Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

T  H  R  E  E

AND

THE FOLLOWING NIGHTS

“Are your fangs making your life a misery?”

And then they were at the house on the other side of Buren Avenue, the Near West Side, and Cody’s brother who looked like him and not like him was saying, “Detective Lawry, my brother really looked up to you.”

“He… I liked Cody. I… He was going to be great. He was great. He had a great heart.”

I’m saying great too much.                          

“He really respected you too. Thought of you as a friend,” Cody’s brother said.

“Too bad when he called you two times that day you never picked up. He might still be alive if you had.”

Is what Cody’s brother DID NOT say, but what David was waiting to hear.

“Too bad,” Cody’s brother said, “I couldn’t have known so I could have stopped it.”

 

“That poor kid,” Dave said.

“Yeah, Cody was too young. This job is hard. He should have got help. He should have talked to somebody,” Dom shook his head and sounded almost angry as he drank his Scotch at the bar set up for the wake.

“No,” Dave said. “I meant his brother. I just talked to him. He… can you imagine? You’re talking to your brother, your best friend, and he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and you see him just pick up his gun, put it in his mouth and pull the trigger. Just blow his brains out the back of his head.”

“Did you see him. Before they closed the casket. He looked so peaceful.”

David started to say “Stenger and Stenger do good work,” but instead he said, “I hope he is. I hope wherever he is, he is… at peace.”

What a cliché!

“Me too,” Dom said, looking very sad.

But maybe there was something to clichés? After all, that’s why they existed. And he could use some peace, himself? Couldn’t they all?

Dom said, “Dave, you are coming over tonight. I don’t like you just being by yourself.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Don’t just say yeah.”

“I’m coming.”

“Cause none of us is really that strong. We think we are, but none of us is.”

“I said yes, Dom.”

“There’s a thing I gotta tell you, so I might as well tell you now. And it’s gonna undo everything cause we’ve been friends a long time and I’m worried about you and I don’t want you to think I’m a piece of shit, but… And I should keep it to myself forever…”

“Dom, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Do you remember Suzie?” Dom looked at David with the saddest eyes.

“Yeah.”

“I told you she was no good. She was cheating on you.”

“You were so mad at her.”

Dom looked at his drink.

“I was mad at myself. I always felt like shit about this. I new she was cheating cause she was cheating with me. With others too, but everyone was fucking her, and I hated myself for doing it, and I hated it cause people were talking about you, so…. That’s what I did. I told you.”

“Oh,” David said. Suzie was almost eighteen years ago. So much more had happened. Dom had been carrying that with him? All through high school? They had been kids. Sophomore, junior and senior year, Dom had been carrying that?

“Dave, I’m so sorry.”

“Dom, buddy,” David hugged his friend.

“Buddy, it’s history.”

“You still coming to dinner? Cynthia’s doing a chicken caprese.”

“Well, then I’m definitely coming,” Dave said. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

 

After the funeral of Cody Beeker, David Lawry spent the evening at his old high school friend Dom Ciamente’s house, and this was the beginning of his not being so lonely. Not long after Claire invited him to her house, and so the two of them made their way from his mother’s bed in that lonely house to her warm bed in a feminine house with the smells of potpourri and wax tarts. Life seemed to be getting better and better, and even Captain Karney was thinking David would be alright after all.

And then, one night, on Ecosae, one of the nice streets around the University, in an alley they found a twenty something, most probably a college student, in jeans and a good shirt, a pea coat, dead against a wall. David and his new partner Ron McCafferty were called in, and the cops who had found him said it seemed as if he’d been strangled. His throat had been crushed.

“He looked so familiar,” David murmured over and over again. “He looked so familiar.”

It had been on their way home that David and McCafferty got a call from the morgue and went down to see the pale, blond boy. He looked, and this sounded strange to say, deader than ever, and David thought he really should get another line of work. The coroner was saying: “…crushed wind pipe, but not by a bar or anything, by a hand but how strong a hand it would have been…”  And no human hand was that strong.

“And look,” she said.

At first David wasn’t sure what she was pointing to. It was McCafferty who squinted and said, “Bite marks?”

“Like he was mauled,” the coroner said.

“We never looked at that. We never saw that,” McCafferty said, as the ground disappeared from David’s feet and he remembered his dream of the blond boy chased by a crew of men, lifted up against the very wall where he had been found, with no one to hear him.

“You wouldn’t have thought of it,” the coroner said. “There was no blood. He was drained of every drop of blood.”

 

The louder she screamed, the harder he fucked her. He knelt on the bed, holding her hips and he thought she was trying to forget her son who didn’t want to talk to her, and her first husband and the bullshit of her job, and he was definitely, definitely trying to forget dead bodies, bodies drained of blood, young boys, boys dying, dreams of boys dying, being someone who didn’t stop shit from happening, but was just a witness to madness. If he could, one two, three four, head in the air, eyes open to the darkness, fuck it out, get it out… His body shook… He gasped as he came…

If he could…. If he could….

It wasn’t hard to get women off. It wasn’t impossible. You just had to know what you were doing, to pay attention, and he got Claire off long before he came so that he could have this moment of stupid silence where he knelt behind her like one stunned, and then gently folded over in bed.

 

Things didn’t stop, though. Four days later, another college boy was found dead in the same way. It was the strangest thing, and when it happened the the third time they had to put their heads together, realized they should have done so before. Here was something new. The target was white boys, college students, all around the university area.

“Aren’t they usually the ones we’re worried about raping girls on campus?” Tanya Sommers quipped. David looked at the detectivie with distaste, and like most Black women he’d met, she looked back at him like she didn’t care.

“And all with the blood drained from their bodies, throats crushed, throat punctures.”

“A vampire killed them,” Detective Sommers said blankly.

When David and Dom looked at her she said, “You were thinking the same thing.”

“Or,” David reasoned, “someone who thinks he’s a vampire did it.”

“Or she,” Tanya said.

“Or she.”

“Then we just gotta tell guys to watch out,” Dom said. “Go around campus and let them know.”

“I bet they already know, but let’s get on it,” Tanya said.

“And before you say anything,” Dom continued, “we’re going to tell all guys. Not just white guys.”

Tanya Sommers nodded. “Who knows what this crazy bitch’s motives are in the end?”

 

“Okay, so that was great,” Logan Long declared. Grey haired, scruffy, the sort of middle aged guy who never saw a shirt tucked in that he didn’t want to untuck or a plaid that he didn’t wear, was, with his life partner, Burt  Alexander, the proprietor of the Grey Note.

“They loved you,” he told Dan. “And by the way, I’m glad you and Nick made it work out.”

“It’s all business.”

“He’s a piece of shit,” Logan said frankly. “But you need him for now. I don’t want to see you guys fold just because of him.”

Like Dan, Logan Long was a man of partially Middle Eastern descent with dark eyes in his olive complexioned face.Dan nodded.

“By the way… that blond over there wants to meet you. And I know how much you like to be met these days.”

Dan raised an eyebrow. Logan elbowed him. “Go on over.”

Now that the band was done, the jukebox was playing, and tonight the club was busy.

 

Scar tissue that I wish you saw
Sarcastic mister know-it-all
Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, 'cause
With the birds I'll share

With the birds I'll share this lonely viewin'
With the birds I'll share this lonely viewin'

 

The girl was standing in the little hall that led to the kitchen and the stockroom with bathroom doors on either side.

“I think you’re really great,” she said.

“Do you, now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I think you have really great taste,” Dan was drawling, as he took a cigarette out and placed it between his lips.

“I got your first album.”

Dan chuckled, “No one has our first album.”

“I do. I loved it. I listened to it over and over again.”

“Do you have a name, girl who listened to my first album over and over again?”

“Stephanie.”

“Stephanie….”

“Crawford.”

“Stephanie Crawford, who knows I’m Dan Rawlinson, I appreciate that you enjoy—”

“All of your music.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah. Even that new song about that bitch who did you wrong.”

Dan chuckled nervously. He knew how to do nervous. He knew how to do shy. He knew how not to press, how to be pressed.

“I would love to show you how much I appreciate you.”

There it was.

“Really?” Dan said, still smiling, giving a little chuckle.

“Really,” she said.

“Well… maybe we could go outside and talk some more.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”