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We found the poor old guy lying in garbage and quite a lot of his own blood
in the alley next to the Midnight Mission. His shoes had been stolen no way of
knowing if he'd been wearing socks and whatever had been in the empty, dirty
paper bag he was clutching. But his fingernails were immaculate, and he had no
beard stubble. Maybe sixty, maybe older. No way of telling at a cold
appraisal.
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There were three young women down on their knees, weeping and flailing toward
the darkening sky. It was going to rain, a brick-mean rain. Bag ladies in an
alley like that, yeah, no big surprise ... but these weren't gap-toothed old
scraggy harridans. I recognized two of them from commercials; I think the
precise term issupermodel . Their voices outshone the traffic hissing past the
alley mouth. They were obviously very broken up at the demise of this old bum.
We strung the yellow tape; and we started assembling whatever was going to
pass for witnesses; and then, without any further notice, the sky ruptured and
in an instant we were all drenched. The old man's blood sluiced away in
seconds, and the alley was that slick, pretty, shiny black again. So much for
ambient clues.
We moved inside.
The smell of Lysol and sour mash was charming. I remember once, when I was a
little kid, I shinnied up an old maple tree and found a bird nest that had
recently been occupied by, I don't know, maybe robins, maybe crows, or
something, and it had a smell that was both nasty and disturbing. The inside
of the room they let us use for our interrogation smelled not much the same,
but it had the same two qualities: nasty, and unsettling.
Lieutenant, one of the uniforms said, behind me; and I turned and answered,
Yeah? Not the way I usually speak, but this was about as weird a venue, as
troubling a set of circumstances as any I'd handled since I'd been promoted to
Homicide. Uh, excuse me, Lieutenant, but what do you want us to do with these
three ladies?
I looked over at them, huddling near the door, and for a moment I hated them.
They were taller than I, they were prettier than I, they were certainly
wealthier than I, they had no hips and their asses were smaller than mine, and
they dressed a lot better. I won't compare cup size: at least I had them beat
in that capacity.
Keep them from talking to each other, but be easy with em. I think they're
famous, and we've got enough problems in the Department this week. I was
talking, of course, about the serial hooker-slayer who had been leaving bits
of unrecognizable meat all over town for the preceding six months. Then I went
to work. Bird nest smell. Not nice.
* * * *
The first half dozen were either too wetbrain or demented even to grasp what I
was asking them. Clearly, none of them had been out in that alley. But
someonehad been; the old man probably didn't cut his own throat. I'd say
definitely, not even possibly.
The first bit of remark that bore any relation to a lead was the ramble of a
guy in his thirties, broke-down like the rest of them, but apparently not as
long in the life as his peers. He had been an aerospace worker, laid off at
Boeing a few years earlier in one of the periodic downsizing ploys.
His name was Richard. He mumbled his last name and I wrote it on my pad, but
I paid less attention than I might've, had he been a real suspect, when he
said, Wull, I seen the green light.
Green light?
Richard. Muh name's Richard.
Yeah, I got that part. You said a green light.'
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Uh-huh. It was a light, out there, with him, y'know, the dead guy?
I said, yeah, I know the dead guy. And there was this light. And it was
green.
Uh-huh.
I contemplated a career in orthodonture, as I was already pulling teeth.
Well, look, Richard, you can be of great help to us in solving this murder,
if you could just tell meexactly what you saw. Out there. In the alley. The
green light. Okay?
He nodded, the poor sonofabitch; and I confess I felt my heart go out to him.
He actually was doing the best he could, and I didn't want to push him any
more fiercely than common decency would permit. It is probably toasty warm
inclinations of a similar sort that will forever block me from becoming one of
the Bosses. Oh, well, Lieutenant is a perfectly decent rank to die with.
I wuz, er, uh... I read embarrassment.
Go ahead, Richard, just tell me. Don't be embarrassed.
Wull, I wuz takin a leak out back. Around the corner in the alley, but back
around the corner, y'know? Back behind where the dumpsters are. An I wasn't
watchin nothin else but my own business, an I heard these girls singing and
laughin', and I wuz fraid they might come over round the back corner an see
me wit my di ... with my pants unzipped...
The green light, Richard? Remember: the green light?
Uh-huh, I wuz gettin to that. I zipped up so fast I kinda wet myself, an I
turned around to the back over there, an all of a sudden there was this green
light, big green light, an I heard the girls screamin and there was some
kinda music, I guess it wuz, an then allmigawd it was really loud, the girls
screamin', an I ducked outta there, and went around the dumpsters onna other
side, and went over to the fence an crawled over and come back to the
Mission, b'cuz I din't want to get involved, cuz...
He stopped talking. I had dropped my pencil. I bent to pick it up where it
had rolled, next to his right foot. I saw his shoes. When I straightened, I
looked him in the eye and said, But you went out there afterward, didn't you,
Richard?
Nuh-uh! He shook his head violently, but I was looking him right in the
eye.
Before the police came, you went out again, didn't you, Richard?
His lower lip started to tremble. I felt sorry as hell for the poor slob. He
was somebody's son, somebody's brother, maybe even somebody's husband, once
upon a layoff; and he was soaked to the skin with cheap wine; and he was
scared.
C'mon, Richard ... Iknow you went back, so you might as well tell me what
else you remember.
He murmured something so softly, and with such embarrassment, that I had to
ask him gently to repeat: I found the big knife.
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And you took it?
Yes'm.
When you took his shoes.
Yes'm.
And anything else?
No'mum. I'm sorry.
That's all right, Richard. Now I want you to go and get me the big knife,
and bring it right straight back to this room, and give it to me. I'll have
one of the officers go with you.
Yes'm.
I called for Napoli, and told him to take Richard out to the common room, to
retrieve the big knife. As they started for the door of the smelly little
room, Richard turned back to me and started to say, You gonna take...
And I stopped him. No, Richard, no I'm not going to take back those nice
shiny new shoes. They look very comfortable, and they're yours. In exchange
for the big knife.
He smiled weakly, like a child who knows he's done wrong, is truly abject
about it, but is grateful for being let off with just a reprimand.
When he came back, Napoli was carrying the big knife. I'd expected a
grav-knife or a butterfly, something street standard. This was a rusty
machete. A big, wide-bladed, cut-down-the-sugar-cane machete. The blood that
was dried on the blade, all the way up to the handle, was for certain some of
the same that had been, until recently, billeted in the carotid artery of that
old man.
I took the machete gingerly. Napoli had tied a string around the base of the
haft, to preserve Richard's and any others' prints. I lowered the killing
weapon to the table using only the string noose. Then I went back to
questioning Richard.
He'd thought he could sell it for some sneaky pete. That's all there was to
it. The shoes, because he needed them; and the knife, because it had been left
lying there next to the body.
He tried to tell me the story a dozen different ways, but it was always the
same. Taking a leak, seeing the green light, running away, coming back and
taking the old man's shoes (and socks, as it turned out), swiping the machete
while the three women bawled and screamed.
And he went on. For some long while. I gave him a five dollar bill, and told
him to get a good dinner over at The Pantry. I'm not ready for this line of
work. It's only eleven years; I'm not ready.
* * * *
Days or weeks or millennia later, or maybe it only seemed as quick as that, I
was back at the Precinct. I turned the big knife over to Forensics. My feet
hurt, and there was a patina of Post-Its all over my desk ... and faxes ...
and memos enough to choke a Coke machine. But the only urgent one was from the
M.E. So I handed all the others off to Napoli, and told him to get them
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squared away, while I went downtown and had a chat with dear Old Doc Death,
our coroner. The Boss saw me heading out, and he put those two fingers in his
mouth and whistled me to a halt, and yelled across the squadroom, Have you
eaten?
Since what time? I answered.
Since ever. Go get some dinner.
I got to go downtown to see Dear Old Doc Death.
Jacobs, he said, without room for argument, do as I tell you. I said,
yessir, and I went to The Pantry and had a T-bone. Richard of the green light
was there, having a meal. He looked happy in his new shoes. I felt a lot
better about the universe after that. In your heart of hearts, you think a
Richard kind of rummy is going to stoke up on some sweet lucy or a tankard of
muscatel, and so you just don't dip into the wallet for somebody like that.
But every once in a sometime they fool you. This Richard was eating well, so I
told the guy behind the cash register not to take his money, that I was paying
for it, and Richard could maybe have a second meal, or buy a hat, or get a
life. It was easier, after that, to go downtown.
* * * *
Not only has his throat been cut literally from ear to ear practically
excising his head from his neck, not only was the rip strong and deep enough
to sever the carotid, the jugularand the trachea we're talking someone with
heavy-dutypower ! but I put his age at something over a hundred, maybe a
hundred and two, a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred fifty, there's no way of
judging something like this, I've never seen anything like it in all my years;
but I have totell you that this one-hundred-and-two-year-old corpse, this old
man lying here all blue and empty, this old man ... is pregnant.
Dear Old Doc Death had hair growing out of his ears. He had a gimp on his
starboard side. He did tend to drool and spit a mite when he was deep in
conversation or silent communication with (I supposed) the spirits of the
departed. But he was an award-winning sawbones. He could smell decay before
the milk went sour, before the rot started to manifest itself. If he said this
headless horseman was over a hundred years old, I might wrinkle my brow and
have to lave myself with vitamin E moisturizer later that night but I'd make
book he was dead on. Not a good choice of phrase, dead on. Right. I'd bet he
was right. Correct.
What're we talking here, Doc, some kind of artificial insemination?
He shook his head. No, not that easy. He breathed heavily, as if he didn't
want to move forward with the story. But I caught a whiff of dinner-breath,
anyway. Then he spoke very softly, sort of motioning me in closer. Fettucine
Alfredo. Look, Francine, I've been at this forever. But with all I've seen,
all I've known of the variety of the human condition ... never anything like
this. The man has two complete sets of internal organs. Two hearts. Two
livers, kidneys, alimentary canals, sixteen sinuses, two complete nervous
systems interlocked and twisting around each other like some insane roller
coasters and one of those sets is female, and the other is male. What we have
here is
Hermaphrodite?
No, goddamit! He actually snapped at me. Not some freak of nature, not
some flunked transvestism exercise. What I'm describing to you, Francine, is
two complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carcass. And the
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woman in there is about three months gone with child. I'd say it would have
been a perfectly normal but how am I to know, really a perfectly normal little
girl. Now, all three of them are dead.
We talked for a lot longer. It never got any clearer. It never got any easier
to believe. If it had come from anyone but Dear Old Doc Death, I'd've had the
teller of the tale wrapped in the big Band-Aid. But who could doubt a man with
that much moss coming out of his earholes?
* * * *
One of the supermodels was Hypatia. Like Iman or Paulina or Vendela. One name.
Maybe before the advent of blusher she was something additional, something
Polish or Trinidadian, but to eyes that rested on glossy pages of fashion
magazines, she was one name. Hypatia.
Candor: I wanted to kill her. No one of the same sex is supposed to look that
good after wallowing in an alley, on her knees, in the rain and garbage, amid
blood and failure.
Care to tell me about it?
She stared back at me across a vast, windy emptiness. I sighed softly. Just
once, lord, I thought, just once give me Edna St. Vincent Millay to
interrogate, and not Betty Boop.
I don't know what you mean, she said. Gently. I almost believed she didn't
have a clue.
Well, how about this for a place to begin: you are a pretty famous
celebrity, make many hundreds of thousands of dollars just to smile at a
camera for a few hours, and you're wearing a Halston suit I'd price at maybe
six-five or seven thousand dollars. And you were on Skid Row, outside the
Midnight Mission where the name Donna Karan has never been spoken kneeling in
a pool of blood spilled by an old, old man, and you're crying as if you'd lost
your one great love.
I did.
* * * *
The other two were equally as helpful. Camilla DelFerro was brave, but barely
coherent. She was so wacked, she kept mixing her genders, sometimes calling
him her. Angie Rose just kept bawling. They were no help. They just kept
claiming they'd loved the old guy, that they couldn't go on without him, and
that if they could be permitted, if it wasn't an inconvenience, they would all
three like to be buried with him. Dead or alive, our option. Wacked; we're
talking wacked here.
And they mentioned, in passing, the green light.
Don't ask.
When I turned in my prelim, the Boss gave me one of his looks. Not the one
that suggests you're about to be recycled, or the one that says it's all over
for you ... the one that says if I had a single wish, it would be that you
hadn't put these pages in front of me. He sighed, shoved back his chair, and
took off his glasses, rubbing those two red spots on the wings of his nose
where the frames pinched. No one saw anything else? No one with a grudge, a
score to settle, a fight over a bottle of wine, a pedestrian pissed off the
old guy tried to brace him for loose change?
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I spread my hands. You've got it there, all of it. The women are of no
earthly help. They just keep saying they loved him, and that they can't live
without him. In fact, we've got two of them on suicide watch. They might
justnot want to live without him. Boss, I'm at a total loss on this one.
He shoved back from the desk, slid down the chair till his upper weight was
resting on his coccyx, and stared at me.
What?
He waggled his head, as if to saynothing, nothing at all . He reached out an
enormous catcher's mitt of a hand and tore a little square off his notepad,
wadded it, and began to chew it. Never understood that: kids in home-room with
spit-wads, office workers with their minds elsewhere, people chewing paper.
Never could figure that out.
So, if it's nothing, Boss, why d'you keep staring at me like I just fell off
the moon or something?
When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?
I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four
times my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug
delivered by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married, with
great-grandchildren stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox
Catholic; and he bit his nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even
genuinely, shocked.
Hey, don't we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having
to haul your tired old ass up on sexualhare -assment?
You wish. He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. So? Gimme a date,
I'll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade.
I didn't think this was amusing. I live the way I like.
You live like shit.
I could feel the heat in my cheeks. I don't have to
No; you don't. But I've watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your
step-father, and I knew Andy...
Leave Andy out of it. What's done is done.
Whatever. Andy's gone, a long time now he's been gone, and I don't see you
moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one
of these days they'll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you
live in, and they'll bust open the door, and there you'll be, all leathery and
oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those
two creepy brothers...
The Collyer Brothers.
Yeah. The Collyer Brothers.
I don't think that'll happen.
Right. And I never thought we'd elect some half-assed actor for President.
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Clinton wasn't an actor.
Tell that to Bob Dole.
It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar
crap had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like shit again, the way I'd
felt before dinner. Are you done beating up on me? He shook his head slowly,
wearily.
Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we'll start all over. I thanked him, and
I went home. Tomorrow, we'll start all over. Right at the level of glistening
black alleys. I felt like shit.
* * * *
I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage-filled alley.
The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was
reassuring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. Yeah? I
wasn't as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end
was Razzia down at the house. The three women ... them models...?
Yeah, what about them?
They're gone.
So big deal. They were material witnesses, that's all. We know where to find
em.
No, you don't understand. They'rereally gone. As in vanished. Poof! Green
light ... and gone.
I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. Green light?
Urey had em in tow, he was takin em down the front steps, and there was
this green light, and Urey's standin there with his dick in his mitt. He
coughed nervously. In a manner'a speakin'.
I was silent.
So, uh, Lootenant, they're, uh, like no longer wit us.
I got it. They're gone. Poof.
I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed.
Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for
me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk
with love who now had vanished in front of everyone's eyes; and we still had
an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread
The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.
I didn't collect old newspapers. I had a subscription toTime . And the J.
Crew catalogue.
* * * *
And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to
me.
As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early
forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the
force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed
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the dream of true love.
She appeared in a green light. I understood that ... it was part of the
dream, from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a
green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how
beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla
had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was ...
and we made love.
If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go
softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess,
and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.
I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted
from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with
her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in
each other's adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.
I said: take me away.
And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the
three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to
death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending
monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.
* * * *
I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more
profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life
that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon-scented place for a
very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would
not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to
move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted
eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.
I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of
our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she ... or he,
sometimes ... had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other
women. With other men.
But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the
best eternity of my life, yet she carried that damned thing inside her with
more love thanever she had shown me. As it grew, asit became the inevitable
love-object, I withered.
Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with
whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose ... but
from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light
now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won't be there to see it.
Not this time.
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