The Trouble With Normal

by Salieri

troyswann@yahoo.ca

“The trouble with normal is it always gets worse”

(Bruce Cockburn)

CHAPTER ONE

Hutch always looked first. Starsky wasn’t sure when this pattern got established. Early on, probably, when they were still green to each other, and habits got pressed into the still-soft ground and solidified and then got worn around the edges with use so that he couldn’t really see them anymore, even when he followed the contours every day. Eight times out of ten it was Hutch who stopped the attendants, or the coroner’s pick-up guys with their stretchers on the way to the ambulance (on the good days) or the wagon (on the bad days). It was Hutch who crouched beside the vague shape on the asphalt or the grass and lifted the edge of the sheet to look under. It wasn’t like Starsky deliberately held back. He looked, too, as long and as hard as Hutch did when he had his turn. But somehow Hutch wound up looking first, the way Hutch went high and Starsky went low at a bust-in.

Starsky could tell from the way the angle of Hutch’s head changed, from curious and assessing to something softer and worn and resigned, that it was bad. There wasn’t enough room for the both of them in the cramped space behind the boiler, so Hutch went first. Hutch had to shimmy in against the wall and slide down gingerly so he could pull back the sheet, twist his neck so he could get a good look at the face, and that’s when the angles changed and Starsky winced and braced himself. Hutch put the sheet back carefully and stayed there perfectly still for a minute at least with his hands hanging between his knees, his gaze on the side of the boiler. It was hot in there, but he stayed until Starsky said, “Hutch,” making him blink and snap his head around like he didn’t know that Starsky was there, like always, three feet away.

Starsky waited until Hutch levered himself upright again, which wasn’t easy with nothing to hold onto except a boiler and a body, and edged out into the more open space of the boiler room.

“Bad?”

Hutch nodded and rubbed his eyes, swiped the sweat off his face. “A kid. A girl. Maybe seventeen.” He looked over Starsky’s shoulder at nothing, maybe the pipes snaking along the ceiling of the basement or the doorway with the stairs going up into the kitchen where volunteers were already clanging pots and pans because people had to eat, no matter what was curled up in the boiler room. “Damn,” he said softly and ran his hand over his face again.

Leaving him there to watch the attendants maneuver the stretcher down the narrow stairwell, Starsky went to take his own look. Seventeen seemed about right. Blonde hair once in a ponytail but now snarled and tangled around the elastic. Plump face too white and doll-like, a little bow mouth and long lashes casting shadows around eyes that were once green, maybe, or gray, before they’d glazed over. Her hands were folded under her chin like she was praying. Her wrists were tied with a wide blue ribbon, a perfect bow over the knots. Starsky folded back the sheet a little more to expose a high school jacket with JHS embroidered on the breast, blue jeans zipped up and buttoned. No blouse or T-shirt under the jacket that he could see. Her feet were bare.

When Starsky shuffled out to make way for the coroner’s guys, Hutch was still standing in the same place. He’d stopped staring and was making notes, head bowed low over his notebook as he scribbled with a stub of pencil, laying barbed wire between his reason and his imagination, the letters all sharp on the tops of the loops, facts snared. His fingertips were white, he was pressing down so hard.

“JHS, that’s Jackson High School, right?” he asked without looking up.

“We’re a long way from Bel Plaine.”

“Yeah.”

Behind them the attendants were pulling the body out of the narrow space.

“She’s a long way from home,” Hutch said, snapping his notebook shut and stuffing it in the pocket of his shirt.

“And on the wrong side of the tracks.”

Nodding again, Hutch watched the attendants, his face showing nothing. One of them took a long stride over the body and leaned down to get his hands under the girl’s shoulders while the other lifted her under the knees. Her fogged eyes stared at them. Hutch’s hands opened and then closed tight at his sides before he stuffed them in his pockets. Starsky knew the feeling exactly. It seemed wrong, closing her up in the black bag with her eyes still open like that. Soon enough, though, she’d be hidden away, at least until the coroner sent up his file. Then there’d be more details than anybody wanted. And fewer than they needed. Connect-the-dots with half the numbers missing. As they followed the stretcher in its slow progress up the stairs and into the kitchen, Starsky wondered if she’d been placed behind the boiler with her hands folded that way on purpose, and what it meant, and how many beers it would take to make the picture fade enough so he could sleep.

In the kitchen, a heavyset grandma-type with a long braid of graying hair was kneading dough at the counter. Another almost identical woman—her braid was wound up in a bun on her head instead of hanging down her back—was stirring an enormous pot on the stove, and a third was chopping carrots so fast her knife was a blur. They all stopped at the same time and turned to watch the passing stretcher with carbon copy expressions of curiosity and compassion on their worn-out faces. Then the first one sucked her teeth and shook her head, exchanging with her sisters a look of sadness and resignation before going back to work. The mission dining room was visible through the serving counter window. It was already half full of hungry men, and the bread wasn’t even in the oven yet.

Starsky thumbed the elevator button again and leaned back to look at the numbers over the door. None of them were lit up. With a sigh, Hutch turned and headed for the stairs, elbowed the door open and waved Starsky ahead of him.

“Not exactly the Bel Plaine they show in the brochures,” Starsky said. He kept his pace even. The twelfth floor was a long way away.

“I suppose the gardeners and the cooks and the school teachers gotta live somewhere,” Hutch answered as he trudged along behind him.

The spit-and-polish world of trimmed hedges in the shape of chess pieces and winding driveways with monogrammed gates, that was front side, boulevard side. This was the backside of the good neighborhood, the part you usually saw from the train. The low rent annex: gray apartment buildings and bungalows squatting in narrow lots, brown lawns and laundry on the line. Starsky had relaxed into the familiarity of it the minute they pulled into the cracked and faded lot and parked next to a VW microbus painted in rust primer.

But as they climbed higher the tension came back, his hands and his spine responding to a different kind of familiarity. He wondered how many times he’d made this walk already. Hutch was quiet back there, his feet falling in time with Starsky’s, beat for beat.

They didn’t have to say the words. Anita Spender’s mother knew the second they pulled out their badges and said Anita’s name. Still they were obliged to say it, and Hutch did it, leaving out the details. Beverley Spender stood in the doorway with a dishtowel in her hands, listening, and slowly, behind the expression of slightly baffled politeness, the life drained out of her face. It was like watching somebody do a fade into a dark room. Going, going, gone. And that was what Hutch called “the blank,” and Starsky thought of as the train wreck. It was the moment when someone’s brain derailed, came up against something they couldn’t think past or through and everything crumpled against it, turned to twisted shapes, and when the brain disengaged, the face didn’t know what to do. The blank. He could see it in his own head when it happened to Beverley Spender: the wreck and the tracks still gleaming and leading straight on into the truth of it.

Usually people’s bodies reacted before their minds did. Starsky had seen some weird things over the years. Sometimes you told a parent that their girl or little boy was dead and they’d laugh. They’d laugh right in your face and that was the train wreck, the sound of collision. He’d seen a father fold double like he’d been kicked in the chest. Lots of times people stepped backward, held their hands out like the truth was coming at them teeth and claws out of the fog. Starsky almost expected to see defensive wounds on their forearms. He’d told Hutch that one time, and Hutch’d nodded and said, “Stigmata.” Starsky had looked that up and felt the word stabbing through his hands for days after.

More than once, a mother or a father had punched him in the face. The first time he’d deflected the blow by reflex. After, he’d learned to stand still.

Beverley Spender blinked finally and said, “Would you like coffee?” She turned like somebody was pulling strings and walked stiffly through the living room without looking to see if they were following.

The apartment was tidy, thrift-shop furniture chosen to match more-or-less, a knitted blanket folded over the fraying upholstery of a chair. Otherwise the place was cozy and plain except for the flowers on the end table and lots of photos on the wall over the sofa. Hutch examined them while Starsky watched Mrs. Spender moving around the kitchen like a blind person in unfamiliar territory.

“She was a pretty girl,” Hutch said. He pointed at a picture of Anita poised on a diving board ready to tip off into a swan dive or some kind of crazy somersault. She didn’t look scared at all. Next to that one was another of her holding flowers and a medal. The smile was wide enough to crack the frame.

“Bad luck for her,” Starsky answered.

When Hutch repeated that, his voice dropped off to a whisper like water falling over a cliff.

She couldn’t have heard them, but it seemed like cause and effect when Mrs. Spender lurched back into real time again. The empty coffee mugs slipped from her hands and smashed on the floor. She was heading after them, falling in slow motion, but Hutch was fast—long legs were an asset—and caught her before she could slice her legs or hands up on the broken pieces. He held her while Starsky got a chair behind her knees and together they eased her down. Hutch murmured, “I know, I know,” in that voice he’d use when someone was bleeding and the ambulance was still a long way off, and like a bleeding person, she groped in the air for some kind of purchase. People would hang on to the world when they felt themselves sliding away from it on the inside. Starsky had been surprised more than once to find hand-shaped bruises on his arms from time to time, because he never felt it when it was happening. Now, in Beverley Spender’s sunny kitchen, Hutch let her twist his collar in her fist and pull him down into a crouch in front of her so that she could search his face. Her dark eyes were dry. She wasn’t all the way back yet. Sometimes the tears could take days.

Her mouth moved around the questions, trying to find the one that meant the most. But they all meant the most, so no sound came out at all.

“We don’t know who did it yet,” Hutch said, keeping his eyes on hers, unflinching. She nodded. “We don’t know anything yet. But we will.” She nodded again, maybe a mechanical response to his voice, maybe a gesture of faith. “We need to ask some questions.” Another nod. “About who saw her last. Who she was hanging out with. Where she went.” He unwound her fingers from his shirt and backed himself up so he could swing another chair around and sit down to face her. “Do you think you can help us?” Hutch waited for another nod and then met Starsky’s eyes over her shoulder. “I got her for now.”

As he looked around the living room for a phone, Starsky listened with one ear to the soft insistence of Hutch’s voice, the hesitant sound of Mrs. Spender coming back to the world one sentence at a time. The phone was on a table in the hallway, and while he waited to be connected to the duty officer, he leaned around to check out the rooms on either side of the hall. One was obviously mom’s room, laundry piled neatly on the bed waiting to be put away. The other was Anita’s. It was plain like the rest of the apartment, but it was a teenaged girl’s room, no doubt about it. The unicorn poster alone cinched it, even without the bed overflowing with stuffed animals and the open closet and dresser drawers spilling socks and the floor decorated with rejected outfits.

He’d finished requesting someone to come collect Mrs. Spender to take her to the morgue and was reciting the address of the apartment complex when something in the jumble caught his eye. On the back of the closet door was a dress. Lots of frills around the shoulders, lacy bits. Fancy. After dropping the phone back in the cradle, he walked in and fingered the material. The dress was still in the process of being made. Pins held it together in places. Around the waist was a wide sash of blue ribbon.

“It’s her prom dress. We’re making it together,” Mrs. Spender said. She was in the doorway, clutching her sweater close to her throat.

“It’s very pretty.”

She smiled and the glitter in her eyes was just the far side of normal, too edgy, like a reflection in a cracked mirror. “She doesn’t like it much, but she wouldn’t say so.”

Hutch appeared behind her and Starsky held the end of the ribbon up so he could see.

“Do you have any more of this ribbon?” Hutch asked her, and then stepped back so she could go around him to the living room. When she was gone, Hutch came closer and ran a finger over the cloth in Starsky’s hand. “Well,” he said. “So maybe he knew her.”

“Maybe.”

Before Starsky could go on, Mrs. Spender was back, empty-handed. “I’m sorry. I had a whole yard of it left but it’s not there now.”

Hutch darted a glance Starsky’s way. “Would she have had any of this ribbon with her?”

Mrs. Spender frowned and then shook her head. “I don’t see why. She didn’t like it.” A hand waved vaguely toward the living room. “The extra was in my sewing basket the other day.”

“Which day?” Starsky asked. “Can you remember?”

Another frown. “Sunday?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

Hutch stepped in. “We’re not sure just yet.”

Mrs. Spender looked at him for a few seconds too long, enough for him to shift his weight uncomfortably, and then turned her glassy gaze to the dress. Her hand fluttered across the front of it, straightening the ruffles Starsky had disturbed, but her expression was puzzled and dark, like horrified was just a little way down the tracks. Starsky could see it coming as her mouth hardened with the realization that they’d turned the prom dress into evidence, and the room suddenly felt wrong, crowded with him and Hutch in there. Starsky backed into the hallway as she took a pair of small scissors out of her apron pocket and began to snip the stitching with sharp, efficient strokes.

“Take it.” She tore the last few stitches free with a yank and held the ribbon out to Hutch. “Anita doesn’t—Anita didn’t want it, anyway. She thinks it made her look like a little girl.”

It took twenty minutes for the uniforms to show up. In the meantime, Hutch poured coffee and kept asking questions in that low voice, taking notes without looking too much like he was taking notes. Mrs. Spender almost seemed normal when she answered him, except for the hitches in her sentences where the verbs were all wrong, where she worked on putting her kid in the past tense. No, Anita hadn’t said anything about anyone bothering her or following her. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend. She’d never had a boyfriend. She was going to go to the prom with her girlfriends. Yes, she took the bus into the city to volunteer at the hospital. Yes, the one near the All Saints Mission. Yes, sometimes she got a ride home from friends at the hospital. No, she never stayed out late. Never. Swim practice was at six in the morning.

Mrs. Spender turned the coffee cup in her hands. Around and around.

Starsky asked, and then took the photo of Anita and her medal off the wall and slipped it out of the frame. By then the uniforms were there.

When he and Hutch were on their way out, Mrs. Spender caught Hutch by the sleeve. She looked up at him from her seat at the table, and still there were no tears. She said, “What do I do now?”

The uniforms who canvassed the street and the mission and the hospital had been thorough. That translated into a stack of paper about two feet high. With a sigh, Starsky rested his temple on his fist and slid another report off the pile. He and Hutch had already been through everything flagged as promising. Now they were working through the rest of it, since promising wasn’t all that promising. Out there in the city where traffic was backing up and bars were filling with happy hour customers, cops were still tracking down friends and teachers, orderlies, supervisors, bus drivers, and winos. So far it all added up to nothing, nothing, and nothing with a side order of not much at all. Anita Spender was well-liked, studied hard, worked out with the swim team three mornings a week, volunteered at the hospital Mondays and Saturdays, never missed a class, never got detention, never had a bad word to say to anyone, never had a brush with the law until the day she turned up under a sheet in the basement of the mission and Hutch sitting over her with the thousand-yard stare.

“So,” Hutch said, throwing another file into the growing stack at his elbow and leaning way back in his chair to stretch his back and rub his eyes. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that cases like these make me miss the crime lords and the hypes.” At Hutch’s grunt, Starsky looked up at him. “They make sense.”

“This guy makes sense. We just don’t know what kind yet.”

“Crazy kind.”

“See? Progress.” Hutch quit the eye-rubbing to take another folder from the clerk, dropped it in front of himself and flipped it open.

“What kind of crazy is the question.” Starsky really hated having to think his way down that list. It gave him the creeps in his spine. Not to mention the fact that the list had about fifty different categories, not counting creative variations, and that wasn’t exactly normal stuff for a normal guy to have to carry around in his head. He wondered, not for the first time, whether it could eat through the strong box he kept it in.

Absorbed in reading the file, Hutch didn’t answer. Scanning quickly, he thumbed his way forward until he came to the glossy photos and his fingers stumbled to a stop. His jaw tightened and the muscles in Starsky’s back automatically twisted a little tighter.

“What?” Starsky leaned closer but couldn’t make out what Hutch was staring at. “What is it?”

“Coroner’s report.” Hutch met his eyes and then tossed the file across his desk onto Starsky’s where some of the sheets fanned out and the photos spilled over the side onto the floor. “She died of alcohol poisoning. Red wine and vodka to be exact.”

Starsky stopped in the middle of gathering up the photos to say, “What?” and then sat up with the messy pile on his lap. He straightened them without looking at them and frowned at Hutch instead. “You’re kiddin’.”

“Yes, I am. You can tell by the big smile on my face.”

“That’s—”

“Weird? Sick? Fucked?”

“—usually something you do to yourself.”

Hutch jabbed a finger at the papers and photos in Starsky’s hands. “Do you think she did that to herself? Tied her wrists with wire? Yeah, the ribbon was just—” He grimaced. “—decoration. You think she did that—” Another jab of the finger. “—to herself?”

Starsky looked down at the top photo in his pile. It was a shot of Anita Spender’s back. She was covered with writing, tiny black block letters following the contours of her shoulder blades, her spine, along the hollow between each rib, the same thing over and over.

“Drink somebody to death. That’s cold-blooded,” Hutch went on, the words clipped, his voice hitting hard on the beats. “He’d have to plan it. It would have to be managed. So she wouldn’t pass out too soon. So she wouldn’t puke it all up.”

Starsky nodded as he angled the picture to cut down on the glare from the fluorescent lights. He couldn’t make out what the writing said.

“It says,” Hutch answered his unspoken question, his voice a growl. “Suffer the little children.”

The first shot went wide. The second went high. Starsky frowned and looked around for something to help adjust the trajectory. With a little “aha,” he took the cardboard coaster out from under Hutch’s beer glass and folded it in half.

Hutch didn’t notice. “The wine has to mean something,” he was saying.

Starsky decided that the folded coaster wouldn’t work. Too tall. “Uh-huh,” he answered as he considered his options. “I can think of a few times in my life I wanted to drown in wine.”

“In Richard the Third a guy was drowned in a vat of wine.”

“Actually it was a butt of malmsey,” Starsky said.

Hutch stopped with his glass halfway to his mouth and raised an eyebrow at him.

“What? Like I never read a book?” Tipping his chair back on two legs, Starsky stretched out to hook the ashtray on the next table so he could steal the box of matches from it. “’Course, I like the sequel better. Richard the Fourth.”

Hutch’s snort of laughter made Starsky grin. “Better car chases, huh?” Hutch said.

“My point exactly. Sure sign of great literature.” By the time Starsky had the spoon balanced on the matchbox Hutch was gone again, staring morosely into his beer, his thumb stroking his lip. Starsky leaned low to eyeball the angle and fumbled in the bowl for another peanut. “Maybe it’s religious. Wine and blood. Something about the Eucharist,” he suggested. “But that’s not exactly my bag, so I dunno.” He dropped the peanut into the bowl of the spoon and smacked his hand down on the handle. The peanut bounced off of Hutch’s forehead and into his beer. Starsky danced the funky chicken in his chair. “Two points.”

Hutch blinked and leaned over to look at the peanut at the bottom of his glass. “Starsky,” he said mildly. “You know you’re a putz. Don’t you.”

“And your brooding is leading to the untimely demise of a lot of good peanuts.” Starsky put another peanut in the spoon and snapped it into the air. He’d underestimated his own strength though, and the shot was wild, arcing up over Hutch’s shoulder and landing with a plink in the middle of a woman’s dinner plate on the table behind him. When she turned to glare at him, Starsky waggled his fingers at her and smiled his most winning smile. It worked. She winked at him and ran her tongue along her lip before turning back to the geezer across from her.

“Besides,” he said to Hutch, “you love me for it.”

The next shot was a thing of beauty. Hutch tipped his head back and caught the peanut in his mouth. He chewed, looking thoughtful. Finally he said, “I love you for your ass. The putz I put up with.”

“You are so beautiful when you talk dirty. Say ‘ass’ again.”

“Putz.”

“Close enough.”

Hutch nodded like he wasn’t listening anymore and stared over Starsky’s head at the wall. After a minute, he leaned forward and closed his eyes, stiff fingers tapping his forehead.

“What?” Starsky asked.

“Something. Back east somewhere.” Hutch snapped his fingers and pointed at Starsky like he’d just held up a flashcard to jog Hutch’s memory. “Boston.”

“Baked beans.”

“Yeah, that. And a case, a kid with his hands bound up with wire.”

Starsky drained his beer and put it back in its circle of condensation on the table. “Lots of people get tied up with wire.”

“In the boiler room of a hospital. A clinic.”

That shook the dust off of something in Starsky’s rafters. He narrowed his eyes and tried to see it. “Yeah. And they found the mother a couple days later in her hotel room.” Hutch was nodding encouragingly, but there was nothing else under the dust. Starsky frowned at him. “Why do I remember that?”

“Because the dude was from here,” Huggy answered, having materialized out of the crowd with a tray balanced on his shoulder. “So, what are you two gents up to tonight?” He app