Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  ‘Two weeks of grunt work and in bed at two A.M. every night, up at eight the next morning.” He paused. “Sorry. I kept meaning to call.”

  Cali covered the mouthpiece. She laughed, shaking her head. “He’s claiming he’s a workaholic now.”

  “Maybe he is,” Bev said. Then she grinned. “Not a bad quality sometimes.” Bev’s grin was like the sun coming out—it made Cali feel a little less cold toward Det.

  Just a little less.

  Cali whispered into the phone, "This is the last time, Det. My fee goes up for this.”

  “Homicides don’t come cheap,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Not sure. Six, seven hours.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Perp probably male. Victim, female.”

  “As usual,” she sighed. “Give me twenty minutes. And give me something to read, okay? I don’t want to walk into a snake pit of cops and not get to work.”

  He didn’t respond.

  She got a feeling. “What’s going on? Something you want to tell me before I hike uptown?”

  Another pause on the line.

  “Joss is here, too.”

  Cali sucked in some air, shaking her head. Her mind went blank for a second. That name: Joss. Colin Joss. The moron cop who had managed to get under her skin and stay there like some kind of tick. “Get rid of him before I get there.” “Can’t do that, Cal.” “Do what you can. Bye.”

  She hung up her cell phone. Closed it; slipped it into her jacket’s inner pocket. The hum of the coffeehouse came back to her, as if she’d blocked it completely while she’d listened to him on the phone.

  “Don’t tell me,” Bev said. “You have to run.”

  “I am, he said, the woman of his dreams, he’s madly in love with me, he can’t resist me. He says. He even knows what I’m wearing, practically. I thought he was obsessed with me. I thought he was too into me. Then”—she snapped her fingers—”two weeks, no calls. Suddenly there’s a murder, and he manages to take two minutes to call.”

  “I warned you about cops,” Bev said. “You have a bad history with cops.”

  “And you have a bad history of telling me what to do,” Cali added, laughing.

  “Big sisters are like that,” Bev said. “If you had listened to me when—”

  “I know, when Gary Atkins proposed, back in New Hope, I’d have three children by now and be teaching school instead of living in this big, ugly city and doing fortune-telling on the radio and running after cops and going to look at where people die.”

  “I never said that,” Bev said, more seriously.

  “Okay, okay, you never said it. Exactly.”

  “But I’ve been thinking of it.”

  “Spend the night at my place?” Cali asked. She wanted to beg actually, because she was afraid that she and Det would work, and then she and Det would get all hot and heavy again, and that was the last thing Cali wanted.

  “I’ve got to get back home.”

  “You could call Mike and just be there for me tonight?”

  “Can’t, Cali,” Bev said. “Not tonight. I have an early day tomorrow. And I’m not going to be used as your excuse for avoiding him.” Then she leaned over the table and whispered, “You packin’?” in an ironic tone.

  “Always. In here,” Cali said, holding her purse up. “My new boyfriend.”

  Bev withdrew, leaning back in her chair. She didn’t like guns, she had told Cali often enough. Cali had grown tired of hearing it all, but it didn’t matter whether Bev said a word. It was written on her face. Cali called the gun “my new boyfriend” as a joke, but it scared her, too, sometimes. Det had suggested she carry it with her, ever since the death threats. It was a .380-caliber Sig Sauer P230, a supposedly comfortable semiautomatic that made her feel like she was lugging around a bomb. But still, an NYPD-approved bomb that might protect her life from the nuts who tended to go after women who helped investigate murders. Cali had taken to it fast.

  “Okay,” Cali said, trying to forget the gun in her purse. “You going to call me tonight?”

  “Oh, yes, I want the whole story,” Bev said, the sparkle returning to her eyes. “Now, get going.”

  7

  Traffic was terrible. The cab was a snail in a river of molasses. It took Cali Nytbird thirty-five minutes to get to the crime scene.

  The building, called the Mohegan Hotel, was large, but more a fortress than a hotel, which it had been in the twenties and thirties. The stonework facade had lions and griffins cavorting and fighting, all wrapped up in Celtic-like carvings; some scaffolding wrapped around the building where parts of the stone had been crumbling. It was both cheap and ritzy, and Cali guessed, just by the wrought-iron gateway and the leaded-glass front door to the security area, that no one lived here for less than six thousand a month. The guard took her name, and she was about to ask where the elevator was when Det appeared (out of thin air, as usual, acting as if he had been stood up by his date). He grabbed her arm, and she tugged it free.

  “Traffic?” was the first word out of Det’s mouth. (Remember this, she thought, for later. Savor it. Torture him with it.)

  “As bad as ever at six P.M. on a Tuesday with a cabbie who likes to take every street that has trucks double-parked on it,” she said. “Bev says hello.”

  “You look amazing. Even stunning,” Det said, just like it was a date. (All right, she admitted, it was the way they had dates, damn it. He called her in on a breaking assignment, and then they ended up going out for a drink or going for a walk or something. It never ended like business, and this was against everything she had always believed in, but for one thing, she wasn’t meeting guys outside of her two jobs, and for another, she just had this thing for Det Detweiler.) Det glanced at her shoes. “I was right. Wasn’t I right? Kate Spade. And that”—he pointed to her shoulder bag—”see? I remember these details, it’s what I’m good at. Nice jacket, though. You’ve been shopping. I would guess, that’s a what?” He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she drew back.

  “It’s a denim jacket. That’s all. Salvation Army store.” She held out her hand. “Got anything for me?”

  Detweiler grinned. He had a nice smile—nothing to write home about, not a dazzling one, but the kind that just started the meltdown on her heart. Just a little. He was solid and a bit husky, and he had nostrils that seemed too big and blond hair that flopped around where it wasn’t thin in patches, and sometimes he even drank too much beer when they were out together, but that smile always got her.

  She admired him; she found something very ... together ... about him. It was the mystery of romance, she figured.

  He reached into his pocket. “Sixth floor, overlooking the park. Beauty place. Real nice. Good place to die, you ask me.” Then he began whistling, which sometimes annoyed her, but now it felt comforting, and when she recognized the tune—“Uptown Girl,” the Billy Joel tune—she hummed along as they got on the elevator together.

  She felt less like humming along when she saw the woman’s body in the apartment, nineteen knife wounds in her back.

  8

  “All right,” Cali Nytbird said, her eyes still closed. She held the scrap of paper in her left hand and what looked like a thin ring in her right. She blocked them all out, and within seconds of closing her eyes imagined herself in absolute darkness that alternated with a brilliant purple-and-yellow light. It was the place she called the Getaway, and it was where she went when she needed to focus on what she had in her hands. It would guide her to whatever imprint the object had.

  In this case, a piece of paper, which was less imprinted than she had wanted, but Det would not let her touch any of the other evidence because his department had lost a high-profile case a few months earlier purely because there was some suspicion that too many people had been around the crime scene. So, a piece of paper that the killer or victim had held—that was all she had to go on.

  For a moment she savored the cool loneliness of the Getaway.r />
  Until, of course, someone said something.

  “Vibes,” one of the cops chuckled. He must’ve been standing less than a foot away from her, which was unusual. Det generally made sure she had her space among them. He was getting lax.

  Cali ignored him. While the comment could have come from any of a number of cops or even one of the other investigators, she knew exactly who had said it. It would be Colin Joss, from the Third Precinct. He was a prick, and had always made comments behind her back, some of them racist, which hadn’t surprised her. She was used to it. If they didn’t believe what she was doing, they either pulled race—she’d been called “Voodoo mama” more than once, even though she had been raised in the Church and had never had lads, as she shot back to this one—or they hinted that she herself was a criminal in some undefined way. When Joss was nice he called her Radio Lady; when he was less than nice he’d ask her if she brought her “goofer dust.” She had wanted to pull out the pepper spray she carried and give him a nice shot of it. She never did, but she fantasized. Sometimes the nastiness from Joss was less subtle, and words were said that she didn’t even like to think. Words that barely touched her but still she had their effect.

  She tried to forget everything. Get Joss out of my head. Get him out.

  What came into her head instead was the moment when she was seven years old, when she had gone to the Getaway for the first time, when her grandfather had died, and she held his gold watch in her hand, and in just a few minutes had experienced the last moments of his life. His left arm felt as if it were splintering, and he grasped it with his right arm, and he kept saying words over and over again that made no sense to her. She was terrified by the aloneness of the experience, by the dark room it put her in, and by having to be there as she watched him die, alone, in a nursing home bed when he was supposed to be recovering from heart surgery.

  Then she was in the Getaway in her mind again. She was alone there, and no light came up.

  After several minutes of trying she opened her eyes again. The room was anything but the gray feeling she had in her head (her moods, as far as she was concerned, had colors, and the mood now, for her, was charcoal gray, like a dark mist). The floor was a black shiny marble, although Cali assumed it was fake, because it looked too good and, in its own way, too cheap against the more expensive-looking white rugs that looked as if animals had been killed just so someone could walk across the floor without getting his bare feet cold. The cops stood there. Detective Detweiler sat in the chair, looking up at her. At least he believed in her.

  “Nothing.”

  Someone swore in the back of the room, and Cali’s eyes flashed. “Look, I get a bunch of cops breathing down my neck.” She looked directly over at Colin Joss. He would’ve been handsome if his entire aura weren’t hideous.

  Detweiler held his hands up defensively. “Okay, okay.”

  Joss snorted. “What the hell is she going on about? We have work to do. This is a waste of time.”

  Cali remained silent and tried to keep her anger in check. It was her temper that had gotten the better of her once before and had created distrust. She glanced at Colin Joss. He was handsome and pale and blond, and on some level she knew he wanted to caress her. The thought disgusted her, but it was better than the other thought that crept into her mind when she looked at him. He also wanted to kill her. To smother her. To stop her altogether.

  She pulled back.

  It was just a room—they called it the hot room of the crime scene—and there were six cops on hand, all getting their shoeprints all over everything, but Det had not been able to stop that. He needed her. He trusted her.

  Trust, she thought. Closing her eyes again.

  But there was nothing.

  This was why she’d been called in: she was psychic, had been since the day she was born, according to her grandmother, and her specialty was psychometry, which meant she could hold an object associated with, in this case, the murder of a young woman and, if the situation was right, find out something about the murderer or victim that might help in the investigation. The scene was fresh—the murder had only occurred three hours earlier. The forensics expert had come through and collected, and the photographer had snapped, and the body had finally been moved. That was when Det had called her up to the apartment at Seventy-second and Central Park West.

  Behind her closed eyes, Cali could not get Colin Joss out of her mind. It bothered her that one prick in the police force could cause her so much grief. Psychic grief, she smiled to herself. Psychotic grief, she played with the phrase in her head. The first time they’d met, on a fairly routine homicide that the department still hadn’t been able to solve after three months, Joss had asked, “What are you?” and she had told him that she was a psychic who seemed to have a knack for what was called telemetry.

  But he had persisted, “No, I mean, what are you? Your name: it sounds fake. But then, you’re the radio lady, right? You make up all that bullshit about people’s problems and you make up a name to go with it. You ain’t black, you ain’t white, you ain’t Chinese, but you’re a mutt or something, right?” To which she’d replied with a slap; Joss had taken it, but she knew it would not end with a slap with a guy like that. Usually Det kept Colin Joss away when she was around.

  She had said to him then, “My name is Calista Nytbird, and yes, I changed the spelling of my last name slightly. So what? My mother was Chinese and Scottish, my father was African-American and Cherokee. I guess we’re just everything that makes up America, and you’re just some guy whose grandfather came over from England fifty years ago.” It wasn’t the most mature—or even smart—reply in the world, but she hadn’t given a damn. Still, it started a minor war between them that wasn’t going to end any time soon.

  God, I hate knowing he’s here in this room. I feel like he’s just going to interfere with any work I do here.

  She decided to go ahead and tell Det to clear the place. She opened her eyes and was about to say something when she realized that she was still in the hot room, only the murder was happening, right now, in front of her.

  Her inner vision began, and she got the feeling again, of a kind of fear that was nearly exciting—and this scared her more than the look of hunger in the killer’s eyes.

  9

  The man glanced back, as if he could see Cali (but he can’t. I know he can’t. He’s just feeling something. He’s just hearing a sound in the hall). He had a thick mane of dark hair, and his skin was bright red from his fury. In his left hand was the broken glass, and in his free hand, the woman. She was slim, blond, frail—her white blouse was torn, and she was trying to push a table against the closet door.

  Cali looked up at the door. It was narrow.

  A tiny closet.

  Why would this woman do that when a man was about to slash her with broken glass? The smell of whiskey and cologne mingled in the air, and Cali noticed that the room was actually chilly. Cali glanced around the room and saw that the air conditioner was turned on high. She smelled something else—what was it? Something like... peppermints. It was odd—the scent of fury in the air, the knowledge of an impending murder, and the smell of peppermints.

  The man played out his role (Cali tried not to think of it as murder when she went into these states, because it would make her crawl under a table or weep for days; she just thought of it as a replay of a movie in her mind, and it kept her safe). The woman shrieked briefly, and then she was quiet. Cali felt her heart racing but tried not to look directly as the man kept stabbing the woman, more curious about the closet door and the table.

  She walked across the room, to the table, stepping around the man, who was now on the floor, on his knees, hunched over the woman’s body.

  What’s behind there? What would she be trying to hide from him in her last moments of life?

  Then Cali felt some kind of shuddering feeling go through her flesh. It was as if human fingers were tickling her beneath the skin.

  There was somethi
ng awful coming.

  Something she didn’t want to have to see.

  Inside that little closet was something terrible. Something she didn’t want to be inside this room to see. To know.

  But the man made her face it.

  He rose from the woman and, wiping his hand over his bloodied mouth, staggered to the table. He pulled it back and grabbed the doorknob to the closet.

  It was locked.

  He went back to the woman’s body and went through her pockets but found nothing.

  “You bitch!” he shouted.

  He stared straight at Cali, who stood before the closet door. “You goddamn bitch, you made me do this! You came here and you knew I would have to do this, and now you just wait there for me and play this game!”

  Cali had never experienced this before. He was yelling at her? He could see her? He could sense her?

  The thought occurred to her: Perhaps he was psychic as well.

  But no, his eyes looked through her. He was yelling at someone else. Someone she couldn’t see. Was he tormented?

  Then she felt it.

  Like icy fingers tickling her spine.

  Something else was there. Someone else—a presence was in that room. More than just the man and the dead woman and Cali.

  Something...

  She turned and looked at the closet door.

  Whatever .. . whoever ... it was. Inside that closet. That small closet.

  And then she was wrenched from the sense memory of the murder.

  10

  Cali Nytbird opened her eyes.

  That awful feeling again. Whenever it happened. Whenever she had to come back to reality from a vision. It was like getting socked in the solar plexus, getting the wind knocked out of her. Every single time. It was never pleasant, but she had learned, over the years since her ability had manifested itself, to swallow the nausea and the sense of displacement.

  It always took her a moment or two to remember to breathe. She glanced at Detweiler, who still watched her. He was good with her this way. He wasn’t like the other detectives and cops. He had some empathy for her situation.