by Bryan Gilmer
Forty-seven
Leonard downed two mouthfuls of sanitizer and drove the station wagon to Centurion Apartments and looked for the Honda Civic Hybrid he knew Marinna drove. He found the notepad where he had written down the address from Marinna’s personnel file, and he clutched the picture from the vet office birthday party that showed her smiling with Dr. Nagra and her co-workers he’d stolen off the bulletin board. He gave her picture face a big kiss, put it into his front pocket. He splashed on some Old Spice from a bottle in the glovebox, then put it back.
He needed to be with her now. His pride in the album had vanished again when he had put on the CD in the car and listened to the track he’d FUCKED UP, heard how the burglary he had performed last night now wasn’t true to the musical score at all. His blood pressure still felt sky high. He started thinking the whole album was worthless.
He bounded up the concrete stairs, pounded on her door and shouted, “Ma’am, wake up! Please, wake up! Maintenance man! Come to the door, please!”
She opened the door just a crack, and he could see that as sleepy as she was, and with his new hairdo and clean shave and zero duds, she didn’t recognize him. “There’s an emergency,” he told her.
She opened the door wider, and Leonard stepped across the threshold, nudging her backward, feeling in control of this situation and determined not to let that change this time.
He closed the door behind himself and grinned. “Hey. It’s me.”
She yanked the chain to turn on the lamp on the end table behind her.
“Corey.” Her eyes widened, and fear crept into them. “You took the phenobarbital from work.”
“My real name’s Leonard. Sorry to play a trick on you just now,” Leonard told her. “And to introduce myself using a BS name. I just came here because I really need another one of those great hugs of yours. I need to talk to you.”
She was backing away from him. Fear widened her eyes, and even though she knew he was in control, she hadn’t turned into a bitch. She’d stayed a princess, just like he knew she would. In a way, she had subconsciously been his muse for this track all along.
“I love you, Marinna.”
Her back was flat against the living room wall now because she’d run out of space.
“Corey – Leonard, I do NOT want to kiss you,” she was saying. “NO. I want you to leave. Please, leave. LEAVE RIGHT NOW.”
She loved him. He clutched her right hand – felt a sudden wave of nausea. He doubled over, gagged. The bitch had kneed him in the balls! They were all the same!
“Corey, you get away from me!” she screamed, and ran for the door. He chased her, fishing in his pocket for the bass guitar string. He caught up to her next to a bookcase, pressed her to the wall, made sure she didn’t get another shot at his nads, still expecting to puke any second from the first one. He wrapped the string around her throat; the color of her face changed to scarlet. She cracked him on the head with a crystal paperweight, which rolled down his back and clonked onto the floor behind him. That friggin’ hurt! Sticky wetness was pooling underneath his hair… He slackened the pressure without meaning to.
Something sharp made him yelp.
He looked down. She had jabbed a friggin’ No. 2 pencil into his armpit. “Oh, Marinna.” He felt so betrayed. He pulled her to the middle of the floor where she couldn’t reach anything else. She pulled out the pencil and stuck it into him again. This time, it broke and half stayed inside him. Now she was whacking at him with her hands, really hurting him, staring at him with terrified blue eyes.
Not sweet eyes. Animal eyes.
But she was losing her strength.
Leonard still felt like puking from the shots between his legs and under his arm, and now blood from his scalp was running down the left side of his face. He was really upset, starting to weep, feeling bad for her, wanting her to be okay, wanting to be nice to her, for her to like him again.
But she had disappointed him. He remembered the desperate, helpless, weak feeling in the car. Though grief and sadness and love had flowed back in to replace his rage, he sniffed in the tears and pulled the wire tighter.
“Marinna? Why? I love you.”
She couldn’t speak any more, but it was several minutes before she was still, and her eyes never closed. Leonard curled up close to her body and wept for a long time.
Forty-eight
When Jeff woke at 7 a.m., Caroline was still naked but now had a towel wrapped around her hair and was sitting at the room’s small desk, listening to her cell phone voicemails. She playfully slapped him away, protesting that she’d just showered.
Jeff looked at Caroline’s phone and remembered his own. It was made by the same company, and he realized that her charger fit it.
He plugged the cord in and held down the power button until the phone played its little song. It beeped to indicate that it had retrieved voice mails from the cellular network. Five missed calls. He wondered how long it had been dead. He put his finger on the button to check messages,
“Hey beau, the crew is bugging me about when can they get that furniture out of your loft,” Cooperton said in the first message. “Nobody’s got a key but you. Is it all right if they cut off the padlock and put a new one on there?”
The next one made him sit down on the edge of the bed: Sarah, his boss, sounding stunned and frantic: “Jeff, my ex-husband has broken into my house during the night and taken Jacob. Um, taken Jacob. He’s just gone.” A noisy pause. “I know it’s the middle of the night, but I’m hoping you’ll get this and come over right away…”
The voicemail system said the message had been left very early Sunday morning, well over 24 hours ago. How long had Jeff’s phone been dead, and why hadn’t he noticed sooner?
The next message was from Sarah, too, and it didn’t make very much sense besides reiterating that she wanted him to come and help her. “… just took him right out of his crib, and called me on the phone while they were leaving, and I think Leonard might – kill, um, the baby, and there wasn’t anything to do … Deputies aren’t doing anything to get him …” She was a mother leveled by the grief of not knowing that her son was safe. Concern tickled Jeff’s shoulders and tensed his abdomen.
Caroline read Jeff’s face as Jeff ended the call and dialed Sarah’s mobile number, and he told her, “My boss’ ex showed up in the middle of the night and stole their son out of his crib,” and Caroline sucked her lower lip into her mouth.
Now when Sarah answered the line, she was calm and driven. It was clear Jeff hadn’t wakened her.
“Haven’t found him yet,” she told Jeff. “Where are you? Where’ve you been?”
“My investigation of the Reuss thing led me to Philadelphia,” he said, remembering how his boss had arrived at his loft the other night when he’d needed her. “I had some problems with my phone. I’m so sorry I just now got the message.
“Damn it. Philadelphia?”
“Yeah, the fake addresses on the suspect from both the home improvement store and the food delivery business are both streets in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philly.”
Sarah said nothing for a moment. Then: “That’s where Leonard’s from.”
And they both made the connection at the same moment. Sarah’s ex-husband was doing all this.
“He’s doing all this to get back at you?” Jeff said. “Let me send a picture to your phone to make sure. Call me back.”
He used the phone’s camera to snap an image from the printout of Cooperton’s e-mail and explained to Caroline at the same time. He sent the picture to Sarah, and within a minute, she called back.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s Leonard. He’s been in bad shape lately.”
She explained that her husband had been despondent since she’d asked him to move out, that he’d never gotten attached to the baby the way a father ought to, that he’d sounded wild and manic when he’d called this week. “He wanted to settle the divorce in my favor. I tried to make it to where he wanted to mee
t, the mall, where he was playing with his band. He wanted me to sit and listen to the set, but I didn’t get there in time, and he just flipped out, was the opposite of how he’d been on the phone.”
“Well look,” Jeff said, “I was here to identify a suspect, but if we know who it is, I’ll just head back right now. Do you think flying would be faster?”
“It will be faster,” Sarah told him. “And I’ll have Annie charter you a plane. But as long as you’re already there, there’s one thing I want you to do.”
* * *
A door slammed, waking Leonard. He sat up, turned on the lamp. It was 7:30 in the morning.
Probably Marinna’s downstairs neighbor. He wiped his eyes with her stylish blue-and-brown bedsheet.
He reached for the plastic bottle on the nightstand to swallow five more ibuprofen tablets with a double mouthful of Waterless Hand Sanitizer. He smacked his lips.
He had plucked out the pencil fragment and then squeezed half a tube of Neosporin into the puncture wounds under his arm before bed. He’d mended his scalp with butterfly closures, also from the first-aid kit he’d found in Marinna’s kitchen. That would do fine. He knew this persistent ache in his nuts wouldn’t let him sleep any more, even though the blinds were still dark. He hoped the ibuprofen would dilute the pain.
He’d been afraid there would be an odor, but there was none he could detect so far. He stood and walked to the living room, peeked around the corner. It all felt so much like a dream that he half didn’t expect her still to be there.
But the blanket-wrapped bundle was on the floor in front of the couch. He knelt by her shoulders and sobbed until his stomach hurt from the heaving breaths he was drawing.
Get it together and finish the composition, Leonard. He slapped himself on the right cheek, focusing on the cool, muted sting. What have you let happen these past few days?
He sniffed again, wiped his nose with a tissue, stood and turned away from the girl.
He had lost his artistic focus. He had gotten caught up thinking about girls, an obsession that had threatened his art – threatened anything of potential value to him – for most of his life.
He had hurt Marinna.
Quickly, Leonard gathered the few things he had brought inside – and the bottle of ibuprofen and first aid kit. He took her keys from the mahogany box on top of her dresser. He stepped outside, not making a sound.
As he gently closed the door to her apartment for the last time, he didn’t lock it. He took a silent vow to remain celibate and disciplined and focused until the album was finished. He would make a pilgrimage this morning, have a cleansing experience.
Refocus.
Forty-nine
Jeff and Caroline turned left at a corner where a store’s window advertised “water ice,” the local name for Italian ice, and showed a drawing of a paper cup containing a brightly colored, frozen sphere.
The address on a street called Tulpehocken was only about 12 blocks from the hotel, an old, two-story white clapboard house that had been divided into three apartments. Nora Noblac had lived here for 20 years. Sarah said Leonard had just been up here visiting her. Mrs. Noblac hated Sarah, but Sarah thought Leonard might have called her in recent days – or even dropped by again – and Sarah wanted Jeff to check.
Nora Noblac’s apartment had its own little stoop halfway up the steep driveway. Jeff and Caroline climbed the grade and then the single concrete step, and Jeff found the doorbell button, encrusted with white paint. An old buzzer sounded harshly, heralding footfalls inside the house.
Soon, an inner wooden door opened, and a dour face peered suspiciously through the aluminum storm door.
“Hi, Mrs. Noblac,” Jeff said, with a winning smile. “Is your son around?”
The woman frowned. “What’s he done?”
Jeff worked to hide his astonishment. “We’re in town from North Carolina, and we hope you can help us with an investigation we’re working on down there.”
Now she looked at Caroline, who was smiling. The woman opened the door, which swung out over the step, forcing them back down to the driveway. “What’d he do, kill his ex-wife?”
Fortunately, Caroline hung a winning reporter grin on her face and made the right move. “Oh, no ma’am, nothing like that. Could we step in and talk to you? Then we can explain everything.”
The old lady didn’t reply. She just pushed the storm door open another two inches. They had to open it the rest of the way for themselves.
The doorway led directly into a stairwell. The old steps creaked as Jeff and Caroline climbed slowly behind the older lady, and Jeff noticed the smell of some kind of polishing oil mixed with the chemical tang of mothballs. The stairs were wide, as if this must once have been the house’s grand staircase, accessible from the first floor before the house had been cut into apartments. At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Noblac took out an antique key and opened a French door with a glass knob and led them across an anteroom to a living area with gold, short-pile carpet.
She glared at Jeff and dropped her weight into a threadbare burgundy recliner. “Well, you gonna answer me? What’d he do? Did he kill her?”
“No, he didn’t,” Jeff answered carefully.
They hadn’t been invited to, but Jeff took a seat on a Victorian sofa with worn, teal upholstery, and Caroline took a rocker off to the side. “When’s the last time you talked to him?” Jeff asked.
Nora Noblac dropped her bulk into a chair and took a sip from a tall glass that waited on a table next to it. “He was up about two weeks ago, but I don’t like to talk about it. He was dreadful to be around, moreso than usual. Could barely talk to him, he was so upset about the divorce. Very angry. I finally made him leave. I guess he went back down there, huh? I don’t know why he did that after she kicked him out. All he wanted to talk about was some album he was about to record, and how that would show me and everybody else what a musical talent he was. That he should never have been stupid enough to give up his music. Seemed to me like he was completely losing his marbles. I thought he might finally go ahead and kill himself, but other than that, I’ve been kind of afraid of what he might do. So, like I say, what’d he do?”
Other than that? Jeff thought, and wondered if his distaste showed on his face. Caroline looked at him for a cue, and Jeff drew in a breath and said it: “He broke into his ex-wife’s house yesterday night and took the baby.”
The woman shook her head scornfully and displayed no evidence that the news surprised her. Jeff thought she didn’t know about it before he told her, though.
“Lennie always was a screwup,” she said. “All he ever wanted to do was play that colored music. His teachers in high school thought that was just the end-all and be-all, and so did he. So he was always goofing around on that big bass fiddle, thump thump thump, all the time in the house. But you see where it got him. I always told him musicians were fruits and what he ought to do was learn a trade. You see the kind of rathole he lets his mother live in.”
Jeff leaned forward to urge her on, and she kept going.
“He never should have moved to Raleigh. That snooty woman he married in New York dragged him down there. He knew he’d be miserable in the suburbs, but he was too much of a pansy to stand up to her about it, so down he went. Then she was pregnant. Sure enough, she left him not six months after it was born.”
There were five seconds of awkward silence. This was how the woman referred to her own grandson? It? Jeff looked around the apartment. There were no photos or other mementos to indicate the woman had a family.
Mrs. Noblac let out a nasty laugh. “I would have divorced him, too. Couldn’t get him to grow up and keep a real job. All he wanted to do was lie around the house and play that marijuana music, mess around with bands that were never going to make anything. The girl was right about one thing – if he couldn’t make it as a bass player after 20 years of trying in New York, it was never going to happen.”
“What kind of music?”
She gave
a bitter chuckle. “Jazz.”
She stood to indicate that she wanted them to leave.
“But whatever else he did, whatever else he does, that’s not my son. I didn’t raise him to be like that.”
* * *
Halfway down the staircase to the driveway, Jeff’s phone rang, and the display said it was Margaret’s cell number, so he answered. The phone hadn’t been plugged in very long this morning, so the battery gauge already read low.
She sounded like she had been crying, something he had never known her to do.
“Jeff, I’m so sorry to bother you, especially after you specifically asked me not to, but something happened last night, and I don’t know anyone else around here, and I’m feeling really upset and afraid, and I’m not used to dealing with the police …”
He interrupted and asked her to calm down as gently as he could. “What’s wrong?”
She sucked in a breath, then begin again, irritated.
“I was sleeping, last night, in my room, and I felt somebody’s breath on my cheek,” Margaret said. “That woke me up, and my cheek brushed against this wet piece of plastic. Jeff, I think he had my toothbrush in his mouth, and his spit was all over the handle. I bit his hand, then sort of rolled to the other side of the bed and kicked him. He made this little squealing sound and grabbed the Marquis de Savigny and ran into the hallway. I double locked my room door and called the front desk on my room phone while I dialed 9-1-1 on my cellphone.”
Jeff’s pulse was racing now. He was sure this was Leonard Noblac, too. The guy had targeted Margaret. And he realized the only reason he would have done that was because of her connection to Jeff. A blood vessel at Jeff’s temple felt like it might burst. Why hadn’t Cooperton told him about this? Then Jeff realized he hadn’t known, because city PD would have handled it, and they would have had no reason to believe it was connected to the string of Rocky Falls burglaries.