The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (9 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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There were signs on the second floor indicating a radio station was housed here, but the linty rooming-house atmosphere of burned-out naked light bulbs and eerie trash in the hallway would get anybody thinking that these placards—WPRD 103 FM and SHHH BROADCAST IN PROGRESS!—were holdouts from some unrecollected age, like the one on the stairs that said CAUTION—FRESH PAINT!, a claim that was, by his reckoning, more than one hundred percent false. In the hallway there were two doors to WPRD, and he took the first into the station’s front office. That was one-third of the place, and the rest was the production studio and the announcer’s studio and the bathroom. No janitor had ever been at work here. They looked like the premises of an outfit that was almost ready to be inaugurated or one that had very recently closed.
He was a little surprised to find Berryman’s phone interview right where it should have been in the tape library, which was really a closet in the front office of WPRD. Part of him had expected it to be missing.
He listened to it through headphones in the production studio. It was just your average interview, nothing remarkable about it that English could see, aside from the awful peaks-and-valleys volume—Berryman shouted in his ear, while the replies from Wilkinson, the head of ’Nam Vets for Cape Cod, sounded like a small bee in a jar. Side effects of Agent Orange, Wilkinson said, were turning up in the veterans who’d used this herbicide in Vietnam. Wilkinson spied a conspiracy to resist all the evidence that this chemical was dangerous. Everybody was in on it, the American Legion, the Vets Administration, the President, Congress, the John Birch Society, other right-wing outfits. “Dow Chemical and those guys,” he said. “Any chemical company, whether they manufacture it or not. Insurance companies don’t want this information passed around. People are still using it right here, there’s chemically related stuff being used along the roadside, right out here on Route 6. The right-wingers, these poor suckers the Truth Infantry—you better edit that out,” he said.
“Edit what out?” Berryman asked him loudly.
“Don’t you know who you’re working for?” Wilkinson asked. “Edit that out, too.” But Berryman had edited nothing out.
 
 
 
R
ay Sands was flat on his back. “Today you’re the investigator,” he told English, who was feeling, for reasons he couldn’t put a finger on, proud to be admitted to the sick man’s bedroom. The room didn’t smell of medicine or a stale convalescence. Sands was dressed for business in a shirt and tie, but instead of a suit coat and street shoes, he wore a quilted blue robe and bright yellow slippers. He lay propped up by pillows on the perfectly made bed in a sunny atmosphere, while English got the idea that any taint of illness here emanated from himself.
He neglected to take the white envelope Sands was holding out to him. “I don’t know the first thing about missing persons.”
“You’ve done it before,” Sands said. “You did a fine job of work on the Charlie Hendler thing.”
“But really all I did was drive to the Hyannis bus station. I mean, it was just a case of staying between the lines on Route 6.”
“This is the address,” Sands said, giving the white envelope a shake. “Go there, talk to Mr. and Mrs. Twinbrook, and get anything he left behind with numbers on it—address book, bills, letters if they’ll let you take them, diaries, appointment books, any such material. Bring it to me, and we’ll go over it together.”
“But what do I ask these people? What kind of information is supposed to help? See, I don’t know that stuff.”
“There’s really nothing to it, Lenny. Ask them what you’d ask if they were the parents of a friend, an old friend you were trying to track down. Who does he know? What does he do? Where does he go, what places did he frequent, where would you find some friend of his or some acquaintance who might have further information? A good deal of the time, you’ll find they know just where the person went, but they don’t want to make certain of it themselves. The daughter’s run off with the gardener, and so on. In this case, the son.”
“I’m not ready for this.”
“I’m here to assist you. I’m your assistant now. Just talk to the Twinbrooks and just keep bringing them around to the subject of their son. If they mention people, places, or numbers, write those down.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand—it wasn’t like him. “Names and numbers. Names and numbers. Make of car, year of manufacture, license plate, passport number, age, height, weight. Recent photos. What we’re going to do is compile a list of facts about this man, and a list of people for you to contact, and a list of places for you to visit …”
Now his boss seemed to be at rest, or in thought. English was sitting in a stuffed chair by the bed and didn’t mind waiting forever, except that he wanted a cigarette. He hoped Sands didn’t have cancer or something like that. What if it was cancer? And the guy didn’t even smoke.
“There’s a trick to all this,” Sands resumed, “that’s what I want to say. When you’re talking with people, especially the strangers you’ll be interviewing later, your attitude has to be that you just don’t care. Your only interest in life is to gather information that will locate. You’re blind to anything that might compromise the people you’re talking to. Anything that’s illegal or strange. Nothing matters to you—that’s what gets people to open up. You want names and numbers, not stories. Take the same attitude you did when you were working for the police in Kansas. You don’t care, you don’t judge.”
“Couldn’t you just phone them? The Twinbrooks, I mean? Couldn’t you just give them a call?”
“I intend to do that, if it becomes necessary.” Sands melted back into himself visibly. Now he really did appear ill—holding a precious motionlessness on the bed, he looked out at English as if from a cage. “I’ve got to take care of this respiratory condition.”
English accepted the envelope bearing the penciled address of the couple who couldn’t find their son.
What do you mean, he wanted to ask, by respiratory condition? But Sands was old. It might be serious. English decided he didn’t want the details.
On his way out, he paused at the bottom of the stairs and stood at the door to Sands’s office and photography studio and looked in. The stool stood before the dark backdrop curtain, a tripod without a camera on it stood before the stool, Sands’s desk stacked neatly with the paper of commerce waited before the window where the curtains lay wide open, admitting daylight and fearing no examination. Of course, he told himself. What would I be looking for anyway? A swivel chair addressed the desk and was occupied only by a pale green tennis ball. He left, avoiding Grace Sands, whom he heard around the corner of the opposite door, puttering in her living room.
 
Mrs. Twinbrook turned out to be small, and she didn’t look quite right in a turtleneck sweater. “I hadn’t expected such a—youthful detective.” Her face was heavily powdered and looked frozen. It had been the business of the years to make her features heavy and changeless, but her voice was kind.
More than once, on TV, English had seen just such a woman in just such a crisis, and the TV woman had always worked something around in her hands, a pen, a scarf, her own blue-veined fingers, but Mrs. Twinbrook only gestured, maybe a little weakly, with hers. “This is the dayroom, that’s the parlor,” she said, moving past these rooms too swiftly to let them be anything but names in his ears.
“Let me show you the lower level, Mr. Sands.” She led English beyond the dayroom and down some stairs into what constituted a whole extra house. They skirted a row of rooms like compartments on a train—a study, some sort of sewing room, a bedroom—each with a picture window looking out on a garden filled with sculptures in the snow. It was thawing, and a big rock and a birdbath, and the stands for delicate metal works of art, were edged around with the black wet of the winter lawn.
“Actually, I’m not Mr. Sands. I’m Leonard English, I’m just the assistant. I’m the one you talked to on the phone yesterday.”
“Oh. I thought you looked awfully young. I’d understood Mr. Sands was retired, and I—naturally—” At the door of the last room, she held him off. “And where is Mr. Sands?”
“Taken ill. He’ll be going over the information and planning my moves.”
“Good.”
“I stopped by the address you gave Mr. Sands,” he told her. “The lady next door hasn’t seen him lately. But she says somebody’s come by once or twice—a man, she said. And there’s no mail in his mailbox.”
“I have his mail,” Mrs. Twinbrook said. “Gerald’s been picking it up—Gerald Senior, my husband. There’s not much.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at it. I don’t know, return addresses might tell us something.”
“Of course. Remind me before you go.”
Now was the time to start asking questions, but he couldn’t bring the words out.
“This is my son’s studio. He works here a couple of days each week.”
It was small and looked more a place of storage than a place of work. Paintings, most of them no larger than dinner trays, were stacked against the walls, and above them hung more paintings. Cardboard boxes filled with rags and paper, and paint-smeared glass jars, each with a shock of brushes, cluttered the floor. There was hardly anywhere to stand or walk. The big window gave it all a sense of light and space that was false—an element of dust, a museum quality, lay on the air. By the window stood a large collapsible table with drawings and pencils all over it.
“Does he actually paint here?” English was sidestepping objects to get to the table, but he was distracted by the paintings hanging on the walls on either side of him. Now that he was in the room, a tincture of oils took hold of his breath. “Did he do these pictures in this room?” One of the paintings suggested Miami Beach, as English imagined that place, with tall buildings overlooking a shoreline blotched with umbrellas.
With every further statement, he felt his next one would be a confession of his complete inability to know where to begin.
“Jerry paints outdoors,” Mrs. Twinbrook said. “I believe he sketches in here, or rethinks portions of his canvases. He’s very, very meticulous. He believes in the absolute power of detail. I want you to look at this man’s elbow.” She laid a coral fingernail against the brown flesh of a sunbather in the scene he’d been studying. All the figures were simply rendered. To English the elbow looked like the joint of a stove pipe. There were no faces on this beach. The half-dozen bathers in the foreground were all looking away. “That elbow is
leaned
on, wouldn’t you have to agree?” The man reclined in an oval of umbrella shade, his maroon bathing suit slashed by the sunshine.
English was at a loss when it came to elbows, but he had no trouble recognizing, in some of these paintings, the eerie Cape light. On overcast days the sun might be just a brighter patch in a grey sky, but its effect would smolder anyway on the hills and occasional white buildings of the countryside and on the water, so that the world seemed to lie straight under a blowtorch; and yet things cast no shadows. English had guessed that the light collected somehow on the waters and made a brightness in the air, even under clouds—just in the air, a brightness not otherwise locatable. Jerry Twinbrook had caught that light and let it fall through these paintings. “I’ve been to this place.” English pointed at the two landscapes flanking the one of Miami Beach. “Herring Cove, right? Just outside P-town.”
“You see,” she said.
English could only nod. See what? He was supposed to be asking questions, but she expected him to pay attention to this stuff first. He felt sorry for Mrs. Twinbrook, because she looked, by her clenched interest in this room, like bricked-over despair. She herself had the same black-and-white quality as her walled back yard. Her turtleneck sweater was thick and snowy, but her hair was a shining, artificial black and her skin was dark—as a matter of fact, it came to English, she was suntanned.
“I’m just taking all this in.” He tried to sound like an expert, a genius of the faintest trails. “Now, these look like they were painted indoors.” At the level of his knees, various interior scenes leaned against the walls. He saw what she’d meant about elbows—the people in these somber pictures were mysterious, seated around tables or standing in doorways, and they had no faces, only blank ovals, but in the way they held their bodies the people were alive.
English looked at the drawings on the table, carefully moving each one from on top of the others so as not to smear them or disturb something—evidence maybe. He wasn’t a judge of art, but these seemed to be only doodles, geometrical shapes scratched on rough heavy paper, studies of chairs and torsos, practice at the cast of a shadow or the angle of a view. None of it was information. He was wasting her money as he handled these sketches. And yet he felt a prickly discomfort, as if he were learning more than he wanted to know about this lost person.
“You see,” Mrs. Twinbrook said, as if English would grasp what eluded her husband, “my son has a gift.”
Her husband had been driving away just as English had arrived, and he’d paused only long enough to give English an impression of a pink, shaven face as he’d rolled down the window of his Lincoln to say, “Are you the detective?” English had gotten out of his Volkswagen and started across the gravel driveway toward him, but already Mr. Twinbrook was rolling up his window. “He can’t paint and he’s probably good for nothing, but we love him. Find him.”

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