Trip Wire (3 page)

One friend, one lover, one life folding into another. The freak network, as Wilton called it. “We always manage to find each other,” he said. “Soon as I met Cassandra, I knew she was one of us.”

After supper, Mia went off to her meditation class. I joined the others at a dingy club on Wells Street for a rare appearance by Otis Spann. We drank barrels of cheap red wine, and when the last set was over we hiked to the lot where Dan Zuni kept his wreck of a car, toking up all the way. Dan was going to drive me home, so everybody piled in and went along for the trip to Hyde Park. When Dan pulled into the driveway of the building where I lived with Uncle Woody and Aunt Ivy, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I finally did, though, and waved good-bye to them all.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I was too happy. Around three in the morning, I switched on the radio. That was sufficient to bring me down. Death toll for the week so far: 112. The figure sat in my mind. I began to picture them. One hundred and twelve dead American boys laid end to end. Missing limbs. Stomachs blown open. Some headless. Meat. And then there was all that enemy meat, the barefoot peasants who were kicking our ass.

I lit a cigarette, got out of bed, and walked over to the window. I searched the night for the house where Wilton’s parents lived. Maybe I’d meet them some day. Maybe they’d like me and I’d be the one to broker a reconciliation between them and Wilt.

We talked about Vietnam a lot, Wilton and I. I estimated a good 50 percent of the boys from the poor school I’d attended in my grandmother’s neighborhood wound up in ’Nam. Wilton figured nobody from his class at Francis Parker was there. But this brother he knew, Alvin, had been there. Alvin was outtasight. He was a real black man.

“I’m glad I’m not a man,” I whispered to him. The two of us were at a teach-in, listening to this legless vet speak about the war.

“Me too,” he said, and took my hand. “I’m glad you not a man, too.”

3

You can’t fall apart. That’s what I kept thinking as I watched the cops move in and out of our rooms.

Beth and Clea had not loved Wilt like I had. But they were falling apart. Useless. So I had to take a hand in things.
I
had to call the ambulance for Mr. Fish.
I
had to call the police for Mia and Wilt.
I
had to find the phone number of the laundromat and summon Taylor and Cliff back to the house.

My cool-cucumber act must have been working. Like the uniformed cops who first showed up, the tall detective from the homicide squad was directing all his questions to me. He was fair-haired with pitted skin and blue eyes that seemed never to blink. Playing the Quiet American, strong and silent. Poking into our things, judging us. I despised him.

He opened the door to Wilt and Mia’s room with a gloved hand. “This where they slept?” he demanded.

“You never even showed your badge,” I said.

“What?”

“This isn’t the crime scene. This is a private home. You’re supposed to show ID when you’re in a person’s home—not to mention a little respect.”

He stared at me for a moment, as if he was thinking about backslapping me. “My name is Norris. James Norris. Happy now?”

I didn’t answer.

“How do you know the victim?”

“Which one? There’re two victims.”

“The girl.”

“I met her this summer. Mia was a nice person. I mean, a good person.”

He grunted. “And him? Who was he to you?”

“My friend.”

“You sleeping with him?”

“No. He was with Mia.”

“So what? Everybody sleeps with everybody. Isn’t that the idea? Free love.”

Mia and I had been arrested a couple of months before at a housing rally. We were thrown in the women’s lockup at Cook County Jail until Nat raised bail money. Most of our companions in the cell were prostitutes. According to them, the Chicago cops were no strangers to free love. I didn’t point that out to Norris, though. I just said, quietly, “Wilton was my friend.”

“You jealous?”

“What did you say?”

“You saying you weren’t jealous? He was putting it to the white girl, wasn’t he? Stud like him. He had a regular harem in here. But he wasn’t putting it to you. You mean to say that didn’t make you mad?”

“Somebody killed my friends. I’m pretty mad about that.”

“Yeah, you’re jealous all right. Why don’t you tell me what happened?” He flipped out his notepad then, suddenly, brandishing it like a saber.

“I can account for every minute of my time since one o’clock yesterday.”

“Save it. The other colored girl—was she having sex with him?”

“Wow. You’re unbelievable. I thought they made you take some sort of intelligence test before they promoted you to detective.”

He came close to laying hands on me at that. But he didn’t. He ordered me out of the room.

The crowd of cops and technicians pushed us farther and farther away from the center of the apartment. Cliff and Taylor were flanking Clea, who was shaking.

There was some kind of stir about where Norris was going to set up an interrogation room. He settled on the sunporch where Taylor and Barry Mayhew slept.

“Fuck,” Taylor muttered.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Barry stashes in there. What if they go snooping in his stuff?”

“Don’t they have to have a warrant to do that?” Cliff asked.

“Yeah, Cliff,” Taylor said. “They care a lot about that kind of thing.”

Jesus. That was all we needed. Getting busted on the same day two friends get slaughtered.

“Barry’s probably going to walk in here any minute,” I said. “No telling what he’ll do.”

Taylor answered, “He’ll rat us out in about two seconds, probably tell them the dope is mine.”

One by one, Norris called us in. When Cliff came out of the room, he looked all caved in, on the verge of tears.

I looked away from him, willing myself to keep it together.

The cops had been in the apartment for hours. It was dark now, but when I glanced out of the window, blinding lights were shining up at me. The local news station had sent a van and equipment. The sidewalk below was alive with people. Reporters, neighbors, onlookers, medics, uniformed police.

“Oh, God, Cliff. Jordan’s down there. Look.”

“He must be scared out of his mind. I’m going down to get him.”

He didn’t, though. The cops wouldn’t let him leave. Cliff stalked the living room like a crazed horse. He must have been thinking, as I was, that those junkie skanks who called themselves Jordan’s parents had no business letting him roam around at night. I wished they would both overdose and let Cliff raise him.

The cops were allowing Clea to go home. As she pulled into her coat, she could barely look at me.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “I just want to get out of here.”

It shamed me, but the thought did fly through my mind: not much chance I’ll have to worry about her moving in now.

Annabeth was smoking furiously when they released her from the interrogation session. She turned her back to the cop who was picking through the back issues of
Rising Tide
on the coffee table and spoke low and urgently. “Where the fuck is Dan? That cop is asking all this stuff about who lives here and he sounds like he thinks Dan might have done it.”

Lord. In all the confusion, I had forgotten about Dan Zuni. I looked over at Cliff, repeated the question. “Where is Dan?”

“Taking photos, I guess.”

“Where?”

“Who knows.”

It wasn’t at all unusual for Dan to take off by himself for days at a time. He’d throw a few things in the back of the car and go into the woods to take photos, to think—meditate, as Mia called it—or to enjoy the peyote a friend had laid on him.

Of course, it was just as likely that he’d met some girl and gone off with her. Dan was spacy by nature, and a loner, but he had that gorgeous mane of silken hair, that burnished skin and those arresting black eyes. Females couldn’t get enough of him.

The cops let us make tea. It felt weird to be puttering at the stove. The kitchen had been Mia’s province. I didn’t get to drink mine, though. Detective Norris had saved the best for last, so to speak. He crooked his finger at me, calling me out to the sunporch.

Man, that guy rubbed me the wrong way. Earlier, the feeling had seemed to be mutual, and then some. But Norris’s manner had softened a little by the time I took a seat across from him on the foldout sofa.

The questions he put to me about Wilt and Mia went all over the map—jealous exes, drug deals, enemies, gang membership, Mafia ties, sexual kinks, satanic cults.

I guess my answers jibed sufficiently with what the others had told him. As the interview rolled on, he even deigned to answer a couple of my questions.

“Did you take those ropes off of him? Are they gone yet? The bodies, I mean.”

“Yeah. They’re on the way to the morgue.”

“How long were they laying there like that? You’ve got some kind of tests to tell you that, haven’t you?”

“Hard to say. The ME’s gonna have fun with this one. There’s no heat in that place. It being so cold, they coulda been killed yesterday afternoon or late last night. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, really.”

But I did know. I was being stupidly messianic. I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d stayed at home, or if I hadn’t decided to spend the night at Nat’s, I could somehow have stopped the slaughter.

“Are you finished with me now?”

“Almost.” He leaned back in his chair, offered me a cigarette. “You go to the same school as Wilton Mobley?”

“No.”

“Where do you go?”

“Debs.”

He gave me a Gomer Pyle grin. “Huh. So you like them commie teachers?”

Off-the-wall question. But I knew what he meant. Debs College had been founded in the 1930s by a renegade group of Socialist academics fed up with the ivory-tower mentality and racial quotas. From all accounts, it was a glorious hotbed. But now, some thirty years later, there was little difference between it and just about any other midlevel university.

“I like them okay,” I said. “They’re better than fascists anyway.”

As the interrogation wound down, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d much rather deal with the fat-ass street cops who had busted heads in Lincoln Park than a jerk like Norris. At least you could usually outrun them.

CHAPTER THREE

WEDNESDAY

1

I lay there listening to the others in the kitchen. The room was freezing cold. I had forgotten to put the heater on and had slept—if you could call it that—all curled up, the covers pulled over my head. I knew I had to get out of bed sooner or later, but the effort seemed enormous. This huge weight was on my chest, and my eyes were crusted over.

Finally I got up and pulled my woolen sailor pants and a warm turtleneck out of the closet. I dressed myself slowly, concentrating minutely on each task and trying to block out what had happened. Not just what had already happened, but what lay ahead: police investigations; funerals; facing not one but two sets of grieving, freaked-out parents. How were we going to get through it? How long was my little chin-up/grown-up masquerade going to last?

I didn’t even bother to brush my teeth. I walked into the kitchen, the heaviness still upon me.

They were all drinking coffee, all rumpled and funky, and nobody looked any better than I did.

“We ought to go out and get a paper,” Taylor was saying.

“Why?” I said acidly. “Don’t you remember what happened? Wilt and Mia are dead.” I knew I had no business snapping at Taylor that way. “I’m sorry,” I blurted out, and along with the apology the tears erupted.

Annabeth put her arm around my shoulders, and Cliff poured coffee for me. After I was all cried out, Taylor spoke. “Well, what now?”

“For one thing, somebody’s got to find Dan,” said Annabeth. “The cops are looking for him, and the longer he’s gone, the more it looks like he’s running away. Barry, too.”

“He’s got to hear about it, right?” said Cliff. “I mean, it must be in all the papers, TV.”

Taylor snorted. “I guess you forgot that Dan lives on Planet Zuni. When did you ever know him to pay any attention to the news? Besides, he’s probably fifty miles from nowhere, shitting in the bushes.”

I had an image of Dan then. Lying on his back, looking the way he did when he was high, mouthing the words to “Suzie Q.”

All the what-ifs began to play across my mind. “What if they try to arrest him and he runs?” I said. “Will they shoot him? What if he’s stoned when they find him? What if he thinks they’re not real?”

“Why don’t we take it easy?” Cliff quieted me. “Look, it’s too cold for him to stay outdoors for long. Maybe he’s visiting somebody in the country, like one of his teachers. He’s gonna be okay.”

At the sound of the key turning in the lock, we took a collective breath.

Not Dan.

It was Barry Mayhew. Red-eyed, his goatee scraggly, shaking with rage. Hands down, he looked worse than any of us.

“Get me something!” he exploded.

I pushed my coffee cup toward him, but he swept it off the table. “Get me something to fucking smoke!”

Taylor made a beeline for the stash.

Barry threw himself into a chair. “Fucking motherfuckers, man. I was walking home last night, minding my own business. Next thing I know, pigs everywhere. They put me in a
car,
man. Like I’m some street trash. Some
crim
inal, man. Morons had me at the pig station since two o’clock this morning. Talking about murder. They said Wilton and Mia—oh, man. What the fuck happened here?”

Barry was still a mess, but his face began to relax as he smoked. Before long, he was narrating his harrowing experience with the true storyteller’s gusto, the center of attention, all of us in a circle around him.

He’d been at an all-night party on Wacker Drive—some rich people he sold acid to—fucking straights, man—when the cops called them to check out his alibi, at first they were too scared to say he had been there—who did the pigs think they were dealing with? some dumb, stoned-out hippie?—he knew a lawyer who’d make them look like clowns—fucking A, they had to release him, or else he was gonna get fucking Kunstler on their asses—
And what the fuck is the matter with the phone, man?

“What phone?” Annabeth said.

“I tried to call you assholes a hundred times. The line’s all fucked up.”

I picked up the receiver of the wall phone. Sure enough, it was dead. I went into the living room, looked at the extension in there. It was off the hook. It must have been knocked over during the chaos of last night. I replaced the receiver on the set.

When I got back to the kitchen Barry was passing joints around, still talking. “I gotta find someplace to crash,” he was saying.

“What do you mean, ‘someplace to crash’? You’re splitting?” Taylor asked.

“Damn right. You think I’m gonna stay here and get greased like they did?”

We fell silent for a moment, partly out of embarrassment at Barry’s insensitivity. But there was another element to the stunned silence. Shocking as the murders were, it hadn’t even occurred to me to fear for my own safety. It was not until Barry’s crude comment that I tuned in to fear.

And clearly I wasn’t alone in this. I could read it on their paralyzed faces—Beth’s, Cliff’s, Taylor’s.
Jesus Christ,
they were all thinking.
Somebody just walked into our building and murdered two people. We’re not safe here.
Talk about dumb, stoned-out hippies.

I had an even worse thought then, something I bet hadn’t even occurred to the others—yet. If somebody was out to get us, maybe Mia and Wilt hadn’t really been the first victims. Maybe Dan Zuni had already been got. Could be he’d never made it into the woods or wherever he was headed. I didn’t even dare voice that fear. We were already freaked enough.

It had been barely sixty seconds since I’d righted the telephone. Now it was ringing. Cliff picked up the kitchen extension, listened for a few seconds, then hung up.

“Who was that?” Annabeth asked.

“Some guy from the
Sun-Times.
”

“Take it off the hook again,” she said.

Oh, sure. A reporter after the inside story of the scandalous hippie murders. Look what’ll happen if you let your children become free-love dope freaks.

“Hey, Sandy,” Cliff said, holding on to me. “You okay? You look weird.”

“I’m just so cold.”

“Yeah, man, it’s freezing in here,” Barry said. “And I’m so hungry I could eat lint. Damn, I wish—” At least he had the decency not to finish that sentence.
I wish Mia was here.
That’s what he was about to say. How about some scrambled eggs, Mia? Wait a minute . . . oh, yeah, right. She’s dead. “What? Don’t look at me like that. What are we supposed to do?” he said. “Starve?” He popped up from the chair and rubbed his hands. “Let’s go get some grub. We’ll go to Chester’s. I’m buying, as usual.”

“I guess he’s right,” Annabeth said. “It feels like I haven’t had anything to eat in two weeks.”

We milled around stupidly, suddenly loath to lose sight of one another. It seemed to take forever to find our coats and scarves. Then, when I opened the front door, the real chill set in. I saw four angry eyes rolling around in their sockets. A black fist poised to knock on the door. It was all I could do not to scream. Facing me were my aunt and uncle.

2

My aunt Ivy is what some people would call prim. She is a small woman with a lovely, willowy figure. It
was
willowy, anyway, before she was hospitalized earlier in the year, and nearly died. Now she is just plain skinny. But the superpale complexion and the sunken cheeks and perfect red lips suit her, too. Closing in on sixty and in poor health, she is still a beautiful woman. Nor did the illness take anything away from her impeccable manners and her modulated way of speaking.

“Damn you, Cassandra, I don’t know whether to kiss you or beat the living shit out of you.”

That was not the way Ivy usually talked.

“Do you know what you put us through, child? Waking up this morning and hearing about this disaster on the radio. I said, ‘Woody, have mercy, Jesus, isn’t that the address where Cass is?’ And then when we called and called and couldn’t get an answer on the telephone—Lord, Cass. The police are circling like flies downstairs. I thought you were—Do you know what we’ve been through? Answer me!”

But I couldn’t, because Woody started in with his own version of Do You Know What We’ve Been Through. It was full of threats and ultimatums, and it rang through the corridor like the voice of God in a bad mood.

I had always suspected that my self-made, self-educated uncle Woody was attached to the numbers racket in his youth. My grandma only dropped hints about the shrouded past of her sister’s dapper husband Woody Lisle: Maybe he was a rumrunner and maybe he was a gambler; maybe he was once the “business partner” of the notorious South Side criminal Henry Waddell. But with him standing in the doorway like that, booming at me in that commanding, whiskey-lined voice, I felt like a nickel-and-dime gambler who had welched on a debt and was ignorant enough to think he could get away with it.

“You march back into this goddamn apartment and pack your goddamn bags, young miss,” was the way Woody’s tirade ended.

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I simply held my face in my hands.

“I guess this is your family, huh, Sandy?” Cliff asked.

I began to giggle insanely.

When I recovered, I asked them in. Ivy’s manners won out, after all. She was coolly gracious as I introduced her to all my roommates. Woody, on the other hand, was barely civil as he looked at one after another of my rumpled friends. His long, thin frame remained tight almost to the point of snapping.

I was finally able to put a few rational words together. “We’re all hungry. Nobody’s had anything to eat.”

“You what?” Ivy fell back into outrage. “You mean between the five of you, you can’t manage to put any food on the table?”

“No, no. I don’t mean it like that. It’s—never mind. Please, just sit down a minute. Will you please?”

I settled my aunt and uncle in the front room and told the others to go on without me. “That your old man?” Barry asked on his way out.

“More or less.”

“That old dude is clean. I love those kicks he’s wearing.”

I hadn’t noticed Woody’s shoes. But then, I didn’t need to. I knew he was always shod in something English. He polished them every night before going to sleep. Like it was some kind of manic ritual for him.

From the hall, I watched Woody and Ivy for a few minutes before joining them. I could see, mixed in with their fear and anger, their distaste at the messiness of the room. This sure wasn’t how I had envisioned their first visit. A far cry from me serving them sherry and Mia’s almond cookies and introducing my buddy Wilton to them. I took a long breath and then walked in. “Don’t say anything,” I announced, startling the hell out of them.

“Cassandra—” Woody began.

“Don’t say anything,” I bellowed. “I’m not leaving here until they find out who killed Wilton and Mia. I’m not ditching on my friends. And I am not going back with you.”

“You most certainly are,” my aunt said.

“No, Ivy. No way.”

She placed a restraining hand on Woody’s thigh. He was about to spring up at me.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t understand. Wilton meant the world to me.”

“Cass,” she said, “why wouldn’t we understand that? You mean the world to us.”

“This is different.”

“You mean you were living with that man,” Woody said petulantly.

“Yes. No. I mean, I loved him in a different way. Kind of the way I feel about the other people who live here, only stronger.”

“Not stronger than you love your family, Cassandra,” he said. “You don’t love strangers more than your family.”

I tried to choose my words carefully. “Okay. You’re right. In a way. But I can feel close to other people—strangers, if that’s what you want to call them—in a way I can’t feel close to family. They just get things that you don’t. We’re all going through the same stuff.”

“Cass, no one is saying you can’t keep these people as friends. But that doesn’t mean you have to live in the same house with them,” Ivy said. “You can feel just as strongly about . . . these people . . . living at home.”

“I am at home, Ivy.”

“No, you aren’t, honey.”

“You’re not getting it, are you? I moved out of your home. This is my home.”

“There’s been some killing done in your precious home,” Woody shouted. “You had a safe place to live with us, girl—with your own. Everything you needed. But you had to run off to be with these people. You’re not like these white youngsters, Cassandra. They got the way paved for them from the day they were born, and they still live this foolish kind of life. Now just look what it got them. You must be out of your mind to stay here after somebody’s been murdered.”

“Goddammit, stop calling him ‘somebody.’ He had a name.”

He stood then, spent a few seconds attending to the crease in his trousers. Then he fixed me with one of his terrifying looks. “Cassandra, I have had just about enough of this nonsense. Get your bags.”

I guess the totality of the thing had finally undone me. I was only 50 percent coherent when I started shrieking at them.

“You are driving me crazy. Suffocating me. You’re fucking tyrants, both of you. You don’t respect me, you don’t listen to me, and you don’t love me unless I do what you say. Where’s that at, huh? You think you’re the police? Is that it? You think I care about your bullshit neighborhood association and your corrupt Uncle Tom friends? I hate them and I hate the stupid way you live.”

“Get your things, gal.”

“You go to hell, Woody. I’m not going anywhere until I see some kind of justice done for Wilt and Mia. Just leave me the fuck alone.”

The gallant Woody Lisle bent to help his lady to her feet. “Cass,” he said, “if you were a man, I’d try to kill you.”

Then he pulled Ivy, her mouth agape, out of the apartment. She slipped around the open door like an old silk scarf.

3

My face was hideous. I blew my nose, swiped at the residue from that hysterical bout of crying, and tore into the fried egg sandwich that Cliff had brought back for me.

“Don’t cry, Sandy. I’m staying if you are.”

“Thanks.”

“I just called home,” he said. “My mom’s acting just like your people.” He held a big Dixie cup full of chocolate milkshake for me to drink through the straw. “Taylor says the police wouldn’t let me go home now even if I wanted to.”