Black House (12 page)

Some of the brilliant lights he had seen flashed not from the Ferris wheel but from the tops of Santa Monica patrol cars. Out on the pier, four uniforms were discouraging a crowd of civilians from breaching the circle of crime-scene tape around a brightly illuminated carousel. Jack told himself to leave it alone. He had no role here. Besides that, the carousel aroused some smoky, indistinct feeling, an entire set of unwelcome feelings, in him. The carousel was creepier than the stalled Ferris wheel. Carousels had always spooked him, hadn’t they? Painted midget horses frozen into place with their teeth bared and steel poles rammed through their guts—sadistic kitsch.

Walk away,
Jack told himself.
Your girlfriend dumped you and you’re in a rotten mood.

And as for carousels
.
.
.

The abrupt descent of a mental lead curtain ended the debate about carousels. Feeling as though pushed from within, Jack stepped onto the pier and began moving through the crowd. He was half conscious of taking the most unprofessional action of his career.

When he had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, he ducked under the tape and flashed his badge at a babyfaced cop who tried to order him back. Somewhere nearby, a guitarist began playing a blues melody Jack could almost identify; the title swam to the surface of his mind, then dove out of sight. The infant cop gave him a puzzled look and walked away to consult one of the detectives standing over a long shape Jack did not quite feel like looking at just then. The music annoyed him. It annoyed him a lot. In fact, it bugged the hell out of him. His irritation was out of proportion to its cause, but what kind of idiot thought homicides needed a sound track?

A painted horse reared, frozen in the garish light.

Jack’s stomach tightened, and deep in his chest something fierce and insistent, something at all costs not to be named, flexed itself and threw out its arms. Or extended its wings. The terrible something wished to break free and make itself known. Briefly, Jack feared he would have to throw up. The passing of this sensation bought him a moment of uncomfortable clarity.

Voluntarily, idly, he had walked into craziness, and now he was crazy. You could put it no other way. Marching toward him with an expression nicely combining disbelief and fury was a detective named Angelo Leone, before his expedient transfer to Santa Monica a colleague of Jack’s distinguished by his gross appetites, his capacity for violence and corruption, his contempt for all civilians regardless of color, race, creed, or social status, and, to be fair, his fearlessness and utter loyalty to all police officers who went with the program and did the same things he did, which meant anything they could get away with. Angelo Leone’s disdain for Jack Sawyer, who had not gone with the program, had equaled his resentment at the younger man’s success. In a few seconds, this brutal caveman would be in his face. Instead of trying to figure out how to explain himself to the caveman, he was obsessing about carousels and guitars, attending to the details of going crazy. He had no way of explaining himself. Explanation was impossible. The internal necessity that had pushed him into this position hummed on, but Jack could hardly speak to Angelo Leone of internal necessities. Nor could he offer a rational explanation to his captain, if Leone filed a complaint.

Well, you see, it was like someone else was pulling my strings, like another person was doing the driving
.
.
.

The first words out of Angelo Leone’s fleshy mouth rescued him from disaster.

—Don’t tell me you’re here for a reason, you ambitious little prick.

A piratical career like Leone’s inevitably exposed the pirate to the danger of an official investigation. A strategic sidestep to a neighboring force offered little protection from the covert archaeological digs police officials mounted into records and reputations when the press gave them no other choice. Every decade or two, do-gooders, whistle-blowers, whiners, snitches, pissed-off civilians, and cops too stupid to accept the time-honored program got together, rammed a cherry bomb up the press’s collective anus, and set off an orgy of bloodletting. Leone’s essential, guilt-inspired paranoia had instantly suggested to him that L.A. Homicide’s ace boy might be gilding his résumé.

As Jack had known it would, his claim of having been pulled toward the scene like a fire horse to a fire magnified Leone’s suspicions.

—Okay, you
happened
to walk into my investigation. Fine. Now listen to me. If I
happen
to hear your name in some connection I don’t like anytime during the next six months, make that ever, you’ll be pissing through a tube for the rest of your life. Now get the fuck out of here and let me do my job.

—I’m gone, Angelo.

Leone’s partner started to come forward across the gleaming pier. Leone grimaced and waved him back. Without intending to do so, without thinking about it, Jack let his eyes drift past the detective and down to the corpse in front of the carousel. Far more powerfully than it had the first time, the ferocious creature at the center of his chest flexed itself, unfurled, and extended its wings, its arms, its talons, whatever they were, and by means of a tremendous upward surge attempted to rip free of its moorings.

The wings, the arms, the talons crushed Jack’s lungs. Hideous claws splayed through his stomach.

There is one act a homicide detective, especially a homicide lieutenant, must never commit, and it is this: confronted with a dead body, he must not puke. Jack struggled to remain on the respectable side of the Forbidden. Bile seared the back of his throat, and he closed his eyes. A constellation of glowing dots wavered across his eyelids. The creature, molten and foul, battered against its restraints.

Lights reflected on the scalp of a bald, black man lying dead beside a carousel
.
.
.

Not you. No, not you. Knock all you like, but you can’t come in.

The wings, arms, talons retracted; the creature dwindled to a dozing speck. Having succeeded in avoiding the Forbidden Act, Jack found himself capable of opening his eyes. He had no idea how much time had passed. Angelo Leone’s corrugated forehead, murky eyes, and carnivorous mouth heaved into view and, from a distance of six inches, occupied all the available space.

—What are we doing here? Reviewing our situation?

—I wish that idiot would put his guitar back in its case.

And that was one of the oddest turns of the evening.

—Guitar? I don’t hear no guitar.

Neither, Jack realized, did he.

Wouldn’t any rational person attempt to put such an episode out of mind? To throw this garbage overboard? You couldn’t
do
anything with it, you couldn’t
use
it, so why hold on to it? The incident on the pier meant nothing. It connected to nothing beyond itself, and it led to nothing. It was literally inconsequential, for it had had no consequences. After his lover had sandbagged him Jack had lost his bearings, suffered a momentary aberration, and trespassed upon another jurisdiction’s crime scene. It was no more than an embarrassing mistake.

Fifty-six days and eleven hours later, the ace boy slipped into his captain’s office, laid down his shield and his gun, and announced, much to the captain’s astonishment, his immediate retirement. Knowing nothing of the confrontation with Detective Leone on the Santa Monica Pier, the captain did not inquire as to the possible influence upon his lieutenant’s decision of a stalled carousel and a dead black man; if he had, Jack would have told him he was being ridiculous.

Don’t go there,
he advises himself, and does an excellent job of not going there. He receives a few involuntary flashes, no more, strobe-lit snapshots of a wooden pony’s rearing head, of Angelo Leone’s distempered mug, also of one other thing, the object occupying the dead center of the scene in every sense, that which above all must not be witnessed . . . the instant these imagistic lightning bolts appear, he
sends them away.
It feels like a magical performance. He is doing magic, good magic. He knows perfectly well that these feats of image banishment represent a form of self-protection, and if the motives behind his need for this protective magic remain unclear, the need is motive enough. When you gotta have an omelette, you gotta whisk eggs, to quote that unimpeachable authority, Duke Wayne.

Jack Sawyer has more on his mind than the irrelevancies suggested by a dream voice’s having uttered the word “policeman” in baby talk. These matters, too, he wishes he could
send away
by the execution of a magic trick, but the wretched matters refuse banishment; they zoom about him like a tribe of wasps.

All in all, he is not doing so well, our Jack. He is marking time and staring at the eggs, which no longer look quite right, though he could not say why. The eggs resist interpretation. The eggs are the least of it. In the periphery of his vision, the banner across the front page of the
La Riviere Herald
seems to rise off the sheet of newsprint and float toward him.
FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN.
.
.
.
Nope, that’s enough; he turns away with the terrible knowledge of having brought on this Fisherman business by himself. How about
IN STATEN ISLAND
or
IN BROOKLYN,
where the real Albert Fish, a tormented piece of work if there ever was one, found two of his victims?

This stuff is making him sick. Two dead kids, the Freneau girl missing and probably dead, body parts eaten, a lunatic who plagiarized from Albert Fish. . . . Dale insisted on assaulting him with information. The details enter his system like a contaminant. The more he learns—and for a man who truly wished to be out of the loop, Jack has learned an amazing amount—the more the poisons swim through his bloodstream, distorting his perceptions. He had come to Norway Valley in flight from a world that had abruptly turned unreliable and rubbery, as if liquefying under thermal pressure. During his last month in Los Angeles, the thermal pressure had become intolerable. Grotesque possibilities leered from darkened windows and the gaps between buildings, threatening to take form. On days off, the sensation of dishwater greasing his lungs made him gasp for breath and fight against nausea, so he worked without stopping, in the process solving more cases than ever before. (His diagnosis was that the work was getting to him, but we can hardly blame the captain for his astonishment at the ace boy’s resignation.)

He had escaped to this obscure pocket of the countryside, this shelter, this haven at the edge of a yellow meadow, removed from the world of threat and madness, removed by nearly twenty miles from French Landing, removed a good distance even from Norway Valley Road. However, the layers of removal had failed to do their job. What he was trying to escape riots around him again, here in his redoubt. If he let himself succumb to self-centered fantasy, he would have to conclude that what he had fled had spent the last three years sniffing his trail and had finally succeeded in tracking him down.

In California, the rigors of his task had overwhelmed him; now the disorders of western Wisconsin must be kept at arm’s length. Sometimes, late at night, he awakens to the echo of the little, poisoned voice wailing,
No more coppiceman, I won’t, too close, too close.
What was too close, Jack Sawyer refuses to consider; the echo proves that he must avoid any further contamination.

Bad news for Dale, he knows, and he regrets both his inability to join the investigation and to explain his refusal to his friend. Dale’s ass is on the line, no two ways about it. He is a good chief of police, more than good enough for French Landing, but he misjudged the politics and let the staties set him up. With every appearance of respect for local authority, state detectives Brown and Black had bowed low, stepped aside, and permitted Dale Gilbertson, who thought they were doing him a favor, to slip a noose around his neck. Too bad, but Dale has just figured out that he is standing on a trapdoor with a black bag over his face. If the Fisherman murders one more kid. . . . Well, Jack Sawyer sends his most profound regrets. He can’t perform a miracle right now, sorry. Jack has more pressing matters on his mind.

Red feathers, for example. Small ones. Little red feathers are much on Jack’s mind, and have been, despite his efforts to magic them away, since a month before the murders started. One morning as he emerged from his bedroom and began to go down to fix breakfast, a single red feather, a plume smaller than a baby’s finger,
seemed to
float out of the slanted ceiling at the top of the stairs. In its wake, two or three others came drifting toward him. An oval section of plaster two inches across
seemed to
blink and open like an eye, and the eye released a tight, fat column of feathers that zoomed out of the ceiling as if propelled through a straw. A feather explosion, a feather hurricane, battered his chest, his raised arms, his head.

But this . . .

This never happened.

Something else happened, and it took him a minute or two to figure it out. A wayward brain neuron misfired. A mental receptor lapped up the wrong chemical, or lapped up too much of the right chemical. The switches that nightly triggered the image conduits responded to a false signal and produced a
waking dream.
The waking dream resembled an hallucination, but hallucinations were experienced by wet-brain alcoholics, drug takers, and crazy people, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, with whom Jack had dealt on many an occasion during his life as a coppiceman. Jack fit into none of those categories, including the last. He knew he was not a paranoid schizophrenic or any other variety of madman. If you thought Jack Sawyer was crazy,
you
were. He has complete, at least 99 percent complete, faith in his sanity.

Since he is not delusional, the feathers must have flown toward him in a waking dream. The only other explanation involves reality, and the feathers had no connection to reality. What kind of world would this be, if such things could happen to us?