The Memory Killer

by J. A. Kerley

  Debro felt his anger rising as he crossed to Harold, a memory regressing thirteen years, to high school, Harold Brighton practicing for a production of Grease, his lithe body vaulting across the stage, his shirt off in the dank heat of the auditorium, shorts rolled up his sinewy dancer’s thighs. It’s after-hours and Brighton is rehearsing alone. Debro has crept …

  into the wings and crouches in the dark behind an old piano, watching Harold Brighton cross the floor repeatedly, working to get the moves correct. Debro’s hand drifts to his crotch as Brighton counts off one-two-three and again launches into his routine. Except this time Brighton doesn’t stop downstage: He runs straight to the piano and stares down at the crouching Debro.

  “I knew I saw someone. What are you doing?”

  “I-I-I …” is all Debro can muster. He’s wobbling, trying to keep from fainting in terror.

  Brighton leans closer. “You’re that pimply fat thing in Mr Kremer’s homeroom, aren’t you?”

  Debro can only nod. He feels tears welling in his eyes.

  “Why are you spying on me, you gross turd?” Brighton demands, arms crossed.

  “I-I-I wuh-wasn’t ssss-pying,” Debro says, wiping spittle from his chin. “I wuhwuh-was …”

  Brighton’s eyes fall to Debro’s khakis. Just below the belt buckle is a dark and spreading dampness. Brighton’s face wrinkles in disgust.

  “Oh, God … sick. You, you monster.”

  The next day all of Brighton’s friends have heard the tale. They snicker in the hall.

  Debro whips the tarp from Harold and swings the pry-bar at his head. Thud. Harold slumps to the floor. Debro crouches and sinks the needle into Harold’s hip, pausing to note what a lovely, muscular, dancing hip it is. He looks down at the man’s legs, strident with muscle. They’re beautiful. But then, the man is a dancer, a special person. He’d received gifts most people could only dream of having.

  But he was mean and nasty, too.

  Debro’s hand lingered on the powerful leg before he stood, staring down at Brighton. The man clearly didn’t deserve his ability to dance. When he returned to the world he’d be as he always was – special – just as he’d return to being spiteful and nasty and causing pain.

  I’ve been wrong, Debro thought, nudging Brighton’s leg with his foot. Taking them, using them, throwing them back into their lives to pick up exactly where they’d left off: nasty little boys so smug and sure and perfect … never knowing the insults, the put-downs, the laughter that people like Debro had to endure. People like Harold Brighton had never known pain, only adoration.

  What they really needed to know was Justice.

  Debro thought a long moment, then pulled off his knit hat, set it back in the anteroom, and rolled up his sleeves. The heavy pry-bar in his hand, he stepped back into the main room and closed the door.

  When he emerged five minutes later, he paused in the anteroom to strip off his clothes and shoes, red with blood spatter and pieces of pink flesh. He returned to his apartment feeling like each breath was filled with sunlight. He paused and looked down at himself. A spreading wetness across his shorts. Somehow his release had gotten lost in his time with Brighton, all part of a continuous, explosive joy.

  Feeling intoxicated, Debro showered, dressed in chinos and a blue T-shirt, crossing the room to pick up his knit hat, snugging it to his head. He paused, thought for a moment, then pulled off the hat and threw it to the floor.

  “Debro calling,” he said as he stomped up and down on the hat. He smiled. Debro wasn’t his real name, but it was a name he loved, a kind of joke he played on the world.

  It stood for Dead Brother.

  Debro kicked the hat into a corner, pivoted on his feet like a dancer, and skipped back up the stairs to return a corrected Harold Brighton to the world.

  We stayed in the office. I’d put an investigative crew into checking out local herbalists, asking whether anyone had expressed an interest in toxic plants, but so far the results were a big fat zero.

  “There are herbalists across the area,” Detective Ruiz had told us. “Datura’s not something they carry. When I ask, they wonder if I’ve been reading Castaneda.”

  I recalled Carlos Castaneda from college, writing about supposed meetings between an anthropologist and a Mexican brujo or sorcerer. The brujo gives the anthropologist datura, which sends him to a dark land filled with terrifying creatures. But the brujo didn’t keep black locust and dumb cane in his medicine bag.

  At two in the afternoon my phone rang, the screen showing GARY.

  “Donnie sent me a letter,” Ocampo said, his voice trembling. “It’s horrible.”

  “Put the letter down, don’t touch it. I’m on my way.”

  Gershwin and I split up, him heading off to interview the potentials from the Missings file, me racing to Ocampo’s shop. Jonathan was there, looking less reserved and cool than previous visits. Maybe the guy humping the window had broken the effect.

  “Something’s happening,” the clerk said, rolling his eyeballs to the ceiling. “Gary’s up and pacing.”

  I heard labored creaking of the floorboards and elevatored upstairs to find Ocampo in the center of the room, his legs like pink, rash-stricken phone poles. He wore a blue velvet robe that could have covered an antelope and was sipping nervously from his big red bathroom cup. For some reason I detected a slight background odor of vomit.

  Ocampo pointed to his bedside table. “It’s there. I don’t want to go near it. It stinks.”

  “Stinks? Why?”

  “Read it.”

  The letter was face up, freckled with wiped-away drips like coffee. A torn-open envelope lay beside it, one of those with the bubble lining. I leaned and read the precisely inked block lettering.

  I wrote this on paper I PUKED ON after seeing you. You are a FAT SLOB and make me ASHAMED. You are WEAK. You make me SICK! Things like YOU shouldn’t be allowed to LIVE!!!

  There was no signature, but I figured it was Donnie.

  “Not allowed to live,” Ocampo sniffled. “He wants to kill me.”

  I picked the note up in my fingernails, held my breath, and walked it to the kitchen. I returned to the living room and cranked half-open windows wide to air warm and smelling of a nearby tacquería.

  “You’re safe,” I said. “There’s a surveillance team watching around the clock.”

  “He’s watching, too. How else would he know I’m a fat slob?”

  “He can’t get close. He wants to scare you.”

  “Why?” Ocampo was almost in tears. “Why is he doing this?”

  “He’s disturbed, Gary. Listen, I’ve got to get this to forensics as soon as possi—”

  “DON’T LEAVE!” he shrieked. He sat in the huge chair and hung his head. “At least not yet. Please … my heart’s pounding. I feel sick.”

  “Do you want me to call a doctor?”

  “No, just hang out a bit, OK?”

  I took a photo of the letter with my phone, made a call, then pulled the wooden chair from the wall and sat, figuring I might be able to get his mind off events, at least temporarily, so I initiated idle chatter to get him talking.

  “How long you owned the store, Gary? Long?”

  He shrugged. “For almost a decade.”

  “How’d you get started? I mean, this isn’t a standard business.”

  He looked to see if I was joking, saw I wasn’t, cleared his throat. “I-I collected comics when I was a kid, buying over the Internet, selling. I was … am, actually pretty good at it.”

  “You must be, to have made enough to buy a store.”

  “I study things, subscribe to Hollywood news sheets. I listen for whispers of superhero scripts being optioned, movies based on comics. I buy heavily in that series. If the movie hits, the prices go way up. Especially rare issues. Then I buy all the promo items associated with the movie, because they’ll become collector’s items.”

  I smiled. “Buy low, sell high.”

  He nodded. “I’ve boug
ht issues for forty bucks, sold them for two thousand. I got a Japanese customer spent over twelve grand last year. My biggest customer is a member of the Saudi royal family. The dude’s sitting on, like, a billion barrels of oil but when I call and say I’ve got an early mint Marvel, he freaking flies over to get it in person.”

  “How about the video games?”

  “Jonathan’s better with the games. I do the comics and the magic stuff.”

  “Why magic? Is it profitable?”

  He reddened. “Maybe six hundred bucks in sales last year. I like magic. It’s … probably kind of ridiculous, but I was a prestidigitator of some note. A hit at children’s birthday parties. I was called the Great Campini.”

  A prestidigitator, I thought, hearing a note of pride in his voice. The Great Campini.

  “This was when, Gary?”

  “When I was a teenager, junior high and high school.”

  I had a mental picture of a chubby, fifteen-year-old Ocampo standing before a half-circle of eight-year-olds in party hats, the center of attention as he pulled a stream of pennants from his mouth or produced quarters from behind ears to squeals of delight and applause, probably the only applause he ever received.

  My brother had gone through a magician phase, mail-ordering a miniature guillotine that appeared to slice through his finger, a box that seemed empty one moment, dispensing a nickel after my brother tapped it with his wand, a pencil wrapped in electrician’s tape. He learned to make a quarter seem to jump from one hand to another. Jeremy’s magic phase had lasted about two months, which I expected was typical. That Ocampo kept the trappings of his sole youthful success seemed telling, and rather sad.

  “You still do any, uh, prestidigitation?” I asked.

  A sigh. “I showed Jonathan a few tricks. He yawned.”

  “Whaddaya got, Campini?” I chided. “Show me something.”

  “I couldn’t. I’m rusty … It’s been a while. I’ll screw up.”

  Though his mouth was saying no, his eyes were hopeful.

  Ocampo moved faster than I thought possible, scrabbling through the closet until finding a red turban fronted with feathery eyes from a peacock’s tail.

  “The Great Campini is in the house. Take a seat, Detective.”

  I sat in the wooden chair, Ocampo the cushioned one. “Pull it closer,” he said, suddenly the man in charge. “Right up to me. There … perfect.”

  I sat. He patted at his robe as if looking for something, his eyebrows theatrically raised. “Hmmm. Might you have a coin I could use, Detective? A quarter?”

  “Uh, let me see if …” I started to stand and check my pockets.

  He waved me back down. “Wait, I know where one is.” He held up an empty hand, the index and forefinger pinching together like tweezers. “Open your mouth, Detective.”

  I complied. The tweezing fingers flicked toward my lips and came away with a bright quarter between his fingertips. “You should get a coin purse, Detective,” he said, dropping the quarter in my palm. “And not keep your money in your mouth.”

  I laughed and he took my wrist in hand and pressed the quarter deep into my palm and rolled my fingers around it as he intoned, “Now you see it, now you don’t. Is it there or …” he tapped my hand with his, then opened it finger by finger. No coin. “… turned to air?”

  I hadn’t felt the grab and smiled. “Nice.”

  He bowed and circled his hand, hiding the grin but loving the moment. “The Great Campini never disappoints.”

  I heard a small buzzer sound from somewhere near the bed. Ocampo padded to the corner of the room and switched on one of the monitors. Its screen showed the front door downstairs, motion as someone entered.

  He gave me worried look. “Are you expecting someone?”

  I nodded. “Forensics is picking up the letter.”

  He glanced at the stained page and his face fell as he pulled off the turban. He tossed it atop the bureau and fell heavily into bed, the vomit-reeking letter again forefront in his mind.

  The Great Campini had left the building.

  I was back in the office in minutes. Gershwin studied my photo of the note.

  “He’s obviously not happy with big brother.”

  “The anger is so visceral – puking? – that the note seems written soon after Donnie got his first look at Gary.”

  Gershwin pulled a chair before my desk and sat, legs crossed, hands behind his neck. “What’s your take, Big Ryde? You spent like what, two thousand hours interviewing crazies in prison?”

  “My hunch is that in Donnie’s megalomaniacal delusions he feels Gary thinks exactly as he does, and he wants to share his conquests, to revel in triumph. Maybe he wants them to physically share what he perceives as the spoils, like a prehistoric hunter bringing meat to a kinsman.”

  “Meat in the form of pretty young gay boys.”

  I nodded. “Somehow he discovered Gary and expected they’d become a team, the invincible twinship. He expected to find a copy of himself. Instead he found, well … Gary.”

  21

  All the talk about brothers reminded me mine was doing things that were probably bizarre or dangerous and maybe both, so I distracted myself by heading to the hospital to check on our two victims. I was surprised to see Morningstar at the nurses’ station, and veered her way.

  “Things slow at the morgue, Doc? You must be here two hours a day.”

  “I make it up at night. At least until I—”

  We heard a crash from Brian Caswell’s room and ran the hall. I entered with drawn weapon, finding Caswell up and shuffling through the bedclothes, the IV rack tipped over on the floor. He looked at us with wild eyes. “I can’t find my clothes. I’ve got a show to do and I can’t find my clothes!”

  He was having some form of episode. He eyes fell to my Glock and he shrieked. I’m surprised the window didn’t shatter.

  “Easy, Brian,” I said, holstering my weapon. “I’m a cop, she’s a doc. We’re here to help you.”

  “Then you can start by finding my fucking clothes,” he demanded, lifting a pillow and looking beneath. “Someone stole them.”

  “Look around, bud. You’re in a hospital room.”

  He didn’t seem to hear, bending to check beneath the bed. “I’ve got a fucking performance. I’m doing Ivana Tramp tonight.”

  “It got cancelled,” I said, going with the flow. “You’re on next week.”

  He peered at me over the bed. “Really?”

  “Cross my heart.” Which I did.

  He looked around and seemed suddenly perplexed. His knees began to buckle and I vaulted the bed to catch Caswell before he fell, laying him back on the mattress. Two nurses hovered outside the door and I waved them away, under control.

  “Shitarooni,” Caswell said, like seeing the surroundings for the first time. “It is a freaking hospital. I, uh, why?”

  Morningstar uprighted the IV rack, the tubes still running to Caswell’s thin arm. “Thanks, hon,” Caswell said to Morningstar “God, you’re cute. Great eyes.”

  “You woke up earlier, Brian,” I said. Talked to a nurse, remember?”

  “Uh … kind of. Big freckly girlie with—” he bounced invisible breasts. “bodacious breastage?”

  I’d seen the woman a time or two in the hall, hard to miss, easy to remember. “That would be her,” I acknowledged.

  “What happened to me?”

  I looked out the door. No sign of Costa. “You were drugged after a performance, bud.”

  “I did a show? How were the reviews?”

  I did a thumbs-up. I didn’t mention the show was over a week ago. He rolled his head, arched his back, frowned. “I ache. And unless I’m wrong, someone’s been knocking on my back door.”

  “Uh, yes. You were assaulted.”

  He shifted on the bed, winced. “Gawd, tell me about it. I hope the bastard practiced safe sex.”

  “We know he’s not positive,” Morningstar said. HIV status had been checked along with the D
NA.

  Caswell sighed. “At least there’s that, fair lady. You … the pensive fellow with the sexy frown. Did you catch the monster?”

  I realized he was addressing me. “We’re trying, Brian. It’d help if you could tell us what you remember.”

  He closed his eyes and searched for memories. “I’m sorry, your detectiveness, all I see is me at home getting ready for a performance, packing my dresses, accessories … after that it’s like a switch goes off. Click.”

  “No weird pictures, stuff like that?”

  “I see pieces of things, shapes. But mainly, it’s like I fell asleep and woke up here. Listen, I gotta get home, get a couple vodka tonics in my tummy and some ice on my chundini. Can you make that happen?”

  “You gotta stay here, Brian. The toxins may take a while to clear. I’ll have a nurse bring some ice.”

  “Send the one with the big bosoms. Maybe she’ll give me some seeds.”

  “Seeds?”

  He winked. “So I can grow a pair like that. Woo-woo.”

  “He’s a piece of work,” I smiled as Morningstar and I retreated to the elevator, buoyed by Caswell’s recuperation.

  “I think he’s the type who has to keep talking,” she said as the door rang open and we stepped inside. “If he stops, he’ll think about what happened. It’s a protective mechanism.”

  I smiled as the door shut. “Protective mechanism, Doc? Maybe you should add psychoanalysis to your pathology duties.”

  “It would be easy to make my folks lay on the couch. But this would be a good time to tell you: I won’t have path duties much longer. I’m leaving the department.”

  I turned, trying to keep my jaw from dropping. “You’re going to another city?”

  We stopped and the doors whisked open. Morningstar stepped into the lobby. “I’m going into taxidermy and specializing in mice,” she smiled over her shoulder. “You spend less money on filling.”