My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  She reaches over and brushes my hair back.

  “He was a troubled man,” she says. “All that boxing and running and working those boats when he did. I think he needed to feel and give pain. It was probably just a fight. He got loud in the bar with the wrong people and they killed him. Simple. But I think it’s true. You always wanted there to be more to it. Sometimes things are as they are. Maybe that’s what confounds you. Your father was like a storm, Sam. Always more questions than answers. What makes people like that? Your mother loved him, though. She did. She told me once, ‘Maggie, in all that roughness there is quiet.’ Did you ever see that quiet? I certainly never did. I don’t think he really liked me. We had an understanding, though.”

  “He was calm just after dawn. He’d sit in the kitchen drinking coffee and listening to the radio. A station that played old music. Kept it real low, like company. He’d gather himself for the day, piece by piece till he was whole again. I feel like that sometimes. How to get through it all, you know. I never figured out how I felt about him. He was my father. I loved him. I think I did. But I didn’t know him. He never let me get close, not like Mom. She got close.”

  Maggie clears the plates, kisses me on the forehead, and goes to bed. I sit for a while in the kitchen. I liked being alone here as a child when we’d visit. I was never scared of this house in the way children can be in the darkness with unfamiliar things. I drink a beer and listen to the creak of wood and the faint whistle of a radiator. My mother doesn’t know me. A parent should never have to bury a child, but a child, even when he’s a man, should not be forgotten. She waits by the window for my father and her sparrow. I turn off the light and walk up the stairs to the small bedroom at the end of the hall. I undress and slide into bed and pull the covers up. The air is the air of my boyhood: cool, bracing. The moon is in the window. Bright. I turn toward it and fade away.

  Chapter 11

  Hellooooo.

  A little attention here, Mr. Detective.

  We have a murder, you know. A body. A mystery. And you’re in Boston holding your mother’s hand while she draws sparrows. Okay, that’s sad. And your father—yes, that legacy is unfortunate too. But we all have our burdens. (You don’t want to get me started on my mother.) And what’s with St. Maggie? (That old dope-smoking leftist has a whole folder in your laptop—pictures too.) Now, can we please get back to the matter at hand? My game. You are testing my empathy gene, and that gene is shrinking. I’m agitated, nerves on skin. Flying upward and back on a swing of loose chains. Do you know that feeling? I hide mine well. Most of the time. I’ve learned to tame it, but, you know, there are cracks. I should get back to playing tennis. Hit the ball. Focus. My father taught me, every day, hitting balls at the courts down the street. So often that it became instinct. I loved to watch my father smile, amazed at me, his daughter, tall and quick, hitting balls on the rise. It took me to Stanford, that game. But I outgrew it. One day, I woke up and felt as if part of me had left. It was hard to imagine. Does that make sense? I found architecture, different lines and grace. My mind is racing. Maybe I should go back on pharmaceuticals. A little lithium or Zyprexa might even me out. But the numbness would come. The blurry lack of sensation. I can’t have that. I need all pixels flaming. Vibrant. Everything. All the senses. Who wants an unsweet orange? Am I right? I want a taste explosion. I need a cigarette. The strike of the match, the smoke. It fills me. Note to self: Am I making sense?

  I’ll have a present for you when you get back.

  I’m marching past your building now with women carrying signs, holding balloons, yelling and singing, some dancing. The police are here, but nothing’s dangerous, just a great trembling sound beneath the blue sky. Girls are here, so many little girls, holding mothers’ hands in awe and wonder. I want that wonder. Where does it go? Why do they take it from us? One girl has a painted face and she is singing; another climbs into the arms of her mother. I want to hold the little girls and whisper things they should know. We are passing Grand Central Market, the great swell of us. Footsteps like horses in canyons. Helicopters skim above. It is beautiful to be alive. Can I put this moment in my heart? Keep it there. A woman next to me is crying, not sad but joyous, defiant. She’s holding a sign with a lyric from Fiona Apple: “Keep your tiny hands off my underpants.” I feel that I know this woman, that she is in part of me somewhere, in my woman genes, my spirit, myself, the XX that makes me different from the XY; she shares my chromosomes, a pool of my uniqueness. We are in front of City Hall now, the sea of us, and he is there, our new president Trump, defiled on posters and buttons. It is not rage we feel; rage destroys. No, we feel the collective, the spirit that won’t be taken. But it is taken sometimes, and we must get it back. Oh, yes. In our own little ways, we must reclaim. I hadn’t expected to be here, but I looked down from Angelino Heights and saw them filling the streets, their colors. My sisters drew me to them. The architecture of the crowd: moving lines, splendid patterns, like great buildings come to life. Marching. Still coming. I can’t see beyond them. They are my horizon. They don’t know what I have done. What I will do. I don’t want them to. I want to be part of their purity; they seem so pure. I know they’re not, that each of them, like me, has something—not as bad as mine, but something they carry, some mark they don’t want their daughters to inherit. The loudspeakers boom. The speeches begin. A small woman in a head scarf. A black woman. An East Asian. A Buddhist in saffron. A Sikh. An angel with a pink umbrella; two topless lesbians with nipple rings and a sign, “This pussy grabs back”; a woman in chiffon; a transgender in satin; a Mona Lisa; a Susan B. Anthony; a homeless woman yelling scripture; Latina girls with Oreos and bandannas; a man in a gold cape; the president swinging in effigy like a bloated orange Ken doll. Others, too—so many others, holding microphones, telling stories. I feel my rushing pulse. Could I stay here in this moment? Could all else fall away? My buildings, my drawings, my designs? No. That’s okay. It is enough to be in it now in this transitory joy. A woman hands me a sign: “My Mind, My Body, My Choice.” Oh, would that it were so.

  “This is America,” says the woman who has handed me the sign. “I didn’t think I’d come, but my daughters put me on the bus. They’re here somewhere. Isn’t it great? To do this, to fight back. I was too young for the sixties. I didn’t know how I felt about the Iraq war. But I know how I feel about this.”

  I shake my head. She wipes her eyes. Transformed.

  “I hope it doesn’t die after today,” she says. “This spirit. I don’t think it will.”

  “It won’t,” I say. “Too much to lose.”

  She sways her arms and spins.

  “I feel like a child, a girl,” she says. “How do you feel?”

  “Lifted.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. Lifted—I like that. I was worried, you know, about things. Ever since the election. So ugly. All that anger. Those terrible things said. I don’t feel that way now. This is part of the rescue, I think. All of us. I’m not religious, but it’s a kind of religion. A bonding. My one daughter, Tara—she’s a teacher—says it’s a reawakening. As if we’ve all been asleep.”

  The woman hugs me. I feel her warmth, sweat, and joy. No woman’s hugged me in so long, not since that night Isabella saved me. I feel odd being held in a crowd, so publicly. It doesn’t matter, though. There is nothing odd here. I smell her herbal shampoo and perfume. Her spearmint breath. I hold my sign in one hand and her with the other. People passing might think we’re mother and daughter. What a notion.

  My mother is dead. She killed herself. My father and I never knew whether it was mistake or intent. We found pills scattered around her on the floor. She’d fallen into a low period after being so high. The light had drained. I had seen it often as a child, the desperation in her eyes to find a way back. I used to think she was a lost woman in a dark story and that I could save her. That my presence standing before her, willing her to be happy and join my father and me
at dinner, was enough. That I could heal. You believe that as a child: a moment of invincibility before life settles around you with its truths. For a long time, I pretended she wasn’t dead and that I would receive a postcard from a distant place where she had found peace and where, one day, I would be invited. Where would it be? I guessed in the north—she loved the snow and was a fearless sledder. On winter vacations, she’d slide me between her legs as she held the ropes, and we teetered forward and then, as if in flight, swept down the hill in wind and laughter. My father called her “the butterfly.” I think he was referring to her moods and how she would drift around us, disappear, and come back. A constant flickering in the house. I imagine her over a field, sun on her wings. I read her medical files the year I went to college. Parts of her, I recognized; other parts, the doctors didn’t get right. But how could they? I saw some of me in those lines. Mother, daughter. Deformations and blessings handed down, mine nowhere near as extreme as hers, not as colorful or dark, more like trills than cymbal crashes. We are tricks to ourselves. I think this. I pretend this woman hugging me now, this stranger, is my mother. I close my eyes, and for a second, my mother and I are dancing in the dawn in our nightgowns. It is okay to feel this way among my sisters, this great tribe of women. I can see them through my tears.

  The woman releases me and dances into the swarm. She waves and throws a kiss. The sun on my face. I look to the sky. I want to stand here and never go. I want to pull this sea around me, this noise, this joy, this echo of girlhood, gangly and clean.

  They say it’s snowing in Boston. Flurries. Not here. The winter moon and the sun share the same blue. Isn’t that something? You’ll be back soon from your mother’s. The red-eye. I’ve been thinking. I have decided that at some point we should meet. Oh, yes. I want to be beside you. To see you up close. Maybe we could lie together. Just once. To feel each other, to see deep inside. I think we have that connection. Such an unromantic word, connection. Not pretty. But you know what I mean. I think we could. Just once. My plan will not allow more, though I wish it would. Perhaps we’ll meet at that bar you like, the one where Lenny pours and talks too much, but still you like him. You like all the misfits—Esmeralda too, that homeless lady camped across from your window every night. Yes, I know her. She’s in your files. I have entered your files. Well, not me exactly, but the unknown me who killed Gallagher. I am not even a suspect yet; no one is. You don’t know my name. My existence. Isn’t that magnificent? Because I know you so well. So many murders over the years have worn you down, though not in a bitter way. You still have faith in the world. Still want to rescue, to solve. I find that remarkable for someone like you. You are called when we have done our worst. It’s hard, isn’t it? Bodies on slabs. The cutting away for clues and truth. We’ll all be there one day, won’t we? Forensics and scalpels. That’s what we come to. You like that place where the dead lie for the final offering. You sit among them. You say, in your file marked “The Sacred,” that they whisper to you. They don’t. It is your own voice. The dead are silent. When the last breath leaves, they evaporate in bits and specks. Why am I having dark thoughts? They find me even here in front of City Hall, among the women. The girls. I have my sign. My declaration, but still … I don’t know; these dark things come and go. A woman onstage is singing with a guitar. She is a dot, but her voice is strong; it rolls over us, our huge beautiful crowd, and echoes through the buildings and rises toward the hills and the ocean. I breathe it all in.

  I work my way out of the crowd and head back to the Heights. It is dusk when I return. I pour a pinot and put on Chopin. I light a candle and a cigarette and sit in the almost night. I go over the plan once more. It’s a tricky one. A masquerade, really. I have to become someone else, not just the outside but the inside too. It won’t work otherwise. It’s hard, you know, slipping into a pretend skin. But I’ve prepared. As I did with Gallagher. He was easy, though. I was a force from behind, knife flashing in the dark. He was so small and wiry, anyway. A punk. I felt so strong that night. All my weightlifting and hitting the heavy bag paid off. He went down quite easily. Jamieson will be different. You’ll see what I mean, of course. You’ll probably get the call shortly after you land. (Have you noticed I’m calling you “you” instead of “my detective”? I suppose we’re intimate now.) Anyway, you’ll find him.

  My coming-home present to you.

  Chapter 12

  He sits naked in a chair, a pale blue ribbon tied in a bow around his neck. He’s wearing finely drawn black eyeliner and purple lipstick. His skin is powdered. His feet point straight ahead. His back is rigid. He seems a statue—a strange one, with a knife wound to the heart, and the index finger missing from its left hand. Cut clean. Eyes open, twenty-seven floors up, as if he’s looking out over the top of Disney Hall to the San Gabriels. A wineglass sits on the table. Why just one? An empty bottle of Shiraz from a vineyard in Paso Robles. A pair of women’s underpants. Lace and pale blue, the color of the bow, laid out like a wing below the wine bottle. He’s posed as if waiting for a show to begin. A slight grin. It can’t be—must be the way the powder and the lipstick meet. I bend down and examine a speck of red on the neck bow. I slide on latex gloves and lift the bow a bit with my pen and see a prick on the skin. From a needle, most likely. His blond hair is combed. A scent of cologne. A rose tattoo on his shoulder. Small. I step back.

  “You know this guy, Detective?” says a uniform, a Latina with short-cropped hair.

  “Paul Jamieson. He was a friend of the architect killed over on Main.”

  “This guy an architect too?”

  “Yes. He was.”

  “Bad month for architects.” She scribbles in a notepad. The crime scene unit spreads through the apartment. Cameras flash. Stuff is bagged. The underpants tweezered into plastic. The bottle. The wineglass. Jamieson, undisturbed by it all.

  “Guy’s packed.”

  “What?”

  “Strong. Look at those arms and pecs. Lot of his kind at my gym. Must have been caught by surprise.”

  “Judging by the fact that he’s sitting naked with a bow around his neck, I’d say so. Or drugged. You work out a lot?”

  “Training for an Iron Woman.”

  “No kidding. Remind me not to piss you off.”

  She closes her notebook, smiles, and nods. Most uniforms wait for instructions. She’s a beat ahead of me.

  “I’m going to knock on some doors.”

  “Last night would be my guess,” I say.

  “Yeah, he still looks close enough to life. Lipstick, eyeliner. Some kink going on. What is it with guys?”

  “What are you thinking?” I say, glancing at her badge. “What’s your first name, Hernandez?”

  “Lily.”

  “Okay, Lily.”

  “Doer’s definitely a woman. No man could put on lipstick and eyeliner like that. That’s a woman’s touch. Expert. The perfume’s Estée Lauder. My sister works at Macy’s. Brings cosmetics and shit home all the time. Why he’s coated in powder, I don’t know. That’s Kabuki shit. Maybe the doer put it on when he was alive, letting him know he was going to be a ghost soon. The rest is all a woman’s work, or maybe a gay makeup artist from the Valley. It’s too neat. Like looking in a mirror.”

  “Estée Lauder?”

  “Couldn’t you smell it?”

  “Maybe the stiff did it himself, playing dress-up. A fantasy.”

  “Nothing else in this place suggests that. The doer came and left with the makeup.”

  “Made him pretty, then killed him?”

  “Like I said, Detective, kinky shit.”

  “Hooker?”

  “Hate. This is planned. Hate plans. Hookers don’t hate.”

  “What about the finger?”

  “Token. Souvenir. Diversion.”

  “You’re pretty good at this, Lily Hernandez. Go shake loose a neighbor.”

  Hernandez dri
fts out and knocks on the door across the hall. I wander through the apartment—two bedrooms, maybe twelve hundred square feet, lightly furnished with expensive, sleek taste. Fine carpets. Turkish in blues, cumin, and eggplant. A few paintings from the Old World, but this is not a full-time home. Must be his downtown place. Celebs and the rich are buying apartments to be close to the Renaissance. A lot of good grooming on Bunker Hill and around the lofts on Spring going down toward the Eastern building and the Ace Hotel. Rooftop pit fires, Belvedere bottles, and women coming and going in Escalades. How things change. Every dead body tells a new story about the city. Gallagher liked it here too, but in the seedier heart of downtown. Jamieson preferred his dirt clean, I guess, twenty-seven floors up, immaculate, windows so clear they seem not to be there. The bed’s not slept in; the shower’s dry, the sink too. Nothing out of place. No scent or faint trace of another. Who was she? Or was it a she? The underpants don’t look lived in. Displayed like a taunt. But who knows? Lipstick. Mascara. A bow. The emasculation of a man—even the way his legs are slightly parted, his penis lonely, exposed. That’s taking something from a man. This isn’t like Gallagher. It’s performance art. To set it all exactly as she wanted. Sly and meticulous. I’m thinking she (or whoever) made Jamieson suffer to take in the full perversion of her design. The whole thing has the staged air of a Vanity Fair cover and will probably pop up on YouTube one day.

  “Hey, Detective,” says Hernandez, “can’t find the finger. They’re getting ready to bag him. You need anything more?”

  “No. What about the neighbors?”

  “One lady saw nothing. No one else is home.”

  “We have the lobby and elevator videos. See what you can get from building security.”