Poison

CHAPTER 9

So did Charles Ingersol Endicott, Jr. At eleven o'clock on that Friday morning, April 4, after having given considerable thought to the matter, and after having discussed it with his partners at Hackett, Rawlings, Pearson, Endicott, Lipstein and Marsh,he telephoned the squadroom and spoke not to Willis—who at that moment was still in bed with Marilyn Hollis—but instead to Carella, who had just returned from his brief encounter with Nelson Riley. He told Carella that it appeared to him and his colleagues that someone was systematically murdering Marilyn Hollis's friends—what with the second murder on April Fool's Day, did Carella attach any significance to the date?—and that it might be advisable,since he was after all a close friend of Marilyn's, to request some sort of police protection at this juncture. Didn't Carella agree that he might be in line for imminent extinction?

Carella secretly agreed that Endicott might very well be a candidate for termination with extreme prejudice, but he said only that he would take the matter under advisement (his language automatically emulating the lawyer's somewhat curlicued style) with the lieutenant and get back to him as soon as a decision had been made.

Lieutenant Byrnes said, "Where the hell is Willis?"

"He's not due in till four," Carella said.

"So what the hell are you doing here?"

"I want your job," Carella said, and smiled.

"You're welcome to it," Byrnes said.

"What do I tell Endicott? And Riley?"

"They're worried, huh?"

"Wouldn't you be?"

Byrnes shrugged. "I've been around too long," he said. "You start worrying about a safe falling out of a ten-story window and hitting you on the head, you go crazy. What are the odds on this guy trying to nail the other two? I'd say one in a million."

"Which are heavy odds if you happen to be one of the other two."

"What are they asking for? Round-the-clocks? Three shifts?"

"They didn't specify."

"That'd mean taking six men away from where they should be. I can't spare six detectives, that's for sure. Not with the weather turning nice and all the bedbugs coming out of the woodwork."

"We can use patrolmen."

"In plainclothes, if they're going to serve our needs. He spots a blue uniform, he'll run like hell."

"That's the idea, isn't it?"

"No. The idea is if we're going to divert manpower, it has to serve some purpose other than protecting two guys who are running scared. If we sent policemen around to protect everybody in this city who thinks somebody's gonna kill him, we'd have no cops left to do anything else. I'm in favor of the round-the-clocks only because if our man does try another hit, we'll have somebody there to nab him. Let me see if Captain Frick can spare six blues. Put Endicott and Riley on hold till then."

It was determined within an hour, and over Captain Frick's objections, that six patrolmen could indeed be diverted from their usual posts in order to set into motion the undercover round-the-clocks on Endicott and Riley. Frick (because the bedbugs were coming out of the woodwork not only for detectives but for the uniformed force as well) chose six men he could most afford to lose, a half-dozen fuck-ups who looked upon the surveillance job as a welcome break from the tedium and danger of streetwork—until they were told a murderer might put in an appearance. All at once, the job didn't look like a paid vacation in the country anymore. They began arguing among themselves about who would have the Graveyard Shift, the choice shift in that Endicott and Riley presumably would be asleep during the empty hours of the night and morning, and their protectors might also get a chance to do a bit of cooping. Frick settled the quibbling at once by assigning the shifts himself, you for the day shift, you for the evening shift, you for the night shift. Period. Reluctantly, at two o'clock that afternoon, two of the six fuck-ups trotted off in opposite directions, one to Nelson Riley's loft downtown on Carlson Street, the other to Endicott's law office midtown on Jefferson Avenue.

For now, both men were protected.

Sort of.

Willis came to work at a quarter to four that afternoon.

He was whistling.

Carella, who'd been on the job since nine that morning, nonetheless worked through the shift till a quarter to twelve that night. During the shift, the men caught an armed robbery in progress, an attempted rape, three assaults, and a burglary. Nobody tried to kill either Endicott or Riley, much to the joy of the two fuck-ups who had been relieved on post at a quarter to four that afternoon. At a quarter to twelve, the third pair of fuck-ups reported for duty and were respectively told that Endicott and Riley had been tucked in for the night. Carella and Willis were relieved at that same time.

Both men had the weekend off. Carella went directly home to his wife and kids in Riverhead.

Willis went directly to the house on Harborside Lane.

One wing of the house had been closed off—"To save on the heating bill," she told him—and served as a storeroom for a collection of junk she could find no place for in the rest of the house. A brightly colored, hand painted vase, for example, sat on what Willis thought was a low coffee table covered with a red shawl. Marilyn told him that the vase was hand-painted by a man who'd been sitting on the sidewalk downtown in the Quarter, with all these ugly little clay things all around him, except for this one, which she thought was really beautiful, although she suspected the colors might wear off one day. The vase used to contain artificial flowers, but she'd thrown those out when she discovered there was a leak in the ceiling, after which she'd moved the box with the shawl and the vase on it under the leak because if you had to have something for a leak, the vase was more esthetic than a kitchen pot, wasn't it?

What Willis had thought was a coffee table under the vase and the shawl was instead the "box" to which she'd referred. She had bought the shawl in Buenos Aires, where she'd gone after running out on Joseph Seward. The box was a Sunkist orange crate she'd found behind a grocery store when she first got here to the city. She had planned to soak off the label on the end panel and then have it framed in a little shop she knew on the Stem, where they did absolutely marvelous work and could make even a crumby little pencil sketch look like a Picasso. She'd taken the crate here when she bought the house, but she'd never got around to soaking off the label, and finally she moved it into the storeroom where she'd covered it with the shawl and put the vase with the artificial flowers on it, until the ceiling developed a leak.

There were four dog leashes hanging on the wall in the storeroom.

She'd once had a dog, this was after she'd bought the house, a huge Lab named Iceberg because he was black, but she couldn't take him to the park for the exercise he needed because she was always running here and there to interior decorators and showrooms when she was furnishing the house. So she gave the dog to this man who was a friend of hers—

"A friend or an acquaintance?" Willis asked.

"Well, he was a friend, I thought," she said.

—but the dog got run over by an automobile, which could have been the end of their friendship right then and there, the man being so careless and all. Instead she kept seeing him until she learned that he had a wife and four kids in Las Vegas, at which point she told him she didn't care for either philanderers or liars, especially philandering liars who let a dog run out loose in the street where he could get run over by a Caddy. She kept the leashes because she'd really loved that dog, and also because one day she might decide to buy another dog, although that was only a remote possibility.

The storeroom was packed from floor to ceiling with cartons. Some of the cartons contained letters she'd saved, mostly from friends here in the city when she was living on the Coast and later in Houston when she was in Seward's stable. She didn't want to go into detail about how she'd got in the life—"The usual story, Hal, a guy turned me out, and that was that"—but she did say that she'd drifted to Houston after she walked out on the Malibu beach bum who used to smack her around. No, her mother never contacted her there in California. No, her mother never married an oil millionaire. As he already knew, those were lies. Because if she'd started telling him the truth about what had happened after she left California, she'd have had to go into Houston and all the rest, Buenos Aires, all that, and she might have lost him right there on the spot.

Most of the cartons contained newspaper and magazine clippings.

There were articles on breast cancer…

"I worry to death that someday I'll get breast cancer. Or worse, cancer of the uterus. When I was in the life, I used to worry all the time about picking up a dose. I was lucky, but can you imagine what those poor girls have to worry about nowadays? I mean, gonorrhea or syphilis you can cure. But herpes is for life, and AIDS is for death. I never worried about cancer, though maybe I should have. I'm scared to death of it now because my mother died of cancer. Jewish women never get cancer of the uterus, you know, or at least not many of them, because Jewish men have their cocks circumsized, it's a shame I'm not Jewish. Uterine cancer is mostly a Gentile disease, it's from rubbing against a man's foreskin. But my mother died of cancer, so you see I could be prone to it. That's why I saved all those articles about breast cancer because who knows what might happen one day? Would you love me if I had only one breast?"

… and pictures of fashion models snipped from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Seventeen…

"When I was in the life, I used to dream of being a fashion model. They only get sixty, seventy dollars an hour, most of them, and I was getting sometimes three hundred an hour, but oh, how I used to dream of trading places with them. I used to pose in front of the mirror naked and practice standing the way models do. You have to stand differently, you know, like this sort of, with one foot in front and the hips sort of sideways. I have narrow hips, a plus for a fashion model, and small breasts, too."

"Your breasts aren't small," Willis said.

"Well, I'm not your earth-mother type, that's for sure," she said. "But thank you."

There was a whole file of material on World War I in the storeroom, including some 1919 copies of a newspaper she'd picked up in an antiques shop on Basington Street…

"Because, you know, that's a war that really fascinates me. All those men sitting out there in trenches, just looking across No Man's Land, with rats crawling all over everything, and jerking off and whatnot to while away the time. It wasn't like modern-day warfare at all, where people just drop bombs on each other. I hope they don't drop the big one, don't you? If they do, I hope we're in bed together. Do you know what I'd really like to do some day? Please don't laugh. I'd like to write a book about World War I. That's ridiculous, I know, I haven't got a shred of talent. But who knows?"

Her legacy from the years she'd spent in Buenos Aires was a command of the Spanish language that floored Willis, especially when she turned it loose on an unsuspecting Puerto Rican cab driver who—driving them back to the house after lunch out that Saturday—had the gall to take them a few blocks out of their way. She spoke the language fluently, colloquially, and obscenely as well, peppering her diatribe with directives such as "Vete el carajo" (which she told Willis meant "Go to hell"), and epithets like "hijo de la gran puta" and "cabeza de mierda," the latter causing the diminutive cabbie to come out from behind his wheel shouting some choice language of his own, both he and Marilyn squaring off in the middle of the street, nose to nose and toe to toe, screaming at each other like Carmen and an arresting army officer, while crowds gathered on the sidewalk and a uniformed cop looked conveniently the other way. In bed with Willis later that afternoon, she told him she'd only called the cabbie a shithead.

She was not, he discovered that weekend, much of a housekeeper.

A woman came in to clean for a few hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but between visits—as now—Marilyn let the house "return to the jungle," as she put it. The kitchen was total chaos. The sink was cluttered with dirty dishes, pots, and pans because Marilyn found it easier to use her entire supply and leave everything for the housekeeper to clean when she came in. The refrigerator was a brand new model, but the only things in it were several open containers of yogurt, a wilted head of lettuce and a slab of rancid butter. Marilyn explained that she rarely ate at home, or if she planned to it was easier and more healthful to stop in the grocery store on the Stem just two blocks south, to buy fresh produce or milk and eggs or whatever when she needed it, instead of letting it sit in the fridge. There was a pile of dirty clothing on the bedroom floor and even in the living room just inside the entrance door. Marilyn liked to take off her clothes the moment she came into the house, locking the door behind her, dropping blouse and skirt, or jumper and leotard, kicking off her shoes, wandering around in her panties. She explained that the house was very well protected from the street and no one could see in, and besides even if some guy in the park across the way happened to look up and spot her starkers, he wouldn't be seeing anything a hundred thousand other guys hadn't already seen.

"I'm sorry," she said at once. "Does that bother you?"

"Yes," he said.

"I promise I'll never mention the life again, I swear to God. But it's what I did, you know. For a long time."

"I know."

He was thinking lots of cops ended up marrying prostitutes; he wondered why.

He also wondered why marriage had popped into his mind.

On Sunday afternoon, they smoked pot together.

He'd never smoked pot in his life, though he knew other cops who did.

They were lying in bed together when she got up and went naked to one of the antique dressers. When she came back to the bed, she was carrying what appeared at first glance to be a pair of cigarettes.

"I don't smoke," he said.

"These are joints," she said, and of course, now that she extended them on the palm of her hand, he recognized them at once as marijuana.

"This is a joint," he said, grasping his erection.

"That's a joint for sure," she said, "but these are joints, too. Come on, sweetie, we're going to turn on."

"I'm turned on already," he said. "Witness the joint."

"Put that thing away for now," she said. "This is very good stuff, it'll make the sex even better."

"How can it possibly get better?"

"Well, don't you know?" she said, and then looked at him in surprise. "Haven't you ever smoked pot?"

"Never."

"Oh, goodie," she said, "a virgin! Come, let me teach you."

"I'm not sure I want to learn."

"Oh, come on," she said. "I'll bet even the Commissioner smokes pot."

"Maybe so, but…"

"It's only a little pot, Hal! Nobody's about to stick a needle in your arm."

"Well…"

"What you do is you take a very deep drag on it, much deeper than you would on a cigarette, and you swallow the smoke and hold it in for as long as you can."

"I've seen it done," he said drily.

"When you finally let out your breath," she said, "there shouldn't be anything but the tiniest trace of smoke left, okay?"

"Marilyn…"

"Just watch me, and stop being such a Goody-Two-Shoes. I'll take the first drag so you can see how it's done, and then I'll pass the toke to you. Please drag on it right away, Hal, because this is Acapulco Gold and not a Winston or a True."

She inhaled on the joint and handed it immediately to him. He took a deep drag and began coughing violently.

"Oh, my," she said, and clucked her tongue. "Try it again."

He tried it again. This time he didn't cough.

"Good. Now let me have it."

They passed the joint back and forth half a dozen times until it was scarcely more than a glowing little stub. Holding the roach between her thumb and forefinger, Marilyn sucked on it noisily and then dropped the coal in an ashtray on the bedside table.

"Evidence," she said. "In case you're planning a bust."

"I'm off duty," he said.

"Boy oh boy, are you!" she said. "How do you feel? Do you feel anything yet?"

"Nothing."

"Give it a few minutes," she said. "Sometimes, with virgins, it doesn't work right away."

"I don't feel anything," he said.

"Isn't everything getting sort of very sharp and clear?"

"No."

"It works differently with different people," she said. "I see everything very sharply and clearly, all the outlines crisp and sharp and clear. All the outlines. Crisp and clear."

"You forgot sharp," he said.

"Yes, crisp and clear and sharp," she said. "For some people, everything gets fuzzy, but not for me. What happens with me is I feel very relaxed and everything just shines with a sharp, clear crispness."

"What happens with me is nothing," Willis said.

"How do you see me?" she asked. "Do I look crisp and sharp?"

"You look naked."

"I know, but am I also crisp and sharp?"

"No, you're soft and round."

"Some people see things soft and round," she said.

"Especially if they are soft and round."

"Try to be serious," she said. "Get up and walk across the room, okay? Oh, look," she said, "it's gone. What happaned to it?"

"Your Acapulco Gold killed it," he said.

"No, it makes sex better, you'll see. Get up and walk across the room."

"Will that bring my hard-on back?"

"I want you to see how the timing is off. And the distance. With a lot of people, distances get distorted. The wall there'll seem a million miles away, it'll take forever to walk across the room and touch the wall. Go ahead, try it."

"I want my hard-on back," he said.

"Go on over to the wall there."

"Don't I get a blindfold?"

"Does the wall look far away?"

"It looks right there."

"Right where?"

"Right there at the end of the tunnel," he said, and began giggling.

"There was a man I used to see…"

"You promised you wouldn't…"

"No, no, this was a friend. And he said Hell is the Holland Tunnel. Hell is getting stuck forever in the Holland Tunnel."

"Where's the Holland Tunnel?" Willis asked. "In Amsterdam?"

"No, in New York. He was a New Yorker. He recited a poem to me."

"A Dutch poem?" Willis said, and giggled again.

"English, English. He wrote it himself, would you like to hear it?"

"No," Willis said, and giggled.

"'Twas brilliant when the slimy toads…"

"The what?"

"The slimy toads. Just listen, okay? 'Twas brilliant when the slimy toads, set fire to Gimbel's underwear. Aunt Mimsy was in Borough Park, and the Nome rats ate her there."

"The what rats?"

"The Nome rats."

"From Alaska?"

"I guess. They ate her."

"Who?"

"Aunt Mimsy. Just like the ones in Mexico. Or maybe all over the world, for that matter. The rats, I mean."

"Mexico? What are you talking about?"

"Eating poor Aunt Mimsy. Regular cannonballs."

"Cannibals, you mean."

"Yeah," Marilyn said.

"Do you know you have a hammer here?" Willis said.

"Where?"

"Here on this table."

"What table?"

"This table alongside the bed here. With this lamp on it, and this phone, and this hammer."

"Oh, yeah, my hammer," she said.

"Are you perhaps a carpenter?" he said, and giggled.

"That's for protection," she said. "It's the best weapon a woman can own. I saved an article about it."

"Do you have a permit for that hammer?" he asked. He was still giggling. He couldn't seem to stop giggling.

"I'm serious," she said.

"Carry or Premises?" he said, giggling.

"A woman knows how to use a hammer. There isn't a woman on earth who hasn't at one time or another had to hammer a nail or something. She knows how to grip it, she knows how to swing it, she knows how to use it. I pity any poor bastard who comes in here and tries to mess with me. In Mexico, there were people who used hammers on the rats down there."

"Mexico?"

"Sure, there were rats the size of crocodiles down there. They used to jump on people while they were asleep in their beds, try to chew off their faces. They were regular cannibals, those rats."

"Cannibals only eat their own species," Willis said.

"Great idea," she said, grinning. "Come eat me."

They made love tirelessly and endlessly all day Sunday, and late that night as they were lying spent in each others' arms, whispering about their favorite colors and their favorite ice-cream flavors, and their favorite movies and television shows, and their favorite songs—all the favorites new lovers feel obliged to list for eternity—she mentioned that no two lines rhymed in the song "Moonlight in Vermont." He asked her where she'd come across this astonishing piece of information, and she said she'd learned it from a trombone player she used to know.

"You didn't tell me about the trombone player," Willis said.

"Well," she said, "there's no sense telling you about every little thing I've ever done, or everyone I've ever known in my life. Anyway, it's true that no two lines in the song rhyme. Try it," she said.

"I don't know the words," Willis said. "Tell me about the trombone player."

"Why? So you can get mad all over again? The way you got mad in the park Friday?"

"I won't get mad."

"He was just somebody I knew, that's all."

"A john?"

"Yes. A john."

"Where?"

"In Buenos Aires."

"A South American?"

"No. He was from New Orleans."

"That's right, South Americans play guitars, don't they?"

"See?" she said. "You're getting mad again."

"No, I'm not," he said.

"I think we'd better get something straight right now," she said.

"Sure," he said.

"I used to be a hooker, okay? That's something I never told anyone else I know in this city. But if…"

"You only told me because I found out about it," he said. "From the Houston P.O."

"Why ever I told you, it happens to be a fact. Let me finish, will you please?"

"Sure."

"What I'm trying to say is that if what I did a long time ago is going to cause problems all the time… I mean, I can't watch everything I say or do, Hal, I'm sorry."

"No one's asking you to do that."

"Yes, I think you are. I used to be a hooker, yes. But I'm not anymore."

"How do I know that?"

"Oh, shit, here we go again," she said, and got out of bed.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To get another joint," she said.

"No, let's talk about this. You're the one who wanted to talk about it, so let's…"

"Fuck you, I want another joint," she said.

"Marilyn…"

"Listen, you," she said, and stamped back to the bed and stood beside it naked, her hands on her hips. "I don't want to hear another word about was he a friend or was he a John or did I fuck him or suck him or let him shove a cucumber up my ass, okay? I did all those things and worse, and if this is going to be the kind of relationship I want it to be…"

"What kind of relationship is that?"

"Honest," she said. "Open. And if you make a dumb comment about that word, I'll hit you with the hammer, I swear to God."

"No comment," he said, and smiled. "I'm afraid of hammers."

"Sure, joke about it. I'm being serious here, and you're…"

"I'm being serious, too."

"You think I'm still hooking, don't you?"

He didn't answer.

"You think the trombone player was last week instead of five years ago in Buenos Aires, don't you?"

"Was he?"

"I am going to hit you with the fucking hammer!" she said, and reached for it.

"Calm down," he said, and grabbed her wrist.

She tried to pull away from him.

"Calm down," he said more gently.

"Let go of me," she said. "I don't like being manhandled."

He released her wrist.

"You want to talk or what?" he said.

"No, I want you to get dressed and get the fuck out of here."

"Okay," he said.

"No, that's not what I want, either," she said.

"What do you want, Marilyn?"

"I want you to move in with me."

He was shocked speechless.

He tried to read her face in the dim light that filtered in under the drapes from the street outside. Was she serious? Did she really…?

"Then you'll know for sure," she said. "You'll know I'm clean. And then… maybe… you can love me."

He was moved almost to tears. He brought his cupped hand up to his eyes to shield them, fearful that he would begin crying in the next moment, and not wanting her to see his eyes if he began crying.

"Will you?" she said.

"I thought you'd never ask," he said, trying to keep it light, but the tears came anyway, and suddenly he was sobbing uncontrollably.

"Oh, baby," she said, taking him in her arms, "please, there's nothing to cry about, please, baby, don't cry," she said, "oh God, what am I going to do with this man, please, darling, please don't cry," and she kissed his wet cheeks and his eyes and his mouth, and she said, "Oh, God, how I love you, Hal," and he wondered how long it had been since a woman had spoken those words to him, and through his tears he said, "I love you, too," and that was the real beginning.