Square Wave Page 13

  The fire station rose up on his left, in gray brick, stolid. There had been three firebombings in as many months, all stillborn. Molotov cocktails punctured the upper panes of the windows only to be retarded by metal grills. The fires burned themselves out in the windows, on the steep iron escapes, carbonizing black paint but nothing more.

  The department would soon succumb, though. The garage, two fire trucks in it at the time, fell to the flames just weeks later. Several firefighters came rushing up to the second floor after midnight, talking about an inferno below. As the smoke wound its way upstairs, they took to the escapes and made their way down to the asphalt outside. A neighboring fire department was called in to put out the blaze. The cause was never determined. The tanks of the trucks were double-lined steel and the garage itself was heavily insulated. Of the men, the night watchman, a junior firefighter, was dismissed pro forma.

  The arrow leaped again, haloed in translucent powder blue and locating Stagg in the middle of the river. It swiveled around, holding course. He was close now, he felt.

  He rounded the corner of a twisting lane and a sourness tore at his face. A spasm ran through him from the chest down. The phone slipped from his hand and somersaulted across the metal rain grating. He stumbled on a deep fissure in the sidewalk, a hand across his mouth, and nearly followed the phone to the ground. The loss of balance, the fallen phone, they displaced the odor of waste at the core of his awareness. Instantly it reestablished itself, filling not only his nose, but his mouth and chest. It seemed to penetrate his eyes too, like light, but passing through them altogether, filling the space beyond.

  Stagg climbed up a short stoop with a hand on his forehead, instinctively separating himself from the street. An agitated water flowed across it, some vanishing down the sluice, but most flowing around it, toward the corner he’d just turned. Granules, whorls of fine sediment, and bubbles, some barely visible, some large, ballooning and popping, traveled in the flow. He took a snort of air through the nose and choked.

  Having landed in the middle of the grating, the phone was mostly safe from these waters. He snatched it up and felt the grit on it. The screen bore a spiderweb crack but the arrow still pulsed, or really, it shimmered, through a halo extended by refraction. It guided him onward. He gauged the shallow flow and checked the time. The woman, Jen, would be waiting. He walked as briskly as he could, his course unchanged.

  The source of the foul water seemed to be only a few buildings down, at the turn in the alley. The trouble would be over once he’d cleared it. The smell, of stool fringed with urine, bloomed as the building came into fuller view. But as he approached, it became clear the water came from further on, from the apartments near the next turn in the switchback.

  Things went the same way with this building, though, and the one at the turn after too. For a time the source seemed always deferred. Stagg’s incredulity grew with each turn in the lane, each false origin, as the air grew fouler and the water flowed stronger and thicker with sediment. It splashed about at his feet as he chased the arrow, and by the time he finally came to the end of the passageway, his shoes were sopping.

  The alley opened onto a wedge of industrial outfits: a body and tire shop, a small hardware store, seemingly family-run, a seller of insulation materials, and several others. An aquamarine billboard adorned with shortboards and blond cigarettes, its skin wrinkled, being imperfectly laid, loomed over the shops and angled out toward the freeway. The whir of traffic mingled with the manhole’s gurgle as it shot sludge and stained water up into the middle of the street like a fountain. The epicenter.

  On the other side of the wedge was a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and behind it one of Halsley’s smaller waste stations. The fence gaped—the hole made with bolt-cutters, it appeared. A dozen officials, some uniformed, some signifying their connection to the police force only with caps, but all masked for the pungent air, milled about, assessing the damage. Two others stood near the center taking sharp pulls from cigarettes held like joints. Another pair stood toward the edge, near the fence, silent and blank, with their phones pressed against their ears.

  Several police cars and a fire truck were parked on the station lot as golden smoke streaked with rust billowed from the hydraulic pumps. The smoke enveloped a ten-yard stretch of the freeway; the cars shot through it unperturbed.

  Beneath the billboard, some of the workers had their shirts pulled up to their eyes. Another held a grease-streaked rag over his mouth and nose. The flow had so far left their shops untouched, the slight incline drawing the filth down the lane Stagg had come by. His loafers were a mess, and his eyes began to water lightly, whether from the excrement rushing out of the manhole, the gauzy twists of smoke, or the ruined shoes. Cordovans.

  Further up the road, past the filth, he could see a gas station. He would hear all about the incident soon enough: the demographics of the neighborhood, a public utility compromised in a poorer district. There was no rush—only to the interview with Jen. He’d left in plenty of time and now he was going to be late anyway. It was a pattern that wouldn’t break.

  He walked around to the back of the station in shoes squeaking wet. He snatched the air hose by its neck and twisted the copper nozzle. A hiss turned to a whine. He knelt and untied his shoes with one hand while holding the hose pointing skyward near his ear, shooting air into air. Once out of the shoes, he took the hose to them, blasting away the crusting debris and dirty water. The shoes deformed. They shrunk flat when he shot them from above, looking almost like covered slippers, and the uppers ballooned when he pushed the hose up into the toe box.

  Having left the socks in a stinking pile near the pumps, he did to his feet what he’d done to his shoes. The skin shuddered as their structure surfaced under pressure.

  The hose took his shoes and feet from wet to damp and that was the best he was going to do. He twisted the nozzle shut and flipped the air hose to the ground, not bothering to hang it up. With the water hose he rinsed his hands and walked off from the station, sockless.

  He dug the phone out of the pocket of his blazer and wiped the cracked screen, still beaded with water, across his sleeve. Apparently its brains were intact. The face glowed in the weakening light, and the arrow trembled back to life, pointing him further up the lane—away from the piss and shit—to 384 West.

  ■■■

  The woman swung the door open at Stagg’s weak knock. Her flaking, lightly pockmarked face, the crevices filled with matte makeup not unlike cream spackle; the contrasting sheen of her forehead; the wide eyes offset by a narrow rhinoplastied nose; and the feathery shoulder-length hair, a brown leaning orange—for a moment his lungs locked up. He could think only of the cocks that would have bruised her throat over the years, the heavy mucus they would have drawn from her, fortified by pre-come, the demands, as those heads crashed against her tonsils, that she swallow. And then the trains she must have ridden to get here, the paperlessness of her life, the money better than she’d ever seen.

  “She’s over there,” she said, pointing to the tan leather sofa near the windows. Stagg could see only a woman’s bare feet dangling over the edge of it in the last bit of light. They slipped off the sofa’s arm and fell out of sight.

  “I’m Mariela,” she said. “Jen’ll be with me for a little.”

  “Good.”

  She opened her eyes wider.

  “I’m from the agency. Carl Stagg. We just need—”

  She backed up into the apartment and he passed through the doorway.

  Jen was sitting up now, with her sling resting on an oversize sofa arm, and her figure-eight brace coaxing uncommonly good posture from her. The sight of her face, now largely healed except for the bloody eye, seemed to transform into the disfigured one he’d seen under the truck. This was an inversion of that night, when her true face, one he could now see he had correctly imagined, even in the finer details, had seemed to surface from behind the blows and cuts, the froth of blood along the mouth and chin.
He wished he could leave the other face behind. But it remained as a kind of spectral superimposition. He couldn’t hold her eyes.

  Mariela leaned on the sofa arm farthest from Jen. Stagg raised his eyes to hers, but the throat reaming came back to him. He turned away from her too.

  “Okay, I’ll be back in an hour, maybe two?” Mariela said. “Enough time I hope.”

  Looking only at the peach floor, he nodded with a delicacy of significance lost on the Latina. The door was noisy, the hinges on the jamb squeaking, the metal of the loose knob rattling and clicking as Mariela twisted it and pulled the door closed twice to get it to shut.

  From an inner pocket Stagg pulled a spiral pad of unlined paper, pale green. He scrawled the date on the first blank page. “You wouldn’t mind,” he said, moving toward a tall halogen tower near where Mariela had stood.

  “It’s dark,” Jen said, nodding at the tower. These were the first words she’d spoken to him, now or at the crime scene. He twisted on the light and followed her gaze out the slatted blinds, still open, a second geometry overlying the gridded glass. Dusk was passing. The apartments were mostly lit.

  Stagg sat down in a cavernous chair the color of cognac and faced Jen across the coffee table.

  “You know the man that did this?” Stagg asked.

  “No. Or only by reputation.” A pained half-smile flitted across her face.

  “And this issue, the violence, it’s well known.”

  “To the girls?”

  “Right.”

  “You couldn’t not know, really. I don’t see how you could. Well, you, I can’t say. But us.”

  “I’d still have to start somewhere, whatever I know.”

  “There’s been no chance to forget either,” she continued. “Two months go by, then this,” she said, with a look at her braced collarbones. “And the start?”

  “Yes?”

  “That must go back a long time.”

  “The first woman you heard about like this.”

  “Oh, that’s simpler. Nine months, I think. Mariela will know better. She’s been around longer.”

  “And you?”

  “Yes?”

  “You started when? The workers involved, who might have information, the department’s not going to bother them.”

  “The workers.”

  “The sex workers.”

  She brushed away a long dark curl of hair that fell from behind her ear across her mouth. “Not long ago, at least around here. Three months maybe. Three and a half months.”

  “You started working the neighborhood where you were found.”

  “I’m not a walker.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a tightening in the exchange. Stagg could smell his shoes lost to the deluge, the rot. He wondered if she could too.

  “He took me there,” she said. “I was working out of a club. No dancing, just escorting. Most of the dancers do it. The club’s mainly a brothel. The dancing is for show.”

  “It has rooms.”

  “The usual private dance ones. But not that many, and not the kind a lot of johns want, real bedrooms. The girls will go with them then. The hotel we use is down a few blocks. Someone had called and scheduled with me, asked for me, from the club. The hotel knows what we use it for, so it’s safe for us, in a way, because of that. So they sent me off to meet him, in the lobby. But he was waiting for me at the intersection, outside the hotel.”

  “In a car.”

  “He was standing outside it with the door open. And he called me by my name, my work name. Lisa.”

  The ordinariness of the name struck him hard.

  “You knew it was him?”

  “I thought I recognized his face. But not really. I hesitated near the car. He said we could just do things there, down the road, no need for a room. Normally you don’t do that, it exposes you, like the girls in the street. But this was arranged through the club. Anyway I couldn’t really deal with a cancellation that night. I couldn’t. And he was clean cut, a pressed suit, seemed like a businessman or a lawyer taking care of himself for the night. Handsome too. The tip was going to be good. So I got in, this sedan, a Lexus, I think.”

  “And the color?”

  “Green, but like it was black. It took lights to see what it was, and—I’m not sure how to put it—it had this depth to it. Then inside it was all white leather. He started the engine, I asked him what he needed. He said he was thinking about it, had to see the girl before he knew, and maybe we should drive, find the right place first. That didn’t sound so strange, from a man looking like he did. So he took me out past the tenements, the cash-check shops, all the dust and dirt, toward the freeway. The luxe hotels were just across the way, two or three exits. Maybe he only wanted something nice.

  “But just as it looked like we were going to get on the freeway, he pulled up under the overpass. I looked at him, a little surprised. But not really, he hadn’t said we were going anywhere in particular.

  “He said he’d figured it out, what he needed. ‘From what,’ I asked with a light little laugh. ‘You haven’t looked at me since we got in.’ He said just from breathing me in. The air, that was all it took, most of the time. ‘What, then?’ I said. He said he needed to talk to me. ‘That’s all?’ He said he wasn’t sure, that ‘the air doesn’t settle everything.’ Which was a pretty thing to say, I thought.

  “Finally he turned to me. He hadn’t looked at me once yet in the car. His eyes were calm. There was even a warmth in them, on and off. He started asking me how long I’d been working, doing this, the reasons, how long I intended to carry on. You know, up until the questions, I hadn’t really been concerned, but I started to think—”

  “He spoke with the other women at length too,” Stagg said, thinking aloud more than talking to her. “That’s what they’ve said.”

  “But that wasn’t it, some pattern. Even if nothing at all had happened, the questions, the extent, it would have still stuck out as… unnecessary. From a john. They do want to talk sometimes, even just talk, that’s not that strange. But there was no charge, no tinge of sex in his voice. There wasn’t any pain in it either. He wasn’t looking for a listener, confiding in strangers—that happens too. He just seemed interested, intellectually, I guess, in my… history. And that doesn’t really happen. So I started to feel a problem coming, whether it was actually him, or just someone like him.

  “You’re already all nerves if you’re sleeping with people for money. That’s what the drugs are for, the ones to sleep, the ones to get out of bed. And now, what’s happened to ten girls, your nerves, they’re just searching for a trigger.”

  She coughed and put her hand to her eye. “But I was right. And it was too late.”

  Stagg stirred. He looked at his pad and a bear stared back. He’d been doodling, apparently, though only now, scanning the immediate past, at the margins of memory, could he recover any experience, and even then it was faint, of laying down the lines of the animal’s face, its wide tongue, its teeth drawn tiny.

  It was difficult for him to see the drawing as his. He’d been listening carefully, raptly, to her story. He was paid to listen, after all, and he wasn’t going to lose this gig. But it was more than that. Her story, her way of telling it… he liked the way she spoke. That’s how Renna would have put it. Everything was balanced just so. Whatever exactly he asked, she would look inward the way you could only look outward, at someone else’s situation. It’s how he was too. You saw more that way, even if after a while, you looked around for something to blind you. A pill, a drink. Still, before that happened, you could see the art in things that were ugly and vile. Like tragic verse. That’s what she’d been making him see now.

  But as hard as he’d been listening, by the looks of it he’d also been drawing, and quite carefully too. It seemed incredible to him, but there it was: the contours of the bear’s head natural and subtle, the expression of the beast equanimous, if beasts were capable of such. The eyes, though, had not been finish
ed. But then, being unsure of his intentions, he couldn’t say if this wasn’t the full picture. Whatever it was, the eyes were mere circles in the pale green of the paper, not the black of the pen. Perhaps that’s where the equanimity resided.

  Stagg turned back to Jen. She had paused, noticing his involvement with the pad. Probably she thought something important was written there, about her case. Perhaps a relation to the other cases, or some interpretation of her words. A key. Even he expected better of himself: something about his essays, if he had to drift. Not a bear.

  He flipped the sheet. “And then, the attack itself?”

  “I answered his questions, told him I’d been doing this for a while, on and off, that I didn’t know how long I would keep doing it. It depended on what alternatives came up. He said he knew young women who worked as clerks, waitresses, baristas, that sort of thing, and aren’t those alternatives. I told him I had done some of those jobs, that they humiliated me in certain ways that felt worse than giving head.

  “He gripped the steering wheel tightly and stared out the windshield. He said, ‘Then why don’t you do that, right now?’ I was a little surprised, given his tone up to now. But that’s why I went on the ride, right? So I leaned over his lap and undid his belt. He gently put his hand on my shoulder. I pulled his cock out and started stroking it. I was about to put it in my mouth when I felt a terrible pain in my back. He’d hit me with a blackjack.

  “I knew it was him then, and my fears—some of them—grew. I knew there was going to be pain. I knew there’d be the hospital. But some of my fears shrank. I knew I’d be left alive like the others.

  “Anyway, that’s how he pulped me that night, with the blackjack. I thought it was like an especially bad beating by a loan shark, except you’d never borrowed money from him in your life. I think he kicked me a few times too. I can’t remember everything after it started. I gave way at that first shot, collapsed in his lap, with my face resting on his cock. He pulled me from the car, from the driver’s side, and lashed me with the sap, all over. I remember seeing the tool, the woven leather, the springy handle.