3

 

 

Gibney had to be right, Benek told himself at week’s end. The brainless body was a hoax, whose careful method had left no easy evidence. It turned out that there was only one type of blood in the body. Gibney had expected red dye.

There was no way to continue the investigation. Brainless, it was difficult to judge time of death accurately. The corpse might have been in cold storage a long time in preparation for the prank.

Gibney had continued to be convincingly skeptical rather than irritated, despite losing his bet on the blood types and red dye, as he leaned forward over his old brown wooden desk, which he claimed to have liberated from the South Bronx High School, where he had once been a student before they tore down the building. Sentimental even when he did not seem to be. “You know, son,” he had said, “it troubles me that you want to pursue this case. Are you in so bad with your captain that you need to solve it? You won’t, you know.”

“I’m not exactly the star of the precinct,” Benek had said, feeling slightly sorry for himself.

“Do you screw up much?”

“No, just a lot of unsolved cases,” Benek said, and wondered why he would tell Gibney anything about himself. He didn’t have to and didn’t much want to, but it was a pleasant change to have someone ask about him. “Not more than most, but I guess I just don’t seem to fit in,” he continued. “I’m the only detective who dresses up, for one thing. The others wear casual clothes and make jokes about my neatness.”

“I’ve noticed. Why do you dress up?” Gibney had asked, smiling. “I mean that you dress well, of course.”

“I guess it makes me feel in control of myself,” Benek had said, wanting to tell him.

Gibney had given him a sharp-eyed look. “Control is good, but it costs you in tension, and you enjoy that much less of life. Gives you an unconscious belief that you can control pretty much everything in the way of accidents and the unexpected. It unnerves you when you’re proven wrong even once. What do you like to do? Got any hobbies?”

Benek had not answered. He’d never had enough leisure to find out what he might like to do. Besides, there was no such thing as free time; every bit of it cost something.

Gibney’s manner, more than his personal questions, had made him think. Nothing immediate depended on answering them. He had learned to set his personal feelings aside long ago, since they never seemed to interfere with anything practical in his job. The case was much more irritating than his errant emotional weather, however dead-end the case seemed to be.

Who would set up such an elaborate hoax? There had been no mocking letters or phone calls bragging about it. The hospitals had not reported any missing cadavers. It made no sense except as a stunt that had gone wrong in some way.

But how would it have gone right? What was there to have succeeded?

Exactly as it did was the only answer.

But who was satisfied? The point seemed to be to have it on the police record, that it had been done, and then years later maybe write something about it, citing records that would take it out of the realm of an urban myth. Maybe it was not a hoax, but something left over from some other action, perhaps abandoned.

The case nagged at him, even pushing aside the uneasiness and doubt that had been creeping into him lately, as he sank deeper into himself, encountering odd bits and pieces of someone unknown to him, a person he might not be able to keep under control.

A long time ago he had accepted the way it was with him, and the way it would always be—orderly. He filled his days with work, went home, ate, watched television, and got a good night’s sleep. He went to the movies whenever possible, well aware that it was to keep from thinking too much about himself. The big screen freed him, but work was still the best escape. Without his routines, he might stumble and fall into inherited depths and never climb out.

He rarely listened this closely to his differing self. He was afraid of what lurked there and in other peoples’ disapproval, in their waiting hatred, whose power to hurt was endless. He had seen it in his father. Never a kind word, never a hint of approval, as if the son had stolen something from the father. And Benek had discovered early that the stolen power was self-control. Some people called it restraint, or even good manners. How quaint it sounded. He still had it and his father had none. He had a future; his father had only had the past, but remembered having a future and losing it and not being able to get it back, and had come to hate himself when the road had run out ahead of him.

So Benek had resolved to practice self-control in his appearance, in his schoolwork, even in the way he had handled his father—by letting the old man wear himself out, never arguing with him; and the drunkard had resented it, as if his son might have lent him some self-control but was holding it back. He had tried to protect his mother, by staying close whenever his father was near her and conscious.

“A woman can drive you mad,” his father had said, “by keeping you from doing what you have to do to… to get away. You have to do that, you know. She wants you to be in control of yourself all the time, to see everything, to keep the world from getting close. She wants you to be her idea of you, all the time. But that’s more than anyone can do.”

“But do you have to be drunk all the time?”

“It’s the only way to go far away, to have a respite.”

“But where does it take you?”

“Far, far into yourself, where you can’t be judged.”

“You don’t make any sense.”

“I know exactly what I mean. Women want to change what can’t be changed. Once you start doing what they want, they’re your private police. You’re never your own again. You’re being remade. They’re remaking you whenever their eyes catch you. And when you fail to become what they want to make of you because you can’t help but resist, as you always do, they make you suffer. You’re never yourself again, or what they wanted you to be. They own something that’s in between, what’s left of you. You’re just… leftovers!”

“But it’s not fair to Mom.”

“She had years of fair. There’s no more left to get out of me. She got you out of me, and that quieted her needs.”

“Didn’t you need me, Pop?”

“No. And she didn’t, either. She just needed something to be born out of her, by anyone at all!”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” There had been no point in trying to understand his complaints, except that he felt them, true or false. Mostly false.

Benek knew that his father had given him his shyness of women; but it was nothing to fear, because he would simply overcome it when he met someone he liked enough. She would be a revelation, and help him rediscover himself. Of that he was certain. She would bring him peace and be content to share his orderly life, in her own orderly way. He would ask that much.

Benek was sure that he understood himself. He had gotten to the bottom of himself and there was no more to know. Only the chaos within other people was a mystery, waiting to destroy his personal order and hurl him into the same free fall that had ended his father’s ugly life.

One day Benek had come home from school and found his parents embracing and passed out together in the basement room; his mother had gotten drunk with his father in order to share his stupor, to silence her pain and disappointment at the loss of what they had once meant to each other. Benek’s self-control had slipped as he was forced to admit that something of her still loved the old man. She had made no sound when she awoke hours later to find him dead beside her of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Helped by his mother’s silence, Benek had pushed back the feelings that had choked his reason, and had vowed that it would never happen again.

Was there something about this silly case that was really about himself? Was that what Gibney was getting at? Was he losing his discipline and pursuing a perverse event as if it meant something, as if it had to mean something? He might just as well expect a pattern of cracks in the ceiling to become a map of all reality.

No, he told himself, the case was very real, not something sent at random to confound his reason.

He looked around at his living room of ragged, second-hand furniture. He never sat in the two green easy chairs, so they came off best. It was the worn and torn sofa that looked as if it had been put out on the sidewalk before being rescued. The browned, parch-ment-like shades on the end table lamps seemed about to crumble into dust, but they had been decades old when he had bought them, and would last as long as he didn’t touch them. The coffee table was something a woman would hate and run screaming from when she saw it. There were too many unsightly repair nails in it, all of them the wrong size, but he never put his feet up on it, so it would not collapse. The bare wooden floor was a desert of dust balls, but with the windows always shut the dirt particles rarely moved, he told himself. The landlord had promised to paint, but his scheduling was always delayed. His wife had died a few years ago, and he seemed not to care about anything.

Benek told himself that he had become a cop because he could do it, because he could peer into people’s minds just enough to see cases clearly. Maybe this kind of life was all the powers-that-be had planned for him, except that there were no such powers and he had made his own choice. Most cases were not anything deep. He saw cases well enough to do his cop job when called out. Great wisdom was not needed.

Anyway, he had no time to clean regularly or decorate his apartment, and what good would it do him even if he did? When would he have time to invite anyone over? What would he say to a guest? Most of the other cops at the precinct lived in Queens, the Staten Island cop enclave, or on Long Island, and much of their free time was wasted in getting there and back. From upper Manhattan, Benek got to work in a few minutes.

Still, there was a kind of order and neatness to his living room that went well with the old beige paint job, reminding him of the still-life orderliness of the attic bedroom at his childhood home, which had not been opened in thirty years until he had moved into the house with his parents and disturbed the locked room’s dusty peace. His mother had cleaned it up, and had made a retreat of it for herself, because her husband was lazy, or too drunk to climb the stairs after her. Silently, she had gone there on the day he had died in her arms, and Benek had found her asleep in the big wooden double bed with a peaceful expression on her face.

She had opened her eyes and looked at him calmly. “It’s all right, Billy,” she had said out of her silence. “He didn’t want to live. He wasn’t himself anymore. It’s all right.”

The phone rattled the wooden end table. Benek let it ring, wondering that the old dialer still worked. He had found it at the same warehouse sale in Brooklyn where he’d picked up the old furniture. The old bell ringer got on his nerves, but he could hear it even in the shower, unlike the new models, which chirped like birds and trained him to mistake various other sounds for the phone.

He picked it up on the fourth ring. “Hello.”

“Bill?”

“Yes.”

“Frank Gibney. I’ve been checking up some more on the autopsy. Want to come over and see for yourself?”

“I’ll be right there,” he said, shaking off his mood as he hung up, pushed his doubts aside, then grabbed his coat and went out the door. As he turned the key in the deadbolt, and then in the police lock, his phone rang again. He hurried to the elevator, thinking it was probably Arthur DeSapio, his neighbor from the floor above, calling to demand again why the fuck can’t you get a modern phone with a soft ringer and what kind of cop are you anyway disturbing the peace?

Still, Benek preferred loud ringing to soft aviary calls.

 

“It was routine, as Johansen told me,” Gibney said as they went into one of the smaller autopsy rooms. “But your concern made me look again.”

Benek squinted in the harsh fluorescent lighting as Gibney lifted the plastic sheet from the center table and revealed the body of the old black man. “See for yourself.”

Benek looked away from the scooped-out skull, but the room’s sickly green walls only made him feel even more like hurling. “So what do you think?” he asked, holding back.

“I’ll say officially that this head was not opened and closed prior to the autopsy, and the skull was full of fresh blood.” He squinted at Benek with small, blue eyes, then laughed nervously. “There’s nothing else to say, and no obvious conclusion to draw—except that what we see here could not have happened. The blood typing was our only hope of showing that this was a hoax, but it’s all the same blood. Does that make you happy?”

“Why should it?” Benek asked.

“You seemed to want it.”

“I appreciate your extra efforts,” Benek said.

“Want to see the videotape of the autopsy?”

“No, I trust you.”

“Oh, we found this in the man’s shoe, covering a hole.”

Gibney handed him a dirty business card. Benek held it up to the light and read:

 

TENTH STREET APARTMENTS 
DIERDRE MATERA, PROPRIETOR

 

An address and a phone number were printed in smaller letters in one corner. Benek put the card in his pocket.

Gibney stared at the body and shook his head. “There has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s on this table. Something stupidly simple.” He covered the corpse.

“I’ll check this address. Do you want to know what I find out?”

Gibney grimaced. “Sure. No one here is going to go after this. No one cares about dead nobodies until somebody complains. Especially stiffs who seem to have lost their minds somewhere along the way.”

Benek felt that Gibney’s further interest in the case was partly a favor to him, as if he were trying to make a friend.

“I’ll keep in touch,” Benek said.

Gibney smiled and nodded, and Benek felt like a tolerated son.