Can it?
He had to admit that it was possible, and not just because the police might have put him together with the dead men in the rest area. He could see himself in a bar or a stripjoint somewhere, Morris Bellamy, the college dropout and self-proclaimed American lit scholar, tossing back bourbon and having an out-of-body experience. Someone starts talking about the murder of John Rothstein, the great writer, the reclusive American genius, and Morris Bellamy – drunk off his tits and full of that huge anger he usually kept locked in a cage, that black beast with the yellow eyes – turning to the speaker and saying, He didn’t look much like a genius when I blew his head off.
‘I would never,’ he whispered. His head was aching worse than ever, and there was something wrong on the left side of his face, too. It burned. ‘I would never.’
Only how did he know that? When he drank, any day was Anything Can Happen Day. The black beast came out. As a teenager the beast had rampaged through that house in Sugar Heights, tearing the motherfucker pretty much to shreds, and when the cops responded to the silent alarm he had fought them until one belted him unconscious with his nightstick, and when they searched him they found a shitload of jewelry in his pockets, much of it of the costume variety but some, carelessly left out of madame’s safe, extraordinarily valuable, and howdy-do, off we go to Riverview, where we will get our tender young buttsky reamed and make exciting new friends.
He thought, The person who put on a shit-show like that is perfectly capable of boasting while drunk about murdering Jimmy Gold’s creator, and you know it.
Although it could have been the cops, too. If they had ID’d him and put out an APB. That was just as likely.
‘I need a lover who won’t drive me cray-zee!’
‘Shut up!’ This time it was Morris himself, and he tried to yell it, but what came out was nothing but a puke-clotted croak. Oh, his head hurt. And his face, yow. He ran a hand up his left cheek and stared stupidly at the flakes of dried blood in his palm. He explored again and felt scratches there, at least three of them. Fingernail scratches, and deep. What does that tell us, class? Well, ordinarily – although there are exceptions to every rule – men punch and women scratch. The ladies do it with their nails because more often than not they have nice long ones to scratch with.
Did I try to slap the make on some twist, and she refused me with her nails?
Morris tried to remember and couldn’t. He remembered the rain, the poncho, and the flashlight shining on the roots. He remembered the pick. He sort of remembered wanting to hear fast loud music and talking to the clerk at Zoney’s Go-Mart. After that? Just darkness.
He thought, Maybe it was the car. That damn Biscayne. Maybe somebody saw it coming out of the rest area on Route 92 with the front end all bloody on the right, and maybe I left something in the glove compartment. Something with my name on it.
But that didn’t seem likely. Freddy had purchased the Chevy from a half-drunk bar-bitch in a Lynn taproom, paying with money the three of them had pooled. She had signed over the pink to Harold Fineman, which happened to be the name of Jimmy Gold’s best friend in The Runner. She had never seen Morris Bellamy, who knew enough to stay out of sight while that particular deal went down. Besides, Morris had done everything but soap PLEASE STEAL ME on the windshield when he left it at the mall. No, the Biscayne was now sitting in a vacant lot somewhere, either in Lowtown or down by the lake, stripped to the axles.
So how did I wind up here? Back to that, like a rat running on a wheel. If some woman marked my face with her nails, did I haul off on her? Maybe break her jaw?
That rang a faint bell behind the blackout curtains. If it were so, then he was probably going to be charged with assault, and he might go up to Waynesville for it; a ride in the big green bus with the wire mesh on the windows. Waynesville would be bad, but he could do a few years for assault if he had to. Assault was not murder.
Please don’t let it be Rothstein, he thought. I’ve got a lot of reading to do, it’s stashed away all safe and waiting. The beauty part is I’ve got money to support myself with while I do it, more than twenty thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and fifties. That will last quite a while, if I live small. So please don’t let it be murder.
‘I need a lover who won’t drive me cray-zee!’
‘One more time, motherfucker!’ someone shouted. ‘One more time and I’ll pull your asshole right out through your mouth!’
Morris closed his eyes.
Although he was feeling better by noon, he refused the slop that passed for lunch: noodles floating in what appeared to be blood sauce. Then, around two o’clock, a quartet of guards came down the aisle between the cells. One had a clipboard and was shouting names.