The Killer Is Dying (8 page)
DOLLS.
What the hell did dolls have to do with anything?
It had come up in talking to Hector, his usual he-maybe-heard-someone-heard that was half the time garbage, the other half incomprehensible, with once in a great while a tiny sliver of something substantial stuck between. Then when he got home from his shift and from sitting in his car outside the hospice for over an hour, watching shapes and shadows move around inside the windows, there it was, on the pad:
Please contact me. This is for you alone. I sell dolls.
He’d mixed a drink and sat down to go through his notes.
Dolls.
And now he found himself looking at that sunset over Camelback again. Thing had been getting lots of screen time of late. Graves was off testifying at a hearing, guy they’d finally busted for ag assault after giving the poor SOB, a vet, three walks. This time they hadn’t been able to smooth it over, and truthfully hadn’t been much inclined to do so.
Down the row between desks, Robert came plodding with his cart and his earphones plugged not into an iPod but into one of those pocket-size transistor radios you never saw anymore, one he’d had, he kept telling everyone, since he was a kid. The mailman, even though no one got mail anymore. Mostly Robert passed out memos and requests for donations and the like, and those things that
were
addressed to specific people, he generally got them wrong. His father had worked the job for nineteen years, had five months to go till retirement and pension before he made a routine traffic stop, got slammed with the door then run over four or five times. Didn’t even make it to the hospital. Right after that, the chief gave his kid this job and he’s had it ever since, going on ten, twelve years now. Robert’s around thirty.
Sayles thanked him and looked at the envelope Robert had handed him. He’d take it over to Barry Vandiver later.
Robert, always a steady-rolling, keep-it-moving sort even with nothing to do, which was most of the time, lingered by Sayles’s desk. Sayles watched him pull out the earplugs and carefully place them in his shirt pocket with the radio.
“You got a minute, Detective? Can I ask you something?”
“Sure thing.” He pushed a chair a couple of inches Robert’s way with his foot, but Robert remained standing.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I found something, and I don’t know what to do.” His eyes met Sayles’s and slid away again. “I was looking for something I just up and remembered, a shirt my dad used to wear, pretty blue one with red roses, I thought it might fit me now. All his things are in the closet in the other bedroom.”
After ten or twelve years? Sayles thought.
“But I couldn’t find the shirt at first. It was all folded up in a plastic bag from the cleaners, with some dress shirts, in a box on the top shelf. This was in the box, too.”
Robert held out a slim notebook, the kind a lot of cops use for taking notes at the scene. It came from the same pocket he kept the radio in. Sayles took it and looked at the first page, then leafed quickly through. Names in one column—mostly initials—with dates and sums of money. Little doubt what this was. Thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years.
Sayles looked back up at Robert. Did he know? Always hard to tell how much Robert understood about things. Couldn’t read it in his eyes, his face. A glimmer, maybe. A suspicion.
Most people, when they ask what they should do, they’re only wanting your validation for what they’ve already done or decided to do: Tell me I’m right. This was different. Robert was authentically asking for advice.
“What did your mother say?”
“She doesn’t talk to me much these days. Besides, I haven’t told her yet.”
“Don’t.” Sayles handed him the notebook. “It’s nothing. Put it back in the box, Robert.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Back in the box and leave it there.”
“Okay. Thank you, Detective.” Robert replaced the notebook, pulled out the earphones and fingered them into his ears, pushed his cart on down the line.
Maybe ten words had passed between them all these years. So why had Robert picked him to talk to about this? To share what might be the only moral dilemma he’d ever—
Well,
that
was stupid. For all he knew, behind the apparent blandness, behind the dullness, Robert’s every hour might be chockful of dilemmas, moral and otherwise. Things we all take for granted could be pitched battles—
And that was just as stupid from the other direction.
The closer you looked at the simplest thing, the deeper you dug, the more complicated it got. How could anyone ever fall folly to believing he understood
anything
?
Robert had parked his cart squarely by the wall, poured out dregs of coffee from both carafes, and begun rinsing them preparatory to making fresh.
Dolls.
And who
was
this guy? He’d had Lee Volheim, the department IT man he knew best, follow up on the e-mail. Bounced through half a dozen servers, Volheim said, commercial origin, a library, print shop, cybercafé. Like that. Best he could do.
Doll Seller: We should meet
, Sayles had sent, suggesting an open, public place.
No
, came the reply. He’d had to wait some time for it, as it bounced (he now knew) like a pinball from bumper to bumper.
Where then?
Here.
?
On the Web.
Right, Sayles thought. Here. Where you can remain a ghost.
Just after that, he and Graves had pulled a call, attempted murder. Turned out to be one of the expensive office complexes on Scottsdale Road near Biltmore Fashion Park, all copper-colored glass and reflected sunlight. Walked in on a man sitting at his desk and gone as pale as anyone Sayles’d ever seen. His right hand was pinned to the desk, teak from the look of it, with a letter opener shaped like a tiny samurai sword. His secretary, the swordsman, sat in a chair nearby, knees carefully together, hands on the chair arms, smiling.
OKAY, SO HE’D SPENT most of the night throwing up, remains of his broiled fish and steamed vegetables swimming about the sink. He’d had to take his fingers and work the mess into the drain, water on full force the whole time. That didn’t mean he was getting worse, getting closer. It could be these damn pills.
Sure it could. Or it could be the ozone layer. Or all the wastes, detergents, meds, and solvents leached into the water from the sewers and from there into the ground—like those wiping out whole species of birds and amphibians.
Sure.
Sunken eyes, hollows, shadow. Waxlike skin. The light coming from above the bathroom mirror in this Motel 8 or Paradise Motel or whatever the hell it was would make even a healthy, young man look ghostly. There were four bulbs set six inches apart. He held up his hand and turned: four dovetailed images on the wall. When he opened his hand, sixteen fingers moved all together. But not his blurred vision—not this time.
He came out of the bathroom as from a cave, blinking; past his window, daylight was kicking out its first footholds. He watched a bus disgorge its load of the last of the night folk heading home and replace them with those just beginning their day, wondering how many of them might be thinking about their lives, where they’d wound up, where they’d began, the curves and crooks and bland mystery of it all, all these Jonahs.
He had an hour before he was supposed to contact this cop, Sayles. Time enough for breakfast. And while his throat constricted at the thought of food, he needed to eat something, keep his strength up.
He had oatmeal at the cybercafé, eating slowly, and managed to keep it down. Sat there, because a blind man came in halfway through, seeing-eye dog curled beneath his table, remembering Witch.
Back in the day. He was renting this tiny house outside town, driving in for classes three days a week in a Dodge that, whenever it rained or got really humid, spewed smoke like a dragon. Ellie had moved in that August. Few months later she showed up—he and a paper on microeconomics were locked in a death struggle—with “a surprise for you,” the surprise, out in her truck, being a sodden, swayback mutt of a dog she’d found advertised on the bulletin board at the Laundromat. Witch had immediately taken to him, would sit by his desk for hours as he studied, then get up and politely scratch at the door to go out. He’d watch her vanish into the high corn.
Then one afternoon she came back with blood on her muzzle, followed shortly by the landlord, Mr. Brenneman, who informed him that Witch had killed one of his sheep.
Christian apologized, and offered to pay, wondering how much a sheep might cost and where the hell he thought he’d get the money.
Mr. Brenneman didn’t respond right away.
“Generally,” he said, “we have to put them down, son. Once they get the taste for blood, they don’t stop.”
For better than a week, Christian kept Witch in, then one day, absorbed in schoolwork, without thinking about it when she scratched at the door, he got up and let her out. Sitting there peering hard into the latticework of quadratic equations, hoping that his vision somehow would clear, he heard the two shotgun blasts and knew instantly what they were. Hands poised above, he listened to the hum of his typewriter fill the new silence.
Within the month, Ellie was gone as well. And within the year, everything else of his life—as he sat enjungled, with undershirt, pants, a world-class case of athlete’s foot, beer for breakfast, and no silence anywhere.
Finishing his oatmeal, Christian checked the clock again.
Time.
He had just signed on, moments later, when he heard a crash and someone saying, first softly, then loudly, “Joe? Joe?” Instantly, even after all these years, he was in go mode: battlefield breathing, eyes taking it all in, jamming the pieces together at some level below conscious thought. Man stood to get a refill, went down with mug in hand, took the table with him. Woman looking down, still sitting, round table rocking back and forth, dark stain (coffee? blood?) spreading on her skirt.
“Somebody …?” she said.
And Christian was there, beside the man. Carotid pulse thready, skin pale and clammy, diaphoretic. Respirations shallow but regular.
“Sir, can you hear me?”
A nod.
“Open your eyes.”
He did, and they darted about startled, so he’d definitely been out. Pupils equal. And he tracked Christian’s finger when asked.
“Ma’am, does he have heart problems that you know of?”
“I don’t think so. He was just saying that he hadn’t eaten all day.”
Which probably meant that he hadn’t drunk much of anything either. Christian was already dragging the chair over, propping the man’s legs up on it.
Small infarction. Stroke. Or simply low blood sugar, hypotension.
As he rechecked the man’s vitals, Christian could feel himself gearing down. But others had gathered around to watch, making him acutely aware that, in violation of years of discipline, he had made himself visible. Vulnerable.
“Do you know if he’s diabetic?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. We just work together.”
A young man, arms vivid with tattoos of imaginary beasts, had come out from behind the counter to ask if he could do anything.
“Probably only his blood sugar or blood pressure bottoming out, but it could be almost anything. Has someone called for paramedics?”
“On their way. We have to, whenever …” He pointed, apparently having used up all his words.
“Good.” Slammed with sudden vertigo, right, left, up, and down gone missing from body and room—nothing to grab onto anywhere—Christian wasn’t sure he could stand, or move at all. Thankfully, it was passing.
He looked at the clock. Unless the man was preternaturally patient, patience being altogether an unlikely virtue in a cop, he had missed his rendezvous with Sayles.
And he sure as hell had to be out of here before paramedics arrived and started asking questions.
WHY IT HAD TO BE some specific time, fuck if he knew.
Just like he didn’t have a clue what the hell good any of this could possibly do. But sure thing, let’s get together at high noon and talk dolls. Why not. Be good for both of us.
So what
was
it about the time? A busy social life? Places to go, things to do? Simple control? “May be something to do with the bounces,” Volheim had suggested, at Sayles’s look quickly adding, “The routing? How he hops between servers?”
Sayles had just clicked on when the call came.
“Gonna need your help,” Graves said at the other end.
“You still at court?”
“Well …”
Sayles watched the hour roll up on the counter. No idea if Dollman would wait. Or if, bottom line, he even cared.
“I’m in jail,” Graves said.
“Sure you are.”
“On contempt.”
“You’re a cop, for godsake. You were giving testimony.”
“We drew Judge Lang. Just a step or two to the right of—hell, you know him. Getting ready to put Sidney away for the rest of his life when I politely asked for a word to the court. Damn, Sayles, the man was a fucking hero. I’m maybe two sentences in, when Lang says ‘That will be enough.’ ‘No, it’s not enough,’ I said back, ‘not nearly,’ and I’m still saying my piece when his flunkies haul me out.”
“He didn’t just fine you?”
“Never went there. Sped right past, straight to lock-up.”
“You must have hit a nerve—”
“Or he was already up in the tower looking for someone to shoot, yeah. You know how some of these shirts are. Puts on that damn robe, thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants in his courtroom.”
Sad fact is, Sayles thought, he pretty much can.
“So where are you, Durango or Madison Street?”
“Madison.”
“Overnight, I assume, since he was that pissed.”
“Yeah, rest of the girls oughta be here soon for the sleepover.”
“Okay, stay put.”
“Funny.”
“I’ll go talk to the Cap. There’s not much to be done at this point—you know that as well as I do. And you’ll be out come morning, whatever.”
Sayles hung up. Probably too late by now, but he logged on to the designated site anyway. Watched a discussion of snake handlers scroll steadily, line by line, down the screen, looking for the screen name Dollman said he’d be using. Hackneyed phrases passed through his mind: This cow don’t give milk, Elvis has left the building, Lights are on and nobody’s home.
Giving that up, he swung the cursor to Google
Hospice
+
Phoenix.
Over a hundred thousand hits. Adding
women
took it down to about thirty thousand. He clicked at random and read swatches of articles about the city’s aging populace, baby boomers “easing” into their declining years, the exponential growth of extended-care facilities, family responsibility, community support. Many of the euphemisms had become as familiar to him and as oddly comforting as well-worn clothes. Declining years. Family ties. Waning faculties. Terminal care. Parades of word pairs that reminded him of comedy teams, one straight man earnest as the day is long, one innocent who just never quite gets it.
And he’s been here, done this, how many times? Expecting what? To find something new? Suddenly to understand?
What was there to understand?
She was gone. Gone from his life, gone soon enough from her own.
He picked the new glasses up off his desk and put them on, aware as he did so of the world rushing toward him, fitting itself around him, taking him in. Better when the world’s edges weren’t so clear, he thought, when they’re allowed to bleed, to run—that’s where the interesting stuff happens.
So who was Dollman? And what was his interest in this? Chances that he had anything useful to offer were slim to none, of course. They’d had one brief Internet encounter before setting this up. Challenged, Dollman had provided details of the shooting—the attendants, what the victim had been wearing—but would go no further, proving only that he was present at the time. No proof at all that he wasn’t just another one of the sick puppies that always came lapping around.
Sayles had picked at the doll thing till it went threadbare. Used up all his contacts, every resource person he knew inside and outside the department. Even called up a collector’s shop out in Mesa and spent close to an hour hearing about porcelain, composition, cloth, vinyl, hard plastic, bisque, tin-head, and ball-joint dolls. Specialty furniture and clothes. Eyelashes, rooted hair, feather brows, pierced ears. Chicago’s Doll Hospital, specializing in restorations of antiques. Dolly Lama out in Carslbad, chockful of ethnic and religious dolls. “Red Molly” Bing over in Utah with 4,673 dolls, so many that she bought a second house to put them in. There was a walkway …
Sayles had begged off at that point. Thanked him and hung up with the familiar sense of having touched, just beneath the surface of his own, another, previously unsuspected world.
Four thousand dolls. Never mind why, where did one
get
four thousand dolls?
Not a lot of specialty shops like his, the young-sounding man in Mesa had said, but a few. He could close the shop down tomorrow, in fact, and thrive on mail order. There was a sizable network of collectors forever buying and selling. Trading, too—quite a lot of that. Newsletters. Local and national conventions and such, loads of informal get-togethers. Web sites, many of them with forums.
Pushing up to the desk, Sayles thumped the mouse, watched Camelback and setting sun slide away. He clicked for Internet access, Googled
doll
, and hopscotched a dozen or so sites, winding up on eBay. Three or four of the descriptions sounded like close kin, he thought, similar phrasing, structure. Not too surprising, naturally, in such a niche market; formulas would develop, specific patterns of language emerge. “Item Location” listed one set of dolls (a family, no less) as being in Arizona, a Gilligan doll simply as “in the Great Southwest.” Different screen names on all. He’d have to ask Volheim if there was some way of tracing them, tracking down the sellers’ names and locations.
“You stag?”
He looked up. Will Stanford stood by the desk, tie stained with the remains of more than one meal but tugged into a perfect Windsor. Will pointed to the empty desk chair across from Sayles. “Flying solo, I mean. Or did Graves just finally get enough of you?”
Which reminded him that he needed to go talk to the captain.
Graves was thinking back to a response he’d been on when he was fresh on the streets. Some old guy called in a disturbance, his partner told him. Nine to one we get there and it’s the kind who doesn’t have a life, spends all his time worrying about what everybody else in the neighborhood is doing. They arrived to find a boy about eleven years old ushering an adult along the sidewalk toward a typical mid-city ranch house. The man looked to be early middle age, forty to fifty, wouldn’t appear to need the help the boy was giving, but when you got close you saw something was wrong, something about the eyes and the way he moved. “He wanders,” the boy told them, saying he needed to get him indoors if that was all right. Inside they found a woman somewhat older, sixties maybe, with another child, female, attending her. The home was spotlessly clean, everything in place. Doilies on tables, antimacassars on chairbacks, framed needlepoint homilies on the wall.
Love Binds Us
,
Bless This Our House
.
The kids were twins. Their father had been taking care of their mother up till a couple of years ago when he started getting sick too, at which point they had taken over care of both. Of course it was hard, they said when asked, looking surprised—surprised not at the question, but that the two policemen would think there was anything strange about their assuming care.
Graves remembered the kids’ names, Alexander and Isobel. A lot of responds followed that one, he was new, shifts were packed with challenge, danger, new experiences, apprehension. So he never followed up, never found out what became of the family, what had been wrong with the older Glaisters. Never even thought much about it till years later, and when he did, he got to wondering if it might be something hereditary, something the kids had in them too.
Probably best not to think about that, take that too far.
Given where he was right now, probably best not to think too hard about much of anything.
