The Poisoned Rose

THE POISONED ROSE

Revised Edition (January 2013)

Daniel Judson

Book One of

THE GIN PALACE TRILOGY

Winner of the 2002 Shamus Award

 

The Poisoned Rose
was a stunning and wondrous debut, and
The Bone Orchard
only confirmed Daniel Judson’s artistry and unique style, but those two dark gems do not prepare the reader for the huge leap forward that is
The Gin Palace
. The final outing of Declan “Mac” MacManus, one of our most compelling PIs, shows an author at the very height of his dizzying power. Fresh, vibrant, startling, and beautifully rendered, Judson’s The Gin Palace Trilogy breathes a whole new energy into the genre. -- Ken Bruen, author of
Headstone

This taut thriller is far from predicable, and its dark and mysterious plot suits Judson’s understated writing style—Publisher’s Weekly

 

Daniel Judson is so much more than a crime-fiction novelist. He’s a tattooed poet, a mad philosopher of the Apocalypse fascinated with exploring the darkest places in people’s souls. --Chicago Tribune

 

Daniel Judson is a thoroughly accomplished writer. --Kirkus Reviews

 

for David Thompson

 

Contents

 

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Also by Daniel Judson

About the Author

Connect With Daniel Judson Online

PROLOGUE

 

I am back at the start again, back on Gin Lane again, a boy of ten with his whole life ahead of him. It is a hot summer morning, and breathing in the barely perceptible ocean breeze is like inhaling the air that rises up from the tip of a flame. The sun is new in the sky but already gives off a warmth that touches my face in the way it should in the hours that follow noon, not dawn. A sound comes from the inland side of the dunes, catching my ear. I turn to face it. The sound punches through the long roar and hiss of the Atlantic crashing in again and again just feet behind me. I hold still, warm sand shifting beneath my bare feet, and listen.

I hear cries, big fear in a voice that sounds small and tinny. I see nothing, just the dunes and the great houses built upon them. I hear then the sound of a dog barking—this, too coming from somewhere behind those dunes, from the street beyond. These distinct sounds reach me in waves. They push against the sound of the ocean, fight it, are diminished by it. Still, I can hear them well enough to know something is wrong.

I start toward them, still unable to see the road that is beyond the dune. I make it over the soft sand to the foot of the dune and hurry to climb it. I drop down to all fours and scramble for the top. Sand disappears below my hands and feet, but I persist and crest it and stumble down the other side to the small blacktop parking lot below, where violence waits.

Asphalt crumbs lay along the broken edges of the lot, where sea grass grows wild. Pale yellow, the grass stands stiff in the August air and brushes my legs as I come through it. Each blade is just moments from combustion, a dry match head aching for the slightest friction.

I see her then. She is a blonde-haired eleven-year-old girl, seated on the sun-warmed pavement in the middle of the empty seaside parking lot. She has just fallen from her bike, bare knees scraped, hands shimmering with blood. Stunned, she stares at the source of the barking, which sounds to me like automatic gunfire, short bursts of snarling and grunting that echo sharply off surrounding dunes and the fronts of the nearby houses.

It is, I see now, a mastiff that is charging her, one hundred and twenty pounds of rabid viciousness. It is wild and enraged but focused and moves faster than anything should be able to move. But I am nearer to her than it. I know I can make it to her if I don’t let up.

I continue toward her, throwing myself forward, one leg after the other. I feel the softened pavement shift beneath the balls of my bare feet. I haul it, my eyes on her, and when I finally reach her, when my out-of-control running turns to barely controllable slowing, the beast is only seconds away.

I drop fast into a crouch beside her and grab her arm and try to pull her up to free the bike around which her legs are tangled. But my touch startles her. She looks at me suddenly, drawing away instinctively. Because she is looking at me she is not paying attention as the mastiff lowers its head like a plow and makes its last wide strides and takes a hold of her right leg with its jaws. It stops on a dime and scoops her up, its barks funneling down to a deep, feral snorting. Long strands of spittle break free from the foam hanging from its mouth and go flying like shrapnel. I feel it hit my face.

The girl panics and grasps at me, looking down in horror at the animal tearing into her. She holds onto me with tremendous strength as it tugs on her. Her fingers dig into my arms. She screams and looks up at me. I see her eyes so clearly. They are all I can see.

Behind us the ocean collapses on the shore. The sound of it is my only connection to sanity, to the world that existed just moments ago, before this burst of violence. I think in a split second that in the mouth of the beast, this girl seems like a ragdoll.

Over the sound of the waves I hear an approaching siren. Blood and spittle fly in all directions through the air, arcs of milky-red. The girl screams again, a desperate shriek, and I cannot take it. I let go of her and grab hold of the dog by the collar and slide between them. I hook my fingers around the tube inside its throat and dig in till the tip of my middle finger and thumb meet.

It takes just a second for the mastiff to gag and release her. But I have not harmed it, merely angered it. When it does release her it wiggles violently, like a game fish on a line, and I lose my grip and it snaps its jaws down on me. Its teeth break my skin and lodge deep into my muscle of my leg, into my thigh bone. It has a solid, crushing hold on me. Within a second it begins to shake its head from side to side.

Blood comes out of me fast. I feel myself lifted off the pavement, and then all I see is sky where there should be ground and ground where there should be sky. The dog shakes me like a rag doll now, does so more times than I can count. I cannot imagine that this will end. Then out of all this insanity I hear the sound of the siren grow nearer. My ear tunes in on it. It fills my head, then finally stops and all I’m left with is the growling and the tearing of flesh and the crashing waves.

I hear the crack of gunfire. I hear it again. Suddenly I am dropped, slick with blood and spit, to the pavement.

The instant I hit the ground I feel two hands grab me by my arm. It is the girl. She is pulling me across the pavement, pulling me toward her, away from the beast dropped by a cop’s .38.

I look for her eyes but get only the morning sun, the color of pain and heat, in my own…

Chapter One

 

 

It was in the pale light of what seemed enough to me like morning that I awoke to the sound of someone pounding on my door. Outside my three front windows a steady rain was falling through the few yellow and red leaves that were left hanging on the trees that lined Elm Street, drilling hard into the already saturated lawn two floors below. It had been raining for days and I almost couldn’t remember a time when there had been anything else but this. I preferred the sound outside my windows over the pounding on my door, so I let myself hear only that for a time. I was facedown on a bare wood floor, breathing in dust and damp, and thinking how the drops hitting the leaves sounded like rain falling on a hundred tiny umbrellas.

My muscles ached and the left side of my face stung. I didn’t think too much of any of it. Last night’s drinking was still in my veins. I could feel waves of intoxicants moving like thickly clustered schools of tiny fish in my blood. A part of me was still asleep, and the part of me that wasn’t wanted to join up with it again as soon as possible.

Finally I got up off the floor. It took some doing but I made it to my feet. I wanted more to stop the pounding than to see who was there. When I opened the door I saw George standing in the dark hall outside, his arm poised for another bang. He looked pretty much half in the bag himself. He lived in the apartment below mine and served drinks seven nights a week in the bar one flight below that. The town we lived in was a small resort town that all but shut down between September and May, and the bar we lived above, the Hansom House, catered to the working-class locals who lived there year round, artists and laborers alike. There wasn’t much to do at night during the off months out here but drink and gossip, and George was the man to whom most people came when they wanted healthy servings of both.

When he saw me George lowered his arm. He looked a little dumbfounded, and then I realized that his eyes had shifted and were focused on the left side of my face. I felt the stinging again and remembered then the scratches and how they had come to be there.

“Jesus, Mac,” George said, “they look worse than they did yesterday.” He whispered when he spoke; the dark hallway outside my door seemed to require that somehow.

I ignored George’s comment. I felt an urge to touch the scratches but didn’t.

“What do you want?” I muttered.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“You could have just called me to tell me that.”

“I tried, Mac. Your phone’s out of order.”

“Oh, yeah.” Service had been shut off last week because I hadn’t paid my bill. Yesterday I received notice that the electricity was next. “What do they want?”

“She didn’t say.”

“She who?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Have you ever seen her here before?”

“No. And I would have remembered her.”

“So what did she say?”

“That she needed to talk to you. That it was important.”

I had gotten up too quickly and was a little dizzy. It felt as though gravity were working particularly hard on me this morning. It took pretty much all I had not to give into it and just lie back down on the floor for as long as it would take for things to lighten up again.

“Tell her I’m not here. Tell her I left town and you don’t know when I’m coming back. Tell her whatever you want, just make sure she goes away.”

“There isn’t any harm in talking to her, Mac, is there? I mean, no harm in hearing what she came to say, right?” He stopped, then added, “She’s pretty.”

“Just tell her I’m not here, George, okay?”

He nodded. His vision shifted past me and into my apartment. I didn’t have to look behind me to know what he saw. My cramped living room was chaos, crowded with furniture that was probably secondhand around the time I was born. I tuned-in to the rain falling past my three front windows. I heard it landing hard on the roof above us. I listened to the difference in pitch between those two sounds and said nothing as I waited for George’s eyes to shift back to me.

“You should put something on those scratches, Mac. Do you have any ointment or something? If you don’t, I could bring you some—”

“I’m going back to sleep, George.”

“You going to come down later?”

“I don’t know.”

“Drinks are on the house.”

“Maybe.”

“That guy that keeps bothering the girls is coming back tonight. You know the one I mean. Apparently, he’s been in the city for a while, and from what I hear he’s coming back out tonight and will probably come in. He owes me for a tab he ran out on, and he doesn’t seem all that eager to pay it. I was thinking maybe you could talk to him for me.”

“If someone owes you money, call the cops.”

“I don’t want them in the bar, you know that. It’s bad for business.”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

“The thing is, the guy’s not afraid of me. He’s afraid of you. He said so. Just ask him all nice and casual when he plans on paying me. If he doesn’t pay up after that, I’ll call the cops, I swear. All you have to do is talk to him for me. Anyway, drinks are on the house, like usual.”

I was broke, and the promise of free drinks appealed to me more than I would ever say. The life I’d chosen for myself was more tolerable after a few. It was as simple as that. The things I’ve done and seen were more easily forgotten. And so were the people who have forgotten me. “I’ll see what I can do, George, okay?”

“I appreciate it. Listen, I was talking to the girls just now. They’ll be here in a little bit. Everyone’s been wondering what happened to you. They’ll be glad to see you.”

“Kind of early for that, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s four. In the afternoon. What time did you think it was?”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Gotta go, George.”

“So you’re coming down later, right?”

I closed the door without answering, hurried to my bathroom and filled up the iron-stained sink with cold water. I splashed my face and it felt as if I was pressing shards of metal into my open skin. I kept my eyes down and avoided the reflection in the broken hand mirror fixed to the tile wall above the sink. The scratches on my face were days old now but still noticeable enough. Four long marks that began just above my left temple ran down past my eye, ending at my jaw. It would be hard for me to see them and not think of the woman who had made them just hours prior to her death.

I had on only a T-shirt and jeans, so I grabbed an old hooded sweatshirt out of my bureau and pulled it on. It smelled musty but clean and was the last of the wash I had done a week ago. It was chilly in my rooms—too chilly for November. I pulled on my work boots and grabbed my denim jacket and started down the two flights of stairs. But I stopped at the landing above the last flight when I heard George’s voice.

I peeked around and looked down the stairs and could see him standing in the doorway, talking to someone. A woman. I couldn’t see her face from where I was standing, just the shape of her body inside an open overcoat that was sizes too big for her. She was wearing jeans and a thin white sweater. I didn’t move, just stayed where I was and listened.

“Do you know when he might be in?” she was saying. The door was open and her voice was nearly lost to the sound of all that rain falling behind her. Even if I couldn’t hear her at all I would know pretty much what it was she was saying. I’d heard it before, from those who’d come looking for my help before her.

“No, I don’t,” George said. “I’m sorry. He’s hard to keep track of.”

“It’s important that I talk to him.” Her voice was tonal and low, like a cello. I could hear a tightness in it. Whoever she was, she was anxious. Her jeans were faded and baggy. I got the sense by the way they hung off her hips that they had belonged first to a man.

“I don’t know what to tell you, miss,” George said.

“I’ve tried to call him but his phone is disconnected.”

“I can give him a message when I see him. But I can’t say when that might be. That’s the best I can do. Maybe you can leave your name and number with me.”

“No, that won’t work.”

“I don’t know what else I can do. If you’re in trouble, maybe you should go to the police.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Listen, you’re welcome to stay and wait for him, if you want.”

“I can’t do that, either.”

“Well, if I see him I’ll let him know you’re looking for him. What’s your name?”

“It’s okay. Thanks. I’ll try back later on if I can.” She backed away from the door, turned and disappeared. George watched her go. I waited till he closed the door before I went down to him.

“She’s persistent,” he said. “She was halfway up the stairs again when I came back down. She must want to talk to you bad.”

“And you’ve never seen her before?”

“No. She’s pretty, though, don’t you think?”

We all choose the worlds in which we live, and the things to which we are drawn. For George, women—pretty women—were what mattered. He was defined by them, his ego rising and falling by how accepting of him they were. The Hansom House bar was his court, but what the poor guy didn’t know was that he was, to those who came to it, more jester than king.

I thanked him for his help and left. I was late and couldn’t wait any longer. I pulled the hood of the sweatshirt up over my head and ran through the rain to my ancient LeMans parked across the street. I got in and pulled the door shut, and that was when I saw an old two-door red Saab parked on the other side of the street, a few spots down from the Hansom House.

A woman was behind the wheel. I could barely see her through the rain streaming down my windshield and hers. But I could make out the color of the overcoat, and that was how I knew it was her. I could see that her head was tilted forward, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. I didn’t dare start my engine. I didn’t want her lifting her head to the sound of my engine and seeing me. I didn’t want her rushing through that rain toward me. I couldn’t hear what she had to say. I just couldn’t. I was too broke, in every way possible, for any more charity. There was nothing she could say to change that.

So I waited for a few minutes, smelling the damp must of the old interior, watching her. Finally she leaned back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. I looked away. Eventually I heard the engine of her Saab start. I looked up as headlights came on. Then the Saab quickly steered away from the curb.

I ducked down as her car went past. I was confident that she hadn’t seen me. I sat up again and looked in the rear view mirror and watched as she turned left and rode past the train station, toward North Main Street. Then she disappeared from my sight.

Still, I waited a bit longer before starting my engine and driving away.

It was just four in the afternoon but looked like dusk. I had thought only minutes ago that it was dawn. I was close to an hour late for my meeting with Frank Gannon, but there was nothing I could do about that now. If it hadn’t been for George pounding on my door, I would have missed it altogether. As I drove I thought of all the ways that my going there was a mistake.

I rode over flooded streets into Southampton Village. It was just a little over a mile. I parked at the corner of Main Street and Job’s Lane, then ran through the rain to the entrance to Frank’s building. I was soaked through by the time I reached it. His office was the only door at the top of thirteen steep steps. Each plank of creaking wood announced my presence as I climbed up.

The office was dimly lit; the only windows were at the front and the rear of the long room, but even when it was a sunny day outside they didn’t catch all that much light. Before it was an office this space had been an attic storage area above a women’s clothing store. It still had that feel. The corners were dark, the ceiling slanted, particularly toward the back. The furnishings were simple: a desk and chair positioned midway down, two chairs facing it, and a long couch behind those, its back against the opposing brick wall. The rest of the room was just filing cabinets and unusable space.

Frank was behind the desk when I entered, seated with his back straight in his big leather chair. He was on the phone, a stack of files at one elbow and a lit reading lamp at the other. Between his elbows was an ink blotter, heavily stained.

His skin was clean-shaven and taut, and he looked like a man who took care of himself, did so to the point of pampering. No one really knew exactly how well-off Frank was. He had his home on Hill Street, his pretty wife, his two daughters, both in nice Ivy league colleges, and his two Cadillacs. He never seemed to want for anything. His exterior appearance was polished, and yet it did little to hide the real man inside from anyone who did business with him, the rough and violent ex-cop who had found a much better life as a private detective maneuvering in and out of the countless cracks that existed between laws.

I closed the door behind me and leaned my back against it. I didn’t want to step any farther into that tight room. I looked at Frank for a while, then realized there was someone else here, standing in the back, by the rear window, in the shadows.

I looked toward the figure and saw that whoever it was, he had his back to me and was glancing at me over his shoulder. He was holding a folded newspaper under his left arm. He waited for a moment, staring at me, before turning away and looking out the rear window at the cop parking lot below. This was obviously what he had been doing before my arrival.

There was no getting around the fact that whoever this man was, he was a big guy, with a neck like a hydrant. He wore a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and something about his build reminded me of one of those performers in the circus who bend metal bars around their necks as a show of their strength. He wasn’t muscular like a weight-lifter or a professional athlete, just tremendously solid. He was a giant to my gargoyle, blacksmith to my scarecrow. I didn’t have to think hard to figure out what kind of work he did for Frank.

Frank waved me in but I remained by the door. This refusal made my having come this far already a little easier for me to bear. He was listening intently to the person on the other end of the phone, not speaking or even nodding, just sitting with his back straight, the phone in one hand and his other spread flat on the blotter. I shook the rain out of my hair and my three-day-old beard and wiped the palms of my hands on my jeans. Then I looked again toward the giant at the back of the room. He was reading his paper by the weak light that came in through the small window. I looked at him and couldn’t help but wonder how exactly he could fit behind the wheel of a car.