Specimen Song (22 page)

“I’ll pass it along.”

“I suppose I got to stay in your house there,” said Du Pré.

“Of course,” said Bart. “The hotels are all full of crack dealers and lobbyists. Very noisy. I have a very quiet house.”

The plane’s engines began to whine. They said goodbye and Du Pré braced himself for the takeoff. The little jet was quick and fast and in moments they were at altitude and cruising. In the time that it took Du Pré to roll and smoke two cigarettes and look out the window a little, they were descending to Rapid City.

The pilot and copilot came back through the cabin and said that it would take about an hour. Du Pré followed them down the stairs. He found a bar and had a couple drinks and went back and waited for ten minutes. He was paged. He went to the gate and down to the plane and they were soon off.

Du Pré fiddled thirty thousand feet over America. Bart met him at the D.C. airport. He was driving a Land Rover. He was wearing a jacket and a tie.

Detective Leuci waved from inside the Land Rover.

Du Pré went with them to dinner to a very fancy place, so fancy that no one paid any attention to his jeans and boots and worn denim shirt.

“This place costs so much, they figure you have to be a rich eccentric to dress like that,” Bart explained.

“I am just an eccentric,” said Du Pré.

They ate good French food in tiny portions. Bart drank mineral water. The two of them looked happy.

“So,” said Michelle over coffee, “why Chase?”

“I just have this feeling,” said Du Pré lamely. He didn’t know why except he knew it was going to happen. Like he could tell from the air when a storm was coming even though the western sky was clear.

“It was Benetsee,” Du Pré went on. “He said I was looking in the wrong place. Not exactly said that…but…” But the old man had changed to a fox, a cat, a hunter coiled and stalking.

They left. The night was thick, the syrupy air clogged Du Pré’s lungs, made his skin feel oily.

Bart had bought a modest house in Georgetown, one with a high brick and iron fence around it. The gate opened when Bart pressed a button on the dash of the Rover. They drove into a spotless garage with a crimson floor. There were no signs at all that anyone lived there. No lawn chairs hanging, no stuff.

The house was spare and bleak, wood floors drummed, without carpets and furniture to damp them.

“I’m getting some more stuff soon,” said Bart, leading Du Pré through the downstairs. “I just bought it four days ago.”

Probably a half million, Du Pré thought. House here can cost two ranches where I am, I bet, maybe four.

They went into the living room, which had a sofa and a couple heavy stuffed chairs and a thick glass coffee table. Bart went to a pantry and made drinks.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette.

“Why exactly do you think Chase is in danger now?” asked Michelle.

Du Pré squirmed.

“Dreams,” he said finally.

“You have been having dreams about Chase being killed?”

Du Pré shook his head and cleared his throat. “No. When I am out hunting sometimes, I will…I always dream the deer before the deer comes a little. I can’t explain it very well.

Michelle lit a cigarette. Bart brought a couple soda cans to use as ashtrays.

“I’m…I don’t understand,” said Michelle.

“I know that I know the killer,” said Du Pré. “I know him if I see him. I will know him when he moves. I won’t till then. It is many things. When you go to track something, you are not just looking for footprints or the marks of hooves. You look at the country and see what isn’t right about it, something; sometimes you stare for an hour without moving. You try to see everything.”

“The killer was in…whatever that unpronounceable village was where you came out of the forest to the bay.”

Du Pré nodded. Benetsee had said so, he had felt it himself, and then there was the mutilated raven. He had gone over and over that scene in his mind and he couldn’t see what must be there.

Raven. Dead soul.

“I am very tired,” Du Pré said. Bart showed him to a bedroom. Du Pré undressed and crawled between the cool sheets. The air smelled canned from the air conditioner.

In the middle of the night, Bart came and shook him awake.

“They just found Chase,” Bart said. “Come on.”

Du Pré rubbed his eyes and willed his mind to rise.

C
HASE WAS FACEDOWN IN
the ornamental pool. The cops had brought lights and photographers were clicking away. An ambulance sat off a little ways, lights slowly revolving. Three cop cars doing the same.

It was after four in the morning and some workmen were still on the job. The music festival began the next morning. Du Pré walked away from the revolving lights. The sidewalks were well away from any cover and Chase was a good hundred feet from the nearest shadow, and it wasn’t large.

A big man in white coveralls carrying a tool kit walked past.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “did these lights go out ever tonight?”

“Oh yeah,” the man said. “Somebody shorted everything out real good. Took us half an hour to get the damn things back on. I been here since seven yesterday morning. All so a bunch of goddamned hippies can listen to then fucking music.”

Du Pré laughed. Well, boys, there you have it.

He walked back over to the pool and the dead Chase and the cops.

Some ambulance attendants were lifting the body. They carried it to the edge of the shallow pool and set it down carefully on a black body bag. They climbed out, zipped up the bag, lifted it to a gurney, and wheeled it away.

An owlish-looking woman, huge glasses with pinkish frames and hair in a severe knot at the back of her head, scribbled notes in a small black notebook. She had a microphone attached to the lapel of her blouse and she was talking to it while she wrote.

Detective Leuci stood, her arms around her chest. It was hot. She wasn’t cold from the weather.

Michelle came over to Du Pré.

“It seems he was stabbed,” she said. “There’s a hole in his shirt, on the back, where the heart is. The ME waded out and poked it and she said the blade was still in him. Could feel the broken end, real narrow.”

Killing blade, Du Pré thought. You grind away where the blade meets the tang so when you stick the thing in somebody, you can break off the handle and leave the blade in and nothing to grab to pull it out.

“Guy said the lights were out for half an hour,” said Du Pré.

Michelle nodded.

“It’s the same man killed the others,” said Du Pré. “He was hunting Chase, then it got dark, and in he came. I wonder if Chase was running?”

“The building lights stayed on,” said Michelle. “The circuits out here were tripped and a big fuse fried. Why it took so long for them to get the lights back on, finding another fuse that fit.

“Well,” said Michelle, after a moment. “We know where he is, sort of.”

They walked back to the parking structure. Bart was sitting in the Rover. Too smart to follow Michelle around while she did her job. Du Pré nodded at him, half-smiling.

“I will know him this time when I see him,” Du Pré said.

I will know him when he moves. What Benetsee gave me is as good as a photograph of someone you have never seen. He will know me, too. Will he have a gun? So far, he has not used one. So far.

Thousands of people here. Wonder if my chanky-chank band will be here.

Least Chase can’t run me off.

He must not have had much of a life. Didn’t deserve one, either.

“Du Pré,” said Michelle, “You
worry
me. You can’t just kill this guy and scalp him. Then I’d have to arrest
you
. Christ, you people out there watch
High Noon
three times a week till you believe it?”

Du Pré looked at her a long time. He shrugged.

“This guy is crazy,” said Du Pré. “How many more dead people do you want, eh? You can have them, you know. When I find him, he will do something.”

“You don’t have a gun, do you?” said Michelle.

“No,” said Du Pré.

“We haven’t got enough to arrest anyone or we would have,” she said.

“When I find him,” said Du Pré, “I am going to crowd him till he jumps. That’s all. He will jump.”

“Let’s go get some breakfast,” Bart said, sensibly.

They went to a twenty-four-hour franchise and ate horrible food and drank weak coffee. The sun was coming up by the time they finished.

“I think I go and sleep for a while,” said Du Pré, “go over to the festival later.”

Bart dropped him off and he and Michelle headed back down to her office.

Du Pré crawled back in bed and fell into a rolling sleep. Dreams rose and sank. He tossed and writhed and the covers wrapped around him. Nonsense dreams full of dread he could not fathom.

He woke. He was on his back, looking at the ceiling, the last ephemeral scene clear in his mind. Benetsee and his bullroarer, on the rock.

Du Pré showered and put on fresh clothes. A linen shirt Madelaine had made for him, cool in this weather, cool as anything.

He called a cab and went out to wait for it. It was two in the afternoon. The heat and humidity pressed down on him. He was running sweat.

The cabbie dropped him near the festival. Du Pré walked to a ticket booth, paid, and went in, carrying his fiddle case.

He heard zydeco, began to move through the knots of people toward the sound. He couldn’t tell if it was the band he had played with last year.

It wasn’t.

He wandered on.

He heard the eerie trilling of the Inuit throat singers and went toward the band shell it came from. The crowd was small but marveling.

Du Pré found some shade but not any breeze. He squatted on his heels and waited.

The singers paused.

A man vaulted up on the stage, smooth as water flowing—flowing back uphill. Smooth as a cat gaining a ledge.

Du Pré sat, hunting.

The man was carrying a big bottle of mineral water. The Inuit passed it round. How miserable they must be in this heat.

Du Pré waited.

The man flowed back down to the ground.

He was wearing soft, high moccasins with a crosshatch lace.

Du Pré stood up and began to move toward him casually. He moved in spurts and jerks, from one knot of people to another.

The man was hunkered down, butt on his heels. He was with several Indians.

Du Pré knew all of them.

Du Pré slid up behind the little half-moon of people looking up at the Inuit.

“Hey, Lucky,” said Du Pré, face next to Lucky’s ear, “that Hydro-Quebec, they pay you kill those two little Indian girls, too?”

Lucky turned slowly.

Du Pré saw something red pass behind Lucky’s eyes, like a curtain drawn.

Lucky turned slowly on his bent toes.

He looked at Du Pré and his eyes were sleepy.

Then his hand moved and Du Pré felt something slice across his forehead. He flinched.

Lucky jammed a knuckle into Du Pré’s windpipe.

Someone screamed.

Du Pré couldn’t see. Blood was welling down over his eyes.

He stood up, trying to protect his throat.

People were yelling.

But he couldn’t see a fucking thing.

D
U
P
RÉ FELT THE
prick of the needle and the scritch of the suture being drawn through.

“You want something for the pain yet?” said the doctor.

“No,” said Du Pré.

The doctor shrugged and went on with his tapestry work.

Well, I was right, Du Pré thought. And Lucky saved me some trouble there. If he had just asked me what the fuck I was talking about, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

The doctor finished stitching.

Du Pré stood up. He was just a little light-headed, maybe from the pain. He still had some blood stuck to his eyelashes.

He felt like an asshole.

“Thank you,” he said to the physician. But the man was hurrying off to another patient. There had been the approaching wail of an ambulance while Du Pré was on the table.

He looked down at his bloody linen shirt.

Damn head wounds bleed some quick, he thought. So much for Madelaine’s nice shirt that she made for me.

Bart was waiting in the lobby. He had his hands shoved in his hip pockets and he was looking at the ceiling, maybe counting the holes in the acoustical tile.

“I am all embroidered,” said Du Pré.

Bart looked at him. “I can’t tell,” he said. “You got a bandage on it.”

They went out to the Rover.

“Lucky took off like a streak of shit,” said Bart, “and they are after him for assaulting you. But they don’t have enough to get a warrant for anything else.”

“I won’t press charges,” said Du Pré.

Bart nodded. “I told Michelle I thought you might not.

“She pissed?”

“Uh,” said Bart, “I wouldn’t, you know, ask her for a kiss for a couple days.”

“Maybe it wasn’t even Lucky,” said Du Pré. “Maybe it was someone who was behind me and I didn’t know it.”

I barely saw Lucky move, Du Pré thought. He is very fast.

“Are you sure it is Lucky?” said Bart suddenly. “Absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” said Bart, “what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “You won’t just kill him?” said Bart. He was remembering how Du Pré’s father had killed Gianni Fascelli, Bart’s brother. He was a little bit afraid of these Montana people.

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

The telephone in the car chirred. Bart picked it up and listened for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “I told you I thought probably he wouldn’t.”

He listened.

Du Pré could hear Detective Michelle Leuci yelling on the other end.

“You might as well yell at a stump,” said Bart. “Yes, you can.”

Bart handed the telephone to Du Pré and changed lanes.

“Goddamn it,” said Michelle, “at least we could hold him and grill him.”

“I don’t think that would do any good,” said Du Pré, trying to sound apologetic.

“Goddamn you,” she said.

“You catch him or something?” said Du Pré.

Silence.

“He will go back home,” said Du Pré. “He will go back home and he will wait. You can’t arrest him. You can’t hold him if you do.”