So when he heard there was a man who claimed the tattoos on his body were changing, Wade didn’t entirely discount it. Tonight, stumbling down the dark alley without any other light, he searched for the graffiti by lighting one match after another and tossing them away as they singed his fingers. The last message had been the rather vague and irritating the return of the queen of wands. It seemed urgent to Wade not to miss whatever the graffiti might say today of all days; he found the corner and was down to his last match. He struck the match and held it up to the wall, and was immediately disappointed by the most innocuous and meaningless bulletin yet.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
“You’re running out of ideas, my man,” Wade muttered out loud. In his dismay he forgot about the burning match, crying out when it reached his fingertips and flicking it in the air where it fell like a dead firefly.
Those who built Church Central on the huge rock that overlooked the sea to the west and the city to the east never imagined any other structure would challenge its predominance on the landscape. Their contempt for God was large enough that they presumed not only to speak for him but to approximate his stature; a few may have convinced themselves that it was God who gave them the rock for the purpose of building the church in the first place.
In the meantime the Arboretum to the northeast grew higher.
Those living in the Arboretum didn’t give much thought to the Church at all; their descent into the Arboretum’s passages was the lateral motion of their mirth at God and Primacy. The Church insisted on jurisdiction over the zone that it called Redemption but everyone else called Desire and continually drew up plans to tear down the Arboretum board by board. That the priests shrank from STEVE ERICKSON • 65
this finally had less to do with bureaucracy than dread of what might come shrieking out of the Arboretum once its walls had been pulled away. Even heaven, one priest conjectured, needed a hell where the things heaven could not know or touch might be contained.
If Church Central was anxious about the disorder of human desire that lurked in the Arboretum, it genuinely feared the only thing on the landscape that dwarfed both, and that of course was the volcano. The volcano towered high enough in the east that the sun didn’t rise above it until a couple of hours before noon; and from the rooftop of Church Central a day never passed that the priests didn’t contemplate the curl of smoke that rose from the volcano’s flat peak. A day never passed that somewhere in the city a priest didn’t fall to his knees and press the palms of his hands flat to the ground, not to prostrate himself before God and beg for mercy but to assess the seismic whispers of the coming infernal scream.
Mostly Church Central feared the volcano because it represented the most alarming of possibilities: that there was indeed a God, who manifested himself daily in the mix of volcano smoke and ocean fog that the residents called the Vog. What’s more, God’s molten wrath might be reserved not for the hedonists of the Arboretum but the priests’ cynical impertinence, though this consideration demanded a moral imagination no one in Primacy possessed enough to fully formulate or understand. But the possibility nibbled beneath the floorboards of their consciences. It was heard at night as the devouring of an approaching infestation. And if moral imagination would not acknowledge let alone speak to the prospect of God’s living in the crater of the volcano, it certainly wouldn’t account for the fact that if one were to stand on the volcano’s peak and look midpoint between Church Central and the Arboretum in the distance, if one were to stand in the highest tower of the Arboretum and look midpoint between Church Central and the volcano, if one were to stand with the priests on the rooftop of Church Central and look midpoint between the volcano and the Arboretum, the crosshairs of these vantage points would have fallen on the small alley off the corner of Desolate and Unrequited where Wade read the daily graffiti like changing tea leaves.
But Wade didn’t know this either, and the man who would later A R C D’X • 66
chart such coordinates only stared at their undistinguished meeting point and concluded it meant nothing at all.
On his way into headquarters the next morning, Wade encountered the rookie who had provided the rosary for Sally Hemings the previous afternoon. That was when Wade heard about the satellite dish the police had found at the hotel. If there was a dish, Wade thought, then there must have been a monitor, but Mallory hadn’t mentioned either. “Mallory said not to tell anybody,” the rookie added, affecting his most guileless expression but not quite able to conceal the connivance in his eyes. Shit, Wade said to himself, another weasel. Mallory tells the kid not to tell anyone and the kid runs straight to me; the entire force is made up of one ambitious backstabbing motherfucker after another, and that now includes guys who haven’t been around for more than a week. “I was trying to get the concierge to cough up the TV when Mallory came along and said forget it, he’d take care of it. He didn’t want to book the concierge, either.” The rookie said, “I thought monitors and dishes were felonies. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
It was stupid of Mallory, really. Every time Wade thought maybe he shouldn’t underestimate him, Mallory did something silly.
“You’ve done fine,” Wade said to the rookie.
“You won’t tell Mallory that I—” the rookie started, but Wade was already walking away through headquarters, narrowly missing its low ceilings and brass pipes that coiled from the walls. If Mallory worked fast enough, he could have sold the TV on the black market last night at the Arboretum, assuming he was there to check out the Fleurs d’X business and there weren’t a lot of other cops around. For a few minutes Wade was feeling pleased that he had something on Mallory, to balance out whatever Mallory had on him, but the maze of paranoia through which his mind wandered led to another possibility, that Central let Mallory work his black-market scam as a reward for being an informant. Of course, if Mallory was caught red-handed, Central would deny any knowledge of it and Mallory would be on his own. When Mallory walked by his desk Wade, studying the file on the hotel murder, said casually, “Heard you found a dish,” to which someone with a little imagination or humor might have answered something cute along the lines of, You mean the little dark one with the huge tits or the blonde with the long legs and funny accent? Instead Mallory sput-STEVE ER I CK S ON
67
tered just long enough for Wade to change the subject and wave the file at him. “So what do you have?”
“Have?” Mallory said, flummoxed.
Wade leaned back in his chair. “From the hotel yesterday,” he said. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“We didn’t find anything.”
“What did the concierge say?”
“About what?” Mallory nearly shouted.
“The murder, Mallory,” Wade answered slowly, “there was a body, remember? Blood everywhere?”
Mallory read from a note pad he took from his pocket. He was rattled, the way Wade had brought up the TV and then dropped it.
“Concierge says Mrs. Hurley checked into the hotel two nights before.”
“Under what name?”
“Sally Hemings.”
“What was she doing checking into a hotel in the middle of the night?”
“I didn’t say it was the middle of the night.”
“All right. What was she doing checking into—”
“Domestic dispute. Told her husband she was leaving. Or, actually, the husband says she just left.”
“What’s the husband do?”
“He’s an actor in the Arboretum.”
“Did he say what the argument was about?”
“No.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Sure I asked him,” Mallory answered.
“She was upset enough to check into a hotel for two days.”
Mallory said, as though it explained something, “They’re broke.”
“They’re not living off anything he’s doing in t
he Arboretum, that’s for sure.”
“She makes jewelry and sells it. Necklaces and earrings and shit.”
Wade looked at the file. “She ever clear this jewelry with Central?”
“I doubt it.”
A ft C D’X • 68
“You search their place?
“I thought we were investigating a murder.”
“They live off the sale of this jewelry?”
“A couple years ago she inherited some money. One of those things that happens out of the blue, a dead relative she never knew existed.” Mallory checked the note pad again. “Madison Hemings.
Anyway, that money’s gone now.”
“Where was Hurley the night before last?”
“Arboretum, he says.”
“Was anyone with Miss Hemings when she checked into the hotel?”
“The concierge didn’t see anybody. She was up there alone the whole time he knew of. She went out the day before yesterday and came back and told the concierge she’d be leaving. Yesterday he goes up to her room to see if she’s checking out and the door’s open. He takes one look inside and sees everything and calls us.”
“And he never saw anyone else coming or going?”
“He sleeps behind the front desk at night.”
When he’s not watching his felonious TV, Wade thought.
“There’s still no ID on the body,” he said, opening the file again.
“Did you dust?”
“Of course we dusted. She left prints on the door knob and the knife, about what you’d expect.”
“No prints from the dead man.”
“No.”
“And you checked out the premises entirely, the streets outside the hotel and in back.”
“Yeah,” Mallory said impatiently.
“That other door that was in the room, where’s that go outside?”
“We couldn’t find any other door outside.”
“Did you look—”
“We looked fucking everywhere. There was no damned door outside. That door’s been sealed up a long time, like the concierge said.”
“Miss Hemings said something—”
“Mrs. Hurley you mean,” Mallory said.
Wade licked his lips. “Mrs. Hurley said something when she woke. Did you catch it? It was only a word or two.”
Mallory looked at his note pad. ” ‘A miracle.’ “
STEVE ERICKSON • 69
” ‘A miracle’? Are you sure?”
“That’s what I’ve got down here. ‘A miracle.’ ” I Wade kept looking at the file. “And you found nothing—”
“Give me a hint, Wade. What is it we’re supposed to have found?”
“A murder weapon.”
“Excuse me, but there was a knife with blood all over it—”
“You read this file? Guy wasn’t stabbed.” For a while Wade and Mallory looked at each other. “Not a stab wound on his body. He died from a blow to the skull.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hard enough for his brains to run out his ears.”
“The handle of the knife,” Mallory sugested.
“The handle of the knife? The woman goes to kill this guy with a knife and beats him over the head with it?”
“You know,” Mallory leaned across Wade’s desk and into his face, “I get tired of you making me feel stupid. There’s nothing complicated about this. A woman’s in bed with a stiff and a knife has blood all over it.”
“I apologize, Mallory. It may not be complicated to you but I’m confused, because if the knife isn’t the murder weapon, then—”
“She got rid of the fucking weapon.”
“Let me make sure I’ve got your theory straight. She beats the man over the head. She leaves the hotel in the middle of the night with the murder weapon while the concierge sleeps behind the front desk. She must have gone some ways from the hotel to dispose of the weapon because you searched the hotel and you searched the area around the hotel and you didn’t find anything.
She gets rid of the weapon and then returns to the hotel. She comes back through the hotel lobby past the front desk where the concierge is still sleeping and goes back up the stairs. She comes back into the room where she’s murdered a man and leaves the door open, the way the concierge found it, so that people can walk by and get a good look inside and see she’s murdered someone.
Just to make sure somebody finds her there, she crawls into bed with a knife and goes to sleep next to the murdered man while he bleeds all over her.”
Mallory was still leaning over Wade’s desk. “I just knew you were going to find some way to get her off,” he said. “I could see it 1
A R C D’X • 70
all over that big black face of yours yesterday, you licking your chops for some of that black—”
“You should be careful right now,” Wade said quietly.
“Yeah, well, we should all be careful, shouldn’t we?” Mallory answered. “Woman in bed with a dead body and you’re telling me she had nothing to do with it. Well, sure, it’s your call. We’ve all got our secrets and I guess this one’s yours. But, you know, somebody up there,” and he pointed over his shoulder in the direction of Church Central, “might wonder just who killed this guy if she didn’t.”
“It won’t be the first murder that’s gone unanswered in this city.”
“It’ll be the first one,” Mallory said, “where the killer was lying in bed next to the fucking body.”
In fact, it hadn’t been Wade’s intention at all to release Sally Hemings. The discussion with Mallory just sort of evolved that way.
Whether Wade liked it or not, Mallory wasn’t half wrong: Sally was the only person at the scene of a crime that didn’t have any other suspects, except for perhaps the husband if by chance his alibi didn’t check out. The fact was that Sally acted like a woman who had killed a man. From the beginning Wade had assumed she did it, though he might have hoped she had an excellent reason; the fact that they hadn’t found a weapon only meant Mallory had been too busy working his TV scam with the concierge to do a proper search. Now his petty little political struggle with Mallory had put Wade in the position of having to let her go, at least for the time being. He walked to her cell, turning everything over in his mind.
He almost expected not to find her there. He almost expected to walk into the jail and find her cell empty, a lapse among the city’s incarcerated. He thought she might have just disappeared as peculiarly as she’d appeared, that he’d walk back to his desk and find her file vanished with no trace of her having existed for the twenty-four hours she’d existed. But inside her cell she sat on the small bench staring at her hands in her lap the same way she had in the hotel room the day before, appearing only somewhat less dazed at the end of the twenty-four hours than she was at the beginning.
Wade watched her awhile before she looked up at him.
“You said something yesterday,” he finally spoke, “when you STEVE ERICKSON • 71
woke in the hotel. Do you remember?” He said, “Something about a miracle.” She licked her lips and seemed to think about it very hard, terrified that there might be still another thing she couldn’t account for. Wade signaled to the jailer at the end of the hall, who pulled the lever that opened Sally’s cell. Nothing was so sophisti-cated in this city, Wade thought, as the levers that opened and closed cells. “I’m going to take you home,” he said, and she looked at him with the hushed alarm of someone who might be expected to know where home was.
He tried to explain things to her on the way to Redemption. They took the same outer road bordering the city that he’d driven the previous night coming back from the Arboretum. “You’re not clear of this,” he said to her next to him in the front seat, “not by a long shot. You and your family are going to be watched. There’s only so much we have the authority to do in this particular zone, but keeping an eye on you is one of them and arresting you again is another, since the crime was committed in the city proper.” He pa
used.
“I’m sticking my neck out for you.” It only really occurred to him as he said it. Maybe, he thought angrily, she didn’t give a flying fuck. “But my neck’s not that long,” he almost snarled, “not for you, not for anyone.” He still had trouble talking to her. It didn’t help that she said nothing in return. “You know,” he blurted, “if there’s anything you’d like to tell me, this would be a fine time to do it,” and he looked at her to see that he wasn’t talking to thin air.
She was still there, all right; the thin air hadn’t claimed her. She was still there, mute, unaware, and it made him furious. He wanted to stop the car and reach over and shake her, but he was afraid of himself, of what he’d do if he actually touched her and held her in his hands. He wanted just to wrest her from her transfixed attention, until he realized she was transfixed not with her memories or her dreams but something very real beyond the windshield of the car.
She was looking at the volcano. She looked at its flat peak and the smoke that rose into the sky. She watched it a long time, it seemed to Wade, and then for a moment she turned to him, something expectant in her eyes and on her lips. She craned her neck to keep the mountain in view long after they passed it and after Wade had turned the car toward the sea. In the white light of the A R C D’X • 72
circle, when he parked the car and she got out, she continued watching the volcano until her attention was interrupted by the redhaired two-year-old child who ran from the third unit into her baffled mother’s arms.
It may not have been until that moment that Wade knew for certain he was going back to the Fleurs d’X. Even driving Sally back from police headquarters he believed he could resist returning to the Arboretum. But when the small child ran to Sally’s arms, and the mother grabbed her daughter to her breast, Wade reeled where he stood, a huge wavering black blot on the blinding circle beneath his feet. He staggered back to his car. Gann Hurley, tall and thin with long brown hair, stood in the doorway of the third unit watching his wife and daughter.
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