Small Town

Small Town Page 14

Or did they hold the body of a murder victim for a certain amount of time? He’d watched countless episodes of Law & Order, you’d think he’d have learned something about forensic procedures by now.

Then again, what did it matter?

Marilyn Fairchild.

He tried to remember what she looked like, but his own memory had been supplanted by the picture they’d run over and over in the papers and on television, a photo that must have been taken four or five years earlier. She’d had long hair then, and when he pictured her now that’s what he saw, long hair, and he had to remind himself that the woman he’d gone home with had had short hair.

He remembered her voice, pitched low, with an edge to it. The voice had been part of the initial attraction, it had seemed to promise something, though he was unsure just what. A low voice was supposed to be sexy, and he had to wonder why. Was it some kind of latent gay thing? But her voice was neither mannish nor boyish. There was just something about it that managed to suggest he’d find the owner engaging.

Yeah, right.

His other images of her were more fragmentary, rendered so by the drinks he’d had before and after their time together. He remembered the look on her face when she paused on her way to the kitchen and glanced over her shoulder at him. He’d been turning the pages of a magazine, more a brochure, her office’s portfo-lio of co-ops and condos for sale, and something made him look up, and she was looking at him. There’d been something enigmatic in her expression, something that even now kept the image in his memory, but before he could work it out she’d turned again, and when she came back with the bottle and glasses whatever it had been was gone.

He raised the beer bottle to his lips, remembered he’d finished it. There was booze in the house, unless the cops had gotten into it while they went through his things. They’d had a warrant, and they’d come back and searched the place after they took him to Central Booking, and predictably enough they’d left the place a mess. He wasn’t what you’d call compulsively neat, and Karin had once accused him of being the third Collyer brother, but the clutter he lived with was his own, and it had taken him a while to restore some semblance of order (or manageable disorder) to the scene.

He checked, and the liquor was apparently untouched, and he left it that way and lit another cigarette instead. Drinking alone, he decided, was probably not the best idea in the world.

So what was he supposed to do? Drop by the Kettle?

He was free, he could go anywhere and do anything, but how free was he? Where could he go, when you came right down to it?

What could he do?

Yesterday he’d forced himself to go out for a walk. Picked up a carton of Camels, bought coffee at Starbucks. They gave you a free cup of coffee when you bought a pound, and he’d sat at a window table and watched the people pass. He felt throughout as though he was being watched in turn, but the tables near his were unoccupied, the baristas too busy or too self-involved to notice him.

He’d finished the coffee and left, unable to shake the feeling that people were staring at him, recognizing him. Later, when he was hungry enough for dinner, he’d been unable to bring himself to leave the apartment. He wound up ordering Chinese food, and the kid from Sung Chu Mei was concerned only with getting paid and stuffing menus under the doors of the building’s other tenants. He clearly had no idea he had just brought an order of beef with orange flavor to a man who’d been charged with murder.

And now it was a gorgeous day, New York at its best, and the thought of leaving his apartment was entirely without appeal. No, wrong, it was hugely appealing, but the appeal was more than off-set by a reluctance to subject himself to the real or imagined stares of his fellow citizens.

Maybe he’d just stay put. For today, or maybe not just for today.

That was one thing about New York—barring eviction, you never had to leave your apartment. You could stay inside 24/7, and, as long as the phone and the doorbell worked, you could arrange to provide yourself with everything you needed. Because everybody delivered—the deli, the liquor store, and all the restaurants, even the fancy ones.

He had plenty to read, a whole wall full of books. He wouldn’t run out, not with two dozen Russian novels sitting there, the complete works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, all bought during a spell of manic optimism and untouched since the day he’d put them on the shelves. And there were other books, ones he might actually want to read. (Although who was to say that now wasn’t the time to get through Crime and Punishment?) And every week the mailman would bring him fresh copies of New York and The New Yorker. Of course he’d have to go downstairs for the mail, the guy wouldn’t bring it to his door, but he could wait until four in the morning, say, and slip silently out his door and down the stairs, returning with the mail before a neighbor could catch a glimpse of him.

The crazy part was that he could imagine himself sinking into that sort of existence. He didn’t really believe it was likely, but his imagination was more than equal to the task of conjuring up a life of deliberate agoraphobia. A recluse, eyes darting around suspiciously at the slightest sound, hair uncut and beard unshaven, wearing the same clothes until they fell apart. (But was that necessary? Gap and Lands’ End would clothe him if he called their 800 numbers, and damn near everything was available online. Dry cleaners would pick up and deliver. And no doubt there were barbers who’d make house calls, if the money was right.) He shook his head, trying to shake off the life he was envision-ing for himself. He decided the silence wasn’t helping, and looked for a record to play. But no, the last thing he needed was to be forced to make choices. He put on the radio, found the jazz station, and listened to something he didn’t recognize. There was a trumpet player, and he was trying to decide if it was Clifford Brown.

His mind wandered, and he was thinking of something else when the announcer ran down the personnel on the cut she’d just played. He realized as much after the fact, and thought of calling the station. He could do that, and she would never realize she was talking to an accused murderer. Unless she had caller ID, but even then—

Oh, really, did he honestly give a rat’s ass who’d been playing the trumpet?

He was in jail, he realized. He was home, but he was in jail, and nobody could come along and bail him out of it.

six

JERRY PANKOW CAUGHT the two-thirty meeting at Perry Street. During the sharing he raised his hand early on, but when he didn’t get called on right away he stopped trying. When the meeting ended he was angry with himself, so he left his keys on his chair and went around the corner to the Arab deli for a cup of coffee, then came back for the four o’clock meeting. This time he raised his hand and got called on, but he talked about something else, not what was most on his mind, because he’d decided that was something he should talk about with his sponsor.

He called her, and relaxed when he heard her voice. Funny how it worked. You relaxed in anticipation of the relief. He remembered times, fiercely hungover, shaking, when he’d stand at the bar and watch the bartender pour the drink. And then, before he even had the glass in his hand, he’d feel as if the drink were already in him, smoothing the rough edges, quieting the storm.

He said, “Oh, I’m glad you’re in. There’s something that’s driving me crazy, and I really need to talk to you about it.”

“So talk.”

“Could I come over? Or meet you someplace?”

“Well . . .”

“I’m probably being paranoid, but I’d rather not do this over the phone.”

“I’ve got somebody coming at six-thirty,” she said, “but if you come over now we’ll have time. I’ll even fix you a sandwich, because I’m planning to have one myself.”

The conventional wisdom in AA was that one ought to choose a sponsor of one’s own sex, to keep sexual tension from undermin-ing the relationship. That was fine for straights, but it wasn’t that simple in gay AA, where the term pigeon-fucker had been coined to label sponsors who took sexual advantage of sponsees. (He’d heard the term at his first meeting, and thought it was some kinky practice he’d somehow missed out on.) Most gay men did in fact have gay male sponsors, and it worked out most of the time, but, when his first sponsor had looked him dead in the eye and said,

“Jer, I think I’m going to have to resign as your sponsor, because I’m starting to have feelings that get in the way,” he’d decided his next sponsor wouldn’t ever have to face that problem.

Lois Appling was a forty-something lesbian, a professional photographer and a serious amateur bodybuilder, who shared a loft on Greenwich Street with a woman named Jacqui. They’d both been sober a dozen years, and had been together for ten of those years, and sometimes he found himself wondering whether they’d reached that stage of Sapphic intimacy called Lesbian Bed Death, where you feel closer together than ever but, for some unfathomable reason, never have sex anymore. It was, he’d decided, none of his business, but he couldn’t keep from wondering.

He’d called from a pay phone at Fourth and Charles, and Lois and Jacqui’s loft was on Greenwich Street between Tenth and Christopher, so he would ordinarily have walked west on either Charles or Tenth. But that would have meant walking past either the front or the rear of the Sixth Precinct station house, which would ordinarily not have been something to think twice about, or even once, but not today, thanks all the same. And he didn’t want to walk over to Christopher, which was a little bit out of his way, because at this hour on this nice a day it would be a little bit cruisier than he could stand. So he walked a block back to Perry Street, which added a full two blocks to the trip. He asked himself if he was being neurotic, and decided that he was, and so what?

“I W E N T T O T W O meetings today,” he said, “and I wound up deciding I didn’t want to share this at a meeting. But I have to talk about it, and I need advice, or at the very least a sounding board, because I don’t know what I should do.”

“If you’re thinking of selling your story to the National Enquirer, ” she said, “I’d advise against it.”

“My story?”

“‘I Cleaned Up after the Charles Street Strangler.’ ”

“Oh, please. You’re going to think I’m an idiot.”

“What I think of you,” she said, “is none of your business.”

“I feel better already. Oh, this is stupid. What it is, there’s something I forgot to tell the police.”

“‘I love you, Officer.’ ”

“Ha! No, I don’t think so. Lois, there was something I saw that maybe was a clue, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Why?”

“Because I forgot. Because I was flustered, and I already felt like such an idiot, and they clearly thought I was hopeless, and it slipped my mind.”

“If it was a clue,” she said, “maybe they stumbled on it themselves, without Lord Peter’s invaluable assistance.”