As I Die Lying Page 20

  “You okay, Richard?” Beth asked.

  “Never better,” I said, swallowing. “This book I’ve been working on—”

  “Got to run.” She adjusted her brown hat “See you Friday?”

  “I already have an idea for a costume.” Life was a come-as-you-are party, and I already had the masks.

  “Great. And Richard...”

  “Yes?”

  “Things always work out for the best. In the end.”

  I watched her walk away. It seemed like I was always watching her walk away. And I hoped I would always be able to watch her walk away.

  My hand unclenched Little Hitler’s grip on the knife in my pocket.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A man came into the Paper Paradise the next day. He wore a rumpled charcoal suit and his quick dark eyes seemed to read every title in the store at one glance. He was as thin as the cigarette he put in his mouth. He grimaced around the cigarette and came to the counter, looking like he was tempted to disobey the “No Smoking” signs.

  “Is the manager in?” he asked out of the side of his mouth. He was about forty, and the circles under his narrowed eyes made him look as if he had slept on a bed of nails and fucked a raccoon.

  “Miss Billingsly’s off today,” I said. “Can I help you?”

  He pulled out his wallet and flashed something brass-colored. “Detective Randolph Frye, Pickett County Sheriff’s office.”

  Bookworm blinked for a moment, then Mister Milktoast took over. “What can I do for you?”

  Frye dug in one jacket pocket for a moment, then the other. He pulled out a crumpled card. “You Richard Coldiron?”

  “Among other things.” Mister Milktoast was a natural-born liar. I had to practice.

  Frye flipped the card on the counter. “Did you fill out this card?”

  It was a Paper Paradise discount card. “That’s my signature,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “You remember the customer? Shelley Birdsong?”

  “Hmmm. Birdsong. Isn’t that the girl who’s missing?”

  “You read the papers.” He glanced at the rack that held the locals, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post. Then he looked out the window at the highway. His eyes kept moving, as if they might get dusty if they rested for a second.

  “We give these out to students,” Bookworm said. “Kind of a ‘good customer’ card.”

  “This is dated the day before she disappeared. One of those things we have to check out.”

  He fished in his pocket again and brought out a photograph of Shelley, probably taken in the summer. There were the green eyes, the freckles, the faint vacant look, the shiny copper hair. She was pretty and full of life, the opposite of the last time I had seen her.

  I sensed Frye’s oiled ball bearings of eyes on me. I hoped my expression was neutral. But, after all, it wasn’t my expression. Loverboy’s pupils might have flared involuntarily and Mister Milktoast might have winced in recollection. “Yes, I remember her now. I showed her a few books, but she ended up buying a magazine, I believe.”

  Frye grunted. “Was she with anybody at the time?”

  “Not in the store. There could have been somebody waiting in the parking lot, I suppose.”

  “Do you recall what time she was here? We’re trying to put together a sequence of events from the last days she was seen.”

  “I think it was morning, but I couldn’t be sure. We get lots of students in here on the weekdays.”

  “A pretty girl like that and you don’t remember? Anything else you might have noticed? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  No, you gray-skinned gumshoe Columbo wannabe. Just little old me, with daggers in my eyes and a flesh torpedo in my pocket. Just a killer clown with a bat-filled belfry and a winning smile. Just an age-old psychic spirit with an appetite. Just a figment of my own dark imagination, a Stephen King wet dream, a ludicrous leap of logic. All perfectly normal, nothing to see here, just move along, folks. But buy the book first.

  “No, nothing that really stood out.” Besides her nipples that poked out like number two Eberhardt pencil erasers, Loverboy noted. “She was just another college girl...”

  ...who happened to have a little bit of light that needed to be eaten. Another girl who happened to be cursed with the affection of Richard Coldiron. Another piece of taffy that just happened to come between the five or six of us. A dollar’s worth of candy.

  “...nothing special.”

  Frye picked up the card and tapped it on the counter. He studied me as I pretended to check on an elderly couple in the Psychology section. I turned back suddenly, trying to catch him off guard. His eyes flicked away, as elusive as gnats.

  The Insider enjoyed the game. What did it care if I were caught? It could always find another collaborator. Bookworm wasn’t nearly as talented as he thought, and some of his literary references were too obscure.

  “I just remembered something,” Bookworm said, insulted. “She mentioned a boyfriend named Steve.”

  Our eyes finally locked in an invisible tug-of-war. Little Hitler came out, determined and cold, on lizard feet, his tongue like a dagger.

  “Steve?” Frye said, acting as if he were only half-listening. “Yes, we checked him out.”

  “Is he a suspect?”

  “Not at liberty to say, Mister Coldiron. No evidence of foul play as yet. Just a mystery at this point. I hate mysteries.”

  “Too bad. I was just going to recommend the newest Margaret Maron.”

  Frye must have seen something stirring in my eyes, clouding my irises. Spirits, maybe. Ghosts. Multiple personalities. Psychic vampires. He pulled the unlit cigarette from his mouth and then put it back. The butt was crimped and soaked with his saliva.

  “A babe like that, it’s a real shame,” Loverboy said. “I hope she turns up.”

  “And beets and rutabagas,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “What’s that?” Frye said, biting harder on the cigarette.

  “Turns up, turnips. Root-crop reference.”

  “Hanging out here all day, I guess you get funny ideas.” Frye asked. “Anything else?”

  “Huh?” I came back, from miles and rooms away. “No. Nothing that I can think of.”

  Frye faked a smile with one side of his mouth. Wrinkles made arrows around his lips. “Call me if you come up with anything.”

  “Always happy to help.”

  “Thanks for your time, Mister Coldiron.”

  Hey, got nothing better to do, Shit For Brains. Come on back any old time and mess with Richie’s mind. Greatest show on Earth, right here. Step right up, come one, come all.

  I watched the door close behind him.

  “Nice job, Richard,” said Mister Milktoast. “You were as cool as a cucumber before the salad daze.”

  “No thanks to you guys. You nearly blew it.”

  “Passing the buck again, Dicksquiggler?” taunted Loverboy.

  “You’re the one who called Shelley. You’re the one who got her to the house, however you did it. Candlelight dinner compliments of Mister Milktoast? Or did you borrow some poetry from Bookworm?”

  “Hey, Diddledick, I don’t need no help with the ladies. You’re the pasta-prick who pretends to care. I doubt you could even get it up, unless it’s with Mommy dearest.”

  “If I could get my hands on you—”

  “Don’t tease me like that, sweetie. You wouldn’t know how to handle this biscuit.”

  Bookworm stepped in. “Gentlemen, let’s be reasonable. We’re all in this together.”

  “Glad I have you around to edit my feelings,” I told him.

  Bookworm rang up a purchase. The elderly couple bought a Benjamin Franklin biography and a book on dealing with death. After taking care of business, Bookworm rubbed his hands together. “I’ve been thinking, Richard.”

  “News-fucking-flash,” said Loverboy. “Dickworm cuts a brain fart.”

  “No. I’m serious. I know how to beat the Insider.”

>   Here was hope, thrown in my face, a razor of light cutting into the safe darkness. But was it real, or just another of the possessor’s tricks? If the Insider really knew what all of us were thinking, how could we even dream of outsmarting it?

  “Trust me, Richard.”

  Trust. The ultimate trick. But what choice did I have?

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m waiting.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat nine times,” warned Mister Milktoast. “And he had a rat in his belly.”

  “Good things are worth a little risk,” I said, a corny line I’d picked up somewhere and tucked away for just the right moment, just to let everyone know I’d been paying attention all along despite the whims of multiple narrators. “Tell me, Bookworm.”

  “It’s like the answer to its own riddle. An inside joke. Get it? The Insider.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Yes,” said the Insider, coming out, all black brass and barbed wire and pissed at being dragged away from his typewriter. “I’m dying to hear how you’re planning to get rid of me.”

  It laughed for half an hour. Every door in the Bone House shook on its hinges.

  Those next few days, I was a sleepwalker with dreams of blown glass. I hovered just behind the surface of my own eyes, stoned on the emotional pain that nourished the Insider. Sometimes Miss Billingsly would look at me over the top of her glasses and frown. The local poets haunted their corners, outspooking each other with stage-garb nihilism. Speed readers made their mindless trips to the bestseller racks, genre freaks scoured the meager offerings and muttered. I avoided Brittany as much as I could because Loverboy’s attraction was becoming a deeper hunger. He thought she smelled like cinnamon rolls.

  Seven rejection slips showed up in the mailbox. Someone had been making multiple submissions.

  Worst of all, the rejections said things like “Your fantasy novel does not meet our needs at this time,” when the book had been submitted as non-fiction.

  The Insider grew stronger, spinning its bleak lullabies, its voice a molten volcano that oozed cold black lava. It was feeding on my guilt over what I had done to Shelley. But now it wanted more. More pain, more death, more hate, more pages. I fought to keep it down, like a sideshow geek who knows he will be beaten if he vomits the live snake he has swallowed.

  My vociferous friends haunted my every step, twittering like puzzle birds, filling in the blanks as I became an outline. They were the parts that didn’t quite make a whole.

  Loverboy was the lupine eyes, mistaking appetite for attraction, visually groping the tired curves of grandmothers as eagerly as he did the nubs of prepubescent girls.

  Mister Milktoast was the polite mouth, always ready to make a witty comment to the stranger in the checkout line.

  The nose was Bookworm, sniffing for danger and spoilt meat.

  Little Hitler ruled the ears, hearing conspiratorial whispers in the slipstream of passing cars and autumn winds.

  The Insider was the hands that itched to reach, to touch, to caress, to crush, to type.

  The many were becoming the one. They were me, and my point of view shifted to third person plural.

  The end of October brought its cold rains.

  Halloween arrived, brown and dead and damp. I recycled a dozen rejection slips. I checked the outline of my life story to ensure I wasn’t leaving a hole in the plot.

  I put on my costume. Then I drove to Beth’s apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The party pounded the flat stones of the house. Three Draculas on the porch held beer and cigarettes, blowing smoke between their fangs. Princess Leia danced by herself, white and virginal and with eyes clouded by some secret, illegal pleasure. A Viking couple shook their rag fur boots and waved plastic axes. The band was dressed like zombies, with pale makeup and black lipstick and Medusa hair. The lead singer kept falling into the crowd and knocking beer out of people’s hands. Xandria strutted like a Zulu queen, thumping the strings of her bass guitar.

  The night swelled and pulsed. Restless energy hung over the house like a thunderstorm. A hundred people throbbed under one roof, all looking out from their masks, all tapping into their primitive ancestral memories. Halloween. Samhain. All Saints Day. But the night belonged to the sinners.

  I had rented a top hat, cane, and coat and tails. My white gloves were stained with red dye. Mister Milktoast had enjoyed putting the costume together. He loved dress-up and make-believe.

  “Jack the Ripper,” Beth had said when I picked her up. She bought me a white carnation to put in my lapel.

  Hell, I was the Ripper. Or rather, I had been. The Insider had walked those dark foggy Whitechapel streets in 1888. The newspapers had theorized the killer must have been a surgeon, so skilled were the eviscerations. It was a skill that was the result of thousands of years of practice. Or so the Insider said.

  Beth had found a plush velvet dress, royal purple with a laced bodice and frilly neckline. Her breasts strained to pop free, and more than one Frankenstein monster dipped his heavy forehead for a closer look at the pretty flesh. Her golden-brown hair was pulled up into a tower, showing off the enticing slope of her neck. She was the perfect harlot, delectable and trashy, utterly disposable.

  She leaned against me, squeezed by the crowd. I felt the heat of her breasts even through our layered clothes. The carnation gave off sweetness as its petals were crushed.

  “Oil be yer lady for two bob ten,” she said in a bad Cockney accent.

  “Oil not rip yer too bloody bloody,” I said back.

  The band, billed as The Half-Watts, was cranking out a syncopated version of “All Along the Watchtower.” Aliens and pumpkinheads swayed drunkenly. The singer kept switching his impersonations between Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix during the few lyrics he could remember, while the frizzy-haired lead guitarist was all diddle and no bop. The junkie-faced drummer sweated behind his kit, raising his arms high, making up in show what he lacked in technique.

  Xandria’s glistening black muscles flexed as she pounded her fat strings. The whiteface made her look frightening, like a veldt goddess come to demand retribution for Colonial crimes. Beth yelled at her but Xandria’s eyes were fixed on her bass strings.

  “I think I’ll have a beer,” Little Hitler shouted over the music.

  Beth’s mouth opened in feigned shock. “I thought you were too pure for that.”

  “I’m the Ripper, not Richard. And the Ripper’s thirsty.”

  “Would you get me another while you’re at it?”

  “Sure. If I can fight my way to the keg.” I left Beth and pushed past a guy dressed as a beer can. He had Princess Leia pressed against a wall, trying to kiss her, but she was in a galaxy far, far away. Her wide pupils stared at the sagging ceiling tiles.

  The keg was on a tiny back porch that had once been screened in, but the wire mesh was more holes than screen. The air smelled of sweat and piss and reefer.

  A boy of about fourteen was pumping the keg, a goofy grin plastered across his face. He was wearing an oversized diaper and nothing else. “Hit you up, man?”

  “Sure. I need two.”

  As he filled the plastic cups, he said, “Cool costume. What are you supposed to be, an undertaker or something?”

  “Just another ordinary killer,” I said.

  “Heavy duty. Is that knife real?” he asked, pointing at the prop tucked in my belt.

  “Sure.” Confession was good for the soul, especially when nobody believed you.

  “Cool,” he said, and filled his face with beer foam.

  When I got back to the living room, Beth was gone. I looked for her, spilling beer on my rented jacket as the dancers bumped my elbows. I reached the far side of the room just as the band finished its first set. Beth’s roommate Monique was in the hallway smoking a cigarette.

  “Richard,” she said. “How ya doing?”

  Her pale face glowed. She looked like she’d gotten an early start on the beer. Rosy spots of pleasure colored her che
eks. She was dressed in ragged black, a green wart attached to her nose, a pointy hat on her head.

  “Which witch is which?” Mister Milktoast asked.

  “Just the plain old ‘wicked’ variety.”

  “You seen Beth?” I asked, but Loverboy was looking, looking, looking.

  “I think she went upstairs,” Monique said, tilting her head in that direction. “Party room.”

  Bookworm pursed my lips as his heart turned savage flips, wishing her were in a Jane Austen novel instead.

  “Listen, Richard,” she said, putting a hand on my arm before I walked away. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “What?” I said. Mister Milktoast was sending off warning flares but Loverboy shoved him into his closet.

  Monique’s face grew serious, her features becoming even darker than usual. “You seem like a nice guy, Richard. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

  Hurt? Richard Allen Coldiron, feel pain? You’ve got to be kidding. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I mean, maybe it’s not my place to say,” she said, as I watched her beautiful lips form the words. “And I love Beth to death, I really do. She’s a really pleasant person at heart, but she’s totally faithless.”

  Pleasant. Fucking pleasant. I drank from one of the beers, half at one gulp. My hand trembled, making frog-eye foam.

  “It’s nothing against you, Richard. She’s been that way since I’ve known her, and we’ve roomed together for four years. I’ve seen them come and go. Literally.”

  I finished the beer and started on the other one. The two Vikings staggered past, with Baby Louie in tow. Over in the corner, a Tin Man was feeling up Princess Leia. He might as well have been seducing a log.

  “She told me she was a player,” I said.

  “Well, she is honest. But never true.”

  “What about Ted? Does he care?”

  “He’s just a number. He’s in and out faster than a door-to-door coke dealer.”

  Both cups were empty now, and I looked across the room, searching the crowd for Beth’s sweet oval face. The singer with the Edward Scissorhands hair was sitting on a speaker, nodding to the imagined beat. It was as if he didn’t exist when the band was offstage. I watched him a full thirty seconds before I saw him blink.