Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  ‘Back at the house, Angeles Falco’s letterbox. I stole it.’ Janet read aloud: ‘To the Householder. On Tuesday evening my bicycle was stolen while I was delivering newspapers in this street. If it turns up, or anyone can help with evidence, please contact me at the following address.’ The note was signed Christine Moxey, and an address was given on Bishopthorpe Road. ‘That’s last night, when Sam saw someone in her garden.’

  ‘Yes, and the guy made his getaway on a bike.’

  Janet went to the hospital to enquire about Angeles, and to see if she could help Sam not get himself arrested. JD drove to the address on Bishopthorpe Road and found himself at the door of a badly neglected house with fraying curtains and waist-high nettles in the front garden. The roof gutters thought they were window boxes and sported a screen of wispy plants. A long time ago a window in one of the bedrooms had been broken and covered with a sheet of plywood. The plywood had now buckled with exposure to the weather and some accidental chemical exchange had coloured it various shades of blue.

  A thin-faced young man in a black leather jacket and designer T-shirt opened the door. His accent was born out of Liverpool. ‘You’ve just come to stare, have you?’ he said to JD.

  JD shook his head. ‘No, sorry,’ he said. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’

  ‘D’you want me to guess who it is?’

  ‘If... if you like,’ JD told him, slightly taken aback, but disarmed by the guy’s boyish smile.

  ‘Brad Pitt.’ He held the smile and nodded his head in complete agreement with himself. ‘In Seven,’ he said. ‘You saw that?’

  JD shook his head. As far as he could remember Brad Pitt was a blond.

  ‘Because if you saw him in that Robert Redford movie, A River Runs Through It, you won’t think he looks like me.’

  ‘I didn’t see that either,’ JD told him. ‘It wasn’t Brad Pitt I was thinking of. It was somebody else, a writer.’

  The guy’s face fell. ‘Oh,’ he said, all interest in the conversation lost. ‘I thought you was talking someone famous.’ He glanced over his shoulder, back into the gloom of the house, as though there was something fascinating there which he was being denied. Something or someone that couldn’t manage without him. ‘What d’you want, then?’

  JD pulled the slip of paper from his pocket. ‘I came to see Christine,’ he said. ‘About her bike.’

  The guy glanced at his deep-sea diver’s watch. ‘Come in and wait if you like. She won’t be long. I’m Clive, by the way.’

  JD followed the man into the darkened interior of the house, which exuded a strong mixed aroma of body odours and stale socks. But that was OK. As a writer JD was a practical existentialist prepared to experience every situation that came his way. Every time he got into a lift he wondered if this was the time it would get stuck between floors. He didn’t want to get stuck between floors, but there was something in him which thought he should.

  ‘I’ve got some tea in the pot,’ Clive said. ‘Made about five, ten minutes ago. I could warm it up.’

  JD shook his head. ‘I’ll pass,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the offer.’

  ‘Have you seen any of Brad’s movies?’ Clive said. There was a tremor in his voice, as though he didn’t want to face the possibility that there was someone in the world who wasn’t a Brad Pitt fan.

  JD didn’t want to be the one to disillusion him. ‘Hey, I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if I saw him. I know the name, but I can’t honestly put a face to it. Tom Cruise. Di Caprio, I know them. Robert Carlyle and Sean Penn, but Brad’s a little more obscure. What was he in?’

  ‘Fight Club? Meet Jo Black? Interview with the Vampire, you might’ve seen him in that. Or Thelma and Louise, about a couple of women who go away for a weekend and end up getting killed?’

  ‘I’ve heard of Thelma and Louise,’ JD said. ‘But I didn’t catch it.’

  ‘Jesus. What about True Romance, Seven Years in Tibet, or Johnny SuedeV

  ‘I don’t go to the movies a lot,’ JD admitted. ‘Last film I saw was Looking for Richard, A1 Pacino movie. D’you see that? Great film.’

  Clive shook his head. ‘That’s really sad, you know, we’re talking about a guy who’s got everything. He’s a brilliant actor, he’s a sex machine, multi-millionaire. You name it, and Brad’s got it; he’s a guy who is known all over the world, you know, in Japan, anywhere you wanna mention, they’ve heard of him. They go to see his movies, and you don’t even know what he looks like.’

  ‘I’ll try to catch up with him,’ JD said. ‘Next movie, it’ll be one of his. I’ll make a point of it.’

  ‘He was a choirboy in Missouri,’ Clive said. ‘Brought up a Baptist, so he has morals, too. Heart-throbs are a dime a dozen, but with Brad we’re talking real class.’

  ‘No, I mean it,’ JD told him. ‘You’ve convinced me, no need to say any more. I’m gonna keep my eyes peeled for the next film he does. I’ve missed enough good things for one lifetime. Hell, Thelma and Louise was a real mistake. How could I’ve missed that?’

  ‘You know Robin Givens?’ Clive asked.

  JD shook his head. ‘Can’t say the name rings a bell, no.’

  ‘She was married to Mike Tyson. She was one of Brad’s girls. And Gwyneth Paltrow, she was another one. They were engaged. Jennifer Aniston, you know who she is? Women can’t resist him. Even lesbians.’

  ‘I dunno where I’ve been,’ said JD.

  When Christine Moxey arrived home JD was pushed back into a corner of an ancient sofa, half-buried by several hundred colour photographs and posters of Brad Pitt in various stages of undress. ‘This’s JD Pears,’ Clive said. ‘He’s found your bike.’

  Christine Moxey was maybe fifteen years old. She wore white pancake make-up with a landslide of eye-shadow and mascara. Her lips were glossed with a dark purple sheen. Large black plastic hoops dangled from her ears. In spite of the icy wind she had apparently been out without a coat, wearing only a skimpy sleeveless blouse and a miniskirt. The blouse was too short to reach the waist of the skirt, and left a band of pimply flesh adorned with a navel ring.

  ‘Have you brought it back?’ she asked.

  ‘The bike? I haven’t actually found it,’ JD said. ‘That’s a misunderstanding. I wanted to talk to you about it.’

  Christine looked at Clive and did a double-take. Her imagination couldn’t crack the code. ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, sounds good.’

  ‘How d’you take it? Builders or lesbians?’

  JD didn’t blink. ‘Bit of a mix,’ he said. He watched her fill the kettle and put four spoons of tea into the pot. It wasn’t just that she was young, there was a subtext to her phraseology that had been developed through generations of psychological layering. Most of the young men you meet, he thought, they want to get you into bed. But he wanted to get her down on a page.

  ‘I work for a private detective agency,’ JD said. ‘We’re investigating a break-in that took place about the time your bike was stolen. We wondered if you saw who took it.’

  ‘What’ve you got all these pictures out for, Clive?’ She brushed some of the cheesecake posters aside and sat down next to JD. ‘I’m sure the detective isn’t interested in Brad Pitt.’

  It was a question. JD and Clive looked at each other, and each of them waited for the other to answer.

  ‘You can find guys as good-looking as him on the street,’ Christine said. ‘People think he’s the best because of all the exposure he gets. It’s the same with pop music, the promoters think they know their audience, and what they think is what we get.’

  ‘That’s all true,’ Clive said. ‘Except Brad is the goods.’ He looked from Christine to JD. ‘I was educating him. He doesn’t do movies.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ JD said. ‘I’ve been learning.’

  ‘You’ve heard of bird-watchers?’ Christine said. ‘Clive’s a Brad Pitt watcher. He knows everything about him, every move he’s ever
made. Mum said he’s got so much Brad Pitt in his eye that he’s blind to everything else.’ Clive smiled modestly. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of things about Brad that I don’t know.’

  ‘Mum said...’

  Clive’s complexion changed. ‘That’s twice. Don’t mention that woman’s name in this house,’ he said.

  ‘If you’d’ve been half as concerned about her as you are with Brad Pitt, she’d still be here,’ Christine said.

  Clive raised his voice. ‘She was bloody sex mad.’

  JD coughed. He asked: ‘Are you brother and sister?’ Christine crossed the room and took Clive’s arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Clive’s my stepfather. Or he would be if he’d married my mother before she ran off with his mate, Eddie, the Australian sheep-shagger.’

  ‘This is beginning to get complicated,’ JD said. He wanted to know the details, though. You can’t be a writer if you don’t follow up on the leads. There was a human situation here, something he could turn into metaphor.

  ‘It was an everyday story of love and lust on the Bishopthorpe Road,’ Christine said. ‘The winners hitched up together and split, carved out a life for themselves in New South Wales. And me and Clive were the ones left behind to lick each other’s wounds.’

  ‘It was the least I could do,’ Clive explained. He didn’t say it, but you could see it there in his eyes: faced with the same situation, it’s exactly what Brad would have done.

  They fell silent, contemplating an ocean of submerged feelings; reefs of only half-glimpsed crustacean life forms. They need diving-gear, JD thought, something to enable them to get a clear view of their situation. There was colour there, somewhere, colour and movement and possibilities that were obliterated from the vantage point they were allowing themselves.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’ Christine asked.

  JD was intrigued by the idea of the Australian sheep-shagger, but he stuck to the point. ‘Did you see who took the bike?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t even that good a bike. Mum bought it second-hand before she... you know, did a bunk. I thought people only stole good bikes.’

  ‘Where did you leave it?’

  ‘There’s an alley behind the houses. I always leave it there when I do that part of the street. Saves me lugging it along, ’cause I’ve got to come back the same way. There’s old Mrs Hamson down at the bottom what gives me a drink and a biscuit, and I sat with her for a few minutes. When I got back it was gone.’

  ‘Can you give me a description of the bike?’

  ‘Yeah, it was a wreck,’ said Clive, which was funny enough to double him up.

  ‘It was a green Raleigh,’ said Christine, ignoring him. ‘Mountain bike...’

  ‘Hybrid,’ said Clive.

  ‘... battered and dirty,’ continued Christine. ‘It had a Mickey Mouse bell, and the chain was rusty, and there was fifteen gears but you could only get five. And Mum had gouged my initials in the saddle, CAM. Christine Anna-belle Moxey. I told the police all this when I reported it.

  They gave me a crime number so I could get insurance if we were insured.’

  ID jotted it down in his notebook. ‘I’ll keep my eyes open for it,’ he said. He handed her his business card, the one with Sam Turner Investigations on it. He scribbled his own address and telephone number on the back. ‘But do me a favour, will you? If the police find it, or if you get it back some other way, will you give me a ring? It might help us catch the guy we’re looking for.’

  ‘You gonna pay me for info?’

  JD gave her a twenty. ‘There could be more,’ he said. ‘If you ever find out who stole it.’

  Christine showed him to the door. In the background Clive was still talking about his hero. ‘Brad never played a private eye. He was a cop in Seven, but he never played a private eye. You know why that is?’

  Christine came with a wide smile and closed the door. JD turned and walked along the street. He might never discover why Brad had not played a private eye. ‘More sleepless nights,’ he said to himself, ‘worrying about that one.’

  23

  Russell Harvey was shivering. Since Isabel had died the temperature had dropped. Before Isabel the world had been a cold place for Russell, but now she was dead it was frozen.

  That was the one thing. The temperature.

  The other thing was his dog, Emperor. Russell didn’t know how long he’d been in the police cell at Fulford; maybe two days? Whatever, it was far too long to leave Emperor unattended. He’d spoken to the policeman about the dog, the policeman who asked him the same questions over and over again - Superintendent Rossiter - but he couldn’t get a satisfactory answer. What it seemed like to Russell was that if he signed a form saying he’d killed Isabel, then Rossiter would see to the dog.

  The other one, Hardwicke, the sergeant, she thought that kind of behaviour was all right. She smiled whenever her boss spoke. It didn’t matter how cruel he was. Confusing, really, the woman. Crossing and uncrossing her legs all the time. Her face was beautiful until she smiled.

  Isabel had been the opposite of that. Isabel’s face was not really beautiful at all. But when she smiled it lit up. When Isabel glowed like a spiritual fire she was more beautiful than anything Russell had seen.

  It was like the text-cards that he got at Sunday school when he was a small boy. They had pictures of Jesus or Mary and the angels, and the figures were all suffused with that same warm glow. Made you feel good. Made you feel beyond yourself, out of the mire of schoolteachers and policemen and the street. What they did, those text-cards, they made you realize that there was a whole different world somewhere else, where possibilities abounded. A place where it was never cold and you didn’t have to worry about where the next meal was coming from. The thought of money or fags wasn’t part of the equation. You were free, you were free of everything that hung you up here.

  The cell was blue, blue walls and ceiling, and there was a smell of paint, as though it had been done recently. Must’ve been, he thought, because there was no graffiti on the walls. They could have had it painted especially for him, but he doubted it. They wouldn’t go to all that trouble.

  The policemen walked like heroes. That was because of the uniform. When people put uniforms on it gives them a false dignity, makes them strut. Somehow the covering of the uniform envelops them in a self-importance that puffs up their chests and endows them with a bragging gait. Gives them ultimate authority, a moral superiority that is represented by their physical bearing and stature.

  Isabel was in that other place now. Out of it, away from the screaming reality. No one could touch her up there: her sister, her husband, not even Russell himself. She was free of the physical world.

  He shivered. The physical body had always seemed a kind of tyranny to him. It was so huge, so dense and material that it was difficult to imagine how the soul managed to live in it. When you took into account the bones and the blood and the lymph and the layers of muscle and fat, there were very few spaces left for anything else. Being a soul must be a squashed existence.

  Once, when he was a young man, Russell had come out with this argument in a pub and after closing time the three guys he’d been talking to had taken him round the back and kicked the shit out of him.

  Broke three ribs and left him permanently deaf in one ear.

  This was the chaos that politicians called society, civilization.

  24

  She had never been in love. Being in love meant turning your back on the world, meant closing down all possibilities except one. Angeles could not envisage a time when she would want to make her world smaller, when she would willingly whittle away the storehouse of life’s possibilities. There had been men who had tried to insert themselves into her life, but none had penetrated further than the dark cave of her vagina.

  She was aware of him sitting beside her, his large hand covering one of hers. When she moved her thumb she could feel the stiff hairs on the sides of his fingers. The mattress was firm
and the air was etherealized cleaning fluid and urine. An alarm was activated and hurrying feet moved to answer it. Some way off the whirring of a floor-polishing machine confirmed that she was not dead, that she had arrived in a hospital ward.

  When she spoke her throat ran with fire. The torn gossamer tissue of her vocal cords screamed in protest as hundreds of millions of incandescent cells reacted to the vibration of a single syllable.

  His grip tightened. ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked. That rich tone, concern enunciated in each word. And yet a maintained sense of irony and detachment was at work, lest the depth of his disquiet panic her.

  ‘What do I look like?’ she asked. Her voice was a whisper, a croak.

  ‘Bruised. Vulnerable.’

  ‘Tell me. I want to know.’

  ‘You look like shit,’ he said. ‘But you’ll mend.’

  She smiled. If she had to wake up in a hospital bed looking like shit, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather find holding her hand. ‘Shouldn’t you be out chasing whoever did it?’

  ‘I’m going in a minute,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you were all right. And I think you should move into my place when you get out of here. We can’t protect you in your own house.’

  ‘I’d rather take the chance and be in my own place, Sam.’

  He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a question. If you make me a list I’ll collect the things you need.’

  ‘What’s going on, Sam? He tried to kill me.’

  The detective shook his head. ‘We don’t know why. Not yet.’

  Her body juddered. She relived the attack again but compressed into a single instant. Her breeding had taught her to put a brave face on things and that is what she did, but inside she was trembling with fear. Since the death of her sister, no, even before that, her relationship with the world had altered. There was a malevolent force out there, someone was watching her, stalking her, waiting for a moment of vulnerability. She remembered calling to her neighbour’s Persian, Tilly, here Tilly, here girl, and all the while there was no Tilly there. Only a man, a silent presence, watching, waiting to strike.