Bloodstained Kings, Page 3

  Grimes stretched. His body felt perpetually poisoned. He did not know how many pounds he had lost, but his clothes were baggy on his frame. Whenever it was that he’d last been hale he’d weighed one-ninety-five and could bench press two-twenty. He was still an inch and a half over six feet and strongly built, but he felt as if his spine had lost several of its vertebrae. He was thirty-eight years old and he felt seventy and he no longer cared. He had given up the fight that had depleted him more with every punch he’d tried to throw. This was where he was and where he would be until he found himself somewhere else. Today, like yesterday and the days and months before that, he would do nothing: not a relaxed, take-it-easy-and-recharge-the-batteries nothing, but utterly nothing. An infinite nothing. Until the end.

  He would do nothing—he would strive toward nothing—with the same extremity of purpose that he had brought to the other driven journeys of his life. And while Grimes stood there—and as he knew he would later lie there prone, shot through and steeped to the marrow with content-free psychic pain—he realized that he was in a place he’d never been before, a place where no one else had been or ever could be: for it was his alone and his to know alone. He was no longer anything: man or melancholiac, psychiatrist or psychotic. He simply was; and this he could not escape. He had stripped himself of everything that he felt himself to be; he had sought his own nothingness, an extinction more profound than a bullet through the head; and at the outermost rim ofthat nothingness, he now found—in spite of all—that he was. Like it or not, he was.

  With that discovery—that he was—Grimes felt a tremor, a stirring: something that distantly reminded him of the heartbeat of excitement. Then it was gone. The sun once more punished his eyes; his poisoned limbs tested their ability to hold him from the floor; the pit in which he stood beckoned him sweetly.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  For a moment Grimes did not react. He had been out of contact with the outer world for so long that the attempt at communication implicit in the sound of the bell seemed hallucinatory. Then the ringing came again, this time the thumb or finger pushing longer, with more insistence. Grimes went over to the window and threw it wide. Humid air and jagged street noise gusted over his face. He leaned out over the sill and looked down.

  Standing on the pavement by the door was a thin man in a gray summer suit and a flat straw hat with a striped band—a boater—the brim of which hid his face. He held his shoulders square. In his left hand was a briefcase, the leather smooth with age. Grimes waited. The thin man took a step back from the door and looked up. His face was lean, a healthy lean, and had seen a lot of sun. The eyes—blue—were both frank and shrewd. Grimes guessed he was in his early sixties. His voice, when he spoke, had a rural edge and was from out of state. Alabama, maybe. Or Georgia.

  “Good afternoon,” called the thin man.

  Grimes started to speak but found his throat hoarsened through lack of use. An incoherent rasp emerged. He nodded, coughed, tried again.

  “What do you want?” said Grimes.

  The thin man absorbed this lack of courtesy as if it were something he expected. “I was hoping to speak with Dr. Grimes,” he said. “Dr. Eugene Grimes.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Holden Daggett. I’m an attorney.”

  Grimes thought about that. “Does that mean I’ve got a problem?”

  Daggett didn’t blink. “Not as far as I know. I’m not here to serve any papers on behalf of any court—federal, state, or civil. I’ve been instructed by a client to deliver a letter to you.”

  “A client,” said Grimes.

  Daggett nodded, then glanced briefly down the street before calling up again. “Can I come inside?”

  Grimes studied the clear, shrewd eyes a moment longer. He pulled his head back inside. He felt it again: the rumor of a heartbeat. And something else: a sinister premonition, a tinge of fear. Before the premonition won out over the heartbeat he left the window and went to press the button on the wall by the door. With a buzz and a clank the lock on the door to the street below was released.

  From the top of the stairs Grimes watched Daggett close the steel-plated door behind him and tread across the unopened mail carpeting the corridor. Daggett climbed steadily, the flat crown of his straw hat cleaving a straight line, and reached the top of the stairs without panting. Grimes felt a pang of envy. Daggett glanced him over. Grimes, suddenly aware of his appearance, shuffled. He’d slept in his black suit, which was consequendy badly crumpled and, here and there, dusted gray with patches of cigarette ash. His white shirt was limp and en-filthed. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks. Grimes asked himself why he’d let this stranger in to see him this way. Because you have no pride, he answered. Anyway, Daggett didn’t have to hang around any longer than he was inclined to.

  Daggett, his face revealing nothing of what he felt about Grimes’s appearance, held out his hand. As Grimes shook it he noticed a small raised spot with a crumbly surface on the skin of Daggett’s left temple.

  “As a rule, I don’t visit unannounced,” said Daggett. “But you’re not an easy man to contact, Dr. Grimes.”

  Grimes said, “The way I like it is the way it is.”

  To Grimes’s surprise Daggett smiled at that. He nodded back down the stairs toward the scattered envelopes. “I tried to schedule a meeting with you. There should be a couple of letters from me down there.”

  The premonition returned and stuck Grimes in the craw. He swallowed it down.

  “But not the letter you’ve brought with you,” he said.

  Daggett shook his head. “That one I’m obliged to deliver by hand or not at all.”

  He glanced over Grimes’s shoulder through the door into the living room. Grimes looked too, as if with fresh eyes. Now postwar Berlin seemed a romantic notion. The room looked like an Iberville crack factory that had been fire-bombed by a rival gang. Again, whatever Daggett thought of what he saw, he kept from his face. Grimes made a note never to play poker with him. He coughed.

  “I had a fire here, a while back.”

  “So I see,” said Daggett, evenly.

  “Please, come inside, then,” said Grimes.

  “Thanks, but that’s not necessary,” replied Daggett. “I have a plane to catch.”

  He opened his briefcase and took out a white envelope. On the front, written with a lavish hand, was the word Grimes.

  “This is all I came for.” Daggett paused. “I don’t mean any offense by this, you understand, but I’m obliged to ask you for some kind of identification. To prove that you are indeed Dr. Eugene Grimes.”

  Grimes looked from the envelope to Daggett. “Maybe I don’t want the letter.”

  “If you want to burn it without opening it, that’s your privilege,” said Daggett.

  Grimes hesitated.

  “I came a long way to give it to you,” said Daggett. “But I guess that’s no concern of yours.”

  Grimes fumbled in his jacket pockets and found his wallet. From the wallet he produced his driver’s license and gave it to Daggett. Daggett glanced from the photo on the license to Grimes’s face and back again three times. Grimes wondered just what the hell he must look like these days. Had he changed that much? He absendy raised a hand and found, as if it didn’t belong to him, a matted growth of beard on his neck and jaw. Christ. Daggett handed the license back and held out the envelope.

  Grimes took it.

  “You don’t need any kind of answer to this?” he asked.

  Daggett shook his head. “My only instructions were to deliver it.”

  He closed his briefcase and held out his hand again. “Thank you for your time.” For a moment the frank blue eyes were illuminated with an unexpected warmth. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

  For a bizarre instant Grimes felt choked. Daggett appeared to mean what he said; and Grimes wanted to believe him. He thought: man, you are a long ways further gone than you know. He pulled himself together, blinked.

  �
��You too, sir,” said Grimes.

  They shook again. This time Grimes felt as if the firm dry hand were squeezing his heart. Daggett let go, nodded and turned to the stairs. Grimes didn’t want him to leave. With something close to shame he felt a craving for company sweep over him.

  “Mr. Daggett?” said Grimes.

  Daggett turned back.

  “I couldn’t help noticing.” Grimes pointed to the spot on Daggett’s temple. “If I’m not mistaken that’s a basal cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer.”

  “This little thing?” Daggett touched the spot. “I had a physical a month ago. My own doctor didn’t mention it.”

  “They’re easy to miss,” said Grimes. “They grow slowly but it will get worse if you don’t get it treated. Cure is guaranteed.”

  ”I’ll take your advice.” Daggett squinted at him. “You’re from somewhere up north, am I right?”

  “Chicago,” said Grimes.

  “Tough town, or so they say.” From his breast pocket he took a card and gave it to Grimes. “I live in a little Georgia ‘gator hole you won’t ever have heard of: Jordan’s Crossroads, on the Ohoopee River.”

  Grimes took the card without reading it.

  Daggett said, “You ever find yourself in the middle of nowhere, come say hello.” He smiled. “Not much to do on a Saturday night ‘less you’re a moonshiner, but the Ohoopee River bottomlands are pretty, especially in spring. If you like that kind ofthing.”

  “I do,” said Grimes. “Thanks.”

  He slipped the card into his wallet with his driver’s license. Daggett’s eyes flickered up and down Grimes’s body: the bare feet, the dusty black suit and unkempt beard.

  Holden Daggett said, “Take care, now.”

  “You too.”

  Grimes watched Daggett descend the stairs and close the door behind him without looking back. For a moment, from both within and without, Grimes felt engulfed by a great silence. He felt more lost than ever. And yet the brief contact—the press of flesh, the meeting of eyes, the sound of voices, his own not least—had breathed an oxygen into his blood, a whiff, and no more than that, but he felt roused from his anesthetic torpor. He turned and went back inside.

  At the kitchen table Grimes cleared himself a space by scraping an armful of debris onto the floor. The letter in his hand felt heavier than it ought to. On the front, his name: Grimes. Nothing else. Grimes found a cigarette, lit it. He sat down at the table and opened the letter. Inside were three folded sheets of paper and an American Airlines plane ticket. Grimes unfolded the papers but avoided the last page: he didn’t want to read the signature until the end. By halfway through the first sentence he realized he wouldn’t have to: he could hear a voice—rich as burnt toffee—smiling as it whispered in his ear.

  Dear Grimes,

  If you are reading this, then I must be dead; and who knows—maybe even buried. Congratulations. You must have done me proud. But even so, I worry about you: I wonder, as I write this in a dead-man’s hand, how you’re going to get by without me when I’m gone. And I can’t help wondering, too, if you ever think of me these days?

  Sure you do.

  So let me tell you the score: this is my last will and testament. Good words. Testament. Will. Words that don’t come cheap. And the way things are between us, you and I, there’s only one way to spend them: on you. I believe the proper tide is “beneficiary.”

  Are you laughing yet? Then listen to this.

  I’m going to give you the chance to be the instrument—the hammer—of an apocalyptic justice. I say again: apocalyptic.

  Now, I hear you laugh.

  But I also hear you ask, through the tears rolling down your cheeks, just how the fuck I’m going to do that. It’s simple: I’m going to give you the anvil upon which you may forge that justice. The anvil has been twenty years in the making and it’s mine. It grieves me that I left it too late to see the iron glow red and the sparks fly high. But so be it; and if these be the times—then you must be the man. The story goes like this.

  Once upon a time there was a lawman who understood the way of things human. He knew that men of power were drawn by inexorable and extravagant appetites toward the possibility of their own ruin. He knew that they robbed the people they were meant to serve, and bribed each other, and corrupted the laws which even they had made and with whose keeping they were entrusted, in every way imaginable; that they fucked children and animals and whores; that they ordered the deaths of those who stood against them. These men stood high in the land; yet they were scum.

  Now, the lawman, he was powerful too, both in their ways and in other ways that they would never comprehend. He did his share and more of killing, and of torture, and of other evils as vile as any a man might set his hand to; and he put into his pocket the coin of those who believed themselves his masters. But this man—perhaps, it sometimes pleased him to think, this man alone—this man knew the inner nature of what he did and he asked no absolution, either of God or of himself. And though his appetites too were ruinous and vast, they could not bind him. He saw beyond such desires to the possibility of a deeper gratification—a delirium of ruin and destruction, a pandemonium, a festival of anarchy that would shatter the foundations of and tumble to the earth that city of corruption whose sewers and alleys he knew so well, and better—so much better—than did they.

  So during the course of his journey this man—this lawman—became a gatherer of witness; a collector of irrefragable testimony and of evidence beyond refute of every stripe. He gathered papers and statements, photographs and films, databases and disks. He taped the voices of the guilty. He stole wholesale their secret crimes. A corpus delicti of fabulous proportion. And he stored it. He stored it all and waited for the moment when senators and congressmen would tremble at the call; when judges would be gunned down on their doorsteps by wiseguys who’d bought their homes for them and knew they knew too much; when old family names would be smeared with their own feces and the bloated scions thereof dragged off to jail. Louisiana meltdown: a billion-dollar blow-out and a million years of Texas Steel for those who thought themselves beyond all reckoning.

  Such was the lawman’s dream.

  Are you still laughing, Grimes? I hope so because it’s all yours, buddy. That’s my bequest to you. You are going to start the hurly burly on my behalf. But walk softly: they’re already out a-looking. Truth to tell, there must be panic on the streets. Somebody knew it was out there, my anvil; with any kind of secret somebody always does. You know that. While I was alive those few bravehearts that dared to sniff too close died—badly, I confess—but now I’m gone the dogs will be off the leash and panting for blood. All you have to do is collect my bag of tricks and expose its contents before the dogs pick up your scent.

  You need to know where to find my goodies. I’m only going to tell you part of it. The other part you have to get from somebody else: a woman; in fact, a girl. She’s nineteen years old. Her name is Ella MacDaniels. You’ll find her at 175 Willow Street. Treat her right, Grimes. Besides you she’s the only person in the world I give a shit for. She knows me as Charlie. Look after her. The dogs will be on to her too, sooner or later, and she’s no part of all this, except that she’s part of me. Just tell her Charlie wants her to take you to the Old Place. You got that? The Old Place. In the basement there you’ll find two suitcases; inside them you’ll find my trove. Don’t waste it on my erstwhile colleagues in the police department, or on the federal authorities; the one bunch would sell it and the other would bury it. It’s the media you need if you’re to bring them to their knees. That’s where the power lies. Take it to The Washington Post, then buy yourself a TV and watch the fun.

  So that’s it, Grimes. Good luck to you. By the way, you may be wondering what that airline ticket is for. I’m a fair man and I wouldn’t want you to feel you didn’t have any choice in this matter. The ticket is your choice. If you decide not to accept my legacy, take the ticket and run; get out of town and don’t come back; ever. B
ut listen close, and believe me, son: do it soon. Do it now.

  If you do accept, trust no one except yourself.

  Good luck, Grimes. It’s going to be a cold day down there in Hell, so wrap up warm.

  Yours always,

  Clarence Seymour Jefferson

  Grimes stared at his hands. To his surprise they were steady. His mind was vacant. His body was seized by an overpowering desire for sleep, an intense muscular fatigue grinding in deep between his shoulder blades. He realized what his body was telling him: you can’t deal with this, buddy. Do yourself a favor and pass out. He looked over to the shallow grave dug amid the trash on the floor. No bed of flowers, no leafy bower, no woman’s arms had ever looked so inviting. His brain shambled into low gear. They will be coming, the brain said, and you know it: the Captain says so.

  Grimes had known Captain Jefferson for little more than twenty-four hours and yet no other hours of his life had been scorched more indelibly into his being. A little over six months before, Grimes’s older brother, Luther, had looted the Louisiana Mercantile Trust bank of a small fortune; Captain Jefferson, in pursuit of said fortune, had seized and imprisoned Cicero Grimes, here in this very room. And here the Captain had interrogated him; with mercy neither offered, asked nor given. Tooth and claw, head-to-head, they had ravaged and wrestled each other back and forth: from interrogation to torture, from torture to odyssey and from odyssey to a final, pain-soaked standstill, somewhere in the unmapped breach between life and death.

  It was this experience—and Grimes’s revealed experience of himself; of the things he would rather not have known—that had left him suspended in the psychotic melancholia from which he was only just now beginning to stir: with Clarence Seymour Jefferson’s last will and testament clutched in his hand.