The Devil in Gray (6 page)

Decker took his Polaroid camera out of the bookcase, loaded it with film, and took six or seven pictures of the kitchen counter. Then he cleared all the meat and fruit into the sink, and pushed them into the waste disposal. The knife he picked up by the tip and dropped into a plastic food bag.

He looked around the kitchen one more time. He cleared his throat and said, “Cathy, sweetheart, if what I heard was really you, why don't you give me a sign? Why don't you tell me why you're here? Why don't you let me see you for a minute? Why don't you let me touch you?”

He waited but there was no answer and no sign. Maybe he
was
going crazy. Maybe he was simply overtired.

In the end he switched the lights off and went to bed.

As soon as he fell asleep the nightmares began. Nightmares more frightening than any he had ever had before.

He dreamed that he was struggling through thick, lacerating underbrush. It was nearly dark and he knew that he had to hurry. Off to his left he could see fires burning, and he could hear men shouting to each other.

The branches caught in his clothing and lashed against his face. His feet were bare and every step was prickly with briars. The fires began to leap up higher, and he could smell smoke on the wind, and hear the crackling of burning bushes.

He was shaking with exhaustion, but he knew that if he stopped for even a minute the fires would cut him off, and he also knew that there was somebody close behind him, somebody who wanted to do him serious harm. He looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see anybody, but he was sure that they were very close behind.

Somewhere ahead of him, in the gathering darkness, a hoarse voice called out, “Muster at the road, boys! Muster at the road or we're finished!”

He heard a rattling that sounded like rifle shots, and a man screaming. How could he muster at the road when he didn't even know where the road was? He couldn't see anything but densely tangled undergrowth and thornbushes.

He tried to go faster by leaping over the bushes in awkward galumphing bounds, but his face was ripped by the branches and he was terrified of having an eye torn out. He lifted one arm in front of his face to protect himself. His woolen mittens were snared by briars, and his fingers were scratched, but it was preferable to being blinded.

The fires were coming closer, and he felt gusts of furnace-like heat. Another man was screaming, and then another. Then he heard something else: a thick rustling noise, very close behind him, very close. Somebody was catching up with him fast.

He turned around, and a huge figure in a dark cloak was almost on top of him. It came rushing toward him and it didn't stop, so that it collided with him. He found himself struggling in a cage of bones, trapped, unable to get free. The cloak closed around him and he was imprisoned in airless darkness, desperately trying to disentangle himself from ribs and shoulder blades and knobbly vertebrae.

“
Can't breathe!
” he screamed. “
Can't breathe!
”

He twisted around and realized that he was lying on his bed with his sheet over his face, thrashing his arms and kicking his legs.

Panting, sweating, he sat up. He switched on the bedside light and he could see himself in the mirror that faced the end of the bed, pale-faced, with his hair sticking up like a cockerel. His throat was dry—almost as dry as if he really
had
been running away from a brushfire. He reached for the glass of water that he usually left on his nightstand, but tonight he had forgotten it. He said, “Shit,” and swung his legs out of bed. It was then that he realized that his feet were lacerated. They were covered in dozens of small scratches, all the way up to his calves, and his sheets were spotted with blood.

More than that, there were several briars still sticking in his ankles.

Whoa
, he thought.
This is getting dangerously close to insanity
. You can't catch briars in your feet from running through underbrush in a nightmare, no matter how vivid that nightmare might have been.

He put on his glasses and went through to the bathroom, hobbling a little. He switched on the light over the bathroom mirror. His face was scratched, too. There was a nasty little cut on the side of his nose, and the skin on his right cheek had been torn in three diagonal stripes.

Pulling out a Kleenex, he carefully dabbed the scratches on his face. Then he sat down on the toilet seat and plucked the briars from out of his feet. He sprayed aftershave on the wounds because he didn't have any antiseptic, sucking in his breath when it stung.

He stayed in the bathroom for almost five minutes, wondering if he ought to go back to bed. Like, what if he went back into the same nightmare and the brushfire caught up with him? He could be burned to death in his own bed. He had read about religious fanatics who had identified so strongly with the suffering of Christ that stigmata had opened in their feet and the palms of their hands, and their foreheads had appeared to be scratched by a crown of thorns. Maybe this was a similar kind of phenomenon.

At last he stood up and went back into the bedroom. He had to take control of this situation. He desperately needed to sleep, and he couldn't let his subconscious fears start ruling his life. “I'm not going crazy,” he announced. “I'm probably suffering from delayed grief and work-related stress, but I am definitely not going crazy.” He paused, and then he said, “Shit, I'm talking to myself. How crazy is that?”

He eased himself back into bed, but this time he left the light on. It made him feel as if he were a child again, terrified of what might be hiding in the dark. When he was five or six, he had imagined that the parchment-colored lining of his bedroom drapes was the skin of a tall, thin, mummified man, and that as soon as the light was switched off, the mummy would unfold itself and stalk across the room, stilt-legged, to take out his eyes.

At about 3:30, he fell asleep again. He dreamed that he and Cathy were walking together through the Hollywood Cemetery. It was late evening and the sky was a grainy crimson color. The crosses and urns and headstones looked like chess pieces in a complicated board game, and Decker was sure that when his back was turned they kept shifting their position. He kept trying to look at Cathy, but for some reason her face was always blurred and out of focus.

“What were you doing in the kitchen?” he asked her. His voice sounded oddly muffled.

“I was protecting you,” she replied.

“Protecting me? Protecting me from what?”

“From Saint Barbara. Saint Barbara wants her revenge.”

“Saint Barbara? What the hell are you talking about? What I have ever done to upset Saint Barbara?”

“I don't want you to know. I don't want you to find out.”

“Cathy, listen to me. Tell me that I'm not going crazy.”

She said nothing, but turned away from him. He reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but she collapsed, like an empty bedsheet, and when he opened his eyes, that was all he had in his hand.

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning was sweltering and off to the east the sky was a dark coppery color, as if an electric storm were brewing off to the east, over the Richmond Battlefield. Decker went to Sausalito's Café on East Grace Street for coffee and scrambled eggs and sat facing the window, watching the passersby. For some reason that he couldn't explain, the world seemed to be altered, as if the streets downtown had been hurriedly dismantled and reconstructed during the night and some of the details hadn't been put back exactly as they should be. He had always thought that mailbox was on the opposite side of the intersection, yet here it was, right in front of the window. Even the passersby looked unnatural, walking in a hurried, self-conscious way like extras on a movie set. Decker could have believed that he was still in a nightmare.

“More coffee, Decker?” Amy called, from behind the counter. As she did so, a young woman in an oddly shaped black beret looked in through the window and gave him a knowing smile. He gave her a questioning look in return and mouthed,
What?
—but she turned away and disappeared into the crowds, as quickly and completely as if she had been made of nothing more than jigsaw pieces.

Jesus, Decker, you're definitely losing it
.

Mayzie was waiting for him at headquarters.

“You rat, you didn't show,” she complained, bustling after him into the elevator. “I waited for over a half hour and you didn't show. Ha! As if I believed that you really would.”

“I told you, sweetheart, I'm all tied up with the Maitland case. We had witnesses to interview, evidence to look at. Things dragged on much later than I thought they would.”

“You could at least have called me.”

“I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry.”

“Oh, you're sorry. Look at your face, all scratches. Who gave you those?”

“I tripped over. I fell in a bush.”

“Really?
Whose
bush? I'd like to know.”

“Mayzie, I'm sorry-sorry-sorry. How about lunch? I'll meet you right here in the lobby at twelve.”

“You're a rat, do you know that? I don't even know if I
want
a child if it's going to have you as a father.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“Rat.”

“I'll meet you here at twelve, okay? Don't be late, will you?”

He left her in the elevator and walked along the corridor to his office. Hicks was already there, talking on the telephone. Hicks jabbed his finger toward the waiting room. Through the glass division Decker could see Eunice Plummer and Sandra sitting side by side. Eunice was reading an old copy of
The Carytown Guide
while Sandra was playing some sort of game with her fingers.

Decker took off his sandy-colored coat and dropped it over the back of his chair. His desk was heaped with papers and files and scribbled memos, as well as crumpled-up paper napkins and three Styrofoam cups of cold coffee. But there was also a brass-framed photograph of Cathy. He had taken it the day before she was killed, in a corn field out on Route 5, in Charles County. She was wearing a frayed straw hat that cast a ragged shadow over her face, and she was chewing a stalk of grass.
My beautiful hayseed
.

“What were you doing in my nightmares last night?” he asked her, out loud.

Hicks put down the phone and said, “You okay, Lieutenant?”

“Sure, I'm fine. Didn't sleep too good, that's all.”

“Your face is all scratched up.”

Decker touched the scab on his nose. “Yeah … kind of an altercation with the neighbor's pet cat.”

“You should get shots for that. You don't want to get, what is it, rabies?”

Decker didn't answer. He didn't want to have to tell Hicks that it hadn't been a cat, but a briar, and not only that, an
imaginary
briar.

Hicks said, “I was just talking to the ME. She's pretty sure that Mrs. Maitland's injuries were caused by a double-edged swordlike weapon, approximately two and a half feet long. She suggested a bayonet, something like that.”

“A bayonet? Jesus.”

“I was thinking of drawing up a list of all the places in Richmond that sell bayonets. Like gun shops and military curio stores. Antique markets, too. If we can establish that Maitland actually
owned
a bayonet, then it won't matter so much that we haven't been able to find it.”

“That's good thinking, Hicks. Why don't you start with Billy Joe Bennett at the Rebel Yell on West Cary Street? Believe me—if Robert E. Lee had ever had
half
as much ordnance as Billy Joe Bennett, he would have won the Civil War in a week.”

“Okay, Lieutenant. Right on it.” Hicks lifted his coat off the peg beside his desk and picked up his notebook.

“Hey, hey, slow down, sport,” Decker said. “You don't need to take this weapon thing so personal. You conducted a thorough search, you couldn't find it, ergo it wasn't there. Obviously it's going to help us if we can produce the weapon in court, and prove that Maitland used it to kill his wife, but it's not the end of the world if we can't.”

“I just like to have things neatly wrapped up,” Hicks admitted. “I mean—how could a two-foot bayonet totally disappear? It isn't logical.”

“All right, Mr. Spock,” Decker said. But even as he said it, he thought about the face carved out of slices of raw chicken and banana, lying on his chopping board, and what was logical about that, or even sane?

He ran his hand through his hair, prinking up his pompadour. “I guess I'd best go see what my visitors want. By the way, how's your wife liking it here in the city?”

“Good, fine. She's okay.”

“She doesn't miss Fredericksburg?”

“Some. I think she misses her friends most.”

“Well, that's natural. You ought to bring her out one evening.… I know a couple of girls she'll really get on with. Does she like Mexican food? We could go to La Siesta.”

Hicks shrugged. “I'll ask her. She's never been much for socializing.”

“In that case, I insist that she comes. I can't have my partner's wife feeling lost and abandoned in the big city.”

Hicks gave him a tight, unappreciative smile. “I guess not. Thanks. I'll talk to her about it.”

He rapped loose-knuckled on the door of the waiting room. Eunice Plummer looked up and beamed at him, and so did Sandra.

“Sorry I kept you waiting so long.”

“That's quite all right. Sandra finished her drawing at seven o'clock last night and she's been dying to show it to you ever since. She was up at six, all dressed up in her best frock and ready to go.”

“I could have sent somebody to collect it. Saved you a journey.”

“I wanted to show you myself,” put in Sandra.

“Well, Sandra, I really appreciate that. It's people like you who make our job a whole lot more satisfying.”