TWENTY-THREE

I reached in the darkness. My face brushed his overcoat, mildew-smelling. His revolver lay on the closet shelf above me. Teetering on the stool, I grasped the shelf with one hand and stretched. My fingers splayed. The tips felt cold steel …

“Adam!”

My hand fell away as the stool tipped clattering to the floor. I caught the shelf, hanging amidst his clothes. Her fingers clutched the back of my shirt. I lost my grip, fell, landed off balance. Hangers rattled as I stumbled against the closet wall and turned.

Her face was ivory, the blood gone from her lips. Brian cowered behind her. I stood straight. “I have to hold it, Mother.”

She began shrieking and then her palm cracked across my face.…

Ice water ran down my face and neck. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

I heard myself moan, tasted blood, warm and salty. “Let me take you to the hospital,” she was saying.

“Where am I?” The words came slurred to my ears.

“Your car. You crawled here.”

I tried opening my eyes. Terry leaned through the window with a rag and a green jug of water, her features swimming.

“No time …”

“Please, you’re not seeing me, I can tell. There was this crack when he hit you.”

She sounded scared. I rolled my neck on the car seat, trying to focus until I could make out the building. From upstairs a bearded man looked down with his palms pressed on the window. “Get out,” I said. “Go to the police.”

“I can’t. Not now.”

White sun cut into my eyes. I propped myself against the wheel and jabbed at the ignition with my key until the motor snarled. The world had shrunk to the size of my windshield, with Terry pleading from the side. Her face fell away.

My car was crawling onto Twentieth Street as horns blasted and my head screamed. In slow motion I drove to the police station, to sleep …

Rough hands shook me. “Drugs and whiskey,” he rasped. “You look for poison in your sports car instead of Jesus in your heart.”

It was no dream. I raised my head, squinted into the red worn face of a wrinkled stranger with rotten teeth and craziness in his eyes. He stopped waving his Bible up and down. “Give me a hand,” I murmured.

I cracked open the door and fell sideways until he caught me. I let my feet slide out, pulling up by his lapels. His breath stank. “So you’re who he’s got left,” I said.

His eyes, clear, white, and glassy, seemed only to see distances. “He’s coming, brother.”

“Come on,” I managed. “Help me inside.”

He clutched my elbow as I walked up the stairs, stopping every few steps, his breathing a low asthmatic whistle. At the top I rested on the glass door. “Thanks.”

He looked through me. “He’s coming,” he wheezed, and teetered away, shouting at passersby.

I walked leaning forward through a long tunnel toward a door I remembered. I opened it, falling. Rayfield disappeared.

I awoke lying on a metal desk with my suit coat folded under my neck and a paramedic watching me. I could smell iodine, felt explosions in my skull. “I fell,” I said absently.

The paramedic answered, “You were hit.”

“You stupid bastard,” said Rayfield.

The colloquy came to my ears with detached lucidity, as when you’re prattling at a cocktail party and suddenly hear the sound of your own emptiness so clearly it seems someone else’s. But now there was numbness in my feet, nausea, a ringing skull. My crotch felt swollen. “Get me a chair,” I mumbled.

Bast slid one over. I pushed off the table and sat. But I couldn’t retrieve the pounding of my subconscious, why I awoke believing that I shouldn’t be here, that I couldn’t tell Rayfield about Jason. Better to stick with Lee. “Listen—”

“Where you been?” Bast demanded.

“Searching—”

The paramedic broke in. “You’re concussed, man. You’re slurring words.”

“He’s a stupid fuck,” Bast said, “who’s going to get himself killed.”

“I don’t think it was Lee—”

“Who’s the gray-haired man?” Rayfield cut in.

“What man?” Then I remembered Mooring.

Rayfield’s face reddened. Bast leaned over me. “If anyone’s killed out of this, asshole, it’s on you.”

The place smelled of raw nerve ends. “Better take him to the E.R.,” the paramedic said nervously.

“Get Bast out of here,” I told Rayfield.

Rayfield’s jaw worked. He pulled the ball-point pen from his shirt pocket as he nodded toward Bast. Bast and the paramedic disappeared. A fluorescent ceiling light blinked above me. In the open room silent figures moved at the corners of my eyes. Rayfield seemed distant, on the wrong end of a telescope. He shoved coffee at me. I drank some and lit a cigarette, constructing a small manageable world where I did the same things, smoke and drink coffee. Rayfield’s pen began clicking. “What about Lee?”

“He didn’t kill me. He didn’t rape Mrs. Cantwell …” My voice fell off.

“So you say to let him go.” The question was taunting, silken.

I tried to concentrate. “I don’t think you can hold him.”

“You don’t see the mayor, my captain, or all those people who need a killer. Just the idea of who Lee is makes people anxious. Some people want him burned.”

My teeth ached. The pen noise was like dripping water. “I don’t.”

“But you’d do that to protect Henry Cantwell.”

I couldn’t answer. I righted myself and tried reaching for my jacket.

“You know, I’ve wondered.” He said it behind me, musingly. “I guess the worrying over your wife was crap.”

I turned back to his long, speculative look. The look and something new in his voice kept me there. He placed a chair with its back to me and straddled it leaning forward, eyes curious and disdainful as he said quietly, “You’re queer, aren’t you?”

It was like falling in a dream. I wasn’t sure where I was or how the fall would end. “Aren’t you?” he spat.

“Just graceful.”

“No, you don’t look queer. But you can’t go by that.” His silent stare gauged me until he seemed to decide something after a long while. “You really don’t know, do you? He’s got you running like a rat in a maze, getting beat up and lying for him, and he hasn’t told you.”

“Who? Told me what?”

“Henry Cantwell.”

“What about him?”

Rayfield smiled slightly. “He’s a faggot, Shaw.”

“Bullshit.”

“Seven years ago,” he spoke over me, “the vice squad raided a gay motel. Your good friend Henry Cantwell was in bed with a sixteen-year-old boy. He likes them young, Shaw; he just doesn’t like getting caught. He was crying when they brought him in.”

I closed my eyes. “Who told you this?”

“I saw him. He was begging—it would ruin him, couldn’t they understand—weak, like a fairy.” His voice thickened. “It made me sick to watch him. He shivered while they read his rights and told him he had one phone call. He got up, pacing in a little circle like he couldn’t decide. When he reached for the telephone his hands were shaking.

“It was over in an hour. Someone called the captain who ran vice. The records were destroyed. Cade walked into the station, looked around like we were dirt, asked the captain for Cantwell, and dragged him off without speaking. Cantwell wouldn’t even look at him. But the boy was a stray and Cantwell had money. It never made the papers, never went to court. It never happened. Except it did.” His voice shook now. “I hate queers, Shaw. But even worse I hate Cade and Cantwell buying us like whores. It won’t happen twice. This isn’t some sweet little boy getting cornholed and some vice-squad politician. It’s a murder. It’s mine.”

There was thin sweat on his forehead. From my subconscious welled the reason I hadn’t turned in Jason. The room shimmered as I stood, said, “See you, Lieutenant,” and tried moving toward the door.

“Where were you?” he called out.

I didn’t turn. “Nowhere.”

His pen clicked behind me.