Split Images (1981) (30 page)

"If you think I'm forcing you, don't do it."

"What else do you call it? You think I'd freely sign a statement?"

"It's called good-citizen cooperation," Malik said.

"Can I tell my wife that?"

"Tell her you just wanted a strange piece of ass,"

Malik said. "It might work."

Fay wrote his statement with coaching, editing help from Bryan. When he had finished and signed it, Bryan gave him some hope. He said, "Don't tell her anything yet. You never know what might happen between here and the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice."

It was dark, early evening, when Robbie got home.

He left the front door open and walked into the hall yelling, "Hey! Where is everybody? Come out, I won't hurt you--I'm a friend!" He'd had four firstclass Delta martinis on his first commercial flight in years. A maid appeared, hesitant. Robbie couldn't remember her name.

"Where's Walter?"

He wasn't here. He was here a little earlier, but he wasn't here now. Greg talked to him.

Robbie went through the dining room and kitchen to the back stairway and called up, "Greg, where are you? I need you, Greg!"

The cook came down the stairs slicking his dark hair back with his hands, wearing his white shirt and his black pants. "Yes sir." They went into the kitchen and Robbie got a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator while Greg quickly washed his hands at the sink. When Robbie couldn't find a glass Greg got one out of the cupboard, an everyday glass, and Robbie told him to bring one for himself.

"You see Walter?"

"As little as I can," Greg said. Greg was about thirty-five and looked to Robbie like a day laborer, but he could cook.

"I got to find him."

"He was here," Greg said. "He went in your study and I told him hey, you don't work here no more, what are you doing in there? The other day he brings the car back he says he quit."

"He was in my study?"

"About, well a few hours ago he was here."

"Where'd he go, do you know?""No sir. I could care less."

"Care," Robbie said, "just for a minute. I thought you two were from the same neighborhood. Hamtramck, right?"

"That doesn't give us anything in common. You know what he does all the time? He bitches . . ."

"It's a trait," Robbie said.

"He comes in here for a beautiful meal cost him twenty dollars outside, he starts bitching. Beef Wellington, he says take the fucking bread off. I fix veal Oscar you like? He want golabki, pirogies, he wants placki for breakfast. All the time telling me I don't know how to cook."

"He's a rustic at heart," Robbie said, not having any idea what Greg was talking about. "But where can I find him? You know any places he goes, where he hangs out?"

"I don't know if he goes, I know what he talks about, over there."

"Over where?"

"He talks like Hamtramck was Grosse Pointe, like Under the Eagle was the London Chop House.

He don't know anything."

"Under the Eagle?"

"Yeah, I used to eat there sometime, till I learned how to cook. You go in there and get fat."

"Call the place up, see if anybody's seen him.

You know any other spots?"

"Couple of bars maybe.""Call 'em. See if he's been in lately, the past couple of days." Robbie started out of the kitchen with his wine glass, paused and looked back at Greg.

"There's a footlocker out on the front steps the goddamn cab driver wouldn't bring in the house.

But make the calls first, okay?"

Goddamn Walter. Robbie walked through the marble front hall to his den, flicked the light switch on and the switch next to it off as he went in.

The room seemed in order, everything in its proper place. No--some books were pulled half out of the shelves and the cabinet doors were open behind the desk. The dumb shit. Looking for the gun.

That had to be Walter's purpose. Walter the cop turned driver-aide turning snitch. Scared to death.

Or blackmailer, that was a definite possibility.

Robbie sat down in his chair with his glass of wine, picked up the TV remote control gadget and pressed the on button.

"It's showtime . . ."

He watched Walter appear on the television screen, Walter coming into the lighted room, looking around, weaving a little as he moved to the desk, placed his hands on it flat and leaned heavily, resting. He was drunk! Unbelievable. The guy comes in to burglarize the place smashed. Walter was groping around now, edging his way to the cabinets behind the desk while those sneaky cameras that resembled light fixtures followed every move. He'd even explained to Walter how the surveillance cameras worked, these particular ones programmed to look on a subject and follow until the subject left the camera's scan and walked into the field of another, the cameras activated when a light switch was turned on. But Walter was drunk, or wouldn't have remembered anyway. Walter's attention span was about from A to B. He desperately needed someone to wind him up and point him in the right direction. Walter stumbled around, going over to the bar now . . . standing there trying to decide what to drink. That's what he needed. Probably not recognizing one single label. Christ--no, Walter, not the seventy-five-year-old stuff!

Greg appeared in the doorway.

"He was in there today, Mr. Daniels. Under the Eagle? Waitress says he acted drunk. Told her he'd been to Lili's Bar, where he used to hang out. She says she stopped in there for a pop after she was through working and he was in there again. Art told her, the bartender, Walter would go out, come back in, go out, come back. Like he didn't know what he was doing."

Robbie looked over, clicking the picture off.

"You know where Lili's is?"

"It's right off Campau on Jacob."

"Give me some directions."

Greg said, "Yes sir, but I don't know you want to go there at night."

On the first sheet in the pile of notes and typewritten pages was a list of working titles written in Angela's straight-up-and-down hand.

"Hi, I'm Robbie Daniels"

"What's It Like To Be Rich?"

"I Was Just Saying To My Very Good Friend George Hamilton The Other Day . . ."

"Who Would I Rather Be Than Anyone? . . .

Me!"

"Split Images: How Rich-Kid Robbie Daniels Defies Your Viewfinder"

A note below the list of titles said, "Maybe a short dialog exchange would work." And below that, "What would Tom Wolfe call it?"

Bryan got up from his desk. Crossed the squad room toward the wall of mug shots, stopped and turned around, without purpose. He had nowhere to go. He didn't want coffee. He didn't want to turn on the radio. He wanted the telephone to ring and hear Walter's voice, sober. At this moment it was all he wanted because he would not let him-self think of anything else. He was standing when Eljay Ayres came in, the inspector of Homicide dressed in a tailored tan three-piece suit, raincoat over his arm, tired eyes looking at Bryan, wondering things.

"Tell me if you're doing something I should know about."

Bryan shrugged, raised his shoulders a little and let them drop.

"You can think it long as you don't do it. You know what I'm saying to you? Ain't worth it."

"How do you know?" Bryan said.

"I don't know much," Ayres said. "Nobody sits down and tells me stories anymore. I have to ask questions, get bits and pieces." He studied Bryan with his tired gaze and began to shake his head.

"You don't even have the gun for the job. Little thirty-eight with the bands 'round it so you don't lose it in your pants. What kind of a gunslinger are you, Bryan?"

Bryan said, "You know how many guns he's got?"

Ayres said, "Has only one I'd be interested in.

From what little bit I hear . . . I'm gonna tell you something I would never tell anybody else. Gonna come right out and say you, Mr. Hurd, are the best homicide dick I know or know of. That includes me, giving you maybe a half a step, no more than that. The point being, the best homicide dick Iknow doesn't fuck up, does he? Doesn't carry the blade to put in the man's hand after, does he? He wins most, he loses a few. But he doesn't ever fuck up. Does he?"

Bryan turned, moved toward his desk. "I've got to write a letter."

"That's cool," Ayres said. "Keep your mind occupied."

Walter parked his sister's Monte Carlo next to a bulldozer that stood in the drive of an abandoned gas station. Every parking place up Jacob and around on Campau was taken. Like somebody was having a party. There were three girls in front of Lili's, standing in the dark smoking, passing around a cigarette. He could smell it now; he was still a cop he could bust them. The hell with them.

He had slept about two hours and was still whacked out, half in the bag. The girls moved away, one of them looking at him as he approached the bar, the girl saying, "The Babies bring out the weirdos every time."

What? He put his hand on the door and felt a vibration. The same girl was saying, "Down here, dad."

The fuck was going on?

They went through a board gate and along a pas-sage with walls that squeezed in close, Walter following sounds in darkness, a girl's laughter, smelling the grass, seeing the glow as the girls took last tokes and went in past a sign that said Pagan Babies. Pagan what? Art was looking at him through a window in a red door. Art said, "Three bucks."

Walter said, "Wait a minute. I got turned around or something."

Art said, "Three bucks, for the band."

Walter dug in his pocket. He said, "For the band?

That's the band? I thought it must be the fucking wreckers tearing down a building, Art. Hey, Art?"

But they were moving him into the wall-to-wall racket of rock sound filling the bar, people behind him now crowding him into people standing inside, the people moving but moving in place, moving up and down, skinny people with painted hair, pink hair, Kraut hair, moving like puppets attached to the beat, skinny girls wired to it together, thighs shining, sliding together with sex on their faces, mouths moving, speaking, but no sound coming out of them, no room for voice sounds in a room filled with electronic sound. Five guys up there by the front with tight suits on and no shirts--no, four guys and a girl playing with them as alike as the guys were alike, moving alike, mechanically, one eating the microphone, saying something about thepope. The pope? "The Turk did it during her afternoon soap--" It sounded like the guy singing was saying the girl was pissed off, she missed all her children, yeah, "She missed 'All My Children'--" And people around him as he tried to get through them, as he used his shoulders to ram his way, were repeating it, their mouths saying, "She missed 'All My Children'--" But the girl was gonna go straight to hell because she was pissed and the guy up there in the suit and no shirt was saying, "Don't forget your Sea and Ski--" And now everybody was mouthing, saying, "Don't forget your Sea and Ski--" Walter raised his face to breathe. He saw Lili, a striped tiger drinking a white drink. He saw a pair of barmaids in shirts that glowed pure white and saw the labels of the fruit-flavored brandy glowing white, girls at the bar moving with their eyes closed and a girl licking the sticky inside of her glass, getting it all, girls squirming in pain to the guys in the suits and no shirts who looked diseased. The sound stopped. It was in the room filling the room and then gone like a plug had been pulled, leaving screams that were moans in comparison. A voice close to him said, "Oh, man, who's got some blow?" Another voice said, "You're busting caps now, man. What do you need with blow?"

Lili's voice said, "Walter? Come on--is that Walter Kouza?"

He stared at her, at her tiger dress. Lili's voice said, "Walter, you sick? Please don't throw up on my customers, Walter. Go outside."

Art's voice said, "He doesn't know where he is."

Another voice said, "I'll take care of him."

Walter turned to the voice.

To Robbie Daniels smiling at him. "Come on, Walter, let's go outside."

Walter heard his own voice say, "I'm messing up . . ."

Bryan wrote in longhand on a legal pad. He wrote lines and scratched out words and tried other words, trying to explain in the letter why he was writing it. He started again and stopped, picked up the phone and dialed a number. He listened to it ring. He hung up and dialed an out-of-state number.

"Irene? . . . Bryan Hurd. I'm sorry to bother you again. Are you sure Walter's at his sister's? I called a few times, there was no answer . . . Yeah. No, I did see him this afternoon . . . He's fine. Sort of unwinding. Give me the number again, make sure I have it right." He wrote numbers on the yellow pad. "And the address? . . ."

The quiet was good, the sensation of gliding in silence, protected, staring at the gleam of the hood as they passed beneath street lights."Is this Belmont?"

"Next one. Hang a left. Go down the second block."

"How do you feel?"

"Shitty. I don't know what happened to me. It was like--you really want to know what it was like? It was like dying and going to hell."