Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  The goddamn reporters were mobbed outside. “Twenty-five years,” one of them shouted. “How does it feel?”

  “Piss off,” Ozzie said. He was pushing fifty, still skinny and barely strong enough to last through a two-hour set. How the hell was he supposed to feel? “I was acquitted, remember? You know who did it. They all went to jail. All hundred and fifty of them. So leave me the fuck alone.”

  “But why rock and roll?” another one shouted.

  Because I was going nuts. Framed, beaten, tried, but never forgiven. Fuck you all, he thought. You got the greatest era of peace in the history of the world. No more assassinations, America out of Vietnam before it even got ugly, manned colonies on Mars. All because one reporter stumbled on the biggest conspiracy in history, with agents everywhere from the Mafia to the CIA to the Birchers to the goddamn Rosicrucians. All of them in Attica now, the ones that had lived.

  But what about me?

  “Why not?” Ozzie said.

  “Lee!” another one shouted. “Lee, over here!”

  “It’s not Lee anymore,” Ozzie snarled. “It’s Ozzie Oswald, nice and legal, got it?”

  Then he was into the limousine, soundproof, bulletproof, the kind Kennedy should have had. He laughed at the crowd and held up his middle fingers. If I had it to do over, he thought, I would have killed him myself. What do you think about that?

  The limo took him off, laughing, into the night.

  Love in Vain

  For James Ellroy

  The room had whitewashed walls, no windows, and a map of the US on my left as I came in. There must have been a hundred pins with little colored heads stuck along the interstates. By the other door was a wooden table, the top full of scratches and coffee rings. Charlie was already sitting on the far side of it.

  They called it Charlie’s “office” and a Texas Ranger named Gonzales had brought me back there to meet him. “Charlie?” Gonzales said. “This here’s Dave McKenna. He’s an Assistant DA up in Dallas?”

  “Morning,” Charlie said. His left eye, the glass one, drooped a little, and his teeth were brown and ragged. He had on jeans and a plaid short-sleeved shirt and he was shaved clean. His hair was damp and combed straight back. His sideburns had gray in them and came to the bottom of his ears.

  I had files and a notebook in my right hand so I wouldn’t have to shake with him. He didn’t offer. “You looking to close you up some cases?” he said.

  I had to clear my throat. “Well, we thought we might give it a try.” I sat down in the other chair.

  He nodded and looked at Gonzales. “Ernie? You don’t suppose I could have a little more coffee?”

  Gonzales had been leaning against the wall by the map, but he straightened right up and said, “Sure thing, Charlie.” He brought in a full pot from the other room and set it on the table. Charlie had a Styrofoam cup that held about a quart. He filled it up and then added three packets of sugar and some powdered creamer.

  “How about you?” Charlie said.

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You don’t need to be nervous,” Charlie said. His breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes. When he wasn’t talking his mouth relaxed into an easy smile. You didn’t have to see anything menacing in it. It was the kind of smile you could see from any highway in Texas, looking out at you from a porch or behind a gas pump, waiting for you to drive on through.

  I took out a little pocket-sized cassette recorder. “Would it be okay if I taped this?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  I pushed the little orange button on top. “March 27, Williamson County Jail. Present are Sergeant Ernesto Gonzales and Charles Dean Harris.”

  “Charlie,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nobody ever calls me Charles.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay.”

  “I guess maybe my mother did sometimes. Always sounded wrong somehow.” He tilted his chair back against the wall. “You don’t suppose you could back that up and do it over?”

  “Yeah, okay, fine.” I rewound the tape and went through the introduction again. This time I called him Charlie.

  Twenty-five years ago he’d stabbed his mother to death. She’d been his first.

  It had taken me three hours to drive from Dallas to the Williamson County Jail in Georgetown, a straight shot down Interstate 35. I’d left a little before eight that morning. Alice was already at work and I had to get Jeffrey off to school. The hardest part was getting him away from the television.

  He was watching MTV. They were playing the Heart video where the blonde guitar player wears the low-cut golden prom dress. Every time she moved, her magnificent breasts seemed to hesitate before they went along, like they were proud, willful animals, just barely under her control.

  I turned the TV off and swung Jeffrey around a couple of times and sent him out for the bus. I got together the files I needed and went into the bedroom to make the bed. The covers were turned back on both sides, but the middle was undisturbed. Alice and I hadn’t made love in six weeks. And counting.

  I walked through the house, picking up Jeffrey’s Masters of the Universe toys. I saw that Alice had loaded up the mantel again with framed pictures of her brothers and parents and the dog she’d had as a little girl. For a second it seemed like the entire house was buried in objects that had nothing to do with me—dolls and vases and doilies and candles and baskets on every inch of every flat surface she could reach. You couldn’t walk from one end of a room to the other without running into a Victorian chair or secretary or umbrella stand, couldn’t see the floors for the flowered rugs.

  I locked up and got in the car and took the LBJ loop all the way around town. The idea was to avoid traffic. I was kidding myself. Driving in Dallas is a matter of manly pride: if somebody manages to pull in front of you he’s clearly got a bigger dick than you do. Rather than let this happen it’s better that one of you die.

  I was in traffic the whole way down, through a hundred and seventy miles of Charlie Dean Harris country: flat, desolate grasslands with an occasional bridge or culvert where you could dump a body. Charlie had wandered and murdered all over the south, but once he found I-35 he was home to stay.

  I opened one of the folders and rested it against the edge of the table so Charlie wouldn’t see my hand tremble. “I’ve got a case here from 1974. A Dallas girl on her way home from Austin for spring break. Her name was Carol, uh, Fairchild. Black hair, blue eyes. Eighteen years old.”

  Charlie was nodding. “She had braces on her teeth. Would have been real pretty without ‘em.”

  I looked at the sheet of paper in the folder. Braces, it said. The plain white walls seemed to wobble a little. “Then you remember her.”

  “Yessir, I suppose I do. I killed her.” He smiled. It looked like a reflex, something he didn’t even know he was doing. “I killed her to have sex with her.”

  “Can you remember anything else?”

  He shrugged. “It was just to have sex, that’s all. I remember when she got in the car. She was wearing a T-shirt, one of them man’s T-shirts, with the straps and all.” He dropped the chair back down and put his elbows on the table. “You could see her titties,” he explained.

  I wanted to pull away but I didn’t. “Where was this?”

  He thought for a minute. “Between here and Round Rock, right there off the interstate.”

  I looked down at my folder again. Last seen wearing navy tank top, blue jeans. “What color was the T-shirt?”

  “Red,” he said. “She would have been strangled. With a piece of electrical wire I had there in the car. I had supposed she was a prostitute, dressed the way she was and all. I asked her to have sex and she said she would, so I got off the highway and then she didn’t want to. So I killed her and I had sex with her.”

  Nobody said anything for what must have been at least a minute. I could hear a little scratching noise as the tape moved inside the recorder. Charlie was looking straight at me with his good ey
e. “I wasn’t satisfied,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t satisfied. I had sex with her but I wasn’t satisfied.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to tell me...”

  “I got to tell it all,” he said.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. My voice came out too high, too loud. But Charlie kept staring at me.

  “It don’t matter,” he said. “I still got to tell it. I got to tell it all. I can’t live with the terrible things I did. Jesus says that if I tell everything I can be with Betsy when this is all over.” Betsy was his common law wife. He’d killed her too, after living with her since she was nine. The words sounded like he’d practiced them, over and over.

  “I’ll take you to her if you want,” he said.

  “Betsy...?”

  “No, your girl there. Carol Fairchild. I’ll take you where I buried her.” He wasn’t smiling any more. He had the sad, earnest look of a laundromat bum telling you how he’d lost his oil fortune up in Oklahoma.

  I looked at Gonzales. “We can set it up for you if you want,” he said. “Sheriff’ll have to okay it and all, but we could prob’ly do it first thing tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’d be good.”

  Charlie nodded, drank some coffee, lit a cigarette. “Well, fine,” he said. “You want to try another?”

  “No,” I said. “Not just yet.”

  “Whatever,” Charlie said. “You just let me know.”

  Later, walking me out, Gonzales said, “Don’t let Charlie get to you. He wants people to like him, you know? So he figures out what you want him to be, and he tries to be that for you.”

  I knew he was trying to cheer me up. I thanked him and told him I’d be back in the morning.

  I called Alice from my friend Jack’s office in Austin, thirty miles farther down I-35. “It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She sounded tired. “How’s it going?”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. “Fine,” I said. “I need to stay over another day or so.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Jeffrey?”

  “He’s fine.”

  I watched thirty seconds tick by on Jack’s wall clock. “Anything else?” she said.

  “I guess not.” My eyes stung and I reflexively shaded them with my free hand. “I’ll be at Jack’s if you need me.”

  “Okay,” she said. I waited a while longer and then put the phone back on the hook.

  Jack had just come out of his office. “Oh oh,” he said.

  It took a couple of breaths to get my throat to unclench. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Bad?”

  “Bad as it could be, I guess. It’s over, probably. I mean, I think it’s over, but how do you know?”

  “You don’t,” Jack said. His secretary, a good-looking Chicana named Liz, typed away on her word processor and tried to act like she wasn’t having to listen to us. “You just after a while get fed up and you say fuck it. You want to get a burger or what?”

  Jack and I went to UT law school together. He’d lost a lot of hair and put on some weight but he wouldn’t do anything about it. Jogging was for assholes. He would rather die fat and keep his self-respect.

  He’d been divorced two years now and was always glad to fold out the couch for me. It had been a while. After Jeffrey was born Alice and I had somehow lost touch with everything except work and TV. “I’ve missed this,” I said.

  “Missed what?”

  “Friends,” I said. We were in a big prairie-style house north of campus that had been fixed up with a kitchen and bar and hanging plants. I was full, but still working on the last of the batter-dipped French fries.

  “Not my fault, you prick. You’re the one dropped down to Christmas cards.”

  “Yeah, well...”

  “Forget it. How’d it go with Charlie Dean?”

  “Unbelievable,” I said. “I mean, really. He confessed to everything. Had details. Even had a couple wrong, enough to look good. But the major stuff was right on.”

  “So that’s great. Isn’t it?”

  “It was a set up. The name I gave him was a fake. No such person, no such case.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Jack, the son of a bitch has confessed to something like three thousand murders. It ain’t possible. So they wanted to catch him lying.”

  “With his pants down, so to speak.”

  “Same old Jack.”

  “You said he had details.”

  “That’s the creepy part. He knew she was supposed to have braces. I had it in the phony case file, but he brought it up before I did.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “No. It was too creepy. And there’s all this shit he keeps telling you. Things you wish you’d never heard, you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Jack said. “When I was in junior high I saw a bum go in the men’s room at the bus station with a loaf of bread. I told this friend of mine about it and he says the bum was going in there to wipe all the dried piss off the toilets with the bread and then eat it. For the protein. Said it happens all the time.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jack.”

  “See? I know what you’re talking about. There’s things you don’t want in your head. Once they get in there, you’re not the same any more. I can’t eat white bread to this day. Twenty years, and I still can’t touch it.”

  “You asshole.” I pushed my plate away and finished my Corona. “Christ, now the beer tastes like piss.”

  Jack pointed his index finger at me. “You will never be the same,” he said.

  You could never tell how much Jack had been drinking. He said it was because he was careful not to let on if he was ever sober. I always thought it was because there was something in him that was meaner than the booze and together they left him just about even.

  It was a lot of beers later that Jack said, “What was the name of that bimbo in high school you used to talk about? Your first great love or some shit? Except she never put out for you?”

  “Kristi,” I said. “Kristi Spector.”

  “Right!” Jack got up and started to walk around the apartment. It wasn’t too long of a walk. “A name like that, how could I forget? I got her off a soliciting rap two months ago.”

  “Soliciting?”

  “There’s a law in Texas against selling your pussy. Maybe you didn’t know that.”

  “Kristi Spector, my god. Tell me about it.”

  “She’s a stripper, son. Works over at the Yellow Rose. This guy figured if she’d show her tits in public he could have the rest in his car. She didn’t, he called the pigs. Said she made lewd advances. Crock of shit, got thrown out of court.”

  “How’s she look?”

  “Not too goddamn bad. I wouldn’t have minded taking my fee in trade, but she didn’t seem to get the hint.” He stopped. “I got a better idea. Let’s go have a look for ourselves.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yes. She remembers you, man. She says you were ‘sweet.’ Come on, get up. We’re going to go look at some tits.”

  The place was bigger inside than I expected, the ceilings higher. There were two stages and a runway behind the second one. There were stools right up by the stages for the guys that wanted to stick dollar bills in the dancers’ G-strings and four-top tables everywhere else.

  I should have felt guilty but I wasn’t thinking about Alice at all. The issue here was sex, and Alice had written herself out of that part of my life. Instead I was thinking about the last time I’d seen Kristi.

  It was senior year in high school. The director of the drama club, who was from New York, had invited some of us to a “wild” party. It was the first time I’d seen men in dresses. I’d locked myself in the bathroom with Kristi to help her take her bra off. I hadn’t seen her in six months. She’d just had an abortion; the father could have been one o
f a couple of guys. Not me. She didn’t want to spoil what we had. It was starting to look to me like there wasn’t much left to spoil. That had been 18 years ago.

  The DJ played something by Pat Benatar. The music was loud enough to give you a kind of mental privacy. You didn’t really have to pay attention to anything but the dancers. At the moment it seemed like just the thing. It had been an ugly day and there was something in me that was comforted by the sight of young, good looking women with their clothes off.

  “College town,” Jack said, leaning toward me so I could hear him. “Lots of local talent.”

  A tall blonde on the north stage unbuttoned her long-sleeved white shirt and let it hang open. Her breasts were smooth and firm and pale. Like the others she had something on the point of her nipples that made a small, golden flash every time one caught the light.

  “See anybody you know?”

  “Give me a break,” I shouted over the music. “You saw her a couple months ago. It’s been almost twenty years for me. I may not even recognize her.” A waitress came by, wearing black leather jeans and a red tank top. For a second I could hear Charlie’s voice telling me about her titties. I rubbed the sides of my head and the voice went away. We ordered beers, but when they came my stomach was wrapped around itself and I had to let mine sit.

  “It’s got to be weird to do this for a living,” I said in Jack’s ear.

  “Bullshit,” Jack said. “You think they’re not getting off on it?”

  He pointed to the south stage. A brunette in high heels had let an overweight man in sideburns and a western shirt tuck a dollar into the side of her bikini bottoms. He talked earnestly to her with just the start of an embarrassed smile. She had to keep leaning closer to hear him. Finally she nodded and turned around. She bent over and grabbed her ankles. His face was about the height of the backs of her knees. She was smiling like she’d just seen somebody else’s baby do something cute. After a few seconds she stood up again and the man went back to his table.