The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (39 page)

“And that’s when Di came home? She actually found you in her apartment?”

“Oh, shit, Sylvia. I’ve been kicking myself around the block about this. I know what a lawyer could make of it—I planted the evidence, but miscalculated; Di came home too soon.”

“Di’s thought of that too. Count on it.” Cappello spoke through clenched teeth. “Listen, I’m sending someone else to watch Di tonight. You take the night off, okay?”

If Di’s the Axeman and she gets off because I screwed up, I’m going to die. I’m just not going to be able to get through it.

In fact, I might die anyway
.

She was so depressed she didn’t even phone Steve. She went and got a joint from Jimmy Dee, and tried to think of a way out.

SUNDAYS WERE GREAT as far as Sonny was concerned. Casualties from the Saturday-Night Knife and Gun Club were more or less taken care of—oh, there might be one or two still lying on gurneys if there was a bed shortage, which there usually was, but they were going to make it. And if they didn’t, it wasn’t Sonny’s fault.

There could be an auto accident, but there probably wouldn’t be. Some amateur handyman might cut his hand or something. Maybe a kid would fall and break a leg. An old lady could be sitting in church and notice her ankles were swollen. Everybody’d be too hung over to commit violent crimes.

If every day were like Sunday, he wouldn’t have to worry about getting through the damn rotation. He strode in the back door of the hospital, whistling, in a hell of a mood. Hardly a soul stirred in the waiting room. A tired-looking black woman with a toddler at her heels was shaking an old man sitting in a wheelchair near the wall. He had fallen forward in sleep—no telling how long he’d been waiting. “Daddy?
Daddy!
Oh, my Lord, he’s in a coma!”

She was hysterical, or maybe nuts, but Sonny was in a great mood. He was supposed to be a healer and this morning he felt like one. He walked over to the woman, thinking to help, and as he did, the old man fell to the floor. Sonny dropped and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. The man’s wrist was cold.

The woman was wailing, “I had to go back home, be with my baby. I couldn’t stay; I just couldn’t stay. Now my daddy’s done gone into a coma and I couldn’t be here to do nothin’ about it.”

Sonny felt as cold as the man on the floor. Woodenly, his arms heavy and mechanical, those of a toy soldier, he started doing chest compressions, knowing there was no use. The triage nurse rushed by, came back with help.

When they had him on a roller, Sonny leaped aboard, straddled him, and kept working, looking into a pair of fixed and dilated pupils. Futilely they went through the motions—the shock, the IV, the tube; when he saw the flat line on the monitor, he didn’t even wait for the charge resident to say the phrase “DOA.” He stopped working, and left, his own chest constricted. He had thought of going out again, to get out in the air, but he’d forgotten the man’s daughter would still be in the waiting room.

“My daddy? My daddy?” she said, unable to ask the question.

“I’m sorry.”

“I couldn’t stay with him; I wanted to, I just couldn’t.”

“It’s not your fault, there was nothing you could do. It was just your daddy’s time.”

“My daddy ain’t dead. He ain’t dead! He just in a coma.”

He probably shouldn’t be dead. Probably wouldn’t be if he’d gone to a private clinic, if he hadn’t been a poor man who’d had to sit for hours in a waiting room, silently slipping through the cracks, dying with no one even noticing.

He left her without another word, went back outside, stood on the ramp, and took deep breaths.

It shouldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t have happened
.

Blood pounded in his ears along with the refrain.
I
t wasn’t my fault; didn’t happen on my shift.

Why couldn’t he convince himself?

He went in with a black cloud over his head, engulfing him. Before, he had been quick of step, senses alert, a healer. Now he felt as dead as the man on the floor, as depressed and guilty as his daughter. About as much like a healer as the bewildered kid hanging on to her.

The thing wouldn’t lift. All morning he went through the motions—asking questions, comforting, helping out where he could—and it was all empty action, all performed by a robot. Sonny was hovering somewhere above himself, not the one doing the work at all.

Missy brought sandwiches at mid-afternoon, and he was surprised to see her, had forgotten she was coming. He wasn’t hungry at all.

She said, “Want to go up on the roof?”

“Sure.” He was surprised to find that he did, that once more he longed for air, for relief from these yellowish tile walls, from this suffering. He was surprised to find he had any preferences at all.

Knowing he hadn’t eaten before he left home, she had brought egg salad on whole wheat, a sort of delayed breakfast. She’d found potato chips without salt (she disapproved strongly of salt), had sliced carrot sticks, and had even somehow dug up some peanut butter cookies, his favorite.

He was annoyed by her solicitude. By her relentlessness, by her neediness, by her inability simply to let him be.

She flapped her T-shirt against her skin. “Whoo. A breeze, finally. You have to go this far up to find one. Honestly, I think we’ll have to shave that poor little dog of yours—he gets so hot, he just sits and pants. He was so cute after you left this morning. You know what he did? He tried to get up in my lap, but he couldn’t reach, so he figured out how to get up on the coffee table and jump on the sofa from there. Wasn’t that smart?”

He didn’t answer.

“Sonny? Sonny, what is it? You’re not even eating your sandwich.”

“Missy, you’re not my mom.”

“I didn’t say I was your mom. I’m your girlfriend and I want to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“Oh, Sonny.” She rubbed his thigh, looked pleadingly into his eyes. He could have thrown up.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Would you leave me alone for once? I get so damn tired of your everlasting
loving care,
I could jump off this roof.”

“I just want to help.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper, and she looked down as she spoke, as if in shame, a little girl chastised.

“Well, back off.”

“You don’t know how bad I feel for you when you’re this way. It’s as if your pain is my pain—don’t you understand that?”

“You know what, Missy? All this helpful mothering you’re always doing is really just a bid for attention. You want to feel okay about yourself, so you find somebody to
help
. Well, guess what? It’s not very goddamn helpful!”

“Sonny, you’re yelling!”

“The more I know you, the more I don’t see you growing up. You’re stuck in childhood, always looking for that nice daddy you never had—you can’t stand to see me sad or moody or anything else for a minute because then I’m not being your damn daddy.”

He was starting to gibber, but he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t seem to get back on a logical train of thought. He knew he was mad at Missy, even though he might not be too clear about the reasons, and that was good enough. He just wanted to yell, spit out whatever came into his mind, at high volume.

“You think you’re the only one in the world who was ever molested? You’re making a goddamn career out of it, Missy. When are you going to get over it? It’s time!”

“Sonny! Oh, Sonny!”

“I’m sick and tired of having to be so fucking understanding all the time. Oh, Missy’s like this because her life’s been so hard. She doesn’t know when to quit because there weren’t any boundaries in her family. Boundaries! Goddamn shrinky word! You taught me to say it yourself. Well, when are
you
going to get some goddamn boundaries? When are you going to learn that I’m me and you’re you, and to fucking leave me alone once in a while?”

Her fist came down in the middle of his chest. “You fucker!” It was a meaningless insult, two syllables of nothingness, but her tone was as jagged and dangerous as a bread knife.

Sonny! Oh, Sonny!
He remembered the desperate look in her eyes as she had said it, realized he hadn’t taken it in, and should have.

Her open hand connected with his ear, with the whole side of his head, knocking him sideways. He wouldn’t have thought she had that much force in her, couldn’t understand what he had unleashed.

Now both hands were fists, pounding him on the shoulders, in the face, hard, harder than was reasonable for a woman her size. “Fucker! Dickhead! Fuckface!”

He was getting creamed. He had his arms up to protect himself, he was trying to grab her flying fists, but she was fast, driven by an unsuspected fury.

“Missy. My God! What have I done?”

He thought later that it was the despair in his voice that stopped her. “Missy, I’m so sorry.” He held her by her elbows and watched her face turn from furious to frightened. Terrified. She looked at him as if he were Jack the Ripper and broke away.

He reached for her, afraid that something in her had snapped, that she’d run to the edge and jump; but instead she climbed through the window that led back inside, clambering clumsily, bruising her bare legs in her panic. His impulse was to try to follow her, to soothe her, talk her down, but he resisted, knowing she was too far gone, that she hated him right now, that she was afraid of him.

She has good reason.

Sonny thought that he should be the one to jump off the building, that Missy had trusted him and he had betrayed her.

Like what happened with Gan-Gan.

But that wasn’t what happened with Gan-Gan.

“You know it was, son. You killed your own grandfather.”

I didn’t mean to!

“You didn’t mean to upset Missy either. But you turned her from the sweetest girl in the world into a violent, cursing harpy.”

He hadn’t realized how much his father’s voice echoed in his own brain.

Later, when the call came, it didn’t seem real, it seemed like some crazy part of his mind that had somehow broken out and spilled over into life. His father had never phoned him at work before.

“Sonny, you feeling okay? Missy called, said she’s worried about you.”

“Missy called you?” How dare she! How dare she break the trust between them. They were two against the world, two against a lot of things, firm allies against his father.

Okay. Okay, so she did it out of revenge. I betrayed her, so now she’d betrayed me. Now we’re even.

But it didn’t feel even. He felt controlled, Missy’s marionette, Papa’s puppet—pull its strings or push its buttons, no matter, either way it’ll fall apart.

“She said you seem awful depressed lately. She on the rag or something?”

“I don’t understand why she called you.” He did, he just wanted to know what story she’d given him.

“She said you were under terrific pressure from med school, from your rotation—which rotation, son? I don’t even know.”

“What did she want you to do about it?”

“I don’t know. She said she just needed to put it out there.”

“Well, now she has.”

“I got somethin’ to tell you, boy. Get rid of her.”

“What?” He had heard it, but he couldn’t comprehend. “Get rid of her? Friday night you had our wedding all planned.”

“She doesn’t want to marry you. She said that Friday night.”

“She said what?”

“You gotta face it, boy. For once in your life you gotta act like a grown-up and look at what’s happenin’ right before your eyes. The girl is not gonna marry you. She’s pretty, don’t get me wrong. Real pretty thing. Sweet thing. But she’s just not wife material. Into that weird religion and all. You’ve gotta forget her, son.”

Even for his father, this was pretty strong stuff. Sonny said, “Dad, I want to ask you a question. I hope you won’t take it wrong, but this is pretty weird, what you’re saying.”

“What do you mean, weird? You’re my son, I’m telling you what I know.”

“Dad, are you drinking too much?” His face went hot the minute the words were out. He’d never spoken to his father that way.

“What did you say to me?” Furious.

“Well, Mama said she was in Al-Anon. I was just wondering.”

“You leave your mother out of this!” He was yelling so loud Sonny had to hold the phone away from his ear.

Sonny said he’d have to call back, his beeper had just gone off. He was shaking when he hung up; the conversation had upset him more than he realized.

He had recognized words from his childhood, a phrase he’d heard a lot after he’d mouthed off, “talked back,” his father called it—“What did you say to me?”

It was always shouted, always with eyes narrowed, face suffused, belt in hand, buckle out “so it’ll really hurt.” It had to be answered. If Sonny didn’t answer, his father would beat him until he said the words again, and then would beat him for saying them. If he did answer, they could skip the preliminaries.

Missy hadn’t even called first, had driven to Di’s without even thinking about it. She had to talk to her; of course Di would be there for her.

And Di was. Of course she was.

She greeted Missy from her balcony, fresh in a pair of pink shorts, holding a glass of something that looked like lemonade. Missy felt a twinge of jealousy.
All she needs is a picture hat.

Di would probably look as if she’d just come back from a pedicure and facial if bombs were falling on the city. Missy was suddenly aware that she hadn’t washed her hair since yesterday, and she was getting a pimple on her chin. She had chosen Di to be her sponsor in Coda because she admired her so much it was like hero worship—and she felt concomitantly intimidated. Like she couldn’t measure up in a million years.

Even with all that was on her mind, she said almost involuntarily, “You look terrific, Di! How do you do it?”

“Really? I’ve spent the whole day down in the dumps about feeling so ugly.” Absently, she poured Missy a lemonade and handed it to her, not offering first, behaving like a mother whose kid has come in hot and sweaty. “You remember that new guy who came to the meeting Thursday? Steve? He was at the meeting I went to last night, but I just couldn’t get him interested. I feel about a million years old.”