“Am I too late to make Champion Hero jokes?” That was Bethany, one of Salvatore’s waitresses.
I looked up over my shoulder at her. She smiled her heart-stirring smile. “No, go on. I always love those,” I told her. “They make me laugh and laugh.”
“Now Bethany, you know what they say about hero sex,” said Grassi, pointing at me. “You might want to get in on a good thing here.”
Bethany rolled her eyes. Grassi always took this sort of thing right up to the edge of too far. “What can I get you, tough guy?” she asked me.
“A Sam Adams would be great, Beth, thank you,” I said.
I was still looking up at her as she wrote it down on her pad. She lifted her eyes to me. They were big, green eyes that were deep with tenderness and need. She knew they went right through me. I had told her often enough.
“I’ll get that beer for you,” she said, and went back to the bar.
“So you talk to him?” said Sternhagen. Sternhagen was a nice enough guy. Fifties, lean, steel-haired with a weak sort of face. A good cop once, serving out his time now. “This Frank Bagot. He say anything to you?”
“I recall he complained of his treatment at the hands of our local constabulary,” I said.
“That Dunn,” said Grassi. “He’s a wild man, you let him loose.”
“True that.”
“You didn’t hard-hand a visitor to our county, did you, Champion?” said Sternhagen.
“We had a free and frank exchange of views.”
Bethany set my beer in front of me. I thanked her and took a good pull. It had been a long day: I was ready for it.
“You ask him why he did it?” Sternhagen asked. “Strangle the girl, I mean.”
“He didn’t strangle her. The Nashville boys say he punched her to death. He told us she liked the rough stuff.”
Sternhagen laughed. “He didn’t.”
“That was his reason.”
“There’s criminal logic for you. ‘Gee, if you like a slap on the ass now and then, well, honey, you’re really gonna enjoy being beaten to death.’”
“It was total crap too,” Dunn chimed in. “She was a local girl. People knew her.”
“Yeah, and you’re an expert on that stuff, right, Dunn?” said Grassi. “That teacher you go out with, I heard she’s into all that.”
“Shut up, Grassi,” Sternhagen said. “Jesus, man. Fuck’s wrong with you?”
I was glad he said it so I didn’t have to. Dunn tried to look like he was taking it well, but I could see he wasn’t. He didn’t like jokes about Sally.
Anne Brady chimed in as peacemaker, changing the subject. “Bastard’ll probably get himself a psychiatrist to declare him insane or something,” she said. “Like, yeah, he’s suffering from Evil Dirtbag Syndrome.”
We managed to laugh and move on.
“I remember when I was in uniform,” Sternhagen said. “I got a call once. Guy killed his wife. He says, ‘She drove me crazy.’ I said to him, ‘Well, why didn’t you divorce her?’ He says, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. She never would’ve forgiven me.’”
We laughed, shook our heads.
“Had one like that last year,” said young Deputy Wilder. He was a great big slab of a fellow with a strangely babyish face. “Said he couldn’t get a divorce cause he was Catholic. So he killed her.”
“Yeah, I think the church allows that, don’t they?” Sternhagen laughed.
Grassi smiled wryly into his wineglass. “Way these scumbags think,” he said, and took a swig. Which was rich coming from him, being just this side of a perp himself.
Anyway, the storytelling went on from there and I had another beer. Then after a while, I noticed Bethany trailing out of sight into the corridor in back that led to the restrooms. I pushed away from the table.
“Excuse me a moment,” I said. “Police business.”
“Take a whiz for me while you’re at it,” said Grassi.
I met Bethany in the dark of the hall. She was a good-looking woman in her thirties. She had long blonde hair, in a ponytail tonight. She had a terrific figure which did terrific things to her waitress uniform, a short black skirt and tight white top.
“I’m off at nine,” she said—quickly, softly. “You coming by?” Her breath was warm on my face and her scent, even with the sweat of her working, was delicate and sweet.
“You want to test this hero sex theory, huh?”
Her bright smile flashed but she shook her head. “That Grassi. He’s such garbage.”
I nodded. “Don’t let him get to you.”
“I might let you get to me, though. You gonna come by?”
“I don’t know how I could resist.”
She seemed about to say something else but then she pressed her lips tight to keep it in. “Don’t even think about resisting,” was what she said instead.
She went back out to the main floor. I went into the restroom for a moment or two, then came out and went back to the table to join the others.
It was funny, strange, given what finally happened that night—given the way it all came back to get me like some hand in a horror movie coming up to grab you out of the grave—it was strange that I thought of the past again as I was driving my G8 over to Bethany’s. Maybe it was the fact that it was April—the start of spring—and the air had that April feeling to it that makes you long for something but you don’t know what. It was almost as if the past was in the atmosphere.
Or maybe it was Bethany herself. How good she looked, how sweet she was. That gentleness in her eyes and the way she almost said something to me in the corridor but didn’t. I knew why she didn’t. I thought I knew why. There wasn’t really anything more to say between us. We had had it all out and it was what it was, no more. If she said too much, if she went too far, well, it just caused uneasiness between us.
She had asked me once why—why it was I couldn’t love her. All she wanted was to do for me, she said. She had gotten emotional and asked me if maybe I might not come to love her over time. I don’t recall what I answered. What could I answer? I didn’t want to see her lower herself in that way. I wasn’t going to let her spend her life in some hell of reaching for something in me she just couldn’t touch, that no one touched.
Of course, I asked myself the same thing, privately. Why couldn’t I love her? That cold and watchful incapacity of mine—what was it? But of course I already knew. I didn’t like to think about it, but you always know these sorts of things, deep down.
I couldn’t love Bethany because I was in love already. I was in love with a woman I could never have. You hear people talk about that sort of thing. Usually it’s some guy who carries a torch for someone else’s wife or maybe can’t get over a girl who left him or is even pining away for someone who loved him once but died. And those are all sad stories, right enough. But this was worse than any of them. Well, it was weirder anyway.
I couldn’t love Bethany because I was in love with Samantha. And it was thinking about her—driving the lonely backroads over to Gilead in the night and thinking about Samantha—that drew my mind back into the past again.
4
Flashback: Samantha
I WOKE UP IN the hospital. That was the first thing I knew after the mansion in Westchester, after my meeting with Emory in the secret cellar, with him shrieking “Traitor!” and me falling away into a fog of drugs and smoke and confusion. I opened my eyes and saw the white ceiling and thought: I don’t remember.
I sat up slowly. Gray daylight was at the windows, coming through the slats of the venetian blinds to lie in bars across the fringe of the bedsheet. I drew a breath and turned my head—and there was Monahan. Sheepish and hunched, he looked like a pile of boulders that had tumbled from a mountainside, burying the small blue plastic chair on which he sat.
I dragged my hand over my face and cursed. With my eyes closed, I saw a murky brainscape: swirling, impenetrable red-brown smog with clipped, spastic moments of memory and motion flashing out of it briefly,
then dying away like the light from a falling flare.
“The girl . . .” I said. “The little girl.”
Monahan nodded glumly and spoke on a long sigh. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. “She’s okay. She’ll be okay. Docs say no one touched her. They were saving her for you.”
I pressed my lips together and didn’t answer for a moment. You have to savor these things, these little victories. “What about me?” I said then. I patted myself. My chest, my belly. “Was I shot or something? What am I doing here?”
“No,” said Monahan. “You just went down.” He targeted me with his close-set eyes so I knew there was more he wasn’t saying. The doctors must have found the Z in my bloodstream. Of course they had.
I rolled my legs over the side of the bed. “Who is she? The girl.”
“We don’t know. She doesn’t know. No one seems to have reported her missing. She has a name. Eva. That’s it. She says she used to live in a place with other children, then she went to live with the Fat Woman.”
“The Fat Woman.” I felt a choking surge of rage as more of the night came back to me. “She remember anything about her?”
Monahan blinked rapidly. With that schoolboy face of his, he looked like a baffled ten-year-old. “She said the Fat Woman told her to call her Aunt Jane.”
“Aunt Jane!”
“I asked the kid what Aunt Jane looked like. She said Aunt Jane had no face.”
“Oh, for Christ . . . What the hell is this, Monahan?”
Monahan turned one hand in his lap: a helpless gesture.
“Emory’s going to talk to us,” I said. “Lawyered-up or not. He and I are going to have a private conversation.”
“Not unless you’re planning a road trip to hell.”
“What—he’s dead?”
“It was an understandable reaction to the fact that you put five slugs in him.”
My mouth opened. I meant to say something but only a slow breath came out. I tried to see the scene through the fog: Emory screaming . . . me with the gun . . . “Did I?” I murmured finally.
“Three in his chest, two in his head,” Monahan said.
“I don’t remember.”
Monahan lifted his chin and did his best to give me a meaningful look. “The fool drew down on you, bro,” he told me. “Tried to put a .357 in you with an 850.”
I held his eyes only a moment, then looked down at the gray and white tiles of the floor. I saw flashes in my mind of Emory—only flashes. He had been holding a red plastic container when I first came in. Then later, his hands were empty. I tried to remember him with a gun but I couldn’t. Certainly not a CIA 850. That was a classic throwaway. That’s what Monahan was telling me, see, with that meaningful look of his. He—or someone—had planted the gun on the dead man after I’d blown him away in cold blood.
“I don’t remember,” I said again. I felt it, though. I felt sick inside. The drugs . . . “Too bad. He could’ve told us more.”
“Yeah, he could’ve.”
I stood up. I was wearing one of those thin hospital gowns they give you, my ass hanging out the back. I yanked the gown off, tossed it aside. There was a blond-wood bureau against one wall. I pulled open the drawers until I found my clothes. I started to get dressed.
Monahan could see how I felt, I guess. “He deserved to die. He deserved worse.”
“It’s true,” I said. “He did.”
“No, you don’t even know yet. You were right about him.”
I buckled my belt. “Was I? What do you mean?”
“We found a graveyard in the woods behind the house.”
I had my shirt halfway on. I stared at him.
“Eight children so far,” Monahan said. “They laid off digging last night but they’ll be back at it this morning. They’re sure to find more.”
I went to the window, buttoning my shirt. I felt strange. Heavy and strange and distant. Suddenly I remembered the photographs I saw Emory burning in the trash can. My God, my God, I thought, the things people do to one another.
I looked out through the slats of the blinds. We were on the second story. There was a courtyard below. Grass and paths and benches and a couple of small plane trees, leafless in the winter cold. No one was out there. Nothing was moving but a gray-brown squirrel. I pulled the string of the blinds and lifted them. I knew somehow the dead boy would be waiting—and there he was, small and frail and shivering beneath the naked branches of a tree. Gazing up at me, expressionless, with his large dark eyes.
“Were they girls and boys both?” I asked Monahan. “The bodies they found. Were they both girls and boys?”
“Yeah, both.”
“Any IDs.”
“We’re working on it.”
Alexander, I thought. One of the dead children would be named Alexander.
“If you get any hits let me know,” I said over my shoulder—and when I looked out the window again, the courtyard below was empty. The emptiness had a feeling of finality to it.
I did not think I would see the ghost again.
After a while, Monahan left. I needed a doctor to give me release papers so I badgered the nurses until they sent one. He was a small, serious-looking Asian man named Lee. He held a clipboard in his hand. He had a round face and big glasses. He had no expression on his face, none whatsoever.
“You have any idea what it was you were taking?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “The dealer called it Z.”
“Zattera,” said Dr. Lee. “It was developed as an antianxiety medication but the FDA banned its ass because it makes you nutty as a brainless ape.” He said this deadpan. It was kind of comical. “Hallucinations, hyperaggression. Stuff’s not good for you, Detective.”
“No kidding.”
“Tell you what’s even worse: going off it cold. It’ll make you nuttier than the drug, plus you’ll puke your guts out. Taper off, say over the course of two weeks or so.”
“Right,” I said. But I was lying. I was never taking that crap again. Whatever cold turkey was like, I would get through it and be done.
“Have any good hallucinations?” asked Dr. Lee.
“I saw a ghost. A dead kid. He followed me around.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“I don’t recommend it.”
“Wait till you try to quit. You’ll see things that look so real that reality will pale by comparison.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Like I said: Taper off it. Slow.”
“Right.”
“Right.” He studied his clipboard, expressionless. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep your mouth shut about this.”
“The drug?”
“I’ll lose my license if it comes out I’m covering for you.”
“Are you covering for me?”
“You killed a man in cold blood while doped out of your mind, Detective.”
“Yeah. So why are you covering for me?”
“Because you couldn’t have killed that son of a bitch dead enough to suit me.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“Also your friend Monahan asked me to and I’m afraid he’ll beat me up.”
“He is big, isn’t he?”
Dr. Lee nodded. He signed a page on his clipboard, tore it off, and handed it to me. “Give that to the front desk and they’ll set you free to do more damage to yourself and others.”
Something happened then. Just a small thing. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it would come back to me. It was what I guess you’d call a sort of blackout. When I went to leave the hospital, I remembered walking past the reception desk, walking toward the doors. Then the next thing I knew, I was on the train headed back to the city. I didn’t know how I got to the train station. Walked, I guess. It wasn’t far. I didn’t know how much time had passed. Maybe half an hour. It was gone completely.
I shrugged it off. Just the drug, I figured.
Like I said, I didn’t think much about it at the time. r />
I made my way back to my apartment, the old place in Queens. I was on administrative leave until a grand jury could decide about the shooting. I wasn’t worried about that, though. The “House of Evil” was a big news story. There were pictures all over TV and the Internet. Child-sized corpses being carried in body bags from their forest graves. Fuzzy surveillance shots of the “Mystery Woman”—the Fat Woman—Aunt Jane. Long investigative portraits of Martin Emory, a Wall Street player and a serial killer who made a profit selling his victims to johns before he tortured them to death.
There was not a grand jury anywhere on the planet that was going to charge me with wrongdoing for having blown him away.
My only concern was to get that drug out of my system. I could still feel it working in me. It came in waves of mist and distortion. Weird little fits of distance. I kept catching glimpses of movements at the corners of my eyes. I tried not to turn toward them. I didn’t want to see whatever hallucination was standing there.
My place was on a residential street off the main boulevard. A gray two-story clapboard house with white trim around the windows. I lived on the second floor. The landlord lived below. Ed Morris, his name was. He was a cranky but basically decent old gramps who owned a couple of the houses on the street and spent his time complaining about the tenants.
I had a private entrance. A flight of white steps on the house’s side. I remember climbing the stairs heavily with a bag of groceries under one arm. I remember my apartment door swinging in. I remember stepping out of the gray day into a bleak and irascible darkness. The blinds in the apartment hadn’t been opened for days. Sandwich wrappers and beer cans were still on the low coffee table. I’d never gotten around to fully furnishing the place and it looked particularly empty and uninviting now, like a cheap motel room at the end of a long day’s ride. Nothing there but a TV and a sofa and the coffee table.