THREE
I went to a dance the other night
Everybody went stag
I said over and over and over again
This dance is gonna be a drag.
21 ~ Long Distance
“You need professional help from Schultz,” Al Hammond said. “You’re nuts, off the edge, missing in action.” The connection from Hawaii sounded like a meteorite shower was slamming the satellite: brief, sharp-edged shards of clarity embedded in bursts of ragged static. My own voice was mimicked by a sort of mission-control echo that had the unfortunate effect of forcing me to listen to everything I was saying, but the NASA comparison ended there: Mission control usually knew what it was doing. “Maybe I should come home,” Hammond said between head-on collisions.
“Maybe he should,” Schultz said peevishly. We were using the speakerphone in his office, and he was leaning back in his reclining chair, nervously trying to tie his legs in a knot. Even though Schultz was the one who’d insisted we call Al, and even though it was his speakerphone, he didn’t seem to have gotten the hang of it. He addressed all his remarks to me and waited for me to relay them to Hammond.
“You’re on your honeymoon,” I said, being dutiful. Actually, having Al on hand sounded pretty good.
“We’ve met all the cops,” Hammond said. “It’s raining so hard you can’t find the beach. We’re the only people in the hotel who aren’t Japanese. Japanese are different when there are more of them than there are of you. They look at us like they’re waiting for us to shoot somebody. We feel like Mr. and Mrs. Godzilla.”
“Tell him what I said,” Schultz prodded. He’d managed to get one foot through the armrest. If the chair went over, he was ticketed all the way down.
I felt as though I were playing pass it along. “Tell him yourself.”
“I told him he could go to jail,” Schultz shouted to Hammond, taking long distance literally. “I told him he was interfering in an investigation.” He started using hand gestures for extra emphasis across all those wet miles. “I told him”-he pointed at me-“to call the Sheriffs”-he put his hand to his head, finger and thumb extended, to mime a telephone-“and give them the phone number.”
The speakerphone emitted space noises, perhaps a solar flare or a distant planetary system being blasted into cinders, and as the photons and neutrinos receded Hammond’s voice said, “-ass in jail.”
“My opinion exactly,” Schultz said, vindicated.
“If what you’re afraid of is that McCarvey will tip the kid off after I call, forget it,” I said to both of them. “The kid’s not in Seattle. He’s here. In Los Angeles. And if Schultz is right, Al, this McCarvey is someone he hates, someone he keeps killing. They’re not going to be chatting with each other. Look, all I want is a name.”
“And if you get it?” Suddenly it was like Hammond was in the room.
“I’ll give it to the Sheriffs.”
“Huh.” Hammond was unconvinced. “Sonia thinks you should call them now.”
“Thank Sonia for a constructive share.”
“And Sonia thinks this party you’re throwing is even dumber than not giving them the phone number.”
“It’s a wake,” I said for the second time, “and if he doesn’t come, so what? Max deserves a wake. He helped a lot of people.”
Audio bric-a-brac of hisses and pops. “-you know it’s a waste of time,” Hammond said.
“Actually,” Schultz said, “I don’t think it is.” This was the part that made him really nervous, because he might be wrong, and he hated being wrong. He was leaning back in the chair, rocking back and forth furiously.
“Is that Schultz?” Hammond asked.
“My expert,” I said.
“I remember,” Hammond said sourly. He didn’t like Schultz any more than Eleanor did. “Ask him why-”
I rapped on the desk for attention. “Look, you guys, this is a speakerphone. Break the word up, analyze its components. Speaker, as in loudspeaker. Phone, as in telephone. You can talk to one another directly. You’re both speaking English, you don’t need an interpreter. Now, Al, do you have a question for Norbert?”
Hammond woofed. “Schultz, your name is Norbert?”
“At least it’s a real name,” Schultz bristled. This was clearly an issue he and his own analyst needed to spend some time on. “ ‘Al’ sounds like something on the periodic table of elements.”
“Hey,” I said happily, “you guys are talking to each other.”
“So tell me, Norbert,” Hammond said, heavy on the name. “Why do you think the perp is going to show up for Simeon’s party?”
“I didn’t say he would.” Schultz, like most scientists, seemed to feel that definite statements were a conversational throwback, one step up from a grunt. “I think he might.”
“And why is that? Why do you think he might? He knows someone has his tags, he’s gotta figure he’s already being traced.”
“You’re assuming they lead to him,” Schultz said.
“A phone call might tell us,” I interjected, just to keep the issue alive.
“But that’s not the point.” I’d forgotten Schultz’s perpetual assurance that he was the only one who understood the point of anything. “The tags are probably magical objects. Ritual objects. They’re part of who he is. Look, you have a man here who’s devoting his life to killing people. He doesn’t have a life, in the way you and I do.” He passed a palm over his forehead, snagging his cigarette in what remained of his hair. I could smell it all the way across the room, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Everything normal, all the ordinary routines and attachments, are held in abeyance, everything is arranged to allow him to go out on his killing trips. We are what we do, to a much greater extent than most people imagine. Once he gets started, he’s practically a robot. He does what’s imprinted on his circuits. The tags are part of the circuitry, part of this rite that he performs whenever he can or whenever he feels he has to, whenever the conditions are right.”
“The conditions,” I said. It was the third or fourth time something had thumped its knuckles on the wall Eleanor had described. There was definitely something on the other side of that wall.
“Exactly.” Once he’d gained momentum, Schultz wasn’t easily derailed. “When the conditions are there, he almost has to act. Whoever he was to begin with, there’s not much left of him now. He’s a ball of energy that gathers itself in the dark until it’s time to come out and explode. The same cycle, over and over again. Find someone appropriate. Flirt with him, mislead him, make him fall in love. Betray him. Stomp him, cut him, reveal his sexuality back home, where it matters most. Then it’s back to the cupboard until the next time. He probably would have been caught months ago if the cops had been really interested, if the victims were straight.”
“You’re saying he’s stupid,” Hammond said, disregarding the slur on the police. “Stupid enough to show up at this-”
“Not stupid, not smart.” Schultz sounded impatient. “Cats aren’t particularly smart, but they’re very good at being cats. Efficient, ruthless, streamlined. You can’t teach a cat not to kill. You can teach it not to kill while you’re watching, but when it’s outside, the birds had better keep their eyes open. Like I said, this man probably doesn’t have much left of himself except the killing. The tags are an inextricable part of the act. He’s already risked his life to get them back. How often does the murderer really return to the scene of the crime?”
“It happens,” Hammond said. Sonia said something interrogative, and Hammond said, “Killer return to the scene of the crime.” I heard Sonia’s voice again, and Hammond said grudgingly, “But not much.”
“If we could hear him thinking,” Schultz said, “I’m pretty sure we’d hear two voices: the voice of the original human being, urging caution and common sense, and the voice of, oh, I don’t know, the cat, arguing every point. Something like, ‘I’d better get out of here.’ ” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “ ‘But everyone will be wearing a costume.’ ‘It’s got to be a trap.’ ‘I’ll have to cover my hair.’ ‘Should I take a chance on an airplane, or take the bus?’ ‘I could dye it and leave it exposed.’ ‘I’d never get my hands on the tags anyway.’ ‘I’ll never know unless I go. If I don’t go, I’ll never see them again.’ ‘I’ll never get away with it.’ ‘Of course I will, I’ll just be one more faggot in a costume.’ Sorry about the, um, terminology,” Schultz said in his normal voice. “I’m projecting here.”