Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m twenty-six years old and I feel like I’m all used up.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. Sensitivity. You’re damn good at trampling over other people’s feelings. I bet you fit right in down there in your West Side hellhole.”

  “Yeah, I’m a pig in shit.”

  “That’s frighteningly accurate.”

  He stared at me for a second, then laughed in a violent snort. “You always did have my number, Bernier.”

  “Welcome home, Gordon.”

  “This is not my home. But I’m willing to think of it as my cabin in the woods.”

  “So come on, what’s going on with you? How’s life down there at the Pink Lady?”

  “The Gray Lady.”

  “Pink is prettier. You covering some cool stuff?”

  He didn’t say anything, just started scratching his head in that Gordon way of his, attacking the follicles so the hairs stood up straight when he was done. I could tell he didn’t want to answer, but he finally did. “Stringing night cops.”

  “You mean you’re the fourth guy in line to cover a car fire in Queens at three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Boss’s really rubbing my nose in it.”

  “The same guy you decked in the city room?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But you’d still rather be a peon at the Slimes than cover a serial killer for the Gabriel Monitor.” He stared more, scratched harder. I got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me. “Gordon, what the fuck are you up to?”

  He focused on his plate for a long time, like he was counting the holes in the Swiss cheese on his bialy. Finally he looked me in the eye. “I’m covering a serial killer. For the New York Times.”

  I was speechless, which doesn’t happen often. When I finally thought of something to say, it wasn’t all that eloquent. “You jerk.”

  “Give me a break. What was I supposed…”

  “You fucking weasel. So that’s what you’re doing up here. I can’t believe you’re up here covering this thing. Don’t you think you might have mentioned that before you got me to spill my guts? Jesus Christ, I told you all sorts of shit that hasn’t run in the papers. Like how this son of a bitch cut my roommate open and took out her major fucking organs. Man, I am such an idiot…”

  “Take it easy, Alex.”

  “Take it easy my ass. You knew what you were doing, and I fell for it. I can’t believe I let you finesse me like a source. ‘Talk about it, Alex, you’ll feel better.’ You are such a prick.”

  “What did you think I was doing up here?”

  “Did you bring your tape recorder? Have you been recording this?”

  “Of course not. I can’t believe you’d even think that.”

  “It would hardly be out of character.”

  “I didn’t have to tell you about the Times thing, you know. I just didn’t want you to find out from somebody else.”

  “You could have told me before you grilled me.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “You bet your ass.”

  “Come on, Alex. You know I can’t use anything you said on the record. I have to get it all confirmed someplace else anyway. What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that I’m supposed to be your friend and you just screwed me. Jesus, Gordon, what happened to all those fancy ethics of yours? I seem to remember you lecturing me plenty last year. And now you come up here and trick me just so you can get some stupid scoop? Well you know what? I hope you win your fucking Pulitzer, and I hope you choke on it.”

  I stood up, but he didn’t move. And when I stopped wanting to kill him long enough to look at him, I could tell he was actually upset. It was the first time I’d ever seen Gordon express an emotion that wasn’t either journalistic blood lust or generalized disdain, and I got the feeling he was worse off than he was letting on. I sat back down. “You look like hell, you know.”

  It was true. He had big circles under his eyes, and since Gordon is so pale he’s practically transparent, he resembled a sad Jewish raccoon.

  He reached up to loosen his collar, only to realize he was wearing a T-shirt. He let out a strangled sort of groan and put his head down on the table for a minute. Then he twisted his neck just enough to talk over his elbow. “What you see is what you get.”

  “What’s your damage? I mean, you’re back in the city, getting mugged every Saturday night. What’s the problem?”

  “I fucked myself but good.”

  “By coming up here for six lousy months? You weren’t out of the loop for that long.”

  “Yeah, but you know how it is. You can bust your ass for years, but step out of line for a second and there’s ten guys killing each other to fill your slot. I don’t have to tell you how fierce the competition for jobs is, especially for white guys. When I got canned, I was up for doing investigative shit. Now I’m back at the bottom of the sludge heap.”

  He banged his head lightly on the table, loud enough to make a statement but not so hard as to shave any points off his 160 I.Q. “Jesus, Gordon, cut it out. Come on, sit up and calm down.”

  He stopped banging. It seemed a good sign. “My life is a living hell.”

  “I don’t get it. If they hate your guts, why’d they hire you back in the first place?”

  “Good fucking question.”

  “So how did you get this story? Just because you know people up here?”

  “I promised I could deliver the merchandise.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I also begged.”

  “That I’d pay to see.”

  He finally sat up. “You’re really pissed at me, aren’t you?”

  “Why? Just because you’re a manipulative schmuck who ignores me for four months, then shows up to pump me like I’m some idiot beat cop?”

  “Come on, Alex, please don’t be mad at me. My wires are crossed.”

  “Are you pleading insanity? Non compos mentis? I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “I’m desperate.”

  “Really? I think I like the sound of that.”

  “I don’t have what you’d call a well-rounded life, you know. I don’t have a passel of people eating at my house every Thursday night. Women don’t exactly throw themselves my way. My career is pretty much it.”

  “You could get a cat.”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  I sighed. He was right. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Start seeing my shrink three times a week instead of just two.”

  “I mean about this story. What are you going to do with the stuff I told you?”

  “You want me to sit here and promise I’ll forget it all? You know me better than that.”

  “I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “The truth is, I’m going to bust my hump to write the best goddamn story my wanker of an editor has ever seen. One of those eighty-inchers, jump off the front of the metro section, two sidebars. ‘Murders strike fear into upstate town,’ by Gordon Band. We’re talking simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia, all that writerly shit. And when they catch the guy I’m going to crawl up his ass and suck on his brain.”

  “There’s a lovely image,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Page one, above the fold,” he went on. “ ‘Inside the mind of a killer.’ I love that shit. And that’s going to win me my fucking Pulitzer.”

  “Speaking of minds,” I said, “I think you’re losing yours.”

  15

  THE WACKOS REALLY STARTED COMING OUT OF THE WOODwork then, and I don’t just mean Gordon. Gabriel has more than its share of what you might call “alternative elements” if you were feeling generous, and “unemployed freaks” if you weren’t. They roam the Green in packs—when they have enough energy for roaming—and although it’s amusing, sometimes it isn’t pretty.

  The Green’s storefronts are evenly divided betwe
en the hippie (selling cheap scented candles and used clothes) and the yuppie (selling pricey scented candles and new clothes that look used), and the local crunchy-slacker population likes nothing better than to mock the professorial wives as they sally forth to stimulate the local economy. They mutter things like “cultural imperialist” at them, and it can get nasty. Last fall, the wife of a chaired professor at the business school was actually charged with assault after she pummeled one guy with her Dooney and Bourke handbag, screaming “socialize this, you little pisher.” When the DA tried to get an indictment, the grand jury gave her a standing ovation.

  I mention this by way of explaining that although a certain number of psychics and soothsayers always flock to a big murder investigation, in this case they didn’t have much of a commute. Besides the usual hippie contingent, our fair town is already home to a glorious tapestry of tarot throwers, aura photographers, dowsers, channelers, gurus, shamen, spirit guides, and readers of everything from palm lines to the grunge at the bottom of your latte.

  And on Monday, I had to talk to all of them.

  They’d staged an event on the Green—you couldn’t call it a sit-in, because you can sit on the Green all day and no one gives a damn. They just called it an “Awareness” with a capital “A,” and although I should have asked them what they meant by it, frankly I was just as happy not knowing. Apparently, “their gathering was intended to protest the police’s perceived indifference to their possible contributions to the investigation.” At least, that’s the way I put it in my story; the truth was that they were as frothing mad as you can get and still claim a connection to the Great Goddess.

  “Those pigs don’t know shit,” one young lady was telling me. “We went trying to help them, man, and they just gave us some mumbo-jumbo fucking crap about procedure, man, like they don’t even give a fuck that people are dying here, man.”

  I scribbled it all down and tried to figure out if it would make any sense with the expletives deleted. I’d done six interviews so far, and I hadn’t gotten a single quote my editors would let me run in a family paper. At least I was learning that, along with peasant blouses and cutoffs, the word “pig” was coming back into fashion.

  My latest interview subject was dressed for a day at the Renaissance Fayre, in a dark purple dress with a thin white underblouse and some sort of corset laced up the front. She didn’t have much of a bosom, but the extra support gave the effect of two big potato rolls on a tray. If I tried to wear the thing, I’d put somebody’s eye out.

  She was in her mid-thirties, with dyed black hair that didn’t match her coloring, and dark purple eyeliner that did, at least, match her dress. Her name—first, last, and only—was “Guenevere,” and when I asked her how she spelled it she said it was the same way Malory did in The Morte Darthur. That shut me up.

  From what I gathered, Guenevere and her compatriots had tried to tell the cops about the visions they’d had of the killer, and they weren’t exactly satisfied with the response. The police had listened very politely, written everything down, and shown zero enthusiasm for following up their leads. So they’d returned to the cop shop en masse to plead their case, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and nearly got themselves arrested. I was starting to picture how Cody must have spent his weekend.

  By Monday, they’d worked themselves into a tizzy. They decided the public had a right to know about the GPD’s lack of enlightenment, so they took over the Green to air their theories about the murders and gather signatures, of which they had precisely twelve. Even the Awareness organizers weren’t quite sure what the petition was for.

  Believe it or not, the sight of two dozen rabid psychics doesn’t raise too many eyebrows around here. Gabriel has its conservative and ultra-liberal extremes, but most people fall somewhere in the middle; this is a town full of leather-wearing vegetarians, and lawyers who belong to the Green Party. The general consensus among the spectators I interviewed was that the incense contingent couldn’t do any harm—and besides, the cops could use all the help they could get.

  I stuck around for a couple of hours and managed to scrape together a couple of quotes that didn’t contain the f-word. I was on my way back to the paper when I ran into Guenevere, who was sitting on a bench rolling a cigarette.

  “You’re not into it, are you?” she said as I passed.

  “Into what?”

  She stretched her arm toward the pavilion where her friends were gathered. The gesture was broad and dramatic, like something from Swan Lake. “The scene. You’re not into the scene, man.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t subscribe.”

  “You mean you think I don’t buy it?” She nodded and lit her cigarette. “Well, you’re probably right.”

  “You gonna give us a fair shake?”

  “You mean in the story?” She nodded again. “Of course.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s my job not to take sides.”

  “Nah, I mean how come you don’t believe?”

  Because it scares me to meet a woman who washes her hair even less often than I do, I thought. But I just said, “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you spiritual?”

  “Um… no.”

  “Come on, take a load off.” She patted the bench beside her.

  “I have to get back to the paper.”

  “Just sit down here for a sec. Think of it as research, man.”

  “You know, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m not a man.”

  She chortled herself into a racking smoker’s cough. “That’s a good one, man,” she said when she caught her breath. “That is a good one. Come on, just give me your hand for a sec.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to tell your future.”

  “That’s okay. Sorry to be all bourgeois and everything, but I’m one of those people who’d just as soon not know.”

  Her eyes widened and she nodded solemnly, as though I was suddenly speaking her language. “I gotta respect that. Gotta respect it. You can’t force the future on anybody.” Then she grabbed my wrist anyway.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reading your past.”

  “There’s a treat.”

  She stared at my hand for several minutes, tracing the lines with her fingers and mumbling under her breath. I wondered how long I was going to have to sit there, and whether I’d ever be able to live it down if someone from the newsroom walked by. Then she looked up, and I saw that she had tears in her eyes. Actual tears.

  “You poor thing,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “So much death,” she whispered, and I noticed she’d dropped the hippie vernacular. “So much death.”

  “Jesus, I heard you the first time.”

  “I hope I’m wrong.”

  “That makes two of us.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. She really looked shaken. “Hey, come on, it could be worse. At least it’s my past, not my future.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was both.”

  On that happy note, I went back to the newsroom and started working on my story. I typed in all my notes, which I rarely do since it’s usually a waste of time, but at least it was a way to avoid calling the cops. I had to give them a chance to respond, but I knew just who the call was going to get referred to: one Detective Brian Cody. And since I hadn’t heard from him since he crawled out of my bed and hit the road, I was in no hurry to make more of an ass of myself than I already had.

  This, of course, is why your mother tells you not to get involved with people you work with. “Don’t hunt quail where you get your mail” is her expression, but Mad puts it a bit less eloquently: don’t shit where you eat. Not that it’s ever stopped him.

  And in case you’re wondering… No, reporters are not supposed to cover people they’re sleeping with, or sleep with people they’re covering. Clearly, I wasn’t behaving well. So much for that guest lectureship at Columbia J-school.

&nb
sp; Okay, I thought. If ’tis done, ‘tis best done quickly. But ’tis even better done from the phone down the hall in the library, just in case I decide to cry.

  I shut the door behind me, dialed the station house, and was transferred to Cody inside of three seconds. I tried to gird myself. Be professional. Be detached. Just get your quote and leave him to fester in his miserable pit of…

  “Alex, I’m so glad you called.”

  His voice was warm, and it threw me for a loop. I’d been expecting the distant-and-awkward treatment. I pulled him out of the mental pit I’d dropped him in a second before. Provisionally, at least. “You are?”

  “Course I am.” He lowered his voice so it came out all rich and husky. “God, I miss you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You probably think I’m the world’s biggest jerk.”

  “Oh, uh… no. Why would I think that?”

  “Because I haven’t called you.”

  “Well, um… I haven’t called you either.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the guy. I’m supposed to call.”

  “So why didn’t you?” I couldn’t believe we were having this particular conversation with me in the Monitor library and him at the cop shop; I was willing to bet it was the first chat of its kind conducted between these two phone numbers. I wondered which one of us would be the first to get the sack if we were found out. The chief would be mightily pissed, but in the end I decided Marilyn would decapitate me with one mighty karate chop.

  “You wouldn’t believe the weekend I had,” he was saying.

  “Oh, yes I would.”

  “These crazies kept coming around the station waving crystals at us…”

  “I know. That’s why I’m calling. I’m writing the story.”

  He was silent for a minute. “I thought you called… you know, because you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I did want to talk to you. But I was waiting for you to call me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the guy.”

  He chuckled. “Fair enough.”

  “So can I ask you a couple questions for the paper?”

  “Only if I get to ask one first. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”