she loves me not' with the limbs of a dead rodent might arch his own quivering brows.
'You must be Mr. Stelfreeze.' A withered hand reached out towards the larger cop. 'Mr. Fassl told me you would be coming by. I do so love watching the way he talks about our Cubs. ' She mentioned the network affiliate Stelfreeze's brother-in-law worked for.
She extended her hand to Rexer, continuing her talk of baseball. 'That Mark Grace is just the cutest thing!' Rexer smiled, wondering why there wasn't more expensive furniture in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was upstairs, and the money they were making here furnished a lakefront home in Winnetka.
They still clutched hands, their calluses touching. 'I am Mama Tomei. Please to call me Mama.'
'The pleasure is mine,' Rexer said. He smelled meat on her breath. Stelfreeze also nodded back in greeting.
Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Castle Frankenstein, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into a shadowed gutter. A black-and-white Emerson TV, antennae angled towards two o'clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Deitrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.
'Please,' the woman said, sliding into a chair. 'You sit now. Celly, she is with someone now.'
'Soon,' she repeated, busying herself with fluffing napkins into a wooden holder cut into the shape of a blue duck. Her nails had been painted coral, but the color was chipping away on each finger. 'Would either of you gentlemen like some coffee? Mountain-grown, the best kind.'
She said this with a smile as Stelfreeze glanced towards the hallway, pushing herself away from the subject of her daughter's man friends. Mama Tomei busied herself at the counter.
Rexer looked at the tablecloth of fractal images, discovering several profiles of what could be construed as silver men smoking corncob pipes.
'I thought times like these were made for Taster's Choice,' he said to himself. On the television, the ending bass strings for Barney Miller, the shot of the Manhattan skyline. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of
Rexer suddenly wanted the evening to fast-forward. 'I have to use your bathroom, ma'am. Mama.' He cleared his throat.
She told him, 'First door on left, down hallway.'
There was a mirror above the kitchen sink; passing it, Rexer looked at his reflection, seeing gray hairs like cobwebs in his mustache for the first time.
Let Stelfreeze sweat it out of her, he thought as he moved down the hallway, the walls bare on either side of him. Yet he still tried not to focus on any single direction for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. She thought his partner was of high recommendation and maybe Stel could be casual about it.
But Rexer was downright claustrophobic.
The hall floor was carpeted a sickly orange and magenta, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the slim cop saw shadows of branches dancing against living room bay windows. Again, as is expected in north side apartments, the bathroom light was a metal chain dangling to the right of the medicine cabinet. The pull chains always reminded him of the dog tags he wore around his neck, as a member of the air force reserves. Rexer always felt a sense of security when he touched those tags.
He turned in to the bathroom, reaching for the right spot. The white bulb flickered on, and he looked at himself in the mirror briefly. The toilet seat was broken, yellowed tape wrapped around the connected pieces.
He urinated in silence.
But he also noticed the muted amber light, a hazy cone above the stairwell landing. Then he heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.
It took him less than a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door with hopes that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.
Assumably looking forward to the excitement.
Rexer counted twelve steps and turned right at the top of the landing, finding himself facing several of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with their mournful eyes, lost dogs who gazed upon Rexer in a way that made him think of old Polish women praying at the stations of the cross at Saint Mary of Naz.
The upstairs hallway was L-shaped, and the slice of the room visible to Rexer put the nude woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. Mama Tomei's daughter lay on her back, her thin arms propped against the headboard, hands hanging limp. The handcuffs that held her that way were police-issued. With arms raised, her breasts swelled up, dark nipples pointing in a cross-eyed fashion. Rexer could smell sweat, cologne, and even a fresh aroma, like Ivory soap.
He moved to the side, looking in at a better angle, and had to bite on his palm until he drew blood. Growing out of the left side of the woman's rib cage was a small head, its eyes wide and unblinking.
Rexer jumped when it moved, falling back against whitened ribs so that he thought of a plaything lying atop a painted street gutter. He couldn't tell if it moved because of Mama Tomei's daughter shifting her weight, or because it was alive in some way.
Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight, felt the direct sun on her stupefied body.
Celandine Tomei's face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow's peak, a crooked nose and mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.
A sound came from deep within her grimaced mouth, and he would always remember what he saw next. A hand coming into view, a man's hand, fingers splayed so that it grabbed onto the vestigial head like it was a bowling ball, lifting it and letting it fall, the woman moaning louder.
The hand was a familiar one; he recognized a pale ring that Bill Valent had received during an altercation with a perp on PCP in the Hermitage Avenue corridor the previous summer.
But he couldn't step into the room farther, he could only stare at the head in the middle of Celandine's torso. The head had sparse black hair and was almost a pinhead, as if part of the connective skull plates were missing. It rested against Celandine's breasts as though they were deflated pillows. He could smell Valent's cologne, dammit!
The head turned towards Rexer, not of its own volition. It simply fell into the crook of the girl's arm. Orange drool formed around the mouth's gum line. Then everything started happening fast, the worst of it being the sound of a man's slacks being zipped up just beyond sight in the room. That sound would keep Rexer awake at nights for weeks to come.
He backed up, his palm striking against a small display case. The movement disturbed the doily dangling over the edge. Looking down, Rexer dry-gagged as he saw rows of gelatin eyes displayed in a cheap jewelry case. Some of the pupils had gold flecks, others were solid blue or hazel, and he knew he had to get out of there.
He backed away, towards the stairwell, knowing his hand was on his holster. He had been blinking away red spots in his mind, wanting to grab his shirt collar and start chewing on it, uncertain.
The next thing he remembered was moving down the stairs as quietly as he could, and Rexer almost shrieking when he saw Stelfreeze standing in the hallway.
'Let's go,' Stelfreeze said, not even bothering to nod at Mama Tomei as they moved past her to the door. Rexer thought she looked ashamed.
'What is it, partner?' Rexer said to Stelfreeze as they walked out of the alley onto Eugenie Street. 'If she didn't say, I can tell you Valent was up there.'
Stelfreeze told him about the stories he had heard from his brother-in-law, the ones he now knew were true. Rexer confirmed what he had seen upstairs.
The thing was: Valent wasn't getting payoffs. He was going there to do what everybody else did, only at
