by David Daniel
I worked from room to room downstairs, opening and shutting doors. Beyond was a broad hallway, and the swoop of a banister and wide stairs to the upper floor.
In an upstairs bedroom, on a table was an array of framed photographs, many showing the same woman and boy as those downstairs, but moving the pair ahead through time, so that I recognized that the boy was Martin Travani. And I realized that no matter how much he aged in them, he was always the little boy.
Downstairs again, I began to breathe a little easier. I was headed for the exit when I spotted something I’d missed before when I’d been moving in the opposite direction. On the parquet, only partially visible, was what appeared to be a bloody footprint. It was man-sized, from a work boot, I judged from the sole pattern. What was puzzling, however, was the angle and its position facing out from the wall. Then I understood. The wall was constructed to conceal a door. It opened with a firm push.
I wrinkled my nose as the odor I’d smelled before became instant and pervasive. It was a scorched, vinegary, gunsmoke smell. The door had concealed a dark inner chamber. Breathing through my mouth, I felt for a light switch, and my fingers discovered that the walls were paneled in egg-crate foam, the kind used to baffle sound. Was I in a home music studio? I located a rheostat knob and gave it a slow twist.
In the gradually revealing light from spots set in the ceiling, details came into view. One wall was a mirror. Suspended from the ceiling were several knotted ropes, with velvet cuffs and Velcro fasteners. To the left, built into the corner, was what looked like a wardrobe cabinet with a drape-hung door and crisscrossing lattice on the side. I turned the dimmer knob all the way up.
On a pale beige leather couch set near the right wall lay a woman, her back turned to me so that all I could see was a disheveled mass of blond hair against her black ribbed-cotton sweater. Asleep? I had to bend across her and lean close to get a look at her face, and even then recognition came slowly. She didn’t resemble the way she’d looked the last time I saw her, when she’d ducked into her apartment and slammed the door in my face. A gunshot to her head at close range had given her skull an odd, elliptical elongation, the way passage through the birth canal sometimes will a newborn’s. Her jaw was wide open, locked in a silent scream. From the front edge of her cheek all the way back to behind her ear was a mess of erupted tissue, like the lobes of an overripe cauliflower. Curds of blood, like dark red smoke, had bubbled from her mouth to form a congealing pool on the bone-colored leather cushion.
My head swam. I fought an urge to flee … might have fled, but I wasn’t sure my knees would hold. I braced on the sofa and shut my eyes. Tiny motes of light drifted before them. When I opened them, I saw the red spatter on a pillow wedged between her shoulder and the sofa back, its brocade fabric blackened around a burnt hole. I stood for a moment, trying to slow my heart for what I dreaded to find next.
The judge was behind the couch, underneath a sofa table, as if he’d crawled under there looking for safety. He was on his back, one leg curled and leaning against the wall. He was wearing the same suit he’d been wearing several hours ago at his club, but it was a mess. His starched shirt collar was blood-soaked. His mouth was collapsed inward, and the teeth, which indeed were in a dental plate, lay on the braided rug several feet away, evidently having been blown out by the impact of a gunshot. There was a thread of blood on them.
I looked around for an obvious explanation—for a gun that would make it play as a murder-suicide, but there wasn’t one, as the footprint in the hall should already have told me. When I looked back at Travani, his eyes were on mine. He was alive.
I gripped his hand. “Hold on. I’m going to get help.”
I rushed back to the kitchen, found a wall phone, and punched 911 and was amazed at the speed with which the call was answered. Ignoring the operator’s request for my name, I told her two people had been shot, one still alive. I gave the address and hung up.
At the center of my fear and nausea, like the eye of a storm, was a cold calm. In a drawer by the sink I found several clean dish towels. I wet one under the tap and went back to the concealed chamber. Careful of where I stepped, I put the damp cloth on his forehead. I looked for the wound. It seemed to be behind his head. I didn’t want to move him. He kept his eyes on mine. Perhaps he was speaking with them, though I didn’t know what they might be saying. Maybe he had no idea who I was and was just trying to keep some link with the living.
I held his hand, and with my other hand I reached to the wardrobe cabinet and drew aside the drape. Instead of shelves or hanging clothes, I looked into an empty booth. For an instant I was confused, and then I realized what it was, or was meant to resemble. Lying on the floor in one corner was a costume—a nun’s habit, and looped atop it a rosary. Thoughts were clustering at the back of my mind, like moths gathering around a faint light. I waved them away.
The judge’s mouth twitched, an odd movement without teeth. Wanting to tell me something? I bent near. Instead of words, I heard a soft, clattery sigh, like a footfall in dry leaves. His eyes were still open, and there was still a pulse, but the light was fading from his eyes. What did judges dream of as they lay dying? A writ from on high? A full pardon? Conviction?
I heard the first siren. EMTs or the police. I wasn’t there under any jurisdiction that I could invoke. The police would charge me. Criminal trespass, destruction of evidence, tampering with a crime scene … They might even try for two counts of murder, though that one wouldn’t stick. At the very least, they’d demand a full statement, which would have to be typed up, read, and signed. Not today.
As I stood up, it was as if I’d stepped off a still-moving carousel. For a moment, the world lurched under me, and then it steadied. Outside, from closer now, came an overlapping wail of sirens, approaching even faster than I’d imagined they would. Driving away, I had to force myself not to speed.
When you get overstressed, your mind starts to yammer. It begins to see things that may not be there. It can, says Poe, hear things in hell. Mine insisted on imagining stories. If the waitress from Viva! who wanted to write for the movies had been there, I’d have asked her if that was the way it happened, if the narrative suddenly took form in the mind, complete with characters doing their bits of business and action, speaking lines …
“Jesus. What happened?” The cop bends over the dead woman on the carpet. She’s in the black-and-white costume of a nun. Cinched tight around her throat is a small beaded chain: a rosary. A rill of blood has run from one nostril, almost dry now. The cop draws back and turns to the judge. The judge sits on a bone-colored couch, bent forward, head in hands. He is having a difficult time of it. “Tell me exactly what happened,” says the cop. “Everything.”
I drove by rote through the afternoon traffic, the houses and buildings and bright trees blurring by. A weight of exhaustion was dragging hard behind the adrenaline, like a string of loaded boxcars hooked to a locomotive on a steep uphill climb. In those boxcars I could feel the freight shifting around.
The judge is hyperventilating, his face damp with sweat, his hair mussed. “She came here today and said she was going to stop this … not meet me anymore. I …” He swallows and regains some control. “I asked her to wear the habit one more time. Just once more. And go in there.” He gestures at the booth in the corner. “To tell me her sins … ask me to absolve her, make her do penance. May … maybe I pulled too hard, I don’t know. thought the chain would snap. Oh, God, what have I done? What’s going to happen now? I don’t … I—”
“Shut up! Get hold of yourself. Tell me what happened!”
“There’s a man who—”
“What man?”
“Huh? Who she was going to marry. A man she knew a long time …”
Grim-faced, the cop paces, leaving a space around the woman’s body, glancing at the judge in disgust. “Did you spank her this time?”
At a stoplight, I saw a donut shop. Beyond the big windows, decorated with cutout paper leaves and cornstal
ks, people were sitting on stools, drinking coffee, reading newspapers, talking about the weather, and I had a powerful yen to go in there, to reenter that everyday world. But even as I thought this, I knew I was far beyond that. When the light changed, I sped past.
“Did you?” the cop demands.
“No, no. She was going to go to this man.”
“Would she already have told him about any of this—about you and her?”
“She said she hadn’t—wouldn’t. She said he could never know.”
“You believe her?”
“Yes. I do.” The judge is in an agony of fright and remorse.
“Do you know the guy’s name? Where he is?”
“He works … at the carnival.”
The cop looks up. “The carnival that’s here now?”
“Yes. She was with him there yesterday. He’s the one she had a restraining order against. Carly would know his name.”
The cop paces again. Stops. “All right. I’m going to need some help.”
The judge grows attentive.
“That green car in the driveway. Hers?”
The judge nods.
“I’ll take care oƒ it. You’ll need to clean up here. Take the rosary oƒƒ and that damn costume. But don’t touch her skin. Have you got some sheets? Better yet, a shower curtain. All right, get it. Let me make a call.”
And that’s what happens. Duross is going to the carnival anyway, for his paid detail. He’ll get someone to help, to drive Flora Nuñez’s car over to Regatta Field. He’ll drive in from behind the meadow and dispose of her body. Why not? Since he has duty there a little later anyway, it’ll be a simple enough thing to dump the body, park her car near the carnival, get into Pepper’s trailer, and plant some evidence there.
Pieces were coming together. The juror ballot card that I’d found in the statuette at Flora Nuñez’s apartment—had T stood not for Troy but for Travani? Were the dates appointments she had with the judge, to satisfy his kinky lusts? Set up by Carly Ouellette—who had first been a teacher and later procurer of her students? It would explain Lucy Colón’s reluctance to speak with me; because perhaps she was one of the judge’s women, too. Women from another country, who might have cause to fear the legal system and welcome a protector?
I puffed a shivery breath. It was one story. Another tale was more recent: The judge and Carly Ouellette about to have tea, to discuss the crisis situation they find themselves in because of a nosy private investigator—and someone unexpected comes. Loose threads to be snipped …
My cell phone chirped.
“Detective. You were quick.”
The voice wasn’t quick, though; it was ponderous and low and deeply distorted. I have heard many things in hell. “So were you,” I managed.
“Not quick enough. You called nine-one-one from there.”
The voice was electronically altered, giving it the guttural sound that the voices of evil entities in scary movies have. You saw devices for sale in the security management catalogs that enabled you to do that. I couldn’t listen to it and drive. I drew sharply to the curb. “Okay, Duross,” I said, taking a stab. “What do you want?”
There was a silence, and I was pretty sure I’d stabbed right, but the voice remained altered. “I want what you’ve got,” it said. “Whatever you found at the judge’s house.”
And what you must not have found, I thought. “What makes you think I got anything?”
“Better pray that you did, or you have nothing to trade.”
“Be specific.”
Laughter that might have come from hell itself. “She keeps crying for her Pop.”
44
I swallowed, wanting to loosen the Doric column my neck had become. I got enough breath into my throat to form words. “Nicole is with you?”
He gave an address. I scribbled it down on the only thing I had handy, the back of my new auto registration. “Forty minutes,” he said. “Walk through the gate alone. If I see anything I don’t like …”
“Wait! Let me—”
But the voice was gone, leaving only its echo in my head, like something pondering along the gloomy halls of a nightmare. I stared at the phone, willing it to ring again, to tell me what to do next. It didn’t. So I fell back on what seemed logical. I called police headquarters. I asked for Paul Duross, but I was told he was off duty. For a moment I sat, feeling something moving in me, something dark like a fast-fading winter sky when it reminds you that death is waiting. I put down the phone. The woman setting up the Halloween display at the public library had spoken of breaching the barrier between the living and the dead. It was what I needed to do. I looked at the dashboard clock—I didn’t have a lot of time—then raised the phone and made another call. It rang a long time before someone answered, coughing rust out, but at least it was a real voice. I steadied my own. “It’s Rasmussen,” I said.
45
I hadn’t wanted to carry the sawed-off in my trunk for fear of getting caught, and lately it seemed as though being stopped was a daily thing, but now I was ready to take the risk. I had time enough to go home, get the shotgun, and still make the meeting. But one other thing first.
In my mind I replayed the voice on my cell phone—Duross’s, I was convinced. It told me things: that he’d known I had been at Travani’s house, that perhaps he’d come back and seen me. It told me that there was evidence, probably incriminating, or why risk going back? Most important, it told me that he had Nicole. He had no reason to kill her, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. He had to be feeling desperate right now. I needed to let him believe that I had found something before the cops came.
The video store was a little mom-and-pop operation on Westford Street. I asked the clerk, an Indian or Pakistani woman, if she had blank videocassettes. When she finally understood me, she said she didn’t have any blanks. All right, I said, I wanted to buy one of her rentals.
“You don’t have member card?”
“I want to buy one,” I said. I had my wallet out and drew out a twenty.
After I made her understand, she took the money and asked me what I wanted. I said it didn’t matter. “Do you want Tom Cruise? He is very popular. Or Julia Roberts?”
As I hurried toward my car, a black SUV with a stainless steel push bar rolled up onto the curb, cutting me off and almost pinning me against the adjacent building. Louis Hackett got out of the passenger side. “I thought that was your heap,” he called. “Been looking for you.”
“I don’t have time right now.”
“Wrong answer.”
“I hope not. It’s the only one I have. I’m in a rush.”
“Yeah, to see me. I asked you nice, even warned you, but did you listen?”
The driver’s door opened, and Squisher Spritzer climbed out and walked around the back of the Toyota. Hackett said, “You know, Rasmussen, maybe it isn’t you, maybe you’re just some dumb prick who wandered into the sound stage and ruined the whole shot, and the director’s got to yell, ‘Cut!’ and waste a bunch of time getting everything set up again. Yeah, I really think that’s what it is—you’re a fuckup.”
“Look, I’ll meet with you—we’ll huddle, we’ll hondle, whatever you want—but it’s got to be later.”
He jabbed a finger into my chest. “You know, this is the kind of bullshit I hate.”
My face grew hot and there was a thumping throb in my head. I felt time slipping away from me.
“But it’s like that day on the river,” he went on, “when the restaurant owner knew someone was skimming, only he didn’t know who. Somebody’s got to be an example.” He looked at Squisher and made a sideways motion with his head. “I’m gonna cruise around the block.”
I opened my mouth to speak, and Squisher punched me. It was a short, straight blow that hit my chest like a pickup truck. It emptied my lungs. I staggered a few steps back on the sidewalk, dropping the videotape. He locked his arms down against mine, pinning them to my sides. He head-butted me, which touched off a blit
z of light. My legs went gimpy He let go and stepped back, probably to let me drop. I didn’t. He saw the cassette lying there and stomped it with a snapping crunch, as if it were Julia Roberts’s fine-chiseled bones breaking—and mine next. I submarined a punch to his gut. It was like hitting a slab of butcher block. He knocked my next swing aside and hit me again. I got my hands up, but he chopped me in the throat. I gagged. He rammed me back across the sidewalk. My head and elbow cracked hard against the brick wall of a building.
Pain. I was treading in foggy water, trying to keep afloat. He was so close that his feet were bumping mine, like a clumsy dance partner’s. I tried to raise an arm to push him back. My elbow felt like it had broken glass inside. He pressed nearer, squeezing with his thick arms. He was so close his face was a blur, pocked like a hazy moon. His cigar breath and cheap aftershave dizzied me. He could kill me. That quickly the thought came. There were no controls on the man; he would cripple me, or worse, as surely as he’d dropped a man into the Harlem River or mauled an opponent in the ring. Another moment and I’d have breathed my last. Already my vision was starting to speckle with light. I saw one chance to survive.
Bracing my shoulders on the wall, I jacked a knee up into his groin, hard as I could. His cheeks bulged bullfroglike and he gasped a chestful of breath into my face. I kneed him again. His eyes rolled and he shuffled back, a look of agony and surprise stamped on his face. He began to moan, as if the pain were starting to build. I’d have let it end there—I wasn’t out for torture, only survival—but I knew that if he came around, it was going to go worse for me. Pushing past the hot ache in my left elbow, I gripped his lapels, both hands clutching hard on the slick polyester fabric. I swung him around. I dropped my shoulder and drove him against the building. He hit it and bellowed like a bull. I pulled him toward me, more pain in my elbow He twisted in my grip as I started to slam him back. I missed the wall and we hit a plate glass window with a thump. A sign read MEMBERS ONLY: PLEASE SHOW ID. It was a health and fitness club, I saw. Beyond the reflection on the window, several women had quit whirling away on Exercycles and gaped out at us. Squisher reached for me, and I drove him back one more time. He went through the glass like a dump truck. There were screams. I reached in with my good arm and hauled Spritzer out. His coat was shredded, and there were speckles of blood staining the fabric.