The Whisperers (24 page)

Well, nearly anybody.

‘What the fuck is cryptozoology?’ asked Louis as we sat in Monument Square, drinking wine and watching the world go by. Today, Louis was wearing Dolce & Gabbana: a black three-button suit, white shirt, no tie. Even though his voice was not loud, an elderly woman eating soup outside the restaurant to our left looked at Louis disapprovingly. I had to admire her courage. Most people tended not to give Louis looks of any kind other than fear or envy. He was tall, and black, and quite lethal.

‘My apologies,’ said Louis, nodding to her. ‘I didn’t mean to use inappropriate words.’ He turned back to me, then said: ‘What the fuck is whatever it was you said?’

‘Cryptozoology,’ I explained. ‘It’s the science of creatures that may or may not exist, like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘The Loch Ness Monster is dead,’ said Angel.

Today, Angel was wearing tattered jeans, no-name sneakers in red and silver, and a virulently green t-shirt promoting a bar that had closed down sometime during the Kennedy era. Unlike his partner in love and life, Angel tended to provoke responses that varied between bemusement and outright concern that he might be color-blind. Angel was also lethal, although not quite as lethal as Louis. But then, that was true of most people, as well as most varieties of poisonous snake.

‘I read it somewhere,’ Angel continued. ‘This expert who was looking for it for years and years, he decided that it had died.’

‘Yeah, like two hundred and fifty million years ago,’ said Louis. ‘’Course it’s dead. The fuck else would it be?’

Angel shook his head in the manner of one faced with a child who can’t grasp a simple concept. ‘No, it died
recently
. Until then, it was still alive.’

Louis stared hard at his partner for a long time, then said: ‘You know, I think we need to set a limit on the conversations you can join in with.’

‘Like in a churrascaría,’ I offered. ‘We could turn up a green symbol when you can speak, and a red one when you have to sit quietly and digest whatever it is you’ve just heard.’

‘I hate you guys,’ said Angel.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘You don’t respect me.’

‘Well, that is true,’ I admitted. ‘But, then, we really have no reason to.’

Angel thought about this before conceding that I had a point. We moved on to the subject of my sex life which, although apparently endlessly entertaining to Angel, didn’t detain us for long.

‘What about that cop, the one who’d started coming into the Bear? Cagney?’

‘Macy.’

‘Yeah, her.’

Sharon Macy was pretty and dark, and she’d certainly been sending out signals of interest, but I had still been trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that Rachel and our daughter were now going to be living in Vermont, and that my relationship with Rachel was effectively over.

‘It was too soon,’ I said.

‘There’s no such thing as “too soon,”’ said Louis. ‘There’s just “too late,” and then there’s “dead.”’

A trio of young men in loose-fitting jeans, oversized t-shirts, and fresh-out-of-the-box sneakers oozed along Congress like algae on the surface of a pond, heading for the bars on Fore Street. They had ‘out of town’ written all over them – well, written anywhere that wasn’t already occupied by a brand, or the name of a rapper. One, God help us, even wore a retro Black Power t-shirt, complete with clenched fist, even though they were all so white they made Pee Wee Herman look like Malcolm X.

Beside us, two men were eating burgers and minding their own business. One of them wore a discreet rainbow triangle on the collar of his jacket, and a ‘Vote No on I’ badge beneath it, a reference to the impending proposition intended to overturn the possibility of gay marriage in the state.

‘You gonna marry him, bitch?’ said one of the passing strangers, and his friends laughed.

The two men tried to get on with their meal.

‘Fags,’ said the same guy, clearly on a roll. He was small, but muscled up. He leaned over and took a French fry from the plate of the man with the badges, who responded with an aggrieved ‘Hey!’

‘I ain’t gonna eat it, man,’ said their tormentor. ‘Never know what I might catch from you.’

‘Burn, Rod!’ said one of his buddies, and they high-fived.

Rod tossed the fry on the ground, then turned his attention to Angel and Louis, who were watching them without expression.

‘What you looking at?’ said Rod. ‘You faggots too?’

‘No,’ said Angel. ‘I’m an undercover heterosexual.’

‘And I’m really white,’ said Louis.

‘He is really white,’ I confirmed. ‘Takes him hours to put on his makeup before he can leave the house.’

Rod looked confused. His face fell into the appropriate expression without too much effort, so it probably wasn’t the first time.

‘So I’m just like you,’ continued Louis, ‘because you’re not really black either. Here’s something for you to think about: all those bands on your shirts, they only tolerate you because you put money in their pockets. They’re hardcore, and they’re talking to, and about, black people. In an ideal world, they wouldn’t need you, and you’d just have to go back to listening to Bread, or Coldplay, or some other maudlin shit that white boys are humming to these days. But, for now, those guys will take your money, and if you ever wander into any of the ’hoods they emerged from, you’ll get stomped and someone will take the rest of your money as well, and maybe your sneakers too. You want me to, I can draw you a map, and you can go express your solidarity with them, see how that works out for you. Otherwise, you run along, and take Curly and Larry there with you. Go on, now: bust a move, or whatever it is you homeboys do to help you perambulate.’

‘Bread?’ I said. ‘You’re a little out of touch with popular culture, aren’t you?’

‘All that shit sounds the same,’ said Louis. ‘I’m down with the kids.’

‘Yeah, the kids from the nineteenth century.’

‘I could kick your ass,’ said Rod, feeling the urge to contribute something to the conversation. He might have been dumb enough to believe it, but the two guys behind him were smarter, which wasn’t exactly something worth putting on their business cards. Already they were trying to move Rod along.

‘Yes, you could,’ said Louis. ‘Feel better now?’

‘By the way,’ said Angel, ‘I lied. I’m not really heterosexual, although he still really isn’t black.’

I looked at Angel in surprise. ‘Hey, you never told me you were gay. I knew that, I’d never have let you adopt those children.’

‘Too late now,’ said Angel. ‘The girls are all wearing comfortable shoes, and the boys are singing show tunes.’

‘Oh, you gays and your cunning ways. You could run the world if you weren’t so busy just making things prettier.’

Rod seemed about to say something else when Louis moved. He didn’t get up from his chair, and there was nothing obviously threatening about what he did, but it was the equivalent of a dozing rattlesnake adjusting its coils in preparation for a strike, or a spider tensing in the corner of its web as it watches the fly alight. Even through his fog of alcohol and stupidity, Rod glimpsed the possibility of serious suffering at some point in the near future: not here, perhaps, on a busy street with cop cars cruising by, but later, maybe in a bar, or a restroom, or a parking lot, and it would mark him for the rest of his life.

Without another word, the three young men slipped away, and they did not look back.

‘Nicely done,’ I said to Louis. ‘What are you going to do for an encore: scowl at a puppy?’

‘Might steal a toy from a kitten,’ said Louis. ‘Put it on a high shelf.’

‘Well, you struck a blow for something there. I’m just not sure what it was.’

‘Quality of life,’ said Louis.

‘I guess.’ Beside us, the two men abandoned their burgers, left a twenty and ten on the table, and hurried away without saying a word. ‘You even frighten your own people. You probably convinced that guy to vote yes on Prop One just in case you decide to move here.’

‘With that in mind, remind us why we’re here again,’ said Angel. They had arrived barely an hour before, and their bags were still in the trunk of their car. Louis and Angel only took planes when it was absolutely necessary to do so, as airlines tended to frown on the tools of their trade. I told them everything, from my first meeting with Bennett Patchett, through the discovery of the tracking device on my car, and finished with my conversation with Ronald Straydeer and the sending of the photographs from Damien Patchett’s funeral.

‘So they know that you haven’t dropped the case?’ said Angel.

‘If the GPS tracker was working, yes. They also know that I visited Karen Emory, which may not be good for her.’

‘You warn her?’

‘I left a message on her cell phone. Another call in person might just have compounded the problem.’

‘You think they’ll come at you again?’ asked Louis.

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d have killed you the first time,’ said Louis. ‘If they figured you for the kind of guy who walks away after some amateur waterboarding, they got you all wrong.’

‘Straydeer said that they’d started out with the intention of helping wounded soldiers. It may be that killing is a last resort. The one who interrogated me said that nobody was going to be hurt by what they were doing.’

‘But he made an exception for you. Funny how folk do that where you’re concerned.’

‘Which brings us back to why you’re here.’

‘And why we’re meeting in public, on a bright summer evening. If they’re watching, you want them to know that you’re not alone.’

‘I need a couple of days. If I can get them to keep their distance, it will make life that much easier.’

‘And if they don’t keep their distance?’

‘Then you can hurt them,’ I said.

Louis raised his glass, and drank.

‘Well, here’s to not keeping one’s distance,’ he said.

We paid our check, and headed to the Grill Room on Exchange for steak, for the prospect of hurting someone always made Louis hungry.

16

J
immy Jewel sat in his usual seat as Earle finished closing up. It was close to midnight, and the bar had been quiet all evening: a few rummies looking for a straightener after the previous night’s excesses, yet without the stamina or the funds to embark on another bender; and a pair of Masshole tourists who had taken a wrong turn and then decided to order a couple of beers while congratulating themselves on the authentic squalor of their surroundings. Unfortunately, Earle didn’t take kindly to people making unkind remarks about his working environment, especially not urban preppies who, in the good old days, would have been kissing the lid of a trash can in a back alley as atonement for their bad manners. The Massholes’ attempt to order a second round was met by a blank stare and the suggestion that they should take their business elsewhere, preferably somewhere over the state line, or even over multiple state lines.

‘You got a way with people,’ Jimmy told Earle. ‘You ought to be with the UN, helping in trouble spots.’

‘You wanted them to stay, you should have said,’ Earle replied. His face was guileless. There were times when even Jimmy didn’t know if Earle was being sincere or not. Still waters, and all that, thought Jimmy. Occasionally, Earle would pass a remark, or make an observation, and Jimmy would stop whatever he was doing as his brain struggled to process what he had just heard, forcing him to reassess Earle just when he believed that he had him figured out. Lately, it was Earle’s choice of reading material that was throwing him: he seemed to be playing catch-up with classic literature, and not just Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn either. Earlier that evening, Earle had been reading a collection by Tolstoy,
Master and Man and Other Stories
. When Jimmy had questioned him about it, Earle had described the plot of the title story, something about a wealthy guy who shields his serf after they both become lost in a winter storm, so that the serf lives and the wealthy guy dies. The wealthy guy made it to heaven as a consequence, though, so that was all right.

‘Is there supposed to be a message in that?’ Jimmy had asked.

‘For whom?’

‘For whom,’ like Earle was John Houseman now.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jimmy. ‘For wealthy guys with bad consciences.’

‘I’m not a wealthy guy,’ said Earle.

‘So you’re like the other guy?’

‘I guess. I mean, I didn’t take it that way. You don’t have to be one or the other. It’s just a story.’

‘If we get caught in a blizzard, and one of us is going to die, you think I’m not going to use you like a blanket to keep warm? You think I’d take a hit for you?’

Earle had considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think you would take a hit for me. Wouldn’t be the first time, either.’

And Jimmy knew that Earle was referring to Sally Cleaver, because he had sensed it playing on Earle’s conscience ever since the detective’s first visit. Jimmy knew Earle well enough by now to recognize when that particular ghost had chosen to whisper in Earle’s ear.

‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Jimmy.

‘Maybe,’ said Earle. ‘Thing of it is, I wouldn’t let you take that hit, Mr. Jewel. I’d keep you alive, even if I had to smother you to do it.’

That sounded to Jimmy like a contradiction in terms, and he was also mildly disturbed by the image of his slender frame lost in the folds of Earle’s fleshy body. He decided that this was a conversation that they didn’t need to have again. With no further customers likely to trouble them, and with other, more pressing matters on his mind, Jimmy had told Earle to lock the door for the night.

Now the floor was swept, the glasses were clean, and the night’s meager takings were safely locked up in the safe in Jimmy’s office. A newspaper lay, half read, by Jimmy’s left hand. This was unusual, thought Earle. By now, Jimmy would usually have dispensed with the paper entirely, even down to the crossword, but today he had seemed distracted, and he was currently staring at the pencil that lay on the bar before him, as though expecting it to move of its own volition and provide him with the answers that he sought.