Phoenix Noir

Others of my kind by James Sallis

Glendale

As I turned into my apartment complex, sack of Chinese takeout from Hong Kong Garden in hand, Szechuan bean curd, Buddhist Delight, a man stood from where he’d been sitting on the low wall by the bank of flowers and ground out his cigarette underfoot. He wore a cheap navy-blue suit that nonetheless fit him perfectly, gray cotton shirt, maroon tie, oxblood loafers. He had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

“Miss Rowan? Jack Collins, violent crimes.” With an easy, practiced motion he flipped open his wallet to display a badge. “You give me a minute of your time?”

“Why not. Come on up.”

Without asking, I spooned food out onto two plates and handed one to him. For a moment he looked surprised, but only for a moment, then tucked in.

“So what can I do for you, Jack Collins?” I asked between bites. We stood around the kitchen island. Tiles chipped at the edge, grout stained by untold years of spills and seasoned by time to a light brown. The kitchen radio, as always, was on. After 6:00 the station switches from classical to jazz. Lots of tenor sax. California bebop beating its breast.

“Well, first, I guess, you could tell me why you handed me this plate.”

“You’re not wearing a wedding ring. Your shirt needs pressing, and even with that suit and tie, you have on white socks. A wife or girlfriend would have called you on that. So I figure you live alone. People who live alone are usually up for a meal. Especially at 6:30 in the evening.”

“And here I thought I was the detective.” He forked in the last few mouthfuls of food. “Vegetarian?”

I admitted to it as he went to the sink, rinsed off utensils and plate, and set them in the rack.

“I know what happened to you,” he said.

“You mean how I spent my early years.”

“Danny and all the rest, yes.”

“Those records were sealed by the court.”

“Yeah, well...”

He came back to collect my dishes and utensils, took them to the sink and rinsed them, added them to the rack. Stood there looking out the window above the sink. Another tell that he’s a bachelor, used to living alone. Maybe just a little compulsive.

“Look, I’m just gonna say this. I spent the last few hours up at the county hospital, Maricopa. Young woman by the name of Cheryl got brought in there last night. Twenty years old going on twelve. Way it came about was, the neighbors got a new dog that wouldn’t stop barking. They didn’t have a clue, tried everything. Then, first chance the dog had, it shot out the door, parked itself outside the adjoining apartment, and wouldn’t be drawn away. Finally they called 911. Couple of officers responded, got no answer at the door, had the super key them in. Found Cheryl in a closet, bound and gagged, clothespins on her nipples, handmade dildos taped in place in her vagina and rectum. Guy was a woodworker, apparently — one of the responding officers is a hobbyist himself, says this mook used only the best quality wood, tooled it down to a high shine. Cheryl didn’t talk much to begin with. Then about 5 this morning she stopped talking at all. Just started staring at us. Like she was behind thick glass looking out.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens. You get tired of all the questions, you know they’re never going to understand.”

“Mook got home from work not long after the officers arrived on the scene. Had some sort of club there by the door, apparently, and came at them with it. Junior officer shot him dead, a single shot to the head. Training officer, twenty-plus years on the job, he’d never once drawn his piece.”

Collins opened the refrigerator door and rummaged about, extracting a half-liter bottle of sparkling water. Mostly flat when he shook it, but hey. He poured glasses for both of us and threw in sliced limes from the produce drawer.

“Look, you don’t want to go back into all that, I’ll understand. But we’ve got nothing except blind alleys north, south, east, and west. No idea who this girl — this woman — is. Where she’s from, how long she’s been there.”

“Twenty going on twelve, you said.”

He shrugged. “Could just be shock. One of the doctors mentioned sensory deprivation, talked about developmental lag. A nurse thought she might be retarded. At any rate...” He put a business card on the island between us. “They’re keeping her at the hospital overnight, for observation. You see your way clear to visiting her, talking with her, I’d appreciate it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fair enough.”

“Anyone ever tell you you have beautiful eyes, Officer Collins?”

“My mother used to say that. Funny. I’d forgotten...” He smiled. “Thanks for the meal, Ms. Rowan — and for your time. If by some chance you should happen to change your mind, give me a call, I’ll drive.”

I saw him to the door, tried to listen to music, picked up a Joseph Torra novel and put it back down after reading the same paragraph half a dozen times, found myself in a bath at 2 a.m. wide awake and thinking of things best left behind. Not long after 6, I was on the phone.

“Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No problem. Alarm’ll be going off soon anyway.”

“Your offer still open?”

Nowadays, whenever anyone asks me where I’m from, I tell them Westwood Mall. I love seeing the puzzled look on their faces. Then they laugh.

Everyone here’s from somewhere else, so it’s doubly a joke.

But I really am from Westwood Mall. That’s where I grew up.

I was eight years old when I was taken. I’d had my birthday party the week before, and was wearing the blue sweater my parents gave me, that and the pink jeans I loved, and my first pair of earrings.

His name was Danny. I thought he was old, of course, everybody over four feet tall looked old to me, but he was probably only in his twenties or thirties. He liked Heath bars and his breath often smelled of them. He wasn’t much for brushing teeth or bathing. His underarms smelled musty and animal-like, his privates had an acid smell to them, like metal in your mouth. Some days I can still taste that.

I really don’t remember much about the first year. Danny kept me in a box under his bed. He’d built it himself. I loved the smell of the fresh pine. He took the jeans and sweater but let me keep my earrings. He’d come home and slide me out, pop the top — two heavy hasps, I remember, two huge padlocks like in photos of Houdini — his own personal sardine. He’d bring me butter pecan sundaes that were always half-melted by the time he got home. I felt safe there in the box, sometimes imagined myself as a kind of genie, summoned into the world to grant my summoner’s wishes, to perform magic.

I’m not sure I was much more than a doll for him. Something he took out to play with. But he’d be so eager when he came home, so I don’t know. His penis would harden the moment I touched it. Sometimes he’d come then, and afterwards we’d just lie together on his bed. Other times he’d put things up me, cucumbers, shot glasses, bottles, either up my behind or what he called my cooze. He’d always pet my hair and moan quietly to me when he did that.

He worked as a nurse’s aide at Good Samaritan and as a corrections officer at the prison out in Florence, pool and swing shifts at both, irregular hours, so I never had much idea what time of day it was when I felt my box being pulled out. Sometimes, from inside, I’d smell the heavy sweetness of the sundae. I was always excited.

Two years after I was taken, we went to Westwood Mall, the first outing we’d ever had. It was our second anniversary, Danny explained, and he wanted to do something special to celebrate. He gave me a pearl necklace, real pearls, he said, and I promised to behave. He’d even bought a pretty blue dress and shoes for me. At Acropolis Greek I stabbed his hand with a plastic knife, kicked off the shoes, and fled. I was surprised at how easily the knife went in, at the way it broke off when I twisted. Flesh should not be that vulnerable, that penetrable.

After that, I lived in the mall. Found safe places to hide from security guards, came out at night or during the rush hours to dine off an abundance of leftover fast food, had my pick of T-shirts, jackets, and all manner of clothing left behind, read abandoned books and newspapers. I had turned from genie to Ms. Tarzan. Periodically I’d watch from various vantage points as Danny prowled the mall hoping to find me. You may remember apocryphal tales of Mall Girl, sightings of which were first reported at Westwood then quickly spread throughout the city’s other malls. Eventually everyone came to believe the whole thing was ex nihilo, spun from vapor to whole cloth, no more than a self-serving stunt. The journalist who first reported these tales and devoted weeks of her column to following up on them, Sherry Bayles, was summarily fired. Lack of journalistic integrity, the paper cited. Later, when she was working as a substitute teacher, more or less by simple chance we became friends. She’s the only one I ever told about my days in the mall. Endearingly, she did no more than smile and nod.

My Edenic time at Westwood ended after eighteen months. A newly hired security guard gave credence to the stories and lay in wait for me long after his shift was done. I was biting into half a leftover hamburger I’d fished out of one of the trash containers when he came up behind me and said, “I’d be happy to buy you a whole one.” His name was Kevin, a really nice man. He bought me that hamburger, complete with fries and shake, on the way to the police station. There, a Mrs. Cabot from Family Services picked me up.

So the second — third? fourth? — act of my life began.

Next morning I woke up in what they call a holding facility. Whatever they called it, it was an animal pen, thirty or forty kids all stuffed in there. One of them came snuffling around my bed like a pig after truffles around 3 a.m. and left with a bloody nose, down one tooth. At 8:00 they gave me a breakfast of underdone, runny eggs with greasy bacon mixed in and carted me off to see a social worker.

She said her name was Miss Taylor. “The report states that you’ve been living on your own in the mall. Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re eleven?”

“Almost twelve.”

“You told the admitting nurse that before this, you spent two years in a box under someone’s bed.”

Miss Taylor was sitting behind a desk in an office chair. She rocked back and forth, staring at me. When she rocked back, she went out of sight. There she was. Gone. There she was again.

“The nurse thinks you made that up.”

“I don’t make things up.”

“You also said that during that time he repeatedly abused you.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Ignoring me, she went on: “That he touched you in inappropriate places, put his member in you.”

“His penis, you mean.”

“Yes. His penis.”

“Sometimes he did. More often it was other stuff.”

I’d made her out to be just another office zombie, but now she looked up, and her eyes brimmed with concern. You never know when or where these doors will open.

“Poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

“Sweetheart—”

“My name’s Jenny.”

“Jenny, then. Adults are supposed to care for children, not take advantage of them.”

“Danny did take care of me. He brought me sundaes. He fed me, he cleaned my box twice a day. Took me out when he came home.”

Tears replaced the concern brimming in her eyes. I had the feeling that they habitually waited back there a long time; and that when they came, they pushed themselves out against her will.

She tried to cover by ducking her head to scribble notes.

Three days later, Mrs. Cabot showed up again to escort me to what everyone kept calling “a juvenile facility,” half hospital, half prison. (Daily my vocabulary was being enriched.) The buildings were uniformly ugly, all of them unrelievedly rectangular, painted dull gray and set with double-glass windows that made me think of fish tanks. I was assigned a narrow bed and lockless locker in Residence A — a closed ward, the attendant explained. Everyone started out here, she said, but if all went well, soon enough I’d be transferred to an open ward.

That was the extent of my orientation. The rest I got onto by watching and following along. Each morning at 6 we had ten minutes to shower. Then the water was turned off, though there weren’t enough showerheads to go around and even when we doubled up, some girls were left waiting. After that we had ten minutes to use toilets in open stalls before being marched in a line through a maze of covered crosswalks to the dining room. Captives from other residences, boys and girls alike, would just be finishing their breakfasts. We waited outside like ants at a picnic. Once the occupying forces were mustered on the crosswalk opposite, we entered.

School was next, three or four grades and easily twice as many ages lumped into one, with a desperate teacher surfing from desk to desk looking as though this, staying in motion, might be all that kept her from going under. Each hour or so an attendant materialized to cart a roll-call group of us away for group therapy (equal parts self-dramatization, kowtowing by inmates, and surreptitious psychological bullying by therapists), occupational therapy (same old plastic lanyards, decoupage, and ashtrays), weekly one-on-ones with the facility’s sole psychiatrist (a sad man whose hopelessly asymmetrical shoulders accepted without protest the dandruff falling like silent, secret snow upon them). Occasionally one of our troop would be led off for shock therapy, only to return with eyes glazed, mother’s milk of her synapses curdled to cheese rind, unable to recognize any of us, to recall where she was or remember to get out of bed to pee or, if she did, to locate the bathroom. One or another of us would take her by the hand and lead her, help her clean up afterwards.

I could provide little useful information about my parents or my origin. Scoop the fish from the bowl, which is the whole of what the fish knows, how can the fish possibly describe it to you? Family Services’ own searches came to naught as well. Back then few enough possibilities for tracking existed. Children’s fingerprints went unrecorded. Enforcement, legal, and support services were not so much islands as archipelagos. I’d been taken more or less at random and kept, first by Danny, then by myself, in seclusion. Four years had passed. Essentially I had no identity.

The long and short of it was, I got assigned as a ward of the court and, barring foster placement, which we all knew to be about as likely as universal health care during a Republican administration, was remanded by the court to the juvenile facility “until such time as the aforesaid attains her majority.” This majority, I found as I burrowed into outdated law books for impenetrable reasons ensconced in the facility’s woeful library, was not fixed. I could petition for it after my sixteenth birthday.

In addition, the court’s ruling decreed twice-yearly reviews by the board. For the first couple of reviews I showed up and said my piece, watching women in sober dresses and men in short-sleeve white shirts nod their heads, claiming they understood. Sure they did. As they went home to their families, Barcaloungers, TVs, chicken-and-mashed-potato dinners. I could see why it was called a board. No bending here, just sheer functionality. Nothing came of those first command performances, of course, and after that I stopped caring. Until age sixteen, when indeed I did petition the court — not the mental health, juvenile courts to which I’d been restricted the last few years, but an adult, open court. I’d spent considerable time in the facility’s library researching this, doing my best to get my ducks all in a row, even if some quackery were involved.

Mall security guard Kevin, one-time journalist Sherry Bayles, Family Services agent Mrs. Cabot, and social worker Miss Taylor were all there to testify on my behalf. Appropriately demur and deferential, I walked out emancipated. Miss Taylor set up residence for me in a halfway house. “Just until you get on your feet,” she assured me.

It was out on Ocotillo around Sixteenth and Glendale, a part of town where, whenever you emerged blinking into sunlight, homeowners on adjacent porches and in neighboring fenced yards stared at you as though you might be a cabbage that had somehow managed to uproot itself and learn to walk. (God knows how the property came to this purpose and at what cost. Some Old Money donation, possibly trying to me-morialize an addicted wife or child?) I always smiled my biggest smile, said good morning with eyes steady on these neighbors, and inquired how they were doing on this fine day. By the third week they were calling me over to ask how it was going.

Not spectacularly well, as it happened. Once prospective employers heard I was sixteen, had spent four years in a state facility, and had never before worked, the interview was pretty much over. Never mind court papers certifying me as an adult, or my own composure and comportment at these interviews. Two months in, I began having the terrible feeling that halfway might be as far as I was going to get. I mentioned this when I stopped to chat with old Miss Garrett at the end of the block. She was out in her garden weeding flowers as usual. How those weeds managed to regrow overnight, every night, I never understood. But there she was each morning in ancient pink pedal-pushers and sky-blue straw hat, pulling those suckers up with her own rootlike, arthritic hands.

“If you don’t mind swing shifts and long hours, honey, I’ve got a nephew with his own business who’s looking for a waitress. Figure you can handle pushy men?”

Cheryl was everything I expected, a plain girl like myself, quiet and superficially ingratiating, with still eyes that reminded me of my friend Bishop from back in the halfway house, or of walls spackled with unreadable graffiti.

Collins took me in and introduced me, then discreetly withdrew.

What can I say? I told her how I had come to pass the middle years of my admittedly short life. I talked about not carrying forward regrets, about simply getting on with things. Halfway through, it occurred to me that what I was saying sounded not at all different from the harangues that hundreds of teenagers suffer daily from parents. We all think we’re special, somehow exempt. When the real lesson’s how much alike we all are.

I told her I’d check back with her later, that she shouldn’t hesitate to call me if she needed to talk, anytime, day or night. Wrote my name and number on the back of a deposit slip, the only piece of paper I could find in my purse.

“Miss Rowan?”

To that point Cheryl had given no indication she was listening, not the least register of recognition, as I spoke.

“Yes?”

“Where are they going to take me next?”

For her, I well knew, the world seemed at this point little more than a congress of theys, dozens of theys shoving her about like a pawn on the board, forever testing her survival skills. Pawns were things one sacrificed, things that were captured and went away.

“Some kind of holding center would be my guess. You’re overage for the state juvenile facility. They’ll probably try for a shelter of some sort. Depends on what’s available. I’ll call in later, find out where you are. Maybe we can talk then.”

She nodded. For a moment, before they became still again, things struggled to surface in her eyes.

That night after dinner with Collins, upon which he insisted, I came home, poured a final glass of wine, and drank it standing at the front window, looking out at my neighbors’ shrouded, brightly lit houses.

As I drew the shower curtain closed, I felt safe in a way I never will outside, and as I washed, I considered how I’d always thought of the scars as something I put on, like clothes or a hat, not part of me at all, nothing to do with my essential self, and remembered the first man in my bed, the first man I’d let see them.

Memories are the history we carry around with us, a history that’s mapped out upon our bodies, pressed into the very folds of our minds. So that night I remembered. Just as I go back to the mall at every opportunity, an immigrant returning to the homeland, and feel safe there.

What no one understands is that, lying in the box under Danny’s bed, miraculously I was able to stop being myself and become so much more. I could feel myself liquifying, flowing out into the world. I became numinous. Sometimes, though ever less often as time goes by, I’m able to recapture that.

“Thanks again for touching base with Cheryl,” Jack had said as we settled in. The restaurant, Italian, was Mama Ciao’s on McDowell, recently relocated to the abandoned shell of a Mexican establishment and demonstrably in transition.

“I only hope that eventually it may do some good.”

“What we all hope. You never know.” He sipped a couple ounces of draft. “Have to tell you this one thing.”

“Okay.”

“I have an ex-wife — not really ex, I guess, since all we are is separated. Divorce’s been in the works awhile. We have a daughter.”

I waited.

“Just wondered how you felt about it,” he said, “that’s all.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Deanna.”

“You see her often?”

“I used to, when she was young. Had her for weekends, half the summer. As she grew up, less and less.”

“Just how long has this divorce been in the works?”

“Little over ten years.”

“You check with Ripley, see if that’s some kind of record?”

“Think I should?”

“Probably.”

His eyes were bright with good humor.

“We all have to decide what’s important to us and fight for it, Jack. Sometimes the best way to fight is to do nothing.”

“Friends I have left say I’m living in the past, trying to hold onto something that’s no longer there.”

“The past is what we are, even as we’re constantly leaving it.”

“You know what? I have no idea what that means.”

“Neither do I,” I said, laughing. “But it sounded good.”

“What’s important to you?” Jack had asked as we walked out. Night was settling in, last tatters of daylight become pink banners riding low in the sky. When he took my arm to gently guide me left, our eyes met.

“Everything,” I told him.

Valerie by Kurt Reichenbaugh

Grand Avenue

All I had left was that look on Valerie’s face as she watched Cooper bleed out onto the stained motel carpet. That’s the last picture of her.

My mind worked like that when it came to Valerie. A mental slide show of her. Snapshots that I’d arrange in ways that pleased me differently each time. And this was the last one. The one of her standing above Cooper, legs apart, that cut across her right cheekbone, a teardrop line of blood trickling from it.

My arms and legs were cold.

I couldn’t move.

It hurt to breathe.

I never thought much about how I’d go out. I wanted another turn at things. Another go-round to see if I could make things different.

Instead, I just had this picture of Valerie and the sad knowledge of just how stupid I’d been.

“Dude, they got a vending machine that sells pussy shots in the men’s room!”

I remember looking back over my shoulder at the guy bragging about his find in the john. That was my first sight of Cooper. Healthy, early thirties, a tad overweight, cheeks showing the first blush of hypertension. Wardrobe from Abercrombie & Fitch, with attitude from Scottsdale.

Valerie told me she’d be meeting him at the Bikini Lounge. Said I should come also and get a look at him before the job, you know, get a feel for the target. Her words: a feel for the target.

Well, I’d gotten my look. I wasn’t impressed.

“Two PBRs,” Cooper told Sally, pressing up to the bar next to me.

Sally eyed him with tired patience. “I’ll need to see some ID.”

I watched as Cooper dug out his wallet and slid an Arizona license and credit card across the rutted wood bar. Johnny Cash began singing on the juke. Always Johnny Cash. I liked Johnny Cash enough, but sometimes it would be nice to hear someone like Duane Eddy for a change.

“Cash only,” Sally said, setting the bottles down in front of him. “No cards.”

“No cards?” Cooper looked at her like she was crazy. “Shit, hold on a sec.” He went back over to the table where I knew Valerie was waiting for him.

Sally looked at me and rolled her eyes.

Cooper returned with his money and took the bottles of beer. He gave me a dose of stink-eye as he did.

I hate guys like him. Too many phony pricks like him all over Phoenix. And he had to come here, my turf, and turn Valerie’s head.

The Bikini Lounge had been on Grand since late 1947. It would have remained a forgotten dive until hipsters like Cooper discovered it. I liked it anyway. It was close to where I lived. Started coming here after the Emerald Lounge closed down. Either here or the Alaskan Bush Company, just a piece further down Grand.

Grand Avenue slashed diagonally through Phoenix’s grid-lined streets. Certain streets in the city are sunburnt. This stretch of Grand had gone on to skin cancer. But lately the neighborhood had seen something of a revival. Artists found the rents affordable and the setting appropriately retro-beat and moved in, luring adventurous suburbanites in with them, pushing the hustlers, vagrants, and addicts deeper into the shadows just off the main drag.

I’d been to most of the galleries: Red Door, Perihelion Arts, Art One. I didn’t know art from Shinola but I’d gotten used to the boho scene. I figured galleries were better than payday stores.

I once saw a hell of a good Rockabilly band from Tucson in one of the galleries. Can’t remember their name anymore. But that’s what I liked about Grand. It wasn’t lined with phony bullshit you’d find in Scottsdale. Now that was a city made for the Coopers of the world.

Phoenix had grown on me. I liked the cowboy skies as the sun exploded against the western clouds, the pomegranate sunsets. The dead streets at night downtown. The lingering mid-century postcard architecture, motel dives, and plazas. I wished the rest of the world would just leave Phoenix alone.

I lived on McDowell, near Seventh Avenue, in a bungalow apartment. I moved there after the Air Force. I’d been stationed at Luke and when my time was up I decided to stay.

Back when I moved into my apartment one of my favorite places was the Emerald Lounge on Seventh Avenue. I’d seen the Hypno-Twists play there a handful of times. Great place to see a band.

The Emerald Lounge was gone now.

Replaced by a Starbucks.

Nothing good ever stayed.

Then I met Valerie.

The earliest snapshots of Valerie are the ones from the Bush Company. The ones that kept me company on those long hot nights when I couldn’t sleep. I’d seen her dancing to “Thunder Kiss ’65” and I knew she’d be my favorite. I’d only stay there on the nights she worked. I’d sit patiently, nodding the other girls by, taking their dirty looks with them, until she’d finally come over to me. Skin like milk, hair black as coffee, and eyes to match.

“My name’s Karl,” I told her one night during a private dance.

“Valerie.”

“Okay if I ask where you’re from, Valerie?”

“Tucson.” Red lips against my throat. “What about you, Karl?”

“Right here.”

“No one is from here. So, where’re you from, really?” I noticed the accent then. Not Spanish like you’d expect in Phoenix. Something else, Eastern European, maybe.

“Okay,” I said. “Nowhere. Then here.”

But she wasn’t listening anymore, her back against my lap, sliding down between my legs.

I swallowed my beer and looked at my watch.

“Thinking of heading over to the Paper Heart later. They’re showing Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! tonight,” I said to Sally. “What about you?”

“Seen it.”

“Come on, Cooper,” I heard Valerie’s husky voice behind me. “We should get to the motel already.”

I had to look at her. Her face, lined beautifully in the glow of the tiki lamp above the table where she and Cooper sat. I tried telling myself how much she hated being with Cooper. She made it clear to me that she had to act like she was into him. But knowing this didn’t make it any easier watching them together.

“Yo, you want something?” Cooper shouted across the floor at me. Valerie pretended to see me for the first time. She put her hand on Cooper’s arm, saying something I couldn’t hear.

Touching Cooper’s arm like that, I bet it was something she did a lot. One of her finest talents, touching guys, prodding them, making them do what she wanted. I hated that about her.

“Easy, friend,” I said. “No harm meant.”

I turned around and looked down at my beer, its foam sticking to the sides of the glass. “The fuck,” I heard Cooper continue. “You hear that shit? Ain’t your friend, yo!”

I finished my beer. That’s right, Cooper, listen to your girlfriend there. Forget about me and think about all that swag you got with you instead. I’m no one. Just another loser in a bar.

My throat burned. I smacked my glass down, feeling Valerie’s nails caressing Cooper’s arm, his back, other places too.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up. “I guess I’m outta here. See ya, Sal.”

Outside, the night hadn’t cooled any. They rarely did. Not when the days hit above 110 degrees. That’s when the heat just soaks into the concrete and glass and waits there until morning. Riding out the hot nights, I’d lay awake in my apartment with the radio on, reading a Luke Short or Louis L’Amour paperback and listening to the whistle of the trains off Grand slide with the hum of traffic on I-10.

A Chevy truck rolled by on Grand, Ranchero music trailing as it passed me.

I could hear singing from the church around the corner. White globe lights hung from its trellises, glinting off the cars and pickups that lined the street in front of it.

My car, a fourth-generation Impala rolling out its last miles, sat parked around the corner on Fifteenth Avenue, across from the boxing club. I could see two Latino boys sparring in the ring. Another worked the bag while a woman, his girlfriend maybe, jiggled an infant on her knee as she watched him pounding the bag, working it, working it.

“He always brags about his jewelry business. How he’s a big entrepreneur,” Valerie had told me. We were in Mel’s Diner on Grand, after her shift. She stirred sugar into her coffee. She put lots of sugar into her coffee, I noticed. She sipped it quickly as she spoke. I wished she’d finish it and we could go back to my place.

“He’s just another guy full of shit,” I said. I was sick of hearing about Cooper already. “Phoenix is full of guys like Cooper. Forget about him.”

“Is Karl jealous?” She put her mug down, smiling on one side of her mouth.

“Karl’s tired,” I answered. “Karl would like to take you home.”

“And do what?”

“You’re a smart girl, Valerie. I’m sure you can figure that out.”

“Dance for you maybe?” That crooked smile again. “You’d like Valerie to dance for you again tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe dance, maybe more than dance?”

I wanted more than the dance. She knew it. “Like I said.”

She sipped from her mug. That’s the snapshot of her when I first compared her hair to the color of coffee. “I like dancing for you, Karl.”

“Yeah?”

She got up from her side of the booth and slid over next to me, her short denim skirt high up her thighs.

“Do you wonder why I tell you about Cooper?”

“You already said it. To make me jealous.”

“He wants me to quit dancing. Work for him instead. I can make more money working for him, he says, selling his jewelry designs.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“He carries jewels around with him. He wants to get into the jewelry-design business. He buys from designers and sells them as his own. I asked him once where he gets his jewels. He tells me people who owe him money sometimes pay in jewels. I think he buys jewels with his father’s money. Maybe you’ve seen his father’s commercials on TV. His father is that car dealer from California. He marries beauty queens from Texas.”

“Again, why are you telling me this?”

“Cooper carries around jewels with him. He shows them to me. I tell him I know people he can sell jewels to maybe. Clients with money. I meet them doing escort jobs. Cooper wants to fuck me like a big shot. He is like a fucking teenager. But a teenager with too much money.” I could hear the Eastern venom in her voice.

The door opened and a pair of Phoenix PD came in. Young and athletic looking; ASU Sun Devils material. They both threw brief glances at us before taking a booth near the corner. I heard a cough of static from one of their radios.

Valerie smiled at them.

I looked out the window, at the fenced-in used car lot across Grand. I waited for her to get on with it.

It came with a flicker of hot tongue against my ear. A voice so low, hypnotic; a razor blade coated with the scent of coffee and cigarettes.

“Maybe Karl and Valerie teach the big shot a lesson.”

More snapshots of her for the slideshow then. Ones of her dancing for me at my place, swaying to the Roy Orbison tape on my cassette player, wearing nothing by the end of the third song. Then, only in my apartment, would she let me touch her as she danced.

But touching only, nothing else.

That would come later, she promised me.

Until then, she would do other things for me.

Sometimes, afterward, sitting in the chair by the window, she’d talk about her escort jobs, the blue smoke from her cigarettes drifting out into the night. But mostly she talked about Cooper. How he was growing impatient with her. When would she quit dancing and work for him. And when was she going to let Cooper meet with her people. He had big plans and wouldn’t wait on her and her people for long.

Then she stopped coming over to my place.

No reason why.

After the last night there, I found her spangled thong under my pillow. It glittered in the light from the window like dreams from the Emerald City. I didn’t notice when she left it, but knew she’d left it for me as a souvenir, a promise from her to add to the pictures in my head.

At work, she acted like I was just another creep.

I’d watch as she danced for the other men, waiting for her to come back to me. She wouldn’t even look my way. I’d stay up late after coming home from work, eating chili or tamales from a can that I’d heat over a hot plate. I played my tapes low as I ate. Roy Orbison sang “Mystery Girl” and I would mouth the words along with the song, running the slideshow of Valerie real slow, timing it to the music. She had once danced to “Mystery Girl” for me, before, when she used to come over. I always thought of it as her song.

Of course, it worked.

I had one of the other dancers give her my message.

I was in. I would help her teach Big Shot Cooper a lesson.

I waited in the Desert Sun Motel’s parking lot. Cooper and Valerie had a ground-level room, across from the empty swimming pool. The doors to the rooms were painted blue. Arizona-sky blue. Highway blue when the clouds are the only things that break and fall into infinity. Cooper’s Lexus sat in front of their door. I’d seen them park there, having followed them from the Bikini Lounge.

No one had meetings in a dump like this, unless it was with a hooker or a dealer. Cooper had to be naïve, stupid, or both to come here with Valerie to do business. This was going to be too easy, I thought.

“Wait for me,” she’d told me. “I’ll leave the room to get ice and leave the door open. You will come back to the room with me and take the jewels. No problem. Got it?”

It seemed simple enough. That was all I had to do. Go back with her and take his swag.

I waited in the darkness of my car, thinking about how she and I would celebrate later. Thinking about the way she danced for me — until I saw her open the door to their room.

I got out of my car. She looked at me and nodded, an empty ice bucket in her hand.

I went up to the door and waited for her to return with the ice.

“It’s about time.” Cooper stood up from the bed. A gym bag sat on the corner of it, next to him. He looked at me for a moment, confused. “Hold on a sec. He’s that guy from the bar. What the hell is this?”

I heard the door close behind me, the chain sliding on the lock.

“Take it easy, Cooper,” Valerie said.

“No, you take it easy.” Cooper’s voice cracked with fear. “What the hell is he doing here? You set me up!”

“Take it easy, Cooper,” I repeated.

“Screw you, man!” Cooper dove to the bag and wrenched a small gun from it. He pointed it at me. I don’t know shit about guns. I just know that you don’t want to get shot by one, no matter how big or small they are. They fuck you up. His gun soaked up the wan light from the lamp. It was small and black in his fist. A woman’s gun, I thought, a chick’s gun. I could see the barrel tremble.

“You think I’m going to just sit here and let someone rob me? You think I’m stupid or something?”

“Cooper, put the gun away. You’re not going to use it.” Valerie reached out, as if to calm him. “You said yourself the jewels were insured. Put the gun away.”

“Forget it. I’m not a fucking chump! And I’m not letting no cheap whore and her goon-boy rip me off!”

Cooper pointed the gun at her.

I jumped him then, hitting him just as the gun went off. The gun sounded simultaneously with the shattering of the lamp. The room went dark. My ears rang from the shot.

I held onto Cooper’s wrist, twisting it, punching him with my free arm as we rolled off the side of the bed. Cooper landed beneath me, the bag spilling beside us.

Cooper yelled then, unintelligible words in the darkness between the bed and the wall where we struggled. I grabbed a loose pillow and crammed it against his face, stifling the noise and trying to keep the gun away. Valerie pounced on us, pulling at the gun in Cooper’s fist. It happened before I knew it. Cooper’s muffled screaming ended the instant she fired the gun into the pillow. Cooper’s body collapsed beneath me. My vision tunneled. The small room filled with the smell of shit, gun powder, and burnt pillow foam.

The light from above the sink came on. Valerie stood above us, the gun in her hand.

I saw a cut across her right cheekbone. A thin line of blood trickled from it, leaving a teardrop’s path.

That’s the one I told you about before. The last one of her.

“Karl.” I could barely hear over the dull ringing from the gun. “Karl, we have to get our asses out of here, now!”

The phone started to ring.

“Don’t answer it,” she said.

Valerie above me. Yeah, that shiny streak of blood on her cheek. I could crawl to her to lick it off...

I scrambled away from Cooper’s body.

She kicked his legs to the side and searched his pockets, pulling out a set of keys and his wallet. She ripped the wallet open and pulled out the cash, stuffing it into her jeans. She threw the wallet back against his chest.

The ringing stopped.

The pillow remained over Cooper’s face.

A dark stain spread on the cheap carpet beneath him.

She went to her knees and grabbed the bag. She threw the gun into it along with the items that had spilled from it in the struggle.

“Karl, we gotta go now!” she said, getting to her feet.

Valerie pulled at me.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“I’ll live.” She shoved me toward the door. “Move!”

Her fingers fumbled with the chain, finally pulling it off. She pulled the Do Not Disturb tag off the inside knob and looped it over the outside knob. I slammed the door shut behind us and pushed against it once. The day’s heat still soaked into it, warm against my back.

“Worst thing, I figured, is maybe we’d have to smack him around a little, you know. That’s it.”

Her in the car next to me. The light at Fifteenth Avenue and Grand had turned red. Through the windows of the boxing club, I could still see the kids working out in the ring.

“Stupid fucker. Why’d he have to bring a gun?”

“All the jewels are in the bag?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

She ran her fingers down my shoulder. I reached a hand up toward her face to touch her, stroke her hair.

She leaned back and lit a cigarette, using the dash lighter.

“You got another one of those?”

She pulled another butt from the pack and handed it to me. I used hers to light it.

I sucked in deeply and exhaled. It’d been a long time since I’d smoked. I’d forgotten how good it felt.

“No one saw you? The desk clerk, anyone like that?” I asked her.

“No one. He got the room. I waited in the car.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure. No one saw me. I stayed in the car.”

“Okay then,” I said at last. “Where do we go now?”

I tried not to think about what she’d done to Cooper back at the hotel. She’d pulled me into this mess and I didn’t know how to get out. I felt no closer to her for it. She sat there smoking, thinking about what, I had no idea. About me? About where we’d go next? I was half tempted to just drive her to the bus depot and leave her there.

Be done with it.

No tail was worth it.

Then she put her hand on my leg.

I could smell her body, closer to mine now.

“Your place?” she asked.

I drove, imagining how she’d look in my bed. It had been too long since I’d had a woman in my bed. Okay, she’d just killed a guy and didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it, but Cooper had it coming to him. He should have stayed in Scottsdale, with his television dad, rich girlfriends, and phony so-called business associates.

She had no choice.

I told myself this as I imagined the feel of her dark body beneath mine, the coffee hair spilling across my chest.

We stopped for a bottle on the way.

Vodka.

That’s what she wanted.

She took the vodka from me as soon as I got back into the car.

“You sure you don’t want to wait until we get to my place?”

She took a pull from the bottle, sighed, and leaned her head back on the seat. “I need this now.”

“I’ve got clean glasses at home.”

“Here.” She handed me the bottle. I put it to my lips and drank. It burned. I didn’t like vodka, but I wanted to make her happy. And I had done everything she asked me to do. What difference did it make what kind of bottle we should get?

I sat down behind the wheel and passed the bottle back to her. She put the cap back on it and set it down on the floor between her feet.

The vodka didn’t make much of a dent against the jangling of my nerves. It would take more than a few shots for that.

My hand shook as I turned the key in the ignition.

She put her hand over mine. “You’ll be fine now, Karl. It’s over.”

“I didn’t think anyone was supposed to get killed, that’s all.”

“No one did.”

“How much you think we got? In the bag, I mean.”

“We count it at your place. We count it, then we go to bed. It will be good for both of us, Karl. I promise. Soon, you’ll not worry anymore about Cooper. Valerie will worry for both of us.”

“No,” I said. I reached for her and pulled her next to me.

“We’re in it together, Valerie. I said I’d do this with you.” But I didn’t really mean it anymore.

I kissed her. I closed my eyes and kissed her in the darkness of the car, tasting the vodka and cigarettes. I tried to put it out of my mind but I could only see her now above Cooper, the gun in her hand, the look of triumph in her eyes.

We parted.

I started the Impala and backed out onto Grand.

Once we got back to my place we would split the goods. I would let her stay the night, if that’s what she wanted, but after that I was gone. I needed to get a story. If anyone connected me to her I’d just tell them she was a pickup and that’s all. I didn’t know shit about Cooper, the money, any of it. It was better that way. I’d let her go. I would miss her, a lot, but I didn’t have any choice.

I had driven about half a mile when she told me to pull over, that she was going to be sick.

I steered the car off Grand, beneath the eastbound lanes of I-10. She lurched out of the car and stumbled to one of the pillars that held the freeway above us. I could see her hunched over in the shadows of the overpass, shoulders hitching.

I waited.

The bag was on the floor of the passenger seat next to the bottle.

The jewels were all there in it.

All I had to do was shut the door and drive. Get on I-10 and drive west and don’t stop until I hit the Pacific.

She’d have to go back to the stripper pole and escort jobs. Too bad about that, but I didn’t ask to be part of a murder.

Her door remained open, leaving the interior light on. I reached over to pull the door shut when I heard her cry out. I wasn’t sure. The cars were so loud above us. I called out to her.

No answer.

I got out of the car and went around to her side. Her door was still open. Before shutting it, I looked down at the bag.

I had to see them. Seeing them all there would make it easier leaving her.

I leaned down and reached for the bag. That’s the moment I felt the punch of the bullet hit me from behind. Right under my rib cage. It knocked me down against the seat of the car. I could smell her there on the vinyl, and the hot odor of the dirt and tires beneath me.

I slid down from the seat and onto the hard, dry ground.

I could see her above me, gun in her hand, pointing it at me. I tried reaching up to the door handle. Then something slammed into my chest and this time I heard the pop of the gun against the rushing of cars above us.

I couldn’t breathe. My mouth worked but nothing came.

She leaned over me.

She kissed me then. The last one.

You ever think about the last kiss you’ll get? Who will give it to you? If perhaps it’s someone like Valerie out there waiting to do it?

Maybe there are worse things than that.

“I’m sorry, Karl. You don’t have to worry now.”

I tried to speak, spitting blood at her instead.

The train’s whistle brought me back.

Valerie was gone.

So was the Impala.

I could see the ribbon of the overpass above me. It seemed so high. I’d never noticed that before. How high above Grand the interstate was. I couldn’t hear the cars on it anymore. They had all gone away.

Everyone had gone away.

I’d reviewed the pictures of Valerie enough. I was tired of it all. There was just the last one of her left anyway.

I could see the moon between the lanes above me. Just a fingernail, really, that was all.

Paint it red and claw my fucking heart out.

The train off Grand cried out again. Maybe it was heading west. It didn’t matter. I would be riding that whistle into the black, bringing that last picture of Valerie along with me.

Blazin’ on Broadway by Gary Phillips

South Phoenix

Somebody Told Me” by the Killers pumped from the overhead speakers as Ivan Monk entered the busy fitness club. The facility took up the fourth floor of a new high-rise offering a pool, sauna, and a large expanse of machines and free weights.

Passing by the spin class, he heard the instructor joke into her hands-free set, “My friend told me, looking at the mess of clothes on my bed, ‘Girl, you need to get you some new gear.’” The woman, a bronze-hued Latina in a form-fitting outfit, laughed gleefully. She would have been at home on the cover of Maxim. “And I realize that light blue sports bras against dark skin can be distracting, but I can get them three for a good price at Big 5. I guess I kind of had it hanging out in some of my outfits, but you know, really, I hadn’t noticed.” She chuckled again.

Monk noticed. Every man in the class and a couple of the women noticed too. He regretted he couldn’t linger and hear more about her choice of workout clothes. He asked a trainer, “Excuse me, where can I find Nazeen Loveless?” The guy pointed a veined finger at a door, and continued his count as a sweating hausfrau completed a series of crunches.

Monk went to the door and knocked lightly. Built into the nearby wall was an aquaterrarium — half gravel and the other side a miniature pond. Various plants he didn’t recognize populated the tank, as did several reptiles. A dark green toad sat on a rock, croaking and glaring at him between blinks. Monk glared back.

“Come in,” a throaty voice announced.

He entered and shook the proffered hand. From his research Monk knew that Nazeen Loveless was past fifty, but she was still a striking woman with a toned body encased in a silk shirt tucked into a mid-length skirt with a slit. A heavy silver bracelet slid up and down her right wrist.

“So, old Ardmore sent you out here,” she said affectionately. She sat back down and he took a seat opposite. Behind her a window overlooked the morphing landscape of Phoenix’s south side.

“He’s putting out this compilation CD package, as he told you, and asked me to run down some leads to make sure everything was cool rights-wise.”

The handsome woman tilted her head, her chandelier earrings tinkling. “And you’re Ardmore’s coproducer?”

“I’ve got a private ticket,” he said.

“Pardon?”

Monk explained he made his living as a PI. “Ardmore asked me to do his legwork because we’ve known each other awhile and—”

“Antony never did like lawyers,” she finished.

He nodded agreement and removed a PDA from the inner pocket of his sport coat. It was hot as a mother outside but he’d put the jacket on in the comfort of the air-conditioned building to look professional.

“There’s a couple of people Ardmore hoped you could help me locate.”

“It’s been a long time,” Loveless said.

“I know,” he said sympathetically. “When I was a teenager, I remember KDAY playing the hell out of ‘Blazin’ on Broadway.’ I still have the LP it was on, Double-Barreled Funk.”

“You weren’t into disco then?”

“I got into my share of clubs with my fake ID, sitting around playing Pong and backgammon,” he admitted, “learning the Hustle and trying not to sweat all over some girl. But I have to credit my sister Odessa with being the keeper of the flame when it came to R&B and Soul. She predicted disco would die, though not the numbers like what Hayzell and the Sugar Kings performed.”

Loveless seemed distracted for a moment, then asked, “Who are the ones you’re trying to find?”

He consulted his handheld’s screen. He’d initially argued strenuously with his old lady about how his steno pad was trustworthy, how words on paper had proven satisfactory for hundreds of years. But she’d prevailed.

“Believe me, you’ll get hooked,” Superior Court Judge Jill Kodama had said. Damned if he now didn’t find his Crack-Berry indispensable.

“How about Minnie Thaxton?” Monk asked. “Also, what about Burris Parchman?” He looked up expectantly.

“When Ardmore called last week I figured Minnie’d be one of the people you’d want to talk to. In fact, her set’s closing tonight at the Raven’s Mill. I can call over there to let her know you’ll be coming.”

“Thanks.” He noted this using his stylus. “And Parch-man?”

She folded her arms, shaking her head, a morose cast to her features. “You know he was a slave to that ’caine.”

“Ardmore understood he’d been clean and sober,” Monk suggested.

“Last I knew, and this was maybe ’97 or ’98, he was back in Baltimore living in a shelter. But,” and she held her hands apart, “that’s the last I heard.”

Parchman had been a session man, keyboardist and organist on several later Hayzell and the Sugar Kings numbers. It was believed that Parchman had come up with an instrumental called “Do Your Thing” on one of the tracks. There had been several conflicting publishing credits for the tune and Monk hoped to settle the matter. But Parchman was most known as the man who’d killed Hayzell Mumford, the Sugar Kings’ lead singer.

“Well, I’ll talk with Minnie and see how that goes.”

“She’s going to like you,” Loveless observed. “She must be pushing back seventy, hard, but she appreciates her some younger sturdy mens, as she would say.”

“I ain’t that young no more,” Monk averred.

Her eyes brightened. “You’re upright and got those shoulders. That’s good enough.”

They both chuckled and he asked, “Is there anyone else around from then who I should talk to? I believe Hayzell’s mother is alive.”

She bristled. “You said you only wanted the ones who wrote some of the numbers.”

Monk hunched a shoulder. “I like to be thorough.”

“You’re nosy,” she declared.

He grinned, hoping to defuse the tension. “That too.”

“What is it that you’re really after?” she hissed, an edge in her voice. “About how Hayzell was killed over drugs?”

Monk was going to offer a denial but she leaned forward, her hands splayed on her desktop. “I know goddamn well that he was, now don’t I? I’ve had plenty of offers to tell my story, from Rolling Stone to a couple of white boys over at ASU doing a book on the Phoenix rhythm-and-blues scene. I haven’t said anything to them about then, and won’t to you either... Look, I need to get back to work.”

Monk rose and put out his hand. “Thanks for seeing me.”

She pretended to be reading some paperwork and mumbled, “Uh-huh,” and didn’t proffer her hand again.

At the Raven’s Mill that night, Minerva “Minnie” Thaxton tore up a rendition of T-Bone Walker’s “Cold, Cold Feeling.” The club had been closed for years but several enterprising types, including a skateboarding champion turned brand name, had cleared up the title, then refurbished and reopened the place. There was money to be made on the nostalgia angle, and there were the loft dwellers trickling into the south side who knew all about the blues from public television.

The audience was more white and young than black and old, but the applause was genuine and the vibe mellow. She finished her first set with one of her own numbers, “The Heat of My Heart,” which showcased her searing riffs on guitar. Monk was allowed backstage as had been arranged, and after announcing himself, he entered Minnie Thaxton’s dressing room.

“Sheeeittt,” the big woman said, sipping more of the Stoliover-ice Monk had been advised to bring. After introductions, she’d asked him to pour one for her and one for himself from the short dog he’d brought along. “That chick always did have her ways. Even back then when Nazeen and Hayzell were going around together, she was whispering in his ear about how he should go solo and whatnot.”

She took another dainty sip. Monk figured she could drink like that all night and not be affected.

“You know she was my manager for a while?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah, Nazeen may be high-toned, but she can TCB, honey. She handles that fitness club hustle but puts on a few doo-wop concerts each year too. I play ’em, it’s good money.”

“She was your manager after Hayzell was killed?”

“Yeah,” she said, swirling the contents of her plastic cup. She tilted her head back. “That was some time around here. You from L.A. and I know about Watts in ’65 and all that, but black folks here in Phoenix, child, we caught double hell when it came time for us trying to get ours.” She shook her head. “Then, as now, this is Goldwater Country. It don’t matter he was part Jewish, that didn’t temper a goddamn thing. Don’t let them fancy golf courses over in Scottsdale or what they building round here fool you,” she shook a ringed finger at the wall, “there’s plenty of redneck cowboys left to remind you in case you get giddy.”

She cracked herself up and had another taste.

“I understand Hayzell died in his mother’s arms and you two were there. Is that why Nazeen Loveless is so sensitive about it? Watching him die?”

She put her feet up on a hassock and kicked off her heels. “I guess,” she sighed. “It messed her up bad when it happened. We all knew he was snorting up enough snow to coat the Rockies, but she wanted to believe she could help him. Well, she did for a time.” She licked her bottom lip. “Too bad he loved that shit more than her.”

“Burris Parchman was a replacement band member, wasn’t he?” Monk’s other task from Ardmore Antony was to clear up inconsistencies in the liner notes he was assembling. The producer also knew the eye couldn’t resist a juicy murder. The misguided and misunderstood fascinated Monk, for wasn’t he one of them? In understanding them, wasn’t this a method to better understand himself? He was as hooked on probing the psyche as Hayzell or any other cokehead was on his drug.

“Yeah, that Jheri Curl — head fool Burris sure could burn up that Hammond B-3. Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff didn’t shame him, I’ll tell you that. Coke wasted Hayzell, but it was tonic to Burris... Speaking of vices,” she jiggled the lonely ice in her cup at Monk, “hit me one more time ’fore my next set, dark and lovely.”

He did but refrained from refilling his supply. “So he and Hayzell were arguing in the recording studio?”

“That’s right.” She drank and chewed a piece of ice. “Used to be there was only Audio Recorders here in town when I got here in the early ’60s. But by then, nineteen and seventy-six, we had a couple of others, including Express Tracks. There was a break in taping and people, you know how they do, drift off, go outside and have a smoke, be it a regular cigarette or a border special.” She winked. “But these two go into this little room in the back and snort up. Seems Hayzell then accused Burris of stealing from his stash.”

“Did he?”

She made a face. “Sheee. Who knows with those two? But like I said, this is AZ and they don’t play around here. Sure, by then the Black Power thing was played out, but you gotta remember that the Sugar Kings had stepped out there after Hayzell heard Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and got his head bent. Not to mention being high and getting inspired listening to Funkadelic and Sly Stone. Him and Burris even got into a little acid like them white boys cause they heard Hendrix and George Clinton had dropped some. So toward the end of ’71 we started experimenting. Doing some protest songs, for lack of a better word, in our concert mix. Songs about getting over. Sheeee.” She gulped what was left of her vodka. “We almost got shot in Flagstaff.”

“Hayzell carried the gun for protection?” Monk asked.

“Partly for the peckerwoods,” she allowed, “but he also dealt with bad folk on the road since he was always on the hunt for nose candy. Whatever the reason, way Burris tells it, their argument got out of hand and Hayzell pulls his roscoe. They wrestle and the gun gets knocked to the floor. Burris dives for it as Hayzell picks up a mike stand to brain him. Even when he wasn’t loaded, Hayzell did have something of a temper. I certainly remember several times when he’d go off on us after a gig for messing up the beat or coming in too slow or too fast on the bridge. He couldn’t read music, but goddamn his eyes if he didn’t have the most natural sense of timing I’ve ever witnessed.”

Thaxton had been one of the few women in that era making a living playing guitar. She gathered herself and added, “Burris had the gun. One shot and Hayzell went down, a fatal wound to his chest. We come rushing in, and at that precise moment his mother arrived to surprise him and take him to lunch. It had been weeks since he’d been back in Phoenix, you see.”

She finished her drink and plopped the cup down noisily on the dressing table.

“Parchman is tried for second-degree voluntary manslaughter. He does five years and some change at Safford.” She slipped her shoes back on and straightened her stylish wig. “It almost killed him, but Hayzell’s daddy did a magnificent service for his only son.” A quaver went through her voice but she remained clear-eyed.

“You know where I could find Burris?”

A mirthless laugh rumbled in her chest. “You gotta understand, when he got out he tried coming back on the scene. But it was strange, follow me?”

“Him being the killer of Hayzell Mumford, the south side’s own. Whatever the circumstances.”

“Exactly. He was off the blow but hit rock bottom with the booze. He’d get gigs but it didn’t take long for some fool or another to bring up the incident and he’d be getting more attention than he wanted.”

“Like a regulator in the Old West who could never outrun his rep,” Monk observed.

“Now, could be I heard he was up Oakland way last I notioned on it. But,” she sighed, “that’s been a long damn time too. At least ten years.” She held out her hand. “Help me up, baby. I need to get back out there and entertain.”

There was a knock on the door and a trim bespectacled man in his early forties leaned his head in. “Five minutes, Minnie,” he said, grinning at her and frowning at Monk. He wore a houndstooth sport coat.

“Okay, honey,” she replied, blowing him a kiss. He withdrew but left the door slightly ajar.

Thaxton stretched and said, “I’ll have my man go over these papers and we’ll be in touch with Ardmore.”

“Great, I appreciate your time.”

“Not a problem.”

Monk departed and was at the side exit door when the man with the glasses stopped him.

“What’d you want with Minnie?”

Monk told him, assessing him as a protective younger boyfriend.

“Hey, that sounds like a winner,” the guy enthused when Monk got to the part about the proposed agreement for Thaxton’s songs. “Let me give you my card. I’m Minnie’s manager.”

Monk guessed there’d been a succession of “sturdy mens” in his age range as her managers. He glanced at Charles Estes’s card while handing the man one of his own. “Good to meet you.”

“You know, my uncle wrote a couple of songs when he was a Sugar King. But maybe you’re not going to include him because of what happened. Really, it’s messed up what they laid on him.”

“Your uncle is Burris Parchman?” Monk said.

“He’s not really blood, but our families have known each other a long time. My dad and him went to the same grade school.”

“Charles, get over here,” Minnie Thaxton called out, standing before her dressing room door.

Estes grinned sheepishly at Monk. “Her majesty needs me.”

“What about your uncle?”

“Holler at me tomorrow, man. My celly’s on the card.”

He rushed away and Monk returned to the Ramada Inn on First. After all these years chasing chuckleheads, from the common street thug to the truly flagitious, and getting socked in the head or worse for his trouble, he was still on a budget. It was hard being the People’s Detective, he lamented.

Early the next day, Charles Estes called Monk, who was drinking coffee at a local café. “Hey, man, sorry I kind of misrepresented matters last night. Truth is, I haven’t seen Burris in a long time. I don’t know where he could be.”

“Maybe somebody in your family might know.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” and the line went dead.

That was a kiss-off. Thaxton must have told Estes to get the party line right. Why didn’t she want him talking to Burris Parchman? It must have something to do with the shooting. Phoenix was unknown territory to him. But he had a day left on the room that Antony was paying for, and figured he’d use the time productively.

At the main library on Central, an imposing five-story rectangular structure seemingly modeled on a space-age toaster, he went through collected bound hard copy and microfiche newspaper accounts of the shooting. He studied the coverage in the black newspaper, the Arizona Sun, and the white press too, including the Herald Examiner in L.A. The pieces contained various mentions of the pioneering civil rights work of Hayzell Mumford’s parents, the Reverend Asa Fairchild Mumford and Dr. Justine Mumford, PhD in social anthropology. From World War Two and Jim Crow — divided Fort Huachuca, where the reverend was an officer not inclined to bow and scrape to whites, to the early ’90s, the Mumfords were a driving force in various struggles for social justice. From job equality in the public sphere, school betterment for minority students, and housing integration in the greater Phoenix area, they’d been at the center of many pivotal moments of change in the state.

On July 4, 1976, during the nation’s bicentennial, Phoenix, like a lot of cities, put on a large parade and celebration. The Mumfords were to be honored, and, Monk noted in one account, the Sugar Kings were slated to perform. But it had been the week before that the fight had taken place at the studio, so naturally that segment of the festivities had been canceled.

From what Monk could gather, the reverend was not a fan of his son’s avocation. “I cannot be reconciled with Hayzell’s pursuit of these most temporal and tempting of concerns,” Mumford was quoted. Another article contained, “I can only continue to pray that the Lord will guide him out of this episode of his life and return him to the fold.”

More recent online searches showed that the father had died in 1998. The partisans who attended the funeral included Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, who at that time was trying to get a film made about the Mumfords, and former Congressman Gus Hawkins, the first black man elected to the California legislature. Monk then read a quote from Nazeen Loveless in the Examiner:

Monk did an eyebrow raise worthy of Spock. He then searched for references to Parchman. There were no articles about him online except for the time during the shooting. But looking back at the bound hard copies of the black newspaper, he spotted several ads for local clubs where Burris was listed as a headliner. The last one was from 2004. That was just a few years back, indicating he was still active, at least then, in the Phoenix area. Loveless and Thaxton had said Parchman had disappeared before that. Maybe he snuck into town and left promptly. Or maybe not.

Burris Parchman wasn’t listed in the white pages, and though Monk called several music booking agents, he got nada. He did find a listing for the Mumfords’ church, Greater First Congregational Methodist on East Jefferson, once the heart of the black community’s south side.

“Yes, you see,” Monk told the helpful woman over the phone, “I’m wondering for the purposes of this documentary we’re putting together if we could interview Mrs. Mumford. I realize she retired some time ago. Is there a way you can get her a message?”

“I would like to help you,” she said. “Justine would love to participate, only...”

“Yes?” Monk said in a solicitous tone. What sort of bad ju-ju was he racking up lying to a good woman like this?

“She’s been under the weather,” the woman said in a way that suggested Mrs. Mumford wasn’t simply suffering from a cold. She was in her eighties, after all. “Let me see what I can do. Give me a number to reach you at, would you?”

He gave her his cell number and the one to his office in Los Angeles, then hung up.

Monk walked about downtown, came upon a barbecue rib and chicken joint, and had a late lunch. It was past 2 and still over a hundred degrees of dry heat. His cell chimed as he swallowed a bite of tri-tip sandwich. After his hello, a quiet voice said, “My name’s Burris Parchman. I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Who told you?”

“Charley did. Course, he also convinced me to let him resurrect my so-called career. Once the Sugar Kings compilation comes out, he said he’d be able to get me some new gigs.” He had a rumble of a laugh like the organ he played. “Well, one thing at a time, I guess.”

“Where are you?” The number and area code hadn’t come up on Monk’s screen.

“Sure, let me give you this address. I’m staying with a friend.”

The house was a neat little Craftsman not unlike those Monk was familiar with in the older parts of L.A. It was east of downtown in a mostly Latino section judging from the Llantas Goodyear and mini-mercado signs.

“Come on in,” a pleasant voice said on the other side of a screen door.

“Thanks,” Monk said, stepping into a freshly painted room with little furniture and no TV. The hardwood floors looked like they’d been recently refinished. The walls were bare.

“She’s getting some work done,” Burris Parchman remarked. The musician was a thin, medium-complexioned black man in his mid-sixties with a trim mustache and receding hairline. He wore wrinkled khakis, a short-sleeved shirt, and raggedy tennis shoes. “As you can see,” he continued, pointing at the open windows, “the air-conditioning hasn’t been put back in. But I have some iced tea. I was just about to have a glass. You?”

“Sure, that’d be great,” Monk said.

“Cop a squat,” Parchman said as he stepped into the kitchen. He soon returned with two glasses and put one before Monk on a side table. The coaster was already in place and was from the Raven’s Mill.

“So tell me about this project.”

Monk sipped his drink and began to speak, half rising from his chair to hand over the paperwork. His head suddenly felt light and he sat back down quickly, his mouth dry despite the liquid. Coltrane’s sax was moaning “Naima,” but he knew there was no music on. He drained his drink, his throat closing up. He stared at the residue in the bottom of the glass. Were those scales?

“Say,” Monk began, dropping the glass, his fingers telling him to do so. “Why would Minnie and Nazeen Love... Love nobody.” He giggled but it sounded like one of those demon clowns in a low-budget horror movie. “Why would they lie to me about where to find you?” Why was it so hard to get a sentence out?

“This is the West, Mr. Monk. We protect our legends around here.” Parchman seemed to be talking to him underwater. It was as if Monk were floating up to the moon and watching the earth recede beneath him. He stood but his shoes had ballooned way out of proportion like in a cartoon. He fell over and was quite content to lie there on his side, his ear to the floor listening for the woo woo of the Underground Railroad. He smacked his lips, tasting purple while he counted the infinite swirls and whirls within the wood floor. His heart beat rapidly and sweat doused his face and shirt front.

“How long will he be like that?”

“I don’t know but we need to get him out of here. Then wipe the house down for his prints and put the For Sale sign back up.”

Monk rolled over and glared hazily at the green Martians with their elongated heads discussing his fate. Through a window he could see a giant ant from Them looking at him too. He decided this was a party. Especially since Lee Dorsey was singing, “Everything I do gohn be funky from now on.” He sang along, trying to snap his fingers.

Hands lifted him off the undulating floor. The Martian with the fancy silver bracelet was talking again. “Check outside and we’ll put him in his car. Get his wallet.”

“We driving him away from here?”

“That’s too risky. It’s better to get him behind the wheel,” the silver bracelet said. Clearly, Monk cogitated, this one was the H.N.I.C., ah, the H.M.I.C. He giggled again. Kurt Vonnegut, the size of a fly with insect wings, landed on his arm. He said in a tiny voice, “Three to get ready and two to go, bro.” Kurt the Fly-Man flitted away. Monk was sad to see him go.

“He could hurt somebody,” one of them said.

“We’re in this too far now. We can’t have him hurt her,” one of the Martians said.

In a blue haze, they walked him to his car. Or was it a stagecoach? He squinted at the giant ants hitched and ready.

“Giddy-up!” he yelled. He went all rubber and, jerking his arms free, flopped to the ground. Time for a sit-down on these mufus, he reasoned. He had to catch his rocket to the moon. His honey would be waiting for him. “I got to call Jill,” he added, rolling around on the ground like a temperamental child.

“Get his ass up before somebody sees us.”

He was snatched upright and hauled to his car. Keys were plucked out of his pocket and he grabbed at them.

“Cut it out,” a nearsighted Martian said, hitting him in the face.

“We can’t leave marks or it won’t look right,” the H.M.I.C. warned.

“Good advice,” Monk said, trying to get out of the diving bell but forgetting how his legs worked. A jackrabbit with the head of a strawberry hopped onto the hood and quoted Wole Soyinka.

“The human factor, alas, is a ponderous and imponderable factor of history.”

“You got that right,” Monk mumbled. Transfixed by the literate rabbit, he became gradually aware that he was in motion. He had a hold of the steering wheel. The radio speaker fuzzed and Henry Ford spoke. No, Monk listened closer and realized it was Ann Sothern as My Mother the Car. She was trying to tell him something about pedestrians and traffic lights, but the horizon flipped over and everything came to a thundering halt.

Propelled forward, Monk cracked his head open on the windshield. Blood dripped into his eyes and he blinked them clear as he stumbled from the wrecked vehicle. The car had jumped the curb, plowed over a mailbox, and finally came to a stop when it smashed halfway through the side of a building. Martians and creatures with tentacles for arms lunged at him and he ran, so happy he remembered how to make his legs work. He knew what they really were beneath their disguises.

Canadians. Canadians terrified him. Sneaky infiltrating bastards. On he ran through the jungle and into the desert, his heart thudding in his ears, drowning out the sirens and the yelling and the cursing. He ran and ran and stared crying. Suddenly, he stumbled across an arid landscape where the snouts of crocodiles stuck out of the sand like cacti, their fearsome crooked teeth snapping expectantly.

Monk stepped tippy-toe around them and came upon the squatting marble statue of the Great Aztec Toad. Only it wasn’t a statue but the living toad god Tlaltecuhtli. The Earth Mother toad opened her maw, and after hesitating for a moment, the Canadians getting closer with their monkey sirens, he dove into the black. He swam and crawled through the murk, panicked that he’d never find his way out. It was then, at his lowest, that he saw his dead father, Sergeant Monk, Mechanic Monk, Husband Monk, stepping out of a door from nowhere.

Monk’s dad held out his big calloused hand. “Come on, Ivan, you can do it. Come on, son. Just a little further and you’ll be safe.”

“Wait for me, Pop.” Crying and bleeding, he ran and leapt through the doorway.

Dr. Justine Mumford’s private room at the Northcross Manor rest home smelled faintly of gardenias and hyacinths, her favorites. The flowers commanded the room in various baskets and vases, and her attendant had already filled three paper shopping bags with Get Well cards. There was to be no recovery for the civil rights icon, but just as she had confronted adversity, threats, and violence in her life, she faced death with bravery and aplomb.

“It’s going to be fine,” Mrs. Mumford said, her voice barely audible above the humming of the respirator.

Nazeen Loveless cried softly, holding onto the old woman’s hand. Age and illness had diminished the elderly woman’s physical shell but her voice yet reflected her power of conviction.

“It’s been three days and the cops are still looking for him,” Charles Estes whispered. He stood further back from the bed, where Loveless and Minnie Thaxton hovered. He switched off the radio he’d tuned to local news.

“Soon it won’t matter,” Thaxton said.

“What won’t matter?”

The three turned and stared mutely at Monk, who stood in the doorway. He had crashed his Galaxy 500 into some boarded-up storefronts, just down the block from the long-defunct Express Tracks recording studio. The police had been called but he’d run away howling before they arrived. He’d spent several hours hidden in a Port-a-Potty at a strip-mall construction site. At some point he pissed himself as the hallucinogen in his system wore off. Assuming the cops were looking for him, he’d waited until nightfall to sneak away. Monk had collect-called L.A. and asked Jill Kodama to wire him money for toiletries and a room at a hot-sheet motel, since it wouldn’t be safe to return to the Ramada Inn.

Estes started forward and Monk said calmly, “I’m not high now, Charles. You want to jump bad, I’ll be swinging back this time.” Estes paused. “We don’t want to disturb Mrs. Mumford, but you three need to do some ’fessin’.” There was complete silence other than the old woman’s breathing. “I do have a guess.” He pointed at her. “She killed her son, didn’t she? And you got Parchman to take the fall.”

The other three gaped.

“As I came down from my trip,” Monk continued sardonically, “a lot of clarity percolated up. I became fixated on comments from you two,” he indicated Thaxton and Loveless, “about when Mrs. Mumford had entered the studio that day.”

Loveless blurted, “We were exact.”

Monk replied, “That’s the point. Given the excitement of the moment, witnesses routinely don’t recall events in the same sequence. If it’s too tight, too rote, something’s up. And in both your accounts, to me and to the newspapers, you used identical phrasing.”

Loveless and Thaxton looked at each other.

Monk rubbed his lower jaw. “By the way, was that a Colorado River Frog at the gym? Used the toad skin as a chaser in the Timothy Leary cocktail you slipped me?” Not only had he reread the news accounts, but he’d also studied up on toads, frogs, and bufotenine, a hallucinogen the croakers and some plants produced, at the library. Monk found that if you were quiet, off in a corner doing your own thing, the library made for a nice hideout.

He came further into the room. “You must have also used some substance to get your witch’s brew into my bloodstream quicker. Now, you could have given me a heart attack or psychotic breakdown... But I ain’t mad at you,” he added sarcastically, suppressing his anger. “I suppose you brainiacs discussed my outright kidnapping first, huh? Anything to get me out of the way long enough for the lady here to pass on and any questions I raised to be discounted.”

Loveless deflated.

Mrs. Mumford moved and said, “Help me sit up.”

“Justine...” Minnie Thaxton started.

“No, no, please.” She held out a hand and Thaxton used the control to raise the top portion of the bed. “Come over here, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stood by the side of her bed, hands clasped before him.

“I did it,” Justine Mumford said, looking beyond the walls, then back at Monk. “I came down to the studio to talk with Hayzell that day. The drugs, the sex, those things of course disappointed me. But I knew at the bicentennial celebration, where his father and I were to be honored, he was going to sing that song.”

Monk frowned. “‘Blazin’ on Broadway?’”

She closed her eyes. “Yes, the damned hit of his. Part of the lyrics talk about a certain woman the singer meets and falls for. He was referring to a real woman. Someone his father knew...”

“Someone he had an affair with?” Monk hedged.

“It had happened in the early ’60s,” Minnie Thaxton said hoarsely. “She was a member of the church and a young widow. Her son and Hayzell went to Sunday school together, and the son had spied the reverend tippin’ in one night.”

Loveless glared at her for being so coarse in front of the dying widow.

“I forgave him,” Justine Mumford said, “but Hayzell never did. As he grew up and they grew more apart about everything from baseball teams to the Vietnam War, he wrote that section of the song to get back at the man he considered to be a hypocrite.”

“Justine hushed the affair up around the church,” Loveless said. “The woman and boy left town.”

“But the band knew, cause Hayzell made a point of telling us,” Thaxton added. “It was a big joke to him.”

“So it was you two arguing in the backroom of the studio?” Monk asked the old woman.

She gave a brief nod. “The church was the landlord of that property. Gospel used to be recorded there. Imagine. I had a key and came in the back way to try and talk to him away from the others. As we argued, Burris heard us and rushed in, trying to get him to calm down. Hayzell was medicated, as was usual then, and pulled his gun on Burris. They fought and the gun dropped to the ground.

“I picked that pistol up,” the old woman proclaimed. “I suppose I thought to scare him.” Her eyes got wet. “But he taunted me, belittled his father and spat on all that we’d worked so hard for. He said he was going to enjoy singing that song to all those who’d be there for his father, and he threatened to tell everyone how he came to write it... How could my own son be so hateful?” Thaxton handed her tissue paper. She sighed and said, “Yes, I killed him, murdered the flesh of my flesh. I committed the greatest sin there is.” She turned her head away to the wall.

“We covered it up. We had no choice,” Minnie Thaxton explained. “It was one thing for one dope-fi end musician to shoot another. But the woman who was the symbol of Arizona civil rights? We just couldn’t give that kind of ammunition to the crackers.” She looked pleadingly at Monk. “We just couldn’t.”

Dr. Justine Mumford passed away peacefully two weeks later. Luminaries such as Jesse Jackson and former president Bill Clinton attended her august funeral. Several legal entanglements were hanging over Monk in Phoenix, but the prestigious law firm that represented Greater First Congregational was providing its services pro bono.

Ardmore Antony had a lot of unanswered questions, but the rights to his compilation were secured. The CD was eventually released, with extra tracks and updated liner notes, including recent remorseful quotes from Burris Parchman. The tragic story of Hayzell Mumford’s demise remained unaltered.

Nearly forty years after its original release, “Blazin’ on Broadway” by Hayzell and the Sugar Kings enjoyed a renewed run on the R&B charts.

It’s like a whisper by Megan Abbott

Scottsdale

The thing about Bob,” she said, and her fingers snapped the ties on Julie’s cocktail apron, “he’s so American. He’s so American.”

Julie nodded. It was good to see Brenda again, and she liked looking at her. She had a Clairol-girl face and silver-blond hair washed twice a day, but things were happening behind those glinting blue eyes and you could feel her winking at you all the time.

Julie looked across the lounge at the man in the beige denim shirt and slacks sitting on one of the low chairs and it was Bob Crane, just like switching a television channel.

“Look at his face,” Brenda was saying, and she slid her fingers under the sash on Julie’s apron and pulled her close, so she could hear her. “It’s so blank. It’s like a billboard.”

Julie didn’t know what Brenda meant, but this was how she always talked. Brenda liked to dance and she made the scene in Phoenix at Bogart’s, B.B. Singer’s, Chez Nous, Ivan-hoe’s, where she’d introduced herself to Bob. She was always meeting people and she said it was her special energy. You could like it or not, but Julie liked it.

“So let’s make it happen,” she was saying and she took Julie’s arm and they walked toward Bob Crane, their heads nearly bobbing together, matching blond locks to their waists and smiles popping. Bob was watching them, watching them and smiling, and what man in the Registry lounge wasn’t?

“Who’s the tomato?” Bob said as he rose. He was handsome and, old as he was, almost as old as someone’s dad, he didn’t look like a dad. The way he turned toward her, so casual, so knowing, like he’d been waiting for her.

When he looked at her, something sharpened in his eyes, sharpened into a spark, and then his face lit, like a camera flashing, and there he was, Bob Crane. He was giving her Bob.

“This is Julie Sue, Bob,” Brenda was saying. “She’s got tits you’d serve soft at Dairy Queen.”

Bob looked down at Julie’s chest in a funny, sly way, and she felt like Fräulein Helga. “Well, nothing wrong about that,” he said. “So, Julie Sue,” and he bent forward just slightly so she would know she was the only one he wanted to talk to, “are you going to be my friend?”

“Yeah, Bob,” Julie replied, and she could feel a tickle in her knees. This would be something. “I’m going to be your friend.”

She told them she had to work until close and Bob said she could meet up with them later. They’d be at the Safari coffee shop and then back to Bob’s place. He wrote his address on a napkin and gave it to her.

Brenda leaned toward her and whispered in her ear, “Do you think he can handle us?” Bob was looking at them and he folded his arms across his chest, just like on the show. Just like Colonel Bob Hogan. “He does that on purpose,” Brenda added, “it’s a gas.”

“What a picture you two make,” Bob said, grinning. “My blond babies.”

And she and Brenda leaned into each other, necks bent, heads touching, smiling tangerine lipsticked smiles.

“Like Siamese blondes,” he said, and he made a sound like laughing.

Carl came by an hour before close, a little high. He was drinking a screwdriver at the bar.

“Baby,” Julie said, “I have to break our date. Brenda came by. I’m meeting her for breakfast.”

Carl gave her a long look. “Brenda’s back,” he said, smiling a little. “Hey, that’s your scene, babe.”

“I’ll see you later,” Julie said, and Carl’s face looked so shiny. His mustache was slightly wet. She remembered it was the suit he wore when they met about seven months ago, at the Bombay Club. He sold synthesizers and wore those woven sandals, huaraches.

She watched him stir his drink with his finger and flick it dry. “Go with God, Julie Sue,” he said. “That chick is bad news.”

He turned and faced the bar. They’d partied at Brenda’s once and Brenda had read the tarot and told Carl that he was letting his hang-ups hold him back and that secrets were being kept from him. Later she told this story of how Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl, was her old babysitter. She said Linda read her cards once and told her she would die young, stabbed against a white wall. Everyone at the party freaked out a little and Carl said she was bad news.

“I like Brenda and I haven’t seen her in a while,” Julie said. Brenda was so much fun. And there was Bob Crane.

“Keep your head,” Carl advised, looking in the mirror above the bar. “You know what I’m saying.”

The Safari was one of her favorite places. Once she saw Angie Dickinson walk through the lobby in a white bikini. But the coffee shop was quiet that night and she didn’t see Brenda and Bob. “They were here, but they left,” the waitress said. “He’ll probably be back later.”

Julie looked at the napkin for Bob’s address, then decided to drive over to the Winfield Apartments.

On the way, she tried to remember the Hogan’s Heroes theme song. It kind of made you want to march. What was that thing the fat guy in the helmet always said on the show, “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing...”? She wondered if Bob was still friends with the Family Feud guy. Maybe he’d come to town too.

Brenda really knew how to make a scene. Julie’d met her by the pool at the Camelback Inn awhile back. Brenda was stomach-down on a deck chair, barelegged, wearing a Mott the Hoople T-shirt and sunglasses. Purple eye shadow smeared across one temple.

“Hey,” she’d said, twisting around to talk to Julie, cross-legged on a beach towel. “I know you.”

“I don’t think so,” Julie answered.

“No, no, man, I know you,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “You have freckles behind both knees.”

Julie smiled. “You just saw that when I was doing my back.” But she knew she hadn’t turned over yet.

“It was awhile ago,” Brenda said, grinning. “You had the sharpest tan lines. You had the swimsuit with the keyhole in the front.”

Julie didn’t say anything.

“You shouldn’t have let him do that,” Brenda said, and she shook her head.

“What?” Julie started, feeling dizzy, wondering if she had sunstroke. “What are you talking about?”

Brenda shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t you.”

They’d gone swimming and then to one of the rooms where Brenda was staying with two musicians. They were high and they had a bottle of rum and Julie drank some. They told the girls to get in the shower together and they did. It was fun and Brenda was beautiful with that long twisting hair, and it’d been a good time. They got free tickets to the concert at Feyline Field.

The air conditioner was going. It was cool in the apartment and there was one floor lamp on and the television set.

“Join the party, Julie,” Brenda said. She was naked and her white dress was on the floor. Julie felt overdressed in her uniform, though it was so short she couldn’t bend over, even to reach behind the bar.

“Welcome to Casa Bob,” Bob said, standing up in his undershorts.

There was a buzzing sound. She thought it was the air unit, but it wasn’t. It was the camera running in the corner, on a big tripod.

“Look,” Brenda said, pointing to the television. “Bob’s on TV again.”

“I never left,” Bob said.

Julie glanced over at the television and it was Bob and Brenda having sex on the sofa. Brenda’s head was in Bob’s lap, her blond hair white on the screen and spread in all directions.

“Julie,” Brenda said, “Bob can help so you too can make it on the big screen. Or small screen.”

“Baby, I can make you a star,” Bob said, smiling at Julie.

“Can I have a drink?” Julie asked. She thought a drink would be a good idea.

“She likes Southern Comfort,” Brenda said, tucking her legs beneath her on the striped sofa.

“I’m sorry,” Bob said. “I just moved in and I don’t drink. But I want to make Julie happy. Someone brought me some Scotch at the theater. Do you like Scotch, Julie?”

“I like Scotch, Bob.”

He smiled again and said he was glad. “I like that place,” he added, talking about the Safari. “Did you ever roast cocktail weenies in that big charcoal fireplace?”

Julie grinned and drank her Scotch. Brenda was tugging at the back of her uniform, trying to drag the zipper down. Julie tried not to giggle. “Carl sure couldn’t handle this,” she said.

“I go there every night,” Bob said. “I like the coffee shop.”

Julie felt the cold air hit her shoulders and breasts. Brenda ran her hands down Julie’s stockings and hooked her fingers underneath to pull them off.

Julie peered at Bob, who was sitting on the arm of the sofa, wearing his glasses so he could look back and forth between the television and her.

She wondered why he wasn’t on TV anymore, and why he was here, like this. She hadn’t been to his play at the Windmill, but she bet it was terrific.

“You seem like a good person, Julie,” Bob said. And there was something in his eyes and it made Julie feel funny, even sad, and it must’ve been the Scotch, which sometimes brought her down.

“I am,” Julie said, as Brenda pulled the stockings from her feet. “I am a good person.”

“Bob,” Brenda asked, “would you like to see how good she is? Would you like to watch me? I can make her beautiful.” Brenda wrapped her arms around Julie’s stomach and nuzzled her neck.

“She’s already beautiful,” Bob said.

“I can make her more.”

“You can try.”

In the living room, when it was going down, Julie couldn’t stop looking around, couldn’t stop thinking, This is happening, wow, isn’t this a trip, Colonel Hogan himself, and she looked at the camera on its big tripod and the stack of cassettes in the corner, and she saw a leather jacket on the floor in the corner and she wondered if that was the jacket he wore on the show and wouldn’t she like to get into that, and her eyes caught her reflection on the TV screen and there she was and she saw herself and Bob Crane and she saw her eyes and they were startled. And she saw Brenda and Brenda was looking too. Brenda was staring and her dark eyes looked so big Julie thought they might swallow the screen.

They ended up in the bedroom. Bob walked behind her, putting his hand in her hair. They had sex on the bed. The buzzing in Julie’s ears was making her head hurt and the Scotch was making her dizzy. It seemed liked everything in the apartment was plugged in and running.

The room was dark and at one point it was just her and Bob and the light from the living room flashed on his face, above her. And it was that face, and she thought, it’s like getting it on with the slick cover of a TV Guid e. But it wasn’t really like that. It wasn’t like that and she couldn’t name it, but looking in his eyes, it was doing things to her. It felt like something had passed over between them. She was seeing something and it made her so sad, all of a sudden. She felt her face wet and she thought, I’m crying. I’m crying. Why am I crying?

Later she couldn’t be sure if it had happened.

After, she and Brenda went back into the living room. Brenda put her dress on and helped Julie zip her uniform back up.

They were giggling at first, and talking. It was like a slumber party, curled upon the sofa.

“I’m getting back into music,” Brenda was saying. “Steve bought me a keyboard. Maybe Bob can help me. He used to be a big deejay in L.A. He knows people in the biz.”

“Maybe,” Julie said, and she felt a little sick. She thought she should lie down.

She leaned into the corner of the sofa and Brenda kept talking, on and on, and Julie fell asleep.

“Do you hear that?”

Julie’s eyes flew open and Brenda’s face was big in front of hers, her hand grabbing Julie’s wrist.

“What?” Julie said, trying to prop herself up. “What?”

“Do you hear voices?” Brenda whispered, loudly.

Julie couldn’t hear anything.

“Someone’s trying to get into the apartment,” she said, and they both looked over at the front door. “They’re trying to break in.”

“No,” Julie said. “You had a bad dream.”

“I’m worried about my house.” Brenda jumped to her feet. “I need to get home.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Just relax, Brenda.”

Brenda’s body was shaking and Julie stood too, head groggy, and tried to speak slowly and firmly, like you’re supposed to do when someone’s having a bad reaction to dope.

“Brenda, you’re fine. You’re fine.”

“It’s like the dream,” she said, her voice pitching up and down. “It’s like the dream.”

“See? You were just having a bad dream. Don’t be scared, Brenda.” Julie put her hand to her own head, fighting off the dizziness. That buzzing noise was back. It had been gone while she slept and now it was back and it seemed louder.

“I’m sensitive that way,” Brenda said, gravely. “When the moon is a certain way, I can get these vibrations. It’s like a whisper. When I met Bob, I had this picture. It came to me. I blacked out for a second and it was like I could see something was in his way. It was a darkness, on his bed. A darkness there on the bed with him.”

“Brenda...” Julie said, starting to feel something prickly in the back of her head, like touching a hot wire.

“And when I got here, it was like I was hearing an atmospheric disturbance in the place.”

“No. No,” Julie said, but her voice quavered. “It’s the air conditioner. It’s the equipment.

Brenda, you—”

“And now I can see it. I can see it on the wall like a shadow.” She pointed at the wall by the front door.

Julie couldn’t see anything, or thought she couldn’t. There were lots of shadows, more than she could count. The prickling in her temples was worse and worse and she felt so hot, even with the air blasting behind her.

“I know you see it,” Brenda said. Then her voice rushed up fast and she pointed at the wall. “It’s behind you, Julie. It’s behind you!”

Julie felt her heart rush up her chest and she turned around so fast she nearly fell. The minute she did, she felt silly. “Brenda,” she started, but she couldn’t make her voice calm. “Did you drop a tab? Did you drop a tab?”

“You know I don’t use that. I don’t use anything,” Brenda replied, and her eyes were so wide and she kept putting her hand to her forehead and she started pacing back and forth in front of Julie.

“There’s nothing there, Brenda. Are we... are we still sleeping?” She knew it didn’t make sense but she felt it, she felt it looking all around the room, which was like the TV screen, everything either black or white, black cassettes and equipment and the tripod and shadows and white walls and Brenda, who was standing stock-still in front of the coffee table.

Suddenly, Brenda’s hand flew to her mouth. “The thing in the corner,” she said. “The thing in the corner.”

“What thing? What thing?”

“It sees you, Julie.”

And Julie felt her heart thundering and she wanted Brenda to stop and she wanted to leave. She wanted to leave but couldn’t imagine how to make her body move to the door.

“Stop it, Brenda,” she said, her voice jangling. She wondered how Bob did not wake up.

“It’s here. It’s here. Silent. Waiting. Voices, or a rush. Julie, don’t let it see you. Don’t let it...”

Julie felt her hands dart out and cover her ears. There was the buzzing and behind the buzzing it was like there were whispers and in the whispers was Brenda’s voice, urgent and throbbing, beating like a drum. “Julie, Julie, watch out. Watch out.”

She felt her arms fling out and shove Brenda, who staggered backward and curled into herself, and Julie ran to the bedroom door and saw Bob was sleeping still and the sounds of his breathing were so peaceful. But there was Brenda behind her.

An awful feeling came to her as she watched Bob. She felt like this was something Brenda was doing to Bob. She felt like Brenda might be the dark thing.

“Don’t, Julie,” Brenda was whispering. “Don’t go in. You’ll bring it in there.”

Julie backed up and turned around and her hand swung out and cracked against Brenda’s face and Brenda’s eyes stuttered shut and open and something broke and Brenda paused and Julie stood still, her hand shaking, and the pause stretched and the hurtling look in Brenda’s eyes was gone.

“Julie,” Brenda said. And she didn’t say anything else. There was a coolness in her face, a sudden calm. And there was a knowingness to it, like she could look at Julie and see everything.

“I have to go,” Julie said. “I have to go home now. Don’t I. I have to go home now.”

Brenda stared at her and nodded.

“Do you want to come with me, Brenda? I think you should come with me.”

But Brenda gave a half-smile and turned and walked toward the bedroom. She could see the flash of white sheets as Brenda slipped into bed beside Bob, who let out a forlorn sigh.

Julie grabbed her handbag and walked over, stopping at the bedroom door. “It wasn’t me, Brenda.” She wasn’t even sure what she meant. “I didn’t bring it...” Her voice trailed off.

Brenda, hair falling over her face, lying there, looked at her but didn’t say anything.

It was two weeks later, the day after the murder, when she called the police. Everyone in town was talking about it. Everyone had seen Bob, at all his places. Bob and his friend John, the one the police knew did it. Everyone was getting called in or getting visits. Carl told her to make the call or it could be worse. This was right before Carl started up with the hostess at Bobbie McGee’s and before she got into that new scene, the crowd that hung out at that dance place in Phoenix. The detectives came by and asked a lot of questions. They showed her pictures and it was terrible seeing them. Why do you have to show me these? she said, and seeing him lying there, nearly as she’d left him the week before, lying on his bed, eyes closed, but with that dark mass streaking from him, across the sheets.

For weeks and weeks she replayed it all in her head. It usually started with a dream, and the dream was always the same and it always began with her walking toward him in the Registry lounge, and that look in his eyes, like he was expecting her.

It wasn’t long after that she drove by Brenda’s place and saw new people living there. She asked around at the Safari, the Camelback, Chez Nous, Bogart’s, the modeling agency in Phoenix. One night, a regular at the Registry told her that she’d heard Brenda went to Mexico to make a film and was killed in the desert.

It was his face she remembered, long after. Brenda had said it was so blank, vacant, or transparent, like glass, knocking light and shadows off everyone. Or maybe it was a mirror. But that wasn’t how it was to her. In her head now, he was right before her, his eyes filled with things, cluttered with them, with desperation and darkness and loss and, now she saw it, surrender. It was as if he was waiting for it, for her. She knew that somehow he was.

Author’s note:[1]