Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  Black female. Late twenties, early thirties. Dressed in a ratty, polyester-satin bathrobe. From the looks of things, she’d given herself a hot shot of heroin while seated on the bed. The spoon, lighter, and empty bindle of Hellraiser were still on the bedside table. Claimed by gravity, the body itself had tumbled forward, onto the floor. It was arranged now in what medical examiners call a “praying position”—a prostrate pose similar to the one assumed five times a day by adherents to Islam—her weight distributed evenly between her knees and her forehead, her arms acting as outriggers. The syringe remained where she’d left it, plunger down. She’d tied off with a Mickey Mouse jump rope.

  From the looks of her fingertips—dry and leathery, wrinkled like raisins, the skin receding from the nails—she had been dead for several days. Her body had begun to mummify, the process accelerated by the dry environment. Leaking from her nose and mouth, forming a puddle on the floor, was a mixture of blood and gases, the by-product of putrefaction—a reddish, viscous discharge, known to MEs as “frothy purge.”

  On the floor near the body was another series of reddish prints—tiny frenetic paw prints, with roundish central pads radiating four sharp digits. A trail led from the body to the radiator and back. Looking closer, he could see bite marks on the victim’s ears and lips—tiny nibbles, bloodless half-moons.

  Hatfield stood like a statue, mouth agape, overcome.

  And then it occurred to him.

  The baby!

  Something inside of Hatfield gave way, popped like a ham-string at a Sunday afternoon softball game.

  Frantic, adrenalized, half blinded by tears of fear and rage, Hatfield searched the premises for the child, tossing aside sheets and mattress, re-riffling the drawers, throwing clothes and boxes out of the closet …

  At last he found the boy in the kitchenette, in the cupboard beneath the sink. Naked and dirty, partially wrapped in a blanket, he was sucking his thumb, which was red and sticky with frothy purge.

  Hatfield eased down onto the floor, like a nanny trying to win over a new charge. He took off his hat, put on his happiest face. “How you doin, bud?”

  The boy looked back at him blankly, a toddler version of a thousand-yard stare.

  36

  An orderly in pink scrubs gestured in Seede’s direction with a tapered ebony hand. Seede figured him for a man but it was hard to be certain. The hair was gathered into a nappy top-knot; the slinky, swivel-hipped walk recalled Diana Ross in her prime. Seede followed him down a long corridor. They passed a series of medical observation cells. Each had a metal door and a large one-way viewing window on which the name and booking number of the patient/inmate were handwritten in nonpermanent marker, a neatly applied schoolteacher cursive that seemed out of place in its surroundings.

  The orderly stopped at cell 17: Rubin, Michael David #90194. He keyed the lock, opened the door for Seede. “You got fifteen minutes, baby,” he said in a smoky voice.

  A TV hung from the ceiling; on the bedside table was a phone with no dialing mechanism—incoming calls only. In the far corner was the standard aluminum sink and toilet combo, this one retrofitted with a seat. The Pope of Pot looked small in the big hospital bed. His head was elevated; he was wired to an array of machines. Seede hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July Smoke Out in Lafayette Park. He had always seemed so large: a big man with big appetites and big ideas, many of them absolutely crazy. The difference was disconcerting. It looked as if he’d been shrunk.

  “Pope? Are you awake?”

  The Pope of Pot opened his eyes. “Howdy, honey, howdy,” he rasped. An oxygen tube was strapped beneath his bulbous nose; he had a three-day growth of stubble. He worked his mouth, searching for moisture.

  “I’m Jonathan Seede from the Washington Herald. Do you remember me?”

  The Pope squinted in Seede’s direction. Without his thick glasses, his eyes looked small and far away. “Could you pour me a drink, toots?”

  Seede set down his reporting stuff on the bedside table. He found a pitcher of water, filled a paper cup. With effort, the Pope turned his head and drank from a straw. The way his lips pooched, greedy and helpless, reminded Seede of his son at the breast. “I take it the service in here isn’t exactly papal,” he said.

  The Pope attempted a smile. “Bless you, my child.”

  Seede dragged over a chair and sat down by the bed, opened his notebook. It was warm in the room. He still felt clammy but the nausea had pretty much abated. He kind of needed a hit of crack—he could feel the emptiness gathering in his gut—but the H was doing a decent job of keeping it at bay. “I still can’t believe the judge remanded you,” Seede said. “I wouldn’t say you’re a big threat to the community.”

  “All hate is just fear,” the Pope said. “All fear is insecurity.”

  Seede wrote it down.

  The Pope’s bedsheet was pulled only to his waist. A thatch of curly hair covered his chest and abdomen. Here and there, like clearings in a jungle seen from the air, were an assortment of scars—knife slashes, punctures, medical entries, scallop-shaped bullet wounds—monuments to his eventful days in the drug trade in Amsterdam, New York, and DC. In his hand he discovered a coarse brown paper towel; he attempted to wipe the cottony residue from the corners of his mouth. “The people I was arrested with—do you know what happened to them? Are they still in jail?”

  “Waylon was released this morning.”

  “What about the others?”

  “All their bonds were posted by”—he thumbed through his notebook—“the Realized Fantasy Trust.”

  The Pope closed his eyes, a measure of relief. “At least some things are as they should be.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “I am an open book.”

  “The police report says they found an ounce of cocaine at your church. You’re charged with possession of coke with intent to distribute. I know in the past you’ve demonstrated publicly against hard drugs, especially cocaine. Can you explain what you were doing with so much coke at the storefront?”

  “Preposterous,” the Pope said dismissively. “The police planted that coke. No doubt it was stolen too.”

  “Stolen?”

  “The police think they’re entitled to free drugs. They go around stealing whatever they want.”

  “You have firsthand knowledge of police stealing drugs?”

  “Of course: when they raided the church, they took seven pounds of my sacrament, but they only charged me with possession of four pounds.”

  Seede studied him for a few seconds, trying to figure out what the Pope was trying to say. “Isn’t that better for you? You’re charged with less weight. That should be better for your case, right?”

  “Do the math,” the Pope said, with all the derision he could muster. “Three pounds are missing. If the cops want pot, they should have to pay for it like everyone else. I made a formal complaint to Internal Affairs.”

  “Internal Affairs?” Seede’s eyebrows went up. He wrote IAD on his pad, underscored it three times. “I was wondering why you were busted by detectives from IAD. Those guys never make street arrests.”

  “I had invited the gentlemen to the church to discuss the return of my sacrament.”

  “So you had actually lodged an official complaint? Is there paperwork?”

  “What’s right is right. It’s what the good Lord expects from us.”

  “And you’re saying that because you lodged a complaint, they came to the church and planted coke and arrested you.”

  “Obviously you’re a man of great intellect.”

  “What would you say,” Seede asked, choosing his words with care, “if I told you it’s a little hard to believe that the police would go to all that trouble just to take you down?”

  A mournful expression descended over the Pope’s face, like a curtain dropping on the last act. The light in his eyes dimmed.

  And then a coughing fit ensued, a series of deep black hacks that rattled his entire body.


  Seede stood by helplessly. “Do you want me to call someone?”

  The Pope of Pot motioned for another drink of water. Seede directed the straw into his mouth, held the cup. He’d known the Pope now for a couple of years. His pot was always primo, his count was always honest, he always had something on hand. On nights he visited, Seede would hang out with Waylon and the rest, drinking hot chocolate, listening to the Pope hold forth as he delivered one of his seemingly daffy diatribes. Invariably, on the way home Seede would suddenly be struck by something the Pope had said. For the rest of the night, the next day, it would be lodged in his brain like a song heard on the clock radio first thing in the morning. In a town full of conventional wisdom, where the politicians talked in endless meaningless circles (punctuated with the usual fist bangs and semi-up-thrust thumbs), and where the journos and pundits gave credence to all the doublespeak by endlessly discussing and interpreting it, the Pope of Pot could sometimes be absolutely inspirational. He reminded Seede of Don Quixote, a personal hero since eleventh grade, when he read the book for Spanish 4.

  Seede replaced the cup of water on the bedside table, rested his hand lightly, affectionately, on the Pope’s forearm. The skin was soft and papery, freckled with brown age spots, the purplered blossoms of broken blood vessels. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked.

  “I’ve done nothing, my son. I am the victim of foul play.”

  “Everyone says it: the Pope of Pot is his own worst enemy. The choices you make—it’s mind-blowing. Handing out joints to people in line for the White House tour? What’s the purpose of that? What statement does it make? What do you have to gain? You give the government no choice. It’s like you’re asking to be arrested. They hate you. They want to lock you up and throw away the key.”

  “Let them do what they must.”

  “Didn’t your family used to have a factory in New Jersey? The Realized Fantasy Trust—that’s family money, isn’t it?”

  “A modest sum, if you must know. Foundation garments. The bullet-boob look of the fifties? That was my father’s design.”

  Seede chewed the top of his felt-tip pen, a perplexed look on his face. “I gotta tell you, Pope: your message isn’t coming across. People don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish. I don’t even understand, and I’m trying to understand. You just seem childish and perverse. You flaunt everyone and everything. The city attorney told the judge, in open court, that you are”—he flipped through the pages of his notebook—“‘dangerous to himself and others, most likely certifiably insane.’”

  “Do you think I like being in here?” the Pope asked. “Do you think I like being everyone’s pain in the ass?” As he spoke, the cottony strings at the corners of his mouth expanded and contracted. Seede had the urge to reach out and take the paper towel from the old man’s hand and wipe his lips for him. “Believe me,” the Pope continued, “it’s not fun absorbing everyone’s anger and defensiveness and animosity all the time. The name calling. The outright derision. What have I done to provoke such ire? People call and write letters. They go out of their way to hate. Do you think it’s fun to read editorials in the newspapers that say nasty things about you? Do you think I don’t notice the ridicule?”

  “Things could be different,” Seede said. “You’re obviously a very intelligent man. A brilliant man. The things you say, some of your concepts and life lessons—you have original and interesting ideas. Some of that shit is amazing. Winning by example. The silent I-told-you-so. The Theory of Originals: be number one in a class of one—never compete with anyone but yourself. It really works. Like, since I’ve stopped competing with others and focused on myself, I have to tell you, my career has taken off. You told me that stuff last July; it sticks with you. It works. And that thing you just said—” forward a few pages in the notebook. “‘All hate is just fear. All fear is insecurity.’ Wow. I mean—that is so fucking true. It’s fuckin elemental. Wisdom like that doesn’t come around every day. Wisdom like that needs a bigger audience. Maybe you could focus your message a little better. Maybe you could quit the pot dealing. Maybe you could go about things in a different way. A way that people can understand. You could start a legitimate nonprofit organization. You could lobby Congress or hold seminars. You could be the Tony Robbins Antichrist! There are lots of things you could do, most of which pay handsomely, none of which would require going to jail. Take a look at yourself, Pope. This isn’t working for you. Something needs to change.”

  The Pope of Pot squinted in Seede’s direction, trying to get a clearer view of misguided youth. “It’s like this, toots,” he sighed. “You’re in a canoe without any paddles and the boat is just going. You’re headed down the rapids and the current is strong. The water is breaking over the side. Your pants are soaked; your ass is wet. But you’re going wherever you’re supposed to be going. All you’re doing is kind of hanging on for dear life, bailing as needed. Because there’s a force at work that stands behind you and on top of everything, a force that is in fact more powerful than anything you can come up against—more powerful than the police, the laws, the federal government—more powerful than anything. You have to speak the truth when untruth is surrounding you. When there is insanity surrounding you, you have to communicate that. Somebody has to. There’s a part in the Old Testament that says those who see danger approaching the village must blow the trumpet and warn the people. And if they don’t blow the trumpet, the responsibility for the people’s welfare—and the outcome—rests with them. I am trying to sound the alarm. The responsibility rests with me. I accept it.”

  Seede looked at his watch. His fifteen minutes were almost up; he hadn’t even begun to open the door on the Pope’s list of clients—his alleged role in selling marijuana to cops, judges, and congressmen—the reason his editor had sent him here in the first place. But the truth was, there was a bigger story here, maybe an important story, and it had nothing to do with who bought pot from the Pope. If you looked at Seede’s recent string of front-page articles—at all of his articles, for that matter, all of the stories he’d done over the course of his career at the Herald—what you’d notice would be the fact that none of them had really meant much in the wider scheme of things. Yes, they were in turns bright, pithy, evocative, entertaining, investigative, gut wrenching, well written, newsworthy, and outrageous. But taken in sum, what was the meaning of all that piecemeal effort? What had it amounted to? A decent paycheck, yes. Lunches in the publisher’s private office with community leaders. Some degree of social status. A house on Corcoran Street, one wife, one child, one car, one motorcycle. One Hollywood deal in the works. But now he was nearly thirty years old. The meter was running. He wanted to write something meaningful, something that would illuminate and entertain. Something that people would remember long after he was gone. Hopefully, this book of his was going to be the answer. Deep down he had the sense that the Pope needed to be an important part.

  “Do you really want to die in jail, Pope?”

  “What better place?”

  “I don’t know. The beach, maybe? Your own bed?”

  “If I die in here, everyone will know that the government killed me for my beliefs.”

  “They’ll know you died in jail—if it even makes the news.”

  “It’ll make the news, I guarantee you that, toots. Pot Pontiff Perishes in Prison. No news editor in the world will be able to resist.”

  “They’ll make total shit of you and all the things you stand for.”

  “But everyone will know. Everyone will know. Don’t you see? The truth is the truth, no matter what. You have to be willing to die for what you believe in. You have to make your body a living sign.”

  At this last bit Seede’s ears pricked up. He turned to a clean page in his notebook and wrote it down: Make your body a living sign.

  37

  Sojii alighted from the back passenger-side of a Japanese-made SUV driven by Geoff Greene, the proprietor of Mystic Eye Books. Jim Freeman shut the
door, leaned into the front passenger window. “I think we could have managed the five blocks on foot,” he said brightly.

  “Don’t be silly,” Greene said. “I was going out anyway to do a few errands.”

  “We should get together sometime for dinner,” Freeman enthused. Then he knocked himself lampoonishly in the forehead. “Hellooooo! What do you think about sushi? I just finished this great Japanese cooking class where we learned how to—”

  “Is this your place?” Greene indicated the townhouse behind Sojii, who was standing on the sidewalk, her backpack slung over her shoulder, looking like she wanted to go inside. It was a narrow building, painted brick red with blue-gray trim. An antique iron staircase led up eight steps to the front gate.

  “Oh, no, no, no!” Freeman laughed, his booming baritone giggle—perish the thought. “We’re on the other side.” He pointed over the top the vehicle to the opposite side of the street. “It’s 1329.”

  Greene twisted around. “The white and gray one?”

  “That’s right. With the gingerbread eaves. It was built in 1880 by this—”

  “Impressive,” Greene pronounced. He twisted frontward again, indicated the house behind Sojii. “Who’s is this?”

  “Adorable, isn’t it? He just had it pointed and painted this fall. He got it five years ago for … guess how much?”

  The primate fear grimace: “Surprise me.”

  “One fifty,” Freeman stage-whispered. “I could sell it tomorrow for more than twice that!”

  “Amazing,” Greene said. A lock of his expensively cut hair fell rakishly over one eye. “I take it the owner’s a client?”

  “Client slash friend. He worked with my ex at the Herald. I like to say I got custody of him in the divorce. You’ve probably read his byline: Jonathan Seede? He just optioned a story to Hollywood about—”

  “Excuse me … Jim?” Sojii’s head was recessed into the fluffy, borrowed coat like a turtle’s into its shell.