He tried to recall the number of times he had taken Jennifer to the park. On Sunday mornings, when the park was almost always deserted, and on crowded Saturday afternoons; sometimes after school when he had picked her up after cutting his day short or come home early from a conference or meeting. They had spent so much time together, alone, when her mother had gone shopping or to the health spa, or visited friends. He had been fortunate. Blessed. Pushing heron the swings, waiting for her at the bottom of the slide, launching her into the air and guiding her descent back to earth on the seesaw. Hearing her laughter. Watching the flash of her thin, white legs, the auburn curls flying in the air.
Then carefully, so carefully, bringing her home and washing her, making sure she was clean, tending to her bruises and cuts, and then playing the games he had concocted for them when they were alone, together. She had always been a good girl. Flesh of his flesh. So few times naughty. Only once, really… crying… throwing a tantrum…resisting…no one had been around, in the park…didn’t mean to…just blew up…a child is such a fragile thing…the pieces…
“Even the fucking squirrels got to sleep.” The words thundered suddenly in the stillness and reverberated in Brad’s mind like the sonic boom from a low flying jet. He jumped, hands flying from his pockets, spilling change, and ducked his head instinctively to evade a blow. He slipped, lost his balance, and fell off the bench, landing on one knee and the palms of his outspread hands.
“But they got places to sleep in, you notice that?” the voice continued, and Brad saw a tall, dark mass behind the bench outlined in the faint light from a distant street lamp outside the park boundaries. “Even the squirrels got places to go. People like me, we got no place.” The mass moved in a series of jerky motions, like a character in a poorly animated cartoon, and came around the bench to sit, finally coalescing into a recognizably human shape.
The scraggly features Brad picked out in the darkness confirmed the newcomer’s identity as one of the homeless men he had seen camped out occasionally in the park, sleeping under the benches with card board roofs and floors protecting them from rain and wind. He could smell the man, even separate the stink of soiled and filthy clothes from the foul stench of his breath. The pockets of his multiple-layered pants and jackets bulged with packaged foods and random items of clothing sticking out from holes in the fabric. Brad stood up and brushed dirt with trembling hands from his trousers and trench coat. His heart pounded as hard now as when Vanessa had stopped suddenly to ask her silly question.
Taking a second, closer look at the homeless man, he noted that though bearded and gaunt, he was young, in his early twenties. Balancing his need to gather his wits and strength with the possible danger in sitting next to the vagrant, he decided the young man showed no signs of violent psychosis, and his apparent physical condition eliminated any danger of direct assault. Brad collapsed on his end of the bench. One foot shook uncontrollably.
“They’re just rats,” the homeless youth continued, staring at Brad’s foot as it pumped up and down spasmodically. “Cuter, but just rats. Sharp claws, always digging, scratching. I see them run all the way up to the sixth floor of those apartment buildings out there, claws finding every crack and crevice in the bricks. Seen them run like bullets from dogs and cats, and chase each other up and down the trees like mad little demons. Seen them fuck… Disgusting. Little flea factories, they are. Filthy creatures. Build lots of nests all over the place, seen them myself. Take twigs, branches, leaves, anything they can find or root out. Fleas get so bad in one nest, they move to the next. Ever heard of such a thing? Can’t even stand their own homes. What kind of creature is that, can’t stand their own nests? Makes you think, you know? Like, you ever see a baby squirrel? What do they do with their youngsters? They got black eyes, you know? Jet black, I seen them, watching me…Sometimes, I get scared, they do to me what they do their youngsters. I know what could happen…I don’t like those squirrels…Stay away from their nests, I tell you…”
The young man stopped, catching his breath and looking up to stare at the dim outlines of squirrel nests above them, in the tree branches. Brad automatically followed his gaze as questions and hypotheses formed in his mind. He opened his mouth to ask about the young man’s family, then stopped himself in time. He looked down at his trembling foot, willing it to stop as desperately as he forced himself to ignore his old clinical response habits. He was an administrator, he had left the sick behind a long time ago, before the homeless, and AIDS, and drugs had broken out of their respective cages to assail society’s structure. He could not tolerate the ill, they disturbed him too much. He wanted to move on, to shut out the derelict’s rambling. But he listened, and his questions and analyses raced ahead of his need to run.
“I watch them,” the young man continued, taking a deep breath in preparation for another run of words and thoughts. “I got nothing else to do, and somebody’ got to keep an eye on them. Sit here, in the playground, on the rock. Or back there, in the bushes. Watch everything. I know what the squirrels do. They ain’t innocent, you know? The baby squirrels…”
Brad could think of nothing but the homeless man, sitting in the bushes, all day, morning to night, watching everything that went on in the park. Everything.
Suddenly, Brad felt as if his privacy had been invaded, as if he had come home to find his apartment burglarized, and the thief sitting down at his kitchen table, having a cup of coffee.
“Do you know me?” Brad asked gently, finding his old counseling voice, soft and reassuring.
“Yeah, I seen you around. I remember you. I ain’t completely crazy, you know.” The vagrant looked confused for a moment, frowning and staring at Brad as if he had just noticed him.
“You around, Sunday mornings?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see…my daughter, kidnapped?”
“I was around when they said that happened. Detectives questioned me. Didn’t see nothing like that.”
“What did you see?” Brad asked, with an earnestness he had not heard in himself since his graduate school days, doing his social work internship in a public grade school. The little girls had loved him, then, and he had discovered how much he had loved them in return: far too much to be safely confined in institutions full of children. People would never understand.
Terror lit up the homeless man’s eyes, as they open wider with recognition, leaking madness into the world. “Nothing. I didn’t see nothing.” The young man stood up, took a step back. “I ain’t on medication no more, anyhow. I keep seeing things, hearing things.” He took another step back, fading into the darkness. “I ain’t right. You can’t trust what I see.”
“Visual hallucinations are much rarer than auditory hallucinations,” said Brad. The assertion sounded flat, lifeless. He had lost his old counseling empathy and emotion. The administrator had returned.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what the shrink and cops told me, in the hospital yesterday…” The vagrant’s words faded with the outline of his figure, until, as soundlessly as he had appeared, the homeless youth vanished into the depths of the park.
Brad stood and limped along the path leading out of the park, resting once at the entrance, leaning on a stone pillar, before crossing the street and heading home. His body was numb. He thought he would feel nothing if he went back out into the middle of the street, stripped his clothes, and allowed himself to be hit by a passing car.
He walked up the six flights of stairs to his floor rather than use the elevator, hoping the climb would get the ice floes of blood in his veins and arteries circulating so his sluggish brain could resume its normal functioning. The inner violation Brad had experienced over the discovery of the homeless youth’s secret presence in the park became a physical sensation, like flesh rubbed raw, when he saw that his apartment door had been forced opened. He put his hand on the knob and pushed the door in. A harsh roaring in his ears drowned out all other sounds. He felt his organs being displaced, as if a hand or surgical inst
rument was pushing and shoving them aside in its lusty search the hidden source of his life. The darkness within his apartment waited for him.
He entered cautiously, eager to grapple with a concrete problem he could resolve. He hoped the thief or thieves were still be inside, and he balled his fists, trying to conjure up the frustration, the rage and the fear, he had felt earlier in the day. The spell died when he turned on the light and saw the detective investigating his daughter’s disappearance sitting on his sofa, pinning him with a hard stare set within a neutral expression.
A neighbor’s door opened behind him. The detective’s partner emerged, filling the hallway. The gun in the detective’s hand pointed at him.
“We have a search warrant, so don’t start any of that shit,” said the seated detective with sudden vehemence, and without changing his expression. The roaring in Brad’s ears died away. The silence in the apartment seemed to creep out from the depths of a freshly opened crypt.
Brad took another step into the apartment. Stopped when his foot struck something. He looked down, and he glanced over the stack of DVD’s he’d kicked, the packets of pictures spilled across the hard wood floor, the magazines and letters in his daughter’s hand he had made her write to him and the photo albums of pictures. Pain seared his abdomen like an abomination about to be born.
“We have a few questions we’d like to ask,” the detective said, keeping his eyes raised to look at Brad. “But first, I want to show you something. Maybe you can explain it.”
The detective stood up and walked to the back of the apartment, to the entrance to his daughter’s room, ignoring the pornography that had been torn out of hiding places that had multiplied like a sweet-eating child’s teeth cavities since Brad’s wife had moved out. Brad walked gingerly through the shambles of his collection strewn across his path and followed the detective into Jennifer’s room.
The detective pointed at the window by Jennifer’s bed, next to the radiator. Brad opened the dusty venetian blinds and looked out at the apartment building across the way—a wall of darkness broken only by a few lighted windows. The detective stood beside him, but was careful not to let their bodies touch. He rapped the glass near the bottom of the window with the knuckles of his fist. Something darted across the striped field of light cast through the venetian blinds by the overhead light in Jennifer’s room. A grey, liquid wave of fur slid up the metal fire escape steps leading to the roof, then came to a sudden, panting stop on the edge of the rectangle of light. A squirrel, bushy tail raised high, cocked its head and turned a black eye to the window. Brad did not want to look, but felt his gaze pulled down by the dark mass on the fire escape landing outside the window.
The squirrel had built the nest flush against the window, anchoring it with thick twigs laced through the iron slats and rods of the escape landing and railing. Smaller twigs, leaves, scraps of paper and plastic, pieces of fabric had been woven into the nest. The detective kept tapping the glass, drawing Brad’s gaze to the pale twig near the window corner. A pale twig, with bits of stringy matter still attached. Then Brad looked back at the pieces of plastic and fabric, and thought of squirrel claws, digging, prying secret places open, tearing tightly wrapped packages and the white Spring dress, rending dead flesh, pulling bones out to build nests.
Brad looked back up at the squirrel, with its front paws held up as if in prayer. “Filthy creatures,” he whispered.
The detective grunted as he took hold of Brad’s arm in a tight grip and led him away from the window.
SUSPECT CITY
The stationmaster, eyes bright, a quiet smile ruffling his short, carefully trimmed beard, waited by one of the platform pillars as the train glided to a halt. The screeching symphony of metal grinding on metal reverberated in the dirty whiteface tiled cavern, obliterating the conductor’s announcement of the stop. Shadows danced in stately union as the station’s three lonely light fixtures swung back and forth from the cracked and peeling ceiling. A faded sign declared the station’s name: “Rondo Callo Monte.” The conductor did not recall speaking that name into the microphone.
“Hi, Matteo,” said the stationmaster, tipping his cap as he appeared in the conductor’s window with the train’s final, grinding lurch.
“Good morning,” the conductor answered. He stuck his head out, opened the doors with a flick of the control switch. He snorted to expel the scent of the stationmaster’s spicy sweet cologne.
A woman startled Matteo by getting off two cars up the train. Head shaved, medical gown billowing in the tunnel draft, she gave him a glance before bowing her head, crossing the line of platform columns and leaving his field of vision. A passenger exiting the train when no one was supposed to be on board was just another thread of unreason running through his world. Worse was not finding a passenger who just boarded. Questions went unasked. The dread of missed opportunities gnawed at the gut, pumped cold sustenance for the heart’s fear. And there was nothing to do about it. There were rules that applied only to him. The train could skip stations packed with people. It could wait for hours at an abandoned platform. Schedules and station names did not match the lines the train followed. People came and went without his knowing, though it was his responsibility as conductor to be aware of the train rider count, in case of emergency.
Matteo almost laughed at what might constitute an emergency down in the subway tunnels.
More than a responsibility, passengers promised salvation. He had only to catch the right one. Not let him or her walk off, or disappear, unquestioned. But there was no use complaining. The stationmaster was no help. And breaking the rules, abandoning his post, refusing to do the job, brought consequences he would rather not face.
Neck and shoulders tingling, he looked at the open doorway to his compartment. No one was there.
It was never that easy.
“Or is it afternoon?” he said to the stationmaster at last, irritated by his own fear and foolishness, and the passenger he just lost.
The stationmaster shrugged his shoulders. “One’s much like the other, isn’t it?” His smile broadened to show teeth. He cocked his head in the discharged passenger’s direction. “Maybe she’s the one. Maybe you let her get away.”
“Fuck you,” Matteo said. He put his hand on the switch to close the doors. A figure jumped out of the darkness at the end of the platform and boarded the train.
“It’s going to be one of those days,” the stationmaster said, his smile sealed once again. He stepped back and behind the pillar. Disappeared. Subway tunnel sewer smell rolled into the conductor’s compartment.
Matteo closed the doors, sat on the pull down seat, absorbed the train’s jerk start and erratic acceleration. The woman on the platform passed in a flash of white, blood staining the gown as she tore at the fabric, at her flesh. Her wail of despair challenged the electric sizzle of sparking motors.
Matteo’s mood lightened slightly. He didn’t feel so bad about missing her. She wasn’t a suspect. She was a victim.
Just before the tunnel swallowed the train, a gray rectangle momentarily relieved the station’s deepening darkness. Stairs leading up. Matteo’s heart fluttered at the rare sight, thinking of what might be outside. Though they were never labeled with exit, entrance or destination signage, it was impossible not to imagine where they led. Day. Night. People. His home. A life.
He slammed the window shut as the sewer smell bloomed into a stench. He tried to blank his mind of hope and dreams. A bare bulb whisked by, illuminating a patch of rock wall barely a hand’s length away. The rhythm of wheels clacking over rail joints gave him a hypnotic, relaxing focus. Another bulb passed, sooner than usual, distracting him. A reflection moved in the window.
Matteo cried out. Turned, his back braced against the window. The fold up seat slammed against the compartment’s wall. He faced the figure filling the doorway, feeling the warmth drain from his hands, the chill shooting through him to pierce his heart like a thousand icy needles.
Daddy, he al
most said.
But, of course, it wasn’t. A station master double, this time in a tweed jacket and dark slacks, gold detective shield dangling over his stripped tie, gun holster showing the butt of an automatic, gave him a thin smile. “Any luck?” he asked, his voice hoarse, as if he had not spoken in a very long time.
“No.” Matteo clinked into a corner.
“Didn’t think so.” The detective braced himself in the entrance with big hands, thick fingers pressing against the inside of the opening.
Their hands were always bigger, and as heavy as anvil heads. “Is there a problem?” Matteo asked, squeaking.
“Want to change your story? It’d give you a chance to get off duty for a while, come down to the station house, have a cup of coffee and talk to us. Get things off your mind.”
“I don’t have anything on my mind, except doing my job.”
“You sure? I’m only trying to help.”
“No. Fuck you.” Another new one. Freshly blessed, full of divine inspiration, going for the tough ones first. Trying out the charisma of his blessing. Reaching for the glory of making his bones on redemption or damnation the first time out. The old ones only came back to enforce the rules. Sometimes, for fun, they tried making him change his story the hard way. They had practice using those fists.
This one was no better than others, actually worse than most. He didn’t try very hard, as if he was only down in the subway to say he had made the trip. The hump on his back gave the wings away. His eyes wandered over the compartment, to the empty car, the browned cigarette strip ads, a graffiti-covered system map, and the Miss Subway voting poster. Already, he was eager to move on, throw himself into the big fight. No understanding of subtlety. No appreciation of the stakes. Verdict already rendered, waiting to execute judgment.
But he was right. They were wrong. He wasn’t a suspect, he was a victim. The suspects were all around them, but they were too stupid and blind to see.
A Blood of Killers Page 32
