The Devil's Only Friend (22 page)

My shoulders weighed down on me. I was on the porch, but I could not bring myself to knock at the door.

“She's not there,” a voice growled not far off. “She won't be there.”

I turned dully but saw no one. Over the long porch I dragged my feet, until I could see the hazy figure of Eileen's old neighbor surveying me through his thatch of shrubbery.

“Patterson,” I said.

“I don't know where she's gone,” he said.

He was trimming back the feral strands of some bushes that had not been cut in the fall. His knuckles were so twisted from arthritis that it was hard to see how his little pruner could work in his hand without nipping away parts of his fingers. He wore boots that seemed twice too large for him, that rose over his bowed legs almost up to his sagging crotch.

I didn't know if he could see my weary nod or if he cared about it. It took a long time to make up my mind that it would be best not to press him about Eileen. Another wave of shame worked over me: I should have been able to guess where she'd go; I should have known her better than I did. It was too late to do anything about all of that. Despite what I might have told myself about loving her, I could not honestly say that I deserved any part of her attention or regard. To judge only from what had happened during the time I had been closest to her, she would be right to forget me if she could.

Patterson left off his clipping to watch me carefully while I stood on the porch. After I came down from the porch and meandered away toward Campau, I could hear him begin to cut again. The gentle sound was rattled away by an air hammer buzzing in the body shop alongside the alley.

*   *   *

When I came up the back stairs at my apartment building, I was careful not to slap my shoe leather on the treads, and I was easy with the key in the door. I sat down right away to take off my shoes. It was all for fear of alerting Federle to my presence. He would know the creak of every floorboard. I was powerfully thirsty, and so I had to pull a glass of water from the kitchen faucet. It would have been best to open the tap at once and blast the glass full. But trying to be a sneak I turned the knob only slightly, which drew a rattle and an echoing groan from the depths of the plumbing. The water was good, but I couldn't enjoy it because my mouth was bad. It seemed to me that I could feel the water dribbling around a solid mass of undigested something in my gut.

Wherever I turned, I expected to find some bloody part of Hank Chew poking out. I had an idea that whoever had chopped him up had planned a little game for me, like an Easter egg hunt. Maybe his pecker and balls were in a jar in my cupboard. If I opened my icebox, I might see his head wrapped in tinfoil like an Easter ham. If I looked in my closet, would I find his clothes hanging up, spotless and neatly pressed? Maybe all his little paper notes were tacked up in a row on the ceiling over my bed.

I had to think. I had to figure out the whole game, but I wasn't in the condition to do it. Even if I had not been short of sleep and hungover but good, I'd still have been a half-wit. Clearly Eileen was in some danger, the kind that might flash at any time—
but probably most when darkness falls,
I thought.
And darkness is falling all around.
For all I knew, she might have gone to stay with my mother for a few days. I played with the thought that she might have arranged to stay at her new beau's place, though it seemed unlikely that her character could change so much.

They'll know how to find her. He will.

Whoever had separated Chew would be able to get to Eileen; I believed it without really considering it. I guess I had become so sick of my own self that I had come to believe in such magic, that there could be a criminal so slick and ruthless that I couldn't do anything to stop him from his work. It wasn't so, or at least I could try to tell it to myself. In my mind I could think about it straight: If it was only one man, he was just gristle and bone like anybody else. Even if it was a proper gang like the thugs that had worked me over, they could be put to rest as any other thing with blood to spill could be put to rest. But it wasn't a matter where thinking could make an end of it. I had lost a portion of my nerve, and I thought of myself as a danger to anything I cared about. It clawed at my heart the way superstition had wracked me as a child.

I knew it would be selfish to track down Eileen. I could do nothing to help her now except keep away. At least as far as Jasper or Whitcomb Lloyd was concerned, my lack of personal concern might let me work to some kind of effect. I vowed to quit Eileen altogether, to swallow any feeling if I could, to cut myself away.

Nobody on the force would believe I had done anything to Chew, but maybe there would be some who would be glad to smear me with it anyway. Dilley and Foulard hadn't even grilled me much about it. If anything more turned up, they'd pull me back in for a proper squeeze. I could line up a lawyer. How would they like that? I could scrounge up the dough.

The main problem was that I knew I had it in me to kill that lousy Chew. It's the sort of thing that crossed my mind whenever I got a troublesome fellow alone in a secluded spot, like a way of playing with ideas. It would take a powerful reason to get me to chop somebody to pieces, for sure—if it was a matter that couldn't be finished any other way. But I was reasonably certain I wouldn't ever cut somebody up and leave the parts around like a kind of game. I wouldn't
do
it, no, but I couldn't keep from
thinking
about it. Ever since the goons had made me tell them everything, I knew that the inside of my brain wasn't safe from the light. It was always possible that I'd flap my gooms again and the world would know what nasty ideas I had. If I could just leave off thinking altogether, maybe I'd be better off.

It comes from being murderous. Though I had not so far done it casually, I had killed a few men. Most of them clearly deserved it. I had busted up a few dozen more in my time, and from the look of things, it wouldn't be long before I'd have to spatter myself with mud again. It wasn't the guilt that bothered me so much. Every time you do a bad thing, your mind changes because of it, your way of thinking. You get to be a little darker, and you can't help thinking the bad way. The brain can get sick like a liver that goes bad from all the poison it has to suck up.

I pulled off all my smelly clothes and crawled into bed. Despite the worry, it wasn't long before I settled in. I remember thinking about how regular my breathing was getting, and then I went out like a light.

*   *   *

Sure enough, as time is lost in sleep, there came a timid rapping to wake me up. I was flat on my back and my mouth was dry and sticky like tar. My eyelid would slide open only with some effort, snapping loose from the crust at the bottom lid and dragging over the dry ball until I could see my cracked ceiling—no notes from Chew.

The rapping came again: three slow, polite raps. I imagined Federle squirming in the hall.

“Come in,” I croaked, though not loud enough to be clear.

The knocking came again.

I rolled and let my legs fall over the edge of the bed. There was numbness and tingling in both; this came and went. I stood up and croaked again. “Come in!”

I should feel better than this,
I thought.
A good night's sleep.

When my eye began to see, a seated figure seemed to draw itself out of the darkness at my little table. It was Ray Federle, tapping a folded pocketknife gently on the cheap wood.

“The stitches should come out,” he said softly.

“You should have knocked on the door,” I said.

“I could hear you snoring,” he said. “The door was open.”

“Well,” I said, “why couldn't you let me sleep out the night?”

“It's getting toward time for me to go out,” he said. “I should have let you go on dreaming.”

“I wasn't dreaming.”

He seemed fully at ease, slumped lightly in my chair with one elbow on the table. His breathing was deep and relaxed, as if he had been sleeping himself. The knife was long and slender and gently shaped in a double curve. The handle was made of pearl or bone worn smooth from use. He let it slip down between his thumb and first finger until it tapped the table, flipped it, and slipped it down again, over and over in a steady rhythm.

“Where have you been, Pete? It seemed like we'd go out again today.”

“I got hung up last night.”

“You should stay at home. You always get in trouble when you go out.”

“I got one mother already,” I said. There was only one chair at the table, so I put myself down in the stuffed chair.

Federle didn't say anything for a time, and I eased myself back and rubbed at my legs to get the feeling into them again. I couldn't say what time it was, but the world outside my window was dark except for the glow the full moon made through the thin clouds.

It was no comfort to know that he had not cut my throat as I lay sleeping.

“You don't want to say anything about how the case is going?”

“I'm ready to be done with all of it,” I said. “It's enough to put me under.”

“Maybe Walker scared up something about the Hardimans.”

“Maybe he did. Maybe— What day is it?”

“You didn't talk to him today?”

“Listen,” I said, pushing myself up from the easy chair. “I was in the clink most of the day.” I went over to the window and made the shade go down, and then I walked across to switch on the light. The brightness made the apartment seem even more cramped.

“What did they put you in the can for?”

“I was— It wasn't for anything that I did.”

“They got you with your pants down?”

“What's that?”

“It's nothing but trouble being out late,” Federle said. “You should know that by now.”

In the light he seemed weaker, less comfortable. There was a green canvas bag on the table with the long carrying strap neatly coiled up beside it.

“Living alone,” he said, “it's hard on a fella. I was on my own—” He broke off and took up the knife between his strikingly slender fingers. “Before I settled in with Patty, I was a rambler, all right. Pete, it's good to be a part of something, I want to tell you. You should try to keep in at night if you can.”

“I'll stay in. I'll listen to the radio. That seems right.”

“Don't be sore at me.”

“Come on in while I'm sleeping and sit down at my table. Wake me up with your tap-tap-tapping little knife. It makes me feel like everything is safe on the home front.”

Federle's blank eyes rolled away. I could see how many ideas he might have had blustering inside him, how he had to be on the alert all the time to keep the wrong ones from coming out.

“I'm saying that the best way to be safe is to belong, to be connected to things.”

I didn't make a ready answer.

“If things were different—if you'd met Patty—or a girl like her—if you can get past that awful first impression you had—”

“It's pretty late to think of that, Ray.”

“Sure.” He sat up in the chair as if he were waking. “Do you want me to pull out those stitches or not? You can't leave them in or—”

“All right,” I said. “Why not?”

He opened up the square green bag on the table. Over the buckle someone had used ink to scribe a perfect circle on the canvas. Inside the circle the letters RE had been neatly written.

“My friend Reno didn't make it,” Federle said. “So I brought home his kit.”

There were only a few things inside the bag: forceps like a big pair of tweezers, a couple of rolls of gauze wrapped in paper turned a little brown from heat and salty water, white tape, a little turkey baster with a rubber bulb on the end, a few tattered stick bands. Federle arranged everything on the table and seemed sad that there wasn't more.

“You've still got that alcohol in the head?”

“It's not good for drinking,” I said.

He got up stiffly and said, “Sit down here.” Then he went off to fetch the rubbing alcohol.

I slumped down into the hard chair in just my shorts. The air in the room was dead, and I had not enough hope or energy to get up to crack open the window. There was a fan in my mother's garage, I knew, a desk fan, but I had not brought it to my place.

“You're done with the pain, mostly, eh?” Federle said. “It could look better, but you're healing, anyway, not festering.”

He set to work methodically. First he broke open the cleanest roll of gauze and used his knife to slice off a few square pieces. Then he opened the bottle of alcohol, soaked one square, and used it to strip the germs off the tip of his little blade. He wiped the forceps, too, and a corner of the tabletop, and then set all his truck there while he used his hands to judge how the stitches had set. He pressed his fingertips all along the jagged lines of stitches front and back like you'd test a steak to see if it was cooked right. His fingers were deft enough to lull me into a stupor like a barber would.

“See here, on the back, it's not done setting. It's deep, yah. But they can still come out. The scars will flatten out better if we leave it a little wet. You just have to take it easy, Pete.”

He soaked a few more squares of gauze and scrubbed over the lines of stitches across my chest. The alcohol felt at first like it burned and then like it was turning the flesh to ice. The silk sutures were dry and stiff like a row of caterpillars. One by one he gripped each stitch with the forceps and snipped it with the very tip of his blade. There was no pain. He dropped the bits onto the floor. At first I watched, but there were so many, and the process was so soothing, that eventually I closed my eye and let him work. It was only the thought of the sharp little blade that kept me from falling off to sleep entirely.

“When you're on the landing craft, Pete, you can't believe you'll be able to jump out when the time comes. You can't believe it. You can see up ahead on the beach some guys getting ground to hell already, and you don't see how you could throw yourself into it. But then you have to. You do.”