Black House (22 page)

“Okay, bud, how about ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ the one Bunny Berigan did?”

“Oh, I
love
that,” Alice says. “Yes, play ‘I Can’t Get Started.’ ”

“Happy to oblige,” Stan says in Henry Leyden’s normal voice. Without bothering to jive around or spin the records on his hands, he simply exchanges the LP on the turntable for one from the first box. He seems oddly wilted as he steps to the mike and says, “I’ve flown around the world on a plane, I settled revolutions in Spain. Can’t get started. Dedicated to the lovely Alice Blue Gown and the One Who Walks by Night.”

“You’re no better’n a monkey on a stick,” says Burny.

The music begins. Rebecca taps Hermie on the arm and moves up alongside Charles Burnside, for whom she has never felt anything but mild revulsion. Now that she has him in focus, her outrage and disgust cause her to say, “Mr. Burnside, you are going to apologize to Alice and to our guest here. You’re a crude, obnoxious bully, and after you apologize, I want you to get back into your room, where you belong.”

Her words have no effect. Burnside’s shoulders have slumped. He has a wide, sloppy grin on his face, and he is staring empty-eyed at nothing in particular. He looks too far gone to remember his own name, much less Bunny Berigan’s. In any case, Alice Weathers has danced away, and Symphonic Stan, back at the far end of the platform and out of the pink spot, appears to be deep in thought. The elderly couples sway back and forth on the dance floor. Off to the side, Hermie Boettcher pantomimes dancing and quizzes her with a look.

“I’m sorry about that,” she says to Stan/Henry.

“No need to apologize. ‘I Can’t Get Started’ was my wife’s favorite record. I’ve been thinking about her a lot, the past few days. Sort of took me by surprise.” He runs a hand over his sleek hair and shakes out his arms, visibly getting back into his role.

Rebecca decides to leave him alone. In fact, she wants to leave everyone alone for a little while. Signaling regret and the press of duty to Hermie, she makes her way through the crowd and exits the common room. Somehow, old Burny has beaten her to the corridor. He shuffles absently toward Daisy wing, head drooping, feet scuffing the floor.

“Mr. Burnside,” she says, “your act may fool everyone else, but I want you to know that it doesn’t fool me.”

Moving by increments, the old man turns around. First one foot shifts, then a knee, the spavined waist, the second foot, finally the cadaverous trunk. The ugly bloom of Burny’s head droops on its thin stalk, offering Rebecca a view of his mottled scalp. His long nose protrudes like a warped rudder. With the same dreadful slowness, his head lifts to reveal muddy eyes and a slack mouth. A flash of sheer vindictiveness rises into the dull eyes, and the dead lips writhe.

Frightened, Rebecca takes an instinctive step backward. Burny’s mouth has moved all the way into a horrible grin. Rebecca wants to escape, but anger at having been humiliated by this miserable jerk lets her hold her ground.

“Lady Magowan had a bad, bad nightmare,” Burny informs her. He sounds drugged, or half asleep. “And Lady Sophie had a nightmare. Only hers was worse.” He giggles. “The king was in his countinghouse, counting out his honeys. That’s what Sophie saw when she fell asleep.” His giggling rises in pitch, and he says something that might be “Mr. Munching.” His lips flap, revealing yellow, irregular teeth, and his sunken face undergoes a subtle change. A new kind of intelligence seems to sharpen his features. “Does you know Mr. Munshun? Mr. Munshun and his li’l friend Gorg? Does you know what happened in Chicago?”

“Stop this right now, Mr. Burnside.”

“Duz you know uff Fridz Haarman, him who wazz zo loff-ly? Dey called him, dey called him, dey called him ‘da Vamp, Vamp, Vamp of Hanover,’ yez dey dud, dud, dud. Evveybuddy, evveybuddy, evveybuddy haz godz nide-marez all da dime, dime, dime, ha ha ho ho.”

“Stop talking like that!
” Rebecca shouts.
“You’re not fooling me!”

For a moment, the new intelligence flares within Burny’s dim eyes. It almost instantly retreats. He licks his lips and says, “Way-gup, Burn-Burn.”

“Whatever,” Rebecca says. “Dinner is downstairs at seven, if you want it. Go take a nap or something, will you?”

Burny gives her a peeved, murky look and plops a foot down on the floor, beginning the tedious process that will turn him around again. “You could write it down. Fritz Haarman. In Hanover.” His mouth twists into a smile of unsettling slyness. “When the king comes here, maybe we can dance together.”

“No, thanks.” Rebecca turns her back on the old horror and clacks down the hallway on her high heels, uncomfortably aware of his eyes following her.

Rebecca’s nice little Coach handbag lies flat on her desk in the windowless vestibule to Chipper’s office. Before going in, she pauses to rip off a sheet of notepaper, write down
Fritz Harmann
(
?
),
Hanover
(
?
), and slip the paper into the bag’s central compartment. It might be nothing—it probably is—but who knows? She is furious that she let Burnside frighten her, and if she can find a way to use his nonsense against him, she will do her best to expel him from Maxton’s.

“Kiddo, is that you?” Chipper calls out.

“No, it’s Lady Magowan and her freakin’ nightmare.” She strides into Chipper’s office and finds him behind his desk, happily counting out the bills contributed that afternoon by the sons and daughters of his clientele.

“My li’l Becky looks all ticked off,” he says. “What happened, one of our zombies stomp on your foot?”

“Don’t call me Becky.”

“Hey, hey, cheer up. You won’t believe how much your silver-tongued boyfriend conned out of the relatives today. A hundred and twenty-six smackers! Free money! Okay, what went wrong, anyhow?”

“Charles Burnside spooked me, that’s what. He ought to be in a mental hospital.”

“Are you kidding? That particular zombie is worth his weight in gold. As long as Charles Burnside can draw breath into his body, he will always have a place in my heart.” Grinning, he brandishes a handful of bills. “And if you have a place in my heart, honey-baby, you’ll always have a place at Maxton’s.”

The memory of Burnside saying,
The king was in his countinghouse, counting out his honeys
makes her feel unclean. If Chipper were not grinning in that exultant, loose-lipped way, Rebecca supposes, he would not remind her so unpleasantly of his favorite resident.
Evveybuddy haz godz nide-marez all da dime, dime, dime—
that wasn’t a bad description of the Fisherman’s French Landing. Funny, you wouldn’t think Old Burny would take more notice of those murders than Chipper. Rebecca had never heard him mention the Fisherman’s crimes, apart from the time he groused that he would not be able to tell anyone he was going fishing until Dale Gilbertson finally got off his big fat butt, and what kind of crappy deal was that?

8

T
WO TELEPHONE CALLS
and another, private matter, one he is doing his best to deny, have conspired to pluck Jack Sawyer from his cocoon in Norway Valley and put him on the road to French Landing, Sumner Street, and the police station. The first call had been from Henry, and Henry, calling from the Maxton cafeteria during one of the Symphonic One’s breaks, had insisted on speaking his mind. A child had apparently been abducted from the sidewalk in front of Maxton’s earlier that day. Whatever Jack’s reasons for staying out of the case, which by the way he had never explained, they didn’t count anymore, sorry. This made four children who had been lost to the Fisherman, because Jack didn’t really think Irma Freneau was going to walk in her front door anytime soon, did he? Four children!

—No, Henry had said, I didn’t hear about it on the radio. It happened this morning.

—From a janitor at Maxton’s, Henry had said. He saw a worried-looking cop pick up a bicycle and put it in his trunk.

—All right, Henry had said, maybe I don’t
know
for certain, but I
am
certain. By tonight, Dale will identify the poor kid, and tomorrow his name will be all over the newspaper. And
then
this whole county is going to flip out. Don’t you get it? Just knowing you are involved will do a lot to keep people calm. You no longer have the luxury of retirement, Jack. You have to do your part.

Jack had told him he was jumping to conclusions, and that they would talk about it later.

Forty-five minutes later, Dale Gilbertson had called with the news that a boy named Tyler Marshall had vanished from in front of Maxton’s sometime that morning, and that Tyler’s father, Fred Marshall, was down there right now, in the station, demanding to see Jack Sawyer. Fred was a great guy, a real straight arrow and family man, a solid citizen, a
friend
of Dale’s, you could say, but at the moment he was at the end of his rope. Apparently Judy, his wife, had been having some kind of mental problems even before the trouble started, and Tyler’s disappearance had driven her off the edge. She talked in gibberish, injured herself, tore the house apart.

—And I kind of know Judy Marshall, Dale had said. Beautiful, beautiful woman, a little thing but tough as all get-out on the inside, both feet on the ground, a great person, a tremendous person, someone you’d think would never lose her grip, no matter what. It seems she thought, knew, whatever, that Tyler had been snatched even before his bicycle turned up. Late this afternoon, she got so bad Fred had to call Dr. Skarda and get her over to French County Lutheran in Arden, where they took one look at her and put her in Ward D, the mental wing. So you can imagine what kind of shape Fred’s in. He insists on talking to you.
I have no confidence in you,
he said to me.

—Well, Dale had said, if you don’t come down here, Fred Marshall is going to show up at your house, that’s what’ll happen. I can’t put the guy on a leash, and I’m not going to lock him up just to keep him away from you. On top of everything else, we need you here, Jack.

—All right, Dale had said. I know you’re not making any promises. But you know what you should do.

Would these conversations have been enough to get him into his pickup and on the road to Sumner Street? Very likely, Jack imagines, which renders the third factor, the secret, barely acknowledged one, inconsequential. It means nothing. A silly attack of nerves, a buildup of anxiety, completely natural under the circumstances. The kind of thing that could happen to anybody. He felt like getting out of the house, so what? No one could accuse him of
escaping.
He was traveling toward, not running away from, that which he most wanted to
escape—
the dark undertow of the Fisherman’s crimes. Neither was he committing himself to any deeper involvement. A friend of Dale’s and the father of a child apparently missing, this Fred Marshall, insisted on talking to him; fine, let him talk. If half an hour with a retired detective could help Fred Marshall get a handle on his problems, the retired detective was willing to give him the time.

Everything else was merely personal. Waking dreams and robins’ eggs messed with your mind, but that was merely personal. It could be outwaited, outwitted, figured out. No rational person took that stuff seriously: like a summer storm, it blew in, it blew out. Now, as he coasted through the green light at Centralia and noted, with a cop’s reflexive awareness, the row of Harleys lined up in the Sand Bar’s parking lot, he felt himself coming into alignment with the afternoon’s difficulties. It made perfect sense that he should have found himself unable—well, let us say unwilling—to open the refrigerator door. Nasty surprises made you think twice. A light in his living room had expired, and when he had gone to the drawer that contained half a dozen new halogen bulbs, he had been unable to open it. In fact, he had not quite been able to open any drawer, cabinet, or closet in his house, which had denied him the capacity to make a cup of tea, change his clothes, prepare lunch, or do anything but leaf halfheartedly through books and watch television. When the flap of the mailbox had threatened to conceal a pyramid of small blue eggs, he had decided to put off collecting the mail until the next day. Anyhow, all he ever got were financial statements, magazines, and junk mail.

Let’s not make it sound worse than it was,
Jack says to himself.
I
could
have opened every door, drawer, and cabinet in the place, but I didn’t
want
to. I wasn’t afraid that robins’ eggs were going to come spilling out of the refrigerator or the closet—it’s just that I didn’t want to take the chance of finding one of the blasted things. Show me a psychiatrist who says that’s neurotic, and I’ll show you a moron who doesn’t understand psychology. All the old-timers used to tell me that working homicide messed with your head. Hell, that’s why I retired in the first place!

What was I supposed to do, stay on the force until I ate my gun? You’re a smart guy, Henry Leyden, and I love you, but there are some things you don’t GET!

All right, he was going to Sumner Street. Everybody was yelling at him to do something, and that’s what he was doing. He’d say hello to Dale, greet the boys, sit down with this Fred Marshall, the solid citizen with a missing son, and give him the usual oatmeal about everything possible being done, blah blah, the FBI is working hand in glove with us on this one, and the bureau has the finest investigators in the world.
That
oatmeal. As far as Jack was concerned, his primary duty was to stroke Fred Marshall’s fur, as if to soothe the feelings of an injured cat; when Marshall had calmed down, Jack’s supposed obligation to the community—an obligation that existed entirely in the minds of others—would be fulfilled, freeing him to go back to the privacy he had earned. If Dale didn’t like it, he could take a running jump into the Mississippi; if
Henry
didn’t like it, Jack would refuse to read
Bleak House
and force him to listen instead to Lawrence Welk, Vaughn Monroe, or something equally excruciating. Bad Dixieland. Years ago, someone had given Jack a CD called
Fats Manassas & His Muskrat All Stars Stompin’ the Ramble.
Thirty seconds of Fats Manassas, and Henry would be begging for mercy.

This image makes Jack feel comfortable enough to prove that his hesitation before cupboards and drawers had been merely a temporary unwillingness, not phobic inability. Even while his attention was elsewhere, as it chiefly was, the shoved-in ashtray below the dash has mocked and taunted him since he first climbed into the pickup. A kind of sinister suggestiveness, an aura of latent malice, surrounds the ashtray’s flat little panel.

Does he fear that a small blue egg lurks behind the little panel?

Of course not. Nothing is in there but air and molded black plastic.

In that case, he can pull it out.

The buildings on the outskirts of French Landing glide past the pickup’s windows. Jack has reached almost the exact point at which Henry pulled the plug on Dirtysperm. Obviously he can open the ashtray. Nothing could be simpler. You just get your fingers under there and tug. Easiest thing in the world. He extends a hand. Before his fingers touch the panel, he snatches the hand back. Drops of perspiration glide down his forehead and lodge in his eyebrows.

“It isn’t a big deal,” he says aloud. “You got some kind of problem here, Jacky-boy?”

Again, he extends his hand to the ashtray. Abruptly aware that he is paying more attention to the bottom of his dashboard than to the road, he glances up and cuts his speed by half. He refuses to hit his brakes. It’s just an ashtray, for God’s sake. His fingers meet the panel, then curl under its lip. Jack glances at the road once more. Then, with the decisivesness of a nurse ripping a strip of tape off a patient’s hairy abdomen, he yanks out the sliding tray. The lighter attachment, which he had unknowingly dislodged in his driveway that morning, bounces three inches into the air, greatly resembling, to Jack’s appalled eye, a flying black-and-silver egg.

He veers off the road, bumps over the weedy shoulder, and heads toward a looming telephone pole. The lighter drops back into the tray with a loud, metallic thwack no egg in the world could have produced. The telephone pole swims closer and nearly fills the windshield. Jack stamps on the brake and jerks to a halt, arousing a flurry of ticks and rattles from the ashtray. If he had not cut his speed before opening the ashtray, he would have driven straight into the pole, which stands about four feet from the hood of the pickup. Jack wipes the sweat off his face and picks up the lighter. “Shit on a shingle.” He clicks the attachment into its receptacle and collapses backward against the seat. “No wonder they say smoking can kill you,” he says. The joke is too feeble to amuse him, and for a couple of seconds he does nothing but slump against the seat and regard the sparse traffic on Lyall Road. When his heart rate drops back to something like normal, he reminds himself that he did, after all, open the ashtray.

Blond, rumpled Tom Lund has evidently been prepped for his arrival, for when Jack walks past three bicycles lined up next to the door and enters the station, the young officer takes off from behind his desk and rushes forward to whisper that Dale and Fred Marshall are waiting for him in Dale’s office, and he will show him right in. They’ll be glad to see him, that’s for sure. “I am, too, Lieutenant Sawyer,” Lund adds. “Boy, I gotta say it. What you got, I think, we need.”

“Call me Jack. I’m not a lieutenant anymore. I’m not even a cop anymore.” Jack had met Tom Lund during the Kinderling investigation, and he had liked the young man’s eagerness and dedication. In love with his job, his uniform, and his badge, respectful of his chief and awed by Jack, Lund had uncomplainingly logged hundreds of hours on the telephone, in records offices, and in his car, checking and rechecking the often contradictory details spun off by the collision between a Wisconsin farm-insurance salesman and two Sunset Strip working girls. All the while, Tom Lund had retained the energetic sparkle of a high school quarterback running onto the field for his first game.

He does not look that way anymore, Jack observes. Dark smudges hang beneath his eyes, and the bones in his face are more prominent. More than sleeplessness and exhaustion lie behind Lund’s affect: his eyes bear the helplessly startled expression of those who have suffered a great moral shock. The Fisherman has stolen a good part of Tom Lund’s youth.

“But I’ll see what I can do,” Jack says, offering the promise of a commitment greater than he intends.

“We can sure use anything you can give us,” Lund says. It is too much, too servile, and as Lund turns away and leads him to the office, Jack thinks,
I didn’t come here to be your savior.

The thought instantly makes him feel guilty.

Lund knocks, opens the door to announce Jack, shows him in, and vanishes like a ghost, utterly unnoticed by the two men who rise from their chairs and fasten their eyes upon their visitor’s face, one with visible gratitude, the other with an enormous degree of the same emotion mixed with naked need, which makes Jack even more uncomfortable.

Over Dale’s garbled introduction, Fred Marshall says, “Thank you for agreeing to come, thank you so much. That’s all I can . . .” His right arm sticks out like a pump handle. When Jack takes his hand, an even greater quantity of feeling floods into Fred Marshall’s face. His hand fastens on Jack’s and seems almost to
claim
it, as an animal claims its prey. He squeezes, hard, a considerable number of times. His eyes fill. “I can’t . . .” Marshall pulls his hand away and scrubs the tears off his face. Now his eyes look raw and intensely vulnerable. “Boy oh boy,” he says. “I’m really glad you’re here, Mr. Sawyer. Or should I say Lieutenant?”

“Jack is fine. Why don’t the two of you fill me in on what happened today?”

Dale points toward a waiting chair; the three men take their places; the painful but essentially simple story of Fred, Judy, and Tyler Marshall begins. Fred speaks first, at some length. In his version of the story, a valiant, lionhearted woman, a devoted wife and mother, succumbs to baffling, multifaceted transformations and disorders, and develops mysterious symptoms overlooked by her ignorant, stupid, self-centered husband. She blurts out nonsense words; she writes crazy stuff on sheets of notepaper, rams the papers into her mouth, and tries to swallow them.
She sees the tragedy coming in advance, and it unhinges her.
Sounds crazy, but the self-centered husband thinks it’s the truth. That is, he
thinks
he thinks it’s the truth, because he’s been thinking about it since he first talked to Dale, and even though it sounds crazy, it kind of makes sense. Because what other explanation could there be? So that’s what he thinks he thinks—that his wife started to lose her mind because she knew that the Fisherman was on the way. Things like that are possible, he guesses. For example, the brave afflicted wife knew that her beautiful wonderful son was missing even before the stupid selfish husband, who went to work exactly as if it were a normal day, told her about the bicycle. That pretty much proved what he was talking about. The beautiful little boy went out with his three friends, but only the three friends came back, and Officer Danny Tcheda found the little son’s Schwinn bike and one of his poor sneakers on the sidewalk outside Maxton’s.