Manifesto for the Dead (16 page)

During that time, the story of the Alameda Murders broke. It was all over the newspapers and the television and pieces of it filtered through to him in the sanitarium. The speculation was wild and lurid—a third man at the murder scene, a connection to the underworld, a Hollywood serial killer on the loose—but how much of that was his own hallucination, the leeches whispering in the darkness, he didn't know, and it seemed to him as he came out of withdrawal that maybe all of it had been: the dead girl, the Okie, those memories of himself straggling along the hillside with a corpse over his shoulder. Either way, by the time he was discharged, the police had tied it all up in a neat little bow. Murder-suicide, the story went. Billy Miracle had killed Lombard when he backed off the deal. Apparently, Michele Haze had been ready to turn evidence against him. So he had killed her, too; then turned the gun on himself.

As for the girl in the hillside, she was not part of the equation. No one knew about her, no one cared.

Meanwhile, Alberta had used the money inside the envelope to pay for his treatment, and to buy a few more weeks at the Ardmore—because she was too busy going back and forth from the sanitarium to complete the move. Now, though, his stay was finished. And here they were.

Detective Mann showed up not long after they'd settled into the Hillcrest. A social call, he said, just to see how things were going. Alberta enjoyed the company. She liked the cop. He seemed earnest to her, clean cut and polite. Together they talked about a little town called Rabbit, not far from where she'd grown up.

“The cutest little town you ever seen.”

“I know it.

“Full of picket fences.”

“Houses with chimneys.”

“Down home cooking.”

“You bet.”

“Indians live there.”

“Colored too. Right alongside”

“Whites. Mexicans. Everyone in harmony.”

“Not like it is here.”

“No sir.”

“No crime to speak of.”

“That's a fact.”

“Except, you know, there was a little something.”

“It's the same way everywhere.”

“The world's changed.”

“Nothing like it used to be.”

“A severed head, that's what it was. Belonged to a local banker. Found in the local creek.”

“Oh, my God.”

“My brother's a policeman on the local force, and they couldn't figure it out for the longest time. It just seemed like some random crime.”

“Goes to show you.”

“Yes, it does. Everyone in town, well they thought the banker had run off to California with his secretary—but it turns out bits and pieces of him and the woman, they were scattered all over town.”

“You think it's the miscreants. But it's the upstanding ones.”

“Wife did it. Jealous, I guess.”

Alberta shook her head. “It's a darn shame, to see that happen in a place like Rabbit. Happens there, it can happen anywhere.”

“Right in your own living room.”

“Let's hope not,” said Alberta. They laughed, and Alberta filled the detective's glass with more iced tea. They went on like that, gabbing away, until finally Mann got up to leave. Alberta said good-bye to him at the door, and Thompson walked Mann out to his vehicle. It was parked on the same spot, more or less, where Thompson had first discovered the girl in the trunk of the Cadillac.

“Nice place you have,” said Mann.

“No, it's not.”

Mann looked at him. His eyes said go ahead, have it your way, and he leaned against the squad car. Thompson expected that now, alone, the cop would throw him a question or two about the Lombard murder, but instead there was just one of those long silences in which you could have heard the rise of the cicadas, if there had been cicadas, except of course there weren't any, not in this part of the country, just the sound of the transformer on the light pole overhead and the traffic rushing up Highland.

“So you still want my prints?”

“I been meaning to apologize about that. Reason I stopped by, I guess. But a man in my position, he has to examine every corner.”

“How about my shoe size?”

Mann laughed. “Oh you mean that stray shoe. Well, it's a loose end, that's for sure, and if you want to come forward and claim it well, you can do that. And the wallet too. There's always stuff like that around a crime scene, with a logical explanation, harmless, innocent, but you don't know what that explanation is unless someone provides it.”

Thompson looked away. This was the real reason Mann had come, he figured, because he still suspected those items belonged to Thompson, and wanted to know how they got to the scene. Thompson wasn't going to bite, not now.

“We did identify those prints, though,” said Mann. “They belonged to Billy Miracle. We figured Michele Haze may have been at the scene, too—or at least she knew about the murder.”

“Why didn't she come forward?”

“She was afraid of Miracle, we figure. We had one of our men talking to her the day before she was killed. She was about to crack. A couple more days, and she would have given it up. Miracle must have figured the same.”

Lieutenant Mann seem satisfied with this explanation. The official investigation was all but over, he said, there would be a final assembly of evidence, a report, a hearing, but the case would go down as solved. There were a couple curious details—odd blood smears, signs of scuffle at Haze's place, and that ancient revolver, unregistered, which Miracle must have picked up at a rummage sale, or some damned place.

“Not to change the subject,” said Thompson, “but how about that guy on the street?”

“Which guy?”

“The one who tried to rob me.”

“He'll turn up. Maybe not here, maybe not soon, but don't worry. Sometimes, a little piece of it just gets away from you. And because it's missing, you think it's bigger than it is, more important, and the whole world seems cock-eyed. But it's not cock-eyed. It's a just a little piece you don't understand.”

“Sure,” said Thompson

He noticed a flash in the cop's eyes, though, that let him know that maybe Mann didn't quite believe his own words. It was his job, sure, to wrap things up, put it all in some neat order and dismiss that which didn't fit. It's what people wanted from a cop. It wasn't too much different, when you got down to it, then what they wanted from a scientist, or a man of the cloth. Maybe Mann didn't believe it himself, maybe he'd spent too much time mucking in the blood and the mud to swallow his own nonsense, but it was his job to keep mucking, and to keep talking, too, like everything could be wrapped up and explained.

Himself, all he knew was that the Okie had stumbled on him, down there in front of Countdown Productions, by accident, by chance, maybe, but Alberta had beaten him away. The Okie was not the same man, precisely, that he had imagined for Billy Miracle, but they had intersected, the imaginary, the real, himself, though even in that moment of intersection, there was still a gap, an inexplicable space, a darkness that opened and kept opening.

And the Okie, he was still out there.

“In my profession, the imagination, it has to be disciplined. Otherwise it can lead you into dark corners,” Mann gestured up the street at all the little houses, so peaceful under the cadmium lights. “Otherwise, all this, it goes to hell.”

“I understand.”

Lieutenant Mann put his hand on Thompson's shoulder, a friendly gesture it seemed, one man to the next, like they were two men of the same ilk, talking on the front porch back home, but he's pulling my leg, because underneath he's suspicious, he knows something has gotten loose from him (the dead girl, Thompson thought, buried on that hillside) and though he doesn't know what it is, he suspects me, because it's his job to remain on patrol after all, to be diligent as a man can be, to keep everything in its place.

“I'll be seeing you,” the cop said.

“Sure.”

Detective Orville Mann gave him his country boy smile. Then he tipped his hat, started his engine, and drove off into the twilight.

There was a story he had once yearned to write, but he had never done so. Fragments of the story were in everything he'd written but never in the right order, and never how he meant for them to be. He could blame people like Billy Miracle, or the publishing industry, or himself. He guessed, though, it was none of these.

The story had first occurred to him at the end of a long summer more than forty years before. He had been twenty-two years old, hitchhiking his way to Lincoln, Nebraska from the Texas oil fields, when he'd gotten stuck in a small town. Walking through the section of town with the old, substantial houses, he'd seen two young women on the front porch, sisters, he thought, because they looked something alike, even though one of them was beautiful and virginal, the other slack-jawed and hellish. He didn't know how he looked to them, like danger, maybe, something exciting about to happen, unshaven and coarse. He had given them a little wave. One of them had waved back, and the other had smiled—the kind of smile someone gives when they've been molesting you in their dreams—and he had the distinct impression he could have strolled up the walkway into the lives of those women. He went on ahead to the corner, then turned back, his heart filled with desire. The sisters still sat there, in the dull Texas heat, their dresses damp with sweat, their hair curling and moist, but he saw now a man walking up the steps, a sampler case in his hand, and heard the sisters giggling, and he knew then he'd lost his opportunity. So instead he had kept going, hitching off to his first year at college, until one day he stood on the porch of his true love, holding a bunch of flowers. And that was the story Thompson had wanted to write, the story of that instant, of the young man standing on the porch with the flowers in his hand. The young man would be thinking about the girl inside, and he would remember those two sisters on that Texas porch, and meanwhile tiny no-see-um's would be crawling over his skin, biting him to beat Jesus. He would hold red flowers in his hand and when she opened the door her face would seem suddenly strange to him, beautiful, yes, but ugly too, and he would want suddenly both to smother her with kisses and to hurt her in some horrible way, while behind her the door opened into the darkness of the house with its antique furniture and walls hung with the pictures of dead relatives in ruffles and high-collared shirts, waiting for him to join them.

Thompson had wanted for the story to be tender and devastating, a void into which the reader would fall, experiencing the gap, the empty space, his desire had created within him, and he wanted the story to have within it unexpressed all the streets he would ever wander and his own past boyness too, and his sainted mother and his lost father, and the girl he had left behind, all somehow there without being there, without even having been mentioned. That was the story he had wanted to write once and would never write, he realized, because after all what was anybody but a stranger on the street, afraid for himself and what was inside him, and when you looked back it was always too late, as you caught the dark shadow of yourself—a traveling salesman, a returning father, a god without mercy—climbing the stairs you had been too afraid to climb, walking inside the soft door of your heart, murdering your dreams with his charms, his good looks, his unstoppable tongue.

THIRTY-FIVE

The days passed. He did not go back to the Aztec Hotel. He stayed away from Musso's. He did not drink (or he did not drink much), and he did not write. He thought sometimes of the girl buried by the freeway, and of the Oklahoman, and he sat in the small park across from the Hillcrest Arms and smoked his Pall Malls, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. There was something unfinished, he knew. Death was around the corner, but of course death always was. He should be hearing from his editor regarding the manuscript he'd written for Miracle. There was no movie deal anymore, even Countdown had lost interest, so full rights should be returning to him. Trouble was, everyone else had lost interest as well.

Alberta was still cool. She treated him with a politeness, a certain prim demeanor, as she moved about their shabby apartment. Even so, they found their own rhythm together. In the evening, the sun fell in long angles through the palms, and they would walk up the hill past all those houses with their gardenias and hydrangea and the birds of paradise growing on the other side of the picket fence. He'd see the women leaning over those fences, and hear the children playing, and the whole world would have that roseate glow. But there was always the other side too. Messages from the glowing tube in the corner, from the newspaper. Old women who had been knifed in their beds. Prowlers that crawled through windows. Bodies that washed ashore. Encyclopedia salesmen who came back in the middle of the night to steal children. And Thompson would lie beside Alberta thinking about those others. He felt at times she had to be thinking the same things as himself, but when he talked to her, she spoke in the same sort of Oklahoma platitudes she always spoke in. All we have is the here and now, honey, she would say. You know that. And there's no moon like the harvest moon. Because, the wind, well, it always blows hardest just before the corn is ripe. Things like that. But when he reached to touch her, she still rolled away in bed.

All this while, he heard nothing from his publisher. He decided to call Hector Sally, his editor. “I love it,” Hector said, “there's just a few little changes I'd like to see. Give me a few days, and I'll get back to you.”

Hector, though, did not call. When Thompson tried to contact him, the secretary said he was out. The next time, she told him he had left the firm. The new editor couldn't find the manuscript.

“I love your writing, Jim,” said the new man. “I'm a big son-of-bitch fan, but I'm afraid it isn't here.”

“What do you mean, it isn't there?”