Black House js-2 Page 11

  There is one act a homicide detective, especially a homicide lieutenant, must never commit, and it is this: confronted with a dead body, he must not puke. Jack struggled to remain on the respectable side of the Forbidden. Bile seared the back of his throat, and he closed his eyes. A constellation of glowing dots wavered across his eyelids. The creature, molten and foul, battered against its restraints.

  Lights reflected on the scalp of a bald, black man lying dead beside a carousel . . .

  Not you. No, not you. Knock all you like, but you can’t come in.

  The wings, arms, talons retracted; the creature dwindled to a dozing speck. Having succeeded in avoiding the Forbidden Act, Jack found himself capable of opening his eyes. He had no idea how much time had passed. Angelo Leone’s corrugated forehead, murky eyes, and carnivorous mouth heaved into view and, from a distance of six inches, occupied all the available space.

  —What are we doing here? Reviewing our situation?

  —I wish that idiot would put his guitar back in its case.

  And that was one of the oddest turns of the evening.

  —Guitar? I don’t hear no guitar.

  Neither, Jack realized, did he.

  Wouldn’t any rational person attempt to put such an episode out of mind? To throw this garbage overboard? You couldn’t do anything with it, you couldn’t use it, so why hold on to it? The incident on the pier meant nothing. It connected to nothing beyond itself, and it led to nothing. It was literally inconsequential, for it had had no consequences. After his lover had sandbagged him Jack had lost his bearings, suffered a momentary aberration, and trespassed upon another jurisdiction’s crime scene. It was no more than an embarrassing mistake.

  Fifty-six days and eleven hours later, the ace boy slipped into his captain’s office, laid down his shield and his gun, and announced, much to the captain’s astonishment, his immediate retirement. Knowing nothing of the confrontation with Detective Leone on the Santa Monica Pier, the captain did not inquire as to the possible influence upon his lieutenant’s decision of a stalled carousel and a dead black man; if he had, Jack would have told him he was being ridiculous.

  Don’t go there, he advises himself, and does an excellent job of not going there. He receives a few involuntary flashes, no more, strobe-lit snapshots of a wooden pony’s rearing head, of Angelo Leone’s distempered mug, also of one other thing, the object occupying the dead center of the scene in every sense, that which above all must not be witnessed . . . the instant these imagistic lightning bolts appear, he sends them away. It feels like a magical performance. He is doing magic, good magic. He knows perfectly well that these feats of image banishment represent a form of self-protection, and if the motives behind his need for this protective magic remain unclear, the need is motive enough. When you gotta have an omelette, you gotta whisk eggs, to quote that unimpeachable authority, Duke Wayne.

  Jack Sawyer has more on his mind than the irrelevancies suggested by a dream voice’s having uttered the word “policeman” in baby talk. These matters, too, he wishes he could send away by the execution of a magic trick, but the wretched matters refuse banishment; they zoom about him like a tribe of wasps.

  All in all, he is not doing so well, our Jack. He is marking time and staring at the eggs, which no longer look quite right, though he could not say why. The eggs resist interpretation. The eggs are the least of it. In the periphery of his vision, the banner across the front page of the La Riviere Herald seems to rise off the sheet of newsprint and float toward him. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN. . . . Nope, that’s enough; he turns away with the terrible knowledge of having brought on this Fisherman business by himself. How about IN STATEN ISLAND or IN BROOKLYN, where the real Albert Fish, a tormented piece of work if there ever was one, found two of his victims?

  This stuff is making him sick. Two dead kids, the Freneau girl missing and probably dead, body parts eaten, a lunatic who plagiarized from Albert Fish. . . . Dale insisted on assaulting him with information. The details enter his system like a contaminant. The more he learns—and for a man who truly wished to be out of the loop, Jack has learned an amazing amount—the more the poisons swim through his bloodstream, distorting his perceptions. He had come to Norway Valley in flight from a world that had abruptly turned unreliable and rubbery, as if liquefying under thermal pressure. During his last month in Los Angeles, the thermal pressure had become intolerable. Grotesque possibilities leered from darkened windows and the gaps between buildings, threatening to take form. On days off, the sensation of dishwater greasing his lungs made him gasp for breath and fight against nausea, so he worked without stopping, in the process solving more cases than ever before. (His diagnosis was that the work was getting to him, but we can hardly blame the captain for his astonishment at the ace boy’s resignation.)

  He had escaped to this obscure pocket of the countryside, this shelter, this haven at the edge of a yellow meadow, removed from the world of threat and madness, removed by nearly twenty miles from French Landing, removed a good distance even from Norway Valley Road. However, the layers of removal had failed to do their job. What he was trying to escape riots around him again, here in his redoubt. If he let himself succumb to self-centered fantasy, he would have to conclude that what he had fled had spent the last three years sniffing his trail and had finally succeeded in tracking him down.

  In California, the rigors of his task had overwhelmed him; now the disorders of western Wisconsin must be kept at arm’s length. Sometimes, late at night, he awakens to the echo of the little, poisoned voice wailing, No more coppiceman, I won’t, too close, too close. What was too close, Jack Sawyer refuses to consider; the echo proves that he must avoid any further contamination.

  Bad news for Dale, he knows, and he regrets both his inability to join the investigation and to explain his refusal to his friend. Dale’s ass is on the line, no two ways about it. He is a good chief of police, more than good enough for French Landing, but he misjudged the politics and let the staties set him up. With every appearance of respect for local authority, state detectives Brown and Black had bowed low, stepped aside, and permitted Dale Gilbertson, who thought they were doing him a favor, to slip a noose around his neck. Too bad, but Dale has just figured out that he is standing on a trapdoor with a black bag over his face. If the Fisherman murders one more kid. . . . Well, Jack Sawyer sends his most profound regrets. He can’t perform a miracle right now, sorry. Jack has more pressing matters on his mind.

  Red feathers, for example. Small ones. Little red feathers are much on Jack’s mind, and have been, despite his efforts to magic them away, since a month before the murders started. One morning as he emerged from his bedroom and began to go down to fix breakfast, a single red feather, a plume smaller than a baby’s finger, seemed to float out of the slanted ceiling at the top of the stairs. In its wake, two or three others came drifting toward him. An oval section of plaster two inches across seemed to blink and open like an eye, and the eye released a tight, fat column of feathers that zoomed out of the ceiling as if propelled through a straw. A feather explosion, a feather hurricane, battered his chest, his raised arms, his head.

  But this . . .

  This never happened.

  Something else happened, and it took him a minute or two to figure it out. A wayward brain neuron misfired. A mental receptor lapped up the wrong chemical, or lapped up too much of the right chemical. The switches that nightly triggered the image conduits responded to a false signal and produced a waking dream. The waking dream resembled an hallucination, but hallucinations were experienced by wet-brain alcoholics, drug takers, and crazy people, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, with whom Jack had dealt on many an occasion during his life as a coppiceman. Jack fit into none of those categories, including the last. He knew he was not a paranoid schizophrenic or any other variety of madman. If you thought Jack Sawyer was crazy, you were. He has complete, at least 99 percent complete, faith in his sanity.

  Since he is not delusional, the
feathers must have flown toward him in a waking dream. The only other explanation involves reality, and the feathers had no connection to reality. What kind of world would this be, if such things could happen to us?

  Abruptly George Rathbun bellows, “It pains me to say this, truly it does, for I love our dear old Brew Crew, you know I do, but there come times when love must grit its teeth and face a painful reality—for example, take the sorrowful state of our pitching staff. Bud Selig, oh BU-UD, this is Houston calling. Could you Please return to earth immediately? A blind man could throw more strikes than that aggregation of WIMPS, LOSERS, AND AIRHEADS!”

  Good old Henry. Henry has George Rathbun down so perfectly you can see the sweat stains under his armpits. But the best of Henry’s inventions—in Jack’s opinion—has to be that embodiment of hipster cool, the laid-back, authoritative Henry Shake (“the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby”), who can, if in the mood, tell you the color of the socks worn by Lester Young on the day he recorded “Shoe Shine Boy” and “Lady Be Good” and describe the interiors of two dozen famous but mostly long-departed jazz clubs.

  . . . and before we get into the very cool, very beautiful, very simpático music whispered one Sunday at the Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio, we might pay our respects to the third, inner eye. Let us honor the inner eye, the eye of imagination. It is late on a hot July afternoon in Greenwich Village, New York City. On sun-dazzled Seventh Avenue South, we stroll into the shade of the Vanguard’s marquee, open a white door, and proceed down a long, narrow flight of stairs to a roomy underground cave. The musicians climb onto the stand. Bill Evans slides onto the piano bench and nods at the audience. Scott LaFaro hugs his bass. Paul Motian picks up his brushes. Evans lowers his head way, way down and drops his hands on the keyboard. For those of us who are privileged to be there, nothing will ever be the same again.

  “My Foolish Heart” by the Bill Evans Trio, live at the Village Vanguard, the twenty-fifth of June, 1961. I am your host, Henry Shake—the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby.

  Smiling, Jack pours the beaten eggs into the frying pan, twice swirls them with a fork, and marginally reduces the gas flame. It occurs to him that he has neglected to make coffee. Nuts to coffee. Coffee is the last thing he needs; he can drink orange juice. A glance at the toaster suggests that he has also neglected to prepare the morning’s toast. Does he require toast, is toast essential? Consider the butter, consider slabs of cholesterol waiting to corrupt his arteries. The omelette is risky enough; in fact, he has the feeling he cracked way too many eggs. Now Jack cannot remember why he wanted to make an omelette in the first place. He rarely eats omelettes. In fact, he tends to buy eggs out of a sense of duty aroused by the two rows of egg-sized depressions near the top of his refrigerator door. If people were not supposed to buy eggs, why would refrigerators come with egg holders?

  He nudges a spatula under the edges of the hardening but still runny eggs, tilts the pan to slide them around, scrapes in the mushrooms and scallions, and folds the result in half. All right. Okay. Looks good. A luxurious forty minutes of freedom stretches out before him. In spite of everything, he seems to be functioning pretty well. Control is not an issue here.

  Unfolded on the kitchen table, the La Riviere Herald catches Jack’s eye. He has forgotten about the newspaper. The newspaper has not forgotten him, however, and demands its proper share of attention. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN, and so on. ARCTIC CIRCLE would be nice, but no, he moves nearer to the table and sees that the Fisherman remains a stubbornly local problem. From beneath the headline, Wendell Green’s name leaps up and lodges in his eye like a pebble. Wendell Green is an all-around, comprehensive pest, an ongoing irritant. After reading the first two paragraphs of Green’s article, Jack groans and clamps a hand over his eyes.

  I’m a blind man, make me an umpire!

  Wendell Green has the confidence of a small-town athletic hero who never left home. Tall, expansive, with a crinkly mat of red-blond hair and a senatorial waistline, Green swaggers through the bars, the courthouses, the public arenas of La Riviere and its surrounding communities, distributing wised-up charm. Wendell Green is a reporter who knows how to act like one, an old-fashioned print journalist, the Herald’s great ornament.

  At their first encounter, the great ornament struck Jack as a third-rate phony, and he has seen no reason to change his mind since then. He distrusts Wendell Green. In Jack’s opinion, the reporter’s gregarious facade conceals a limitless capacity for treachery. Green is a blowhard posturing in front of a mirror, but a canny blowhard, and such creatures will do anything to gain their own ends.

  After Thornberg Kinderling’s arrest, Green requested an interview. Jack turned him down, as he declined the three invitations that followed his removal to Norway Valley Road. His refusals had not deterred the reporter from staging occasional “accidental” meetings.

  The day after the discovery of Amy St. Pierre’s body, Jack emerged from a Chase Street dry cleaner’s shop with a box of freshly laundered shirts under his arm, began walking toward his car, and felt a hand close on his elbow. He looked back and beheld, contorted into a leer of spurious delight, the florid public mask of Wendell Green.

  —Hey, hey, Holly—. A bad-boy smirk. I mean, Lieutenant Sawyer. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. This is where you have your shirts done? They do a good job?

  —If you leave out the part about the buttons.

  —Good one. You’re a funny guy, Lieutenant. Let me give you a tip. Reliable, on Third Street in La Riviere? They live up to their name. No smashee, no breakee. Want your shirts done right, go to a Chink every time. Sam Lee, try him out, Lieutenant.

  —I’m not a lieutenant anymore, Wendell. Call me Jack or Mr. Sawyer. Call me Hollywood, I don’t care. And now—

  He walked toward his car, and Wendell Green walked beside him.

  —Any chance of a few words, Lieutenant? Sorry, Jack? Chief Gilbertson is a close friend of yours, I know, and this tragic case, little girl, apparently mutilated, terrible things, can you can offer us your expertise, step in, give us the benefit of your thoughts?

  —You want to know my thoughts?

  —Anything you can tell me, buddy.

  Pure, irresponsible malice inspired Jack to extend an arm over Green’s shoulders and say:

  —Wendell, old buddy, check out a guy named Albert Fish. It was back in the twenties.

  —Fisch?

  —F-i-s-h. From an old-line WASP New York family. An amazing case. Look it up.

  Until that moment, Jack had been barely conscious of remember-ing the outrages committed by the bizarre Mr. Albert Fish. Butchers more up-to-date—Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer—had eclipsed Albert Fish, not to mention exotics like Edmund Emil Kemper III, who, after committing eight murders, decapitated his mother, propped her head on his mantel, and used it as a dartboard. (By way of explanation, Edmund III said, “This seemed appropriate.”) Yet the name of Albert Fish, an obscure back number, had surfaced in Jack’s mind, and into Wendell Green’s ready ear he had uttered it.

  What had gotten into him? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

  Whoops, the omelette. Jack grabs a plate from a cabinet, silverware from a drawer, jumps to the stove, turns off the burner, and slides the mess in the pan onto his plate. He sits down and opens the Herald to page 5, where he reads about Milly Kuby’s nearly winning third place at the big statewide spelling bee, but for the substitution of an i for an a in opopanax, the kind of thing that is supposed to be in a local paper. How can you expect a kid to spell opopanax correctly, anyhow?

  Jack takes two or three bites of his omelette before the peculiar taste in his mouth distracts him from the monstrous unfairness done to Milly Kuby. The funny taste is like half-burned garbage. He spits the food out of his mouth and sees a wad of gray mush and raw, half-chewed vegetables. The uneaten part of his breakfast does not look any more appetizing. He did not cook this omelette; he ruined it.

  He drops his he
ad and groans. A shudder like a loose electrical wire travels here and there through his body, throwing off sparks that singe his throat, his lungs, his suddenly palpitating organs. Opopanax, he thinks. I’m falling apart. Right here and now. Forget I said that. The savage opopanax has gripped me in its claws, shaken me with the fearful opopanax of its opopanax arms, and intends to throw me into the turbulent Opopanax River, where I shall meet my opopanax.

  “What is happening to me?” he says aloud. The shrill sound of his voice scares him.

  Opopanax tears sting his opopanax eyes, and he gets groaning up off his opopanax, dumps the swill into the garbage disposal, rinses the plate, and decides that it is damn well time to start making sense around here. Opopanax me no opopanaxes. Everybody makes mistakes. Jack examines the door of the refrigerator, trying to remember if he still has an egg or two in there. Sure he does: a whole bunch of eggs, about nine or ten, had nearly filled the entire row of egg-shaped depressions at the top of the door. He could not have squandered all of them; he wasn’t that out of it.

  Jacks closes his fingers around the edge of the refrigerator door. Entirely unbidden, the vision of lights reflected on a black man’s bald head.

  Not you.

  The person being addressed is not present; the person being addressed is scarcely a person at all.

  No, no, not you.

  The door swings open under the pressure of his fingers; the refrigerator light illuminates the laden shelves. Jack Sawyer regards the egg holders. They appear to be empty. A closer look reveals, nested within the rounded depression at the end of the first row, the presence of a small, egg-shaped object colored a pale and delicate shade of blue: a nostalgic, tender blue, quite possibly the half-remembered blue of a summer sky observed in early afternoon by a small boy lying face-up on the quarter acre of grass located behind a nice residential property on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Whoever owns this residential property, boy, you can put your money on one thing: they’re in the entertainment business.