten -- time to get out of the wind as best he could by hunching behind one of the building's outlandish topped columns.

  Because of Z's need to see Johnny Dosso, Z had set up a later on-campus meeting as a substitute for Calder's offer of a free supper. ("First things first," his Mother would have said, killers living by another of his Mother's mottos: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.")

  Seeing Johnny D was so important to Bob Z that the first business that morning had been to call International Imports (the firm where his old friend "didn't work",) Z demanding an immediate personal meeting with the firm's non-employee.

  After that, Z had spent the rest of the day in his office, waiting for Johnny's call and speculating about whether or not an old Ford he'd noticed behind him in the morning's traffic had been following him. He also did some musing about earlier feelings of being watched, the last time by that old man at the gallery. Z must have been followed all the way home by someone, somewhere, sometime. The proof? People kept showing up at the house to do him bodily harm. (What his enemies couldn't be doing was finding him in the phone book. Z's business made it necessary to have his home phone, and therefore his address, unlisted.)

  Taking it one more step, if the "smoke man" and "little Antony" were not one and the same, two trackers had followed Big Bob Zapolska to his lair, moreover, within the space of a few days.

  Pretty sloppy for a detective to have failed to notice he was being tailed -- at the same time, an understandable slip. P.I.'s were hunters; sometimes forgetting that, to another hunter, they could also be the prey.

  Other than theorize about how long the "smoke man" had been behind him, there was nothing Z could do but wait for John's return call.

  But not this time. When the call came at 4:00, it had just been a message: "Meet your party where you last met. Nine o'clock. Tonight." Click.

  And where was that?

  Thinking back, Z was sure the last time he'd seen Johnny had been at the funeral ten years ago, the eulogy given for Johnny's young son who'd shot himself while "cleaning" a handgun. (When you needed a comforting word for grieving parents, where were the lobbyists for the N.R.A. with their reassuring slogan: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people?)

  The ceremony had been in a nineteenth-century, downtown cathedral, the church now cowering beneath the glass-and-steel construction of the financial temples of the city.

  A tragic accident, the priest said during the long service. (Priests had been known to lie, of course; never more eloquently than when presiding at funerals.)

  Flowers everywhere. Flowers and priests. Flowers and priests and well-dressed, hard-eyed mourners. Flowers and priests and well-dressed, hard-eyed mourners, and immaculate morticians -- undertakers, the only men in America who's job required them to look sad about the way they made their living.

  No. ... The very last time he'd seen Johnny D had been when they'd stood side-by-side before the young man's coffin, the casket positioned above the new-dug grave in the raw Northland cemetery of Lakeside.

  More meaningless rituals to disguise the truth. Flowers and priests and Johnny's "business associates" and a plain-clothed Kansas City dick who took the usual surreptitious pictures of the crowd. And Big Bob Z, standing to the left of a balding, paunchy, red-eyed Johnny D.

  A thousand mental miles to Johnny's right was John's estranged wife. Nothing left for them to share but the mutuality of their pain.

  Almost as depressing as the priestly assurances of heaven -- promised to "believers" who were doing everything they could to avoid going -- was the cemetery itself, a recently established graveyard of shiny granite tombstones thinly scattered over treeless ground -- small jars of eternally plastic flowers placed before the graves.

  For melancholia, nothing beat a brand new boneyard.

  So -- it was to be the cemetery.

  Z wondered if Bob Z and Johnny D would recognize each other after all these years? No matter. At nine o'clock in the dead of night, who else but the two of them would haunt a lonely place like Lakeside?

  Earlier that same night, not wanting to risk the possibility of making a mistake about the loyalties of Johnny D, Bob Z had arrived at the cemetery at 8:00. Had driven up the circular drive before pulling into the shadows at the back of the worker's building, the shed where Lakeside's personnel kept the back hoe, shovels, and the yards of plastic grass used to soften the shock of new-dug dirt. Parked there, he would have the first look at whoever came up the approach road from the street, the cemetery path curving along the edge of an ice-encrusted pond that the graveyard's owners laughingly called a lake.

  It was a chilly wait until 8:30, when a black Lincoln pulled in, coming slowly past the "lake" to stop 20 yards from "Z's" building. Switched off. Doused its lights.

  Not wanting to take unnecessary chances either, Johnny D had also come before the appointed hour.

  How many years would it be before Z and John no longer trusted each other, even when safely separated by phones?

  Big Bob Zapolska opened the Cavalier's door quietly; slid out of the seat; stalked from the shadows. "Johnny?"

  There was a solid click as the Lincoln's door cracked open. No dome light showed.

  "That you, Z?"

  "It's me."

  The big sedan's door opened then, after a pause, thunked shut with a solid tank-hatch sound. Thick steel and heavy glass.

  A short pear-shaped shadow detached itself from the larger darkness of the limo; walked heavily up the sloping concrete path.

  As Johnny lumbered up, his shallow breaths white in a scrap of moonlight, Z saw that Johnny D had aged a solid twenty years in the ten they'd been apart.

  "Good to see you in the flesh, Z," Johnny said, as quiet in person as he was noisy on the phone.

  The place, perhaps.

  And memories of his son.

  Solemnly, like aliens meeting on a bleak, but neutral, planet, they shook hands.

  "Sorry about this ... place," Johnny said with a sigh and a feeble shrug. "It's just that only you could'a known about it. Some people might get nervous if they thought I was talkin' to a dick, public or private. But you and me, we got memories that nobody listenin' in could have."

  "Not all good."

  "Too Goddamn many of them bad." Said with the weight of years ... rather than with the heat of youth.

  They stood there. For a long moment. Remembering the bad.

  While only fools believed the lover's maxim, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," Z wondered if the adage could be true for sons ... a sudden shredding of the clouds freeing the moon to cast its cold fluorescence on the headstone-littered field.

  And so, to business.

  "It's your party." Johnny bowed.

  "Something I got to know. Did our mutual friend get to the windy city?"

  "Yes."

  "Could he be back?"

  "Don't worry. Way I hear it, he's gotten into somethin' permanent there. Real estate. Jimmy Hoffa Real Estate."

  As cold as it had been on that stony plain, it was the first time Z had shivered.

  "He have a friend? Picking up where he left off?"

  "No way."

  "You would ... know?"

  "I would know."

  Face to face, it was the simple truth that Bob Zapolska had come to hear.

  Little
remained to be said. Johnny asked and Z told him (without being specific) that the reason for the meeting was a personal problem -- like before.

  Johnny offered his protection, said it would be superior to the best the feds could give.

  Z declined politely.

  And that was it, the long sedan crunching gravel as it backed. Made a brontosaurus turn. Rolled down the lane to lumber off on Highway 1.

  All day in the planning, the meeting had lasted only minutes -- a spark of time in which Z had learned two things. First, what he'd come to hear: that the "smoke man" was an independent, meaning there was no longer a doubt that the attempt on Z's life came from the Bateman murderer himself. The second revelation, that Big Bob Z could never work for Johnny D. No amount of cash was worth the price of working for an organization that made you meet old friends ... in brand new cemeteries ... in the dead of night.

  Once again retreating to the protective porch on Bateman hill, Z was now waiting for Doctor Calder. Using the "down time" to pick the old lock on Bateman Hall's front door. He'd even thought about going inside for a solitary look at the "ghostly" tower room -- but rejected that idea. No sense blundering about in an unfamiliar building when Calder could probably take him right to the spot. In addition, the professor might have learned something new that Z should be aware of before their "ghost hunt."

  There was nothing left for him to do but "cool his heels" under the portico of the strange old building; try, while waiting, to keep to the leeward side of a fat stone column.

  Twenty minutes passed, Z occasionally braving the wind to look out past the low porch and down the hill, before he saw Calder's portly figure halfway up the right front steps. Halfway up and mounting at a faster clip than Z would have thought possible. Maybe climbing stairs as a form of exercise was doing the chubby professor good.

  Ducking back behind the column where it was warmer, he gave the doctor time to reach the top and approach the Bateman walk before Z stepped out again.

  "Sorry I'm late," Calder called softly, pivoting off the main sidewalk, continuing until he'd stepped up on the porch to shake hands. "Most nights I want to climb up here there's no trouble finding a parking place. But tonight I had to park a lot further away than usual. That's where the frat houses are." His wave encompassed a quarter mile of city down below. "Probably a party going on, accounting for all the cars." Even in the feeble light of a cloud-streaked sky, Z saw Calder's teeth flash in an apologetic grin.