Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (58 page)

    He finally did and died that instant.

    The cops questioned me full-tilt boogie. They came around in three teams of two. I got the Officer Friendlys, the hair-trigger hardcase growlers, and the plaintive guys who just sort of whined at me and wanted me to admit to murder. I told them his last words and they thought maybe he had ratted out the almighty and vengeful aluminium foil powers that be. They quizzed each other about the name Dr Lauber. They all said it sounded familiar, maybe a hit-man working for the syndicate. Maybe a plastic surgeon who'd gone out of his tree.

    I suspected that if anybody Googled the name they'd find him to be the man who'd discovered the endless rolling process with the sons of J. G. Neher.

    The whiners took me down to the station and put me in a holding room with a big mirror, where I stared at myself and whoever was behind it and started to re-evaluate the cops in my novels. I'd been trying way too hard. I'd been breaking my ass creating brilliant detectives who solved crimes with the sparsest clues. But these guys were never going to figure out who'd killed the aluminium foil liar, not unless somebody confessed out of hand just to stop all the bitching.

    Eventually they cut me loose and I wandered the streets. I was the guy who had to clean up all the blood off the lobby floor back at Stark House. I didn't want to go back yet. I'd seen death before but not murder. I'd written about it and I recognized how far off I'd been from what it really felt like to be in the presence of homicide.

    A certain sense of guilt lashed me as I thought about how close I'd come to walking in on the man being attacked. Maybe two minutes, maybe less. Perhaps I could've prevented it. If only I'd moved a little faster. If only I'd run out into the street to see what could be seen. Maybe I would've spotted a killer rushing away or hailing a cab.

    I stopped into a bookstore and bought Corben's latest novel. His dedication read: TO ALL THOSE WHO LOVE THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH AS MUCH AS I DO. It was followed by AND TO MY WIFE.

    Not even her name, her lovely name. The bastard pasted her in there as an afterthought. How could she read that and not be appalled? How could he expect her not to be upset? I didn't understand it and knew I never would.

    I read the first ten pages leaning against the window of a nearby bodega, and read another twenty walking back to Stark House. I sat outside on the front steps for a half-hour and let the paragraphs slide by under my gaze. I didn't know what the hell I was reading. I was too full of my own anger and past to even see the words. I flipped the pages by rote. I looked at the dedication again and tried to see the substance and meaning behind it. Corben didn't love the mysteries of life. I wasn't sure he loved anything at all. I left the book there and went inside.

    The cops had put up little orange cones around the murder scene, with yellow tape cordoning the area off. The tape didn't say POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS so I tore it down and got my mop, gloves, scouring pads and sanitizers out of the closet. It took me two hours to do an even halfway decent job of it. I had thought it would take longer. There was still a bad stain. I kept having to stop when my hands started to shake. I didn't know if it was because of all the blood or because I'd been so wrapped up in my own problems that I hadn't seen someone else's desperate loneliness. I'd thought I had it bad, but Jesus, dying with the dry facts of aluminium foil on your lips because you wanted to get laid, it was a whole other level of heartbreak.

    Ferdinand the Magnifico and Mojo put on little shows for the neighbourhood kids in the garden behind the building. It wasn't much of a garden, but by East Side standards it was practically the Congo. The monkey grunted with certain inflections and Ferdi appeared to honestly believe Mojo was chattering like he was playing Bridge with the Ladies Auxiliary Club. Mojo went "Ook" and Ferdi, with childish glee, raised his arms out and said, "You see there, clear as the chimes of St Patrick's! He said, 'I love you'. You heard it yourself! Did you not?" The kids said that they could. They giggled and clapped and tossed pennies and nickels. They chased the chimp and then ran away when the chimp chased them. It brightened the place up.

    I didn't quite get how Ferdi made enough to pay Manhattan rent while nickel and diming it, but maybe he had tours booked. He could've really cleaned up in South Dakota. It seemed possible. For all I knew Mojo'd sold out Fourth of July at Madison Square Garden.

    I'd used three different bleaches and detergents doing additional clean-up work over the course of a week but still hadn't managed to get all the blood out of the tile in the lobby. It had become ingrained, as deep as the aluminium foil liar's guilt.

    Something had happened to me that day. My usual brooding and pathos took a left turn into a darker, calmer sea of purpose. I had the increasingly powerful feeling that my life held a greater intent and meaning now, though I didn't know what the hell it might be. I watched the front door. I waited for more murder. I could feel it hovering nearby in every hall. I thought about all the lies I had told to get laid, and wondered if they'd come back to haunt me in the end. What would be my last words? And would they sound dreadfully strange to whoever might be there holding my hand?

    The media caught wind that Corben lived in the building and the camera crews started floating around. He showed up on television and made up stories about how close he'd been with the aluminium foil guy. He claimed to have a theory about the killer and said he was working closely with the NYPD to solve the case. They asked if he was afraid of potential retribution. He claimed to own a derringer that he always kept on his person. A lovely reporter asked if he had it on him at the moment. He dared her to frisk him. I watched his last couple of novels bullet up the bestseller lists.

    My agent kept calling trying to get me to ride his coattails, or more appropriately the murderer's coattails. He said I should be doing whatever I could to get my last few titles out to the reporters. I should carry my novels around with me, stick them in front of the cameras. I asked him if he knew how stupid that might make me feel. He asked me if I knew how stupid he felt representing an author who still couldn't garner more than a five grand chump change advance after publishing a dozen books. It put things into perspective but I still didn't go around clothes-lining the reporters and shoving my novels under their noses. My agent quit calling.

    My sleep filled with mad laughter and shouting. Some of it was my own. I occasionally startled myself awake making noises. I started smoking more. I wrote more and deleted more. I painted the foyer and caught up on all the minor fix-it stuff that I'd let slide the last several days. I got a closer look at some of my neighbours.

    I finally met the lady who had an affair with a famous televange-list's wife and was now something of a lesbian icon. She mildly flirted with me and prompted me to tell her how pretty she was. She seemed insecure and irritable. She told me she wasn't a lesbian at all but had just been fooling around with the wife for the fun of it, but she couldn't admit it in public anymore because of all the money she was making lecturing to various lesbian organizations. She had the televangelist's show playing on a high definition TV screen with the surround sound turned way up. He seemed to be preaching from every corner of the apartment. It was spooky. I fixed her broken toilet handle and blew out of there.

    The toxic waste guy said the old-fashioned elevator didn't accommodate his wheelchair. He was right. The chair was old and wide and well lived in. He'd been in the building the entire time I'd been there. He was proud of his tumours and tried to show them to me as often as he could, turning his melted, half-eaten face this way and that so it would catch the light from the corridor lamps. He was so pale I could see the blood pulsing underneath his skin. I wondered how long it had been since he'd been outside in the sun. I removed one of the side rails in the elevator and it was a tight fit but his chair squeezed in. We tested it together. His oxygen tube hissed into the hole that used to be his nose. The tank clanked loudly whenever the chair went over a bump. I could just imagine it breaching and the explosion taking out the whole floor. He said thank you and rolled back to his apartment and shut the door.

    The former child actor turned gay porno star turned sex therapist daytime talk show host cancelled after three months now retired after writing his autobiography wherein he named names, was sued, counter-sued and won big cash off a couple of closeted politicians outed and forced to resign needed a couple of his electrical outlets rewired. He interviewed me like I was a guest on his show, asking me a lot of pointed questions about the murder. He wanted to know how finding a corpse had transformed me. I told him I hadn't found a corpse, that the man was still alive when I got there. He wanted to know how I'd been transformed by the discovery of a dying man with an ice-pick in his forebrain. He wanted to know what I heard, what I smelled, if there had been any aftertaste to the incident. He licked his lips when he said it. He kept looking to one side like he saw an audience there staring at him. I knew he was working on more of his memoirs. When he got to this chapter he'd say that he'd found the aluminium foil liar and the dying man had spoken profound and wondrous lessons of good will.

    A couple more days drifted past. I felt eyes on me and found myself constantly looking over my shoulder and checking down the ends of dark hallways. Muffled voices followed me but that was nothing new, muffled voices follow everybody in old apartment houses.

    Except I kept hearing my name, or thought I did. For some reason, it made my scalp tighten.

    The morning came when I awoke to a knocking - twin knockings -on my basement door. I figured it was the cops doing a follow-up, but instead there was Ferdinand with Mojo, both of them grinning. They were each holding a bunch of paperbacks.

    "You are the wonderful writer called Will Darrow!"

    "I'm Will Darrow anyway," I told him.

    "But why, why did you not let me know this the very day we were introduced? I await the next emergence of your tough guy character, stories of the brutal but heroic King Carver!"

    That took me back hard. Mojo pulled on his chain and tugged Ferdi into my apartment. They may have been the first guests I'd ever had inside the place. I said, "You've read my books?"

    "Yes, all of them! Will you please sign, yes?"

    Mojo extended a novel out to me. It had a cover I'd never seen before, printed in a language I didn't know. Portuguese, maybe?

    Neither my agent nor my publisher had ever mentioned selling those sub-rights. Or any. My breath caught in my chest and I tried not to think about how much money folks might be skimming. The monkey wouldn't let go of the book. Ferdinand said, "Mojo, give! For signing! He will return it to you!"

    A couple of the other books were in the same language, and two more were in a different one. Maybe Swedish. Danish? I had no idea. The rage climbed the back of my neck but there was also a strange sense of pride coming through, knowing people in other countries were reading my work. My hands were icy. I couldn't remember how to spell my name and just scribbled wavy lines inside the books.

    "I ask now when shall I be able to tell my friends a new King Carver adventure shall soon be theirs?"

    I didn't know what to say. My agent had sent all my recent manuscripts back. I tried to keep faith. "I don't know, Ferdi. But I'll let you know as soon as I finish a new one, all right?"

    "That will be stupendous! Will it not, Mojo?"

    Mojo went, "Ook."

    "You hear, he says-"

    "Uh huh."

    "-he shall effort to have patience but he excitedly waits for more King Carver!"

    "Uh huh."

    "Tell me now, how is Miss Gabriella?"

    It was the first time I was aware that I hadn't seen her since that day he'd moved in two weeks earlier. A minor twinge of alarm sang through me. "I don't know, Ferdi, it's been a while."

    "If you see her, please say that I have inquired about her health!"

    "I'll do that."

    I handed him the signed books back and Mojo got mad and started hopping and banging his fists against his knees until Ferdi gave him one of the titles. Mojo immediately quieted, opened the book, and his mouth started moving, as if he really could read.

    The cops eventually came around again. All three teams, about two hours apart from one another. The nice guys weren't so nice this time. The hardasses not as hard. The whiners still tried to plead with me to tell the truth and come clean about croaking the old man with an ice-pick. I stuck firm to my story. Nobody hit me with a phone book or a rubber hose. No one asked any new questions or seemed to have any other leads besides me. I started to get a clue as to why there were so many television shows about unsolved crimes. They asked if Dr Lauber had shown up yet, if I'd seen some guy with a stethoscope and a doctor's bag creeping around the building. Maybe doing illegal abortions in the neighbourhood. I blinked and reminded them that abortions weren't illegal. They discussed this amongst themselves for a bit. They invited my opinion but I chose to stay out of it. I stared at them and they stared at me.

    I waited to catch sight of Gabriella. I did everything I could do in order to hang around the fifth floor. Fixing hall lights, bracing the handrails, polishing the footboards and wainscoting, polishing the floors. I put an ear to Corben's door and listened for their voices. I heard nothing. There were no more arguments. He'd quit calling out his bibliography. For all I knew they were vacationing in Monaco.