I found a glass that smelled only of dust and blew it out. In a moment, I was the very tentative owner of six ounces of water. As much as I wanted it, and knew that I needed it, it took me a while to accept more than a sip at a time into my body.
After I’d verbally done my damage to Alice the evening before, I’d tried to destroy myself, and did a pretty good approximation of getting the job done. The short version was that I brutalized my liver on my way to dislocating a shoulder. I’d gotten in a fight, ended up at the hospital, took a cab home then stumbled into my dark kitchen and collapsed, sprawled across the table. It was still dark outside, but as best I could tell, it had to be close to morning. How close to dawn was too hard a puzzle for that moment. There was so much noise inside my head, layered on top of my pounding pulse. Take a radio, turn it just off dead center so it squawks like a shortwave broadcast. Pour about a thousand weight of gravel onto the floor, slow and steady. Then, when you’re in the groove, have someone switch a dozen Aldis lamps on and off, continuously.
Do that for an hour or eight, until you and the demons are all tired of that ruckus, and that’s what my head was feeling like, minus any expectation of relief or redemption.
I had my water along with a handful of aspirin I keep next to the kitchen sink. I filled and emptied to glasses, and that was about all I was going to manage for a while. I felt my way through the house and got nearly as far as the sofa before I gave in. I faded out, propped against the sofa, trying to hoist myself up onto the cushions with my one good arm.
Next time I woke, I was jackknifed on the floor, my neck twisted up against the sofa. I was on my left arm which was dead asleep or just disgusted with me, like everybody I knew, and refusing to get involved. I tried to roll into a position where I could right myself, but that got me nowhere. Instead, I landed in a cool, sticky pool of something I must’ve puked out in the night. Whatever it was, I was sure it was nothing I was looking forward to cleaning up.
I tried rolling the other way, onto my right arm, and regretted that even more. Fire raced down my arm and across my torso. I screamed, but whether it was inside or outside my head, I still don’t know. I laid still for several minutes, hoping I wasn’t laying in the puddle, trying to summon enough will to fling myself bolt upright.
Just as I tried to lunge forward, someone shouted “Police!” My front door splintered and peeled itself away from its frame. It was an odd thought, given the circumstances, but it seemed like I ought to be able to place the voice. After all, I’d had some kind of run in with most of the plainclothes cops and my share of the uniforms. The voice was close to someone I might make out any moment.
Flashlights painted streaks around the room. I’d have thought it was a Gestapo raid, if we were on another continent and five years in the past.
“Hands up – hands up – get your goddamn hands in the air, asshole!”
I tried. Propped up on one, and the other one bound to my body, I didn’t do much good, though. I just flopped around, half waving and half teetering.
I flailed, trying to do something, anything that seemed to suggest compliance, but my right arm just lay there, indifferent to my efforts.
The yelling to get my hands in the air continued until someone found the light switch. The six flash lights pointed at my face went down, but the guns stayed up as the cops took in the room.
“Holy Christ, Mike.” Everyone froze and turned, glancing first at the detective who said it, then toward where he was staring. It was then that I recognized him, Phil something or other from Homicide. His partner was Mike Perkins.
Homicide. The prospects for the day were getting darker. Hell, the prospects for the next 10-20 years were getting darker. There was no way homicide dicks kicking down my door was a good thing. Once again, my imagination had been trumped by the excesses of reality.
They stepped forward, tightening their ring. Someone asked a Lieutenant Boman a question, which Phil answered. Boman. Phil Boman. After a couple of beats, they all murmered their own first takes on the scene – “Oh my word” or “Son of a bitch … ” or “Did you ever…”
They went back and forth between staring behind me to waving their guns my way. Both made me worry. I was hoisted to my feet by two uniforms and dragged by arm and shoulder over to Boman. “What the hell happened here, Steele?”
They turned me roughly, pointing me toward the scene they were all struggling to absorb, and I understood. A corpse looking for all the world like Jerry was eight feet away, at the far end of a ribbon of blood that trailed back to me. In the middle of the stream and tracked over to where I’d crashed were footprints, which I was pretty sure were going to match a size 10E Floorsheim, just like the ones at the ends of my legs. I looked back at the body. Behind the bruising and the blood, I could make out enough of his face to be sure. There was never any mistaking Jerry.
The drug store was a popular place. I wasn’t the only person in the room who recognized good old Jerry. I was still too drunk and drugged up for the anger to hit me, but none of them were.
Perkins turned to me, grabbing me by the collar. He drew a fist back to somewhere way out in Parker County and held it there for a moment. I didn't know much, but I knew it was going to hurt, even under the mask of my pain relievers. After the pause he dropped his fist. I thought I was free and clear for the moment. I was, though, unfortunately, it wasn't a long moment. When I turned my eyes back to Jerry, Perkins decided to go ahead and give it to me. His fist, shoulder square behind it, rocked me back on my heels - hard. I'd have tumbled over if it weren't for the uniforms holding me up. My eyes stayed on Jerry, though, even as I wobbled, even as the space between him and my eyes got watery. All I felt was empty - a searing emptiness that was part the absence of Jerry and part my own physical pain. The pain from his punch, and the second, echoed inside a bare shell.
It might've been an hour; or it might've been five minutes. The next thing I knew, Tom blew through my broken front door, landing next to me. "Jesus Fucking Christ, what the hell did you do this time, Dix?" I looked his way, but didn't really see him, and I didn't say anything. He glanced down, running the length of me with his eyes, and jumped back a little. "What the hell? How'd you get that!?"
It was really only at that point all the events of the evening poured back into my head. I'd felt too sick, and too much had been happening for me to realize exactly why my arm wasn't behaving like I wanted, but now I knew. I hadn't just pissed off Alice for the twentieth time. I'd gotten myself roaring drunk, and when I didn’t want to leave the Four Deuces without a piece of some fella named Angelo, the bouncers convinced me by cracking a couple of ribs and then dislocated my shoulder throwing me down the driveway. To be fair, someone good sam there had called me an ambulance. When the Emergency Room finished taping me down and drugging me up, I'd tried calling Tom for a ride home, but never tracked him down. I called a cab, whose driver complained all the while about going into certain neighborhoods at three in the morning. I handed him all my cash and he tumbled me out onto my lawn when I passed out again. My stomach flipped a couple of times when I realized how close I’d come to tripping over and probably falling on top of, Jerry as I stumbled from kitchen to sofa. As it was, I woke in a pool of his blood.
Despite whatever Perkins and Bomen had hoped when they first surveyed the scene, I hadn't imagined that I could've been the one to kill Jerry, but now it was obvious to me that whatever had happened was a setup. Someone had lured Jerry to my house, killed him, and left him in a place where he'd be sure and get found, then they must've dimed me up with the cops. I come in late most evenings, so it wasn't unreasonable for them to play things that way. They wanted to bury me bad, not knowing that I had almost gotten myself buried while they were doing their setup. Not only couldn't I have beaten Jerry to death given my injuries, I wouldn't even have had time to do it. Even a window peeper like me could tell that the blood had had hours to start drying before I’d walked into it the living room.
They sat me in a chair and hovered over it like angry wives. They walked me through everything I did, starting with waking up and peeing yesterday morning, all the way through to them crashing through the door this morning. Then we went through it again, and a third time. Phil and Mike were dying to hear something out of place, see some kind of red flag, but I just didn’t have it. After that, they had two uniforms stand guard over me while they went to the kitchen to confer.
I played the whole thing over again in my mind as Tom, and the two other detectives gaped at me, each wearing their own masks of anger. It was a two reeler, the first one on what had happened to me and the second on how I imagined Jerry’s murder had played itself out. Phil and Mike were disgusted that, even as we stood there, the case against me was dissolving. Tom was disgusted for reasons I only came to understood later.
Phil interrupted the cinema in my head when, suddenly, his bloated head loomed directly in front of me. He took my lapel in his fist and rotated it, the skew drawing us closer together. I could smell the bacon and coffee on his breath, and the whiskey he'd chased everything with. Or maybe that whiskey was all me. The sun was starting to brighten the eastern horizon and my pores were already oozing, covering my skin with the toxins I'd poured down my throat the night before. "Listen, Steele. I still like you for this, not because I think you did it, but because I don't like you for anything else. We’re going to run down every word you’ve given us, and if the tiniest thing is off, we’re going to get shovels and forks and turn over your entire life. Even if you couldn’t have done this by hand, you could’ve set it up. For that matter, even if someone’s setting you up, you're getting this treatment because of something you know or something you did. Just you hope I don't find a way to make you wear this." To firmly mark his firm resolve, he shoved me back by my lapels. He then thumped Mike on the shoulder and said, "Get him the hell outta my crime scene. Go take his statement in the prowl car, or on his front steps, just not here."
Perkins jerked his thumb toward the front door and the two uniform cops who'd hauled me to my feet helped me stumble my way out to the porch where a junior detective waited.
My conversation outside with the kid detective taking my statement “one more time for the record” was pretty tidy. I walked him through what I knew of my day and what I supposed. I heard a lot of “Are you sure about that?”, “Who else was there?” and “Full name?” He then took me through it a second time, again writing everything down as I said it. He might have walked me through it backwards if Bomen hadn’t come outside to check on things. Bomen took the notepad, then lead me through each page of the kid’s notes. He’d read a section and have me verify the details presented. Here and there, he’d make up something slightly incriminating, hoping to pry holes in my story with it. As drunk and sore as I still was, I understood his hope. Less alcohol-conditioned men might have broken and confessed to who knows what.
After a week or so of this, he flipped the notepad back to the kid, said “Ecchhh!” or something similar, and waved an end to the whole thing. Not counting inside my head, I’d told the story maybe eight times, and it was barely daylight.
He banged on the front door and cops started filing out. Before they were gone, however, they had wrapped all entry points in crime scene tape.
“Hey, Bomen – where the hell am I supposed to sleep!?”
“What the hell do I care, Steele? I’m not your mother.” He was half way to his car and just yelled back over his shoulder and kept walking.
“When is this stuff coming down?”
“Not til I get tired of it, asshole.”
Tom walked back up from a curbside conference with two uniforms. He sized up the crime scene tape, then told me “Give it a couple of days, Dix, and I’ll try to get it taken down. In the meanwhile, you can bunk up on my couch.”
“Thanks, pal. For now, just take me to my car. I’m going to go lay down on the cot in my back room for a bit, then I have to … I don’t know. I have to do something. It’s Jerry.”
He wound up and was about to give me a combination of his usual “good friend” and “good cop” speeches, but threw it all away after a deep breath. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Dix – or do it yourself. Are you even fit to drive?”
My car was still up the hill at the Four Deuces. Before he let me get in the car, he quizzed me on things like who the president was and what the date was and what six times thirteen was. I passed, though maybe not with a perfect score.
I got in behind the wheel and waved Tom off. All I wanted to do was sleep for a couple of hours. Here it was eight o’clock and I’d had only about 45 minutes of sleep, even with pain relievers. I’d have preferred sleeping horizontal, but even with the rib pain, I could’ve slept standing up, propped against something. My front seat seemed like a good compromise. My body was heavily in favor of napping right there, but my brain lied and said I’d do it as soon as we got to the office and dug a clean shirt out of my file cabinet.
My head, shoulder, and ribs hurt too much for me to be sure of what day it was, so I headed first to the drug store. If Jerry wasn’t there - and he obviously wasn’t - then his uncle would be, working in his place. George deserved to be told by someone who knew him, and who was a friend of Jerry’s. Alice also counted herself as a friend of Jerry’s, and she needed to be told personally, too. If it was a weekday, she’d be upstairs in the office. If it wasn’t, she’d be at home having breakfast. I could take care of those two, and then maybe get an hour or two of sleep.
It hit George really hard. He took it like a sucker punch to the gut, bending double before I got to the end of the first sentence. By the end of the second sentence, he was sitting doubled over. Somewhere in the fourth sentence, he threw up in the wash basin next to the compounding table. I hated being the herald for the Angel of Death. I had to tell him twice that he’d been found dead in my place, and that the reason he’d been killed was that he was my friend. At one point, he said “God save your friends, Mr. Steele” and I don’t think he meant it kindly, as a benediction. He made sure I had something for my pain, then waved me on, perhaps fearful of being mistaken by God as one of my friends. I turned as I went through the door, and he was at the gate to the pharmacy counter, watching me depart. I don’t know what was going through his head as he watched me, but there was nothing in there that could have been good.
Telling George was hard enough. I knew that telling Alice was going to rip a hole in me, right next to the one that was already there. I stood on the sidewalk, squinting from the morning sun, and weighing my next move. I could go upstairs and maybe she would be there and we would take care of things right then. I could get in my car and drive to her apartment, and maybe it would buy me some time, especially if she was at work the whole time. I wanted a little break after George, like maybe a month or two. I felt tore up enough already, from his anguish as much as my own. I wasn’t going to get any rest, though until I told Alice. I needed to make sure she heard it from the right person, even if that right person wasn’t me at the moment. The newspaper rack in front of me said it was Sunday. I wanted to go upstairs for a shirt, but I knew I’d just hide there, given the opportunity, so I dragged my will over to my car and got in.
I came around her block and saw her car in its space, so I took a spot on the street nearby. I suddenly feared myself unprepared. Maybe I should’ve stopped for flowers along the way or something. I knocked twice and she opened the door as I was raising my hand again. The words log jammed in my throat, but her face fell before anything came out. This wasn’t me coming to apologize for being an ass twelve hours ago. I was in a sling and spattered in blood, to start with. Along with everything else, I’d left my poker face at home.
“… Dix … wh-who died …?”
My lips moved and still nothing came out. She stepped back and waved me in. My eyes were underwater so she led me to her dining room table and waited as I worked my way up to the news, her eyes large and her face grey.
Once I squeezed out “Jerry’s dead”, the doors opened enough to force the story through. On the first pass, I spared her a lot of details. On the second pass, I avoided the gore, but gave her more depth.
She said “Oh, Dix …” and put her hand on my arm, then got up and brought me cold coffee and cold toast. She went to her hall closet and got out a pillow and blanket and made up her couch for me. She kissed me on the forehead, then she went to her room and closed the door. It would stay closed for hours.
