She must have caught pregnant in January, because that was when she started to be sick in the mornings, and she missed her first period in February. The case which prompted Norman’s ‘official reprimand’ — one that would be carried in his jacket until the day he retired — had come in March.
What was his name? she asked herself, still drifting in her bed, somewhere between sleep and waking, but for the time being still closer to the latter. The man who started all the trouble, what was his name?
For a moment it wouldn’t come, only the memory that he had been a black man . . . a jiggedy-jig, in Normanspeak. Then she got it.
‘Bender,’ she murmured in the dark, listening to the low creak of the crickets. ‘Richie Bender. That was his name.’
1985, a hell of a year. A hell of a life. And now there was this life. This room. This bed.
And the sound of crickets.
Rosie closed her eyes and drifted.
9
Less than three miles from his wife now, Norman lay in his own bed, slipping toward sleep, slipping into darkness and listening to the steady rumble of traffic on Lakefront Avenue, nine floors below him. His teeth and jaws still ached, but the pain was distant now, unimportant, hidden behind a mixture of aspirin and Scotch.
As he drifted, he also found himself thinking about Richie Bender; it was as if, unknown to either of them, Norman and Rosie had shared a brief telepathic kiss.
‘Richie,’ he murmured into the shadows of his hotel room, and then put his forearm over his closed eyes, ‘Richie Bender, you puke. You fucking puke.’
A Saturday, it had been — the first Saturday in March of1985. Nine years ago, give or take. Around eleven a.m. on that day, a jiggedy-jig had walked into the Payless store on the comer of 60th and Saranac, put two bullets in the clerk’s head, looted the register, and walked out again. While Norman and his partner were questioning the clerk in the bottle-redemption center next door, they were approached by another jig, this one wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey.
‘I know that nigger,’ he said.
‘What nigger is that, bro?’ Norman asked.
‘Nigger rob that Payless,’ the jig had replied. ‘I was standin right over there by that mailbox when he come out. Name Richie Bender.He a bad nigger. Sell crack out of his motel room down there.’ He had pointed vaguely east, toward the train station.
‘What motel might that be?’ Harley Bissington asked. Harley had been partnered with Norman on that unfortunate day.
‘Ray’road Motel,’ the black man said.
‘I don’t suppose you happen to know which room?’ Harley had asked. ‘Does your knowledge of the purported miscreant stretch that far, my brown-skinned friend?’
Harley had almost always talked that way. Sometimes it cracked Norman up. More often it’d made him want to grab the man by one of his narrow little knit ties and choke the Kokomo out of him.
Their brown-skinned friend knew, all right, of course he did. He was undoubtedly in there himself two or three times a week — maybe five or six, if his current cash-flow situation was good — buying rock from that bad nigger Richie Bender. Their brown -skinned friend and all his brown-skinned jiggedy-jig pals. Probably this fellow currently had some sort of down on Richie Bender, but that was nothing to Norman and Harley; all Norman and Harley wanted was to know where the shooter was so they could bust his ass right over to County and clear this case before cocktail hour.
The jig in the Bills jersey hadn’t been able to recall the number of Bender’s room, but he’d been able to tell them where it was, just the same; first floor, main wing, right in between the Coke machine and the newspaper boxes.
Norman and Harley had bopped on down to the Railroad Motel, clearly one of the city’s finer dives, and knocked on the door between the Coke machine and the newspaper dispensers. The door had been opened by a slutty high-yellow gal in a filmy red dress that let you get a good look at her bra and panties, and she was obviously one stoned American, and the two cops could see what looked like three empty crack vials standing on top of the motel television, and when Norman asked her where Richie Bender was, she made the mistake of laughing at him. ‘I don’t own no Waring Blender,’ she said. ‘You go on now, boys, n get your honky asses out of here.’
All of that was pretty straightforward, but then the various accounts had gotten a little confusing. Norman and Harley said that Ms Wendy Yarrow (known more familiarly in the Daniels kitchen that spring and summer as ‘the slutty high-yellow gal’) had taken a nailfile from her purse and slashed Norman Daniels with it twice. Certainly he had long, shallow
cuts across his forehead and the back of his right hand, but Ms Yarrow claimed that Norman had made the cut across his hand himself and his partner had done the one over his eyebrows for him. They had done this, she said, after pushing her back into Unit 12 of the Railroad Motel, breaking her nose and four of her fingers, fracturing nine bones in her left foot by stamping on it repeatedly (they took turns, she said), pulling out wads of her hair, and punching her repeatedly in the abdomen. The short one then raped her, she told the IA shoofiies. The broad-shouldered one had tried to rape her, but hadn’t been able to get it up at first. He bit her several times on the breasts and face, and then he was able to get an erection, she told them, ‘but he squirted all over my leg before he could get it in. Then he hit me some more. He tole me he want to talk to me up close, but he did mos of his talkin with his fists.’
Now, lying in bed at the Whitestone, lying on sheets his wife had had in her hands, Norman rotted onto his side and tried to push 1985 away. It didn’t want to go. No surprise there; once it came, it never did. 1985 was a hanger-arounder, like some blabby asshole gasbag neighbor you just can’t get rid of.
We made a mistake, Norman thought. We believed that goddam jig in the football jersey.
Yes, that had been a mistake, all right, a rather big one. And they had believed that a woman who looked so much as if she belonged with a Richie Bender must be in Richie Bender’s room, and that was either a second mistake or an extension of the first one, and it didn’t really matter which, because the results were the same. Ms Wendy Yarrow was a part-time waitress, a part-time hooker, and a full-time drug addict, but she had not been in Richie Bender’s room, did not in fact know there was such a creature as Richie Bender on the planet. Richie Bender had turned out to be the man who had robbed the Payless and wasted the clerk, but his room wasn’t between the soda machine and the newspaper boxes; that was Wendy Yarrow’s room and Wendy Yarrow had been all by herself, at least on that particular day.
Richie Bender’s room had been on the other side of the Coke machine. That mistake had almost cost Norman Daniels and Harley Bissington their jobs, but in the end the IA people had believed the nailfile story and there had been no sperm to support Ms Yarrow’s claims of rape. Her assertion that the older of the two — the one who had actually gotten it into her —
had used a condom and then flushed it down the toilet was not provable.
There had been other problems, though. Even their greatest partisans in the department had to admit that Inspectors Daniels and Bissington might have gone a little overboard in their efforts to subdue this one-hundred-and-ten-pound wildcat with the nailfile; she did have quite a few broken fingers, for instance. Hence the official reprimand. Nor had that been the end of it. The uppity bitch had found that kike . . . that little baldheaded kike . . .
But the world was full of uppity, troublemaking bitches. His wife, for instance. But she was one uppity bitch he could do something about . . . always supposing, that was, he could get a little sleep.
Norman rolled over onto his other side, and 1985 at last began to fade away. ‘When you least expect it, Rose,’ he murmured. ‘That’s when I’ll come for you.’
Five minutes later he was asleep.
10
That slutty gal, he called her, Rose thought in her own bed. She was close to sleep herself now, but not there quite yet; she could still hear the crickets in the park. That slutty high-yellow gal. How he hated her!