Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “And you were shot in the chest at approximately 10:46 p.m. yesterday night outside of the Pelican nightclub on Bleecker Street?”

  “Looks like it.”

  He leaned so far forward I couldn’t see past his furrowed eyebrows, which met in the middle. “Did you see who shot you, Miss LeBlanc?”

  “I was too busy almost dying.”

  “You’re awfully glib about something this serious.”

  “Oh, I’m serious as a bullet. The trouble is, one went through me. Yesterday. So if you don’t mind getting to the point?”

  The kid blushed purple and quickly pulled a photograph from a folder. I had schooled my expression into exhausted ignorance, and so just managed to maintain the pose at the sight, though my pulse jumped hard and I felt faint with shock and pain.

  “Do you recognize the man in this photograph?”

  It was Trent Sullivan, serial murderer. “I thought it was a woman who shot me?” I said.

  The officer’s heavy eyebrow raised at either end. He pulled out another, recently familiar photograph. “The shooter’s name is Maryann West. His girlfriend.” My eyes widened in surprise, mostly real. I had believed Dev, but this truth was still quietly upending my existence.

  “Why would she shoot me?” I asked, because I knew very well—her screams, her fingers tearing at the door.

  “This man was killed about a decade ago. Unsolved case. But the knife work is distinctive. We’ve found several bodies like this over the years. We’re sure to catch the perp eventually. Closing in, I’ve heard.”

  I frowned at him, wondering who Victor had forgotten to pay, and why some pissant rookie cop felt comfortable threatening me with prosecution.

  And then I remembered that Dev was an informant, and since the precinct cops were in Victor’s pay, he had to be working for the higher-ups: vice squad, or even Commissioner Valentine himself. Which meant Victor—and his angel—could go down tomorrow, if they wanted.

  I lifted my left hand with some effort and pushed away the photograph. The cop flinched at my touch, and spilled the rest of his file over my blankets. He squatted to retrieve the ones that slid onto the floor, mumbling apologies thick with unease. Even like this, I intimidated him. This pleased me. I was still enough of my old self for that. I picked up the papers nearest my hand, and was surprised to recognize them: corpses, crudely photographed (none of Walter’s unsung artistry here), each twisted body missing its hands. So many. I’d never guessed that there could be so many.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Unsolved murders,” he said, snatching them. “These are just the ones from the last decade.” He frowned. “And if you know anything, Miss LeBlanc, you should know the law is prepared to offer leniency for information. The individual who kills with knives has committed at least two dozen murders that we know about. More than enough for the hot squat.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with me.”

  He smiled, the effect ruined by his dilated pupils and shaking hands. “I’ll be seeing you, ma’am.”

  He’d get corrupted soon enough, but for now the policeman had a new-penny shine, ruddy with self-righteousness and purpose. I saw myself in him, as I had once been. And I understood how he saw me—a woman past her prime, washed in blood, better off dead.

  Alone, I closed my eyes and considered my new, clamoring questions. Victor had lied to me for a long time, that much was clear. Maybe Maryann West had killed that man for his hands, maybe she used to do it alongside her boyfriend, but I wondered about those other photographs, that morgue of bodies stretching back a decade. Trent was already dead and I didn’t see how Maryann could have killed them all by herself—maybe she hadn’t killed them at all. If Victor had used me to settle some other vendetta, if he had brought down the killing wrath of his angel of justice for some petty territorial dispute but told her it was for murder—

  It’s Victor, Trent Sullivan had said, when he had finally recognized me in the dim light of his bedroom.

  We know about the hands, I had said.

  But I didn’t do nothing to them—

  I’m here to make sure you never do it again.

  And then Maryann started screaming and Trent managed to toss me against the headboard and there were no more words between us, only a great deal of blood.

  I hadn’t believed Trent’s denial. Even when I’d wanted to drown myself in Dev’s bloody bathtub, I’d trusted Victor implicitly—that he’d never send me after someone who didn’t deserve it. Only his angel could bring justice, after all.

  Except that he had.

  “Darling? Are you crying?”

  I wiped my eyes roughly. The dentist paced at the foot of my bed. He had a look I recognized.

  “I just called my wife,” he said. I waited. He bit his lip. “Darling, you know how much I love you, but … well, she’s pregnant again, that’s all there is to it. I can’t be with you, no matter how much I want to. This might seem difficult now, but you know Victor will take the best care of you…”

  I tried not to listen to him, and nearly managed the trick by staring at a mold stain spreading like dried blood along the ceiling tiles.

  I needed to talk to Dev. All of the lies I had told myself about him ripped me every time I took a breath—an informant, a motherfucking stoolie, all those lonely years—but he might still help. At the least, he wouldn’t betray me to Victor.

  “Marty,” I told the dentist, “congratulations to you and your wife. Can you do me one last favor?”

  He cleared his throat. “A-anything, Phyllis.”

  “Tell Dev I’d like to see him?”

  I saw him consider the propriety of telling me that the hospital was segregated, decide against it, and then just nod.

  He left.

  I tried to sleep, and cried instead. My tears burned like vinegar; they made me cough. I cried for a long time, until the nurse came in. She took one look and shot me full of mother morphine, lit my veins like a carousel and spun me like soft candy, round and round.

  * * *

  I dreamed of Dev’s hand on my forehead. I dreamed of him whispering my name. I dreamed I couldn’t answer.

  My dream tried to speak to me. He started, “I was just a rookie—” and choked to a stop. He tried again. “You killed our key witness—how did Victor find out?—I made a deal—I made a deal to save you.”

  I lost his words for a while, after that.

  I could only hold on to the tone of them, sandstone crumbling against granite, scraping and fragile.

  “You remember—it was the last—it was the first—I’ve never hated the way I hated that night.”

  I had seen it in his eyes, hadn’t I? Even in the dream, I couldn’t forget how Dev had looked at me, just before he left. As if he didn’t even know me, as if he had never seen me naked and covered in blood.

  But I didn’t want to remember that. I wanted this dream, the only way I would ever have him again. I wanted to bury myself in it. His hand on my shoulder, the one that didn’t hurt. His voice as soft as Virginia cotton.

  He was telling a story about India, about the farm where he grew up.

  “We kept goats for the milk,” Dev said. “I thought I might be a disciple of Pusan, the god of lost animals. The way they looked at me … But one night a wolf got through a bad mend in the fence, killed the dam and all but one of the kids. I found her, the kid. In her mother’s spilled entrails. Gagging and—”

  He paused. He withdrew his hand, and I wished that this were a dream where I was given to move, to touch him. “She—” he tried. “She was covered in blood. Not her own.”

  I knew what he was thinking. This was a dream, of course I did. Hadn’t I just tried to stop myself from dredging the same memory?

  “You didn’t know me when you left Trent—and his girl, oh God, his girl, poor Maryann—not until you were naked in my clawfoot tub, and the water turned pink, because you said, ‘It’s a sunset, Dev.’ And I—”

&nbs
p; I dreamed that his breath caught like a fishing line in his chest. I dreamed that he squeezed my hand and kissed my forehead and left me there, to dream alone in that room, without him.

  * * *

  My next three days in the hospital unspooled with steady boredom, occasionally relieved by pain and then painkillers. I sucked morphine like a greedy child, and dreamed strange dreams about Dev. That first one in particular was so odd that for a whole day I thought it might have been real.

  He was a stoolie—or a plant, depending on how you looked at it—and I found myself jerking as though newly awake every time I remembered. The Dev of my dream had said that he had been working with the cops from the very beginning. And maybe that was only pain and paranoia, the knife I wielded on myself to pay for the hubris of even dreaming that he would come back to me. But every time that molten knowledge of it burned me through, I thought, Oh, so that’s why. Dev had always held himself apart from us, but he’d never been out of place. Maybe he had only seemed to love me, too.

  At that point I asked the nurse for more morphine and tried to forget how to think.

  Walter brought chocolates—promptly confiscated—and funny stories about the Pelican. I particularly liked the one about how the dentist got so ossified the night he left me that Dev had to haul him into a taxi. “Over his shoulder like a sack of grain,” Walter said, demonstrating. “Wasn’t too careful, either. I wouldn’t’ve wanted to be Marty’s head the next morning.”

  Tamara, he said, had jumped feet first in love with her soldier boy. “Lot of long faces in that club these days. Not that most of them ever had a chance.”

  “And Dev?” I asked, not wanting to.

  “You know Dev, he’s happy for her. And his heart’s not as broken as he thinks, anyway.”

  This sparked enough hope that I asked if Dev had said anything about me, but Walter just shook his head and put his hand on my good shoulder.

  We did not discuss Victor, or the woman who shot me, or what Walter might do if I got myself lost again. I did not ask him any of the questions that my rookie cop had forced upon me. After Walter left the doctor made a pointed comment about certain types of visitors and I stared at him until he looked away.

  The next day, Walter brought me a letter from Tamara:

  Oh Pea, my sweetest Pea, Walter says you’re at some segregated hospital uptown, so I can’t get in unless I pretend to clean your toilet, which, you can imagine, is not something I find myself itching to do. If I’d wanted to scrub toilets I’d have stayed in Virginia! The Pelican is still standing, you’ll be glad to know. I confirmed a real coup of a show next Thursday: a Hungarian sculptor who got out just before Hitler got in—terrifying stuff, nightmare shapes rising out of rock, absolutely terrific. The Amsterdam News promised me they’ll send down a reviewer.

  Unfortunately, we’re also debuting one other artist—at Vic’s request. You’re well rid of that dentist, sugar. Marty has as much artistic sensibility as a government-employed horsefly, but Vic’s got it in him to be “generous.” Foreshortened doodles of horse’s heads with teeth like a toothpaste model’s! I know Vic made the Pelican, but sometimes I swear he did it by accident.

  Well, I don’t mean to bore you with all this gossip while you can’t even come down here to see it! You scared the devil out of me, Phyllis. Get better soon and get out of that damned hospital. I owe you a good reading. I’ve been trying, but the numbers are funny and I think it would be better if I had you with me when I laid out the cards. All I get are spades, Pea, spades and hearts and every once in a while, as if he’s been watching over my shoulder, that damned devil joker.

  xoxo

  Tammy

  P.S. Clyde sends his love!

  This made me laugh and roll my eyes and mutter crossly to myself and feel better by the end.

  She was wrong, in any case—Victor had known exactly what he was doing when he made the Pelican: integrated, high-minded, perfumed with reefer and the right kind of danger, the kind that kept the cops as disinclined to arrest you for indecency as for selling liquor without a license. Tamara had just refined the model to fit her own dreams. And I wasn’t sure how much stock to put into Tamara’s trick of reading the fates, but I was a Harlem girl who’d been visited by the hands—so I couldn’t not believe her, either.

  The next evening, I shared the lounge with one other patient up late to watch the sunset. We inmates were, in general, an early-slumbered cohort, but today frustration had goaded me into selective deafness when the evening nurse suggested I return to my bed. It seemed that Victor’s influence extended a few steps beyond the extravagance of my single room; my glare precipitated a hasty retreat, and my companion—an elderly white gentleman with a broken hip and a palsy—happily co-opted my intransigence. The view was of the Hudson and the cliffs of Jersey’s dockyards beyond it. The sun squatted behind the rusted boats and long warehouses, pregnant and hungry and red as the cherry squashed against the remains of my dessert. Not even Victor could do much about the food.

  The river had swallowed the sun and I was wondering if those bore-holes burning down my arm might not have some kind of salutary, character-building effect—to remind me of the inevitability of my loveless death, perhaps—when the door opened.

  My companion had fallen asleep in his chair, and I could not be bothered to make the awkward turn just to greet a nurse, so I looked at a tanker slowly moving upriver until Dev’s head blocked the view.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I stared at him; he pulled up a chair across from mine.

  “How are you doing, Phyllis?”

  I snorted. Same old Dev, caring just enough. “I’m terrific. I hear you’re nursing a broken heart, but then, that’s going around these days.”

  He smiled, acknowledging the hit. “For what it’s worth, Marty never deserved you, Pea.”

  God, I hated him. Hated the soft fondness in his eyes, his speckled hair, the way he under-aspirated hard consonants.

  “Oh, I’m sure he did.” I laughed, and winced. “I’m not exactly a catch.”

  Dev just looked at me. “Are you tired? I’m sorry I couldn’t visit earlier. I can come back in the morning.”

  He meant this was his first visit. Which meant the goat, the wolf, the broken confession—just a morphine fantasy.

  “Let’s get this over with, Dev.”

  “And what is this?”

  “A deal. A bargain. Probably a short straw for you, frankly, but maybe for old time’s sake? I need your help. With Victor.”

  Dev slid a look at the old man, now drooling on the arm of his wheelchair. He stood up, pushed the man outside, and set a chair under the knob to stop someone from interrupting us. I didn’t say anything; paranoia was our cost of business.

  “Pea,” he said. “You remember what I told you?”

  Did I remember? I wanted to laugh at him, but I was afraid something else might come out.

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “You haven’t asked yet.”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t think Trent Sullivan killed those people. And I don’t think, not his girl, either. That night … makes more sense, that way. I think Victor’s been lying, using me on his associates and telling me it’s justice. If that’s true, I figure you might know?”

  Dev’s breath left him. He didn’t catch it again for nearly a minute.

  “You never suspected.”

  In his grated words I recognized something of the voice from my dream. It had been a decade since I had touched Dev like a woman with a lease on his skin, but now I reached out, unthinking, to wipe watery tracks from his face. With a faint groan, he pressed his cheek into my hand and closed his eyes, though they still leaked with steady, baffling tears. I didn’t understand what I had said.

  “Dev, at the club, you asked me if I believed everything Victor told me…” My voice closed in on itself, cut off by some latent wave of shame. Hadn’t I trusted Victor? It had been safer, certainly, to believe our bargain h
ad held. To never question, or delve deeper into those flashes of unease I felt—yes, just that sickening lurch—ever since I had killed Trent Sullivan. It is difficult to get a woman to understand something that her heart depends upon her not understanding.

  Desperate, I tried, “Why would he lie when he could get a dozen other men on a hit without asking questions?”

  Dev’s throat worked against my wrist. “You’re a legend. They’re all terrified of you. Whatever you thought about justice had nothing to do with that power. Of course Victor would use it.”

  “Of course,” I repeated. “I have been very stupid. I wish you had told me sooner.”

  A sob cracked his throat and he wrenched himself away. He wouldn’t look at me. “Tell me what you need, Pea.”

  “If I’ve been … if Victor’s angel has just been another bag man, all this time—” I felt wide open as a swinging door. I felt unhinged. “I want to find whoever’s killing people for their hands. If he just used someone else’s murders as a convenient excuse…”

  The look in his eyes. I couldn’t keep speaking, not if this was what it did to him. A moth popped and buzzed against the aging light fixture. The burnished steel of the wheelchair handle glared back at me like Victor’s silver jaw. Dev’s wet eyes stayed on me like a lost dog’s. Lost, like that dog of Tammy’s, that little yippy spaniel she named Josephine or Celeste or Betty depending on the month; she cried for weeks after it ran away during a show and no one had the heart to tell her that Victor had kicked it to death in the alley.

  And the world, so happily unmoored and swinging, slotted itself neatly back into place.

  “Victor,” I said.

  “Who else, Phyllis, who else?”

  Victor wanted the hands. And if the hands wouldn’t come to him, then he’d do them like he did the Barkley brothers: he’d just take what anyone else got.

  It was cold in here, with the sun gone. Cold as a meat factory. I shook. “But Maryann—how’d she get back into this after so much time? And what does that devil think he can do with a dead man’s hands, anyway? Has it been the whole time, Dev? The whole time I’ve been with him? No, no, don’t tell me, I can’t bear—” I sat up straight, though damn did it hurt. “I have to kill Victor.” My thumbs jumped, though I didn’t make them.