Distemper Page 3

  “Is that gonna grow back?”

  “Nope. I have to join the Hair Club for Women.”

  “You serious?”

  “No.”

  “Bill wants to see you as soon as you’re healthy.” Bill’s our city editor, a type-A kind of guy who thinks that any reporter who doesn’t file twice a day owes him some sort of Japanese suicide ceremony.

  “Is that how he put it? Or did he say he wants me there now?”

  “The latter. But I told him you’d be there when you can make it up the stairs by yourself.”

  “That would be now.”

  “Fuck ‘m.”

  “Have pity. He must be going out of his gourd with the new cops guy.”

  “Junior? Oh, not to worry. He’s got lots of experience. He covered at least one drunk-and-disorderly at his college paper.”

  “You calling him Junior to his face now?” Mad crinkled his eyebrows. The new cop reporter had only been at the paper six weeks, and I hadn’t worked with him that closely. But Mad was on cops for a while in his misspent youth, before he switched over to the science beat and stayed there, and he’d been appointed the new kid’s fairy godfather. He was not thrilled. “I bet Bill’d give his left nut to have Gordon back. You hear from him?”

  “That big-city shithead? He called to see if you were okay. He wants you to call him when you get home.”

  Gordon Band is a reporter for the New York Times who spent nine months in upstate purgatory as punishment for a particularly egregious newsroom meltdown. The paper had banned him for life, but no one seemed to recall this fact once he helped break one of the year’s biggest national stories, dateline Gabriel. He’d blown town in February for the isle of Manhattan, and no one had heard from him since.

  “How did he hear about what happened?”

  “How does he hear about anything? It was on the wire.”

  “I was on the wire? Are you kidding me?”

  “How hard did you hit your head? Of course it was on the wire. Front page of every paper in New York State.”

  “Even the Times?”

  “Okay, not them. You can’t expect them to give a damn who gets capped north of Westchester.”

  “Jesus, the cops are gonna kill me. You should have seen ‘em when they figured out who I was. Chief Hill came into my hospital room personally to tell me to keep my mouth shut, that I wasn’t a reporter, I was, get this, ‘a material witness to a crime,’ but by then I’d already spilled everything to Bill. So there.”

  “You filed from your hospital bed? You da woman.”

  “Did I tell you the first cop who talked to me thought I was in high school?”

  “I heard.”

  “Man, poor Junior. What a way to get started. Multiple homicide. I wouldn’t want to be covering it.”

  “Liar.”

  “Seen it, done it, been there. You know that. I’ve covered enough crazy killers, thank you very much.”

  “One’s your limit?”

  “Yep.” I stared out Mad’s window, which still had the outlines of fall leaves crusted on the outside. It had been nearly a year since Adam Ellroy died, and since Mad and Gordon and I nailed the killer. Nearly a year since I lost the only guy I’ve ever really loved, and I just barely escaped with my life. I was in no hurry to start dating again.

  “So where to?”

  “Huh?”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Where am I taking you? Home or into battle?”

  “Home. I want to see my dog.”

  He parked on the street in front of my house, came around to open my car door, and before I knew what he was up to he’d swept me off my feet and into a bridegroom’s carry like something off the cover of a Harlequin. He stood at the front door trying to figure out how to turn the knob and be manly at the same time when it opened from the inside and Shakespeare came running out. “Alex, you’re home!” Marci said, a little too brightly even for her. “We cut class to make sure you were okay.”

  Mad dropped me on the couch, the dog jumped up on my lap, and about two seconds later I figured out what was up. C.A. was there too—she actually had lipstick on—and Emma came out of the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of martinis on a tray and wearing something best described as a sarong. I’d told them I didn’t need a ride from the hospital, since Mad was picking me up. They’d been lying in wait, and they looked like a bunch of cats who’d just been handed a really good-looking ball of string.

  Have I mentioned that Mad is a total babe? We’re talking six-foot and change, obsessive gym goer, Nordic parentage, the whole thing. Truly, he’s hard to walk down the street with. Sometimes I think that regular access to Mad is the main reason the girls let me live with them. Steve too.

  “Oh, Jake, it was so very kind of you to collect Alex,” Emma said. “And I thought you didn’t have manners in this country.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Sit down,” C.A. said. “Ya wanna drink?” For her, this was Martha Stewart.

  “You know it,” he said, and Emma handed the glasses around.

  “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  “The cocktail hour,” said Mad.

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “I worked yesterday and the day before, thanks to you. Today’s my day off.”

  “Well what about me? Don’t I get a glass?”

  “Oh, sweets, you can’t drink,” Emma said. “You just came out of hospital.”

  “How do you know? You’re a goddamn veterinarian. How do you know I can’t drink? What am I, a terrier?”

  “It can’t be good for you.”

  “But what if I want one?”

  “Do you?”

  “No. But a girl likes to be considered.”

  They turned their collective gaze back to Mad, who was in pig heaven. “That’s such an interesting car you have out there,” Emma said. “Such humble transport for a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Law School.”

  Mad smiled his wolf smile. “Stickers came with the car.”

  Emma didn’t even look fazed. “Why, Jake, you urchin.”

  “So, Mad, what ya benchin’ these days?” C.A. asked. “Two? Two-ten?”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “How about you?”

  She turned to Marci. “What do you weigh?”

  Marci’s eyes narrowed. “One-twelve.”

  “One-twelve.”

  Mad cracked up. “You wanna give me another go?” He rolled up his sleeve and leaned his elbow on the coffee table; C.A. did the same. Emma clapped her hands and made a happy little chirping sound.

  “I have got to find my own apartment,” I said to no one in particular. “And did I mention I have two broken ribs and a sprained wrist? Thirty-two stitches too. And a headache.” When there looked to be no end to the arm wrestling, Marci came over.

  “Listen, Alex,” she said. “There was something I wanted to ask you. About… what you found in the woods.”

  I stared at her. If C.A. had asked the question I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised, but Marci is the last person who’d want to hear the gory details. “What do you want to know?”

  “It’s, um… the girl. When you found her, what did she look like?”

  “You really want to know?” She nodded. “She was naked, and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth…”

  “Stop. Oh, God, that wasn’t what I meant. I mean, what did she look like? Did she look like me? Like the other one did?”

  I thought about it for a minute. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Nobody who died like that could ever really look like someone alive. But I knew what she was asking. “She was about our age. Mid-twenties, you know, and white. But don’t worry, Marce. Other than general stuff like that, she didn’t look like you.”

  “Phew. That makes me feel better. I’m not sure why, but it does. I didn’t really think some… maniac was hunting me, not logically anyway. It’s al
l so silly, isn’t it? But that other girl really had me all spooky, and when I heard about the second one I didn’t know what to think. Thanks, Alex.”

  She pecked me on the cheek and practically skipped across the room to watch Mad finish off C.A. Even on his day of chivalry, he wasn’t about to let some dame beat him. The two other girls looked positively feral with glee, and even C.A. didn’t mind losing. “Victory is mine,” he said. “And now which of you lovely ladies wouldn’t mind getting the champ-een another drink?”

  I sat there watching them, feeling the ache creep farther into my cranium. I’d had plenty of death last summer, and now it looked like a killer of a very different kind had set up housekeeping. He was out there somewhere, and he liked to turn live women into dead ones, and although no one had had the nerve to use the words “serial killer,” it was just a matter of time.

  But that wasn’t the only thing on my mind as I stroked Shakespeare’s silky snout. Yes, I’d been terrified when I found the body. I might even have been within feet of the killer, and within seconds of becoming girl number three. But there was something else. As frightened as I was, I had to admit that for the first time in nearly a year I actually felt alive. I’d spent the past eight months living in a netherworld between I’m-okay and everything’s-fine. I hadn’t gone on a movie date, hadn’t slept with anyone, hadn’t even cried about Adam too much because after the first few weeks even my well had run dry.

  But I knew for sure that when I was running through the woods, when I was flying down the hill and pedaling back to town, I wanted to live. I wanted to pick up whatever pieces I had left, try to fit them together and make some sense of my life. I wanted to get back into the game. I just wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. And I was more than a little freaked out to realize that the only thing to shake me out of the doldrums had been the very thing that put me there. To wit: someone else’s demise.

  How creepy am I?

  I was thinking about all this as I sat there, listening to the four of them drink and giggle and flirt. But I was also pondering another thing as well: I’d lied. The truth was, the second dead girl did look like Marci. Maybe even more than the first.

  4

  WORD TO THE WISE: IF YOU HAVE A SPRAINED LEFT WRIST, don’t try and drive a Renault Encore with a stick shift and no power steering. If I’d sprained my right one, it would have been impossible. Either way, I didn’t have much choice but to take my own car, since Mad showed no inclination to stop snorting martinis with my roommates. I got to the Monitor around one and found the newsroom was its usual charming self. As I walked in from the back staircase past the darkroom I heard O’Shaunessey, the world’s loudest sports editor, reaming out one of the photo interns. “I don’t give a goddamn rat’s ass if it’s art. I told you to shoot the goddamn fucking football game, not the motherfucking thrill of victory on the quarterback’s grandmother’s goddamn fucking face. You didn’t get one single goddamn picture of the goddamn game. What am I supposed to run tomorrow? Shut your mouth. If you say ‘art’ another son of a bitching time I swear I’m gonna…” It went on like that for some time. I kept walking. With O’Shaunessey, it ends as quickly as it starts. He’d be buying the kid a beer by the end of the night.

  At one end of the city desk, the schools reporter was grilling whatever pour soul was on the other end of the phone. Lillian is in her early seventies; she came back to the paper two and a half years ago after retirement nearly killed her with kindness, and picked up her old beat when I moved over to politics. I have to admit she’s way better at it than I was; her interviewing style is affectionately known as “silent but deadly.” “Now, really, Mr. Superintendent, I understand how you feel. It’s a terrible position you’re in. My stars, it certainly is a pickle. But what can we do? The charges have been made… Now, sir, really. I don’t want to pry. But you have children in that school yourself. A third- and a fifth-grader, isn’t that right? Please put your professional position aside for a moment. As a parent, wouldn’t you want—wouldn’t you deserve—some concrete information about what’s going on?” She must be working on the Cub Scout ass-grabbing story. If I knew Lillian, she’d break him in under three minutes. Someday I have to get her to give me lessons.

  My desk is one over from hers. We sit in a block of four cityside reporters, schools and politics across from cops and science. It may sound odd that at a paper our size we have a full-time science reporter, but academia and research are big business, and this is a company town. Benson University is the major employer in the county, and every reporter at the paper covers it in some way. Mad does all the high-tech stuff, I do town-gown, the cops guy covers the various schoolboy antics, and so on.

  When I got to my digs I found that somebody (or probably everybody) had taped a mock-up of Monday’s front page to one of the poles that do their best to hold up the newsroom ceiling. The original headline had been SECOND BODY FOUND IN NEWFIELD with the subhead FIRST VICTIM STILL UNIDENTIFIED; POLICE WIDEN SEARCH. This one read BERNIER FINDS NAKED DEAD CHICK: “WHERE’S THE GUYS AT?” ASKS HORNY NEWSHOUND. I would have been pissed, if whoever did it hadn’t also left me a very large chocolate cupcake.

  I’d just sat down and started peeling the paper off the cupcake when Bill called me into his office. He did this by throwing a tennis ball at his Plexiglas window and catching it on the rebound, a habit that new hires tend to find alarming. I brought my cupcake with me. “Bernier, you look great.”

  “Is that on the record?”

  “Okay, you look like hell.”

  “Mad’s sentiments exactly.”

  “I was just talking to Junior here about the story.” He jerked his tennis ball toward the kid, who flinched as though he was going to get beaned. Junior’s real name is Franklin, and his regular expression is Bambi-in-head-lights. He’s got pinkish skin, and freckles, and patches of acne that wax and wane with his deadlines. There’s a newsroom pool going on how long he’ll last; my betting slip says September 1.

  “What’s up?”

  “Cops called a press conference for eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Eight? But that’ll blow our deadline. TV’ll get it a whole day earlier.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “They’re not playing nice? What for?”

  “Word on the street is they’re twisting in their polyester over you flapping your gums.”

  “Flapping my… Give me a break. They didn’t really think I wouldn’t tell you anything. What was I supposed to say? ‘No comment’? That’s a hoot.”

  “Yeah, well, what they expected you to do and what they ordered you to do are on two totally different planets, capisce?”

  “So good luck me ever getting another cop to open his mouth?”

  “You got it. North Pole time.”

  “What’s this press conference all about?”

  “Word is they’re going to ID one of the vies. Maybe one, maybe both.”

  “If the cops are freezing us, how’d you hear that?”

  “Mad just called from the Citizen. Picked it up from one of the TV guys. Cameraman said somebody at the cops leaked it to his producer, dangled a carrot about how they were going to scoop our ass.”

  “How did Mad get there? I just left him swilling gin with my roommates.”

  “How the hell do I know? He was there with some limey chick.” So Mad and Emma were living it up at the Citizen Kane, the local journalists’ bar of choice. Fabulous. Well, maybe she could handle him. Or else she’d wind up dumping a pitcher of Molson over his head, like so many before her. “So it looks like the sons of bitches are yanking our chain,” Bill went on. “I was going to send out Junior here to get somebody to spill it, but he assures me that there’s not one single cop that’ll give him the time of day.”

  “Well, actually, I…” Franklin began.

  Bill shut him up with a look. “Meter maids don’t count.”

  “Will you give him a break?” I said. “He just started. How many decent source
s did any of us have when we first got here? Don’t feel bad, Franklin. Right now I couldn’t even get the meter maids to talk to me.”

  “You got that right,” Bill said.

  “That bad?”

  “Fact is, when the chief called to screw me over with the press conference, he specifically said to make sure you weren’t there.”

  “No way.”

  “Yep.”

  “So I take it you’re sending me?”

  “Of course.”

  “When again?”

  “Tomorrow, eight A.M.”

  “Wow, they’re really pissed. They know no A.M. reporter starts before ten. What a bunch of jerks.”

  “So tomorrow, bright and early.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “What about it?”

  “Are we really going to lie down and get screwed? Me, I like some romance first.”

  “You got a better idea? I’m up shit’s creek here. My best reporter is drunk off his ass…”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “… and my second-best reporter just did a Wicked Witch of the West down the side of a mountain. My cop reporter looks like he’s dying for his mother’s tit. Who am I supposed to send? Lillian? The cops aren’t the goddamn ladies-garden-club bunch they’ve got over at the school board. We don’t exactly have a staff of thousands here, you know. Hey, I got it. Maybe I could get one of the sports guys to go over, give me some play-by-play.”

  “There’s a thought.”

  “Go home, Alex. Go get some sleep and let me figure out how I’m going to explain to our esteemed publisher that the world’s smallest TV station is going to scoop us on the biggest story of the year.”

  “Come on, it’s not that bad. It could be worse. They could be scooping us when they catch the killer. Then we’d all be out of a job.”

  “Junior, make sure Alex gets home okay. And for Chrissake, shut my door.”

  We went out by the back stairs, but when Franklin headed for his car I dragged him in the other direction.

  “Where are we going? Alex, wait, will ya? Bill told me to get you home. You heard him.”