Dreamsongs. Volume II

  He almost expected Jonathan to say, calmly, “I own the police,” but there was only silence and static on the line, then a sigh. “I realize you’re upset about Joan—”

  “Shut the fuck up about Joanie,” Willie interrupted. “You got no right to say jack shit about her; I know how you felt about her. You listen up good, Harmon, if it turns out that you or that twisted kid of yours had anything to do with what happened, I’m going to come up to Blackstone one night and kill you myself, see if I don’t. She was a good kid, she…she…” Suddenly, for the first time since it had happened, his mind was full of her—her face, her laugh, the smell of her when she was hot and bothered, the graceful way her muscles moved when she ran beside him, the noises she made when their bodies joined together. They all came back to him, and Willie felt tears on his face. There was a tightness in his chest as if iron bands were closing around his lungs. Jonathan was saying something, but Willie slammed down the receiver without bothering to listen, then pulled the jack. His water was boiling merrily away on the hotplate. He fumbled in his pocket and gave himself a good belt of his inhaler, then stuck his head in the steam until he could breathe again. The tears dried up, but not the pain.

  Afterwards he thought about the things he’d said, the threats he made, and he got so shaky that he went back downstairs to double-check all his locks.

  COURIER SQUARE WAS FAR GONE IN DECAY. THE BIG DEPARTMENT stores had moved to suburban malls, the grandiose old movie palaces had been chopped up into multi-screens or given over to porno, once-fashionable storefronts now housed palm readers and adult bookstores. If Randi had really wanted a seedy little office in the bad part of town, she could find one on Courier Square. What little vitality the Square had left came from the newspaper.

  The Courier Building was a legacy of another time, when downtown was still the heart of the city and the newspaper its soul. Old Douglas Harmon, who’d liked to tell anyone who’d listen that he was cut from the same cloth as Hearst and Pulitzer, had always viewed journalism as something akin to a religious vocation, and the “gothic deco” edifice he built to house his newspaper looked like the result of some unfortunate mating between the Chrysler Building and some especially grotesque cathedral. Five decades of smog had blackened its granite facade and acid rain had eaten away at the wolf’s head gargoyles that snarled down from its walls, but you could still set your watch by the monstrous old presses in the basement and a Harmon still looked down on the city from the publisher’s office high atop the Iron Spire. It gave a certain sense of continuity to the Square, and the city.

  The black marble floors in the lobby were slick and wet when Randi came in out of the rain, wearing a Burberry raincoat a couple sizes too big for her, a souvenir of her final fight with her ex-husband. She’d paid for it, so she was damn well going to wear it. A security guard sat behind the big horseshoe-shaped reception desk, beneath a wall of clocks that once had given the time all over the world. Most were broken now, hands frozen into a chronological cacophony. The lobby was a gloomy place on a dark afternoon like this, full of drafts as cold as the guard’s face. Randi took off her hat, shook out her hair, and gave him a nice smile. “I’m here to see Barry Schumacher.”

  “Editorial. Third floor.” The guard barely gave her a glance before he went back to the bondage magazine spread across his lap. Randi grimaced and walked past, heels clicking against the marble.

  The elevator was an open grillwork of black iron; it rattled and shook and took forever to deliver her to the city room on the third floor. She found Schumacher alone at his desk, smoking and staring out his window at the rain-slick streets. “Look at that,” he said when Randi came up behind him. A streetwalker in a leather miniskirt was standing under the darkened marquee of the Castle. The rain had soaked her thin white blouse and plastered it to her breasts. “She might as well be topless,” Barry said. “Right in front of the Castle too. First theater in the state to show Gone with the Wind, you know that? All the big movies used to open there.” He grimaced, swung his chair around, ground out his cigarette. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

  “I cried when Bambi’s mother died,” Randi said.

  “In the Castle?”

  She nodded. “My father took me, but he didn’t cry. I only saw him cry once, but that was later, much later, and it wasn’t a movie that did it.”

  “Frank was a good man,” Schumacher said dutifully. He was pushing retirement age, overweight and balding, but he still dressed impeccably, and Randi remembered a young dandy of a reporter who’d been quite a rake in his day. He’d been a regular in her father’s Wednesday night poker game for years. He used to pretend that she was his girlfriend, that he was waiting for her to grow up so they could get married. It always made her giggle. But that had been a different Barry Schumacher; this one looked as if he hadn’t laughed since Kennedy was president. “So what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “You can tell me everything that got left out of the story on that Parkway murder,” she said. She sat down across from him.

  Barry hardly reacted. She hadn’t seen him much since her father died; each time she did, he seemed grayer and more exhausted, like a man who’d been bled dry of passion, laughter, anger, everything. “What makes you think anything was left out?”

  “My father was a cop, remember? I know how this city works. Sometimes the cops ask you to leave something out.”

  “They ask,” Barry agreed. “Them asking and us doing, that’s two different things. Once in a while we’ll omit a key piece of evidence, to help them weed out fake confessions. You know the routine.” He paused to light another cigarette.

  “How about this time?”

  Barry shrugged. “Hell of a thing. Ugly. But we printed it, didn’t we?”

  “Your story said the victim was mutilated. What does that mean, exactly?”

  “We got a dictionary over by the copy editors’ desk, you want to look it up.”

  “I don’t want to look it up,” Randi said, a little too sharply. Barry was being an asshole; she hadn’t expected that. “I know what the word means.”

  “So you are saying we should have printed all the juicy details?” Barry leaned back, took a long drag on his cigarette. “You know what Jack the Ripper did to his last victim? Among other things, he cut off her breasts. Sliced them up neat as you please, like he was carving white meat off a turkey, and piled the slices on top of each other, beside the bed. He was very tidy, put the nipples on top and everything.” He exhaled smoke. “Is that the sort of detail you want? You know how many kids read the Courier every day?”

  “I don’t care what you print in the Courier,” Randi said. “I just want to know the truth. Am I supposed to infer that Joan Sorenson’s breasts were cut off?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Schumacher said.

  “No. You didn’t say much of anything. Was she killed by some kind of animal?”

  That did draw a reaction. Schumacher looked up, his eyes met hers, and for a moment she saw a hint of the friend he had been in those tired eyes behind their wire-rim glasses. “An animal?” he said softly. “Is that what you think? This isn’t about Joan Sorenson at all, is it? This is about your father.” Barry got up and came around his desk. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Randi, honey, let go of it. I loved Frank too, but he’s dead, he’s been dead for…hell, it’s almost twenty years now. The coroner said he got killed by some kind of rabid dog, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “There was no trace of rabies, you know that as well as I do. My father emptied his gun. What kind of rabid dog takes six shots from a police .38 and keeps on coming, huh?”

  “Maybe he missed,” Barry said.

  “He didn’t miss!” Randi said sharply. She turned away from him. “We couldn’t even have an open casket, too much of the body had been…” Even now, it was hard to say without gagging, but she was a big girl now and she forced it out. “…eaten,” she finished softly. “No animal was ever foun
d.”

  “Frank must have put some bullets in it, and after it killed him the damned thing crawled off somewhere and died,” Barry said. His voice was not unkind. He turned her around to face him again. “Maybe that’s how it was and maybe not. It was a hell of a thing, but it happened eighteen years ago, honey, and it’s got nothing to do with Joan Sorenson.”

  “Then tell me what happened to her,” Randi said.

  “Look, I’m not supposed to…” He hesitated, and the tip of his tongue flicked nervously across his lips. “It was a knife,” he said softly. “She was killed with a knife, it’s all in the police report, just some psycho with a sharp knife.” He sat down on the edge of his desk, and his voice took on its familiar cynicism again. “Some weirdo seen too many of those damn sick holiday movies, you know the sort, Halloween, Friday the 13th, they got one for every holiday.”

  “All right.” She could tell from his tone that she wouldn’t be getting any more out of him. “Thanks.”

  He nodded, not looking at her. “I don’t know where these rumors come from. All we need, folks thinking there’s some kind of wild animal running around, killing people.” He patted her shoulder. “Don’t be such a stranger, you hear? Come by for dinner some night. Adele is always asking about you.”

  “Give her my best.” She paused at the door. “Barry.” He looked up, forced a smile. “When they found the body, there wasn’t anything missing?”

  He hesitated briefly. “No,” he said.

  Barry had always been the big loser at her father’s poker games. He wasn’t a bad player, she recalled her father saying, but his eyes gave him away when he tried to bluff…like they gave him away right now.

  Barry Schumacher was lying.

  THE DOORBELL WAS BROKEN, SO HE HAD TO KNOCK. NO ONE ANSWERED, but Willie didn’t buy that for a minute. “I know you’re there, Mrs. Juddiker,” he shouted through the window. “I could hear the TV a block off. You turned it off when you saw me coming up the walk. Gimme a break, okay?” He knocked again. “Open up, I’m not going away.”

  Inside, a child started to say something, and was quickly shushed. Willie sighed. He hated this. Why did they always put him through this? He took out a credit card, opened the door, and stepped into a darkened living room, half-expecting a scream. Instead he got shocked silence.

  They were gaping at him, the woman and two kids. The shades had been pulled down and the curtains drawn. The woman wore a white terry cloth robe, and she looked even younger than she’d sounded on the phone. “You can’t just walk in here,” she said.

  “I just did,” Willie said. When he shut the door, the room was awfully dark. It made him nervous. “Mind if I put on a light?” She didn’t say anything, so he did. The furniture was all ratty Salvation Army stuff, except for the gigantic big-screen projection TV in the far corner of the room. The oldest child, a little girl who looked about four, stood in front of it protectively. Willie smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.

  He turned back to her mother. She looked maybe twenty, maybe younger, dark, maybe ten pounds overweight but still pretty. She had a spray of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Get yourself a chain for the door and use it,” Willie told her. “And don’t try the no-one’s-home game on us hounds of hell, okay?” He sat down in a black vinyl recliner held together by electrical tape. “I’d love a drink. Coke, juice, milk, anything, it’s been one of those days.” No one moved, no one spoke. “Aw, come on,” Willie said, “cut it out. I’m not going to make you sell the kids for medical experiments, I just want to talk about the money you owe, okay?”

  “You’re going to take the television,” the mother said.

  Willie glanced at the monstrosity and shuddered. “It’s a year old and it weighs a million pounds. How’m I going to move something like that, with my bad back? I’ve got asthma too.” He took the inhaler out of his pocket, showed it to her. “You want to kill me, making me take the damned TV would do the trick.”

  That seemed to help a little. “Bobby, get him a can of soda,” the mother said. The boy ran off. She held the front of her robe closed as she sat down on the couch, and Willie could see that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. He wondered if she had freckles on her breasts too; sometimes they did. “I told you on the phone, we don’t have no money. My husband run off. He was out of work anyway, ever since the pack shut down.”

  “I know,” Willie said. The pack was short for meatpacking plant, which is what everyone liked to call the south side slaughterhouse that had been the city’s largest employer until it shut its doors two years back. Willie took a notepad out of his pocket, flipped a few pages. “Okay, you bought the thing on time, made two payments, then moved, left no forwarding address. You still owe two thousand eight hundred sixteen dollars. And thirty-one cents. We’ll forget the interest and late charges.” Bobby returned and handed him a can of Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer. Willie repressed a shudder and cracked the pop-top.

  “Go play in the backyard,” she said to the children. “Us grown-ups have to talk.” She didn’t sound very grown-up after they had left, however; Willie was half-afraid she was going to cry. He hated it when they cried. “It was Ed bought the set,” she said, her voice trembling. “It wasn’t his fault. The card came in the mail.”

  Willie knew that tune. A credit card comes in the mail, so the next day you run right out and buy the biggest item you can find. “Look, I can see you got plenty of troubles. You tell me where to find Ed, and I’ll get the money out of him.”

  She laughed bitterly. “You don’t know Ed. He used to lug around those big sides of beef at the pack, you ought to see the arms on him. You go bother him and he’ll just rip your face off and shove it up your asshole, mister.”

  “What a lovely turn of phrase,” Willie said. “I can’t wait to make his acquaintance.”

  “You won’t tell him it was me that told you where to find him?” she asked nervously.

  “Scout’s honor,” Willie said. He raised his right hand in a gesture that he thought was vaguely Boy Scoutish, although the can of Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer spoiled the effect a little.

  “Were you a Scout?” she asked.

  “No,” he admitted. “But there was one troop that used to beat me up regularly when I was young.”

  That actually got a smile out of her. “It’s your funeral. He’s living with some slut now, I don’t know where. But weekends he tends bar down at Squeaky’s.”

  “I know the place.”

  “It’s not real work,” she added thoughtfully. “He don’t report it or nothing. That way he still gets the unemployment. You think he ever sends anything over for the kids? No way!”

  “How much you figure he owes you?” Willie said.

  “Plenty,” she said.

  Willie got up. “Look, none of my business, but it is my business, if you know what I mean. You want, after I’ve talked to Ed about this television, I’ll see what I can collect for you. Strictly professional, I mean, I’ll take a little cut off the top, give the rest to you. It may not be much, but a little bit is better than nothing, right?”

  She stared at him, astonished. “You’d do that?”

  “Shit, yeah. Why not?” He took out his wallet, found a twenty. “Here,” he said. “An advance payment. Ed will pay me back.” She looked at him incredulously, but did not refuse the bill. Willie fumbled in the pocket of his coat. “I want you to meet someone,” he said. He always carried a few cheap pairs of scissors in the pocket of his coat. He found one and put it in her hand. “Here, this is Mr. Scissors. From now on, he’s your best friend.”

  She looked at him like he’d gone insane.

  “Introduce Mr. Scissors to the next credit card that comes in the mail,” Willie told her, “and then you won’t have to deal with assholes like me.”

  He was opening the door when she caught up to him. “Hey, what did you say your name was?”

  “Willie,” he told her.

  “I’m Betsy.” She le
aned forward to kiss him on the cheek, and the white robe opened just enough to give him a quick peek at her small breasts. Her chest was lightly freckled, her nipples wide and brown. She closed the robe tight again as she stepped back. “You’re no asshole, Willie,” she said as she closed the door.

  He went down the walk feeling almost human, better than he’d felt since Joanie’s death. His Caddy was waiting at the curb, the ragtop up to keep out the off-again on-again rain that had been following him around the city all morning. Willie got in and started her, then glanced into the rearview mirror just as the man in the back seat sat up.

  The eyes in the mirror were pale blue. Sometimes, after the spring runoff was over and the river had settled back between its banks, you could find stagnant pools along the shore, backwaters cut off from the flow, foul-smelling places, still and cold, and you wondered how deep they were and whether there was anything living down there in that darkness. Those were the kind of eyes he had, deep-set in a dark, hollow-cheeked face and framed by brown hair that fell long and straight to his shoulders.

  Willie swiveled around to face him. “What the hell were you doing back there, catching forty winks? Hate to point this out, Steven, but this vehicle is actually one of the few things in the city that the Harmons do not own. Guess you got confused, huh? Or did you just mistake it for a bench in the park? Tell you what, no hard feelings, I’ll drive you to the park, even buy you a newspaper to keep you warm while you finish your little nap.”

  “Jonathan wants to see you,” Steven said, in that flat, chill tone of his. His voice, like his face, was still and dead.

  “Yeah, good for him, but maybe I don’t want to see Jonathan, you ever think of that?” He was dogmeat, Willie thought; he had to suppress the urge to bolt and run.

  “Jonathan wants to see you,” Steven repeated, as if Willie hadn’t understood. He reached forward. A hand closed on Willie’s shoulder. Steven had a woman’s fingers, long and delicate, his skin pale and fine. But his palm was crisscrossed by burn scars that lay across the flesh like brands, and his fingertips were bloody and scabbed, the flesh red and raw. The fingers dug into Willie’s shoulder with ferocious, inhuman strength. “Drive,” he said, and Willie drove.