Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  Jesse let the bench-top slap down, and looked Eddie over as well. He made no effort to cover up. He would not be sent scurrying in his own house. And he did not want to turn his back to her.

  She grinned and winked at him. “What were you going to do to me with that thing?”

  Eddie unwrapped his fist. “Nothing,” he said. “Just drying off.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the towel.” She laughed and turned away. “Do you have anything to drink?”

  “Beer.”

  “Got anything stronger?”

  “Look around.”

  She rummaged through Eddie’s kitchen cabinets. He toweled off and slicked back his wet hair with his hands. He put on jeans, an old sweatshirt and sneakers. Ugly clothes. An outfit a man wears when he’s not interested in impressing a woman.

  “Is this the General VonKatz you talk about?” she called out. “He’s so cute.”

  “Yeah, that’s the General.” He realized Jesse had never been to his place before. Why was she there now? Danny was barely in the ground.

  She spoke baby talk to the General. “Are you a cute boy? Yes you are. You’re sooo cute.”

  Eddie had never seen Jesse without Danny, except at the wake. And even then she had been at his side. She had never flirted with Eddie, not even in his imagination.

  He joined her in the kitchen. Jesse poured vodka over shrunken ice cubes in two short glasses. “You had this bottle of Absolut in the cabinet under the sink,” she said. She handed him a glass and took the other for herself. Eddie followed her to the living room, where she sat in the recliner. Her coat was on the floor. The slit in her dress slid up her thigh. She did nothing to fix it.

  Jesse swirled the vodka in the glass, downed a gulp, and winced.

  Eddie’s few experiences with hard alcohol were hard to remember. He sipped the drink. The ice had tainted the liquor with freezer burn. He leaned against the wall and watched her. Jesse was in no rush to get to the point and Eddie resolved to wait her out. Her finger traced the rim of the glass. She gulped more vodka and raised her eyebrows at the spirit’s bite. Eddie studied her arms. They were well defined, yet still feminine. Most likely the work of a personal trainer, two sessions a week on the biceps machine. Were those arms powerful enough to crack her husband’s skull? Maybe, if she were mad enough.

  She made Eddie uneasy, just sitting there silently, fingering the glass. At the wake, she had been the ice widow. And now? He didn’t know what she was. Her presence stirred his most primitive instincts. Danny’s widow, the ultimate forbidden fruit, lazing in his chair with a drink and paying no mind to the rising hem of her dress.

  But she repulsed him, too, for the same reasons. And it had been a long time since his carnal side called the shots. She would not see his bed tonight.

  Finally, she spoke. “Have you ever lost something?”

  “Not like you did,” he answered.

  “Loss is loss. Whether you lose out to a cemetery, or to an English teacher.”

  Pam’s husband-to-be taught journalism in Vermont, not English, but Eddie got the point. He shrugged. “When Pam and I split, we both lost something.”

  “Did Pam lose you? Or leave you behind? There’s a difference.”

  Eddie didn’t like where Jesse was going with this, but he wasn’t afraid, and he sought to prove it. “Pam left me, met a male model with a master’s degree, and moved to a mansion with a view of the Green Mountains,” he said. “Her Doberman’s doghouse is bigger than my place, and I bet a little nicer, too.”

  Jesse threw her head back and laughed. “Always the wordsmith,” she said. “Danny dreamed about writing like you do.”

  “He was getting there.”

  Her voice grew bitter. “Be honest, Eddie. Danny dug the dirt better than anyone but he never made it sing. He was a hacker and a technocrat, full of facts without any spirit.” She slugged more vodka. Her voice softened, all the way to sultry. “Tell me which was worse,” she said. “Losing Pam, or realizing you had trusted the wrong person?” She eyed him.

  Eddie considered the question. Jesse had assumed too much. “Wasn’t about trust,” he said. “It was about success. I wanted it and was willing to put in the hours to get it.”

  “And she was jealous of the time you devoted to work.”

  Close, but not quite. “Pam couldn’t appreciate what success means to me.”

  “What she couldn’t appreciate,” Jesse said, “is not being the most important part of your life. It sounds like you were two-timing her, not with another woman, with your job.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Eddie said. She had irritated him. He took care to edit his tone, to keep it flat.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Oh really?” Jesse was smiling, but the ice widow was back. “Look at you, still lying to yourself about it. I can imagine how you must have had to lie to her.”

  “Why are you here?”

  She studied him, saw his harsh body language, and frowned. She put down the glass and casually pulled her dress to cover her leg, a silent acknowledgement that the widowed vixen act wasn’t working. Her fidgeting attracted General VonKatz. He sniffed around her shoes.

  “I’m curious about what you know about Danny’s death,” she said, businesslike. “The police have told me very little.”

  Eddie had no way to verify what she said. He could not decide if he could trust Jesse, so he chose not to.

  He shrugged. “I know what’s been in the paper.”

  Jesse scrutinized his poker face. He’d never had a great one. She said, “It’s not in your nature to let sleeping dogs lie, Eddie. You and Danny had that in common. It’s why you worked well together. It’s one reason you could have been close friends.”

  Could have been? So Jesse had noticed the distance between them. Maybe that’s why she thought the vixen routine would work. But work for what? To get Eddie to talk? What did she think he knew?

  He had no comeback. Jesse was right, of course—Eddie poked every sleeping dog in his path. General VonKatz picked that moment to hop into Jesse’s lap. She stroked him.

  “He likes you,” Eddie said. “He’s usually skittish around people he doesn’t know.”

  “Aren’t we all?” she said. Her tone had changed again, to soft and mournful. She sighed, looked into her empty glass and said, “My husband had no personal items on him when…when he died. Did Danny ever mention to you where he might keep things like that?”

  Is this what she had come for? Eddie drank some vodka. “Like what?” he asked.

  “You know, family photos, the little poems I wrote him, his keys?”

  Just his wallet, under a bridge in a heroin den. “Let me check around,” he said. “I bet I can find something like that, for you to remember him by.”

  She stood up with the General and nuzzled her face into his fur. She thanked Eddie, and set the cat down. Eddie picked her coat from the floor, helped her slip it on and then walked her to the door.

  “One more thing,” she said. “I think you’re much better off without Pam.”

  He humored her. “Yeah, sure.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Relationships without honesty don’t deserve a place in our lives,” she said. Her heels clicked down the cement steps.

  Eddie shut the door and wondered which of Jesse’s personalities was the true one, if any. And then he locked the deadbolt for the first time he could remember.

  Chapter 16

  In the morning, Eddie spent fifteen bucks on the way downtown for six coffees and a dozen doughnuts. He drove south past the Empire building toward the train depot. He veered onto Chelmsford Street and passed over the railroad bridge under which he had spent the night before last. He then turned right, down a steep hill, and inched through a cramped residential area clogged with apartment houses and parked cars. He left the Mighty Chevette near a neighborhood pub, and carried the coffee and doughnuts in a box to the railroad tracks.

  He wat
ched his feet along the catwalk, balancing the food in his left arm. His right hand felt for handholds along the retaining wall.

  Gabrielle saw him coming.

  “Hey reporter man,” she yelled. “You here to tell the story of our little underworld?”

  “I’m here with breakfast,” Eddie answered, offering half the truth.

  Leo was away. Four other men were under the bridge. Three lay swaddled in blankets and old clothes. One sat overlooking the tracks, his legs dangling over the ledge. He sucked hard on a cigarette stub and mumbled to himself between drags.

  The campfire crackled; smoke lingered between the I-beams. Leo’s candle, unlit, stuck up from the cement, ready for the day’s cooking.

  Eddie handed Gabrielle the box of food. She took a coffee and a powdered-jelly doughnut for herself, and then passed the box around. It didn’t come back. Eddie wished he had taken a java for himself first. A caffeine withdrawal headache stirred behind his eyes. He dismissed it as psychosomatic.

  “Where’s your husband?” Eddie asked.

  “He’s out buying,” she told him. Her honesty about their crimes and addiction was hard to get used to. “Do you want to interview him?”

  Warmer weather had put a dab of pink in her cheeks. Squinting just enough to blur her ravaged features, Eddie saw a face with pretty angles.

  “I can’t do the story,” he said. “At least not yet.”

  She shrugged.

  Eddie explained, “It’s my editor. He won’t let me, the prick.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. Disappointment had long since lost any effect on Gabrielle.

  “I’ll get it done somehow,” Eddie pledged. “Maybe as a freelance magazine piece.”

  She shrugged again. Big promises had also lost any effect.

  Eddie watched with envy as she blew the steam off her coffee and sipped it. He took out his notebook. “I wanted to talk about the man you found in the canal, the man I knew,” he said. I want to believe you, but I have to be sure.

  “We told you everything,” she said.

  “Tell me again. I have the time if you do.”

  She laughed. It was a hoarse, honking laugh, like a goose with a sore throat, and it led to a wet cough. She cleared her throat and spat over the ledge. “I can squeeze you in between appointments,” she said.

  She told Eddie again how they had found Nowlin’s body hung up on branches at the edge of the Worthen Canal while they were walking to meet their heroin supplier. They took his wallet, and sent the body adrift so somebody would inevitably find it and call the police. Not one detail had changed from when she had first told him the story. Continuity was as close to confirmation as Eddie was going to get.

  He asked her, “Had you ever seen that man—Danny Nowlin, that was his name—before that night? Did you ever see him alive?”

  Gabrielle shook her head. “I don’t remember him. I could have passed him on the street—who knows? I don’t remember people unless I meet them. And it’s hard to meet people who think I’m invisible.”

  None of the men under the bridge remembered Danny, either. Eddie wondered if any of them remembered last July.

  “Was your friend a user?” Gabrielle asked.

  Surprised, Eddie said, “He tried heroin at least once—how did you know?”

  She smiled. “Why else might we know him down here on the Island of Misfit Toys?”

  Eddie knew the Island of Misfit Toys from an animated Christmas special he watched as a kid. It was easy to forget that Gabrielle had a childhood. “Is there any way to find out if he shot up often?” he asked.

  “Lots of chippers buy in the city,” she said. “White collar guys like you. Recreational users, you’d call them. But we don’t shop at the same stores.”

  “Let’s assume he wasn’t a regular user. Where would he shop?”

  Gabrielle bit the doughnut and chewed the bite down. “To buy one hit?” she said.

  “One hit.”

  She wiped powered sugar from her lips with her sleeve. “Most of them chippers snort, or smoke the black tar,” she said. “They don’t use the spike.”

  “Suppose he did.”

  Gabrielle considered the possibilities. “A one-time user looking for a taste might just walk the Acre to see who’s open,” she said. “Would he need a rig too?”

  “A needle?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But he hadn’t used for a long time, if ever, before last week. So let’s say, yeah, he buys a needle, too.”

  She thought some more, and then said, “Young, handsome, middle-class guy with no history, looking for a bag and a clean rig within the past week—somebody might remember him. We’ll ask around.”

  Eddie gave her his business card and a handful of pocket change for the pay phone. “Call me if you get anything,” he said. “It’s real important.”

  She looked at the coins in her hand, and then at Eddie. She laughed. “Been a while,” she said, “since I had a job.”

  Chapter 17

  The advantage of an afternoon paper was never getting scooped. If the morning rags had a story The Empire did not, then the editors assigned the reporter on the morning “fireman shift” to chase it down by deadline, with help from additional reporters, as needed, as they filtered in. The disadvantage was deadline crunch for breakfast every day. Rules of polite society peeled away, and the level of profanity rose with the stress. The newsroom at deadline was like a pan of water approaching a boil. The trick was to put the paper together before the pan boiled over and the paper was late.

  Any day’s deadline was actually many incremental deadlines. If a reporter was late with a story, the copy editors might sacrifice part of their editing time to make up the difference, or they might pass the delay along to the paginators who map out the pages on computer. The buck stopped at the press. If it rolled late, The Empire missed deadline. And the union truck drivers started pulling overtime for standing around, chain-smoking Kents.

  Eddie got to the newsroom by ten o’clock, smack in the middle of the morning deadline. Boyce Billips had pulled the six-o’clock fireman’s slot this morning. He waved Eddie over.

  “What do you think of this top?” Boyce asked, pointing to the first ten lines of a story on his screen.

  Boyce made no mention of the fat yellow dog nibbling its own belly on the floor next to his desk. The dog’s leash was tied to Boyce’s chair.

  Eddie read over his shoulder. Two people had been hurt in an accident on the Lowell Connector, a short stretch of highway linking the city with Route 495. It was known for wrong-way crashes and roadside shrines for the victims.

  “Christ,” Eddie said. “The Connector is about one fatality short of a nickname. Something like Suicide Alley, or Murderer’s Row. That’ll be great for tourism.” He advised Boyce to move up a line about the number of past accidents on the highway. “The pols won’t fix the road until the readers threaten to throw them out,” Eddie said. “And the readers won’t do it unless we whack them over the head every chance we get.”

  Eddie also nit-picked a few wording changes to tighten the language. “But overall, it’s strong,” he said. “Good job.”

  Boyce didn’t have the condition reports for the victims. He kept typing from his notebook while Eddie called the hospital’s patient information number. As long as he had the victims’ names, their condition should be available. The cops had been quick to provide Boyce the names after the crash, usually a sign that the injuries were not life threatening. One victim was listed in “serious” condition, and the other in “satisfactory.” That’s jargon for “somewhat mangled,” and “not so badly mangled.” Both should live.

  Eddie dictated the information to Boyce, who tapped it into the story.

  Phife hollered over the deadline bustle. “Boyce, I need that accident brief.”

  “Two minutes,” Boyce yelled back.

  “No, Boyce. Right
now! Hit the goddam button!”

  Boyce finished typing a final sentence and then filed the story. “I didn’t have time to run the spell-checker,” he shouted to Phife, who was already reading the story, and ignored him.

  “I hope he’s not mad,” Boyce said. “Do you think he’s mad at me? What if he’s mad at me?”

  Eddie ignored him, too. The yellow mutt on the floor stuck its snout up Eddie’s pant leg and sniffed his ankle. Eddie’s socks were on their second wear since their last wash, though they had aerated a full week on the floor before he had put them back on. The dog took thirty seconds to catalogue the sock’s potpourri of flavors.

  With Boyce’s deadline crisis over, Eddie dryly asked him, “Is this Take a Fat Dog to Work Day?”

  “He’s my mental health dog,” Boyce said. He looked the mutt over. “Do you think he’s too fat?”

  “A mental health dog?”

  “Like a Seeing-Eye dog, except he helps keep me mentally balanced.”

  “I don’t think Keyes allows dogs in the newsroom,” Eddie said.

  “He has to allow Superdog,” Boyce insisted. “He’s certified. My psychiatrist signed for him. Mental-health companion animals are allowed anyplace a Seeing-Eye dog can go—stores, restaurants, airplanes, and places of business. It’s all right here in the law.” He offered Eddie a stack of photocopies, which Eddie waved off.

  The mutt snorted and flopped its head on the rug with a thump.

  “Superdog, eh?” Eddie said. “He looks slower than erosion.”

  “He was more active when he was young,” Boyce explained. “He’s seven. That’s forty-nine to you and me.”

  Eddie groaned. “If I’m like that at forty-nine, just cover me with compost. Is he trained for this?”

  “No. His calming effect on my mental state is the product of our relationship.” He scratched the dog’s belly. “Any more questions?”

  “Why is he so fat?”

  “Do you really think he’s too fat?”

  Eddie left Boyce to contemplate his dog’s weight problem, and settled in at his own desk.

  Detective Orr, her voice lacking its usual patronizing politeness, was on his voicemail. “I need to ask you some questions of an immediate nature, Mr. Bourque, relative to your relationship with certain known and alleged dealers of narcotics.”