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Haydon rolled down the windows of the Vanden Plas and drove along Heights Boulevard, with the long narrow park stretching for several blocks down its center. There were a few people in the park, lounging in night shadows of the gazebo, smoking on the broad spaces of the grass. He caught a brief aroma of marijuana and then it was gone. He turned right into the smaller streets of the Heights. Dirty yellow light came from the opened doorways and windows, often mixed with the lonely blue of a television. He heard children shout, and a boozy tune from a radio in a parked car.
If he continued imagining the blood he wouldn’t be able to stand it. He could live with the nightmares, with the tension that seized him every time he felt a little funky and feared it was the slow, menacing precursor to a racking season of depression. All this he could adapt to, the way you endured a chronic pain. But not the blood. It was remarkable and unnerving. It was as though the idea of flowing blood had lodged itself in his imagination in the same way horrible and shocking scenes have traumatized and burned themselves into the minds of those who have witnessed them, only to intrude unbidden and unwanted into their consciousness at unsuspecting moments for the rest of their lives. Forceful memories. Scenes to be repressed, but never forgotten.
He turned south, backtracking down Studewood to White Oak Drive, which he followed west past Stude Park and then White Oak Park, that hugged the bayou. He remembered the execution killings down in there. Three chubby Mexicans side by side, shot in a kneeling position in the back of the head, all clutching cheap metal crucifixes. It was summer then too, it was always summer, and that was why the three men were chubby. Mooney had been with him. They were new homicide detectives together then, just as they had been rookie cops together. Dystal had been a part of the group too. So many streets, so many scenes, memories of them scattered all over the city like ghosts that would!1’t close their eyes and you saw them everywhere you went, every time you got in the car, three, five, ten ghosts depending on the route you took, looking at you from a vacant lot, a drive-in grocery, a derelict house, a fashionable home, a gas station, an alley, a bayou, a street corner, a park, a bar. Lonely places. Each with a ghost rooted to the spot. This is where we died.
When he bothered to notice where he was, he found himself idling once again past the small frame house near the Holy Cross Cemetery where he had seen the little boy earlier in the day. It was wide open. Through front bedroom windows he could see deeper into the house, where a dim glow backlighted smoky silhouettes in the bedroom. Jungle movements gliding slowly past the torn screen of the window. Silent movements. Naked movements. He knew there was a back bedroom and a back door that came into the kitchen. Flash-flash-flash flash-flash! Not the glamour of cinematic slow motion. Not like that at all. Flash-flash-flash! No time to think . . . and then an unexpected second of clarity, time to think . . . and doing it. FLASH! It was over. And then it wasn’t, and never would be again.
He wasn’t doing a very good job of living with it, although at first he thought he was. On the other hand it had been eleven years now, almost long enough for him to make himself believe it hadn’t happened, except that he couldn’t get away from it. God knows he had tried. He had shut his mind against it and closed his ears, prayed that the drumming memory of it would riot deafen him, that once he had turned his back it would not emerge in the periphery of his consciousness, like some wild horrible thing that had crept off a Bosch canvas. He ran from it, and sometimes he outstripped it, but it was relentless and never tiring. There were only times of reprieve, never the solace of absolution.
Sitting in the car across the street, he watched the house. He had removed his suit coat and thrown it across the seat. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief, wiped his face. The street was quiet except for the distant and incessant rumble of the North Freeway. He could smell the dankness of Little White Oak Bayou, which coiled itself around the neighborhood and the cemeteries like a marshy tape worm.
The smell had not changed, probably never had, never would. It had been a July night then, too. An unusually wet spring had hidden the bayou in lush vegetation; weeds and saplings gummy with new growth hung over the sluggish black water swarming with mosquitoes. He ran, chasing the devil that was chasing him, into the sultry dark through the flower streets of Jessamine, Marigold, Lilac, and Goldenrod, the fateful Hyacinth, across Cosmos, and beyond into the silent world of crypts and saints, ghosts upon ghosts as far as you could see, almost to the bayou again and Moody Park far away into the night. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
And then he went no farther but turned and faced him, out of breath, full of fear, standing five graves away, leaning on a leaning stone, hunched and sucking air, the low dank air from the bayou. He could see his eyes, white as the canting gravestones scattered all around them, eyes so recently glazed with the horrors of Hyacinth and now seeing the horror from the other side because he knew, could sense, that now he was going to cross a different Cosmos, and so he watched and waited with incredulity bulging his eyes. And as he waited he started toward him, getting closer so there would be no mistake, stalking over the graves, narrowing the distance between now and the black minute. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
~
HE WAS GLAD TO SEE Nina’s car. He pulled in behind it, locked the Vanden Plas, and let himself into the front hallway. At three in the morning the house was as still as it would ever be. His footsteps echoed down both halls as he crossed the entryway and started up the stone stairs. Halfway up the crescent he could see the light on the marble passageway that came from their bedroom. Nina would be waiting. She might have dozed, but she would have heard the car coming in the gates and was now looking at the door, waiting for him to open it, anxious to look at his face to see what it would tell her about him. He unconsciously massaged the two vertical creases between his eyebrows, which she said made him look intense even when he wasn’t and made him look older than he was.
She was in bed, a book propped on her knees, looking at him.
“When you say ‘late’ you mean it.” She smiled, but her eyes locked onto him, exploring all his features as though they were the sensitive fingers of a blind woman, touching with knowledge the contours of his face that seldom hid everything from her.
“Sorry,” he said. He came around to her side of the bed and kissed her, anticipating and finding the fragrance of her bath. “Things are speeding up a little now. I hate to stop when it gets like this.”
“I know.”
He went over to his closet and began taking off his clothes. “How was your evening?”
“Fun. Going to Tony’s is always fun. I was so surprised when you didn’t come.”
He looked at her. She was grinning. “I’ll bet Race was disappointed too,” he said, pulling off his shoes.
“No, Race wasn’t. But I did enjoy talking with the Nordstroms.”
“What’s she like?” Haydon was taking the stays out of his collar.
The shirt had been steamed in the bayou heat and pressed into a thou sand wrinkles.
Nina put a book marker in the book and laid it aside.
“She’s in her early thirties. Sharp features, but small. Not a large woman, though she gives the feeling of being larger than she is. She would not photograph petite. Natural blonde. I liked her. I only had dinner with her, but she didn’t seem to be the greedy little opportunist everyone’s been gossiping about. In fact, they seem to be one of the sanest couples I’ve met in a long time. She’s a good deal younger than he is, but neither of them seem to fall into the negative stereotypes people often think of in that situation. They were very nice. They gave me the impression of being very kind.”
“Just great people all around,” Haydon said, taking his baggy white calzones from their hook inside his closet as he walked into the bathroom.
“Great people all around,” she confirmed.
He showered quickly, washing his hair, and then toweled dry. He brushed his teeth, slipped on his calzones, and walked back into the bedroom, tying the drawstring at his waist.
“And your day?” she asked.
“Met a lot of nice people,” he said.
She laughed. “The note on the lampshade seemed to have been written in a hurry. Terrible handwriting.”
“It was.”
He stopped and put his shoe trees into his shoes and put them into the closet. He hung his belt on a hook inside the closet and took his cuff links off the top of the dresser and put them in their box; the brass collar stays went into their leather case. He stopped at the windows a moment and looked down to the terrace. The early morning hours were blue.
He must have stood there longer than he realized. “Why was it written in a hurry?” she asked.
“Ed called early in the evening. A woman who worked for Bill Langer, and whom I’d interviewed earlier this morning, was found dead at home. I had to go over there.”
“Was she killed?”
“It looks like suicide.”
“Looks like?”
“Pills. She was very depressed when I talked with her this morning.” He turned away from the windows and walked to the light switch. “You ready?”
She nodded.
He turned off the lights and went over to the bed and lay down.
Nina threw off her covers and lay with him on top of the sheets. “Are you making any progress?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Is Langer going to be okay?”
“No, he isn’t.”
Haydon lay there, feeling his body slow down. His heart rate returned to a slower, easier rhythm. He shouldn’t have stopped jogging. It wouldn’t be long before the rate at rest would be quicker. Right now it seemed steady and strong, and even though he was exhausted, it made him feel good to know he was in shape.
Nina rolled onto her side and put an arm across his chest. “And how about you? Are you going to be okay?”
The question made him instantly angry, but he didn’t say anything. He simply lay there, letting her words hang in the air, unstable, waiting. What was the matter with him? Didn’t he want her to care? If she didn’t care, would he be happier? If he thought she might stop caring, would he be happier? What was it he wanted from her? Did he want her to be perfect, caring when he wanted her to care, not caring when he didn’t want her to care? Wasn’t he ever going to allow her to be human about him? He had had to catch himself before he said something he would have regretted two minutes later. Why was that? He didn’t understand why he continued to return her concern with bitterness. Why in God’s name did it cost him so much to be totally honest with her?
“It’s gotten old quickly,” he heard himself say.
She made a small movement with her hand on his chest and then was still.
“I like it,” he added, “but it gets serious too soon. You get caught up in their lives. The messes they’ve made of them. You look closely at the messes, you’ve got to, and then you realize you’re not all that different. I find myself feeling hypocritical looking at them under the microscope of the investigation.”
He looked toward the blue windows, at the black tops of the trees on the other side of the panes.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Her voice was so soft she almost whispered. It was as if she did not want to intrude into his thoughts beyond planting the question in his mind.
“In a sense,” he said, “an unexplained death gives an investigating detective extraordinary rights. Private lives become public, at least potentially and in fact, insofar as the detective is concerned. As a stranger you are free to go to the heart of personal things, things you ordinarily would have no right to ask about and would not ask about now except for the fact that you think you ought to know. Suddenly you’ve got the freedom to look into the corners of people’s lives, study what you find there, make judgments about what you discover. You see things you were never meant to see, not anything that pertains to the case particularly, just private little things, things on the edges that you weren’t meant to discover, and you wish you hadn’t.”
He waited, but she didn’t speak. He wondered what she was thinking, if she was wondering where he was going with all this and what it meant. He wanted to say “Penny,” but he didn’t. She fit next to him like an actual part of himself. She belonged there, breathing along with him, exchanging breath for breath, keeping him alive. He imagined that if she were suddenly taken away he would be sucked into a vacuum of such crushing force he could not long survive it.
Nothing else seemed important now. He held her, and sleep surprised him.