Down These Strange Streets

“Yeah. Crap storage.”

Scarrey went down on his hands and knees, fishing the white cardboard out into the room. Old clothes in wads. A book on how to pick up girls. A stack of pornographic magazines. Two old bricks. A pile of yellowing paperbacks held together with a wide rubber band. A collection of DVDs teaching magic, juggling, unicycle riding. Scarrey ran his fingers over everything like he was flipping pages in a book. He paused, eyes narrowing.

“Missing,” he said.

“What?”

“The circus training disks. One’s missing,” Scarrey said. He picked up the one on juggling. On the box, a guy in clown-face makeup was grinning, a cartoon circle of blue dots and streaks standing in for actual juggling balls. Scarrey read through the text on the back, his lips moving. He made a satisfied grunt.

“Something?”

“Nothing unexpected,” he said. “Contortion.”

Scarrey dropped the disk back into the box and picked up the pile of paperbacks.

“Contortion?” Mason said.

“Bending,” Scarrey said. “It’s when someone—”

“Yeah, I know what it is.”

“More to the point, it’s the one he lost. Or got rid of. I don’t know whether he intentionally removed it, or if it was just something he had out often enough to misplace, but it hardly matters. And these, ah look. From a church library. Chariot of the Gods. Releasing Your Inner Light. Satan Among Us. Ah! Look. The True Meaning of the New Testament, by Reverend J. Linklesser. As if there were only one meaning! But . . .”

The rubber band came off with a snap, and Scarrey let the book fall open. Mason saw underlined passages flicker by.

“Aramaic?” Mason said.

“If English was good enough for our Lord and Savior . . . except, of course, it wasn’t.”

“It’s crap then,” Mason said. “All that shit Sobinski’s pulling. He’s not possessed.”

Scarrey looked up from the floor, baffled.

“Of course not. I mean, I had to check the site of the sacrifice to be totally certain, but really. John Zombie?” Scarrey grimaced and shook his head. “Semitic languages like Aramaic are Afro-Asiatic, not Afro-Caribbean. And Mait Carrefour and Marinette are very specific loa, neither one associated particularly with Jacob’s Ladder. You were quite right about the man, he really isn’t very good. Not that he’s evil. I mean he is evil, he killed that poor girl, but he isn’t very good at what he does.”

“Wait a minute, you knew he wasn’t possessed?”

“Of course.”

“Then, excuse my saying it, but what the fuck are we doing here?”

“Oh,” Scarrey said. “I’m sorry, Detective. I’m not here to find whether he’s possessed. I’m here to find why he’s pretending to be.”

“Insanity plea,” Mason said.

“No, that won’t do. For one thing, in practice that defense never works. Even if it did, life in prison isn’t appreciably different from indefinite detention in a mental institution, except that the prison is more pleasant. Now, given how badly he’s done everything else, your man Sobinski might not have realized that.”

“Straight-up insanity.”

“He could have had some kind of psychotic break. Not to the degree that he couldn’t plan and carry out a complex crime. And he didn’t seem to have any signs of Beleth the King of Hell before he was arrested. Possibly being caught induced psychosis as a way to distance himself from responsibility, but . . .”

“But?”

“Well, there are some problems with it,” Scarrey said, softly. “I have a hard time saying that a man who did what he did is well, mentally, but I think, I think, I know what he was looking for.”

* * *

“I’VE ALREADY TOLD THE POLICE WHAT I KNOW.”

The sausage cooker downstairs was a thick-boned Korean woman in her late forties named Anna. Her kitchen was exactly the same layout as Sobinski’s, but with less light and more cooking. She stood at the stovetop, stirring a pan of sizzling meat. The smell of hot gristle and salt hadn’t gotten less repulsive by being closer. Scarrey didn’t seemed bothered by it.

“I’m not a policeman. Did he seem to have many friends?”

She scowled at Scarrey, then up at Mason, then at the food cooking before her.

“He didn’t have any for very long. He was one of those people who knows someone really well for a little while, then moves on. Drank too much. He was always . . .”

She shook her head. Scarrey looked at his own clasped hands. For a moment, he could almost have been praying.

“Frightened,” he said.

Anna glanced at him, then nodded.

“Could put it like that. He was always talking about how the liberals were going to take away our rights, or how George Bush was really working with the Saudis. He was pretty evenhanded about his politics. Give him that. Hated everybody.”

“Did you know him well?”

“For a little while.”

“Did he frighten you?” Scarrey asked.

“No, never.”

“Does that frighten you, considering what he did?”

“Yeah,” she said, turning off the burner under her pan. “Yeah, it does.”

She turned to the refrigerator and took out a round loaf of uncut bread. The place was so small, she didn’t have to shift her feet.

“How did the two of you end your acquaintance?” Scarrey asked. Mason shifted his weight to his left foot. Anna took a knife from its stand and slit the loaf of bread down the side. She was quiet for long enough that Mason started to wonder if she’d heard the question, and, if she had, whether she’d answer it.

“He didn’t hit me,” she said. “He didn’t even get mean. He just drifted off. Didn’t come down for dinner anymore, and so, after a while, I stopped cooking for him.”

She pushed a lock of hair back over her ear, put down the knife, and bent the opened bread, the crust cracking under her fingers, and the soft white tissue of the loaf blooming out.

“I was going to cuss him out,” she said. “But I never got around to it. I wonder. If I had . . .”

“Did he take up with another woman?” Scarrey asked.

“No. He was in a band. Teaching himself guitar. Only lasted about a month. Then there were a bunch of Jesus freaks he had over for a while, until they stopped coming. I stopped paying much attention after that. I don’t think he was the kind of man that ever knew much peace.”

“Would you call him depressed?”

She opened the refrigerator again and took out a tub of fake butter and used the same knife she’d cut with to spread it.

“No,” she said. “He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t depressed. He was . . . hungry? Scared? Shit, I don’t know what you want to call it. He was messed up. Bad childhood or something. He was always looking for something, always had a scheme for how it was all going to be okay this time. Only it never was.”

She was still scowling, but the angle of her shoulders had changed. Her guard was coming down. Mason tried to keep his own expression soft and unintimidating. He wasn’t much in practice for that.

“You guys want some food?” she asked.

Jesus no, thought Mason.

“Please,” Scarrey said. “That would be lovely.”

“None for me,” Mason said. “Just ate.”