The Sleeping and the Dead Page 3

  I leaned over the backseat of my Nissan and dug through the garbage on the floorboard until I found a plastic grocery bag full of dried-up Kleenex. I rolled down the window and shook the bag out in the rain, and then wrapped it around the camera. The leather camera case alone was worth three hundred dollars and it didn’t even belong to me yet. I had to show the Leica to Michi-san if I wanted to get more money. I tucked a thin manila folder under my windbreaker, climbed out and had to slam the rusty door twice to get it shut.

  The wide lawn was gray and the house hidden by veils of rain. A couple of cars were parked in the driveway—a white Saab and an old baby-blue Camaro with a faded rainbow apple sticker peeling from the back window. As I ran up the drive through the rain, the house slowly resolved from the mists, a looming pile of rock and timbers, with high mansard roofs steepled by dripping gothic ironwork, beetling windows and a forest of stone chimneys. A broad Italianate porch, deep as a cave, wrapped around the front and north sides of the house. I cut across the yard, splashing through deep puddles that soaked me to the knees, and hurried up the steps.

  All the porch furniture was shrouded with white oilcloth, even the tables. Dead ferns hung in plastic flowerpots from the rafters, quietly dripping. A glass ashtray swimming with cigarette soup sat on the porch rail beside the steps. I thumbed the softly glowing doorbell. The door opened while it was still ringing.

  “I’m here to see Michi Mori,” I said to the young black man who answered it. He looked about twenty, boyishly thin with narrow hips, long wrists and curly black hair that he shook out of his brown eyes when he smiled. His smile glowed and his lips were dark, like an Ethiopian. I had never seen him here before, but he seemed perfectly at home, greeting me at the door in his gym shorts, white socks and naked chest. He looked like a catalog model for boys’ underwear, and in less than five hours, he would be dead.

  “Come on in,” he said. I stepped into the entry hall and onto a thick rubber mat. “You’d better take off your shoes. You can hang your coat up here.”

  I set the Leica and the manila folder on a table behind the door, then shrugged out of my dripping jacket. “This weather is ruining the floors,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll see if I can find him.” He left, singing “Michi-san!” all the way down the hall. I sat on the edge of a Rococo Revival slipper chair and peeled off my wet socks. The hall tree opposite the chair had five pairs of men’s shoes of various sizes tucked neatly underneath it, and three umbrellas hanging from the coat hooks, all dry. I draped my wet socks over the two remaining hooks.

  “She didn’t tell me her name,” the young man said as he returned.

  A second voice, reedy and slightly nasal like an oboe, whined, “You let a strange-ah into my hay-youse?” The owner of that voice tottered around the corner behind his young companion, leaning heavily on a bone-white cane. He was short, round as a boule, with a flat bald head like a rotting pumpkin.

  “Oh good lord, child, it’s only Jackie,” Michi said when he saw me. He stopped and put his hand against the wall to rest. “I thought you said she was a strange-ah.”

  “I never said she was a stranger, Michi-san. I only said I didn’t know who she was.” He turned aside and pounded up a curving staircase, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Michi waved his cane at me. “Come on in my kitchen, honey. I got thangs on the stove,” he said in his Hollywood version of a South Carolina accent. I took the squat little arm he held out to me and waited while he slowly pivoted around his cane. “Lord have mercy, you are soaked through. Do you think it will ever quit raining? My hip does act up in this weath-ah.” He played up his accent because it was startling for people to hear a redneck voice coming out of his Japanese face. I didn’t know why he still did it with me. He’d drop the accent when it became too much of a burden.

  Michi’s grandfather had been a taro root farmer in Hawaii before the war. Michi was only six when his family was moved to the Japanese internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas. After the war, they couldn’t afford to move back, they couldn’t even afford a train ticket to California, so his father moved them to Greenville, Mississippi, and took the first job he could get—sharecropping cotton for the camp commandant. Most of the local sharecroppers had moved away or joined the army during the war. So Michi grew up speaking Mississippi Delta English. He spoke almost no Japanese because his father insisted his children assimilate and become “real” Americans. Kowtowing to their cracker overlords probably kept them from being destroyed; postwar Mississippi was no place to raise a Japanese family.

  The kitchen was recently remodeled and modernized with new stainless-steel appliances, a Viking stove, and white marble countertops imported from Italy. Michi had the builders knock out a wall and construct a big bay window that looked out on the garden and elm forest in his backyard. There wasn’t much to see there now, just steel-gray columns of rain. I liked the old kitchen better. It looked like my grandmother’s kitchen. Now you could film a cooking show in Michi’s kitchen.

  Michi pointed me to a chair while he turned up the volume on something hugely operatic playing on his Bose stereo. I sat at the Skovby kitchen table in a chair by Marie-Christine Dorner. Michi always let you know the lineage of his purchases. I pushed the Sunday paper aside to make room for my camera and folder. Michi picked up a large white coffee cup and a cigarette that he’d left burning on the edge of the marble counter. “Shush!” he said as the music pounded toward its finale.

  The soothing voice of a public radio announcer came in at the end: “That was ‘Nessun Dorma,’ from the opera Turandot, by Giacomo Puccini, with Jussi Björling, directed by Erich Leinsdorf.” Michi touched a finger to his lips and the announcer continued, “Classical Afternoons are made possible by a generous grant from the Michi Mori Foundation.” He smiled and turned down the volume. He paid a lot of money to hear his name over the radio.

  He toddled over to his stove, where an eight-quart stockpot quietly steamed and a large iron skillet hissed with onions and celery. “I’m gettin’ my conebread dressin’ ready for Thanksgiving,” he said in his exaggerated drawl. He pulled back a chair and sat across from me at the table. “For my family, such as they ah. Most of them have nowhere else to eat turkey.”

  “Isn’t it a little early to be cooking Thanksgiving?” I opened the camera case and snapped his picture, the smoke of his cigarette caressing his wizened face. If he ever wrote a book, this photo would go on the back cover. He looked like a merry old Buddha, his sagging pectorals like an old woman’s breasts. His silk pajama bottoms and glittering red curly toe slippers, his coffee cup and his perpetual cigarette were as much a part of his left hand as his fat little sausage fingers, and his white skull-headed cane a bony extension of his right arm.

  Not that he would ever write a book, unless it was a cookbook, or a dirty book filled with pictures of naked French children.

  “You’re trying to flatter me, Jackie,” he said after a moment. “You got a new camera. May I?” He set aside his cane, took the camera from me and squinted at his picture on the LCD screen on the back.

  “It’s a Leica.”

  “And you prefer this to film?” He frowned at his photograph, then set the camera on the table. “God, I look like an old wrastler. Do you remember Tojo Yamamoto?”

  “Wasn’t he an admiral?”

  “He used to wrastle here in Memphis.” He took a long crackling drag on his Winston and squinted one eye against the smoke. “Being Japanese, he usually played the heel. But you should have seen him karate-choppin’ all them big sweaty young men—Jerry Lawler, Austin Idol.” He sighed and closed both eyes. “Wildfire Tommy Rich.”

  He took another drag and left the cigarette wedged in the corner of his lip. “Kamala the Ugandan Giant. You wouldn’t think I’d care a switch about such lowbrow trash, would you?” He glanced at the manila folder lying on the table between us. “I had me a front-row seat at the Mid-South Coliseum. Season ticket. I was there the
night Jerry Lawler broke Andy Kaufman’s neck with a pile driver—April 5, 1982. Do you remember Andy Kaufman?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He was on that show.”

  “Taxi. That was before he started wrastling women. It was theater, of course, but what the hale did we care? It got your heart to pumping so you wanted to smash somebody with a folding chair. What’s in the folder?”

  “Some pictures I thought you might like.” I removed the rubber band and pushed it across the table to him.

  Michi looked at it briefly, then stood up and hobbled to his stove. He picked up a spoon and stirred the skillet. “You look like shit, Jacqueline,” he said. I could always count on Michi for this. He wasn’t cruel, just honest, like a child who will tell you your breath stinks while they hug your neck.

  “I’m OK. All I need is a shower.”

  “You can use one of mine.” He stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray beside the stove. “I got half a dozen. I got some I ain’t seen in five years.” He pinched another smoke from a pack beside the ashtray and held it to the blue gas flame until the end caught fire. He blew out the flame and took a long drag and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment.

  “I got a new apartment today. I’ll be OK.”

  “Where at?”

  “Summer Avenue.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “As safe as anywhere. Nowhere is safe in this city.”

  He limped slowly back to the table and took my hand. His hand was fat and soft and dry as a pincushion. He squeezed my fingers affectionately. “Let me see your pictures.” He opened the manila folder. I took his cigarette and stuck it in my mouth, tasting the coffee residue from his lips. “Oh my,” he said, leaning closer to the first photograph. “Honey, this is different.”

  The photo on top was a glossy 8x10 blowup of the remains of Roger and Loeb Simon—high-school brothers who were found three years prior in the ruins of the Warren Academy auditorium. The boys were curled up side by side in a claw-foot iron bathtub. The outside of the tub was charred, but the white enamel inside was only slightly browned. They were naked and partially submerged in their own liquefied fat, like sheep boiled in butter.

  “Is this…?”

  I nodded. “Playhouse Killer. Victims two and three.”

  “I didn’t know you worked that case.” He lifted the first photo and reverently set it aside, revealing the same gruesome scene shot from a slightly different angle. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “They’re still open investigations. If the department found out I showed these to anyone, much less sold prints…” I inhaled a lung full of Michi’s Winston. My grandfather had smoked Winstons. He drank so much coffee and smoked so many cigarettes that his dentures would turn their soak water brown as tea. I had a cousin who said you could catch a buzz drinking it.

  It wasn’t easy letting these pictures go. As much I hated anything to do with the Playhouse Killer, I hated the idea of profitting by his work even more. I walked to the fridge, opened the massive stainless-steel door, stood in front of the cavernous shelves with the cold flowing out around my naked feet like a ghost. “You got any beer?”

  “In the door.” He lifted the third grisly photograph and tilted it into the light. I found a Heineken and twisted off the cap. “Do you have more of these?” he asked.

  I swallowed and shook my head no at first, then shrugged. “I have pictures from all the murders.”

  Michi set the photos down and turned in his chair to look at me. “God dammit, you’re no different than any of my other little sycophants. You profit by my eccentricities, yet you withhold your best from me. You know I’ll buy every picture you bring me, yet you keep these…” He turned and reverently touched the four photographs with his outspread fingers. “… masterpieces of the genre to yourself.”

  I had been supporting myself over the last four years by selling accident and suicide photos to Michi, catering to his death fetish, but selling these photos was a new low for me.

  “I’m taking a huge risk even coming here,” I said, suppressing a belch.

  “And I pay you well for your risk.” He thumped his cane on the floor. “You know I love you, Jacqueline, but why don’t you do something positive with your life, instead of sticking every dollar you earn into your arm?”

  “I’m not a user,” I said.

  “Really?” Michi exclaimed. “Yesterday I bought three thousand dollars’ worth of pictures from you, yet here you come back today in the pouring down rain to sell me some more. What did you do with it all?”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  The young black man who’d let me into the house entered the kitchen, suddenly and unannounced. He was dressed in a loud yellow sports coat and check slacks. He opened the fridge and fished out a bottle of Evian.

  “Where are you off to?” Michi asked him.

  “Out,” he said as he glanced at his watch.

  “With who?”

  “Whom with?” The young man twitched a moist lock of hair from his eye. “If I told you, you’d only have a stroke, Michi-san.” He opened the bottle, took a swig, winked at me and left. His was a friendly secret smile, shared between us parasites. It was scary to think that somebody can be that close to death and not know it, not sense it somehow.

  Michi frowned after the boy. “I’m getting old. I can’t recall his name. Chris something, I think. So many boys come through my house these days, I don’t even meet half of them. But I don’t complain because they would just go somewhere else.”

  “I’m buying the Leica,” I said. The boy was already gone from my mind. I passed the strap over my head and let the camera’s weight rest between my breasts. “This is one of the finest cameras in the world, used by the best photographers, professionals like William Eggleston and Huger Foote. I already paid three thousand for it, but I need another five hundred. A new Leica would cost twice that.”

  Michi laid his cigarette on the edge of the table. “Good for you, honey!” he said. “I always hoped you’d take your art seriously. You’re a remarkable photographer. You’re wasting yourself with these…” He waved his fat hand over the grisly photos spread across the table. “… things, though by all means you should continue taking them. They do pay the bills. But if you’ll put together a portfolio, I’d love to help you out. I know all the wine-sippers and cheese-nibblers in this shitty town. I can make things happen for you, if you’re willing to do the work.”

  “I appreciate everything you do for me, Michi-san.”

  “Of course, you’ll have to clean yourself up first.”

  “I already told you, I’m not a user.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean do something with you—yourself. Buy some decent clothes, get your hair done. You’re still a good-looking woman. Take advantage of that.”

  “I’d rather make it on talent.”

  “Wouldn’t we all?” Michi laughed. “But that ain’t the way the world works and you know it, honey. God gave you looks, so why waste them? You got to use it while you got it. You won’t always got it, and then you’ll wish you did.” He stubbed his cigarette out and scooped up the four photographs.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. I stood up, ready to get away from his vinegary smell and the screech of his voice, the nagging and the guilt trips and the fake sincerity. Michi was rich and spent his money freely, giving it away to artistic friends to whom he clung like a tick, growing fat on their creative energy, pulling them back with promises of more money whenever they tried to escape.

  Leaving was always the hardest. I hated to ask for the money, but Michi wouldn’t let it go until you pried him loose. He always wanted to hang on to you for another minute, to squeeze that last penny out of the soul you sold him. I tossed the empty beer bottle in the trash and bummed a smoke out of Michi’s pack. As I stooped to light it off the stove, a shadow passed the kitchen door. I heard footsteps hurrying up a nearby set of stairs. “Who was that?”

  “My daughter’s son,” Michi
said.

  Michi had a grandson named Noboyuki Endo. I had only seen him once—when he was a gangly, sullen fourteen-year-old boy with thick eyebrows that almost met over his nose. His parents were dead and he had been living with Michi since he was four. He was placed in state custody when I arrested Michi on child-pornography charges. I had always assumed he remained in foster care. “How old is he now?”

  “Almost twenty-eight. His birthday is Friday. You’re invited to the party, of course.” The bitterness in Michi’s voice surprised me almost as much as the fact that he had never once mentioned Endo in all the times I’d been here.

  “Does he still live with you?”

  “No, thank God.” He lit another cigarette and looked out the window at the rain. “That boy is the reason I have to walk with a cane.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “After I was acquitted, the state tried to give him back to me. I told them I didn’t want the little bastard, but they insisted. He was listening around the corner, like he always does. So one evening dear Endo pours a bottle of olive oil all over the bathroom floor while I’m taking a shower. A good bottle, too, imported from Tuscany, a hundred and twenty bucks a pint. I could’ve killed the little shit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I laid on the floor a couple of hours until one of my house guests found me.” He sighed a cloud of cigarette smoke and shrugged. “I can’t blame Endo. I’ve never been much of a grandfather to him, but we’re the only family either one of us has got.”