John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Before they could knock, I opened the door and indicated that we should talk in their room. They hadn’t heard about the shootings at Metairie since, according to Angel, they hadn’t been listening to the radio in the rental car. His face was red as he spoke and his lips were pale. I don’t think that I had ever seen him so angry.

In their room, the bickering started again. Stacey Byron, a bottle blonde in her early forties who had kept her figure remarkably well for a woman of her age, had apparently come on to Louis in the course of their interrogation of her. Louis had, in a manner, responded.

“I was pumping her for information,” he explained, his mouth twitching in amusement as he looked sideways at Angel. Angel was unimpressed.

“Sure you wanted to pump her, but the only information you were after was her bra size and the dimensions of her ass,” he spat. Louis rolled his eyes in exaggerated bafflement and I thought, for a moment, that Angel was going to strike him. His fists bunched and he moved forward slightly before he managed to restrain himself.

I felt sorry for Angel. While I didn’t believe there was anything in Louis’s courting of Edward Byron’s wife, beyond the natural response of any individual to the favorable attentions of another and Louis’s belief that, by leading her on, she might give away something about her ex-husband, I knew how much Louis mattered to Angel. Angel’s history was murky, Louis’s more so, but I remembered things about Angel, things that I sometimes felt Louis forgot.

When Angel was sent down to Rikers Island, he attracted the attentions of a man named William Vance. Vance had killed a Korean shopkeeper in the course of a botched robbery in Brooklyn and that was how he ended up in Rikers, but there were other things suspected of him: that he had raped and killed an elderly woman in Utica, mutilating her before she died; that he may have been linked to a similar killing in Delaware. There was no proof, other than rumor and conjecture, but when the opportunity came to put Vance away for the killing of the Korean, the DA, to his credit, seized it.

And for some reason, Vance decided that he wanted Angel dead. I heard that Angel had dissed him when Vance had tried to get it on with him, that he had knocked out one of Vance’s teeth in the showers. But there was no telling with a man like Vance: the workings of his mind were obscure and confused by hatred and strange, bitter longing. Now Vance didn’t just want to rape Angel: he wanted to kill him, and kill him slowly. Angel had pulled three to five. After one week in Rikers, the odds of him surviving his first month had plummeted.

Angel had no friends on the inside and fewer still outside, so he called me. I knew that it pained him to do so. He was proud and I think that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have tried to work out his problems for himself. But William Vance, with his tattoos of bloodied knives on his arms and a spider’s web over his chest, was far from ordinary.

I did what I could. I pulled Vance’s files and copied the transcripts of his interrogation over the Utica killing and a number of similar incidents. I copied details of the evidence assembled against him and the account of an eyewitness who later retracted after Vance made a call and threatened to fuck her and her children to death if she gave evidence against him. Then I took a trip to Rikers.

I spoke to Vance through a transparent screen. He had added an india ink tattoo of a tear below his left eye, bringing the total number of tattooed tears to three, each one representing a life taken. A spider’s silhouette was visible at the base of his neck. I spoke to him softly for about ten minutes. I warned him that if anything happened to Angel, anything at all, I would make sure that every con in the place knew that he was only a hair’s breadth away from sexual homicide charges involving old, defenseless women. Vance had five years left to serve before he became eligible for parole. If his fellow inmates found out what he was suspected of doing, there were men who could ensure that he would have to spend those five years in solitary to avoid death. Even then, he would have to check his food every day for powdered glass, would have to pray that a guard’s attention didn’t wander for an instant while he was being escorted to the yard for his hour’s recreation, or while he was being brought to the prison doctor when the stress began to take its toll on his health.

Vance knew all this and yet, two days after we spoke, he tried to castrate Angel with a shank. Only the force of Angel’s heel connecting with Vance’s knee saved him, although Angel still needed twenty stitches across his stomach and thigh after Vance slashed wildly at him as he fell to the ground.

Vance was taken in the shower the next morning. Persons unknown held him down, used a wrench to hold his mouth open, and then pumped water mixed with detergent into his body. The poison destroyed his insides, tearing apart his stomach and almost costing him his life. For the remainder of his life in prison he was a shell of a man, racked by pains in his gut that made him howl in the night. It had taken one telephone call. I live with that too.

After he was released, Angel hooked up with Louis. I’m not even sure how these two solitary creatures met, exactly, but they had now been together for six years. Angel needed Louis, and in his way, Louis needed Angel too, but I sometimes thought that the balance of the relationship hinged on Angel. Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner always feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it.

It emerged that they hadn’t learned much from Stacey Byron. The cops had been watching the house from the front but Louis and Angel, dressed in the only suit he owned, had come in from the back. Louis had flashed his fitness club membership and his smile as he told Mrs. Byron that they were just conducting a routine search of her garden and they spent the next hour talking to her about her ex-husband, about how often Louis worked out, and in the end, whether or not he’d ever had a white woman. It was at that point that Angel had really started to get annoyed.

“She says she hasn’t seen him in four months,” said Louis. “Says that last time she saw him, he didn’t say much, just asked after her and the kids and took some old clothes from the attic. Seems he had a carrier bag from some drugstore in Opelousas and the feds are concentrating their search there.”

“Does she know why the feds are looking for him?”

“Nope. They told her that he might be able to assist them with information on some unsolved crimes. She ain’t dumb, though, and I fed her a little more to see if she’d bite. She said that he always had an interest in medical affairs; seems he might have had ambitions to be a doctor at one time, although he didn’t have the education to be a tree surgeon.”

“Did you ask her if she thought he could kill?”

“I didn’t have to. Seems he threatened to kill her once, while they were arguing over the terms of the divorce.”

“Did she remember what he said?”

Louis nodded deeply, once.

“Uh-huh. He said he’d tear her fucking face off.”

Angel and Louis parted on bad terms, with Angel retiring to Rachel’s room while Louis sat on the balcony of their room and took in the sounds and smells of New Orleans, not all of them pleasant.

“I was thinking of getting a bite to eat,” he said. “You interested?”

I was surprised. I guessed that he wanted to talk but I had never spent time with Louis without Angel being present as well.

I checked on Rachel. The bed was empty and I could hear the shower running. I knocked gently on the door.

“It’s open,” she said.