by Blake Banner
BLOOD IN BABYLON
Copyright © 2019 by Blake Banner
All right reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BLAKE BANNER
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ONE
It was Al’s birthday. That gave him an air of importance as he made his way south down Virginia Avenue from the Hugh J Grant Circle. It wasn’t just any birthday, either. Joy had told him that. He was sixty. Sixty was a big number. It was an important age. An age when a man should do important things. He’d been through several important ages: Harvard, Mexico, Brazil. Twenty had been real important, but he couldn’t remember much about twenty. That was like another life. Forty had been important too. That was when he’d started to go wrong.
The sun slipped behind the trees and the rooftops, casting long winter shadows across the road. The temperature dropped and Al shuddered. It was getting dark and he wanted to be home. He wanted to be safe.
Dr. Epstein and Joy had been nice to him. They were always nice to him. They’d made him feel special. They’d given him a cake and laughed with him. That had made him shy, but it had also made him stay too late, because he didn’t want to leave. Now the darkness was closing in, and he did not like to be out in the street when the darkness closed in.
He hurried with big, jerky strides, holding his birthday card with his hand in his pocket, gulping breath through his mouth, because when he hurried, he couldn’t breathe through his nose. He hurried past Newbold Avenue and tried not to look up at the towering apartment blocks on his left. They always made him feel like they were looming over him, like angry judges watching him. Joy and Dr. Epstein had told him it wasn’t true, that apartment blocks could not watch you or judge you, but he knew, inside, that they could. So he kept going, with heavy, hurrying steps, gulping air through his mouth, even when he heard the shout. When he heard the shout, he ignored it and just kept on going.
“Hey! Freak! Weird ass! I’m talkin’ to you!”
Al didn’t look. He didn’t need to look. He knew who it was. He quickened his lumbering pace. He felt a strong hand grip his heart, making it harder to breathe. He became conscious of the wheezing and gasping in his throat. He also became conscious of the running feet behind him: not sprinting, not a charge, just running to catch up. Instinct made him hunch his shoulders. He could see the green shop front of the upholstery store on the corner with Ellis Avenue. He was almost home.
“Hey! Freak! I’m talkin’ to you, bro’!”
The voice was much closer now, right behind him, and he could hear laughter across the road, high pitched, screeching laughter, as though they were all being strangled by invisible wires. It was what they deserved. The thought brought on a sudden rush of fury, but he knew better than to confront them. He kept lumbering forward, tried to control the croaking in his throat, kept his eyes on the darkening blacktop in front of him.
A voice, at his elbow now. “Hey, man, why you make that noise when you walk?” More laughter from across the road. Now the speaker was smiling, too. “What is that? You sick or something’? Or you just singing yo’self a song while you walkin’ along?”
The laughter was now like shrieks. Al prayed silently that they should become real shrieks of pain. He had reached the upholstery store and started across the road toward it. A hand plucked at his shoulder. “Hey! I’m talkin’ to you! You don’t disrespect me, you motherfockin’ piece a shit!”
Al broke into a stumbling run, grunting as he went. He heard his own voice saying, “No! No…”
The door of the upholstery shop opened. A small group of men and women emerged, talking. Two men and a woman stood at the door of the deli next door, going in. He almost collided with them. One of them half-shouted, “Whoa! Look where you’re going, pal!”
He ignored them, hurrying on, listening. The voice came again, more distant now. “Wait up, freak! I wanna talk to you!”
He kept going. His heart was pounding in his chest. His breathing was loud, like the roar of giant waves. He passed the apartment block, the gated alley behind it. He lumbered on, passed 1929, passed the house next door with its pretty wrought iron porch, and then he was at the gate of his own house.
Now he could hear feet, lots of them, running in earnest. His hands were shaking badly and he fumbled with the latch of the gate. His gasping breath turned to a whimper. He pushed through the gate and stumped up the four steps to his door. His whimpering turned to sobbing as his fingers, large and clumsy like sausages, struggled with his keys. Behind him, feet skidded to a halt: four, five, six pairs. He dare not look.
“Hey! Freak! I’m fuckin’ talkin’ to you! We got questions for you!”
The key slipped in. Behind him, the gate clanked open. He pushed in, wrenched the key from the lock and slammed the door. But it did not close. Instead, there was a terrible scream of pain. He wrenched the door open and slammed it again, putting his full three hundred and ninety pounds behind it. Another scream, and again he pulled it open and slammed it. This time, it closed and locked.
He backed away, sobbing violently. Outside, he could hear screeching, shouts, furious voices, judgment, hatred: a great tidal wave of hatred washing over his house, and him. He turned and stumbled into his small kitchen area. There he grabbed for the phone and called Dr. Epstein. Joy answered and he cried out, an inarticulate noise of relief and love, and grief and fear.
“Al? Is that you, baby?”
He tried to say it was, but a primal grief deep in his gut would not let him shape the words out of the awful noises in his mouth.
“What in the world is wrong with you? Now you take a moment and breathe…that’s right, you just take one good, big old breath and relax. Good, and another… Now first off, you tell me right now if you are OK.”
His breath shook, but the tightness in his chest eased. “Yes…”
“So what has you
so upset?”
“They were waiting for me.”
“Who were, honey? You sure it wasn’t somebody you imagined…?”
“No.” His voice was clear, educated, articulate, strangely at odds with his huge, graceless body. “No, it was that boy, and his gang. They wait for me. They call me a freak. He says he is going to cut me. And they make dark waves that come at me from the street.”
“Now, honey…”
“I am not hallucinating. You can’t see it. But it comes when they close in on me. It overwhelms the house. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.”
“Are they still there?”
“No, they’ve gone. But they might come back. They always come back. Joy, I think they followed me from Mexico. I saw them in Mexico, but they were farther away. But if they have found a way into my dreams, if they can get in during the night…”
“OK, baby, now here is what I am going to do. I’m going to call the police and I’m going to have them swing by and make sure you’re OK. Can you tell them what these boys look like?”
“I never look at them. You mustn’t look at them. That’s how they followed me. But I know his name. I hear them call him Ned.”
“Ned? You sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure about that.”
“OK, good. So you be sure to tell that to the officers when they come by. And Al? Remember, these are not evil forces, they are just stupid boys whose momma was too soft on them. If I take my belt to them, they gonna find out what good manners are real quick!”
That made him laugh and she laughed too. They spoke a moment longer, till she was sure he was OK, and then they both hung up.
After that, he did the rounds of the house, keeping the lights off, peering through the darkened glass at the empty, lamplit streets outside. The windows had bars. He had insisted on that when Joy had gotten the house for him. Dr. Epstein had thought it was a good idea. He had said it was good to see him making important decisions like that.
The kitchen door out to the back yard was locked, and had two heavy deadbolts. The windows here also had bars. He stood a while, transfixed by the shadows cast across the floor by the lamps in the parking lot beyond his backyard. One of those lamps was behind a tree, and the shadows of the leaves tossed slightly in the pool of light on his floor.
He went to his living room and stood for a long while, staring out at the empty street. He still had his birthday card in his hand. When he was satisfied there was nobody there, he went and closed the drapes. Then, he lay on the sofa and covered himself with the blanket he always kept there, and switched on the TV. He had it set up and ready. He was starting Murder She Wrote from episode one for the thirty-fourth time. As the music started to play, he hummed along, and as the dialogue started, he spoke it silently with the characters. His eyes closed, as though of their own volition, and he drifted into sleep.
Everything was safe. Jessica would take care of everything.
When the hammering on the door came, he didn’t know how long he had been asleep. Episode two was almost finished. He walked stiffly into the hall and stood holding the living room doorjamb, staring at the door. It hammered again and his heart jumped and started pounding.
Then the voice. “It’s me! Open up!”
He went to the door and unlocked it. He smiled. “Hi, I was watching TV… Come on in.”
He led the way into the living room, pointed at the TV and smiled. “I like Jessica. She makes everything OK.” He turned to smile at his visitor, but frowned instead at the large, silver blade of the kitchen knife. It entered swiftly and with precision, slipping between the fourth and fifth ribs on his left side, slicing through his lung and his heart in one smooth thrust.
His body briefly went into spasm. His consciousness endured for a few seconds, enough for him to be aware of the strangeness of the feeling, and to reach back for the sofa. But as the blood drained from his brain, darkness enfolded him and he crashed to the floor.
* * *
I found Dehan doing a dangerous mixture of yoga and Tae Kwon Do in the back yard. She smiled at me, winked and delivered a devastating side kick to an invisible foe who, judging by the height of the kick, must have been seven feet tall. I withdrew to the kitchen and made coffee.
She came in just after the coffee had started to gurgle and the rich, dark aroma had wafted out to the back yard and hooked her by the nose. She was panting, flushed and perspiring slightly, dabbing her face with a towel. I sighed and wondered, not for the first or last time, what I had done in a previous life to earn such good kama[1].
She stopped dabbing her face and stared at me. “What?”
I shrugged with my eyebrows and shook my head.
She continued wiping. “I know, I look a wreck, but I want that third dan, and that’s hard work.”
“You want coffee?”
“Is the Pope a Catholic? What’s wrong? You look troubled.”
“I’m in a kitchen with a beautiful woman who is flushed and breathing heavily. Naturally, I look troubled.”
She smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. “OK, smart ass, you got your brownie points. Now pour me some coffee and tell me what’s really on your mind.”
I poured. She sat at the kitchen table and I rested my ass against the sink. I sipped and said, “Aloysius Chester, otherwise known as Al.”
She nodded. “What about him?”
“I just wrote the prologue.”
She grinned. “That’s amazing. Can I read it?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. And I’m not sure I’m going to write it.”
She frowned with her cup halfway to her lips and set it down again. “Why not? You said it was perfect.”
“I thought it was.”
“You stood right there and told me it was insoluble, so you could build a whole set of fictional circumstances around it. Perfect for your first attempt at writing…”
“I know. I know what I said, and that was what I thought.”
“So…?”
“I think it should be our next case.”
“You just told me you know what you said. What you said was that it was insoluble. That means ‘can’t be solved’.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Stop being a smartass and listen to me. Just reading the case file, reading the reports, trying to imagine what it was like—for him…” I trailed off. “It’s hard to explain, Dehan, but hell! Bottom line is, whether I write the book or re-investigate the case, I’m going to be doing the same damned legwork! And I just feel this guy deserves justice. Let’s look into it. What’s the worst that can happen?”
She shrugged and made a face to go with it. “We get our first unsolved cold case.”
I pulled out the chair and sat at the table, leaning forward on my elbows. “Who came to the door that night? Can you imagine how he felt? He must have been terrified. Why would he open the door? If it was the kids who’d been harassing him, he would not have opened the door.”
“Are you sure he did? The forensics were inconclusive. Somebody might have picked the lock.”
I grunted. It was one of the many—too many—unanswered questions shrouding the case. “You’ve seen the crime scene photos…”
“Many times.”
“He didn’t look as though he’d…” I hesitated, not liking the vagueness of what I was about to say. “There are questions I want to ask about those photos.”
She nodded. “Sure, I get that. Me too. There are a couple of things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. But it was twelve years ago, and those questions are not questions anybody can answer anymore. Sometimes the truth just…” She made little explosions with her fingertips. “Fades away. Even when the trail were still warm, they were hard to answer. Now…” She shook her head.
I sighed, sipped and watched her. “What can I say? I have a feeling, Dehan. Something in my gut just says there is something there, something in what happened that night. Something,” I repeated, “maybe, in the photos, that we can
use. I don’t know how else to say it. Al deserves that we should make the effort. Poor guy, you know?”
She smiled, not unkindly. “That is sentimental reasoning, Stone, and has no place in police work.”
“I know. ” I nodded. “But at the end of the day, it’s why we do what we do.” I sat back. “Well, what do you say?”
She spread her hands. “Frankly, personally, I think it’s a waste of valuable police resources on a case that is probably never going to be solved. Having said that, you know I’ll back you up, whatever you decide to do.”
“See? That’s why I married you. That and the whole…” I gestured at her with my open palm. “The whole flushed cheeks, heavy breathing, slightly perspiring thing you have going on there. It really works for you. “
She leaned back and gave me the kind of smile that should be against the law but, thankfully, isn’t. “Does it work for you?”
“Kind of does.”
She stood and winked at me. “Well, I’m going to take a nice, looong, hot shower. You can be gathering up your case notes, and maybe prepare a salad for lunch.”
She took her big grin upstairs with her. I sat a moment, staring after her. Then I rose, opened the fridge and stood staring at the lettuce and the tomatoes, till I heard the hiss of water from the shower. Then I closed the fridge and went upstairs.
TWO
The shadows were growing long across the lawn. There was a slight breeze and thin wisps of smoke, with an occasional, lazy trail of sparks, drifted over the grass to be lost among the rose bushes. Rose bushes my mother had planted, I had neglected and Dehan had brought back to life.
She stepped out from the kitchen onto the patio, holding plates, cutlery, salt and pepper. Her hair was still wet from her second shower, hanging long down her back, making damp marks on her summer dress. I watched her, feeling the heat of the barbeque on my back.
She set down the load, grabbed a bottle of wine by the neck and stabbed the cork with a corkscrew. As she began to twist, she said, “The guy was crazy, right?”
