Mr. Apology Page 7

  “Ah, but you didn’t, Harry.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” he said. He reached out and hugged her. “I can’t believe the things you do for me.”

  He closed his eyes. He felt Madeleine’s lips brush against the side of his face, then she moved away from him. He heard the slight clicking sound as she pushed the button on the answering machine.

  “You want to hear from your latest fans?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It’s hardly lullaby stuff.”

  She lay down beside him as the tape whirred. There were a couple of hang-ups, one heavy breather, then silence for a while. He felt himself drift to the edge of sleep, to the black margin of unconsciousness, but then the sound of a voice jolted him back.

  APOLOGY? APOLOGY, YOU LISTENING TO ME, MAN? IF YOU’RE A GODDAMN MAN AND NOT SOME FUCKING MACHINE …

  Pause. He opened his eyes. This voice had an edge to it, a sharp quality, something harsh and unpleasant. It disturbed him. He sat upright, staring at the machine.

  LISTEN TO ME, MR. APOLOGY. KNOW SOMETHING? I GET THE FEELING YOU’RE THERE, MAN. I GET THIS DISTINCT FEELING YOU’RE JUST SITTING THERE LISTENING.… WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP THE TELEPHONE? OR IS THAT SOMETHING YOU NEVER DO? WE COULD HAVE A NICE LITTLE TALK, YOU AND ME. I’D LIKE THAT. ASSHOLE …

  Harrison had an impulse to turn the tape off, but it held him, fascinated him; he had the strange feeling that the caller was inside the bedroom right now, standing just inside the doorway or hiding in the closet. Ridiculous, he thought. But he couldn’t get past this sense of violation, intrusion. This disquieting sense of a presence somewhere in the loft. He held Madeleine’s hand, squeezed it.

  HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU … UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY.… I’M GONNA KILL SOMEBODY. I MIGHT USE MY KNIFE, I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS, BUT IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, APOLOGY, AND YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT IT IN ADVANCE … AND THERE’S NOT A GODDAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.…

  Harrison raised his hand and let it hover above the machine. It seemed to him he could feel a faint electric current issue from the answering device, almost as if something quite malevolent were trapped within the coils and circuits of the gadget, something that had a faintly pulsing life of its own.

  WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON, MR. APOLOGY.

  WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON.

  And there was laughter, cruel, broken, unpleasant.

  He reached up and turned the machine off.

  TWO

  1.

  Frank Nightingale could remember the golden age of the American hamburger, a time when they didn’t put soybeans and cereals and sawdust into the meat, when a burger didn’t taste like polyurethane. These days, when you ordered one, you never knew what you were going to get inside your cardboard bun. You could count on pickle chips and scraps of lettuce and little slivers of tomatoes, whether you wanted these extras or not—but you couldn’t just assume the meat had ever wrapped the bones of any living creature. He stuck his finger inside his mouth and removed a thing—a UHO, an unidentified hamburger object. He put his hand outside the car window and flicked the item away, filled all at once with a terrible yearning for a real McCoy burger placed between two bits of bun that actually tasted like bread.

  Doug Moody watched him from the driver’s seat. “I was up the whole goddamn night, Frank. It was that Brussels sprout kebab I had at Leaves and Shoots. I had these bad pains in the gut.”

  Brussels sprout kebab. Vegetables skewered on sticks. Nightingale thought about the owner of Leaves and Shoots, one Shenandoah Silvertree, a hippie who’d probably been ancient at the time of Woodstock, for Christ’s sake. Silvertree hadn’t been able to tell them much about Camilla. Hard worker, conscientious girl, a little spacy, but so was everybody else these days. A private soul. Someone just digging her own little space, you know? Nightingale narrowed his eyes and looked across the street at a bunch of black kids playing basketball in a dilapidated playground. The walls beyond the court were spray-painted with the mysterious terminology of gangs and clubs. What had happened to good old Kilroy, who used to peer out at you everyplace you went?

  “Brussels sprouts on a stick. What kind of meal is that, Doug?”

  Moody shrugged. “I blame the marinade. Marinating is a lost art, Frank.”

  “Maybe the guy that cooked it should be on the telephone confessing his ass off to your Apology,” Nightingale said. He felt a tiny twinge in his own stomach now. Ever since Sarah had gone off on her bizarre odyssey upstate, ever since she’d resolved, like some pilgrim, to trek north to lovely Fulton, his diet had largely consisted of greasy artifacts devoured in haste. He shut his eyes, felt around inside his mouth again, and remembered, with considerable longing, the meals Sarah had cooked for him. Roast duck with black cherry sauce. Ribs smothered in her own barbecue sauce. Beef Wellington. He opened his eyes and sat upright in the passenger seat. “So what did you think of this Shenandoah Silvertree, anyhow?”

  “I looked at him and one of my treasured fantasies dissolved,” Moody said. “I always thought antique hippies had been pensioned off. I always figured they’d been sent to obscure communes to live out their last years in peace. I even imagined some kind of federal office where they applied for permits to be classified as superannuated hippies. Applications in triplicate and an examining body. Now I know they run shitty veggie restaurants, Frank, and I’m disillusioned.”

  Nightingale smiled, staring at the basketball players. “Silvertree said something about Camilla having a brother.”

  “He didn’t say much else.”

  “He said her brother came by the restaurant now and again, maybe a couple of times, and they’d stand whispering in the corner.”

  “Family affairs,” Moody said. “According to her marriage license, her unmarried name was Camilla Chapman.”

  Nightingale could feel grease begin to dissolve in his stomach. “Maybe we’re dealing with something random here, Doug. You know? A guy gets inside, kills her, the motive being robbery.”

  “Robbery? She didn’t look like any high roller. An unlikely candidate for robbery.”

  “Okay, she was poor. But there’s always somebody poorer.”

  Nightingale looked back at the court. Those black kids had energy to burn. Just looking at them made him feel exhausted. He leaned forward and drummed his fingers on the dash.

  “You see any cash lying around her place, Doug?”

  Moody shook his head. Nightingale sat back again, stuffing his hands inside the pockets of his coat. Robbery, plain and simple. In this city, people would kill for a safety pin. He remembered when he’d just joined the force, he remembered how back then he’d felt somehow immune to murder, the sight of death, the corpse, almost as if he’d had a youthful talent for tuning the bad things out of his brain. A funny thing, though, but as he got older every new homicide seemed to touch him more deeply than the last one, seemed to kill something far inside himself. Maybe you developed compassion as the years rolled on, maybe you identified more and more with the victim. What was it—some chilling perception of your own mortality?

  Moody said, “I’ve got somebody checking records, so we should know more about next of kin pretty soon. We should know something about Camilla’s brother. Hard data.”

  Hard data, Nightingale thought. Data was a cold word he associated with computers, with scientists weighing things on their little scales or sociologists compiling their demographic maps. Data wasn’t a word he wanted to associate with Camilla Darugna.

  “Lunch’s over,” he said.

  “So where to?” Moody asked.

  “I’ve heard of some very peaceful retreats in Ceylon, Moody, where the only sound you hear is the quiet chanting of monks and a soft wind whistling through prayer wheels. Whatever the fuck a prayer wheel is.”

  “Okay. Ceylon it is.” And Moody started the car, slipping away from the sidewalk. Nightingale watched the basketball players recede in the side mirror. He wished he were young again and hamburgers were real.r />
  2.

  Billy Chapman didn’t like the way Sylvester kept staring at him. The guy just sat there in the busted armchair at the window and stared. Billy Chapman got up from the narrow bed and ran cold water into the washbasin and let it slither over his wrists.

  “What’s this, man?” Sylvester asked.

  Billy Chapman turned. Sylvester was holding the crumpled poster Chapman had brought home yesterday.

  “I don’t know what the hell it means,” Billy said.

  Sylvester smiled. “Hey, maybe you should be calling this number, Billy. Confessing your sins, my man.”

  “What sins? I ain’t got nothing to confess.”

  “We all got something to confess, Billy. Ain’t that the truth?”

  Chapman didn’t like the way Sylvester was smiling; it was a cutting kind of smile, the kind that seemed to mock you. I see through you, baby. You ain’t putting nothing over on me. He felt irritated but he didn’t need to argue with Sylvester, because you didn’t get into any hassles with your main man, your score. He dried his hands nervously on a used paper towel he found on the floor beneath the sink. He watched Sylvester pick the poster up again and read it. What’s he staring at that thing for? Why doesn’t he get down to biz?

  “Anyhow, Billy. You got the bread?”

  “I got it.” Chapman put his hand in the pocket of his jeans and took out the wad of notes and flashed it in front of Sylvester’s face.

  “Hey hey hey. You rob a bank or what, Billy?”

  “Yeah. I robbed a bank.”

  “You look like you got enough right there to move out of this pigsty you call home, Billyboy.”

  Chapman said nothing. He looked around the room. It was one mother of a mess. But he was used to the peeling wallpaper and the brown blind that hung askew on the window and the newspapers and beer bottles and cigarette butts that lay scattered across the floor. Home was a place where you felt comfortable. He moved towards the table. A jar of peanut butter, a couple of curled slices of old bread, a few dead flies stuck to a slick of spilled grape jelly.

  “At least you could buy yourself a pillowcase,” Sylvester said. “Or get a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens.” He rose from the tattered armchair, moved around the narrow room, and looked distastefully at the soiled sheets crumpled on the bed.

  “I like it here. Nobody hassles me, man. I got my privacy.”

  There was silence for a while, then Sylvester turned on the portable radio. There was an old Eddie Cochran rock hit. “Twenty Flight Rock.” “When I get to the top, I’m too tired to rock …” Sylvester clicked his fingers in time to the music. “You rip this off, Billy? Nice little radio. Halfway decent sound.”

  “Yeah. I ripped it off.”

  Sylvester looked at Billy and smiled. “You can be honest with me, man. Where the hell did you get the bread?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Is that any way to treat your main connecto, Billy?”

  Chapman sat down on the edge of the bed and switched off the radio. A cockroach scuttled across the dark stripes of the pillow and was gone before he could slap the damn thing to death. Then he watched Sylvester for a while. The guy played dipshit games all the time, making Billy wait before he condescended to produce the blow from his jacket, like it was all one big sonofabitching tease.

  Sylvester returned to the armchair. “This place smells, Billy. You know that? Can’t quite describe it … something like old cauliflower that’s been lying in water for weeks. You got any old cauliflower in here?”

  Billy Chapman didn’t speak. This goddamn game—how long could it go on for? Sylvester was staring from the window now, gazing at the brick wall of the next building. Billy Chapman closed his eyes. I came back here last night and I puked and I fell asleep and then the dreams came in and she was just screaming and screaming through the whole thing and when I touched her on the neck her head fell off, just like that, like it wasn’t attached to her body at all.…

  “Where’s your paraphernalia, man?” Sylvester asked.

  “I got it.” Billy Chapman reached under the bed and pulled out a mirror, on the surface of which lay a razor blade and a straw. He put the stuff on the table, clearing a space by pushing the peanut butter aside. The edge was working inside him now, the sense of anticipation, the greed. He watched Sylvester take a small plastic box from his inside pocket; he opened it and measured out a small amount of cocaine on the mirror. Billy Chapman couldn’t take his eyes from the blow. Sylvester straightened it into a small line with the razor blade.

  “Rusty razor. You’ll do yourself an injury, man,” Sylvester said.

  Chapman picked up the straw and leaned over the mirror. The stuff burned inside his nose and he made a small gasping sound. “Holy shit.”

  “You don’t like the sample, Billy?”

  “Burns like a motherfucker.”

  “You don’t want to make a buy?”

  Billy Chapman rubbed his nose. “Sure. Sure I wanna buy.”

  Sylvester glanced at the mirror a moment. “Seductive drug, man. I hear people say it ain’t addictive. They’re full of shit. It’s about as addictive as anything that ever came down the pike. You’re a walking proof of that, Billy.”

  Quit with the bullshit. Just knock it off. “What’s the tag?”

  “One-forty.”

  “One fucking forty?”

  “Inflation, Billy.”

  One hundred and forty bucks. Shit. He put his hand into his jeans and pulled out the bills. You don’t think about the money, you only know you got to have the blow.

  “How much do you want?” Sylvester asked.

  “Two.” Chapman began to count the cash. Two hundred and eighty bucks. “Don’t I get a break on two?”

  “I don’t give breaks unless you’re looking at three, Billy.”

  “Yeah.” He passed the money to Sylvester, then watched as two small packets were laid on the table. Sylvester stuck the cash in his inside pocket.

  “Well, Billy. Good to do biz with you. You know where to reach me if you’re looking for another score. Just don’t go robbing any more banks.”

  Billy Chapman watched Sylvester go to the door.

  “Vaya con dios,” Sylvester said, and then he was gone.

  As soon as the door closed, Chapman carefully opened one of the packets. SnoSeal paper. It was always SnoSeal. He examined the white powder inside, then laid a bunch of it on the mirror and began to chop carefully with the razor blade. Chopchopchop: He was always impatient with this part of the ritual. The stuff had a nice sparkle to it. He shaped it into two long lines and placed the straw against one of them. He snorted. Burned like it was going to tear great holes in his mucus membranes. Then he did up the other line. Whoooo. His eyes watered and he sneezed, careful to turn his face away from the mirror. It’s kicking in, he thought, it’s kicking in real mean. You wait for the lift, the quick ride on the old roller coaster, the speedy visit to the Disneyland inside your head. He got up and walked around the table. Faster heartbeats, quicker pulses. The big feeling you could do anything you wanted all of a sudden. He sat on the bed for a moment. He needed another couple of lines. Just another two, then he’d cool it for a while, make it last. He snorted up another two, longer than the first ones. Zapped, filled with energy, pacing the room like a caged creature. He turned the straw over in his fingers. Red and white, a good old McDonald’s straw. It’s never quick enough with a straw, Billy. You get off fast but not fast enough.

  He looked beneath the bed and found a plastic bag that contained a packet of hypodermic syringes, the kind people with diabetes use for their insulin shots. He carried it to the table. Then he laid some of the cocaine in a spoon, mixing the powder with a few drops of water. When he’d stirred this mixture around, he filled one of the syringes with it. He stared at the veins in his left arm. Pop one open. Get into the bloodstream and from there you’ve got a fast ride on the freeway to your head. His hand was trembling a little. He made a tight fist and the ve
ins stood out on his arm, then he pushed the needle through his skin. Blood and cocaine, fast, a lightning bolt, a violent rush of pure energy through his whole system, little Christmas lights going on everywhere in his mind, sweet Jesus. He was sweating heavily. He walked around the room. He found the poster Sylvester had dropped and he picked it up and read it and the words were suddenly all bullshit nonsense to him, like they’d been written in another language. He screwed up his eyes and wondered how some nut could set himself up like he was the pope or God almighty, listening to people confessing things over a telephone. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST! Misdeeds, my ass.

  She shouldn’t have struggled, she shouldn’t have made me kill her, how could she have provoked me like that, like she’d forgotten the way it had been when we were kids together—

  Cunt.

  What the hell, it was all in the past now.

  After a few minutes he wandered back to the table, letting the poster slip from his moist trembling fingers to the floor.

  3.

  Levy’s parrots were loose in the room, three big flashy birds flapping their great wings through the air and colliding with walls and windows. Harrison watched them, ducking occasionally, thinking how the blur of colors—reds and greens and blues—reminded him of acrylics spilled on a palette. Levy stood at the other side of the room, his back to the double glass doors that led to a small walled yard. The yard was overgrown, wild, and weedy, with a fountain covered by the crusted droppings of sparrows and pigeons.

  “Maybe you should cage the parrots,” Harrison said.

  “And put all heaven in a rage?” Levy asked. He was a small man with a benign face. He wore a beret and a striped sweater, which gave him the appearance of a cartoon Frenchman. At other times he reminded Harrison of a diminutive version of Burl Ives: You wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him suddenly break out into a chorus of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

  “The birds need periods of freedom, Harry. They’re just like people, you know. They like to spread their wings now and again.”