Loren had once arrested an old man who’d kept women chained up in his house, to use as his personal sex toys and punching bags. That was years before, out in Ohio, when he’d first become a detective and started working with Gallo. Springfield was a town that’d once been named one of the best places to live in America but had since gone to shit, and it was the place where he’d seen firsthand how desperately bad humanity could be. Oh, but it was bad everywhere, he came to understand that over time, and sometimes he’d run across a pocket of something really bad, something so putrid and terrible that it didn’t seem like it could possibly be real. Surreal, that was supposed to be the word for it, but it wasn’t enough to explain it, not by a long shot. Surreal wasn’t awful enough, but there wasn’t anything else, so it would have to do.
That particular killer had been a real piece of work, Loren remembered. Lazy eyed and gray haired, he told Loren he’d been keeping the women locked up to further the population. Breeders, that’s what he called them, because after the soon-to-come apocalypse went down there’d need to be people to rebuild. His children would do it, he said. A whole new world order would come about because of the splooge shooting from his balls.
But the old man seemed to have forgotten he’d had a vasectomy a few years before and there was no way he was getting any woman in the family way. He just liked women and sex and hurting people, the sick look a person gets on their face when they’re in pain, and he couldn’t get it unless the women were always with him, unless he got to do whatever he wanted to them without any sort of consequence. He had two women when the police came knocking on his door—it’d been three, but one had managed to escape and had gone straight to the cops and brought them back—but by the time Loren busted his way into the place and found the women, they were dead. Well, one was dead, her head split in half like a melon with a tire iron, the skull peeling back from her brain, and the other was just about there. She’d started squirming when she saw Loren come into the room, trying to scoot away because she thought he was the old man, come back to hurt her some more, to finish the job he’d started when the cops had shown up on his doorstep, and Loren had screamed that he had a “breather,” not a “breeder” like the guy had been calling her, that he needed a paramedic right away.
Please, she’d said, gurgling the words through the blood running down her throat. Please don’t.
A young Ralph Loren, who had a normal childhood, who had parents who loved him and who ate a home-cooked dinner with his family every night as a kid, who’d graduated the police academy before he had hair on his chest, when his voice still sometimes cracked and turned high pitched—he’d never known how really fucked up the world could be until that moment. The past, it makes a person who they are, and if Loren was asked what the watershed moment in his life was, the experience that defined him, he would say there were a few of those moments in his life, and finding that woman on the floor of that attic room was the first of them. Of course, if anyone ever asked Ralph Loren a dumb-ass question like that, it was much more likely he’d tell them to go fuck themselves than answer.
But if Loren decided to open his mouth and spill the beans, this is what he would say: Breaking the lock on the thick oak door to that attic room, kicking at the knob so hard he wouldn’t be able to put any weight on that foot the next day, barely able to hear the screams of the old man as he was arrested downstairs, and then walking into the room, into the smell of shit and blood and death and sex, and being hit by an overwhelming wave of dizziness, because this couldn’t be real, could it? This room was something you’d see in the movies, you’d see it on the big screen and then you’d go home to your nice, clean home, where there wasn’t a dead woman curled up in one corner like a shrimp, her arms thrown up over her face to protect herself. This couldn’t be real. Could it? Could it?
But it was.
It was an attic room the women had been kept in, the small windows boarded up with thick planks of wood, and big O-hooks had been screwed into the walls with the chains binding the women’s ankles threaded through them. In one corner was a plastic paint bucket with a lid, the kind anyone could get at the hardware store, and even though the lid had been snapped into place the thick smell of shit still hung around it in a cloud. It was their toilet, Loren realized sickly. And written on the wall above this makeshift toilet were five words, scrawled up there with a red marker, or maybe it was blood, he never knew. There were other things, too, little sketches and tick marks, maybe the women drew them to count the days or just pass the time, but none of it caught his eye, except those five words. And those words might as well have been burned into his brain because Loren carried them with him for the rest of his life, like a mean, grinning monkey on his back who’d decided to hitch a ride. Words can be the most powerful thing in the world, sometimes they were the best things but they could also be the worst, and he could never hear any of those words alone without it bringing the entire phrase to mind.
ALL TOGETHER
NOW
WITH FEELING
“It doesn’t matter what it means, Ralphie,” Gallo said when he mentioned it. “We caught the sonavabitch. He won’t spend another day out at King’s Island trolling for sluts to lock up in his attic.”
“They weren’t sluts.”
“All women are sluts, Ralphie,” Gallo said. “Even your mama was one once, I don’t care if you think otherwise. It’s true.”
If anyone made a comment like that to Loren these days they’d most likely be swallowing their own teeth, but back then Loren ignored those sorts of things. Let them pass. Like water off a duck’s back, his mother had taught him. The days of turning his cheek were long behind him though, and a lot of that was because of Gallo. He learned a lot during their time as partners. Gallo showed him the ropes, taught him everything about working Homicide, about analyzing the scene and becoming the suspect, going on the hunt. Loren learned a metric shit-ton from Gallo, maybe too much. And then it soured. A partnership is like a marriage, like Hoskins always said; a good one is hard to find. And it was good with Gallo, until it wasn’t.
All together now, with feeling.
What did it mean? No one cared, but Loren couldn’t stop thinking about those words, about that phrase, and it was the girl who’d escaped who finally told him that one of the dead women had taught choir at some high school and she used to say it when the old man wasn’t home and they’d all scream in unison, in the hopes that a neighbor would hear and come help.
“‘All together now, with feeling,’ that was kind of our mantra, know what I mean?” the girl had told Loren with a wry smile. That girl had been tough, but she’d spent months chained up in that attic, living through things no one could even imagine, things no one would want to imagine, and less than a year after she’d escaped she was dead. Her sister found her hanging in her own closet, the cords from the window blinds looped around her neck. “She’d yell that, and then we’d all start screaming. Harmonizing, she called it, and sometimes we’d laugh about it. But it never worked, no matter how loud we were. No one ever came to see what all the racket was about.”
Many years later, many miles away from Springfield, a lifetime away, Loren would walk into another crime scene that looked like one of Jacky Seever’s but wasn’t, and there would be words written on a wall, a different phrase, but it wouldn’t matter because it would still bring him back to that attic room, to the woman on the floor, her eyes bright with terror as she tried to scoot away before making one final, choking gurgling noise on the blood in her throat and then dying. Two different crime scenes, with nothing in common except Ralph Loren, one man bridging the gap between them, because everything is connected, everything is a circle, it’s all the same even when it isn’t, and it’ll never be over.
Second verse, same as the first.
And right now the past was coming back with a roaring vengeance. There was Pete Ortiz, his hands folded across his chest, waiting for him to come home. Just like he’d done thirty years before, except now Ortiz wasn’t so skinny or zitty, and he was dressed nice, good shoes and a wool coat with his hair slicked back from his face, but the ghost of the kid he used to be was still there, lurking behind the mask of his adult face, peeking around the edges.
“This has happened before, right?” Loren wanted to ask Ortiz once he’d thrown his car in park and climbed out. “We’ve done this before, this same exact thing? You waited for me outside my house after Gallo disappeared because you wanted answers. You were angry and I hit you, and here you are again. I’m not crazy, am I? That’s what happened? Am I remembering it right?”
But Loren didn’t ask, mostly because he was afraid of the answer. He was sure it did happen, Ortiz had been waiting for him, angry and frightened, and then slunk away after Loren broke his nose, but he’d been sure about memories before and been wrong. And if he was wrong, if he asked the question and Ortiz looked at him like he was crazy, he wasn’t sure what he’d do.
So instead, he asked Ortiz if he wanted to go out and grab some dinner, maybe try to make some peace.