The Burning Soul

  ‘I can’t do that, Martin. You know I can’t.’ Gently, he laid a hand above Dempsey’s heart and tapped his finger in time to its beats. ‘And you can’t do it either. If you did, I’d make sure that I lived long enough to kill you myself. We’re not rats, Martin. Never that.’

  Dempsey nodded sadly.

  ‘You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m frightened, I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t have to be frightened, Martin. We might get out of this yet. And if we don’t, well, I’ll be there with you at the end. You know that, don’t you?’

  His hand moved from Dempsey’s breast to the back of his neck, his big palm cupping it fondly. There was no threat to it. It was a moment of contact between a father and a beloved, if sometimes troublesome, son, the older man letting the younger understand that he would guide him on the right path. Dempsey knew Tommy well, had learned to judge his moods and his silences, the cadences of his sentences and the meaning hidden in the pauses in his speech. He closed his eyes and smelled Tommy’s breath on his face, and the sweat from the journey, and the smoke on his hair and his clothes. Dempsey thought of his own father. How long had it been since he’d seen him: six, seven years? They had never been close, and his mother’s death had not brought them any closer. His father now lived somewhere outside Phoenix, in a house that he had bought with his second wife’s insurance money. The old man had outlived two of his women, and Dempsey believed that he might outlive one or two more. He was a hard man, but he drew women to him, drew them to him and then ground them down. Dempsey had never been to Phoenix. He wondered if he would ever make it now.

  Tommy’s hand lifted. He patted Dempsey on the back.

  ‘Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.’

  ‘I was going to order a pizza. I haven’t eaten since morning. You want something?’

  ‘No, I’m good.’

  ‘You should eat, Tommy. It’s not good for you to be starving yourself. You’ll need your strength. We’ll need your strength.’

  ‘You’re right, Martin. Let me know when it comes. Maybe I’ll grab a slice of yours.’

  They walked back toward the motel. Ryan stood at the open door of his room. When he saw them coming, he went inside. Dempsey noticed how still the night was, how quiet. Their voices had probably carried back to Ryan. He was always curious, was Ryan. He was always listening. Who had said that to Dempsey once?

  It came to him: Joey Tuna. Old Joey, who was trusted by everyone, or was said to be trusted by everyone, but trusted no one. Mr. Indispensable. Everybody’s friend. He was gone now, but he’d have his revenge, even from beyond the grave. Men would kill them in his name, mourning him publicly even as they expressed private relief at his passing, because a man who is everybody’s friend really has no friends at all.

  ‘How long will we stay here, Tommy?’ Dempsey asked as the two men parted.

  ‘Not long,’ said Tommy. ‘We’ll wait, and then we’ll move.’

  ‘What are we waiting for?’

  ‘A call. Just a call.’

  Tommy went into his room, closing the door behind him, and Dempsey joined Ryan. He was now lying on one of the beds, flicking through the channels on the TV. The room was cleaner than Dempsey had expected. Everything looked worn, but he’d stayed in chain-hotel rooms that were worse. It was as if the office and the woman were a test, and the room the reward for passing it successfully, for not being taken in by appearances.

  Ryan didn’t speak. Dempsey thought he might have been sulking.

  ‘I’m ordering,’ said Dempsey. ‘You hungry?’

  Ryan shook his head. He’d found the same sitcom that the woman in the office had been watching. These shows were on some kind of perpetual loop, a domestic hell soundtracked by canned laughter. Dempsey had no time for any of them.

  The phone in the room allowed local calls only, free of charge. Dempsey ordered a sixteen-inch margarita pizza, convinced that, once the food came, Ryan and Tommy would eat their share. But when it arrived Ryan was already asleep, and Tommy’s room was dark. Dempsey knocked softly at the door, but there was no reply. He ate alone, the sitcom playing silently on the TV, lost in the pointlessness of it all. When he had eaten his fill, he slipped from the room and walked to the nearby bar. It was not dissimilar to the motel: unprepossessing from the outside but simple and cozy within. There was a pool table to the right of the door, and a CD jukebox to the left was playing Waiting for Columbus. All the tables were unoccupied, but three men and a woman were seated at the bar. The woman had a hand on the thighs of the men at either side of her, and the third man’s knee was held between her legs. She smiled at Dempsey as he entered, as if inviting him to find a way to join in, and he smiled back before taking a seat as far away from the group as possible, with a pillar blocking their view of him. The bartender told him that he would be closing up soon, but nobody seemed in any hurry to get going, and the lovers had an assortment of liquor and beer racked up, the bottles still fresh from the cooler.

  ‘Just one for the road,’ he said. He put a ten and a five on the bar, ordered a boilermaker, and told the bartender to keep the change for his trouble. When the bartender went to the well, Dempsey stopped him and told him to make it with Jack’s from the call.

  ‘Don’t make much difference if you’re dropping it in a beer,’ said the bartender.

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘It’s your money.’

  ‘Sorry that it’s coming out of your tip.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s my bar.’

  He was in his sixties. Twin scars ran the length of both arms from the elbows to the wrists. He saw Dempsey looking at them and said, ‘Motorcycle.’

  ‘I figured unsuccessful suicide, but I’ll buy the bike story.’

  The bartender chuckled. It sounded like mud bubbling up from a hot pool.

  ‘You staying at the motel?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You meet Brenda?’

  The question brought a burst of laughter from the group at the other end of the bar.

  ‘I don’t know. What does she look like?’

  ‘Old gal in the office. Glasses. Big, big woman.’

  ‘Yeah, I met her. She said you had pickles, but that I shouldn’t eat them.’

  This brought more chuckles from the bartender, and more gales of laughter from the lovers.

  ‘Ayuh, pickles,’ said the bartender, and wiped a tear of mirth from his eyes. ‘That Brenda.’

  With that, he left Dempsey to his drink. Dempsey couldn’t see any pickles. It troubled him only slightly. ‘Old Folks Boogie’ was followed by ‘Time Loves a Hero.’ The bartender talked to the group at the bar. They ordered more drinks, and he served them, even though they had plenty still left from the earlier rounds, his warning about the imminence of closure seemingly forgotten. They sent up another boilermaker to Dempsey, and he made the obligatory polite conversation with them by stretching his head around the pillar, but they could tell that he wanted to be left to himself, and they were having too good a time to resent him for it. ‘Mercenary Territory’ came on, and Lowell George sang about being qualmless and sinking, and the second boilermaker tasted bitter to Dempsey, although he had seen the shot being poured and knew that there was nothing wrong with it. He went to the restroom. When he came back, Ryan was standing at the bar. He was tense, and that tension had communicated itself to the rest of those present, because the level of conversation had dropped, and the woman was no longer as intimate with the men as she had been. Dempsey could see the shape of the gun beneath Ryan’s shirt. He didn’t know if the others had noticed it. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Dempsey. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’ He called to the bartender. ‘We good for one more for my friend?’

  The bartender glanced pointedly at his watch but didn’t refuse the order. Ryan pulled up a stool, but he didn’t look at Dempsey. He just stared straight ahead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Ryan.


  ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m having a drink.’

  ‘I woke up and you weren’t there.’

  ‘What are we, married?’

  He sipped his drink, trying to look unconcerned, but his hand trembled.

  ‘You take your phones with you?’

  ‘No, I left them in the room. What’s it to you?’

  The bartender arrived with another boilermaker, and Dempsey put a fifty on the bar and told him to buy everyone a round, and one for himself. The bartender just took the payment for Ryan’s drink and returned Dempsey’s change.

  ‘I’m closing the register now,’ he said.

  ‘We won’t be here long,’ said Dempsey.

  ‘Sometimes the cops come by,’ said the bartender, and Dempsey knew that he had seen Ryan’s gun.

  ‘I understand,’ said Dempsey. ‘Thanks for letting us know.’

  The bartender drifted away.

  Ryan didn’t mix the shot but drank it separately from the beer.

  ‘Did you use the phone here?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? What kind of question is that?’

  Ryan’s back was ramrod straight. He still hadn’t looked at Dempsey.

  ‘I asked you a question. Did you use the phone?’

  ‘No, I didn’t use the phone. You want to check with the bartender? Why don’t you dust it for fingerprints? Jesus, Frankie, what’s the problem?’

  Some of the pressure eased from Ryan, and Dempsey realized that Ryan wasn’t angry, he was scared. Dempsey could feel him trembling as he laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘I thought you’d run out on me,’ said Ryan. ‘I thought you’d sold us out.’

  ‘What? How could you think that? I’ve never given you cause to think that way.’

  ‘I heard you talking to Tommy. I didn’t hear all of it, just some of it. You were talking about a rat, and how Joey Tuna didn’t like having me around. It was like you didn’t trust me, like you didn’t think I was sound.’

  How had their conversation carried so far? Dempsey wondered. How much had Ryan heard in recent times?

  ‘I know you’re sound, Frankie. You’ve always been a stand-up guy. I know we’ve had our differences, but I’ve never doubted you.’

  ‘I wasn’t the rat, Martin. I swear it.’

  ‘I never believed you were. Look, I don’t even know if there was a rat. I was just thinking out loud.’

  Now Ryan turned to him. He was like a child, thought Dempsey, a child with a gun who dreamed of killing other children.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Martin, without you getting angry?’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  ‘And you can’t take it personal, and you can’t lie.’

  ‘I promise you, I won’t.’

  ‘Were you the one who talked to Oweny and Joey Tuna?’

  The enormity of the question nearly floored Dempsey. He couldn’t even begin to conceive of how Ryan had found the balls to ask it. Ryan was asking him if he had ratted them out to Oweny and Joey. And if he said ‘Yes’, what then? Was Ryan going to pull out a gun and kill him? What was the kid thinking?

  But Dempsey knew what Ryan was thinking. He knew because he was under the same pressures, and had made the same connections. By killing Joey, Tommy had killed them all. None of them would be allowed to walk away if they stuck together, but one of them might live a little longer if he sold them out to Oweny and the rest. All it would take was a phone call, and when the time came, and the motel doors were kicked in, and the guns roared and the blood flowed, they might remember that you were the guy who gave up Tommy Morris, and maybe they would stick to the deal they had promised you.

  Maybe.

  ‘No, Frankie, I never talked to them. My mother’s gone, but I swear it on my father’s life, and on my own. I never gave them anything.’

  Ryan looked deep into his eyes, then turned away again.

  ‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘I’d know if you were lying.’

  Dempsey realized that he had been holding his glass too tightly, ready to use it on Ryan if it seemed that his fears were about to get the better of him.

  ‘I had to ask,’ said Ryan. Even though he thought Dempsey was an animal, Ryan knew that he represented the best hope of survival for Tommy and himself, because the men who were coming for them would be worse even than Dempsey. What mattered was only that Dempsey was sound.

  ‘Finish your drink,’ said Dempsey, and the two men sat together in silence until the lights dimmed, and the bar emptied, and the bartender disappeared, and there was only themselves and Lowell George singing ‘Willin’,’ all of them out on the road late, all of them waiting for a sign to move on.

  The traffic was sparse when at last they left the bar. They paid it no heed, and so neither of them noticed the car parked in the shadows across the street, or the occupants of the vehicle: a couple in their twenties, the horse-faced woman in the driver’s seat no longer frightened and weeping as she had seemed in the Wanderer, her male companion beside her dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, not a single hair on his head out of place, each of them expressionlessly watching the progress of the two men.

  23

  Randall woke again to the silence of the house. He was worried. He didn’t understand. The girl had still not returned. Where was she? He listened, half expecting to hear the sound of the television from downstairs. She wasn’t supposed to watch it after ten p.m., but sometimes she did, and unless he was in a bad mood he would not fight her over it. But there was no noise, only the sound of his own breathing in the room.

  There were times when he would play music late at night: Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Chopin. He had a collection of vinyl, and a good record player. He believed that classical music in particular sounded better on vinyl: warmer, more human. He had always wanted to be a pianist, but the handful of lessons he had taken since his release had revealed to him his singular lack of talent and application. He could have persisted, he supposed, but to what end? He could never approach even an iota of the genius of Ashkenazy or Zimerman, the great interpreter of Chopin, better even than Rubinstein. So he contented himself with admiring the greatness of others, and the girl was permitted to listen too, if she chose. Mostly, though, she tended to slip away. She resented his indulgences, resented anything that gave him peace or pleasure. Yet he forgave her her moods, because she was at once so young and so old.

  Where was she? He wanted to know. This was not how it was supposed to end between them.

  The girl had first appeared to him as he sat in one of the holding cells at the station house. They had isolated him from the other prisoners for his own security. The next day he was to be transported to juvie, and would remain there until his trial. Bail would not be applied for. The nature of the crime forbade it, but it was felt that the boys would probably be safer away from their homes anyway. Although Selina Day’s killers had not been identified, even the birds in the trees called their names. One of Selina’s aunts was interviewed on television, and said that she could find no forgiveness in her heart for those who had taken her niece from the world, children though they were themselves. When asked if she spoke for all of Selina’s family, she replied tartly that she spoke for ‘all good people.’

  Selina’s mother made no comment on the apprehension of her daughter’s killers. It would not bring her little girl back, and the ages of the boys involved had only added to the horror of what had been done. The media was discouraged from approaching her as the black community closed protectively around the Day family, and thus there were no cameras to witness a woman of middle age approach the Day house and knock on the door; nor were there microphones to pick up her words as she introduced herself as the mother of William Lagenheimer. No reporter waited, pen in hand, to record his impressions of the scene as Selina Day’s mother reached out to the older woman and slowly, softly embraced her, children now lost to both, the pair united in grief.

  After the initial shock
of discovery and confession, the boy had accepted his situation with equanimity, even stoicism. Later, the psychologists and the social workers would express surprise at that fact, and would make assumptions about his character based on it, but they were wrong in all that they thought. Just as he would later feel no sadness at coming to terms with his limitations as a pianist, and would refuse to rail at the Fates for not gifting him the talents that he desired, so too he found a strength within himself following the girl’s death. Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt. As a boy, he would not have been able to couch his view in those terms, yet he had instinctively understood it to be true. If he was sorry for what they had done to the girl, it was only because of all that had resulted from it.

  The cell was very warm, and the bed was hard. A drunk nearby had shouted at him until one of the policemen told him to shut up. The policeman had then checked on the boy. They had taken away his shoelaces and his belt. He didn’t know why, not then. The policeman asked the boy if he was okay, and he replied that, yes, he was. He requested some water, and it was brought to him in a paper cup. After that he was left alone, and the cells stayed quiet.

  He had been trying to sleep, his head turned to the wall, when he smelled her. He knew it was she because something of her odor was still with him. He’d tried washing it from his hands, but it had lingered: cheap drugstore perfume, sickly and cloying. It had prevented him from eating the prison food, because that smelled of her too. With her dying, she had polluted him.

  Now the smell was stronger, more pungent, and he felt a hand upon his back, pushing at him, demanding his attention. He didn’t want to look, though. To look would be to acknowledge the reality of her presence, to give her power over him, and he didn’t want that, so he closed his eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep, hoping she would go away.

  But she didn’t. Instead, her fingers probed at him. She touched his eyes, and his ears, then stroked his cheek before forcing his lips apart. He tried to keep his teeth together, but his gorge was rising and he gagged. Now her hand was deep in his mouth, her fingertips on his tongue. He bit down on them, but the grip on his tongue grew stronger, and he was choking on his own vomit and the sweet-sour stink of her. With one hand buried in his hair, and the other holding his tongue, she made him face her, made him look upon what they had wrought.