The Dead Do Not Improve
Page 12
“Who is they?”
“The same people who drugged you.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Well, for you … It was a mistake. They thought you were some other cop. But for the other guy, the pornographer”—she looked down, demurely, while pronouncing that word—“they’ve been planning this for a while. They want to scare him.”
“They thought I was some other cop?”
“Bar Davis.”
“Bar Davis is a woman.”
“Well, they know that now. But they just assumed, you know, ’cause you were with the other guy.”
“They thought I was Bar Davis.”
“Yes. But they knew they fucked up when they checked your ID when you were passed out.”
“And the other man back there?”
“The closest thing you could call him would be my boyfriend.”
“What happened to him?”
“Once I knew you were coming, I drugged him.”
“With what?”
“Lots of stuff.”
“Well, I have to assess whether or not somebody is going to die.”
There was a snap to their exchange that struck Finch as odd. It was as if they had already had this talk and were simply rehearsing it again, quickly, so each could head back home. For some reason unknown to him, maybe the residual effect of the drug, he licked his palm and slicked back his salty, stiff hair.
“So the other man is your boyfriend.”
“You have to help me here. Please.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?”
“I can’t tell you right now. Please, can you take me down to the station or something?”
A distant look of reverie fell over Heather LeBlanc’s face, as if she were trying to remember something from a happier past. Her eyes began to fill with tears. Her lip trembled. With a restored tremolo, she wailed, “I know why you’re suspicious. You’re right to be suspicious. Listen, I know why you don’t trust me. I was back there in the café when they drugged you, and you can probably tell, just from your detective’s eye, that I haven’t lived a good life.”
“What?”
“I’ve been bad.”
“That doesn’t matter, Heather. Why are you in danger?”
“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you right now. You have to trust me. Be generous, Inspector. I know I have no right to ask you, but you need to help me.”
“Well, I am a police officer, and therefore am bound by my—”
“Please!”
“We’ll take you down to the station. You’ll be safe there. We can sort things out. But first, I have to tend to those two guys in that house. You understand, right?”
Something buzzed. She nodded. They left the park. On the corner of 39th and Fulton, Finch’s gun got dislodged from his waist and fell, barrel-first, down his left pants leg. Finch laughed again, but then wondered what might have happened to his brain.
When they got to the house, both of the Mercedeses, the old Dodge Ram truck, the boyfriend, and Hofspaur were all gone. Of course they were.
ANTE UP
1. I answered all of Jim Kim’s questions. It took about an hour. He didn’t put me in an interrogation room or offer me coffee. Instead, I sat on a smelly couch in his office. His questions were mostly about work. I told him I didn’t know anything more about Bill’s clients than he did, but that the company must have Richard McBeef’s credit card information on file. I told him no one who worked at getoverit.com had ever had any actual contact with a client. At least not that I knew of. We used fake names, made up fake friends, cut and pasted our advice from a database of reassuring words. I agreed that one of us probably did deserve to get killed.
As for Richard McBeef, I told Kim the truth: Despite the awfulness of making fun of it on a profile page, I never would have had the heart to summon up that name, especially to someone who wasn’t specifically hurt by the menace of Cho Seung-Hui. Kim shook his head. His earlier disgust had been replaced by a grim, mechanized dickishness. The edges of his mouth never moved. His pencil kept tap-tap-tapping at the edge of his desk.
To answer Ellen’s pleadings, Kim told us we probably weren’t in danger. If I did not exist, the Baby Molester and Bill would be planets spinning in their own sad, little orbits. As proof, he pointed out that Bill had 573 friends across seven different social networks, and not one of them was friends with Dolores Stone. Bringing up one of my profiles, he pointed out that despite having spent his entire life in San Francisco, insulated by a tight-knit all-Korean social group, Kim’s own little brother was friends with not one but two people who were friends with me. It was a weird way to prove our safety, but I guess it was reassuring to see even the slightest hint of math in our favor. “Unless you killed them both,” Kim said, “there’s no reason to worry. Besides,” he reasoned, “if they wanted to kill you, they would’ve killed you outside the bar. These gangs, they don’t kill witnesses like they do in movies. I mean, except when they do. But for the most part, taking civilian lives just gets us up their ass. They wouldn’t just pop some dipshit because he was seen walking with some other dipshit who might have known something about some murder nobody is linking them to anyway.”
“So,” Ellen asked, “what you’re saying is that this is a coincidence?”
“No,” Kim said, “it’s too early to say that. I agree, it’s fucked up, but I don’t think you two need to be running around fearing for your lives. Go home. Share a meal. I’ll call you later tonight.”
2. We returned to a gutted room. The tubs had been flipped, the bed stripped of its New England linen. All those lovely pastel bottles of hair and body products had been decapped and poured out into the shower. Even Ellen’s gym bag had been violated, the aluminum water bottle drained, the shin guards sliced open. We found her field hockey stick under the bed. Ellen gripped it tightly as we searched in vain for anything that might be missing.
When every last lacrosse ball, every bit of lingerie had been counted, we sat on the edge of the bed, my hands shoved in the crevasse between her thighs. Ellen tried calling Kim, but went straight to voice mail. She left a detailed, polite message, explaining exactly what had happened. I cannot remember what went through my mind, at least not exactly. At some point, I started to rub the heel of my palm against the spot where my memory had mapped out her clitoris. In response, Ellen snorted. The room got dark. It was seven-thirty.
There was nothing left to do. Our panic and shock burned out. Both of us accepted our lot and wherever the lot might go.
We threw everything back into the tubs and went out to get drunk.
3. Our first stop was at the breezy, yuppie wine bar up on 18th Street. Ellen took out her phone and placed it faceup on the bar. “I can’t feel the vibrations anymore,” she explained. “Especially when I get as drunk as I’m planning on getting.” She ordered two bottles of wine and a cheese plate. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was lactose-intolerant, but had just the shred of hope left to not risk a night of farting in front of my new girlfriend. She didn’t notice, ate the whole cheese plate herself. Again, I was in love. We didn’t talk about what was happening. Instead, she told me about her parents’ vacation house in Mexico and the boys she met during her childhood summers. A bottle and a half in, she giggled and said that there had been times when she had wondered if her relationship with Mel was just her way of finding a white replacement for all those beautiful Mexican boys. Who has the heart to judge a girl who talks about sex while devouring cheese? Especially in my state? I just drank more and told her about the time I drove down with my friend Chad to a rope swing out in Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was a half-mile hike through poison ivy and all the greenish undergrowth that pops up in the South, the sort of generic, choking vegetation that never seems worth naming. As we walked up the river’s bank, we could see little islands of pig shit floating on the surface of the brown water. Somehow, the cocooning greenness of the leaves, the redness of the clay, and the
humidity in the air made even pig shit seem healthy. About a year later, while I was trying to show the first girl who had ever told me that she loved me the rope swing, a vacationing couple from Fort Lauderdale would rear-end my minivan and blow out the back windows. The girl gathered a handful of shattered glass and put it in an Empress typewriter ribbon tin because she had just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Anyway, on that day I was just telling you about, Chad and I drove to the rope swing listening to Bill Withers’s Greatest Hits. There was a thrift store on the way, and next to it, a soda fountain that served egg creams. We stopped in and looked for tuxedos for some school dance that was coming up. When we got to the turnoff for the rope swing, we parked and walked in, towels draped around our shoulders. But when we got to the spot, we saw a bunch of Mexican kids taking turns on the swing. Neither of us knew what to do. Were they black, we would’ve skulked back to the car. If they were white, we would’ve asked for a turn. Even then, I think both of us had been to too much school to realize that we had not, at the age of sixteen, ever dealt with a Mexican without the ease and padding of some service position, so neither of us could acknowledge the weirdness, and so we took refuge under a willow and silently watched them take turns climbing the boards nailed into the side of the tree—the sort of tree steps that could have appeared in Pogo or even Br’er Rabbit—as the Mexican kids, one by one, bombed themselves right, and I mean right, into the islands of pig shit. In the spring, every year, the white people would have a festival on that river, to save it from pig shit, and so when Kathleen finally asked me to the bluegrass festival where I first saw the Baby Molester, how could I have explained what, exactly, was churning in my heart? Just the jangly, kind crowd, the sight of old men and mandolins on the stage brought me back to the muddy spot where Chad and I stood on the bank of the river beneath the heavy droop of a hundred-year-old willow whose greenness is impossible to describe—if you cut Hermes open, his heart would be that green. After some hand-wringing, we decided to try again later and turned to walk back to the car. As we came out from under the willow, I saw one of the kids, his face glowing like a lucky moon, gesture us toward the tree. The other kids were all bobbing in the water, and they just grinned as I grimly climbed up the steps. The kid who had motioned us over handed me the rope, and before my cowardice could betray me, I jumped off. I don’t know, it was like maybe fifteen, twenty feet off the ground, I didn’t look down. My arms back then were just barely strong enough to support my weight, so instead of swinging out into the deep middle, I tumbled headfirst down into the shallow bank. You know those videos people send around of rednecks catching catfish with their arms? That’s where I landed. No, I wasn’t hurt, but when I came up to surface, those brown heads were bobbing nearby and each one was laughing at me.
My mother told me once to soften up my laugh. She could hear no forgiveness in it, no concession to the fact that we are all trying. I can think of the reasons why it ended up that way, but I’ve never been able to change.
That dickhead detective was right. When I laugh, it’s because the world is suffering.
When I came up to the surface and saw the kids laughing, my mind locked into an ugly, eugenic calculus. Chad went hurtling over my head and splashed straight into one of those pig shit blooms. The laughter, once again, rang up the river. I remember pretending to be hurt, clutching at my knee to avoid looking back out at the river, or up at the branch, where the moon-faced kid still sat. Had I known what to look for, I would have seen the generosity my mother had always missed in her only son, the kindness you can only hope happens to your children, because while you can teach a person to act kindly, you can’t really teach warmth.
From the willow tree, I watched Chad get along better with those Mexican kids. I couldn’t come up with a comfortable, or even angry, reason why, so I just watched, excerpting myself so that the heat and the humidity and the greenness were no longer oppressive or sticky or even beautiful. Then, Smiley-Face Moon, who had since jumped down from the branch, ran over to a plastic cooler they had set on a stump. After rummaging around a bit, he pulled something out and trotted over toward my willow fortress. I stood up, vaguely scared, and screwed on a smile. He did a better job at it. You know when you meet someone who doesn’t speak English and they give you this huge, silly grin, like they’re saying, “Hey, I’m sorry we can’t talk, but we’re okay”? There’s a lady who works in one of those doughnut shops–slash–Chinese buffets on Clement Street who smiles like that. It’s always kind of breaking my heart—did I just use that phrase?—because she’s always touching dirty things and not washing her hands. Anyway, this kid ducks under the willow branches, and guess what he hands me? A quesadilla in a Ziploc bag. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Me, standing there, humiliated, worried vaguely about how the unflattering fabric of my bathing suit was clinging to my shrinking, stereotyped penis, Chad making friends, and this kid brings me a fucking quesadilla in a plastic bag. I looked down at the tops of my bare feet and the little currents of pig shit river water dripping off my shorts, and, for that moment, I could press my hands up against the furthest edge of love. And it felt massive.
Even back then, I knew this sort of moment would have been better set in the fifties or sixties or even the 1890s, but in 1996 we all knew better than to say something silly and impolite, like, when I was seventeen, I met some Mexican kids on the banks of the Haw River and one of them handed me a quesadilla in a plastic bag. I’ll never get the image of that quesadilla out of my mind, but I can’t tell anyone that story and I certainly can’t write about it because our modern tolerance assumes all cross-cultural exchanges are either zero-sum or simply amazing. You’re supposed to write, at best, about foods, dances, weird clothes, and mothers who catch you with your cock in your guilty, yellow hands, but you’re not supposed to write about the time when you became a bit less of a bigot. Because you already were supposed to have gotten through that.
We, you and me, were raised to assume our humanity.
She laughed. She said, “Maybe you were.”
We got a bit drunker.
At some point, Ellen picked up her phone to see if Kim had called. A grizzled man smiled on the screen. He had on some sort of floppy sun hat. I would not have described him as looking happy, but I suppose, if fair is fair, I have never described anyone as looking happy. Ellen stared in at the man’s face, not quite comprehending.
“That’s mine. Your phone is over there.” It was the bartender. Maybe it was all the wine and the soft light, but she looked, almost exactly, like Diane Lane.
Ellen placed the phone, screen up, in her open palm and offered it to her. She asked, “Is that your boyfriend?”
“Husband.”
“Husband?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky. He’s really hot.”
The bartender plucked the phone out of Ellen’s hand and stared in at the screen. She pursed her lips. Attractively. And sighed. Also attractively. Looking up at Ellen with those Diane Lane doe eyes, she said, “Thank you.” And then, “I’m going to step away for a minute. You two good?”
Kim called Ellen’s phone at around eleven. Her side of the conversation involved a lot of yeses and noes. After hanging up, she asked the bartender if she could turn the TV to the local news, and, perhaps, turn up the volume. Something important had just happened. The bartender asked if there had been an earthquake, but Ellen shook her head and just repeated the request. The bartender said she could turn on the news, but couldn’t turn up the sound. Her manager, she explained. Ellen asked if she could at least turn on the captions.
SED A STATEMENT TONIGHT REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF THE LETTER, AND, INDEED CONFIRMING THAT IT HAD BEEN SENT BY AN ORGANIZATION CLAIMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MURDERS. HOWEVER, NO DETERMINATIONS HAVE YET BEEN MADE AS TO WHETHER THIS CONSTITUTES TERRORIST ACTIVITY.
The image on the screen had frozen. Street reporter Sam, bathed in halogen, was standing on the steps of what I assumed was the downtown police station. His eyes had been frozen half closed, and his lip was curled just enough to reveal a blurry but dazzlingly white set of teeth. Behind his left shoulder, with, again, a blurry, malicious look on his dirty potato face, was Jim Kim.
I was too drunk to make much sense of it, but I do recall, for whatever reason, feeling relieved. I looked over at Ellen, but those fine, sturdy New England features weren’t giving anything away. I considered telling her I loved her. The bartender, back from her break, said, “Holy shit. Jim Kim.”
The bar’s front door swung open.
It was Jim Kim.
The bartender said, “Jimmy. How weird. Look, you’re up on the TV!”
He said, “Sarah. Where is your husband? I can’t reach him on his phone.”
Before she could answer, he looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Did you recognize that name? Did you catch that name?”
I stared at the floor.
Mr. Brownstone. The name of Cho Seung-Hui’s other play.