Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery

by Maggie Estep

  A half hour later I’m watching her sleep. I’ve got claw marks up and down my torso, and though I’ve left Ruby pretty much unscathed, she’s apparently exhausted. She’s sleeping like the kitten does, curled into a tight ball, safe from the world’s harms.

  I envy her this abandon. I feel restless, a little nervous. I get up quietly and go into the bathroom to retrieve the Smith & Wesson before I forget it and end up extremely fucked.

  I walk over to where my clothes are jumbled at the foot of the bed, put the gun in the pocket of my jacket, then go back to lie next to Ruby. She’s turned over now. She is exquisite.

  Ruby Murphy

  23 / My Pretty Lungs

  I’m curled on my side, exhausted but feeling opiated, lying half awake. I feel Ned, right behind me, sleeping. I consider turning over to look at him, but I need to run it all through my mind a few times first.

  I feel him move and I turn my head slightly, see him go into the bathroom. And emerge holding a gun. I screw my eyes shut and feel my body go numb. When I open them again, I see Ned put the weapon into his jacket pocket. I don’t know what he’s doing with a gun. Maybe it’s not something you mention on a first date. Maybe I’ve turned into a terrible judge of character and Ned is dangerous and is going to kill me.

  He comes back over and I shut my eyes tightly. My heart is thumping and I start shaking. I worry that Ned is going to turn around and put the gun to my head.

  I try to stop trembling and think of an escape route. How can I quickly jump from the bed? Get to the door?

  Ned settles back into the bed. I sense him looking at me. Time passes. Seconds thick as lifetimes.

  After a long while, when Ned’s breathing sounds even, I open my eyes and carefully turn my head. He looks like he’s asleep. I make note of where my pants and shirt and shoes are, where the door is, and what I can use to defend myself. The only weaponlike thing I see is the garish ceramic lamp on the dresser. I picture myself picking it up and smashing Ned over the head with it. I’ve never done anything to physically hurt any human or animal in my life. But then again, my life’s never been threatened. Maybe it isn’t being threatened now. Maybe I’m being hysterical. But then again, maybe not. I always thought my instincts were good. In the past, if a guy was trouble, I sensed it straight off and went into the fire willingly. I felt something slightly off about Ned Ward when I first met him, but I overlooked it, which makes me angry with myself. So angry it washes away some of the fear and I leap out of bed and scramble for my clothes. No sooner do I have my pants on than Ned sits bolt upright in bed.

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  I stand frozen, idiotic. Then I grab my shoes and go to the door.

  “Ruby, where are you going?” he demands, and for an answer I fumble with the dead bolt.

  I make it out into the parking lot, pulling my shirt on over my head, not stopping to put my shoes on.

  “Ruby, come back here!” Ned calls out.

  I run down Emmons Avenue, over to Shore Avenue. I feel something jab into my foot but it’s only a vague, disassociated sensation and I veer off Shore down one of the small residential streets. My breath rasps in my throat and my head is pounding.

  When I reach Brighton Beach Avenue, I slow down enough to look back. I don’t see Ned. I don’t see anything except one stunned-looking old guy, staring after me.

  I start to feel like a ridiculous ass. I’m running barefoot down the streets of Brooklyn. My fly is down and I don’t have my bra. I slow down. And suddenly I think I’m a paranoid jerk. Ned’s having a gun doesn’t necessarily mean he’d use it on me, does it?

  At that moment I see someone come running around the end of the block. I can’t tell if it’s Ned but I pick up my pace and hurl myself as fast as I can down the street, cutting between two houses into a small alley running on pure instinct. I dart and cut and turn back and make circles until I’m sure I’ve lost Ned—or whoever it was. And then, just a couple blocks from home, my whole body gives up and I drag myself, like a wounded animal, into the parking lot of a diner where I wedge myself between a huge Dumpster and a wall.

  I sit there for a long time, confused, exhausted, and scared. It’s a dark, moonless night. Time passes. My mind is empty and black.

  Eventually, when I can breathe normally again, I make my way home.

  X

  CLIMBING THE hallway stairs, I see a light on. Ramirez’s door is open and I look in to see my neighbor and Elsie both sitting at the kitchen table in their underwear, staring ahead.

  They don’t look happy.

  “You guys all right?” I ask.

  “My chest hurts,” Elsie says grimly. Then she looks up at me and her eyes grow round. “What the hell happened to you?” she asks.

  I shake my head, not knowing how to explain. “Long story. But I’m a little worried someone’s gonna come looking for me.”

  “What?” Ramirez is paying attention now. “What’re you talking about, little girl?”

  “I got into a bad spot with a guy. Maybe it’s got something to do with the job.”

  “Job? You mean following that lady’s boyfriend?” Ramirez is frowning hard. “I told you I didn’t like the sound of that,” he says emphatically.

  “Yeah. You might have been right. It’s turning into a mess,” I say sitting down, feeling my whole body turn to Jell-O now that I’m safe. “I went with this Ned guy to a motel. He had a gun. I don’t know what he was going to do with it. He didn’t point it at me or anything. But there’s no reason I know of that this guy should have a gun. I’m a little worried he’s gonna find out where I live and come get me.”

  Both Elsie and Ramirez are aghast and seem to think I’ve gone off the deep end completely. The two interrogate and chide me until Oliver, apparently having heard our voices, suddenly appears at Ramirez’s door.

  “What’s going on?” he says, leaning his thin frame against the door. He’s blinking sleep out of his eyes and his hair is sticking up, making him look like a sparrow with ruffled head feathers.

  “Your girl Ruby got a little too close to a man with a gun,” Elsie tells Oliver. Then, turning back to me: “You gotta call the cops, girl.”

  “And say what? I went to a motel with this guy and he had a gun?”

  “Exactly,” she says. “He had a permit for the gun?” she wants to know.

  “What, was I supposed to say, ‘You got a permit for that, pal?’“ I fan my hands open in a helpless gesture. “I think maybe he seduced me with ulterior motives. Maybe he’s in with the horse killer people.”

  “You don’t even know if there are horse killers,” Oliver says.

  “There are. I know there are. I think I knew it right at the beginning. Knew there was something going on. But I didn’t know I knew. Until now.”

  “Oh come on,” Oliver rolls his eyes at me, “you’re stretching it.”

  “No she ain’t. Women know these things,” Elsie counters.

  Oliver shrugs, unconvinced, and all of a sudden the abject ridiculousness of the situation hits me. I’m sitting here with a moody Vietnam vet, my ex-lover—who’s wasting away from cancer—and a stripper with botched implants. And I’ve just been to bed with a man I know very little about who carries a gun. I longingly flash on a few days ago, back when I had a simple, calm life, before everything careened wildly off course. I wish I still drank so I could just throw back a few and sit at the piano tapping out maudlin minuets and feeling sorry for myself. But I don’t drink, and in lieu of extreme inebriation I have no choice but to stay up all night with my odd brood of compatriots. Elsie and Ramirez are too riled up to get any sleep, and Oliver, whose sleep patterns have been off for months, is wide-awake.

  It’s well after daybreak by the time Oliver and I bid Ramirez and Elsie good night and go back to my apartment. In light of all that’s happened, I’ve decided to devote the morning to going to see Ariel to officially resign from my detective job. But first I need some sleep.

  Oliver and I nestle i
nto the bed, legs entwined.

  Sleep comes quickly but I jolt awake an hour later.

  I go into the kitchen to start the coffee, then collapse onto the couch, feeling like I’ve been dropped down a rollercoaster. Stinky is perched on the couch arm, stomach spilling over the sides. Sun is streaming across the piano. My little world looks deceptively peaceful and lovely this morning.

  After I’ve poured two cups of coffee down my throat, I check for cell phone messages, but there aren’t any. I try Ariel’s various phone numbers. All I get is her voice mail.

  I sit staring at the wall for ten minutes. I keep getting images of Ned. I let them come then patiently wait for them to leave.

  Eventually, I wake Oliver, who has a slew of doctor appointments this morning.

  As he stumbles into the shower, I try Ariel yet again, and still failing to reach her, decide that after seeing Oliver to the train, I’ll try putting everything out of my mind by getting on my poor, neglected bicycle and riding into Manhattan, to go see my friend Jane, who’s capable of soothing me no matter how I may have spiraled. I dial her number and she answers brightly, not only up at seven-fifteen A.M. but having already meditated, eaten fruit, and washed her yoga mat.

  “You’re coming to see me?” she asks, incredulous.

  “I am. I have to talk at you,” I tell her.

  “I’m taking Christopher’s class at 11:45 but you can come with,” Jane says.

  “Oh,” I say, not feeling particularly inclined to be put through my paces by Christopher, a wonderful but utterly merciless yoga teacher.

  “You have to come. It’s good for you.”

  “I doubt that, but all right,” I concede, “I’ll be at your doorstep in a little more than an hour.”

  “Good,” Jane says, apparently so happy at the prospect of seeing me that she’s actually admitting it.

  I hang up just as Oliver emerges from the bathroom with a towel around his waist. His longish brown hair is combed back, making him look like a freshly bathed 1940s gangster. He sits down on the couch and grabs the bottle of skin lotion I keep on the end table in case I get a sudden urge to lotion my perpetually dry hands.

  “I have a craving for tomato soup,” he announces as he rubs lotion into his arms.

  “Do you want me to go to the store and get you some?”

  “No. Thanks, but I’ll just puke it up in an hour or two.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t be depressed. The chemo’s shrinking the tumors. Look,” he says, taking my hand and placing it on his lymph nodes. “See? Smaller, right?”

  I nod. Repressing the horror I feel at touching the bumps that are trying to kill him.

  I watch him rub lotion into his feet.

  “I think I’m gonna ride my bike into the city,” I tell him.

  “And you’re going to see that awful Ariel woman and tell her you quit, right?”

  “If I can find her. Yeah. First I’m gonna go take a yoga class, though. With Jane.”

  “Good,” Oliver says, and I feel slightly guilty. Oliver loves yoga, but he’s too sick to do much right now.

  “I was considering going home after the doctors’ appointments,” he tells me, “but I can’t leave you alone since that gun toting creep is on the loose.” He goes into the bedroom to get dressed.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got Ramirez. He was in ’Nam. He can look out for me.”

  “He’ll be home tonight?” he calls out.

  “Sure,” I say, though of course I have no idea if this will be true.

  “You sure?”

  “I am,” I lie.

  Oliver emerges fully clothed, studies me for a second then decides to believe me.

  I stuff my yoga clothes into my backpack, throw my beloved seafoam green racing bike over my shoulder, and Oliver and I walk out onto Stillwell Avenue. We part at the subway entrance, Oliver turning back to wave and grin.

  I get on the bike and head to Ocean Parkway. Fear about Oliver forms a dead weight in my chest. I start singing to myself loudly trying to drown out the ominous thoughts in my head with a rousing rendition of a Joy Division song. When that wears thin I hum the beginning of JSB’s Mass in B Minor. It’s a bit too complex for my useless voice, though. I stop singing and ride.

  The neighborhoods change, from Russian to Hasidic to Spanish and then black as I veer off on Flatbush, circling Prospect Park and heading into Fort Greene then finally through another blanket of Hasidim in South Williamsburg. I take the Williamsburg Bridge across into Manhattan, occasionally looking down to the murky waters of the East River.

  In a few more minutes I’m at the corner of Third Street and Avenue C, once an anarchic and delirious cesspool of crime and possibility, now bordering on bourgeois with studio apartments renting for $1,600 and five star restaurants popping out of storefronts that once sold nothing fancier than crack and kitty litter. Multicolored kids from a nearby high school walk in little gangs. Black, white, Asian, Spanish, spilling out of their clothes, their lives full of big gestures and plans, which I find demoralizing. I’ve always found successful youths demoralizing. Particularly since I was a highly unsuccessful youth myself, barely passing from one grade to the next, lurking from one high school to another as my father and I ambled from town to town, arriving in each new place filled with hope that he’d find a moving company that treated him well and that I wouldn’t stick out as the weird new kid nobody wanted to befriend.

  At some point both my father and I gave up. We learned that no matter where we moved, eventually it would be exactly the same. He would take shit for being the new man on the moving crew, and I would take shit for being weird and new—a double whammy girl. I adopted a Fuck You dress code and a philosophical stance. This didn’t win me any popularity contests either, but at least it afforded me the illusion that I was an outcast by choice.

  I ring Jane’s bell. She buzzes me in, and I hoist the bike onto my shoulder and carry it up three flights. Jane and Harry’s door is open a crack. I push my way in and am greeted by two white and gray fur balls: Stewart and Blossom, the cats. They weave between my legs, trying to trip me, as all cats seem sworn to do to all humans.

  “Ruby!” Harry says happily, emerging from the bedroom to greet me.

  “Harry,” I say, resting the bike against the hallway wall and pecking him on each cheek. “Where’s the wife?”

  “Where else?” he says, indicating the shower.

  Jane has a bizarre compulsion; whenever a guest arrives, she gets in the shower. She’s known I was coming for over an hour, ample time to shower, but as she’s done several hundred times in the past, she waited until I actually rang the bell to step under the water.

  “Coffee?” Harry raises his eyebrows at me.

  “Great, yes, thanks.” I go into the tiny living room and plant myself on the hideous black foam couch with a dent in the center Harry has been sitting in this same spot each day for several years, chain smoking, making notes for the true crime magazines he’s constantly launching, and watching the Weather Channel, with which both Harry and Jane are obsessed.

  Stewart and Blossom exaltedly sniff at my shoes as Harry comes in holding a steaming cup of coffee. I take the cup and sip from it.

  “Where’ve you been hiding, Ruby?” Harry asks, taking a seat in the plastic lawn chair opposite the couch.

  “Jane told you about my new job?” I ask, noticing Harry’s peculiar getup of black socks, flip-flops, a T-shirt from a surgical museum in London, and a pair of baggy plaid boxer shorts.

  “Yeah,” Harry nods, lighting a cigarette, “something about the racetrack, right?”

  “Right,” I say, giving him the specifics, which Jane’s probably already done but that Harry, in his perpetual daze of preoccupation and pot smoke, has probably long forgotten.

  Eventually, Jane emerges wearing a strange pink dressing gown. “You’re here,” she comments, shooting a filthy look at Harry’s cigarette.

  “I am,” I confirm.

  She
sits down on the hideous couch. The thing’s diabolical gravity is such that she’s sucked right into the center, forcing us to sit shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “You look a bit worn,” she tells me.

  “I had a date with a man with a gun.”

  Neither Jane nor Harry seem particularly moved by this statement, so I detail it for them. Ned, the motel, the gun, my Marathon Man—style run home to Coney.

  Jane’s jaw actually drops. I take immense satisfaction in this. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything that actually shocked her. Harry is frowning hard and pretty quickly launches into the now standard lecture I’ve gotten from both Ramirez and Oliver.

  I nod my head. “Say no more, I’m quitting anyway,” I tell him.

  “I should hope so,” Jane says indignantly. “You’ve gone completely insane, haven’t you? I can’t let you out of my sight for five minutes.”

  “It’s just a fluke. I had no intention of getting into any of this. It’s not my fault.”

  “Everything you do is as you intended,” Jane says gravely, quoting some swami or other.

  “We ought to get going,” Jane adds. “It’s after eleven.” She gets up and goes into the bedroom to change. I give in to my compulsion and smoke one of Harry’s cigarettes—even though I usually don’t smoke for at least two hours before yoga practice. When Jane emerges, wearing loose yoga pants, a sweatshirt, and an odd floral scarf, she sniffs at the tobacco-scented air and shoots me a filthy look.

  We bid Harry farewell then go down to the lobby, where Jane has her old brown bike chained to the iron banister. We ride over to Broadway, to the yoga center where Jane teaches and studies. A few minutes later we’ve rolled our mats out side by side and are lying on our backs, savoring a moment of rest before we’re put through the rigors of the Ashtanga primary series. A few minutes later our teacher, Christopher, strides into the room.

  “Ah,” he says triumphantly, coming to stand at the head of my mat, “look what the cat dragged in.” He stares down at my supine form.