The Long Way Home

by Richard Chizmar

  Graves was a precise, somewhat nervous, middle-aged man in a blue medical tunic. He needed to lose twenty pounds and he needed to get a smaller pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. This pair covered his face.

  “My wife and I had some troubles in our marriage,” Graves said. “But they’ve long since been worked out.”

  Neely said, “But he did sleep with your wife?”

  “He did.”

  “And you were angry about it?”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to be angry?”

  “You were angry,” Neely said. “That’s what I’m trying to ascertain here.”

  “I was angry. Yes.”

  “Very angry?”

  “Very angry, if you insist.”

  “You tried to destroy his career.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I said, “You were in San Diego last night?”

  “Yes. I went to see my brother.”

  “And you stayed at his house?” I said.

  “No. He was suddenly called out of town on business. So I stayed in a hotel.”

  “Which hotel?” I said.

  “The Ravenhurst.”

  “Do you have your credit receipts?”

  “I gave all that to Joan when I came in.”

  “Joan,” I said, “is the red-head?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Bridges?” Neely said.

  He shrugged. “Uhh…a year or so, I suppose.”

  “Where was that?” she said.

  “A medical conference in Boston. It dealt with subjects that concerned assistants as well as physicians.”

  “Did you speak to him?” Neely said.

  “No.”

  “Did he speak to you?” I said.

  “No.”

  “When,” Neely said, “was the last time your wife saw Mr. Bridges?”

  “Two years at least. More than that, most likely.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  He looked uncomfortable. A little embarrassed. “She was the one who wanted to reconcile. Not me. I felt she’d humiliated me enough. So she volunteered to have Byreum injections every three months.”

  Byreum was the technical word for truth juice. Nobody lies under Byreum. And I mean nobody. But the big problem is that ninety percent of all people are allergic to the stuff. A small percentage have such a bad reaction that they find themselves growing hair on their tongue, thanks to a fungus-like growth resulting from the drug. So now they give you a test first and if you show any allergic reaction at all, the drug isn’t administered. That allergic aspect makes it pretty much useless for police work. Besides, all sorts of lawsuits could result from giving it to the wrong people.

  “You give her the injections?” Neely said.

  “Yes.”

  “And so for at least two years—”

  “And so for at least two years now,” Doctor William Graves III said, “I can assure you that my wife has been faithful.”

  “How about you?” I said.

  “Me?”

  “Have you been faithful?”

  “I don’t see what my being faithful has to do with it.”

  “Just trying to figure out if you go to cybersex bars.”

  “Hardly. I mean, I don’t think my patients would be very comfortable if they thought I was shooting up on steroids three or four nights a week.”

  “So you’ve never been inside a cybersex bar?”

  “Once or twice,” he said.

  “When was this?” Neely said.

  “Five or six years ago. When they first came around. It was the novelty. I wanted to see what they were like.”

  “Are you allergic to Byreum, Doctor Graves?”

  He smiled. “Yes, I am. Were you going to give me an injection if I said I wasn’t?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  He checked his wall chrono. “Listen, I’ve got a full load of patients today. I really need to get back to it.”

  He stood up and shook our hands again. “It was a terrible way for him to die, wasn’t it? Do you…do you suppose he was still alive when they…cleaved it off?”

  He was praying that Bridges had been alive, praying that it had taken him a long, painful time to die.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  He nodded his head and left us.

  The receptionist gave us all the good doctor’s credit receipts from last night.

  We took copies of them with us, and left.

  5

  Just after flashing my ID and being admitted to my apartment, I heard the moans from my daughter’s bedroom, and knew that she was at it again.

  My first impulse was to go in there and break up some furniture. Actually, what I wanted to do was break her up like so much kindling. But what the hell. She was my daughter and she’d been forced to have me as a father.

  I didn’t knock. I just pushed into her room.

  She was already in the process, so she wasn’t even remotely aware of my presence.

  She lay naked on the bed, her body covered with a myriad of tattoo symbols of the various causes she’d joined over her sixteen years. She was down to ninety pounds, which is way too thin for a girl of five-six. Her ribs looked like they belonged on an abandoned dog.

  I got a blanket and covered her up as well as I could. Her skin was death cold.

  The snake was at least three-fourths of the way in her mouth, so I knew better than to try to get it out. Most junkies go into shock when you try and yank the snake out.

  The snakes are something we owe to those little bastards, the Alatians, who brought them along with them. You swallow the little black devils and they give you an extraordinary high, one far more powerful than any earth drug. By the time the snake has passed through your digestive tract, and come out your other end, you’ve absorbed all the poison in it and that’s what makes you high. The snake is pretty much dead by that time, so you just pitch the twelve-inch black thing into the Destroy chute.

  And then, when you wake up, you go buy yourself another snake.

  Ellie had been hooked for seven months now. I’d had to stick up several liquor stores to do it, but I managed to get her into one of those trendy detox places. She ran away after three days. Lost her place on the waiting list. And they kept all the money, of course.

  I watched the tail of the snake wriggle between her lips. And disappear. I watched her throat choke down the last of the alien beast.

  And then Ellie was completely still except for an occasional tiny whimpering sound.

  I went out into the kitchen and put my head down on the table and cried.

  I do that sometimes. Just can’t help it. It all gets to be so fucking much that I sometimes envy what Rossiter did. Just put his shooter in his mouth and got it over with.

  Rossiter used to be my partner. Helluva good copper and a good friend. Married to a real nice lady, three kids, a house down by the river. But it wasn’t enough. He was always so goddamn sad. Always talking about the past like it was where he belonged. He’d ride alongside me and blather on and on about when there were rolling meadows as far as the eye could see and real farms where farmers grew corn and wheat and vegetables. And the cities weren’t like this back then, he’d say. Sure, there was violence. There had always been violence. But as recently as forty, fifty years ago, you could still walk down most city streets and not get blasted. Hell, they even used to decorate the streets for Christmas and other holidays. And then he’d pull out some old book and show me the pictures and really get himself worked up.

  He used to cry in front of me. One minute he was fine, the next he was leaking all over the inside of the car. I always used to get embarrassed. I could just see Neely if I started crying in front of her.

  I sat ther
e at the kitchen table and thought of Rossiter this way and it made my heart ache and I cried so hard I thought maybe I would puke. Actually puking didn’t sound all that bad an idea. Purgation. Maybe that’s what I needed. Purgation.

  Then I slept. Right there at the kitchen table with my head down. Just drifted off.

  Dreamed of Rossiter and his pasture land. Dreamed of a trip my father took me on when I was just a boy. To the last of the remaining wilderness up in Wisconsin. Most beautiful land I’d ever seen. Went fishing there for two days. Never smelled anything as good as that fresh air in the morning. Never saw water that clear or sunlight that bright and clean. Not even sex was as good as that feeling.

  Then I was with my wife again and she was alive and we were cuddling in bed and she was telling me how much she loved me and I was crying then, too, except this time I was crying because I was so happy. My wife was the most perfect human being I’d ever known. Full of laughter and easy smiles. I used to bring her gifts three, four times a week—

  “Dad.” Then: “Dad.”

  When I woke up, Ellie was standing there. She had her nose rings and tongue rings and ear rings and nipple rings all in place. She’d sprayed her hair pink. She was getting ready to go out. That was the only thing about the wriggle highs, as they were called. They only lasted about an hour.

  “Dad.”

  I pawed sleep from my face.

  “You headed back to school?” I said.

  She frowned. “God, Dad, you mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “Figured what out, honey?”

  No matter how pissed off I get with her, I never forget that she’s my daughter and that I love her.

  “I quit school two months ago.”

  “Oh, Ellie.”

  “It’s boring, Dad.”

  “You shoulda told me.”

  “You shoulda been able to figure it out. I mean, I’m around the apartment an awful lot during the day, aren’t I?”

  “I guess that’s a good point.”

  “And I haven’t been asking you for any school money.”

  “Yeah, that’s another good point.”

  I reached over and took her hand.

  “So what’re you doing during the day?”

  For the first time, she looked a little nervous. “Oh, this and that.”

  “This and that?”

  “Yeah, you know, a little of one thing, a little of another.”

  “Aw, kiddo. Don’t try to bullshit the old man. Now tell me what you’re up to.”

  She shrugged her sweet little shoulders. “Dancing.”

  “Dancing?”

  “In a club.”

  “A club?”

  “You know, a gyration club.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m screwing anybody or anything.”

  Vibrating clubs, in case you don’t know, is kind of the cut-rate version of cybersex. Naked gals put these vibrating implements on their fingers and then they sit on your lap and squirm around until you come.

  “I want you to quit,” I said.

  “No way.”

  “You know what your mother would say if she knew?”

  Ellie smirked at me. “Yeah? Well maybe you don’t know everything about Mom you think you do.”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  She shrugged again. “Never mind.”

  She turned and started away.

  I grabbed her slender wrist. “Meaning what exactly?”

  She sighed, looked uncomfortable. “Meaning that you idealize her too much.”

  “She was about as perfect as a person could get.”

  “No, she wasn’t, Dad.”

  I saw the pity in her eyes and it scared me. She really knew something I didn’t.

  I repeated myself. “Meaning what exactly?”

  She sighed. “You don’t want to hear this, Dad.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Please, Dad. Please don’t make me say it.”

  “You said she wasn’t perfect — meaning what exactly?”

  She sighed again. “Meaning she had boyfriends on the side.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “She did, Dad. She even brought some of them up here. One day I came home from school early and I caught her in bed with one of them. Couple days later, he tried to hit on me.”

  But I wasn’t listening anymore. I was just deaf, dumb, and blind. Nothing got through.

  Boyfriends.

  I thought about Neely’s husband sitting in that wheelchair, totally insensate to everything that was going on around him.

  And you know what? I felt a kind of envy of him.

  Then my head was down on the table again and I was crying and then Ellie was rubbing my neck, and then she was crying too and saying over and over, “I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have told ya. I’m so sorry…”

  6

  That afternoon, the precinct was busy. There’d been a meat riot in one of the western sectors, meat riots being the name the newsies gave to large groups of people with guns raiding supermarkets. I always felt sorry for the starving people, and I took no pleasure in killing them. Some coppers loved this kind of shit — target practice, they called it — but I always tried to avoid this particular duty.

  Neely poked my arm and said, “Look.”

  On the computer screen was a listing of all the sex crimes committed in the city over the past four years.

  Under the sub-heading of “Genital Mutilation,” we found the number “6” listed.

  Six such cases.

  Unfortunately, every last one of them involved females. Not a single male in sight.

  We next ran backgrounders on all the owners of the cybersex parlors, see if maybe they were involved in some sort of illicit activities that Bobby Bridges might have stumbled into. But nothing. For cybersex owners, they were some clean living sons-of-bitches.

  We decided to go see Sandy Lane.

  ****

  “So you never stalked him?”

  “No.”

  “Or harassed him at work?”

  “No.”

  “Or threatened to kill his wife?”

  “No.”

  “Or threatened to kill him?”

  “No.”

  Neely, who had been asking the questions, smiled. “Well, if you didn’t do any of those things, Ms. Lane, then Bobby Bridges had quite an imagination.”

  “He thought I was in love with him.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “Are you kidding? He was just some pushy little guy who thought he was a stud.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you know what Byreum is, Ms. Lane?” I said.

  “Sure. That truth stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “What about it?”

  “We’d like to give you an injection,” I said.

  “Right here?”

  “Right.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right.”

  “No.”

  “You’re refusing?” I said.

  She nodded. “I want a shyster.”

  “No problem. You’re free to tri-phone him so we can see and hear the whole process.”

  We’d been at Sandy Lane’s place for half-an-hour, a crumbling ancient home right on the edge of a very violent sector. The home had been divided into apartments. She lived in the back, on the second floor.

  Chemicals had bleached her hair and whitened her teeth and filled out her breasts and tanned her skin and blued her eyes. She wore a fluffy red robe and matching red slippers that for some reason looked sort of sad on her big flat feet.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “I guess I kinda did have the hots for him for a little while.”


  “I see,” I said.

  “But I never threatened to kill him.”

  “All right.”

  “Or her.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I didn’t stalk him, either.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’d just kinda show up in places where he was once in a while.”

  “Ah.”

  “And a coupla times I probably waited for him in parking lots. At bars, I mean.”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “But I never stalked him stalked him if you know what I mean.”

  I decided to try an old police trick that still worked from time to time.

  “We have an eyewitness who says he saw you talking to Bobby at the cybersex parlor the night he died.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  I nodded to Neely. “You got that Byreum injection ready?”

  She held up the hypo.

  “All right, all right,” Sandy Lane said. “I was there. And I did talk to him.”

  “Talk?”

  “Yeah, and that’s all, too. I didn’t cut off his dick.” She looked right at Neely. “Though, believe me, I sure wouldn’t have minded doing it. He was a son-of-a-bitch. A real son-of-a-bitch.”

  Then she started crying so hard that I had to sit her down in a chair and Neely had to go get her a glass of water.

  7

  Later in the afternoon, we took Sandy Lane down to the precinct where we took full-length holo shots of her. We then brought in the eyewitness who said he’d seen somebody standing by Bobby Bridges’ body the night of the murder. But he couldn’t positively ID her. He said maybe, that was the best he could do for us. Maybe.

  After the eyewitness left, we spent an hour more with the Lane woman. We collected all the samples we could — blood, tissue, hair, the works — hoping it would be useful later on. Then we let her go. No way we could hold her, given the little we had.

  Later that night, an hour or so into our patrol, Neely said, “How about Davis?”

  “The holo store guy?”

  “Right. He’s three months out.”

  “Maybe we should wait a little longer.”

  She shook her head. “Mulligan, I don’t know about you, but I need the money.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do, too.”

  “He makes more than we do,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”