Lullaby

  Duncan, his eyes are green.

  His spit lands in little cold specks on my arm, bringing germs, little wet buckshot, bringing viruses. Brown coffee saliva.

  I say I don’t know. The book calls it a culling song. In some ancient cultures, they sang it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land. You sing it to warriors crippled in battle and people stricken with disease, anyone you hope will die soon. To end their pain. It’s a lullaby.

  As far as ethics, what I’ve learned is a journalist’s job isn’t to judge the facts. Your job isn’t to screen information. Your job is to collect the details. Just what’s there. Be an impartial witness. What I know now is someday you won’t think twice about calling those parents back on Christmas Eve.

  Duncan looks at his watch, then at me, and says, “So what’s your experiment?”

  Tomorrow, I’ll know if there’s a causal relationship. A real pattern. It’s just my job to tell the story. I put through his paper shredder.

  Stick and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

  I don’t want to explain until I know for sure. This is still a hypothetical situation, so I ask my editor to humor me. I say “We both need some rest, Duncan.” I say, “Maybe we can talk about it in the morning.”

  Chapter 7

  During my first cup of coffee, Henderson walks over from the National desk. Some people grab their coats and head for the elevator. Some grab a magazine and head for the bathroom. Other people duck behind their computer screens and pretend to be on the phone while Henderson stands in the center of the newsroom with his tie loose around his open collar and shouts, “Where the hell is Duncan?”

  He yells, “The street edition is going to press, and we need the rest of the damn front page.”

  Some people just shrug. I pick up my phone.

  The details about Henderson are he’s got blond hair combed across his forehead. He dropped out of law school. He’s an editor on the National desk. He always knows the snow conditions and has a lift pass dangling from every coat he owns. His computer password is “password.”

  Standing next to my desk, he says, “Streator, is that nasty blue tie the only one you got?”

  Holding the phone to my ear, I mouth the word Interview. I ask the dial tone, is that B as in “boy”?

  Of course I’m not telling anybody about how I read Duncan the poem. I can’t call the police. About my theory. I can’t explain to Helen Hoover Boyle why I need to ask about her dead son.

  My collar feels so tight I have to swallow hard to force any coffee down.

  Even if people believed me, the first thing they’d want to know is: What poem?

  Show it to us. Prove it.

  The question isn’t, Would the poem leak out?

  The question is, How soon would the human race be extinct?

  Here’s the power of life and a cold clean bloodless easy death, available to anyone. To everyone. An instant, bloodless, Hollywood death.

  Even if I don’t tell, how long until Poems and Rhymes from Around the World gets into a classroom? How long until, the culling song, gets read to fifty kids before nap time?

  How long until it’s read over the radio to thousands of people? Until it’s set to music? Translated into other languages?

  Hell, it doesn’t have to be translated to work. Babies don’t speak any language.

  No one’s seen Duncan for three days. Miller thinks Kleine called Duncan at home. Kleine thinks Fillmore called. Everybody’s sure somebody else called, but nobody’s talked to Duncan. He hasn’t answered his e-mail. Carruthers says Duncan didn’t bother to call in sick.

  Another cup of coffee later, Henderson stops by my desk with a tear sheet from the Leisure section. It’s folded to show an ad, three columns by six inches deep. Henderson looks at me tapping my watch and holding it to my ear, and he says, “You see this in the morning edition?”

  The ad says:

  Attention First-Class Passengers of Regent-Pacific Airlines

  The ad says: “Have you suffered hair loss and/or discomfort from crab lice after coming in contact with airline upholstery, pillows, or blankets? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”

  Henderson says, “You called about this yet?”

  I say, maybe he should just shut up and call.

  And Henderson says, “You’re Mr. Special Features.” He says, “This isn’t prison. I ain’t your bitch.”

  This is killing me.

  You don’t become a reporter because you’re good at keeping secrets.

  Being a journalist is about telling. It’s about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media.

  The culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos.

  Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

  Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.

  The new death, this plague, can come from anywhere. A song. An overhead announcement. A news bulletin. A sermon. A street musician. You can catch death from a telemarketer. A teacher. An Internet file. A birthday card. A fortune cookie.

  A million people might watch a television show, then be dead the next morning because of an advertising jingle.

  Imagine the panic.

  Imagine a new Dark Age. Exploration and trade routes brought the first plagues from China to Europe. With mass media, we have so many new means of transmission.

  Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable.

  Imagine people chanting prayers, singing hymns, to drown out any sound that might bring death. Their hands clamped over their ears, imagine people shunning any song or speech where death could be coded the way maniacs would poison a bottle of aspirin. Any new word. Anything they don’t already understand will be suspect, dangerous. Avoided. A quarantine against communication.

  And if this was a death spell, an incantation, there had to be others. If Iknow about, someone else must. I’m not the pioneer brain of anything.

  How long until someone dissects the culling song and creates another variation, and another, and another? All of them new and improved. Until Oppenheimer invented the atom bomb, it was impossible. Now we have the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and the neutron bomb, and people are still expanding on that one idea. We’re forced into a new scary paradigm.

  If Duncan’s dead, he was a necessary casualty. He was my atmospheric nuclear test. He was my Trinity. My Hiroshima.

  Still, Palmer from the copy desk is sure Duncan’s in Composing.

  Jenkins from Composing says Duncan’s probably in the art department.

  Hawley from Art says he’s in the clipping library.

  Schott from the library says Duncan’s at the copy desk.

  Around here, this is what passes for reality.

  The kind of security they now have at airports, imagine that kind of crackdown at all libraries, schools, theaters, bookstores, after the culling song leaks out. Anywhere information might be disseminated, you’ll find armed guards.

  The airwaves will be as empty as a public swimming pool during a polio scare. After that, only a few government broadcasts will air. Only well-scrubbed news and music. After that, any music, books, and movies will be tested on lab animals or volunteer convicts before release to the public.

  Instead of surgical masks, people will wear earphones that will give them the soothing constant protection of safe mus
ic or bird-songs. People will pay for a supply of “pure” news, a source for “safe” information and entertainment. The way milk and meat and blood are inspected, imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption.

  People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean.

  White noise.

  Imagine a world of silence where any sound loud enough or long enough to harbor a deadly poem would be banned. No more motorcycles, lawn mowers, jet planes, electric blenders, hair dryers. A world where people are afraid to listen, afraid they’ll hear something behind the din of traffic. Some toxic words buried in the loud music playing next door. Imagine a higher and higher resistance to language. No one talks because no one dares to listen.

  The deaf shall inherit the earth.

  And the illiterate. The isolated. Imagine a world of hermits.

  Another cup of coffee, and I have to piss like a bastard. Henderson from National catches me washing my hands in the men’s room and says something.

  It could be anything.

  Drying my hands under the blower, I yell I can’t hear him.

  “Duncan!” Henderson yells. Over the sound of water and the hand dryer, he yells, “We have two dead bodies in a hotel suite, and we don’t know if it’s news or not. We need Duncan to make the call.”

  I guess that’s what he says. There’s so much noise.

  In the mirror, I check my tie and finger-comb my hair. In one breath, with Henderson reflected next to me, I could race through the culling song, and he’d be out of my life by tonight. Him and Duncan. Dead. It would be that easy.

  Instead, I ask if it’s okay to wear a blue tie with a brown jacket.

  Chapter 8

  When the first paramedic arrived on the scene, the first action he took was to call his stockbroker. This paramedic, my friend John Nash, sized up the situation in suite 17F of the Pressman Hotel and put in a sell order for all his shares of Stuart Western Technologies.

  “They can fire me, okay,” Nash says, “but in the three minutes I made that call, those two in the bed weren’t getting any deader.”

  The next call he makes is to me, asking if I’ve got fifty bucks for him to find out a few extra facts. He says if I got shares of Stuart Western to dump them and then get my ass over to this bar on Third, near the hospital.

  “Christ,” Nash says over the phone, “this woman was beautiful. If Turner hadn’t been there, Turner my partner, I don’t know.” And he hangs up.

  According to the ticker, shares of Stuart Western Tech are already sliding into the toilet. Already the news must be out about Baker Lewis Stuart, the company’s founder, and his new wife, Penny Price Stuart.

  Last night, the Stuarts had dinner at seven o’clock at Chez Chef. This is all easy enough to bribe out of the hotel concierge. According to their waiter, one had the salmon risotto, the other had Portabello mushrooms. Looking at the check, he said, you can’t tell who had what. They drank a bottle of pinot noir. Somebody had cheesecake for dessert. Both of them had coffee.

  At nine, they drove to an after-hours party at the Chambers Gallery, where witnesses told police the couple talked to several people including the gallery owner and the architect of their new house. They each had another glass of some jug wine.

  At ten-thirty they returned to the Pressman Hotel, where they’d been staying in suite 17F for almost a month since their wedding.

  The hotel operator says they made several phone calls between ten-thirty and midnight. At twelve-fifteen, they called the front desk and asked for an eight o’clock wake-up call. A desk clerk confirms that they used the television remote control to order a pornographic movie.

  At nine the next morning, the maid found them dead.

  “Embolism, if you ask me,” Nash says. “You eat a girl out and you blow some air inside her, or if you fuck her too hard, either way you can force air into her bloodstream and the bubble goes right to her heart.”

  Nash is heavy. A big guy wearing a heavy coat over his white uniform, he’s wearing his white track shoes and standing at the bar when I get there. Both elbows on the bar, he’s eating a steak sandwich on a kaiser roll with mustard and mayo squeezing out of the far end. He’s drinking a cup of black coffee. His greasy hair is pulled into a black palm tree on top of his head.

  And I say, so?

  I ask, was the place ransacked?

  Nash is just chewing, his big jaw going around and around. He holds the sandwich in both hands but stares past it at the plate full of mess, dill pickles and potato chips.

  I ask, did he smell anything in the hotel room?

  He says, “Newlyweds like they were, I figure he fucks her to death, and then has himself a heart attack. Five bucks says they open her and find air in her heart.”

  I ask, did he at least star-69 their telephone to find out who’d called last?

  And Nash says, “No can do. Not on a hotel phone.”

  I say, I want more for my fifty bucks than just his drooling over a dead body.

  “You’da been drooling, too,” he says. “Damn, she was a looker.”

  I ask, were there valuables—watches, wallets, jewelry—left at the scene?

  He says, “Still warm, too, under the covers. Warm enough. No death agonies. Nothing.”

  His big jaw goes around and around, slower now as he stares down at nothing in particular.

  “If you could have any woman you wanted,” he says, “if you could have her any way you wanted, wouldn’t you do it?”

  I say, what he’s talking about is rape.

  “Not,” he says, “if she’s dead.” And he crunches down on a potato chip in his mouth. “If I’d been alone, alone and had a rubber . . .,” he says through the food. “No way would I let the medical examiner find my DNA at the scene.”

  Then he’s talking about murder.

  “Not if somebody else kills her,” Nash says, and looks at me. “Or kills him. The husband had a fine-looking ass, if that’s what floats your boat. No leakage. No livor mortis. No skin slippage. Nothing.”

  How he can talk this way and still eat, I don’t know.

  He says, “Both of them naked. A big wet spot on the mattress, right between them. Yeah, they did it. Did it and died.” Nash chews his sandwich and says, “Seeing her there, she was better-looking than any piece of tail I’ve ever had.”

  If Nash knew the culling song, there wouldn’t be a woman left alive. Alive or a virgin.

  If Duncan is dead, I hope it’s not Nash who responds to the call. Maybe this time with a rubber. Maybe they sell them in the bathroom here.

  Since he had such a good look, I ask if he saw any bruises, bites, beestings, needle marks, anything.

  “It’s nothing like that,” he says.

  A suicide note?

  “Nope. No apparent cause of death,” he says.

  Nash turns the sandwich around in his hands and licks the mustard and mayo leaked out the end. He says, “You remember Jeffrey Dahmer.” Nash licks and says, “He didn’t set out to kill so many people. He just thought you could drill a hole in somebody’s skull, pour in some drain cleaner, and make them your sex zombie. Dahmer just wanted to be getting more.”

  So what do I get for my fifty bucks?

  “A name’s all I got,” he says.

  I give him two twenties and a ten.

  With his teeth, he pulls a slice of steak out of the sandwich. The meat hangs against his chin before he tosses his head back to flip it into his mouth. Chewing, he says, “Yeah, I’m a pig,” and his breath is nothing but mustard. He says, “The last person to talk to them, their call history on both their cell phones, it said her name is Helen Hoover Boyle.”

  He says, “You dump that stock like I told you?”

  Chapter 9

  It’s the same William and Mary bureau cabinet. According to the note card taped to the front, it’s black lacquered pine with Persian scenes in
silver gilt, round bun feet, and the pediment done up in a pile of carved curls and shells. It has to be the same cabinet. We’d turned right here, walking down a tight corridor of armoires, then turned right again at a Regency press cupboard, then left at a Federal sofa, but here we are again.

  Helen Hoover Boyle puts her finger against the silver gilt, the tarnished men and women of Persian court life, and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She killed Baker and Penny Stuart. She called them on their cell phones sometime the day before they died. She read them each the culling song.

  “You think I killed those unfortunate people by singing to them?” she says. Her suit is yellow today but her hair’s still big and pink. Her shoes are yellow, but her neck’s still hung with gold chains and beads. Her cheeks look pink and soft with too much powder.

  It didn’t take much digging to find out the Stuarts were the people who’d bought a house on Exeter Drive. A lovely historic house with seven bedrooms and cherry paneling throughout the first floor. A house they planned to tear down and replace. A plan that infuriated Helen Hoover Boyle.

  “Oh, Mr. Streator,” she says. “If you could just hear yourself.”

  From where we’re standing, a tight corridor of furniture stretches a few yards in every direction. Beyond that, each corridor turns or branches into more corridors, armoires squeezed side by side, sideboards wedged together. Anything short, armchairs or sofas or tables, only lets you see through to the next corridor of hutches, the next wall of grandfather clocks, enameled screens, Georgian secretaries.

  This is where she suggested we meet, where we could talk in private, one of those warehouse antique stores. In this maze of furniture, we keep meeting the same William and Mary bureau cabinet, then the same Regency press cupboard. We’re going in circles. We’re lost.

  And Helen Boyle says, “Have you told anyone else about your killer song?”

  Only my editor.

  “And what did your editor say?”

  I think he’s dead.

  And she says, “What a surprise.” She says, “You must feel terrible.”