the Black Marble (1977)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Before he'd made a conscious choice, Philo had the phone in his hand and was dialing the number he knew so well.

  She lay awake in the moonlight, on satin sheets damp with tears. She sensed who it was. Their conversation was grimly subdued this time. They were both exhausted.

  "Hello."

  "It's Richard."

  "I know."

  "Get dressed if you're not. Get the money." "All right."

  "How big is the bundle?"

  "Not large." It was surprising what a small bundle twenty thousand dollars made.

  "Can you put it in a shopping bag?"

  "Yes, easily," she said.

  "Okay, put it in a shopping bag. No, a plastic bag. Do you have any plastic trash bags?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Put it in the plastic bag. Wrap the bag good and tape it shut. Make a neat bundle."

  "Yes."

  "Drive . . . let s see . . . drive east on the Suicide Bridge. Drive slow."

  "Yes."

  "When you get to the east end of the bridge, toss the bundle out the passenger side of the car. Carefully. So it falls in the street."

  "Yes."

  'There shouldn't be a single car on that bridge at this hour. Don't most of you people in that area use the freeway instead of the old Suicide Bridge?"

  "Yes. There won't be anyone on the bridge."

  "If there is, if you see another car's lights, don't drop the money. Go home and wait for my call. Understand?"

  "Yes. When will you bring Vickie home?"

  "I won't bring Vickie home. You'll get a call from me tomorrow at noon. I'll pick a safe place for Vickie near your home. Maybe a church or a public building. I'll tie her up there and I'll call you and tell you where."

  "How is she?" Madeline stifled a sob, remembering the horror of that last call.

  "She's all right," Philo said bleakly. "That wasn't my fault. I never hurt an animal before. That was your fault."

  "Yes. I'll do as you say. Shall I go now?"

  "Wait exactly thirty minutes. In thirty minutes you better be driving east on the Suicide Bridge. And there better not be any cops around."

  "There won't be."

  Then Philo lied and said, "Because if there are ... if there are, my friend is ordered to cut the schnauzer's head off."

  "Oh, my God," Madeline said.

  Then Philo told the truth and said, "Do you know why I decided on the Suicide Bridge?" "No."

  "Because," he said, "if there are any cops waiting for me, Fm going to jump off that bridge. "

  "There won t be, I swear."

  "Fll be dead and so will your Vickie."

  "Yes, I understand."

  "This is not the way I planned it, lady. Fm not stupid enough to plan it like this. Fm desperate, do you believe me?"

  "I believe you," she said.

  "So we're going to just do it. In thirty minutes. And trust each other. I get the money, you get Vickie. Or I jump. Right now, lady, I want you to believe that it don't make much difference to me."

  _ _ _

  There was a range light burning in the kitchen, otherwise the cluttered apartment was dark. They lay in Valnikov's daybed with only a coverlet over them. She had her face on his hairy keg of a chest listening to his heart. He had a heavy slow heartbeat now. He wouldn't stop caressing her. Her head, her shoulders, her neck, her arms. Natalie Zimmerman was purring like a cat. In fact, Misha and Grisha were getting nervous just listening to her.

  "Andrushka?" she said.

  "Yes, Natasha?"

  "It's been a good night."

  'The best of my entire life," he said.

  "Andrushka?" she said.

  "Yes?"

  "Nothing. I just love the sound of the name."

  They were silent for a moment and he said, "Natasha?"

  "Yes?"

  "Nothing. I just love Natasha."

  Suddenly it troubled her. She said, "The name? You mean you love the name."

  But he was silent. So she said, "This is just a crazy night. We're just drunk and having a hell of a good time and . . . this is just a crazy night that's resulted from a crazy day and the craziest investigation of my life and . . . well, you mean you love the name Natasha."

  His silence troubled her more. It made her remember the case she was working on. Reporting his madness was now out of the question. In fact, it was past changing her burglary assignment. She was going to demand a transfer from Hollywood Detectives immediately. She didn't want to be there when somebody else discovered the truth about Valnikov. But mental aberration wasn't incurable. It wasn't irreversible, for God's sake! And though she had to get away from him, there was no denying how much she liked him. You had to like anybody born and raised in Los Angeles, twenty-two years a cop, who was as corny and old-fashioned as he was. And so crazy. And that, she reasoned, was probably what brought on the orgasmic bursts. Some perverse streak in her she wasn't aware of. Making love to a madman.

  "So it's been the best night of your entire life," she said.

  "Yes," he said, still stroking, caressing, as he listened to the Gypsy violin and stared at the darkened ceiling.

  "Tell me more about your entire life," she said.

  "How can I tell you about my entire life?" he chuckled.

  'Tell me about your old neighborhood."

  "Boyle Heights? Well, it was Russian and Jewish and Mexican, and old. It's a very old neighborhood. Now of course it's almost all Mexican."

  "Were you a happy kid?" she asked, propping herself up on an elbow, looking at his eyes, wet in the darkness.

  "Sure I was happy," he said. "Of course it was tough after my father died, but Alex was much older and he supported us just fine."

  "Did you go to church?"

  "Of course we went to church," Valnikov smiled. "Our lives centered around the church. Our batushka was there. Our professor was there. We went to services and to Sunday School and to Russian school all there in the church. All of us had to learn to read and write the language from our professor."

  "The Russian language?"

  "The only language as far as our mothers were concerned. They were monarchists, you see. They truly believed they were going back one day. Every single one of them dreamed of at least having their bones sent back someday when the Bolsheviks were overthrown. Do you have any idea how impractical they were, those immigrants? How they dreamed? How mystical they were?"

  "But you kids were happy?"

  "Of course we were happy. It got a little tough after World War Two when it wasn't fashionable to be a Russian anymore. In fact, when I graduated from high school it was very unfashionable. We were in the Korean War, and kids used to call us Communists and Reds. The new immigrants from the second immigration had it worse. They actually were Soviets and got it from all sides. If you didn't go to church even the old Russian people called you a Bolshevik. The American kids didn't know the difference. We were all Bolsheviks, even though every single house of the first immigration had a picture of Nicholas Romanov displayed as reverently as an ikon. You could depend on it. Nicholas, then the Virgin, then Khristos."

  "Did you think in Russian?"

  "Only until the fifth grade or so. Then I started to think in English. My Russian got terrible. But my mother lived long enough to hear Khrushchev on television and she said her Andrushka would always speak Russian better than that ignorant Ukrainian. She used to say that when that peasant farted you could hear it from Moscow to Malibu." Valnikov stopped to laugh and wipe his eyes at the memory.

  Natalie Zimmerman got up suddenly and walked naked to the kitchen and he heard her pouring something. He thought it was water but she returned with a tumbler full of vodka.

  "Here/' she said.

  "I don't want any more."

  "Please have some more. I'd like to talk."

  "But I don't need vodka to talk."

  "You might."

  "But I'm trying to cut down on my drinking."

  "Do it tomorrow. Tonight dri
nk for me. I'll help you."

  Valnikov pulled himself up on the daybed and let her prop a pillow behind him. Then Natalie slipped under the sheet again next to him.

  "Drink," she said. And he drank.

  "I want to hear more about your old partner."

  "Charlie Lightfoot?"

  "Yes. Why was he such a good homicide detective?"

  Valnikov drank now without prompting. "Good? He was good. He could cut through it all."

  "Yes?"

  "Like the old black woman they found decomposing in her bed. The neighbors called to complain about the bad smell coming from her little cottage." Valnikov stopped to drink again. "And the officer that got there discovered the glass was smashed out of a side window. And then he discovered a pane broken out of the back door. And then he discovered a burnt match on the back porch. And another in the kitchen. And another in the hall. And another ..." He drank more vodka. Ah, what does Natalie call it? Mellow. Yes. "And another and another. Burnt matches leading all over the house and finally into her bedroom, where the trail stopped. And there she was. Charlie used to keep the crime lab photo. You see, the patrol officers had called the crime lab and latent prints and photo lab and their watch commander. Her hair was white and electric. It fanned out electric around her skull. She was so decomposed her eyes were silver sockets and her lips were mostly gone showing all her teeth clear up past where they should have been tissue and wasn't. Charlie took one look and said, No murder. No murder! they yelled. No murder? The house has been broken into. A burglar broke in and murdered her in her bed! I'll bet they'll find a knife wound! the patrol officers yelled. Maybe she was strangled. Oh, everyone was raising hell over this one.''

  "And was it murder?" Natalie asked while Valnikov sipped at the glass.

  "No murder," Valnikov said. "Charlie got all the bluesuits together and showed them how it happened. The burglar came to the house at night. He broke out the pane in the back door. The glass is on the floor inside. He starts lighting matches, going around the house, pleased as punch, wondering how he's going to cart all this stuff away. Maybe there's a bad smell coming from the bedroom. Maybe he's got a cold and doesn't smell it. Anyway, the trail of matches tells us that he goes in there last. He's maybe singing to himself. She's got a TV set, a nice transistor radio, some money in a kitchen jar. He's going to make enough to buy some dope. He lights the very last match at the foot of the bed. Then he sees the corpse I described to you. The bedroom window is busted from the inside out. He yells and goes through the glass head first. He's still running ..." Valnikov was shaking the daybed with his laughter. "She was ninety years old and died a natural death, the autopsy showed. He's still running ..."

  Valnikov, incredibly enough, almost had the tumbler emptied. He wouldn't die a natural death, she thought. Not if he continued to drink like that. Which of course she wasn't helping-

  "Why did Charlie Lightfoot shoot himself?" she said suddenly.

  Valnikov drained the glass. "They said it was a hunting accident."

  "Charlie Lightfoot was no hunter," she reminded him.

  Valnikov said, "He never should have retired. He had his work, at least."

  "Did he like his work?"

  "He was old. He was very old for his age. He thought the world was draining into a sump hole. The Big Sewer is how he referred to everything. Gone down the Big Sewer, Charlie would say about a dead body. He was an atheist, Charlie was. And human beings were nothing more than . . . than something to rush down the Big Sewer."

  "He was your friend. He liked you, didn't he?"

  "He did," Valnikov nodded. "Except toward the end. He didn't care about anyone, especially not himself. I think I started drinking on duty then. I'd been a policeman twenty- one years, and even as a detective I never drank on duty. When all the other dicks had martinis and bourbon for lunch, I never drank on duty. We both started drinking a lot then. On duty, off duty." Valnikov sighed. "When Charlie pulled the pin and went to be a mountain man I knew it wouldn't work out. We were both in the habit of daytime drinking then. We'd had the worst time either of us ever had then."

  "The worst time?"

  "Five child murders in a month! Nobody ever had to handle that many so quickly. And we were only supposed to assist divisional detectives on their unsolved murders, on their whodunits."

  "Did you get the killer?"

  "Killers!" Valnikov cried suddenly. "That's just it. They were unrelated killings. Five in a row, all under ten years old. Three by their mothers, one by a father, one by a mother with a father. They weren't whodunits. The divisional detectives should have been able to see the marks of old torture. Five in a row we had. That was too many"

  He dropped the water tumbler. It didn't spill. It was empty. "Here, let me get you some more," Natalie Zimmerman said: And she was up and hurrying to the kitchen again. Let old Natalie help you. Sure. Let Natalie do the torturing. God, Valnikov could make you hate yourself. He had that way about him. She poured the glass half lull of Russian vodka. Have a shot of oblivion, Valnikov. Kiss your liver good-bye. Compliments of your good old partner, Natalie Zimmerman. Let your partner turn your head into piroshki.

  When she handed him the vodka his hands were shaking. He drank with both hands. He was perspiring and his teeth were chattering. She pulled a blanket up over them and got under the covers.

  "What made you get in the fight with the doctor?"

  "Doctor?"

  "They kicked you out of homicide. They transferred you to Hollywood Detectives, didn't they? Was it drinking? There was some problem. At an autopsy."

  "Doctor," he mumbled. And there it was! The sparkly dots beginning to shape into ... a doctor! There was an Asian doctor. No, a Caucasian doctor. Two doctors.

  "What is it, Valnikov?" she demanded.

  He drank vodka. It spilled down his chin onto the curly cinnamon hair on his chest. "Sometimes I get a picture," he said, staring off in the darkness at the picture forming. Siberia. Snow again. 'The picture just gets . . . away."

  "Does it come every day?" Natalie Zimmerman was sitting up in the daybed, white flesh in the darkness.

  "Every day," Valnikov said. "If I could just get it once. It s like . . . deja vu."

  "Deja vu," she said.

  "It's deja vu. But the most . . . intense kind of deja vu. I ... I know that if I could just get it clear and see it . . . "

  "Does it come at night? In a dream?"

  There it went. The sparkling dots were swimming and losing form.

  "Do you dream about a rabbit?" she pressed.

  Now it was coming back. Now, by God! The rabbit was hopping through the snow.

  'The rabbit!"

  "Do you dream about a rabbit?"

  "Yes!" he cried.

  "Take it easy," Natalie said. "Drink a little vodka."

  Valnikov drained the water tumbler. She didn't know anyone could drink that much and stay conscious.

  "What's the last autopsy you remember? It must have been the one where you got in trouble."

  "Last autopsy?" he said, watching the dots lose their shimmer. Watching the phantoms retreat in the darkness.

  "How many autopsies have you attended?"

  He looked at her and said, "Hundreds, I guess. I don't know."

  "And die last one. Who was dead?"

  "The last one," he muttered.

  Was that the one with the pretty teenager who had died of a barbiturate overdose? Yes. No.

  How about this one, Valnikov? This little chippy and her boyfriends, they have a pill-popping party and she . . . get this . . . she dies of an overdose. Look.

  The man plunges the turkey skewer into her flawless young belly. The steel dart squeaks when it goes in.

  Get this: The liver temperature says she was dead all the time the boys were gangfucking her last night. Imagine that? They banged a corpse! Know what one doper says when they told him that? He says, well, she always was a dead piece a ass. I didn't notice no difference. Isn't that a scream?


  A scream.

  The little boy used to scream, Sergeant.

  Then why didnt you call the police, damn you!

  But I didnt want to get involved.

  Involved! How long did you hear these screams in the night? How long?

  Three weeks, the neighbor answers fearfully.

  Three weeks! Three weeks! If there's a hell, lady, you'll burn there! If there's a hell!

  There is no hell, Charlie Lightfoot says. There's no heaven either. There's just the Big Sewer.

  Tutu was there. Charlie Lightfoot was there. The rabbit was there.

  "The rabbit!" Valnikov cried out. He had been drifting asleep and Natalie Zimmerman, who by now decided that it was very dangerous playing Dr. Jung, decided to let him.

  He sat up straight in bed, dripping sweat and cried: "The rabbit!"

  "What's the rabbit doing, Valnikov?"

  "The hunter's gutting him," Valnikov cried. "With a big knife. A butcher knife with a white handle like bone!"

  "Try to remember, what did the hunter do then?"

  And it came. For the first time in the months that it had been tormenting him it started to come. The picture was forming on the ceiling, among the sparks and motes and shimmering dots. "He's gutting it like a fish! He's reaching inside the throat that he's slashed open. It's like holding a fish by the gills. He just reaches clear inside and the little fish body jerks upward. He jerks the little body up with his strong hands."

  "The fish? The fish?" Natalie demanded.

  "The rabbit!" Valnikov cried. "The neck is limp and the little head is thrown back because he's got it under the throat. In the throat. He's got the jaws. His big hand is clear inside. The little head is thrown back on the ..."

  "On what?"

  "On the wooden pedestal. The light ..."

  "What kind of light?"

  "Sunlight!" he cried. "And snow. The doctor must have caught the rabbit in the snow!"

  "And dien what?"

  "It changes," Valnikov said. "The picture changes but I still see it. I ... I had to keep looking at the little arms and hands to remember it's still a rabbit. Because the face was all swollen and deformed from the beatings ..."