Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

  Royce agreed that it just about was.

  “And,” Thurman continued, “he asks me for advice. And I don’t mean just computer advice, Dr. Royce. In fact, Dr. Royce—oh!—Dr. Royce, what an opportunity! Oh my goodness, I’m so flustered I can barely make myself plain! It seems that Abdhul—that’s the boy’s name, Abdhul, isn’t it just too genuine?—has this little infection, Dr. Royce.…”

  And Thurman proceeded to describe, in precise detail, a rather intimate problem. Royce listened patiently, then told him what he could do about it. There was no way to determine, with Thurman, precisely who had this problem, as he was not one to lay on the subterfuge too thinly. For all Royce knew, it could have been Johanson himself.

  “A few dirhams at the local pharmacy, Thurman, that’s all it amounts to.”

  “Oh, Dr. Royce, I can hardly bring myself to merely thank you, sir. Might there be something I could, you know, do for you? Hmmmm? Would you like an appointment?”

  Royce shook his head. Thurman was doing three consecutive ninety-nine-year terms for burying quite a few young Mexican boys under his Corpus Christi mansion after performing unspeakable things upon them. But that wasn’t why Royce politely declined the offer. “No,” Royce said, “I don’t believe you need to do anything much for me, Thurman, although I was looking to talk to Warden Johanson about something.”

  “Why, I do thank you, Dr. Royce, and please remember that I’m deeply in your debt. But I’m afraid the Warden is not in his office today.…”

  Royce already knew that. It was the custom for everyone involved in an execution to take a little time off afterward. Today Johanson would be castrating calves and shooting skeet on his ranch.

  “You know, there was an execution this morning, and that dreadful murder …”

  “Yes,” Royce said tersely, “yes, there was an execution this morning.”

  “Oh I am sorry, Dr. Royce.…”

  Like hell.

  “We all know how you feel about those dreadful things and I can only say that I thank my lucky stars they caught me in 1970, while that mean old death penalty was out having lunch.…”

  Indeed, Dr. Royce thought, indeed.

  “Not to mention,” Thurman prattled on, “it was only after I came here to Huntsville that I learned that Joan Crawford had made so many wonderful movies.…”

  Royce shook his head sadly. Just exactly, he wondered, was the meaning of the word, “carefree”?

  “But maybe it’s something I can help you with, Dr. Royce?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, Thurman,” Royce said quickly, “it was just a bit of information I needed, about that fellow last night, I mean, this morning, Bob—I mean,” Royce searched his memory, “Robert Lambert Men … Was it Mencken, that fellow’s name, Thurman?”

  Thurman sighed. “We called him Snowball, Dr. Royce, those of us that were fond of him.”

  “Snowball?”

  “Pretty humpy, Dr. Royce,” Thurman tittered, “if you know what I mean.”

  “Snowball … ,” Royce said thoughtfully.

  Thurman’s voice took on an oddly pedagogical tone. “Have you never read, Dr. Royce, have you never read Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose?”

  “Can’t say as I have, Thurman.” Like many cons with nothing but time on their hands and an aggressive librarian just a few floors down, Thurman had thoroughly educated himself in the last decade or so. Admittedly, his education reflected a certain bias.

  “Well, Dr. Royce, Miracle of the Rose is a novel, you see, a prison novel—you do know that Genet is one of our great prison novelists?”

  Although he’d always heard Genet described as a homosexual novelist, Royce, never having read the man’s work, was only marginally aware that Genet had done most of his writing in prison. Primarily, Royce was of a generation that might dimly remember the great outcry from the world’s artists and intellectuals that had freed Genet from a life sentence.

  “Fag, too—wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, absolutely, Mary,” Thurman said archly. “You try making it in the joint otherwise. When they say you’re going to do a stretch, they—”

  “Thurman,” Royce said pointedly, “I’m the doctor. Remember?”

  “Oh, of course, Dr. Royce, excuse me, I was getting a little giddy. … Oh!” Thurman laughed, “where was I?”

  “You said that Mencken was called Snowball?”

  “Of course, and aptly yclept, what a dish. In the novel, to go your bail on the five hundred pages, Snowball was a murdering black Adonis, condemned to death, with whom the narrator falls in love. From afar, of course, I hasten to add.”

  “From afar. You mean from across the exercise yard?”

  “Yes!” Thurman enthused. “Exactly, Dr. Royce! Are you sure you didn’t read the novel in your, ahm, formative years?”

  “Positive.”

  “So one day the narrator, who’s mad for this big, beautiful, black murderer,” Thurman savored each of his adjectives unconscionably, as if they were big, new, glass marbles in his front jeans pocket, “has this vision. Snowball is always wreathed in chains, you see, and Genet has built up this delicious, detailed fantasy about him, and lives, fantasizing, from sighting to sighting, as it were, until one day, as he’s watching Snowball worshipfully, he sees Snowball’s chains turn into garlands of roses! Isn’t that beautiful? Because he’s a saint, you see, blessed and beatified by Genet’s vision.…”

  “So what’s all this to do with Mencken?”

  “Nothing, really,” Thurman sighed wistfully. “That was the miracle of the rose, you see, the chains turning into roses, the metamorphosis of pure evil into pure beauty, and that’s where we got Snowball’s nickname.…”

  “Was he, ahm, saintly, Thurman?”

  “Oh, absolutely, Dr. Royce, divine is not too strong a word. Why, just this morning in the shower a fellow was observing how in a more perfect world Snowball’s shit would be commended to the pope, for beatification, for the single act alone of ridding us of that nasty sociopath, Pit Bull Peters.…”

  “Has anyone … claimed the body, Thurman?”

  “Whose? Peters’?”

  “No, Snowball’s.”

  “I would,” Thurman said demurely, “given the—”

  “Come on, answer the question,” Royce snapped.

  “O.K., O.K., keep your blouse on. No; the answer’s no.”

  “Did he ever have any visitors?”

  By the timbre of the silence coming over the phone, Royce could tell that Thurman was pouting.

  “Thurman, look …You liked Bob—I mean Snowball.” Thurman spoke with a catch in his voice. “I, I loved him, Doctor.…”

  I take back what I thought about carefree, Royce reflected sourly. “Would you give me a little help on this? It might…I don’t know.…” Royce looked at the wall of medical journals beyond his desk. Might as well come straight out with it. He might surprise himself as much as Thurman. But a moment passed before he said, “I want to find out what happened to him.”

  Thurman didn’t seem too surprised. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be looking into Snowball’s case, Dr. Royce?” His tone was decidedly cool.

  “No,” Royce said thoughtfully. “I don’t think so.”

  Thurman was silent a moment. Then he said, “Hang on.”

  Royce swiveled his old chair around so he could look through the sliding glass door that led to the side yard, where the pool was always going to be, where nothing but an old rusted-out Aeromotor windmill always had been. What he looked out on was a vast plain of mesquite and tumbleweeds and post oak, distinguishable from his property by a barbed wire fence running through it about thirty yards from the house. A hawk circled in the distance, high above the gentle rise a half-mile to the south.

  Royce could hear the distinctive clicks and beeps of a computer keyboard. After a long minute, Thurman spoke. “Do you have a computer handy, Dr. Royce?”

  Royce turned around and faced his desk. “There’s an old U
nderwood portable in front of me.”

  “MS-DOS?”

  “Yes.” The world is leaving me behind, he thought.

  “Right on. Does it have a modem?”

  He fingered the shift key on the typewriter. The carriage moved up and down. “There’s one built in.”

  “Boot it up,” Thurman said glibly. “You’ll need about 50K for the file—”

  “Thurman—”

  “He was a beautiful man, Dr. Royce. I’ll print the file and leave it in your box.”

  SEVEN

  The tall young black man’s head was shaved as close and smooth as an eight ball, and his wraparound sunglasses fit him so closely they looked like they’d been leaded into his face, like a taillight in the fender of a customized car. When he turned to point the way, the top of his head showed where the stylist had bleached white a perfect circle of closely cropped, tightly curled hair around a pair of circles left black, one above but overlapping the other, to form the numeral eight. He held his head high and stood perfectly straight, and didn’t mind at all telling Royce how to find number sixteen Zapata Street, in a very deep voice. They were standing on Zapata Street at the time. But number sixteen faced onto an unnamed dead-end alley off the north side of the middle of the block. The numbering simply came down the street, ran up one side of the alley and back down, and continued another two blocks west, toward the Oak Hill district. It was a simple thing to have missed. Anyone might have missed it. But missing it made Franklin Royce nervous. He felt compelled to make a friendly overture to this kid, almost as tall as he was, who had shown himself willing to be friendly.

  “Thank-you, son,” he said pleasantly. “What’s your name?”

  The young man tilted his head forward and pointed to the spot of hair on top. “Eight Ball,” he said.

  Royce smiled and proffered a dollar bill at the kid. The kid looked at it.

  “I’m not a cop or anything,” Royce explained.

  The kid squinted myopically. “You telling me, mister?”

  “So take the dollar.”

  Eight Ball waited.

  Royce shrugged. “The lady lives at sixteen, you know her?”

  Eight Ball grinned. “Sheeeee…”

  “How’s that?”

  “Everybody knows her.”

  “Is her name Colleen?”

  “Yeah. Her name’s Colleen.”

  “Lived there three, maybe four months?”

  The kid screwed up his face and asked him, “Hey, mister, why don’t you go down to the gas station and talk to the mirror in the washroom? It’ll sound just the same as you standing there asking me questions you already know the answers to.”

  “Take the buck, kid. Go buy some chalk for your cue.”

  Eight Ball looked at him thoughtfully for a moment; then he smiled and took the dollar. “I have been scratching lots,” he said cheerfully.

  Royce watched the kid lope down the middle of the street. He walked with his long arms straight down at his sides and very stiff-legged, using the full hinge action of each foot instead of his knees to make it from one stride to the next. He’d had something with that remark about the mirror. Royce had stopped looking into them awhile back and wasn’t planning on looking into another one any time soon. He didn’t like to see the pudginess his drinking had gradually brought into his face, or the traces of blood in the whites of his eyes, or the burst vessels just beneath the mottled surface of the skin of his nose… any more than he liked to be reminded of the first time a barber had offered to dye his hair back to brown—or black, even. He picked up the Gladstone bag and made his way up the street. He passed two men staring sadly into the engine compartment of a parked car. Each had a hand on the raised hood and a foot up on the front bumper. Various tools lay along a length of carpet padding draped along the streetside fender. Children of all ages ran up and down the block, chasing a ball, chasing each other, seemingly oblivious to the evening heat and humidity. An old yellow dog lay across the sidewalk in the shade of the building that stood at the mouth of the alley that opened onto Zapata Street, with his head up on the dusty sidewall of a bald tire. He was breathing deeply and slowly, his rheumy eyes half-closed and his red tongue spilling out of the side of his mouth.

  Royce turned into the alley and found a worn set of wooden stairs going up the face of a three-story wood-frame building with clapboard siding and yellow paint peeling off of it. Two pot-metal numerals, a one and a six, painted the same color as the building, were tacked to a post that supported the outside of the staircase. A lot of broken glass and empty potato-chip bags had accumulated beneath the first run of stairs. Some local entrepreneur would be keeping the place free of anything aluminum. A stripped motorcycle frame sat rusting on its forks among the trash under the stairs, secured by lock and chain to the same post that held up the address.

  Royce climbed to the first landing and faced a bewildering profusion of doorbell buttons set into a piece of plywood nailed across a gate that more or less blocked further access to the building, although any kid wouldn’t have much trouble getting around it. One step up onto the banister and security was history. In fact, it looked so easy to bypass any courtesy about getting into this place that he had another thought and pressed the gate. It swung back on its hinges with no resistance whatsoever, just a creak.

  She lived all the way up in the back, and took a long time answering his knock. When she did, Royce wondered why or how she’d bothered.

  Colleen Valdez was so stoned when she opened the door she could barely stand. She had raven-black hair that fell straight to her waist, with a few tangles on the way, and wore an apricot housecoat that enclosed more or less of her hair in more or less the same proportions as it exposed her body. Even though she was speaking to her unexpected visitor, her eyes were closed, and that was that. Her voice was just a little louder than an interior monologue, and said about the same thing. She smacked her lips gently between the words she was using. As she muttered, Royce watched a thin trickle of blood as it crept down the inside of her forearm.

  “Oh, Eddie,” she said, “I, uh, mean…”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Royce said, doffing his short-brim, “I’m a friend of Bobby Mencken’s, and I’m looking for a Miss Colleen Valdez?”

  A small frown flitted across her blank features, as if she were blind and couldn’t remember where she’d left the salt shaker. “Oh, wow,” she said, and smiled briefly and might have batted her lashes but couldn’t get her eyes to completely open, “a real gentleman. Well I swan. But… she’s not… She’s… indisposed you see.…” She swallowed and made the light smacking sound with her lips, as if they were quite dry, flicked the tip of her tongue over them. Then she began to shake her head and said as if to herself, “I don’t even know why I answered the door,” and giggled slightly, effortlessly, as if there were not enough energy in her system to get out a really decent laugh, even if the joke were on herself, and then she frowned like a little girl. Royce thought the joke might have been on her. If he’d been a cop he might have run this girl in on a narcotics charge. As it was he said, “You don’t seem particularly well, Miss Valdez. May I help you to a chair?”

  Miss Valdez took a deep breath that evidently taxed her strength beyond its capacity, for it caught in her throat on the way in, and she blanched completely white. Then she sagged against the doorpost, turned around it and fell into Royce’s arms.

  She weighed maybe 110 pounds. Royce dropped his bag and his Stetson to catch her. “Miss Valdez?” No answer. He carried the woman into the apartment. The front door opened into a narrow hallway. Going left, he found himself in a very small and very disorganized kitchen, with the smell of burnt matches in the air. He backed down the hall and out the front door, turned and made for the right-hand end of the apartment. Here he found two rooms. In the first were a ragged overstuffed chair, a guitar, a sofa and a table facing a television set on a small bureau. In the second a splintered double-hung window looked over a patchwork of back
yards and clotheslines and a teeming freeway a quarter- or half-mile away. A tangled double bed took up nearly the entire room, and he awkwardly laid the woman down on it as gently as possible. He took her pulse. It was slow but regular. He checked her arms and found tracks running up and down both of them. There was a little barrel serving as a table beside the bed. On it lay an eyedropper fitted with the bulb of a child’s pacifier at one end and a hypodermic needle at the other, with a trace of blood still on its point; a bent spoon that had been burned black; several blackened matches; a candle end, still burning; a half-empty match-book; a razor blade. A glassine envelope on top of a paperback copy of War and Peace had been slit open along its seams and smoothed flat. It was the kind of tiny translucent envelope stamp collectors used to get their rare issues in. Maybe they still do.

  Interesting, Royce thought. He blew out the candle.

  The room was very close. He drew a ragged piece of cloth over the open window and the room became dark. A thick, humid atmosphere of jungle congress subsumed it. There was a broomstick cutting across the corner of the room at the foot of the bed, from one nail in one wall to another nail in the window sash, with a bunch of clothes hanging from it on hangers or draped carelessly over it: a man’s clothes and a woman’s clothes, flowered patterns on thin fabrics, worn out and faded from being so loud for so long.

  He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to the window and watched the drugged woman for a while.

  It was her face that got him first. It was evenly mottled by small-pox scars, or some disfigurement like them; her face was ruined. It looked like pitted marble, five hundred years old. But like Bobby Mencken, she was young, not yet thirty. But it could have been beautiful. In fact, the more Royce looked at Colleen Valdez’ face the more he came to think of it as beautiful. Her complexion was slightly browned, whether by sun or blood he couldn’t know. But her eyes were narrow, as if from an Asian influence, and the scarred cheek-bones close up under them. The nose was small and straight, slightly rounded. Though now drained of their color, her lips were full but wide over surprisingly even little teeth, between which he could see the tip of her pink tongue.