The Sleeping and the Dead (6 page)

“I can tell you that,” Cole said.

“You said you didn't know.”

“I didn't know before. I know now.”

“How?”

“Because I asked,” Cole said.

“Jesus Christ,” Adam swore. “I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind.”

“Not at all. I just thought I'd save you the trouble. Half them boys won't even talk to you for fear you'll turn their lives into a public spectacle. Like Michi said, they're good boys. They'll talk to me.” Cole touched Adam's arm. The old fag could lay the butter on thick when he wanted.

“All the same…” Adam began.

“Oh screw that. My word is as good as theirs. Better, and I'll testify to it if need be. Chris was supposed to be rehearsing tonight. He's playing Banquo in a production of that Scottish play at the Lou Hale Theatre. Or I should say
was playing
.” Cole finished his martini and looked a little sad and tired around his Cherokee eyes.

“Which Scottish play?” I asked.

“
Macbeth
,” Adam said.

“Oh, he is one of us, after all,” Cole said to Michi.

“I told Kouyate he shouldn't stage that thing,” Michi frowned.

“Why not?” I asked.

Adam answered for him. “Theater people have a lot of superstitions about
Macbeth
, including a fear of speaking his name or quoting lines from the play anywhere but on a stage.”

“Bad things happen.” Cole touched his nose conspiratorially. “Nothing good ever comes of a production of
Macbeth
.” He gasped and clapped a hand over his mouth. “Excuse me. It's late and I really need a drink.” He hurried away.

“We should probably talk to the manager at the Lou Hale,” Adam said to me.

“You're not staying?” Michi asked.

“No, but I'll need a list of people who knew Chris.”

“I'll have Cole arrange it.” Michi followed us to the door, leaning heavily on his cane and breathing in wheezing gasps between puffs of his cigarette. I knew the extremity of his decrepitude was just a show for Adam's benefit. Maybe he was trying to make up for grabbing me. My wrist still hurt, the bastard.

Adam opened the door and stepped out on the porch. It had begun raining again. I paused. “One more thing,” I said to Michi. “You're on the board of directors at the Lou Hale Theatre, aren't you?” I didn't know for sure, but it was a logical guess.

He flicked his cigarette past me into the rain. “So what? I'm on the board of damn near everything. Is that all?”

“That's all,” Adam said. “For now.”

“Well, goodbye then. Don't be a
strange-ah
,” Michi drawled. Adam started down the steps.

As I leaned close to give Michi a peck on his flabby cheek, just to show him we were still friends, I whispered in his ear, “You missed a drop, Michi-san.” I pointed at the white blob still stuck in one of his forehead wrinkles. He touched it, paled, then flushed pink as a piglet and slammed the door in my face.

 

6

A
DAM DELIVERED ME
BACK
TO
the Orpheum and dropped me off at my car before somebody towed it away. A news van and a fire engine were still parked in front of the theater. Adam was going to be up all night working on the case.

I drove home in the pouring rain, thinking things over, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself turning into the lot at my old apartment. Blue plastic sheeting covered the smashed-out windows, but the rain hadn't washed away the smudges of soot going up from the windows to the roof. This place was only the latest in a long string of personal disasters going back almost five years. The starting point was when I ruined my marriage and left my husband, Reed Lyons. I had a tendency to destroy everything I touched, nothing lasted once I got my claws into it, whether it was a career or a relationship or even something as innocent as a car or an apartment. That was my problem—I had a destructive genie, too much fiery yang. I couldn't help it. It wasn't anything I did. It just happened.

But it didn't
just happen
, I usually made it happen. I left the barn door open and the stove on and the cigarette burning. I cheated on my husband, shirked my responsibilities, slept with my bosses and hooked myself on pills and smack. For a while, the Police Department acted like they were interested in keeping me on the payroll, but they were only following the prescribed steps so the police union wouldn't get all up in their kitchen when they eventually fired me. So they sent me to talk to a counselor who asked me about my father and told me I harbored a morbid fear of success. Any time I seemed to be getting my life together, I'd do something stupid to bring it all crashing down again. Any time I got close to someone, I'd drive them away; Adam was the exception. God knows I'd done my best to run him off, but he didn't seem to care. Maybe he was just a stubborn ass. Maybe he felt like he had to save me. I didn't particularly want saving. What was it the man said?—Life is nasty, brutish and short.

After they rescued me from the fire, I ran into my landlord standing in the rainy parking lot looking up at the smoke and steam still pouring out of the broken windows. He said, “What the fuck, Jackie? Ain't no blackened catfish this time. I hope you got some goddamn insurance.”

I didn't. He had insurance, he just didn't want the insurance company coming in and setting minimum standards for the people he rented to, to make him run credit checks and collect security deposits that half his clientele couldn't pass or pay, most of them Mexicans without Social Security numbers and living six or eight to a bedroom. His insurance company would triple his rates and price him right out of business. I knew I could use that against him. The smoke and water damage and the busted doors and windows added up to more than I owned in the world. So while he was talking to the fire chief, I took all I could salvage and split. He was going to have to sue me, provided he could find me.

Sitting in the parking lot, seeing my burned-out apartment and thinking about how easily I could have died and the innocent people I might have taken with me, I suddenly wanted more than I had in a long time to push a big fat needle in my arm and be done with it, ride that magic carpet so far away I could never find my way home. Sayonara, you fucked-up old world, y'all are better off without me. Instead, I turned around and drove out of the apartment complex before the landlord spotted me sitting there feeling sorry for myself, mooning over my miserable life. He used to watch out the windows. He never caught a single burglar or car thief, but he always knew you were home when you were behind on your rent.

Money was going to be tight after tonight. I had probably ruined my relationship with Michi. Not that I particularly cared for him. I never was convinced the old perv wasn't a pedophile, no matter what the DA thought. I had busted Michi for buying a book of photos of nude boys.
Art
, they said, but what kind of art was that? If Michi wanted art, couldn't he find something that didn't skate along the edge of kiddie porn? And what about his
boizu
—those college-age young men who lived out of his house like gypsies and alley cats? He gave them money and a place to stay in exchange for their participation in his rites. Being physically incapable of engaging in a sexual act didn't stop him from entertaining the most profound sexual perversions. The least of these, to my knowledge, involved his infamous Monday-night bukkake parties with eleven young men dressed up in football uniforms. That's what we had interrupted tonight.

But Michi's
boizu
were adults, if only just, and they were willing participants, so who was I to judge them or, for that matter, him? They probably needed Michi's money as much as I needed it. I hated my need, but maybe they hated it, too. For several years now, Michi had been buying my photos of the dead. He always paid more for violent deaths. He paid best for suicides, especially hangings, and especially if they were still hanging. I don't know what he got out of it, but in some way I could almost understand—he had seen too much and hurt too much and now the only things he could feel through the numb calluses on his perverted heart would blast the eyes of any ordinary mortal. It wasn't sex. It was far deeper, darker, gone beyond simple fetishism or even carnal depravity, down to a place where the acts performed in the conjuring chambers of his seven-gabled house might actually summon The Devil Himself to watch and sing along. Or so I sometimes imagined. Honestly, I didn't know what he did, and I didn't want to know. But I needed his money just to keep my head above water, so I catered to his death fetish and sold him the graven images for his midnight sabbaths, even if it damned my soul.

It was all too easy to forget the people I had photographed, all the bodies and parts of bodies, the human wreckage of so many lives thrown away. I had become numb to them, except the Playhouse Killer victims. For most of the others, it was a job. I took the pictures and sold them to Chief Billet, to insurance companies, to people with lawsuits and personal injury lawyers, and to Michi Mori. Meanwhile, every drowned baby and every bloody smeer on the road chipped away at me until almost nothing remained but a cold lizard brain, flicking its tongue and tasting an opportunity to make a buck. The money took the pain away for an hour or two. I couldn't stand to see a dead dog on the side of the road but it was nothing to shoot photographs of some bum cut in half on a train track, because I knew Michi would write me a fat check. But no matter how I tried to kill the horror—with drugs, sex, oblivion—it never went away.

They
never went away, either, but sometimes they weren't so bad. Sometimes they were bad. Sometimes very bad. November never was a good month for me.

There was this thirteen-year-old girl who hung herself. I couldn't remember her name, not even if I wanted to. I had cut her name out of my memory with a heroin needle, but I couldn't forget her face. I couldn't forget her parents, who wanted a photo of their dead daughter to print on posters, because after the funeral they were traveling to Washington to demonstrate in front of the FDA who approved the antidepressant that had driven their baby girl to suicide. I still woke up nights thinking about those people and the enormity of their grief. They had sent their daughter to the doctor to help her, they had forced her to continue taking her meds even though she told them something was wrong and begged them to let her quit. They had killed her trying to save her from being a normal, dysfunctional teenager.

With the murder victims and the car crashes, a corpse was just an object to me. There was a purpose to my work then—to record the event, to provide evidence for the trial or the settlement. But that girl and her parents, furiously determined that her death should have some meaning, haunted me like no other. They lived on Central Avenue near the Pink Palace Museum, and I used to drive past their house on my way to Preston's office, where I sold most of my accident pictures. I would see her sometimes, standing in her yard beneath the elm tree where she hung herself. She wasn't looking at anything. I don't even know if she was real or just something left over from another time, like a photograph.

She wasn't the only one who still haunted me. There were others, plenty of others, some whose corpses I had photographed, others I had never seen before. And there were some I wanted to see again but never could. On bad days the bad ones would crowd around so, it got hard to tell people apart, who you could talk to and who you couldn't. I could photograph the dead all day long, because they're just meat, but I couldn't deal with the grief of the dead. They brought the grave near enough to see myself in it. It was too much. But without grief, you aren't human. That's what separates people from monsters.

Tonight, as I was driving home, Adam was headed to Whitehaven to tell Chris Hendricks's parents their son was dead. I didn't allow myself to imagine that scene. I didn't need to imagine it because I had lived it. Instead, I drove home to my new apartment and unlocked the door. It was a heavy, solid door with stout bolts and brass screws driven into real wood, not plywood, not some flimsy fifty-dollar piece of cardboard and glue that some crackhead could kick in. This building, old as it was, had good bones.

I unstrapped my cameras, hung up my jacket and peeled off my wet clothes. My socks were still soaked. There was an old steam radiator in one corner, no longer hooked up to steam but it made a good place to to dry my jeans. I was still hungry but what I really wanted was a fix.

I resisted. To take my mind off it, I downloaded the photos from the Orpheum and burned them to a CD. I didn't examine them except to make sure I wasn't sending crappy pictures to Chief Billet. While the CD was burning, I opened my last quart can of Tecate beer. I put the finished CD in a brown envelope, addressed it to Chief Billet and set it on the kitchen counter. It was too late to call a courier.

I plugged the Leica into my laptop and opened Photoshop to view the pictures, but the camera's brand-new memory card appeared empty. I unplugged the camera and checked the review feature. The photos were there. I plugged it back into my laptop and examined the memory card. The files were there, but my computer wasn't able to recognize the Leica image file format.

Luckily, I knew where I could get the right software. I had already planned to drop the camera off at Marks Camera Repair to make sure everything was working before I took full possession. Deiter Marks was one the best camera gurus in the country. His shop wasn't even open to the general public. He catered almost exclusively to professional photographers, numbering the top pros among his select clientele.

I shut down my computer, took a quick shower, checked the door and climbed into bed. I always slept commando. It was only a little after midnight—an early night for me. I lay in bed and watched the lights play across the ceiling and the brick wall, getting the feel of the place. It was my first night there.