Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  The white fed—I heard his partner call him Landry—lit a cigarette. The other one pocketed his notebook and started walking toward the car.

  “Hey,” Landry called. “That broad’s tough. She’s bi-racial, huh? What is she? You figure maybe a quadroon?”

  “There’s something very black about her, Landry,” his partner said. “It’s the belt that I understand she has in karate. You want to be sucking on your own testicles, you go ahead and mess with her.”

  Landry flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and walked to the Ford.

  • • •

  WHEN THE TWO FEDS HAD DRIVEN OFF, I WALKED back into the Willard and strode directly to the elevator. There, I joined a mother and daughter going up. The woman gripped her child’s hand and stared rigidly at the elevator door. The little girl looked up at me. “What’s your name, mister?” she asked.

  The mother yanked at her daughter’s arm and hissed, “Missy.”

  I smiled. “John,” I said. “I guess you’re Missy.”

  “Don’t bother the man,” Missy’s mother said.

  A drama wrote itself in my mind. I would kill the mother. Missy might experience a moment or two of distress, but then she would be relieved. Then, therapists would fuck everything up. They would arrive by the busload to convince Missy that she had been traumatized, and had repressed her memories of horror. She would oblige these manipulative hordes and exhibit symptoms, attend groups, and live her life out as a victim, a survivor of Elevator Mother Murder. The truth of it all—that the kid had wished the old bitch dead a thousand times—would be lost.

  I have standards.

  When the elevator door opened at my floor, I said good-bye to Missy, then left the two of them to their parent-child wars.

  I stepped into the carpeted hall and walked toward Lucas Frank’s room. I entertained myself with the thought that I was in the Coen brothers’ film, Barton Fink, and that I was about to ignite the world, beginning there in that long, silent corridor.

  I slipped my hand around my .44 Magnum, not because I was concerned with Lucas Frank’s door springing open. I was considering a substantial variation in my script.

  THERE WAS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR AND THE phone rang.

  “Everyone wants us at once,” I said to Lane, pointing at the phone and walking to the door.

  I could hear Lane talking as a member of the hotel staff entered with a tray of coffee that I had ordered. He placed the tray on a table and handed me a small package. “This was on the floor, Dr. Frank, right outside your door.”

  I thanked him, and closed the door.

  “Who’s it from, Pop?” Lane asked as she replaced the receiver.

  “Doesn’t say. Who was on the phone?”

  “Not good. A reporter at the Washington Blade. Her name is Darla Michaels. She wants to talk to you about Willoughby’s death. I remember her name. She covered the Wolf case last year.”

  “Did you tell her to call the feds?” I asked as I opened the box and unwrapped a small sheet of stiff paper—mockingbirds and thrashers, page 124 of Peterson’s Field Guide.

  I froze.

  “Yeah, but how does she even know you’re here?” Lane asked. “Pop? What is it?”

  I held up a small brass figure, about the size of the stone gorilla that Lane had found for me in Lake Albert. A sticker on the base of the figure said only “Oliver.”

  “It’s the phoenix,” I said. “Know your mythology?”

  “The phoenix rises out of the ashes of its own funeral pyre, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Death and resurrection.”

  Lane shot up out of her chair. “The sonofabitch is here. He knows where we’re staying.”

  I rubbed my fingers across the rough surface of the mythical bird’s partially unfurled wings, then placed the brass figure on the coffee table, sat, and stared at it.

  You watch from a silent distance as you pull the strings on your marionettes, don’t you, lad? You are a patient assassin.

  “He’s close,” I said, feeling suddenly weak, as if I couldn’t get enough air. “We have our personal notice of his ascension. If I had any question about what was motivating him, it’s gone now. I ‘killed’ him in Vermont. Now it’s my turn to die.”

  “He was outside that fucking door, Pop,” Lane said, crossing the room and examining the page from Peterson. “What the hell does this mean?”

  I shrugged. “Janet got kingbirds. We get mockingbirds.”

  Law enforcement is not equipped to deal with the wolves of the world. Traditional investigation misses them more often than not. They’re invisible. Most are caught by accident—usually because of something minor like the traffic violations of a Bundy, Joel Rifkin, or David Berkowitz.

  Wolf was a cut above the pack. Back at the lake, I knew that I would be the one to bring him down. He would not allow himself to be taken alive, and ultimately there was only one confrontation that he wanted.

  I could feel myself pulling away from Lane. It was a familiar sensation, one that I had experienced many times over the years, whenever a killer summoned me.

  I walked to the window and pushed aside the curtain. “It’s raining,” I said, looking down at the street. “Did you notice how wet that cellar was in the old house in Vermont? Smelled like grave dirt. Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for Wolf as a kid, when his stepfather locked him in the coal bin down there. I’ve tried to imagine, to put myself there, to feel what he must have felt. I can’t.”

  I glanced back at Lane. “I can’t because he didn’t feel anything. He thought a lot, reasoned, planned, but he didn’t feel a damn thing.”

  Childhood trauma is only one possible ingredient in the recipe that produces a serial killer. Most children who survive abusive home lives do not go on to careers in homicide. How they perceive their experiences, and how they reason their world, have as much or more to do with shaping them as the experiences themselves. For years, our microscopes had been trained on the family, and we had ignored the subject of our study

  Lane walked up behind me. “So, Wolf makes his announcement,” she said. “He’s back from the dead. What do the bird book pages mean?”

  “Janet’s kingbird, Tyrannus tyrannus, the tyrant—is Wolf saying that he’s the tyrant, the evil lord of all?”

  “And what? ‘Mocking’ you?”

  “I don’t know what else it could mean.”

  I continued to gaze out at the city, at the crazy collections of lights blurred by the rain. As frightening and ominous as Wolf’s gift was, it had also triggered a strange sense of resolve.

  I moved closer to the window, touched the pane of glass with my fingertips, and tried to feel the drops of rain.

  LATER, AFTER SAYING GOOD NIGHT TO MY DAUGHTER, I slipped out for the evening.

  I was restless, and I had some business to attend to. I also wanted to explore the city, to visit those parts of D.C that would be most hospitable to someone who needs to preserve his anonymity. I knew that Wolf would not hang out in any part of the capital where the paparazzi did, and that eliminated a good portion of the city. He was on a mission; he couldn’t afford to be caught in a casual photo that turned up on the front page of the Blade.

  A gray sedan—my federal escort, I surmised—was parked on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue, thirty yards north of the Willard’s entrance. I walked over and tapped on the window. It slid down, revealing two thirty-something white men in matching tan suits. The one on the passenger side was Special Agent Rex-ford Landry.

  “If John Wolf is dead,” I said, “why are you following me?”

  The driver stared at me, then hit a button and the tinted window closed. I felt like putting my fist through it.

  My first chore, then, would be to dump the feds, and for that I needed a well-situated, but seedy public bathroom with a window on an alley I’d had twenty years to master my defenestration techniques, and they had never failed me. My favorite “emergency exit”—in Neil’s Beer Garden—ha
d been demolished when Boston built its government center. Poor trade, if you ask me.

  A half hour later, I sipped a beer at Jewell Howard’s, a bar that my nephew, Lymann Murr, had recommended if I was ever in D.C. The bouncer, Oscar Bell, a tall, muscular black man, had played drums in one of Lymann’s short-lived reggae bands. We had met only once, when I was in New York visiting Lane, but Oscar remembered me.

  When I walked in, he nodded, cracked what passed for a smile, and said, “Lymann’s uncle.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “After we met, Lymann told me all about you.” He grinned. “I don’t like bad guys either.”

  Oscar got paid to make sure that violence didn’t happen, or if it did, that it didn’t erupt in Jewell’s. Because of his massive size, he was well qualified for the job.

  With the advent of Uzi-toting gangs in the city, Oscar’s job had gotten complicated. If he had red headbands in the bar, no blues got in. When the blues caught an early table, the reds had to walk down the block to another bar.

  It was Nina Simone night in Jewell’s—nothing but Nina on the cranked-up jukebox, and drafts at half price.

  “I have a couple of feds following me,” I said, handing him a twenty and explaining what I had in mind.

  “The feds will pay the cover,” Oscar said. “They never drink. They don’t even loosen their neckties. They come in here and they fuck up the mood.”

  I sat at the bar, sipped my beer, and watched as Oscar collected a five from each of the agents. Landry remained near the front door. His partner stood at the side exit.

  I tapped my fingers to Nina doing “Black Swan.”

  Each time that Landry glanced in my direction, he found me staring at him. It was a conditioned response for him to look my way less often. I wasn’t supposed to see him. People do have a bit of the ostrich in them. When he was taking as long as thirty seconds between glances, I slipped off the stool and headed for the bathroom.

  I opened the window in the small, dingy room, climbed through, and moved into the darkness next to Jewell’s Dumpster. I heard noise in the bathroom behind me, pulled my nine-millimeter, and stepped back to the window.

  Landry was sprawled on the pissy linoleum floor. Oscar stood over him.

  “Man slipped,” Oscar said, smiling his cracked smile. “Hit his head on the sink, I guess.”

  So much for losing the feds, I chuckled.

  I nodded, then walked back through the alley’s darkness.

  AS I WANDERED THE CITY STREETS THROUGH A steady, light rain, I struggled with the uncompromising feeling that I was lost in an urban wasteland. I passed housing projects, liquor stores, burned-out wrecks of cars, buildings that housed whores, Tarot readers, and the Church of the Laughing God. This dismal land came with its own soundtrack—the soprano wail of sirens, the thrumming bass of a police helicopter, the staccato burst of an automatic weapon somewhere in the city’s maze of dark corridors.

  This was a territory where Wolf could disappear. I teased myself with the notion that I was bait, that Wolf was following me, that I was accomplishing something. I pictured him stepping out of the shadows, saw myself raise my weapon and drop him with a single shot.

  It was delusion.

  All I was doing was traveling through a long, dark tunnel, its walls decorated with snapshots of the scarred remains of a land more destroyed than Dresden after the bombing. But I was certain my travels were preordained.

  This city was the center of power for the entire world. The perfect place to bring to its knees. But how?

  At an intersection, I saw a pile of burning debris in the middle of the road. There were mattresses, a broken banister, pieces of furniture—all smoldering. Sparks shot up, but the light rain muted the prospect of any conflagration, instead, blinding smoke billowed out from the makeshift inferno.

  Two uniformed officers and five civilians stood there. I joined the group, my eyes watering, nearly blinded.

  A third cop arrived. “Tactical’s on their way,” she said. “Who’s out there?”

  “Neighborhood guy. He’s wasted. Killed his girlfriend, and now he’s got her three-year-old daughter with him. We’ve got to move these people back.”

  Rain matted my hair, running in rivers beneath my shirt collar.

  “Tactical wants to know what he’s got for weapons,” the officer said.

  There was no response. I felt a slight breeze begin to move the late summer air as I strained to see beyond the group of cops. A small, barefoot child in pink pants and a white shirt stepped out of the smoke. She had her thumb stuck in her mouth, and grasped a rag doll shaped like an owl. The female officer rushed over, knelt, and said, “You okay, honey?”

  The little girl yanked out her thumb. “Billy in the smoke,” she said.

  At that instant, I heard a savage roar—like a wounded animal—as a small, slender black man wielding a kitchen knife ran from the smoke directly at the cop kneeling with the child. Reflexively, my hand went to my gun.

  A woman threw herself over the front end of a parked car. Two men dropped to the wet pavement.

  One of the cops had much faster reflexes than I. His nine-millimeter exploded, and the running man smashed to the asphalt, his blood—briefly red in the firelight, then blue, and finally black—flowed into the pools of water.

  If there had been any hesitation, the outcome would have been different.

  The little girl had her fingers plugged in her ears.

  “C’mon,” the officer said, picking up the girl and her doll.

  “Billy didn’t make chicken noodle,” she said. “Mama said what Billy made had okra in it. Mama’s ’lergic to okra, so she went to heaven.”

  Each member of the small crowd had an opinion on why Billy “snapped.”

  “He was dead in his head from that crack,” one said.

  “He couldn’t find no work,” another contributed.

  “That woman didn’t want Billy ’round there.”

  “Why he damn near kill the baby?”

  “What was his last name? Billy what?”

  The last speaker’s question was the answer. Billy had no recognition. These were neighborhood people, and they didn’t know who he was. He lived among them, but he was a nobody. The man had been powerless. Just another crackhead.

  In the end, Billy had settled for “suicide by cop.”

  I turned away from the D.C smoke and the slowly growing crowd, and watched as a black Lincoln pulled to the curb.

  WHEN WE WERE COLLEGE ROOMMATES, HARRY Storrs had no intention of entering politics. He had majored in comparative literature, toyed with joining SDS, and, along with hundreds of others, hurled unflattering epithets at then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, until the Cambridge cops turned their dogs loose on the demonstrators. The Dobermans and shepherds had sent us scurrying up the trees along the Charles River. We chanted, “Dogs need trees.”

  Now, in the rear seat of his Lincoln, Senator Harry Storrs handed me a bottle of microbrewed ale from his home state. He popped the cap off another for himself.

  “What was the commotion back there?” he asked.

  “Neighborhood guy killed his girlfriend and was going to kill her daughter. The cops got him first.”

  Harry lowered his bottle and stared at me. “You saw that?”

  “I saw a skilled police officer kill a ‘Billy’ with no last name before Billy had a chance to hurt a child or another cop who was crouched next to the child.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I had seen the expression on Billy’s face as he emerged from the smoke. Rage. “Every person he could reach was going to die. No work, a crack habit, domestic problems. He had to dig himself out. This was his chance to taste power, to tell the world to go fuck itself. I think he believed that if he created an intolerable horror, people would stop dead in their tracks and notice him. It was his justice, his way of bringing down the shithouse.”

  Harry shook his head. “Neighborhoods like these are ba
d for your health,” he said, raising his bottle and drinking.

  “Do something about it.”

  “That’s up to Marion Barry. My constituents are concerned about farm subsidies. They don’t give a shit whether there’s any toilet paper in the District Building. How’s Savvy?”

  “She’s fine, as far as I know. I had a card about six months ago. Vera?”

  He laughed. “I think I see her about as often as you see Savvy. Ever think we might’ve planned it that way? You’re the shrink, Lucas.”

  “What’s going on with the Willoughby investigation?”

  He shook his head. “You never did play enough. The FBI will be back on your doorstep. The Bureau’s had a rough couple of years. The Olympics thing didn’t help. The problems with the lab. Now this. Publicity goes down the tubes. Morale suffers. Then, of course, funding becomes a problem. They don’t have anything in this Wolf matter. Is that his name?”

  I nodded.

  “Nothing. They’re running a routine investigation on the agent’s death. Intensive, but routine, and no wolves. You think he’d be in a neighborhood like this?”

  “I do. He’d blend in here.”

  Storrs drank again from his ale, and I watched as his head went back—the mane of white hair, the familiar profile.

  “What do you think of this ale?” he asked.

  “It’s almost an India pale,” I said.

  “Not bad, though, huh?”

  I smiled at my old college friend. “For something they ship to the legions in a foreign land, it’s excellent.”

  He laughed, then looked at his bottle. “You prick. You’re right.”

  “Too bitter,” I said. “What else do they make?”

  “I don’t know. I’d rather drink bourbon anyway. I read about that business last year, Lucas. I thought you were finished with this crime stuff.”