Hard Light (14 page)

“The twentieth century's dead,” I said. “We're the ones who're dying.”

“And look at you. Last punk standing.” She stroked the cat in her arms, and in a raspy voice began to sing.

“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high

Ash comes falling from the sky

And all the children say they'll die

For want of the Golden City.”

Her words vanished into a motorcycle's roar and the rumble of buses as she slipped back into her flat and closed the door. I felt a twinge of grief and regret, a strange despair that lingered like the last notes of Poppy's song; then I checked to make sure the Mortensen book was safe in my bag and hurried off to find a drink.

 

16

I walked quickly down the block, looking over my shoulder for the platinum-haired woman I'd seen earlier. Near the bus stop, I elbowed my way through a small crowd, pulled out the TracFone Adrian had given me, and hit redial. He answered, his voice terse.

“Yeah?”

“Done.”

I disconnected and walked on. When I saw an empty alleyway, I stepped aside, my back to the street, dropped the TracFone, and ground it beneath the heel of my cowboy boot. I gathered up the pieces and headed on toward the pub, dropping bits of shattered circuitry and plastic into drains and waste bins along the way.

No tidy window boxes or faux-antique signs marked the Blackbird, just the pub's name above the door and a warning that CCTVs were in use. The room was dark and cold, with that lost-bar smell of spilled beer and Windex. I didn't see any CCTVs, or any other post-1960s technology except a computerized cash register.

The male bartender was young and disinclined to smile or make eye contact. I got a tumbler of Scotch and a bag of salted peanuts, and retired to a stool at a small table. At a neighboring table, a young woman wearing boots and a too-tight pencil skirt stared at a pack of Camel Lights, her bare legs goosebumped with cold. Two tiny, wizened men, identical twins in identical tweed caps and Costa del Sol sweatshirts, sat side by side and gazed at the wall, occasionally taking a sip from their pints. Behind the bar, an old regulator clock ticked softly as the young barkeep polished glasses with a white cloth. There was no radio or piped-in music; no ringtones. No one spoke. Except for the clock's pendulum, and the bartender's hands flicking his white cloth, nothing stirred.

I drank and ate my peanuts and thought about Poppy Teasel. Collecting priceless prehistoric artifacts was an odd hobby for a groupie, but I've heard of worse. The memory of her voice rasping “Golden City” was like something half-remembered from a drunken sleep; that and the word
thaumatrope.
When my glass was empty, I went to the bar and ordered another by pointing at the tumbler, paid without speaking, and returned to my table.

I'd never been in a public space that was so quiet. I felt I'd become a figure in a diorama, motionless, my fingers melded with my glass. Maybe this was what junkies like Quinn or Poppy Teasel had experienced, back when they were using.

I took out the Mortensen book and turned a few pages, then glanced up.

There were no photos in the room around me, no paintings or portraits on the wall, no mirrors. It felt strange. Still, for most of human history, and prehistory, people lived without images of themselves. Portrait paintings and sculptures had belonged only to the wealthy.

Ditto cameos and miniatures and mirrors. Daguerreotypes were mementos mori, sacred to the memory of the dead. The Mayans believed that mirrors operated as portals between the worlds. In the nineteenth century, some Native Americans thought that a photograph could steal an individual's soul. In the 1970s, photo critic A. D. Coleman would ask his students if they had photographs of loved ones in their wallets. He told them that they could show them to others in the classroom, but only if they were willing to then incinerate the photos immediately. No one did.

I thought of the single photo of Quinn in my wallet, all that remained of the hundreds I'd taken of him as a teenager. I didn't remove it.

The pub's door opened and a young woman entered, talking loudly on her mobile.

“… can't fecking meet you, I tol you I already fecking left!”

Cold air trailed her as she hurried to the bar. I exhaled, the spell broken; pulled on my hat and gloves and stood to leave.

Where was my scarf?

I peered under the table, searched my camera bag, retraced my steps to the bar. It wasn't there. I had a flash of Poppy Teasel's kitchen, of Poppy playing with the skull-patterned scarf on the table in front of her.

“Shit,” I muttered.

The twin gnomes in tweed caps turned to glare at me. So did the girl yattering into her mobile, and the bartender. It was like the dark side of Ealing Comedy. I glared back, grabbed my bag, and left.

It was raining now, hard. The sidewalks were a slurry of melting snow. A man running to catch the bus slid across the greasy pavement, past four teenage boys and a woman who wore a chador beneath a transparent pink rain poncho. The boys whooped as the man fell. The woman's kohl-lined eyes met mine then quickly looked away.

I thought of the platinum-haired black girl I'd seen that morning, the girl in the military parka. I put my head down, strode on toward Poppy's building and up the steps. I pressed the buzzer.

Nothing. I held the buzzer down, its tone echoing loudly inside.

Still nothing. I craned my neck to see if there was any motion behind the front curtains. The scarf had only cost a few quid; I could get another at any of the million stalls that sold tourist crap. I don't think I've hung onto a scarf for more than a week in my entire life.

Still, the fact that Poppy had seemed to admire it made me suddenly want it back.

And I had a furtive, almost guilty desire to see her again, to once more hear her hoarse voice singing a song I had forgotten decades ago and watch that bone disc flicker in the air between us like a conjurer's trick or a magical, tiny moon. I rattled the doorknob. Beneath my gloved hand, the knob turned.

“Hey, Poppy? It's me, I forgot my scarf.” I stepped inside, holding the door ajar behind me. “Poppy?”

I left the door cracked and entered the hall. Something white caught my eye—Poppy's cat, crouched in the middle of the living room. Rose petals were strewn across the floor and on the sofa where Poppy dozed. The cat bent over one tiny crimson blossom. When I stepped into the room, it froze and stared up at me with beryl eyes.

A red starburst bloomed around the cat's mouth: It hissed, ears flat against its skull, and went back to lapping at the floor.

“Poppy,” I said, staring at the couch.

The wig had slid to one side so that a fringe of silver hair fell across one eye, giving her a coquettish look. A spike dangled just above the crook of her elbow. A red tendril trailed down her wrist to blossom on the floor below.

I did an about-face and raced back to the front door. Stopped.

I held my breath.

I could hear nothing. From where I stood, nothing seemed out of place. After a minute I turned the dead bolt. I pulled off my boots, set them by the door with my camera bag, and walked silently into the kitchen.

Here too everything seemed exactly as it had when I'd left. Coffee grounds in the cafetière; two empty coffee mugs on the counter. My scarf on the table, its rows of bright skulls grinning at me. I looped the scarf around my neck and stepped to the sink. I washed the mug I'd used, dried it and set it back on a shelf; squeezed detergent onto a sponge and scrubbed the table and chair where I'd sat. Grabbing some paper towels, I wiped up the damp spots left by my boots on the floor by the front door, wiped off my fingerprints from the door doorknob and dead bolt, stuffed the wet paper towels into my pocket, and returned to the living room.

They say that certain butterflies are drawn to the scent of carrion. I used to feel like that, in the Bowery in another century. Doubling back to see if the motionless heap in an alley or doorway was a dead wino, or just a mound of rotting clothes that hadn't been claimed yet by a crazy person pushing a shopping cart.

There was no decaying flesh here, but the corrosive smell of damage was enough to make my neck go cold. I knew I should get the fuck out of there. But I didn't.

I stared down at Poppy. Her eyes were shut, her mouth slack. I stooped to peer at her fingertips. They already had the bruised blue sheen that comes with an overdose. I straightened and gazed at her face.

All the lines were gone. Except for the lesions on her scalp, she appeared much as she had as a seventeen-year-old, clinging to Jonno outside the Filmore. That strange simulation of youthfulness sometimes happens in death, but usually not so quickly. Poppy's tranquil expression was courtesy of whatever she'd injected.

Why would a recovering junkie who'd been clean for more than three decades decide to shoot up again? Terminal cancer would be one really good reason, but she hadn't struck me as someone who was on the verge of using the minute I walked out the door.

Yet something—pain, fear, the knowledge that the man in the bright nightgown was waiting in the wings—must have become too much.

So she relapsed.

But mainlining after thirty years of abstinence is a pretty dramatic way to go off the wagon. Recovering heroin addicts are especially susceptible to overdosing, regardless of the product's purity. I'd have been less surprised if she'd been chipping or popping—snorting or injecting subcutaneously. Mainlining takes a certain amount of skill, and Poppy had been out of practice. To judge by the mess on the couch, really out of practice.

She might have injected an air bubble, which would also have killed her. But it looked more like she'd hit an artery. My old roommate Jeannie, the one who used to yell “Scary Neary!” whenever she saw me coming, checked out like that. So did a kid I'd photographed in an alley, a shot that made it into
Dead Girls.
That was back when you'd see junkies lined up around the block on the Lower East Side, waiting to get inside a shooting gallery to buy packets stamped with the brand of heroin they contained—Black Cat, China Blade. That neighborhood might have cleaned up over the decades. But last time I was in the city, business had been brisk again.

I leaned down to get a better look at Poppy's arm. Ropy scar tissue snarled around the crook of her elbow, long-healed abscesses. The needle was on the inside of her arm, about three inches above the elbow. It had been plunged so deeply that the needle bulb—the entire tip—had jammed in her flesh. Around it, a small constellation of pinpricks shone red against her white skin. She'd tried to hit a vein several times before succeeding.

Not a vein. The brachial artery. Once when he was shooting up as a teenager, Quinn had pointed out his.

“This is what you don't ever, ever want to hit,” he'd said, tapping the inside of his upper arm with the barrel of the needle. “Unless you don't want to ever wake up.”

Now I drew back and scanned the floor for other needles. Not even a needle cap, nothing but a purple bandanna she might have used to tie off. I crouched to examine the spike again.

It was a disposable, a Monoject or the UK equivalent. The inside of the barrel looked clean. None of the sludgy residue you get from slamming tar, the cheap Mexican heroin you find in the States. Poppy had mentioned getting her heroin through the NHS before she cleaned up. She could have had a stash somewhere, or pills that she'd ground up and cooked, or maybe some loaded spikes.

But this looked like a modern hypodermic needle, not one that had been hygienically shrinkwrapped since 1980.

I stepped away from the sofa, careful to avoid the blood spattered underfoot, and retreated back into the hall.

Poppy hadn't OD'd. Somebody had killed her.

 

17

It was a clever idea: off a onetime junkie turned cancer patient using what had been her drug of choice. To any casual observer, Occam's razor would suggest that Poppy had overdosed, intentionally or not. From what I knew, she had no next of kin. Considering her late-stage cancer, it seemed doubtful that the police would bother to mount an investigation. Unless they found signs of sexual trauma, or employed a forensic scientist who took a real interest in the case, they'd just see another dead junkie.

The fact that she was middle-aged and a woman probably wouldn't help. No one would look for a killer, because the killer was sticking out of her arm.

The real killer was an amateur. I was sure of that. She or he hadn't tied off Poppy's arm with that bandanna—there'd been no bruising. It had to have been someone Poppy knew, or she wouldn't have let them in. Morven Dunfries? Mallo? Adrian?

Whoever it was, Poppy had opened the front door; when the killer split through the same door, they'd left it unlocked because the dead bolt couldn't be turned without a key. The attacker might have been armed. I tried to imagine Morven Dunfries standing in her old friend's living room, forcing her at gunpoint to shoot herself up. The image was too bizarre even for me.

Poppy didn't seem to have put up a fight. There was no overturned furniture, and I hadn't noticed skin or hair under her fingernails.

But she hadn't been the one to slam the plunger in. And her killer had done a lousy job of doing it for her. I'd seen enough Tarrantino movies to know that in certain circumstances, an amateur can be just as effective as a pro, and far more dangerous.

I stepped into Poppy's office. The bottom drawer of the curio cabinet was ajar. I knelt and opened it, staring at the rows of small glass-topped boxes. None seemed to have been touched. I yanked open the other drawers: more of the same.

I stood and scanned the room. Poppy's purple reading glasses were on top of her desk, but the mess of papers had been moved to one side. And the top drawer of the desk was open. Letters and envelopes were scattered on the floor beneath it, along with pens and paperclips. Poppy might have done that, if she'd been in a hurry, or if she'd been interrupted.