Olsher winced like gas pains.
“I’ll need a researcher and a forensic shrink, maybe that woman from Perkins. But what I need more than any of that is for you to trust me.”
Olsher rose. No DPC enjoyed the headache of cash authorization; getting it was like standing before a Senate subcommittee. Nevertheless, Olsher said, “You’ve been thinking about this all day, haven’t you? Maybe you do give a shit. So get on it.”
“You’re giving me the case?”
“What do you think, Jack? You’re a ragass. You’re a longhair. You’re probably a drunk. You can’t handle the psychological pressure of the job anymore, and you’re letting a busted romance pull you to pieces. The Yankees are only good because they buy players, and I’ve seen you drink house booze many times. But you probably are the best homicide investigator on my fucking department.”
Jack smiled.
“But don’t make a dick of me on this, or you’ll be the best unemployed homicide investigator…”
“Loud and clear, boss.” Jack crushed out his Camel and lit another. “If I’m lucky — and sometimes I am — I can get a line on this fucker. To catch a killer, you have to know him before you can find him. He can be the smartest killer in the world, but no matter how well he covers his tracks, there’s always one little thing he always leaves behind.”
“What’s that?” Olsher asked.
“His soul.” Jack drew smoke deep into his chest. Red, he thought. In his mind he saw red. “This guy left his soul all over the walls of that girl’s bedroom.”
It stuck in his mind — a memory more persistent than the others. He didn’t know why then, but he thought he did now. Perhaps it had been the present telling him something about the future, an eager specter whispering in his ear, saying, Listen, Jack. It’s really you they’re talking about. Listen. Listen…
A month ago? Two? He wasn’t sure. They’d gone out to eat somewhere — McGarvey’s, he thought — and then had stopped for a drink at the Undercroft. Veronica seemed particularly content; she was used to their relationship now, comfortable with it. She accepted it as part of her.
Jack, too, was very happy that night. It was a combination of complacencies. He’d just gotten a raise and a letter of commendation. Veronica had just sold two more paintings and had been interviewed by Vanity Fair. Their lives, together, were stable. They were happy, and they were in love.
That was the sum of the combination: love. It was his love that made him happy.
Romantic affection sometimes seemed silly, but that made him happy too. Just holding her hand, or the easy way their knees touched when they sat. How she unconsciously touched him when she talked. These were subtleties, yet they were also anchors, weren’t they? Verifiers. More little pieces of their love.
There’d been many nights like this, but this one stuck out because of something that happened later. As the evening wound down, some guy from the state film institute came in and introduced himself to Veronica. His name — if Jack remembered right — was Ian. He was young and had just graduated from film school; he was currently directing an independent movie, some avant-garde sort of thing. Very quickly Ian and Veronica got into a very heavy discussion. It didn’t bother Jack, giving some of his time with her to someone else; it seemed important. Instead, he yacked with Craig about beer, women, and the Steelers.
But something bothered him. He found he couldn’t help keeping an ear on Veronica’s conversation. She and this Ian guy seemed to be talking about the function of fear in art.
What’s fear got to do with art? Jack wondered.
“Like Argento and Bava,” Ian was saying, “it’s all a system of psychological symbols.”
“And Pollock and de Kooning,” Veronica said, sipping a Sapporo.
“Exactly! Using objective structural standards as a method of subjective conduction.”
“Looking in the mirror and seeing someone else’s face.”
“Or no face at all,” Ian postulated.
“Ah, so you’re an existentialist,” Veronica assumed.
“No, I’m just a director. The only honest creative philosophy is no philosophy. Truth is all that motivates me—human truth.”
Sounds like a bunch of gorilla shit to me, Jack thought.
“And you view truth through its correlation to human fears,” Veronica stated rather than asked.
“Yes,” Ian said. “Our fears make us what we are. Every action generates a reaction. Fear makes us react more than anything else.”
“Wait a minute, pal,” Jack interrupted. “You’re saying that fear is the only truth in life?”
Ian’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, I think I am. Fear is the base for everything else we want to be truth. Even our joys are created out of inversions of our fears.”
“That’s a load of shit.”
“Jack!” Veronica snapped.
“But he’s just proved it himself. His reaction to our discussion has created a denial. His fear that we might be right.”
Jack felt fuddled.
“For a short time in my life,” Ian explained, “I went on a hiatus. I knew I could never be creatively complete until I had identified my greatest fears. So that’s what I did, I went looking for the things that scared me the most.”
“What were the things?” Veronica asked.
“There were only three,” Ian said. “Drugs, greed, and love.”
Love, Jack thought. Cigarette smoke smeared the sunlight in his office window. The sudden recognition numbed him. Fear. Love. Was one really based upon the other? Now he knew why that night stuck in his mind. It was a portent, a mirror to the disheveled future he was sitting in right now. Ian had been right. Jack’s love — now that he no longer had Veronica to give it to — scared him to death.
Fear is the base for everything else we want to be truth, Ian had said.
Love, Jack thought.
Then he saw another, closer memory. In red:
HERE IS MY LOVE
“I just talked to Beck in Millersville,” Randy Eliot said.
Jack hadn’t even noticed the entrance of his partner. Randy, in a sharp gray suit, was helping himself to Jack’s coffee. When he turned, he stopped. “Christ, Jack. You look like—”
“Like I slept in a cement mixer. I know. Olsher just got done doing the plunger on my ass. Thinks I’ll fuck up the case.”
Randy stayed comment and sat down.
“Let me ask you something, as a friend,” Jack said. “Do you think I’m slipping?”
“Anybody who brews coffee this bad must be good for something.” Randy dropped his cup in the trash. “You want the truth? You drink way too much, and you’re too impressionable.”
“Impressionable? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t let go of things. Like Veronica.”
Jack smirked. “Who asked you anyway?”
“You did.”
“Well, next time I ask, don’t answer. What’s that about Beck? I thought you were running down the Bayview girl.”
“I am, and we’ve dug up plenty of shit. Name’s Shanna Barrington, thirty-two, single, no roommates. Got an art degree from St. John’s, worked for an ad agency off the Circle, one of the big ones. She started in the business as a commercial artist…”
Jack remembered the pastels and watercolors on the walls.
“Got promoted to senior art director last year, pulling almost seventy K. Good job record, good credit…”
“But?”
“Mary Poppins she wasn’t.”