Black House

“Don’t bother, you fucking monkey.”

Chipper Maxton is already on his feet and straightening his shirt, and the old man’s words throw him momentarily off his stride. He recovers nicely, grins, and says, “Stay right there, Chicago.”

Although the mention of his native city sends a prickling sensation down his spine, Burnside gives nothing away as Maxton moves around the side of his desk and walks across his office. He watches the director leave the room. Chicago. Where Poochie Flagler and Sammy Hooten and Ferd Brogan and all the others had lived and died, God bless ’em. Stalks of grain, blades of grass, so foul so beautiful so enticing. With their smiles and their screams. Like all Caucasian slum children, pure pale ivory white under the crust of dirt, the fishy white of the city’s poor, the soon-to-be-lost. The slender bones of their shoulder blades, sticking out as if to break through the thin layer of flesh. Burny’s old organ stirs and stiffens as if it remembers the frolics of yesteryear. Tyler Marshall, he croons to himself, pretty little Ty, we will have ourselves some fun before we turn you over to the boss, yes we will yes indeedy yes yes.

The door slams behind him, yanking him out of his erotic reverie. But his old mule, his old hoss, it stays awake and on its mettle, bold and brash as ever it was in the glory days.

“No one in the lobby,” Maxton complains. “That old bag, what’shername, Porter, Georgette Porter, down in the kitchen stuffing her face, I bet, and Butch Yerxa sound asleep in his chair. What am I supposed to do, ransack the rooms to find a dry shirt?”

He strides past Burnside, throws up his hands, and drops into his chair. It’s all an act, but Burny has seen much better than this. Chipper cannot intimidate Burny, not even if he knows a few things about Chicago.

“I don’t need a new shirt,” he says. “Asswipe.”

Chipper leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head. He grins—this patient amuses him, he’s a real card. “Now, now. There’s no need for name-calling here. You don’t fool me anymore, old man. I don’t buy your Alzheimer’s act. In fact, I don’t buy any of it.”

He is nice and relaxed and he oozes the confidence of a gambler holding four aces. Burny figures he is being set up for some kind of con job or blackmail, which makes the moment all the more delicious.

“I gotta hand it to you, though,” Chipper goes on. “You fooled everybody in sight, including me. It must take an incredible amount of discipline to fake late-stage Alzheimer’s. All that slumping in your chair, being fed baby food, crapping in your pants. Pretending you don’t understand what people are saying.”

“I wasn’t faking, you jackass.”

“So it’s no wonder you staged a comeback—when was that, about a year ago? I would have done the same. I mean, it’s one thing to go undercover, but it’s another to do it as a vegetable. So we have ourselves a little miracle, don’t we? Our Alzheimer’s gradually reverses itself, it comes and it goes, like the common cold. It’s a good deal all around. You get to walk around and make a nuisance of yourself, and there’s less work for the staff. You’re still one of my favorite patients, Charlie. Or should I call you Carl?”

“I don’t give a shit what you call me.”

“But Carl’s your real name, isn’t it?”

Burny does not even shrug. He hopes Chipper gets to the point before Butch Yerxa wakes up, notices the bloody prints, and discovers Georgette Porter’s body, because while he is interested in Maxton’s tale, he wants to get to Black House without too much interference. And Butch Yerxa would probably put up a decent fight.

Under the illusion that he is playing a cat-and-mouse game in which he is the cat, Chipper smiles at the old man in the wet pink shirt and rolls on. “A state detective called me today. Said I.D. on a local fingerprint had come back from the FBI. It belonged to a bad, bad man named Carl Bierstone who’s been wanted for almost forty years. In 1964 he was sentenced to death for killing a couple of kids he molested, only he escaped from the car taking him to prison—killed two guards with his bare hands. No sign of him since then. He’d be eighty-five by now, and the detective thought Bierstone just might be one of our residents. What do you have to say, Charles?”

Nothing, evidently.

“Charles Burnside is pretty close to Carl Bierstone, isn’t it? And we have no background information on you at all. That makes you a unique resident here. For everybody else, we damn near have a family tree, but you sort of come out of nowhere. The only information we have about you is your age. When you turned up at La Riviere General in 1996, you claimed to be seventy-eight. That would make you the same age as that fugitive.”

Burnside gives him a truly unsettling smile. “I guess I must be the Fisherman, too, then.”

“You’re eighty-five years old. I don’t think you’re capable of dragging a bunch of kids halfway across the county. But I do think you’re this Carl Bierstone, and the cops are still eager to get their hands on you. Which brings me to this letter that came a few days ago. I’ve been meaning to discuss it with you, but you know how busy things get around here.” He opens his desk drawer and pulls out a single sheet torn from a yellow notepad. It bears a brief, neatly typed message. “ ‘De Pere, Wisconsin,’ it says. No date. ‘To Whom It May Concern’ is how it starts. ‘I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to continue monthly payments on behalf of my nephew, Charles Burnside.’ That’s it. Instead of writing her signature, she typed her name. ‘Althea Burnside.’ ”

Chipper places the yellow notepaper before him and folds his hands together on top of it. “What’s the deal here, Charles? There’s no Althea Burnside living in De Pere, I know that much. And she can’t be your aunt. How old would she be? At least a hundred. More like a hundred and ten. I don’t believe it. But these checks have been coming in, regular as clockwork, since your first month here at Maxton’s. Some buddy, some old partner of yours, has been looking out for you, my friend. And we want him to continue what he’s been doing, don’t we?”

“All the same to me, asswipe.” This is not precisely truthful. All Burny knows of the monthly payments is that Mr. Munshun organized them long ago, and if these payments are to stop, well . . . what comes to an end with them? He and Mr. Munshun are in this together, aren’t they?

“Come on, kiddo,” Chipper says. “You can do better than that. I’m looking for a little cooperation here. I’m sure you don’t want to go through all the mess and trouble of being taken into custody, getting fingerprinted, plus whatever might happen after that. And me, speaking personally, I wouldn’t want to put you through all of that. Because the real rat here is your friend. It sure looks to me like this guy, whoever he is, is forgetting that you probably have something on him from the old days, right? And he’s thinking that he doesn’t have to make sure that you have all your little comforts anymore. Only that’s a mistake. I bet you could straighten the guy out, make him understand the situation.”