"I don't know how you can…"
"Random. Isolated. Incidents." Sweat rolled down his sides. Search felt his face getting red.
"Downtown hotels and restaurants claim business has dropped more than twenty percent." Brazil wasn't trying to argue. He just wanted to get to the bottom of this.
"And people like you are only going to make that worse." Search mopped his forehead, wishing Cahoon had never passed this goddamn assignment along to him.
"All I want is to tell the truth, Mayor Search," Billy Budd, Billy Graham, said.
"Hiding it won't help resolve this terrible situation."
The mayor resorted to sarcasm, laughing at this simple boy's simple logic. He felt that bitter juice seep through his veins, the bile rising, as his face reddened dangerously, his rage a solar flare on the surface of his reason. Mayor Search lost control.
"I can't believe it," he laughed derisively at this reporter who was nothing in life.
"You're giving me a lecture. Look. I'm not going to sit here and tell you business isn't suffering. I wouldn't drive downtown at night right now." He laughed harder, unstoppable, and drunk with his power.
By six p. m. at happy hour, West and Raines were on their way to being drunk at Jack Straw's A Tavern of Taste, next to La-dee-da's and Two Sisters, on East Seventh Street. West had changed out of her uniform, and was casual in jeans, a loose denim shirt, and sandals.
She was drinking Sierra Nevada Stout, the beer of the month, and still in a state of disbelief over the videotape she had watched with Hammer.
"Do you have any idea how this makes me and my investigative division look?" she said for the fourth time.
"Christ. Please tell me this is a nightmare. Please, please. I'm going to wake up, right?"
Raines was drinking Field Stone chardonnay, the wine of the month. In gym shorts, Adidas with no socks, and a tank top, he was turning all heads except for the one across the table from him. What was it with her? All she ever talked about was work and that twit from the paper she rode around with. And Niles, oh yes, let's not forget that fucking, God-save-the-queen, cat. How many times had that cat ruined a building moment? Niles seemed to know exactly when to cause a distraction. A jump on Raines's back or head, a bite of a sock-covered toe. How about the time Niles sat on the remote control until the volume of Kenny G sounded like an air raid?
"It's not your fault," Raines said again, working on the spinach dip.
West ate another pickle fried in beer batter as Jump Little Children began setting up all their equipment and instruments. This small place with blue plastic table cloths and funky art in screaming colors by someone named Tryke was going to rock tonight, jam, trot out primitive Ids and libidos. Raines hoped he could make West stay at least until the second set. Actually, Raines thought what had happened to her all in a day's work was hilarious. It was all he could do to look tender and concerned.
He imagined Mungo-Jumbo swinging into the Presto to chow down. He spots a dude with a banana in his pocket who's the head of the Geezer Grill Cartel. A task force is formed, ending with a videotape of Blondie, the King of Vice and top suspect in the Black Widow serial murders, as he cruises Five Points in his tight black jeans and reporter's notepad. What wouldn't Raines have paid to see a videotape of Hammer sitting in her important conference room watching this shit!
Christ! He fought a smile again, and was losing. His face was aching and his stomach hurt.
"What's wrong with you?" West gave him a look.
"There's nothing fucking funny about this."
"There certainly isn't," he said weakly as he dissolved into laugher, doubled over in his chair, howling as tears streamed down his face.
This went on as Jump Little Children set up amplifiers, and checked Fender electric guitars. Pearl drums with Zildjian medium crash cymbals, and Yamaha keyboards. They gave each other sly looks, flipping long hair out of the way, earrings glinting in the dim light. This guy was fried. Man, look at him go. Cool. The girlfriend wasn't digging it, either. Him taking a trip she's not on.
Kind of weird he's drinking chardonfucking-nay.
West was so angry she wanted to flip over the table, cowboy style. She wanted to jump on top of Raines, flex-cuff his ankles and feet and just leave his sorry ass in the middle of Jack Straw's on a hot Thursday night. She halfway believed the only person Mungo was undercover for was Goode. Maybe Goode had gotten to him, and promised him favors if he would set up West, and destroy her credibility, her good relationship with Hammer. Oh God. When they had been sitting at that polished table and the video had flickered on, at first West was certain some mistake had been made. Brazil, big as life, was walking along to the sound of traffic, making notes, for Chrissake! How many serial killers or drug kingpins walk around in the middle of the day making notes?
As for Brazil's physical description, Mungothe-Woolly- Mammoth had missed that by about forty pounds and six inches, although West had to admit she'd never seen Brazil in clothes that tight. She didn't know what to make of it. Those black jeans were so tight she could see the muscles in the back of his thighs flex as he walked, the red polo shirt fitting like paint, muscles lean and well-defined, and he' had veins. Maybe he was trying to blend out there. That would make sense.
"Tell me what she did," Raines choked, wiping his eyes.
West motioned to the waitress for another round.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Oh come on, Virginia. Tell me, tell me. You got to." He straightened up a bit.
"Tell me what Hammer did when she saw the tape."
"No," West said.
Hammer hadn't done much, in truth. She'd sat in her usual spot at the head of the table, staring without comment at the twenty-four-inch Mitsubishi. She'd watched the entire tape, all forty-two minutes of it, every bit of Brazil's long promenade and indistinct conversations with the city's unsavory downtown folks. West and Hammer had watched Brazil point, shrug, jot, scan, and squat to tie shoelaces twice, before finally returning to the All Right to retrieve his BMW. After a pregnant silence, Chief Hammer had taken off her glasses and voiced her opinion.
"What was this?" she had said to her deputy chief in charge of investigations.
"I don't know what to tell you," West had said, feeling dark hate for Mungo.
"And this all began the day we had lunch at the Presto and you saw a man with a banana in his pocket." Hammer had wanted to make sure she was clear on the facts of the case.
"I really don't think it's fair to link the two."
Hammer had gotten up, but West knew not to move.
"Of course it's fair," Hammer had said, hands in her pockets again.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you, Virginia." She'd begun pacing.
"How could Mungo not recognize Andy Brazil? He's out there morning, noon and night, either for the Observer or us."
"Mungo is deep cover," West had explained.
"He generally avoids any place police or the press might be. I don't think he reads much, either."
Hammer had nodded. She could understand this, actually, and she was raw. Hammer was not ready or willing to react violently to the embarrassments and honest mis takes of others, whether it was Horgess, Mungo, or even West, who really had made no error, except perhaps in her choice of Mungo to do anything in life.
"Do you want me to destroy it?" West had asked as Hammer popped the tape out of the VCR.
"I mean, I'd prefer not to. Some of that footage includes known prostitutes. Sugar, Double Fries, Butterfinger, Shooter, Lickety Split, Lemon Drop, Poison."
"All of them were in there?" Hammer was perplexed as she had opened the conference room door.
"They blend in. You have to know where to look."
"We'll hang on to it," Hammer had decided. Raines was laughing so hard. West was furious with herself for telling him the rest of the story. He had his head on the table, hands covering his face. She wiped her forehead with a napkin, perspiring and flushed, as if she were
in the tropics. The band would be cranking up soon, and Jack Straw's was getting crowded.
She noticed Tommy Axel walk in, recognizing him from his picture in the paper. He had another guy with him, both dressed a lot like Raines, showing off. Why was it most of the gay guys were so good-looking? West didn't think it was fair. Not only were they guys in a guy's world, with all the benefits, but their DNA had somehow managed to appropriate the good stuff women had, too, like gracefulness and beauty.
Of course, gay guys got some of the bad stuff, too. Sneakiness, game playing, compulsive grooming, vanity, and shopping. Maybe it had nothing to do with gender, after all. West considered. Maybe there was no such thing as gender. Maybe biologically people were just vehicles, like cars. She'd heard that overseas the steering wheels were on one side, while here they were on the other. Different genders? Maybe not. Maybe just different cars, the behavior of all determined by the spirit in the driver's seat.
"I've had enough," West hissed at Raines.
She drained her Sierra Nevada and started on another one. She might just tie one on tonight. Raines was driving.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He took another deep breath and was spent.
"You look like you don't feel too good," he said with one of his concerned expressions.
"It is a little hot in here."
West mopped her face again, her clothes getting damp, but not in the way Raines might have hoped. She was feeling the heaviness in her lower nature, the goddess of fertility reminding West with more volatility every month that time was running out. West's gynecologist had warned her gravely and repeatedly that troubles would begin about her age. She, Dr. Alice Bourgeois, spoke of punishment when there were no children and none on the way. Never underestimate biology, Dr. Bourgeois always said.
West and Raines placed an order for cheeseburgers, fries, and another round of drinks. She wiped her face again and was getting cold. She wasn't sure she could eat anything else, not another fried pickle. She watched the band setting up, her attention wandering to people at other tables. She was quiet for a long time, overhearing a couple not so far away speaking a foreign language, maybe German. West was getting maudlin.
"You seem preoccupied," said Raines the intuitive.
"Remember when those German tourists got whacked in Miami? What it did to the tourist industry?" she said.
Raines, as a man, took this personally. He had seen the bodies in the Black Widow slayings, or at least several of them. It was unthinkable to have a gun shoved against your head, your brains blown out. There was no telling what indignities those guys had been subjected to before the fact, and how did anyone really know that their pants hadn't been pulled down first, that maybe they hadn't been raped and then spray-painted? If the killer had been wearing a condom, who was going to know? West had said just the right thing to put Raines in a mood. Now he was totally pissed, too.
"So this is about the tourist industry," he said, leaning across the table and gesturing.
"Forget guys being jerked out of their cars, brains blown all over, balls spray-painted with graffiti!"
West wiped her face again and dug Advil out of her butt pack.
"It's not graffiti. It's a symbol."
Raines crossed his legs, feeling endangered. The waitress set down their dinner. He grabbed the ketchup bottle as he folded a french fry between his lips.
"It makes me sick," he said.
"It should make everybody sick." West could not look at food.
"Who do you think's doing it?" He dipped a bouquet of french fries into a red puddle.
"Maybe a shim." She was soaked in cold sweat. Her hair was wet around her face and neck, as if she'd just been in a foot pursuit.
"Huh?" Raines glanced up at her, biting into his dripping burger.
"She-him. Woman one night, man the next, depending on the mood," she said.
"Oh. Like you." He reached for the dish of mayonnaise.
"Goddamn it." West shoved her plate away.
"I must be about to start."
Raines stopped chewing, rolling his eyes. He knew what that meant. The first twangs on electric guitars shattered the din, and sticks beat-beat and beat-beat-beat. Cymbals crashed and crashed as Axel snaked his foot around Jon's ankle and thought about Brazil for the millionth time this day.
W Packer was thinking about Brazil, too, as the editor earned Dufus out the back door, like a small, squirming football, headed for the same Japanese maple. Dufus had to go in the same place, get used to it, and be able to find his smells. It didn't matter that the tree was in the hinterlands and that it had started to rain. Packer dropped his wife's wall-eyed dog in the same bald spot next to the same gnarled root. Packer was out of breath, watching Dufus curtsey to the Queen.
"Why don't you lift your leg like a man," Packer muttered as bulging eyes watched him, speckled pink nose twitching.
"Sissy," Packer said.
The worn-out editor's pager had vibrated earlier this evening while he was mowing the grass on his vacation- day. It had been Panesa, calling to tell him that the mayor had admitted that even he wouldn't drive downtown at night right now! Jesus living God, this was unbelievable.
Surely the paper was well on its way to winning a Pulitzer for a series that made a difference in society, one that changed history.
Why the hell did this wait to happen when Packer was out of the newsroom? He'd been there thirty-two years. The moment he decided to put life in perspective, ward off that heart attack perched outside the window of his existence, Andy Brazil showed up.
Now it was run-through-the-yard time to get Dufus's bowels wound up that they might unleash what, in Packer's mind, should have been a humiliation to any creature, except maybe a small domestic cat. Dufus would not chase Packer, or come, and this was not new. The editor sat on the back porch steps while his wife's dog chewed mulch until it was time to drop his niggling gifts. Packer sighed and got up. He walked back into the air-conditioned house, Dufus on his heels.
"There's my good little boy," Mildred cooed as the dog hopped and licked until she picked him up and rocked him in loving arms.
"Don't mention it," Packer said, falling into his recliner chair, flicking on television.
He was still sitting there hours later, eating chicken nuggets, and dipping them in Roger's barbecue sauce. He loudly dug into a big bag of chips, swiping them in sauce, too. After several Coronas with lime, he had forgotten about the window and the heart attack perched beyond it. Mildred was watching Home for the Holidays, again, because she thought it was their life. Go figure. In the first place, Packer did not play the organ and she did not wear a wig or smoke, and they did not live in a small town. Their daughter had never gotten fired, at least not from an art gallery. That was one place she had never worked, probably because she was color blind. Nor was their son gay that Packer knew of or cared to know of, and any intimations to the contrary by his wife went into the Bermuda Triangle of their marital news hole. The editor didn't listen and the story didn't run. The End.
Packer pointed the remote control with authority. The volume went up, the ubiquitous Webb staring at the camera in a way that Packer knew meant trouble.
"Shit," Packer said, hitting a lever on his chair, cranking himself up.
"In a rare, if not shocking, moment of candor today," Webb said with his sincere expression, "Mayor Charles Search said that because of the Black Widow serial killings, hotel and restaurant business has dropped more than twenty percent, and he himself would not feel safe driving downtown at night. Mayor Search implored Charlotte's citizens to help police catch a killer who has ruthlessly murdered five…"
Packer was already dialing the phone, bag of potato chips falling out of his lap, scattering over the rug.
'. an individual the FBI has profiled as a sexual psychopath, a serial killer who will not stop. " Webb went on.
"Are you listening to this?" Packer exclaimed when Panesa picked up his phone.
"I'm taping it," he said in
a homicidal tone Packer rarely heard.
"This has got to stop."
Brazil never watched television because his mother monopolized the one at home, and he did not frequent Charlotte's many sports bars, where there were big screens in every corner. He knew nothing about what had been on the eleven o'clock news this Thursday night, and no one paged him or bothered to find him. All was peaceful as he ran on the Davidson track in complete darkness, close to midnight, no sound but the rhythm of his breathing and falling feet. As pleased as he was about his amazing nonstop journalistic home runs, he could not say that he was happy.
Other people were getting a lot of the same stuff he was. Webb, for example, and no matter how informative or compassionate the story, the bottom line was the scoop. Brazil, of late, was scooping no one, if the truth be told. It just seemed he was because what he wrote routinely ended up on the front page and changed public opinion and seemed to rattle a lot of cages. Brazil would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his days writing pieces that did just this and nothing else. Prizes didn't matter much, really. But he was realistic.
If he didn't beat everybody to the quote, the revelation, or the crime scene, one of these days he might not get paid any more to write.
At which point, he could become a cop, he supposed, and this turned his mind to West again, sailing him off firm ground into a dark, tangled, painful thicket that hurt and frustrated him the more he tried to fight his way out of it. He ran harder, bending around goal posts, passing empty bleachers filled with the memories of games, mostly lost, during fall nights when he had usually been studying or walking the frosty campus beneath stars he tried to describe as no one ever had. He would tuck his chin into his hooded sweatshirt, heading to the library or a hidden corner of the student lounge, to work on a term paper or poetry, not wanting couples he passed to notice him.
Even if West hadn't wanted to play tennis, there was no need for her to have been rude about it unless she hated him. Forget it. Her voice saying those heartless words followed him as he ran harder, lungs beginning to burn, catching fire around the edges as his legs reached farther, and sweat left a trail of scattered spots. He tried to outrun the voice and the person who owned it, anger flinging him through the night, and past the fifty yard line. Legs wobbled as he slowed. Brazil fell into cool, damp grass. He lay on his back, panting, heart thundering, and he had a premonition that he was going to die.
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