Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘Hey, Ray,’ Leo said.

  ‘I hate to say it,’ Ray said, ‘but you look like shit.’

  ‘This thing with Clyde has me tied up in knots. I got about ten minutes’ sleep last night. I just lay there, feeling my muscles getting tighter and tighter. It’s amazing I can stand up straight.’

  ‘Do your laps, and we’ll relax over lunch. Everything will be fine.’

  Leo performed another desultory crunch. ‘Does Sally know what happened?’

  For a little more than a year, Ray had been on-again off-again with an attractive, deeply messed-up editor at Ballantine named Sally Frohman. Currently they were on again, though indications such as the frequent usage of the word ‘relationship’ led Ray to anticipate a period of sexual drought within a matter of weeks, perhaps even days. ‘Why?’

  ‘I guess I was wondering what you said, and what she thought about it, how she reacted, that’s all.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Ray asked.

  ‘Well, you know,’ Leo said.

  ‘Okay, Leo. Sally was pissed off about something. She was sitting on the sofa, staring at the floor with her hands pushed into her hair, and I was at the kitchen table, doing revisions. The phone rang. That detective, Brannigan, told me about Clyde, probably the exact same way he told you. When I hung up, Sally said, “Am I allowed to know who you’re meeting tomorrow afternoon” “Yes, Sally,” I said. “I have to talk to a detective at the 26th Precinct. About two hours ago, one of my friends from the gym, Clyde Pepper, was found in Riverside Park with his throat cut and his head bashed in. You never met him, but Clyde was a nice guy, and for some reason I’m having trouble believing he was murdered while you and I were sitting here ignoring each other.” “Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” She started to cry. I made a drink for her and a drink for me. Then Gus and Tommy called. Sally and I went to bed, and for some reason we had the best sex we’ve had in months. Afterwards, I began to tell her a few things about Clyde, and I choked up. Pretty soon, we were both crying.’

  ‘I called Tommy and Gus,’ Leo said. ‘I would have called you, but I figured Sally was spending the night at your place.’

  ‘Your tact is greatly appreciated,’ Ray said.

  The four of them proceeded through their rounds of the exercise machines and returned to the locker room to change into bathing trunks. Four flights below, a utilitarian passage led to a scarred grey door and the labyrinth containing the swimming team’s lockers and two small, green-tiled chambers lined with shower heads. After brief, obligatory showers, they padded up a cement ramp and two by two, goggles swinging from their hands, went down a narrow corridor and through a metal door into an echoing underground vault.

  Eight lanes wide, the Columbia University pool was open to the general student population, faculty, staff, and alumni every weekday afternoon from noon to two p.m. Red plastic cones and wall plaques clamed the central lanes for ‘fast’ swimmers, the two at their left for the ‘medium’, and the first two and the eighth, long ago dubbed the ‘geezer lanes’ by Gus Trayham, for slowpokes. Within each lane, a blue stripe at the bottom of the pool divided inbound left from outbound right, and its occupants swam in circles. In the past, unless the presence of too many other swimmers forced them to alter the pattern, Leo and Clyde Pepper had taken lane 1, Tommy Whittle lane 2, and Ray and Gus wider, deeper lane 8.

  Composed more of faculty, alums, and staff than students, the fifteen to twenty swimmers who shared the pool with them separated out into the unobjectionable (those who did their laps in a steady, businesslike manner), the tolerable (who swam too slowly but were reasonable about it), and the offensive (people who barely moved at all, strayed out of their lanes, kicked up geysers of spray while mooching along, charged into people instead of detouring around them, and those whose ugly, ungainly strokes made them appear to be crippled). In the latter category were ‘the Monitor’, whose floundering crawl suggested that one of his arms had been amputated; ‘Cruella’, an elderly woman with a permanent sneer who did not actually look too bad until she followed a deliberate blow from a passing foot with a death-ray delivered through her radioactive blue goggles; and ‘Creeping Jesus’, a mournful character thought to be a Professor of Biblical History given to crouching in silent prayer by the end of the pool for fifteen minutes before crawling in and thrashing, apparently in utter panic, from one end to the other.

  Ray noticed the Monitor and Cruella making life miserable for the two Japanese girls also in lane 1, so he was not surprised when Leo announced that he would take the far lane today, although he secretly thought that Leo would have done the same had only the Japanese girls, ordinarily a great attraction, occupied the first lane. Tommy slipped into the water and joined two sturdy middle-aged women who were churning back and forth like horses. Ray, Gus, and Leo wandered past the diving boards to the far end, where a crop-headed blond lifeguard whose piglike face always reminded Ray of a dissolute peasant in a Dutch tavern painting looked up from his perch and said, ‘The big guys!’ He glanced at Leo Gozzi, then back at Ray. ‘What happened to your buddy?’

  Leo came to an abrupt halt and recoiled, as if he had bounced off a wall.

  ‘He dropped out,’ Ray said.

  ‘Suddenly called away,’ said Gus.

  ‘Sorry to hear it,’ said the boy. ‘For an older guy, he had major pecs. Hey, you’re all in great shape. I hope I look the same at your age.’

  ‘Be enough to get to our age,’ Gus said. ‘What with putting your life on the line three days a week.’

  ‘Hah,’ the boy said.

  One by one, they lowered themselves into the pool and breast-stroked towards the far end, Gus in the lead, then Ray, Leo behind him, each of the latter two waiting until the man ahead reached the middle of the pool before pushing off. For the first four laps, Gus was rolling into his return just as Leo ducked underwater and started back up to the far end. According to the same custom by which Gus invariably led off, thereby setting the pace, they did not break rhythm to stop and rest until after the tenth lap, but after Ray dipped into the turn for the back half of his sixth, he saw Leo floating down at the other end, one arm over the rope lane-divider, the other propped on the splash ledge. Gus ploughed through the water and executed his turn without saying anything to Leo. When Ray came to the end of the pool, he looked at Leo, who waved him on. Ray spun under and kicked off.

  His shoulder muscles stretched to meet the resistance of the water, seeming nearly to take in breath. There was always that moment when you and the resistance locked together and you felt your relationship with the water change from unconscious acceptance into a working partnership in which the resistance became a springy, yielding support. The difference had to do with consciousness, with being awake to your context. This moment of contextual awareness, Ray thought, resembled those periods when, immersing himself for the fiftieth time in a new book’s early scenes, he finally noticed how greatly his conception of certain characters diverged from the selves announced by the actual words they spoke. Supposedly sympathetic characters said things like, ‘Roger acts like he’s cynical and cold-hearted, but down deep he’s a real monster.’ While writing his seventh novel, Ray had learned at last how to listen to his characters; a decade later, consciousness of this other context had come to him only after months of reporting to Columbia’s pool. You had to pay attention to the medium through which you moved: if you did not, you were blind and flailing.

  Leo was still clinging to the rope when Ray swam back. He said, ‘Keep dragging your ass, you might as well get in with Cruella and the Monitor.’

  ‘I needed a rest,’ Leo said.

  Ray set off again for the top of the pool. Hallway there, he looked back and was relieved to see Leo swimming towards him.

  After Ray’s and Gus’s tenth lap and Leo’s eighth, they took a breather, bobbing in the water and holding onto the ledge. ‘Leo,’ Gus said, ‘I gather you had a rough night.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ Leo asked.


  ‘Well,’ Gus said, ‘Thursday is Ruth’s night. We had dinner at Jezebel and went back to my place. I stood on Junior. After Lieutenant Brannigan woke me up, you talked to me for half an hour. Then Tommy called. I sent Ruth home and talked to Ray. I kept thinking about how you brought Clyde in, how we all hooked up with him. I was trying to get my head around what happened. Took me hours to get to sleep, all the crazy shit that was going through my mind. We all had a rough night, and now we got to carry on, hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Leo said. ‘But I was closer to him than the rest of you.’

  ‘Then you got to deal with that,’ Gus said, and swam away.

  * * * *

  Carrie, their waiter (or ‘waitress’, as the geezers would have put it) at The Heights, said, ‘What happened to your buddy?’

  The pig-faced boy who guarded the watery realm of Cruella and the Monitor three days a week had used the same words, and although the question had not been addressed to him, Ray answered as before. ‘He dropped out.’

  ‘The man took a hike,’ said Gus, putting a more active spin on the concept that Clyde had been called away.

  Leo turned his head to the long second-floor window looking down on Broadway and muttered, ‘You could put it that way.’

  Carrie awaited farther clarification. She was a slender, small-boned young woman, and her waiting had an open, expectant quality. A couple of seconds passed while the four men at the table examined the silverware, the chalkboard listing the day’s specials, the mixture of Columbia students and neighbourhood funk milling on the sidewalk.

  ‘Ohh-kay,’ Carrie said. ‘Four spinach salads and two Cokes, coming up.’

  They had the same lunch every day, and their regular waiters, Carrie, Troy the Boy and Melissa, had been trained to add extra bacon and blue cheese to the salads. Ray suspected that they just went into the kitchen and said, ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Leo,’ Gus said, ‘I’m a little concerned about you.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Leo said. ‘I’m not supposed to open my mouth?’

  ‘Open it all you like,’ Gus said. ‘But don’t put your business on the street. Say, Carrie reads about this business in the paper. Say, she sees his picture on the news. Until that happens, and I don’t think it will, because I never heard Carrie indicate she gives a damn about the news unless some movie star gets his tit caught in a wringer, but until it does she’s better off thinking Clyde moved out of town. Why spoil her day?’

  ‘I get it, I get it,’ Leo said.

  ‘All of us have to deal with what happened to Clyde, but we don’t have to drag other people into the process.’

  ‘Gus,’ Leo said, ‘please stop lecturing me.’

  ‘You’d learn what a lecture was, I ever gave you one,’ Gus said. ‘This here is friendly advice.’

  ‘Try keeping the friendly advice to yourself for once,’ Leo said.

  Gus held up his hands, palms out, and smiled at Leo.

  Carrie set their plates before them and went through the routine with the pepper grinder. Ray and Tommy Whittle got the Cokes. All four men ran their knives through the salads half a dozen times, cutting the spinach leaves into smaller and smaller sections, and began eating.

  When the silence became unendurable, Gus said, ‘Who saw Clyde last? I guess it must have been you, Leo.’

  ‘As far as I know,’ Leo said. ‘After the three of you got into a cab, Clyde and I went down Broadway to 107th. He dropped me at my building and kept walking towards West End. That was the last time I saw him.’

  ‘Anybody call him that evening?’ Gus asked.

  ‘Not me,’ Leo said. ‘Did you?’

  Gus widened his eyes. ‘I don’t think I called Clyde but twice in the past two years. Once when you had to spend all day tinkering with some movie star’s computer, and once when I had an extra Knicks ticket and couldn’t get any of you to go with me. He turned me down too, so I wound up taking Louise, my Tuesday regular.’ Gus Trayham had long ago evolved a complicated system which allocated certain days of the week to the inner core of his sexual partners, most of them married women operating on tight schedules. ‘Did you two talk to Clyde last night?’

  ‘No,’ Ray said. ‘Outside of this, I never saw Clyde that much. We had dinner a couple of times last year. One day when the gym was closed for Christmas break, we went to a movie together. And about two weeks ago, he called up around nine, ten at night to say he was down the block from my place, and I invited him over. We had a few beers.’

  ‘The same thing happened with me,’ Tommy said. ‘Last Friday, the phone rang. It was Clyde. He said he was out for a walk, noticed he was in my neighbourhood, and wondered what I was doing. I told him to come up. We shot the breeze, and he started looking though my videotape collection. “I guess you do like John Wayne,” he said. “Have you got She Wore a Yellow Ribbon?” “You bet,” I said, and we watched the whole thing. Great movie.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Gus said, ‘but you didn’t say if you talked to him last night.’

  Tommy’s head snapped forward. ‘Last night I didn’t talk to anyone until Brannigan gave me the bad news. He said he got our names from Clyde’s address book. Right away, I called Leo, but I guess he was talking to you, because I tried you next, and both lines were busy.’

  ‘Clyde should have wandered back to our neighbourhood instead of getting stupid and going to Riverside Park,’ Gus said. ‘Time to settle up and pay a visit to the Man.’

  * * * *

  A bored uniform glanced through a pane of bullet-proof glass that looked as though someone had once tried to shatter it with a brick. He listened to Gus’s explanation of why they were there. He asked him to repeat it, then he looked wearily at Ray.

  ‘Lieutenant Brannigan asked us to come here at 3:00 in connection with the death of Clyde Pepper,’ Ray said.

  Although he was wearing a watch, the uniform consulted the wall clock and observed that the time was 2:58. He shook his head and loafed to the door to request, very slowly, that another officer conduct these gentlemen to Lieutenant Brannigan’s office. Without saying a word, the second officer got to his feet and began slouching down the corridor.

  At the back of the station, the officer led them into a squad room where prematurely jaded men and women in their early thirties sat at desks crowded with papers and cups of coffee. He flapped a hand at a wooden bench and a row of plastic chairs. Ray and Gus took the bench and Leo and Tommy dropped into the chairs. The officer knocked once at a wooden door, slouched inside, and returned a moment later, followed by a tall, balding ex-fullback wearing a handsome Italian suit, a sparkling white shirt and a lustrous silk necktie. His eyes were the colour of wet cement, and his lipless mouth had all the warmth of a mail slot.

  The geezers stood up as the ex-fullback strode towards them and introduced himself as Lieutenant Brannigan. The mail slot lengthened into a deathly smile as Brannigan shook their hands. His mushroom-coloured teeth seemed too numerous and surprisingly small.

  ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ Brannigan said. ‘You were Clyde Pepper’s only friends in the world, looks like. I want to pick your brains, see what you might be able to tell me. Chances are, his assailant was a mugger, and we’re doing everything we can on that front, but the degree of violence here exceeds ninety per cent of muggings, including those that result in homicide. So we have to keep our minds open. We have to consider other options. I want to find out a few things about you, hear whatever comes into your mind about the deceased. You never know what might give us a lead, no matter how insignificant it seems to you. The procedure shouldn’t take much more than an hour. Are we in agreement?’

  Each in his own way, the four men assented.

  ‘Thank you for your co-operation. Let’s begin with you, Mr Constantine.’

  * * * *

  Brannigan pointed Ray to a chair, sat behind his desk, and opened a notebook. For a moment, the wet-cement eyes bored into Ray’s. ‘Are you comfortable a
bout having this conversation, Mr Constantine?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Ray said. ‘I guess I was assuming that a mugger must have killed Clyde, so I wasn’t sure how we could help you. I’m happy to tell you everything I can, though.’

  ‘I appreciate that. Were you aware that before taking retirement your friend was a homicide detective assigned to this precinct?’

  ‘All I knew was that Clyde was a retired police officer.’ Ray paused, but Brannigan simply sat behind his desk, watching him. ‘Did he work here a long time?’

  ‘Twelve years,’ Brannigan said. ‘Most of that time, Detective Pepper lived out on the Island. After his divorce, he moved into a high-rise in Riverdale. Right after he retired, he came into the city and took the place on West End.’

  ‘He must have missed his old neighbourhood,’ Ray said.

  Brannigan displayed another deathly smile. ‘What kind of work do you do, Mr Constantine? Most people can’t take two, three hours off in the middle of the day to work out in a gym.’