Black House (15 page)

As Jack drives past the boys, the first, a scowling heavyweight with the inflamed face of a schoolyard bully, displays an upraised second finger. The next two continue the imitations of their great-grandfathers having a hot night out in 1921 and gape, idiotically, mouths slack and open. The fourth boy, whose dark blond hair beneath a Brewers cap, bright eyes, and general air of innocence make him the nicest-looking of the group, gazes directly into Jack’s face and gives him a sweet, tentative smile. This is Tyler Marshall, out for a spin—though he is completely unaware of it—into no-man’s-land.

The boys glide into the background, and Jack glances into the mirror to see them pedaling furiously up the street, Sluggo in front, the smallest, most appealing one in the rear, already falling behind.

“A sidewalk panel of experts has reported in on the Dirtysperm,” Jack says. “Four kids on bikes.” Since he can scarcely make out his words, he does not think Henry will be able to hear them at all.

Henry, it seems, has heard him perfectly, and he responds with a question that disappears into the uproar. Having a reasonably good idea of what it must have been, Jack answers it anyhow. “One firm negative, two undecideds tending toward negative, and one cautious positive.” Henry nods.

Violent marzipan-destruction crashes and thuds to a conclusion on Eleventh Street. As if a haze has blown from the cab, as if the windshield has been freshly washed, the air seems clearer, the colors more vibrant. “Interesting,” Henry says. He reaches unerringly for the
EJECT
button, extracts the disc from the holder, and slips it into its case. “That was very revealing, don’t you think? Raw, self-centered hatred should never be dismissed automatically. Morris Rosen was right. It’s perfect for the Wisconsin Rat.”

“Hey, I think they could be bigger than Glenn Miller.”

“That reminds me,” Henry says. “You’ll never guess what I’m doing later. I have a gig! Chipper Maxton, actually his second in command, this Rebecca Vilas woman, who I am sure is as gorgeous as she sounds, hired me to put on a record hop as the slam-bang climax to Maxton’s big Strawberry Fest. Well, not me—an old, long-neglected persona of mine, Symphonic Stan, the Big-Band Man.”

“Do you need a ride?”

“I do not. The wondrous Miss Vilas has attended to my needs, in the form of a car with a comfy back seat for my turntable and a trunk spacious enough for the speakers and record cartons, which she will be sending. But thanks anyhow.”

“Symphonic Stan?” Jack said.

“A knocked-out, all-frantic, all-zoot-suit embodiment of the big-band era, and a charming, mellifluous gentleman besides. For the residents of Maxton’s, an evocation of their salad days and a joy to behold.”

“Do you actually own a zoot suit?”

Magnificently inexpressive, Henry’s face swings toward him.

“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. To change the subject, what you said, I mean what George Rathbun said, about the Fisherman this morning probably did a lot of good. I was glad to hear that.”

Henry opens his mouth and summons George Rathbun in all his avuncular glory.
“
‘The original Fisherman, boys and girls, Albert Fish, has been dead and gone for sixty-seven years.’
”
It is uncanny, hearing the voice of that charged-up fat man leap from Henry Leyden’s slender throat. In his own voice, Henry says, “I hope it did some good. After I read your buddy Wendell Green’s nonsense in the paper this morning, I thought George had to say
something.
”

Henry Leyden enjoys using terms like
I read, I was reading, I saw, I was looking at.
He knows these phrases disconcert his auditors. And he called Wendell Green “your buddy” because Henry is the only person to whom Jack has ever admitted that he alerted the reporter to the crimes of Albert Fish. Now Jack wishes he had confessed to no one. Glad-handing Wendell Green is not his buddy.

“Having been of some assistance to the press,” Henry says, “you might reasonably be thought in a position to do the same for our boys in blue. Forgive me, Jack, but you opened the door, and I’ll only say this once. Dale is my nephew, after all.”

“I don’t believe you’re doing this to me,” Jack says.

“Doing what, speaking my mind? Dale
is
my nephew, remember? He could use your expertise, and he is very much of the opinion that you owe him a favor. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you could help him stay in his job? Or that if you love French Landing and Norway Valley as much as you say, you owe these folks a little of your time and talent?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you, Henry, that I’m retired?” Jack says through gritted teeth. “That investigating homicides is the last thing, I mean, the
last
thing in the world I want to do?”

“Of course it has,” Henry says. “But—and again I hope you’ll forgive me, Jack—here you are, the person I know you are, with the skills you have, which are certainly far beyond Dale’s and probably well beyond all these other guys’, and I can’t help wondering what the hell your problem is.”

“I don’t have a
problem,
” Jack says. “I’m a civilian.”

“You’re the boss. We might as well listen to the rest of the Barenboim.” Henry runs his fingers over the console and pushes the button for the tuner.

For the next fifteen minutes, the only voice to be heard in the pickup’s cab is that of a Steinway concert grand meditating upon
The Goldberg Variations
in the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires. A splendid voice it is, too, Jack thinks, and you’d have to be an ignoramus to mistake it for Glenn Gould. A person capable of making that mistake probably couldn’t hear the vibration-like inner sound produced by a General Motors door handle.

When they turn right off Highway 93 onto Norway Valley Road, Henry says, “Stop sulking. I shouldn’t have called you a schmuck. And I shouldn’t have accused you of having a problem, because I’m the one with the problem.”

“You?” Jack looks at him, startled. Long experience has immediately suggested that Henry is about to ask for some kind of unofficial investigative help. Henry is facing the windshield, giving nothing away. “What kind of problem can
you
have? Did your socks get out of order? Oh—are you having trouble with one of the stations?”

“That, I could deal with.” Henry pauses, and the pause stretches into a lengthy silence. “What I was going to say is, I feel like I’m losing my mind. I think I’m going sort of crazy.”

“Come on.” Jack eases up on the gas pedal and cuts his speed in half. Has Henry witnessed a feather explosion? Of course he hasn’t; Henry cannot see anything. And his own feather explosion was merely a waking dream.

Henry quivers like a tuning fork. He is still facing the windshield.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Jack says. “I’m starting to worry about you.”

Henry opens his mouth to a crack that might accommodate a communion wafer, then closes it again. Another tremor runs through him.

“Hmm,” he says. “This is harder than I thought.” Astonishingly, his dry, measured voice, the true voice of Henry Leyden, wobbles with a wide, helpless vibrato.

Jack slows the pickup to a crawl, begins to say something, and decides to wait.

“I hear my wife,” Henry says. “At night, when I’m lying in bed. Around three, four in the morning. Rhoda’s footsteps are moving around in the kitchen, they’re coming up the stairs. I must be losing my mind.”

“How often does this happen?”

“How many times? I don’t know, exactly. Three or four.”

“Do you get up and look for her? Call out her name?”

Henry’s voice again sails up and down on the vibrato trampoline. “I’ve done both those things. Because I was sure I heard her. Her
footsteps,
her way of walking, her
tread.
Rhoda’s been gone for six years now. Pretty funny, huh? I’d think it was funny, if I didn’t think I was going bats.”

“You call out her name,” Jack says. “And you get out of bed and go downstairs.”

“Like a lunatic, like a madman. ‘Rhoda? Is that you, Rhoda?’ Last night, I went all around the house. ‘Rhoda? Rhoda?’ You’d think I was expecting her to answer.” Henry pays no attention to the tears that leak from beneath his aviator glasses and slip down his cheeks. “And I was, that’s the problem.”

“No one else was in the house,” Jack says. “No signs of disturbance. Nothing misplaced or missing, or anything like that.”

“Not as far as I saw. Everything was still where it should have been. Right where I left it.” He raises a hand and wipes his face.

The entrance to Jack’s looping driveway slides past on the right side of the cab.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Jack says, picturing Henry wandering through his darkened house. “Six years ago, you went through all the grief business that happens when someone you love dies and leaves you, the denial, the bargaining, the anger, the pain, whatever, acceptance, that whole range of emotions, but afterward you still missed Rhoda. No one ever says you keep on missing the dead people you loved, but you do.”

“Now, that’s profound,” Henry says. “And comforting, too.”

“Don’t interrupt. Weirdness happens. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Your mind rebels. It distorts the evidence, it gives false testimony. Who knows why? It just does.”

“In other words, you go batshit,” Henry says. “I believe that is where we came in.”

“What I mean,” Jack says, “is that people can have waking dreams. That’s what is happening to you. It’s nothing to worry about. All right, here’s your drive, you’re home.”

He turns into the grassy entrance and rolls up to the white farmhouse in which Henry and Rhoda Leyden had spent the fifteen lively years between their marriage and the discovery of Rhoda’s liver cancer. For nearly two years after her death, Henry went wandering through his house every evening, turning on the lights.

“Waking dreams? Where’d you get that one?”

“Waking dreams aren’t uncommon,” Jack says. “Especially in people who never get enough sleep, like you.”
Or like me,
he silently adds. “I’m not making this up, Henry. I’ve had one or two myself. One, anyhow.”

“Waking dreams,” Henry says in a different, considering tone of voice. “Ivey-divey.”

“Think about it. We live in a rational world. People do not return from the dead. Everything happens for a reason, and the
reasons
are always rational. It’s a matter of chemistry or coincidence. If they weren’t rational, we’d never figure anything out, and we’d never know what was going on.”

“Even a blind man can see that,” Henry says. “Thanks. Words to live by.” He gets out of the cab and closes the door. He moves away, steps back, and leans in through the window. “Do you want to start on
Bleak House
tonight? I should get home about eight-thirty, something like that.”

“I’ll turn up around nine.”

By way of parting, Henry says, “Ding-dong.” He turns away, walks to his doorstep, and disappears into his house, which is of course unlocked. Around here, only parents lock their doors, and even that’s a new development.

Jack reverses the pickup, swings down the drive and onto Norway Valley Road. He feels as though he has done a doubly good deed, for by helping Henry he has also helped himself. It’s nice, how things turn out sometimes.

When he turns into his own long driveway, a peculiar rattle comes from the ashtray beneath his dashboard. He hears it again at the last curve, just before his house comes into view. The sound is not so much a rattle as a small, dull clunk. A button, a coin—something like that. He rolls to a stop at the side of his house, turns off the engine, and opens his door. On an afterthought, he reaches over and pulls out the ashtray.

What Jack finds nestled in the grooves at the bottom of the sliding tray, a tiny robin’s egg, a robin’s egg the size of an almond M&M, expels all the air from his body.

The little egg is so blue a blind man could see it.

Jack’s trembling fingers pluck the egg from the ashtray. Staring at it, he leaves the cab and closes the door. Still staring at the egg, he finally remembers to breathe. His hand revolves on his wrist and releases the egg, which falls in a straight line to the grass. Deliberately, he lifts his foot and smashes it down onto the obscene blue speck. Without looking back, he pockets his keys and moves toward the dubious safety of his house.

PART TWO

The Taking of
Tyler Marshall

5

W
E GLIMPSED A
janitor on our whirlwind early-morning tour of Maxton Elder Care—do you happen to remember him? Baggy overalls? A wee bit thick in the gut? Dangling cigarette in spite of the
NO SMOKING
!
LUNGS AT WORK
!
signs that have been posted every twenty feet or so along the patient corridors? A mop that looks like a clot of dead spiders? No? Don’t apologize. It’s easy enough to overlook Pete Wexler, a onetime nondescript youth (final grade average at French Landing High School: 79) who passed through a nondescript young manhood and has now reached the edge of what he expects to be a nondescript middle age. His only hobby is administering the occasional secret, savage pinch to the moldy oldies who fill his days with their grunts, nonsensical questions, and smells of gas and piss. The Alzheimer’s assholes are the worst. He has been known to stub out the occasional cigarette on their scrawny backs or buttocks. He likes their strangled cries when the heat hits and the pain cores in. This small and ugly torture has a double-barreled effect: it wakes them up a little and satisfies something in him. Brightens his days, somehow. Refreshes the old outlook. Besides, who are they going to tell?

And oh God, there goes the worst of them now, shuffling slowly down the corridor of Daisy. Charles Burnside’s mouth is agape, as is the back of his johnny. Pete has a better view of Burnside’s scrawny, shit-smeared buttocks than he ever wanted. The chocolate stains go all the way down to the backs of his knees, by God. He’s headed for the bathroom, but it’s just a leetle bit late. A certain brown horse—call him Morning Thunder—has already bolted from its stall and no doubt galloped across Burny’s sheets.

Thank God cleaning ’em up isn’t my job,
Pete thinks, and smirks around his cigarette.
Over to you, Butch.

But the desk up there by the little boys’ and girls’ rooms is for the time being unattended. Butch Yerxa is going to miss the charming sight of Burny’s dirty ass sailing by. Butch has apparently stepped out for a smoke, although Pete has told the idiot a hundred times that all those
NO SMOKING
signs mean nothing—Chipper Maxton could care less about who smoked where (or where the smokes were butted out, for that matter). The signs are just there to keep good old Drooler Manor in compliance with certain tiresome state laws.

Pete’s smirk widens, and at that moment he looks a good deal like his son Ebbie, Tyler Marshall’s sometime friend (it was Ebbie Wexler, in fact, who just gave Jack and Henry the finger). Pete is wondering whether he should go out and tell Butch he’s got a little cleanup job in D18—plus D18’s occupant, of course—or if he should just let Butch discover Burny’s latest mess on his own. Perhaps Burny will go back to his room and do a little fingerpainting, kind of spread the joy around. That would be good, but it would also be good to see Butch’s face fall when Pete tells him—

“Pete.”

Oh no. Sandbagged by the bitch. She’s a fine-looking bitch, but a bitch is still a bitch. Pete stands where he is for a moment, thinking that maybe if he ignores her, she’ll go away.

Vain hope.

“Pete.”

He turns. There is Rebecca Vilas, current squeeze of the big cheese. Today she is wearing a light red dress, perhaps in honor of Strawberry Fest!, and black high-heeled pumps, probably in honor of her own fine gams. Pete briefly imagines those fine gams wrapped around him, those high heels crossed at the small of his back and pointing like clock hands, then sees the cardboard box she’s holding in her arms. Work for him, no doubt. Pete also notes the glinting ring on her finger, some sort of gemstone the size of a goddamn robin’s egg, although considerably paler. He wonders, not for the first time, just what a woman does to earn a ring like that.

She stands there, tapping her foot, letting him have his look. Behind him, Charles Burnside continues his slow, tottery progress toward the men’s. You’d think, looking at that old wreck with his scrawny legs and flyaway milkweed hair, that his running days were long behind him. But you’d be wrong. Terribly wrong.

“Miz Vilas?” Pete says at last.

“Common room, Pete. On the double. And how many times have you been told not to smoke in the patient wings?”

Before he can reply, she turns with a sexy little flirt of the skirt and starts off toward the Maxton common room, where that afternoon’s Strawberry Fest! dance will be held.

Sighing, Pete props his mop against the wall and follows her.

Charles Burnside is now alone at the head of the Daisy corridor. The vacancy leaves his eyes and is replaced with a brilliant and feral gleam of intelligence. All at once he looks younger. All at once Burny the human shit machine is gone. In his place is Carl Bierstone, who reaped the young in Chicago with such savage efficiency.

Carl . . . and something else. Something not human.

He
—it—
grins.

On the unattended desk is a pile of paper weighed down with a round stone the size of a coffee cup. Written on the stone in small black letters is
BUTCH’S PET ROCK.

Burny picks up Butch Yerxa’s pet rock and walks briskly toward the men’s room, still grinning.

In the common room, the tables have been arranged around the walls and covered with red paper cloths. Later, Pete will add small red lights (battery powered; no candles for the droolers, gosh, no). On the walls, great big cardboard strawberries have been taped up everywhere, some looking rather battered—they have been put up and taken down every July since Herbert Maxton opened this place at the end of the swingin’ sixties. The linoleum floor is open and bare.

This afternoon and early evening, the moldy oldies who are still ambulatory and of a mind to do so will shuffle around out there to the big-band sounds of the thirties and forties, clinging to each other during the slow numbers and probably dampening their Depends with excitement at the end of the jitterbugs. (Three years ago a moldy oldie named Irving Christie had a minor heart attack after doing a particularly strenuous lindyhop to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.”) Oh yes, the Strawberry Fest Hop is always exciting.

Rebecca has all by herself pushed together three wooden flats and covered them with a white cloth, creating the basis for Symphonic Stan’s podium. In the corner stands a brilliantly chromed microphone with a large round head, a genuine antique from the thirties that saw service at the Cotton Club. It is one of Henry Leyden’s prize possessions. Beside it is the tall, narrow carton in which it arrived yesterday. On the podium, beneath a beam decorated with red and white crepe and more cardboard strawberries, is a stepladder. Seeing it, Pete feels a moment’s possessive jealousy. Rebecca Vilas has been in his closet. Trespassing bitch! If she stole any of his weed, by God—

Rebecca sets her carton down on the podium with an audible grunt, then straightens up. She brushes a lock of silky chestnut hair off one flushed cheek. It’s only midmorning, but the day is going to be a genuine Coulee Country scorcher. Air-condition your underwear and double up on the deodorant, folks, as George Rathbun has been known to bellow.

“Oi thought you’d never come, me foine bucko,” Rebecca says.

“Well, I’m here,” Pete says sullenly. “Looks like you’re doing fine without me.” He pauses, then adds:
“Foine.”
For Pete, this is quite a witticism. He walks forward and peers into the carton, which, like the one by the mike, is stamped
PROPERTY OF HENRY LEYDEN.
Inside the box is a small spotlight with an electrical cord wrapped around it, and a circular pink gel that is meant to turn the light the color of candy canes and sugar strawberries.

“What’s this shit?” Pete asks.

Rebecca gives him a brilliant, dangerous smile. Even to a relatively dull fellow like Pete, the message of that smile is clear: you’re on the edge of the gator pool, buddy; how many more steps do you want to take?

“Light,” she says. “L-I-G-H-T. Hangs up there, on that hook. H-O-O-K. It’s something the deejay insists on. Says it gets him in the mood. M-O-O—”

“What happened to Weenie Erickson?” Pete grumbles. “There was none of this shit with Weenie. He played the goddamn records for two hours, had a few out of his hip flask, then shut it down.”

“He moved,” Rebecca says indifferently. “Racine, I think.”

“Well—” Pete is looking up, studying the beam with its intertwined fluffs of red and white crepe. “I don’t see no hook, Miz Vilas.”

“Christ on a bicycle,” she says, and mounts the stepladder. “Here. Are you blind?”

Pete, most definitely not blind, has rarely been so grateful for his sighted state. From his position below her, he’s got a clear view of her thighs, the red lace froth of her panties, and the twin curves of her buttocks, now nicely tensed as she stands on the fifth step of the ladder.

She looks down at him, sees the stunned look on his face, notes the direction of his sight line. Her expression softens a bit. As her dear mither so wisely observed, some men are just fools for a flash of panty.

“Pete. Earth to Pete.”

“Uh?” He looks up at her, mouth agape, a dot of spittle on his lower lip.

“There is no hook of any kind on my underwear, I’m sure of that as of few things in life. But if you will direct your gaze upward . . . to my hand instead of my ass . . .”

He looks up, face still dazed, and sees one red-tipped nail (Rebecca is a through-and-through vision in strawberry red today, no doubt about it) tapping a hook that just gleams out of the crepe, like a fisherman’s hook gleaming murderously out of a gaudy lure.

“Hook,” she says. “Attach gel to light, attach light to hook. Light becomes warm pink spotlight, as per deejay’s explicit instructions. You get-um message, Kemo sabe?”

“Uh . . . yeah . . .”

“Then, if I may coin a phrase, will you please get it up?”

She comes down the ladder, deciding Pete Wexler has gotten the biggest free show he can reasonably expect for one lousy chore. And Pete, who has already achieved one erection, pulls Symphonic Stan’s pink pinspot out of its box and prepares to achieve another. As he mounts the stepladder, his crotch rises past Rebecca’s face. She notes the bulge there and gnaws the inside of one cheek to suppress a smile. Men are fools, all right.
Lovable
fools, some of them, but fools, all the same. It’s just that some fools can afford rings and trips and midnight suppers at Milwaukee nightspots, and some fools cannot.

With some fools, the best you can get them to do is put up a lousy light.

“Wait up, you guys!” Ty Marshall calls. “Ebbie! Ronnie! T.J.! Wait
up
!”

Over his shoulder, Ebbie Wexler (who really
does
look like Nancy’s not-too-bright boyfriend, Sluggo) calls back: “Catch us, slowpoke!”

“Yeah!” Ronnie Metzger yells. “Catch us, po-sloke!” Ronnie, a kid with a lot of hours in the speech-therapy room ahead of him, looks back over his own shoulder, almost crashes his bike into a parking meter, and just manages to swerve around it. Then they are fleeing, the three of them filling the sidewalk with their bikes (God help the pedestrian headed the other way), their racing shadows fleeing beside them.

Tyler considers a final catch-up dash, then decides his legs are just too tired. His mother and father say that he
will
catch up in time, that he’s just small for his age, but brother, Ty has his doubts. And he has had increasing doubts about Ebbie, Ronnie, and T.J., too. Are they really worth keeping up
with
? (If Judy Marshall knew of these doubts, she would stand and applaud—she has wondered for the last two years when her bright and thoughtful son will finally tire of hanging out with such a bunch of losers . . . what she calls “low-raters.”)

“Suck an elf,” Ty says disconsolately—he has picked up this harmless vulgarity from Sci-Fi Channel reruns of a miniseries called
The 10th Kingdom—
and dismounts his bike. There’s no real reason to speed after them, anyway; he knows where he’ll find them, in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, drinking Slurpees and trading Magic cards. This is another problem Tyler is having with his friends. These days he’d much rather trade baseball cards. Ebbie, Ronnie, and T.J. could care less about the Cardinals, the Indians, the Red Sox, and the Brew Crew. Ebbie has gone so far as to say that baseball is gay, a comment Ty considers stupid (almost pitiable) rather than outrageous.

He walks his bike slowly up the sidewalk, catching his breath. Here is the intersection of Chase and Queen streets. Ebbie calls Queen Street Queer Street. Of course. No surprise there. And isn’t that a big part of the problem? Tyler is a boy who likes surprises; Ebbie Wexler is a boy who doesn’t. Which makes their opposite reactions to the music pouring out of the pickup a little earlier that morning perfectly predictable.

Tyler pauses at the corner, looking down Queen Street. There are shaggy hedges on both sides. Above those on the right rise a number of interconnected red roofs. The old folks’ home. Beside the main gate, some sort of sign has been placed. Curious, Tyler remounts his bike and rides slowly down the sidewalk for a look. The longest branches of the hedge beside him whisper against the handlebar of his bike.

The sign turns out to be a great big strawberry.
TODAY IS STRAWBERRY FEST
!!!
is written below it. What, Ty Marshall wonders, is a Strawberry Fest? A party, something strictly for old folks? It’s a question, but not a very interesting one. After mulling it over for a few seconds, he turns his bike and prepares to ride back down to Chase Street.

Charles Burnside enters the men’s room at the head of the Daisy corridor, still grinning and clutching Butch’s pet rock. To his right is a line of sinks with a mirror over each one—they are the sort of metal mirrors one finds in the toilets of lower-class bars and saloons. In one of these, Burny sees his own grinning reflection. In another, the one closest the window, he sees a small boy in a Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt. The boy is standing astride his bike, just outside the gate, reading the Strawberry Fest! sign.