Lowboy (7 page)

“I’ll tell you what I know.” She shook her head. “I know I’m down here and they’re not. I know I got no kind of meds in me. I know—” She hesitated. “I know that I’ve got
ideas
.”

“I have them too,” he said. “I wish I didn’t.”

“You don’t have my ideas, you little cracker. Nobody got my ideas but me.” She stared at him fiercely, working her jaws in a slow circle, as though she were sharpening her teeth.

“I don’t want them.”

He expected her to hit him but she didn’t. She sat up very straight, heaved an unamused sigh, then pulled his jeans back up and zipped them closed. She did it roughly, matter-of-factly, the way that Violet would have done it. It was enough to make him wonder.

“Do you have kids, Miss Covington?”

For the space of a breath she stared wide-eyed at him, sucking in
her cheeks. Then her face went slack. “If you so sick, Rex Morgan, what you messing with me for? Why not go home and get your diapers on?”

“I told you why.” He took a breath. “The air is getting—”

“Hotter,” she said flatly. “I remember.” She brought a wrist to her nose and sniffed at it thoughtfully, like someone standing at a perfume counter. “I tell you what. If I was a skullfucker, I might say that all this foolishness about the air—”

“Thank you, Miss Covington,” Lowboy said, getting to his feet. “Thank you very much. That’s all for now.”

She laughed and hooked a finger through his belt. “Where you running off to, little boss? Hang around a little. I’ll be good.”

He was full in the light now, squinting down into the corner, and the hand she held him with looked disembodied. People were walking across the grates in twos and threes, innocent and self-assured as children. Watching them he began to feel the cold.

“You’ll shut up?” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “You’ll mind your own business? You’ll put a sock in it? You’ll say it with flowers?”

She said nothing to that, only pulled him back down, and he shook his head but let himself be pulled. It was warmer beside her. Their feet were in the sunlight but their bodies were sequestered and secure. He looked down at his dirty Velcro sneakers. They looked ridiculous in the brightness, oversized and crude, surplus footwear from a failed moon landing. He yawned and laid his head back on the quilt.

“I want to stay here forever,” he said. “I don’t ever want to go back up.”

“You and everybody else,” Heather Covington said. “Everybody want to be the Dutchman.”

“The who?”

“Dutchman,” she sighed. “Like the opera. Like the play. Dutchman been riding the 6 train for seventeen years. He ain’t crossed a turnstile since 2002.”

“How does he stay alive?” Lowboy said. He propped himself up on his elbows. “What does he find to eat?”

“Don’t know as he eats anything,” she said indifferently. She pulled her suitcase toward her and began to rummage through it. Something inside made a clinical sound, brittle and sharp, like beakers in a high school science kit. “Maybe he eats candybars from the kiosks. Maybe he fries chickens on the rail.” She winked at him. “Maybe he eats horny little boys.”

The sunlight lost its color suddenly. Lowboy hummed to himself and laid his head down again and waited for her to keep talking. He wanted to believe her very much. What mattered most about the Dutchman was that the Dutchman was impossible. If the Dutchman existed then other impossible things could exist, like the Loch Ness monster or Ouroboros or the devil. The thought of it made Lowboy’s teeth start to chatter and the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. If the Dutchman existed you couldn’t be sure about anything. Half the books in the library would have to be rewritten. People would start walking backward down the street. He almost laughed out loud at that. If the Dutchman existed the world might not actually end.

He rocked himself gently and watched Heather Covington fussing. She was mumbling to herself now, hunched over the suitcase like a jeweler, putting some small thing together slowly. She seemed to have forgotten that he was waiting. He hummed to himself and tapped his feet against the channeled concrete floor. The idea of the Dutchman got bigger as he waited and began to throw off white and green and coppercolored sparks. Something was going to happen. The kingdom of the impossible stood glittering over his left shoulder, waiting quietly to admit him. All he had to do was turn his head.

“How old is the Dutchman?” he said. His voice sounded clumsy. “What does he look like?”

“White,” said Heather Covington. “He don’t smell right. Most times he’s got a whole car to himself.”

The way she said it told him not to press her. He rolled onto his
stomach and pushed his face into the quilt, breathing the sourness in, trying to keep his excitement to himself. The Dutchman is real, he thought. He’s an actual living person and she knows him. Maybe she’s even brought him to this room.

“Why only the 6 train?” he said. “Why just that line?”

“Hhff,” said Heather Covington. Something was in her mouth now: something brittle. Her left arm jerked upward and he heard a sucking. The air smelled like butane for a moment, then like roasted almonds, then like sweat.

“Miss Covington?” he said.

“Shut your mouth,” she whispered, lowering her head until it vanished. With her head gone she looked like a monster on some ancient map of the world. She made a sucking sound through her teeth and kept her body absolutely still. “Little baby,” she said, bracing her left hand against the floor. She coughed without covering her mouth. “Little baby,” she said. “Little dollar bill.”

The air was full of smoke now and the smell slid down his windpipe like an eel. He put a hand over his mouth, then over his eyes, then over the whole of his face. When he took it away Heather Covington was lying splayed out with her arms bent behind her, breathing in a soft contented stutter. Her right eye was open but her left eye was closed. A thimblesized glass bowl lay sideways in the hollow of her chest, rolling like a buoy with each breath. The smoke led up toward the city like a ladder.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I never expected you to get on me.”

He bit down on his lip and looked at her. “How come?”

“I’m ugly as a bitch.”

He kept his eyes on the bowl, thinking of a way to answer her. Finally he propped himself up and looked at her closely and saw she was right. Her face was as flat and lifeless as a skillet.

She coughed. “I wasn’t always ugly, though. I use to be a little blue-eyed girl.”

“I know that,” Lowboy said. “I saw your passport.”

“Ever heard of Dr. Z?” She sighed and began rolling up her sleeves. “
Zizmor
, I mean. Jonathan Zizmor, MD. That Jew skin doctor on Third Avenue.”

“I’ve seen his ads,” said Lowboy. He grinned at her. “I like the one that says
BLEMISHES?—BLOTCHES?—BUMPS?
in purple letters.”

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s the one.” She held a gray forearm toward him, running two fingers along its skin, then brought both hands up gravely to her face. There was no light in her black eyes any longer. They looked like two holes punched into a piece of paper.

“Jonathan Zizmor did this to me,” she said.

Just then a noise fell down on them like a hammer against a nail and the darkness folded over into nothing. A man in a uniform was squatting above them, unhooking something heavy from his belt. “That you, Rafa?” the man said, shining a light down into the smoke. His voice sounded agreeable and mild.

“Heather Covington, Officer Martinez.” She was wide awake again and her body was as solid as an arch. She put her right hand on the back of Lowboy’s neck and leaned forward to keep him out of sight. He couldn’t see the policeman but he could hear him drop to his knees against the grate. Heather Covington’s head was trembling slightly, like an old woman’s or an alcoholic’s, but her eyes were hard and clear and full of hate. Lowboy braced his back against the wall.

“Smells like good times down there, Rafa,” the officer said. “Smells like you’ve been doing yourself some cooking.”

“Smoking crack, Officer Martinez,” Heather Covington said brightly. “Trying to make the time go by.”

The policeman heaved a sigh. “Thank you, Rafa. Thanks for including me in your life.” The stillness between his breaths was absolute. “What are you doing over there in the corner? Why not turn around and talk to me?”

Heather Covington shut her eyes and took the tip of her tongue between her teeth. “Can’t,” she said finally. “Can’t do it, Officer. I’m not
presentable
.”

For a moment the officer made no sound at all. When he spoke again his voice was free of all emotion, even and smooth, the voice of a surgeon asking for a sterile cloth. “Who’s that with you, Rafa?”

As she turned her head to answer Lowboy kicked against the wall and slid out between her spread legs like a baby. The roar of the street shook the room like a matchbox and the officer was banging with his flashlight against the grate but by then he was already back inside the tunnel. He’d have run straight out onto the tracks but the sound of the water saved him and he caught himself on the crimped edge of the seam. He teetered and bobbed like a drunk at the end of a pier. He waited there as long as he could stand it. Nobody followed him.

Maybe he arrested her, Lowboy thought. Maybe he shot her. Maybe they’re smoking crack together. He opened his eyes wide, then shut them, then opened them again, straining to make out a difference in the blackness. Twice he heard the sound of rustling leaves. He counted from one to one hundred, took a few deep breaths, then counted from one hundred down to one. When he was done he went to the next station.

A breeze was building in the tunnel as he started walking. Uptown train coming, he said to himself, and it helped to take his mind off what had happened. Express, he decided, feeling the air against his open fingers. The through train to the Bronx. The uptown D. He quickened his steps as the sound overtook him. He felt clearheaded and relieved to be alone. He was hidden again, as safe as he’d ever be, down in the lightless, airless bowels of the world. The hum all around was a sweet thing to hear, gathering as the wind gathered, and it seemed as though it had something to tell him. He laid his head against the tunnel wall and listened.

Y
ears later, in the rarefied seclusion that most of his life had been a dress rehearsal for, Lateef would claim that he’d recognized Violet Heller’s significance right away. If he hadn’t, he’d have sent her home at once: she wasn’t telling him enough to indulge her. “I had a feeling about Violet, right from the beginning,” he’d say quietly, then withdraw behind his famous blank-eyed smile.

The truth was that he kept her in his office because she looked like a portrait by Brueghel, awkward and immaculate at once, and because there was nothing to do for the moment but wait. She was eccentric, of course, and stubborn—it was impossible, thank God, to imagine her in hysterics—but unlike most of the mothers who put themselves in the way of his paycheck, she refused to be parted from her self-control. She doesn’t want to give me that satisfaction, Lateef thought, and the idea held his interest. But never for a moment did he suspect that she had any real part to play, either within the Special Category Missing or outside of it. Not until the call came in.

Her reaction to her son’s case report had been predictable enough: she’d gone absolutely still, as though he’d propositioned her, and had stared at him in a way that he’d been acquainted with since his first day on the job. If she’d kept quiet it was only because her mouth had gone too dry with rage to speak. He’d returned her look calmly, even encouragingly: his misgivings had subsided as he watched her. Her own attitude, after all, had forced his hand.

“Obstruction of justice seems to come naturally to you, Miss Heller.” He let the file fall theatrically closed. “I’d almost think you had a history yourself.”

“You’re a born policeman, Detective,” she said, looking past him out the window. “Every little old lady is a mafioso.”

“Listen to me, please. Everything I’ve learned about your son leads me to believe that time is very tight. His medication is at a negligible level, he’s in a hazardous environment, and his psychoses tend to be violent.” He sat back a moment and let that register. “In my opinion, there’s a good chance that a crime will be committed: a serious crime, Miss Heller. A felony. It could very well be happening as we speak.”

“Then why aren’t you out looking for him, Detective?” she said, rising mechanically to her feet. “Why are you sitting here doing absolutely fucking nothing, shuffling cards like we have all the tea in China?”

She was standing an arm’s length from him now, legs set hard against the desk, opening and closing her fists like someone at the onset of a seizure. If I laugh now, he thought, I’ll have lost her completely. She looks as though she might actually take a swing.

“All the time in the world, I think you mean.”

Her palms came down on his desk with such force that a drawer clattered open. “
Answer
me, Detective! What the hell are we still doing here?”

Her accent’s stronger now, Lateef thought, composing himself before he gave his answer. She sounds like a Hollywood Nazi. “We’re waiting for the phone to ring, Miss Heller. That’s all we
can
do, I’m
sorry to say. Unless you have some ideas about your son that you’d be willing to share with this department.”

“I do have some ideas, in fact.” She sucked in a breath. “I wonder why you didn’t ask before.”

He permitted himself a smile. “You don’t seem very shy with your opinions.”

“You’re manipulating me now, Detective.” She turned away from him tiredly. “If I thought you were acting out of a genuine desire—”

The buzzing of his deskline interrupted her. She stopped herself at once, her mouth hanging open like a sleeper’s, and stared at the receiver with a look of simple dread. He paused a moment before answering, watching the fact of the call sink into her. There was no trace of relief in her expression.

“Excuse me just a minute, Miss Heller.”

She gave no sign of having understood him.

The conversation was brief—a minute at the most—and for his part Lateef said almost nothing. When he set down the receiver Violet slumped slightly forward, making a small defeated sound, as though her worst fears had already been confirmed. Any doubt he might have had that she believed her son was violent vanished in that instant. She’ll work with me now, he thought. No more putting on airs. She knows there’s no more sense in wasting time.

“A traffic cop working the intersection of Eighty-fourth and Columbus spotted your son through a grate. This was about twenty minutes ago, at ten forty-five. According to the officer, he appeared unharmed.”

“Through a grate?” she murmured. “Under the sidewalk?”

He nodded. “He’s still in the MTA network.”

She was already standing. “I told you he’d stay underground. In the last note he sent—”

“Slow down just a little, Miss Heller. I wouldn’t mind keeping you company.”

There was somehow no question, Lateef would say later, of leaving her at the Department. She took it as a given that he’d bring her. It’s certainly not unheard-of, he reminded himself, following her almost bashfully into the hall. She might easily prove useful, if only to make a positive ID. But what struck him most, both then and afterward, was that the agreement was entirely unspoken: it was as natural a thing as turning off the light. He’d no more have thought of stopping her than of leaving his wallet or his .38 behind.

She led the way downstairs and out of the building, not once looking back to see if he was following, and crossed Centre Street without a moment’s hesitation, stopping only at the entrance to the lot. He didn’t ask how she’d known where his car would be: he no longer expected her to act like a complainant. He was gratified, how-ever—even slightly relieved—when she swept confidently past his car.

“Just missed me, Miss Heller. Behind you on the left.”

She’d chosen a patrol car at random and was standing at the driver-side door, her arms crossed at her waist as though she expected to be cuffed. “That one?” she said, with obvious disappointment. “The little green hatchback?”

“The little green sport utility sedan.”

“Does it even have a siren?”

“Excellent mileage.” He unlocked the passenger-side door for her. “A pleasure to park.”

She kept quiet until they were on the West Side Highway. “You’re not a family man, apparently.”

“Why do you say that, Miss Heller?”

“This car of yours. It’s spotless.”

He said nothing to that, only smiled and shrugged his shoulders, and she seemed appreciative of the silence. She tilted her seat back and closed her eyes. He felt the urge to watch her but resisted it. At the stoplight at Thirty-fourth Street she sat up with a start, as though her name had been called, and fixed her gray eyes wonderingly on his.

“That sticker on your bumper. Is it true?”

He squinted at the stoplight. “What sticker would that be, Miss Heller?”

“Does this thing really run on soybean oil?”

He caressed the dashboard lovingly.

“Will would admire you for that.”

“Would he? Why?”

“Global warming is his allconsuming passion. That’s how the world is going to end, you know.”

“No argument there,” Lateef said, switching lanes.

She opened the glove compartment and saw the gun inside and pushed the compartment shut. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that, come to think of it. You must not have read Will’s case file very closely.”

She was looking away from him as she spoke, watching the numbered cross streets arcing past. She was milder now, less strident, more composed. The arrogance had been leached out of her voice. Because she’s been asleep, he decided. She’ll be arrogant again soon enough. But he found himself telling her the truth regardless.

“I have no access to your son’s case history, Miss Heller. The files on all minors are sealed at sentencing. I’d have to call in all my favors just to see it.” He sighed. “To be honest, I doubt whether I have that much pull.”

For the better part of a minute she said nothing. Lateef kept his eyes on the road, feigning indifference, but even so he could tell that he’d astonished her. Finally she took hold of the rearview mirror and tipped it until their eyes met. “What the fuck did you have in that folder?”

“A clipping from the New York
Daily News
.”

“But how?” She shook her head in disbelief. “If you weren’t allowed—”

“I happened to remember your son’s case. It’s part of my job to read the paper, ridiculous as that may sound.”

Fifteen minutes earlier she’d have risen to the occasion, made some joke about not seeing him do much else, but this time she said
nothing. They were coming to the intersection of Amsterdam and Seventy-second. She waited until he’d made the turn onto Amsterdam, then said in a disinterested voice: “You’d have more luck with your witnesses, Detective, if you stopped treating them like political prisoners.”

He let his eyes rest on the city bus in front of them. “You’re not a witness, Miss Heller. You’re a complainant. And I treat everyone who lies to me the same way.”

She blinked at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“You told me that your son had no friends but his grandfather, no interest in anything but comic books. When obviously he was spending time with that girl.”

She tilted her head out of view.

“Why didn’t you mention the girl to me, Miss Heller?”

“I didn’t think she was important.”

“I’d have to disagree. I think she is.”

She started to answer him, then stopped herself. When she spoke again her voice was strangely muffled. “Will’s not a murderer, Detective. Will is a boy with an illness.”

He frowned at her. “I wasn’t aware the girl was killed, Miss Heller.”

“She wasn’t killed,” she said quickly. “Emily is fine.” Both her arms were braced against the dashboard. “Could you slow down, Detective? We’re practically up that bus’s muffler.”

“We don’t have all the tea in China,” Lateef said gravely, but she didn’t seem to hear.

“It’s incredible that Emily wasn’t killed,” she said after a time. “Her head came down an inch from the third rail. The 6 was less than a stop away, just a few hundred yards uptown, but they managed to get the signals switched somehow.” A taxi rolled past them and she watched it pass. “By the time they took Will away she was already in a bed at City Hospital.”

“Did she testify at your son’s trial?”

“She refused to testify. She told everyone she’d jumped of her own volition.” Violet shook her head. “No one believed her, of course.”

She leaned forward and rested her head against the dash. Lateef kept quiet for the length of four full blocks, determined not to rush her. He knew the rest was coming and it was.

“Try to imagine, Detective, what it’s like to have a child—” She stopped in mid-sentence and straightened in her seat. “What it’s like to have a child, only one, and to feed that child all of your own old ambitions. It’s wrong for other parents, of course, but you feel different, free to indulge yourself, because your child is very close to perfect.” She arranged her hands more precisely in her lap. “It isn’t only because you love him that you think of him this way. He’s gentler than most other children are, more self-contained, more independent. As far as anyone can tell—teachers, neighbors, even other children— he’s also a good deal smarter. He takes your life over completely.”

They were coming up to Eighty-second Street, just three blocks from the sighting, but Lateef made a slow right and lifted his foot off the gas. She seemed neither to notice nor to care.

“Then picture what came next,” she said. “Picture everything I’ve told you happening.”

After that she stopped talking and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. He circled the block at a leisurely pace and brought them back to Amsterdam without a word. Her crying didn’t alarm him; just the opposite. It was proof that something had fallen away between them. A barrier had been removed, not through anything he’d said or done, but simply because her son had been sighted alive. She’s saving her strength now, Lateef thought. Saving it for what’s coming. She knows better than to waste it all on me.

“Emily was a remarkable girl,” she said when she was done. “She was taller than Will, the way girls that age often are, and she had lovely dark hair that always hung straight down into her eyes. A tomboy, I suppose you’d say. I never understood what brought the two of them together: it’s so odd for a fourteen-year-old girl to give a younger boy the time of day.” She smiled to herself. “Will had begun to be handsome, but it wasn’t just that. There was something between them.”

Lateef pulled up at Eighty-fourth and Columbus and let the motor idle. “Did your son think of her as his girlfriend?”

“I asked him the same question. It got me grounded for a week.”

“Had Emily been told about his illness?”

“She knew about it.” She tapped a fingernail against the dashboard. “Everybody knew by then.”

He considered that for a moment. “And it made no difference to her?”

“It didn’t bother her at all. She made a point of telling me.” She drew in a deep breath and made a face. “I suppose she must have thought it was romantic.”

“I’m guessing that you didn’t like her much.”

She smiled at him. “You should ask Will’s therapist about that, Detective. Ulysses S. Kopeck, MD. He’ll tell you about my unfortunate fixation on my son.”

“I don’t get along with that kind of doctor,” Lateef said, killing the engine. “They always seem to think I’m paranoid.”

“Do they really?”

He nodded resignedly. “Apparently I view everyone as a suspect.”

She gave a laugh, then stopped herself, as if at a sudden memory. “Kopeck was right about me, though, in spite of everything. I’ve always asked more of Will than I should have.”

“All mothers ask things of their sons.”

“I asked more.”

Something in her answer made him uneasy. “What sort of things, Miss Heller?”

“You have to understand that I came to this country more or less by accident, from one day to the next. Aside from Will’s father, I didn’t have a friend in the world. I had nothing.” She shifted slightly in her seat. “You’re wondering what this has to do with Will.”