Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  ‘Yes. I know Mel.’

  ‘This Kissing feller was killed Friday night, in your office, with an ice pick in his head.’

  Oh Jesus—not Mel. Oh Sweet Jesus spare me Mel.

  ‘Since when nobody’s been able to find you. The Captain told me two and two was four. I said this wasn’t you. Don’t prove me wrong. Tell me where were you between ten p.m. Friday and about four a.m. Saturday morning?’

  ‘Asleep. In Toronto.’

  ‘You can prove this?’

  ‘A dozen witnesses. I’ve been in Toronto most of the last four weeks. More than three of them in the hospital. You want names?’

  ‘Probably not—all the same it ain’t gonna be that simple.’

  Simple? In a couple of copspeak sentences Nate had just ripped out a piece of my heart and flung it bleeding on the floor. I wanted to faint, throw up and die all at once. I turned my face into the blast from the fan. Let it blow me back from the brink. Cool this searing pain in my heart.

  ‘Passport,’ I said, and I could hear my voice begin to break up. ‘I have my passport in my pocket. In and out stamps from the Canadians at Niagara.’

  I took it out of my inside pocket. Pushed it across the desk to Nate.

  ‘Well—whaddya know? Two little blue maple leaves. In May 28, out June 22. I’m gonna have to keep this for a while. You understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Now,’ he changed tack. ‘To the nitty. The ice pick. You do own an ice pick?’

  ‘Yes. Goes with that near-antique icebox in my office. You have to hack it clean sometimes. It’s . . . it’s a necessity.’

  Killed with an object I’d picked up a thousand times in three summers. I could feel it on the palm of my hand even as Nate spoke. Cool and smooth. A black handle, heavy in the hand, a short, shining, stainless steel spike. The means of Mel’s death. I touched it. How could I touch it and not know? Was it not cast into the form and structure of the thing as inevitable as the ordained day of death. Was it not written? How could I not know? How could I touch it and not know?

  ‘The ice pick that killed Kissing was covered in prints. Prints match those on the typewriter, the door handle, the icebox. You name it, they match.’

  I knew what was coming, so I said, ‘They probably are mine. You want to fingerprint me?’

  ‘Sure, why not? Let’s get Speke back in here. Let him do something useful.’ Nate roared for Speke, told him to come back with an ink pad.

  The look on Speke’s face was copsatisfaction—if they were ’printing me I was going down. He rolled the fingers of my right hand across a sheet of white paper. I saw the image of my fingertips appear like Rorschach patterns upon the paper—that unmistakable scar on the tip of my index finger—a bulbous line like the swirling red storm of Jupiter. Speke handed the sheet to Nate. Nate picked up his reading glasses, held them away from the page and used them to magnify the image. Then he picked up a forensic photograph of an index fingerprint, weighed up the similarity and said, ‘Yep. It’s you.’

  Speke smiled at me in a fuck you sort of way. It was me. I had not doubted it.

  ‘Let’s hear it. How did your prints get to be on a murder weapon? And Donny—get out.’

  Speke vanished with his smile.

  I said, ‘It’s my ice pick. Anyone could have picked it up in my office. Anyone in gloves.’

  ‘What was Kissing doing in your office if you been gone a month?’

  ‘He had keys. His office could get to be hectic. He used mine from time to time when I wasn’t around. Same with his apartment. He lived just north of Houston. If he wanted to work of an evening he could just walk five blocks and get away from it all. He must have just let himself in.’

  ‘Ah uh? And when we asked this broad you live with where you were, how come she said she didn’t know?’

  ‘You talked to Rose? You told Rose?’

  How had she taken it? She and Mel had had a cat and dog relationship for years. They could fight fit to spit and draw blood, but she was bound to be hit hard by this.

  ‘I don’t live with Miss Diment, Nate. We just share an apartment. If you ask me I could have sworn I told her I was going up to Canada. But maybe I didn’t. It would have made no difference if I didn’t.’

  Nate pondered this one.

  ‘A month you say? Hospital you say? What kept you a month?’

  ‘Kid stabbed me. Wound got infected. Needed to be drained. I got pumped full of antibiotics. Reacted badly to them. That’s about all there is to it.’

  ‘By kid you mean one of your draft-dodging punks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could not deny it. Joey D was a punk.

  ‘And lots of people knew you were there? And you got out of hospital when?’

  ‘Friday about five in the afternoon. I spent the night with friends, thought better of leaping into a car on Saturday so I drove down today. I can account for all of my time since I got discharged.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Turner. I don’t believe you did this. I also don’t believe you’d be so dumb as to walk back into your own office two days later as though nothing had happened with an “oh gosh” ready on your lips.’

  ‘When did they find him?’

  ‘Morning after. Yesterday. Blood had seeped through the floor into the office below. It being a Saturday the cleaner was in. She dialled 911. We slipped the lock on your door and found the guy.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Downtown morgue.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘Later. There are more pressing matters. I checked with the NoHo cops at the 9th Precinct. It appears Kissing hung out with a weird crowd. Did you know he lived in the same block as that fuckin’ lunatic Jerry Rubin? The NoHos know that place, they busted it a while back. They say it’s regular trouble.’

  ‘Of course I know. Mel and I go way back. Nate—I hang out with a pretty weird crowd. They’re none of them murderers!’

  The NoHo cops were plenty weird themselves. They’d patrol St Mark’s Place in packs of ten or twenty—was that paranoia or ­terrorism?—but they’d take a live and let live approach to a little dope. And that ended up emphasizing the deliberate targeting when they did bust someone. It had been a year almost to the day since they busted Mel’s building—they didn’t bother with a warrant, they said they were investigating a murder up in the Bronx—all they caught was four ounces of cannabis, but they looked for the killer in Rubin’s letters and files. I also heard they took away some grotesque sex toy Rubin had dreamt up, but God knows this could be pure Yippie fiction, I never saw the damn thing. And Rubin got a busted coccyx from the beating they gave him. What was that—law or politics? Mel and I raised his $1,000 bail overnight by hustling everyone we knew.

  ‘Yeah . . . sure,’ Nate was saying, ‘. . . but that’s just your job, right? Chasing dodgers and runaways. I tell you this guy was A1 weird. Hippies, Yippies . . . all of ’em potheads.’

  Just my job? Well, believe that if you want.

  ‘Nate—when did you last pull a reefer-smoking, crazed killer? Sure, Mel was a hippie. But he paid rent and taxes and held down a regular job just like you.’

  ‘Yeah—his job. I was coming to that. I understand from Miss Diment that Kissing worked on the Voice. We talked to the guys there. Nobody seems to know what he was working on. Do you know?’

  ‘No. He’d never tell me things like that till he was good and ready. He’d spent most of the last three months campaigning for Mailer.’

  Nate held out his hands, turned his palms up and looked incredulous.

  ‘Mailer lost on Wednesday! What the fuck was so important in Mailer running for mayor that it was worthwhile knocking off one of his guys after he quits?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, feeble and confident at the same time. ‘M
el getting killed has nothing at all to do with that.’

  ‘Then why kill him?’

  ‘Nate, I’m as clueless as you are. But, if you don’t mind, I’ve just been told my best friend is dead. I’d rather like to go home and think about him for while before I have to talk about him.’

  Nate stood up. Yanked his tie back into place, swept my prints off the top of his desk into the open drawer. He seemed to want a few seconds to weigh this one up.

  ‘OK. I don’t see why not. But . . . the usual applies. Do not leave town without telling me. Report back here tomorrow noon . . . and . . . I gotta ask you for your piece.’

  ‘My piece? I don’t own a gun, Nate.’

  ‘Whaddya mean you don’t own a gun? I endorsed your application for a permit myself.’

  ‘I got the permit. I guess I thought it went with the job. I just never got the gun. When it came to it I just couldn’t see me with a gun.’

  ‘You know, Raines. There are worse things could happen to you than some draft-dodger stabs you. You go after these crazies without a gun, and believe me some of them are very crazy, and you’re going to wind up shot.’

  It was good advice. I was not about to take it.

  I found myself back on the street. Warm rain again. I held out my hands and watched the black smudges on my fingertips dissolve eerily in the green light from the precinct house lamps. Identity washed away. Anonymous once more. What now? Where now? Alone again. I wanted to go home and I could scarcely make myself move. Life seemed suddenly both bare and complicated. My house keys were in my bag. The bag was where I’d dropped it. On the office floor. The keys to the office were in Donny Speke’s pocket. I looked back up the steps. Speke was watching me through the doorway. Flipping a silver half-dollar over and over again pretending he was George Raft when he wouldn’t even make Elisha Cook Jr. I didn’t want to speak to Speke.

  I hooked a dime out of my pocket, walked down the street to a payphone and called Rose.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been, you bastard?’ was the first thing she said, then she broke down crying before I could get another word in. When her breathing slowed and I could hear the roar in the earpiece diminish, I said, ‘I’ll be home in ten.’

  §

  Rose was on the sofa in her robe. Stripped of make-up. Greasy streaks of cold cream bouncing back the light from her face. Thick eyeglasses instead of contacts, making her look like an overgrown adolescent. I always knew when Rose was hell-bent on getting drunk. She’d take out her lenses and put on the glasses, anticipating the point when she’d be too stinko to do it. She was nursing a large glass of gin. Ninety-nine percent stumblin’ drunk already. She looked dreadful. I didn’t ask what I looked like.

  ‘Have you been crying all weekend?’

  I fell into the chair opposite her. Scraped off my boots heel to toe.

  ‘Pretty much. Those coppers who came looking for you gave me the hard time they couldn’t give you. Turner, where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘Canada. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘You know, I’ve never adopted the current vogue for calling them pigs. Perhaps it’s because I was brought up on the notion of “if you want to know the time ask a policeman” and village bobbies with big boots and black bicycles, but that Speke chap really is a pig. Talked to me as though I had committed a crime in not knowing where you were. Had one of his mates follow me if I so much as went out to get a pint of milk. And then the bugger sat on the doorstep all day, just waiting.’

  ‘They won’t do that anymore. I told them all I know, and like I said I’m sorry.’

  She swigged gin. I decided it was just what I needed. I just didn’t want it neat. I went to the icebox and rooted around for a tray of ice cubes. It was frosting up badly. There, on the top shelf, was a black-handled ice pick just like the one that killed Mel. God knows they’re common enough, a couple of dollars in any hardware store, but it stopped me cold. It was stuck there like something I’d have to spend the rest of my life avoiding. Like passing a gibbet. A permanent symbol of Mel’s death. I plunged one hand to the back of the icebox, grabbed a tray and just pulled. The force of it tore the tray free from the frost, spun me round, scattered ice cubes across the floor and flung me straight into the arms of Rose. Her head upon my chest, drunken, heaving sobs, mumbled words I could not understand.

  I watched the ice melt into puddles on the kitchen floor, heard Rose run through a mantra of ‘Bastards, bastards’ and ‘What’re we going to do?’ When she stopped and I felt her go limp I was pretty certain she’d passed out. So many evenings had ended this way. I carried her to her bedroom, flipped the quilt over her, and turned out the light. I went back to my own. A room scarcely bigger than the bed. Rose had dumped all the mail addressed to me here on the bed. Everything in me said ‘mañana’, so I tipped it off, lay down and fell asleep with my clothes on.

  §

  The first thing I knew was the scent of hot coffee wafting under my nose. I opened my eyes. Bright, bright light of morning. Rose bending over me. Dressed, made-up, lenses in, not a trace of chenille or cold cream. A vision for the working day. Sunlight turning the mop of red hair gold. One hand held the cup, the other fiddled with my shirt buttons.

  ‘So?’ she said looking down at the strip of tape and bandage on my belly.

  ‘I . . . I . . . er . . . got stabbed. Nothin’ serious.’

  ‘Nothing serious? God, Johnnie, you’re such a fool.’

  I got up when I heard the door slam, grabbed the pile of mail, and decided to face reality. I tossed the first two. I did not want a subscription to the Reader’s Digest and I honestly didn’t care how much I owed American Express. The third stopped me cold. Mel’s handwriting. A Friday night postmark. I tore it open. A single sheet of paper and another envelope. ‘Turner—just keep this till I ask you for it. M.’

  I tore open the second envelope. His address book, an audio cassette, a slip of paper torn from a telephone message pad—the same kind I kept in the office—with one address on it. Someone called Marty Fawcett of West Rogers Park, Chicago. And a couple of pages of gobbledegook I knew to be shorthand. I did not read shorthand.

  This was an old if neat trick. How to hide something where no one can find it for twenty-four hours? Let the United States Post Office do it for you . . . neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night and all that jazz. Mail it to yourself, mail it to a friend, but while it’s in transit it’s safe—federal offense to interfere with the mail, after all. Mel had wanted this hidden, at least till Saturday. I could not help but wonder from whom.

  I stuck the cassette in Rose’s player and listened. A lot of echo, a lot of engine noise and a surging background of human voices, then—

  ‘You’re not wired, are you, kid?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m a professional journalist.’

  I could almost see Mel flourishing his shorthand notepad and ballpoint pen even as the lie left his lips.

  A horn honked. A voice coming from the loudspeaker cut in—‘all aboard for the six-thirty for New Palz, Kingston and Albany’—and drowned out the next sentence. At least it told me where they were. Underground, at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue. Then the other voice was saying, ‘Did I say I was going to make it easy for you?’

  And Mel, ‘You gotta give me more than this. There’s no story here, just a rumor. And I can tell you—I hear rumors like this all the time.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a story here all right. You just have to find it. Or maybe I should say you have to earn it?’

  ‘Please—I’ll earn it. It’s my job. But you gotta point me in the right direction at least. I can’t just place a classified saying were you present when—’

  A bus honked again. A deep bass reverb, bouncing off the walls smothering what Mel was saying. I wound back the tape. ‘When . . . blew away . . .’ Was it ‘blew a
way’? Meaning what—the common euphemism for killed, for killed almost casually? I couldn’t be at all certain. When the honking stopped, the other man was speaking.

  ‘You find the New Nineveh Nine and you’ll find your story.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The New Nineveh Nine,’ the voice now dropped to a stagy whisper, inadvertently close to where Mel had his microphone hidden. ‘And that’s the last time I’ll say it.’

  ‘A name,’ Mel was saying. ‘Just give me a name. An individual.’

  The loudspeaker made the last call for the six-thirty Albany bus.

  ‘Fawcett. Find Corporal Fawcett. Marty Fawcett.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘That’s all you’re getting, kid.’

  ‘But what do I call you?’

  ‘You need to call me anything? OK. Call me . . . call me . . . Broken Arrow.’

  I heard the man’s footsteps walk away. Heard Mel mutter ‘Oh shit’ to himself. Then the tape clicked off.

  I played it again. It was like getting late to the theater. I felt I’d missed the first act, caught the second. It was impossible to know what they were talking about. When might help. I called the Port Authority, asked if there was a six-thirty Albany bound bus every evening. No, I was told, it was Thursdays only. Weekday buses were on the hour. They put on an extra bus on Thursdays on the half hour and two extra buses on Fridays at twenty minute intervals to cope with the increased human traffic out of the city in summer.

  I was impressed. The postmark on the envelope read 10.30 p.m. Friday. In a little over twenty-four hours Mel had tracked down this Marty Fawcett. I don’t know how he did it. He was a better detective than I was. How much had he been able to deduce from the clues this Broken Arrow had left him. ‘Corporal’—a soldier. A former soldier? I knew what Nineveh meant. Maybe Mel had too. Fort Nineveh in Georgia was a boot camp for the army. Just outside of the township of New Nineveh, not twenty miles from the Alabama line. I’d passed through it a couple of times in the early sixties on my way to civil rights actions in Albany, GA. Quite without incident. It was where they licked the grunts into shape before they shipped them out to ’Nam. But I still hadn’t a clue what Mel had blundered into. All the same, I was certain it had killed him. Knew it in my bones.