Incubi

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.”

“Guys, you mean?”

“All kinds. She was a dance-club queen. Neighbors say she’d come home with a different guy every night. Hung out at a lot of the ritzier places downtown. The resident manager got tons of complaints about her; she was a screamer. A few of the downtown barkeeps gave us the same story. She’d meet a guy, tag him in the sack the first night, then—”

“Next day she’s sick of him,” Jack finished. “She’s out looking for someone new. It’s a common cycle. Lotta girls that age get that way because they’re afraid they’re losing it…” Then he paused, thinking. What? Afraid. Fear. Again, he thought of Ian. “They go hypersexual because they never get the kind of emotional attention they need. So they replace it with physical attention. It gets to be a compulsion. They don’t feel real unless they’re getting laid by a different guy every night.”

“A girl can make a lot of enemies doing that. All she’s got to do is burn the wrong guy…”

No, Jack thought. Not this one. The feel was all wrong, and so was the evidence. Shanna Barrington was not murdered as a result of her promiscuity. She was chosen because of it.

“What were you saying about Beck? She find something?”

Randy nodded, then patted his hair, which was his own compulsion. “The victim had an address book in her nightstand. There were over a hundred names and numbers in it.”

“Big deal.”

“Beck ninned it, and you know what?”

“Let me guess. It was wiped down.

“Right,” Randy said. “But Beck found a single ridgeprint on the edge of the book. It was intact, but it wasn’t big enough to tag to the killer. So Beck—”

“Let me guess again,” Jack knew Jan Beck well. “She fumed the friction ridge, ’scoped it, and determined it was the killer’s by comparing the pore schemes.”

Randy looked disgruntled. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Which means the killer removed the book and opened it. And you think he was looking for his own name.”

“Well, wasn’t he?”

“No. He was either looking at it out of curiosity or to see if it contained anyone he knew. Shanna Barrington and the killer did not know each other. She was picked for precisely that reason. The killer’s name isn’t in that book.”

These were the mechanics of their professional relationship: Randy making speculations, and Jack picking them apart. Randy was perceptive; however, Jack was more perceptive. In the long run it made for an effective method of teamwork.

In the short run, though, it pissed Randy off. “Then why the fuck did he pick the book up, look at it, and put it back!”