The Sleeping and the Dead Read Online Free Page B

LMOST FIVE HOURS EARLIER , I had pulled up to the curb in front of Michi-san’s house and parked under the same dripping sycamore trees. I had known Michi for nearly fifteen years and had been mooching money off him for the last three. If it hadn’t been for Michi’s generous employment, I don’t know if I’d still be around to pollute the earth. He was a sugar daddy who demanded no sugar, daddy to dozens of human derelicts just like me. He had given me the money for the Leica in the first place, but that was before I had been obliged to pay first and last month’s rent on a new apartment. I needed more money and I knew just how to get it. So I was a leech, but I had learned a long time ago how to live with that.
    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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œCome 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.
    â€œSorry,” I said.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œOh good lord,