The Bad Kitty Lounge (23 page)

The cabinets and drawers held the assortment of dishes,
glasses, silverware, and boxed and canned foods that you would expect to find, except an unopened case of Bacardi Gold was in the cabinet under the sink. Louise Johnson was a well-provisioned drunk. The refrigerator was empty except for a quart of milk, a pound of butter, a couple of frozen pizzas, and a twenty-five-pound bag of ice. I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the kitchen cabinets, the counters, the stove, the refrigerator.

I got up and looked closely at the refrigerator door. Lines of grime blocked out two white rectangles against the surrounding surface. I wondered if photographs had filled the white spaces the last time I'd been in the room. If they had, they'd smiled and smiled at me, and I'd drunk Louise Johnson's coffee and ignored them. They'd whispered from the past about a time when Judy Terrano and Louise Johnson throbbed in the heat of a burning city, and I'd all but put my thumbs in my ears and hummed.

I spent as much time in the kitchen as I could justify, then went back to the bedroom and did what I needed to do.

Louise Johnson's dead body was too neatly arranged. It was too clean, except for the black dust on her cheeks and chin. Her killer was sending a message, just as Judy Terrano's killer had sent a message by scrawling the words
BAD KITTY
on her belly.

So I touched her lips. They felt tough and dry as thumbs. I pulled them apart. I pried her mouth open with my fingers. The muscles in her jaws resisted. It seemed like the ligaments would snap and she would yawn so wide she could swallow the room and everything inside it, but her mouth came slowly open. It exposed a tongue, purple and swollen in death, and on the tongue and teeth and pasted to the walls of her mouth were
ashes and, mixed with the ashes, bent and browned bits of burned photographic paper.

I dug them out with a finger. The pieces broke apart in my hand.

The ashes were the burned remains of Louise Johnson's past, I figured, a past that she'd kept alive every time she'd looked at the photos on her refrigerator or passed them in the hall—until a slug ripped into her forehead and stopped time, stopped everything. That probably meant she'd shared that past with her killer, and her killer meant to burn the evidence of it. Or, since the ashes were in her mouth, meant to do more than burn it—meant to make a point by burning the evidence. The killer was silencing Louise Johnson and erasing her past, or some of it. The killer had yanked off pants that Louise Johnson had yanked off thousands of times for twenty or thirty dollars a pop. The killer was saying Louise Johnson was a whore with no other past or future.

Who was the message for?

Maybe the answer was in the burning itself. Forty years ago, David Stone had burned down the Bad Kitty Lounge. Three days ago, Greg Samuelson had burned Eric Stone's Mercedes.

I wiped my hand on the bedsheet, trying to remove the stain, but the soot streaked across my palm. So I went back to the kitchen and washed my hands in the sink until they were red and smelled like the dish soap Louise Johnson kept next to the case of rum in the cabinet, and I washed them some more.

Then I called Lucinda.

Her cell phone rang until voice mail picked up. She must have been deep in the archives, reading about a city that no longer existed but haunted us still. Or else she was ignoring
my call because she was angry with me for failing to split from Corrine.

I left a message telling her about Louise Johnson, her nickel-and-dime contributions to Judy Terrano's charities, her dead body displayed as carefully as a store-window mannequin, and the ashes of photographs in her mouth—ashes of a child or of children who had laughed from pictures on her refrigerator and hall walls.

I wondered how silent the child or children had to be, though. William DuBuclet knew that you can't wipe out the past. You might not always see it, but it's there and it might even talk to you if you listen closely enough. I said to Lucinda, “When you get done with the newspapers, will you go to the county clerk's office? Ask them if they've got any birth records naming Louise Johnson as mother.”

I hung up and called the District Thirteen police station.

Stan Fleming didn't sound surprised when I said I was standing in an apartment with another dead body. He sounded depressed. “Jesus, Joe, you stay away from me when I've got a cold. You're dangerous.”

“I find them dead. I don't kill them,” I said.

“What's the address?”

I told him and he sighed. “Why are you calling me? That's way outside the Thirteenth. Call nine-one-one.”

I told him about the connection between Judy Terrano and Louise Johnson, the short version. And I told him about the ashes in Louise Johnson's mouth. I left out the finger I'd stuck inside and my feeling that the ashes had left a mark that I would never get rid of.

“Second thought, don't call nine-one-one,” he said. “Wait for me there.”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I'm walking out the door as soon as we hang up. But I figured you might want to take a look before other homicide cops get their hands on this.”

“You figured right. Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“I've got a friend I need to see.”

“Does he wear a hooded black robe and carry a sickle?”

“No, he wears a cape and blue leotards.”

“Hey, your private life's your private life.”

“An academy dropout. He was too good for the department.”

“Oh, one of those guys.”

“Yeah, one of them.”

“Well, shake this superhero's hand for me and tell him I'll send him a postcard when I'm retired on pension.”

“You'll never find him to get his address.”

“Yeah, he's one of those guys.”

“Hey, Stan?”

“Yeah?”

“Greg Samuelson still under lock and key?”

He laughed bitterly. “His lawyer sprung him an hour ago. He paid bail on misdemeanor arson and walked out of the hospital on his own feet. They say he looked like living death but he refused a wheelchair.”

A shiver ran down my neck, but I said, “Time line's too tight for him to have gotten here and killed a woman, isn't it?”

“Unless he's another superhero.”

THE PARKING LOT NEXT
to Terrence's apartment building was littered with dry weeds, cans, and a rimless tire. A sign at the McDonald's at the other side of the building said
WELCOME TO MCDONALD'S
. So I parked there. Seagulls that had flown inland to find shelter from the cold lake-wind stood on the pavement, eyes narrowed, looking like they might freeze into statues and spend the winter there. I stepped over a thigh-high wall onto the sidewalk leading to the front of the apartment building. A couple of gulls fought over the remains of a Filet-O-Fish sandwich that someone had chucked against the fence.

When I'd visited before, Terrence had taken me up the back stairs and through his back-porch garden. Now I went to the front door and saw why he liked the back way. There was a hole where the doorknob should have been, and the rust and wear on the rest of the door said that no one had locked it for years. In the foyer, a dirty ceiling lamp gave just enough light to show two old metal chairs and walls that someone once had
cared enough about to cover with flowered wallpaper. A narrow elevator waited for passengers with its door open, its floor about a half-foot higher than the lobby floor, its light off. I took the stairs. Gang graffiti covered the walls up to the first landing, then disappeared, though someone had spent sweet minutes with a girl named Janika on the second landing and had left a message on the wall explaining what they'd done in more detail than Janika probably would have liked.

The graffiti stopped in the stairway up to the third landing. I knocked on Terrence's door.

No one answered.

I knocked again.

Maybe Terrence was out hustling and would return in the afternoon. But I'd called him four times since leaving him at the Stone Tower construction site and he'd never picked up. Anyway, a dead hooker with a bullet hole in her forehead and ashes in her mouth made me anxious to see my friend. I knocked a third time.

No answer.

I tried the doorknob. No luck. Terrence had three locks on his door, two of them Medecos—too good for me. I went to work on the lousy one. After a few minutes I felt the bolt slide into its housing. I tried the knob again and the door swung open.

I grinned, though the two unbolted locks worried me enough to make me pull my Glock out of its holster.

I stepped inside and called, “Terrence?”

A noise came from the kitchen. I went toward it silently. The apartment was cold the way only the inside of an unheated building can be cold, colder than outside where the dim sun still shined.

I came to the end of the hallway, leading with my gun, and stepped around a corner into the kitchen. A gray creature fluttered wildly into the air. I jumped back. It was a seagull.

I shouted, “What the hell are you doing here?”

It landed on the kitchen table and stared like it was wondering the same about me.

The cold apartment made no sense. The seagull made no sense. I kept my finger on the trigger and stepped into the living room. Four seagulls stood on the floor. One held a long, thin strand of something that looked like uncooked beef fat in its beak. It peered at me as if I might take its lunch. Another gull pecked at something small and wet and white. The giant plate-glass window that had separated the living room from the back-porch garden was gone, shattered outward onto the wooden decking. Cold air blew into the room through the gap. I stepped out through the window frame. Spots of blood trailed over the broken glass to the outdoor stairs. I would need to follow those spots, but first I stepped back inside.

Another gull flew through the room and landed at my feet like I might give it a fish. I kicked at it and it leaped into the air and fluttered out through the broken window.

I went from the living room toward Terrence's bedroom. I hoped I would find him sleeping, a pillow hugged over his head to muffle the knocking of a worried friend. I hoped the plate-glass window had been broken by someone dancing wildly during a late-night party. I hoped the blood on the wooden decking came from a seagull that had flown too close to the jagged glass that jutted from the window frame.

But I knew better.

I stepped into Terrence's bedroom.

I smelled him before I saw him—a sharp, salt odor of blood
and urine. The giant man was lying on the floor next to his bed, his head by an open gun cabinet, a gaping hole in his belly. His gentle eyes were gone. Blood craters remained. A seagull stood on his chest and dunked a bloody beak into the hole in his belly. It tugged and came up with a strip of flesh. I yelled and ran at the bird. It flew onto Terrence's bed, carrying the bloody flesh, dragging it over the bedcover, streaking the cotton red. It eyed me fearfully. It knew I was a thief. It cocked its head back and quivered as it drew the flesh into its gullet.

I swung my gun at it and fired. The bird's middle disappeared in a blaze of meat, blood, and feathers. The seagull's head defied everything I thought I knew about the physical laws of the universe—it bounced toward me on the bed as the blast and roar of the gunshot filled the air and made the building shudder. The head came to a rest at the side of the bed, its eyes still open, staring at me accusingly, Terrence's torn flesh edging from its beak.

My body shook.

I didn't trust myself.

I crammed my Glock back into its holster and sank to the floor next to Terrence.

He was as big in death as he'd been in life. I could hardly believe that when he'd fallen the whole building hadn't come down under him. His eye sockets stared at the ceiling like he was amazed by how far and hard he had fallen. I reached for him but stopped. His size could paralyze you, and that didn't change now that he was dead. I closed my eyes and reached, put my fingers on the side of his neck. It was still warm—not as warm as the neck of a living man but warmer than the cold room. How long had he been dead? As far as I knew, a man his
size might stay warm for days, like a cooling planet with a molten core.

I fought to think clearly. What had happened here?

The door to the gun cabinet was open, emptied of the arsenal I knew Terrence had kept in it. If I figured right, Terrence had been reaching for the cabinet when the killer entered the bedroom. He had spun and the killer had shot him in the stomach. The blood on the wooden decking outside the living room probably meant that Terrence had managed to get a gun out of the cabinet before being shot and had wounded the killer. But the killer was in good enough shape afterward to empty the cabinet and carry its contents out the back.

I got myself standing and looked around the room. The window faced the empty parking lot and other apartment buildings beyond it. I walked around the bedroom, taking it all in. Terrence had a couple of small abstract nudes in frames over the head of the bed. The furniture was heavy, big, made of wood and steel. Two framed photographs stood on the dresser. One, fading, was of his younger brother, the brother shot by the cops. The other was of a woman with perfect black skin and tightly curled graying hair, cut so short you could see her scalp. Her irises were so dark they merged with her pupils. She had on a red turtleneck sweater. Terrence's girlfriend, Darlene.

In front of the dresser I picked up a small metal disk from the floor. It was as wide as a dime, but heavier. Its bottom was smooth and the dirty gray of lead. Its top was brass and, in the middle, a perfectly round edge formed a crater. It was a big-caliber slug. The hole in Terrence's belly was a big-caliber hole.

Stan Fleming would want to see the bullet. He might need it to catch whoever killed Terrence and the others.

I held it to my nostrils. I touched it to my lips. I fought an impulse to put it on my tongue and swallow it. I put it in my pocket.