The Bad Place

Page 15

“So you were sleepwalking, and you dressed in your sleep,” Julie said.
“But the clothes I was wearing weren’t any I’d seen before.”
Julie blinked. “Excuse me?”
“They weren’t the clothes I was wearing when I came to in that alleyway two nights before, and they weren’t the clothes I bought at the mall on Thursday morning.”
“Whose clothes were they?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, they must be mine,” Pollard said, “because they fit me too well to belong to anyone else. They fit perfectly. Even the shoes fit perfectly. I couldn’t have lifted that outfit from someone else and been lucky enough to have it all fit so well.”
Bobby slipped off the desk and began to pace. “So what are you saying? That you left that motel in your underwear, went out to some store, bought clothes, and nobody objected to your immodesty or even questioned you about it?”
Shaking his head, Pollard said, “I don’t know.”
Clint Karaghiosis said, “He could’ve dressed in his room, while sleepwalking, then went out, bought other clothes, changed into them.”
“But why would he do that?” Julie asked.
Clint shrugged. “I’m just offering a possible explanation.”
“Mr. Pollard,” Bobby said, “why would you have done something like that?”
“I don’t know.” Pollard had used those three words so often that he was wearing them out; each time he repeated them, his voice seemed softer and fuzzier than before. “I don’t think I did. It doesn’t feel right—as an explanation, I mean. Besides, I didn’t fall asleep in the motel until after eight o’clock. I probably couldn’t have gotten up again, gone out, and bought the clothes before the stores closed.”
“Some places are open until ten o’clock,” Clint said.
“There was a narrow window of opportunity,” Bobby agreed.
“I don’t think I would’ve broken into a store after hours,” Pollard said. “Or stolen the clothes. I don’t think I’m a thief.”
“We know you’re not a thief,” Bobby said.
“We don’t know any such thing,” Julie said sharply.
Bobby and Clint looked at her, but Pollard continued to stare at his hands, too shy or confused to defend himself.
She felt like a bully for having questioned his honesty. Which was nuts. They knew nothing about him. Hell, if he was telling the truth, he knew nothing about himself.
Julie said, “Listen, whether he bought or stole the clothes is not the point here. I can’t accept either. At least not with our current scenario. It’s just too outrageous—the man going to a mall or K Mart or someplace in his underwear, outfitting himself, while he’s sleepwalking. Could he do all that and not wake up—and appear to be awake to other people? I don’t think so. I don’t know anything about sleepwalking, but if we research it, I don’t think we’ll find such a thing is possible.”
“Of course, it wasn’t just the clothes,” Clint said.
“No, not just the clothes,” Pollard said. “When I woke up, there was a large paper bag on the bed beside me, like one of those you get at a supermarket if you don’t want plastic. I looked inside, and it was full of ... money. More cash.”
“How much?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. A lot.”
“You didn’t count it?”
“It’s back at the motel where I’m staying now, the new place. I keep moving. I feel safer that way. Anyway, you can count it later if you want. I tried to count it, but I’ve lost my ability to do even simple arithmetic. Yeah, that sounds screwy, but it’s what happened. Couldn’t add the numbers. I keep trying but ... numbers just don’t mean much to me any more.” He lowered his head, put his face in his hands. “First I lost my memory. Now I’m losing essential skills, like math. I feel as if... as if I’m coming apart ... dissolving ... until there’s going to be none of me left, just a body, no mind at all ... gone.”
“That won’t happen, Frank,” Bobby said. “We won’t let it. We’ll find out who you are and what all this means.”
“Bobby,” Julie said warningly.
“Hmmm?” He smiled obtusely.
She got up from her desk and went into the bathroom.
“Ah, Jeez.” Bobby followed her, closed the door, and turned on the fan. “Julie, we have to help the poor guy.”
“The man is obviously experiencing psychotic fugues. He’s doing these things in a blacked-out condition. He gets up in the middle of the night, yeah, but he’s not sleepwalking. He’s awake, alert, but in a fugue state. He could steal, kill—and not remember any of it.”
“Julie, I’ll bet you that was his own blood on his hands. He may be having blackouts, fugues, whatever you want to call them, but he’s not a killer. How much you want to bet?”
“And you still say he’s not a thief? On a regular basis he wakes up with a bagful of money, doesn’t know where he got it, but he’s not a thief? You think maybe he counterfeits money during these amnesiac spells? No, I’m sure you think he’s too nice to be a counterfeiter.”
“Listen,” he said, “we’ve got to go with gut feelings sometimes, and my gut feeling is that Frank is a good guy. Even Clint thinks he’s a good guy.”
“Greeks are notoriously gregarious. They like everybody.”
“You telling me Clint is your typical Greek social animal? Are we talking about the same Clint? Last name—Karaghiosis? Guy who looks as if he was cast from concrete, and smiles about as often as a cigar store Indian?”
The light in the bathroom was too bright. It bounced off the mirror, white sink, white walls, and white ceramic tile. Thanks to the glare and Bobby’s good-natured if iron-willed determination to help Pollard, Julie was getting a headache.
She closed her eyes. “Pollard’s pathetic,” she admitted.
“Want to go back in there and hear him out?”
“All right. But, dammit, don’t tell him we’ll help him until we’ve heard everything. All right?”
They returned to the office.
The sky no longer looked like cold, scorched metal. It was darker than before, and churning, molten. Though only the mildest breeze stirred at ground level, strong winds apparently were at work in higher altitudes, for dense black thunderheads were being harried inland from the sea.
Like metal filings drawn to magnets, shadows had piled up in some corners. Julie reached for the switch to snap on the overhead fluorescents. Then she saw Bobby looking around with obvious pleasure at the softly lustrous, burnished brass surfaces of the lamps, at the way the polished oak end tables and coffee table glimmered in the fall of warm buttery light, and she left the switch unflicked.
She sat behind her desk again. Bobby perched on the edge of it, legs dangling.
Clint clicked on the tape recorder, and Julie said, “Frank ... Mr. Pollard, before you continue your story, I’d like you to answer a few important questions for me. In spite of the blood on your hands, and the scratches, you believe you’re incapable of hurting anyone?”
“Yeah. Except maybe in self-defense.”
“And you don’t think you’re a thief?”
“No. I can’t ... I don’t see myself as a thief, no.”
“Then why haven’t you gone to the police for help?”
He was silent. He clutched the open flight bag on his lap and peered into it, as if Julie was speaking to him from its interior.
She said, “Because if you really feel certain you’re an innocent man in all regards, the police are best equipped to help you find out who you are and who’s pursuing you. You know what I think? I think you’re not as certain of your innocence as you pretend. You know how to hot-wire a car, and although any man with reasonable knowledge of automobiles could perform that trick, it’s at least an indication of criminal experience. And then there’s the money, all that money, bagsful of it. You don’t remember committing any crimes, but in your heart you’re convinced you have, so you’re afraid to go to the cops.”
“That’s part of it,” he acknowledged.
She said, “You do understand, I hope, that if we take your case, and if we turn up evidence that you’ve committed a criminal act, we’ll have to convey that information to the police.”
“Of course. But I figure if I went to the cops first, they wouldn’t even look for the truth. They’d make up their minds that I was guilty of something even before I finished telling my story.”
“And of course we wouldn’t do that,” Bobby said, turning his head to favor Julie with a meaningful look.
Pollard said, “Instead of helping me, they’d look around for some recent crimes to pin on me.”
“The police don’t work that way,” Julie assured him.
“Of course they do,” Bobby said mischievously. He slid off the desk and began to pace back and forth from the Uncle Scrooge poster to one of Mickey Mouse. “Haven’t we seen ’em do that a thousand times on TV shows? Haven’t we all read Hammett and Chandler?”
“Mr. Pollard,” Julie said, “I was a police officer once—”
“Proves my point,” Bobby said. “Frank, if you’d gone to the cops, you’d no doubt already have been booked, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a thousand years.”
“There’s a more important reason I can’t go to the cops. That would be like going public. Maybe the press would hear about me, and be real eager to do a story about this poor guy with amnesia and bags of cash. Then he would know where to find me. I can’t risk that.”
Bobby said, “Who is ‘he,’ Frank?”
“The man who was chasing me the other night.”
“The way you said it, I thought you’d remembered his name, had a specific person in mind.”
“No. I don’t know who he is. I’m not even entirely sure what he is. But I know he’ll come for me again if he learns where I am. So I’ve got to keep my head down.”
From the sofa, Clint said, “I better flip the tape over.”
They waited while he popped the cassette out of the recorder.
Although it was only three o’clock, the day was in the grip of a false twilight indistinguishable from the real one. The breeze at ground level was striving to match the wind that drove the clouds at higher altitudes; a thin fog poured in from the west, exhibiting none of the lazy motion with which fogs usually advanced, swirling and churning, a molten flux that seemed to be trying to solder the earth to the thunderheads above.
When Clint had the recorder going again, Julie said, “Frank, is that the end of it? When you woke Saturday morning, wearing new clothes, with the paper bag full of money on the bed beside you?”
“No. Not the end.” He raised his head, but he didn’t look at her. He stared past her at the dreary day beyond the windows, though he seemed to be gazing at something much farther away than Newport Beach. “Maybe it’s never going to end.”
From the second flight bag out of which he had earlier withdrawn the bloody shirt and the sample of black sand, he produced a one-pint mason jar of the type used to store home-canned fruits and vegetables, with a sturdy, hinged glass lid that clamped on a rubber gasket. The jar was filled with what appeared to be rough, uncut, dully gleaming gems. Some were more polished than others; they sparkled, flared.
Frank released the lid, tipped the jar, and poured some of the contents onto the imitation blond-wood Formica desktop.
Julie leaned forward.
Bobby stepped in for a closer look.
The less irregular gems were round, oval, teardrop, or lozenge-shaped; some aspects of each stone were smoothly curved, and some were naturally beveled with lots of sharp edges. Other gems were lumpy, jagged, pocked. Several were as large as fat grapes, others as small as peas. They were all red, though they varied in their degree of coloration. They vigorously refracted the light, a pool of scarlet glitter on the pale surface of the desk; the gems marshaled the diffuse glow of the lamps through their prisms, and cast shimmering spears of crimson toward the ceiling and one wall, where the acoustic tiles and Sheetrock appeared to be marked by luminous wounds.
“Rubies?” Bobby asked.
“They don’t look quite like rubies,” Julie said. “What are they, Frank?”
“I don’t know. They might not even be valuable.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“Saturday night I couldn’t sleep much at all. Just minutes at a time. I kept tossing and turning, popping awake again as soon as I dozed off. Afraid to sleep. And I didn’t nap Sunday afternoon. But by yesterday evening, I was so exhausted, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more. I slept in my clothes, and when I got up this morning, my pants pockets were full of these things.”
Julie plucked one of the more polished stones from the pile and held it to her right eye, looking through it toward the nearest lamp. Even in its raw state, the gem’s color and clarity were exceptional. They might, as Frank implied, be only semiprecious , but she suspected that they were, in fact, of considerable value.
Bobby said, “Why’re you keeping them in a mason jar?”
“Because I had to go buy one anyway to keep this, ” Frank said.
From the flight bag he produced a larger, quart-size jar and placed it on the desk.
Julie turned to look at it and was so startled that she dropped the gem she had been examining. An insect, nearly as large as her hand, lay in that glass container. Though it had a dorsal shell like a beetle—midnight black with blood-red markings around the entire rim—the thing within that carapace more closely resembled a spider than a beetle. It had the eight, sturdy, hairy legs of a tarantula.
“What the hell?” Bobby grimaced. He was mildly entomophobic. When he encountered any insect more formidable than a housefly, he called upon Julie to capture or kill it, while he watched from a distance.
“Is it alive?” Julie asked.
“Not now,” Frank said.
Two forearms, like miniature lobster claws, extended from under the front of the thing’s shell, one on each side of the head, though they differed from the appendages of a lobster in that the pincers were far more highly articulated than those of any common crustacean. They somewhat resembled hands, with four curved, chitinous segments, each jointed at the base; the edges were wickedly serrated.