The Shaft (18 page)

    He was then herded toward the foyer, and more scrutiny. It was announced that Jonathan had been in and out of the premises before, during, and after the pinpoint time of the event. But not on the third floor. So he claims.

    Stallis reported to Reinholtz, the bulky one. Reinholtz's expression said that Jonathan's story was wet toilet paper.

    Reinholtz was the Bird Cop. He had his cap off and Jonathan could see a gleaming bald patch that had forced scant, grizzled occipital hair rearward. It looked like a glob of mashed potatoes full of pepper in the process of sliding off the back of his head. His eyes were diluted blue, like drinking water that assumes the hue of its container. The Bird Cop carried a bowling-ball belly. After four Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys, he talked in bars about shooting people like Jonathan on sight.

    Wind howl cut down as the foyer door closed. The old man being grilled by the Bird Cop turned on Jonathan.

    'You,' he said. 'I ain't-a never seen you here before just now. No sir.' He sidled closer. Jonathan caught a whiff of canned spaghetti sauce as he was inspected. 'Nope.' Light from the unshaded bulbs careened off the old man's blue eyes, making them harsh and ajudicatory. 'You some kinda Jew?'

    Near the mailboxes another officer sniffed loudly, as if to protest his heritage to this elderly bigot. A group of people came thudding down the stairs and Jonathan saw his new upstairs neighbor, Cruz, in handcuffs. Behind Cruz was a girl in lace and leather; streak job, caramel skin, elliptical, almost Japanese eyes of bottle green, a stone fox from scalp to soles. Just now her eyes were clouded with hassle and ill temper.

    'Well, hi-dee-whore,' the Lizard Cop smirked. 'If it isn't our old darling Cyndi the Choad Chomper.'

    'Now who in hell is that little slut? I ain't never seen her around here before neither!' The man in the bathrobe was moved to the sidelines to play more guessing games with the Monkey Cop, who was clearly at the limit of his competence just restraining the old fart.

    Cruz and the woman were being prodded along by a Robot Cop. Jonathan spotted sergeant's hashmarks. The Robot Cop was the oldest officer present, the largest, the slowest-moving. False teeth, too even, browned by decades of rotten coffee.

    'Didn't think we'd find any new faces in this shithole, but here I found Cyndi, who says her name is Jamaica this week, stuffing her turkey with this spic hemorrhoid. Third floor.'

    The Robot Cop's silver nametag flashed. BARNETT. His steel-rimmed glasses put Jonathan in mind of Gort's visor, just barely restraining a death ray gaze from frying everyone standing. More metal was involved in badges and decorations. The Robot Cop clinked when he moved. Inside his unzipped coat Jonathan could see the shoulder epaulettes peculiar to Chicago 's finest.

    'Christ on a Wonder Wheel,' groused the old man. 'I don't know any of these damned brats!'

    'These two were holding,' said the Robot Cop. 'Traces all over the apartment. Found a page beeper.' He gathered Cruz's collar in a meaty fist. 'You flushed quite a wad, didn't you, dickhead?'

    'No, sir,' Cruz said, eyes down. Police and animals with rabies dislike direct visual contact.

    'Toilet was stuck and running; I think he introduced a kilo to our sewer system and now the rats are all racing little rat speedboats. Probably one of Bauhaus' new butthole buddies. What the hell; we need to update him anyway, and that goes for this sweet piece here, too, whatever her goddamned name is today.'

    Each enemy of society was jostled forth.

    'Hey, Reinholtz,' said the Lizard Cop. 'Tell the spic how much police nightstick this bimbo has sucked.'

    The Bird Cop warmed immediately to the game. 'Aw, hell, Stallis, hard to say. You'd have to tote it in board feet. Right, hotpants?'

    Jamaica shrugged free. 'Yeah. One board foot means I must've made it with ten of you dung flumes, and you know what? Cops can't fuck for spit.' She smiled brilliantly; America 's Sweetheart gone to porn.

    Jonathan wanted to edge nearer to the stairs.

    'Wait a second, you.' It was the Lizard Cop, his keeper. 'You hang fire with Miss Candy Cunt, here. Nobody said you could go.' Jonathan's bicep was vised and he was escorted to the corner by the mailboxes to join Cruz, Jamaica and the old man, under the watchful eye of the Monkey Cop. He was still holding his box of possessions.

    'Welcome to the neighborhood.' Cruz acted like his bracelets were no biggie.

    Jonathan's eyebrows went up-down. Too unbelievable. Too late for this outrage.

    Cruz leaned closer, notching his voice down. '674-2779. Call it. It spells a word. MR HAPPY. Call it and let them know what happened to me. Cruz. Right? Do it. Tell them what went down.'

    From the stairs the Robot Cop ordered Cruz to shut his trap. Cruz yessired. Then, to Jonathan, he added: 'Do it.' He was serious, urgent.

    Jonathan had not said yes or no, but Cruz turned his mouth downward and nodded, as though assured of their pact.

    Jamaica was browsing Jonathan. Not bad for a white boy. 'You live in this place?'

    He nodded again, like a marionette or a court jester. He admired her fire, the way she'd unhesitatingly mouthed off to the police when she had to know it could only buy her trouble. It injected him with another dose of self-loathing. Good old Jonathan. Given the manly option of doing something and doing nothing, you can rely on good old Jonathan to spring into inaction. Why risk the tarnish of involvement? Civilization had been custom-fitted to Jonathan, offering thousands of civil rationalizations that could easily document or justify any weaseldickery. Stay dead neutral. Do nothing. Avert your eyes and the irritant will magically rinse clean. Blame Amanda and flee to Chicago, where no one will suspect what a chickenshit you are. When confronted with that nagging inability to muster backbone, do it again - run. Whenever you try to take action it's too little too late, so don't bother. That stunt with the wine bottle had sure worked out in your favor, for sure, Sir Jonathan. So pretend it never happened. Blame others. Fault the fucked up universe at large.

    
Do anything… but for godsake don't actually do anything.

    'You gonna help him?' she said.

    'Uh.' His brain was finding elementary tasks confounding. He wanted to stare at her for hours. She was exotic, enigmatic, sensual. He realized her smell was making him crazy. She smelled like sex, recent friction and humidity, lots of it, robust and deep-dish. 'Uh. I. ' Seeing her expression downshift into resentment helped clear his board. 'Yeah. I guess. That is, I mean -'

    'Last warning, fungo,' barked the Robot Cop. Jamaica, not cuffed, sweetly offered a single-digit salutation.

    'MR HAPPY,' Jonathan said.

    'You got it, babe.' Her gaze was still levelled at the Robot Cop, plotting vengeance, mutilations.

    Jonathan had just joined the ranks of the underworld. If the cops did not throw him back, he would balloon fiercely out, a blowfish of spines and stingers and concentrated venom. His aggressors would go yahand spring back with only a hairsbreadth moment to regret their poor pushy judgement before the swift slash and tear of fangs and poison and the slow acid suffering of justified death.

    A child had vanished from the third floor, leaving behind a screaming infant sister, a befuddled father newly home from the graveyard shift, and a pregnant mother nearly grand mal with shock. Jonathan felt relief, knowing that whatever had happened he could not be incriminated. He knew already that he was innocent.

    The old man was released first. He lived on the first floor right underneath Jonathan. When he shut his door he was bitching about how Jew babies cried the most.

    The Lizard Cop and the Bird Cop engaged in a quick confab concerning how Jamaica might work off the time it would take them to book her. Jamaica spit on the Lizard Cop in fury and was formally arrested.

    Cruz was conducted to the back seat of one of the patrol cars by the Robot Cop, who did not care if Cruz bonked his head while being shoved inside. Jonathan remembered that he had just assumed residence on Mayor Daly's old stomping ground.

    After leeching him of useless minutiae, the police permitted Jonathan to resume his lawful private business, sans apology. Free at last to hump up the stairs, Jonathan felt as though he had just gotten away with something major.

    He found the black cat waiting for him outside of207.

    This time he noticed the stink of fresh paint permeating the second floor. That would be Fergus, sloppily rejuvenating some other recent vacancy. Jonathan smiled when he remembered that landlord had been a epithet, a perjorative during the days of the Colonies. The phylum sure hadn't matured much since.

    Jonathan's bathroom was a sterling exemplar of Fergus' overwhelming inadequacy. A half-hearted attempt to retile it had been aborted. Periodically, poorly glued tiles would disengage to shatter on the floor or in the tub. Chunks of stale grouting crumbled free to hamper those who dared go barefoot. Vermin used the resultant trenches to conduct nighttime troop movements, like Viet Cong in their tunnel mazes. Now and then a drowning bug would make a desperate leap for life during a shower and land on a naked human being. If you hazarded a hot bath in an attempt to bypass the neverending cold, you might spot the same bug, swimming, hellbent. Downdrafts of frozen air rattled the metal lining of the ventilation shaft and sneaked goosebump fingers through the crummy seal on the bathroom window. If you went wet in there, it was enough to spike your temples like a mouthful of ice cream.

    The bathroom ceiling was another effort of Fergus' that had not been a success. Jonathan could estimate the building's horrendous seasonal plumbing problems by looking up. Some twenty months back the ceiling had rotted out and been replaced with crookedly sawn sheets of gypsum board stamped Sheetrock Firecode. Rather than plastering and painting, Fergus had sutured the seams with fat swatches of duct tape. These soon peeled under gravity. The overweight wallboard grew moist and gray from seepage about once a week. It was beginning to sag like parachute nylon. It stank of mildew. Jonathan had already fabricated a nightmare image of it busting loose to shower him with sump water and bloated insects and other tenant's flushings.

    Face it. The bathrooms in most places where people pulled the old nine-to-fiver were generally worse. Cracked concrete floors. Wobbly toilet seats. That one-and-only stench of spattered piss.

    
Feed me.

    'Free ride. You little parasite.' He fished up his keys, not yet used to knowing which came first in the game of locks he had to beat. He set down the box and his fingers unclenched, achingly. The cat sauntered over to sniff the swag, then rub a shorthaired cheekbone against one cardboard corner,
rasp rasp
.

    
Come on. We're pals. Feed me.

    
Just stay clear of my legs,
Jonathan thought. What might be a cat might also be a spider inching up your leg, hunting for a warm place to empty venom sacs.

    Jonathan's inner/outer door arrangement was identical to Cruz's, in 307. To the immediate right of Jonathan's first door, however, was one of the old iceboxes, a vertically stacked row of three small doors. The latched cooler doors still worked, making the solid click-lock noise of an industrial butcher's cold room. Chicago was once termed the Hog Butcher of the World. Thanks to Fergus' artistry with the paintbrush, the fit of the small doors was too tight, and sticky. The cream-colored paint had intimidated the corridor lights down to a baleful yellow.

    Kenilworth Arms was like a latter-day House of Usher, its shafts and passageways actually the convolutions of a lunatic's brain. Somewhere near the center, that feverish glow, the burnout-flare of something ill, something dying, something not entirely normal. So much paint, bulbs so lightless, floors so creaky. Shut-down elevators. Obsolete freezers. No doubt other aspects of the structure that worked, did so in abnormal or unanticipated ways. Jonathan thought of rats in the foundations as potential roving hematomas; black cats, freestalking tumors waiting to perch. All the tenants just the passing fictions of a crazy person's imagination - here now, gone tomorrow. Errant thoughts, facts to be misfiled by an unsound mind whose memories were sepia-toned and sugar-coated by extreme age, perhaps even by dreams.

    Be a good little corpuscle, he thought, or the antibodies will getcha. The spark of a single synpase was never noticed as an important event by itself. Or missed.

    
Hey. Food time.

    'I won't forget, you little putz. Who else am I going to complain to about the po-leece?'

    
I'm innocent. I wasn't even there.

    'You're lying.' Said casually, with no oomph. 'MR HAPPY.' The intrigue of codes committed to memory was seductive. Like Cruz, Jonathan had not bothered wading into the quicksand of local forms that would gain him a phone for 207. He did not plan on being in residence that long, Bash willing. A telephone was an unneeded luxury inside a stopover for transients. There were phones at the post office, three blocks away. Apart from Bash or Capra's office, who was he going to call?

    Just now the prizewinning question: Was he going to call MR HAPPY?

    He imagined Cruz's glare, should he do nothing to get him out of jail. How inclined toward physical retribution might Cruz be? Jonathan had watched him hang stolid in the face of cops and cuffs and baiting.

    How had that firey girl known what she could get away with? Jonathan did not admire her so much as wish he could emulate her on an autonomic level. Respond without thinking; trust your reflexes. She had bigger balls than he did.

    
Scuze me.

    The cat slipped ahead of him into the room. Most cats are thinner than most human beings and the door had only been opened a crack. He had left a lamp on inside. By the time he got to the windows all but one of the police growlers had departed, leaving the overlapping scrawl of multiple tire tracks in the snowy streets. The near-hysterical Velasquez tribe had been loaded into one of those cars and hauled away for more paperwork. It was a fair bet that Oakwood's white-on-white constabulary presupposed that this beaner mama had decided she had one nifio too many and needed to trim her workload. The question in which the authorities would be most interested tonight was: Okay, what did you really do with the body, you dumb Mex or Puerto Rican or whatever the hell you are.