Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  He kissed Madeleine lightly on the cheek.

  You don’t know how yet, Harry, but you’ll find a way to go back to the beginning, to turn back clocks, and start things all over again with her. Restore her, soothe her memory, love her. Make love heal the wounds. Make it work.

  He closed his eyes briefly, opened them, gazed through the office door at the dark gallery beyond. The rainbow canvases appeared, in shadow, to have been gouged out of the walls. Sinister in some way, like a huge destructive hand had just scoured the surfaces of the walls, breaking, tearing.

  A spooky dark gallery.

  A vast expanse of unlit space.

  He drew Madeleine towards him again. “I love you, Maddy,” he said.

  She nodded her head slightly.

  “Trust me,” he said. Start trusting me all over again. “It’s going to be okay.”

  You don’t know that.

  You can’t say something like that.

  But you have to.

  6.

  It was close to midnight. The interview room smelled bad, like a hundred drunks had inhaled and exhaled there overnight, overwhelming the smell of disinfectant. Nightingale looked at the big white bandage on his arm, remembering the handsome nurse who’d applied it. Jean Maxymuk, her little ID badge had said. What the hell kind of name was Maxymuk? For a time, bewildered by the pain, he’d tried to work up the guts to ask her for a date, but he’d been embarrassed by the shape of his body as he’d sat on the bench and watched her clean the wound and apply the bandage. She wouldn’t accept, he’d told himself, but now he felt the abyss of a missed opportunity. He admired the bandage, which was neat and wholesome. But there was a dull throbbing pain just under it. Presumably it was nothing to what Billy Chapman felt, a small consolation. He looked across the interview room at Moody. Quick-draw Doug, he thought. How could he have fired off a shot like that? He wasn’t exactly a trigger-happy kind of guy. Call it nerves, inexperience. Put it down to that. Or something else, Nightingale thought—a hatred rooted in the same old grudge, the same old past humiliation. It could go that deep. It could quite easily go very deep, and over the years it would produce, by a process of mental chemistry, a cesspool of loathing. He wondered if Moody dreamed about Chapman, if William A. Chapman sauntered into his nightmares, smirking, flipping the finger, accusing Moody of being a failure. And now Billy Chapman sat at the head of the table with a bandage visible beneath the shoulder of his shirt. He had this habit of scraping his feet on the floor, around and around in a grating manner.

  Moody said, “We’ve got you dead to rights, Billy. We’ve got your prints all over your sister’s apartment. How can you sit there and tell us they aren’t your prints, huh? No two people, Billy, in all this wide world, are known to have the same prints. Do you understand that?”

  There was an expression on Moody’s face that Nightingale didn’t like to see. The jaw was very tight, the eyes filled with contempt, the mouth narrow, as if the lips had disappeared from the face entirely. Oh, boy, it goes real deep inside you, doesn’t it? Nightingale felt a twinge of pain.

  “It’s a coincidence,” Chapman said.

  Moody snickered. “Some coincidence, Billy. Why did you kill her?”

  “Who says I killed her?”

  “The hard evidence, Billy. You can’t just slide under the hard facts, okay? You could go hire F. Lee Bailey and maybe he’d manage manslaughter. That’s how fucked your situation is, understand?”

  A space baby, Nightingale thought. A severe case of being out of touch with the concept known commonly as reality. Where does he hang his brain at night? he wondered. He studied Chapman’s ferrety face for a while, trying to ignore the pain in his arm. It was cocaine; it was the drug that had raddled his thought processes. Nightingale had seen hardcore coke freaks in his time and they had this in common: They were not entirely of this world. They were out there like so much hardware from Houston.

  Chapman said, “I haven’t seen my sister in a long time.”

  Moody glanced at Nightingale, raising his eyebrows. “The last time you saw your sister, Billy, was the day you killed her.” Moody got up and, like a courtroom shyster, paced around, his shoulders slightly hunched. “I mean killing your sister is a pretty bad thing to do, Billy. There are laws against the taking of life, okay? There isn’t a state in the Union where murder is acceptable. So killing Camilla wasn’t the wisest thing you could come up with. But fucking her as she lay dead? Really, Billy. A taboo situation.”

  Nightingale felt uncomfortable. This was the bit he couldn’t take. He squirmed in his chair. He felt content to let Moody do all the talking because somewhere inside he knew there was a slow-burning anger he didn’t want to let out.

  “I never killed her. I never fucked her.”

  “What is it with you, Billy? You’re flying in the face of the evidence. Let me see if I can remind you of certain events. First you strangle her. Bare hands no less. Then she falls down in a total state of death and you whip down your pants. You don’t take them off entirely, just enough to get your pecker out, which is a hard mother by this time, because you’re all hot and bothered by your sister’s thighs, so you slide out your piece and you stick it inside her. Murder, necrophilia. I’d like to make more of the incest factor, but the truth is, Billy, I am pretty damn disgusted with you.”

  Nightingale lit a cigarette. He noticed Chapman’s hands shaking.

  “Say, is there a cold beer around here?” Chapman asked.

  Nightingale leaned forward. “Room service is out for the night. What do you think this is, the fucking Hilton?”

  Chapman scraped his feet around. Moody stood directly behind his chair, his hands on Chapman’s shoulders. A cold beer, Nightingale thought. Jesus Christ, some guys had gall. Maybe it hadn’t registered with Billy, maybe he didn’t think this was a cop shop and he was in hot water up to his buttocks. He shut his eyes: Moody’s graphic description had made his stomach turn.

  Now Moody was pacing again. He looked over at Nightingale a moment, then stopped right in front of Billy Chapman. He was holding a photograph up in Chapman’s face.

  “You know this face, Billy?”

  “I ain’t seen him before in my life, man.”

  “Look close,” Moody said. “This guy was found strangled too, Billy. Henry Falcon a.k.a. Dick Bird. You ever see him? You know anything about him?”

  “I told you, man.”

  Nightingale looked at his younger partner. Maybe Billy Chapman did kill Henry Falcon—maybe he killed hundreds of people all over the country—just the same, the venom in Moody’s attitude showed a marked lack of control and discipline. It was like young Moody was walking a razor’s edge, something in his mind breaking. You knock on too many doors and climb too many flights of stairs and keep hours that would jaundice almost anybody in the world, you drag your ass along too many grubby back alleys, inhale too much stale smoke, it’s bound to catch up to you, break out someplace, manifest itself in your language and the way you behaved—but this wasn’t any excuse for the way Moody looked, the unadulterated hatred on his face.

  Billy Chapman said, “I don’t know no Henry Falcon, Christ.”

  Nightingale got up. He took Moody aside. “You really think so, Doug? You really think you can get him to break on this Falcon thing?”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “You really think so, huh?” Nightingale sighed. He wished it could be done, wished Billy Chapman could be handed the blame for Falcon. What a nifty symmetrical world.

  “Look, we got two stranglings. We got the sex act, the perverted sex thing.” The Boy Wonder looked adamant, stern. Nightingale felt weak and had to sit down again. He watched Moody saunter back towards Billy Chapman.

  Then it happened. It happened so suddenly that Nightingale barely had time to see it and for a moment he wondered if he had misinterpreted the situation, been deceived by the bad light and the quick movement of Moody’s body—but then he noticed Billy Chapman was bleeding from the si
de of his head, doubled over, moaning, racked with pain. Holy shit, holy shit, Billy kept saying over and over. Nightingale rose, saw the gun in Moody’s hand, saw that Moody held it by the barrel. Jesus, he’d just pistol-whipped Chapman. Just like that. Out of nowhere. What the hell was it? Did he want Billy Chapman dead?

  “Doug, for fuck’s sake! What are you trying to do?”

  Moody ran one hand over his forehead. He looked dismayed, as if he were bothered by his own abrupt act, couldn’t explain it. “I don’t know. I don’t know what got into me. I guess I just looked at his fucking face and I saw him leering at me—I let go, Frank. I just lost it. I’m sorry.”

  “Take it easy, will you? You want to take a break?”

  Moody shook his head. “I’m okay.”

  Billy Chapman was still moaning. Nightingale handed him a handkerchief, which he held to his wound. “Hey, you know they call this police brutality. Wait until my lawyer hears.… Jeez, what is it with you guys?”

  “Shut up, Billy,” Moody said. “It was an accident. My hand slipped.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Chapman said.

  Moody circled Chapman’s chair. Nightingale sat down again. He was shaking. It had gone deeper inside Moody than he’d ever suspected. The guy needs a vacation. He needs to get away from the city, the job. A blow like that could kill a guy. Nightingale lit a cigarette and coughed as if his lungs were two burnt-out salmon fidgeting in his chest. He started to think about Sarah, about Fulton, about retiring and going up there and getting the cracks in his life Scotch-taped. Just to hold her, just to sleep with her again—maybe you could even get used to the bluster of violent winds huffing up from the Oswego River, the endless winters up there, the small-town mentality that considered even a day’s outing to Syracuse a trip to Mecca. Who needs all this death, this stench of brutality?

  “Okay, Billy. We’ll talk about Henry Falcon when you’ve had time to remember.” Moody paused. Sweat was running down his face. “Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Jamey Hausermann, okay? Let’s talk about the brutal way you killed her, huh?”

  Nightingale shut his eyes. He thought he could hear a wind scavenge inside his head. I am going to sit here and say nothing and let the Boy Wonder pull stuff out of his magic hat, let him forge the links of his own zigzagging chain. I am too old to compete, to cope. I am too tired. Jamey Hausermann. More symmetry: The press liked words such as “spree”—as in “mass murder spree”—and everybody cheered when such a monster was brought to justice even if his ultimate sentence might be life in Bellevue and seventy-five milligrams of Valium per diem forever. Symmetry, that was the thing. Put everything in one box and if it doesn’t quite fit, then stuff the fucking things down as hard as you can. I don’t belong in this world.

  Maybe I’ve lost the edge of instinct. Maybe young Moody is the cop of the future.

  A sharper instinct.

  Finely honed skills.

  I have grown out of touch.

  A dinosaur, a fucking dinosaur that lost the battle in the stakes for survival of the fittest.

  “Hey, man,” Chapman said, rubbed his face. “I never heard of anybody like that.”

  “Tell me how you got inside her apartment, Billy,” Moody said. “Tell me why you killed her the way you did, why you cut her tits off with a razor. I’m interested. I want to know.”

  “I keep saying,” Chapman complained.

  “I want to hear the truth, Billy. I want the straight, unvarnished truth, okay? We’ve got you for one murder. I think we can get you for a second. If you confess to a third, we can always say something about how you co-operated.” Moody was drumming his fingers on the table.

  “Listen,” Chapman said. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Liar, liar,” Moody said. “Lies are a waste of my time, Billy. Think again.”

  “What’s to think about?”

  Nightingale opened his eyes. He felt sleepy in this stuffy room. He stared at the door. Through the opaque glass he could see the outline of a figure in the corridor. He got up and moved towards the door. He needed to get out of this place, leave Billy Chapman to the devices of Moody; what the hell, Moody had all the answers. Let Moody make all the accusations stick. Let him grind out the confession. He opened the door, stepped into the corridor, found Stanislavski there.

  “Lieutenant, you’ve got to read this.” The uniformed cop handed him a thick manila folder. “I tried to give it to you before.”

  “What is it?” Nightingale asked.

  “This broad came in and made a statement.”

  Nightingale opened the folder. “And what’s this?”

  “A cassette.”

  “About what?”

  “I think you should listen to it, lieutenant. It seems this chick’s boyfriend is in the Apology business. It also seems we got a killer’s voice on that tape.”

  Nightingale turned the tape over in his hand.

  “The voice of the guy—according to this chick—is who killed Henry Falcon and Jamey Hausermann.”

  “Is that right?” Nightingale felt a pulse of intrigue.

  He glanced at the notes inside the folder and went back to his office. He wondered when, if ever, he was going to get any sleep tonight.

  7.

  “What’s keeping them, Harry? They should have been here by now.”

  Harrison sat up on the edge of the desk. There was a dictaphone, a blotter, a couple of wood trays. He reached out, holding Madeleine’s hands.

  “They won’t be much longer,” he said.

  Her hands trembled. The fingertips were chilly. She’d retreated, gone back inside herself to a place he couldn’t touch. He wanted to hold her harder. Over her shoulder, across the dark gallery floor, he could see the front door. Someone passed in the street outside. Nothing, he thought. Somebody just drifting along the sidewalk, that was all.

  These nerves.

  It was like every part of your body was working against every other part, creating incoherence, confusion, jumpiness.

  You can’t think straight. Can’t see straight.

  Fear made you live in an endless present tense.

  He couldn’t take his eyes from the front door, the pale light out there pressing against the glass.

  What is it, Harry?

  You don’t remember.

  Don’t remember what?

  Did you lock the door behind you when you came in?

  He wasn’t sure—he wanted to go and check it—but he didn’t want to take his arms away from Madeleine. Didn’t want to leave her here in this office.

  That shoe. That stupid shoe. What was it about that goddamn thing?

  It lay there alone. That was it. Where was its companion?

  He stared at the front door again. Madeleine shivered.

  “What’s keeping them, for God’s sake?”

  He didn’t say anything. He could feel night press all around this building; he could sense it seeping through tiny cracks and small fissures, a spreading darkness that you couldn’t keep at bay no matter what.

  “Maybe you should call again,” she said.

  The door. You can’t take your eyes off the goddamn door.

  Harry, maybe you should call again—

  Go check the door. Check it.

  He shut his eyes a moment, drew Madeleine nearer to him.

  Love love love—

  There was a faint sound from the gallery.

  That sound.

  A small bell ringing over the doorway.

  He took his hands from Madeleine and opened his eyes, listening to the echo of the bell as it faded, chimes growing feebler and feebler until there was nothing.

  Harry—

  It’s still ringing, he thought, still ringing inside my head.

  A shadow passed across the gallery floor.

  8.

  It definitely contained the remains of a dead animal but there were other less subtle flavors. Soy, breadcrumbs, MSG. Nightingale put t
he half-eaten hamburger down and belched into his fist. “Where the fuck did this come from?” he asked.

  “Tully’s,” Moody said. “I sent Stanislavski.”

  “He knows I don’t patronize that scummy joint.” He pushed the offensive thing away. Why did his life seem like a fruitless search for the perfect burger? In Tully’s, where the grease was so thick even the cutlery stuck together, the burgers were cooked by a Sardinian who didn’t have his green card. One day, Nightingale thought, I’ll make a phone call on the sly to Immigration unless his cooking improves. He poked a finger inside his mouth and came out with what looked like a sliver of wood. “America is going down the tubes, Moody. It’s going to the dogs.”

  He stared across the office. He picked up his Coke and sipped it. The wax container had sprung a slight leak and there were little brown fizzy drips on his desk. He looked at his wristwatch. 2:04. What time was it in Shelbyville anyhow, and why hadn’t he been called back by that hoarse-voiced hick who might have been an imposter passing himself off as a local sheriff? He tried to imagine the great middle of America, wondering if perhaps out there was the last bastion of the hamburger. He gazed at the cassette player. Since they’d listened to the tape, Moody had become strangely silent, withdrawn: The Boy Wonder sees his theory shot down in flames and he sulks. Oh, Jesus, it was going to be neat and tidy, it was going to be Agatha Christie, brilliant young detective, graduate of Buffalo, was going to pin three deaths on one man, to wit, Billy Chapman. Close the file, send it to the DA, go home, get some sleep, have sweet dreams, come back the next day with your newspaper clippings, instant promotion, take six weeks off, you brilliant young man. Poor Moody. There were two distinct voices on that tape, one of them obviously Billy Chapman’s, an apparent reference to having killed his sister. The other belonged to a person unknown, who had talked openly about killing somebody called Randy in a place known as Shelbyville, Ohio. And, according to Stanislavski’s report, the woman called Madeleine Demarest claimed that this same voice had confessed to the killing of Henry Falcon—if not by name, exactly. Madeleine Demarest also claimed that the person whose voice was on the tape had killed Jamey Hausermann—all because of a project entitled Mr. Apology. It had a bunch of vague things in there, a bunch of vague claims, but the voice of Billy Chapman didn’t match that of the caller who was supposed to have killed Henry Falcon. Nightingale massaged his eyelids. 2:05. What kind of hours were these anyhow? He stared at Stanislavski’s report. Mr. Apology was the pseudonym of a certain Harry Harrison. Jesus Christ, you could lose your screws dickering with all these goddamn names, trying to keep them straight. Madeleine Demarest. Billy Chapman. Henry Falcon. Harry Harrison. Mr. Apology. Shelbyville. Randy. A thicket of names.