NYCTALOPIA IS THE TERM FOR NIGHT BLINDNESS. A PERSON WHO is nightblind might be a nyctalope. So, what is a person with day blindness? Or a person who won’t work? Jobalope?”
“That would be Ivy.”
“We’re both squinting. How about diurnalope?”
“If it weren’t for these shades,” Lavinia said, “I’d have driven straight into that cemetery wall.”
It was one of those mornings we Californians like to think happen only in California, which may be one thing we’re right about. No humidity, of course: none. Which means cool in the shade, warm in the sun. Predawn, it’s cool with the certain prospect of future warmth. A few wisps of coastal fog remain in the east, as if deliberately, a small committee to welcome the tangelo hues of the ascending dwarf star. The blues of the sky run a gamut from cornflower, backlighting the wisps, to blueberry, straight up, and violet as you move west, all the way to the contusive horizon, where sky and sea can’t be determined as agreeing on a boundary. The latter color is a disturbing one, as of an integument having sustained a mighty pummeling in the night, implying that now, as of yore, we have no idea of the terrible machinery that animates it.
Still, with the exception of maybe a half-hour’s shuteye grabbed in the back seat of the Lexus while we waited for Ivy Pruitt to get himself processed out of jail, and my twenty minutes on the floor of Ivy’s kitchen, Lavinia and I had been up all night. Despite a couple of pairs of shades retrieved from the glove compartment, which I gingerly teased past the black nine-millimeter that lived in there like a hibernating puff adder, the daylight hurt our eyes. And though she was driving quite reasonably along the back streets of Oakland, the slipstream, tugging at the hole where the back window used to be, tugged also at our few remaining calories. We hadn’t gone a block before Lavinia had the heater on. That Lexus was some kind of luxury car. Everything in it ran quietly. Though the fan was on full blast KCSM didn’t have to work very loudly to serenade us with Cannonball Adderly’s exquisite cover of Autumn Leaves.
“Are people who wince at daylight universally called musicians?” Lavinia asked, apparently just to make conversation.
My answer was, “That guy didn’t have shoes on.”
“What guy?”
“Stepnowski. In the warehouse.”
Lavinia frowned. “He didn’t?”
“The socks on his feet were white but not very dirty and seemed randomly dispersed.”
“Randomly dispersed….”
“Like a pair of shotgunned puppets.”
She thought about this.
“Sorry,” I said. “I have shotguns on the brain this morning.”
“He was on a loading dock….”
I nodded automatically, though in fact I was mulling something else entirely, namely the fact that, having counted out our money, we hadn’t spared the time to take a look around the rest of that De Haro Street warehouse. But I said, “That’s a very interesting point.”
“…Because the next conclusion would be that Stepnowski was killed someplace else.”
“And dumped on the loading dock.”
Stopped at a red light and facing directly into the sun, we thought about it. Lavinia dialed down the heater fan. “He was a little guy. Could one person, alone, have deposited him where we found him?”
“A hundred pounds is still a hundred pounds.”
“He weighed more than a hundred pounds.”
“Very likely.”
“So, two guys with a watchamacallit left him there.”
“A dolly? A handtruck? A forklift?”
“But what about the pool of blood?”
“What about it?”
“How much blood in an adult human?”
“Ten pints.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “How do you know that?”
I shrugged. “You can only practice so much. Since I don’t drink seriously, never watch television, and can’t afford a social life, I read.”
Livinia kept on watching me for a bit, then turned to face the windshield. “Huh.”
“The real question is, can you be an adult human, and a drummer, too?”
The light turned green and the tune was over. I turned off the radio. Driving, Lavinia said, “If only we’d had a look around.”
“I was just thinking that thought.”
“We might have found his shoes.”
“Or no shoes.”
“How much is ten pints, anyway?”
“Fifty bucks, if it’s Guiness….”
She wheeled us into a Safeway parking lot. A neon sign atop two concrete pillars high above the store remained illuminated: OPEN 24 HOURS; poppy red letters against the robin’s-egg blue of the sky.
“Why didn’t we have a look around, again?” she asked, as she guided the car into a parking space.
“We got what we came for, and there was a dead guy on the floor.”
“Right.” The parking lot was nearly deserted. Delivery vehicles of every size and description, from bakery vans to Safeway’s own tractor-trailers, surrounded the store. “Nothing about us being chickenshit.”
“Not a cheep.”
“Yeah. We got what we came for and we left.”
“That’s my take on it.”
The supermarket’s doors opened automatically. The lighting was very bright. Lavinia took a shopping basket from a stack inside the door and handed it to me.
“We’re just here to get the egg thing,” I pointed out.
“What the hell,” she said. “When’s the last time you had something to eat?”
I considered this. “I can’t remember.”
“So what comes immediately to mind?”
“Orange juice, coffee, hash browns, toast, butter, jam, and … eggs.” I looked at her and she looked at me and we both said, “Poached eggs.”
“Sounds good to me, and I don’t even eat breakfast.”
“A lot depends on what Ivy wants an egg poacher for.”
“We can always fry them.”
“I bet he doesn’t own a frying pan. You’ll have to get salt, pepper, sugar, paper plates, cups, forks and spoons, too. He has a couple of knives.”
“How about a coffee percolator?”
“How about running water?”
Lavinia made a U turn and came back with two liters of bottled water, which she placed into the basket.
“Gas,” I said. “I know he has gas.”
“I’ll bet a gas stove was his single requirement for signing the lease.”
“The back-porch view of the Inevitable was just a bonus.”
“He didn’t think twice about it.”
I followed Lavinia as she selected a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, a quart of milk, a variety of picnicking products. As she added paper towels to the basket, I said, “Maybe we should just go out for breakfast.”
“Don’t fuck with me; I’m waxing domestic.”
We rounded an end cap of tortillas stacked five feet high. “Corn or flour?”
“Corn.”
“How about ground pork sausage instead of bacon?”
I shrugged. What the hell did I care? Despite the three-way split, I was still holding more cash than I’d held in a very long time. In years, maybe. Why not go for steak?
Lavinia gathered enthusiasm as she accumulated groceries. She crossed over the back aisle to a wall of meat products and retrieved a pound of ground sausage. “You are in for huevos rancheros like you never had before. For which we need salsa.”
“Right here. I guess those Mexican kids leave a little culture behind them every time they get deported.”
“And all we offer in return is NAFTA. Excuse me, sir.”
A man wearing an apron with a feather duster in one back pocket and a price-sticker gun in a hip holster didn’t turn around from a pyramid he was constructing with half-pint cans of peas. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Do you have such an animal as an egg poacher?”
He was a big man with dill pickle fingers that dwarfed the cans he was stacking. “Aisle Six.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder as he turned to look at us. His bloodshot eyes and ragged voice betrayed the fatigue unique to the middle ground between the end of a night shift and the beginning of a second job. It was obvious that the man was exhausted. We should have been helping him, instead of the other way around. Lavinia noticed it, too. “Thank you, sir,” she said tenderly.
I glanced at a sign overhead. “This is aisle Four.”
The man acknowledged Lavinia’s civility with a tired smile and turned back to his pyramid. “Enter Six from the front of the store,” he advised us. “Get your egg poacher and exit the way you came. That way, you’ll avoid a direct encounter with the man who’s taking a shit in School Supplies.”
For once Lavinia was nonplussed. “School Supplies?”
“It’s at the other end of Six.”
“Ahm,” I hesitated, “is this a regular customer?”
“He’s real regular,” the clerk said.
“Where are your security people?” Lavinia asked.
“Security don’t want nothing to do with him.”
“What about the cops?”
“Cops got real crime to attend to.”
“Where’s the manager?”
“Crying in his office.”
We walked to the row of cash registers at the front of the store, crossed over to aisle Six, and peered cautiously around its end cap, which consisted entirely of pineapples.
“He wasn’t kidding,” Lavinia said.
“I never thought so. There’s the kitchen stuff. Only twenty feet in.”
A speaker overhead reproduced Hello Goodbye, by the Beatles.
“Let’s go.”
We had to scan the display. Salt shakers. Knife sets. Chafing dishes. Can openers. Sauce pans. Fondue forks. Wooden-handled barbecue spatulas. Refrigerator magnets. “Get a pot-holder,” I suggested.
“God almighty,” Lavinia said, angrily throwing a pair into our basket. “What the hell has that guy been eating?”
“Cheap wine, I’d guess.”
“What do you know about it?”
“What’s to know? You are what you eat?”
“Look. There’s a goddamn egg poacher.”
She pointed out a plasticized package containing a saucepan with lid, five shallow semi-spherical metal cups, and a flat, round flange with five holes stamped out of it.
“It looks like a hubcap.”
“It cooks eggs by steaming them in these cups.” She stood on tiptoe to pull down the package. “The cups fit into the hubcap, which covers the saucepan, half-filled with water, which you put on the stove….”
“I got it I got it—get it.”
“I can’t reach it….”
From thirty feet away came sounds not unlike those to be obtained by spitting on a hot griddle, with moaning in between.
“God almighty….”
As the woman at the cash register ran the egg poacher over the bar code scanner, she said, “First thing we sold off Six in a while.”
I nodded. “No wonder the manager’s crying in his office.”
“He said he’d turn this store around.” She scanned the sausage. “But the store’s turning him around.”
“Curly, look.”
Lavinia pointed to a San Francisco Examiner in a rack of tabloids and fashion magazines at the entrance to the check stand. Its headline read, “FAMED DRUMMER MURDERED.”
“Famed?” I said. “That guy was no more famous than road tar in the average fender well. He—”
Lavinia elbowed me sharply in the ribs. “I heard it was converting to a tabloid format.” She pulled a copy. “And sure enough. Yuck. Last I heard,” she added, holding it so I could look at it too, “they no longer publish on Saturday or Sunday.”
“They never had a Saturday edition,” the checker said. “And as soon as that Hearst tit dries up they’ll suspend Monday through Friday, too. Mark my words.”
Lavinia folded the paper. “But the guy who redesigned the Examiner redesigned The Wall Street Journal, too.”
“What are you trying to tell me,” the checker retorted with unexpected venom, “that shit stinks no matter how it’s packaged?” Lavinia laughed out loud, but the checker wasn’t amused. “I will never forgive how that ass-wipe Wall Street Journal crucified Bill Clinton. Every day for eight years.”
“They don’t publish on the weekends, either,” Livinia pointed out.
The checker vehemently totaled the register. “My uncrowned king!”
In the parking lot, Lavinia spread the Examiner over the trunk lid of the Lexus.
Acting on an anonymous tip, police discovered the body of Tenesmus drummer Stefan Stepnowksi in a Potrero District warehouse early this morning.
Few details were available by press time. Citing the confidentiality of an ongoing investigation, a police spokeswoman disclosed only that a Caucasian male had been shot at least once at close range and that be probably died instantly. The body was discovered in a pool of blood behind the unlocked door of a warehouse on De Haro Street at 12:41 A.M.
Although the police spokeswoman refused to confirm the victim’s identity, pending notification of next of kin, the Examiner night desk was able to determine through informed sources that the murdered man has been positively identified as Stefan Stepnowski, famed drummer of the short-lived thrash-metal band Tenesmus. Though releasing only one CD before disintegrating over disagreements about the band’s creative direction, the influence of Tenesmus extended far beyond the scant ten months of its existence. Music acts as diverse as Pocono Harris, Star Chamber, Robohammer, and Unclaimed Deceased often cite the band’s pioneering sound. A fan who works the night copy desk at the Examiner reports that despite their initial success none of the members of Tenesmus was able to capitalize on the notoriety of the band’s first and only recording, Scarred By Chains. That album has been out of print for at least ten years due to contractual disputes, the fan said, and Stepnowski was widely presumed to have been the sole surviving member of the band.
“What a depressing mess,” Lavinia said, as she started the car. “And what about the man’s poor wife?”
I settled the groceries in the footwell of the passenger seat. “I never heard of Unclaimed Deceased.”
“Three guys dress like morgue attendants right down to the necrotic cosmetics and perform songs about getting high on formaldehyde and necrophilia and the smell of dead Easter lilies, which act they manage quite handily to turn into a metaphor for greed in corporate America, and you never heard of them? Where the fuck have you been?”
“Re-reading The Octopus by Frank Norris,” I said.
Livinia rasied her head with a start. “Is that where—?”
“I guess they expressed something about the human condition that needed expressing,” I interrupted.
“They’ve sold millions of records, Curly.”
“Sometimes the shit works and sometimes it doesn’t,” I observed glumly.
She drove us out of the parking lot.
“Christ,” I said after a while. “The Examiner used to be a great newspaper.”
“That was then. This is now. Don’t litter.”
The sun was up but it was still early. We stopped at a red light. On a power line above us a pair of rosy finches perched, facing opposite directions, and twittered merrily.
“I can’t believe they decided to call that guy famous,” I groused as we pulled through the intersection. “He was nobody.”
“A nobody in a pool of blood,” Lavinia said.
“Are you going to start up with that again?”
“If he was shot some place else, then dumped on the loading dock, why was there so much blood?”
I rolled up the Examiner and stuffed it in the grocery bag. “I asked myself that while I was still looking at him.”
“If he was shot at close range, accurately enough to kill him, it seems logical he would have bled out on the spot.”
“So he was lounging around the warehouse with his shoes off. Somebody found him and killed him. So what?”
“I wish we’d looked for his shoes.”
“Why? What are you saying? That Stepnowski was killed somewhere else, the killer collected his blood, moved the body and redistributed the blood around it, all to confuse the police? It seems like a lot of trouble. What the hell for?”
“Exactly.” Lavinia tapped a fingernail on the steering wheel. “The killer didn’t want anybody to know where the killing happened. He or she didn’t want anybody even to suspect that it happened someplace else. So he or she went to a lot of trouble.”
“But not so much trouble as your little brain is going to. How do you collect blood from a gunshot wound? You pick the guy up and hold him over an empty bucket?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because dead people weigh too much. You ever heard the term dead weight?”
“Man, Curly, you take things too literally. I wasn’t even interested in this idea until you decided the setup was wrong. Now you’re so pissed off you think it was my idea. Don’t be such a cheap date.”
I looked out the window. I never minded staying up all night for the right reason. But staying up all night for the wrong reasons—which far outnumber the right ones—is nothing if not exasperating.
Another block passed. “Besides,” Lavinia said, “Stepnowski was a little guy. Real little.”
Ten minutes later, as we were walking around the side of the garage to Ivy’s back steps, she said, “It’s interesting to think about.”
“Personally, I’m trying to forget that guy, face down in his own blood.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his blood.”
“Maybe those weren’t his socks.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his money, either.”
“It wasn’t his money. It was our money. Wait.” She stopped. “You mean somebody moved the body and planted the money on it? Because—wait, don’t tell me—because they knew we were looking for him and when we found him we would take the money and go away and not tell anybody about it, thereby implicating ourselves in the murder and ultimately muddying the identity of the true murderer into the bargain?”
“Exactly.”
Lavinia paused with one foot on the first step, turned halfway back toward me, paused again, turned forward again, and paused again. Then, abruptly, she resumed climbing the staircase.
“Maybe he wasn’t even dead.” She took a step. “Maybe he wasn’t even really there.” She took another step. “Maybe he was a hologram.”
“Now you’ve got a theory….”