A Visible Darkness (8 page)

12

I
pulled into the ranger station parking lot at 4:00
A.M.
There was a single light on over the wash house door. Another burned high on a pole over the dock. When I wheeled into my usual spot, my headlights hit a small reflective sign:
PARKING BY PERMIT ONLY
.

I sat staring at the words, looked around stupidly like I wasn’t sure I was in the right place, and then felt the blood rising into my ears. I put the truck in reverse, punched it and sent a spray of shell and dirt clattering through the undercarriage. I backed into a spot on the other side of the lot, clearly in a public space. I pulled out my bags and locked up. As I approached the pool of light near the dock, I saw another sign that was staked next to my overturned canoe:
ALL UNATTENDED WATERCRAFT ARE THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OWNER. THE PARK IS NOT LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE
.

I flipped the canoe, checked for the paddle, still safe inside, and then dragged the boat to the ramp. I stored my bags and turned back to stare into the front of the ranger’s office, hoping to catch the new man, maybe at the window, awakened by my rumblings. Nothing. All I could see was a single red dot glowing inside; a security alarm indicator that had never been there before.

I pushed the boat forward and floated the bow. With one foot in the stern and hands gripping either gunwale, I shoved off onto black water.

I took several strokes west and then sensed the incoming tide taking me. I could feel the water through the thin hull like a shiver under a horse’s coat. A half moon was pinned high in the sky like a flat silver brooch and its light glittered on the calm water. I cleared my throat and spat once, then started paddling toward home. The moon followed.

It took me more than an hour to reach my shack, and the thin light of dawn was already seeping into the eastern sky. I checked the stairs and went up. I stripped off my clothes and stepped back out to stand under the rain-barrel shower and used a few gallons to hose the sheen of sweat off. I pulled on some shorts and poured the rest of the thermos of Richards’s coffee into a mug, then sat in my straight-backed chair and put my heels up on the table. By the third sip I was asleep.

I dreamed of O’Hara’s Gym, down on Cantrell, east of the school. O’Hara’s son, Frankie, had been a friend since we were boys. It was Frankie who invited me to the gym one day after football practice and let me spar with him. His father didn’t mind teaching a little to someone from the neighborhood, and after they found out I could take a decent shot to the head without going down, they didn’t mind having a six-foot-three, 215-pound sparring partner around for the real fighters to warm up on.

I just liked the place. The heat in the winter. The odor of liniment and sweat and talcum. The rhythm of leather slapping on leather and the sting and whoosh of a jump rope. That and the silence.

No one in O’Hara’s wasted their breath on words. A trainer might yelp instructions to his fighter in the ring, or have a low conference between the two-minute bells, but a man on the heavy bag didn’t trash talk. A guy rattling the speed bag only breathed swiftly and kept the rhythm. The shadow boxers had nothing to say to the man in the mirror.

I’d been going to O’Hara’s for a year before my father found out. On a November evening one of his patrol buddies led him and another cop in after their shift. They’d stopped off at Rourke’s Tavern like always. They came in yapping.

“I’ll show ya. It’s true,” said the smallest of the group. Schmitty, I think they called him.

“Bullshit,” my father was saying, and the sound of his voice turned me just as I was climbing into the raised ring to take a few rounds with a middleweight trying to tune up for a bout that month in Atlantic City.

Mr. O’Hara walked over to the trio, and even though they had changed out of their uniforms, he knew from their carriage and sense of ownership who they were.

“Can I help you officers?”

By that time my father had spotted me. His seventeen-year-old son up in the ring, without his knowledge, or his permission.

“That’s his kid there,” Schmitty said, touching my father’s arm and pointing up at me.

Mr. O’Hara looked into my father’s face and then back at me as if to confirm the resemblance.

“Yeah. OK. Nice to meet you Mr. Freeman,” he said. “You want to watch your boy, OK.”

My father had a look on his face that I’d never seen, a look of surprise, but with the narrowed eyes of his constant skepticism and an alcoholic sheen of disregard.

The bell for the round rang and snapped my eyes off his. From the other corner, Mohammed “Timmy” Williams came bouncing across the ring. Williams was a professional and had an agenda. He moved like mercury spilled from a bottle, slipping, circling to his right, body bunched but fluid and within itself. I tried to cut off the ring on him like Mr. O’Hara had taught us but Mohammed was much too fast, bouncing on his toes, automatically anticipating the moves that I had to think about. It was like trying to pinch that ball of silver liquid. You could never seem to touch it. He slipped in close and fired two left jabs into my high right glove. The first one I blocked, the second I hadn’t even realized he’d thrown. The punch knocked my headgear askew. Now I circled and shot out a jab, just to be moving.

“Atta boy, Maxey.” The one called Schmitty was yelling.

“Long arms,” quietly rasped Mohammed’s trainer from his corner.

The professional was there to work technique. His upcoming opponent was long-limbed like me. He was trying to perfect his ability to slip inside those long punches and punish the other fighter’s torso.

I was there to get hit. It’s what sparring partners do. I kept my elbows down and in, knowing his intent. He fired two more jabs that snapped into my headgear, high on the forehead.

“Come on, Maxey. Give ’em a shot.”

The cop named Schmitty was excited. The rest of the gym was, as usual, voiceless. My father only watched.

I threw another, instinctive left jab that Mohammed deftly stepped into and let slide by his ear before delivering a short right hook to my exposed ribs. My mouthpiece came halfway out onto my lips from the air that popped from my chest. My knees lost the connection between upper and lower legs for an instant and I stumbled back. Mohammed bounced away and waited. I tried to get my lungs to work again. We circled again. Mohammed started to throw stinging punches, combinations, left-right, left-right off my headgear.

“Come on, Maxey,” yelled the cop. “Give some back to this homey.”

I heard the machine rhythm of the speed bag lurch, just once, before regaining its patter. I heard someone on the heavy bag snap it with a vicious punch.

Mohammed moved back in. His punches to my head were too quick to stop but that was not his intent. Despite that knowledge, my elbows were instinctively coming up. He dropped his guard suddenly and I took the bait, delivering my own combination. This time he slapped away my left, slipped under my right and hooked two short punches, filled with the power of his hips and legs, into my midsection, just above my hip bones.

I lost my eyesight for a second and had a strange recollection of the first time I tried to stand on ice skates as a child and felt no friction under my feet.

When my vision returned and refocused, I was down on the canvas with my knees together and ankles splayed out, squatting. Mohammed was back in his corner, standing, taking instruction from his trainer. The room was still spinning when I turned to look out of the ring. My father was missing. And then I saw his back turned to me. The sight of his son being dropped to the floor by a black man, even in sport, was something he could not bear to witness. His shoulders filled the door to the street and he met the cold wind without dropping his chin.

13

T
he light woke me. A midday sun left bright and clean by a high pressure system that had swept the sky clear of cloud. I was not used to sleeping in daylight.

“The evils of city nightlife,” I said aloud, with no one to share the joke. I got up and set the coffeepot going and rummaged through the rough pantry shelves for canned fruit and a sealed loaf of bread. As I ate I could hear the hard “keowk” of a tri-colored heron outside, working the tide pools on the western bank of the river. I looked for a book in my sloppy stack on the top bunk and picked a collection of stories about the Dakotas by Jonathan Raban. I took it outside and sat on the top step, propping my back against the south wall. I was deep into the fourth story when the cell phone started chirping.

“Yeah, Billy?” I said instinctively into the handset.

“Ya’ll wait till I say hello an’ you wouldn’t make that mistake,” McCane said from the other side of the connection.

“McCane?” I said. “Who gave you this number?”

“Well, that’d be your pal Manchester. He doesn’t seem too eager to deal with me one-on-one, if you know what I mean.”

I could hear a tinkling of glassware and the strains of a Patsy Cline song in the background.

“What do you need?” I said.

“I need to get with you on this little purchase group I’ve been sniffin’ out, Freeman. Why don’t you come join me? We’ll sit down and have a drink and sift through it a bit.”

“Why don’t you sift through it over the phone? I’m afraid I can’t make it back in today,” I said. It was early afternoon and I could hear the softening of the hard vowels and drawn out
s
sounds in McCane’s speech, telltale patterns I’d heard too many times in my youth. He wouldn’t be sober by suppertime.

“Okay. Have it your way, bud,” he started. “We got a bit of a trail working here. But it’s not exactly clear where it’s leadin’. Through our company I pulled some private documentation and laid out the purchases on our insured. Then I got some friends with the other companies to do the same.”

He was clicking back into business mode and I had to admire the transition.

“Now, these investment boys pull these life policies in from a lot of places. The so-called gay community was a choice target when that AIDS thing was knockin’ ’em off a few years back. And there wasn’t too much illegal goin’ on, since these boys figured they had a death sentence anyway so let’s get the money and party. Hell, the investors bought ’em up for twenty cents on the dollar. The boys spent the money while they shriveled up, and when they died, the investors cashed out.”

Even with a few drinks in him, McCane still only bordered on displaying the homophobia in his voice. Nothing that an e-mail or printed deposition would ever show.

“But the money guys needed a go-between,” he continued. “They sure as hell weren’t gonna go hang out in the boy bars themselves recruitin’ business.”

“So you’re saying there’s a go-between here also?”

“There’s always a go-between Freeman. You know that. The money men, especially the white-collar money men, never get their hands dirty.”

McCane sounded more bitter than he had a right to, considering he worked for the white-collar insurance world. But he was right. No different than the drug trade or Internet scams. The guys with the investment capital never saw the streets. They sat high above, just doing business.

“So you have a line on any of these middlemen?”

“I’ve got an eye out, Freeman. And you ought to, too. Your boy Manchester is pretty good at trackin’ the fìnancials on whatever names I give him. I’ll just follow the money trail.”

McCane took a long pause. I could almost hear the whiskey sliding down his throat.

“How much money do you pay a man to kill old ladies in their beds?” I finally said.

“Depends on the man, Freeman. Depends on the man,” he said. “So what have you got for me, Freeman? I assume you ain’t leavin’ this all to me.”

I told him about my tour of the neighborhood, my meeting with a local detective I knew and the suspicion that they had a serial rapist who had progressed to choking his victims to death. Whether it had any connection with our case, I wasn’t sure. Hell, I wasn’t even sure we had a case. But if I believed what McCane was telling me, he wasn’t just dismissing it.

“So you’re with me on this?” he repeated.

“You stay on the middlemen, McCane. Leave the locals to me,” I said.

I hung up and sat on the top step of my porch and watched a heron fishing in the shallow waters under a stand of pond apple trees. The bird’s roving eye seemed to be everywhere at once, but I knew it was focused on a target. The tapered beak was always poised. I sipped from my cup and watched the filtered sunlight dance around him and then, with a flick, the beak struck and came up with a small pilchard fish pinched at the head, its tail flapping furiously. Nice lunch, I thought. But instead of flying away with its catch, the heron stood frozen, its eye still worrying. I looked up into the canopy, scanning the top foliage, then twisted around and saw him. The big osprey was perched in the top of one of the twin cypress trees that marked the entrance to my shack. He was looking down at the heron, or perhaps at me as if to say, “Now that’s how to catch a fish.”

After a minute the standoff ended. The heron finally bent its legs, unfolded its wings and took flight. The osprey didn’t move. He sat there, as if waiting for me to decide on a course to take. I stared at him for a few minutes, then got up and went inside, closing the door softly behind me.

14

T
his one was not as weak. Eddie replaced the metal lid on Ms. Thompson’s garbage can in the alley behind her small house on Thirty-fourth Avenue. Inside there had been empty packages from frozen dinners, the smell of shaved pork from a wad of tin foil and a confetti of small ripped pink packages of sugar substitute. It was not like the garbage he’d seen on earlier forays. The others had eaten little or nothing. Their cans had been near empty, holding only mounds of tissues, a few half-filled cans of protein substitute and bags of medical trash. Ms. Thompson was not waiting on the edge.

Eddie knew she lived alone. Her husband was long dead. But he had seen her move about in the past. Had even watched her drive that old Chrysler till just a couple years back. She was more like his own mother, feisty and bitchy and always getting on him about how he needed a job. Humpin’ ’round all day pickin’ trash and bein’ laughed at by everyone in the neighborhood ain’t no job, she would say. And why don’t he clean hisself up and go on Sunday with her down to Piney Grove Church like he used to and her not thinking that was twenty-five years ago when he was still a boy. No, this one would be more like his momma, who wouldn’t get off him, constantly pushing on him about making money to help her out and how come he can’t be like other sons and what was he going to do when she was gone and where would he stay and who would take care of him then. Well, today he had three new hundred-dollar bills in his pocket down by his watch and he was making it just fine in her house without her. No, this Ms. Thompson would not be as easy as the others. She’d be more like his momma.

He watched the house from the cover of a ratty hedge. The smell of the alley didn’t bother him. A trail of ants led from one of the trash cans to the base of a shed across the way. Their industry was constant. It was an odd, jiggling ribbon of life that would only be temporarily interrupted when Eddie slapped his boot down, crushing half a dozen. Then he would again study Ms. Thompson’s window lights, marking her habits. He’d push his cart up and down her street. And by the time he came back, the ants would have resumed their marching. Eddie wondered what would happen when a car or truck rolled through the alley and mashed the whole line.

On the third night, the lights in Ms. Thompson’s kitchen went out and Eddie moved. In the darkness he could get closer. He left his cart and took up a position in the side yard. He inspected the grates on the side windows. He knew he could quietly turn those bolts out if he had to. And usually, if he removed the iron grate and set it down on the lawn, the window behind it would be carelessly unlocked. People didn’t care, Eddie thought. They set themselves up for what they got.

He moved again, to the other side of the house into a shadow on the neighbor’s wood slat fence. He could see the carport from here. The old Chrysler looked like it hadn’t moved for years. The windshield was layered with dust. The tires had gone soft and there were cracks in the rubber whitewalls. His eyes moved to the carport door that led into Ms. Thompson’s utility room. It was a louvered door, the dull metal handle and lockset still strong, but there was no grate over the windowpanes. With a couple of panes out he could reach through and snap open the lock.

He waited for an hour. Never dozed off. Never once did he lose his concentration on the inside noises. He saw when the living room lights went off and then the shine of the small bathroom window on the back lawn. He waited that one out, too. Eddie was patient, but the stiff hundred-dollar bills in his pocket seemed to press into his thigh. He needed to see the Brown Man.

When the house had been dark for another hour, he stepped to the carport door and slipped the socks over his hands and started on the jalousies. With his hand inside, he turned the deadbolt and slipped the chain—he would have to remember to refasten it when he left. Inside the small laundry room, the odor of bleach stung his nostrils. He moved, a single wary step at a time. A clock ticked on the kitchen wall. The hallway was carpeted and quiet. The bedroom door was ajar and the bathroom across the hallway smelled oddly of what? Cologne?

Eddie gripped the door, fingers wrapped around its front edge, and pressed it up and tight against the hinges to avoid any squeaking as he eased it open. He was surprised to see a line of light glowing at the bottom of a door inside. Another bathroom. It was wrong for this neighborhood. She must have had it installed, Eddie thought. He had never seen a second bathroom in these houses. He watched the strip for several seconds, soaking up the light, adjusting his eyes. In the high-mounted bed, he could see the line of Ms. Thompson’s body turned away from him. He could see her white hair in the slight glow. Another pillow lay next to her, punched down and indented. Eddie picked it up, assessed the position of the old woman again, and then pushed the material over her face.

He was just beginning to close his eyes to her muffled groans when light burst into the room.

“Abby baby, you purrin’ like a ol’ lioness ain’t too tired…” The man coming out of the lighted bathroom caught a glimpse of the huge thick back bent over the woman he had just recently started calling his girlfriend and yelped “What the hell?…”

The speed of Eddie’s left hand swapped its hold from the woman to the old man’s throat before another syllable could be uttered. The man’s eyes went big. Eddie’s right palm remained on the pillow and the light from the doorway caught all three of them in an ugly instant of time.

Just as the old man started kicking Eddie tightened his grip, feeling the soft flesh and then crushing the bony windpipe under his thumb. He spread the fingers of his other hand and kept the pocket of his huge palm over the mouth of the other. And he silently held the pose, watching the man’s face go from red to dusty blue in the light of the new master bathroom. Eddie was a patient man and did not move until he was sure that the lives in both of his hands were gone.