“You’re exaggerating.”
“Really? Talk to the ADA, Melissa Carter, see what she has to say. She was as shocked at the sentence as I was. And remember I told you I was beat up and threatened in my vestibule. I’m certain it was his file clerk, a man named Curtis Lobban, who did the beating and the threatening.”
“You said you didn’t see a face.”
“I recognized his voice.”
“That will sure convince a jury. You promised you’d stay away from them.”
“She’s a vampire,” I said, “and he’s a murderer.”
“He’s a Supreme Court justice.”
“And a murderer.”
“You don’t know.”
“It’s pretty clear to me.”
“You sure this Lonnie found out about the two of them?”
“She told me so yesterday.”
“You sure he told the justice about it?”
“Pretty sure. It seems like he was looking for someone to tell. I was going to ask Lonnie about it just to be certain. That’s why I was here. But I mentioned Lonnie to the justice today. I even told him where the shop was.” As it dawned on me, I spun around in frustration. “I led the bastard right to him.”
“So you’re not sure that Lonnie told the justice back then.”
“Not absolutely, no. But that’s exactly why he killed Lonnie and set the place on fire. That’s exactly why he killed Joey, because Joey could have traced back the killing of Tommy Greeley to him. He’s covering his tracks. And that’s how I ended up in jail when you bailed me out, because of him. He’s doing what he can to discredit and discourage me because I am on to him.”
“Or maybe it was simply an entry error.”
“You don’t believe that. You don’t believe that.”
“And maybe this Lonnie was killed by someone not so happy about a competitor cooking up methamphetamine and selling it on his turf. Perhaps one of the local motorcycle gangs who run the business up and down the East Coast.”
“You’re looking to look the other way.”
“It’s a tough business he was in,” said Slocum.
“How does Babbage fit into your theory?” said McDeiss. “Why would the justice care about Babbage?”
“Maybe Babbage knew something to connect Straczynski to the drug ring. Or maybe Babbage’s death was just a heart attack.”
“Montgomery County coroner, when I asked him, seemed to think it was exactly that,” said McDeiss. “Acute myocardial infarction. Only when I looked at the report something seemed a little off. Some missing hair off the back part of his scalp.”
“Oh?”
“Torn out.”
“It’s him, I’m telling you.”
“It sounds personal,” said Slocum.
“He killed one client. Stepped back another into an unjust sentence. He sent his clerk out to beat me up. He threw me in jail. And now he almost incinerated me. Yeah. It’s personal.”
“How’s your dad?” said Slocum.
“Not good,” I said, “and getting worse,” and as I said it a wave of hopelessness washed over me. It started with my thinking about my father, who was indeed getting worse, every day, every hour, and there was nothing I could do about it, but it wasn’t just my father. I was up against a man whose power was beyond my comprehension, who could throw me in jail, ruin my clients, kill my friends with impunity. I was up against a man who could destroy me absolutely, if he wanted, and he apparently wanted. And the two men in the city’s employ that I admired most, that I had trusted could help me, were turning their backs on what I was sure was the truth. And there was nothing, nothing I could do about it. Nothing.
“He’s going to get away with it,” I said, my voice flat with despondency.
“Why don’t you go clean up and then visit your father in the hospital,” said Slocum.
“It’s past visiting hours.”
“Go on home then, Victor. Get some rest.”
“You aren’t going to do anything. He’s too powerful.”
“Get some rest,” said Slocum.
“You’re terrified of him.”
“By the way,” said Slocum. “You’ll find out tomorrow. The Bar Association has started proceedings against you on the Derek Manley thing. They’re going to try to pull your ticket.”
“It’s him. Don’t you see? Don’t you?”
“Go home and get some rest, Victor. We’ll be in touch. Just go home.”
I went home.
I left Slocum and McDeiss huddled on the sodden, scarred street and went home. My suit stank of smoke and chemicals, was ripped at the knee and the shoulder, a total goner, as were my shirt and socks, all of it smelling as if I had been dancing like a medicine man in the middle of a campfire. Only my tie came through unscathed. But I didn’t undress as soon as I came home, didn’t strip and shower and scrub the stench of the black night off my skin and out of my hair. Instead, I went straight to the photographs pinned to my wall and began, one by one, to rip them down.
They repulsed me, now that I knew how they were taken and whom they were of. One by one I ripped them down and let them drop like dead leaves onto the floor. One by one. But then I stopped.
It was the despair that was driving me, I realized, not the photographs. There was still something clean about them, something of the ideal in them. They had captured not Alura Straczynski, in all her vainglory, but instead the dreams and hopes of Tommy Greeley. I could imagine him, atop his collapsing drug enterprise, the dogged Telushkin sniffing here, sniffing there, getting closer to closing it down and putting him in jail. But there, in that spider’s web of a studio, behind the barrier of a camera, Tommy Greeley maybe thought he spied something true and pure, something that might be able to save his life. And he captured it. Snap snap. And it was still alive, on my wall. And even if it had proved a pathetic illusion, there it was, the thing he prayed would transform his life. On my wall.
My father had felt the same way as Tommy Greeley, I was sure, about the love of his life, his Angel. And though that vision had proven just as illusory, just having it was more than I had ever given him credit for. My father. It was all almost enough to give me some hope.
But only almost. Because I knew the truth of it, the truth behind everything. That our certainties are all false, our dreams are all lies, our loves will always betray us.
The living go on dying, only the dead will rise unchanged.
Maybe he was right, Cooper Prod, meditating on the sins of his past in his prison ashram. Maybe the only hope for life was death.
It was too late to visit, but I called the fourth-floor nurses’ desk anyway, just to find out how he was doing, my father, how he was doing.
Not so well.
Chapter
49
“VICTOR?”
I looked up. Dr. Mayonnaise was in the room. Her head was tilted funny, as if once again, when she looked at me, she was seeing an art work that made no sense. This time a Magritte painting perhaps.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Is there anything I can get you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“What happened to your forehead?”
“A pigeon I kicked flew up and punched me in the head.”
“While you were playing golf?”
“How did you know?”
“You want me to look at it?”
“No.”
“We’re doing everything we can.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s still too early to tell whether the Primaxin is working. Sometimes the lag between first administering the drug and seeing a definite result can be seventy-two hours.”
“Okay.”
“I know it looks bad, Victor, but in these cases it’s the best thing for him. His heart rate is down, his oxygen level up.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Indicators are promising.”
“I can tell,” I said, as I looked over at my father.
He was out, more unconscious then asleep, which I suppose was a good thing, considering there was a blue tube snaking down his throat. The respirator bellows were drawing and blowing at a steady clip, the heart monitor was letting out a steady bleep. He was being kept alive by a machine while they waited to determine that the latest antibiotic also was having no effect on the disease that plagued him. They were stumped, the doctors, stumped by my father, which put them in the same uncertain place I had stood toward him for the entirety of my life. I wasn’t sure of the reasons for my own bewilderment, Freud would have a better theory for that than I could ever come up with, but I knew why the doctors were confused. They thought they were fighting a mere microbe, but what they were up against was far more virulent. The thing destroying my father piece by piece was his past.
“I’ll inform you if there’s any change,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Let me get you some Kleenex.”
“I’m okay, really,”
“Your tie’s getting wet.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s indestructible.”
“Handy.”
“Can you do one thing for me, Karen?”
“What, Victor?”
“Can you save his life? Please.”
She looked stricken.
“Can you? Please? Save his life?”
“Let me get you the Kleenex,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I felt sorry for her, just then, Dr. Mayonnaise from Ohio. It was going to be a long career, fetching Kleenex and going around saying things like Indicators are promising. I used to be jealous of doctors, the money they made, the status of their little degrees, the way everyone bowed and scraped in their presence and made it a point to use the honorific before their names, as if it were a sign of higher nobility. Excuse me, Lord Wentworth, I’ll have a table for you in a few minutes, but first I have to take care of Dr. Finster. He’s a gastroenterologist, you know. I used to be jealous of doctors, but not anymore. Dr. Mayonnaise was welcome to it, the money included. Before her time was up she’d earn it.
I sat alone in the room with just my father and my hopelessness for a long time. It was surprisingly peaceful there, with the predictable rhythm of the bellows. Resignation is a very peaceful emotion. I was through, I told myself, it was over. Joey Parma had given me a murder and now I was giving it back, along with his own. It was too hard, I didn’t have enough fight in me. The bastard behind everything had the law on his side and he had won. Maybe I’d be able to save my career, maybe my life would return to where it was before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, maybe I’d finally get my cable back. It was funny how comforting maybe had become. And as I made that decision to give up, finally, my body unclenched and I caught myself once and then twice, my chin falling, my eyes drifting shut before they snapped open in panic. And then I didn’t catch myself, I let myself slide into sleep, beside my father, with the soft rhythm of the bellows.
A nurse shook me awake.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I jerked to a stiff position. “I know I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Carl. You’re allowed to sleep. That’s not why I woke you. You have a visitor.”
“I’m not a patient,” I said.
“Not yet,” she said, with a maternal smile. “But none the less, someone is here to see you. But he’s not allowed in the room.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll have to go out to see him.”
“Okay,” I said and I did. And he was waiting for me, leaning at the nurses’ desk, hat in hand, chatting away, making the cute night nurse blush.
Skink.
Chapter
50
“I KNEW A girl once, name of Gwendolyn,” said Skink. “Gwendolyn, not Gwen. She wasn’t one of them thin twigs everyone goes for now. Gwendolyn had breasts like great piles of pudding, they was. I used to love my pudding. Tapioca. With the whip cream. Not no more though, on account of the cholesterol. But Gwendolyn was a lovely girl, nice feet she had, and we had us a lovely time. This was when I was living in Fresno. The girls there they didn’t put on no airs. Of course what kind of airs was you going to put on in Fresno? Still. Gwendolyn.”
Skink and I were in the hospital cafeteria. I had bought a coffee, an egg salad on white, and a bag of potato chips for my dinner. I brought half the limp sandwich up to my mouth and Skink stared at it as if it were some exotic island grub I was sticking into my craw.
“What?” I said.
“Why don’t you just inject a pound of lard into your veins and get it over with?”
I took a bite of the sandwich and, with my mouth still full, I said, “Get on with it, Phil. Why are you telling me about lost loves?”
“Just shut up and listen. So one night I put on the Old Spice, grease back the hair, stuff a handkerchief in the suit pocket, and I’m ready for a night. I picks up my Gwendolyn, takes her to this frilly grease trough, what with candles and a violin. Dinner and a show and the show, it’s going to be back at her place. So I’m laying on the sweet talk, laying it on so thick my tie is curling, when she ups and says, ‘Philip, we need to talk.’ ”
“You don’t have to go any farther.” I opened up the bag of chips, offered it to Skink. “You want?”
“Don’t be daft. So that’s the last of her, I figure. She’s a good-enough sport to give me a final plow for old time’s sake, but that’s the end. No more pudding for Mr. Skink. The last I figure I’d ever see of lovely Gwendolyn. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? The next night, who’s knocking at my door?”
“Gwendolyn?”
“Just wanting to see how I was doing. I’m doing fine, I says. Good, she says. You want to catch a movie? I thought we broke up, I says. We did, she says. So what’s with the movie? I says. We can still be friends, she says. I wasn’t in it for the friendship, I says. Oh, Philip, she says. Go put on a jacket. And damn if I didn’t. You see what I’m getting at here, Victor?”
“Not quite.”
“I began seeing more of Gwendolyn after we split up then I ever did when we was parallel parking. Every night she’s stopping over or calling on the phone to check on me, make sure I was up and chirpy. One night I even found myself out drinking with Gwendolyn and her flock, some girls what made Gwendolyn look like a queen by comparison and a few other Joes what she also was at one time doing the boink but were now strictly friends. A little too pathetic there, don’t you think? That was it for me. Bye-bye Gwendolyn, bye-bye Fresno. She’s married now with a couple boys in the army, but Gwendolyn, she’s still sending me Christmas cards. You see there, Victor, some girls, they ain’t as interested in the bouncing as they are in the collecting.”
“Okay. So?”
“Your Alura Straczynski, she’s like my Gwendolyn, she is. A collector.”
I stopped eating my sandwich, narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
He took out his notebook, licked his thumb. “You’ll be getting a full report, all names and numbers, along with my invoice. But I thought you might be wanting a preliminary idea of what I found. Every night she’s Mrs. Straczynski, out with her husband, doing the rounds, like the perfect little helpmeet. But each morning she’s up and out at the crack. Has got her errands to run, doesn’t she? Busy girl.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s a bloke in a nursing home. He ain’t much for conversation, never says a thing, had some sort of attack that left him like an eggplant, but she’s there every day, visiting, reading to him. There’s a panhandler on the street, his spot is Sixteenth and Locust, and she drops him a sandwich every day, and a kind word to boot. There’s a print shop she has some sort of interest in, not a copy machine place, but a real honest-to-god print shop where they got this huge old press and they hand sew the books they prints up. She stops in every now and then, helping out the staff, sometimes coming out with her hands black with ink. And there’s an invalid woman she pays
call on every other afternoon or so and stays a bit. I was wondering about that so I knocked on the door, tried to sell the lady some knives.”
“How’d you do?”
“No sale. Even though it is guaranteed to be the best knife you’ve ever used or your money back. Cutco. I keep a sample case in my car for when I need to go knocking on a door. Tools of the trade, so to speak. Sometimes I even get an order. Every dollar helps. But even without the sale it was a profitable visit. Because there she was, your Alura Straczynski, cooking up something in the kitchen.”
“Are you sure? This doesn’t sound like her.”
“You ain’t getting it, are you. It wasn’t no charity work. It’s like she has all these different family members what she collected. See what I mean?”
“Okay,” I said, and then a thought struck about the invalid woman who had refused to buy the knives. She is ill, had said the justice’s file clerk about his wife. You have disturbed her delicate equilibrium. “What was her name, the woman Mrs. Straczynski was caring for.”
“Lobban,” he said. “Matilda Lobban.”
“Surprise, surprise. What else did you find?”
“Something good. Something you’ll love. There was meetings and visitors to that studio place of hers. Usually men, but some women too. You was one of the visitors, drinking with her at that bar she’s always at, she likes a drink she does, and then just the other day you going up to her studio.”
“Business,” I said, picking up the other half of the sandwich, taking a bite.
“Sure it was. I ain’t here to judge.” He gave a judgmental wink. “But there was others too. Somes I didn’t recognize. But one I did, one I couldn’t help but.”
“Who?”
“And it wasn’t just one time neither, him climbing up the stairs to that place of hers in the old factory building.”
“Let’s go, Phil. Just tell me who.”
“But it must not have been going on too long, this one, or I’d a seen it before, wouldn’t I?”
Past Due Page 32
