Lake of Darkness

by Scott Kenemore

  “And does Janice Collins still work for you?” Flip asked with growing excitement.

  “Yes,” Abbott said. “She’s a full reporter now. A very good one.”

  “Does she still live-?” Flip asked.

  “Above the identical twin?” said Abbott. “No. Janice got married a few years back. Seems like that happens to good looking women when they move up to Chicago. I don’t even know if the twin lives in that house anymore. And alas, now I’ve told you all I can.”

  Flip began to ask something, but Abbott cut him off.

  “Let me guess; you want to speak to Janice.”

  “Of course,” Flip said. “Very much.”

  “And here’s where things become uncomfortable,” Abbott replied, setting down a half-eaten roll. “I can vouch for my own ability to keep a secret temporarily. To play ball wit’cha generally, Flip. But Janice is another matter. Another game entirely. Janice is here, on this earth, to tell the truth. To get at the truth, and then get it out to as many people as possible. That’s what a reporter’s supposed to do, and it’s why I hired her.”

  Flip’s expression said he might have tasted something sour.

  “Anything she finds, she’ll want to run with,” Abbott warned.

  “You could stop that,” Flip suggested. “Refuse to print it. You operate the damn presses, Bob.”

  “But I’m not the only game in town, am I?” Abbott reminded the policeman. “Story that big—with that kind of grisly detail?—she could take it to the Daily Journal or the Tribune or five other papers who’d pay her for it. She’d publish it under a false name and get a nice big check. Officially, we’d never know it was her.”

  Flip tasted something sour again. He knew that Abbott was correct.

  “But here,” Abbott said, sensing Flip’s frustration. “Maybe you could do it. . .”

  “Do what?” said Flip.

  “Convince her to wait,” Abbott said. “You’re good at convincing folks. You can be persuasive. I think back over the years—think about the things you’ve convinced me to do—and I think ‘How did that man do that?’ And I still don’t know . . . but you did.”

  The sour taste seemed to fall away from Flip’s mouth. There was hope again.

  “Is Mrs. Collins in the office at the moment?” Flip asked.

  Abbott shook his head no.

  “She’s on assignment writing up the real estate scandal in the Fox River Valley,” Abbott explained. “But I expect a story from her first thing tomorrow morning. You could stop by when she comes to drop it off.”

  “We might just do that,” Flip said.

  “We?” said Abbott. “The three of you working as a team?”

  “Something like that,” Flip told him.

  The newspaperman finished his roll and pushed back his chair.

  “Thank you, Bob,” Flip said, also rising. “I appreciate you coming here. All this way I mean.”

  Abbott smiled. He took up his bowler hat, made sure his gaze was fixed in an upwardly—possibly celestial—direction, and departed.

  TWELVE

  That evening they tried again at the Singling Brothers Circus grounds. Tark dressed as his brother and Flip once more donned the costume of a carnival hand. Sally, who insisted upon coming along, proved—for a woman who made her living at least partly on her looks—surprisingly game to gussy herself down until she could pass for the kind of person who might hang around a smelly circus encampment.

  “Are there any other women here?” Sally asked as they crept into the field.

  “Yes,” said the magician. “We have some female acrobats and a lady who does contortion tricks. And a couple of the roughnecks too—if you checked under the hood, you’d find they were of the female variety.”

  “Try to stay in character, you two,” Flip advised. “He could be watching us right now.”

  Tark chuffed like a horse to say he thought it unlikely.

  As he had before, Tark took a lion-taming podium and marched it to the edge of the field near where the stranger had left his hat. Tark sat, took out a glass bottle, and began to drink and to dream. Sally joined Flip. They sat half underneath a caravan with a clear line of sight to Tark. Cloud cover had gradually formed over that afternoon, and a light rain began to fall. Most of the circus workers stayed out of sight; they’d either left the grounds or were huddling in tents alongside the animals. Sally let her legs—fitted in ratty white stockings—stick out from underneath the caravan. Flip worried this might attract the wrong kind of attention. He decided he would say something if it did, but only if it did.

  “This is how you did it last time?” Sally asked as they watched Tark put his bottle down and close his eye.

  “Most essentially,” Flip replied.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Sally said.

  “You just did.”

  “About the case?”

  Flip nodded.

  “Tark brought it up before . . . but you didn’t really answer him. Why are we doing this tonight, instead of out looking for Durkin?”

  “Maybe we are,” Flip said. “Maybe he’s gonna come through those trees in just a few moments, with two big bullet holes in his belly, just like in the picture I saw.”

  Sally crossed her long legs.

  “How is it all those rich men want you to find him if he’s already dead?” she asked. “How can he be the one doing the killing?”

  Flip took a sip from a tin flask on his hip, but did not speak.

  “I tell you. . . I have seen some shit over the years, Joe Flippity,” Sally continued. “I have seen things—just inside the Palmerton—would make a grown man faint dead away. I’ve seen a man’s ear torn off, slowly. I’ve seen murder for no reason at all. All manner of perversion. But a dead man coming back to kill? Come on now.”

  “What’s the oldest customer ever come to the Palmerton?” Flip asked, almost as though he had not been listening.

  Sally tilted her head to the side.

  “Does this have to do with the case . . . or are you askin’ for your granddad?” she wondered.

  Flip silently took another swig.

  “We’ve had men close to ninety, I believe,” she told him. “Is that what you want me to tell you? Men who seemed very close to the end of their lives. I suppose it was like having a last meal. A last drink.

  Men that age, wasn’t much happening downstairs. It was all about the ritual.”

  “How about the oldest person you’ve ever seen?”

  “Oldest person I. . .”

  “Last time we talked, you told me you thought Ursula Green was 105 now,” Flip said to her.

  “That sounds about right,” Sally replied. “Of course, I haven’t actually seen her in years.”

  Flip turned to Sally and cocked his head to ask ‘Oh really?’.

  “She rented out the basement. . . I don’t know,” Sally recollected. “It was before I took over at the Palmerton. I was just a working girl then. Had to be ten years ago.”

  “She could be 105,” Flip said. “But you know, I think she could be older, too.”

  Sally’s expression said that she found this doubtful.

  “My mother,” Flip continued, “she used to talk about old men up in the hills who drank ramp juice. Do you know what that is? A plant. They would ferment it. She said it made them hibernate like bears. They would drink the ramp juice—jars and jars of it—and then sleep all winter. Wake up again in the spring. By doing this, she said they would live to 150 or 160.”

  “I never heard of such a thing,” said Sally. “But people in the South tell tales. Your momma from down South?”

  “Of course,” Flip said.

  “Where from?”

  He did not answer.

  “Ramps are like leeks, yes?” Sally asked after a moment. “I don’t know if I ever tasted one.”

  “They grow around here,” Flip said with a nod. “Cross between garlic and onions. Lore holds that the Indians named the city after the smell of wil
d onions. That could be true. I’ve seen ramps growing along the lake, plenty of places.”

  “You ever taste one?” Sally asked.

  Flip shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I tried smelling one once. That was enough.”

  Sally put her hand to her chin and drummed her fingers.

  “I wonder about Du Sable, the first man who lived here,” Sally said. “Back in history, you know? Maybe he ate them. Or drank them.”

  “Everything about that man is a mystery,” Flip said of the founder of Chicago. “Nobody knows what happened to him when he left. Some say he moved to St. Louis or just drifted away downriver. I don’t think they even know where his body is buried. Where he died. When he died. If. . .”

  “He’s dead, Flip,” Sally said. “That was 100 years ago.”

  Flip smiled.

  “I get to thinking about Ursula, and I don’t properly know anymore,” he told her. “I think about how Ursula could have known him; known Du Sable. And then I know Ursula. So. . . So I don’t know what that means. Maybe she knows if he ate or drank the ramps that grew here back then. Maybe I should ask her next time. What you think?”

  Sally put her hand to her hip. Though she was in a seated position, the desired effect was achieved.

  “Flip, all respect to your momma, but that is crazy. This whole line of thought. Drinking ramp juice wouldn’t do nothing but make a man sick. Or a woman.”

  Flip grinned.

  “You got another explanation for how Ursula is 105?” Flip asked, if only to pass the time.

  (There was no compelling reason to let the conversation die. Tark was now motionless at the end of the grounds, probably unconscious. There was nothing to do but watch.)

  As if this answer were obvious, Sally said: “Sheer dumb luck. Chance. The nonsense of the world.”

  Flip put his hands behind his head and relaxed against the ground.

  Sally said nothing else for a long time.

  “This is how it was before, watching him?”

  Flip nodded.

  “And you expect the killer to come through the trees just beyond?”

  Flip nodded again.

  “Then I still got to ask. . . Are you expecting a white man named Durkin, or a Negro man with a hole in his head?”

  “At this point, I’m liable to take whoever I can get,” Flip said wearily.

  They looked out across the field. Though his visible eye was closed, a strange expression had crossed Tark’s face. Then he began to moan. His foot kicked once, twice, three times. His mouth began to hang open.

  “Like a dog having a nightmare,” Sally observed.

  “First time we did this, he dreamed that an insect with a triangle head was watching him,” Flip said. “A giant one. That’s what he told me. Maybe it came back.”

  “Hell of a thing to dream about,” Sally said.

  “I don’t know,” Flip replied. “I’ve had plenty of dreams that were stranger than a big bug.”

  Flip surveyed the treeline. There was no movement except for rain on leaves. The sun went down completely and the wind started to blow, cool and wet. Usually, Chicago winds blew west to east, so the weather went out over the lake. But on this evening, it seemed to Flip that the weather came in from the lake, unnaturally. The breeze smelled like sea spray and sewage and dead fish, like after a rain. The clouds parted only once, and Flip glimpsed the indifferent pale moon, just beginning to rise.

  Out on his animal pedestal, Tark stretched himself, massaged his neck, and adjusted his groin. If he had gone into a trance to summon someone—or something—he was coming out of it now. And, plainly, it had not worked.

  “We’re not going to catch anybody tonight,” Flip whispered to Sally.

  “Well, it is Sunday,” Sally said absently.

  “What does that mean?” asked Flip.

  “Sunday is special,” Sally insisted.

  Her tone said that this fact was so plain that no further explanation should be required.

  “I’ll admit I thought it was unlikely he’d show, but this was still the best use of our time,” Flip told her.

  “That who would show?” Sally pressed.

  Flip did not answer the question.

  “Tomorrow I want to go to that reporter, Janice Collins,” he said. “And I’d like you to come along.”

  “Oh?” Sally said. “Why? Because I’m a woman?”

  “Partly,” said Flip. “I don’t know if she’ll want to help us, especially if she’s not going to get a story out of it. Maybe we’ll have to convince her to cooperate out of the goodness of her heart. I ain’t met her, so I don’t know what kind of heart she has. But hearing about your own twins—from you—seems like it might get us a good result.”

  Sally worked her jaw back and forth, considering. Tark walked up.

  “We done,” Tark stated. “He ain’t coming tonight.”

  “I don’t think so either,” Flip said.

  “Naw, the giant insect told me he ain’t coming,” Tark said, rubbing his eyes. “It was pissed off about it. I think it wanted a show.”

  “What does a giant insect sound like when it talks?” Flip asked.

  Tark pointed to his temple.

  “It talks into the side of my mind,” he said. “It’s like a buzz. I think you gotta be a magician to understand.”

  “Or just drunk enough?” Sally wondered.

  “Maybe that too,” Tark said, removing the eye patch that made him look so much like his brother. “Maybe that too.”

  The next morning Flip stood outside the apartment building that housed the Defender and thought to himself that if he never saw or heard about a twin again for the rest of his whole goddamn life that would be just fine.

  Tark and Sally stood with him, a few paces off. The pair whispered to one another. It seemed to Flip that the two were perhaps becoming chummy. He had not yet decided if this was a positive development.

  Some of the Defender staff recognized Flip and said hello as they headed in to start their workdays. Flip had already asked two women he did not know if they were Janice Collins. They had not been. But then a third appeared. She wore a white blouse and a long blue skirt, and she carried a brown purse. Her hair was covered against the summer heat by a blue and white scarf.

  For whatever reason, Flip liked his chances.

  “Janice Collins?” he asked.

  The reporter widened her eyes and smiled to show he had her attention.

  Flip introduced himself, and said it was police business. Then he said he had a few questions that would only take a moment.

  “I’m on my way to turn in a story,” Janice Collins explained.

  “About the real estate in the Fox River Valley,” Flip said. “Bob told me about it. He’s the one who said I should talk to you.”

  “Oh. . .” the reporter said. “Well, all right then. How can I help you?”

  Flip conducted her to the side of the apartment building, away from the entrance. The magician and the madam also headed over. While more Defender employees filed past, Flip introduced Janice Collins to Sally and Tark. The reporter’s face showed she was already familiar with both, by reputation if not personally. Introductions out of the way, Flip got right to the point.

  “Bob says when you first moved to town, you rented a room from a man who was an identical twin.”

  “That’s right,” Collins said. “Ed Nash. He sold insurance. It was in a little house by the yards. Nasty neighborhood. Rats as big as cats at night. And the smell! I got away as fast as I could—soon as my lease was up.”

  Flip took out his notebook and wrote down Ed Nash.

  “And Ed was once attacked by a man with a deformity in his head?” Flip asked.

  Collins looked around, searching for what to say.

  “I do recall him telling me that,” she replied after a moment. “Said he’d been assaulted quite seriously one night. But officer, don’t tell me you’re here trying to solve a mugging from nineteen
hundred and six?”

  “We think the man who attacked your neighbor might still be at it,” Flip told her. “Any information you can give us—whatever you remember—might help us catch the criminal.”

  “What else do you want to know?” Collins said, shifting her purse to her other shoulder.

  “Street address be a good place to start,” Flip said.

  Collins gave it, but quickly followed with: “I’ve no idea if Ed still lives there. I’ve no idea if the house is still here. Hmm. I can’t think of what else to tell you. Ed and I, we didn’t talk much. He tried to flirt a couple of times. I shot that down.”

  “Did you ever meet his twin?” Flip asked. “And do you know the twin’s name?”

  “Rotney,” she said. “Not ‘Rodney,’ but with an R-O-T, like something gone bad. He came by a time or two. He flirted with me also. Looked a lot like Ed, but more disheveled. More dirty. Always wore blue overalls, I seem to recall.”

  “But he was an identical twin, yes?” Flip pressed.

  Janice Collins’ stare became suspicious.

  “Why does that part matter?” she asked, her reporter’s brain working now. “Why are you interested in the twin part? I suppose if one twin did something, he could blame the other? Or if a witness saw one, the other might get blamed. But if Ed Nash is the victim . . . then what does his brother have to do with it?”

  Flip continued to believe the less he told any Defender reporter, the better.

  “We just want to ensure we have the right man,” Flip said as though it were all routine. “There could be more than one Negro man called Ed Nash in a city this size. Being a twin narrows it. We got to check we’re accurate.”

  Janice Collins’ eyes again went back and forth very fast, like someone watching a tennis match.

  “No, no,” Collins said, almost to herself—almost in a trance, now, with the figuring of it. “That doesn’t make sense. You would not come here and ask me this—not in this way—if that were your goal. . .”

  To Flip’s surprise, Collins reached into her purse and took out a notepad of her own. She took out a pencil too, and prepared to write.