Count Geiger's Blues (29 page)

56
Antinoolity Cubed

“How’re you gonna find this Stickney turkey?”
The Mick asked. “He coulda moved. He could be dead.”

“He hasn’t moved,” Xavier said, rummaging through a drawer for the Greater Salonika Telephone Directory. “He was here to haul off the cancer clinic’s radwaste six years ago. And here last summer to pick up that Therac 4-J, and he was inhaling salad gas in P. S. Annie’s right after you pulled your stupid cut-and-run stunt.”

“Hey.” For The Mick, a pretty low-key bristle.

Xavier ran his finger down a tight column of names on a page of S’s. There were eleven Stickneys in Greater Salonika, but no “Wilbon T.” among them. (The closest was a “Willie Ray.”) He tossed the directory onto the counter and dug deeper into the drawer for an older book. The Mick sidled near to peer over his shoulder.

“You could call some of these Stickneys and ask for Will or Wilbon T. Whoever answered, if they said ‘No,’ you could scope their voice to see if they was lying.”

“Mikhail, my powers don’t function that reliably over Ma Bell’s phone lines. I’d probably alert Stickney that something was up and he’d bolt. No thanks.” Xavier found a three-year-old directory (saved for the addresses and numbers scribbled on its cover) and plopped it open atop the book already on the counter.

Mikhail edged between Xavier and the counter and scanned the Stickneys with his index finger. Its ebony nail halted and tapped. “Here he is. ‘Stickney, Wilbon T. 1117 Jarboe Lane.’ But the number ain’t good no more, worse luck.”

Jarboe Lane lay across the Chattahoochee in Satan’s Cellar, but it could offer a valuable lead. An old neighbor of Stickney’s might remember him. Somebody over there might even know where he’d moved. If he’d moved. If Xavier’s questions didn’t panic his tipster and trip a cascade of alarms all along the ghetto grapevine. To Xavier, a visit to Stickney’s old address seemed worth the risk and aggravation.

“Just give the police his name,” The Mick said. “If he’s a hopelessly blown weed-eater and repeat offender, they may already know where he is.”

“What? Mikhail Menaker—the outlaw regent of retropunkdom—wants me to ask the morally iffy enforcement agency of our fascist establishment? Do my ears—”

“Yeah, yeah: ‘deceive me?’ Never mind. But if you’re going, I’m going with.”

Xavier started to protest, but caught himself and relented. As new as he was to Salonika, The Mick was savvy about the Cellar. As his guardian, Xavier ought to forbid him to come. Dangers abounded over there, motiveless slayings were commonplace—but where an expedition of one might end in injury or failure, the two of them together might succeed and actually return to savor the triumph. Xavier had a small brainsquall. “Bring your Geiger counter, and I’ll be happy for you to come.”

“My Geiger counter? My Geiger-Müller counter?”

“Yes. Bring it. Do you want to come or not?”

“Affirmative,” The Mick said. “Absodamnlutely.”

*

Even with a map of Satan’s Cellar (from the Salonika Tourist Center, with tiny fire decals to denote crime hot spots), Jarboe Lane was no cinch to find. It was squeezed between two alleys not far from the trolley terminus, amid a jumble of flophouses, flea-bag hotels, and fly-by-night shops. At least three times before identifying it, Xavier and The Mick strolled past the cavelike entrance to Jarboe Lane: a cobbled defile barely wide enough for a hot-dog cart, gloomily awninged over with mildewed canvas scraps. Farther in, the narrow, tread-worn stairs of 1117 Jarboe Lane took Xavier and The Mick up one flight of steps to a turn-around office occupied by three Oriental males playing a board game with pielike plastic counters. Its door stood open. Xavier and sidekick Mick entered, Xavier in the same outfit in which he’d emulated a Smitten at Grotto East, The Mick in a getup virtually
de rigueur
in the Cellar.

“
‘Which UC stalwart is known to his mundane colleagues at Zoo Salonika as Leonard White?’
” the thinnest young game player said, reading the question from a card that he immediately returned to its box.

“The Snow Leopard!” a second player shouted.
“Hai yah!”

“Does Wilbon T. Stickney live here?” Xavier asked the group.

“Never heard of,” the card reader said.

“Maybe,” said the player facing the open doorway.

“Down hall on left,” said the player who had just called out the answer to the thin card reader’s question.

The Mick’s brow furrowed in evident puzzlement. “Mr. Stickney doesn’t have a phone listing at this address anymore. He hasn’t for like three years.”

“Probably not here then,” the thin card reader said.

“Out on business call,” the player facing them said.

“Sleeping with TV on,” the third player told them. “Always sleeping with TV on. Apartment five.” Neither of the other men rebuked him for divulging this information.

“Thanks,” Xavier said. He and The Mick did an about-face and walked down the boxy hall to apartment five. Outside it, they could hear strangled crowd noises, no doubt from the TV. Above that sound was the broken nasal trilling of an announcer, his every word unintelligible. The Mick knocked. Once. Twice. A third time, louder than before. Then he tried the knob. The door drifted inward, flooding the hallway with frantic audio and a grainy wash of televised light. Stickney, if it
was
Stickney, wallowed in a beat-up recliner, an Edsel-era La-Z-Boy. He lounged facing the blue-grey TV screen, nodding before it as if disastrously poked out. Not surprisingly, the room stank of salad-gas fumes and of sweat-soured clothing.

“Phieuw,” The Mick said. “Gaawghh.”

Xavier soft-shoed over the threshold behind The Mick and closed the door. Had he been a thief or a hit man, he could have walked off with all of Stickney’s worldly goods or his dirt-cheap life, if not both. Who would have cared? Maybe Stickney was already dead. Xavier crossed to the recliner to see.

It was Stickney, all right, the pokehead who—while sitting, no less—had accosted Xavier on his first visit to P. S. Annie’s. He had an army recruit’s haircut, a drowned man’s bloated jowls, a sunburned tourist’s lobster-broil tan. The fingers that had seized Xavier’s wrist in P. S. Annie’s were flabbier now. They gripped the chair’s arm with an almost pitiable looseness. Under the flap of his malodorous Oriental robe, Stickney’s other hand basketed his groin. Xavier started to jostle his elbow when a sudden click and an insistent mechanical whirr halted him.

“Only the VCR,” The Mick said. “The tape’s run out. It’s on like automatic rewind or something.”

Xavier and Mikhail waited, doing homage to the rewind (Xavier realized) like Episcopalians hearing out a communion homily. When the process concluded, a softer click and a fresh whirr brought the tape’s FBI warning against unauthorized copying wobbling into view. Again.

“It’s on automatic replay too,” The Mick said. “Stickney’s set it up on a kind of never-ending flashback loop.” The tape’s opening titles appeared: a
Sports Monthly
compilation of clips from the career of the world’s most inept heavyweight boxer, Rashid “Eggshell” Harrell. The clips were brief: Harrell had never lasted more than three rounds in any official bout. He’d had hundreds of fights, of which more than twenty had ended with his ejection, over or through the ropes, from the ring. A montage of these graceless exits appeared. Like a misfired Scud, Harrell repeatedly achieved parabolic flight before crashing into a different set of ringside seats.

“Mr. Stickney.” Xavier squeezed his shoulder. “Mr. Stickney, wake up.”

Stickney showed his eyes the way a KO’d boxer, under the knuckles of a referee, involuntarily shows his, his irises the sad grayish beige of used bath water.
“Wha thuh?”

“Turn that off,” Xavier told Mikhail. “Who knows how long it’s been on?”

“Turn it off? But—”

Xavier gave him a look. Mikhail went to the set—it and the VCR seemed to be the only functional pieces of equipment or furniture around—to kill the boxing tape. Instantly, the set’s screen was a riot of flying phosphor dots. The Mick clicked it off too. Now the only light came from a night-light plugged into the socket beside the La-Z-Boy. Molded to caricature a naked adult female, the night-light glowed a warm vulvar pink. A truly tacky item, Xavier thought. It embarrassed him, and all the more for monopolizing The Mick’s attention.

“Turn on another light,” Xavier said. “Right now.”

The Mick sidled to the kitchen and turned on the fluorescent above a sink stacked high with roach-colonized pie plates and empty cans of spaghetti.

“Stickney!” Xavier barked. “Stickney, wake up!”

Stickney roused a little. His pupils, initially as large as dimes, shrank to the size of typewriter
o
’s. Then, aware that his apartment had been invaded, he lurched forward, banging his chair’s footrest down.

“Who th’ hell’re you guys? Whad’re you awl doing here?”

Xavier put a hand on Stickney’s arm and introduced himself and Mikhail. “Your door was unlocked. The Mick and I would like to ask you a few questions.”

“Stupid, leaving th’ door unlacked! Go on, then—kill me.”

“I don’t want to kill you. I want to know about Environomics Unlimited. Could you tell me about it, please?”

“It’s defunk,” Stickney said, rearranging his Oriental robe. “Or leastwise my jab with ’em is.” He began to sweat, profusely. “Damn! My toe! It hurts somepin orful!” Stickney’s big toe, twitching noticeably, shone red, as if an angry wasp had injected it with venom. “It’s th’ gout, ’nother damned attack.” Stickney peered past Xavier at the TV. “Where’s my baxing video? I’ll ’clapse like a stove-in chimbley if that nephew of yores don’t turn it back on double damned quick.”

Mikhail tripped back into the living room to restart the video of Eggshell Harrell lowlights. Xavier made him turn down the sound, but the mere sight of Harrell stumbling about disoriented or landing on the ringside press table satisfied The Mick’s curiosity and alleviated Stickney’s gout. His big toe had already stopped throbbing so vividly.

“I can’t watch this garbage,” Xavier said.

“Yeah. And I can’t
not
wortch it.”

“Radiation exposure caused you to develop a type of the Philistine Syndrome, didn’t it, Mr. Stickney?”

“Philistine Syndrurm?”

“The ailment that got you tooting poke and indulging dozens of other twelfth-rate amusements to balance off the symptoms brought on by first-rate ones. Am I right?”

“Whot?” Stickney looked craftily confused.

“Look around. Evidence of your efforts to counter the syndrome is everywhere.” Xavier nodded at framed drawings on the wall behind the La-Z-Boy. Seven of the pieces consisted of penciled stick figures engaged in hard-to-identify consensual (or maybe not consensual) erotic (or maybe not erotic) acts. Clearly, Stickney had hoped that this inept homemade pornography (if that’s what it was, and, yes, it seemed to be) would forestall some of the metabolic fits triggered by his love of “classy” cutie-book photography. The boxing tape reversed the depredations triggered by
Hee Haw
reruns.

A search of Stickney’s old vinyl-record albums turned up a collection of barnyard sounds—hogs in rut—to counteract acne attacks or diarrhea occasioned by listening to pre-Syndrome favorites,
Lefty Frizell’s Greatest Hits
, say, or
Minnie Pearl Live!
Other illness-offsetting albums were by artists whom Stickney, before going to work for Environomics Unlimited, had most likely despised: Engelbert Humperdinck, Luciano Pavarotti, Joni Mitchell, Don Henley. Other evidence that Stickney had taken his own approach to the treatment of his Syndrome was a plastic Coke bottle full of flowers on a nearby table—“flowers” such as desiccated milkweed pods, dandelions, and cockleburr stalks. Stickney had arranged them with no visible skill, but they still looked okay. Xavier knelt before Stickney . . . to block his view of Eggshell Harrell.

“Working for EU, you often dealt with radioactive waste, right?”

Stickney struggled to see around him. “Not awl that orfun. That was a partime jab for jes’ about ever’one who worked for ’em. If somepin better come up, we took it.”

“The Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic called on you twice in six years to dispose of radwaste. The first time you dumped it into a stream in the Phosphor Fogs—then fudged your documentation to make it appear you’d followed NRC guidelines.”

“Yeah,” Stickney said. “Move over.”

“He loses by a knockout, Will. You’ve already seen it. Now, why’d you hide that obsolete Therac 4-J in a warehouse on the far outskirts of the Cellar?”

“Are them Silvanus County folks gonna die?” He had stopped trying to see the TV screen.

“Some will. The young Wilkinses for sure, all three of them.”

“Damn. Lissen. We didn’t know. What th’ hell’s a Therac 4-J anyhow? Gooz and me couldn’t tell cesium 137 from cesspool overflow. It ’uz a accident, plain and simple, what happened to them poor crackers.”

Xavier shook his head. “How many other times did you fraudulently dispose of radioactive waste?”

“Not awl that many. Most o’ th’ time, we ’uz getting rid of hormless shit, filling the woods up with broke-down equipment, used syringes, old drugs. ’Cept for six or eight other places, that chunky nurse’s concer clinic was th’ only place that gave us hot crap to hawl. Swear to Gawd.”

“Who’s behind Environomics Unlimited? Who paid you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Stickney.”

“ ’Fie talk about it, I’ll likely get kilt for spilling it out.” He chuckled mirthlessly.

“Just like Larry Glenn Wilkins. That was his reward for spilling out that deadly cesium cake.
Who paid you?
”

Stickney vented a sour sigh. “I don’t care. It don’t matter no more ’fie’m dead or alive. Dead’d be a blessing.”

“
Who?
” Xavier said, smacking his fist against the chair arm.

“F. Deane Finesse. He ’uz th’ big cheese behind the firm, th’ guy who wanted th’ radwaste from six years back dumped upcountry next to Plont VonMeter.”

“Finesse?” The Mick said. “The big shot on the cancer clinic’s board of directors? The prez of Uncommon Comics?”

“Swear to Gawd. Wunst,
he
paid me. Paid me out cosh on a sidewalk outside th’ Hemisphere. Finesse it was, you’d better b’lieve it. He had a grudge on—mebbe still does—’gainst ol’ Con-Tri.”