Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  I had a moment when my optimism matched that of the Bakersfield cops. They wouldn’t have to build a solid case against the car salesman. All they needed was reason to believe he’d done it. Oregon could prosecute for crimes he’d clearly committed, and Bakersfield, on their own, could decide he was Cindy’s killer and close their very cold case.

  But that wasn’t to be. And, sitting in front of the TV, I sorted the good and bad news. The good news, along with the fact that this particular menace would be off the streets for the rest of his life, was that I was no closer to drawing the attention of the authorities.

  The bad news? That the case, however cold, was still open. And that they had physical evidence. If it was sufficient to exclude the car salesman, one had to presume it would serve to include the guy in the Buddy shirt. The man who’d actually

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “done the deed.” That’s how I’d have finished that thought. I had it in mind when I stopped writing yesterday, stopping in the middle of a sentence as I’ve occasionally done so that I’ll know where to pick up the next day. Or a few days down the line, if it takes me that long to get back to this curious task I’ve set myself.

  I have to interrupt myself, I have to dart ahead into present time. Because I had a visitor last night. And no, it was not the one I’d been dreading, the faceless fellow in uniform knocking on my front door.

  It was Cindy Raschmann.

  Know that I was asleep, stretched out on my back on the left-hand side of the marital bed, with Louella sound asleep next to me.

  “Oh, the old fool had a dream.”

  That’s what you’d have to think, isn’t it? But Cindy Raschmann has invaded my dreams from time to time over the years, insinuating herself into an appropriate or inappropriate portion of a dream’s haphazard narrative. I don’t often remember the specifics of such visits, typically recalling only that she was there. Or some anonymous dream character turns around, and her face is Cindy’s. Or I pick up a newspaper, and the headlines are unreadable, but there’s a picture and I can see that it’s her.

  Or—oh, never mind. Those are dreams. I can summon up wispy memories of some of them, consisting perhaps of nothing more than the dim recollection that she was present. And in fact I may have seen that face a thousand more times in dreams of which I never became consciously aware.

  Dreams. They are, as best I understand it, how the mind at rest sorts through and processes elements with which it is not entirely at ease. Aren’t there experiments in which subjects prevented from dreaming are rendered mentally and emotionally fragile in their waking hours?

  Last night was different.

  I was asleep in bed, and I was conscious of a presence, and without knowing who it was I was nevertheless afraid to open my eyes and see for myself. But then I did, and there she was, and I recognized her instantly.

  She was wearing the scoop-necked blouse, the skintight jeans, the boots. She was older, but not as old she she’d have been if she lived. Say late forties, early fifties, as if she’d aged a single year for every two in real time.

  I’m thinking that now. At the time all I could think was that this was Cindy Raschmann, this was the woman I’d killed. In my house, in my bedroom, standing at the foot of my bed.

  Her vivid blue eyes were quickly locked with mine.

  Her eyes, her eyes. I half-remembered them as blue, but I couldn’t have sworn to their color, although I never failed to recall watching the light go out of them. In memory they always presented themselves as oddly colorless, virtual blank circles. Little Orphan Annie Eyes, wide with something. Dread or wonder, I suppose.

  “Hey, it’s Buddy,” she said.

  Her first words to me all those years ago. Then she’d been squinting at my pocket, working to bring the embroidered letters into focus. Now her brow was unlined, her blue eyes aimed not at my breast but at my own blue eyes.

  Not so blue as hers, though. The years had washed some of the color out of mine, even as they’d turned my hair gray.

  The years do take their toll . . .

  Hey, it’s Buddy. The words echoed in the bedroom’s silence. I parted my lips to reply but couldn’t find words of my own.

  Nor did she seem to be waiting for me to say anything. She just went on gazing into my eyes, and I into hers.

  Then she said, “You’ve been waiting such a long time, haven’t you? Except there is no time, you know. Time was created to keep everything from happening at once. But it doesn’t really work, because everything really does happen all at once.”

  I was conscious of two things at once—that her words didn’t make any sense, and that I somehow understood them and found them brilliant.

  She fell silent, and I remained unable to speak, and our blue eyes, hers and mine, maintained their unbreakable connection. Something passed between us, almost electrical in nature, but whatever it was seemed to be beyond words, beyond thought.

  No idea how long this took. But if there was no time, who can put a number to it?

  “I forgive you.”

  Three words, spoken with—as best I recall—no inflection whatsoever. A rush of indefinable feeling overwhelmed me. There was something I needed to say and I had no idea what it was. I opened my mouth to let the words out, but there were no words there, nothing for me to say, and as I came to grips with that realization, she began to evanesce.

  I think that’s the word I want. I first typed “disappear,” but it doesn’t seem to me to convey what I observed. Her image somehow lost substance, or lost the appearance of substance, growing pale and, well, immaterial. I can’t seem to render this accurately, perhaps because I don’t really know what I saw, or didn’t see.

  I don’t know how long the process took. In her timeless universe, I suppose it took no time at all. In mine, it took somewhere between no time at all and all the time in the world.

  Oh, never mind. She was there, vividly, and then she was less and less present, and then she was gone.

  Where she’d been I now saw not the normal view from where I lay, not my chest of drawers and Louella’s dressing table and the entrance to the en suite bathroom, but an open vista. Western, from the looks of it, with mountains rising far in the distance.

  How could that be? How could I be lying in bed with my eyes open and gazing at a setting that, if it existed at all, was at least a thousand miles from where I lay?

  I blinked, and what I saw was unchanged. I willed my eyes shut, and kept them shut, and my vision remained unaltered—that vast expanse of open land, then foothills, then faraway mountain peaks.

  Eyes open, eyes shut. No change.

  How could that be?

  My mind struggled to come to grips with what it knew, or seemed to know. Here I was, with my eyes wide open, and how could that be?

  “With my eyes wide open I’m dreaming . . .” A line from a song, although it came to me then with no melody to carry it.

  But were they open?

  I managed to figure out, or was somehow given to know, that they were not. I was in fact not sitting up but lying on my back as I always did when I slept, and my eyes were closed.

  It was not without effort that I willed them open, not the eyes that had opened to engage Cindy’s blue eyes but my own physical eyes. I’m struggling to explain this, but it’s a fool’s errand, for how can I explain what I don’t myself understand?

  Here’s what I do understand, or at least what I recall. I was in fact lying in my bed, conscious of the presence beside me of my sleeping wife. There was no great vista, no distant mountains, just the usual quotidian backdrop of a maple chest of drawers and a dressing table.

  My heart, while not exactly racing, was beating a little more rapidly than usual.

  I closed my eyes—actually closed their lids—and settled my head on my pillow. You’ll never get back to sleep, I told myself, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

  I’ve thought about this. Oh, it was a dream . . . except I don’t think that’s the wo
rd for it. It was all still vividly there in memory when I finally opened my eyes to a bright morning. Indeed, it’s here now. Dreams, when I’m conscious of having had them, are quickly dispersed by the light of dawn. But this experience of mine is no less real now than it was a few hours ago.

  Google proved helpful, as it so often does, leading me to discover that there was a distinction to be drawn between the dream state and the experience I’d undergone, for which the term seemed to be visitation. I followed the word down the internet rabbit hole and saw it all become at once clearer and more confusing.

  Apparently the woman I saw was real, and not a figment of my imagination. She had no conventional corporeal reality, she’d proved that by dispersing like fog in morning sunlight; she’d left no footprints on the bedroom carpet, and had there been a tape recorder running, it would not have picked up the words she said.

  So was I then visited by her disembodied spirit? Were people survived by such spirits, and could they turn up in one’s bedchamber after such a span of time? Yes, it was true that she’d said (or I’d sensed her to be saying) that there was no time, that in the sphere in which she existed everything essentially happened at once. But in my universe, in the sphere in which I exist, there is indeed such a thing as time, and a considerable amount of it had unspooled between our two meetings.

  Why had I received this visitation now?

  And whose idea had it been? Even if it were not a dream but a visitation, even if an existing spirit had come from its own reality into mine, was this in part my doing? Had something in my own mind made this happen, not by spinning it into a dream but by summoning that surviving unmurdered part of her to stand at the foot of my bed?

  I couldn’t answer these questions. I could barely wrap my mind around them sufficiently to ask them. I might as well have tried to call back the spirit who’d come to me, or to slip back into the unreal reality of a dream.

  Two questions lingered: Why now? Followed in due course by Now what?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “DAD?”

  I was at Thompson Dawes, in the little office in back, seated at my desk. The oak desk and the matching swivel chair had been there when Porter Dawes owned the place; they’d outlasted him and would likely outlast me as well. Some years back I’d replaced one of the chair’s casters, and one of the desk drawers could be difficult to open on humid days, but age had been kinder to them than it is to most of us.

  “Dad, I figured out what I want to get you for Christmas, and it can only partly be a surprise.”

  I don’t know that the discovery of his genetic makeup meant a great deal to Chester. He was the same creature, whether or not we knew he was half-Rottweiler, and I don’t think any of us related to him any differently for the knowledge.

  But it changed Alden’s life. He was now spending not two but four afternoons a week at the Debenthal Small Animal Clinic, and Ralph was paying him for his time.

  He still ran errands, and observed procedures. But he also swabbed cheeks, because the good Doctor Debenthal had been interested to learn about Chester’s DNA results—he’d never have guessed Rottweiler, he said, not in a million dog years. He might have taken it the next step and thought of offering DNA testing to his patients, but it was Alden who suggested it, and Ralph to his credit who saw at once the merits of the suggestion.

  There was, one or the other of them would tell a customer, this online service that could tell you all about Towser’s ancestry. They send you a kit and all you had to do was reach into his mouth and swab his cheeks and mail in the specimens, and they get back to you with the results. Or we can take care of all of that for you, and I’ll do it right now, if you’d like.

  “Almost everybody goes for it,” Alden told me.

  It was a good profit center for Ralph, and he responded by finding more things for Alden to do—and putting him on the payroll.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he told me now, “and it’s totally pain-free.”

  He brandished a pair of oversized cotton swabs. I think I must have been half-waiting for this, albeit unconsciously, but still it took me by surprise, and not in a good way. And I guess this showed in my face.

  “No pain,” he assured me. “All you have to do is open your mouth. Or take the swabs and do it yourself.”

  I said, “I don’t think so, Alden.”

  “Seriously? Because I thought, you know, here’s a perfect present for you. You said you don’t know anything about where your grandparents came from—“

  “They were all born in America,” I said.

  “As far as you know.”

  “Right.”

  “But what about your great-grandparents, or even going back generations? They’d have to be from someplace else. Unless some of them were Indians, and wouldn’t that be cool? I mean maybe you’d turn out to be part Choctaw or Apache or Pawnee, whatever, and you could, I don’t know, open a casino or something?”

  How to say this? How to explain without explaining?

  “If I’m part Rottweiler,” I said, “I’d be just as happy not knowing it.”

  “But why, Dad? Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

  “My childhood,” I said, “was not a happy time.”

  “You said you had foster parents.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And growing up in foster care wasn’t so great.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “And you barely remember your real parents.”

  Was that how I’d put it? “I remember a little,” I said. “I remember more than I want to.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve worked hard to keep those memories from surfacing. In fact I’ve done what I can to avoid remembering those early years, and the last thing I want is to know more about the people I’ve been trying to forget. I don’t care what parts of Europe their forebears came from, or how they got here, or what high crimes and misdemeanors they may have committed along the way.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Rats,” he said. “Here I thought I had this brilliant idea for a present, and it turns out to be the last thing in the world that you’d want.”

  CHRISTMAS CAME, AND Alden’s gift to me was a pair of driving gloves—which, I couldn’t help thinking, would keep me from leaving traces of Touch DNA on the steering wheel, a thought I was happy to push aside.

  My gift to him, along with the clothes Louella had chosen, was a boxed set of eight books by an English veterinarian, published in the 1970s and popular bestsellers in their day. Alden had come across one of the books in the school library and liked it enough to read some passages aloud at the dinner table, but it hadn’t occurred to him to seek out the rest of the man’s work.

  I tracked them down on line—no daunting task, as like no end of books in the internet age they were hiding in plain sight. He was delighted. “I knew he wrote more books,” he said, “but that was the only one in the library. I didn’t realize you could just, like, find them out there.”

  But he knew what else you could find, and had gifted his mother and sister accordingly, having swabbed their cheeks earlier for what he told them was a school assignment. It was for biology lab, he explained, and would consist of examining epithelial cells under the microscope.

  “Which we actually did,” he said, during the opening of the presents. “But I just used my own cells for that, and it was more about getting comfortable using the microscope than what was going to turn up on the slide. But with you guys, well, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  And I suppose he didn’t want to risk having them opt out the way I had.

  He’d bought himself a present as well, an ethnic analysis of his own DNA, and now he helped interpret everybody’s results. His own makeup came in at 87% British Isles, 6% German and 4% French, with the rest essentially unidentifiable.

  Rottweiler, Kristin suggested.

  “See, now what this does,” he said, “it tells us something about my father. Not about Dad, but Duane Alle
n Shipley, you know, my biological father. See, when we look at Mom’s data we see that her DNA’s still mostly British Isles, like 74%, with the rest about half and half German and French.”

  “My mother’s mother,” Louella said. “There were Pennsylvania Dutch on that side of the family. That would account for the German. I don’t know where the French part would come in.”

  Given the way the France and Germany abutted, and the long history of war and territorial give and take, that much genetic intermingling seemed likely enough. We batted that around some, and agreed that the Shipley contribution would have been exclusively British Isles.

  “Which makes me pretty much white bread all the way,” Alden said. “Which I more or less figured, but I sort of hoped something interesting would turn up. A great-great-grandfather who was part African or Asian or, I don’t know, Arapaho? Or maybe Jewish, but something to make me a little less boring.”

  Louella told him he was pretty interesting, no matter where his genes came from.

  “Now with Sis here,” he said, “you can see right away that we’re half-siblings.”

  “And I’m the better half,” Kristin pointed out. “And it’s not that different. I’m still mostly British Isles, same as you.”

  He went over her profile with her. Her DNA was predominantly British Isles, but the figure they supplied was 65% for her as opposed to 87% for him. The French component was the same, but German was a little higher, and much of the remainder was identified as Scandinavian, with a 3% dash of Native American in the mix.

  The Scandinavian didn’t surprise me. I’d almost forgotten, but remembered now, that there were cousins on my mother’s side named Olson. Boisterous and athletic, as I recalled, but I’d never really known any of them, or anything about them.

  If Kristin was 3% American Indian, my own percentage would presumably be twice that. Which was enough to be real (assuming the analysis was accurate) but what did that amount to? One great-great grandparent? You’d have to go back a few generations to find a Comanche in the woodpile.