Prelude to a Scream (24 page)

Corrigan is getting a little carried away on the question of turpitude, Stanley was thinking, as he watched the detective. So what's this tack? In his unusually animated rage Corrigan had allowed his features to become exaggerated and distorted, cartoon-like was the term that occurred to Stanley. A cheaply produced cartoon from Hong Kong or Seoul, where they omit two cells out of three to save money, so the completed sequence has this wooden, time-lapsed quality — although, he reflected, quality has little to do with it. Inevitably, as Stanley knew from years of watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kind of self-mortification involving hangover penance, bad animation was not put there to entertain you; the purpose of bad animation is to sell you something.

So what was Corrigan trying to sell him?

“That's why we got laws against withholding evidence,” Corrigan went on. Stanley started to interrupt him, but Corrigan shouted, “I'm not finished yet!” and shook a finger in Stanley's face. “We got laws against clowns like you thinking they can sit on a piece of evidence long enough to turn it to their own advantage. I could book you right now. I could turn it into months of hassles for you, Ahearn. You hear that? Months! Shit. I go for accessory to murder, we're talking
years
.”

Corrigan paced out of the circle of light, toward the front door, exhaled raggedly, looked at the Pyramid for a moment, then paced back. “But I'm not going to do it. No, I'm not going to run you in. You want to know why, Ahearn? You care? You give a shit?”

“Sure, Corrigan.” But Stanley was thinking, go ahead and tell me, if you have to. Spill your guts, if it's going to make you feel better. But despite the fact that I just got one and maybe two and possibly three people killed, for some very particular reason of your own, you want to let me off the hook. “So why? How come?”

“I'll tell you why, Ahearn. It's because I feel sorry for you. That's why.”

Stanley almost laughed.

“You little juice-monkey, I could give you a shot to that kidney incision that would wake your mother in heaven.”

“No mothers,” said Stanley coldly. “You were explaining my dispensation.”

“I feel sorry for you. I really do. Sure, you saved that little girl's life. So what if it was three years ago? It's admirable enough. Not just any character would have done the same, either. But that was your moment, Ahearn. You've been living off it ever since, you're never going to do anything else for anybody again, and that's pathetic. That's sad. You've been sitting up on this roof watching television and drinking whiskey going on four years. What a life. Your only problem is that now you've only got one kidney to metabolize that booze with, and that kidney's sick. Isn't that right? Is that what you're afraid of? That you might have to quit all this? Isn't the drunkard's dream about to go up in smoke? Am I right?”

Stanley said nothing. He was waiting for the cop's weird reasoning to become clear, and, unlike Corrigan, he wasn't about to let this personal stuff obfuscate the issue.

“Then what, huh? When it's over, when you have to get sober, what are you going to do?”

Stanley frankly shrugged.

“Maybe that morphine scrip can be strung out for a few months,” Corrigan suggested thoughtfully. “Maybe you can get off the booze and onto the junk.” He gestured toward the door. “The stuff's all over out there. It might even be cheaper than the booze, initially. They say you live longer, too; though maybe that's not your idea of a plus. Of course, there's the social stigma involved, junkies are looked down upon, as if you care. For sure, though, you won't like the copping scene. A major irony is that while junk will turn you into even more of a misanthrope than you already are, you will become even more dependent on certain forms of — shall we say ‘scum'? — way more dependent on certain scum-forms than when you were just a lush. That would be pretty hard on a guy with your personality. A guy who likes it easy. You get so bad off you can't negotiate a simple junk-for-blowjob deal on the street. That's you giving the blowjobs, now. No longer receiving them. For the money, you understand. For your habit. The contrapositive of your present Friday night which, like all your other nights, will become indistinguishably alike. They'll all merge into a spirit of misery, haunting the desperate husk of your former self. Of course,” he dragged a palm back and forth over his day's growth of whiskers, sandy brown mottled with white, “of course, you get strung out enough you won't
want
a blowjob — on Friday or any other night. You won't be able to get it up, and you won't care. You won't even think about it anymore.…”

Corrigan smiled and chucked Stanley's shoulder with his fist, a little harder than he needed to. “But hey,” he said, “that bum kidney and your bum life will last a lot longer on junk than they will on booze.”

Stanley jerked his shoulder away.

Corrigan paced to the front door and stood there, looking out over the wheelchair, as if peering into the heart of the darkened city. If so, the expression on his face suggested the metropolis was teeming with heartworms. He filled his lungs with fresh air and loudly exhaled. “And that guy, your landlord here.” He inclined his head toward Stanley without looking at him. “What's his name?”

“Toy,” Stanley answered quietly. He could see that Corrigan knew the name. He just wanted to get Stanley to say it himself. “Hop Toy.”

“Hop Toy,” said Corrigan, drawing out the last syllable. “Hop Toy's a good man. A family man. I had a long talk with him. You know Hop Toy?”

Startled, Stanley said, “Yes. I know Hop Toy.”

“Hop Toy,” Corrigan continued, “defends Stanley Ahearn down to the ground. There he is, in his wholesale grocery. The guy's knee-deep in ginger bulbs, or whatever they call them, and he's telling me he doesn't give a fuck about what you do, or how you live your life. He's
defending
you. All he knows is Stanley Ahearn comes to work most days, that Ahearn would never drive his truck while drunk, that Ahearn saved little… You saved little…”

Corrigan inclined his head toward Stanley, again without looking at him. “What's the little girl's name, Ahearn?”

“Tseng,” said Stanley, his mouth tight around the syllable. “The little girl's name is Tseng.”

“Tseng,” repeated Corrigan, looking out over the city. “Little Tseng. ‘Stanrey save my riddle girl's rife,' Hop Toy says. ‘I take care of Stanrey.'”

“You don't have to—,” Stanley began, his face clouding.

“It's the kind of thing we used to find on the walls of ruined temples in the jungles in Cambodia,” Corrigan went on, ignoring him. “Chiseled in stone, with the whole jungle crowding in, tree roots busting through the masonry. The roof gone, the floor gone, the doors gone, the priests gone, the people gone.…”

He turned and looked at Stanley, his face in shadow. “Moral instruction chiseled in stone, instructing nobody. You saved that kid's life, and Hop Toy's going to take care of you till some day he hasn't seen you for a couple days. It's going to come. Sooner or later, it's going to come. And so he'll climb up here. He'll find the door standing open, and the TV on, and something all burned up on the stove if you're still bothering to feed yourself. And there you'll be, stone dead in that easy-chair, with a bottle in your hand and shit in your drawers and seagulls standing on each shoulder fighting over what's left of your eyeballs. Then he'll be free.”

“Who?” said Stanley, with a start. “Who'll be free?”

“Hop Toy will be free, Stanley.” Corrigan had sweat gleaming on his cheek. “Who'd you think I meant? You? That you'd be free?” He laughed without mirth. “You have a point, I guess. Hop Toy won't be as free as you, at that particular moment. I guess, metaphysically speaking, that's true.”

A moment of introspection passed between them.

“But,” Corrigan abruptly continued, “Hop Toy will be free to start thinking about taking the money he's been spending on you and putting it toward Tseng's college education or her dowry or her first Mustang convertible or the good-luck firecrackers for her bat mitzvah — whatever. Something useful. Something important.”

Another moment of silence.

“Which,” Corrigan added, “Hop Toy will know would be the way you would have wanted him to deal with his new freedom — and your new freedom — with the resulting extra money. Respectively, he might even spring for your cremation.

“Hell,” Corrigan smiled, showing teeth in the gloom. “Who else would?”

A longer silence. Even the man two stories down and across the alley, who apparently could not pass a waking moment without his pornography, had turned it off, or turned down the sound at least. There were the continual windchimes, a foghorn or two, and a far-away siren getting further away as they listened. A drip in the sink. The smells of cold coffee and scorched milk. The dank reek of geraniums. The city was giving itself and its citizens the gift of a pause.

Corrigan walked back to the counter. “Excuse me,” he said, shouldering Stanley aside to gather the photographs. When he had them all in a stack he paused to study the shot of the body in the sleeping bag.

“Okay,” the detective finally said, holding the photo so they could both see it. “You got any more bright fantasies about this case?”

“No,” Stanley said, staring at the picture and chewing his lip. “I don't.”

Corrigan fixed him with a long stare. Corrigan was worn out. Stanley could see that. His complexion was going gray and there were bags under his eyes. He needed a shave. His suit was rumpled and smelled like bus station upholstery. But the cop's stare was unrelenting.

“What about Iris?”

So that was it.

Stanley shrugged. “Iris is a nice girl.”

“And?”

He gave it a moment. Then he shrugged again and said, “Don't worry, Corrigan. I know I'm not good enough for Iris.”

“Excellent,” the detective said huskily. “We understand each other. But one more thing. If I catch you making the least additional move in this case — any move at all, dumb, mediocre or brilliant — I'm going to collect your ass off this roof no matter what and put it where there's no view at all and no bottle to suck on, either.
Moreover
, you'll have to talk to people every day, my misanthropic friend — dozens of them, think of it — just to beg them to turn down their radios, just to kid them into liking you well enough not to shank you for kicks, just to stop them from stomping on your face till it looks like the sidewalk at Sixteenth and Mission, just to get them to stop
bothering
you, just to get them to desist interfering with the soul-deep yips brought on by your involuntary detox. You'll see more
Star Trek
than you ever knew existed. You'll listen to so many idiots discussing it you'll wonder whether there's an intact brain left on the planet. You'll wish I was your best friend. Even after you get over your d.t.'s you won't be able to change anything. Accessory to murder is not a light rap, and neither you nor the altruistic Hop Toy will be able to afford a lawyer good enough to get it off your shoulders.”

Corrigan slid the photos into the mouth of the manila envelope. Then he raked Stanley across his neck with one edge of the flap.

“You get me, my misanthropic friend?”

Stanley surprised himself. He was a hair from slugging Corrigan. But then he suppressed a smile.

Iris. That much was plain. Of Stanley and Iris, Corrigan could hardly bring himself to think.

But maybe, just maybe, while Corrigan may have enough evidence to take Stanley in, he might not have enough to make it stick. It seemed more than possible. Corrigan had smoked out his relationship to Giles, all right. But that was no crime, really, and no proof that he'd really known what he was doing when he went to the clinic. For that matter, Corrigan would probably be hard-put to prove that Stanley had been there at all. What had Giles left behind? He hadn't had Stanley's phone number, just Fong's e-mail address. That hadn't come up, either. Which meant that Corrigan may not have figured out the connection. And what, after all, had Stanley done? It was Giles, not Stanley, who had surmised that the code for the info-sharing query had been tampered with.

And it was Giles who had paid the price.

It seemed possible that Corrigan wanted to goad Stanley into slugging him. All that stuff about “Stanrey” being a lush? Baiting him with ersatz racism? About freeloading and being a worthless citizen? And then, as if attacking him, the bureaucrat inflicts a paper cut? Was it just so he'd have an excuse to take him downtown and keep him for a few days? For assaulting an officer?

It seemed extreme. Ridiculous. Why didn't Corrigan just take him in on any old charge?

Maybe he was a straight cop?

“Don't worry, Chief,” said Stanley, touching his neck where the edge of the envelope flap had nicked it. He drew his hand away and saw a thin streak of blood on it.

Corrigan saw it, too. His lip curled toward a smile, and there was a light in his eye Stanley hadn't seen before.