Authors: Jack Ketchum
He caught a glance between Stevie Ray and the girlfriend. On the girlfriend’s part it was a worried glance.
What was this guy’s problem?
He was liable to get his ass kicked just sitting here.
“Hey, whatever.” He snorted another line.
Doing the coke gave him an idea. A terrific idea. An inspiration, really. Good drugs could do that to you.
“Hey Roger, how much you take for a gram of this shit? Twenty?”
Roger hesitated and stroked what passed for his chin. He shook his head.
“Like I said, man, I’d like to give it to you for twenty. I’m real tight for bread right now. I mean, like, I’d have to say thirty. You think you can go thirty? It’s really good blow, man, you know?”
Roger was gouging the shit out of him but what the fuck. He dug into his wallet again and produced a twenty. Roger got up and went to his filthy walk-in kitchen and opened a drawer and tossed him a thimble-sized glass bottle with a plastic cap.
“Done, my man.”
He wondered if the thirty included another line or two at the table. He decided not to push it. Stevie Ray was still staring at the red shirt like it was a fucking red flag and Stevie Ray was an angry bull.
He finished his beer and said
thanks, good to see you guys
and pocketed the coke and got his ass out of there while it still was safe and sound and the last thing he heard when the door shut behind him was Stevie Ray say,
flicking pussy in a pansy shirt
, he could hear it because the Donovan album was over by then and tears of sudden rage stung his eyes.
Get that piece of shit bastard alone with the Ladysmith and then let’s see how tough he is, let’s see who’s the pussy
. But in a way he had to be almost grateful to this asshole too because the coke and wanting to get out of there so bad had given him the idea in the first place.
He’d go home and have a little more. Not too much. Two or three lines and the rest he’d save.
A present for Katherine.
Something to look forward to. No,
something else
to look forward to.
He knew she liked surprises.
He walked away smiling.
Once the coke wore off he’d sleep now.
Charlie Schilling was having no trouble sleeping. In fact he was sleeping away half the evening, falling out in front of the TV set. And twice there was a scotch in his hand which he found still clutched there in the morning. He was breaking his own rules drinking like this but somehow the rules didn’t seem to matter enough to worry about.
When he thought about exactly why he was falling off his personal version of the wagon he thought about his son Will and his daughter Barbara, and about Lila and fucking up with his family. He thought about Ed and Sally and felt that he was failing them too in some way though he didn’t quite know how.
He thought about the felony animal abuse case he was working, where a couple named Neinhauser had dragged their black Labrador bitch behind their car at thirty miles an hour as a punishment for running away, pausing only in order to let the dog vomit. He’d found a thousand-foot trail of bloody pawprints behind their car. The dog was in a new home now and the Nein-hausers were out on bail. There would be jail time and a fine, but not enough of either.
But mostly he thought about Barbara and Elise Hanlon and Lisa Steiner.
And Ray Pye.
Not even the business with the dog could touch his anger the way Pye could. It was as though Pye had been born to engage his fury and to no other purpose whatsoever. None that he could see. Pye was his White Whale, his Judas Kiss. All these years, getting away with killing a pair of kids. Riding around town in his convertable, taking in a movie, going on dates, going to parties. Basking in the fucking sun.
When the sun should burn, not bake him.
He thought
jesus christ get off of it
. Ed had found a way to leave it alone and he knew that so should he. But the only way he could leave it alone other than to get the kid was to drink and drinking would kill him eventually if he kept it up, he knew that too. His liver would fail him or his car would argue with a tree or he’d make some stupid mistake on the job. You couldn’t be a decent cop and drink. Plenty had tried but to his knowledge nobody yet had succeeded.
Booze would kill him. And Pye would have outlived him.
Leave off of this
, he thought.
Yet Wednesday night found him parked in front of the Starlight Motel in a half-drunk sullen rage looking for some excuse to push the kid, some way to bust the kid’s balls, even just to annoy the kid. Any excuse, the kid not even around that night, his apartment dark and vacant. Schilling waiting, his radio turned up high enough to violate his town’s own noise ordinances. Drinking steadily from a flask of Cutty. His ashtray filling with cigarettes and his head beginning to bob eyes wanting to close until he woke to the first rays of morning to the birds twittering in the trees and a wicked throb in his head that told him more about what the rest of his day was doing to be like than he wanted to know.
You’re losing it
, he thought.
You really are. You got to get straight
.
You got to stop this shit and get the kid
.
When she wasn’t with Ray, Jennifer spent most of the week indoors at the Griffiths’ house avoiding Tim and his calls. She felt awkward and guilty around Tim now. What they’d done together was a betrayal. That was how it felt. Especially after Ray had given her the ring and told her how much he loved her. She felt guilty. She didn’t know what Tim felt but she sure did. It was a beautiful ring. It must have cost him a fortune. She thought now in retrospect that she’d slept with Tim only to spite Ray, not to just be with someone tender. Ray could be tender too, couldn’t he?
You’re still my number one, Jen. You know that
.
She figured that in time her awkwardness around Tim would fade so that was what she was doing, giving it time. She still wanted to be friends with him. It would just take a while.
She helped Mrs. Griffith with the chores, the shopping, the cooking, the housekeeping. She caught up on her magazines, sitting in her room listening to the Carpenters and the Mamas and the Papas on the stereo, neither of which Ray or even Tim could stand. Mrs. Griffith was happy to have her there and grateful for help with the chores what with her arthritis kicking in again and probably both she and Mr. Griffith were surprised to have her home so much too. It’d been a long time since they’d felt anything like a family together.
She never told them that it couldn’t last.
On Tuesday afternoon Katherine slept with Deke at his place in Oakland.
On Wednesday she buried her mother.
On Friday she slept with Deke again and told him about this strange little guy she’d met who said he’d committed murder.
Schilling woke—
really
woke—to the world around him, surveyed it as from some great height and found it unacceptable.
Unacceptable
wasn’t even the word for it.
His bedroom was a tidal flat of strewn clothing and shoes and dirty sheets and pillowcases. He hadn’t even bothered to shove the dirty laundry in his closet. There were books and newspapers and magazines scattered across the floor, the night table, the dresser. Coffee cups stood stained and empty. Ashtrays brimmed. His floor had a very bad case of the dust devils, compounded by paper clips, the nub of a number-two pencil, assorted pocket change, dropped gray ashes, sprigs of tobacco and the occasional twisted butt that had somehow escaped its intended target.
This at just a scan.
In the bathroom there were rings in the sink and the toilet bowl and tub and peering into the tub he found it surprising to see just how much hair he was losing. The tub looked hairy as his chest did. His towel felt crusty and smelled of mildew. There were suspicious yellow stains on the porcelain rim of the toilet. He supposed he’d missed his mark a couple of times. Toothpaste splatters on the mirror. Yet more hair on the floor and in the sink.
The living room wasn’t much better than the other two rooms.
It looked like the Visigoths had ridden through. It looked like somebody’d come in and tossed the place while he was sleeping.
But the kitchen was the worst. The kitchen was by now
abstract
. It was not his kitchen, it belonged to Jackson Pollack. Whatever havoc it is possible to wreak with empty cans, freezer wraps and boxes, tinfoil, cellophane, eggshells, apple cores, lemon peels, beer cans, liquor and soda bottles and bottle caps, Wonder-bread and butter wrappers and crumbs and toast crusts, pans and knives and forks and dishes, this he had wrought and done so supremely.
He was a titan of disorder. It was summer. Flies buzzed.
Heave to
, he thought.
My god
.
And heave he did.
He worked all morning long and into the late afternoon. Washing and scraping and polishing. Mop and vacuum, dust cloth and sponge, Windex and Comet, plain old soap and water. He thought at the beginning it was a hell of a goddamn way to spend your day off but by the time he stepped into the gleaming white hairless tub to shower off the muck of his efforts he felt a kind of catharsis, an actual cleansing of the wit and soul.
It had come upon him gradually. With the finding and placement of the telephone book where it belonged beneath the end table. With the folding of his socks in the drawer, the stuffing of his towel in the hamper. His house was his house again. The Visigoths were vanquished. He scrubbed his armpits singing. Tunelessly.
But singing.
You work with your hands, he thought, sometimes you work things out some. You eliminate the toxins, the confusions. Questions find—if not exactly answers—approaches to answers. And that’ll do.
He didn’t have Ray Pye. Not even close. But he did have a couple of names. Two names of people he knew were important to the guy. Two pressure points.
He’d always had the one. Tim Bess. Ray’s best friend. Tim hadn’t budged back then. But that was back then. People change over the years. It was worth a shot again and if he did it right and not just strictly by the book he might get some results this time.
He had some ideas.
But as of the night of Ray’s party he had another name. Jennifer Fitch. It should have occurred to him right then and there when she handed him her ID and wanted to stay behind. And maybe it
had
occurred to him in a way because he’d filed the name in his memory. He’d just been too damn loaded half the time to figure how to use it.
The first thing he wanted to do was dig into the file and see what Jennifer Fitch had said to Ed in her interview four years ago. It couldn’t have been much or else Ed would’ve called her in for a follow-up with Schilling and he hadn’t. But anything might help. He was feeling pretty optimistic about this for a change, he really was.
He even took the time to wash behind his ears.
The tune he was singing was something he’d heard on the radio. It was catchy and popular as hell as was most of their stuff.”
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged
. . .
You got that right, moptops.
Get back
Lo-retta!
“Man, put on the radio!” Tim said. “They’re talking about it after practically every song.”
“Can’t.”
Ray stood behind the desk watching the couple leave the office, the guy with a bunch of travel brochures off the rack he’d probably never use.
“Problem with the AC in some of the units and the old lady’s being real hands-on about it. Watching the repair guy like a fucking hawk. So she’s been in and out of here all day long and you know what a bitch she is about the sound on the TV and the radio. I don’t even know why we bother to have a radio. Anyhow, who gives a shit?”
“Man, we shoulda gone. We fucked up bad. They’re talking four hundred thousand people, maybe more. Four hundred thousand people! Three days and nights, man, nonstop rock ’n’ roll. Hendrix, Joplin, Cocker. Can you imagine all the dope got to be floating around? All those chicks?”
“Tim, I gotta get you laid. I really do. Those chicks are
hippie
chicks. Unshaved legs and armpit hair, remember? They’re fucking
diseased
, man. Go listen to your radio. It’s cheaper than a dose of the clap.”
“We shoulda gone. Really, man.”
“Sure. I’m gonna drive all the way to Woodstock to listen to Joan Baez and Arlo fucking Guthrie and sit around on some farm with a bunch of dirty longhairs and chicks with the crabs. And then I’m gonna join the marines and get my fucking head blown off. Get a grip, Timmy.”
His father relieved him at the desk at four and he drove immediately to her house. Her car was in the driveway.