Shade of Pale

by Kihn, Greg;

  She heard the door open and the music leap out suddenly from the open door.

  Bobby was back!

  She frantically moved the mouse, bearing down too hard and making it unresponsive. The sensitivity was set too high and she kept missing the little box. She clicked and clicked again, and kept missing. She heard Bobby close the door and lock it behind him.

  Her heart was pounding like the hooves of racehorses, the pulse in her ears nearly blocking out the ungodly din of the music. Using all the willpower she could muster, she held her breath and steadied her hand. And tried again.

  This time her hand left the mouse and went to the keyboard. With incredible luck she managed to strike “COMMAND Q,” quitting the program. A box appeared asking if she wanted to save changes to “Dolly w/rope” and she clicked “no.” The image winked and disappeared.

  She got up and moved away from the computer, shaking and weak. The music pounded on.

  Bobby entered the room and his eyes went directly to the computer. The screen was as he had left it.

  “Were you fucking around with the computer?” Bobby shouted above the music.

  Cathy forced herself to speak, even though her voice sounded like it had been pushed through foam rubber. “No, baby … I didn’t go near it.”

  Bobby fixed her with a malevolent stare. Cathy looked back, blinking and shuddering. Bobby scared her more than she knew how to react.

  Can he sense it?

  Cathy sniffed her runny nose and scratched her forearms.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Bobby asked, stepping to her and reaching out his hands.

  She looked at the hands and contemplated. If she didn’t go to him and act like nothing was wrong, he’d suspect that she knew his secret. But to go to him, to touch him, was now as repugnant as touching a corpse.

  “C’mere, Cat,” he said.

  The music stopped abruptly and the room decompressed into sudden silence. Cathy’s heart seemed as loud as a cannon in the new subsonic environment. She shivered, part with fear of Bobby and part with the misery of her own withdrawal.

  She willed her hand to reach out and touch his. He grasped it and pulled her roughly to him. She fell against him like a broken marionette.

  Bobby’s arms encircled her and she began to shake violently. She imagined those arms like pythons, able to crush the life out of her in a second. Tears streamed down her face.

  Bobby broke off his embrace and held her by the shoulders. He peered into her face, now wet and desperate.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m sick, Bobby. I’m real sick. I been throwing up all morning.”

  Bobby smiled as if he were a demon in human skin. So evil was his expression that for a moment Cathy was unable to take a breath. That smile was a joyless parody of the one she knew.

  “The China flu, eh? Looks like you need some of Daddy’s medicine.”

  Cathy came alive at the sound of that word. “Medicine? You got more?”

  Bobby pulled a plastic bag of white powder from his pocket and dangled it in front of her face.

  “Just scored big-time.”

  Cathy changed. “Oh, Bobby, yeah.… Yeah, I need some—”

  “You’re strung put, bitch. You went and got yourself strung out on this shit and now you expect me to just give it to you for free? Like a fuckin’ prescription?”

  “No, Bobby, I … I … I’ll pay for it.”

  “With what? You ain’t got a pot to piss in, let alone the kind of dough you need for this.” He shook the bag.

  Cathy sweated. “My brother’s got money; he’ll give it to me. I know he will.”

  Bobby clucked and turned away. “You look like shit; you know that? You’ve really let yourself go. Look in the mirror.”

  Cathy stood. Bobby spun around and grabbed her.

  “Look in the fuckin’ mirror!” he shouted and pushed her to the wall where a full-length mirror hung.

  She looked. The person looking back was a stranger. Cathy’s once-rosy face now appeared ashen and hollow. The discoloration around her eyes from Bobby’s last beating still showed, and her swollen lip refused to heal. Her hair hung limp and dirty in her face. She slumped like a hunchback.

  Cathy said nothing.

  “You’re no good to me like that. What should I do? Kick your sorry ass out right now?”

  “No, Bobby, don’t,” she heard herself say. Her voice now belonged to that stranger in the mirror. “I’m just a little sick, that’s all. Give me the medicine and I’ll fix myself up real nice for you.”

  “I told you to be careful with this shit. You didn’t listen.”

  “I’ll listen now, Bobby.”

  Cathy’s tears had salted her lips, and she spoke now with the bitter irony of someone who didn’t know good from evil. She hated herself for groveling to Bobby, but her craving for the drug overcame her fear. She rationalized it.

  Maybe the picture was a fake. Isn’t that what PhotoShop is for? Maybe it was just a well-done fake. She cleaved to that idea desperately. And if it’s not a fake, then maybe Bobby didn’t kill her, maybe somebody else did, and he just took the pictures.

  Bobby stood behind her tortured face, looking into the mirror at her. Now he was the heroin messiah; the photography monster was gone.

  “Please?” she sobbed.

  “I hate it when you beg.”

  Bobby slapped the back of her head and sent her crashing into the mirror. Miraculously, it didn’t break. She bounced back into his python arms, and he carried her to the couch and threw her down.

  She cried piteously.

  “All right, I’ll cook some up. But this is the last time; got that? After this you’re drying out.”

  “Yes, yes.…”

  The music started again, loud, muffled, and relentless.

  Bobby got up and walked over to the wall and beat on it with his fist. “Hey! Give it a break, huh?” he shouted.

  After Bobby had injected the heroin into both of them, he decided he wanted to hear some real music. The crap that the band next door had been pumping out unrelentingly for the past hour was getting on his nerves.

  A concert sound system stood against one wall of Bobby’s studio. He stored it for a friend who rented the equipment out for rock concerts. The friend owed Bobby money, so Bobby had suggested the sound system be stored at his place, just in case.

  A mammoth thing, it consisted of six huge speaker cabinets, high-frequency horns, several banks of amplifiers, and a stack of four monitor speakers.

  Bobby had it rigged to his CD player.

  He smiled, stoned and mischievous, and proceeded to turn on the power amps. They hummed to life.

  The band next door needed to be taught a lesson.

  “Cat! Bring me the sacred CD!” he shouted over the muffled din.

  Cathy went over to the rack and hunted down Procol Harum’s Greatest Hits. Walking unsteadily, she delivered it to Bobby’s hand.

  Bobby squatted in front of the glowing stack of power amps, adjusting levels, and laughed with fiendish delight. “You know what’s so great about this song?” he asked.

  Cathy humored Bobby. Stoned now, and afraid to think about the pictures on the computer, she acted contrite. The terrible memory faded as if it had happened years ago.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Everything. Keith Reid’s lyrics, Gary Brooker’s vocal, the Bach organ piece ‘Sleeper Awake’ that Matthew Fisher plays on the Hammond B-3, the gothic production, all of it, it’s magic!

  “And listen to the drums. Man, I love the way he rides the cymbals. I think that’s B. J. Wilson. I saw these guys once in concert and it was the best show I ever saw. You can’t imagine.”

  He slipped the CD into the changer and pushed a button.

  He stood and shook his fist at the wall separating them from the horrendous band next door. Their muffled onslaught continued.

  “Get ready for some real music, you assholes!”

  Wi
thout warning the massive speakers quaked with the sound of the organ playing the opening strains of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harum. The room shook. The sound flared out of the huge speakers like a jet engine, rattling their teeth at concert hall volume. It completely dwarfed the noise coming from next door.

  The sound slammed into their ears as if they were standing in front of the band onstage.

  The organ swirled, ponderous and grand, the magnificent cymbals splashed along, and the incandescent production swept them away.

  Bobby’s eyes swelled with moisture as the big, beautiful chorus boomed forth across the room.

  This is the best part, thought Bobby. To be high like this, listening to this song on this sound system, man, this is what it’s all about!

  Bobby held onto the chair, letting the music wash over him. His fingers dug into the armrest. The wonderful gothic production throbbed inside his head.

  A whiter shade of pale.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Detectives Jones and Panelli made their way through the street scene in front of the Star Hotel. The hookers and drug dealers hooted at them as they passed. Even though both officers were in street clothes, these people could smell a cop.

  A tall man wearing a filthy Mexican blanket spit at them. “Hey, man, you ain’t got nothin’ on me! Get off my street! I’ll give you my disease! I’ll give you AIDS!”

  In an alley across the street O’Connor pretended to drink wine from a paper bag. The shouting had captured his attention, and he watched as the tough old cop reacted to the situation.

  O’Connor had been tailing Jones for several days.

  The man in the Mexican blanket spit again and nearly hit George on the arm. George spun around and confronted the deranged street person. The tall man stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the malevolent gleam in George’s eyes. The man had obviously mistaken George for one of the city’s civilized, rule-abiding cops. The person who glared back at him now was as dangerous and violent as anyone else on the street at that moment.

  George stuck out a big hand and put the index finger squarely in the spitter’s face. The man who had initiated the sequence now felt that he had made a major mistake. The sneer melted from his lips and he didn’t move; he did not make any gestures or quick movements that could have been construed as even remotely threatening. In George’s mind, that would have given him due cause to kick some ass. The man in the Mexican blanket must have sensed it. The old cop with the crew-cut had an attitude he could smell.

  “Did you spit at me, chump?”

  The spitter in the Mexican blanket was now mute.

  “I asked you a question!”

  Still no response.

  “All right, tough guy, let’s see some ID. Now!” George stepped toward him, whipping out a set of handcuffs like magic.

  Panelli knew this game; it was the old “good cop/bad cop” routine. He’d played it with George before. Panelli said, “Aw, come on, man. Let him go; he’s just a bum.”

  Jones bristled. “He spit at me. This piece of shit spit at me! Nobody spits at me. I oughta kick his ass.”

  “Take it easy; this guy ain’t worth it.”

  “Fuck you, Panelli! I’m gonna bust him.”

  The tall man in the Mexican blanket reacted predictably, starting his pleading right on cue. “Hey, man, come on. I wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”

  “Shut up, scumbag!” Jones yelled in his face, loud enough for everyone else on the street to notice and start to drift away.

  Panelli, working from the classic script, said, “Let him go; he’s not worth taking downtown. Look; he’s sorry, aren’t you, fella?”

  The Mexican nodded vigorously.

  George shook his head. “Let’s just beat the shit out of him, OK? Nobody will care; when he gets out of the hospital maybe he’ll show some respect for the law.”

  “Nah, let’s just let him go.”

  Jones looked the Mexican blanket man up and down. “You spit on me again, you son of a bitch, and I’ll break your ugly face.”

  The tall man stopped talking, abruptly breaking off his pleas. He turned and shuffled away gratefully under George’s glare.

  O’Connor slid back into the shadows. The old cop was good, he thought, tough, direct. O’Connor took note.

  Mrs. Willis said he was special.

  George looked at Panelli and smiled. “Nothing like a little street theater,” he said.

  The lobby of the Star Hotel was worn and shabby and smelled of stale cigar smoke. The clerk still read his paper and did the same thing to them that he did to everybody: ignored them completely. He was nearly sixty, George guessed, and about as sociable as a leper. George took out his wallet and put his badge in the man’s face.

  The man put down his paper. “OK, you got my attention. So, what do you want? I already talked to your boy here.”

  George smiled. Panelli rankled at being called “your boy” but kept silent.

  “So now you can talk to me.”

  The clerk was older than George, more grizzled, unflinching, and obviously a veteran of many police interrogations. He kept his cool, used as few words as possible, and met George’s gaze with a blank one of his own. “The girl came in like she always does; some guy was with her … I guess. I never saw ’em. I was out takin’ a piss.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I just told you, I wasn’t here when they came in.”

  “What about when the guy came back out?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you see anyone leave the building?”

  “Yeah, I saw lots of people leave, but I didn’t really take notice of any of ’em. It’s like I told your partner.”

  Panelli looked up, aware that he’d been promoted from “your boy” to “your partner.”

  The clerk said, “I don’t know anything. Guys come in here all the time; they’re all scum. I try not to look at ’em. They make me sick.”

  George nodded, acting as if everything the old clerk said made total sense. “Did you see anyone different that night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  George put his badge away. He looked around the lobby and whistled. “Just as nice as the Helmsley,” he said sarcastically. Then, turning back to the clerk, he said sternly, “OK, let’s take a look at the room.”

  The clerk wearily picked up the key and led them up the stairs. They were the same stairs that the strangler had followed Dolly Devane up a few nights before.

  Her room proved to be as drab and run-down as the lobby. The police lab team had been over it, and there were still traces of gray fingerprint powder here and there. They’d found nothing.

  “The lab report said she was strangled again after she died. The first time he used his hands; the second time he used a rope. You find that curious?”

  Panelli grunted. “Yeah. We’re dealing with a real sicko.”

  As George looked around the room, he reviewed some things in the trace evidence report that had caught his eye. Speaking aloud to Panelli, George took stock.

  “Christ, this rug is filthy. According to the lab, there were enough particles of foreign matter on this carpet to fill a shopping bag. They must hardly ever clean this place. With the lack of vacuuming and the frequency of visitors, it’s no wonder the lab boys turned up this weird list of shit.”

  Looking at the rug now, its tired, threadbare pattern nearly invisible, he wondered what else they would find. A brown stain marked the spot where Dolly fell off the chair.

  George squatted and examined it.

  He pulled out a small notebook in which he had copied the particles from the trace evidence report.

  “Listen to this. Cigarette butts, five, with and without lipstick traces, French fries, eighteen different kinds of hair, automobile oil, empty condom packets, traces of marijuana, coffee, traces of talc, bread crumbs, paper fibers, gum, beach sand, and popcorn.”


  “Popcorn?”

  “Yeah. Why does that one leap out? There was enough trace evidence on this rug to qualify it as a city street,” George said. The popcorn, however, had caught his eye.

  “Did she go to the movies a lot?” George asked.

  The clerk, not realizing he was being asked a question, started to leave.

  “Hey!” George shouted. “I asked you a question. Did she go to the movies a lot?”

  The clerk turned and shrugged. “What am I? Her mother? You think I know these people? Shit. You think I care what goes on in their miserable lives? I don’t know and I don’t wanna know.”

  The clerk asked Jones and Panelli to close the door when they were through and went back to his post.

  George checked the hallway outside the door carefully. The lab boys had gone over the room, but they would have probably stopped at the door unless they had reason to continue.

  George got down on all fours with a penlight and checked the floor in the hallway, from the door to the steps. His mind worked like a computer as he crawled, cataloging minute garbage.

  Panelli wandered out into the hall and watched.

  George cleared his throat and began to tell Panelli what was going through his mind. “The report said that this victim, like the others, had been strangled first, then placed in a sitting position in a chair.”

  Panelli nodded. “Yeah. Strange, isn’t it? I wonder why he did that.”

  “The killer sat them down and then did something in front of them. He needed an audience. Why? What was he doing?”

  “The guy’s a psycho,” Panelli snorted. “What other reason do you need?”

  “Well, it’s buggin’ me. Try to put yourself in the scene, OK? There’s the victim, freshly killed, sitting in the chair. OK, what else happened?”

  “He probably whacked off,” Panelli said.

  “First he kills ’em; then he sits ’em up.”

  “Scary shit, man.”

  George looked up. “If he whacked off, the trace evidence would have showed semen.”

  “Maybe he used a towel or something.”