Do anything… but for godsake don't actually do anything.
'You gonna help him?' she said.
'Uh.' His brain was finding elementary tasks confounding. He wanted to stare at her for hours. She was exotic, enigmatic, sensual. He realized her smell was making him crazy. She smelled like sex, recent friction and humidity, lots of it, robust and deep-dish. 'Uh. I. ' Seeing her expression downshift into resentment helped clear his board. 'Yeah. I guess. That is, I mean -'
'Last warning, fungo,' barked the Robot Cop. Jamaica, not cuffed, sweetly offered a single-digit salutation.
'MR HAPPY,' Jonathan said.
'You got it, babe.' Her gaze was still levelled at the Robot Cop, plotting vengeance, mutilations.
Jonathan had just joined the ranks of the underworld. If the cops did not throw him back, he would balloon fiercely out, a blowfish of spines and stingers and concentrated venom. His aggressors would go yahand spring back with only a hairsbreadth moment to regret their poor pushy judgement before the swift slash and tear of fangs and poison and the slow acid suffering of justified death.
A child had vanished from the third floor, leaving behind a screaming infant sister, a befuddled father newly home from the graveyard shift, and a pregnant mother nearly grand mal with shock. Jonathan felt relief, knowing that whatever had happened he could not be incriminated. He knew already that he was innocent.
The old man was released first. He lived on the first floor right underneath Jonathan. When he shut his door he was bitching about how Jew babies cried the most.
The Lizard Cop and the Bird Cop engaged in a quick confab concerning how Jamaica might work off the time it would take them to book her. Jamaica spit on the Lizard Cop in fury and was formally arrested.
Cruz was conducted to the back seat of one of the patrol cars by the Robot Cop, who did not care if Cruz bonked his head while being shoved inside. Jonathan remembered that he had just assumed residence on Mayor Daly's old stomping ground.
After leeching him of useless minutiae, the police permitted Jonathan to resume his lawful private business, sans apology. Free at last to hump up the stairs, Jonathan felt as though he had just gotten away with something major.
He found the black cat waiting for him outside of207.
This time he noticed the stink of fresh paint permeating the second floor. That would be Fergus, sloppily rejuvenating some other recent vacancy. Jonathan smiled when he remembered that landlord had been a epithet, a perjorative during the days of the Colonies. The phylum sure hadn't matured much since.
Jonathan's bathroom was a sterling exemplar of Fergus' overwhelming inadequacy. A half-hearted attempt to retile it had been aborted. Periodically, poorly glued tiles would disengage to shatter on the floor or in the tub. Chunks of stale grouting crumbled free to hamper those who dared go barefoot. Vermin used the resultant trenches to conduct nighttime troop movements, like Viet Cong in their tunnel mazes. Now and then a drowning bug would make a desperate leap for life during a shower and land on a naked human being. If you hazarded a hot bath in an attempt to bypass the neverending cold, you might spot the same bug, swimming, hellbent. Downdrafts of frozen air rattled the metal lining of the ventilation shaft and sneaked goosebump fingers through the crummy seal on the bathroom window. If you went wet in there, it was enough to spike your temples like a mouthful of ice cream.
The bathroom ceiling was another effort of Fergus' that had not been a success. Jonathan could estimate the building's horrendous seasonal plumbing problems by looking up. Some twenty months back the ceiling had rotted out and been replaced with crookedly sawn sheets of gypsum board stamped Sheetrock Firecode. Rather than plastering and painting, Fergus had sutured the seams with fat swatches of duct tape. These soon peeled under gravity. The overweight wallboard grew moist and gray from seepage about once a week. It was beginning to sag like parachute nylon. It stank of mildew. Jonathan had already fabricated a nightmare image of it busting loose to shower him with sump water and bloated insects and other tenant's flushings.
Face it. The bathrooms in most places where people pulled the old nine-to-fiver were generally worse. Cracked concrete floors. Wobbly toilet seats. That one-and-only stench of spattered piss.
Feed me.
'Free ride. You little parasite.' He fished up his keys, not yet used to knowing which came first in the game of locks he had to beat. He set down the box and his fingers unclenched, achingly. The cat sauntered over to sniff the swag, then rub a shorthaired cheekbone against one cardboard corner, rasp rasp.
Come on. We're pals. Feed me.
Just stay clear of my legs, Jonathan thought. What might be a cat might also be a spider inching up your leg, hunting for a warm place to empty venom sacs.
Jonathan's inner/outer door arrangement was identical to Cruz's, in 307. To the immediate right of Jonathan's first door, however, was one of the old iceboxes, a vertically stacked row of three small doors. The latched cooler doors still worked, making the solid click-lock noise of an industrial butcher's cold room. Chicago was once termed the Hog Butcher of the World. Thanks to Fergus' artistry with the paintbrush, the fit of the small doors was too tight, and sticky. The cream-colored paint had intimidated the corridor lights down to a baleful yellow.
Kenilworth Arms was like a latter-day House of Usher, its shafts and passageways actually the convolutions of a lunatic's brain. Somewhere near the center, that feverish glow, the burnout-flare of something ill, something dying, something not entirely normal. So much paint, bulbs so lightless, floors so creaky. Shut-down elevators. Obsolete freezers. No doubt other aspects of the structure that worked, did so in abnormal or unanticipated ways. Jonathan thought of rats in the foundations as potential roving hematomas; black cats, freestalking tumors waiting to perch. All the tenants just the passing fictions of a crazy person's imagination - here now, gone tomorrow. Errant thoughts, facts to be misfiled by an unsound mind whose memories were sepia-toned and sugar-coated by extreme age, perhaps even by dreams.
Be a good little corpuscle, he thought, or the antibodies will getcha. The spark of a single synpase was never noticed as an important event by itself. Or missed.
Hey. Food time.
'I won't forget, you little putz. Who else am I going to complain to about the po-leece?'
I'm innocent. I wasn't even there.
'You're lying.' Said casually, with no oomph. 'MR HAPPY.' The intrigue of codes committed to memory was seductive. Like Cruz, Jonathan had not bothered wading into the quicksand of local forms that would gain him a phone for 207. He did not plan on being in residence that long, Bash willing. A telephone was an unneeded luxury inside a stopover for transients. There were phones at the post office, three blocks away. Apart from Bash or Capra's office, who was he going to call?
Just now the prizewinning question: Was he going to call MR HAPPY?
He imagined Cruz's glare, should he do nothing to get him out of jail. How inclined toward physical retribution might Cruz be? Jonathan had watched him hang stolid in the face of cops and cuffs and baiting.
How had that firey girl known what she could get away with? Jonathan did not admire her so much as wish he could emulate her on an autonomic level. Respond without thinking; trust your reflexes. She had bigger balls than he did.
Scuze me.
The cat slipped ahead of him into the room. Most cats are thinner than most human beings and the door had only been opened a crack. He had left a lamp on inside. By the time he got to the windows all but one of the police growlers had departed, leaving the overlapping scrawl of multiple tire tracks in the snowy streets. The near-hysterical Velasquez tribe had been loaded into one of those cars and hauled away for more paperwork. It was a fair bet that Oakwood's white-on-white constabulary presupposed that this beaner mama had decided she had one nifio too many and needed to trim her workload. The question in which the authorities would be most interested tonight was: Okay, what did you really do with the body, you dumb Mex or Puerto Rican or whatever the h
ell you are.
That was why Kenilworth was not overrun with searching cops.
The cat resumed its investigation of Jonathan's other boxes. Bash had loaned him a collapsible camp cot that folded out bigger than a single, not quite a full. Jonathan would not trust his spine to anything that Fergus might scare up as 'furnishings,' although he did thieve a wicker rocking chair from the wreckage in one of the basement storage rooms. 207 had come with a hot plate, refrigerator, a mirrored bureau and a card table.
Something stank.
The fridge was chugging, pump laboring with a sound that suggested duress. Maybe the motor was busily frying its coil. But the smell was not electrical or mechanical; it was organic, a hint of decay. It was too cold inside. Jonathan could hear the steam heater in the corner sibilantly delivering warmth. He knew the knob was opened all the way. Definitely too cold.
A knock of chill hit him next to the closet. By process of elimination, he called the place with the tub and toilet the bathroom; cold air was coming at him from the bathroom, then. Carrying the smell with it.
Had the john overflowed? His lips retracted to tighten his face at the odor. His body requested he breathe orally unless he enjoyed the spectacle of regurgitation.
The stink was similar to maggotty meat, a lush bouquet that again took him back to his Choc-O-Pop days and his discovery of a decomposing squirrel in the fireplace flue. He had yanked the sooty steel handle to vent the hearth. It resisted, screeching open when out-muscled. And the tiny corpse had tumbled out to burst open at his feet, loaded with wriggling white grubs. Yuck.
Jonathan wondered if other tenants had to put up with this smell of fresh dogshit and suppurated bandages. As he reached for the pullchain over the sink, moving air hit him in a rush and for one second of bugfuck terror he was sure that someone or some thing was in the tiny bathroom with him.
The window next to the tub was broken, most of the sharp, reflective wedges scattered inside the tub. Raked onto the sharp fractures still clinging to the frame were gelid clots of reddish-black matter like bloodstained feces. It was in the tub, too, a lot of it, slopped onto the sides as if a dumptruck of sewage had been emptied there through the window and most of it had bubbled down the drain, leaving semisolid chunks and crimson, inviting flies. Who knew where the flies had been drawn from, in this cold?
It was a fastidious mess, considering.
Jonathan turned the hot tap to full and engaged the shower plunger to dissolve and sluice away the detritus. Only four or five viscid droplets of muck had glopped onto the floor outside the tub. He tried not to imagine what it actually might be. It was just sewage, backup. Bloody sewage. The stuff in the tub was slightly redder than the stuff on the window.
Mrs Velasquez's child had been taken in blood. Jonathan's heartbeat fired and missed.
Leaving the water running and the doors open, he hurried up the next flight of stairs and came out on the third floor. Here was Cruz's apartment, 307, locked tight. Several doors down, near the stilled elevator was the Velasquezes'. Past it, just around the western corner near another set of disused icebox doors, he found a bloodstain on the carpet. White tape had been laid around it.
When he returned to his bathroom he found the cat lapping at the coagulated gunk on the floor. He swept the animal aside, using his foot but not kicking it. It took no offense and kept its eyes on what it thought was food.
'Get the hell away from that, stupid, you want to poison yourself?'
You said you'd feed me.
'I did not say I'd feed you. Just hang on a second.'
I'm hungry now.
'You gotta be kidding. I was hungry until I saw this shitstorm here.' It smeared when he attempted to scrub it, releasing a riper, subdermal sourness. 'I was hungry until I had to ftick around half the night with the goddamn police; before I practically became an accessory to a drug bust and an infanticide!'
Fortunately for Jonathan, Bash had bestown a six-pack of Quietly Beer. Those first cold gulps would rinse down a lot of strife.
Jonathan no longer cared who might be disturbed at this hour. He redonned his trucker's gloves and used a wrench to break out the remaining pieces of glass, which plummeted into the dark netherworld below and splashed. The shaft itself was no paragon of olfactory pleasure. It was like sticking your face into the smoke from a chimney at a crematorium. Something had died down there, something serious, and from the smell, still rotting eagerly away. Jonathan's face tried to close all ports in a tight pucker; even his surprised pores slammed shut.
Rats. Perhaps they had crawled into the bottom of the shaft to eat, and got trapped down there, or drowned.
As he pulled his head back to safety he heard a slight noise, beyond the dripping water and the steel acoustics of the shaft itself. Sort of a tuneless hum, truncated. Maybe another of Fergus' hapless tenants, weeping in the night.
He emptied a box and cut it apart with his Swiss army knife, sizing a square that would block the hole for tonight. After work tomorrow he'd try to beard Fergus and complain.
Doubtless he would get new window glass, a protestation of innocence, and no clues. He'd tell Bash about it at work, and Bash would listen. But he had no obligation to explain the night's events; he had his own problems to wrestle these days. Camela the Butt Person, for one.
'MR HAPPY,' he said. An observation. A curiosity. A reminder. A possible path to some facts he could utilize.
As a name, I hate it. Stick to Cat.
'You cause any more problems, you become a rectal nuisance, and I'll yoke you with a stupid name, kiddo.' This was not a toothless threat. Too many people he'd known had handicapped their pets with imbecilic labels derived from Tolkien or Star Wars or comic strips.
Or a cat. May be a cat fell in and was bitten to death by all the rats. A BIG cat.
Cruz could enlighten him. This sort of mystery was completely beyond Jonathan's ken.
'Tell you what. I'll leave you in here. Live bait. If you're still here when I get back, we'll try something else. No sense in trying to sleep right now, anyway.'
He left the cat a dish of skim milk and some smoked turkey, then bundled up, bound for the phones at the Oakwood post office.
THIRTEEN
This cell just wasn't big enough for Cruz and the guy who wanted to mangle him.
Routine nightly bullpen follies, he thought. No one in the block could know what time it was. There were no windows, no clocks, and no public servant was about to waste his or her life by playing cuckoo-bird for the lowlife soiling the cages. Along about dawn, Cruz got to see the result of one of Officer Stallis' forcible restraints. The glimpse was too detailed.
A guy nineteen or so. Hard to tell past the blood. Divested of a biker jacket, shorn of insignia plus anything with a solid or sharp edge, shaken free of smokes and change, belt and shoes confiscated, he was hammerlocked, handcuffed and staggering. He had gotten his nose skewed sideways and a tooth or two was lost upfront. He had bitten through his lower lip. Or fallen and accidentally struck his head on a curb, several times. He had been revived with Officer Stallis' baton, at which time he made a gesture both officers Stallis and Reinholtz interpreted as threatening. He had probably been trying to hold his face on and figure out which way gravity was pulling. Fortunately the rear door of the patrol car sprang open and prevented the suspect from inflicting grievous bodily harm upon either officer. Several times.
Cruz had been abstracting past the barwork, hands stuck through the interstices and into the freer portion of the cellblock, when Stallis had dragged in his catch of the night. The guy tried to clop and pace the duty officer's bring-along, but the cop was in a hurry and the arrestee still didn't know what planet he had just landed on. There was no time to compensate for the new and unusual G-forces and atmosphere. On this alien world you were expected to breathe your own blood. Midway past the bullpen the new prisoner lost it, doubling over and coughing.
'Wait, wait… oh, god!'
The duty officer's face flared with
annoyance. He executed a classic ten-hutt stiffarm, grabbing scruff and cuffs and straightening the crooked captive the way you'd unfold a deck chair. He wheeled the guy around to fling him headlong into the bullpen's grid of metal. Cruz thought of the way he would flop a topheavy mattress against the nearest wall to keep it from tipping backward and overwhelming him. He jerked his arms in too late. Droplets from the Oakwood station's newest guest, unimpeded by the bars, speckled him. A deathly draft of beer-breath hoicked at him, stinging his nostrils with the rotten-tooth odor of congealing blood.
'Fuck!' Cruz spat mostly at the uniform. He was behind bars now, and free to say just about any damned thing he cared to, since he was no longer in control of his immediate destiny. He wished for a teeny pinch of blow to put him on Cruz Control until escape time. He was, right now, glad he had kept his head and not smarted off to look good in front of Jamaica. She knew the score, anyway.
The new arrival was billeted in solitary, a few doors down the stone corridor. That made him a minor; otherwise he'd be in with the general population. They were going to unload on the poor sumbitch: Obstruction, assault with intent, impeding officers in their lawful duty, resisting arrest, and whatever garni du jour they could add to whatever it was the guy had done in the first place. Bail would be astronomical.
Big deal. Cruz knew his own bail would top four figures, easy. They had 24 hours to charge him. The way police logic worked in Oakwood, until Cruz was charged he was not entitled to any phone calls. If he complained about this later, they would simply respond that he was offered his calls, but had refused them. Once you're in that cell, shine the bullshit some cops will tell you about getting to use the telephone.
The Shaft Page 14
