Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (2 page)

"Yes. She went out there to visit him several times."

"What's his name?"

"Burke, I guess."

"You ever meet him?"

"No."

"Mother?"

"Her mother died when Billie was a little girl. Have you told her father?"

"We're trying. You sure Miss Burke didn't have weird sexual tastes?"

"I'm sure."

"Mr. Deemer, we need someone to identify the body," said Loccatuchi.

"Huh? You mean you're not sure it's her?"

"It's just a legal formality. It's much better for everybody when we have a positive ID."

God, I didn't want to see Billie dead. "When?" I asked.

"How 'bout now?"

"Now?"

"Unless you're too busy."

In a dying Buick we splashed east across the park on the Ninety-sixth Street transverse. Water stood axle-deep under the bridges after ten consecutive days of rain, and the traffic slowed to a cautious crawl to keep the engines dry. Loccatuchi drove and Cobb rode shotgun, me in the back alone. Cobb eyed the city and its movements with malice. Even if I couldn't see his face reflected in the streaked side window, I would have felt the malice convected from the back of his neck.

We turned south on Second Avenue. The Buick's spent shocks set up a nasty swaying motion, like a boat rolling in a seaway. We'd hit a pothole and the car would reverberate for the next two blocks. I was getting sick. Raindrops on the window glass smeared the city lights like tears in the eyes. I adored Billie, and almost every day I'd wondered why a woman like her wanted to be with me. The windshield wiper on Cobb's side had no rubber
thing. A metal arm scratched back and forth, scarring the glass deeper with each swipe. We were south of Fifty-seventh Street before anyone spoke.

"So what've we got?" Cobb asked the broken wiper. "A simple sex killing? You say she wasn't weird sexually, but maybe you're wrong. Maybe you're lying for reasons I don't know yet."

I didn't say anything. I had this heavily buttered welder's glove lodged in my gullet.

"Maybe she took the wrong guy home to play tie-up. No sense to it, no purpose. We'll never catch a guy like that unless he does it again and fucks up. But maybe it was something else. What'd she do for a living?"

"Photographer," I mumbled. I was getting sicker with each pothole.

"What kinda photographer?"

"Bums," I said.

"What?"

"Bums You know, homeless."

"What else?"

"Nothing?"

"Bums don't come back and kill you, they don't like their portrait."

"I'm gonna throw up."

"Huh?" He spun around to look at me. "Sal, pull over! The guy's gonna hoop! Open the door, buddy! Don't blow in the car!"

We jerked to a stop, double-parked. I opened the door and immediately threw up near the tire of a Volkswagen. Pedestrians stopped. I could see their legs hesitate and then hurry on after they realized what they were watching. Cobb never turned around. I wouldn't have either. I hoisted myself up by the window handle and sat back limply. Only then did Cobb look into my face. Would I or would I not blow in his car?

"He's okay, Sal. Let's go." We did.

A staticky woman's voice on the radio said that a robbery was in progress at 108th and Broadway, my neighborhood, but Cobb switched it off. I curled into my corner and rested my head. I remembered the tiny mark, like a fleck of gold ore, in the iris of Billie's left eye, and the thought of it, milky and gray now, made me want to slam my fist into the back of Cobb's neck.

"How do you make a living photographin' bums?"

"You don't."

"So what'd she live off of? The two grand from you each month?"

"I guess."

"You lived with her, right? She have any other income then?"

"Was she naked?"

"Huh?"

"Was she naked?"

"No. Fully clothed." He stared at me. "I find out you know things you ain't saying, then I'm on your ass like a cheap suit. You hear?"

"Fuck you."

"Sal, did he just say fuck you?"

"Sounded like it, yeah."

"They all do. Sooner or later."

Bellevue. I should have known that's where it would be. The house of mirth. We turned onto Twenty-fourth Street, turned again between two festering green dumpsters and down a short, steep incline that ended at a closed garage door. Loccatuchi stuck a card between the jaws of a security device, and the door rose with a clatter. We drove into a sooty concrete parking garage.

Loccatuchi pulled up in front of an open elevator large enough to drive into. Cobb got out, opened my door and led me into the elevator. Was this the way the dead entered? Dented aluminum doors closed in front of us when Cobb pushed the button. We lurched up one floor, and the doors opened onto a long two-tone green hallway. The walls were puckered and peeling
from generations of steam leaks like deep, infected wounds. We turned into other hallways, turned about six times through several sets of swinging metal doors, passed exhausted interns with aged eyes, bored cops who seemed to be nursing grudges, and nurses angry at the human condition. We paused while Cobb flashed his badge at a paunchy guard with a drinker's face who showed no sign of seeing Cobb, me, or the badge, and moved on down the hall. Then, abruptly, wordlessly, Cobb stopped. He shouldered open a green metal door. We had arrived.

It was a kind of anteroom built as an afterthought into the large room beyond. The bottom half of the anteroom wall was made of plywood and painted battleship gray; the upper half was glass reinforced with chicken wire. I tried not to look into the big room beyond, but I did. I saw three autopsy tables. What else could they be? Tools hung neatly on racks within easy reach of the tables, their purposes all too imaginable. When I conjured Billie naked on that table, men about to demolish her with those shiny tools, I jerked my eyes away.

A black guy about twenty and a bloated white guy about thirty-five years older sat across from each other at a wooden table and played double solitaire. Cigarette butts floated in a half-dozen different styrofoam coffee cups. Nobody said anything. Cobb filled out a blue form like a library call slip and handed it to the black guy. The fat white guy didn't move, just sat there with his hands folded over his obscene gut and stared at the cards. My knees quivered. I couldn't keep them locked. This was impossible. I couldn't do this thing. I couldn't walk back there, look into Billies dead face and say yes, that's her; that's the woman I still loved.

The black guy murmured the number, or whatever Cobb had written on the slip, got up, and led us through the door at the rear of the anteroom and into the morgue. The smell hit me hard. At first it seemed a hospital smell of alcohol and soapy disinfectants, but I hadn't smelled anything yet.

The black guy led us around a comer. There they were two full walls of aluminum drawers. Our heels made clicking metallic sounds approaching.

The black guy found Billie's drawer and heaved it open. This was no hospital smell. This was the sort of stench that permeates the tissues of the lungs so deeply that for days you can smell it on each exhalation. When I was a kid, I was given a pet turtle in a plastic terrarium. He soon grew big enough to climb over the walls of his home. One night he did so and vanished. A week later we could smell him under the couch, but this was merely a miniature version of the stench that hit me when I rolled aside the couch and found my turtle dead in a dry puddle of his own fluids. Turtle or woman, they smell pretty much the same dead.

I hung back. It wasn't too late to bolt. Cobb looked into the drawer. "Christ, buddy," he said, "this ain't her. Shape the fuck up!" He slammed the drawer himself. Even Cobb seemed a little shaken by what he had seen in there. I was glad I'd hung back.

The black guy re-consulted the call slip and marched off down the row of drawers. Cobb followed, and I took a few tentative steps in that direction, careful to keep my eyes on the floor. Observe as few details as possible. It's the details that forever haunt. He pulled open another drawer and looked in. I knew what he was doing. He was matching the call slip to a tag wired onto Billie's big toe, but I watched that floor. Having got it right, the black guy stepped aside.

Billie's drawer was about chest high, with three more below her and one above. Cobb looked in, pulled back a green sheet that must have covered her face. Then he glanced at me with a surprised look on his face that said what the fuck are you standing way over there for?

It
still
wasn't too late to bolt. I thought about it. I knew I'd never forget what I was about to see. I knew that years from now the sight of it, on a sunny, happy day, perhaps at the beach, would come flashing back at me. But I didn't bolt. I approached.

She had no color at all. Even her lips, slightly parted but utterly neutral of expression, were chalky white. Her short black hair, still wet, curled in scallops and wisps on her white forehead, the contrast was shattering. I stood staring at her face. I saw that these weren't drawers at all; they were merely racks with no sides. Inside the dead lay unseparated in their common stink. I remembered her laugh, how the skin around her eyes wrinkled and danced as if she were squinting into the sun. Her laughter, particularly when I could cause it, always made me glad to be near. Her right eye was half open, but only the white showed, the pupil rolled back forever. The other one, the eye with the fleck of gold, was closed. Cobb didn't need to ask if I knew her or not.

"What was her real name?"

"What?"

"Billie Burke. That wasn't her real name, was it?"

"Yes," I said, and I reached up and closed her right eye with my index finger. Cobb made a reflex move to stop me, but it was done. Billie's face was as cold as a bathtub. Cobb folded the green sheet over her, and that was the end of it.

The black guy pushed the drawer shut. I watched her naked feet, which had been so ticklish, pass under my face and disappear.

When we returned to the anteroom, Loccatuchi was sitting on the table thumbing through a skin magazine. The swollen white guy hadn't moved. Loccatuchi stood up and handed me a piece of paper. "Sign here, please. It's a statement that you saw and positively identified her." I signed. "Thank you. I'll get a car going uptown for you."

"No, thanks," I said, "I'll take a cab. Just get me out of here."

"Mr. Deemer—" said Cobb.

I turned to him. He straddled a chair and sat down. I didn't like the look in his eye. "Stick around town where we can find you."

"You don't think I did that, do you?"

"Not really. But unsolved murder in my precinct, especially of women, pisses me off. Call me old-fashioned. I don't know enough right now. I hate not knowing enough, and if you're not around when I have a question, that'll piss me off, too."

"Okay, detective. But do you have to be such a nasty fucking prick?"

"You're not the first to ask."

"Thanks for the ID, Mr. Deemer," said his partner.

Jellyroll sniffed my pants leg for a hint of where I'd been. I wondered if I smelled of death and if he knew the smell in some dark atavistic way. I began to cry again. Jellyroll loved Billie, too. She had saved his life. He was a sick little worm-eaten puff of fur when she rescued him from the pound. I sat down on the floor beside him and sobbed into the hair on the back of his neck. He licked my face, and we sat there for a long time in the dark.

My apartment is on the twelfth floor overlooking Riverside Park and the Hudson beyond. No streetlight filters up this high, not even reflection, and no one had seen the moon for two weeks. A total absence of light—except for a tiny blinking red one on my answering machine. When I'm feeling reclusive, in a solitary jazz mood, I can go days without answering the phone. Jellyroll has lost gigs because I've wanted to keep at bay the world below, and if things had been normal, I might have ignored that pulsing red light. But nothing was normal. I got up and played the waiting message:

"Hi, Artie, it's me." Christ, it was! It was Billie! "Are you there, Artie?...No? Okay. It's about nine Sunday night. I'm going to my studio. Please meet me there even if it's late. I've got something to give you. Please come. It's important. I'll see you, Artie." For a mindless instant I thought I would see her, that this night was some kind of mistake. All I had to do was hop the Number 2 train and she'd be waiting, angry, maybe, because it had taken me so long, but alive.

I rewound and played the tape again, then twice more. Jellyroll sat beside me and seemed to listen. What if I had taken her call? I would have met her at her studio, and she might have missed her killer. Or I might have fought him off. No, I tried to tell myself, I wasn't in her life deeply enough anymore to be responsible for it.

TWO

T
HE DAWN CAME up sunless and rainy. I had fallen asleep only an hour earlier. I had tried everything to cause sleep, a couple of bones, bourbon. I tried reading about the Civil War, but I couldn't concentrate on General Beauregard's movements along the Rappahannock, and the carnage of Second Manassas took me near despair.