Can and Can'tankerous (6 page)

“Hermaphrodite?”

“
No
, goddamit!” He actually snapped at me. “Not some freak of nature, not some flunked transvestism exercise. What I’m describing to you, Francine, is two complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carcass. And the woman in there is about three months gone with child. I’d say it would have been a perfectly normal—but how am I to know, really—a perfectly normal little girl. Now, all three of them are dead.”

We talked for a lot longer. It never got any clearer. It never got any easier to believe. If it had come from anyone but Dear Old Doc Death, I’d’ve had the teller of the tale wrapped in the big Band-Aid. But who could doubt a man with that much moss coming out of his earholes?

One of the supermodels was Hypatia. Like Iman or Paulina or Vendela. One name. Maybe before the advent of blusher she was something additional, something Polish or Trinidadian, but to eyes that rested on glossy pages of fashion magazines, she was one name. Hypatia.

Candor: I wanted to kill her. No one of the same sex is supposed to look that good after wallowing in an alley, on her knees, in the rain and garbage, amid blood and failure.

“Care to tell me about it?”

She stared back at me across a vast, windy emptiness. I sighed softly. Just once, lord, I thought, just once give me Edna St. Vincent Millay to interrogate, and not Betty Boop.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. Gently. I almost believed she didn’t have a clue.

“Well, how about this for a place to begin: you are a pretty famous celebrity, make many hundreds of thousands of dollars just to smile at a camera for a few hours, and you’re wearing a Halston suit I’d price at maybe six-five or seven thousand dollars. And you were on Skid Row, outside the Midnight Mission—where the name Donna Karan has never been spoken—kneeling in a pool of blood spilled by an old, old man, and you’re crying as if you’d lost your one great love.”

“I did.”

The other two were equally as helpful. Camilla DelFerro was brave, but barely coherent. She was so wacked, she kept mixing her genders, sometimes calling him “her.” Angie Rose just kept bawling. They were no help. They just kept claiming they’d loved the old guy, that they couldn’t go on without him, and that if they could be permitted, if it wasn’t an inconvenience, they would all three like to be buried with him. Dead or alive, our option.

Wacked; we’re talking wacked here.

And they mentioned, in passing, the green light.

Don’t ask.

When I turned in my prelim, the Boss gave me one of his looks. Not the one that suggests you’re about to be recycled, or the one that says it’s all over for you…the one that says if I had a single wish, it would be that you hadn’t put these pages in front of me. He sighed, shoved back his chair, and took off his glasses, rubbing those two red spots on the wings of his nose where the frames pinched. “No one saw anything else? No one with a grudge, a score to settle, a fight over a bottle of wine, a pedestrian pissed off the old guy tried to brace him for loose change?”

I spread my hands. “You’ve got it there, all of it. The women are of no earthly help. They just keep saying they loved him, and that they can’t live without him. In fact we’ve got two of them on suicide watch. They might just not want to live without him. Boss, I’m at a total loss on this one.”

He shoved back from the desk, slid down the chair till his upper weight was resting on his coccyx, and stared at me.

“What?”

He waggled his head, as if to say
nothing
,
nothing at all.
He reached out an enormous catcher’s mitt of a hand and tore a little square off his notepad, wadded it, and began to chew it. Never understood that: kids in home-room with spit-wads, office workers with their minds elsewhere, people chewing paper. Never could figure that out.

“So, if it’s nothing, Boss, why d’you keep staring at me like I just fell off the moon or something?”

“When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?”

I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four times my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug delivered by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married with great-grandchildren stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox Catholic; and he bit his nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even genuinely, shocked.

“Hey, don’t we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having to haul your tired old ass up on sexual
harassment
?”

“You wish.” He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. “So? Gimme a date, I’ll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade.”

I didn’t think this was amusing. “I live the way I like.”

“You live like shit.”

I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “I don’t have to—”

“No; you don’t. But I’ve watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your step-father, and I knew Andy…”

“Leave Andy out of it. What’s done is done.”

“Whatever. Andy’s gone, a long time now he’s been gone, and I don’t see you moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one of these days they’ll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you live in, and they’ll bust open the door, and there you’ll be, all leathery and oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those two creepy brothers…”

“The Collyer brothers.”

“Yeah. The Collyer Brothers”

“I don’t think that’ll happen.”

“Right. And I never thought we’d elect some half-assed actor for president.”

“Clinton wasn’t an actor.”

“Tell that to Bob Dole.”

It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar crap had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like shit again, the way I’d felt before dinner. “Are you done beating up on me?” He shook his head slowly, wearily.

“Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll start all over.” I thanked him, and I went home. Tomorrow, we’ll start all over. Right at the level of glistening black alleys. I felt like shit.

I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage-filled alley. The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was reassuring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. “Yeah?” I wasn’t as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end was Razzia down at the house. “The three women…them models…?”

“Yeah, what about them?”

“They’re gone.”

“So big deal. They were material witnesses, that’s all. We know where to find ’em.”

“No, you don’t understand. They’re
really
gone. As in ‘vanished.’ Poof! Green light…and gone.”

I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. “Green light.”

“Urey had ’em in tow, he was takin’ ’em down the front steps, and there was this green light, and Urey’s standin’ there with his dick in his mitt.” He coughed nervously. “In a manner’a speakin’.”

I was silent.

“So, uh, Lootenant, they’re, uh, like no longer wit’ us.”

“I got it. They’re gone. Poof.”

I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love who now had vanished in front of everyone’s eyes; and we still had an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread.

The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.

I didn’t collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to
Time.
And the J. Crew catalogue.

And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.

As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the dream of true love.

She appeared in a green light. I understood that…it was part of the dream, from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was…and we made love.

If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess, and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.

I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each other’s adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.

I said: take me away.

And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.

I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon-scented place for a very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.