So Like Sleep (15 page)

“No. I mean, not that I ever met. But the girl was keeping company with another boy at the college before William.”

“Richard McCatty. For a lot of reasons, I doubt it would be him.”

She paused. “There’s really no one else I can think of. I mean, the street kids here, they’d never go out there to pull something.” Her face became concerned. “They didn’t bother you tonight, did they?”

“No, they didn’t. Mrs. Daniels, I’ve very nearly run out of people to talk to. Would it be all right with you if I looked through William’s room?”

“You mean, like through his papers and things?”

“Yes.”

“The police already did that, you know. With a warrant and all, weeks ago.”

“Did you see what they took?”

“Yes, just a couple of pictures of William with the girl and a couple of the girl herself. They even made me sign for them, like a receipt. Didn’t send me a copy of the receipt like they said they would. Does that make a difference?”

“Probably not. I’d still like to see his things, though.”

“Sure. If they couldn’t hurt him, maybe they can help him.”

Willa Daniels led me up a hardwood staircase that was carefully polished. The steps could have used refinishing, however, and the worn narrow gray runner replacing. We turned right at the top of the stairs, and she opened a closed door. “This is William’s. Do you want me to stay or do you want to be alone?”

“Stay, please.”

She sat on a rickety wooden desk chair, partially pulled out from a cheap metal desk with an old, battered Royal portable on it. Next to the desk were a bureau and a closet. A single twin bed lay flush against a second wall and under a window that showed the small yard behind the house. Some bookshelves leaned precariously against the third wall, less a function of poor construction than of chronic overcrowding.

“William has a lot of books.”

“Oh, yes, he read … reads a lot. The jail, they let me bring him books, but he doesn’t seem to want them.”

The shelves contained almost all paperbacks, many looking as if he’d bought them used. Some best-sellers, mysteries, and science fiction, but overwhelmingly college course books, poetry, psychology, history, political science, and so on. A remarkably comprehensive personal library.

I crossed to the desk. Mrs. Daniels moved over to the bed. I went through the papers on his desk, which seemed to be typed rough drafts of schoolwork. I opened each of the three drawers in succession. Old Corrasable bond, pencils, erasers, baseball cards, coins, newspaper clippings, report cards, class pictures, and the various other crap that student desks have always accumulated.

“Mrs. Daniels, did William have any secret hiding place, somewhere he might have put things he wouldn’t want anyone else to see?”

She looked around the room, shook her head. “If he did, he kept it from me.”

Framed on the bureau was a five-by-seven photograph of a younger William standing with Mrs. Daniels next to him. William wore a cap and gown, clutching a diploma in his upraised fist. Both mother and son sported broad smiles.

“High school graduation,” she said. “Seems a long time ago.”

I pushed the desk out from the wall. Nothing taped to it. I took out all the drawers. Nothing. Under the desk frame. Same. The bureau and the bed. Same. Through the closet, past shoes, a baseball glove, a deflated plastic football, and assorted clothing. Same. Under a pile of three cheap sweaters on the top shelf, however, I found a small tape player, designed like a blaster but fancier, with a built-in mike and what looked like a voice-activated recorder button. I pulled it down and examined it. There was a tape still in it.

“The girl gave that to William. For Christmas. He was ashamed because all he could give her was some kind of little perfume bottle that he still had to go without lunch three weeks to buy.”

I ejected the tape. Its label was marked DEMONSTRATION TAPE, NOT FOR RESALE. On each side was printed an awkward title in English, with a Japanese performer’s name in parentheses after it.

“William have many tapes?”

“No. I mean, I never saw him use that thing. I think it reminded him that he couldn’t afford to give her anything so nice.”

I popped the tape back in and pressed the Play button. After some whirring static, lute and mandolin music began. As I was about to hit the Stop button, William’s voice, very hushed, came on.

“Thursday, March eleventh, eleven-thirty P.M.” That was six weeks before Jennifer was killed. There was a change in the background noise after he said “P.M.” I turned the volume up and up without effect until a sound blared from the speakers and bounced off the walls like a wild animal that wanted out. As I turned it down, Mrs. Daniels yelled, “Oh, God, oh, God, turn it off, please turn it off!”

The noise had sounded like a young man screaming.

Mrs. Daniels was crying hoarsely. “That’s William … that’s William. From his nightmares … Oh, God, he taped them, so he could hear … himself…. Oh, God.”

I let her go for a minute or two, getting some Kleenex from the bathroom for her. I took the desk chair, she stayed on the bed.

Mrs. Daniels slowed down, dried her tears, looked up red-eyed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s all right. Can you talk about it now?”

“Yes,” she said, swiping at her nose with the tissues. “I’m fine now.”

“William was having nightmares?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“About the time he started going to Goreham. No.” She sniffled. “No, more like Thanksgiving time. He wasn’t doing well there, his grades and all the other stuff must have been weighing on him more than I knew. Then William moved home here, and he started having these terrible nightmares. Not often, but he’d cry out, in the middle of the night, so … so piteous, like a wounded creature. He would cry out and I’d come running into his room. I mean, William was in college, but he was still my son, and he’d be all tensed up and sweating, like on his stomach, but with his head on the pillow and halfway up on his knees, like a little child hiding from the dark. And I’d try to hold him, but he’d fight me off, even”—she lowered and slowed her voice—“even hit me once, and William never hit me, not ever, but he was still asleep and he didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know it was me, even. But then he’d finally wake up and he’d be crying and shivering like he was freezing to death, even with the heat on and all. It was awful when they came, the nightmares. Just awful.”

“Did he ever see anybody about them?”

“I told William to talk to that psychiatrist he was seeing. Or at least Dr. Lopez over to U Mass, but he never would tell me whether he did.”

“Can I take the machine and tape with me?”

“Well, yes, I guess. Do you think they can help him?”

“They may help me.”

“Then take them, please.”

Willa Daniels promised me she would look to see if there were any more tapes lying around. I made what I hoped were reassuring noises while she showed me out the door.

As I walked down her steps and turned toward my car, I was looking at the tape machine instead of ahead of me. Stupid.

I was less than twenty feet from them before an odd sound made me look up properly. My three friends from last time were lounging on the same stoop, smiling at me in a superior way. Leaning against my Fiat, his rump on the driver’s-side window ledge, was another, older black, maybe six-one and carrying a muscular two forty or so inside his sleeveless sweatshirt. He was swinging a tire chain casually with his left hand against my door. He must have just started with the chain, because it was making the noise that caused me to look up, a drumming like intermittent hail on a tin roof.

“Welcome back,” said the kid I remembered as Negotiator.

“Nice to see you adapting to the culture,” said Stooper, bobbing his head toward the tape machine.

I shifted the thing to my left hand, holding it by the handle across my stomach. “How’s the protection business?” I asked.

“Little slow,” said Negotiator, “ ’til you come along.”

“What makes you think it’s going to pick up?”

Stooper gestured magnanimously and spoke in a falsetto voice. “Perhaps you haven’t met my dear brother, Floyd.” Stooper lowered his tone back to normal. “Floyd, he like two things. Movies and the money to see ’em with.”

Negotiator said, “He hate two things too. You and your car.”

I looked over at big Floyd. He smiled and accentuated the arc and therefore the sound of his weapon.

“The tire chain for me or the car?”

“The car,” said Negotiator.

“You,” said Stooper.

“Maybe both,” said Third.

Floyd grinned malevolently. I said to him, “You must be a real prodigy, Floyd. Hired muscle for three punk kids. What’s the matter, the barbells cut off the blood to your brain?”

Floyd stopped smiling. He came off the car and began swinging the tire chain like a samurai. Around, across, over, intersecting but varying patterns. Unfortunately, he looked like he knew what he was doing. He took two steps toward me and repeated the show.

“So, Floyd, you like movies, right?” I said, slipping my right hand behind the tape player and toward the left front of my belt. “You remember
Raiders of the Lost Ark
? The market scene?”

“Say what?” said Floyd, coming two steps closer.

I drew my gun and leveled it at his chest. His face dropped a few inches and he ran his tongue over his lips. He backed up and I started forward. We kept moving that way, he maintaining the same distance as we approached the Fiat.

Stooper recovered first. “He ain’t got the balls to shoot, Floyd.”

“That’s not the issue, fellas,” I said, setting down the tape player, but keeping my eyes and gun on the now stationary Floyd. I put the key in the lock and opened the door. “The issue is whether Floyd has the balls to find out.”

Negotiator chimed in. “He bullshitting you, Floyd. He shoot you, he lose his license. He won’t shoot. It ain’t like the movies.”

“You’re right there, my friend,” I said, gently tossing the tape machine onto the passenger seat. I rolled down the driver’s-side window and got in. “It’s not like the movies. Out here, dead is forever.”

I started up and pulled out fast, ducking a little, then checking the mirror. Nobody had moved by the time I was half a block away.

I
PARKED THE CAR
behind the building and carried William’s music box up to the condo. I called my answering service and checked my telephone tape machine. Still nothing from Lainie.

I set the blaster on the coffee table and mixed myself a strong screwdriver. I drank half of it, changing to a pair of tennis shorts and a sweater. Then I rewound the tape to the beginning and, being careful to modulate the volume, listened to the tape in its entirety.

It was, in effect, an oral diary of William’s nightmares. Each entry started with William’s whispered statement of day, date, and time. Then dead airspace, then nerve-curdling screams as the voice-activated trigger kicked the machine on during the night. There were five entries altogether, on three of which I could hear Mrs. Daniels’ frightened but soothing talking after two minutes or so of horror. Not much of William’s screaming involved discernible words. I clearly heard a few “No, no” passages and twice I thought I heard him say, “Please, no more, it hurts, it hurts,” or something close to it. Aside from the screaming, the only consistent theme was that each entry was on either a Thursday or a Friday.

I rewound and replayed several times the passages where I thought words were being spoken. I stopped after that. It was pretty gruesome stuff, and I knew that there were enhancement techniques that could bring out more detail if it proved important later on.

I finished a second screwdriver and thought seriously about a third. I was still on an adrenaline high from the incident with the street kids, and I weighed the dulling effect of the drink against the increased chance it would give me my own nightmares. I decided I was being silly and had the drink. And the nightmares.

The hammering at my door woke me up the next morning. Having dropped off on the couch, I was still dressed. I moved to the door, trying to remember if I had heard the downstairs, building door buzzer. I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

“Who is it?” I asked through the wood.

“Detective Cross. Open up.”

I recognized her voice and unlocked the door.

Her eyes looked bloodshot. So did those of Paul O’Boy, standing behind her.

“Can we come in?” she said.

“Sure.”

I led them into the living room and pointed toward the sofa. The music box was still on my landlord’s coffee table, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now. They both sat down, looking about as comfortable as a priest and a nun on a blind date.

“I don’t drink it myself, but there’s probably some instant coffee around somewhere if you’d like.”

They both said “No” quickly. Odd. Cops after long nights always want coffee.

I took a leather chair across from them. “So how do I merit this interjurisdictional visit?”

“Detective O’Boy?” said Cross, staring down at her knees.

O’Boy looked up at me. “I’d like you to come with me. The chief wants to talk with you.”

“Your chief?”

“Naturally my chief.”

“What about?”

O’Boy chewed on his lip. “He said not to tell you.”

Cross kept looking at her knees. I sank back in my chair. “What the hell is going on here?” I said.

“Chief Wooten has some questions he wants to ask you,” said Cross.

“I gathered that. Questions about what?”

“Jesus, Cuddy,” she said, looking up. “Can’t you just go with the guy?”

“Why? Because he’s asking politely?”

“Why not?”

I leaned forward. “I’ll tell you why not. First, it’s barely dawn. Second, O’Boy here doesn’t just call me and say, ‘Could you stop out here sometime today?’ He drives twenty miles to arrive unannounced at my doorstep with a beat Boston homicide cop as shotgun guard. That suggests to me a big-time problem with a short-term deadline for O’Boy’s chief. That makes me want to hear a reason why I should go with him.”