Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine

by Quentin Mouron

  “And he found a solution?”

  “No! What do you think? His damfool daughter cleaned him out long ago! He hardly had enough to put gas in his truck.”

  Gomez pauses for a moment. He knows about those kinds of situations, desires, “fancies.” He too would like his daughter to be able to attend a decent school where they still teach math and the history of the United States, where you can eat the cafeteria food without needing to see the doctor afterward. He knows what it is to lack means. To slave away the whole week to earn a pension and a few minor pleasures, with the permanent sharp, stinging feeling that you’re missing out on something. He glances at the sheriff, who nods to him to continue.

  “Okay, Barney. Now tell me, did Jimmy Henderson come to see you often before he died?”

  Barney is startled. He spits on the floor and looks at them as if he is out of his mind. “Huh? Hold on now, guys, you don’t think it was me sliced him up?”

  “No, Mr. Henderson.” The sheriff takes over. “It’s just that we have to have a more precise impression of the life your cousin was leading at the time of his death.”

  Barney nods. “Yeah, well, Jim did come quite often… Maybe once a month.”

  “And why exactly did he come to see you?”

  “Why exactly? Well… to drink a beer, to chat, a second beer, things like that, see?”

  “And he came all the way from Boston just to see you?”

  “So I’m not worth the trip, is that what you’re saying?”

  Since they got there the deputy has indeed been telling himself that Barney Henderson wasn’t worth the trip. He wonders what can make a man seek such company, take any pleasure in seeing someone wasting away like that, dying a slow death – the worst kind – from thwarted pride and accumulated regrets. Even long enough to drink a beer is too much already, he thinks.

  “Please understand my colleague, Mr. Henderson, he’s asking a legitimate question. After all, your cousin was elderly, older than you, so naturally we have to wonder what was the purpose of his trips…”

  “It seems that when you get older you like a good chat.”

  The sheriff nods. “And besides,” continues Barney, “old buddies are dying all around us, so you start drawing little crosses on your old school yearbooks, and it’s only natural to want to get closer to your distant cousins, to patch things up between you and bring them a beer now and again… Is there any harm in that?”

  Gomez smiles, “None at all, Mr. Henderson.”

  Old Barney smiles too, a wan, weary smile.

  “Mr. Henderson, are you quite sure your cousin used to come to Duxbury just to see you?”

  “Well, no!” exclaims Barney.

  “So what did he come to do around here, then?” asks Gomez.

  “Shopping, I think, yeah, stuff for hunting, or fishing.”

  “Fishing?”

  “That was his latest craze. He would go off fishing in Canada, to a buddy’s cottage, or else in Vermont.”

  “So then he came to buy fishing tackle?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Are you a fisherman too?” Then, noticing the renewed interest in the policemen’s faces, Barney quickly adds, “No, not me. I’m not interested in fish. Time was I painted the sea, and I did a hell of a job. But I never took the trouble to pull its denizens out from the waves in order to cut out their guts.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Henderson.”

  “You’re welcome! Turn out the light as you go.”

  The sheriff and his deputy stand up. They can still hear him belching in the dark as they go out, closing the door behind them.

  12

  The Foxtraps neighborhood has a peaceful reputation. Modest townhouses separated by immaculate lawns extend along Peacock Street and Mount Auburn. The gardens are embellished with stainless steel barbecues, plastic tables and chairs, varnished wooden kennels, and so-called “child-safe” swings. Paul McCarthy’s house is at 52 Peacock Street. His immediate neighbor is a door-to-door dishwasher salesman, while the neighbor opposite, a recent retiree, devotes his time to carving pumpkins – an art practiced by his mother before him. Of all the inhabitants of the Foxtraps, McCarthy is the one whose job is considered the most exciting and different. Sometimes the neighbors chat from their doorsteps or at the celebrated neighborhood barbecues. In the simplicity of tradition, church, and family, the sheriff reflects, these solid citizens spend their days often peacefully, occasionally disturbed, but always honorably. Here, people do what they need to stay alive, he thinks. The stability of the neighborhood strikes him all the more in that he spends his days immersed in its exact opposite: the perpetual, potential slide into the atmosphere of a muffled, interminable bomb-blast. It is an endless succession of drunken brawls, abusive husbands, surly traffickers, and corpses to step over. When he takes off his uniform, says goodbye to Gomez and Jaspers, and exchanges the Ford squad car for his gray Grand Marquis, he is glad to extract himself from the chaos and filth and hug his wife and children – and also embrace the sweetness of an ordered existence. He knows that in the Bellams or Dorchester people think he lives on easy street, that he is privileged; he knows he is a laughingstock for the with-it, bohemian circles who take pleasure in mocking family values, barbecues, slippers, and dog kennels. But the former ones have never had any choice, and experience has taught the sheriff that very few among the needy working-class people who live in the Bellams would, if they had the option, refuse the luxury of a tranquil existence and a perfect lawn. McCarthy is sure that even among the most depraved, the utterly vicious, those ravaged to the marrow, many long for the quiet life of the Foxtraps. As for the artists and dilettantes, the sheriff thinks it would do them good to be confronted, just once, with a drug-hungry amphetamine addict threatening them with a gun; it would sharpen their senses and knock a few ideas into their skulls.

  When he comes home from work in the evening, his wife, two daughters and a polished hardwood floor are there to welcome him. The walls are hung with watercolors that he paints in his spare time, “with no pretensions.” The furniture is sober, light in color, and constitutes a functional, harmonious ensemble which leads guests to comment that the McCarthys “have taste.” The kitchen, living room, and a small dining room occupy the ground floor. The bedrooms are upstairs, along with a den where the sheriff mulls over his current cases or deals with the tasks related to his activities with the Church of the Redemption. That is where he is when Jaspers calls.

  “McCarthy.”

  “Good evening, Sheriff. Sorry to disturb you.”

  “You’re not disturbing me.”

  “I’ve checked on Jimmy Henderson’s address book like you asked.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Among the phone numbers listed, just two are connected to an address south of Roxbury.”

  “Go on.”

  “One belongs to a certain Karen Haye, a retired social worker living in South Roxbury.”

  McCarthy takes a note of it.

  “The other one was under the initials ‘B. H.,’ but it’s the number of a fitness club, The Muscles of Love, in Fort Owl.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  Without hanging up the phone, McCarthy is ruminating.

  “Will that be all, Sheriff?”

  “Just one thing…”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me, do you know a lot of retirees in their seventies with a prostate problem who are willing to drive for an hour just to work out in a fitness club?”

  Jaspers laughs. “Very few, come to think of it.”

  “Then ask his telephone company to send us a list of his calls during, let’s say, the past three months. Tell them it’s urgent. And see what you can find out about that fitness club.”

  At the dinner table, the sheriff, with eyes closed, is just finishing saying grace, holding his wife and one of his daughters by the hand. Then he opens his eyes, raises his head, and smiles. H
e says “Amen!” in a loud voice. The rest of the family choruses “Amen!” in response, and then “Enjoy!” Carefully, he begins to carve the meat. “Order is meaning,” he sometimes says. And he is terribly afraid of losing that meaning, of letting things slide. Grounded in habit and ritual, and certain he is acting each day for the good of others – even if it is sometimes difficult and seems useless – he fends off despair and insanity, the monsters that overwhelmed both his father and mother.

  Doubtless their meals aren’t elaborate – just like the room they are in, its cream-painted walls graced only by two small watercolors and a plain wooden crucifix, just like the rest of the house, just like the rest of the neighborhood, but which creates an environment spacious enough to allow one to breathe easily yet small enough not to get lost in. “Knowing where things are, knowing where you are; that’s what happiness is,” he sometimes says to his wife when they are in bed.

  Charlene McCarthy clears her throat before asking her husband, “What kind of a day did you have? We read about that awful business in the newspapers—”

  The sheriff signals to her to go no further, and winks.

  “They know very well what’s going on, Paul. In town it’s the only thing folks are talking about!”

  “You know, you and the children are like the press – I can’t tell you anything!”

  Everyone laughs wholeheartedly.

  “Can the killer really be this drug-starved addict the papers talk about?”

  “Frankly, I’ve no idea… Gomez has his doubts.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. We may have another line of inquiry… But I’ve seen the unexpected so often – no, in fact not the unexpected, but the entirely expected – that I can’t say anything.”

  He’d like to say more. He’d like to confide his doubts about Alexander Marshall’s guilt to his wife, and tell her too how often they’ve said of someone, “It can’t be him; that would be too obvious,” when it did turn out in the end that the individual was indeed responsible. If Alexander Marshall is a scumbag, he may be enough of one to kill someone and then come back to mutilate the corpse, and even forget to take the money. Appearances are not always deceptive. Sometimes they are even all that’s left of reality.

  “Dad, what will you do with the bad man when you find him?”

  “I’ll arrest him, honey, the way I always do.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to go along?”

  “He won’t have any choice! When you do bad things to people, you’ve got to go to prison.”

  “And what’s it like in prison?”

  The sheriff hesitates before answering. He thinks of his last visit to Norfolk County Jail, looking at that frail adolescent in the infirmary, his entire face a bloody mess.

  “It’s not nice.”

  In the meantime, he eats. Charlene eats. The children too. They utter a few words, they smile. They don’t laugh out loud; they are accustomed instead to a warm, mellow, precious joy – the joy of being together under the same roof. So let the world with its pageant of the sick, the failures, and the ravaged remain on the doorstep. They are together, they are happy, and they show it with restrained gestures that are imperceptible from the outside.

  13

  Parked on Peacock Street with the detachable butt of his Steyr TMP pressed to his shoulder, Franck lines up McCarthy in his sights, then his wife, then each of his daughters. For him, this pastoral scene, with its sterile setting, is a scandal. Of course, it is what he expected. He had met the sheriff at the Church of the Redemption. But at the time the music, indifferent though it was, lent a kind of grandeur, a beauty, to people and things. Here, in the silence, in the night, the neat rows of little white houses fill his heart with a combination of gloom and disgust. It would be doing them a favor to shoot them, he thinks. He’d be sparing them the degradation of growing old in this cesspit full of angels and incense fumes; he’d be destroying this genre painting by a minor master, gashed with forced smiles. He strokes the barrel of his machine pistol. Not a single movement of the family escapes him. Right now the sheriff is scolding his daughter. Probably for botching some school work, unless it’s for peeing in a stoup or sticking a twig up a frog’s anus, thinks Franck. There follows an animated discussion on the transcendence of morality, or some garbage like that. A skinny, gnarled man, preceded by his three dogs, crosses his field of vision. Franck watches him fade into the night and then reemerge at intervals under the streetlights which facilitate the Neighborhood Watch program that is such a valued aspect of American residential neighborhoods, those great, morbid (but anesthetized) growths dotted with townhomes, tiny yards, and white mailboxes that exist all across North America, even as far as Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories.

  When Paul McCarthy rises to answer the phone, Franck lays his gun on the seat and puts on his earphones. He hears the sheriff answer, then a man’s voice saying, “It’s Jaspers, Sheriff. I’ve found out more about our fitness club.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s owned by Lance Le Carré, but it’s managed by a guy called Tom Lord, who was jailed for rape at the end of the 1980s. His latest conviction goes back to 2010, when he was busted with his pockets full of crystal meth. He was also very much involved in the porn movie business.”

  “Involved how?”

  “As an actor. His specialty was violent fellatio – you get that? But he also dabbled in comedy… For example, a trilogy where he had himself sodomized with the prosthesis of a guy who—”

  “Skip it—”

  “His stage name is Wild Bill Hiscock.”

  “B. H.!” exclaimed McCarthy, “like in old Jim’s daybook.”

  “Exactly, chief.”

  “We’ll call on him tomorrow morning. Anything else?”

  “Yes, indeed. The narcs are on his case too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Apparently there’s an investigation underway… Drug dealing. They think the fitness club is a kind of transfer depot, where the goods are shifted from the suppliers to the dealers. Le Carré is a suspect.”

  The sheriff groans. “And what about the dealers?”

  “Oh, a whole lot of guys…”

  McCarthy reflects for a few moments. “Poor guys beaten down by life, in need of a little dough, for example?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “So they’re afraid that with our big boots we’re going to mess up their operation?”

  The sheriff reflects. He feels a strong desire to hold off, to give the narcs enough time, and to bring down Le Carré, who up to now no one has been able to touch. But murder is murder, and given the media buzz about this one, it wouldn’t look good to delay… What’s more, he thinks, Le Carré works with so many sub-dealers that they’ll never be able to lay a finger on him.

  “Tell the narcs they’ve got the whole night if they want to score an arrest. We won’t do anything till tomorrow morning.”

  “Understood, chief. Anything else?”

  “Meeting at ten with everybody. Good night.”

  Franck removes his earphones. He is still observing the McCarthy home. The sheriff seems to have gone upstairs (there’s a light in his office). His wife goes across the living room. The kids have vanished. Their little world has dispersed, he thinks, each gone off to bed to struggle with their little anxieties. Unless they no longer even have enough strength, enough spirit to feel any anxiety? An impulse? Vertigo? Not to be anything more than little tenderly wrapped mummies, busy petrifying under their bandages, slowly going stiff in their open tomb – until some blow of fate intervenes, sealing down the lid and blocking the opening. Miserable robots, with souls as impoverished as their actions, condemned to the monotony of a sterile existence composed of indifference and repetition.

  He stows the Steyr TMP and the earphones in the glove compartment. Peacock Street is now deserted. As he drives off he connects his hands-free phone. It rings three times b
efore she answers.

  “Good evening, Franck! It’s nice to hear from you.”

  “Good evening, Mariella! I didn’t wake you?”

  “I was just dozing, don’t worry. Can I do something for you?”

  “Well, you see, I’m on a new case.”

  “One that will earn us a pretty sum, I hope…”

  “Not a single dollar! It’s just a curious business, if I can call it that.”

  “And I suppose that’s an excellent reason to give it priority, even if everything else has to suffer…”

  Franck laughs. “Bull’s-eye as usual!”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Two things… First, I need you to send me the file on a low-level dealer called Bill Hiscock. You’ll find him under Le Carré. Hiscock works for him.”

  “Perfect. I’ll send you the file within the half-hour. But you said you needed a second bit of information?”

  Stopping at a red light on Lindman Street, Franck notices three guys busily beating up another between two garbage bins, kicking him as he lies on the ground.

  “Yes. I need information about a Professor Ernest Caron, a physicist. He’s Lance Le Carré’s cousin. He doesn’t teach anymore. I’d like to know why.”

  The guy on the ground has stopped moving. One of the three attackers opens his fly and starts to urinate on him. “I see. I’ll take a look in the database.”

  “Thanks!”

  He drives on.

  14

  Fretfully, Franck is turning the pages of the Péladan book. The room is thick with cigarette smoke, gloom, and ammonia vapor. The tiny grains of coke are burning along the white Davidoff. “The study of passion in periods of decadence almost always discovers an illogical, irrational, and absurd determinism underlying psychic phenomena. In those historical moments when a civilization is nearing its end, the principal reality is a nauseous condition of the soul and, especially among the upper classes, a weariness of existence. Then, consciously, deliberately, lives are ruined, intelligence is frittered away, and evil becomes loved for its own sake.” Franck closes his eyes. He pulls on his cigarette. The hint of a smile appears at the corners of his mouth. The practice of evil for its own sake, he reflects, is always better than those animated corpses called sheriffs and parish secretaries, who fancy they do good for its own sake! These fools dripping with piety mistake stumbling for kneeling.