Manifesto for the Dead

by Domenic Stansberry

  “You see, Michele and I, we have the same answering service. I’m friendly with the girl who picks up the phone. When I called this morning, the receptionist told me you and Michele were having a meeting. It worried me, you’ve been so erratic lately, so odd and temperamental. So I hurried over.

  “Unfortunately, I got here a little bit late. Or that’s what I’ll tell the cops. Michele was dead, and you were standing there with your gun. I tried to talk you into turning yourself in, but you wouldn’t listen. We tussled. The gun went off. Down you fell. Right there, right next to Michele.”

  The flaw in his logic was still there, underneath all that detail, and Thompson knew now how Miracle meant to keep it from becoming visible.

  He was going to kill Jim Thompson.

  It was like something out of one of his own books, the killer pulling a double murder, then rearranging the corpses so it looked like one had killed the other. Truth was, such schemes rarely worked. There was always hell to pay: men who analyzed the angle of fallen bodies, the splatter of blood, the residue of gunpowder upon the hand. None of that made any difference now, though, in the land of the mirror, where Miracle spun his story and Thompson stood listening.

  Thompson remembered something else. Miracle had called him at home, back when this whole thing had started. Alberta had given him the address of the Hillcrest Arms. That meeting had never materialized, but it was the last piece of the puzzle. Because when Alberta told him the address, Miracle must have written it down. On the backside of the same paper where he had written the address of the El Rancho Motel. Where the corpse was to be delivered.

  “You’re Sydney Wicks,” Thompson said.

  Miracle’s eyes glinted, and he knew it was true. Miracle had used the name of Sydney Wicks when he set up the murder. He’d given the delivery address to his contact at the Satellite, and the contact had given it to the Okie, not realizing Thompson’s address had been scrawled on the other side. Then the Okie had flipped the paper over, and driven to the wrong place.

  “Turn around,” said Billy Miracle.

  Thompson hesitated. The whole conversation so far had taken place in the mirror. He feared what would happen when he faced the man directly.

  “At the Satellite, it was you the man called. And you ransacked my room. Stole my gun.”

  “Turn around. Or I’ll plug you in the back.”

  Thompson obeyed. He did not know what else to do. The tremor was on the surface now. He shivered hard, and shivered some more, and his body felt no longer his own. The walls vibrated, the room swooned, and every shadow had something to say.

  “I need a drink,” said Thompson.

  “Not now. There’s no time.”

  Miracle approached him, swaying as he walked. Thompson stepped away. “It won’t work. No one will believe you.”

  Thompson moved towards the hall, but Miracle moved with him. There was nowhere to go. Miracle stood at point blank range. If he takes another step forward, Thompson thought, maybe I can reach out, knock the gun away. Miracle lunged. Thompson backed up instinctively, his hands rising at his sides, and there was an instant in which Miracle glanced at him, his eyes moist, his lips parted, when Thompson thought it impossible the other man would shoot. No. It couldn’t happen.

  Miracle fired.

  Thompson felt the recoil in his chest, and heard the explosion loud in his head, and saw the astonished look on the producer’s face. Staggering, glancing towards the far mirror, he saw too his own gruesome expression. The room filled with noise. I’ll die looking in the mirror. Me too, just like Michele. He expected to see blood blossoming on his chest. But no, there was no blood. The noise came from Miracle. Howling, reeling away, holding the gun in his hand, a blister of flesh. His father’s gun had misfired.

  He might have escaped out the front door, but Miracle lurched clumsily towards the hall, blocking Thompson’s path. The producer fell to his knees in pain. Thompson ran to the other end of the flat, looking for the balcony. He yanked open the living room drapes, but they revealed only a picture window overlooking the street. Miracle was behind him now, back in the dining room.

  Thompson hurried into the bedroom. A queen size bed lay unmade before him. A larger dresser stood off to his left, a closet to the right. A narrow line of windows ran along the top of the far wall, but no door that he could see, no balcony. If he had another instant, he might have tried hoisting himself through one of the windows, then trusting himself to whatever lay below. He heard Miracle, closer now, yammering. Thompson stepped into the closet, as far back as he could, hiding himself in the fragrant depths of the dead woman’s clothes. The closet doors were slatted. Through those slats, in the instant before Miracle entered, Thompson saw his mistake. The balcony was directly across from him, outside an alcove in the opposite corner of the room. When he had first come in, the dresser had blocked it from his view. Now he could see plainly his avenue of escape. The sliding door was open, and he could see the rustling date palm and hear the sweet singing of some desert bird.

  It was too late. Miracle stumbled in.

  Thompson shook. His teeth chattered, as if from fever, and that sound alone, he feared, would draw Miracle to him.

  The producer was more familiar with the room’s layout than Thompson. He went directly to the alcove, then stepped onto the balcony. He peered down, studying the courtyard. He came back in, wild-eyed, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “He got away,” Miracle said to himself, “the lousy son-of-bitch. Third-rate writer. Fucking hack.”

  Inside the closet, Thompson could not control his shaking. He breathed deep. A sob rose from the room—he felt it in his chest, it seemed, a horrible, ugly, gut-wrenching sob that put a terror in his heart. He sucked in his breath, doomed. Miracle did not move from the bed. The producer’s shoulders were shaking, the sobbing went on, and Thompson realized it was the other man, not himself, from which the noise came, and the sound of his wailing bespoke how far things had drifted out of his control. He needs my corpse, Thompson thought. With me alive, out in the world, it’s too messy. The man’s story was unraveling in his head, and as it unraveled the tear in the seams became wider, and the details and the clutter came swarming up out of the abyss. Then the sobbing stopped. Miracle raised his head. He placed the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  This time, the revolver’s mechanism worked perfectly. The producer’s body reeled backward, his skull exploded, and bits of red pulp and white bone flew into the paneling where Thompson stood watching.

  Thompson stepped out of the closet. He thought about going down the balcony, but decided no, someone might have heard the gunshot. He did not want to be seen in the courtyard. So he went out of the apartment the way he had come, slipped out a side door. Outside, the flowers were whispering to one another, beasts were loose in the streets. The delirium had come. Thompson closed his eyes, and walked the best he could under that trembling line of palms.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Several weeks later, Alberta stood on the steps outside the Hillcrest Arms, directing the moving men as they struggled the couch through the building door, then down the long hall to their apartment. Thompson stood watching his wife. She should be glum, but if she was, she wasn’t going to let any one see it, not the neighbors, for certain, and not these moving men. She walked with a certain bounce. Her slacks were stylish, her blouse new, and she had given her hair a fresh rinse, not out of the bottle but hand-done at one of the professional joints, so she didn’t look like just anyone.

  Even so, something about her had changed. When it had happened, exactly, he wasn’t sure. In the last few weeks, maybe, or maybe it had been happening all along—and he’d only just now noticed. For years, he had seen in her the seeds of the old woman she might someday become: the wrinkles; the dowager’s hunch; the long blue veins emerging on her feet and hands. Always, though, it had been the woman she was at the moment who dominated: the girl being courted; the young wife; the taut, wiry female of middle a
ge. Now, when he looked at her, he only occasionally saw those others. The young girl living at the edge of the cornfield had become an old woman in slacks, standing on a street corner in Los Angeles, smiling with a forced cheerfulness—and a deep embarrassment—at the young Mexican men who moved box after box of memorabilia into her too small apartment.

  “How are you feeling?” She handed him a glass of water.

  “Fine.”

  He took the glass, drinking it down as greedily as if he were one of the moving men, sweating in a sleeveless t-shirt.

  “This apartment is cute,” she said.

  “It’s a dump.”

  “The only trouble, it’s too close to Musso’s. The doctor said to keep away from temptation, you know, and …”

  Thompson interrupted. “I’m not drinking anything stronger than this.”

  He handed her the empty water glass, and she walked away, back to the business of supervising. He hadn’t had a drink since the day after he’d sneaked out of the hospital, but then he hadn’t had much opportunity. After he’d left Michele Haze’s apartment, he’d caught himself a taxi back to the Ardmore penthouse. His teeth had begun to rattle again in the back seat, more wildly, his bones to shake, and by the time he reached the door his whole body was in tremors. He knew it was no ordinary episode from the look Alberta gave him—and how quickly Doctor Rufus appeared. They’d taken him to the sanitarium, and there some white-coated doctors and a lisping nurse administered the nebutal and the anabuse and weaned him off the alcohol, but no matter the drugs, eventually it came down to himself alone, strapped to the bed, sweating and flailing while the phantasms uncoiled in the darkness and spoke to him in hissing tongues that he could feel wrapping around his body, licking, probing, crawling up his asshole, his intestines, then back out his mouth in hideous screams that shook the leeches from the ceiling and brought them tumbling onto his flesh, and these leeches had a new, strange language of their own.

  During that time, the story of the Alameda Murders broke. It was all over the newspapers and the television and pieces of it filtered through to him in the sanitarium. The speculation was wild and lurid—a third man at the murder scene, a connection to the underworld, a Hollywood serial killer on the loose—but how much of that was his own hallucination, the leeches whispering in the darkness, he didn’t know, and it seemed to him as he came out of withdrawal that maybe all of it had been: the dead girl, the Okie, those memories of himself straggling along the hillside with a corpse over his shoulder. Either way, by the time he was discharged, the police had tied it all up in a neat little bow. Murder-suicide, the story went. Billy Miracle had killed Lombard when he backed off the deal. Apparently, Michele Haze had been ready to turn evidence against him. So he had killed her, too; then turned the gun on himself.

  As for the girl in the hillside, she was not part of the equation. No one knew about her, no one cared.

  Meanwhile, Alberta had used the money inside the envelope to pay for his treatment, and to buy a few more weeks at the Ardmore—because she was too busy going back and forth from the sanitarium to complete the move. Now, though, his stay was finished. And here they were.

  Detective Mann showed up not long after they’d settled into the Hillcrest. A social call, he said, just to see how things were going. Alberta enjoyed the company. She liked the cop. He seemed earnest to her, clean cut and polite. Together they talked about a little town called Rabbit, not far from where she’d grown up.

  “The cutest little town you ever seen.”

  “I know it.

  “Full of picket fences.”

  “Houses with chimneys.”

  “Down home cooking.”

  “You bet.”

  “Indians live there.”

  “Colored too. Right alongside”

  “Whites. Mexicans. Everyone in harmony.”

  “Not like it is here.”

  “No sir.”

  “No crime to speak of.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “Except, you know, there was a little something.”

  “It’s the same way everywhere.”

  “The world’s changed.”

  “Nothing like it used to be.”

  “A severed head, that’s what it was. Belonged to a local banker. Found in the local creek.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “My brother’s a policeman on the local force, and they couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. It just seemed like some random crime.”

  “Goes to show you.”

  “Yes, it does. Everyone in town, well they thought the banker had run off to California with his secretary—but it turns out bits and pieces of him and the woman, they were scattered all over town.”

  “You think it’s the miscreants. But it’s the upstanding ones.”

  “Wife did it. Jealous, I guess.”

  Alberta shook her head. “It’s a darn shame, to see that happen in a place like Rabbit. Happens there, it can happen anywhere.”

  “Right in your own living room.”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Alberta. They laughed, and Alberta filled the detective’s glass with more iced tea. They went on like that, gabbing away, until finally Mann got up to leave. Alberta said good-bye to him at the door, and Thompson walked Mann out to his vehicle. It was parked on the same spot, more or less, where Thompson had first discovered the girl in the trunk of the Cadillac.

  “Nice place you have,” said Mann.

  “No, it’s not.”

  Mann looked at him. His eyes said go ahead, have it your way, and he leaned against the squad car. Thompson expected that now, alone, the cop would throw him a question or two about the Lombard murder, but instead there was just one of those long silences in which you could have heard the rise of the cicadas, if there had been cicadas, except of course there weren’t any, not in this part of the country, just the sound of the transformer on the light pole overhead and the traffic rushing up Highland.

  “So you still want my prints?”

  “I been meaning to apologize about that. Reason I stopped by, I guess. But a man in my position, he has to examine every corner.”

  “How about my shoe size?”

  Mann laughed. “Oh you mean that stray shoe. Well, it’s a loose end, that’s for sure, and if you want to come forward and claim it well, you can do that. And the wallet too. There’s always stuff like that around a crime scene, with a logical explanation, harmless, innocent, but you don’t know what that explanation is unless someone provides it.”

  Thompson looked away. This was the real reason Mann had come, he figured, because he still suspected those items belonged to Thompson, and wanted to know how they got to the scene. Thompson wasn’t going to bite, not now.

  “We did identify those prints, though,” said Mann. “They belonged to Billy Miracle. We figured Michele Haze may have been at the scene, too—or at least she knew about the murder.”

  “Why didn’t she come forward?”

  “She was afraid of Miracle, we figure. We had one of our men talking to her the day before she was killed. She was about to crack. A couple more days, and she would have given it up. Miracle must have figured the same.”

  Lieutenant Mann seem satisfied with this explanation. The official investigation was all but over, he said, there would be a final assembly of evidence, a report, a hearing, but the case would go down as solved. There were a couple curious details—odd blood smears, signs of scuffle at Haze’s place, and that ancient revolver, unregistered, which Miracle must have picked up at a rummage sale, or some damned place.

  “Not to change the subject,” said Thompson, “but how about that guy on the street?”

  “Which guy?”

  “The one who tried to rob me.”

  “He’ll turn up. Maybe not here, maybe not soon, but don’t worry. Sometimes, a little piece of it just gets away from you. And because it’s missing, you think it’s bigger than it is, more important, and the whole world seems cock-eyed. Bu
t it’s not cock-eyed. It’s a just a little piece you don’t understand.”

  “Sure,” said Thompson

  He noticed a flash in the cop’s eyes, though, that let him know that maybe Mann didn’t quite believe his own words. It was his job, sure, to wrap things up, put it all in some neat order and dismiss that which didn’t fit. It’s what people wanted from a cop. It wasn’t too much different, when you got down to it, then what they wanted from a scientist, or a man of the cloth. Maybe Mann didn’t believe it himself, maybe he’d spent too much time mucking in the blood and the mud to swallow his own nonsense, but it was his job to keep mucking, and to keep talking, too, like everything could be wrapped up and explained.

  Himself, all he knew was that the Okie had stumbled on him, down there in front of Countdown Productions, by accident, by chance, maybe, but Alberta had beaten him away. The Okie was not the same man, precisely, that he had imagined for Billy Miracle, but they had intersected, the imaginary, the real, himself, though even in that moment of intersection, there was still a gap, an inexplicable space, a darkness that opened and kept opening.

  And the Okie, he was still out there.

  “In my profession, the imagination, it has to be disciplined. Otherwise it can lead you into dark corners,” Mann gestured up the street at all the little houses, so peaceful under the cadmium lights. “Otherwise, all this, it goes to hell.”

  “I understand.”

  Lieutenant Mann put his hand on Thompson’s shoulder, a friendly gesture it seemed, one man to the next, like they were two men of the same ilk, talking on the front porch back home, but he’s pulling my leg, because underneath he’s suspicious, he knows something has gotten loose from him (the dead girl, Thompson thought, buried on that hillside) and though he doesn’t know what it is, he suspects me, because it’s his job to remain on patrol after all, to be diligent as a man can be, to keep everything in its place.