“There isn’t going to be no fuss,” said Romeo.
“You right about that,” said Antoine, taking a step forward.
“Antoine?” said Romeo, squinting down at him.
“Hey there, Bradley,” said Antoine. “You look like you eating at least.”
“You not starving yourself neither.”
“What the hell are you doing here, bwoy? Last time I saw you, there was work in Boston you were headed to.”
“It didn’t pan out.”
“So now you hanging out here with this motley bunch.”
Romeo shrugged. “It’s a place.”
“This is step back, bruddah.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“Well, bwoy, that’s just sad, that is. Now we’re going inside to talk to this man. And, Bradley, you don’t want to be getting in our way.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Antoine.”
“It’s not me you should be fearing, bwoy. Step aside, or I’ll tell your muddah what you’re up to, and she’ll tell Earl, and then Earl, he will lick you for sure.”
“Not from where he is.”
“Stop playing the fool, mon. You think he can’t reach out from lockup to take care of his likkle bruddah?”
Romeo stared at Antoine for a moment, licked his lips, and then stepped back, keeping the screen door open.
“Up the stairs,” he said, “room at the back.”
“You done right, bwoy,” said Antoine, brushing past Romeo to step inside the house. Derek and I glanced at each other nervously and then quickly followed.
The inside of the house was dark, filthy, a fetid swamp covered with a foul mist of smoke and despair. The living room, if it could still be called that, was crowded with mattresses and sleeping bags and dazed humans lounging lethargically as a large-screen television flickered. It smelled like feces and sweat, laced with marihuana. Two dogs yapped at us and snarled before someone threw a shoe. I started itching just being in there. On the far side of the room was a narrow staircase. We picked our way past the mattresses and sleeping bags. A hand grabbed at my ankle, and I kicked it off.
A few ghosts, languid and vacant, drifted down the stairs. As we rose past them, the sounds of a rock ’n’ roll band and a plaintive male voice climbed above the noise of the television. A whining, complaining voice wailing about bitter pills and love and loss.
On the second floor, there were four doors closed, the sounds of slow shuffling movement coming from within one, from another a groaning. And then the music, sad and angry and wistful all at once coming from the rear room, the front man not really singing, more howling out in desperation. Follow the voice, I figured.
A girl was sitting on the floor in front of the door, picking at a thumbnail.
“Terry in there?” I said.
She looked up at me, a pretty girl, young and thin, her face a terrifying blank.
“Let’s go, sister,” said Antoine, putting out his big mitt.
She placed her tiny hand in his and stood up slowly, swaying once before she moved away from the door.
I gave her a long look and then said to Antoine, “Wait out here. Make sure we’re not disturbed.”
“Not a problem, mon.”
I turned to Derek, nodded once, and pushed the door open. A waft of sickeningly sweet smoke tumbled out of the doorway along with the earsplitting music.
Together we pressed inside.
35
We entered a room so out of place in the middle of that crack house that my breath caught in my chest.
It was like a gentleman’s room from centuries past, or a whore’s boudoir, with blood-red curtains and gold flocked wallpaper. There was a huge, ornate bed in the middle of the bare floor, its carved posts reaching almost to the ceiling, its velvet bedspread mussed, its brown paisley pillows awry. The windows were closed, the curtains drawn, the room ill lit and smoky. In the corner sat a broken guitar, the neck detached from its body.
A cone of light fell from a lamp to illuminate a small desk set against one of the walls, where a man, with his back to us, was bent over, writing, writing away, scribbling with a great urgency, as if the true meaning of the world had just been passed to him in a whisper. He was wearing a jacket, jeans, no shoes, as the music poured out around him. Beside him on the desk was an ashtray with the stub of a dead joint perched on its edge.
I softly closed the door behind Derek and me, stepped over to the stereo. The band’s front man was now raging in compressed anger, a soul-shattering blast of teenage angst. In the middle of the howl, I punched the power button. The music died.
“Romeo,” the man at the desk called out sleepily, dreamily, even as he kept with his scribbling.
“Romeo’s busy,” I said.
Without moving his body, he tilted his head and held it for a moment, then turned around. He had a pale, handsome face, so classical in its features it was like a painted Greek statue come to life, cleft chin, thick pouting lips, cheeks smooth as alabaster, their highlights red as rouge. His curly black hair fell carelessly across his forehead, so perfectly carelessly that you could tell it wasn’t careless at all. I would have expected a shock of surprise on that strange mask of a face, but there was none. It was as if nothing could surprise its owner.
“Ah, so it’s you,” he said leisurely, through a blurry smile. “I wondered when you’d come.”
“And here I am,” I said.
“What’s the matter? Didn’t you find the music soothing?”
“More like a pick in the eye,” I said.
Terrence Tipton’s own eyes, red rimmed and blue irised, squinted in stoned amusement. But it wasn’t his eyes that drew my attention, it was his chest. He was wearing a suit coat but no shirt, and his chest was a gory thing, pustuled with welts and boils, striped with scars.
“Maybe you could come back later,” he said. “I’m working.”
“On what? A suicide note?”
“No, but keep hoping. Poetry. I dabble. ‘Such is the refuge of our youth and age.’”
“Sorry to interrupt your great work, but we need to talk.”
“Do we?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How did you find me? Julia?”
“Your brother.”
“My dear brother,” he said. “I should have guessed. Franklin never could keep a confidence.” He reached for the stub of the joint in the ashtray, stared at it for a moment, offered it up to me.
“No,” I said.
“So you’re like that, are you?”
“Yeah, I’m like that.”
“Is that what Julia sees in you? The utter straightness, the complete lack of any coil in your spine? I suppose it’s a nice counterpoint to my own.”
He popped the roach into his mouth and swallowed it. Then he leaned over, opened one of the desk drawers, pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. He flicked the lighter to life, took the page he’d been scribbling on and set it on fire. As it burned down, he lit his cigarette on the flame, before dropping the burning page onto the floor. As the paper flamed out among the charred remains of scores of other pages, he took a deep drag from the cigarette. He leaned his elbow on the desk, propped his head languidly on his hand, exhaled a plume of smoke.
“I guess it wasn’t much of a poem,” I said.
“I burn them all,” he said, looking down at the smoldering paper. “‘The dying embers of an altar-place where had been heap’d a mass of holy things.’” He lifted his head to stare at me with lidded eyes. “So, Victor, I suppose you’re here to thank me.”
“Why the hell would I thank you?” I said.
“Because now your love has a chance.”
“You killed Wren Denniston for me, is that your story?”
“I wouldn’t cross the street for you. But for my Julia, who ‘walks in beauty like the night,’ I would do anything.”
“Including murder?”
“Especially murder. But true love demands nothing less, don’t you think?”
He pushed himself out of his chair and began to walk slowly toward the bed. He had a pronounced limp, and I noticed only then that his right foot was badly swollen. “I’m not talking lust here, Victor, though I have nothing against lust per se. I’m talking love, the kind that bites into your bones and never lets go. The kind that grows up with you, that grows old with you, that stands the test of your aging because time fails to blunt its sharpest edge.”
“And that’s the way you feel about Julia?”
“No, Victor, that’s the way you feel about Julia.”
I stared at him without responding. He sat on the edge of the bed, winced as he lifted his purpled foot onto the dark maroon bedcover, and then leaned back dreamily on a mound of paisley pillows.
“It is over for me,” he said. “‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care, the exalted portion of the pain and power of love.’”
“Who is that you keep annoyingly quoting? Shakespeare?”
“Byron.”
“Byron, huh?” I looked around at the extravagant room, the burned poetry. “Wasn’t he a self-dramatizing fop who screwed other men’s wives, wrote scads of overwrought romantic verse, and had wanton sex with his sister?”
He took a long drag from his cigarette, exhaled, raised an eyebrow. “Half sister,” he said. “Do you like my room?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Julia did it. She is always bringing me something, fixing the place up, trying to make me comfortable.”
“Trying to make you something, all right.”
“This fits her image of me.”
“Was this ever you?”
“No. Even when we were young, she had me wrong. I suppose that’s the true nature of love. I only play the part these days because it makes her happy. But now, with the ogreish Wren Denniston off to ‘the vanished hero’s lofty mound,’ there is nothing to stop Julia from finding her happiness with you.”
“Except you,” I said.
“Well, yes, true, there’s always me. But I don’t take up much space.”
I pulled a chair next to his bedside and sat down. I now had a clearer view of his ravaged body, and it was a brutal sight. Yes, his face was smooth and perfect—Dorian Gray came to mind—but it was clear from his chest and foot that he was being devoured by some virulent disease, something that infected him blood and bone. Above the tobacco smoke, I picked up a faint whiff of rot.
“What’s with your foot?” I said.
“It’s nothing. I stubbed my toe on something.”
“It smells bad. Like it’s gangrenous. You need to get out of this sepulcher and get it looked at.”
“I don’t want it looked at. ‘The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone.’”
“Stop acting like an idiot. Do you have a doctor?”
“Do I look like I have a doctor? I subscribe to the Doris Day health plan. What will be will be.”
“Let me get you out of here. The emergency room at Temple is not too far.”
“Is that why you came? To save me?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m willing to do that in addition.”
“Who is he?” he said, indicating Derek.
“My investigator.”
“He doesn’t say much.”
“Miracles happen. But he helped me find you, and now he’s here to listen to your confession.”
“Is that what I’m going to do? Confess?”
“That’s right. You’re going to tell us everything. How you showed up at the Denniston house. How you got hold of the gun. How you shot Julia’s husband in the head. And then we’re going to the emergency room.”
“You sound so sure of yourself. Is your investigator going to beat the truth out of me?”
“He won’t have to.”
“Going to ply me with drugs? Please say yes.”
“You’re floating already.”
“No more drugs?”
“No.”
“Pity. But then how do you intend to get me to talk?”
“I’m going to wait,” I said. “You want to tell me. You’re so proud of yourself you can’t help but tell me.”
He laughed. Then he snubbed dead his butt, opened the drawer of his bed table, pulled out a full joint, licked it, lighted it. He sat on that bed, leaned forward to prod his bad foot with a finger, leaned back, stared at me while he sucked in and held the smoke.
I watched him in silence.
It had been an astonishing performance, Terrence Tipton’s little show, with its burning poems and slurred voice and incessant quotations from a long-dead libertine, but that’s all it was, a show. It hadn’t taken me more than a moment to realize he was a dramatic little snit, still on the stage all these years after his vomitous failure as Romeo, still playing the melancholy young man brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past, still waiting for the spotlight to come his way and give him another chance.
And now here I was, at last, his opportunity.
So I wasn’t worried that he was apparently turning me down. I stayed quiet, and I waited. He wasn’t made for Beckett and his cold silences, no. He was made for Shakespeare and all that ripe verbal excess, for Byron’s fatal romanticism. He would soon take his place behind the footlights and begin his grand soliloquy. He couldn’t help himself.
I waited, and I waited some more. But I didn’t have to wait too long.
36
I had plenty of time to think it through later that same night while I sat in the dark in my apartment.
I sat in a chair in a corner of my living room and stewed in a simmering pot of bitterness. She had betrayed me, not just once with the police at Clarence Swift’s urging but repeatedly, overtly, time and again. Terrence Tipton hadn’t let me take him out of that house to treat the disease that was ravaging his body, but he had told me a story, and its clearest message was that at every turn in my tortured relationship with sweet Julia she had betrayed me.
To hear Terry tell it, Julia broke off our engagement because she feared I couldn’t support both her and his drug habit in the manner in which he wanted to be accustomed. She married Wren Denniston because Wren could and was willing to, and look where it got him, the sap. She confessed the details of our old-lovers’ tango to Terry, even as she told me that what was going on between us was ours and ours alone. In my apartment, when she learned of the murder, she collapsed under the weight of her intuitive knowledge that sweet little Terry had shot her husband in the head to allow our tango to reach some heated fruition. And when she rose again, she gathered her senses and did everything she could to protect Terrence Tipton from the just consequences of his brutal act, even if it meant throwing me beneath the train.
I suppose I could have taken this with a certain grain of equanimity in and of itself. Duplicity might simply have been an integral component of Julia’s character, and not the least alluring component at that. Who is ever sexier than a woman on the cusp of a betrayal? But she had betrayed me for a drug-addicted piece of putrefying flesh lost in a haze of posh, romantic, adolescent angst. She had betrayed me for the likes of Terrence Tipton, and that was almost more than I could handle.
Still, amidst all this, I wondered if we had a future. Now who was the sap?
But there was a foundation to my madness. Suddenly it was as if I could peer through Julia’s shields and glimpse her inner life for the first time. She had been twisted around by a twisted love. Something had happened between Julia and Terrence in their desperate youths that had left scars evident in her psyche and upon his flesh. And I now knew what it was. And maybe my love was exactly what she needed to salve the wounds and save herself. The possibilities gleamed. All they required, of course, was to rid ourselves of that murderous piece of human excrement. And right there, sitting on my coffee table, I had the key to his riddance.
“Did you get it?” I said to Derek as soon as we left Terry Tipton’s room.
“Sure thing, bo.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the miniature tape recorder
, clicked it off. “I learned my lesson from last time. This time I pressed the damn buttons before we started.”
“Let me have it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure,” I said.
“You really sure? I mean, how you think she’ll feel about you if you turn that freak in?”
“She’ll never forgive me,” I said.
“So is this tape going to end up in the grip of the police,” he said as he tossed the recorder to me, “or is it going to disappear to keep that girl happy?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said.
And I didn’t, but I intended to find out. So I sat in a dark corner of my living room, staring at the miniature tape recorder glowing dully on the coffee table. I sat there stewing and waiting. Waiting for the knock at the door. Waiting for the ring of truth.
That day I had run from Philly to Washington to Ashland, Virginia, and then back again. I had run around like a fool looking for answers. But I wasn’t running anymore. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen tonight, and it was going to happen here. The players would come to me to figure it all out. How did I know they would come to me? Because I had spent the whole day looking for answers, and now I had them. I knew who had killed Wren Denniston. I knew where the money was. I knew what each player was after, each player but one. All I didn’t know for sure was what my future would bring. But that I would find out with the first knock on the door.
And then it came.
Knock, knock.
“Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”
37
“Victor?” said Julia, peering into the glum darkness. “Is that you?”
“It’s me, all right,” I said.
“I’m so relieved,” she said, stepping into the apartment. “Where have you been all day? I was so worried. I wanted to explain.”
“I bet you did.”
“Victor?”
“I’ve been waiting,” I said. “Waiting for your explanation.”
She must have caught something in my voice because she hesitated at that instant, turned her head to see if someone else was hiding in the apartment, which told me all I needed to know about whose room she had come from.
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