Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery

by Maggie Estep

  In the distance, a horse, probably a mare, whinnies hotly. Joe pricks his ears and looks over in the direction of the call but remains calm. He settles in, arching his neck and focusing, playing with the bit a little.

  We reach the busy road where cars whiz by at remarkable speeds. Joe looks surprised but not particularly frightened. I guess this is nothing compared to roaring racetrack crowds.

  Coleman holds the colt’s head closer to Rusty’s neck now, effectively blocking most of Joe’s view of the traffic.

  We make it across the road then weave through sleepy back-streets, toward the dunes. Weeds, stunted trees, and trash line the path. To our right is an immense empty lot, to our left, bumpy barren land. Coleman loosens the lead rope and Joe takes big relaxed strides, looking around, intrigued, and probably expecting a racetrack to appear at any second.

  “You’re doing fine. Let’s trot,” Coleman tells me, asking his mount for a slow trot.

  I feel Joe’s muscles bunch up as he tucks his head in. We trot over a small hill. Just ahead is Jamaica Bay, deceptively pure looking. There’s not a soul in sight and the afternoon sun is mirrored in the placid blue-gray water.

  “Okay,” Coleman says, “let’s lope.”

  Rusty and Joe both transition into fluid canters. I take a stronger hold on Joe’s mouth. The two horses are cantering side by side and I can feel Joe gathering himself, preparing for his job. He doesn’t realize that I’m not going to ask him for a full gallop.

  “Wanna race?” Coleman flashes a grin at me.

  “No!” I say, but Coleman’s got other plans. The cowboy makes a sound in his throat and unceremoniously shakes Rusty’s reins. The little quarter horse gets excited, throws a buck, and picks up speed.

  Joe points his ears forward with interest and then does what he was born to do: takes off with me.

  “Hey!” I hear Coleman shout behind me.

  “Joe!” I yell at the horse, to no avail. The tenuous hold I had on his mouth is history now. He’s pinned his ears back and transformed himself into a running machine.

  I grab hold of his mane and bunch my body up tightly in order to stay out of the way and not throw him off balance. I feel him stretch out, lower to the ground. I’m terrified but completely exhilarated.

  The world whizzes by in an incomprehensible blur. I hear the music of hooves against hard sand. I melt myself into the colt, trying to become part of his immense body. I look ahead through slit eyes, attempting to see what’s in front of us, but it’s all fuzzy and the wind is making my eyes tear. Thankfully, Joe seems to know exactly what he’s doing, knows where each foot is falling, and I have no choice but to trust the colt.

  As my heartbeat pounds in my ears, keeping time with the sound of the colt’s hooves, the fear suddenly leaves. Fear about Joe taking a wrong step and sending me flying out of the saddle. Fear about the rest of this day. Fear about whatever it is I’ve spent most of my life fearing. It’s gone. Torn off me by the colt’s blinding speed.

  I’m not sure how many seconds or minutes go by. What we’re doing defies time itself, but just when my whole body starts to ache with the effort of staying balanced, I feel Joe slow down, at first almost imperceptibly, then downshifting to a canter. I scramble to regain my seat as he falls into a brisk trot. We’ve reached the end of the beach. Just ahead, a bouquet of rocks juts up from the sand. Joe drops to a walk just short of the rocks. He’s breathing heavily as he points his ears and looks ahead. I lean forward, resting my torso against his neck, breathing in the smell of his sweat.

  “Thanks, Joe,” I whisper to the colt. He flicks his ears.

  We turn back toward the stable, looking for Coleman and Rusty. Ahead of us the sun is starting to fall out of the sky.

  Gargantuan, the next Ruby Murphy mystery will be published in April 2004.

  Look for Maggie Estep’s The Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals, a collection of essays that work together to further illustrate her edgy talent, her appealing voice, and her insightful take on the stranger aspects of life. Turn the page to find an early taste of what will be in bookstores in September 2003 from Three Rivers Press.

  AN EXCERPT FROM

  The Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals

  Are We Sluts?

  I’ve been on a lustful rampage lately, having my way with all sorts of unsuspecting individuals, and most of them are sick. I don’t mean emotionally disturbed. They have the flu and now, predictably, I’m sick, too. I haven’t even slept with most of these people, have just been having high school-like make-out sessions because ever since breaking up with my longest-term boyfriend to date, I’ve been psychically—and physically—flailing all over the place. I’ve got naked with one guy, then suddenly freaked out, threw all my clothes back on, and went running off into the blistering sunset. I actually had sex with another guy but then felt compelled to get up and leave the moment I’d gotten what I came for. For a few weeks, I did pause on Extremely Young Guy, even letting him spend the night once. But he was old school Dominican, and I kept imagining that one day, as we walked around arm in arm, we’d run into his mother—who’s only five years my senior—and she would probably kill me. Because, although Extremely Young Guy is of age, I don’t think the average Dominican mother has tremendous tolerance for chain-smoking white writer chicks corrupting their soft-skinned sons.

  So Extremely Young Guy and I called it quits. And I moved on. To making out with sick people. The incredibly delightful Man with the Glass Eye, a guy who, as you probably guessed, has a glass eye and is intensely smart and sexy in a sort of demented gentleman way but who won’t actually give me any because he knows I’m on the rampage and, in the immortal words of Bartleby the Scrivener, would prefer not to be another notch in my sociopathic belt of love. Though, finally, a few nights ago, weakened from a bout of flu, he did let me kiss him. And, evidently, I’m now playing hostess to his germs. Or maybe it was Wonder Boy, another contender, who’s beautiful but tends to smoke an extraordinary amount of weed—which causes him to sigh a lot. Wonder Boy was sick, too. And no sooner had he managed to get unstoned enough to shove me forward on the bed and hike up my skirt than he started sneezing. All over my ass. We fucked and sneezed and sneezed and fucked.

  Fucking and sneezing. This is all starting to make me feel like an episode of Sex in the City. Specifically the one where the ladies start wondering if they’re A) Women in search of interesting relationships or B) Unmitigated sluts. I always refused to watch Sex in the City, because its author, Candace Bushnell, was the most favored of my former literary agent’s authors, and this agent, if and when she returned my calls, would always tell me she was too busy to see about my foreign rights, she had to have dinner with Candace. I started holding Candace responsible for my lack of sales in France. And refused to watch Sex in the City. Then they snuck it into The Sopranos time slot—The Sopranos being the whole reason I got cable in the first place. And I found myself watching it, and, with mounting horror, relating to it. Particularly to the “Are We Sluts?” episode.

  I don’t know if the Sex in the City ladies figured out whether or not they’re sluts, and I guess the verdict is still out on me. But at least I mean well. I really am fond of each and every person I swap germs with. I don’t bring home people I hate. In fact, on some level, I even love them. Each and every one of them. And there are a lot of them right now. And they’re making me sick.

  Between the Man with the Glass Eye and Wonder Boy, I was probably already infected two times over but I didn’t have any symptoms. Enter my gambling partner, Liz, and her two-year-old daughter, Georgeanne. We three get together biweekly and either go to the track or watch live racing on cable and call bets in to our OTB phone account. We’re pretty serious about this stuff, and Liz and I are cultivating young Georgeanne’s statistics abilities now so she’ll be supporting us all with her winnings by age five. She can already say long shot quite well.

  Both Liz and Georgeanne were recovering from the flu but I cavalierly told
Liz that thanks to my diligent vegetarianism and daily yoga practice, I could doubtless withstand any germs she and her daughter might inadvertently spray my way. So the two of them bundled up and traipsed out to Brooklyn, where we three sat transfixed in front of my TV, rolling around on the floor, cheering on our horses, stuffing ourselves with the batch of cornbread I’d just cooked up, and coughing and sneezing. Or at least they were coughing and sneezing. I didn’t start feeling sick ’til a few days later. I was with the Man with the Glass Eye. We were over in Chelsea seeing the artist Damien Hirst’s latest show, which I liked because it features a great many garishly gorgeous medical tableaux and surgical tools. I love surgical tools. I’m obsessed by alterations to the human body. Probably because I have a bionic hip. I got into a fluke boating accident when I was a barbiturate-abusing adolescent. My hip joint was smashed to bits and they had to put in a metal hip. I sometimes set off airport metal detectors. I even have a little card certifying that I am not a terrorist but rather possess a fake, metal hip. In any case, I’m fascinated by medicine. And was immensely taken with the Damien Hirst show.

  As the Man with the Glass Eye and I stood peering into one of the immense fish tanks filled with gynecological tools, I found myself so moved by the piece’s combination of brilliance and stupidity that I leaned over to try kissing the Man with the Glass Eye for the second time. And sneezed in his face. Within a few hours, I was oozing snot, coughing, sneezing, and shaking with chills. I retreated back to Brooklyn, ingested juice, covered myself in seventy blankets, and have spent the last few days coughing like a late-stage consumption victim, hallucinating, and pondering the eternal question: Are we sluts?

  Bad Day at the Beauty Salon

  I was a twenty-year-old unemployed receptionist with dyed orange dreadlocks sprouting out of my skull. I needed a job, but first, I needed a haircut.

  So I head for this beauty salon on Avenue B.

  I’m gonna get a hairdo.

  I’m gonna look just like those hot Spanish haircut models.

  I’ll be brown and bodacious, grow some seven-inch fingernails painted bitch red, and rake them down the chalkboard of the job market’s soul.

  So I go in the beauty salon.

  A beautiful Puerto Rican girl in tight white spandex and a push-up bra sits me down and starts chopping my hair.

  “Girlfriend,” she says, “what the hell you got growing outta your head there, what is that? Hair implants? Yuck, you want me to touch that shit? Whadya got in there, sandwiches?”

  I just say, “I’m sorry.”

  She starts snipping my carefully cultivated Johnny Lydon post-Pistols hairdo. My foul little dreadlocks are flying around all over the place, but I’m not looking in the mirror because I just don’t want to know.

  “So what’s your name, anyway?” my stylist demands then.

  “Uh, Maggie.”

  “Maggie? Well, that’s an okay name, but my name is Suzy.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Yeah, so it ain’t just Suzy, S.U.Z.Y., I spell it S.U.Z.E.E.; the extra ‘e’ is for extra Suzee.”

  I nod emphatically.

  Suzee tells me when she’s not busy chopping hair, she works as an exotic dancer at night to support her boyfriend named Rocco. Suzee loves Rocco, she loves him so much she’s got her eyes closed as she describes him: “6 foot 2, 193 pounds, and, girlfriend, his arms so big and long they wrap around me twice like I’m a little Suzee sandwich.”

  Little Suzee Sandwich is rapt, she blindly snips and clips at my poor punk head. She snips and clips and snips and clips, she pauses, and I look in the mirror: “Holy shit, I’m bald.”

  “Holy shit, baby, you’re bald,” Suzee says, finally opening her eyes.

  All I’ve got left are little post-nuke clumps of orange fuzz. I’ll never get a receptionist job now.

  But Suzee waves her manicured finger in my face. “Don’t you worry, baby, I’m gonna help get you a job at the dancing club.”

  “What?”

  “Baby, let me tell you, the boys are gonna like a bald go-go dancer.”

  That said, Suzee whips out some clippers, shaves my head smooth, and assures me I will love getting naked for a living.

  None of this sounds like my idea of a good time, but I’m broke and I’m bald, so I go home and get my best panties. Suzee lends me some five-inch pumps, paints my lips bright red, and gives me several shots of Jack Daniels to relax me.

  Eight o’clock that night I take the stage.

  I’m bald, I’m drunk, and by god, I’m naked.

  Holy shit, I’m naked in a room full of strangers. This is not one of those recurring nightmares we all have about being butt naked in public. I am naked. I don’t know these people. This really sucks.

  A few guys feel sorry for me and risk getting their hands bitten off by sticking dollars in my garter belt. My disheveled pubic hairs stand at full attention, ready to poke the guys’ eyes out if they get too close.

  Then I notice a bald guy in the audience. I’ve got a new empathy for bald people; I figure maybe it works both ways, maybe this guy will stick ten bucks in my garter.

  I saunter over.

  I’m teetering around unrhythmically; I’m the surliest, unsexiest dancer that ever go-go’d across this hemisphere. The bald guy looks down into his beer; he’d much rather look at that than at my pubic mound that has now formed into one vicious spike so it looks like I’ve got a unicorn in my crotch.

  I stand there weaving through the air.

  The strobe light is illuminating my pubic unicorn. Madonna’s song “Borderline” is pumping through the club’s speaker system for the fifth time tonight: “Borderline borderline borderline. Love me till I just can’t see.”

  And suddenly, I start to wonder: What does that mean anyway?

  Love me till I just can’t see.

  What?

  Screw me so much my eyes pop out, I go blind, end up walking down Second Avenue crazy, horny, naked, and blind? What?

  There’s a glitch in the tape and it starts to skip.

  “Borderl… ooop … Borderl… ooop … Borderlin … ooop.”

  The Jack Daniels is catching up with me. I stumble and twist my ankle. My g-string rides between my buttcheeks, making me twitch with pain. My head starts spinning, my knees wobble, I go down on all fours and vomit. In the poor bald guy’s lap.

  I’m now butt naked on all fours. But before I have time to regain my composure, the strip club manager comes over, points his smarmy strip club manager finger at me.

  “You’re drunk, you can’t dance, and you’re fired.”

  I stand up.

  “Oh yeah, well you stink like a sneaker, pal,” I say, thrusting out my bottom lip.

  I hobble off the stage, into the dressing room, and then, out of the club.

  A few days later I run into Suzee on Avenue A. Turns out she got fired for getting me a job there in the first place. But she was completely undaunted; she dragged me up to a wig store on Fourteenth Street, bought me a brown shag wig, and then got us both telemarketing jobs on Wall Street.

  And I never went to a beauty salon again.

  About the Author

  MAGGIE ESTEP is the author of the novel Diary of an Emotional Idiot as well as Soft Maniacs, a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Village Voice, The New York Press, and Nerve.com. She is presently working on Gargantuan, a follow-up to Hex. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and hangs out at racetracks, cheering on long shots. Her website is www.maggieestep.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of this work. In all o
ther respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Maggie Estep

  Excerpt from The Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals by Maggie Estep.

  Copyright © 2003 by Maggie Estep. Reprinted by permission of

  Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York. Member of the

  Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS and the Tugboat design are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Estep, Maggie.

  Hex: a Ruby Murphy mystery / Maggie Estep.

  1. Women detectives—Fiction. 2. Horse racing—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.S754 H49 2003

  813’.54—dc 21 2002151269

  eISBN: 978-0-307-53082-0

  v3.0