“How can you stand to come here?” I said.
Lewis sniffed. “It does kinda smell like a back alley in Tangiers. I always expect some dude in a turban to pop out and offer to sell me his little brother.”
“If I had to go to a place like this to get a drink, I’d stop drinking.”
“If God meant you to preach, he’d give you a pulpit.”
We started up the stairs.
“I’m beginning to wonder if he really is blackmailing anybody,” I whispered. “This is hardly living in the lap of luxury. I mean, where’s the money going?”
Lewis glanced back down at me. “You’re the one with the MBA, Cain, you figure it out.” He was whispering, too. We stopped on the landing and stood close together. “He’s probably putting it back into his drug operation,” Lewis said, “like the good little capitalist he is. It’s just a little outside financing . . . no taxes, no interest, no penalty for early withdrawal. Hell, he’s gone from selling a little pot to a full-service pharmacy, just since I’ve known him, and you don’t get that big that fast on sellin’ a few joints. I think you better wait here until he says it’s okay for you to come up.”
“All right.” My voice sounded faint.
Lewis climbed on up to the second-floor landing and knocked a peculiar knock on the door to his right. I heard the sound of light footsteps on old floors, like somebody in his bare feet, and there was a pause, as if that person were peering through a peephole. When the door opened, it was the Jackal’s voice I heard, although from where I was standing I couldn’t see him.
“Hey, man.” Smith sounded sleepy and annoyed. “You forget how to use the phone? What day is it anyhow, this ain’t your day, is it?”
“I got a guest, kid.” Lewis’s New Jersey accent came on stronger, as if he could relax and speak his own language with another native. “She’s got a hunger for a sugar cake, and I ain’t got the eggs to bake it. You got enough on hand I could buy a few extra off you?”
“I don’t like strangers, man.”
“Come on, I know her, and you know me, so what’s the problem? You got the stuff or not? I got the cash, and it ain’t cryin’ for me to spend it here.”
There was a long moment of silence at the top of the stairs. How in God’s name would he react when he saw who the visitor was?
“All right,” the Jackal said, and then he laughed, a low, wicked, rumbling chuckle that flattened me back against the landing wall. “You’re lucky, Riss. I got plenty of sugar on hand. And I got me a delivery of farm-fresh eggs just this very morning. I got brown ones, I got white ones, I got speckled ones, I got pretty little red and blue and pink ones. Your lady into eggs of any special color, man?”
“You can ask her,” Lewis said. “She’s here.”
I heard the Jackal come out of his apartment, and then his head, with its blond, spiked hair, appeared over the bannister. He was wearing jeans, the earring, and a wide gold watch on his wrist. It looked like a Rolex. I probably expected tattoos, but there weren’t any visible. He stared down at me, showing no surprise.
“Well,” he said softly. Then he jerked his head at us. “What’s the matter with you, you like standin’ in halls?”
I climbed the stairs on shaky legs and followed Lewis into the Jackal’s apartment. His interior designer had a taste for the macabre. The walls were covered in black lacquer, and the carpet was black. He had removed the lid from a silver casket, tossed in black pillows, and called it a couch. The lid, turned upside down, served as a coffee table. There was a monstrous television screen, and enough stereo equipment to alter the vibrational rate of the earth’s rotation. How did the neighbors bear it? On the other hand, once having seen this apartment, who’d have the courage to complain? Around the room, he had scattered tools of the funeral trade, the way some people scatter knicknacks . . . hooks, knives, tubes, a couple of trocars, and bottles in which gray fleshy objects floated in greenish liquid. I felt my stomach contract, and I looked quickly away, at the Jackal. The pupils of his eyes were enlarged, shiny, black, and focused steadily on me. In a low, intimate tone, as if we were alone in the room, he said, “You like candles? I’ll put out some candles.” He dug beneath the pillows in the casket and came up with several thick black candles, which he placed in silver holders around the room and lit. “Shut the door,” he instructed Lewis, who did it. “And turn off the lights.”
It was like being plunged into a black night with a quarter-moon rising and fires burning in the forest, flickering against the wall of night. The Jackal switched on the stereo next. Male voices, accompanied by screeching guitars and pounding drums, screamed unintelligible things at us. When he turned the volume down, it made it worse, because then the voices seemed to be whispering obscenities from behind the trees in the forest. If Sylvia had played around with this guy, she’d had a dangerous taste for the strange and the ugly.
We were standing in a triangle, facing each other. Jackal broke the geometry by leaning back against a wall, leaving his lower body in candlelight, his upper body and face in shadow. “So, what’ll it be tonight, girls and boys?”
I saw Lewis reach into his right pants pocket and knew he was switching on the tape player. He then said, in a quiet, serious tone of voice, “I got to level with you, Jackal, I didn’t come here to buy. You know me, I’m a reporter. I deal in news, the good and the bad. I’m afraid I’ve got some real bad news for you tonight.”
The Jackal came out of the shadows. He looked like a wary animal, tense and ready to spring. His arms hung loose at his sides, he flexed the fingers of his hands. “What’s going on here, Riss?”
“Listen to me, Jackal.” There was, in Lewis’s tone, a note of friendly urgency, nothing threatening, nothing tough. “The police know that you went drinking at The Seaman with Sylvia Davis the night she died. They know you had an argument and that you followed her out of there. Jackal, they think you were the last person to see her, they think maybe you killed her. You have to get out of Port Frederick, immediately.”
There was silence for a moment as the Jackal just stared at him, then at me. And then the dark, blank eyes began to shift to the right, the left, as if he were frantically looking for a way out. He took a step toward us, backed off, then turned back into the shadows and I heard him strike the flat of his hands against the black wall. Suddenly, he was back in the light again, as if he’d pushed back from the wall. “Why are you tellin’ me? I know you, Riss, you don’t do no favors. What do you want?”
Lewis spread his hands wide, in a display of honesty. “I want your side of it, Jackal. I’m a reporter, man, and I want the whole story, not just what the cops say. I’m not gonna print it, I just want to know what happened. Like, why was she pissed at you?”
“How do I know you won’t print it?”
“Are you kidding?” Lewis was all disbelief. “If I print it, the cops are going to ask me how I know all this, and they’re not going to like it that I just happened to talk to you just before you just happened to leave town. Come on, man, I’m doin’ you a big one, do this one for me.”
The Jackal shrugged, as if the truth were the least of his worries. “She was screwin’ around with Pittman, and I was making some bucks off him, only she didn’t know that. Then when she finds out, she’s ticked off at me, like it was my fault she was an idiot. We get out to her car, man, and she’s crying and carrying on that she’s gonna lose her job, and it’s my fault, and, I mean, who gives a shit? But I wasn’t the last person to see her, man, ‘cause she said she was gonna go talk to somebody, see if he’d remind Pittman what a”—and here he sneered—“good little worker she was.”
“Who?” Lewis asked quietly.
The Jackal smiled that private, knowing smile. “Friedman, man. You want to know what happened to little Sylvia, you ask Mr. Personnel Prick, little Mr. Aaron Asshole Friedman.”
Lewis had grabbed me by an elbow and was pushing me toward the door. I had my hand on the knob when Smith said, “I got another favor
for you, but you gotta tell me something first.”
“What?” Lewis said.
“Why’d you bring her?”
“She’s the one who told me about the cops,” Lewis lied. The Jackal shifted his gaze to me, and the smile played at his lips again. “Come here,” he said, and he moved over to the casket/couch, where he picked up the black pillows and threw them to the floor. Lewis dragged me over there, and we looked inside to find a cornucopia of drugs: pills in bottles, cocaine in wrappers, pot in plastic bags. “Take your pick,” the Jackal said, “it’s on the house . . . and thanks, man.” But he was looking at me when he said it.
Lewis plunged with both hands into the casket, coming up with enough illicit substances to fill every pocket.
“Go on,” the Jackal said softly to me. “You, too.”
I started to shake my head, but Lewis nudged me with his knee. He grabbed my purse, opened it and stuffed it full, then gave it back to me. Again, he took my elbow and steered me to the door. We were down to the first landing when I looked back up. The Jackal was leaning over the bannister again, staring at me. Lewis looked up, too, and said to him, “You better get gone, man.”
23
“How could you do that?” Full of righteous indignation, and pent-up fear, I threw my purse, hard, across the front seat of Lewis’s car at him. It struck his chest, and he instinctively brought his arms up to protect himself as it fell to his lap.
“Hey!” he said.
But I was rolling now. “How could you warn him like that? How could you give him time to get out of here before the police catch up to him, before they even know they want him? How could you do that? Anything for a good story, is that it, Riss? And these drugs!”
He ignored me, and reached through the open space between the front seats of his car and fumbled around in back, coming up with an empty plastic shopping bag into which he began to dump the illicit contents of my purse and his pockets. The corners of his eyes and mouth lifted into a huge, wondering grin.
“God, will you look at this?” His voice squeaked, like an excited boy’s. “I won’t have to deal with reality for the next six months. Do you have any idea how much this stuff is worth, Cain? Jeez, remind me to do a few more favors for drug dealers, will you? And to think you almost didn’t take any!” He stopped his sorting long enough to stare at me as if I’d suddenly grown two heads. “I’ll bet you don’t mail in your entry in the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes, either.” When he saw me open my mouth, he said quickly, “Jenny, if he didn’t kill her, it’s not so important for the police to find him right away. Anyway, how long do you think a guy who looks like him can hide?”
“He might comb his hair,” I said acidly.
Lewis looked doubtful for a moment, then perked up. “Calm down, Cain, I did okay for us, and for the cops.” He scooped up a pile of drugs with both hands, let them trickle down through his fingers, and laughed wildly. “God, I guess I did okay. Sure you don’t want any of this?”
“No. Do you believe him?”
“Probably, but let’s take it to Ailey, see what he thinks.”
“Ailey?” I put out a hand to stop him in the middle of his happy sorting. “You calm down, Lewis, and listen to me for a minute. We can’t go to Mason yet, because we might put an innocent man in a bad situation, on the word of an extremely unreliable witness. I think we should give Friedman a chance to tell us what happened. And you’d better let me do it alone, because I don’t think he’s going to want to see you again.”
“Why?” Lewis looked puzzled. “Do you think he’s the type to hold a grudge? I’ll swear, some people have no sense of humor.”
Finally, we agreed that I would telephone Friedman and try to persuade him to allow me to see him that night. For safety’s sake, Lewis would follow me in his car. Before I returned to my own car, I said to him, “Please, put that stuff in the trunk, Lewis. And for heaven’s sake, don’t eat any of it. I need you sane and sober.”
He sighed. “Reality sucks, Cain.”
“Please.”
He sat still for a moment, his head down, and when he raised his face, I thought it would be to make another smartass remark. Instead, he said quietly, “I keep seeing her face, Jenny. And it’s like she’s looking at me, and saying it’s my fault she’s dead, like if I hadn’t agreed to interview her, it wouldn’t have happened. I’ve seen a lot of dead faces—car wrecks, homicides—and I don’t like it, but I get used to it, it doesn’t keep me awake. But I don’t think she’ll let me sleep, you know? I want to sleep tonight, I don’t want to be lookin’ at her face in my dreams. So don’t bug me about the drugs, Jenny. We all got our escape routes. You travel yours, I’ll travel mine, all right?”
I placed my hand, briefly, on the curly, springy black hair above his forehead but couldn’t resist chiding him gently, “I don’t “think Bruce Springsteen would approve, Lewis.”
“What do you know?” he said, but managed a slight grin. Then, more flippantly, “That was only an editorial comment anyway, not necessarily representing the views of the management. Go on, I’ll follow you.” He tied the ends of the plastic bag together, took the keys, out of his ignition, and walked around to the back of his car. As I walked away, I heard the trunk lid slam.
I pulled in at the first convenience store I came to and used an outside pay phone. First, mostly to give myself time to cool down, I called Geof’s house to pick up the messages on the answering machine. As I dialed, then waited for the machine to reply on the third ring, I watched Lewis get out of his car, go into the store, and pause by the magazine rack. Thank goodness, I thought, they usually keep the Playboys behind the counter in these stores, so he couldn’t steal one.
“Hello,” I heard the answering machine say to me. “This is Aaron Friedman. It’s five-thirty. Your client can have one of our maintenance men for the rest of the week. Call me at home tonight if you want to, 352-8623.” That’s what I call perfect timing. I put in more change and called Friedman’s number.
“Hello?” said a light, female voice. Wife? Girlfriend?
“I’m calling Aaron Friedman.” I tried to make it sound businesslike, neuter, unthreatening, as not all women like the idea of unfamiliar female voices asking to speak to their husband/lovers, especially so late at night. “May I speak to him?”
“Gee, I’m sorry,” she said as if she meant it. I pictured a pretty, pleasant blonde who was probably even nice to telephone solicitors. “He just stepped out for cigarettes. May I take a message?”
I thought quickly. If Friedman wasn’t there, maybe I could find out some valuable information from her. “Is this Mrs. Friedman?”
“Sort of.” She had a nice laugh.
“Well, I represent Multi-Markets,” I said in a bright voice. “We’re employed by the Columbia Broadcasting System to survey viewers about their opinions of television shows. May I ask you—very quickly, because I don’t want to take up any more of your valuable time than necessary—were you or Mr. Friedman at home watching TV on the night of April third? That would have been, um, this last Tuesday night.”
“Well, part of the time we were.”
“Do you happen to recall if you watched television between the hours of six and eight?”
“No, we were at a party, and we didn’t get home until nearly nine-thirty. Not nearly soon enough if you ask me, God, do I hate other people’s office parties.” I smiled to myself, thinking how people are inclined to tell a lot more about themselves to strangers than they have to. I hoped this very human tendency would play into my hands in this case.
“What about between eight and ten?” I asked.
“No, no, we were just getting home.” That sounded as if she lived with him. How could he have left home to go to the funeral home to kill Sylvia, without arousing the lover’s suspicions?
“What about between ten and midnight?”
“Yes, I’m sure we watched the nightly news, and then we turned on the movie.”
“Well, it’s th
e movie we’re interested in,” I said. “The one that comes on at eleven-thirty. Did you watch the entire movie, ma’am?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“I see. Could you tell me if one of the following responses indicates why you did not watch the entire movie. A: It was on too late at night; B: It did not hold our interest; C: We were interrupted in our viewing by the phone or the doorbell; or D: We had seen it before.”
“C,” she said.
Damn, I thought, I should have split that into two questions; now I still didn’t know if Sylvia actually dropped by to see Friedman or if she only called him. “I’m sorry,” I said, as if I hadn’t heard her. “Did you say doorbell or did you say telephone?”
“Doorbell.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll only keep you a moment longer. For how long would you say the interruption of your viewing continued?”
“How long?” She was beginning to sound less forthcoming and friendly, more suspicious. I would have hung up on me long before, but she was evidently the type who tries to please everyone, even strangers who ask impertinent questions. “Maybe a half hour, forty-five minutes.”
“And did you both resume your viewing when the interruption was completed?”
“These are really strange questions,” she said. “What. . .”
“It’s very helpful for the networks to know these things,” I said in a voice so smooth you could have slid on it. “And it’s so reassuring for the programming people at the network to know that viewers are not turning them off because of the network programming, and that viewers will resume viewing the programming on the network if given the opportunity, if you see what I mean.”