A Serenade For Rats

Crime Fiction by Robb White

I was almost grateful when Bart Massey flung open the door and stomped in, spraying droplets in all directions, cursing the wet weather.

“He show up yet?”

Bart never read an epic, not even a graphic novel version of one, but he starts every conversation in medias res.

“The guy, you know, the guy.”

“No, I don’t know which guy you mean, Bart.”

“Jesus, Ray, you can’t miss him. He looks like the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

Now that was impressive. Normally the totality of Bart’s knowledge of popular culture could fit easily inside the circumference of a shot glass with a fat crayon.

Before I had time to ask the obvious, the door swung open behind Bart. A man taller than Bart but not as broad slipped inside and stood there looking at me beneath the brim of a velour fedora with a sodden feather. Water sluiced forward, spattering his belted camel overcoat that looked expensive when he nodded at Bart first then me.  

In his late fifties, he wore his hair in a long, gray-blond ponytail. He bore no real resemblance to the dashing aristocratic figure on horseback Bart had indicated and which I’d filed away in a dim memory pocket from boyhood. The black satin ruffle shirt tucked into black leather pants which folded into a pair of calf-length black boots completed an ensemble you’d ignore on Melrose Avenue, but this is Bridge Street, Northtown, Ohio, not even Cleveland. Offsetting that impression were a ruddy complexion in a lived-in face, big hands. He had the confident manner  of someone used to creating a scene and not being shy about it.

Even his name had verve: Roald Runyan. Grudgingly, I felt compelled to refer to the deputy as my “part-time associate,” dreading the benchmark I’d just set.

It sounded simple. He wanted me to find a missing man, a friend of his he was riding across the country with. Runyan rode up from tiny Salem, West Virginia where he was on a sabbatical from his teaching position. Jesse Moorehead lived in Sandusky, about 60 miles west of Cleveland on Lake Erie. They planned to meet up here in Northtown at the Wyandotte Bar fifty yards up the street from my office. His friend never showed. Runyan waited, made what he called “a two-day attempt” to find him or get some word from his family in Indiana.  

“What time did you get to the Wyandotte, Mister Runyan?”

“The day after I called Jesse from East Palestine, where I was visiting family before we started the trip.”

“That’s on the Ohio River,” Bart informed me.

“I told him I’d meet him the next afternoon. The fifteenth of August. I’d been drinking.”

“What time did you arrive at the Wyandotte?”

“That next day, as I said. No Jesse. I spent a couple days, drank at the bar, came back at different times, asked again, went right up to closing time. Nobody saw him or remembered him in the place.”

“Did you speak to Ida?”

“Who?”

“Ida Zweigert runs the Wyandotte for her husband Oliver. He’s in the county nursing home.”

“How did Jesse sound over the phone?”

“Stressed,” Runyan said. “But he didn’t say why. I recall loud voices in the background.”

The Wyandotte was rowdy. Lots of police calls, fights, drunk-and-disorderly arrests, especially weekends.

“The background voices. Were they angry or people having a good time?”

“I couldn’t tell. My cell service was cutting out.”

“Do you remember what Jesse said just before the call ended?”

“It was a short conversation. Nothing more than ‘I’ve got to go, see you when you get here. I filed a missing person’s report before I left. Time was critical. I was on contract to teach in the fall. We both were.”

“Mister Runyan, that was last August. Why, if you don’t mind me asking, did you wait three months before contacting me?”

“Did I say ‘last August,’?” Runyan’s face looked as though he’d bit into something sour. “This was five years ago.”

“You’re shitting me,” Bart said.

 “You find people, right?”

“I try to.”

After several more questions on the particulars of the day before and after the disappearance, our talk devolved into the pragmatic concerns of hiring me—costs per diem, providing him with progress reports, and all the paperwork that belies the portrayals of TV sleuths. Our business concluded with a retainer check he placed on my desk. Runyan left in the middle of thunderclap as wind-blown sheets of cold rain splashed against the glass.  

I looked at the date I’d written and added five years.

“Five years and some change,” I said.

“You’re shitting me,” Bart repeated.

“I heard you the first time.”

***

Ida Zweigert has been running the red-brick, Victorian Wyandotte Bar place ever since Ollie Zweigert was put in the county nursing home for early onset dementia.

Mostly alone with her hired staff but sometimes with her on-and-off boyfriends. Still a handsome woman despite the frizzy dye job, she’s a fixture in the harbor; locals believe she carries clout in politics. She also hated my guts.

The music in the place always reflected the tastes of the current boyfriend. The last time I met Bart there, steel guitar boomed from the speakers. When I walked in that afternoon, skipping around the puddles between her place and my office,  I didn’t recognize the music.

“Hey, handsome.”

Her standard greeting for me.

“Handsome” isn’t a compliment.

A big man with heavy shoulders and a blue neck tattoo a few stools down laughed at the cheap wit. I didn’t know him.

“What bring you here, lover boy?”

“Lover boy,” another familiar jibe from Ida’s bag of quips.

Years ago, I’d been involved with a married woman later murdered by her husband. My testimony helped put him away. Small towns, small circles, as they say. More like poisonous Venn diagrams.

“Boilermaker,” I said. “Unless you’re too busy gossiping with Mister Beefcake.”

“What’s he say, Ida?”

“Nothing, babe,” she replied, never even turning her head or raising her voice. “Fix me a JB and a draft.”

He seemed to be flexing just sliding off his stool. Bunched around the bulk of his deltoids, his neck seemed abnormally small. After tossing a black look in my direction, he headed for the racks of bottles behind the bar.

“I’ll swap gossip with you anytime, pretty face.”

The music was making my chest bone thump.

“Ida, who worked the bar five years ago with you and Ollie?”

I looked at her boyfriend behind the bar staring at the glittering rows of liquor bottles reflected in the mirror; he reminded me of an ape staring at a fire.

“Why you asking me that now?”

“Just curious.”

“Bullshit.”

“How’s Oliver doing, by the way?”

“Like you care,” she said. She hunched her shoulders dimpling the tops of her breasts. “He has good days and bad days.”

“You mind if I pay him a visit?”

“Be my guest. Just turn the lights down before you walk into the room. He wakes up and sees you, it might scare the shit out of him.”

Loud enough to draw appreciative chuckles from the knot of drinkers. Her muscle-headed boyfriend loomed into view beside us. He pushed a tumbler of whiskey and a glass of draft in my direction.

“Drink up and buzz off.”

“Now, hon,” Ida said, “Be nice. He’s nice. Aren’t you, Ray?”

“Sure am,” I agreed and toasted him.

I finished the booze. Not even JB. Four Roses, the one she served late at night to the men too drunk to know the difference. I put a ten on the bar, nodded to him, and got up to go.

“So long, creep,” Ida’s new man said.

What was it, I wondered, that drew women to violent men?   

***

The rain had slowed from a deluge to a steady drizzle, like an ice-cold shower from a nozzle, and by the time I crossed the facility’s parking lot, fat flakes tumbled from iron-gray skies. Lake-effect weather, as we call it, can turn here on a dime. Tomorrow could be all blue skies. I glimpsed ranks of whitecaps dotting choppy pewter water smashing into the breakwall farther down from Lake Road. Colossal shafts of crepuscular light, the size of Parthenon columns, created a trompe l’oeil effect of light and shadow like a giant disco light penetrating the bellies of cumulonimbi blanketing Lake Erie as far as Canada beyond the horizon.

Oliver Zeiger’s room was on the second floor at the end of the hallway. Gray flocked wallpaper and blue-gray carpeting with golden fleurs-de-lis created a lulling effect. Every other unit of the overhead fluorescent lighting was switched on, which added to the somnambulistic effect. I’d spoken to the supervising nurse on his condition when I called from the parking lot.

Ida promoted the idea her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s when gossip said it was syphilis, the tertiary and final stage of the disease. He rarely experienced lucid intervals now, according to the supervisor who bought the story I was working for the family’s trust-fund lawyer.

“Ollie, can you hear me?”

I leaned over the bed. His lips moved to my voice. Flakes of dried spittle caked the corners of his mouth. His lids were at half-mast, fluttered twice, seeing but unseeing. His hair was a tangle of ringlets, purple bags like half-moons hung under his eyes. His tongue poked briefly from his mouth and withdrew, an albino eel popping out of a cave. Once a good-looking man, he was ravaged from within by microbes eating his brain. Olly, Olly oxen free, I thought, remembering the childhood game of hide-and-seek.

“He wakes up now and then,” said a voice behind me.

I straightened up. It was the LPN on duty. Her name tag said “Clarissa.”

“Is he able to talk?”

“Mostly he just rambles nonsense and makes squeaking noises.”

“What are these?” I pointed to the drawings on the walls.

“He draws them. The same thing all the time.”

I looked closer. “Big, hairy rats.”

“Nothing else but rats,” she laughed. “All day long sometimes. He likes it when we tape them to the walls.”

A disturbed child’s art gallery of crayon rodents. Sometimes a single one, sometimes pairs. Usually a large brown or gray one at the head of a seething pack. The smaller they were, the more they resembled scribbled swirls, loops, a vortex of rat frenzy. Some had ruby-red jaws.

I pointed at a drawing. “What are these rats doing? Biting? It looks like—”

“Parts of people,” she said. “Arms, legs, faces. Before his condition deteriorated, he would draw them hiding in weeds and a deserted building. Over there,” she said, pointing to the back wall, “those are the oldest ones.”

 “I see.”

“We have to take them down when the state inspector or his wife visits. The wife, she doesn’t come very often.”

It didn’t sound like a rebuke. Nursing home staff get accustomed to families abandoning their loved ones after a while. I thought it odd that Ida Zweigert wanted the drawings down. She wasn’t known for possessing a delicate sensibility.

I stepped over to the farthest drawing and worked my way from one wall to the next. In many of them, the rats fought each other or dined on jagged portions of human anatomy. Some were downright grisly as the feasting became voracious. The last two featured swirling gray masses of rats tearing up or dragging off loops of intestines and genitalia. I noted the squabbling among the rats over viscera, rarely acting in unison, as if they’d decided there wasn’t enough to go around.

I turned, smiling to the aide. “There’s a certain je ne se quois sensibility at play here.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. I was trying to be funny.”

“Whatever.”

She was young. The darker corners of the human psyche were still too new to her. She wore a yellow wool sweater draped over her shoulders and buttoned at the top. She suddenly clutched her elbows together in a nonsexual way, the opposite of Ida back in the bar. “Somebody just walked across my grave,” she said.

“My old grandmother used to say that.”

“Really.”

Her tennis shoes made no sound on the floor as she turned to go. I was left behind with Ollie Zweigert and his rats. Ollie never spoke a word although several times I saw his jaw working. My little joke boomeranged yet brought back another French term for the gesture she made before turning to go: frisson. That little thrill of skin-tingling called paresthesia. I contemplated this morbid gallery of rats rampant for a long time before I felt the need to go home.  

***

The skies unleashed more rain, churned out by the infamous “snow machine” of the lake’s warmer waters coming up against the freezing winds from Canada. Back in my apartment loft above my office, I turned up the thermostat, fixed a drink and settled in my ratty old La-Z-Boy, a Goodwill purchase when I first bought the building from my settlement. I placed the chair smack in the center of the room and it hasn’t moved since. The nap on the arms is so worn it felt like caressing a boar’s hide.

After the second Tom Collins, I knew what it was.

The rats so dominated my attention that I almost missed it. They all occupied the same environment, a neglected ruins. Crumbling, soot-blackened brickwork, now and then a facade. In one, Oliver drew fronds of wild sumac growing against the sides of an abandoned building where the rats cavorted below. Broken windows, a fire escape in another. Tunnels of foul, grainy orange dirt where the rats scurried back and forth from burrows.

How had I not seen it right away? It was locked in my memory. The old textile factory on Hulbert Avenue just above my building’s loft fronting Bridge Street. Long gone, the city tore it down when I was seventeen. The factory stood as a landmark in the harbor for many generations of Swedes, Irish, and Italians who came over to dig the sewerage system. In my early teens, we boys roamed among the ruins, played at war, hide-and-seek, climbed the rickety fire escape to the roof to look out over the harbor at the lakeboats bringing in iron ore pellets, stone, or coal or being emptied of the same cargo by the giant black Hewlett ore unloaders. We made war movies all over that building with my cousin’s Super 8 camera.

On the second level, giant bobbin machines stood in an array as they once had when the factory spun tons of fiber and wool into yarn for clothing merchants. I thought of children working twelve hours on that floor under deafening, dangerous conditions.

But on the first level, little machinery stood by the time we had discovered the place for a playhouse. A few tables and chairs no one wanted to steal. Big gaping holes in the floorboards. We crawled into them going from room to room, popping up in different places where other holes in the flooring existed. We were mindless of the hordes of rats that must have shared that space with us. Not your pet white lab rat, either, but cat-sized, vicious Norwegian rats that gnawed through steel fencing.

One time I had come face to face with a pack of them deep under the floorboards, too far from the next hole, exploring on my own. The touch of whiskers on my face sent me scrabbling in the other direction. I heard the squeals behind me and I felt the nip of sharp teeth on my pants leg. As I reached the hole and pulled myself to safety, a shaft of light illuminated the halo of ground I had scrambled from in terror. I looked over my shoulder and caught the gleam of red eyes.  I never went into the tunnels from then on.

Something else tickled my memory cells like those rat whiskers brushing my face. Some rumor in the harbor around the time Jesse Moorehead disappeared after showing up in Northtown. It was whispered about—sordid gossip of child molestation about a little girl.

Ida Zweigert’s daughter.

***

The Northtown Tribune’s archives at the public library hadn’t been digitized. Microfiche, however, provided some information: a single paragraph in a column below the fold of an issue dated five years ago; the headlines proclaiming the ground-breaking ceremony for the new animal shelter. Of the four county commissioners holding shiny spades and smiling at the camera, two names were familiar political figures in Northtown politics.

But there it was in the old typeface used then: “a man wanted for questioning” in the case of a rumored sexual assault on a child reported by none other than Ida Holyfield. It seems that a wild rumor in town generated enough interest that a county detective was sent to investigate.

I’d forgotten she was from one of the more prolific breeding clans in Northtown—one of the toughest, too. Gossip long said Ida’s “marriage” to Oliver Zweigert was a fiction; she was his common-law wife. Her teenaged daughter by a previous marriage was never connected to the Wyandotte bar as far as I knew, and no one I knew had ever mentioned her except for this one incident. She had been the sexually abused girl.

But abused by whom? The paper didn’t say. I went forward eighteen months hoping to find a follow-up story.

I went back to my databases and found the daughter living in a suburb of Cleveland. I used my access to BMV records to get her current address and phone number.

I called and asked—using a familiar ruse—if we could meet to discuss “a matter affecting her step-father’s will.”

“Is Oliver dead? Did the crazy bitch kill him?”

“I’d rather discuss it with you in person.”

“Who did you say you are?”

I could hear a child crying in the background. Then a man’s thick voice ordering the child to “shut the hell up, Mommy’s on the phone.”

“I work for a firm in Northtown. My questions have to do with a proposed conservatorship for Mister Oliver Zweigert.”

“So is he dead or not?”

“He’s severely incapacitated. The issue has to do with the power of attorney. Technically, you as his only child—” Sounding like a mealy-mouthed lawyer was easy but legally unwise.

“I ain’t his child. Besides, the bitch said she was cutting me out of the will.”

Ida apparently left a scorched earth policy behind even with her own flesh and blood. It worked to my advantage. She reluctantly gave me a time the following day. I gave her the name of a decent restaurant in the Warehouse District where, I said, the sea scallops were the size of crab apples.

“My treat,”I offered. She declined, explaining with a doctor’s appointment as excuse.

“Sounds as if you’re a busy mom.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m sure we can work out a satisfying transaction nonetheless.”

I like the word transaction; it carries as many meanings as it hides.

***

The modest Craftsman had an abandoned house on one side and a boarded up place next to it. Graffiti announced it as Property of the Heartless Fiends, a notorious Cleveland gang with 15-year-olds who will shoot you to see if the gun works.

She was a younger version of Ida except for the silver-blue eyes. Taller than Ida by several inches with deep worry lines around her eyes. She might have been as bosomy as her mother without the cosmetic surgery. She covered what her mother put on display.  

I’d already discovered from my databases the house was in her name in a rough neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland that used to be mainly ethnic Polish but was now African-American, Puerto Rican, and poor whites the cops called “city goats.”

“I saw your step-father last night and I believe he’s—”

“—dying, I hope. Satan has a special pitchfork ready for him.”

“—very ill,” I continued, ignoring the bubbled-up wrath she spewed.

“Can you tell me anything in his past that might be causing him mental distress?”

“You mean besides his slut wife?”

“Yes.”

“How about murder? Him and a bunch of other drunken assholes ran a man out of the bar and clubbed him to death. Will that do?”

Time stopped. I know that because I heard the beating of my heart in sync with the ticking of an ormolu clock on the fireplace mantle.

“That’ll do,” I said.

***

She’d had years to think about it, piece it together from memory. All told, it was a tattered cloth of fragments; partly comprised of what she’d been told by others, rarely from her parents, who demanded silence. And lies. What she thought she knew wasn’t exactly the truth—an acknowledgment she herself made, which made me trust her more.

Louise had been used to wandering around the bar on her own while both her parents worked the bar when the Wyandotte was struggling, not yet solvent, and her mother had no sooner been hired by Ollie as a barmaid than she seduced him. They both worked sixteen-hour days, and every dime made went into the place. Meeting the monthly note was a struggle and there was nothing extra to pay for a full-time babysitter.

She wasn’t exactly “neglected,” she admitted, because she remembered how both her stepfather and mother would track her movements even during the busiest times when the bar was lined with every variety of drinker—college kids, tourists, dockworkers, businessmen, local big shots slumming—and some “bad-assed biker types” looking to stake out the place for themselves.

“There were terrible fistfights out back. I saw men come in beaten to a bloody pulp.”

Lou-Lou, as she was called then, wasn’t allowed outside; she could play in the back rooms as long as she didn’t mess with the beer or liquor cases. The Wyandotte had an old-fashioned Victorian foyer off the front door, with leather armchairs, a potted, withered Ficus, reading lamp, and a bookcase were set up to give the effect of  pretentious British club but came off, according to Ida’s daughter, “looking more like an old-time cat house.” I remembered the Skeeball machine from my own visits as a boy with my father while he drank and kibitzed with the tugmen at the bar.

One really busy evening, she recalled a strange man spoke kindly to her while she nodded off in one of the chairs. She was bored and wanted to go home, but she knew it would be hours before her parents would find a free moment to hustle her off to home and bed.

“The teachers were always pissed at me,” she reflected, “because I never did much homework. I was so exhausted from being kept up late that I fell asleep in school.”

She remembered how the strange man looked at her and smiled when he came in. “He must have been young, in his late twenties, but to me all adults were ‘old.’ Yet he seemed different.”

“How, Louise?”

“He was someone I never saw before. I knew he’d come on a motorcycle because he wore the same leather as other riders.”

“Like the bikers across the street at the Step Down?”

Even as the Wyandotte gentrified, the Step Down remained squalid, dangerous—fights between biker gangs, knifings, and drugs until it was torched by “Jewish lighting,” in Ida’s words.

“Yes—no, not like those scum. They were hardcore sonsofbitches with beards and greasy clothes. They smelled. Once in a while, they’d come in and say things under their breath. I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew they were nasty. Oliver warned me not to talk to those men.”

“This stranger was different,” I prodded.

The loneliness of her childhood in a bar full of noisy drunks and loud music from the jukebox came through in the pitch and tone of her voice.

“Some jokers played Frankie Yankovic’s ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ whenever they got shit-faced.”

“What do you remember about that night?”

“It gets confusing,” she said.

She was close to tears by then.

“Because of what happened afterward?” I prodded.

“All the screaming and running around, my mother going nuts. I was afraid they were mad at me.”

“The man, is this him?”

I placed Jesse Moorehead’s photo on the coffee table in front of us.

“God, yes, that’s his face.”

“You said ‘confusing,’ Louise. What did you mean by that?”

“There was . . . another man,” she said. “He came in right after the first one. He wasn’t a biker, but I don’t know if I fell asleep and woke up again or I dreamed it, you know?”

“I understand but try to remember.”

“He, the other man. He smiled too. He kept coming out to see me. Once he brought me an orange pop and a bag of potato chips.”  

“It wasn’t the first man, you’re sure?”

“Yes, I remember this man’s smile. They were the same age except he, the second one, had street clothes, not biker’s.”

I waited.

“He touched me. I don’t remember what led up to it. All I remember is the pain I felt when he put his finger inside me. I’ll never forget the look on his face. The way his smile twisted. He looked crazy.”

“What happened then?”

“I didn’t run out tell everyone a man put his finger in me, if that’s what you mean. I remember sitting there in that chair, thinking I had to pee badly. I was afraid I was bleeding. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Did you see him—this man—was he at the bar, the one who hurt you?”

“I remember talking to my mother. I must have told her something. She went crazy. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. I started bawling. She brought Oliver over. Then all hell broke loose.”

“What happened?”

“You must know or you wouldn’t be here, right? A bunch of those drunks—respectable citizens by now, I’ll bet—they formed a posse on the spot and went after the stranger. I remember a man running out the door, I remember shouting.”

Louise’s memory would write the narrative the only way it could to deflect more pain; the word posse was an afterthought, maybe Ollie’s or her mother’s, an adult word she’d picked up long after the incident.

“So you . . . picked out the stranger, the nice man, the one who first smiled at you, the biker wearing leather?”

She looked as if I’d slapped her face.

“You were a child, Louise,” I urged, placatingly, “You’re not responsible for what adults did.”

From stunned to wilted to fury, in one swoop.

“They told me later he got what he deserved. . . .”

“But he wasn’t the one,” I said.  

If she wanted absolution from me, I couldn’t give it. I had my own demons.

An old story. Outraged villagers grabbing their pitchforks and heading for the monster, a man who’d defiled a child.

She seemed to come out of a trance. “What’s this got to do with me? Get the fuck out of my house!”

The sobbing began as a low moan and climbed the scale. When the ersatz husband came out of the bedroom, I was afraid I was going to be beaten up in her living room surrounded by a screaming child. I headed for the door.

That’s me, Ray Jarvi, spreader of cheer all around.

***

On the drive home, I had much to ponder as far as my next move. Ida was too volatile to confront in the bar with my new information. Ollie was for all intents and purposes a rat-sketching vegetable. Louise had come right up to the edge of what she could clearly recall and be certain of, but a first-year law student could pick her story apart if any future indictments were levied. And where was that lynch mob today?

Louise remembered the nice stranger making a phone call from the pay phone in the anteroom because her mother had dragged her out there by the hand and pointed at him, screaming: “It’s him, isn’t it, Lou-Lou!” She remembered a bloodless expression as he understood what the outraged mother was accusing him of.

I imagined the end of the call with Runyan, dropping the receiver and bolting for the door with a pack of hyenas behind him.

The puzzle had a few more pieces to go. By the time I pulled into the lot behind my building, I found a way to get them from the only person who could provide them.

***

Twelve hours a day scouring databases is not why I became a private investigator. I neglected calls from paying clients. I risked losing my license if what I discovered ever became public, but I was past the point of no return. I showed Ida the documents revealing how much she paid the I.R.S. versus what the bar probably took in. In return for my silence, she agreed to come clean.

“All I want to know is how he died.”

She didn’t even bother to ask who the “he” was.

She led me into the dimly lit storage area. I had a moment’s panic thinking her musclehead was in there waiting with a baseball bat. Louise said she used to play with her dolls back here and pretend the stacked cases of beer were mountains.

“I wasn’t there,” she began.

“Bullshit.”

Neck Glyph appeared at the end of the bar. “Any problems back there, babe?”

“Go back to the bar. If I need you, I’ll fucking call you!”

Pure Ida Holyfield, hill accent intact.

“Your pet gorilla, will he keep out of this?”

“He’ll do what I tell him just like Ollie. Now as for you, I swear I’ll take you down with me if this goes public.”

“Agreed.”

She breathed deeply and then cut her eyes to me, a cocky woman who thought herself smarter than everybody, especially men who couldn’t stop staring at her boobs.  

“Ollie went total ape-shit at first,” she said. “He was running up and down the bar screaming he was going to strangle the son of a bitch with his bare hands.”

“Who accused him?”

I shoved the photo of Jesse at her.

“Get that away from me!” she barked. “I made Lou-Lou tell me who, point to the man, but she wouldn’t. She just shook her head and cried.”

“Somebody accused him. Why would he run?”

“Someone said it had to be a stranger—”

“You told a reporter from the Trib the next day.”

“No one recognized him. Someone at the bar said he was on the phone while Louise was sleeping in the chair out front.”

“So who said it was the biker?”

“Forget it, gumshoe. That’s the nephew of the city manager. He runs the country club nowadays. You go near him, you’re toast.”

She made me pry it out of her. When Jesse felt those eyes boring into him, he knew he had to get out of there or he’d be surrounded by a mob of inebriated males spoiling for vigilante justice. He ran. Maybe he shouldn’t have. Jesse must have thought he could outrun a bunch of boozed-up males. He almost made it. He’d gotten his bike started when Zweigert hit him like a linebacker and knocked him to the street. Jesse abandoned his bike and ran across Bridge Street and up Hulbert Avenue with that dog pack on his heels.

Somebody tackled him opposite the abandoned sweater factory, according to Ida, who saw it all from the rear. Others caught up, and then it wasn’t a fair fight. Surrounded, he was beaten and stomped in the deserted street. Ollie wasn’t satisfied. While the men were standing around Jesse’s unconscious body, Zweigert went off into the weeds and came back with a thick chunk of concrete. Before anyone could say anything, he brought it down on Jesse’s head.

“It sounded like a busted melon,” Ida recalled.

I’m sure she got her own licks in. But I didn’t accuse her.

“Was he dead then?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you ‘don’t know’?”

“Ollie and them guys, they hauled him off into the weeds. Ollie told me that night he came back later and shoved the body into a big hole in the floorboards. He said the rats would devour him.”

The rats devoured more than Jesse Moorehead’s body; they ate Ollie’s brain.

A couple of Northtown’s finest citizens were in the posse that night, including a future superintendent of schools. They all punched or kicked the fallen body when they could get a shot in until Ollie did the coup de grâce with his block of concrete. Ollie hauled Jesse’s bike away the next day and threw it into the Northtown River.

Ida said many of them still come into the Wyandotte with their wives.

They all thrived in various careers except Vinnie Stallamattio, the Bridge Street boozer who jumped off the top of the lift bridge. Power hoses washed the blood off the road. Pillars of the community. Stalwarts of public decorum. All with families, wives, and kids grown up. People who pay taxes and vote, civic-minded folk who serve on juries.

***

I try not to be superstitious. Sometimes I look for patterns where there aren’t any. Explanations for why things are the way they are. Why people act like dogs meeting in the road. When you look at the space station on a dark night, it seems to zigzag but only seems to.  Computers aboard keep it perfectly synchronized on its GPS track without the slightest numerical variation in latitude or longitude. The human mind needs patterns, so we think it moves helter-skelter across the sky. On the day Jesse Moorehead was attacked by a bunch of drunks and left to rot beneath decayed floorboards in an abandoned textile factory, thousands of “true believers” led by an expert in Mayan cosmology gathered in sacred sites around the world to ward off global disaster by holding hands, meditating, and humming in harmonic resonance. It was also the umpteenth anniversary of Elvis’ death. Nothing to connect, you say.

The tiny spider broke my concentration. He was only a few feet from where I’d first spotted him on the ceiling the day the Scarlet Pimpernel showed up in my office. I start and end my day with a routine: I check the TV in case there’s a thermonuclear war declared, or a Mt. Everest-sized asteroid heading our way. Disaster gives me hope. That evening, it happened a radio astronomer from the massive telescope in Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert was announcing a new super-Earth-sized planet had been discovered for Barnard’s Star, six light years out, as if it were lurking just beyond the Oort Cloud.

“It’s an extremely cold planet,” the young scientist burbled to the interviewer.

“Not as cold as ours,” I said to the TV.

The exuberant interviewer nattered on about space travel in the coming years for ordinary people. I shut off the fluorescent lights, listened to the familiar sizzle as they flickered and went out. I was nailed to the floor by my own dull, nighttime routine waiting for me upstairs. I wanted to stay there in the dark, not moving, lurking in the soft dark like the black spider on my ceiling. It knows nothing of suffering or of its universal cause:  attachment.

In the end, I went upstairs, made a Tom Collins, and sat in my scuffed-up chair listening to a Chopin étude and thinking about how I would inform a client with a literary name he’d been saddled with of the death of Jesse Moorehead, a friend he’d wondered about for the last five years.

---

Bio: Robb White is the Derringer-nominated author of the Thomas Haftmann, Raimo Jarvi, and Jade Hui detective series. Betray Me Not was selected for distinction by the Independent Fiction Alliance in 2022. His latest works are a collection of noir tales: Fade to Black: Noir Stories of Grifters, Drifters, and Unlovable Losers and a crime novel: Danse Macabre in New Orleans.

Robb has published with The Yard several times. You can read his short stories HERE.

He has written quite a few books, which can be found on Amazon HERE

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