Instead of surgical masks, people will wear earphones that will give them the soothing constant protection of safe music or bird-songs. People will pay for a supply of "pure"' news, a source for "safe" information and entertainment. The way milk and meat and blood are inspected, imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption.
People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean.
White noise.
Imagine a world of silence where any sound loud enough or long enough to harbor a deadly poem would be banned. No more motorcycles, lawn mowers, jet planes, electric blenders, hair dryers. A world where people are afraid to listen, afraid they'll hear something behind the din of traffic. Some toxic words buried in the loud music playing next door. Imagine a higher and higher resistance to language. No one talks because no one dares to listen.
The deaf shall inherit the earth.
And the illiterate. The isolated. Imagine a world of hermits.
Another cup of coffee, and I have to piss like a bastard. Henderson from National catches me washing my hands in the men's room and says something.
It could be anything.
Drying my hands under the blower, I yell I can't hear him.
"Duncan!" Henderson yells. Over the sound of water and the hand dryer, he yells, "We have two dead bodies in a hotel suite, and we don't know if it's news or not. We need Duncan to make the call."
I guess that's what he says. There's so much noise.
In the mirror, I check my tie and finger-comb my hair. In one breath, with Henderson reflected next to me, I could race through the culling song, and he'd be out of my life by tonight. Him and Duncan. Dead. It would be that easy.
Instead, I ask if it's okay to wear a blue tie with a brown jacket.
Chapter 8
When the first paramedic arrived on the scene, the first action he took was to call his stockbroker. This paramedic, my friend John Nash, sized up the situation in suite 17F of the Pressman Hotel and put in a sell order for all his shares of Stuart Western Technologies.
"They can fire me, okay," Nash says, "but in the three minutes I made that call, those two in the bed weren't getting any deader."
The next call he makes is to me, asking if I've got fifty bucks for him to find out a few extra facts. He says if I got shares of Stuart Western to dump them and then get my ass over to this bar on Third, near the hospital.
"Christ," Nash says over the phone, "this woman was beautiful. If Turner hadn't been there, Turner my partner, I don't know." And he hangs up.
According to the ticker, shares of Stuart Western Tech are already sliding into the toilet. Already the news must be out about Baker Lewis Stuart, the company's founder, and his new wife, Penny Price Stuart.
Last night, the Stuarts had dinner at seven o'clock at Chez Chef. This is all easy enough to bribe out of the hotel concierge. According to their waiter, one had the salmon risotto, the other had Portabello mushrooms. Looking at the check, he said, you can't tell who had what. They drank a bottle of pinot noir. Somebody had cheesecake for dessert. Both of them had coffee.
At nine, they drove to an after-hours party at the Chambers Gallery, where witnesses told police the couple talked to several people including the gallery owner and the architect of their new house. They each had another glass of some jug wine.
At ten-thirty they returned to the Pressman Hotel, where they'd been staying in suite 17F for almost a month since their wedding.
The hotel operator says they made several phone calls between ten-thirty and midnight. At twelve-fifteen, they called the front desk and asked for an eight o'clock wake-up call. A desk clerk confirms that they used the television remote control to order a pornographic movie.
At nine the next morning, the maid found them dead.
"Embolism, if you ask me," Nash says. "You eat a girl out and you blow some air inside her, or if you fuck her too hard, either way you can force air into her bloodstream and the bubble goes right to her heart."
Nash is heavy. A big guy wearing a heavy coat over his white uniform, he's wearing his white track shoes and standing at the bar when I get there. Both elbows on the bar, he's eating a steak sandwich, on a kaiser roll with mustard and mayo squeezing out of the far end. He's drinking a cup of black coffee. His greasy hair is pulled into a black palm tree on top of his head.
And I say, so?
I ask, was the place ransacked?
Nash is just chewing, his big jaw going around and around. He holds the sandwich in both hands but stares past it at the plate full of mess, dill pickles and potato chips.
I ask, did he smell anything in the hotel room?
He says, "Newlyweds like they were, I figure he fucks her to death, and then has himself a heart attack. Five bucks says they open her and find air in her heart."
I ask, did he at least star-69 their telephone to find out who'd called last?
And Nash says, "No can do. Not on a hotel phone."
I say, I want more for my fifty bucks than just his drooling over a dead body.
"You'da been drooling, too," he says. "Damn, she was a looker."
I ask, were there valuables—watches, wallets, jewelry—left at the scene?
He says, "Still warm, too, under the covers. Warm enough. No death agonies. Nothing."
His big jaw goes around and around, slower now as he stares down at nothing in particular.
"If you could have any woman you wanted," he says, "if you could have her any way you wanted, wouldn't you do it?"
I say, what he's talking about is rape.
"Not," he says, "if she's dead." And he crunches down on a potato chip in his mouth. "If I'd been alone, alone and had a rubber ...," he says through the food. "No way would I let the medical examiner find my DNA at the scene."
Then he's talking about murder.
"Not if somebody else kills her," Nash says, and looks at me. "Or kills him. The husband had a fine-looking ass, if that's what floats your boat. No leakage. No livor mortis. No skin slippage. Nothing."
How he can talk this way and still eat, I don't know.
He says, "Both of them naked. A big wet spot on the mattress, right between them. Yeah, they did it. Did it and died." Nash chews his sandwich and says, "Seeing her there, she was better-looking than any piece of tail I've ever had."
If Nash knew the culling song, there wouldn't be a woman left alive. Alive or a virgin.
If Duncan is dead, I hope it's not Nash who responds to the call. Maybe this time with a rubber. Maybe they sell them in the bathroom here.
Since he had such a good look, I ask if he saw any bruises, bites, beestings, needle marks, anything.
"It's nothing like that," he says.
A suicide note?
"Nope. No apparent cause of death," he says.
Nash turns the sandwich around in his hands and licks the mustard and mayo leaked out the end. He says, "You remember Jeffrey Dahmer." Nash licks and says, "He didn't set out to kill so many people. He just thought you could drill a hole in somebody's skull, pour in some drain cleaner, and make them your sex zombie. Dahmer just wanted to be getting more."
So what do I get for my fifty bucks?
"A name's all I got," he says.
I give him two twenties and a ten.
With his teeth, he pulls a slice of steak out of the sandwich. The meat hangs against his chin before he tosses his head back to flip it into his mouth. Chewing, he says, "Yeah, I'm a pig," and his breath is nothing but mustard. He says, "The last person to talk to them, their call history on both their cell phones, it said her name is Helen Hoover Boyle."
He says, "You dump that stock like I told you?"
Chapter 9
It's the same William and Mary bureau cabinet. According to the note card taped to the front, it's black lacquered pine with Persian scenes in silver gilt, round bun feet, and the pediment done up in a pile of carved curls and shells. It has to be the same cabinet. We'd turned right here, walking down a tight corridor of armoires, then turned right again at a Regency press cupboard, then left at a Federal sofa, but here we are again.
Helen Hoover Boyle puts her finger against the silver gilt, the tarnished men and women of Persian court life, and says, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
She killed Baker and Penny Stuart. She called them on their cell phones sometime the day before they died. She read them each the culling song.
"You think I killed those unfortunate people by singing to them?" she says. Her suit is yellow today, but her hair's still big and pink. Her shoes are yellow, but her neck's still hung with gold chains and beads. Her cheeks look pink and soft with too much powder.
It didn't take much digging to find out the Stuarts were the people who'd bought a house on Exeter Drive. A lovely historic house with seven bedrooms and cherry paneling throughout the first floor. A house they planned to tear down and replace. A plan that infuriated Helen Hoover Boyle.
"Oh, Mr. Streator," she says. "If you could just hear yourself."
From where we're standing, a tight corridor of furniture stretches a few yards in every direction. Beyond that, each corridor turns or branches into more corridors, armoires squeezed side by side, sideboards wedged together. Anything short, armchairs or sofas or tables, only lets you see through to the next corridor of hutches, the next wall of grandfather clocks, enameled screens, Georgian secretaries.
This is where she suggested we meet, where we could talk in private, one of those warehouse antique stores. In this maze of furniture, we keep meeting the same William and Mary bureau cabinet, then the same Regency press cupboard. We're going in circles. We're lost.
And Helen Boyle says, "Have you told anyone else about your killer sons'?"
Only my editor.
"And what did your editor say?"
I think he's dead.
And she says, "What a surprise." She says, "You must feel terrible."
Above us, crystal chandeliers hang at different heights, all of them cloudy and gray as powdered wigs. Frayed wires twist where their chains hook onto each roof beam. The severed wires, the dusty dead lightbulbs. Each chandelier is just another ancient aristocratic head cut off and hanging upside down. Above everything arches the warehouse roof, a lot of bow trusses supporting corrugated steel.
"Just follow me," Helen Boyle says. "Isn't moss supposed to grow only on the north side of an armoire?"
She wets two fingers in her mouth and holds them up.
The Rococo vitrines, the Jacobean bookcases, the Gothic Revival highboys, all carved and varnished, the French Provincial wardrobes, crowd around us. The Edwardian walnut curio cabinets, the Victorian pier mirrors, the Renaissance Revival chifforobes. The walnut and mahogany, ebony and oak. The melon bulb legs and cabriole legs and linenfold panels. Past the point where any corridor turns, there's just more. Queen Anne chiffoniers. More bird's-eye maple. Mother-of-pearl inlay and gilded bronze ormolu.
Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain.
And she says, "Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?"
With her pink fingernails, from out of her yellow and white bag, she takes a ring of keys. She makes a fist around the keys so only the longest and sharpest juts out between her fingers.
"Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?" she says. "Do you think, a century from now, that anyone will even remember the Stuarts?"
She looks from one polished surface to the next, tabletops, dressers, doors, all with her reflection floating across them.