She was in the living room when he came out of the bathroom. He went into the bedroom and she could not move at all. He went over to his dresser; she couldn’t see him but she could see his shadow through the doorway; it was a blot, a negative image against the white wall. Zelly looked away, out the living room window, and was surprised to see that it was still light outside.
She had to find out where he parked the van. The shadow wobbled and swayed, and Pat came out of the bedroom. She didn’t know how to find out, what to ask. She thought of one thing, too late, the key burning her thigh: “Are you going to have to go out tonight?”
“Not tonight.”
“Good, because I told Stacy I’d try to have dinner with her.”
“Who’s Stacy?”
“Just one of the moms from the park. I’ve mentioned her.”
“I don’t remember. I guess so. You’re going just like that? Why does it have to be tonight?”
“Stacy said she’d let me know if she could ever get a sitter. It’s one of those fluke things. Her next-door neighbor is available tonight. Her husband works late a lot, so he can’t watch the baby.” She was appalled at how easily she was lying, and she couldn’t stop. “Isn’t it okay? If you don’t have an appointment tonight.”
“You’re going without the baby?”
“If it’s okay with you. Just to the Japanese place up on Washington. It’s only a few blocks, and we won’t be late.”
“I don’t mind.” He moved up behind her where she was looking out the window instead of at him; he put his arms around her waist. He rubbed her hips and her belly and then he slipped his hands inside the elastic waistband of her shorts. The key burned. She leaned back against his chest and he rested his chin on top of her head. She could smell his skin and his aftershave—those smells were like the smells of her own skin. A memory smelled like that: There had been a summer, and a fight in the summer, a long time ago. Somewhere near the water. And she had cried and he had come up behind her and rested his chin on the top of her head. The wind had whipped around in a frenzy and she had forgiven him. She closed her eyes.
As if on cue the baby began to whimper: she was done with her supper. “I won’t go until I clean up after Mary,” Zelly said. That had been a long time ago and at the table Mary was painting yam into her hair.
“I’ll give her a bath,” Pat said. He seemed reluctant to take his hands off her belly. That long-ago summer day came back again for an instant: the absolute luxury of his arms. She made her voice empty. “Did you have trouble finding a parking space?”
“Hmm?”
“Were you able to find a parking spot close to the house?”
“It wasn’t too bad.” Pat relaxed his grip and they both moved away, she forward and he back.
“Stacy told me they had signs up all over different streets saying no parking—they’re repaving the streets or something.”
“No, there weren’t any signs on Hudson.”
Relief made her dizzy for a minute. She went over to Mary and began to wipe her sticky face. “No, they’re not doing anything on Hudson. I think it was Bloomfield.”
“I have to move the van before ten tomorrow, though, that’s the only reason I got something even remotely close to the house.”
“I wish I could drive the stick, I’d move it for you.” Adrenaline was making her weak, she knew she could find it now but she didn’t want to waste time, she wanted him to tell her. Mary waved her arms frantically to avoid the washcloth and gurgled delightedly. Pat went into the kitchen with Mary’s dirty dishes. “It’s not bad,” he said, “it’s only by the park at Fourth Street—” and he said something else but she didn’t hear it because of the sudden ringing in her ears and then a silence so complete she thought he might have left the apartment. But he was still in the kitchen and he hadn’t heard anything, of course. Hudson and Fourth, her palms were sweating. She leaned her head into Mary’s where it rested against her shoulder. Her hair was impossibly soft, like kitten’s fur.
“You going to get sushi?” Pat came out of the kitchen toward her and Zelly saw him a thousand times, every time he had ever walked toward her, across a room or a crowd or an empty beach, on their honeymoon in Santo Domingo, with a nimbus around his head from the setting sun; out of the kitchen so many times and the fluorescent light always made a halo; when she was in labor with Mary and he had to go to the bathroom and when she saw him coming back through the delivery-room door she suddenly started crying.
Had they also seen his face?
“You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.” He moved to the stereo and became engrossed in choosing something to hear. Zelly shifted Mary onto the other shoulder and said no, nothing, but he wasn’t listening. He didn’t suspect anything. Her heart was beating in her ears again. She kissed Mary’s head and felt as though if she put her down she might never get to pick her up again. “Here, take the baby,” she said; she kept her own head down so that he wouldn’t see that she was almost crying.
“You won’t be late, right?”
“I won’t be.”
“Not that it matters. I’m just going to listen to something until the game comes on, and then I’m going to put on the answering machine and watch the game. Yankees versus Philly.” Zelly leaned to kiss Mary’s head again and Pat ducked his head to find her mouth. “Come back soon,” he said. “I want both my girls safe at home,” and Zelly reached up and put her palm on his cheek and kissed him unexpectedly, passionately.
“Hey,” he said, “your fingers are like ice.”
“I love you,” she said fiercely.
“I love you, too, honey. And the baby loves you. Whenever you go out you act like it’s the end of the world as you know it. We’ll both be here when you get back. I’ll be watching the end of the baseball game and Mary will be snug in her crib. If she wakes up I’ll give her a bottle.”
“I know I’m silly. It’s just hard.”
“You moms. You’d think I wasn’t fit to take care of her.”
“You’re not. You’ll probably have her up rooting for the Yankees until eleven o’clock,” Zelly said, and she turned and ran out the door and down the steps and stood out on the sidewalk in front of the building and cried.
At Hudson and Fourth was Stevens Park, where Zelly sometimes went to walk a little while by herself, if it’d been a particularly hard day with the baby. Teething, colic, just nerves sometimes. “Mama,” she’d say on the phone, “we’re both teething today. Can you come for a little while?” And her mother would come and Zelly would walk down to the park and look at Manhattan across the river. Pat liked to look across the river at the city too. Right where Stacy had said she’d seen the van that frightened her.
And it was there, like a big, phony-looking prop in a movie: the Van. When Zelly slipped the key in the lock and swung the back door open the noise was enormous on the empty street. There were kids goofing around on the softball field across the park; there wasn’t any scheduled Little League game tonight but there were always kids on the field. There was a big black-and-brown dog running in the dog run and two people, their heads close together, sitting on a bench under a tall wrought-iron lamp. The back of the van stank of Leatherette. The light spilling out onto the sidewalk accused her, the stale smell accused her. Trespasser, liar. She wanted violently to be sitting in a curtained booth talking about toilet training with Stacy while she drank warm saki out of a little blue-and-white china bottle.
Zelly stepped inside the van and turned the overhead to keep the light on and pulled the door shut behind her and it made that terrible noise again. The interior of the van was not remarkable but it looked remarkable; it was lit from within by possibilities. Gray carpet, with ominous, ordinary splotches here and there; a shoebox in one corner; a bucket; a bundle of sheeny black tarp. A pile of magazines. A sneaker. Of course there was no blood on the walls.
Was the phone ringing in her living room? Stacy had taken her number at the end of their conversation and
said that she would call “one night soon.” Or had she said, “tomorrow”? Everything she said Zelly remembered as if she had heard it first in just this two-dimensional light, unreal, with a ringing silence in her ears. If Stacy called what would Pat do? There was no way of knowing, because she didn’t know who Pat was anymore. She had to move now, and look around this place, and find out who Pat was. I have to see.
The magazines were mostly Popular Mechanics; there were a few old TV Guides and a copy of Penthouse Letters: “The Ten Most Beautiful Women in Prime Time.” “Wet and Wild, Doggy-Style.” The splotches on the carpet were irregularly shaped and spread out over the whole floor. There was a big, dark, moist-looking spot over in one corner: a bloodied head or an overturned coffee cup. The sneaker was a size ten and a half, the walls had not been recently scrubbed.
Zelly knelt in front of the shoebox. She did expect, when she opened it, to see the panties—the purple-pink satin, the insouciant white bow—but what she didn’t expect was to see them lying shredded in long uneven strips, as though they had been gripped and pulled between teeth.
Underneath the shredded panties were other things, in a little jumble. There was a ring of keys with a heavy brass tag: Grant Corner Inn. There was a tube of lipstick: Honey Frost. There was a plain white cotton bra: 34C. Underneath the shoebox was a pile of newspapers, some yellow, some new; wedged down next to them were a pair of scissors and a bottle of Elmer’s glue, with its incongruent associations of shiny edible paste drying on sticky illicit palms. The smell of school. There was tape, Number 10 envelopes, Series A stamps. A green spiral notebook with a sticker on it saying $1.99. A red ballpoint pen.
The newspapers on top of the pile appeared at first to be shredded too, but as she fingered them, Zelly saw that they had been cut up in careful columns, with pieces missing, words or whole lines just little holes now. There were fragmented headlines. SLASHER VICTIM LIVES! SYMPHONY SLASHER A POLICE WANNABE? Part of an article, coffee-stained, about the woman who had escaped the Slasher, with only two words missing—her name. WOMAN MURDERED ON SOHO STREET. There were several sheets of heavy oat-tag paper—another reminder of school. Zelly picked up the notebook and it fell open in her hands: DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD? She leafed back a few pages: UNDER THE MUTILATED MOON.
Zelly was crying and her leg had fallen asleep. She got up suddenly, clumsily, dropping the book and then putting the weight of her hand on a page; she picked it up and flattened the page out as best she could. The book wasn’t nearly full. She turned to the last written page: ONE MOTHER DIES, ANOTHER WILL FOLLOW. I WILL CHOOSE THE ORPHAN AND THE FATE OF THE ORPHAN. THE CRYING OF A CHILD AT ITS MOTHER’S SIDE MUST BE STOPPED.
There were clippings from newspapers inserted in the pages of the notebook, long streamers of headlines and carefully cut columns of type. The word “child”; a big O and R from a headline; the word “will”; the word “stop.” Zelly stood holding the notebook as if she had suddenly been struck senile; she leaned back down like a very old person and placed it back in the space next to the newspapers. Each item in the box must be placed just so, the scissors and the glue, the little packet of stamps.
The bucket in the corner stood out against the colorless wall; Zelly’s eyes were preternaturally sharp now. The bucket’s battered side caught the overhead light and fractured it. He is he is he is. Zelly had seen Pat use the bucket when he washed the van, on hot days when the sun made gold tracks in his hair. The bucket was empty, but there was a dark residue at the bottom, a slop of water and something else, and there was a rag in the bucket that was clotted with something else, something dark. Zelly touched it; her hand came away red and she thought for a moment that she was going to scream, but the sound died, just a little snick in her throat; what other voice had spoken inside these walls? Had screamed? The nausea welled up again, so strong it pulled her head back and took her breath and she had to close her eyes. He is he is he is.
Zelly looked at the tarp in the corner. There was no place to wipe her red hand. The tarp was lumpy, it was roughly the shape of a body. Zelly held her hand awkwardly away from her side. With her other hand she tugged at the tarp, but it only rolled a little to the side, with a sickening weight, so Zelly just grabbed it with her bloody hand too and jerked it open.
The smell was musty and gagging and somehow sweet at the same time. Zelly felt the metallic taste of the saliva that floods the mouth before you vomit. There was no body inside the tarp. There was just a tiny dark pool at the center, and the smell; the pool was old now, a tarry dark puddle of black against the black material. There was something gleaming in the pool; when Zelly reached over and took it out, she thought she would fall into the black there and never hit bottom. Her fingers were smeared sticky red-black. A feather, a silver tracery on a little hoop: it was made to dangle. Tangled in the hoop was a long strand of honey-blond hair.
Zelly slapped the tarp back together; she remembered that she had some napkins in her fanny pack from when she and Mary went to McDonald’s three days ago so she wiped her hands (thinking about Mary in McDonald’s proudly smashing french fries on the table) and she wiped the feather earring and put everything back in her fanny pack and looked around the inside of the van. (Had the tarp been folded just that way? Had she screamed for a long time before she died?) The shoebox set atop the papers, had it sat at just that rakish angle? (Had he come to her after, lay in bed next to her, after?) The walls moved in and out, breathing. The bucket moved out of the corner of her eye. In and out, with the overhead light pulsing. She had to get out of there, the door was stuck and the tarp heaved behind her like an animal and the night air hit her like a slap and something glinted in the dark just as she shut the door, where does he keep the knife, she leaned over the cracked pavement her stomach heaving her hands still tacky she was leaning over taking in great gulps of air I will not throw up I will not throw up he is he is he is he is he is.
45
“What do you think of Glemby?”
Blackman snorted into his coffee cup. It was Friday, June twenty-sixth, nighttime, but there were no windows in the room, just a white clock with black hands to tell them the time in the outside world.
“Glemby!” Blackman burst out irritably. “The man has all the charm of a cockroach. And the brains of one, too.”
“I don’t know, cockroaches are supposed to be pretty smart.” Scottie was punching keys on his computer and Blackman was letting the phone ring while two officers with phones already at their ears glared at him from across the squad room.
“Point well taken. But I just don’t think Glemby is the one.”
Scottie was looking intently at the screen. “I have something to tell you—” he began. “Just a second, I have to get this license plate number in—”
“Damn. Yes. Slasher Task Force.” For the next few minutes Easy talked quietly on the phone while Scottie punched in numbers: N2L 110, N2L 145, N2M 127.
Then Blackman hung up the phone. “It was somebody who wanted to know if we were aware of two unsolved murders that took place in Orange, New Jersey, last year,” he said disgustedly. “As a matter of fact I was. Two black women, found in a deserted building. What that has to do with—what is it you’re doing there? I thought you were still collating.”
“I am. I’m also checking out every registration of a gray, black, or blue van purchased in New York City within the last two years. Listen, I finally got a chance to check out John Nassent. Cheryl’s brother. And what do you think I find?” He paused.
Sergeant Blackman was pouring from Scottie’s coffee cup into a Styrofoam cup that was sitting on the desk from the night before. “You’d better not play games—”
“Sorry, sorry. But this is incredible. It seems Cheryl Nassent’s mother died seventeen years ago. She was raped and thrown off a twenty-four-story building.”
Sergeant Blackman’s hand stopped in the air; he put the cup down and his left fist went to his mouth, tapping. “Why didn’t the papers pick this up?”
&nbs
p; “It seems the father is dead too. So John Nassent is the only immediate source of information. When somebody writes the book about this case the story of the mother is going to come out, but nobody’s dug deep enough yet to tip to it.”
“And how did you tip to it?”
“Most relatives of victims fantasize about getting the perp. If they happen to find out who it is they sometimes do something. But to try to get to the killer through another victim—that’s really kind of weird. So—”
“Actually it’s kind of smart. Obviously Madeleine Levy knows more than we’re going to release to the press. So assuming John Nassent, if that’s who it is, can get to her, he might learn something that would lead him to the killer. That’s what we were hoping for when we talked to her, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. So I really went into the background on all these guys—husbands, brothers. I thought there’d have to be something else to send our guy over into actually doing something. And when I found out both of Nassent’s parents had already died—well, that would make his sister’s death even more of a blow. He’d already given us the years of his parents’ deaths in his initial statement, so it was easy to go back and check on death announcements. I didn’t know what I’d find, but Nassent seemed hinkey to me—his situation was different than any of the other victims’ relatives. You know his wife just divorced him last year?”
“Any girlfriends?”
“Not right now.”
“So the boy had nobody but his baby sister.”
“Chen got the impression Nassent pretty much raised his sister by himself. It’s in his report.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“How’s he sound?”
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