Black House (20 page)

Fred rolls himself across the bed, falls off, and lands on his knees like a gymnast doing a trick. He reaches for her. She makes no move to evade him. There’s that, at least. And although she’s choking, he still sees no expression in her eyes. They are dusty zeros.

Fred yanks the corsage of paper from her mouth. There’s another behind it. Fred reaches between her teeth, tweezes this second ball of paper between the first two fingers of his right hand (thinking
Please don’t bite me, Judy, please don’t
), and pulls it out, too. There’s a third ball of paper behind this one, way at the back of her mouth. He gets hold of this one as well, and extracts it. Although it’s crumpled, he can see the printed words
GREAT IDEA,
and knows what she’s swallowed: sheets of paper from the notepad Ty gave her for her birthday.

She’s still choking. Her skin is turning slate.

Fred grabs her by her upper arms and pulls her up. She comes easily, but when he relaxes his hold her knees bend and she starts to go back down. She’s turned into Raggedy Ann. The choking sound continues. Her sausage throat—

“Help me, Judy! Help me, you bitch!”

Unaware of what he is saying. He yanks her hard—as hard as he yanked the fishing pole in his dream—and spins her around like a ballerina when she comes up on her toes. Then he seizes her in a bear hug, his wrists brushing the undersides of her breasts, her bottom tight against his crotch, the kind of position he would find extremely sexy if his wife didn’t happen to be choking to death.

He pops his thumb up between her breasts like a hitchhiker, then says the magic word as he pulls sharply upward and backward. The magic word is
Heimlich,
and it works. Two more wads of paper fly from Judy’s mouth, propelled by a jet of vomit that is little more than bile—her intake of food over the last twelve hours amounts to three cups of coffee and a cranberry muffin.

She gives a gasp, coughs twice, then begins to breathe more or less normally.

He puts her on the bed . . . drops her on the bed. His lower back is spasming wildly, and it’s really no wonder; first Ty’s dresser, now this.

“Well, what did you think you were doing?” he asks her loudly. “What in the name of Christ did you think you were
doing
?”

He realizes that he has raised one hand over Judy’s upturned face as if to strike her. Part of him
wants
to strike her. He loves her, but at this moment he also hates her. He has imagined plenty of bad things over the years they’ve been married—Judy getting cancer, Judy paralyzed in an accident, Judy first taking a lover and then demanding a divorce—but he has never imagined Judy going chickenshit on him, and isn’t that what this amounts to?

“What did you think you were
doing
?”

She looks at him without fear . . . but without anything else, either. Her eyes are dead. Her husband lowers his hand, thinking:
I’d cut it off before I hit you. I might be pissed at you, I
am
pissed at you, but I’d cut it off before I did that.

Judy rolls over, face-down on the coverlet, her hair spread around her head in a corona.

“Judy?”

Nothing. She just lies there.

Fred looks at her for a moment, then uncrumples one of the slimy balls of paper with which she has tried to strangle herself. It is covered with tangles of scribbled words. Gorg, abbalah, eeleelee, munshun, bas, lum, opopanax: these mean nothing to him. Others—drudge, asswipe, black, red, Chicago, and Ty—are actual words but have no context. Printed up one side of the sheet is
IF YOU’VE GOT PRINCE ALBERT IN A CAN, HOW CAN YOU EVER GET HIM OUT
?
Up the other, like a teletype stuck in repeat mode, is this:
BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK

If you waste time looking for sense in this, you’re as crazy as she is,
Fred thinks.
You can’t waste time—

Time.

He looks at the clock on his side of the bed and cannot believe its news: 4:17
P.M.
Is that possible? He looks at his watch and sees that it is.

Knowing it’s foolish, knowing he would have heard his son come in even if in a deep sleep, Fred strides to the door on big nerveless legs.
“Ty!”
he yells.
“Hey, Ty! TYLER!”

Waiting for an answer that will not come, Fred realizes that everything in his life has changed, quite possibly forever. People tell you this can happen
—in the blink of an eye,
they say,
before you know it,
they say—but you don’t believe it. Then a wind comes.

Go down to Ty’s room? Check? Be sure?

Ty isn’t there—Fred knows this—but he does it just the same. The room is empty, as he knew it would be. And it looks oddly distorted, almost sinister, with the dresser now on the other side.

Judy. You left her alone, you idiot. She’ll be chewing paper again by now, they’re clever, mad people are clever—

Fred dashes back down to the master bedroom and exhales a sigh of relief when he sees Judy lying just as he left her, face-down, hair spread around her head. He discovers that his worries about his mad wife are now secondary to his worries about his missing son.

He’ll be home by four, at the latest
.
.
.
take it to the bank.
So he had thought. But four has come and gone. A strong wind has arisen and blown the bank away. Fred walks to his side of the bed and sits down beside his wife’s splayed right leg. He picks up the phone and punches in a number. It’s an easy number, only three digits.

“
Yell-
o, Police Department, Officer Dulac speaking, you’ve dialed 911, do you have an emergency?”

“Officer Dulac, this is Fred Marshall. I’d like to speak to Dale, if he’s still there.” Fred is pretty sure Dale is. He works late most nights, especially since—

He pushes the rest away, but inside his head the wind blows harder. Louder.

“Gee, Mr. Marshall, he’s here, but he’s in a meeting and I don’t think I can—”

“Get him.”

“Mr. Marshall, you’re not hearing me. He’s in with two guys from the WSP and one from the FBI. If you could just tell me—”

Fred closes his eyes. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Something interesting here. He called in on the 911 line, but the idiot on the other end seems to have forgotten that. Why? Because it’s someone he knows. It’s good old Fred Marshall, bought a Deere lawn tractor from him just the year before last. Must have dialed 911 because it was easier than looking up the regular number. Because
no one Bobby knows
can actually have an emergency.

Fred remembers having a similar idea himself that morning—a different Fred Marshall, one who believed that the Fisherman could never touch his son. Not
his
son.

Ty’s gone.
Gorg
fascinated him and the abbalah took him.

“Hello? Mr. Marshall? Fred? Are you still—”

“Listen to me,” Fred says, his eyes still closed. Down at Goltz’s, he would be calling the man on the other end Bobby by now, but Goltz’s has never seemed so far away; Goltz’s is in the star-system Opopanax, on Planet Abbalah. “Listen to me carefully. Write it down if you have to. My wife has gone mad and my son is missing. Do you understand those things? Wife mad. Son missing.
Now put me through to the chief!
”

But Bobby Dulac doesn’t, not right away. He has made a deduction. A more diplomatic police officer (Jack Sawyer as he was in his salad days, for instance) would have kept said deduction to himself, but Bobby can’t do that. Bobby has hooked a big one.

“Mr. Marshall? Fred? Your son doesn’t own a Schwinn, does he? Three-speed Schwinn, red? Got a novelty license plate that reads . . . uh . . .
BIG MAC?
”

Fred cannot answer. For several long and terrible moments he cannot even draw a breath. Between his ears, the wind blows both louder and harder. Now it’s a hurricane.

Gorg fascinated him
.
.
.
the abbalah took him.

At last, just when it seems he will begin to strangle himself, his chest unlocks and he takes in a huge, tearing breath.
“PUT CHIEF GILBERTSON ON! DO IT NOW, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

Although he shrieks this at the top of his lungs, the woman lying face-down on the coverlet beside him never moves. There is a click. He’s on hold. Not for long, but it’s long enough for him to see the scratched, bald place on his missing son’s bedroom wall, the swelled column of his mad wife’s throat, and blood dribbling through the creel in his dream. His back spasms cruelly, and Fred welcomes the pain. It’s like getting a telegram from the real world.

Then Dale is on the phone, Dale is asking him what’s wrong, and Fred Marshall begins to cry.

7

G
OD MAY KNOW
where Henry Leyden found that astounding suit, but we certainly do not. A costume shop? No, it is too elegant to be a costume; this is the real thing, not an imitation. But what sort of real thing is it? The wide lapels sweep down to an inch below the waist, and the twin flaps of the swallowtail reach nearly to the ankles of the billowing, pleated trousers, which seem, beneath the snowfield expanse of the double-breasted waistcoat, to ride nearly at the level of the sternum. On Henry’s feet, white, high-button spats adorn white patent-leather shoes; about his neck, a stiff, high collar turns its pointed peaks over a wide, flowing, white satin bow tie, perfectly knotted. The total effect is of old-fashioned diplomatic finery harmoniously wedded to a zoot suit: the raffishness of the ensemble outweighs its formality, but the dignity of the swallowtail and the waistcoat contribute to the whole a regal quality of a specific kind, the regality often seen in African American entertainers and musicians.

Escorting Henry to the common room while surly Pete Wexler comes along behind, pushing a handcart loaded with boxes of records, Rebecca Vilas dimly remembers having seen Duke Ellington wearing a white cutaway like this in a clip from some old film . . . or was it Cab Calloway? She recalls an upraised eyebrow, a glittering smile, a seductive face, an upright figure posed before a band, but little more. (If alive, either Mr. Ellington or Mr. Calloway could have informed Rebecca that Henry’s outfit, including the “high-drape” pants with a “reet pleat,” terms not in her vocabulary, had undoubtedly been handmade by one of four specific tailors located in the black neighborhoods of New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, masters of their trade during the thirties and forties, underground tailors, men now alas as dead as their celebrated clients. Henry Leyden knows exactly who tailored his outfit, where it came from, and how it fell into his hands, but when it comes to persons such as Rebecca Vilas, Henry imparts no more information than is already likely to be known.) In the corridor leading to the common room, the white cutaway appears to shine from within, an impression only increased by Henry’s oversized, daddy-cool dark glasses with bamboo frames, in which what may be tiny sapphires wink at the corners of the bows.

Is there maybe some shop that sells Spiffy Clothes of Great 1930s Bandleaders? Does some museum inherit this stuff and auction it off? Rebecca cannot contain her curiosity a moment longer. “Mr. Leyden, where did you get that beautiful outfit?”

From the rear and taking care to sound as though he is muttering to himself, Pete Wexler opines that obtaining an outfit like that probably requires chasing a person of an ethnicity beginning with the letter
n
for at least a couple of miles.

Henry ignores Pete and smiles. “It’s all a matter of knowing where to look.”

“Guess you never heard of CDs,” Pete says. “They’re like this big new breakthrough.”

“Shut up and tote them bales, me bucko,” says Ms. Vilas. “We’re almost there.”

“Rebecca, my dear, if I may,” Henry says. “Mr. Wexler has every right to grouse. After all, there’s no way he could know that I own about three thousand CDs, is there? And if the man who originally owned these clothes can be called a nigger, I’d be proud to call myself one, too. That would be an
incredible
honor. I wish I could claim it.”

Henry has come to a halt. Each, in a different way, shocked by his use of the forbidden word, Pete and Rebecca have also stopped moving.

“And,” Henry says, “we owe respect to those who assist us in the performance of our duties. I asked Mr. Wexler to shake out my suit when he hung it up, and he very kindly obliged me.”

“Yeah,” Pete says. “Plus I also hung up your light and put your turntable and speakers and shit right where you want ’em.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Wexler,” Henry says. “I appreciate your efforts in my behalf.”

“Well, shit,” Pete says, “I was only doing my job, you know? But anything you want after you’re done, I’ll give you a hand.”

Without benefit of a flash of panties or a glimpse of ass, Pete Wexler has been completely disarmed. Rebecca finds this amazing. All in all, sightless or not, Henry Leyden, it comes to her, is far and away the coolest human being she has ever been privileged to encounter in her entire twenty-six years on the face of the earth. Never mind his clothes—where did
guys
like this come from?

“Do you really think some little boy vanished from the sidewalk out in front of here this afternoon?” Henry asks.

“What?” Rebecca asks.

“Seems like it to me,” Pete says.

“What?” Rebecca asks again, this time to Pete Wexler, not Henry. “What are you saying?”

“Well, he ast me, and I tol’ him,” Pete says. “That’s all.”

Simmering dangerously, Rebecca takes a stride toward him. “This happened on
our
sidewalk? Another kid, in front of
our building
? And you didn’t say anything to me or Mr. Maxton?”

“There wasn’t nothin’ to say,” Pete offers in self-defense.

“Maybe you could tell us what actually happened,” Henry says.

“Sure. What happened was, I went outside for a smoke, see?” This is less than strictly truthful. Faced with the choice of walking ten yards to the Daisy corridor men’s room to flush his cigarette down a toilet or walking ten feet to the entrance and pitching it into the parking lot, Pete had sensibly elected outdoor disposal. “So I get outside and that’s when I saw it. This police car, parked right out there. So I walked up to the hedge, and there’s this cop, a young guy, I think his name is Cheetah, or something like that, and he’s loadin’ this bike, like a kid’s bike, into his trunk. And something else, too, only I couldn’t see what it was except it was small. And after he did that, he got a piece a chalk outta his glove compartment and he came back and made like X marks on the sidewalk.”

“Did you talk to him?” Rebecca asks. “Did you ask him what he was doing?”

“Miz Vilas, I don’t talk to cops unless it’s like you got no other choice, know what I mean? Cheetah, he never even saw me. The guy wouldn’t of said nothing anyhow. He had this expression on his face—it was like, Jeez, I hope I get to the crapper before I drop a load in my pants, that kind of expression.”

“Then he just drove away?”

“Just like that. Twenty minutes later, two other cops showed up.”

Rebecca raises both hands, closes her eyes, and presses her fingertips to her forehead, giving Pete Wexler an excellent opportunity, of which he does not fail to take full advantage, to admire the shape of her breasts underneath her blouse. It may not be as great as the view from the bottom of the ladder, but it’ll do, all right, yes it will. As far as Ebbie’s dad is concerned, a sight like Rebecca Vilas’s Hottentots pushing out against her dress is like a good fire on a cold night. They are bigger than you’d expect on a slender little thing like her, and you know what? When the arms go up, the Hottentots go up, too! Hey, if he had known she was going to put on a show like this, he would have told her about Cheetah and the bicycle as soon as it happened.

“All right, okay,” she says, still flattening the tips of her fingers against her head. She lifts her chin, raising her arms another few inches, and frowns in concentration, for a moment looking like a figure on a plinth.

Hoo-ray and hallelujah,
Pete thinks.
There’s a bright side to everything. If another little snotnose gets grabbed off the sidewalk tomorrow morning, it won’t be soon enough for me.

Rebecca says, “Okay, okay, okay,” opens her eyes, and lowers her arms. Pete Wexler is staring firmly at a point over her shoulder, his face blank with a false innocence she immediately comprehends. Good God, what a caveman. “It’s not as bad as I thought. In the first place, all you saw was a policeman picking up a bike. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe some other kid borrowed the bike, dumped it, and ran away. The cop could have been looking for it. Or the kid who
owned
the bike could have been hit by a car or something. And even if the worst did happen, I don’t see any way that it could hurt us. Maxton’s isn’t responsible for whatever goes on outside the grounds.”

She turns to Henry, who looks as though he wishes he were a hundred miles away. “Sorry, I know that sounded awfully cold. I’m as distressed about this Fisherman business as everyone else, what with those two poor kids and the missing girl. We’re all so upset we can hardly think straight. But I’d hate to see
us
dragged into the mess, don’t you see?”

“I see perfectly,” Henry says. “Being one of those blind men George Rathbun is always yelling about.”

“Hah!” Pete Wexler barks.

“And you agree with me, don’t you?”

“I’m a gentleman, I agree with everybody,” Henry says. “I agree with Pete that another child may well have been abducted by our local monster. Officer Cheetah, or whatever his name is, sounded too anxious to be just picking up a lost bicycle. And I agree with you that Maxton’s cannot be blamed for anything that happened.”

“Good,” Rebecca says.

“Unless, of course, someone here is involved in the murders of these children.”

“But that’s impossible!” Rebecca says. “Most of our male clients can’t even remember their own names.”

“A ten-year-old girl could take most of these feebs,” Pete says. “Even the ones who don’t have old-timer’s disease walk around covered in their own . . . you know.”

“You’re forgetting about the staff,” Henry says.

“Oh, now,” Rebecca says, momentarily rendered nearly wordless. “Come on. That’s . . . that’s a totally irresponsible thing to say.”

“True. It is. But if this goes on, nobody will be above suspicion. That’s my point.”

Pete Wexler feels a sudden chill—if the town clowns start grilling Maxton’s residents, his private amusements might come to light, and wouldn’t Wendell Green have a field day with that stuff? A gleaming new idea comes to him, and he brings it forth, hoping to impress Miz Vilas. “You know what? The cops should talk to that California guy, the big-time detective who nailed that Kinderling asshole two-three years ago. He lives around here somewhere, don’t he? Someone like that, he’s the guy we need on this. The cops here, they’re way outta their depth. That guy, he’s like a whaddayacallit, a goddamn
resource.
”

“Odd you should say that,” Henry says. “I couldn’t agree with you more. It is about time Jack Sawyer did his thing. I’ll work on him again.”

“You know him?” Rebecca asks.

“Oh, yes,” Henry says. “That I do. But isn’t it about time for me to do my own thing?”

“Soon. They’re all still outside.”

Rebecca leads him down the rest of the corridor and into the common room, where all three of them move across to the big platform. Henry’s microphone stands beside a table mounted with his speakers and turntable. With unnerving accuracy, Henry says, “Lot of space in here.”

“You can tell that?” she asks.

“Piece of cake,” Henry says. “We must be getting close now.”

“It’s right in front of you. Do you need any help?”

Henry extends one foot and taps the side of the flat. He glides a hand down the edge of the table, locates the mike stand, says, “Not at the moment, darlin’,” and steps neatly up onto the platform. Guided by touch, he moves to the back of the table and locates the turntable. “All is copacetic,” he says. “Pete, would you please put the record boxes on the table? The one on top goes
here,
and the other one right next to it.”

“What’s he like, your friend Jack?” Rebecca asks.

“An orphan of the storm. A pussycat, but an extremely
difficult
pussycat. I have to say, he can be a real pain in the bunghole.”

Crowd noises, a buzz of conversation interlaced with children’s voices and songs thumped out on an old upright piano, have been audible through the windows since they entered the room, and when Pete has placed the record boxes on the table, he says, “I better get out there, ’cuz Chipper’s probly lookin’ for me. Gonna be a shitload of cleanup once they come inside.”

Pete shambles out, rolling the handcart before him. Rebecca asks if there is anything more Henry would like her to do for him.

“The overhead lights are on, aren’t they? Please turn them off, and wait for the first wave to come in. Then switch on the pink spot, and prepare to jitterbug your heart out.”

“You want me to turn off the lights?”

“You’ll see.”

Rebecca moves back across to the door, turns off the overhead lights, and does see, just as Henry had promised. A soft, dim illumination from the rank of windows hovers in the air, replacing the former brightness and harshness with a vague mellow haze, as if the room lay behind a scrim. That pink spotlight is going to look pretty good in here, Rebecca thinks.

Outside on the lawn, the predance wingding is winding down. Lots of old men and women are busily polishing off their strawberry shortcakes and soda pop at the picnic tables, and the piano-playing gent in the straw boater and red sleeve garters comes to the end of “Heart and Soul,”
ba bump ba bump ba ba bump bump bump,
no finesse but plenty of volume, closes the lid of the upright, and stands up to a scattering of applause. Grandchildren who had earlier complained about having to come to the great fest dodge through the tables and wheelchairs, evading their parents’ glances and hoping to wheedle a last balloon from the balloon lady in the clown suit and frizzy red wig, oh joy unbounded.

Alice Weathers applauds the piano player, as well she might: forty years ago, he reluctantly absorbed the rudiments of pianism at her hands just well enough to pick up a few bucks at occasions like this, when not obliged to perform his usual function, that of selling sweatshirts and baseball caps on Chase Street. Charles Burnside, who, having been scrubbed clean by good-hearted Butch Yerxa, decked himself out in an old white shirt and a pair of loose, filthy trousers, stands slightly apart from the throng in the shade of a large oak, not applauding but sneering. The unbuttoned collar of the shirt droops around his ropy neck. Now and then he wipes his mouth or picks his teeth with a ragged thumbnail, but mainly he does not move at all. He looks as though someone plunked him down by the side of a road and drove off. Whenever the careering grandkids swerve near Burny, they instantly veer away, as if repelled by a force field.