Lords of Salem (11 page)

Herman raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to you discovering the next Earth, Wind, and Fire,” he said.

Just for that, I will bother
, thought Heidi.
And if it’s good, I’ll figure out some way to tell Herman “I told you so.”

“You got to update your references, dude,” said Whitey.

Herman stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I don’t have to do nothing,” he said. He stared back without blinking. They held the look until it was too much and they both burst out laughing. Herman got up and opened another bottle.

By the time they were walking out of the station, all three of them were pretty loaded. Heidi was carrying the bottle and drinking straight from it. Outside it was dark. The air, which had been crisp before, was now windy and freezing. Herman shivered.

“Goddamn!” he said, fumbling at his coat’s zipper. “It’s fucking witchy titty cold out here. Man, I hate this time of year.” Still unable to get the zipper to go, he wrapped his coat tighter around his body and crossed his arms over it. “Anyone care for a lift?” he asked.

“My head is spinning,” said Heidi. “If I get into a car, I think I just might puke.”

“All the more reason to get in Herman’s car,” said Whitey.

“Real funny,” said Herman. He bowed. “Enjoy the walk. The fresh air will do you right. Good for the lungs, I hear. Not that I’d know from experience.”

“Thanks,” said Heidi. She took a drink from the bottle and then passed it along to Whitey. Whitey drank as well, wiping his mouth dry with his sleeve after.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said.

Heidi smiled. She stumbled a little, rested her palm lightly on Whitey’s chest. “All right,” she said. “Probably a good idea.”

“Well, la-dee-fucking-da,” said Herman. “I’m freezing. This gentleman is going to try and get home to the warden without racking up another DWS. If you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” said Whitey, turning toward him. “You mean DWI.”

“Naw, DWS,” said Herman. “Driving while sexy.” He thrust his head back and gave a James Brown shriek. Spinning around, he soft-shoed off toward his car. How he could manage to do that after having had so much to drink, Heidi wasn’t sure.

“Good luck,” called Heidi after him.

“See you suckers later,” said Herman. Then he shouted, “Fuck, it’s cold!” and jumped into his car.

Whitey and Heidi watched him drive off and then they started walking toward Heidi’s place. For a while they walked in silence, trying not to shiver in the cold.

Whitey was the first to break the silence. “You think Herman’s wife knows he calls her the warden?” he asked.

“No way,” said Heidi. “And he doesn’t mean it. He’s a pussy cat around her.”

They walked along again in silence. The wind was blustery, sending the autumn leaves skittering across the empty street and over the sidewalk in front of them. Heidi shivered, concentrated on walking
straight. She’d had a lot to drink, as usual, but not as much as the night before.
I’ll probably be okay,
she thought,
as long as I don’t keep on drinking once I get back to the house.
She wrapped her faux fur coat tighter around herself, snuck a glance at Whitey. His forehead was wrinkled, as if he was trying to think of something to say.

They stopped at the steps of Heidi’s building. Heidi reached out and grabbed his arm. In a pretend flirty voice, she said, “You want to come up and see what’s cooking in my kitchen?”

“Really?” said Whitey.

From the overexcited way that he said it, she knew she’d stepped wrong. He apparently couldn’t read the difference between flirty and pretend flirty.

“Really?” she said back, imitating his tone. She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean come up so I can suck your dick in the kitchen. I mean come up so I can make us some pancakes or something.”

“I knew that,” Whitey pretended, back to his old non-eager self, but still not quite meeting her eyes. He looked at his watch. “Hmmm? It’s getting pretty late,” he said.

Can’t let him go home with his feelings hurt
, thought Heidi. “Come on,” she said. “You got something better waiting than pancakes?”

If it’d been Herman, he would have figured out how to turn that one into a joke, but Whitey didn’t. Maybe they both had had too much to drink. “Ya know,” he said, “the sad thing is… I never have any place better to be.”

Heidi nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “So what’s stopping you?”

He looked at his watch again and then shook his head and smiled, followed her in. Things were back to normal, Heidi thought. Well, if normal was what they’d actually been before.

They were inside and on the inner stairs leading up to her apartment when a door on the first floor opened.
Fuck
, thought Heidi,
we’ve woken the landlady up
. She kept walking. From behind her, she heard Lacy call her name.

She turned, putting on her nice company face, trying not to look too drunk. Whitey hesitated a moment, but turned with her. Lacy was standing there, still wearing that same batik wrap, her hair no longer loose now but instead gathered in a ponytail.

“Hi, Lacy,” Heidi said. “Sorry if we woke you up. I’ll try to be quieter next time.”

Lacy just shook her head and smiled. “I’m a night owl,” she said. “You didn’t wake me.”

Then what does she want?
Heidi came down a few stairs, lifted her eyebrows expectantly.

“So, I took a look at five,” Lacy said.

“Yeah?” said Heidi. “And?”

“And everything looked just as expected,” said Lacy. She came a little farther into the hall, to the very base of the stairs. “Dusty as hell and full of cobwebs,” she said, “but normal. No sign of any intruders… alien or otherwise.” She smiled.

What?
thought Heidi.
But I saw the door open, and there was someone there. I know it.

“I’m positively sure I saw somebody standing in the doorway,” she said. “My eyes are bad, but I’m not blind.”

Lacy shrugged. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I don’t see how it’s possible. The place was locked tight and I have the only set of keys. And even the dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed. I’m afraid nobody was there.”

“Wow,” said Heidi. She thought for a moment. Could she have imagined it? Maybe. She’d been hungover, after all. Or could there be someone there but for some reason Lacy didn’t want her to know about it? No, that was crazy—Lacy was a nice old hippy lady. She didn’t have any reason to hide someone and then lie about it. What reason could there even be to do so? She shook her head. “Okay, well, I guess I’m seeing things… again,” she said. She smiled, turning it into a joke, but was worried that Lacy would see the fear in her eyes. “It’s been a while since I’ve had that problem.”

Lacy nodded and smiled back. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It happens to the best of us,” she claimed.

But Heidi felt less sure than she sounded, and she knew she didn’t sound all that sure. Something weird was going on, maybe inside of her. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. She turned to start up the stairs again, saw Whitey hovering above her.
Almost forgot
, she thought. “Lacy,” she said. “I should introduce you. This is White Herman. He ‘works’ at the radio station with me.” She made artificial quotes with her fingers as she spoke the word
works
.

“White Herman?” she said. “What kind of name is that? Some weird family thing?”

Whitey came down a few steps and held out his hand to her. She took it and shook it briefly. “Well,” he said, “we have two Hermans on the Big H team and the other is an African American guy. We kind of figured that Black Herman sounded a bit… you know.” Heidi had to stop herself from feigning innocence and saying,
What? No, I don’t know
. But it wasn’t a good idea to do that in front of her landlady, particularly when she was drunk. Whitey continued: “Most people just call me Whitey,” he said.

Lacy nodded. “Nice to meet you, Whitey. Good night,” she said, but made no move to go back into her apartment.

“Good night,” said Heidi. She turned and headed with Whitey up the stairs. When she reached the top, she looked back. Lacy was still there, at the bottom. She seemed to be watching them closely. Heidi waved once, but Lacy didn’t wave back, nor did she look away.
What’s wrong with people today?
she wondered. And then shaking her head she went to unlock her apartment door.

Chapter Seventeen

Whitey tried to take the apartment in. It was both like he’d expected it to be and different from what he’d imagined. It felt like Heidi all the way through—same kind of eclectic mix of objects and items that he would have guessed, considering the way the girl dressed, same sorts of things dragged in from thrift stores, but not just anything. She’d been pretty careful about what she’d chosen, but there was a lot of it, and things were scattered pell-mell. There was what looked like some kind of antique fainting couch, the upholstery beginning to fray and wear through so that the stuffing poked out. She’d thrown over that a striped, fringed blanket that looked like it had been picked up from a street vendor in Tijuana. Next to that, on the end table, was a lamp with a hula girl for its base, complete with faux grass skirt—the kind of thing you would find in a bad Hawaiian restaurant called Tiki Joe’s or something. The whole apartment was like that, carefully chosen objects that clashed in a way that you couldn’t help but like. Or that he, anyway, couldn’t help but like. Heidi he couldn’t help but like either. She didn’t care all that much about what people expected her to look like—she just dressed however she wanted and that was what you got. But that was all right with Whitey.

Everything was jumbled and mixed, except for the milk crates. She had dozens of them, stacked floor to ceiling on either side of the stereo and filled with old records. The stereo setup, too, he had to admire. She wasn’t messing around there. It was good-quality gear,
great speakers, plus several turntables, a couple of CD players, and a top-of-the-line eight-track tape machine. And the eight-track looked brand new rather than something from a salvage yard. Sure, Whitey had an eight-track, but it was something he’d pulled out of a junked car, and it sat on the floor next to his stereo with wires running every which way. But hers was a home stereo model and didn’t look more than a year or two old.
Didn’t even know you could still get those,
thought Whitey. Maybe she’d had it for years and just took great care of it. Fuck, hot and knew her electronics, too—that was not only rare: it was downright impossible.

“Where’d you get the eight-track?” he asked.

“Huh?” she said. “My dad.”

“Was he a DJ, too?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He just liked his music.”

“You see him much?” he asked.

“No,” she said, her eyes a little absent. “He died.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, and gave him a sad smile. “It’s been a while now. I’m getting used to it.”

She went into the kitchen. After a few minutes of looking the stereo up and down, he started in on the vinyl. Great collection. Lots of stuff he used to have before he dumped his own vinyl, and lots of stuff he wished he still had. Good taste.

“Like what you see?” she asked when she came back from the kitchen. He swallowed, then nodded.

“You are the only chick I’ve ever met with such a killer rack,” he said, gesturing at the stereo, and then wincing when he realized what he’d said.

“What was that about a killer rack?” she asked in her dumb-blonde voice from behind him. If he turned around, she’d probably be standing there with her hips canted and one knee bent like some Miss America contestant. He decided to ignore it.

“Man,” he said, continuing to thumb through the albums. “Seeing
your collection really makes me miss my vinyl. I can’t believe I sold all my shit.”

“I warned you,” she said.

Well, maybe she did, but that was no reason to lord it over him. “Yeah, well,” he said, a little defensively. “I mean, CDs do technically sound better, but they’re dead, too.”

She came around to where he could see her, gave him an exhausted stare.

“Fuck that.” Her voice, too, was exhausted and didn’t have much fight to it, but she wasn’t going to concede. “You and every other muso miss the point,” she said. “Everything sounds the same, but my records only sound like my records. The pops and scratches are my pops and scratches, you know. They belong to me.”

“I guess I never really thought about it that way,” he said. He sat staring at the albums in front of them. Yeah, she was right. It was like the way your car, as it got older, became even more your car: the key you had to jiggle just right, the window that wouldn’t roll down all the way, the ceiling fabric that came loose and brushed your head while you drove—all the little problems that gave it personality. “Fuck,” he said. “Now I’m really depressed. I’ve destroyed my entire musical history. What was I thinking?”

She had gone back into the kitchen. He cast a glance over his shoulder, saw her flip a pancake.

“You weren’t thinking,” she claimed. “Just walking off the cliff with all the other lemmings.” Then she laughed. “Don’t worry, these will make you forget your troubles.”

Whitey shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. Though it was true, the smell of the pancakes was already making his mouth start to water. “Mind if I play something?” he asked.

“Go for it,” Heidi said, “but choose wisely.”

Choose wisely? Was this a test?
“Oh no,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “You’re going to make some judgment based on my choice, I assume?”

Heidi flipped the pancake out of a pan and onto a plate. “Don’t assume,” she said.

He couldn’t decide if she was serious or joking. That was always the problem. It wasn’t like he was a stupid guy, only that when it came to people like Heidi, girls he liked, it was like some switch turned off in his brain and he found himself doubting how he should read them. With Chip it was different—the way that guy thought was just too boring and predictable to follow. His mind rebelled against that. But with Heidi it was probably that he listened too closely and worried he was hearing things that weren’t really there.