Spiked (6 page)

Eccleston spotted Eddie and waved him over. Eddie walked Melissa slowly up the line, warning under his breath, “It's Manny the Mangler.”

“Huh?”

“Just don't laugh.”

Eddie introduced Melissa to the councilman. They shook hands, and then Eccleston said gravely, “Danny was a pillow of the community.”

Eddie felt Melissa's gaze, but kept a solemn face pointed to Eccleston and apologized for not returning his call immediately that morning. The councilman leaned close to talk business. The only wake that slowed down a Lowell politician was the very last one he attended.

“I want to feed you a story about the old church,” Eccleston whispered. His breath smelled of boiled eggs and Listerine.

Eccleston was referring to St. Francis de Sales. The diocese had closed it nearly twenty years ago. Eccleston had been floating a plan to take the land by eminent domain, and tear down the old church to make space for public projects. Eddie had heard rumblings of opposition from a neighborhood group.

Eddie cupped a hand to his ear. “I'm listening.”

“That old building is a real sore eye,” said Eccleston. “It's been an Alcatraz around the city's neck for years. I'll leak you a report that demonstrates absolutely no integrity.”

“Huh?”

“The building—no integrity.”

“You mean the building lacks structural integrity?”

“Right. I'll have it on your desk by the end of the week.”

Eddie nodded. There were more handshakes, and then Eddie walked Melissa back to the end of the line. She whispered to him, “I nearly bit my poor tongue clean through.”

They shuffled along with the crowd, winding down stairs and through three pine-paneled rooms in the basement of the funeral home. The hushed mourners seemed like zombies in a catatonic line dance, plodding across the undertaker's rose-colored carpet. Eddie left his overcoat and Melissa's jacket with the coat checker, and then hunched his shoulders to hide the ill fit of his suit. His cell phone vibrated. Caller I.D. showed that Phife was on the line, but there was no place to talk. Gordon would have to call back.

Near the end of the line, a small table draped in shimmering pink fabric displayed Nowlin's photo in a stand-up frame and a few relics from his life, including a twelve-inch lock of reddish hair, braided into a ponytail. Nowlin had worn long hair until his wedding. He let Jesse snip it at their reception with hedge shears. There was a reporter's flip-top notebook on the table, opened to a page of scribbles done in black ink, and Nowlin's laminated press identification card from the state police.

The line finally brought them to the closed casket—a deep brown poplar model with silver hardware—and to Jesse. A golden shaft of sunlight streamed into the basement chamber through a window high on the wall above the coffin. The light illuminated bits of dust spinning above Jesse's head.

Danny's widow was twenty-nine, the director of a small art gallery in upscale Concord, a half-hour south of Lowell. She was barely five feet tall, nicely proportioned, with sweet blue eyes, like a newborn's. For her husband's wake, she wore an unflattering black dress that hung straight from her shoulders and hid the heart-shaped tattoo on her ankle. Her short blonde hair, usually worn spiked, was jelled back flat against her scalp.

There were no children with her. Jesse could not conceive, and the Nowlins had planned to adopt. Last year, Danny had written a first-person commentary about the red tape hassles of adopting from overseas. Today it seemed a blessing. Jesse embraced Melissa lightly, and then Eddie. Her touch was distant, the way a political opponent hugs to fake reconciliation after a nasty primary.

“You don't have to go through this alone,” Eddie said.

“You get used to being alone,” Jesse said. Her voice was flat. Her eyes looked past him.

Used to it? “Is there anything I can, ah, do for you?”

“Thank you, Danny's done quite enough.” With that, she turned to the next person in line and the current swept Eddie along. He gave Melissa a raised eyebrow, but she showed no reaction.

They greeted Nowlin's father, his sister, stepsister, and assorted relations arranged in what seemed to be decreasing order of emotional distress. Nowlin's father could barely stand. The teenaged cousin from Oakland at the end of the line probably got more upset when the Raiders failed to cover the spread.

The line emptied through a wide archway into a reception room. It was crowded with mourners, many of them holding flaky pastries and collecting their crumbs into white cocktail napkins.

Pastries? Then there had to be coffee.

Eddie left Melissa and eased through the crowd as fast as courtesy allowed. He tried to make sense of what Jesse had said. She was used to being alone? Nowlin worked long hours when the news got hot, but all the reporters did that. And Danny had done quite enough? Enough what? He got himself killed somehow. Is that what she meant?

There was a two-gallon chrome coffee carafe on a long maple table in the back of the room. Eddie grabbed a Styrofoam cup and pulled the handle to let the mind-juice flow.

Damn. Empty.

He held the cup in place and tilted the dispenser forward. Watery brew dribbled out. Slowly, slowly. Just a little more—

A reflection in the chrome caught his eye. Red mittens. And a face he had seen before. Eddie glanced over his shoulder. In the window above the casket, a woman peered into the chamber. Her breath froze a small white patch on the glass. The wind pulled her hair and the ends of her white scarf.

She was the Cambodian woman who had watched from the rooftop when the police took Nowlin from the water.

She looked older than Eddie had guessed before, maybe mid-thirties. She was also more stunning that he remembered. High, sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, and cords of muscle running down her neck, like an adolescent boy's warrior-princess fantasy girl, peeking into the wake of the man she had watched police take from the canal.

Eddie paid attention. There was no such thing as coincidence.

The woman stepped out of sight, only to appear a moment later across the reception room. She spoke to no one as she walked past people waiting in line, then stopped before the table with Nowlin's picture. She studied it briefly, then glanced about the room. Eddie turned around and pretended to get more coffee. He watched her in the chrome. She stepped toward the table for an instant, spun around and paced toward the exit.

Melissa was tied up, nodding politely as two school board candidates bent her ear. Leaving her behind, Eddie exited faster than courtesy permitted, covering bumps and gentle shoves with a string of apologies.

By the time he had reached the street, the woman was already a block away. With no time to collect his overcoat, Eddie turned up the collar of his suit jacket, jammed his hands in his pants pockets and walked after her. The winter air iced his sinuses and the wind shredded his coat as he followed her deeper, into the jumble of windy streets, misshapen city blocks and triple-deckers known as the Acre.

Chapter 7

He had lost her.

The three kids yelled Spanish over the pulse of American rap music beating from a radio so big it should have had wheels. They discussed Eddie's loud and haltingly spoken questions and wild gesticulations that were meant to ask: Have you seen a woman with red mittens?

Somewhere in this labyrinth of streets, originally laid out by Irish immigrants to resemble the labyrinth they had left back home, the woman from the funeral home had vanished. In his search for her, Eddie had twice walked past these kids playing music and kicking a beanbag to each other without letting it touch the street. A woman with centerfold looks wouldn't slip unnoticed past these three boys sprouting puberty's peach fuzz above their lips. It was just a matter of slogging through the language barrier. Eddie's command of Spanish was limited. He could count to eight. For words, he knew
muchas gracias
. That would be handy if the kids were able to help him.

The kids were patient. Eddie's pantomime of pulling mittens on his hands and combing long hair eventually got the question across, or seemed to. The kids covered their mouths and laughed and howled. Yeah, they saw some woman, all right.

They pointed down the street, toward a row of triple-decker tenement buildings. The kids nodded and chattered with excitement.

“Down here?” Eddie said, pointing where they were pointing.

Yes, yes. They were quite sure of it.

“This house?”

No not that one. The next.

“That one?”

Yes, yes. They all agreed.

Eddie tapped fists with each of them, and thanked them in Spanish. They said, “you're welcome” in English, and resumed the beanbag game.

The triple-decker was shedding its skin. Light blue paint curled off the building. A witty drug dealer had scrawled advertising on the house:
“Got crack?”

The building had a covered porch supported by old wooden columns, gouged by dry rot. Three windows jutted out in a first-floor bay. They were covered by weathered plywood streaked with rust stains from the nails. Windows on the second floor were glass, though each was cracked in a spider-web pattern, a small hole in the middle, where the spider would sit.

There was no front door—just another tall sheet of plywood, attached crooked to the doorframe by two brass hinges. A V-shaped chunk was missing from the board about halfway up, opposite the hinges. The wood was brighter around the damaged section, not aged gray like the rest. Somebody had recently smashed off a padlock fixture.

Three great granite steps led to the porch. Eddie climbed them, and then pulled the makeshift door. The hinges groaned. Eddie gasped at the sound and clenched his free hand into a fist. It was a fight-or-flight instinct, in case he had to throw a punch before he could run. But nobody was there. There was a damp smoky smell inside, like from an old campfire.

Bizarre graffiti covered the walls of the narrow hallway behind the door, a dozen grotesque caricatures, each as tall as Eddie, drawn in black and red, as if Van Gogh had painted an acid trip on Easter Island. The bodies of the figures were stick frames, skinny and twisted. Their giant, elongated heads were warped and lumpy. They had gaping mouths full of jagged teeth, and their eyes were rotated half a turn, so that they watched Eddie vertically. Each head had a gushing red wound.

Eddie reached in and touched the painting closest to the door. Red paint, still tacky, came off onto his fingertip. The heat from his walk through the Acre drained away and he shivered. Fear kissed his cheek.

He saw a large room at the end of the hall. Dim yellow sunlight fought through dust on the windows. There was a dirty sofa down there. It might have been white once. A wool blanket was neatly folded and laid over the sofa back. There were soda bottles and brightly colored fast food wrappers on the floor, and a shopping cart on its side.

Eddie stuck his head in the door and listened. If there was anything to hear, the rap music blaring down the street swallowed up the sound. Eddie closed the plywood, turned away down the steps and blew hot breath into his cupped hands. The police would want to know about this place, and about the woman from the rooftop and the wake.

He stopped to think.

If the woman with the red mittens was there, and if she knew something about the case, the cops would sit on it for a week, and then call a press conference. Channel Eight would send Boden and he'd lead the six-o'clock broadcast from these granite steps. Eddie would have the story in the next day's paper, one news cycle later.

Eddie blew a long cone of frozen breath. He climbed the steps again and pulled open the door.
Let them all read about this place in The Empire
.

The house had no heat, but at least no wind. Eddie inched down the hallway, past the giant painted heads. The rotten floorboards had an unnerving, creaky spring to them.

The room at the end of the hall was once a parlor. There was a tile fireplace at one end, though the mantle had been pried away. Black ash was spread in a half-circle around the fire pit, like somebody had cleaned the pit by kicking ash into the room. At the other end of the parlor, grand wooden stairs curved up to the second floor. Spindle rods stuck up from a few of the steps, where once had rested a banister.

There were a dozen more giant graffiti heads here. Most resembled the ones in the hallway. But one was much larger, stretching from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling. Its eyes were black circles, the size of manholes. Its body was stubby and meatier than the rest. The head had a pair of horns curling up, like a ram's. Both arms ended in pistols in the place of hands. Squiggly hand-painted letters, like those on signs at Cambodian markets around the neighborhood, spelled things that Eddie could not understand.

If you measured art by its effect on the viewer, this decrepit house was a masterpiece. The painted figure stole Eddie's breath like hands around his throat. His eyes passed from the horns to the guns and settled on the big black saucers. They were more like holes than eyes, burned out by something they had witnessed.

He kicked through the trash. Nothing. And then through the fireplace ash. He discovered a stain on the floor. Blood?

There was a noise, a light bump above him. Eddie looked to the ceiling. Puffs of white dust dropped from a crack in the plaster. Somebody was walking across the room above.

Fear joined Eddie in the parlor.

He inspected the stairs. Fresh footsteps had swept a track through the dust, up the center of the staircase. Eddie held his breath and rested a foot upon the first stair. He let the breath out and eased his weight up. The stair moaned. Eddie grimaced and froze in place. To his ear, he might as well have stepped on bagpipes. He fought the urge to run.

Thirty seconds passed.

Nothing happened.

Eddie took another step. That stair didn't complain.

Up the stairs and out of sight, somebody—a man—spoke out loud. It sounded like chanting. Eddie couldn't make out the words, just the rhythm. The cadence seemed to repeat itself. It didn't come any closer so he waited, listening. It repeated over and over, as if the voice was stuck on the same line in a song or poem.

Fear brushed her chapped lips over the little hairs at the top of Eddie's spine.

Eddie decided on a plan. He would see what was up there, and run if anybody saw him, right to the cops. He tried to ignore Gordon Phife's voice in his head, quoting from the movie
Tremors
: “Running's not a plan. Running's what you do when a plan fails.”

The voice covered any noise from the stairs, and Eddie hurried on his toes up twelve more steps to a darkened hallway with dirty white walls. He peeked around the corner. An open doorway at the end of the long hall glowed red. From the top of the stairs, the voice was clear. It was low and raspy, repeating a short chant, maybe a sentence or two, in a language Eddie did not understand; certainly not Spanish, probably something Southeast Asian. He tried to memorize the chant phonetically.

Too fast. I'll never remember this
.

Eddie pulled out his cell phone and dialed The Empire. He punched in his own extension. It rang four times, and then transferred to voice mail. He waited for the beep, and then held the phone toward the red-lit room. He let the chant repeat twice, and then broke the connection.

The phone grew slick in his sweaty hand. He squeezed it and edged closer to the voice. Halfway down the hall, he could see a sliver of the room. There, on a knee-high pile of newspaper by the door, was a pair of red mittens.

Edging closer, he peered from darkness into the red light.

The Cambodian woman stood with her back to Eddie, in front of a round kitchen table draped in newspaper. The chanting continued from deeper in the room, out of Eddie's view. Above the table, strung on a wire, hung two small battery lanterns. They were wrapped in red plastic tape. To the right of the table stood an easel. It displayed a large black-and-white photograph Eddie had never seen before, but recognized in an instant.

It was a picture of Danny Nowlin.

The photo measured about fourteen inches diagonally, and was of poor quality. The pixels were too big, like it had been enlarged from a smaller print without the negative. Danny sat alone in the picture, a posed smile on his face.

The chanting stopped and the woman stepped aside. On a square of white handkerchief at the center of the table rested Nowlin's reddish ponytail. She had stolen it, stolen it from the wake in front of everyone. Stunned, Eddie fixated on the lock of hair.

When he glanced to the woman again, she was staring back at him.

That's when Fear nestled up behind him and raked her razor red nails over his Adam's apple. Eddie tried to swallow the lump in his throat. It went down like a fistful of bobby pins.

The woman was still. Her expression said nothing. They both waited, waited.
Good God, she's beautiful—

Bzzzzzzz.

“Hey!” Eddie yelped. The telephone in his fist was ringing.
Not now Gordie!

A man's voice called out.

Eddie spun and ran with abandon, thundering down the hall.

The man yelled again. The language was a mystery to Eddie, but he understood the angry tone. Heavy footsteps pounded after him. Running seemed like a fine plan after all. Nobody could catch him, not with the lead he had.

Shadows flickered on the wall above the stairs. He thought he smelled smoke.

Then he heard a piercing crack, and the squeal of old eight-penny nails tearing from place. The floor rushed up at him and Eddie fought for balance. His right foot plunged through a broken floorboard, straight through thin ceiling slats and plaster, and then into space. His chest crashed to the floor and there was another loud crack.

The blow knocked the wind out of him. Pain crackled up his spine like electricity along a ragged wire. A scream stuck fast inside the vacuum of his empty lungs. Eddie clawed wildly at the floorboards, and then fell through them. He thrashed in the air, grabbing for something solid in the debris, and then instinctively wrapped his arms around his head and waited for the parlor floor.