The Sleeping and the Dead (5 page)

“Does he still live with you?”

“No, thank God.” He lit another cigarette and looked out the window at the rain. “That boy is the reason I have to walk with a cane.”

“I didn't know that.”

“After I was acquitted, the state tried to give him back to me. I told them I didn't want the little bastard, but they insisted. He was listening around the corner, like he always does. So one evening dear Endo pours a bottle of olive oil all over the bathroom floor while I'm taking a shower. A good bottle, too, imported from Tuscany, a hundred and twenty bucks a pint. I could've killed the little shit.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I laid on the floor a couple of hours until one of my house guests found me.” He sighed a cloud of cigarette smoke and shrugged. “I can't blame Endo. I've never been much of a grandfather to him, but we're the only family either one of us has got.”

 

5

S
O THIS
C
HRIS KID WAS
dead and I had seen him alive, maybe one of the last people to see him before he was murdered by the Playhouse Killer. Six hundred thousand people live in Memphis, over a million in the greater metropolitan area. Memphis has the highest rate of violent crime in the country, one of the highest murder rates, and for the last four years I had photographed most of them—everything from cheating wives to gangbangers killed Bonnie-and-Clyde-style in their pimpmobiles. I don't know how many times I'd heard people say,
I just saw so-and-so a couple of hours ago, I can't believe she's dead.
Now I was saying the same words, over and over. Adam was talking and I hadn't heard a thing he said.

“What?” I tried to catch the thread of his one-sided conversation.

“I said I always heard Michi was a perv.”

“He is a perv.”

“If he's helping you, he can't be all bad.” He winked and rose to his feet. Michi's nasally whale song preceded him down the wall.

“But what do they want, Cole?”

“To talk to you.”

“Did the neighbors complain again?”

“They're not in uniform. One's a detective, the other is your photographer.”

They rounded the corner and Michi stopped, huffing in the doorway and leaning against the frame for support. Cole waited behind him, balancing a silver tray on his fingertips. A glass pitcher and four frosted martini glasses stood on the tray. Michi was dressed in a long formal black kimono with clusters of pink cherries embroidered on the sleeves. His face was flushed and damp, as though he had just washed it in scalding hot water.

“Jackie! What are you doing, bringing the police into my house?”

Cole slid past him and set the tray on the coffee table.

“We just need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Mori,” Adam said.

“About what?” Cole asked. He poured four martinis into the glasses. “I'm Michi-san's legal counsel, by the way.”

“I didn't know you were a lawyer.”

“I'm not. But I've written enough lawyers to fake it. Besides, he needs me to hold his fat little hand.” He passed a martini to Michi, who took it, tossed it back and set the empty glass on a side table in almost one motion. Cole offered the next one to Adam, but he declined. Cole passed it to me.

“Now. What's all this about?”

I glanced at Adam and he nodded that I should take over. I took a sip of the martini. It was a good one. “When I was here this afternoon, there was a black kid, about five-ten, thin-boned, curly hair. He answered the door.” Michi and Cole looked at one another and Cole shrugged. “He came into the kitchen while you and I were talking, Michi. He said he was going out. You said his name was Chris something.”

“Oh, him! Chris Hendricks. You remember Chris,” Cole said to Michi. He turned back to Adam. “What's he done?”

“He's dead.”

“Oh Jesus!” Michi shrieked and collapsed like a deflating accordion, nearly tipping out of his chair. Adam caught him before he spilled onto the floor. He helped him to the Casanova loveseat. Cole knelt beside him.

“How?” Michi gasped. “Where?”

“They found him at the Orpheum.”

“Sweet Jesus.” Cole patted Michi's face with a handkerchief. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Which play this time?”

“Nobody said this was a Playhouse Killer case,” Adam said.

“Oh please!” Cole patted Michi's hand and looked at me. “Which play?”

“
Edward the Second
,” I answered.

“He said he was going out with someone. Do you know who?” Adam asked.

Michi mumbled, “No. No, I don't. There's so many boys, I can't keep up with them.…”

Cole dipped his fingers into a martini and flicked gin in Michi's face. “You think somebody here did it? Is that why you're bothering us?”

“No, we're just…” I started to say before Michi piped up.

“These are good boys. Good boys!” He turned to Cole. “Oh my God, to think that monster took one of my
boizu
!” He removed a cigarette case from a pocket of his kimono and opened it, tremblingly removed a cigarette and touched it to his lips. His eyes, almost hidden in folds of fat, darted suspiciously around the room, then settled like roulette balls on me. He removed a hideous bronze cigarette lighter from his pocket and looked at it, then up at me. It was cast in the image of two naked prepubescent boys entwined in a carnal act.

Maybe it was the look on my face, or maybe it was the memory of the first time he and I met. His eyes narrowed even more than usual, his forehead collapsing into elephantine folds and ridges. “So
that's
why you're here,” he whispered. I noticed a white gob stuck in one of his wrinkles. It looked like geisha makeup or cake icing. It stood out like a wart.

Adam said, “We're trying to trace the victim's movements. If anybody knows who he went out with, we need to talk to them.”

“One of the
boizu
at the party might know,” Cole said.

“I'll need to talk to everyone.” Adam opened his notepad and took a pen from his pocket.

“Hold on there a minute, partner,” Cole drawled. “You can't just go busting in, they'll think it's a vice raid. At least give them a minute to put some pants on.”

“I don't want anybody bailing before I can question them.”

“Nobody's going to bail on you, honey.”

Cole departed. He still had his martini. Michi and I stared at one another across the curved divider of the Casanova, while Adam leaned in the doorway watching Cole down the hall. Michi clicked the lighter and touched the flame to the tip of the unlit cigarette still dangling from the corner of his froglike mouth.

“May I?” I held out my hand to him. He laid the cigarette case across my palm. It was heavy, gold with ivory inlay—an antique, probably real elephant ivory. I opened it and removed a cigarette, lit it with Michi's dirty boy lighter, and inhaled the smoke. I took a sip of my martini. It was perfect, of course. I couldn't imagine a man like Cole Ritter mixing anything less than a perfect gin martini.

“You almost look glamorous, Jacqueline,” Michi said as I blew jets of smoke through my nose. His words were friendly, conversational, but his voice was strained, venomous. “You do clean up well.”

“Thanks.” I wasn't sure what he was getting at. I tried the martini again. It was damned good gin. I couldn't place the brand. Something my father used to drink.

Michi continued, “You really don't belong in your generation. You and my wife would have made quite the pair back in '55, dressed to the nines with your hair done up and your heels, mink stoles from King Furs draped over your arms, leaning against the bar at the Peabody on a Saturday afternoon, smoking Turkish cigarettes and drinking Cosmos and then maybe going upstairs to Alice's private suite for an hour of hot fingerfucking before the picture show.”

“Excuse me?” I almost dropped my cigarette. Michi clapped a chubby hand around my wrist and clutched it with a vicious passion. He surprised me with his strength. I tried but I couldn't pull free.

“How dare you bring the police into my house again!” he hissed. “After what you did to me…”

“Hey, pal!” Adam grabbed Michi by the back of the neck and pressed his chins against the loveseat divider. It was all he could do to get his fingers around Michi's rolls of fat. Michi let go of my arm, then shrugged off Adam's hand. He picked up the spare martini, but didn't drink it.

“I was just doing my job,” I said. My wrist was sore now, but I wasn't about to let him know he'd hurt me.

“Doing your job!” Michi puffed furiously at his cigarette for a moment, not even smoking it, just burning it up as he stared holes into me. Finally, he took a long drag and stubbed the cigarette out in a crystal ashtray shaped like a skull face.

“I'll never forget the first time I saw you.” He laughed through the smoke issuing from his toothless mouth. “In that god-awful red Kmart suit with those broad shoulders. And that mullet! Whatever were you thinking? I mistook you for a bull dyke. You hurt me with those handcuffs, you bitch.”

“You deserved it,” I said.

“That's right. I was going to make your career, wasn't I?” He seemed determined to dredge this shit up.

“You bought a book of kiddie porn.”

“Photos of nude boys.
Art
. There is a difference, honey.”

Cole had returned by then but he stopped just outside the door. I saw his martini hand go up as he took a drink. Michi shrugged. “In any case, the charges against me were dropped once my condition came out in the newspaper.”

“Condition?” Adam asked.

“Michi's a eunuch.”

“A what?” Adam's head whipped around in surprise. Cole finally made his entrance. He leaned against the doorjamb and winked at me. Michi frowned at Adam.

“I'm sorry. I had no idea,” Adam said.

“Oh good lord, and you call yourself a cop?” Michi flicked his ashes into the ash tray. “Honey, you need to get out more. It's not like it's a state secret.”

“Ask anybody working in the Style section at the newspaper,” Cole added.

Michi continued, “In 1968 I was skinny-dipping in Maui with a certain male friend
who shall remain nameless
, when I stepped on a stingray. You're familiar with the species? That's what killed that Australian boy that used to be on television all the time. The ray's cruel barb unzipped my scrotum and spilled my gonads into the sea.”

“Lost forever!” Cole cried histrionically.

“I never saw my wormy jewels again, alas. Food for fishes, I suppose.” Michi stood and spread his arms wide, the huge embroidered sleeves of his kimono nearly draping to the floor. “From the bloody foam I arose, a naked Japanese Aphrodite, flush with her first period.”

“Is he serious?” Adam asked me.

Michi returned to his seat and lit a new cigarette from the gold cigarette case. “Naturally at the time I didn't feel gloriously reborn. Frankly, it hurt like Christ on the cross. But I survived. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Isn't that what the man says?”

Michi caught Adam staring at his crotch. “Would you like to see it?” he asked. He started to unwrap his kimono. Adam shook his head no. “Oh, come on. I'm not shy.”

“I am,” Adam said.

“Suit yourself. They didn't want to see at the trial, either. Because of my disability, so to speak, I couldn't possibly receive sexual gratification from looking at those pictures. When I threatened to drop my pants and show the court, the DA dropped the charges.”

“I wrote that last line for him,” Cole noted.

“You got lucky,” I said. Michi wasn't fooling anybody. Politics won that trial, not justice. “The law doesn't care whether you've got testicles. You buy a book of kiddie porn, you go to jail. Unless you're rich or famous.”

Michi puffed his cigarette and squinted through the smoke at me. “Lucky for me I am both. As I recall, your old photography professor testified as to the book's artistic merit. Not to mention the photographer's international reputation. But then again, he was more than just your former professor, wasn't he? Didn't you almost marry him?” He and Cole shared a laugh. Adam watched me from the corner of his eye. He looked like he didn't even know me. I had never told him any of this. “I heard he fled the church just before the wedding because Arkansas state troopers were waiting in the parking lot to arrest him for bigamy.” Michi laughed again, no longer angry, more like a grandmother recounting the exploits of some precocious grandchild. “Isn't that droll?”

“Very Tennessee Williams,” Cole said.

Michi turned to me. “Your failure to brief the DA about your history with the star witness is what got you suspended, wasn't it? It was all downhill from there.”

“And straight to the top for you, dear Michi-san,” Cole added.

“All my life I wanted to be a luminary. I tried to marry into society. I couldn't buy my way in, not even with my wife's old cotton money. Honest to God I never expected I could
weird
my way in. People had always invited me to their parties because of my money. Write somebody a check and they'll let you sleep anywhere. But after the trial, I became
The Star
of Memphis society. I found out people liked me
because
of my little extravagances. I have Jackie to thank for that. That's why we're such good friends. That's why I always try to help her out. That's why I can't believe she brought the police into my house tonight, after all I have done for her, especially after her divorce. How is dear old Reed, by the way?”

“Fuck you for asking,” I said. “Prick.”

“Look,” Adam interrupted. “We're not here to cause any trouble, Mr. Mori. We're just trying to find out if any of Chris's friends know who he was meeting tonight.”