The Sleeping and the Dead Read Online Free Page A

asked.
    â€œIt’s not all this bad. The kitchen’s OK. I haven’t seen the upstairs.” I plopped down on the antique settle.
    â€œI always thought my grandmother’s house was a creep show. She collected those realistic, life-size porcelain dolls. But this…” He ran a hand over the top of his smooth, shiny brown head. “Whoever put this together, there’s something not right with his head.”
    â€œI think all this belonged to his wife.” I wasn’t sure if it did, but sometimes when I visited I saw her sitting in here, polishing her nails. It seemed to be her room.
    â€œMichi was married?” He sat on a Casanova loveseat across from me.
    â€œHe’s a widower.”
    We waited in silence, looking at the carpet. I was struck, as always, by the smell of Michi’s house. It smelled like money, piles of it, obscene wealth mixed with the spicy odor of ancient lacquer, damp bricks, musty fabric and desertous old carpets, grease and rot and dust and sex and death. Behind every great fortune there is a crime, somebody once said. It took me a minute to remember who.
    Balzac.
    The driving, thumping techno beat never let up the whole time we sat there. It reminded me of that Poe story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”—the ancient dying house rotting beneath the weight of the family’s sins, its dark and secret heart bump-bump-bumping to the natural rhythm of a good hard rogering. It occurred to me then, but not for the first time, that Adam and I had never done it, never even made out at a Christmas party. It was strange. Although he was my junior by several years, he was good-looking and certainly desirable enough, but every time I thought about him that way, it gave me the heebs, like wanting to kiss your brother. He’d never shown any interest in me, either, never hit on me, never gave me any vibes at all.
    â€œSorry about tonight,” I said.
    He looked up from his wet brogans. “For what?”
    â€œFor stepping on your toes with the whole Christopher Marlowe thing. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I just blurted it out.”
    â€œYou saved my ass from a major rug dance in front of the chief. Just imagine if some reporter had made the connection instead of you.” He was being very gracious, more gracious than I ever would have been in his position. Adam was the MPD’s expert on the Playhouse Killer. His theater major from Rhodes College had come in handy when all the criminal-justice graduates were scratching their asses for answers. That jumped him in front of a bunch of more experienced detectives on the investigation. If he could break this case, he’d make captain. He knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it. What was more, he looked good on camera, so they had him on This Morning Memphis now and then to talk about the case, and after the last victim, they’d done a cover story on Adam in the Memphis Flyer . There was talk of a national news television show doing a special with him. They were hoping to get a Playhouse Killer episode, but our boy never obliged their shooting schedule.
    â€œYou’re a better person than me,” I said as I stood up. I couldn’t sit still.
    â€œWe already knew that.”
    I was no longer a passive observer in this investigation. I was part of it now—a witness. For the last four years I had been photographing the Playhouse Killer’s crime scenes. I had photographed his first victim before we knew we had a serial killer. Adam got me the gig when I was literally as low as I could get, and he’d broken any number of rules—personal and professional—to do it. At the time, I hadn’t worked in months and was almost to the point of hooking for dope money. He got my Canon out of hock at the pawn shop. I still hadn’t paid him back for that, four years later. He’d never asked. One more person I owed, one more person I could never repay.

 
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