The Lazarus Heart (15 page)

"That's what I
thought,"
Pam Tierney called out after him, just before the smoke alarm in the kitchen went off.

As Jim Unger lights his second Camel a flash of lightning illuminates the room like noonday sun. Two seconds later the thunder catches up and the concussion rattles the windows of the house. On the bed Julie stirs. "What was that?" she asks.

"That was just thunder, honey."

"Oh," she says doubtfully, then, "Why aren't you asleep?"

"I had a bad dream." Though it is the simple truth, it sounds wrong coming out of his mouth.
You thought you heard something. That's what you meant to say, wasn't it? That's what you
wanted
to say.

"Oh," Julie says again, sounding more convinced this time as she rolls over in bed,

turning her back on him.

"Just take it easy, Mrs. Poche. We're not in a hurry here," Vince said for the fifth or sixth time. The old black woman stared out at him through the fish-eye lenses of her spectacles. Jim Unger was losing interest, was staring through Mrs. Poche's lace curtains at one of Tierney's ghouls snapping photographs of the sidewalk.

"Shouldn't I call my lawyer?" she said again. Vince shook his head. "You're not a suspect, Mrs. Poche," Vince said.

Why not?
Jim asked himself.
Why the hell not?
It would make as much sense as anything else here.

"We just want to know if you saw or heard anything unusual this afternoon."

The old lady stared at Vince as if he'd sprouted a second head from the middle of his chest, then rolled her dentures back and forth in her mouth.

"There was
blood
drippin' outta my
ceilin',"
she told him. "I thought that was pretty damn
unusual"

"She's got you there, Vincent," said Jim, closing the curtains. The downstairs apartment smelled like dust and medicine, the miasma of age, and it was starting to depress him.

"If you'll just tell us anything else you saw, ma'am, it'd be real helpful," he said to Mrs. Poche. She looked away from Vince, locked her bewildered gaze on Jim instead.

"It was awful," she said again. "I'm just glad none of my grandbabies were here.

Can you imagine if they'd had to see somethin' like that?"

"Ma'am,"
Jim interrupted, trying to sound polite but losing his patience, "did you see anyone come in or out of the apartment
before
you went upstairs?"

The old lady frowned and rolled her dentures.

Jim looked back up at the maroon stain on her living room ceiling. It was about as big as a large pizza, and he guessed it was situated somewhere just below the foot of Poe's bed. There was a much smaller, matching stain on the floor; sooner or later, the guy on the sidewalk would be in to photograph both.

"All I saw was Mr. Poe, and it's his apartment, so I don't see nothin' unusual about that. He comes and goes all the time."

"And what
time
did you see Mr. Poe leave?" Vince asked her, pretending to write down everything she said on the memo pad open across his knee.

"Oh, wait a minute now. If you're thinkin' Mr. Poe had anything to do with this, you're wrong, young man. Mr. Poe, well, he's a prissy boy, but he wouldn't
kill
nobody.
'Specially
not Benny. Benny was his fella, you know?"

"What time did you see Mr. Poe leave the apartment, ma'am?" Jim asked, still staring at the stain on the ceiling. The room upstairs had been unbearable, but the dark stain seemed to have the opposite effect; his eyes kept coming back to it.

"Ain't nothin' at all wrong with bein' a prissy boy," Mrs. Poche said, crossing her wrinkled hands on her lap. "That's what Oprah said."

"Yes, ma'am," Vince sighed. "She's entitled to her opinion. But didn't you
see
or

hear
-"

"What I
saw
was all that
blood
drippin' outta my
ceilin',"
she said, pronouncing each word slowly, as if she'd decided the two detectives were hard of hearing. Then her front door opened and Fletcher said, "Come on, guys. I think we got him."

The first time Jim Unger saw Jared Poe, the photographer was sitting handcuffed in the backseat of a patrol car, staring straight ahead as if his eyes were focused on something far away that no one else could see. If those eyes had been empty, blank, it might not have bothered the detective, but they weren't. They almost seemed to glimmer in the shadows, and it was difficult to look at his face for very long.

"Another car picked him up all the way over on Conti," Fletcher said, "just wandering around talking to himself. He won't talk now, but his driver's license says he's Jared A. Poe and gives this place as his home address."

The man in the back of the patrol car didn't respond to the sound of his name. The front of his white T-shirt was stiff and crusted with blood, as were his jeans. His hands and arms were the color of dried rose petals.

"He's gotta be our perp, Jim," Vince Norris said. "The old lady said the boyfriend's name was Poe."

"Has he been Mirandized?" Jim asked Fletcher, and the beat cop shrugged. "Probably, but what's the point of asking this fag anything? He's a total veggie,

Jimbo."

"He's
gotta
be the fucking guy," Vince insisted. "Just look at all that fucking blood on him. You think he got that from a nosebleed or something?"

Jim stooped down next to the open door of the patrol car, close enough to smell the drying blood that soaked Jared Poe's clothing. "You've been placed under arrest," he said, "on suspicion of murder. Do you understand these charges, Mr. Poe?"

Jared Poe blinked then, just once, and turned his head slightly toward the three officers. "I understand," he said. His voice came out brittle, like thin glass. "I understand," he repeated. "You think I killed Benny."

"Holy fuck, Batman, the fruit can talk," Fletcher said, and laughed.

"Vince, will you please get him the fuck out of here before he blows this," Jim said, trying not to look away from Jared Poe's glimmering eyes.

"I'm right, aren't I?" the man in the back of the car asked them. "All of you think I did that to Benny."

"Listen, buddy." Jim leaned closer, trying to sound calm, trying to sound reasonable. "What do you
expect
us to think? We know he was your boyfriend and you got blood all over you. We got a witness that saw you leave the crime scene. I'm guessing we're gonna run some tests and we're gonna find out that blood came out of the guy upstairs. Now, if you
didn't
kill him, you better tell us where all this red stuff came from."

"I didn't kill him," Jared Poe said. He closed his eyes, turned away from the detective. "Oh, yeah? Then I'm the goddamn Sugar Bum Fairy," Vince Norris sneered. "Detectives," someone called, and Jim Unger looked over his shoulder. The guy who'd

been taking pictures of the sidewalk earlier was standing in the door to the stairwell. "Pam says she's got something up here you guys ought to see right now. What do you want me to tell her?"

"Tell her to hold her fucking water," he shouted, and the guy disappeared back up the stairs. Jim looked at Jared Poe, who still had his eyes closed. There was blood on his face, too. Long streaks of it, like Indian war paint, and a dark smudge across his lips.

"You could make this easier on both of us," he said, but Poe didn't answer him. When Jim slammed the door of the patrol car a second later Poe didn't even flinch.

"Get him out of here," Jim said to Fletcher, and then to Vincent Norris, "Come on.

Let's see what kind of nasty shit the Dragon Lady's got waiting for us this time."

"Fuckin' wacko," Vince said for the third time as Jim handed the plastic evidence bag back to Pam Tierney. Inside the bag there were two pages torn from a book, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. A couple of lines had been marked with a bright yellow highlighting pen.

"'With mien of lord or lady... '?" Jim Unger read out loud. "Is this even supposed to make
sense?
Like he was leaving us a message or something?"

"Maybe," the coroner said, frowning down at the pages. "Or he was trying to tell

himself
something, or the dead guy. Shit, who knows. I'm not a psychologist."

Jim glanced at the framed photograph again. Tierney or one of her boys had removed it from the bedroom. Now it sat on the floor, leaning against the coffee table. There were crusty streaks of gore on the glass, partly obscuring the image inside, the winged androgyne snarling for the camera. They'd found the poem Scotch-taped to the front of the picture, and Jim didn't really give a shit
what
the killer was trying to communicate with the highlighted passages. There was an excellent partial thumbprint right in the middle of the sticky strip of tape.

"If the print matches, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet you got the right guy," Tierney said.

"Yeah," Jim replied. "Well, let's all just keep our fingers crossed." He glanced over his shoulder at the bedroom. Someone had turned on a floor lamp in there, and he could see the shadows of the men still working through the mess, shifting patches of darkness straining to pass for human, shadows stretched from floor to ceiling, as fluid and insubstantial as ghosts.

The next morning Jim Unger and Vince Norris questioned Jared Poe in a stuffy interrogation room that smelled like floor cleaner and stale cigarettes. What was left of the victim still awaited them in Tierney's office in the basement of the Criminal Courts Building. The autopsy was scheduled for one o'clock. With any luck they'd have a confession by then.

"Okay, Mr. Poe, let's just try to make this as painless as possible," Vince said, lighting a Pall Mall and blowing smoke at the tiled walls. "I can't say I slept real fuckin' well last night and you
sure
as hell don't look like you did either, so I think we'll all be better off if we skip the bullshit."

Jared squinted at the detectives. There were dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, like bruises, and the fluorescent lights in the room lent his skin a sickly greenish cast. He was unshaven and dressed in prison denim, a shirt that looked too large with a big stain on the front.

"That blood we took off your hands and clothes matched up with the victim's, Jared," Jim Unger said, placing a manila folder on the table between them. "And we have a shitload of fingerprints
and
a witness who puts you at the scene of the murder. We
know
you killed Benjamin DuBois, Jared. Are you absolutely sure you don't want a lawyer present before we-"

"I said I don't need a lawyer," Jared replied, blinking at them. "Yeah, I know what you said. But I have to be sure-"

"I didn't kill him." Jared closed his eyes, shielded them from the light with one hand. "I don't need a lawyer."

"We've seen the scratches on your back, Mr. Poe," Vince said. "What do you think we're gonna find under Mr. DuBois's nails?"

Jared Poe answered slowly, as if he was having trouble remembering how to talk, or what words were for.

"We had sex yesterday morning, before I left," he said without opening his eyes. "I didn't kill Benny."

"Then how did you get his blood all over you, Jared?" Jim asked, pushing his chair back from the table a little, trying to see Jared's face better.

"I
found
him," Jared said, and swallowed hard, like someone who was trying not to cry, or throw up. "I found him and I was trying. . . I was... Jesus..."

"So you admit you were there?" Vince asked. He was standing closer to Jared now, leaning on the table, the cigarette's filter clenched between his teeth. Jim thought he looked like a cartoon vulture.

"I was at the CAC. The Contemporary Arts Center on Camp Street. I'm. . . 1 was going to have a show there. I was there all day taking measurements."

"But you just said that you and Mr. DuBois had sex that morning," Vince interrupted.

"Yes, before I left."

"But no one
saw
you there? There's no one to corroborate what you're telling us?" Jared moved his hand so that the bright light washed freely across his face again.

"No," he said after a moment. "No, I don't think so. But
why..
. why do you think I would ever hurt Benny?"

"You tell us, Jared," Jim said, and Vince clicked his tongue loudly against the roof of his mouth.

"I don't have time for this crap, Mr. Poe," he said. "And Detective Unger here, he doesn't have time for this crap. You think a jury's gonna buy any of this? We've seen those pictures you take. That's some pretty twisted shit, Mr. Poe. It looks to me like you have a real hard-on for hurting people."

Jared Poe closed his eyes again.

"So how's it gonna look to a jury, hmmm? Normal guys who don't like to fuck other men up the ass, who don't get their jollies taking obscene pictures of boys dressed up like women? You know, I worked vice two years and I've never seen anything one
tenth
as disgusting as that stuff."

Jim Unger held up one hand to silence Vince, to signal that it was his turn now.

Vince grunted and turned to stare at the one-way mirror on the other side of the room. "You can't tell us you'd never hurt Benny, can you, Jared? Because you hurt him

on a regular basis. Isn't that right? Every time you fucked him you hurt him. Benny

wanted
you to hurt him..."

"What's the point in my telling you anything at all, Detective?" Jared Poe asked. His weary bloodshot eyes made Jim Unger want to look away. "You've already made up your minds. The only thing you want to hear from me is a confession. All that's going to satisfy you is to hear me say that I did. . . that I did
that
to Benny."

"Seems pretty fuckin' reasonable," Vince said without turning around. "Under the circumstances."

"But it's never going to
happen,
Detective."

"Then you better have another good long think about that lawyer, Jared," Jim said, standing up, sliding his chair back under the edge of the table. "Because regardless of what you
say
or how many times you say it, you look guilty as sin to us. And I'm betting you're gonna look just as guilty to the DA's office and a jury."