Vanishing acts, p.21
Vanishing Acts, page 21
They had flown through the discussion about having kids … again. It struck like a sinus blockage about once very week to ten days, that little talk. Both of them had said their lines so often they sounded the way earnest high school drama students do when required to mouth lengthy, knotted ropes of cliché.
She would ask, faking innocence, if he had thought any more about it. He would say no he had not, and lie about being too busy with work and stress and business and living.
She would remind him she was over thirty, that her “clock” was ticking down faster and faster—
And just where in hell had women gotten that idiotic expression about their biological countdown? Jesus! This was the point where the caveman who lived in the darkness of Curson’s occipital began sharpening his adz.
—and he would shoot himself in the foot by conceding the future possibility of fatherhood (way distant future, to be sure), which was always the beginning of his downfall, because …
She would exploit that foothold—foothole?—and strive to steer him toward the admission that he had actually, realistically, honestly, just once, maybe for an instant, considered spending the remainder of what he called his “non-senile adult life” as a daddy. To this attack he would harshly counter that they might as well shove their life’s savings onto one spin of a roulette wheel and win a bundle of joy whose odds of curing AIDS or becoming a serial murderer were equal in the cosmic scheme of things.
Sondra would play the emotion card, her eyes going wet and leaky. Curson’s jaw would lock and he would begin to use his answers to hurt her. He did not wish to hurt his wife; he was merely trying to drive her away from the “discussion” that unerringly hurt them both, left them weak and defensive, and eroded every good thing about a marriage which was otherwise brimming over with good things.
His beeper had gone off at 12:45. It was Janeway, his partner, who frequently rang a chime late at night because he no longer had Curson’s kind of wife-strife. This page was from Division, which meant crime was afoot, and whether it was an excuse or not, Curson deployed it toward Sondra in order to slingshot his ass out the door by 12:50. Saved by the razzing radio surrogate bell.
Like a leaky pipe, badly puttied, the “discussion” was neutralized for one more day. Curson felt supremely guilty about the sense of relief he experienced as he jammed his car out of the drive. Sondra had not moved to the window to forlornly witness his departure. That was a good sign.
He loved Sondra more than anything.
But he felt better fleeing, and he wanted to do something good to repay Janeway’s rescue extraction. His partner needed him, so he went.
“Bad one.” That was Janeway’s answer to Curson’s “What’ve we got?” on the cellular phone as Curson sped toward Division.
“Define bad.”
“Guy mutilated his girlfriend with one of those knives that never needs sharpening. Biggest one in the set.”
“And?”
“Guy says she was pregnant and he tried to cut the baby out of her.”
“She dead, the girlfriend?”
Janeway almost chuckled. “What do you think?”
“I think you haven’t defined bad yet; what are you leaving out?”
“Guy broke out of prison to do it, didn’t fight back when he was caught, and doesn’t want a lawyer.”
“I’d call the last two things good, for us.” Curson’s phone frazzed out briefly. He took his other hand off the wheel for a second to rub his face, though he wasn’t tired.
“You still there?”
“I’m five minutes away. Guy have a name?”
“Victor Quintelle Solos, twenty-five-year-old white male.”
“Sounds like a serial killer name you hear on Court TV.”
“His gig was fifteen years at Fordmill Pen.”
“What, a dime and a half for butchering people?”
“No. Accessory to an armored car robbery in nineteen ninety-two.”
Curson’s face pinched. “Doesn’t sound kosher, does it?” He tried to figure out the anomaly. “What’d his girl do wrong?”
“Zero. They were gonna get married. She had conjugals. No fights to speak of; no drug use.”
“So … he killed her because she was pregnant.”
“Yes and no.” Janeway paused before continuing. Janeway only drew a dramatic breath when evidence didn’t track, or thought he was confusing his partner. He spaced out the words carefully. “He claims she was not pregnant with, uh, a human being.”
“Ah, that’s the bad part.” Curson felt a vast weight settle onto his shoulders.
“Just get here.”
Curson thought of calling Sondra, to tell her he was in for an all-nighter, but hesitated. He wanted to see more before he actually had to confront her voice on the phone.
Victor Quintelle Solos looked like an out-of-work comedian—soft, round, blunt, slightly bug-eyed, and not at all the reptilian predator for which Curson had girded himself. It would have been an easier ride if Solos had come with satanic jailhouse tattoos and the usual hot-seat tough talk. His eyes did not shut out Janeway or Curson, but invited them in. He sought their approbation the way a child seeks to apologize to an adult. He smiled too much; not the smug leer of a guy who could take a beating (if that’s what his captors and inquisitors had to offer), but a smile of hope that these cops might comprehend his essential innocence in tonight’s drama.
He looked, Curson thought, like a fellow in one of those vampire movies who has staked his best friend in front of witnesses and trusts the authorities to buy a fantastic tale of supernatural bloodsuckers. He sat and smoked while Janeway and Curson watched him through the observation mirror.
“There’s no smoking in this building anymore,” Curson said.
“Please, daddy.” Janeway mopped his head with a fast-food napkin imprinted with a jaunty logo. One of the desk drawers beneath the recording gear was a repository for take-out tools—plastic utensils, chopsticks, drinking straws—which testified that some cops ate too much crap. Curson noticed several fortune cookies which he knew had lived in the drawer for at least a year. He wondered whether the fortunes were still valid, or came with spoilage dates.
“He says he’ll tell his story, but not to me,” Janeway said. “So I called you.”
“He’s jacking you. Waiting for a lawyer.”
“I told you, he waived.”
“So why won’t he talk to you?”
“That’s where the weirdness starts.”
“Goddammit, Leo, I hate this fucking game you always play.”
The innocence spiking across Janeway’s face was the most transparently bogus expression Curson had seen in weeks. “What?”
Curson mimed a fist. “You know exactly what. I always have to ask you the question directly; you won’t just tell me, and if it’s to drive me nuts, it’s working, it’s late and I am already getting pissed off. So what is the weirdness, Leo?”
Janeway shook his head, the way a dog does when it hears a space noise. “Sorry. I always think of you as my goofy little brother, and it’s fun to egg you on. I’m just trying to wrap my brain around this guy and I can’t. Know what the first thing he asked me was?”
“The first thing he asked you?”
“He asked if I had any kids, and when I said yes, he shriveled completely shut. Then all he would tell me was what I told you.”
Curson looked at the floor, at the drawer, almost anywhere but Janeway’s eyes. “So you called me.”
“Looks like I tore you away from something really grim.”
“No, it’s just … the thing about kids. I had another fight with Sondra tonight, about kids.”
“Fight?” Janeway put on his doubtful attorney face. “You and Sondra don’t ‘fight’ in the conventional sense of the term as it applies to every other married couple in America, if I may be so bold.”
“Okay, call it more a stiff debate with stomach acid poured all over it. She wants to get pregnant and I want to breathe, and there doesn’t seem to be an accord.”
“Didn’t you ever hear about the three C’s? Communication, cooperation, coordination?”
“I didn’t change my mind, Leo. She did.”
“I thought it was just smoking that had been banned; I didn’t know changing your mind was against the law.”
“You’re a vast friggin’ help.”
“Why don’t you just have a kid? One kid. One more kid won’t topple the planet off its axis. It’ll be as handsome as Sondra and as bilious as you.”
“Please. I’ve suffered every variation of this speech that has existed since the dawn of mankind.”
“Just doing my bit. I love my daughter. She is perhaps my greatest achievement.”
“Yeah, but we don’t get paid for reproducing, we get paid for prying reality out of Victor the Knife Man, in there.”
“I live to serve. Meanwhile, I need you to see if you can pry anything out of Victor the Knife Man in there.”
Janeway was peering at him sidewise, testing depths. “You up for this, partner?”
Actually, Curson preferred grilling a murderer to going home just now.
“He tried to cut a baby out of his wife?”
“Girlfriend, affirmative.”
“How pregnant was she?”
“Seventh, eighth week.”
“So it wasn’t a baby, it was a fetus.” In Curson’s mind, the crime changed from baby killer to someone who had terminated a scrap of tissue and some chemicals, incidentally bumping off the host—the mother.
Janeway made a face. “Oh, you’re gonna be a laugh riot, I can tell.” He motioned toward the interlock door. “After you.”
Victor Quintelle Solos lit his third cigarette since Curson had first seen him. “Detective Curson, do you have any kids? Any children?”
“No.”
“You lying?”
“You wouldn’t talk to my partner, and if you don’t want to talk to me, then you’re wasting everybody’s time and I’ll tank you in thirty seconds. My answer to your question is no, I do not. I also do not play good cop, bad cop, so if you’re waiting for one of us to be mean to you, forget it. Now do you have a story to tell us, or do we say good-bye?”
“He wouldn’t understand,” Victor said, indicting Janeway. “He has reproduced, so his beliefs about them would cloud his judgment.”
“I think I’ve just been insulted,” Janeway said.
“Detective Janeway stays in the room with us. No negotiation.”
“Sorry,” said Victor. “No offense.”
“That’s a good one,” said Janeway. “We’ve already got a two-inch stack of crime scene Polaroids that are pretty fucking offensive.” Janeway often ran coarse when he was fed up, and as a result Curson tried to avoid common cursing—another manifestation of the seesaw nature of most cop partnerships.
Curson had examined the pictures, which reminded him of a photo he’d once seen of Jack the Ripper’s final victim, alleged to be one Mary Kelly, who had been eviscerated over the course of two long hours of butchery more than a century earlier. Victor’s hand-iwork made Jack’s look streamlined.
“I don’t want to see them,” said Victor. “I did what I had to do.”
Janeway rolled his eyes. Curson could tell he was getting ready to shitcan Victor—prematurely—because so far Victor sounded as though he had nothing new to say beyond the standard-issue excuses and prattle of just another killer.
“Shit, Dion, if I have to listen to this fucker spew—”
“Hang on, Leo. Tranquilo. Momentito.” Settle down. Give me a moment. A tiny moment. Janeway’s home life had been the dullest, most predictable standard family-issue Curson could imagine. Bland, even. Janeway could handle everything from body parts strewn across an intersection to the million child-sized catastrophes with which his little girl had gifted him every day while growing up … so why was he running redline, acting like he wanted to strangle Victor right here in the hot room?
Curson sat down close to Victor’s corner of the table. First fold your hands to demonstrate calm, Curson thought, then open them to show you’re willing to listen, that you want to hear the tale. Maintain eye contact. Pay attention and don’t look away while the subject is speaking. Make him feel protected in a hostile environment.
“You want coffee, water, a soda?” Curson cleared his throat. “I know I do, and you must be dry. Leo, do me a favor and snag us a couple of bubble waters from the fridge. Club soda okay?”
Victor looked slightly stunned, his gaze drifting. He answered automatically. “Yeah.”
Curson waved off Janeway’s protest with an A-OK. He wanted to see how Victor acted when Janeway seemed to be out of the room—even though Janeway would linger right by the door, watch-dogging, and have his free hand on a fully charged shockstick.
Victor lit another cigarette. “I know you saw the photos. I know what it looks like. Guy goes berserk and carves up his lady; if you expect me to say I’m possessed or something, I’m going to disappoint you.”
“I just want to know what’s going on, Victor. What did you mean when you said Leo’s beliefs about his children would bias him against you?”
“How many times have you heard that rap about children being the most precious commodity in the world?” Victor was focused now. “Everything we do has gotta be oriented around making children, protecting children, accommodating fucking children. Doesn’t it seem a bit disproportionate to you? Allowing one segment to dominate the entire society?”
“I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of support for not protecting children.”
“That’s just it—that’s the way everybody is programmed, by our society, by our media, by our goddamn parents and families and relatives. Children have become sacred in this culture even though their mean worth to the culture has diminished to practically zero.”
This was kind of creepy. Victor was suddenly using big words and speaking like a man with an education.
“I mean, it’s one thing if we’re tribes squabbling over a waterhole, and every birth means another soldier, which is good because nine out of ten babies die and there’s only a couple thousand apemen on the whole planet. It’s another thing if we’re still pre-Industrial Revolution and most of the kids die of consumption or crib death, and we’re agrarians who need all the hands on the farm we can get. But we’ve got how many billion people overrunning the planet, now? Double that in fewer than thirty years? Reproducing irresponsibly is a sick, atavistic notion.”
“You’re not going to talk people out of having kids, Victor.” Once the words were out of Curson’s mouth, he was mildly shocked to hear himself saying those words in particular.
“I know. It’s an imperative logged right into our DNA along-side fight-or-flight. We’ve evolved a little bit—our wisdom teeth are being bred out, the hair is disappearing from our bodies as a species, the field of focus of our eyes is changing and fingernails and toenails will be completely gone in the next few thousand years. But in order to survive long enough to really evolve, we’ve got to evolve mentally, intellectually, to the point where we stop breeding like fucking bacillae, because the world can’t use more people right now, no matter how wonderful they are.”
“It’s an individual choice,” said Curson.
“No, it’s a species choice. Everybody says, fine, you choose not to have kids, but I’m having all the kids I want and when you die, my kids will be running things and you’ll be forgotten. And I say, no, moron, because when the planet finally chokes to death on an overdose of people, thanks to your untethered spawning, we’ll all go down together.”
“I take it your girlfriend was pregnant and you didn’t want her to have the baby.” Curson was trying to keep his eye on the target.
“Her name is Marisole. Was Marisole.”
Janeway delivered a pair of bottled club sodas. “Would you two like to hear about our specials for this evening? No?”
Curson said, “Was Marisole seeing someone while you were in prison, Victor?”
“Oh, man …” Victor vised his temples as though trying to exorcise some toxin from his forehead. “Simple infidelity is not what it’s about. I’m being completely straight with you, and you have to pay attention. I’m sterile, okay? The plumbing all works fine but reproductively speaking, I’m shooting blanks, okay? That’s not what this is all about.”
Solos was playing the same claw-the-wallpaper game Janeway used to joshingly irritate Curson. He had to ask. “You tell me what it’s about, Victor.”
“It’s about this guy, Johnson Howard.”
“Like the hotel?”
“Only backwards.”
“He was the baker who put the bun in Marisole’s oven?” said Janeway.
“No.” Victor was getting angry, and Curson wished he could just command Janeway outright to clamp. “Johnson Howard was this guy in Fordmill. I was working as a trustee—you know, delivering meals and library books and shit to C Wing.”
“Death row.” Janeway raked up a seat at the far end of the table.
“Johnson told me this story about his wife, when she got pregnant. He killed her. He killed her because of what he saw after she got pregnant.”
Curson sipped. Janeway had thoughtfully brought plastic bottles without twist-caps, which had serrated edges and could therefore be classified as a potential weaponry.
“Detective Janeway there has a child, so he’ll know what I mean when I say once women get pregnant, they smell different.”
Janeway shrugged. Sure, I guess.
“It’s more fundamental than that. Pregnant women exude a radically altered grade of pheromone. All most people know about pheromones is that their purpose is to attract potential mates, which you don’t need if you’re pregnant.”
“I think this guy just said my wife stank,” said Janeway. Curson could see the constant spousal references were stoking his partner’s boiler, almost as if Solos somehow knew that Mrs. Janeway—Michelina—was dead.
“No. I said that once she’s pregnant, she sends out signals that are never transmitted at any other time.”
“Signals. That’s a pleasant way to say it,” said Janeway.
