by Kieran Shea
“Let me get this straight. You kill my wife then read through my journals to find out more about me.”
“It’s for my files.”
He was dealing with a psycho, Ben understood this, but he couldn’t bring himself to call the police.
“What’s a guy like you doing married anyway?”
“According to you, I’m not anymore.”
“Thanks to me.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“You're welcome.”
“I’m being facetious,” Ben said. “You tell a man you killed his wife—if that's what you did—and expect his gratitude?”
“Come on over and see for yourself. Or are you gonna go back to that operator you put on hold?”
Ben had forgotten all about her and assumed she’d rung off, engaged by another emergency caller.
“If you come, you can help me get rid of the body.” The man chuckled. “I wasn’t going to do that, I was just gonna leave her, but for you... If we hide it well enough, you can cook up some story and report her missing. Say she took off. You must have friends who know you guys have had your problems.”
This is insane, Ben thought, utterly insane, but he still felt compelled to keep on talking. He had a desire to explore where this was going.
“Your files, you said. You do this often?”
“I’m not a serial killer, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then what was it about my wife? Why’d you choose her?”
“You wanna get rid of her body or not?”
“I…what for?”
“So people won’t think you did it.”
“I didn’t,” Ben said, his voice rising.
“People might think you did.”
“Bullshit!”
“With the frost between you two? Your friends have seen how bad it can get.”
Again with the friends. Was this creep one of them? Did they have among their group a deranged individual who’d acted tonight on a murderous urge? Unlikely as that seemed, Ben thought it might be the answer to what was transpiring here; it would explain how the guy knew so much about him—because, in reality, the guy did know him.
“You’re implicating me for something you did,” Ben said. “I’ll take my chances.”
“I could do things here, make it look like it was you.”
“Your voice sounds familiar.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Is your name Robert?”
“It’s something you wanted anyway. Wanted to do but couldn’t.”
“I don’t want to kill Carla. I never have.”
“All these years not being able to travel like you used to. She doesn’t go for that, does she? Her style’s Cancun, the posh hotel, a week on a cruise ship. And having to drink a little here, a little there, in secret, so she won’t always be frowning at you. I know the drill. Meanwhile work, and more work. Weren’t you happier when you were renting? Before you took a mortgage? You must feel trapped.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I’m trapped, I allow myself to be,” Ben said, and he thought of his wife’s half-moon hips, meaty breasts, and zaftig behind—the fetish he’d made of her body.
Not too happy but a prisoner of sex. That’s me. I let her stoke me up, pull away, dictate the ebb and flow of our sex life. It’s me who’s being too passive. I’m a prisoner of myself.
“Consider me your liberator then,” the man said, as if mindreading. “Come on home and see how I’ve set you free.”
The stiltedness of the man’s language, even under the grotesque circumstances, almost made Ben burst out laughing.
“If you did what you say you did, I’m not coming home with you there.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You won’t get the chance.”
“I have no desire to hurt you.”
“But Carla you did. Not that you’ll tell me why.”
“What counts is you. And I happen to know, deny it all you like, that you’re relieved.”
It reminded Ben of earlier years, when he’d still been a Catholic and attended confession. The man was requesting only that he divulge his sins.
Say you’re relieved and he’ll lay out what you have to do for penance. He’ll absolve you if you feed him what he wants to hear.
“Hold on,” Ben said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
It was a way of asserting control, making the talk move at his tempo. So far, throughout, he'd felt like the reactive one. But an interruption, created by him, might throw the man off his rhythm.
He put the phone down and was out of his chair before the man could say anything, and he could hear the man's voice as he walked away. This time, using the phone at a colleague's station, he went through with calling 911.
“There’s a man on the line from inside my house… He claims he killed my wife…”
They instructed him to try to keep the man on the phone. When the call was done, he gathered himself together at the water cooler with a cup of cold Evian.
New York PD, nail this bastard and lock him up.
“Okay,” he said, back at his desk, in his chair. “I don’t know what you want to hear.”
“The truth,” the man said. “How you feel.”
“If you’re so sure how I feel, why do you need to hear it?”
“Did you really just go to the bathroom?”
“I told you I did. You think I’m playing games with you now?”
“I hope not.”
“Not the same certainty in you, pal. Did I go to the bathroom, or did I do something else?”
“Just tell me the truth. You’ll feel better afterward. I know I didn’t kill her for nothing.”
“Ah. So you killed her, you’re telling me, to do me a favor.”
“You’re in such denial. I see it all the time. People who cling to this idea they love their wife. Love their husband. They just can’t admit they're miserable, that love has died. They don’t have the courage to make the break.”
Warmed-over armchair psychology—this was what the guy was spouting, and it riled Ben to listen to it. His cheeks were hot.
“Alright, alright, ” he said. “I’ll come clean if you get off my back.”
“It’s to face yourself, not to please me.”
“So you say. You and your bullshit. Anyhow, yeah, the marriage wasn’t going well.”
“And that’s all?”
“I wouldn’t have killed her.”
“But now that she’s gone?”
“Who can tell? My life might get better.”
“You can be clearer than that.”
“She was a stabilizing force when we met. I got a better job, cut back on drinking, stopped going out every night, but over the years, what can I say? She’s lost her sense of fun. She works, comes home, watches TV—everything the same every day. Totally predictable. And she’s frightened of everything, frightened or bothered... Just to get her out of the house for a movie, something that small... ‘Well, Ben, we can watch it when it comes on DVD. Do we have to go out? People talk so much at the movies nowadays.’"
Ben swallowed, teasing moisture down his throat. He was thirsty suddenly, in need of another cup of water, but he feared that putting the phone down again might spook the guy into bolting from his house. The least he could do was hold him till the police arrived.
“Why didn’t you get a divorce?” the man asked.
Those tits, Ben thought, her ass and thighs, though he knew he was being reductive in his thinking, dishonest with himself. When solo, yes, he’d had more freedom and the ability to travel where he wanted, but even on those trips, the loneliness had been there, the solitude he felt hiking alone, sleeping alone, entering foreign bars alone. On frequent occasions during his travels, he’d mulled over the realization that if he never returned to New York, if he disappeared abroad, no one back home would truly miss him.
Then he’d met Carla an
d gotten married.
To have a witness to my life? he wondered. Or to give myself a keeper, a nagging watchdog, so I'm forced to contain myself? The weekend binges every now and then were nothing compared to the way he used to drink.
“You haven’t even asked how I did it,” the man said. “Aren’t you curious?”
He should have been, he told himself, and tried to picture Carla dead on the floor in their bedroom. He envisioned her strangled, or shot, or with a knife handle jutting from her throat, her thick black hair over her face, hiding open eyes.
Carla on her back in her red nightgown, cleavage showing, legs and arms sprawled.
Was there blood? The man had implied he’d done nothing sexual. But even if he hadn’t, had she suffered in dying?
“You can spare me the details,” Ben said, “but the main thing is she’s gone, right? You’ve cut me loose.”
“So you’re feelin’ it?”
“Feeling it, feeling it,” Ben said. “I’ll talk to the cops, put on a sad face, and then, goddamn, I’m free as a bird.”
Where are you, cops? You should be over there.
“I knew you’d admit it,” the man said. “You can tell me. I’ve done you a favor.”
“Tell you what?”
“How much this means to you. The favor I’ve done.”
“I’m telling you.”
“Say it clearly then. To hear that from you is my reward for a job well done.”
“You’re insecure, you know that?”
“It’s all for your benefit. So you can face how you feel directly.”
“You’re like a bad therapist,” Ben said, the blood in his face warming again. “You’re a fount of trite bullshit.”
“I understand you have anger, too. I would expect you to feel some of that.”
“Thanks for cutting me slack.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’ll be what I want,” Ben said. “You kill someone’s wife and…”
“We’re getting off track. You’re angry, but you do concede I did you a favor?”
“Fuck you!” Ben shouted. “You fucking pest. Yes. Right. You’ve done me a favor. I’ll be freer without my wife than with her. Do I have to say it any clearer for you?”
Ben felt flushed, and a throbbing in his temples, and the dryness stuck in his throat ached. He’d stopped yelling, expecting a response, but all he heard coming through the line was a low, static drone.
The sick motherfucker had hung up on him.
“Didn’t like the joke?”
“You made me make a bogus 911 call.”
“You always say I’m too predictable. That I never surprise you.”
“I could’ve got in serious trouble with the cops.”
“But you’re not, are you? So relax.”
In her blue sleeping gown, not the red one, Carla sat nursing coffee in the kitchen, her face alight with a rare amusement. She winked at him, her head tilted back, and crossed her legs under her robe, one hand on her angled hip.
“What did you tell them?” Ben asked.
“That it was a joke that got out of hand.”
“But it didn’t, did it?”
“It went like clockwork.”
“Who was I talking to?"
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does,” Ben said. “Was that Robert Straw?”
“It wasn’t Robert.”
Whoever it was, he’d left by the brownstone’s backyard entrance, scrambling away before the cops came.
And Ben thought, how much did she hear? Did she listen in on the other line? Tape everything? Does she think I meant everything I said?
“Anyway...about what I told him...”
Above the coffee mug held to her chin, his wife’s face was wide-eyed with innocence, all childlike expectation.
“Yes, Ben?”
“I had to play along with the guy. Let him think I was glad so he wouldn’t hang up.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Obviously.”
Carla took a sip of her coffee. “It’s possible,” she said, with the trace of a smile, upturned lips. “That’s just possible. But would you be offended if I offered you an award?”
“What does that mean?”
“From me to you, a private Oscar. Most Convincing Peformance by a Man Improvising. Extremely, extremely believable.”
“But it’s true. I was only acting.”
“You could have fooled me,” his wife said.
He saw lawyers in the future, his voice on tape as evidence, his attempts at explanation scoffed at.
And the settlement, he just knew, would gut him.
Having Chiqui
By Kieran Shea
Early one Saturday evening last February, Mike “Muzz” Mukowski stopped eating his submarine sandwich and cleaning his gun because he heard a noise.
Muzz knew he shouldn’t be doing both, eating and handling a firearm, but he was starving. The blessed Italian trinity of rosemary ham, cappacuolo, and salami had been whispering his name all afternoon. A little seasoned olive oil and red wine vinegar, hot banana peppers, and a rack of iced Budweisers on the side. It was a real nice way to start a Saturday night. Have a light snack. Get buzzed. Clean your favorite gun.
But then there was the noise.
Muzz thought he’d locked the front door when he came back from the corner deli, but then his mother went out after that, so there was Patrick Farrell standing in the crooked, kitchen doorway, all leathered up in his black Prince of Darkness overcoat.
“Hey, Muzz.”
Muzz groped his soft chest in mock surprise, a thin shred of iceberg lettuce catching high in his throat like a bug. Muzz coughed.
“Oh, shit. Hey, Pat. Scared me there…” More coughing. “You ever hear of this thing called a doorbell?”
Pat glanced behind him. “Front door was open.”
“Still, you kind of gave me a heart attack over here.”
“You alone?”
Muzz crunched a salt-and-vinegar potato chip and resumed sinking his teeth into the flank of the sub sandwich. “Yeah, my moms went out,” he said, chewing. “Our Lady of Fatima. Catching Father Carmen’s seven o’clock mass to beat the Sunday rush.” Muzz hoisted a can of beer and swallowed some of his sub. “Offer you a cold one?”
Pat tilted his head sideways letting his long, oily brown hair drape and kept his eyes level. “No, thanks.”
Muzz insisted. “You sure? Got me a whole other sixer in the ‘fridge. Put them in there last night so these babies are rippin’ cold.”
Pat shrugged and shook his head.
“Suit yourself,” Muzz chimed. He drained the beer on the table and tossed the empty can into the overflowing recycling bin in the corner.
Pat entered the kitchen. “Y’know why I’m here?”
That tone. Muzz knew that tone. A slither of runny ice water moved in his gut. Muzz glanced down at gun parts spread on The Newark Star Ledger sports section on the kitchen table in front of him. A nearly empty bottle FP-10 cleaner knighted the bottom left corner of the newsprint, and a set of stubby brass brushes and two packed clips lay to his right. Muzz felt if there were any justice left in the world, time would be suspended like in that old Twilight Zone episode, the one with the bank robber and the magic watch. With time in flux, he could reassemble his Beretta, jack the clip, and have a round chambered before Pat pulled whatever he was hiding beneath his black leather coat. Probably that fancy-pants Sig he always played with at the range down in Lakewood—the compact model, all shiny and clean with style to burn.
Muzz cleared his throat. “I don’t know? Why’re you stopping by? A friendly visit?”
Pat’s eyes bounced off the oiled gun guts on the newspaper and then looked back at Muzz, his face darkening.
“I know about Chiqui, Muzz…”
Muzz blinked.
Fuck.
“Chiqui?”
“Uh-huh.”
Well, that’
s that, Muzz thought miserably. That is fucking that. Now Pat fucking Farrell knows Muzz tried to get it on with Chiquinquirá Otálvora last night, and the big elephant turd is right out there in the open for everybody to take a nice long whiff. Fuck me…fuck me straight to hell.
Chiqui Otálvora was Pat’s girl, a real cockteasing Venezuelan piece of ass and the original Miss Condescending. Sure, maybe Muzz shouldn’t have tried to tap her all rough like that when Pat and Luis Diaz were out of town the night before, but hey if you asked Muzz, that girl was asking for it. Hell, Chiqui was always asking for it. Bending over all deadly in that leather mini, wearing that fake diamond in her belly button like a hot spark.
She asked Muzz over to her basement apartment to score some primo for some of her friends. Muzz had said sure, no sweat, he’d be right over. Chiqui was alone in her dugout apartment, and she told him straight up that it was her girlfriends who really wanted the weed because they were all heading into the city later to some club. Unlike Chiqui, they were shy and wanted Chiqui to hook them up with the groove.
When Muzz arrived he let Chiqui road test some product with a bat Muzz carried around for the occasional nerve-calming quick hit—and in the spirit of good dealing, Muzz fired a fat pinch too. Sweet-tasting Canadian hydro.
As he and Chiqui settled into the couch to share a couple of drinks, Chiqui reached into her purse and tried to hand Muzz a bunch of folded-over twenties. Muzz laughed and waved her off telling her to stop being ridiculous, and the next thing you know, Chiqui smiled that perfect smile of hers. She wiggled her butt next to him and the soft bareness of her caramel-colored thigh brushed Muzz’s knuckles. That was all it took. Muzz felt the charge.
And where was Pat last night, huh? Shit, if he’d stuck around North Jersey and Elizabeth proper Muzz would’ve never even been over there at his girlfriend’s apartment in the first place. Hell, Chiqui could’ve gotten her bitches’ party bud off of Pat himself, but no. Pat Farrell and that Latin King wannabe, Luis Diaz, rolled down to Atlantic City without Muzz. Hitting the blackjack tables and then Delilah's Den and peeling out Hamiltons to the talent, pretending to be real players. They could’ve taken Muzz along with them, but just like back in high school, the sharp-eyed alpha wolves left their tubby homey out of their precious plans. Some line of shit about keeping “the store” open for customers.