Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 10

IN THE CAR, glancing at my watch, I figured I could just make it, so instead of going back to the precinct, I drove through the rain to Ellen’s house, that’s to say my wife’s house, my ex-wife’s house, which once belonged to us both, and had been rebuilt, cherished by the two of us together. It was less than a mile away, where, California Avenue having been crossed, Oakwood abruptly turned into a desirable Venice neighborhood.

I was leaving my work for a little while, but this was no big issue; on the one hand there was a crime scene, a body that wasn’t going anyplace, and on the other, family obligation. A practiced observer of the various discrete portions of my life, I was accustomed to such sliding and juggling. I figured I’d let Ricky Lee stew for a while — it might even do him good. I didn’t realize this was going to be the most important investigation of my life or that along the way it would turn into something else, or rather, just that — an investigation of my life — and that even this seemingly insignificant choice would later seem fateful. For now, Mae Richards was only another body bag in Ghost Town, and I was worried more about my wife’s, my ex-wife’s, reaction should I fail to show up for the Sunday visit.

Ellen was pretty frank about what was required. For some years now she’d been saying, “I want you to be a good father to Lucy, Billy, and not just for her sake.” This meant devotion, taken as read; it also meant money, of which I had little, and showing up on time for my visits, somehow never a problem, even with the caseload. In this one area I was strangely reliable.

Lucy, eleven now, was outside and ready. On this wet gloomy day sheets of rain fell in front of the stoop, but she redeemed the weather, waving, then splashing toward me, rushing, in sneakers, jeans, and a hooded bright yellow slicker like the sun. She had a way of walking, a stooping slouch, with long strides, as if, head down, she were contemplating the entire universe and all its mysteries. She was like her mother, fearless, though where Ellen’s face was proud and strong, decided, Lucy’s was still open, radiant, and vulnerable. She didn’t want life to come and court her. She rushed toward it, as she did toward the car that Sunday, with elbows flailing.

“Hey, Luce, how ya doing? Look, I got you this.” Opening the glove compartment, I took out the pencil set I’d got from an art supply store up in Westwood. She wanted to be an artist and seemed to have the gift, a puzzle both to her mother and myself, since Ellen’s leaning was toward music and my only known talent that of wedding corpse to suspect.

Her green eyes slid down, then up again; she quickly smiled and I knew I’d got the wrong thing. The one she’d wanted came in a sandalwood box with brass fittings and cost more than $250. “They said these were the best, really.”

“They’re cool, Dad. They’re great.”

I reached out fingers to comb away drops of rain from her forehead. I’d let her down again.

When I looked at my watch, she said, “What happened this afternoon? Was there a murder? Shouldn’t you go?”

“It’s OK. There’s a guy, he can wait.”

“The suspect?”

“I doubt it, but not a good guy.”

I’d always tried to encourage in her the idea that my work was real, mundane, not like TV and the movies, though of course sometimes it couldn’t help seeming that way. “Lucy mythologizes you,” Ellen once said. “She thinks you’re some sort of a hero.” Then Ellen had smiled, adding, not without wistful regret, “For those of us who’ve lived too long with the reality, this can be a royal pain in the butt.”

Thus: my ex-wife, who, after I’d failed her, dumped me because I was bringing her down. That sounds too bitter; if resentment and anger were remaining, and they were, they were in me. Love’s best habit is trust, and I’d been unfaithful. The blame for everything that happened lay at my door.

“How’s your mom? She found herself a new boyfriend yet?”

Lucy shrugged and looked out the window at the rain. “Dad, you know you’re not supposed to ask me that.”

“What happened to the last guy? He of the stutter and the Rolls-Royce.”

“Dad!” Laughing, tickled, she tried and failed to keep a straight face. “That was ages ago. She only saw him once.”

“I should think so. His toupee was an open book.”

“He looked like a cauliflower,” she said.

“With a million-dollar bank account, no? Your mom’s doing OK. She is OK.”

All this was cheap, no doubt, beneath me, but I couldn’t say I felt bad. Lucy and I had ceased to be just ordinary company to each other. Each meeting came freighted with an expectation I had to unload as quickly as possible; otherwise I felt challenged and overawed by my own little girl. Lucy was a normal enough kid, a tomboy, not too fond of school, happy most of the time, but with her senses overly tuned to whatever atmosphere prevailed between her mother and me. Our lightning rod, she wished the weather would always be clement; it rarely was.

“Thanks, Dad, these are the best,” she said, and as she leaned over to kiss my cheek, I was, if only for that moment, a fallen angel returned to paradise.

When we reached Draker Street the party was already in full swing. A young guy took our coats in the entrance and stuffed them into a rack beside a host of sodden others. Beyond that, in the gallery itself, everything was warm and dry, the overhead lighting was soft, and individual spotlights picked out each picture on the white walls. Waiters wafted nimbly through the crowd with laden trays. While Lucy went off to inspect the art, I positioned myself in the center of the room, where a fountain, set among palm fronds, blocks of grainy green marble, and orchids flown from Hawaii that morning, tinkled forth its message of wasted money.

The crowd was young and beautiful. What else is there to say? It was a typical Westside bunch. Some wore clunky boots and brightly colored flannel workshirts with small gold rings puncturing their eyebrows, their lips, their noses, and doubtless other bodily areas. They all looked about nineteen. The slightly older set, the ones who were making serious money already, wore cashmere and silk and grumbled about the weather spoiling their Doc Martens or their loafers by J. P. Tod. The oldest of these wouldn’t admit to being twenty-seven. And the only guy actually older than me was my friend Ted Softly, who owned and ran the gallery.

In his sixties, short, supporting a stout paunch, Ted was dressed in outrageous tweed. His white hair was clipped short and he kept stroking it as if it were a teddy bear. Sweating, his forehead covered with enormous beads of perspiration, he smiled in a friendly way and raised his glass toward me from the far end of the room, then laid his hands on the shoulder of an exotic-looking beauty from Japan. He was one of those guys who always seemed to be running, waving in a crowd, or honking from his car, a white convertible he’d bought from a homeboy, even though the engine was clapped out, because the homeboy’s father had died. That was Ted: a tender and funny fellow. When sober, he had good ideas, a sense of style; he was reliable; but then he was sober only fifty per cent of the time. He’d been a banker, a good one, and now, dealing in art, he used all his knowledge of art while displaying an unbankerly lack of cynicism. He supported artists whose talent was greater than their fashionable potential, and threw splashy parties, like this, where the pop of champagne corks was barely muted by the trill of Pavarotti. Somehow he made a go of it all, and was quite unlike anyone else on the Venice art scene.

Ted brought the young Japanese woman over with him. White-skinned, black-haired, she wore a short black dress and stood with aplomb on platform soles of maximum thickness. This wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, his regular girlfriend, though I’d been drunk the two times we’d met. “I don’t know if I believe in God,” he said to the woman on his arm, whose name was Holly. His voice was soft and quick, and he laughed a lot, like someone wooing a lover, his intention no doubt. Ted was a terrible ham and liar, but he had great charm. I like and trusted him. He said, “Yet there’s a power that cares for goodness, right? Surely somewhere justice counts? Look at this guy — he cares. This is a great, a unique cop.”

He was drunk already. I said, “Cut it out, Ted.”

“No, listen, this is how Billy and I know each other, right. It was about ten years ago. Empty Westside apartment. Bill gets the call, goes in, there’s a body that’s been hacked into . . . how many pieces ?”

I said to Holly, “This man doesn’t know me. Besides, he’s just hoping to impress you. He’s inflamed with lust to the marrow of his bones.”

“Six hundred, right. Six fucking hundred.” He sprayed me with spit as he said that, booming the words so loud that people turned to stare. His reply to them was a grin and a sudden stiff-armed wave, more desperate than assured. I’d seen him wired and wild but never quite like this before. He went on, telling the story of the most vicious crime, the most horrible I’d ever seen, and I’d seen some bad ones. The unidentified corpse had been cut into more than six hundred pieces — in fact, it was 658. I sat in the crypt at the morgue with a doctor and an investigator from the coroner’s office while we sorted each of those body parts into tiny chocolate boxes and guessed where they belonged. The process, which became an obsession, went on for months, until we were able to establish that the corpse was young, male, Asian, maybe ten years old. We were able to reconstruct his neck, where there were bruises and lesions to suggest that he’d been strangled. This led me on a search for known sex offenders, both state and federal. Eventually, months later, more than a year after the crime, I found my guy, a Pakistani who’d fled back to Pakistan. The victim had been his son. He’d strangled his own blood, then strung him up in a shower and cut him into little pieces.

“It’s how Billy and I got to know each other,” said Ted. “The Pakistani guy used to come in here with his kid, that same kid. He stood right where we’re standing now, and talked about his collection of Robert Longo. The guy really had the eye. It was totally fucking unbelievable.”

“What happened then?” Holly said to me. She was fascinated now, by this story she’d rather not have heard. People were either frightened of me or else saw me as a turn, cocktail theater, a little too heavy for the entrée. It’s why cops tend to seek out other cops and stand with faces of defiant stone, brooding behind the barrier of being misunderstood.

“I went to Pakistan and brought the guy back.”

“Did he want to come?”

“Not very much.”

Ted threw his head back, roared, and grabbed a glass from a passing tray. The champagne flowed from glass to throat without the courtesy of stopping in his mouth. I wondered what was up — some problem with the gallery? No doubt Ted’s frenzied art world dealings brought him all sorts of hassle. Or was it Holly, who, faced with this crazy man, looked past him toward me without a smile. “Tell me,” she said, head tilted to one side. “Don’t change the subject. How did you make him come back?”

“Yeah, Billy,” said Ted, and covered his mouth to stop a belch. “How’d you do that? I don’t think I ever heard this part.”

“Trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.”

“Shock us,” said Ted. “We can take it. Whatever happened, it happened in Pakistan, right? Which of course completely excuses your behavior. No rules in Pakistan. No morality.”

“There’s that everywhere, Ted. Morality’s not a movable feast.”

“Oh, shut up and tell the fucking story. Amuse and amaze us.”

“OK,” I said, and shrugged. I told them that I’d asked the guards to leave me alone with the man in his cell. I had a metal case with me, which I opened, and from which I took fifty small white individual chocolate boxes, laying them carefully on his bed, on his table, on the window ledge in front of the black iron bars so that in the slanting light they threw shadows the shapes of coffins. “I told him, which was true, that each box contained a piece of his son, and that if I came back in an hour and he hadn’t eaten them, he could either confess or I’d bring him fifty more, and we’d go on doing it until he’d eaten all six hundred and fifty-eight, because I had the rest back at the hotel, and if at the end of them he still hadn’t confessed, then I’d shoot him in the head.”

Ted tried to smile, but it wasn’t really a smile. Holly, a tougher proposition, looked at me with a light in her eye. She said, “You’re joking.”

“Yes. I don’t think I’d have shot him in the head. But he coughed before it came to that.”

“Coughed?”

“Confessed.”

“Jesus, Billy, that’s a horrible story,” said Ted.

“He was the horrible guy, not me.”

Holly was looking at me strangely. “You’re a passionate soul.”

“It’s been a while since anyone’s accused me of that,” I said, looking around to find Lucy. She was off in one corner, beneath an oil painting of a lighthouse, a big piece, about twelve feet by four.

“Is that your little girl?” said Holly. She still had a goofy look in her eyes, as if at any moment she was about to ask me what my inner voice was saying. “She’s so full of light. She seems just to breathe it in.”

“Watch her too long and she’ll break your heart. She might of course break your head first. She has a temper.”

Seeing how autonomous Lucy was, knowing how much her own person she’d been, right from birth, almost as if she were my parent, watching over me, rather than the other way around, I was reminded for the hundredth time that she could live without me, a thought that brought both grief and comfort. During the first years of her life there’d been those among our friends who’d seen nothing of me in her. Later, they all agreed, reluctantly, that she’d taken qualities from me as well. I’d taught her persistence, a way of laughing at the world, and, maybe most important, I’d taught her that she deserved to be admired. Like me, she was assured, angry, moody, cautious. At least I used to be that way once — cautious.

“Excuse me,” I said to Ted and Holly, and went over to join her. “So, Luce, tell me what you see.”

“The big light’s reaching out. The sea’s so wild, but the light will guide you across it. It’s scary, a little, but wonderful, like watching lightning from inside the house on a stormy night.”

When Ellen and I were in the middle of the break-up, Lucy had watched E.T. over and over, sitting with her face inches from the screen, believing that she herself was the extraterrestrial and that Ellen and I weren’t in fact her mother and father; her real family would be arriving soon to take her home in a spaceship.

“You watch any football today?”

“Dallas got their butts kicked.”

“Great.”

She and I shared an affection for linemen whose brief glories came when they struggled from the trenches to squash six-million-dollar quarterbacks in the dirt. She turned back to the picture, saying quietly, “Dad, are you going to stop seeing me?”

I blinked, knowing where this came from but shocked, and with no easy reply at hand. The words escaped in a nervous blurt. “Jeez, Luce, you want another Coke or something?”

“I mean, it’s OK if you won’t be able to see me.”

“What kind of a thing is that to say? I’ll always come to see you, wherever you are; you know that.”

“I wondered, that’s all,” she said, very serious, and I was left with a mixture of oppression and anxiety, sadness. Kids know much more than we think; they pick up on atmospheres better than anything else. I remembered it from my own childhood. “You want that Coke?”

From behind came a hubbub, sharp voices, a scuffle, and I turned to see Ted, no longer looking faded or rumpled, though still very drunk. His face was red and his jaws were clenched so tight that a nerve jumped on his cheek. I suddenly noticed how pale and startling his deep-set eyes were; they stood out huge as portholes. He gripped a revolver, two-fisted.

Someone screamed. Others, slower to realize, started laughing and hastened to stuff their mouths with food before they too backed off, leaving Ted in the center of the room by the fountain with Holly and a young Japanese guy who stood at her side. Dressed in black, head shaven, maybe a boyfriend, he was, together with Ted’s sweating, booze-driven rage, the immediate cause of the argument. Ted’s voice was shrill and tense. “You don’t think I invited you here for this, do you? But I’ll do it if you make me. I swear I will.”

I didn’t know if Ted was serious. I didn’t even know if the gun was loaded, though I knew he was drunk enough to pull the trigger. I said in a whisper to Lucy, “We’re leaving. Come on.” I grabbed her coat and walked with her out to the car, where I said, “Stay here, sweetheart; don’t move. Promise? This will only take a minute. Draw me something while I’m gone.”

Back inside, working my way through, I bumped and shoved against those coming the other way. Some had stayed, retreating to the sides of the gallery, or even throwing themselves flat on the floor, from which vantage points they watched Ted, still in the now empty center of the gallery, still holding the gun in Holly’s face, and still talking. The shaven-headed Japanese boy was nowhere to be seen.

The smart thing here was for me to call for back-up. Failing that, I knew I should stand at a distance, gently collect Ted’s attention, and talk him down from this nonsense. Instead, I watched my feet march across the floor, placing me between him and the girl, the gun inches away from my face. “Boy, I must really be flailing here,” I said. “This isn’t what I learned in tactics school at all. Ted — I’m afraid you’re going to have to shoot me.” My voice sounded calm, staring down the barrel of that .357, another piece of grotesque and gleaming machinery. “Give me the weapon. Come on, Ted, before you do something you regret.”

He gazed at me with sweat on his forehead and no interest in his blank oceanic eyes. This was something else I’d learned: a guy was more likely to shoot if he was refusing to make eye contact, or else negligently making too much. Ted came into the latter category. He said in a strained and too-patient voice, “Billy, will you please get the fuck out of the way?”

I was wondering if I dare take the chance and try to knock the thing out of his hand. I was thinking, this gun doesn’t look like it’s ever been used, but then most guns don’t; they never look worn, they don’t have a visible history like other objects. Human life never shows in them; only their ability to take it away.

Someone dropped a glass. The Japanese kid bulled past, dragging Holly with him, and Ted swung the revolver out of my face toward her again. I jumped to keep in the line of fire.

“Billy, oh, Billy,” he said, pressing the barrel straight into my forehead. I felt the metal leave its print. “It’s not you I want to shoot.”

I leaned forward into the barrel until it pressed so deep, Ted himself had to take a step back. “You know what? You’re going to have to. So go ahead and do it. Fuck me up, and yourself. Or else put the gun down, and we’ll do the cha-cha-cha. Because that’s what I’m thinking. I tell you, Ted, as a dance this is a fucking joke.”

Blinking, sweating, baffled, Ted ceased all movement. I thought, “Shit, I’m insane, this guy’s out of control.” Off to my right I heard the fountain as it went on wasting its money.

“Do it, Ted. Pull the trigger. It’ll make you think you’re a man. You won’t be.”

For a second his eyes went all wrong, flicking this way and that. There was a moment when I thought he was going to do it, when my own eyes felt like the only still points in the moving-up-and-down of the rest of me. Everything was quiet before he lowered the revolver, letting it dangle and bang against his knee, and burst into tears. “She left me, man. Suzie left me.”

I took the gun from his unresisting hand and checked the chamber: six bullets in any language. Suzie was the name of the girlfriend, I remembered. She was a nurse, in paediatrics, working out of UCLA. I’d seen them at the beach, tossing a football. My lips blew little raspberry pops of relief. Someone laughed, very loud, and I couldn’t help joining in. “So that’s what this was about?”

The waiters were back at work already with their trays. Tears rolling down his cheeks, his pale brown myopic eyes moist and sad, Ted said, “But it’s Holly I’m in love with. I love you, Holly. I mean it, babe, I do.”

“Suzie’s left you and you’re devastated but it’s Holly you really love? This sounds a little strange to me.”

“Oh, man!” he said. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s Van Gogh! It’s Renoir painting with the brush between his teeth because the arthritis in his fingers has got so bad!”

Shrugging, waving his hands, eyes crazily ablaze, Ted was talking all of a sudden like a picture he’d taken down from the wall. He was an actor who believed in very little, especially himself, and when he felt passion he needed to convey it with heartfelt magic. “It’s Mozart ripping out the last chords of the Jupiter Symphony when he’s freezing to death in Vienna!”

“I’ve eaten strudel, but I have to disappoint you — I’ve never been to Vienna.”

“We’ve got to walk toward the light, Billy. What else is there?”

My exhausted eyes drooped. I listened while Holly, in tears herself now, stretched up on those enormous heels and touched his face, telling him, “Shush, shush.” This was what the whole show had been, a lovers’ spat, a childish cry for attention with a firearm capable of decapitation or cutting a man in half. On the way out to join Lucy, I shook the bullets from the chamber into my pocket and, having dumped the gun in the trash, turned to say, like the proper English copper I wasn’t, “Evening, all.”

Schopenhauer offers metaphysical consolation to the man driven by confused or puzzled will. He offers the solace of a heartfelt and intense longing for death, for total unconsciousness, for complete nonbeing and the vanishing of dreams. He was German: what can I tell you?

I had done more than duty required, knowing that Ted was more likely not to pull the trigger. He wasn’t that kind of a nutcase. All the same, he’d been drunk, and those were real bullets. The unfunny thing was that part of me had itched for him to go ahead, had longed for that final flash. It wasn’t, in those days, an unusual feeling. Sometimes I’d sit alone in my apartment or in a restaurant, and hours went by while the devils of guilt and loss of self-esteem perched on my shoulder, whispering country-and-Western songs and thoughts of self-removal. Suicide would be like walking into a room bathed in cold blue moonlight. The mess and hullaballoo would be over, a prospect by which I was tempted every day, but then I’d whip myself up again into action, to work, to eat, catching, only while with Lucy or sometimes with Ellen, blurred glimpses of a former happiness. I’m not saying that any of these were unique or unusual feelings, only that they were too powerful to live with for long. I moved between sweet but shapeless hope, the perhaps foolish faith that life could be better, and moods of oceanic desolation. There were, if you like, two Billy McGraths. The suffering Billy was a ship packed with dynamite waiting to go up and therefore down, while the worldly Billy — witty and shrewd, smart and sometimes even wise, capable of footing it neatly on the dance floor of homicide — hoped that the passion and frenzy of work might make everything better, but no longer quite believed that it would.

I walked to the car wondering how it was that, though I loved my daughter more than anything in the world, I still couldn’t make myself care whether I lived or died.