A Killer’s Kiss

35

We entered a room so out of place in the middle of that crack house that my breath caught in my chest.

It was like a gentleman’s room from centuries past, or a whore’s boudoir, with blood-red curtains and gold flocked wallpaper. There was a huge, ornate bed in the middle of the bare floor, its carved posts reaching almost to the ceiling, its velvet bedspread mussed, its brown paisley pillows awry. The windows were closed, the curtains drawn, the room ill lit and smoky. In the corner sat a broken guitar, the neck detached from its body.

A cone of light fell from a lamp to illuminate a small desk set against one of the walls, where a man, with his back to us, was bent over, writing, writing away, scribbling with a great urgency, as if the true meaning of the world had just been passed to him in a whisper. He was wearing a jacket, jeans, no shoes, as the music poured out around him. Beside him on the desk was an ashtray with the stub of a dead joint perched on its edge.

I softly closed the door behind Derek and me, stepped over to the stereo. The band’s front man was now raging in compressed anger, a soul-shattering blast of teenage angst. In the middle of the howl, I punched the power button. The music died.

“Romeo,” the man at the desk called out sleepily, dreamily, even as he kept with his scribbling.

“Romeo’s busy,” I said.

Without moving his body, he tilted his head and held it for a moment, then turned around. He had a pale, handsome face, so classical in its features it was like a painted Greek statue come to life, cleft chin, thick pouting lips, cheeks smooth as alabaster, their highlights red as rouge. His curly black hair fell carelessly across his forehead, so perfectly carelessly that you could tell it wasn’t careless at all. I would have expected a shock of surprise on that strange mask of a face, but there was none. It was as if nothing could surprise its owner.

“Ah, so it’s you,” he said leisurely, through a blurry smile. “I wondered when you’d come.”

“And here I am,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you find the music soothing?”

“More like a pick in the eye,” I said.

Terrence Tipton’s own eyes, red rimmed and blue irised, squinted in stoned amusement. But it wasn’t his eyes that drew my attention, it was his chest. He was wearing a suit coat but no shirt, and his chest was a gory thing, pustuled with welts and boils, striped with scars.

“Maybe you could come back later,” he said. “I’m working.”

“On what? A suicide note?”

“No, but keep hoping. Poetry. I dabble. ‘Such is the refuge of our youth and age.’”

“Sorry to interrupt your great work, but we need to talk.”

“Do we?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How did you find me? Julia?”

“Your brother.”

“My dear brother,” he said. “I should have guessed. Franklin never could keep a confidence.” He reached for the stub of the joint in the ashtray, stared at it for a moment, offered it up to me.

“No,” I said.

“So you’re like that, are you?”

“Yeah, I’m like that.”

“Is that what Julia sees in you? The utter straightness, the complete lack of any coil in your spine? I suppose it’s a nice counterpoint to my own.”

He popped the roach into his mouth and swallowed it. Then he leaned over, opened one of the desk drawers, pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. He flicked the lighter to life, took the page he’d been scribbling on and set it on fire. As it burned down, he lit his cigarette on the flame, before dropping the burning page onto the floor. As the paper flamed out among the charred remains of scores of other pages, he took a deep drag from the cigarette. He leaned his elbow on the desk, propped his head languidly on his hand, exhaled a plume of smoke.

“I guess it wasn’t much of a poem,” I said.

“I burn them all,” he said, looking down at the smoldering paper. “‘The dying embers of an altar-place where had been heap’d a mass of holy things.’” He lifted his head to stare at me with lidded eyes. “So, Victor, I suppose you’re here to thank me.”

“Why the hell would I thank you?” I said.

“Because now your love has a chance.”

“You killed Wren Denniston for me, is that your story?”

“I wouldn’t cross the street for you. But for my Julia, who ‘walks in beauty like the night,’ I would do anything.”

“Including murder?”

“Especially murder. But true love demands nothing less, don’t you think?” He pushed himself out of his chair and began to walk slowly toward the bed. He had a pronounced limp, and I noticed only then that his right foot was badly swollen. “I’m not talking lust here, Victor, though I have nothing against lust per se. I’m talking love, the kind that bites into your bones and never lets go. The kind that grows up with you, that grows old with you, that stands the test of your aging because time fails to blunt its sharpest edge.”

“And that’s the way you feel about Julia?”

“No, Victor, that’s the way you feel about Julia.”

I stared at him without responding. He sat on the edge of the bed, winced as he lifted his purpled foot onto the dark maroon bedcover, and then leaned back dreamily on a mound of paisley pillows.

“It is over for me,” he said. “‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care, the exalted portion of the pain and power of love.’”

“Who is that you keep annoyingly quoting? Shakespeare?”

“Byron.”

“Byron, huh?” I looked around at the extravagant room, the burned poetry. “Wasn’t he a self-dramatizing fop who screwed other men’s wives, wrote scads of overwrought romantic verse, and had wanton sex with his sister?”

He took a long drag from his cigarette, exhaled, raised an eyebrow. “Half sister,” he said. “Do you like my room?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. Julia did it. She is always bringing me something, fixing the place up, trying to make me comfortable.”

“Trying to make you something, all right.”

“This fits her image of me.”

“Was this ever you?”

“No. Even when we were young, she had me wrong. I suppose that’s the true nature of love. I only play the part these days because it makes her happy. But now, with the ogreish Wren Denniston off to ‘the vanished hero’s lofty mound,’ there is nothing to stop Julia from finding her happiness with you.”

“Except you,” I said.

“Well, yes, true, there’s always me. But I don’t take up much space.”

I pulled a chair next to his bedside and sat down. I now had a clearer view of his ravaged body, and it was a brutal sight. Yes, his face was smooth and perfect – Dorian Gray came to mind – but it was clear from his chest and foot that he was being devoured by some virulent disease, something that infected him blood and bone. Above the tobacco smoke, I picked up a faint whiff of rot.

“What’s with your foot?” I said.

“It’s nothing. I stubbed my toe on something.”

“It smells bad. Like it’s gangrenous. You need to get out of this sepulcher and get it looked at.”

“I don’t want it looked at. ‘The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone.’”

“Stop acting like an idiot. Do you have a doctor?”

“Do I look like I have a doctor? I subscribe to the Doris Day health plan. What will be will be.”

“Let me get you out of here. The emergency room at Temple is not too far.”

“Is that why you came? To save me?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m willing to do that in addition.”

“Who is he?” he said, indicating Derek.

“My investigator.”

“He doesn’t say much.”

“Miracles happen. But he helped me find you, and now he’s here to listen to your confession.”

“Is that what I’m going to do? Confess?”

“That’s right. You’re going to tell us everything. How you showed up at the Denniston house. How you got hold of the gun. How you shot Julia’s husband in the head. And then we’re going to the emergency room.”

“You sound so sure of yourself. Is your investigator going to beat the truth out of me?”

“He won’t have to.”

“Going to ply me with drugs? Please say yes.”

“You’re floating already.”

“No more drugs?”

“No.”

“Pity. But then how do you intend to get me to talk?”

“I’m going to wait,” I said. “You want to tell me. You’re so proud of yourself you can’t help but tell me.”

He laughed. Then he snubbed dead his butt, opened the drawer of his bed table, pulled out a full joint, licked it, lighted it. He sat on that bed, leaned forward to prod his bad foot with a finger, leaned back, stared at me while he sucked in and held the smoke.

I watched him in silence.

It had been an astonishing performance, Terrence Tipton’s little show, with its burning poems and slurred voice and incessant quotations from a long-dead libertine, but that’s all it was, a show. It hadn’t taken me more than a moment to realize he was a dramatic little snit, still on the stage all these years after his vomitous failure as Romeo, still playing the melancholy young man brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past, still waiting for the spotlight to come his way and give him another chance.

And now here I was, at last, his opportunity.

So I wasn’t worried that he was apparently turning me down. I stayed quiet, and I waited. He wasn’t made for Beckett and his cold silences, no. He was made for Shakespeare and all that ripe verbal excess, for Byron’s fatal romanticism. He would soon take his place behind the footlights and begin his grand soliloquy. He couldn’t help himself.

I waited, and I waited some more. But I didn’t have to wait too long.