The Little Sleep (4 page)

Eight years ago I got my private detective’s license and narcolepsy. I now live alone with both.

That said, I’m waking up, and there’s someone in my apartment, and that someone is yelling at me.

Sleep is heavy. It has mass. Sometimes it has supreme mass. Sleep as a singularity. There’s no moving or denying or escaping. Sometimes sleep is light too. I’ve been able to walk under its weight. It can be light enough to dream through, but more often than not it’s the heavy kind. It’s the ocean and you’re pinned to the bottom of the seafloor.

“. . . on fire? Jesus Christ! Wake the hell up, Mark!”

The impossible weight lifts away. I resurface too fast and get the bends. Muscles twitch and my heart pushes past my throat and into my head where it doesn’t belong, making everything hurt.

It’s Ellen, my mother. She stands in the doorway of the living room, wearing frilly blue oversized clown pants and a T that reads
LITHUANIA
. The shirt is an old favorite of hers, something she wears too often. The clown pants I’ve never seen before. I hope this means I’m having another hypnogogic hallucination.

I’m sitting on the couch. My mouth is still open because I was asleep with it that way. I blink and mash the back of my hand into my eyes, pushing and squeezing the sleep out. I have my cell phone in my right hand. On my left side is smoke and heat.

The couch is smoking, cigarette and everything. It’s a nasty habit the couch can’t seem to break. The couch doesn’t heed surgeon generals’ warnings. Maybe it should try the patch.

I lift my left leg and twist away from the smoke, but the cigarette butt rolls after me, leaving a trail of red ash. In the cushion there’s a dime-sized hole, the circumference red and still burning. I’d say it’s just one blemish, but the reality is my couch has acne.

I pick up the butt. It’s too hot and I drop it on the floor. I pat the couch cushion. Red ashes go black and there’s more smoke.

I say, “I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t smoking.” Ellen knows what I mean when I’m lying: I don’t want to talk about it, and even if I did want to talk about it nothing would change.

She shakes her head and says, “You’re gonna burn yourself up one of these days, Mark. I don’t know why I bother.” Her admonishment is by rote, perfunctory. We can get on with our day, now that it’s out of the way.

I make my greeting a subtle dig at her for no good reason other than I’m embarrassed. “Good to see you too, Ellen. Shut the door on the way out.” At least this time she didn’t find me asleep with my pants around my ankles and an Edward Penishands porno on the TV.

Ellen stays at my apartment a couple of nights a week. If pressed, she maintains she stays here because she wants to play Keno and eat at the Italian American and L Street Diner with her sister and friends. She won’t admit to being my de facto caregiver. She’s the underwriter of my less-than-successful private detecting business and the landlord who doesn’t want her property, the brownstone she inherited from her parents, to burn to the ground. I can’t blame her.

Ellen is Southie born and bred and, like every other lifelong resident, she knows everything about everybody. Gentrification has toned down the small-town we-are-Southie vibe a bit, but it’s still here. She starts right in on some local dirt, mid-story, assuming I know what she’s talking about when I don’t.

“Davy T said he knew she was lying the whole time. He told me weeks ago. He could just tell she was lying. Do you know when someone’s lying, Mark? They say you watch the eyes. Up and left means recall, down and right means they’re making stuff up. Or it’s the other way around. I don’t know. You should take a class in that. You could find a class online, I bet.”

Davy T is the centuries-old Greek who owns the pizza joint next door. That’s the only part of her monologue that registers with me. I check my cell phone, no messages. It has been a full day since Jennifer’s mall appearance.

Ellen says, “Anyway, Davy T knew. It’ll be all over the news tonight. They found her out. She was making it all up: the cancer, her foundation, everything. What kind of person does that?” Ellen crosses the room as she talks, her clown pants merrily swishing away. She opens my windows and waves her hands. The smoke obeys and swirls in the fresh air. Magic. Must be the pants. “Maybe you
should’ve been on that case, Mark. You could’ve solved that, don’t you think? You could’ve saved folks a lot of money and aggravation.”

To avoid discussing my condition or me burning up with the apartment, Ellen defaults into details of already solved cases that presumably I could’ve tackled; as if I’ve ever worked on a case that involved anything more than tapping keys in front of my computer or being a ghost at a library or a town hall registrar.

Still patting the couch like I can replace the burned and missing upholstery with my Midas touch, I say, “Sure thing, Ellen.” Truth is, my confidence and self-esteem are fighting it out in the subbasement, seeing which can be lower.

Jennifer hasn’t returned any of my calls to the agency. I fell asleep up here, waiting for a callback. Waiting for something to get me going, because I have nothing. I don’t know how she was contacted by the blackmailer, if the pictures were mailed or left on a doorstop, if there had been earlier contact or contact since. It’s kind of hard to start a case without a client, or at least a client that will talk to you.

I say, “So what’s with the Bozo the Clown getup?”

Ellen walks into the kitchen. “I was shooting some kid’s portrait today and the little bastard wouldn’t stop crying until I put the pants on.” When Ellen isn’t her force-of-nature self in my apartment, she lives in the old family bungalow in Osterville, a small tourist haven on the Cape. In downtown Osterville she has a photography studio and antiques shop. She shoots kids, weddings, graduation pictures. Nothing fancy. She’s been doing it since my father died.

“Wouldn’t a red nose and a horn get the job done? Maybe one of those flowers that shoots out water. You need to rely on cliché a little more.”

“What, you’re an expert now? I got the shots.” She plays with her clown pants, pulling them up at the knee, making mini circus tents. “I need to change.” Ellen abruptly disappears into my bedroom and shuts the door.

I pick up the cigarette butt off the floor and try to tidy things up a bit, putting dirty glasses and dishes in the sink, stacking magazines, moving dust around. I eyeball the couch to make sure it’s not still burning.

I check my cell phone again, even though I’ve already checked for messages. Why wouldn’t she call me back? If this is supposed to be some super-special double-secret case, it’s not going to work out. The sleeping me should’ve told her thanks-but-no-thanks when she dumped those pictures on me. The sleeping me is just so irresponsible on my behalf.

Earlier, I did a cursory Web search, reading blogs and message boards, finding no hint or threat of the existence of the photos, or a stalker, or a potential blackmailer. Everything from her camp seems as controlled and wholesome as can be. No one has even posted fake nudes of Jennifer yet, which is usually an instantaneous Internet occurrence once there’s a new female celebrity. I don’t get the lack of buzz. The irony is that if I posted the pictures, I’d likely be helping her career, but I’m not her agent.

Ellen emerges from the bedroom. Her shoulder-length gray hair is tied up and she has on her black-framed glasses, thick lenses that enlarge her eyes. She’s still wearing the clown pants but has on a gray sweatshirt over
LITHUANIA
.

I say, “Are you going to take my picture later? Maybe tie me up some balloon animals? I want a giraffe, a blue one.”

She says, “Everyone at the Lithuanian Club will get a kick out of the pants. And they are comfortable. Nice and roomy.” She walks by and punches my shoulder. “So, should we do something for dinner?” Ellen never makes dinner a declarative statement. She’s earnest in the illusion of a choice being offered. It’s not that I can’t say no. I never have a reason to do so.

I say, “Something sounds delicious, Ellen.” I have a gut feeling the case is slipping away, and if I let it get away I’ll be screwing up something important. This is my shot, my chance to be something more than Ellen’s charity-case son who works on glorified have-you-seen-my-lost-puppy cases and sleeps his days away in front of his computer.

So let’s skip from plan B down to plan X. I know that Jennifer’s father, the DA, grew up in Southie and is around the same age as Ellen. Maybe, a long-shot maybe, she knows something about Jennifer, the first bread crumb in the trail.

I say, “Hey, do you still watch
American Star
?” Plan X: asking Ellen delicate no-I’m-not-working-on-anything-really questions to defibrillate my dying case. I don’t have a plan Y or Z.

Ellen looks at me funny, like I stepped in something and she’s not sure if she should admit she smells it. She says, “You’re kidding, right? I don’t miss a show. Never have missed a show in five seasons.”

I know that, of course. She’s obsessed with
American Star
. She watched the first two seasons from Osterville and still had me tape all the episodes here.

She says, “Why do you ask? Are you telling me that you’re finally watching it too?”

I shrug. Shoulders don’t lie. My fedora doesn’t hide enough of my hairy face. It’s the proverbial only-a-mother-could-love face because the mug was reshuffled partway through the game. Ellen hasn’t once suggested that I shave. That means what it means.

I say, “The show is kind of hard to avoid now. I had it on the other night, but I fell asleep.” Ellen is waiting for more, so I add, “Been hearing stuff about the local girl. She’s the DA’s kid right?”

Ellen smiles. “I might be crazy, but it sounds like you’re pumping me for information. If you got something to ask, just come out and ask it. I’ll help. You know I want to help.”

I can’t. I can’t let her know that I’m working on a case that potentially involves extensive fieldwork. Leaving the apartment and going out by myself. There will be no dealing with any of that conversation. She wants to be supportive only as long as I’m safe in the apartment.

I say, “Nothing like that. Just having a conversation, Ellen. For someone who wears clown pants, you’re tightly wound.”

Ellen goes into the kitchen and roots around in the freezer. She says, “Yes, she’s his daughter. She’s—what, about ten years younger than you?”

Might as well be fifty years younger. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Ellen says, “There’s nothing good in there,” and closes the freezer. “I didn’t have time to pick up anything. We’ll have to go out. At least I’m dressed for it, right?”

I stand in the kitchen doorway, holding up the frame. “Isn’t DA Times from Southie originally?” A softball question, one I know she can’t resist.

“Hell yeah, he’s from Southie. He still owns a brownstone at the end of East Broadway. He doesn’t stay there anymore though. He rents it out.”

“Do you know him at all?”

“I know him well. Or knew him well, anyway. Billy Times and your father were close, used to pal around as kids. They lived in the same building in Harbor Point.”

She hits the softball out of the park. Her answer isn’t what I was expecting. Not at all. I talk even slower than normal, making sure I don’t mess anything up, stacking the words on the kitchen table like bricks, making a wall; maybe it’ll protect me. “Really? You never told me that before.”

Ellen says, “Come on. I’ve told you that before.”

“No. You haven’t.” I’m not offering subterfuge here. I’m more likely to find Spanish doubloons in a handful of loose change than get nuggets of info concerning my father, Tim, from Ellen. She’s miserly with it, hoards it all for herself. I stopped asking questions a long time ago.

“That can’t be right.” Ellen is trying for a light, jovial, fluffy-banter tone, but it’s faltering. “You just forgot.” She adds that last bit as an afterthought, each word decreasing in volume. The sentence runs out of gas, sputters, and shuts off. The sentence goes to sleep. Everything goes to sleep if you wait long enough.

Now, what she said is not fair. Yeah, I forget stuff all the time, but she can’t pass off years of silence and daddy awkwardness on the narcoleptic me like that. I’d call her on the cheap shot, but that’s another argument I don’t want right now. Need that primed pump to
keep spilling. I say, “Cute. So Tim and the DA were BFFs and wore each other’s varsity jackets?”

“Yes, actually, they were best friends but no jackets.” Ellen laughs, but I’m not quite sure why. Nothing is that funny. “Those two used to be inseparable, always causing trouble. Nothing big, you know, typical Southie boys who thought they were tougher than they were.” She waves her hand, like she’s clearing the air of more smoke. Further details won’t be forthcoming unless I keep pecking away at her.

Okay. This goes a long way toward explaining how Jennifer Times landed in my office with her slide show. Her daddy can’t take the case because people talk, word gets out, media sniffing around the DA, especially with his flavor-of-the-minute daughter smiling and primping all over the airwaves. So Daddy DA has Jennifer take her blackmail case, which is as sticky and messy as an ice cream cone on a summer Sunday, to an unknown lower-than-low profile investigator in South Boston, family friend and all that, a schlub willing to do all kinds of favors and keep things quiet with a capital Q, all in the name of his own dear old dad. This makes sense, but the only problem is I don’t know any of this. I’m guessing. Maybe I was told a few days ago while the doctor wasn’t in. Or maybe I wasn’t told anything. Maybe . . .