The Last Dance of Low Seward

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BZZZT. BZZZT. BZZZT.

Detective Nick Archer didn’t feel the vibrations in his pocket until after the empty Kleenex box had hit him in the head.

“Hmph... the f**k?” Nick mumbled, coming out of his deep sleep. His body barely had time to register the corner of the tissue box hitting him before the rest of the pain receptors in his body sent their alert messages to his brain.

“Language,” Janice Archer said. His mother was sitting up in her bed, her eyes transfixed on the silence of the television bolted into the wall over Nick’s head. The fluorescent light above her created an odd shadow, darkening her face and reflecting off the bare parts of her skull where bits of hair had fallen out.

“Sorry, Ma,” Nick said, stretching his back from the cramped position in the pink pleather easy chair.

“Are you going to answer that?”

By the time he’d found the phone, it had gone to voicemail. The glow of the screen stung his eyes and he blinked away the phantom square dancing in his vision in the dim light of the hospice room.

His new partner calling. They must’ve caught a body.

The second thing his brain was able to compute was the time illuminated at the top of the screen. 5:12 a.m.

“Why’re you awake?” Nick yawned. He stood up and rubbed his palm along the prickles of his short hair. There was less and less of it by the day and he’d taken to having the barber buzz it close to the scalp to avoid looking like he was trying too hard to cling to his disappearing youth.

“I don’t sleep anymore, you know this,” his mother said, followed by a fit of coughing.

In a movement that had become instinct, he poured her a glass of water from the large plastic pitcher at her bedside.

“And why am I still here?” he asked, scratching his belly under the untucked white button down.

His mother took small sips of water, the coughing fit subsiding. The tremor in her hand as she raised the glass to her lips had become pronounced instead of merely noticeable.

“You fell asleep. What was I going to do? Wake you up and tell you to go home?”

“That’s exactly what you should’ve done. I’ve gotta work in the morning.”

Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Bzzzt.

His pocket vibrated again. He made a mental note to add impatience to the things he was learning about his new partner every day.

“I take that back. I’ve gotta work right now.”

He hit the “Accept” button on the touchscreen.

“Yeah... okay... text me the address... I’ll be there in ten,” he said into the phone.

As he tried to uncrumple his suit coat from between the cushion and arm of the easy chair, he heard the ping of rain on the window and sighed. It was bad enough he had to wear a suit in the heat of summer, but on the rainy winter days, he felt like he was wrapped in a wet sheep.

It was his own damn fault. The more cases he solved, the more people he had to interview. He got no respect when he showed up to a deposition wearing jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. The first time he came into the station wearing a tie and clean shirt without being asked, he thought his boss, Lieutenant Jenkins, was going to have another heart attack.

“I’ll come back tonight.” He kissed his mother on the forehead and stepped out into the hallway before waiting for her to respond.

The Garden Commons Assisted Living Facility in Echo Park was an eerie cacophony of noise in the wee hours of the morning. Machines whirred and clicked from open doors; some monitoring heartbeats, others keeping people breathing. Whistling snores mixed with the sound of televisions at low volume, late night infomercials competing for the residents’ attention.

Nick wished he could’ve chosen a different place for his mother. One of those homes with brochures featuring old folks smiling as they played tennis or one that sent them on field trips to the Morongo Casino. Something that looked more like a resort than a place where people went to die. But he needed a place in the city, so he didn’t have to drive all the way to Altadena when something went wrong or he wanted to visit her. It also had to have close access to a hospital, in case the medical facilities of the home couldn’t handle severe complications. It wasn’t the best place in the world and it wasn’t the worst. It was a compromise.

Janice Archer had been living with emphysema and cancer when a crazy homeless man broke into her house and stabbed her several times. Because of the advanced state of her diseases and the severity of the injuries, Nick figured that was the end of it. His mother was dead. But the old bird just kept on going. He started to think she would live forever. But after the attack, she wasn’t the same. He’d moved back home when she was diagnosed with cancer so he could take care of her, but the attack had pushed her afflictions too far. She needed around-the-clock care. It didn’t matter how much she protested or refused, there was no way he could afford a full-time nurse and the repairs to the house her attacker had almost burnt down.

After he’d gotten over the near loss of his mother, he took the loss of the house pretty hard. Insurance would’ve covered a portion, but by the time someone came in and took a look at the damage, the old Craftsman was a blight of building code violations. Nick had to put it on the market. His girlfriend at the time, Penny, helped him get a good deal from a house-flipping vulture. Most of the money from the sale went toward his mother’s new lodgings. He was stuck renting a condo in North Hollywood and visiting his ailing mother nightly. Eventually, Penny couldn’t take Nick’s lifestyle anymore.

His whirlwind romance with a murder suspect had soured much quicker than he’d expected. Penny Searle entered his life during a routine questioning on a bullshit case and became his impromptu partner in the case that made his career. At first, Penny was intrigued by his work, found what he did to be endlessly exciting, but when he had started to come home later and later, the novelty wore off. It would’ve been easy for him to blame the souring of their relationship on how much he’d put the job before her, but he couldn’t. It was his mother.

She found his relationship with his sick mother endearing at first. Then she realized she took third billing in Nick’s life after Janice and the job. He didn’t see how unhappy she was toward the end. His interactions with her had dissolved into early goodbyes and late hellos. Weekends were filled with projects or birthday parties for their friend’s kids, neither of which involved a great deal of deep conversation.

He’d never had a connection with anyone the way he had with Penny, but he did nothing to cultivate that comfort and it faded. What they had together never felt like work, but maybe that was the problem. He knew with a good relationship you had to put in the effort to keep it alive. And he didn’t. So, she left.

The drive to Skid Row didn’t take as long as he thought it would. With a gaggle of official vehicles already double-parked, he had to circle the block to find a spot. By the time he got into the building, his suit coat was wrinkled and wet.

One step through the open front door and a wave of nastiness hovering in the air smacked him across the face like a jilted lover.

“Please tell me the smell gets better at the top of the stairs.”

Nick pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and held it to his nose as he squeezed past a couple of uniformed officers making their way back down to the street.

“What dream world you living in?” the uniform at the top of the stairs said to him as he passed.

“How much time do we have before the s**t show starts?” Nick asked.

“We’re not at his primary residence and black and whites don’t draw much attention in this part of town. But given the retirement plan TMZ seems to be supplying to half the department, I’d give us ten minutes before we’re mobbed. Fifteen, if we’re lucky.”

“Great,” Nick said, snatching a paper mask out of the uniform’s outstretched hand and putting paper booties over his wet shoes.

The main room of the apartment looked like it had been designed by an art department on acid. The furniture was ragged and had been dragged off the street. A leather lounge chair and a brand new curved flat screen television, covered in what appeared to be mustard, stuck out amongst the threadbare wreckage. It was as though a rich cousin had come to stay with his poor kin and wanted a bit of finery speckled throughout the disaster area. The crime scene photographer was snapping away, getting the living room from every angle. The photo prints would make for an interesting art installation at one of the galleries a few blocks away in the thriving Arts District.

“Can we open these? It smells like an elephant gave birth in here,” he asked, looking at the row of closed windows.

Willie poked her head out the bedroom door, “You wanna quit your bitching and come in here and take a look at this?”

Nick had only been partnered up with Willie Grant for a couple months. Budget cuts pulled him off of the cold case desk where he’d comfortably sat for the past few years. He’d known it was only a matter of time before he was back out on the streets with the rest of the Robbery-Homicide Division catching fresh bodies, but the thing that worried him most was getting stuck with a partner he didn’t get along with. The last partner he’d liked was when he was cruising in a squad wearing a starched black button down, but his good buddy Hank Drees refused to take the detective test.

Willie and Nick were still figuring each other out. The one thing that made the transition easier was that she loved to bullshit as much as he did. The problem was, neither of them knew when to turn it off. They hadn’t developed the ability to let the conversation wane naturally. When the two of them got together, it annoyed everybody else in the room.

“Is the smell getting to you? We’ve got a standing bet to see who pukes first. You want in for ten bucks?” she asked him, her face buried in her notebook, writing down every detail that caught her fancy.

“I don’t find being accustomed to the smell of s**t and garbage to be a redeeming quality.”

The floor had the tacky feel of a dirty movie theater and he had to peel his shoes from the wood with every step.

“Don’t forget semen,” she said, waving her pen at the foot of the bed.

“Is that what that is?” Nick asked, cringing.

There was a milky-yellow residue lining the floor around the bed. Nick picked his feet up, trying not to step in any more of it.

A tittering giggle came from behind the bedroom door. Nick looked over to where the noise was coming from and back at Willie, his brow contorted in confusion.

“What the hell was that?”

“Oh yeah, forgot to mention that,” Willie said, bringing her face up from her notebook just long enough to give him a smile.

Nick moved the warped bedroom door. He c****d his head slightly and turned back to his partner.

“Dare I ask?”

Behind the door were two Filipino women, no older than twenty-two years apiece, with tiny, tight, perfect bodies. Nick knew this because they were both completely naked.

If this weren’t an odd enough sight, they were playing poker with tarot cards, using dominoes as chips. The dominoes kept falling through the holes in the milk crate they’d flipped over and were using as a table, but it didn’t seem to bother them. The one on the left placed the King of Cups over her opponent’s Death card and they both giggled with glee. A small part of Nick wanted to keep watching, not just because of the enticement of the young and naked, but he also wanted to figure out the rules of their game.

“A new guildmaster has arrived,” the one closest to the door said.