The Octopus on My Head (10 page)

“What a depressing mess,” Lavinia said, as she started the car. “And what about the man's poor wife?”

I settled the groceries in the footwell of the passenger seat. “I never heard of Unclaimed Deceased.”

“Three guys dress like morgue attendants right down to the necrotic cosmetics and perform songs about getting high on formaldehyde and necrophilia and the smell of dead Easter lilies, which act they manage quite handily to turn into a metaphor for greed in corporate America, and you never heard of them? Where the fuck have you been?”

“Re-reading
The Octopus
by Frank Norris,” I said.

Livinia rasied her head with a start. “Is that where—?”

“I guess they expressed something about the human condition that needed expressing,” I interrupted.

“They've sold
millions
of records, Curly.”

“Sometimes the shit works and sometimes it doesn't,” I observed glumly.

She drove us out of the parking lot.

“Christ,” I said after a while. “The
Examiner
used to be a great newspaper.”

“That was then. This is now. Don't litter.”

The sun was up but it was still early. We stopped at a red light. On a power line above us a pair of rosy finches perched, facing opposite directions, and twittered merrily.

“I can't believe they decided to call that guy famous,” I groused as we pulled through the intersection. “He was nobody.”

“A nobody in a pool of blood,” Lavinia said.

“Are you going to start up with that again?”

“If he was shot some place else, then dumped on the loading dock, why was there so much blood?”

I rolled up the
Examiner
and stuffed it in the grocery bag. “I asked myself that while I was still looking at him.”

“If he was shot at close range, accurately enough to kill him, it seems logical he would have bled out on the spot.”

“So he was lounging around the warehouse with his shoes off. Somebody found him and killed him. So what?”

“I wish we'd looked for his shoes.”

“Why? What are you saying? That Stepnowski was killed somewhere else, the killer collected his blood, moved the body and redistributed the blood around it, all to confuse the police? It seems like a lot of trouble. What the hell for?”

“Exactly.” Lavinia tapped a fingernail on the steering wheel. “The killer didn't want anybody to know where the killing happened. He or she didn't want anybody even to suspect that it happened someplace else. So he or she went to a lot of trouble.”

“But not so much trouble as your little brain is going to. How do you collect blood from a gunshot wound? You pick the guy up and hold him over an empty bucket?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Because dead people weigh too much. You ever heard the term dead weight?”

“Man, Curly, you take things too literally. I wasn't even interested in this idea until you decided the setup was wrong. Now you're so pissed off you think it was my idea. Don't be such a cheap date.”

I looked out the window. I never minded staying up all night for the right reason. But staying up all night for the wrong reasons—which far outnumber the right ones—is nothing if not exasperating.

Another block passed. “Besides,” Lavinia said, “Stepnowski was a little guy. Real little.”

Ten minutes later, as we were walking around the side of the garage to Ivy's back steps, she said, “It's interesting to think about.”

“Personally, I'm trying to forget that guy, face down in his own blood.”

“Maybe it wasn't his blood.”

“Maybe those weren't his socks.”

“Maybe it wasn't his money, either.”

“It wasn't his money. It was our money. Wait.” She stopped. “You mean somebody moved the body
and
planted the money on it? Because—wait, don't tell me—because they knew we were looking for him and when we found him we would take the money and go away and not tell anybody about it, thereby implicating ourselves in the murder and ultimately muddying the identity of the true murderer into the bargain?”

“Exactly.”

Lavinia paused with one foot on the first step, turned halfway back toward me, paused again, turned forward again, and paused again. Then, abruptly, she resumed climbing the staircase.

“Maybe he wasn't even dead.” She took a step. “Maybe he wasn't even really there.” She took another step. “Maybe he was a hologram.”

“Now you've got a theory
….
”

Chapter Ten

I
VY WAS SITTING RIGHT WHERE WE'D LEFT HIM, STARING INTO
space and tapping the vinyl table top with opposite ends of his soda straw, reversing its length within his fingers between taps.

“Hi, Ivy,” Lavinia said pleasantly.

“The fuck you been?”

“Shopping.” She pulled the egg poacher from the bag I was carrying and showed it to him. “Remember?”

He took it. “I could have been jonesing, you been gone so long.”

“Hey, Grumpy, think of the alternative.” Lavinia shucked groceries out of the sack onto the kitchen counter. “Everybody could have stayed here and bled to death from having shards of glass lodged in their maxillary sinuses.”

Ivy eyed the groceries with a mixture of suspicion and disgust.

I unrolled the
Examiner
. “Check it out.”

He pushed it away. “I don't read the papers.” As he stood, he retrieved his clasp knife from its belt holster and slit the plastic perimeter of the egg poacher package, spilling its contents into the kitchen sink.

Lavinia distributed her supplies over the limited counter space. “Now, then. How about a nice, hearty breakfast?”

Ivy half-filled the saucepan with water and set it on the front burner of the stove. “Get that shit out of my way.”

“Come on, Ivy. Curly and I are hungry. When's the last time you ate?”

“I don't eat. Make room.”

Lavinia made a face. In that moment I thought we were in for a recapitulation of a domestic argument typical of the two years Lavinia and Ivy had lived together. The setup was perfect. Neither of them liked being told what to do, and both liked to tell others what to do. But Lavinia knew it wasn't worth it, and Ivy didn't care. She shoved the groceries to the back of the counter and stepped aside.

Contrary to appearances, Ivy had busied himself during the first fifteen or twenty minutes of our absence. First, he'd carefully scraped all of our speedball hors d'oeuvre off the edge of the table top and onto the surface of the blue saucer. Next, he'd set about two cups of water to boiling. Then, he'd cut an eight-inch patch out of a clean tee-shirt, which he'd stretched over the mouth of a empty wide-mouthed jar and, after dimpling the cloth with his thumb, he'd secured it there with a rubber band. Then he waited.

Now Ivy half-filled the poacher's saucepan, placed it over a lit burner, and placed egg cups into four of the five holes in the cover flange. The fifth cup he half-filled with tap water.

“Hey,” said Lavinia, nothing the setup. “You going for your own cooking show?”

“That sounds like work,” Ivy said. “Don't get your hopes up.”

“Yeah,” Lavinia said thoughtfully. “Work
….
”

Ivy used the edge of his knife to tip an inch or two of speedball into the fifth egg cup, which he began to pass back and forth through the flame of a second burner while stirring the solution with the tip of the knife. “Turn it down a little.”

All three of us stood around the stove, watching the egg cup heat. Ivy held it by the flat metal tab that extended off its perimeter. “That's too hot.” He cursed and set the egg cup on the stove top, waved his fingers in the air, blew on them, and finally held them under the faucet, thoughtfully watching as cold water trickled over them.

Abruptly Ivy walked out of the kitchen door and down the back steps. Lavinia and I looked at each other. Two minutes passed, then three. Lavinia turned off the cold water. The saucepan began to rattle, and Lavinia lowered the flame.

Ivy came back through the door with a straight pine twig six or seven inches long and about an inch in diameter. He quickly shaved its bark into the sink with his clasp knife, then sliced a diameter about a half inch into one end of it.

With the tip of the knife he worked one of the empty egg cups out of the five-hole flange, flipped it into the sink, and ran water over it. When the cup had cooled to the touch, he pressed its metal tab into the slot at the end of the stick, so that stick and cup became a ladle. He held it up for everybody to admire.

Lavinia nodded approvingly. “Didn't you attend survival school in the Navy?”

“101st Airborne,” I reminded her.

“As if he'd ever let us forget it,” she retorted.

Ivy transferred the dope and water mixture from its original egg cup into the ladle, replaced the empty cup into the flange, and started over again.

He passed the wood-handled cup back and forth over the second flame and stirred it with the tip of the knife. Little bubbles began to form at the bottom of the cup. Soon enough, the mixture of powdered heroin and cocaine began to dissolve.

Lavinia and I were fascinated.

“But Ivy
….
” Lavinia said.

Ivy grunted.

“Are you getting set to geeze this stuff?”

“I don't geeze,” Ivy said.

“Neither do I,” I stipulated, just in case anybody was listening.

Ivy shook his head disdainfully. “You probably weren't even inoculated.”

I pointed at my head. “What do you call this?”

“You got a point.”

Lavinia giggled. “I know you never geeze,” she told Ivy impatiently. “That's why I'm asking.”

To geeze is to inject directly into a vein using a needle. What Lavinia was getting at, however, is that usually a street drug which comes as a powder (though people shoot tarball too; people will shoot anything), as ours had, needs to be converted into something shootable. As a rule it's mixed with a little water in a spoon which is heated over a flame until the powder goes into solution. Then a little piece of cotton wadding, such as is to be found cinched behind the placket by the button threads on your better brands of shirts and blouses, or, more commonly, twisted around the ends of an ear swab, is placed in the spoon. The liquefied drug is drawn through this cotton filter by a needle into the barrel of a syringe and,
voilà
, one more or less purified fix.

Next time you see ear swabs strewn around the sidewalk in front of one or another of your cozy local neighborhood stoops, you'll know what you're looking at.

By the way, while it is commonly held that the bit of cotton will filter impurities from the drug solution, it is not necessarily so. Moreover, a tiny filament of the cotton itself is likely to slip up the bore of the needle, as the piston is drawn back, and slip right back down it when the solution is injected into the bloodstream of the user. The subsequent reaction is called “cotton fever;” the symptoms are not pleasant, and their intensity is capable of exceeding any pleasure to be derived from the drug. Such is the junkies' communal humor that, witnessing a fellow user suffering the painful jactitations of cotton fever, they almost certainly will laugh at him. Whosoever experiences its effects, however, laughs not; he may even die. Although, as junkies never tire of reminding anybody who will listen, especially each other, if impurities or embolisms killed junkies, there wouldn't be any junkies.

“So what are you cooking it up for, then?” Lavinia persisted.

“Quiet. Let's see if it works.”

With a final swirl of the knife blade, the contents of the egg cup went into solution. “Okay.” Ivy removed the cup from the flame and set it on the rim of the sink. “What do we have here?”

“A big spoon, is what we have here,” I observed.

“True story, looks like.” We watched as the eddies in the solution, still quite transparent, slowed and nearly stopped. “There.” Ivy pointed his knife. “See those little dots?”

Tiny specks, like grains of sand, bounded along in the mild turbulence.

“And look,” said Ivy. “There.”

Lavinia leaned closer. “Where?”

“It comes and goes—there—see?”

What seemed to amount to little more than twinkles of light followed along in the wake of other, parti-colored grains.

“Glass,” Lavinia said. “The others look like sand.”

“Sand and glass are related, aren't they?” I speculated. “I wonder which would do the most damage?” Lavinia winced. “Hey,” I pointed out, “I didn't even mention microscopic impurities, let alone soluble ones.”

Ivy straightened up. “Those grits could be anything—including grits. But we got to work with what the good Lord has given us to work with.”

“I hate it when he brings God into the picture,” said Lavinia.

Now Ivy tipped the improvised ladle over the piece of cloth covering the mouth of the jar. The solution pooled there for a moment, then slowly began to seep away. In the end, a clear solution covered the bottom of the salsa jar, and a tiny, dirty collection of grits and bits of glass lay heaped in the bottom of the cloth dimple.

“
Voilà
,” Ivy said.

“Well I'll be damned,” Lavinia said.

“So far, so good,” I agreed. “Now you'll do the whole batch?”

“True story, Curly.”

Within fifteen minutes Ivy had brought two cups of water to a gentle boil and carefully stirred the entire saucer of speedball into solution, which he then ladled onto his cloth filter. When he was finished, larger pieces of glass lay along the bottom of the saucepan. Atop the cloth filter, there remained trash sufficient to half-fill a teaspoon. It significantly slowed seepage through the filter.

Now Ivy removed the cloth from the mouth of the jar and transferred some of its solution to a single egg cup. Then he put the cup with the speedball solution into its hole in the egg poacher and covered the flange with the saucepan lid. He turned up the heat and stared at the saucepan. “I knew a guy, once,” he said thoughtfully, “who started having headaches. When they got worse he called them migraines. Later, in the dark, he'd see flashes of light. They were very real to him, like heat lightning outside his window. But the flashes were generated inside his head.” The saucepan began to mutter. Ivy waited. When steam began to leak out of the seam between the rim of the lid and the rim of the pan, he reduced the heat until the water merely simmered.

“Well,” Ivy continued, “of course my friend was a junky, but he was also very well off, and along with his money he had health insurance. He also had a very sympathetic doctor, one of those guys who looks the other way when it comes to your real health problems and just does what you tell him to do. That doctor led to another and another and another, until my friend found a neurosurgeon willing to operate on my friend's head.” Ivy touched his forehead at the hairline, above his right eye. “Here.”

“And?” Lavinia wanted to know.

“Impurities,” I guessed.

Ivy held up a finger. “A grain of something was lodged in a capillary in his brain. Tiny, but plenty big enough to dry up that part of the cortex, which left the poor motherfucker with headaches, flashes of light, and pain.”

“Really?” Lavinia said. “There's a part of the brain that—”

Ivy waved this off. “Who knows how the brain works? They sewed up his head, sent him home, and—presto.”

“Change-o?”

“He was cured?”

Ivy nodded. “No more headaches, no more lightning flashes, no more fainting spells. But
….
”

“But?” Lavinia and I asked together.

“But he had epileptic-type seizures for the rest of his life. Right away he wasn't allowed to drive. Later, he couldn't be left alone. They got worse and worse until he died, about two years down the road.”

“The seizures killed him.”

“No,” Ivy sucked a tooth. “He died of an overdose.”

“You took the word right out of my mouth,” I said with disgust.

“Gross!” exclaimed Lavinia.

“The operation disturbed more than it cured,” I surmised. “But it didn't disturb the idiot's habit.”

“What is that, Curly?” Ivy cracked the lid on the egg poacher, and peered under it. “Some kind of moral?”

“Moral?” I replied. “What instruction do you take away from that story?”

“That's easy: The brain is a delicate thing. If you're going to fuck with your brain, it pays to eliminate the unknowns.”

I ruefully shook my head. “Unknowns like sand and glass in your bloodstream?” We all tried to see under the lid. “Was the overdose deliberate?”

“It could have been. He was pretty fucked up.” Ivy shrugged. “If it wasn't, it should have been.”

Lavinia and I shared a look.

“Well,” Ivy smiled and turned off the flame. “We're all gonna die, anyway.”

“Just have a look out the back door,” I said quietly.

Ivy removed the lid from the poacher.

All the egg cups were empty, except one.

“See that white stuff?” Ivy said.

“Pure speedball,” I realized.

“One hundred percent,” Ivy agreed.

“My god,” Lavinia breathed, and she looked at the saucer of contaminated heroin and cocaine. “So much for the dry run.”

Twenty minutes later, all five egg cups were half full of cloth-filtered speedball solution, the lid was on the poacher's flange, the saucepan was on the boil, and my cell phone rang.

“Jesus Christ, I've been shot,” I jumped, fumbling at my belt. “I haven't had a call since the French Revolution.”

“It's probably for me,” Ivy said mildly, turning down the heat under the egg poacher.

Annoyed, I said to the phone, “Hello?”

The phone growled back. “For a lousy seventy-five hundred bucks you had to whack the fuck?”

“Tell him I'm busy.” Ivy eyed the flame. “Tell him to call later.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said to the phone.

“Did you at least get the goddamn money?” the phone replied.

“Who is this?”