Anyway, he had been your typical do-gooding shitbug, trundling here and there, too busy trying to save the world most days to change his underpants. Travelers Aid, Salvation Army, Dial HELP, Bosnian Relief, Russian Relief (you d have thought a jewboy like Thump would have had at least enough sense to skip that one, but nope), and two or three ‘women’s causes’
as well. The paper didn’t identify these last, but Norman already knew one of them: Daughters and Sisters, also known as Lesbo Babes in Toyland. There was going to be a memorial service for Thumper on Saturday, except the paper called it a ‘remembrance circle.’
Dear bleeding Jesus.
He also knew that Slowik’s death could have had to do with any of the causes the man worked for . . . or none of them. The cops would be checking into his personal life as well (always assuming a walking Room to Rent like Thumper had a personal life), and they would not neglect the possibility that it had been the ever more popular ‘motiveless crime,’
committed by some psycho who maybe just happened to walk in. A guy looking for a bite, you could say.
None of these things, however, were going to matter much to the whores at Daughters and Sisters; Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. He’d had a fair amount of experience with women’s halfway houses and shelters in the course of his job, more as the years went by and the people Norman thought of as New Age Fern-Sniffers really started to have an effect on the way people thought and behaved. According to the New Age Fern-Sniffers, everyone came from a dysfunctional family, everyone was sublimating the child inside, and everyone had to watch out for all the mean, nasty people out there who had the nerve to try going through life without whining and crying and running off to some Twelve-Step program every night. The Fern-Sniffers were assholes, but some of them — and the women in places like this Daughters and Sisters were often prime examples — could be extremely cautious assholes. Cautious? Shit. They gave an entirely new dimension to the term bunker mentality.
Norman had spent most of yesterday in the library, and he had found out a number of interesting things about Daughters and Sisters. The most hilarious was that the woman who ran the place, Anna Stevenson, had been Mrs Thumper until 1973, when she had apparently divorced him and taken her maiden name back. It seemed like a wild coincidence only if you were unfamiliar with the mating rites and rituals of the Fern Folks. They ran in pairs, but were hardly ever able to run in harness, not for the long haul. One always ended up wanting to gee while the other wanted to haw.
They were unable to see the simple truth: politically correct marriages didn’t work.
Thumper’s ex-wife didn’t run her place along the lines of most battered-women shelters, where the motto was ‘only women know, only women tell.’ In a Sunday-supplement article about the place which had been published a little over a year ago, the Stevenson woman (Norman was struck by how much she looked like that cunt Maude on the old TV show) had dismissed that idea as ‘not only sexist, but stupid as well.’ A woman named Gert Kinshaw was also quoted on this subject. ‘Men aren’t our enemies unless they prove they’re our enemies,’
she said. ‘But if they hit, we hit back.’ There was a picture of her, a big old nigger bitch who reminded Norman vaguely of that Chicago football player William ‘Refrigerator’ Perry. ‘You ever try to hit me, sweetheart, I’ll use you for a trampoline,’ he had murmured.
But that stuff, interesting as it might be, was really beside the point. There might be men as
well as women in this city who knew where the place was and were allowed to make referrals, and it might be run by just one New Age Fern-Sniffer instead of a committee of them, but in one respect he was sure they would be exactly the same as their more traditional counterparts: the death of Peter Slowik would have them on red alert. They wouldn’t make the assumptions the cops would make; unless and until proved otherwise, they would assume Slowik’s murder had to do with them . . . specifically with one of the referrals Slowik had made during the last six or eight months of his life. Rosie’s name might already have surfaced in that respect.
So why did you do it? he asked himself. Why in God’s name did you do it? There were other ways of getting to where you are now, and you know what they are. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake, of course you do! So why did you put their wind up? That fat slob in the newspaper article, Dirty Gertie What’s-Her-Face, is probably standing in the parlor window of the goddam place, using binoculars to examine every swinging dick who goes by. If she hasn’t dropped dead of a Twinkie-assisted stroke by now, that is. So why did you do it? Why?
The answer was there, but he turned away from it before it could do more than begin to surface in his conscious mind; turned away because the implications were too grim to look at. He had done Thumper for the same reason he had strangled the redheaded whore in the fawn-colored hotpants — because something had crawled up from the bottom of his mind and made him do it. That thing was there more and more now, and he wouldn’t think of it. It was better not to. Safer.
Meantime, here he was; Pussy Palace dead ahead.
Norman crossed to the even-numbered side of Durham Avenue at a leisurely amble, knowing that any watchers would feel less threatened by a guy on the far side of the street.
The specific watcher he kept imagining was the darkie tubbo whose picture had been in the paper, a giant economy-sized bag of works with a pair of hi-resolution field glasses in one hand and a melting clump of Mallow Cremes in the other. He slowed down a little more, but not much — red alert, he reminded himself, they’ll be on red alert.
It was a big white frame house, not quite Victorian, one of those turn-of-the-century dowagers that’s three full stones of ugly. It looked narrow from the front, but Norman had grown up in a house not so different from this and was willing to bet it went almost all the way back to the street on the far side of the block.
And with a whore-whore here and a whore-whore there, Norman thought, being careful not to change his walk from its current slow amble, and being careful to swallow the house not in one long stare but in small sips. Here a whore, there a whore, everywhere a whore-whore.
Yes indeed. Everywhere a whore-whore.
He felt the familiar rage begin to pulse at his temples now, and with it came a familiar image, the one which stood for all the things he could not express: the bank card. The green bank card she had dared to steal. The image of that card was always close now, and it had come to stand for all the terrors and compulsions of his life — the forces he raged against, the faces (his mother’s, for instance, so white and doughy and somehow sly) that sometimes slipped into his mind while he was lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, the voices that came in his dreams. His father’s, for instance. ‘Come on over here, Normie. I’ve got something to tell you, and I want to tell you up close.’ Sometimes that meant a blow.
Sometimes, if you were lucky and he was drunk, it meant a hand creeping in between your legs.
But that didn’t matter now; only the house across the street mattered. He wouldn’t get another look this good at it, and if he wasted these precious seconds thinking about the past, who was the monkey then?
He was directly opposite the place. Nice lawn, narrow but deep. Pretty flowerbeds, flushed
with spring blooms, flanked the long front porch. There were metal posts dressed in ivy standing in the center of each bed. The ivy had been pruned away from the black plastic cylinders at the tops of the posts, though, and Norman knew why: there were TV cameras inside those dark pods, giving overlapping views up and down the street. If anyone was looking at the monitors inside right now, they would be seeing a little black -and-white man in a baseball hat and sunglasses moving from screen to screen, walking hunched and slightly bent-kneed so that his six-feet-three would look quite a bit shorter to the casual observer.
There was another camera mounted over a front door for which there would be no keyhole; keys were too easy to duplicate, tumblers too easy to tickle, if you were handy with a set of picks. No, there would be a keycard slot, a numerical keypad console, or maybe both.