The Canal (4 page)

Alan motioned Vincent closer. "When you
hunt," he said, "you dress the animal. Gut it, skin it. You see the
similarity?"

"I-I think so."

But the job wasn't perfect -- the right foot
still wore a leather shoe, which hung by the grace of a tenacious
sinew, spinning in the drafts that belched from the canal. "And
this shoe -- business type, but low dollar. Its been shined
paper-thin."

Alan leaned even closer, swatting at crowds
of flies."There seems to be some kind of oil," he said. "Gluey.
Sticky. Make sure you get a sample."

"From the river maybe? Some sort
of...slime?"

"Possibly. ...And here. Look at this." The
neck and chest were dotted with puncture marks.

"Stab wounds?" said Vincent.

"Something thin. Ice pick maybe, or a
screwdriver."

"Nail, maybe?" said Vincent. "Or--"

"PENCIL," shouted Womack, from above on the
bridge.

"What?" Alan shouted.

"IT COULDA BEEN A PENCIL."

"All right, add pencil to the list," said
Alan. "WE'RE ADDING PENCIL TO THE LIST."

"OKAY."

"I still can't figure it though," said
Vincent. "I mean, to do something like this. What's the point? I
mean it's--"

"It's just one more problem to solve, is what
it is. Remember, Vince -- focus on the details. The connections.
That's what's important."

"I know, I know... But this sort of thing,
it's like the heat gets to people. It makes them act in ways that
aren't natural--"

"OR RAPIER," yelled Womack.

"What!" yelled Alan.

"MAYBE IT WAS A RAPIER."

"...Did he say rapier? Did he? WHAT THE HELL
IS A RAPIER?"

"I...I'M NOT REALLY SURE."

"Forget it, we've moved on."

"WHAT?"

"WE'VE ALREADY MOVED ON."

"OH, OKAY."

Alan looked at Vincent. "You all right? I
don't want this getting under your skin."

"I'll-- I'll get over it."

"Good. Because I want you back out here first
thing tomorrow. I'll make the autopsy, while you -- I want you
going back over every inch of this crime scene in daylight, you
hear me? And when you're finished, do a sweep of the entire canal,
from top to bottom, snooping in alleys and prying into people's
business, I want your eyes everywhere. Understood?"

"Understood."

"D'ANGELO... HEY, D'ANGELO."

"Jesus. WHAT IS IT, WOMACK?"

"AH, WE GOT SOMETHING."

And with that, Alan was quickly back on
shore, back on the bridge. Could it really be this easy? Could they
have already caught a break? Womack ushered a woman his way,
someone from forensics, tweezers held aloft.

"You're not gonna believe this," the woman
cried.

Actually, Alan could believe it, once he got
a good look. She carried a paper roach, soaked in spit and still
smoking.

"It's hand rolled," she announced, squirming
with a passion for evidence: body fluids, foreign hair,
fingernails, pollen, spatters. She talked about tobacco brands and
rolling papers and purveyors. Cigarettes like this were rare,
they'd make a suspect stand out.

Alan just closed his eyes.

"...Are you okay, detective?"

Sometimes anger wasn't sufficient. Sometimes
Alan needed something beyond anger, some new territory to explore,
a place of unmitigated and reckless fury. A red-tinted land, a lush
Galapagos of profanity, where abuse and disparagement were the coin
of the realm. Normally, Alan would be entering this place now.

But today was different. Today, he stayed
relatively calm.

"Throw it in the trash and keep looking," he
said.

"But--"

"Keep looking!" Was this woman not hearing
him?

Alan wasn't surprised, really, that a Joseph
Lombardi cigarette should turn up and foul a crime scene. Good ol'
Joe, marking his territory with his frustrating spoor. And that
about summed it up really, everything you needed to know about Joe.
The man was a joke. A waste of a heartbeat.

Only now, Alan was doing something about
it.

So he settled in. He'd suffer the canal, this
night, these tweezers, this woman's wounded pout. He'd put his head
down, he'd dig in, and he'd settle for nothing less than absolute
diligence. He'd scorch this crew, run them into the goddamn ground.
He'd threaten. He'd harass. And he'd do what he always did.

He'd get the job done.

>> CHAPTER THREE <<

The morning light was too bright for
sleep-fragile eyes. Alan shaded his as he came into the kitchen, a
comfortable, fresh smelling place. He hadn't gotten much sleep;
there had been a lot of work to do last night. There was still a
lot of work to do. Work was like dirt in that respect -- always
plenty of it.

His wife Susan sat at the small table,
reading the newspaper and bouncing their eleven-month-old son
Eugene on her knee. Eugene: diaper on, shirt off -- the kid rode
her like a dead man in a saddle. Hardly a year old and already over
it. Alan often complained that this wasn't normal -- where was the
curiosity, the intelligence? He wondered if maybe something was
wrong mentally with the boy. Surely there was medication that could
bring his mind into focus? Susan would tell him that he was
overreacting. "Be patient," she'd say. "Eugene's personality is
still growing." Alan wasn't so sure.

Susan looked up from her paper. Alan admired
the perfection there, in her face, her nose in particular. Taken
from the side it was a mathematically precise triangle, a small
pyramid that biology built. You didn't see that too often, the
human face could be so awkward sometimes. Completely uneven,
everything skewed sideways, geometrically vulgar. It's why Alan had
fallen in love with Susan's nose. And Susan too, of course. It was
proof that genetics didn't have to be a slob.

"Leftovers are in the fridge," said Susan,
"...and fix your collar." She smiled sweetly.

Alan did as he was told, smoothing his
collar. He felt profoundly better for it. His left pant leg had
snagged on the tongue of his shoe. He made the adjustment.

"Sorry it was another late night," he
said.

"Nothing serious I hope."

"Just the usual. I won't bore you with the
particulars," said Alan, going to the refrigerator. Inside, he made
his usual surveillance. Every jar, bottle, and tub had to be turned
so its label faced squarely outward. Alan checked expiration dates
daily, along with smelling the milk in its carton. Fruits and
vegetables were placed in tightly sealed plastic bags. Alan yearned
for iceberg lettuce that truly lived up to its name -- cool and
blue and crunchy like glass. Satisfied that everything was in
order, Alan turned his attention to the leftovers. They had their
own shelf, near the bottom. It was darker there. And colder. It was
not a place you wanted to linger.

Leftovers. Chicken to be precise, a bag of
unevenly breaded filets. Alan felt some unease. Normally chicken
was one of his more ideal foodstuffs: consistent feel, uniform
color, dependably conservative flavor, skinless, available in
bloodless and boneless format. But in Susan's hands something
terrible happened. Something wicked. Chicken underwent a dark
transformation, emerging wild and deadly.

With enormous regret he removed the bag from
the refrigerator, placed some of the cutlets on a plate, and put
them in the microwave. It was the usual conundrum -- as much as
Alan disliked Susan's cooking, he disliked wasted resources even
more. And so cruelly, he was duty-bound to eat this food --
efficiency demanded it.

While he waited, Alan glanced at the front
page of Susan's newspaper, scanning the headlines. Taxes on the
rise, stocks on the wane, failed diplomacy in far away lands.
Nothing about last night that he could see. That was a good thing.
Alan liked to keep Susan uninformed when it came to the realities
of his job -- she was easily agitated.

"It says it's supposed to be
a-hundred-and-two degrees today," said Susan. "It says rain in a
couple of days though. Sounds unbearable."

Alan gazed at his wife. "What did you and
Eugene do yesterday?"

"Hmm? Oh, you know, just mother and son
things."

"Things?" said Alan, bristling at the
ambiguity. "What about some of the ideas we had talked about? The
math. The reading."

"If you must know, all we really did
yesterday was spend time in the yard."

The yard. They were always spending time in
the yard. "I think we need a distinct course of action, here," said
Alan.

"I know, honey.

"To ensure Eugene's most correct future."

"Of course."

Eugene was now slumped against Susan's ribs.
She had been campaigning hard for Eugene's first word to be,
"Momma." Alan had seen her when she thought he wasn't looking, her
mouth over the baby's ear, murmuring, "Momma-momma-momma..."

Alan wanted to push his point further, but
Susan had already returned to her newspaper. He turned back to the
microwave. Out of habit, he ran his finger across the countertop,
feeling it for crumbs, like a blind man searching for specks of
Braille. It was clean.

When the chicken was finished reheating Alan
got a plate for his wife and himself, and then carried everything
to the table. What he saw waiting there made him pause: an
envelope-sized pamphlet lying on his placemat. He maneuvered for a
closer look.

On the cover was a massive lawn, an entire
beach of grass. Above that burned an ultimate sky, composed in a
blue that was unique to the work of cheap color presses. It
read:

Lawnhill Cemetery.

Prime location. Companion plots.
Mausoleum.

This was something Susan did. Last week it
had been a primer on living wills. Oftentimes eyewitness accounts
of cop shootings got cut from the paper and placed on Alan's
pillow. Interviews with destitute charity widows appeared taped to
his can of shaving cream. Life insurance policies found their way
into the pockets of his trousers. It seemed to Alan that his wife
had developed a minor obsession with his demise.

"The Garden of Peace sounds nice," said
Susan, putting the paper down. "Lots of shade, lots of flowers. A
salesman came by yesterday. And that reminds me, that's the other
thing Eugene and I did. But what this man said was very reasonable.
He said we're all on borrowed time. That you never know how, or
why, something might happen. That's why now is the time to plan.
The Garden of Peace, Alan. The Garden of Peace. Doesn't that sound
to die for?"

She realized what she'd said. "I
mean...doesn't that sound lovely?"

It was too early in the morning for Alan to
be having this sort of conversation. All he wanted was to have a
relaxing, awful breakfast, and then get back to the case.

"This is our home," he said. "Let this be my
garden of peace." Then he unceremoniously smothered the pamphlet
with his plate and sat down.

Susan watched him with a critical eye. She
began folding the newspaper, breaking its spine, methodically
reducing its fluttery mess to a sharply creased, military
rectangle. She held it toward him, tapping the page with one of her
cream colored nails.

"You're telling me I shouldn't worry?"

It had been there after all, in bold print
below the fold: MURDER MOST GRUESOME: BODY FOUND SKINNED.

"This is right here in our neighborhood,
Alan. This is right where we live."

"It's nothing, Susan. It's not anything.
These things happen."

"Right down the street, Alan."

"You're...that's an exaggeration. The canal
is not our neighborhood or our street. The actuality is, we live
closer to the expressway. If anything is our neighborhood, it's the
expressway."

"I don't care about the expressway."

"I like the expressway." The expressway was
momentum, it was progress, it was optimistic. Everything the canal
wasn't.

"You're trying to change the subject."

"No. No. You were, you were talking about the
neighborhood."

"I was talking about you, Alan." She shook
the newspaper at him. "I was talking about these, these crazies and
you're out there, you're around them, Alan. It's like...it's like
they're part of your workplace. And what if...what I'm trying to
say is, God forbid. God forbid one of those crazies were to skin
you, Alan. That's what I'm trying to say.

"I worry, Alan. What would I do if something
happened to you? What would I do? Me, a widow? And with a child?
Where would I turn? How would I survive? I'd become one of those
tramps, Alan, one of those soggy tramps who go to bars by
themselves. All alone. Doing anything for a drink. But who would
possibly want me, Alan? Who, at all? Except for rough dockworkers!
Longshoremen!"

"Suze--"

"Don't Suze me, Alan! I will not be Suze'd!
You... You might as well take my skin. Take it right now and throw
it all away. Throw it out in the street, I don't care! Because
that's how I feel, Alan, peeled -- peeled to the core!"

She was near tears. And Alan was...the truth
was, he'd heard all this before. This argument of theirs was a
running motif. What had she said the last time? She had said that
she couldn't live on a widow's pension. She said she would not be
one of those women who clip coupons. She would not hunt
bargains.

"Susan," he began, "nothing's going to happen
to me. It can't, if that makes sense. But if it makes you feel
better, then the Garden of Peace would be fine. But I'm not..." He
didn't want to say the word, it was sour to him, "...dead yet. I'm
not even thinking about that, Susan. It's kind of off the table
right now."

Which was true. You couldn't accept death.
Acceptance was acknowledgement. And acknowledgement was defeat.

Susan averted her eyes. She stared at the
baby's head, into the gauze of silken hair. "I'm just saying," she
sniffled.

Alan let out a slow breath. Coincidentally,
the real disagreement, it hadn't even begun. Not even close.
Sensing a lull, Alan picked up his fork and knife. No, the real war
was just getting started. Because where Susan and he exchanged
their most acrimonious broadsides was right in front of him. The
food.