Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  In the car, Caroline leafed through notes from the six interviews she’d done with hookers that day. Words leaped from the pages: “bit” and “punched” and “knifed” and “choked” and “bruised,” stories of gang rape at knifepoint, of violations with beer bottles and guns, of molestations by uncles and teachers and probation officers. Words stuck in her throat, names and details ran together, descriptions, regular guys all—Mikes and Daves—and Caroline wondered if they weren’t going at it the wrong way, looking for the guys with the scary perversions. It might be easier to eliminate the white men in pickup trucks who didn’t scare these hookers. Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.

  Caroline could always recognize a street hooker. The police unit that she was in had grown out of the old Vice Squad, which had been in charge of prostitution, gambling, and drugs—a funny collection of crimes once known as vices. After the proliferation of drugs in the seventies Vice became Special Investigations and began focusing on drug dealing, although they still coordinated an occasional prostitution sting, dragging a woman from patrol to dress up and stand on a street corner looking skanky. Caroline did it herself when they couldn’t convince a patrol officer or some girl from the academy to demean herself for an evening. The other cops joked that she was too healthy and good-looking to be a hooker. Hookers in movies looked like Julia Roberts and Jamie Lee Curtis, but most of the ones who worked the street were ugly or fat or sickly or strung out. And even the decent-looking ones who worked mostly hotels and escort services, even those women were usually in need of a shower.

  It was her least favorite duty, but when the task force investigating the serial murders had asked the Special Investigations Unit for help, Caroline knew she would volunteer, just like she’d volunteered to interview hookers, which was hard enough since these women did their best every day to avoid cops. The interviews would be followed tonight by a fishing trip—a john sting with Caroline getting all dolled up and walking the strip in front of adult bookstores and topless bars. Whore duty.

  All day she’d been dreading the cheap clothes, the lie of it, the wire beneath her shirt, standing under a street lamp, trying to keep the lipstick off her teeth, sticking her ass out so far that the next morning her back always hurt. Maybe that’s what she should’ve asked Jacqueline—how you stand like that without hurting your back.

  It was odd now, to be investigating something they usually ignored. Most of the time prostitution was just a given, not even worth mentioning. Many drug dealers had a hand in the business; Burn, for example, pimped a couple of crackheads out of his apartment. But it was nothing more than a fact of their lives, a detail on a rap sheet, like their age or hometown or place of employment. She doubted if most cops even thought of prostitution as a crime anymore, but more as a symptom.

  Caroline glanced over the list of bad dates the women had given her. She wasn’t surprised that the men who paid cash for straight sex seemed all right to these women. After all, they had some control in that transaction, the lies of power, position, and commerce, the hooker as sales representative, billing agent, and service department rolled into one. And, of course, product.

  That’s why she wasn’t surprised that they had so few names to go on. This was a business set up to give the client anonymity, in which all customers were known by the brand name of saints and Baptists, Waynes and Kennedys, the most Christian, most American of names. Johns. Or “dates,” which the women simply called the men, or, if you preferred magic, “tricks.” Anyway, through anonymity or deceptive casualness or magical disappearance, the men remained hard to find, and the women…well, to Caroline, they were all dead or dying.

  She flipped the notebook to the first page of her interview with Jacqueline. After the girl made up her name, Caroline had begun the interview by asking for a date of birth and the girl had just shrugged. Jacqueline said she was from a small town near Spokane (“rather not give the name”), had a baby (“eight months old, foster care”), was a regular drug user (“heroin, meth, pot”), had never been arrested (“says she’s too smart”), and might be HIV-positive (“refuses to be tested”).

  Caroline tossed the notebook on the seat next to her and started the car. She would go back and type up the results of her interviews for the task force and then change into her hooker outfit. Joel had seen her setting the clothes out that morning—the short vinyl skirt and tiny T-shirt—and hadn’t said anything. That was the kind of thing that kept her from being able to trust him completely. It wasn’t anything he did or said, but what he didn’t do, what he didn’t say. She sets out trampy clothing and he just goes off to lift weights without raising an eyebrow?

  Caroline also hadn’t told Joel about tomorrow, that her father was coming to begin going through her mother’s belongings. She supposed she didn’t talk about it because she didn’t want to think about it. It seemed too soon, just three weeks after her mother’s death. She’d tried to get her brother to come too, but Peter said he couldn’t handle it. Caroline would like to have spoken to Dr. Ewing about the next twenty-four hours, about dressing as a hooker, what to do with the embarrassment and guilt she felt sticking her ass out to trap these guys. And she wished she could talk to Dr. Ewing about her father and Peter. She supposed her father couldn’t have been expected to be there to see his ex-wife die, but she was disappointed in Peter, who had come for the funeral but hadn’t been back. When she asked him, he dodged the question, saying that his kids had soccer games. But then he cleared his throat and said, “I can’t face it, Caroline. I’m just not like you.”

  And what was she like? Someone who stared into rivers, who held the hands of dying mothers and drug dealers, who bought sandwiches for dying hookers during the day and dressed up like one at night, who could pose as a hooker but couldn’t handle posing as a mother in a park, who loses her own mother but obsesses over a drowned drug dealer? She shifted the car and turned back toward downtown, past the tavern where Jacqueline hung out. The young prostitute was leaning against a light pole, already eating the sandwich Caroline had bought for her. From the car Caroline could see a guy in the doorway of a tavern behind Jacqueline, watching her. The guy wore sunglasses and a ball cap. As Caroline passed the tavern the man stepped forward, probably to begin the long, slow dance of negotiation with Jacqueline. That was another movie misconception—the deal itself. The movie john drives up, rolls his car window down, and asks, “How much?” In fact, the deal was more often a sad, empty flirtation, the man maybe trying to convince himself that she really likes him, the woman convincing herself she isn’t what she is, the money sometimes an afterthought, other deals made in dope or booze or a ride somewhere or the offer of a roof to sleep under. This barter was another form of denial, the lie that the intimacy of this transaction was no different than the transactions of straight lives, the trading of years for a ring, sex for stability, the factoring into the deal of babies and houses and comfort and meals and entire lives. Caroline felt a kind of mocking dare from these women during these interviews, an accusation from them that a deal was inherent in any relationship, whether the woman charged forty bucks for a blow job or got forty years for a lifetime of them. What is a marriage but a contract, the recording of a deal? Is eliminating loneliness a better motivation than greed?

  As she drove, Caroline wondered if Jacqueline saw the world that way, or if she had her own fairy-tale fantasies. Maybe that dark view of male-female relationships was something Caroline was beginning to believe herself. That got her to thinking about the man in the sweats, putting the picture she’d just seen back together in her mind: Jacqueline leaning against that light pole, the man coming from behind her…

  The man.

  Something familiar…He’d been shaded by the ball cap and sunglasses and was partially shielded by cars along the curb and the light pole, but something about the way he stood or the tilt of his head reminded her of someone else, and when she realized who, the shock pulled her to the side of the road.

  It had to be her min
d playing tricks. No way the man she’d seen talking to young Jacqueline was Lenny Ryan. It was an understandable mistake. He hadn’t been far from her thoughts since he pushed Burn over the bridge railing. Of course she would imagine the quick glimpse of a man to be him, transposing the flatness and evil of what he’d done onto this guy killing prostitutes, and then transposing some innocent guy talking to Jacqueline into a serial killer.

  But the idea was rooted now, and so she turned the car around and sped down Sprague, past weedy car lots and motels with hourly rates, taverns with blackened windows, adult bookstores. She parked in front of the Eight Ball Tavern, Jacqueline’s hangout, but saw no sign of the young hooker or the man in the cap. She went into the bar and asked if anyone had seen her talking to the man in sweats, if Jacqueline had gotten into any cars, but the bartender and the four men drinking flat drafts at 4 P.M. shrugged and said they didn’t know Jacqueline and hadn’t seen her.

  “The guy was just standing in the doorway ten seconds ago.”

  The bartender shrugged.

  “Out front,” Caroline said, losing patience. “You didn’t see a girl out front?”

  They didn’t say no, didn’t shake their heads, just stared at her.

  In front of the bar, she put her hand on the light pole and tried to piece the image together again. It seemed less and less likely. The conventional wisdom held that Lenny Ryan was long gone—back to California, most likely. His uncle’s car had been found at a truck stop, leading detectives to believe he’d hitched a ride out of state with a trucker.

  She hadn’t even seen the guy’s face. The more she thought about it, the less likely it became that the man she’d seen was Lenny Ryan, and the more embarrassed Caroline became over her recent obsessions. What would Dupree say? That she was taking it all too personally. And Dr. Ewing, what would she say at their next session? That she was suffering anxiety over her mother, over what happened at the falls, that she was still horrified by the choice that Lenny Ryan had given her, that she was still replaying what she’d done, that she couldn’t live with her inability to save the young drug dealer. Or even her mother. She didn’t know why exactly, but it galled Caroline that Burn’s body had never been found. Of course, for that matter, neither had Lenny Ryan.

  They were both out there, waiting for her next move, drifting in the undertow, their movements guided by cold, black currents.

  15

  On his way to the hospital Dupree tapped his cell phone against the steering wheel, the phone number covering the screen. He’d been about to place the call—“Sorry, I’m gonna be late”—when he’d been drawn by something out his right window. It was one of those incongruities he sometimes got while driving, an image he had to convince himself he’d actually seen, that he wasn’t filling in details that weren’t there.

  It was on the corner of a busy four-lane in a residential neighborhood, a few blocks from the Public Safety Building. A guy with a Mohawk haircut stood in a yard leaning against a car, in front of a sign. On the sign were written the words “Beanie Babies for Sale.” The car was an AMC Javelin from the early 1970s.

  And that was it, but it had the effect of freezing Alan Dupree, so that two blocks later, when the light changed, he just sat there, staring out the passenger window, where the image had been. He composed the image again, disparate details from different times: a 1980s haircut leaning on a 1970s car in front of a sign offering 1990s toys for sale. Was that even it? Was that what unsettled him, or was it some other memory, some dream, some other reference to that car or that haircut or Beanie Babies?

  He looked down at the phone in his hand, at the number, and didn’t recognize it at first. His thumb rested on the send button and he must have pushed it without realizing, because he was caught off guard when the phone rang on the other end and she picked up quickly, saying “Hello” as if she had been waiting for the call, which of course she had.

  He put the phone to his head, said, “Hey,” and snapped out of his trance. As he pulled out into the intersection, he was amazed to see the light change to yellow above him. How long had he sat there?

  “Alan?”

  He tried to remember what he was going to tell his wife. Everything felt so out of place, so disturbed. So unreal.

  “Did you forget where we live?”

  “I’m sorry.” He shook his head, clearing this fog. “I’m driving. I got distracted.”

  “How late are you gonna be?” He could hear the TV in the background and tried to picture them, Debbie on the kitchen phone, the kids sprawled on the floor of the living room, engrossed in whatever was on Nickelodeon.

  “Could be a while. At least an hour or two.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I gotta go talk to a pawnshop owner who got shot last month.”

  “I thought maybe it was the other thing.” Debbie had taken a deep interest in the serial killer investigation, more interest than she’d shown in his job in years.

  “I’m just chasing my tail on that.” In fact he’d spent the morning going through a good-sized stack of worthless tips and the afternoon comparing the three Southbank murders with other unsolved murders in the area, including a couple of murdered hookers, trying to connect a few dots but coming up with nothing.

  “Alan?”

  He gripped the phone. “Yeah. Sorry. I was waiting for you to say something.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  When they had said good-bye and, as an afterthought, “I love you,” Dupree pressed the phone against his head, then held it out in front of himself. He tried to remember the last pleasant call he’d made on this thing, this transmitter of anxiety. Of bad news. He turned into the hospital parking lot and parked in one of the spots in the emergency lot reserved for police officers. On the way up he stopped at a nurses’ station and bummed a cup of coffee, hoping to wake himself up. He rode the elevator with a nurse and a tiny boy with a shaved head, avoiding their eyes.

  Pollard was pacing the hallway in the intensive care unit, his sports coat with the felt elbow patches draped over the back of a chair. “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry, honey. I should’ve called.” He handed Pollard the five six-packs he’d requested—thirty mug shots in all, the same photo lineup they’d shown Caroline three weeks earlier.

  Pollard jerked his head toward the hospital room and Dupree followed him inside. The light was dim, and something struck Dupree as odd about this hospital room. Then he realized: He’d never seen a hospital room that didn’t have flowers or cards in it. The pawnshop owner, Denny Melling, lay on his back, his head propped on a pillow, IV lines snaking over the headboard of his inclined hospital bed. Bandages and a plastic mask covered his face from upper lip to hairline, as if he’d just come from a costume ball.

  He breathed in shallow fits and spurts, sputtering a tiny whimper with each exhale. Pollard bent close to his ear and spoke quietly.

  “Mr. Melling. It’s Detective Pollard again.”

  “You said I could have…more morphine.”

  “Sure. Sure. As soon as we’ve asked you a couple of questions. Okay?”

  He hummed an answer and Pollard opened his briefcase and removed the first six-pack photo lineup. “Mr. Melling, Detective Dupree here brought some pictures. The guy you mentioned before might be in here. Now I gotta read this, so listen.” He turned over the first six-pack and breezed through the boilerplate on the back. “Okay, ‘The suspect may or may not be portrayed here. Keep in mind hairstyles, beards, and mustaches can change a person’s appearance.’ Okay, I’m going to uncover your eyes. The light is going to be kind of severe at first. Are you ready?”

  The mask had a flap made of surgical tape that covered Melling’s eyes. Pollard pulled it back and Dupree lost his breath. The right eye was fine, although bloodshot, but beyond it was a mess of bone and skin, unrecognizable as a face. The left eye socket was caved in beneath the bandage and his nose was essentially gone, replaced by bumpy red skin held together
with the black thread of fresh sutures. Dupree had read the report—“the victim sustained a gunshot wound to the face…”—but that description seemed so incomplete now as to be inaccurate. The victim no longer had a face.

  Melling’s one eye drifted across the faces on the first photo lineup card. “Anything?” Pollard asked.

  “No,” Melling said. Pollard flipped to the second page and Melling ran his eye across quickly. “Number four,” he said and his eyelid drifted shut. “That’s him…now can you…get me some morphine? I need to go to sleep.”

  Pollard patted his shoulder and let the flap fall back over his eye. He handed the photo lineup to Dupree, who looked at the fourth picture, even though he knew who it was. For weeks he’d been imagining a critical mass of evil, but he never really imagined it could really be one person. But here it was. Their crime spree. Lenny Ryan.

  “Can you tell Detective Dupree here what you told me earlier,” Pollard said, “what this guy Lenny wanted from you?”

  “I told you,” Melling blurted, as if he were about to cry.

  “I know. Just once more and then I’ll have them up your painkiller.”

  “He came in the day before…he shot me and…he wanted to know about…” Melling took more shallow breaths. “…kid who sells dope in the park.”

  Melling concentrated, trying to come up with the name.

  Dupree edged toward the bed. “Burn,” he said.

  “Burn. Yeah.” He took a deep breath.

  “Why did he want to find Burn?” Pollard asked.

  “I don’t know. He wanted to buy some dope. And the kid runs hookers.”

  Pollard shot a glance at Dupree. “Did this guy ask about hookers?”

  “Well, at first, he was all friendly and he wanted to know where they hung out.”

  “And did he mention any particular hookers?”

  “Yeah. That’s why he was in my shop. I get a lot of ’em come in. And I guess some hooker he knew pawned a bracelet in my shop a while back.”