Big City Eyes

by Delia Ephron

  “A handicapped plate was stolen,” I told Art. “I was thinking of writing about how hard it is to find parking in the business district. While I sat in my car last Monday, eating potato chips, I had to get rid of ten drivers who were after my space.”

  “Parking?” He pressed the tips of his fingers into his forehead as if to ward off a headache.

  I pushed harder. “With a handicapped plate you can plant your car anywhere. You won’t even get ticketed in a red zone or in front of a hydrant. That’s probably why one was stolen. It’s a new crime, the first new crime of the twenty-first century.” It was always exciting to give a story millennial significance. “In the twenty-first century, people will spend more time trying to park than they will having sex.”

  He looked startled, and I was, too. How did sex sneak its way into parking?

  “Good idea,” he conceded.

  Safe idea was more accurate. “I’ll do it for next Friday.”

  “Can you cover the school board meeting tonight?”

  Tom was on the school board. “No. Maybe Rob can.” I needed air. “Do you mind?” I tugged at the window, banged the frame, and tugged again before it abruptly flew upward. A wind swished several papers off Art’s desk before I could pull the glass down to a reasonable level. “Sorry.”

  I collected the papers for him, sat, and noticed my hands. How chafed they looked—ugly beet-colored paws. When I was anxious, my skin could go from milky to red in seconds, especially my hands.

  “Do an article on ketamine, a short analysis of the difference between its effect on animals and humans. It’s the drug of choice for club kids.”

  I’d been busy hiding my hands under crossed arms. “Excuse me?”

  “Ketamine. The animal tranquilizer,” said Art. “It’s big. In the rave scene. You’re from Manhattan, you should know all about it.”

  “No.”

  “Kids call it Special K. I’ve got some information here somewhere.” He started mussing papers around on his desk.

  “Ketamine, that substance in the dead woman, is a recreational club drug?”

  “A hallucinogen, as I recall.”

  I was cold now, bumps popping up along my arms. I closed the window. “Maybe I’m getting sick, my temperature keeps jumping.”

  Rob put his head in the door. “Lily, the phone.”

  “Take a message for her,” Art instructed, still flipping through pages.

  “I think I’m thirsty, after all.”

  I went into the hall and took my time at the water dispenser. Did Sam know about ketamine?

  “Hey, I’ve got it, come back here, Lily.”

  I took a few reluctant steps into his office. He waved a Xeroxed sheet. “Here you go. Hey, why don’t you come to dinner sometime? Bring your son.”

  “Thank you.” I read the headline: Hip, Cheap, and Potentially Lethal. “I wonder if the dead woman hung out in clubs.”

  “Could be,” said Art.

  “Lily, the phone again,” Rob yelled.

  “I think I’ll get that, if it’s okay.”

  “Sure.”

  Sam couldn’t be into ketamine. It wasn’t possible. I picked up the receiver. “Lily Davis here.”

  “Mrs. Davis?” A man’s voice. Familiar.

  “Yes.”

  “Chief Blocker.”

  I scouted the room for a private spot. There was no such thing. Rob, busy loading the office camera, was listening to my conversation. I knew because I listened to all his conversations when I had nothing better to do. Bernadette, her back to me, stiffened, her whole body on alert to eavesdrop.

  “What’s up?” I said. They would get no clue from me about who was calling.

  “Would you come down to the station, Mrs. Davis?” Before today, he had always addressed me as Lily.

  “What for?” I inquired neutrally.

  “We need some information. We need to talk to you about something important.”

  “And may I ask what?” I might have been talking to Jane, well, not Jane, someone more in the acquaintance category.

  “Is there some problem? Is your son sick today?”

  “My son?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, of course not. He’s in school.”

  “We’ll discuss it when you get here.”

  “Wait.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Davis?”

  “Suppose I get there in a half-hour, forty minutes at the latest. Would that be cool?” I went overboard selecting a relaxed adjective.

  “As soon as you can would be the best.”

  “Bye,” I bleated, sometime after he’d already hung up.

  I crammed the ketamine article in my purse, grabbed my coat, and started down the stairs. I tried to move quickly, but my legs felt as heavy as sandbags. Peg seemed to glide in slow motion from her desk to the supply cabinet. I seized the front door and noticed my inflamed hands. Deidre had poison ivy. How had she gotten it?

  I ran across the parking lot, hurrying to a place that I wished I would never reach. My vision blurred. The air rippled, buildings undulated, cars acquired strange shapes. No sounds penetrated, but echoes ricocheted from one side of my brain to the other. Deidre’s machine-gun laughter. Sam’s giggles after Bernadette had announced the discovery of the body.

  The slam of the car door shocked me into normal time. I rammed the key into the ignition and fired the car with ten times more gas than it needed. I backed out of the space and heard someone swear. I hit the brakes. Slow down. Proceed with caution. I conjured up an imaginary friend to talk me home. She warned me against driving too fast, ordered me to take a right, to change lanes, to check rearview and side mirrors. I let her guide me down the block and into my driveway, even kept her along so I could amble up the walk and wave carelessly to Woffert.

  “Mary, she’s home,” he called. His wife threw open their door.

  “How are you, Lily, dear?” she asked.

  “Fine.” I practiced the word some more.

  “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”

  Had they read my column? Did they feel sorry for me, too? Was the whole town reading between the lines? “No thank you, that’s very kind, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. Work and all.”

  As soon as I was inside, I tore up to Sam’s bedroom. It was hard to know where to begin. With clothes strewn from one end to the other, the place already appeared ransacked. I pulled out the ketamine article and set a record for speed-reading. The liquid is usually stolen. From veterinarians. Often mixed with vanilla for flavor. Baked until solid. Any fool can do it in a home oven. Three hundred fifty degrees on a glass plate. I owned one Pyrex baking dish, that would do. After the substance cools, crush into powder, then sniff. Sam could know all about ketamine. He could be a pro.

  Did Deidre steal ketamine at the town meeting? Did they plan to use it for recreation, then decide to get some Klingon kicks? Klingons like to kill people. The woman was shot with a dart. They could have hidden anywhere and plugged her. Where did Deidre get that poison ivy?

  How stupid of me to assume all the clues were linked to the same person. The house, the assignation, the tire marks. Who the young lady hung out with or made love to might not have had anything to do with her death. Of course, it was possible Sam knew her. He could have known her from the clubs.

  I scoured the boxes, clothes, drawers, his bed. Under his pillow, I found the condoms I’d given him, the package opened. What a pleasing discovery. I searched his medicine cabinet, the laundry basket. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but expected that it would declare itself, possibly a cache of tranquilizer darts or a vial of unidentified liquid. I opened the extra-strength Tylenol and the boxes of toothpaste and soap, and examined the toilet paper tube. I reminded myself how methodically Tom had dissected the Nicholas house and started over, working the room section by section.

  Nothing.

  I sat on Sam’s bed, trying to figure out what I had missed, then gave up and collapsed backward. Thank God, I ha
dn’t found anything—although that might only mean he’d covered his tracks. I flung my arm to the side and let it dangle off the mattress. I drifted back to that unearthly day when we had first entered the Nicholas bedroom. The erotic shock, Tom’s grip on my shoulders. Our fateful return weeks later. I haven’t known you long enough for “never.” Tom and I had almost rolled right off the bed while making love. Stop this madness, get up, I scolded myself, and as I swung my legs down, my shoe crunched something in the thick shag carpet. I felt around and from between the scruffy yarns extracted a vial not taller than a thumbnail. Amber glass. Too unusual and too remarkably bitsy not to contain bad news. I unscrewed the tiny black top. Brownish-white powder inside. I shook some onto my palm, and the smell wafted upward. Delicious. I might have thought there were vanilla-flavored cookies baking in the oven. No parental guide for this moment. Not in the normal range.

  This was evidence. Except it wasn’t. All this proved was that Sam had ketamine. Anyone present at the deer meeting might have it, too. Should I call Allan?

  I pinched the powder back inside. No, I did not want to talk to Allen. How disheartening. The only person as invested in Sam as I am is someone I can’t stand, someone with whom I never agree, someone determined to blame me for everything wretched about my son. Not necessary, since I already blame myself.

  The phone rang. I didn’t answer, wanting to keep any hellish tidings at bay as long as possible. But this might be Sam’s one permitted phone call from the Police Department after his arrest. “Hello.”

  “Mrs. Davis?”

  A woman. And the second person today to address me as Mrs. Davis. “Yes.”

  “This is Glenn Hall, Deidre’s mom.”

  “Oh, hello.”

  “I’ve been meaning to call. Sam and Deidre are spending so much time together.”

  My lord, you’d think they been hanging out in the sandbox. “Oh yes, I’ve been wanting to meet you, too.”

  “I felt awful when I read your column this morning. I realized that you hardly know a soul here. Can you come to dinner next Friday and meet our family? You and Sam both. Sam’s such a funny kid. We really like him.”

  “I think—Can I call you back? You caught me in the middle of … my hair’s wet. I’m late.”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  I wrote it down along with the rest of the information. Deidre’s, dinner, seven p.m., Friday.

  Sam couldn’t kill anyone. He couldn’t be a murderer. Murderers don’t get dinner invitations. Murderers aren’t funny kids who have meat loaf with their mothers at their girlfriends’ houses. Murderers hide evidence; they don’t drop it on the carpet. I’m fabricating this whole thing. Out the window are trees I can’t identify, animals that aren’t on leashes, fresh air. The only air I breathe easily is the air that alters from moment to moment with the aroma of bagels, burgers, stinky garbage, hot sugared peanuts cooked on a skillet on an outdoor cart. I miss busy stores. I miss that bestial urge on a crowded street to bean an old person so he’ll move faster. The sky here shelters a strange world. And it is so vast. It is not my sky.

  How can I know what I think?

  I hid the vial in the back of a kitchen cabinet, inside a mug shaped like Santa Claus. I phoned the police before leaving, and left a message with Sally to tell Chief Blocker I’d be right there. Again supervising myself as though I were driving with only a learner’s permit, I got myself to the station.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE POLICE station was located just outside the village proper, up a winding hill. Here its modern utilitarian concrete-block architecture could offend no one’s aesthetic sensibilities.

  I expected to be squired to Chief Blocker’s office, but Sally escorted me down the hallway to a cubicle not larger than six by eight. The interrogation room. I recognized it from the video screen in the dispatch office. A disconnect set in, my ironic double marveling that I should ever in my middle-class life be led to the hot seat in a police interrogation chamber. My son seemed a distant appendage, something that might or might not come up, and I might or might not acknowledge our acquaintance.

  Footsteps—a deliberate, even pace down the stairs—and I turned to see Maureen Mooney, the only detective on the force. She was big-boned and self-possessed, and had probably ordered her conservative brown suit from a catalogue. She held her head haughtily, cranked at an upward angle, her eyelids raised only a lazy halfway, the minimum necessary for her to look down her freckled nose at me. When Mooney was a patrol officer, according to Art, she had been known to issue tickets to drivers speeding one mile over the limit.

  “Mrs. Davis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on in.”

  She waited for me to precede her and then indicated one of the four gray metal folding chairs at the rectangular Formica table. I sat, wondering whether I was an accessory simply from hiding that tiny amber bottle in a Santa Claus mug. She took the chair opposite.

  I placed my purse on the floor next to my feet and clasped my hands in my lap. We exchanged polite smiles while we waited, although I didn’t know for what. I was not about to be tricked into filling her silence. That was my technique for getting information, too.

  “Thanks for coming over.” Chief Blocker burst in and commenced a nervous hopping gait from one side of the room to the other. Following him, more cautious and circumspect, was Tom.

  “Hello, Lily,” he said. He didn’t sit, either.

  Blocker brushed his hand through his fuzzy hair. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re squinting.”

  I was, I realized. I had been trying to reduce Tom to a blob, the way I had with that mouse.

  “I’m a little tired. What’s going on?”

  “Sergeant McKee mentioned that you were in the Nicholas house together.”

  “What?” My foot involuntarily kicked up and toppled my purse. I bent over to shove the contents back in.

  “Over a month ago—the day we saw the dead woman,” I heard Tom say smoothly as I set the purse upright and resumed my composure. Oh, that day. “Only, of course, then, she was alive.” He spun a chair, lopped a leg over the seat, and sat. This guy had moves even when it came to chairs.

  “We were wondering,” said Blocker, “if you could cast your mind back to that day. We’re trying to identify the body. Perhaps if you’d describe what you remember, the woman, the room, anything.”

  This isn’t about Sam. This has nothing to do with my son. Not yet, at least not yet.

  Detective Mooney slipped a small notepad out of her pocket. She selected a sharpened pencil from the paper cup in the middle of the table and tapped the eraser impatiently.

  I pretended to think. I made some clicking sounds with my tongue and scratched between my eyebrows.

  “Lily?” said Blocker.

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “That’s impossible. You must. Think back. You and Sergeant McKee entered the driveway—”

  “I told them that you came in,” said Tom.

  My God, did he imagine I was keeping silent now because on that day I’d promised him off-the-record confidentiality? He’d obviously fessed up to Blocker. “I’d injured my ankle. I’d been bitten by a dog and was pretty flipped. Otherwise, I would never have gone into that house, and really, I don’t remember a thing, except those painted toenails. I was not myself. No, I wasn’t. In fact, it’s as if I was never in that overdesigned mansion, ever—that’s how much I’ve blanked it out.”

  I rested my eyes on Tom to make my point: We never happened. He stared impassively back. Then I smiled broadly at Chief Blocker and Detective Mooney, who was looking peeved.

  “A locket around the woman’s neck, perhaps. She was undressed, I understand.”

  “Yes, naked. I don’t remember her face, I think that’s why, because I was so startled and then I tried not to look.”

  “How about a purse? Did you see any clo
thes?” Blocker leaned toward me, pressing his palms into the tabletop.

  I shrugged helplessly.

  A weary calm settled over him. While I was certain that his big toe was wiggling in his shoe, functioning as an exhaust valve, the rest of him wilted. Poor Blocker. He could have been a farmer in a drought: it hadn’t rained for weeks, and now the one possibility—the only cloud on the horizon—had evaporated. I didn’t feel guilty. I had nothing to contribute. Tom was what I remembered and intended to forget.

  I was about to stand, to let them know that the meeting was over, when it crossed my mind that I was not allowed to excuse them. They were the dismissers; I was the dismissee. I waited.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” Blocker said, with a sigh he couldn’t suppress.

  “I couldn’t tell you the color of the bedspread.” A limpid inviting peach. “Or the pillows.” Crisp organdy that wrinkled as easily as linen. Her bare skin and ours. “Not even the length of her hair.” That was true. “Everything I did in that house feels like an accident.”

  “Huh?” said Detective Mooney. “I’m not following.”

  “It’s clear to me,” said Tom.

  “Traumatic but fortunately, mercifully erased.”

  Detective Mooney closed her notepad and deposited the pencil in the cup. Tom got up, whipped his chair around, and slotted it back in. “Thanks for coming over,” said Chief Blocker. He gestured toward the door.

  As they filed out after me, I inquired about whether I could report the fact that the victim had been seen three weeks before she died.

  “Nothing’s on the record for now,” said Blocker.

  “Is George Nicholas a suspect? Has he been interviewed, has anyone else?”

  “No comment.”

  “Nice to see you, Lily,” said Detective Mooney. With the interrogation over, I was Lily again. She punched Tom not too gently on the arm. “I heard your brother, the stud muffin, has been giving Lily a hard time.”

  “My brother?” That mini-grenade shook some suave out of him.