by Grant Mccrea
No answer.
I looked at Butch.
Aren’t you a cop? I asked.
Sure, Rick. I’m a cop.
Then can’t you just bust down this door? Isn’t that what cops do?
Hate to break it to you. But no. Not without a warrant.
Jesus. Why does the law always have to interfere with our fun?
Damn, we were having a good time. I was thinking of asking Butch to join the partnership. R. & D. & B., LLP. It had a ring.
Speaking of which, the door buzzed. I threw myself at it, pulled it open just before the buzzing stopped.
We made our way upstairs. The door to Jules’s loft was open. We peered in. We didn’t see anybody. I called out Jules’s name. Lisa’s. No answer. I looked at Butch. I was nervous. Maybe it was time to call in the troops.
Butch went into trained cop mode.
He pulled a gun I hadn’t known he carried.
Of course he has a gun, I thought. He’s a goddamn cop.
He crouched. He slid into the room. He checked behind the door. He silently reconnoitered the downstairs area. It didn’t take long. Nobody there. No perps. No bodies. No nothing. Not even a mouse. He looked at the balcony above. He looked at me and raised a questioning eyebrow. Where’s the staircase? he was asking. I pointed to the corridor across the way. Butch slid across the room. He vanished. Dorita and I exchanged worried glances. My heart was pounding. Uncertainty was worse than death. If they shot you, you were gone. Nothing more to worry about. If you had no clue, all you could do was cringe.
Butch wasn’t cringing. Neither was Dorita. She took off her black Blahnik pumps, set them lightly on the floor. She slid off after Butch. I tried to grab her arm, hold her back. She shook me off. She vanished too.
I felt like a coward.
Hell, I was a coward. Better get used to it.
I was guarding the entrance, I told myself. I was taking on the dangerous job.
I closed the door as quietly as I could. I stood guard.
I waited. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t hear a thing. The fear became certainty. I ought to call the cops. I didn’t have the skills for this.
Dorita appeared on the balcony. That she was standing up, not hunched over in danger mode, conveyed a message. She motioned me to come up.
I took off my shoes. That seemed to be the protocol. I crossed the empty space. It seemed interminable. I found the stairs. A wrought iron spiral thing, tucked out of view. I climbed it slowly. I thought my heart would burst. At the top, I found Dorita. She shook her head at me.
You wimp, she whispered. Come here.
She grabbed the back of my neck. She kissed me.
The unexpected kiss is the best.
She led me down a corridor. She stopped at an open door. She nodded me in.
Inside, Butch was crouched on the floor, next to a foam mattress stained with blood. In the corner of the room cowered Lisa. Her face was in her hands. On the mattress, cross-legged with his back against the wall, was Jules. He had on the same T-shirt as I’d last seen him in. Still streaked with blood.
I took a closer look. Not streaked. Soaked. Wet with it. A long curved knife lay loosely in his hand. Butch was carefully examining Jules’s torso.
Entrails.
Shit. The little prick had finally done it. Disemboweled himself. Hara-kiri.
I could only hope he’d landed in samurai heaven.
I looked at Lisa. I looked at Dorita.
Get her out of here, I whispered.
Yes, boss, said Dorita.
She went to Lisa. Put her arms around her. She whispered something in her ear. She lifted up the tiny girl. She led her out.
Butch looked up at me. I nodded.
Sure. Call in the troops. What the hell. I didn’t have a client anymore.
We had some time with Lisa before they got there. She was shaking, sobbing, but not out of control. She was a tough little thing, after all was said and done.
Dorita took her downstairs. I poured us all a drink. Fuck regulations. I wasn’t a cop. Gin and tonic for Lisa. A double Scotch for me. Dorita had to settle for a gin and tonic too. I didn’t know how to make a cosmo. Not the time to ask for the recipe.
I brought Butch a beer. He shook his head no thanks. Oh yeah. He was a cop.
Dorita sat with Lisa on the couch. She had her arm around her shoulder.
Lisa, Dorita said quietly. We need to know what happened.
I know, said Lisa, barely audible.
We know it wasn’t you, Dorita said. We know you did whatever you did out of love. We can see that.
Dorita looked up at me reprovingly. Lest I have a different notion. Lest I interfere.
Lisa closed her eyes.
I just want to go to sleep, she said.
I know, said Dorita. I understand. And you can. You can go to sleep. But first you have to tell us. Tell us what happened.
Lisa opened her eyes. She looked at Dorita. Dorita looked into Lisa’s eyes. Lisa slumped back into the sofa. The sharp edges softened into resignation. She nodded her head.
Veronica, she whispered.
Dorita and I looked at each other. There it was again.
What about Veronica? Dorita asked.
Lisa took a deep breath. She straightened her back. She looked at us.
Veronica’s dead, she said.
Okay, said Dorita softly. How did she die?
I killed her, said Lisa.
My poker face broke down.
I didn’t have an index card for this.
Lisa looked at me, at Butch. She shrugged.
I didn’t mean to, she said.
I’m sure you didn’t, said Dorita. Can you tell us how it happened?
That day you came over, said Lisa, looking at me. She was tied up in the back room.
The words caught in her throat.
The room we just found you in? asked Dorita.
Jules and me were fighting.
That time, I said.
Right, she said. And then, just after I went upstairs, Veronica got the gag out of her mouth. She started shouting.
That’s why you put on the music, started yelling at Jules? I asked. To drown out her shouting?
Yes, she said quietly.
Jesus. Veronica had been right there. In the loft. And I hadn’t even thought about her. Thought about finding her. Talking to her.
Cancel my job interview with the CIA.
And then what happened? asked Dorita.
She put her hand on Lisa’s, gave it a reassuring squeeze.
I went into the back room, said Lisa. I was scared. I was so scared.
She sobbed a sob or two.
She pulled herself together. She took a deep breath.
I got the duct tape, she said. That we’d taped her to the chair with. And I wrapped it around her face. To stop her screaming. And when I’d wrapped her up I went into the other room. I lay down. I put a pillow over my head. I couldn’t stand it any more. I was trying to protect Jules. I was just trying to protect Jules.
We could hear the sirens coming.
She struggled to contain the tears. She took a deep breath. She looked at me apologetically.
What was the argument about? I asked.
About Veronica, she said. I told Jules we had to let her go. It was so stupid. The whole thing was so stupid. But he wouldn’t do it. I told him we could go to Mexico. Wherever. Just get away. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted to …
Wanted to? asked Dorita.
Get revenge.
Against whom?
His father. Mr. FitzGibbon. God, he hated his dad so much. It was like, it was like a sickness. Like he was crazy with it.
And how was he going to get revenge? By killing Veronica?
Sort of, she said.
A crowd of blue shirts appeared in the doorway. They were led by a tall detective with a hawk nose and tiny black eyes. I thought I recognized him. From some hooker bust a few years ago. I’d been hired to help out
some john with connections to a senator.
Butch leapt up to intercept the horde. Lisa looked up. No reaction registered on her face. She was beyond reaction.
Butch conferred with Detective Nose in a hushed and urgent voice. The Nose kept glancing up at Dorita and me. I saw him note our shoeless feet, raise an eyebrow.
It was clear what was going on. Butch was trying to explain that we were getting a full confession. Learning everything. And any little upset of the balance might tip Lisa over. Into silence.
Dorita was whispering into Lisa’s ear. She was crying again.
Butch won the argument. A couple of uniforms with evidence kits quietly went upstairs. The rest backed off. Including the Nose, though not without a baleful glance in my direction. Butch closed the door and sat back down across from me.
Dorita was still talking quietly to Lisa. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Butch put ten fingers up, then five. Fifteen minutes. Detective Nose was giving us fifteen minutes.
Dorita, I said, as softly as I could manage.
She looked up impatiently.
Fifteen, I whispered.
She nodded.
How was he going to get revenge? Dorita asked, getting Lisa back on track.
I don’t know the whole thing, said Lisa. But they were going to get control of everything, somehow.
Get control? asked Dorita.
They? I asked.
Of Mr. FitzGibbon’s money. He was doing it with Raul and Ramon.
Dorita looked at me. I looked at her. The phone calls.
I don’t know how, exactly, Lisa went on. He was using Veronica to get to his father. And Raul and Ramon were, like, there. With his father, all the time. They told Mr. FitzGibbon that his wife was kidnapped. That he had to play along, pay the ransom, or she’d be dead. That they might come after him, too. The kidnappers. So Ramon had to be with him every second of the day. Ramon never left his side. Unless Raul was there to take over for a while. But Ramon was the security guy, supposedly. So it was almost always him.
I looked at Butch. He got up quietly. He went out the door.
Dorita looked at Lisa, still with the kindly air. Let’s go back a little bit, she said. How did Veronica die?
She …she suffocated, said Lisa.
Suffocated?
From the … the duct tape.
Okay, said Dorita, taking Lisa’s hand again. It’s okay. We know you didn’t mean that to happen.
I didn’t, sobbed Lisa. Oh God, I surely didn’t.
Surely. It dawned on me that Lisa, for all her punked-out trappings, hadn’t always been a street kid. She’d come from somewhere. She had a family. A dad. A mom. Whoever they were. What they’d been through.
They hadn’t seen anything yet.
So when I came over the second time? I began to ask.
When I sat on you? she anticipated, with a tearful sneaky smile.
Right.
I wanted to distract you. To keep you from looking around. Seeing something. Before Jules got there.
Damn. I wasn’t irresistible after all.
Besides, she said, you were kind of cute.
That was better.
That sneaky smile gave me something to think about. This little girl was far from helpless.
Seeing what? I asked.
I don’t know, she said. I was afraid, that’s all.
I looked at my watch. We were running out of time. Butch came back in. He gave me a Look. I knew what it meant. We weren’t getting an extension.
What about Larry Silver? I asked.
Oh, him, she said with a sneer. That fucker got what he deserved.
How’s that? I asked.
Jules needed somebody to do the actual snatch, she told us. He couldn’t do it himself, of course, because Veronica knew him. Jules knew Larry from the streets. He knew Larry was a mean and angry guy. Somebody who could be violent. And he was stupid. Jules thought he could control him. So he got Larry to do the job. When Veronica got back to New York, Larry grabbed her, brought her to the loft. Blindfolded, so she wouldn’t see Jules. He paid off Larry. Two thousand bucks.
And that was the beginning of the end.
Because Larry wasn’t going to settle for a lousy two thousand bucks. On the day of his murder, as we knew by then, Larry hadn’t come to the loft to talk about a poker debt. He’d come to shake down Jules. They’d gotten into a fight all right. That much was true. But after they were lying there exhausted, Jules had to find a way to make sure Larry didn’t leave angry. He couldn’t risk that. So Jules started to negotiate, at some point managing to put a call in to Raul, who sent over Mr. Security with a baseball bat. Jules gave Larry some cash. Promised more. Larry wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Left the loft happy with his victory. Put one over on that little prick Jules, he was no doubt thinking. Until Ramon grabbed him by the neck, dragged him to the Dumpster.
The baseball bat did the rest.
But Ramon unfortunately left Larry’s body where it could easily be found. And when the police figured Jules as a suspect for Larry’s murder right away, the whole thing started to unravel. It was a fucking disaster.
They’d barely had time to get Veronica out of the place before the cops showed up. Took her to the empty loft upstairs.
And then Veronica’s death. From then on it was damage control.
Funny, I thought. This didn’t jibe with Jules’s sudden calm and arrogance, the fourth time I’d gone to the loft.
So, I hazarded, why did Jules …do what he did? Upstairs. Just now.
I couldn’t think of a nice way to put it.
The tears welled up in Lisa’s eyes again. He’d always been obsessed with the samurai thing, she told us. He’d played with the idea many times. And the night before, it seemed that he had some kind of breakdown. Or maybe it was a revelation. He finally figured out that everything was coming apart. Raul was going to let Jules take the hit for Larry Silver’s murder. Or pin FitzGibbon’s death on him. Get rid of him some other way. Whatever. Maybe just have him hit by a truck. Jules had become irrational, afraid. He’d lost his inner Superman. He’d heard the buzzer ring when we’d arrived. He’d looked out over the balcony, seen who it was. When he saw us, he figured the end was coming. He took the honorable way out. As he saw it, anyway.
Jesus. I was batting four hundred. Five times I’d been to the loft. Twice people died. I was the Grim fucking Reaper.
As my watch ticked off the final seconds, Dorita asked Lisa why she didn’t get out of it at some point. Call the cops. Or at least get the hell out of there.
She couldn’t get away from it, Lisa explained. Not only was she so involved that she couldn’t get out, she was actually enjoying it. She’d gotten caught up in the whole James Bond thrill of it. Nothing in her life had ever been so vital, so close to the bone. She felt alive. Free, in a complicated kind of way.
Alive by death, I thought. Nice.
Which was the cue for the door to slam open, the Nose to stride back in. He didn’t have a compromising air. Enough with the goddamn lawyers. This was going to be his investigation. Butch rose to meet him. Detective Nose brushed him aside.
Lisa Mueller? he said.
She looked up at him with a defiant air.
You’re under arrest for the murder of Veronica FitzGibbon.
Sure, she said, her hard edge back again. No sweat.
We’d lost her.
On the way out Butch asked one of the CID guys whether they’d found Veronica.
In the other building, the guy said.
What other building?
The one next to the alley.
109.
THE SCENE WAS GUARDED by yellow tape and blue uniforms. A skinny cop with a bad facial condition pointed me and Butch to a dark staircase at the end of a narrow hallway.
Down there, he said. But be careful. They’re dusting for prints.
Okay, we said.
The staircase was dimly lit by small orange bulbs. We went down sl
owly. At the bottom they’d set up high-powered floodlights. Every dust ball and dead cockroach was starkly lit, outlined by a harsh shadow.
Careful, shouted one of the CID guys.
I looked down. I’d almost stepped on an evidence kit.
Sorry, I said.
Butch grabbed my elbow.
Just follow me, he said.
Butch conferred a moment with the guy who looked to be in charge. Nodded his head a few times. Beckoned to me. Led me to the farthest reaches of the basement space. Past lines of storage spaces. Each was about four feet wide. Made of ancient spruce laths floor to ceiling, lashed together with chicken wire. The cubicles were endlessly deep in broken tricycles, rusting roller skates, old high chairs. The doors were held shut by a potpourri of dime-store locks. They looked just about secure enough to keep out a paraplegic rabbit.
Perpendicular to the end of the row was a high tin-covered door. I recognized it right away. The inside image of the door in the alley.
I felt sick. I’d never gotten around to checking where it led. Had I only followed through with my intuition, then …what? I might have found a corpse? Well, maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad. Maybe if I had, FitzGibbon would have been spared the ignominy of throwing himself out of a thirty-third-story window – or being pushed – the thought reminded me that we didn’t have all the answers yet.
Would that have been a contribution to the collective welfare?
I thought not.
So maybe it was okay that I was such a solipsistic fool.
Or maybe not. Time would tell.
In the meantime, Butch led me forward. Took a left at the metal door. We ducked down. Peered into the crawl space. The one in which, until a moment earlier, the rotting remains of the good Veronica FitzGibbon had reposed.
It was dark.
It was ordinary.
In the way that extraordinary places often are.
110.
AFTER OUR TOUR of the grotto we picked up Dorita. She had stayed behind. Not having a strong desire to look at dead bodies.
We retired to the closest eatery. I had a double Glenmorangie, straight up.
There are still things we don’t know, said Dorita.
I can’t argue with that, I said.
Me neither, said Butch.
There’s stuff that Lisa didn’t know, I said.