Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 33

  Tell could see that brown bag. That was how bad it had gotten.

  But that short-lived fantasy wasn't the worst. The worst was simply this: the third-floor men's room had acquired a pull. It was as if there were a powerful magnet in there and his pockets were full of iron filings. If someone had told him something like that he would have laughed (maybe just inside, if the person making the metaphor seemed very much in earnest), but it was really there, a feeling like a swerve every time he passed the men's on his way to the studios or to the elevators. It was a terrible feeling, like being pulled toward an open window in a tall building or watching helplessly, as if from outside yourself, as you raised a pistol to your mouth and sucked the barrel.

  He wanted to look again. He realized that one more look was about all it would take to finish him off, but it made no difference. He wanted to look again.

  Each time he passed, that mental swerve.

  In his dreams he opened that stall door again and again. Just to get a look.

  A really good look.

  And he couldn't seem to tell anyone. He knew it would be better if he did, understood that if he poured it into someone else's ear it would change its shape, perhaps even grow a handle with which he could hold it. Twice he went into bars and managed to strike up conversations with the men next to him. Because bars, he thought, were the places where talk was at its absolute cheapest. Bargain-basement rates.

  He had no more than opened his mouth on the first occasion when the man he had picked began to sermonize on the subject of the Yankees and George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner had gotten under this man's skin in a big way, and it was impossible to get a word in edgeways with the fellow on any other subject. Tell soon gave up trying.

  The second time, he managed to strike up a fairly casual conversation with a man who looked like a construction worker. They talked about the weather, then about baseball (but this man, thankfully, was not nuts on the subject), and progressed to how tough it was to find a good job in New York. Tell was sweating. He felt as if he were doing some heavy piece of manual labor--pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cement up a slight grade, maybe--but he also felt that he wasn't doing too badly.

  The guy who looked like a construction worker was drinking Black Russians. Tell stuck to beer. It felt as if he was sweating it out as fast as he put it in, but after he had bought the guy a couple of drinks and the guy had bought Tell a couple of schooners, he nerved himself to begin.

  "You want to hear something really strange?" he said.

  "You queer?" the guy who looked like a construction worker asked him before Tell could get any further. He turned on his stool and looked at Tell with amiable curiosity. "I mean, it's nothin to me whether y'are or not, but I'm gettin those vibes and I just thought I'd tell you I don't go for that stuff. Have it up front, you know?"

  "I'm not queer," Tell said.

  "Oh. What's really strange?"

  "Huh?"

  "You said something was really strange."

  "Oh, it really wasn't that strange," Tell said. Then he glanced down at his watch and said it was getting late.

  *

  Three days before the end of the Daltrey mix, Tell left Studio F to urinate. He now used the bathroom on the sixth floor for this purpose. He had first used the one on four, then the one on five, but these were stacked directly above the one on three, and he had begun to feel the owner of the sneakers radiating silently up through the floors, seeming to suck at him. The men's room on six was on the opposite side of the building, and that seemed to solve the problem.

  He breezed past the reception desk on his way to the elevators, blinked, and suddenly, instead of being in the elevator car, he was in the third-floor bathroom with the door hisshhing softly shut behind him. He had never been so afraid. Part of it was the sneakers, but most of it was knowing he had just dropped three to six seconds of consciousness. For the first time in his life his mind had simply shorted out.

  He had no idea how long he might have stood there if the door hadn't suddenly opened behind him, cracking him painfully in the back. It was Paul Jannings. "Excuse me, Johnny," he said. "I had no idea you came in here to meditate."

  He passed Tell without waiting for a response (he wouldn't have got one in any case, Tell thought later; his tongue had been frozen to the roof of his mouth), and headed for the stalls. Tell was able to walk over to the first urinal and unzip his fly, doing these things only because he thought Paul might enjoy it too much if he turned and scurried out. There had been a time not so long ago when he had considered Paul a friend--maybe his only friend, at least in New York. Times had certainly changed.

  Tell stood at the urinal for ten seconds or so, then flushed it. He headed for the door, then stopped. He turned around, took two quiet on-tiptoe steps, bent, and looked under the door of the first stall. The sneakers were still there, now surrounded by mounds of dead flies.

  So were Paul Jannings's Gucci loafers.

  What Tell was seeing looked like a double exposure, or one of the hokey ghost effects from the old Topper TV program. First he would be seeing Paul's loafers through the sneakers; then the sneakers would seem to solidify and he would be seeing them through the loafers, as if Paul were the ghost. Except, even when he was seeing through them, Paul's loafers made little shifts and movements, while the sneakers remained as immobile as always.

  Tell left. For the first time in two weeks he felt calm.

  *

  The next day he did what he probably should have done at once: he took Georgie Ronkler out to lunch and asked him if he had ever heard any strange tales or rumors about the building which used to be called Music City. Why he hadn't thought of doing this earlier was a puzzle to him. He only knew that what had happened yesterday seemed to have cleared his mind somehow, like a brisk slap or a faceful of cold water. Georgie might not know anything, but he might; he had been working with Paul for at least seven years, and a lot of that work had been done at Music City.

  "Oh, the ghost, you mean?" Georgie asked, and laughed. They were in Cartin's, a deli-restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and the place was noon-noisy. Georgie bit into his corned-beef sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and sipped some of his cream soda through the two straws poked into the bottle. "Who told you 'bout that, Johnny?"

  "Oh, one of the janitors, I guess," Tell said. His voice was perfectly even.

  "You sure you didn't see him?" Georgie asked, and winked. This was as close as Paul's long-time assistant could get to teasing.

  "Nope." Nor had he, actually. Just the sneakers. And some dead bugs.

  "Yeah, well, it's pretty much died down now, but for awhile it was all anybody ever talked about--how the guy was haunting the place. He got it right up there on the third floor, you know. In the john." Georgie raised his hands, trembled them beside his peach-fuzzy cheeks, hummed a few bars of The Twilight Zone theme, and tried to look ominous. This was an expression he was incapable of achieving.

  "Yes," Tell said. "That's what I heard. But the janitor wouldn't tell me any more, or maybe he didn't know any more. He just laughed and walked away."

  "It happened before I started to work with Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it."

  "He never saw the ghost himself?" Tell asked, knowing the answer. Yesterday Paul had been sitting in it. Shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful.

  "No, he used to laugh about it." Georgie put his sandwich down. "You know how he can be sometimes. Just a little m-mean." If forced to say something even slightly negative about someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter.

  "I know. But never mind Paul; who was this ghost? What happened to him?"

  "Oh, he was just some dope pusher," Georgie said. "This was back in 1972 or '73, I guess, when Paul was just starting out--he was only an assistant mixer himself, back then. Just before the slump."

  Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the rock industry had lain becalmed in the horse latitudes. Kids spent their money on video games instead of records. For perhap
s the fiftieth time since 1955, the pundits announced the death of rock and roll. And, as on other occasions, it proved to be a lively corpse. Video games topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A.; rap and hip-hop began to turn some numbers as well as heads.

  "Before the slump, record-company execs used to deliver coke backstage in their attache cases before big shows," Georgie said. "I was concert-mixing back then, and I saw it happen. There was one guy--he's been dead since 1978, but you'd know his name if I said it--who used to get a jar of olives from his label before every gig. The jar would come wrapped up in pretty paper with bows and ribbon and everything. Only instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He used to put them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off martinis."

  "I bet they were, too," Tell said.

  "Well, back then lots of people thought cocaine was almost like a vitamin," Georgia said. "They said it didn't hook you like heroin or f-fuck you over the next day like booze. And this building, man, this building was a regular snowstorm. Pills and pot and hash too, but cocaine was the hot item. And this guy--"

  "What was his name?"

  Georgie shrugged. "I don't know. Paul never said and I never heard it from anyone in the building--not that I remember, anyway. But he was s-supposed to be like one of the deli delivery boys you see going up and down in the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and b-bagels. Only instead of delivering coffee-and, this guy delivered dope. You'd see him two or three times a week, riding all the way up and then working his way down. He'd have a topcoat slung over his arm and an alligator-skin briefcase in that hand. He kept the overcoat over his arm even when it was hot. That was so people wouldn't see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did a-a-anyway."

  "The what?"

  "C-C-Cuff," Georgie said, spraying out bits of bread and corned beef and immediately going crimson. "Gee, Johnny, I'm sorry."

  "No problem. You want another cream soda?"

  "Yes, thanks," Georgie said gratefully.

  Tell signalled the waitress.

  "So he was a delivery boy," he said, mostly to put Georgie at his ease again--Georgie was still patting his lips with his napkin.

  "That's right." The fresh cream soda arrived and Georgie drank some. "When he got off the elevator on the eighth floor, the briefcase chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got off it on the ground floor again, it would be full of money."

  "Best trick since lead into gold," Tell said.

  "Yeah, but in the end the magic ran out. One day he only made it down to the third floor. Someone offed him in the men's room."

  "Knifed him?"

  "What I heard was that someone opened the door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a pencil in his eye."

  For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as he had seen the crumpled bag under the imagined conspirators' restaurant table: a Berol Black Warrior, sharpened to an exquisite point, sliding forward through the air and then shearing into the startled circle of pupil. The pop of the eyeball. He winced.

  Georgia nodded. "G-G-Gross, huh? But it's probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably someone just, you know, stuck him."

  "Yes."

  "But whoever it was must have had something sharp with him, all right," Georgie said.

  "He did?"

  "Yes. Because the briefcase was gone."

  Tell looked at Georgie. He could see this, too. Even before Georgie told him the rest he could see it.

  "When the cops came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left hand in the b-bowl."

  "Oh," Tell said.

  Georgie looked down at his plate. There was still half a sandwich on it. "I guess maybe I'm f-f-full," he said, and smiled uneasily.

  *

  On their way back to the studio, Tell asked, "So the guy's ghost is supposed to haunt . . . what, that bathroom?" And suddenly he laughed, because, gruesome as the story had been, there was something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a shithouse.

  Georgie smiled. "You know people. At first that was what they said. When I started in working with Paul, guys would tell me they'd seen him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the stall door."

  "Just his sneakers, huh? What a hoot."

  "Yeah. That's how you'd know they were making it up, or imagining it, because you only heard it from guys who knew him when he was alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers."

  Tell, who had been a know-nothing kid still living in rural Pennsylvania when the murder happened, nodded. They had arrived at Music City. As they walked across the lobby toward the elevators, Georgie said, "But you know how fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and gone tomorrow. I doubt if there's anybody left in the building who was working here then, except maybe for Paul and a few of the j-janitors, and none of them would have bought from the guy."

  "Guess not."

  "No. So you hardly ever hear the story anymore, and no one s-sees the guy anymore."

  They were at the elevators.

  "Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?"

  Although Georgie lowered his head and the tips of his ears turned a bright red, he did not sound really surprised at this abrupt shift in direction. "Why not? He takes care of me."

  Do you sleep with him, Georgie? The question occurred at once, a natural outgrowth, Tell supposed, of the previous question, but he wouldn't ask. Didn't really dare to ask. Because he thought Georgie would give him an honest answer.

  Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk to strangers and hardly ever made friends, suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie hugged him back without looking up at him. Then they stepped away from each other, and the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the following evening, at six-fifteen, as Jannings was picking up his papers (and pointedly not looking in Tell's direction), Tell stepped into the third-floor men's room to get a look at the owner of the white sneakers.

  *

  Talking with Georgie, he'd had a sudden revelation . . . or perhaps you called something this strong an epiphany. It was this: sometimes you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them.

  There was no lapse in consciousness this time, nor any sensation of fear. . . only that slow steady deep drumming in his chest. All his senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old farts. He could see minute cracks in the paint on the wall, and chips on the pipes. He could hear the hollow click of his heels as he walked toward the first stall.

  The sneakers were now almost buried in the corpses of dead spiders and flies.

  There were only one or two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they weren't there until I saw them there.

  "Why me?" he asked clearly in the stillness.

  The sneakers didn't move and no voice answered.

  "I didn't know you, I never met you, I don't take the kind of stuff you sold and never did. So why me?"

  One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker--it was the mislaced one--settled back.

  Tell pushed the stall door open. One hinge shrieked in properly gothic fashion. And there it was. Mystery guest, sign in, please, Tell thought.

  The mystery guest sat on the john with one hand lying limply on his thigh. He was much as Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this difference: there was only the single hand. The other arm ended in a dusty maroon stump to which several more flies had adhered. It was only now that Tell realized he had never noticed Sneakers's pants (and didn't you always notice the way lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if you happened to glance under a bathroom stall? something helplessly comic, or just defenseless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn't because they were up, belt buckled, fly zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember when bells had gone out of fashion and couldn't.

  Above the
bells Sneakers wore a blue chambray work-shirt with an appliqued peace symbol on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part. From the hook on the back of the door hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There were dead flies on its slumped shoulders.

  There was a grating sound not entirely unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons in the dead man's neck, Tell realized. Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding from the socket of his right eye, it was the same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers.

  "I knew you were ready," he told himself in the hoarse toneless voice of a man who has not used his vocal cords in a long time.

  "I'm not," Tell said. "Go away."

  "To know the truth of it, I mean," Tell told Tell, and the Tell standing in the stall doorway saw circles of white powder around the nostrils of the Tell sitting on the john. He had been using as well as pushing, it seemed. He had come in here for a short snort; someone had opened the stall door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who committed murder by pencil? Maybe only someone who committed the crime on . . .

  "Oh, call it impulse," Sneakers said in his hoarse and toneless voice. "The world-famous impulse crime."

  And Tell--the Tell standing in the stall doorway--understood that was exactly what it had been, no matter what Georgie might think. The killer hadn't looked under the door of the stall and Sneakers had forgotten to flip the little hinged latch. Two converging vectors of coincidence that, under other circumstances, would have called for no more than a mumbled "Excuse me" and a hasty retreat. This time, however, something different had happened. This time it had led to a spur-of-the-moment murder.