Black House (46 page)

“One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone,” Potter says abruptly. “He said the house was a little way off the road, in a clearing, and it should have gotten sun at least five hours a day in the summer, but it somehow . . . didn’t. He said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale, and they didn’t like it. And sometimes they heard a dog growling in the woods. Sounded like a big one. A mean one. But they never saw it. You know how it is, I imagine. Stories get started, and then they just kinda feed on themselves . . .”

Potter’s shoulders suddenly slump. His head lowers.

“Man, that’s all I can remember.”

“What was the moke’s name when he was in Chicago?”

“Can’t remember.”

Jack suddenly thrusts his open hands under Potter’s nose. With his head lowered, Potter doesn’t see them until they’re right there, and he recoils, gasping. He gets a noseful of the dying smell on Jack’s skin.

“What . . . ? Jesus, what’s that?” Potter seizes one of Jack’s hands and sniffs again, greedily. “Boy, that’s nice. What is it?”

“Lilies,” Jack says, but it’s not what he thinks. What he thinks is
The memory of my mother.
“What was the moke’s name when he was in Chicago?”

“It . . . something like beer stein. That’s not it, but it’s close. Best I can do.”

“Beer stein,” Jack says. “And what was his name when he got to French Landing three years later?”

Suddenly there are loud, arguing voices on the stairs. “I don’t care!” someone shouts. Jack thinks it’s Black, the more officious one. “It’s our case, he’s our prisoner, and we’re taking him out!
Now!
”

Dale: “I’m not arguing. I’m just saying that the paperwork—”

Brown: “Aw, fuck the paperwork. We’ll take it with us.”

“What was his name in French Landing, Potsie?”

“I can’t—” Potsie takes Jack’s hands again. Potsie’s own hands are dry and cold. He smells Jack’s palms, eyes closed. On the long exhale of his breath he says: “Burnside. Chummy Burnside. Not that he was chummy. The nickname was a joke. I think his real handle might have been Charlie.”

Jack takes his hands back. Charles “Chummy” Burnside. Once known as Beer Stein. Or something like Beer Stein.

“And the house? What was the name of the house?”

Brown and Black are coming down the corridor now, with Dale scurrying after them.
There’s no time,
Jack thinks.
Damnit all, if I had even five minutes more—

And then Potsie says, “Black House. I don’t know if that’s what he called it or what the subs workin’ the job got to calling it, but that was the name, all right.”

Jack’s eyes widen. The image of Henry Leyden’s cozy living room crosses his mind: sitting with a drink at his elbow and reading about Jarndyce and Jarndyce. “Did you say
Bleak
House?”

“Black,”
Potsie reiterates impatiently. “Because it really
was.
It was—”

“Oh dear to Christ,” one of the state troopers says in a snotty look-what-the-cat-dragged-in voice that makes Jack feel like rearranging his face. It’s Brown, but when Jack glances up, it’s Brown’s partner he looks at. The coincidence of the other trooper’s name makes Jack smile.

“Hello, boys,” Jack says, getting up from the bunk.

“What are you doing here, Hollywood?” Black asks.

“Just batting the breeze and waiting for you,” Jack says, and smiles brilliantly. “I suppose you want this guy.”

“You’re goddamn right,” Brown growls. “And if you fucked up our case—”

“Gosh, I don’t think so,” Jack says. It’s a struggle, but he manages to achieve a tone of amiability. Then, to Potsie: “You’ll be safer with them than here in French Landing, sir.”

George Potter looks vacant again. Resigned. “Don’t matter much either way,” he says, then smiles as a thought occurs to him. “If old Chummy’s still alive, and you run across him, you might ask him if his ass still hurts from that diddling I gave him back in ’69. And tell him old Chicago Potsie says hello.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Brown asks, glowering. He has his cuffs out, and is clearly itching to snap them on George Potter’s wrists.

“Old times,” Jack says. He stuffs his fragrant hands in his pockets and leaves the cell. He smiles at Brown and Black. “Nothing to concern you boys.”

Trooper Black turns to Dale. “You’re out of this case,” he says. “Those are words of one syllable. I can’t make it any simpler. So tell me once and mean it forever, Chief: Do you understand?”

“Of course I do,” Dale said. “Take the case and welcome. But get off the tall white horse, willya? If you expected me to simply stand by and let a crowd of drunks from the Sand Bar take this man out of Lucky’s and lynch him—”

“Don’t make yourself look any stupider than you already are,” Brown snaps. “They picked his name up off your police calls.”

“I doubt that,” Dale says quietly, thinking of the doper’s cell phone borrowed out of evidence storage.

Black grabs Potter’s narrow shoulder, gives it a vicious twist, then thrusts him so hard toward the door at the end of the corridor that the man almost falls down. Potter recovers, his haggard face full of pain and dignity.

“Troopers,” Jack says.

He doesn’t speak loudly or angrily, but they both turn.

“Abuse that prisoner one more time in my sight, and I’ll be on the phone to the Madison shoofly-pies the minute you leave, and believe me, Troopers, they will listen to me. Your attitude is arrogant, coercive, and counterproductive to the resolution of this case. Your interdepartmental cooperation skills are nonexistent. Your demeanor is unprofessional and reflects badly upon the state of Wisconsin. You will either behave yourselves or I guarantee you that by next Friday you will be looking for security jobs.”

Although his voice remains even throughout, Black and Brown seem to shrink as he speaks. By the time he finishes, they look like a pair of chastened children. Dale is gazing at Jack with awe. Only Potter seems unaffected; he’s gazing down at his cuffed hands with eyes that could be a thousand miles away.

“Go on, now,” Jack says. “Take your prisoner, take your case records, and get lost.”

Black opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it again. They leave. When the door closes behind them, Dale looks at Jack and says, very softly: “Wow.”

“What?”

“If you don’t know,” Dale says, “I’m not going to tell you.”

Jack shrugs. “Potter will keep them occupied, which frees us up to do a little actual work. If there’s a bright side to tonight, that’s it.”

“What did you get from him? Anything?”

“A name. Might mean nothing. Charles Burnside. Nicknamed Chummy. Ever heard of him?”

Dale sticks out his lower lip and pulls it thoughtfully. Then he lets go and shakes his head. “The name itself seems to ring a faint bell, but that might only be because it’s so common. The nickname, no.”

“He was a builder, a contractor, a wheeler-dealer in Chicago over thirty years ago. According to Potsie, at least.”

“Potsie,” Dale says. The tape is peeling off a corner of the
ONE CALL MEANS ONE CALL
sign, and Dale smoothes it back down with the air of a man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. “You and he got pretty chummy, didn’t you?”

“No,” Jack says. “
Burnside’s
Chummy. And Trooper Black doesn’t own the Black House.”

“You’ve gone dotty. What black house?”

“First, it’s a proper name. Black, capital
B,
house, capital
H.
Black House. You ever heard of a house named that around here?”

Dale laughs. “God, no.”

Jack smiles back, but all at once it’s his interrogation smile, not his I’m-discussing-things-with-my-friend smile. Because he’s a coppiceman now. And he has seen a funny little flicker in Dale Gilbertson’s eyes.

“Are you sure? Take a minute. Think about it.”

“Told you, no. People don’t name their houses in these parts. Oh, I guess old Miss Graham and Miss Pentle call their place on the other side of the town library Honeysuckle, because of the honeysuckle bushes all over the fence in front, but that’s the only one in these parts I ever heard named.”

Again, Jack sees that flicker. Potter is the one who will be charged for murder by the Wisconsin State Police, but Jack didn’t see that deep flicker in Potter’s eyes a single time during their interview. Because Potter was straight with him.

Dale isn’t being straight.

But I have to be gentle with him,
Jack tells himself.
Because he doesn’t
know
he’s not being straight. How is that possible?

As if in answer, he hears Chicago Potsie’s voice:
One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone
.
.
.
he said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale.

Memory
is a shadow; any cop trying to reconstruct a crime or an accident from the conflicting accounts of eyewitnesses knows it well. Is Potsie’s Black House like this? Something that casts no shadow? Dale’s response (he has now turned full-face to the peeling poster, working on it as seriously as he might work on a heart attack victim in the street, administering CPR right out of the manual until the ambulance arrives) suggests to Jack that it might be something like
just
that. Three days ago he wouldn’t have allowed himself to consider such an idea, but three days ago he hadn’t returned to the Territories.

“According to Potsie, this place got a reputation as a haunted house even before it was completely built,” Jack says, pressing a little.

“Nope.” Dale moves on to the sign about the A.A. and N.A. meetings. He examines the tape studiously, not looking at Jack. “Doesn’t ring the old chimeroo.”

“Sure? One man almost bled to death. Another took a fall that paralyzed him. People complained—listen to this, Dale, it’s good—according to Potsie, people complained about losing their shadows. Couldn’t see them even at midday, with the sun shining full force. Isn’t that something?”

“Sure is, but I don’t remember any stories like that.” As Jack walks toward Dale, Dale moves away. Almost scutters away, although Chief Gilbertson is not ordinarily a scuttering man. It’s a little funny, a little sad, a little horrible. He doesn’t know he’s doing it, Jack’s sure of that. There
is
a shadow. Jack sees it, and on some level Dale
knows
he sees it. If Jack should force him too hard, Dale would have to see it, too . . . and Dale doesn’t want that. Because it’s a
bad
shadow. Is it worse than a monster who kills children and then eats selected portions of their bodies? Apparently part of Dale thinks so.

I could make him see that shadow,
Jack thinks coldly.
Put my hands under his nose—my lily-scented hands—and make him see it. Part of him even
wants
to see it. The coppiceman part.

Then another part of Jack’s mind speaks up in the Speedy Parker drawl he now remembers from his childhood.
You could push him over the edge of a nervous breakdown, too, Jack. God knows he’s close to one, after all the goin’s-ons since the Irkenham boy got took. You want to chance that? And for what? He didn’t know the name, about that he
was
bein’ straight.

“Dale?”

Dale gives Jack a quick, bright glance, then looks away. The furtive quality in that quick peek sort of breaks Jack’s heart. “What?”

“Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

At this change of subject, Dale’s face fills with glad relief. He claps Jack on the shoulder. “Good idea!”

God-pounding good idea, right here and now,
Jack thinks, then smiles. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to find a Black House. It’s been a long day. Best, maybe, to let this go. At least for tonight.

“What about Railsback?” Dale asks as they clatter down the stairs. “You still want to talk to him?”

“You bet,” Jack replies, heartily enough, but he holds out little hope for Andy Railsback, a picked witness who saw exactly what the Fisherman wanted him to see. With one little exception . . . perhaps. The single slipper. Jack doesn’t know if it will ever come to anything, but it might. In court, for instance . . . as an identifying link . . .

This is never going to court and you know it. It may not even finish in this w—

His thoughts are broken by a wave of cheerful sound as they step into the combination ready room and dispatch center. The members of the French Landing Police Department are standing and applauding. Henry Leyden is also standing and applauding. Dale joins in.

“Jesus, guys, quit it,” Jack says, laughing and blushing at the same time. But he won’t lie to himself, try to tell himself he takes no pleasure in that round of applause. He feels the warmth of them; can see the light of their regard. Those things aren’t important. But it feels like coming home, and that is.

When Jack and Henry step out of the police station an hour or so later, Beezer, Mouse, and Kaiser Bill are still there. The other two have gone back to the Row to fill in the various old ladies on tonight’s events.

“Sawyer,” Beezer says.

“Yes,” Jack says.

“Anything we can do, man. Can you dig that?
Anything.
”

Jack looks at the biker thoughtfully, wondering what his story is . . . other than grief, that is. A father’s grief. Beezer’s eyes remain steady on his. A little off to one side, Henry Leyden stands with his head raised to smell the river fog, humming deep down in his throat.

“I’m going to look in on Irma’s mom tomorrow around eleven,” Jack says. “Do you suppose you and your friends could meet me in the Sand Bar around noon? She lives close to there, I understand. I’ll buy youse a round of lemonade.”

Beezer doesn’t smile, but his eyes warm up slightly. “We’ll be there.”

“That’s good,” Jack says.

“Mind telling me why?”

“There’s a place that needs finding.”

“Does it have to do with whoever killed Amy and the other kids?”

“Maybe.”

Beezer nods. “Maybe’s good enough.”

Jack drives back toward Norway Valley slowly, and not just because of the fog. Although it’s still early in the evening, he is tired to the bone and has an idea that Henry feels the same way. Not because he’s quiet; Jack has become used to Henry’s occasional dormant stretches. No, it’s the quiet in the truck itself. Under ordinary circumstances, Henry is a restless, compulsive radio tuner, running through the La Riviere stations, checking KDCU here in town, then ranging outward, hunting for Milwaukee, Chicago, maybe even Omaha, Denver, and St. Louis, if conditions are right. An appetizer of bop here, a salad of spiritual music there, perhaps a dash of Perry Como way down at the foot of the dial: hot-diggity, dog-diggity,
boom
what-ya-do-to-me. Not tonight, though. Tonight Henry just sits quiet on his side of the truck with his hands folded in his lap. At last, when they’re no more than two miles from his driveway, Henry says: “No Dickens tonight, Jack. I’m going straight to bed.”