Spider - Michael Morley [34]
Spider sits naked on the bed’s padded red mattress and out of habit plays with the gold chain around his neck. On it are his dead mother’s wedding and engagement rings. He raises them to his mouth and kisses them. He thinks of her for a moment and then lets go of the chain. From the side of the bed he picks up a plastic canister, twists the top and shakes its contents into the palm of a hand. Slowly, he spreads white talcum powder all over his body, until he’s white, entirely white.
White as a corpse.
As white as Momma’s face in the Chapel of Rest.
Spider lies down and looks up at his Window to Heaven. On the other side, he’s sure, really sure, he can see Momma in the Better Place, her dead white arms stretching out to embrace him.
24
West Village, SoHo, New York
There were two reasons Howie Baumguard couldn’t sleep – one was food and the other was homicide. Right now, he reckoned his plate was filled with far too much of one and far too little of the other. Bare-chested and bare-footed, with his grumbling stomach rolling over some string-tied blue cotton pyjama bottoms, he tiptoed downstairs, trying not to wake the rest of the family. For some time he’d managed to fool himself that he resembled Tony Soprano. Maybe thinning too much up top and certainly thickening too much around the middle, but still a force to be reckoned with. A good shave, a splash of cologne and a jazzy shirt and he always felt great. Great, that was, until his stick-insect wife told him he looked more like the Doughboy monster in Ghostbusters than James Gandolfini, who even she conceded was so big he was as sexy as hell. So last night, at the end of a gruelling day, he’d come home to a shrink-wrapped shrimp salad and zero-fat milk for his dinner. Man, is there no fun left in life? Well, screw her and screw the calories, now is munch time.
‘Look out, Fridge, Howie’s coming in!’ he said as he pulled open the double doors of the larder. His face lit up as brightly as the interior light. He grabbed a foil-wrapped cold chicken and waltzed it to the kitchen table, along with a jar of cranberry jelly. The rollover stainless-steel bread bin yielded more treasure: great slabs of white bread and a jelly-doughnut (left by Howie Jnr, who already seemed to have eaten three out of the four-pack).
For good measure Howie popped a can of beer and took a long slug before settling down in the cool of the kitchen. He ripped off a leg of chicken and gnawed away at the delicious meat. A heavy sprinkle of bad-for-your-heart salt turned it from good into fantastic. He knew he was eating for comfort – and, boy, it was working. Another deep hit of beer and he felt a thousand times better than he had done for the last two sleepless hours, sloped on his side feeling hungry and worrying about the call that he was about to make.
Howie unplugged his cell phone from the charger on the kitchen worktop and hit the speed dial for Jack King. It took an age to connect. Finally an Italian ring tone kicked in and a woman’s voice answered.
‘Buon giorno, hello, La Casa Strada. I am Maria, how may I help you?’
Howie immediately thought of a couple of ways in which a girl with a voice as sexy as hers could help him, both of which would instantly get him on the path to divorce, so instead he stuck to his main reason for calling. ‘Hi there, I’m ringing from America and I’m trying to get hold of Jack King. Could you please