21

Samsa checked his watch: 1 a.m. He filled a wax cup with water from the cooler and gulped it. The basement rooms were stuffy, unbearable. From his position at the cooler he could see through an open door into another room, and beyond that another room, and beyond that yet another. It was like an infinity of reflections in angled mirrors. He imagined himself trapped in endless boxes, dwindling in size the further he looked.

He crumpled the cup and dumped it just as Brodsky appeared. Billy Fogue, white shirtsleeves hanging loose, stood behind Al. His hairless head glistened. Here and there other cops wandered back and forth or worked the phones. The graveyard shift, energized by a fresh homicide.

Al Brodsky said, ‘Fogue got a fingerprint match through the computer.’

Fogue said, ‘The girl was one Cecily Suarez, reported missing by her parents in Denver. Seems she made running away from home something of a habit. She was thirteen years of age.’

Thirteen, Samsa thought.

Christ. One-three.

He felt the clamminess of the rooms invade his heart. Cecily Suarez. She’d told him her name was Almond. Two years younger than Darcy, for God’s sake. He ran a hand across his face. He was thinking of Zane the coroner, the slab in the morgue where the girl had lain, Zane examining the dead flesh. The cause of death was easy for Zane, who’d seen every kind of fatality. The pattern of bruising appeared to be consistent with the use of a blunt instrument of some kind, and he’d studied what he referred to as ‘areas of ecchymosis’.

A blunt instrument, Brodsky had said. Like what? A rubber hose? A baseball bat? A karate chop?

Zane, a skinflint with loose opinions and facile conclusions, had simply said, People just don’t realize how easy it is to break a neck.

The girl had tracks on her arms. Zane had peered at them closely, but with a certain clinical indifference. I wouldn’t say she was a heavy user of a needle. I think we’ll find out more about her drug habits when we’ve examined her nasal passages. Samsa thought of instruments: steel scalpels, probes, the hard awful tools of Zane’s trade.

She’s been dead twenty-four hours, I’d say. Somewhere between ten and eleven last night.

Billy Fogue said, ‘Let me add this news flash. Our girl was picked up a month ago on a streetwalking charge, fingerprinted and kept overnight in juvenile hall, then released on the order of some bleeding-heart social worker because she promised she’d take the next bus all the way home to Denver. She even bought a one-way ticket to Denver, which convinced the dickhead do-gooder that the contrite young Cecily had good intentions. Cunning little number. Did Cecily, aka Almond, catch the bus? Oh, yeah, sure she did.’

Samsa thought, I carried her through the rain, I hefted her wet body on my shoulder and carried her across that field, and even though she weighed practically nothing in life, in death she was heavy. He shoved the memory away like indigestible food, but it kept coming back, a regurgitation of the slog, the mud, the grass, the jagged highs of panic. He’d thought of burying her, but he didn’t have the implements and he didn’t have the time, all he’d wanted was to hide her and get out of that field quickly, a vanishing act, oblivion. But there were no guarantees of oblivion.

No guarantees of anything. Not now.

Samsa stared into the middle distance, as if he were trying to distort the focus of his eyesight.

‘Rebb is on his way,’ Brodsky said. He held a hand in front of Samsa’s face and clicked his thumb and middle finger together. ‘Are you with us, Greg? You remember Stephen Rebb? Long-time vice cop?’

Samsa said, ‘Sorry, I was thinking.’

Brodsky asked, ‘Anything you want to share?’

Samsa shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

‘Give us a holler when you do, Lew Tenant,’ Fogue remarked cheerfully, plucking a cheroot from his shirt pocket and then, glancing at Brodsky, thought better of lighting it while the chief was around.

Samsa remembered the thickets, the way he’d placed the girl among them, how he’d protected his hands from barbs by tugging the sleeves of his jacket down over his fingers. He remembered the wild rain slashing at his face. He remembered her on the coroner’s slab, and how very young she’d seemed, with all the life gone out of her and the make-up washed from her face. Young and very small and soft. A life unlived, an empty bedroom in a house in Denver. Probably posters thumbtacked to a wall. Maybe a secret diary stashed under a loose floorboard. The relics of a person.

Like Harriet’s clothing hanging in closets.

He turned his face as Stephen Rebb came into the room.

Rebb said, ‘Whatcha got for me?’

Brodsky said, ‘A dead girl.’

Rebb was a walking offense, a tall cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and dyed crow-black hair and a serious case of body odor. He’d worked so long in the world of vice it was as if he’d decided that the smells of dark streets and illegal massage parlors and humid whorehouses were preferable to basic hygiene. Dandruff littered the collar of his black jacket and there was always dirt under his fingernails, which he picked at from time to time with a nail file. He was in search of authenticity with a capital A, Samsa sometimes thought. The underworld man with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s illicit flesh trade. You wouldn’t want Rebb in your home. It was hard enough to accept him around the office.

Rebb asked, ‘How old?’

‘Thirteen,’ Billy Fogue said.

‘Streetwalker?’

‘You wouldn’t be here at one in the morning if she was a goddam jaywalker, Rebb,’ Brodsky said, with a measure of impatience and distaste.

‘So I’m not the best-loved character in the department. I accept that role willingly,’ Rebb said. He smiled, showing his crooked upper teeth. He courted unpopularity, wanted to be seen as a night creature, a sleazy outsider who operated on the far margins of the law. ‘The way I see it, I don’t get paid for my charm. I get paid because I’m the only sucker you got who knows what shit really smells like down at street level.’

Samsa said, ‘We all admire your talents, Steve.’

Rebb came close to Samsa, leaving a little cheesy cloud of halitosis in the air. ‘I like to be appreciated, Lieutenant. So who’s the dead babe?’

The dead babe. Rebb had a way of putting things.

Samsa told him.

Rebb, tapping the side of his nose, made whirring sounds like those of a computer scanning a hard disc. ‘She’s coming into view … yeah … yeah …’

‘Forget the sound effects and cut to the goddam chase,’ Brodsky said.

Rebb said. ‘She worked for a guy called … got it, real small-time hustler, name of Lee Boyle. Odd case. Wealthy background – father rich as fucking old John D. – disowned by family, drifted downhill. Drugs, the usual. Excuse me if I don’t find it altogether an all-American tragedy, because this Boyle isn’t a nice guy.’

‘Somebody check Boyle’s sheet,’ Samsa said.

Fogue said, ‘Only too happy to oblige,’ and left the room.

Rebb asked, ‘How did the kid get it anyway?’

Brodsky told him.

Rebb said, ‘Busted neck, huh? I think it’s a risk-type thing these lowlifers actually like. Life on the sordid edge. The next trick may be your last, honey. The next blow job might be HIV-pos, the next fuck might have a short-handled ax in the glovebox.’

Samsa said, ‘You know Boyle?’

‘I squeezed him once or twice for the hell of it. You got to apply some pressure on these guys now and then just to keep them in line. He’s strictly from Peanuts Street. Smart, but missing the essential nuts and bolts that differentiate a regular guy from a slimeball. He used to run a girl called Nancy, who took a hike. But Lee didn’t take kindly to this. So he tracks Nancy down and kicks the shit out of her, and she goes to County with serious fractures and a face that won’t look the same again. But, hey, does she press charges? Does she point the finger at Lee? Fuck she does. I fell down an elevator shaft or I was hit by a goddam car, bullshit stories. See, there’s some real off-the-wall loyalty out there at times.’

‘Could Boyle have killed Cecily Suarez?’ Samsa asked. The question seemed to him to hang in the air a long time. But this is the way it works. The creation of diversions. He was building thoroughfares in his head with no master blueprint, trying to believe they might lead somewhere in the end. Somewhere away from him. He felt shriveled, and wondered if this was what fear and shame did to you. And he remembered his disappointment at dismissing Lew Dice as a suspect. He’d taken Dice aside, questioned him briefly, as if to make sure he could be discounted. The motions of a pointless inquiry. I know you’re innocent, Dice. But this is what I have to do. I am the lieutenant. This is expected of me. You don’t know you’re talking to a shell. You’re just an involuntary participant in a drama.

Tell me what it’s like to stuff dead animals, Doc. But you couldn’t jump from the fact that a guy had a bizarre hobby to the idea he might have killed a kid hooker. Not even in the real world could you make that leap.

Rebb said, ‘Could Boyle have killed her? Depends. If the crystal’s good and it’s coming nice and regular, he’s okay. Take away his pacifiers, who knows? Or maybe he shot up one time too many.’

‘But it’s a possibility,’ Samsa said.

‘So’s the idea of me getting it on with Sharon Stone.’ Rebb picked grime out of his fingernails with his nail file and, leaning into the light of a desk lamp, examined it studiously. ‘So’s life on Pluto.’

Samsa looked at Brodsky, who was gazing at Rebb as if the vice cop were a mutant life form spawned in the sewers under the city. Rebb stuck the nail file into his pocket just as Billy Fogue returned to the room carrying a printout.

‘He’s been a bad boy,’ Fogue said.

‘Let me see that,’ Samsa said.

Fogue passed him the sheet, which Samsa scanned quickly.

LEE H. BOYLE SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER 074-05-2515.

One count of grand theft auto, September 1992. Six-month sentence, County jail. Served ninety-seven days.

One count of aggravated assault, January 1993. Thirty-day sentence, County jail. Served thirty days.

One count of possession of forged credit cards, March 1993. One year probation.

One count of possession of amphetamine (9.4gms), November 1993. Voluntary psychiatric counseling for three-month period.

One count of sex with a minor, April 1996. Dismissed. Lack of evidence.

One count of aggravated assault, January 1997. Dismissed. Lack of evidence.

Samsa handed the sheet to Brodsky, who looked at it and said, ‘It’s penny-ante stuff generally.’

‘Aggravated assault twice,’ Samsa said. ‘Maybe this time he just goes overboard. He crosses the line. Hits a little too hard. I wouldn’t mind paying him a visit. You know where to find him, Rebb?’

‘Not offhand. He doesn’t stay long in one place. I can make a few calls, ask around.’

‘Do it,’ Samsa said. He thought about Darcy. He walked into his partitioned space and dialed his home number.

She answered on the first ring.

‘I’m going to be very late,’ he said.

‘Is this business or another nocturnal voyage?’

‘Business,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Sleepy,’ she said.

‘How was the date?’

‘I wouldn’t write a book about it. He took me to see an Italian movie because he knew I wanted to see it. Halfway through he fell asleep. “I don’t like films where you have to read subtitles,” he tells me.’

‘You’re too bright for him,’ Samsa said. ‘Listen, sweetheart. I’ve got to go.’

‘Any idea of your ETA?’

‘Not a clue,’ he said. ‘Make sure everything’s locked up. Leave the downstairs light on.’

‘Done that already.’

‘I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

‘Oh, one last thing. Eve called. No message.’

He blew a kiss down the line. He thought of her in the empty house as he replaced the handset. The empty whispering house.

He looked at Rebb through the open doorway. Rebb was talking into a phone, his voice hard and aggressive. ‘Yeah, you say you don’t know where Boyle lives, asshole, but maybe I don’t believe you. Maybe my instincts are telling me something else. And maybe I just happen to remember those scuzzy videos you’re selling out the back of your goddam shop … Yeah, the ones with women and fucking camels, dufus, the Egyptian filth that comes to you straight outta Cairo …’

Samsa stepped away from his desk and felt suddenly light-headed, thinking of going out into the darkness and looking for a stranger called Lee H. Boyle and wondering if a murder rap could be pinned on him. Where was all this leading him except deeper and deeper into a night-world that had no basis in any reality he’d ever known before? Would his life always be like this now? He saw himself carrying the burden of an enormous lie, an evasion that hummed inside him constantly, like the vibrations of a machine. He suddenly remembered the fungus that had been growing behind the radiator and he wondered if it thrived still, if it was spreading, changing shape as it did so.