Super in the City

by Daphne Uviller

  I sighed and padded back to the kitchen, aimlessly opening and closing cupboards. I opened the fridge and then the freezer, thinking that if I was going to be up all night, I might have time to at least freeze some juice in ice cube trays.

  But in the freezer were the ice packs I’d found inside James’s window seat. I had forgotten about his mysterious liquids. I slammed the door closed, finally feeling tired, but certain now that I was never going to fall asleep.

  I opened my apartment door and peered across the hall. Two of the agents were dozing and the third, the one who’d been sorting handcuffs earlier, was reading a newspaper.

  “Excuse me,” I said. She looked up, unsurprised to find me there in my T-shirt and boxers. “Am I, uh, allowed to talk to her?” I pointed upstairs.

  The agent shrugged. “As long as it’s not about the case, sure.” She went back to reading her paper.

  I hesitated. Really, an FBI agent should be more explicit. I tiptoed up the stairs and knocked lightly on the door.

  “What? What is it?” came Roxana’s panicked voice. She must have been in her living room, wide awake.

  “It’s okay, Roxana, it’s just me.”

  She opened the door. “I con’t zleep” she said, her gravelly voice rougher than usual. “I con’t zleep at all.”

  “I have a question.”

  She waved her hand at me as if to say she’d had enough questions for a lifetime and slumped back to the couch.

  “Roxana, do you know anything about some liquid James was keeping refrigerated in his window seat downstairs?”

  “Hees beer?”

  “No, not in the refrigerator. Refrigerated. In the window seat. It was in test tubes.”

  “Ooooh,” she groaned. “Zay found dat?”

  “No, I found it,” I said, alarmed. “I forgot to tell anyone today.”

  “Oh, Zepheer.” I waited. She passed her thumb and forefinger along her forehead in a series of pinches. “I dun’t know why he wunted it. I deedn’t ask.”

  “Just tell me,” I said, ready for the worst.

  “James made us geev him zee used condoms. He wus doing an experiment.”

  I wasn’t ready for the worst.

  “With the condoms?” I asked, feeling queasy.

  “Wees duh sperm. He wunted to be a biologeest when he was a leetle boy. Hees fahder unly laughed at heem.” She shook her head sadly.

  I stared at her. Was I supposed to give a rat’s ass about James’s stifled dreams when he had amassed a veritable Baskin Robbins of semen in my house?

  “And you don’t know why?” I prodded.

  She shook her head, sniffling. My eyes had focused now in her dark apartment, and I spotted an empty bottle of vodka on the floor next to the couch.

  “Okay, then, Roxana. You get some sleep.” She nodded morosely.

  I made my way downstairs again, pausing only for a second in front of the agent. She glanced at me and I waved.

  I had probably just gleaned some very important news about something that was almost definitely evidence. It was crucial that law enforcement be alerted immediately.

  I went back inside my apartment and picked up the phone. Luckily, I now had the home number of my very own law enforcement official.

  FORTY- FIVE MINUTES LATER, AT TWO IN THE MORNING, GREGORY arrived. He opened my door, waved bashfully at the agents across the hall, muttering something about new information, and then slipped inside my apartment, where I was waiting for him in the dark living room.

  “Where are you?” he whispered.

  “Here,” I rasped from the couch. I was clutching a throw pillow, my nerves on edge from a deadly combination of sleep deprivation and the singular strain of middle- of- the- night lust.

  He felt his way over and sat down on my feet.

  “Sorry,” I said, starting to pull them out from under him.

  “It’s fine. Leave them,” he said, adjusting himself so that my feet were in his lap, pressing against his crotch, which was already hard. I felt my chest cave in as the oxygen left.

  “Do I really need to tell you right now about this creepy new evidence?” I panted, raising myself up on my elbows. I could only make out his silhouette in the light from the street lamp.

  “No,” he said gruffly, pressing my feet onto him harder. “I’m just glad there was creepy new evidence you needed to tell me about tonight.”

  Gregory got up on his knees, pushed my elbows down and stretched out on top of me. I moaned and closed my eyes.

  “Did you lock the door?”

  “ Uh- huh,” he said, his breath hot in my ear. He ran his lips along the length of my neck, then nudged the collar of my T-shirt aside and lightly bit my shoulder.

  “Zephyr?”

  “I’ve got condoms,” I assured him. “Plenty of them. And not from James’s stash,” I clarified.

  “Did you sleep with that guy who was here the other day? The barefoot one with the beer?”

  I froze.

  “I don’t think you have a right to ask me that,” I said softly. “Not yet.”

  “I know. I know I don’t,” he said quickly.

  “You’re still thinking about what LinguaFrank said about me,” I said sharply. We were face- to- face, his hands pinning mine down, our breath mixing into one warm cloud.

  “Zephyr,” he pleaded. “Wait, who’s Ling—the skateboard? No. I mean, yeah, at the time I was trying to figure out whether you were one of Roxana’s prostitutes—”

  “What!” I freed my hands and heaved him off me. “What?”

  “Oh, shit.” He flopped back on the couch. “I don’t know why I said that. I mean, obviously, I know now you’re not. I only asked about that other guy because—”

  “Wait,” I said coldly, “you thought I was a prostitute?” As I said it, I realized he hadn’t been the only one. I suddenly remembered Senator Smith eyeing my friends and me on the landing the night we’d gone to Soho House, as if he was sizing up the juiciest lobsters in the tank.

  “No. I really didn’t. Not at all.” Gregory put his head in his hands. “But when that guy said it, suddenly I wondered if I had lost all judgment. I mean, here I was, investigating what I suspected was a whorehouse, but I was also falling in love with you, and I got scared that I was falling for a subject. I shouldn’t even be involved with you now.”

  “You’re in love with me?” I asked.

  “But the only reason I asked about the other guy,” he continued, his voice straining with the effort to persuade me, “is because I just want to know where we’re starting from. I want to know that neither of us is tangled up in something else.” He paused. “Yes, I’m in love with you.”

  “I didn’t sleep with him,” I said, happy for the first time since I’d laid eyes on Hayden that this was true. “And I’m not a hooker,” I confirmed, letting a snort of laughter escape.

  He reached for me again, letting his palms cup my breasts, feeling their weight in his hands. He squeezed gently.

  “I’m really glad,” he whispered hoarsely. “About both.”

  NINETEEN

  THE SOUND OF THUNDER ROUSED ME FROM A DEEP SLEEP THE next morning. My arm automatically shot out to answer the phone.

  “Mrs. Hannaham?” I said blearily deciding to change my phone number.

  Thunder again, and pounding. I pulled the phone from my cheek and looked at it, slow to understand that no one was on the other end.

  “They got him.” Gregory was at the foot of my bed, hastily pulling on his pants.

  Oh, right. Gregory. I smiled lazily. “They got Hayden?” I said, still half- asleep. I clamped my hand over my mouth. Jesus, Zephyr, wake up.

  “Who? No, they got Alonzo Pelarose. He’s in custody. Across the hall. Came back at four- thirty this morning to try to kill Roxana. Stupid people make our job a lot easier.” The thunder was the pounding of law enforcement feet up and down the stairs.

  “Oh my God!” I was awake. No one had expected action this quickly. “Is sh
e okay?”

  “She’s fine. Hungover and rattled, but fine. How are you?” Gregory said, his voice suddenly soft. He sat down on the side of the bed and stroked my face.

  “I’m great,” I purred, realizing I wasn’t even worried about morning breath around him.

  “Great,” he said, jumping up, pillow talk concluded. “I’m sorry, Zeph, but I have to …” He nodded his head toward the door.

  I was forever destined to be ditched by men for crime scenes.

  “Kind of convenient,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t know how I was going to explain myself to the guys this morning. This way, I was only checking on you just now.”

  I tried to smile, but my heart was already tightening at the thought of Gregory, the undercover detective, trying to make conversation with Zephyr, the super of her mommy and daddy’s building. For him, I thought, I’d go back to medical school. Anything to keep him interested.

  He threw on his shirt and ran his hands through his hair. “Instead of that picnic …”

  He was already losing interest. I pulled the comforter higher over my chest.

  “… what do you say we go on a field trip to Rikers this afternoon and ask James about his science project?” Just a few hours earlier, we’d sprawled naked on my living room rug, punchy with exhaustion, giggling over the possible purposes of James’s test tubes.

  “Really?” I said eagerly. Prison! Even my dad had never taken me to a prison. This was a sad, somber thing, I reminded myself. I toned down my voice. “That would be great.”

  Gregory came to my side again and put his hand over mine.

  “Is there anything that doesn’t excite you? It’s amazing to watch your face.”

  Well, now. This was news. I tried to smile in an excited way. He frowned.

  “Are you okay?”

  I cleared my throat. “Go. Do your thing. Let me know when you want to leave. I’ll be here.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, GREGORY AND I WERE ZIPPING ALONG THE BQE toward Rikers Island in an undercover police car posing as a gypsy cab, complete with rosary and E-ZPass. I had an oily box of Bleecker Street pizza in my lap. It wasn’t wine and candlelight, but so far, it was the best date I’d ever been on. Gregory glanced over at me and smiled.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes are super green this morning.”

  I snorted and nearly choked on my pizza.

  “Is that funny?”

  “Let’s just say there’s never been a consensus on the color of my eyes.”

  “Are you kidding? Look at them, they’re green. Like emeralds. Like algae. Look!” he insisted, pulling down the sun visor so I could look at myself in the mirror. Maybe it was just the blob of grease glistening on my cheek that made my eyes brighter than usual, but they really did look pretty green. I was so used to having “ish” eyes, I wasn’t sure what to do with this definitive, incontrovertible evidence: I’m Zephyr. I have green eyes. I helped snare a murderous mafioso. I bit my lip to keep from grinning at myself, and flipped the visor back up.

  “Ask me things,” Gregory said, his mouth partly open as he tried to cool off a bite of hot cheese.

  “Okay.” I wiped the grease off my face. “Was there actually any poison in your exterminator canister?”

  He glanced over at me as if he was going to give me a hard time, then changed his mind.

  “Yes. I didn’t think it would be nice to let your building get overrun with roaches just because we’d arrested your super.”

  “Are you qualified to spray poison?” I said, sheepishly aware that I was once again trying to prove to him that I was good at my job.

  “Seriously? These are your questions?”

  “I have a responsibility to my tenants,” I said primly.

  Gregory blew out his cheeks impatiently.

  “Here’s what happened,” he said, pressing hard on the horn as a cabbie cut him off. “I was working with the rackets bureau in the DA’s office, looking at oil companies all over the city. The company James was dealing with—the one you guys were buying oil from—got red- flagged, and then I got very interested in James and started digging deeper. There was stuff in his taps-wiretaps—that was completely baffling. Like, I thought there were a lot more people involved, but it turned out—”

  “That sometimes he’s British and sometimes he’s Brooklyn!” I said excitedly. “Did he use the Brooklyn voice? I’d never heard it till the night he was arrested!”

  “A lot of Brooklyn,” Gregory said, smiling, and I hoped that this was one of those occasions where my enthusiasm was attractive. “So, yeah, I thought it was multiple people, and that kept me guessing for a while. But I didn’t have a clue until I met you and saw the staircase and those two locked rooms in Roxana’s apartment that Roxana and her girls were in the picture. No idea.” He shook his head, mildly disgusted with himself.

  “So why didn’t you wait to arrest him? Until you could find out more?”

  Gregory glanced over at me approvingly. “I wanted to wait, but sometimes there are assholes who—” He took a deep breath through his nose and waved away his incipient tirade. “My boss and I disagreed and he went ahead with the arrest. Prematurely, very prematurely.”

  He reached over and put his hand on my thigh. So warm. Did he always radiate this kind of delicious heat? I’d save in heating bills this winter, I thought stupidly.

  “Any other questions?”

  I hesitated. Don’t blow it, Zephyr. Don’t move backward when you can move forward. But the devil homunculus was restless.

  “Why did you keep making me feel so bad about saying you didn’t look like an exterminator? You weren’t one. Aren’t one.”

  He took his hand back and I felt like I’d been abandoned.

  “Because I thought maybe you were a snob.” He squinted through the windshield.

  I cringed. “But all I was saying was that you didn’t look like one, not that you couldn’t be one or that I wouldn’t date one,” I insisted, certain now that this was the absolute truth. Frus trated, I tossed my pizza crust back into the box. How much proof would he need?

  “I believe you,” he said after a moment. “I’m sorry. It was an unfair position to put you in.” He moved his hand to my leg again and squeezed, silently asking me to forgive him for being such a complicated pain in the ass.

  A plane loomed low over the highway, coming in for a landing at LaGuardia. I studied its metal underbelly and realized that if it were to crash into us at that moment, I was glad I’d be going down beside Gregory. I pushed away the thought. He was a complicated pain in the ass and I was a morbid psycho. It was looking like we might be perfect for each other.

  I looked over at him, to find him looking back at me expectantly. He had a blob of tomato sauce on his cheek. I leaned over and gently licked it off.

  “So you really never noticed anything unusual going on upstairs?” he said happily, gunning past a dyspeptic diesel truck.

  “You don’t ever have to worry about speeding tickets, do you?” I said with awe, as impressed as if he’d invented the radar gun.

  “Nope.” He grinned at me. “Are you a lead foot?”

  I shrugged. Points on a license was the stuff of fourth or fifth dates.

  “I try not to be nosy,” I lied, in answer to his first question.

  “Nosy? There was an entire stairwell on your property that escaped your attention!”

  “Hey, listen,” I said sharply, “not all of us are cut out to be undercover cops. I didn’t notice it.” I glared at him, waiting for the next time he glanced away from the wheel. But he only smiled. Now that he could be himself around me, he was unflappable. It was both completely annoying and a huge relief.

  “Well, I think you’d be a great detective.”

  “Ha.” I slumped back in the seat. I felt vulnerable, remembering our heart- to- heart on the stoop. He knew exactly where I stood, career- wise.

  “I’m serious. You need a pretty rich imagination to piece together something like
the Roxana-Pelarose connection. I was working on James for months and I never got that close. That’s one aspect of detective work—trying to imagine all the permutations of how the different pieces fit together. Some truth is more outrageous than what most people can imagine.”

  I still wasn’t sure whether he was putting me on.

  “And I think,” he continued, turning the car onto a low causeway, “that our ability to distinguish between truth, fiction, and mental illness is about to be tested. Welcome to the isle of Rikers.”

  * * *

  ZEPHYR, LOVE! DARLING! AREN’T YOU SPLENDID TO COME PAY your uncle James a visit!”

  Three weeks in prison had rendered James sallow and bruised. His shoulders were hunched and his beard was an overgrown tangle, but you would have thought we were having high tea at the Savoy. Instead, we were sitting at a cafeteria-style table in a gray- tiled cavern surrounded by armed guards. James rubbed his unshackled wrists and looked genuinely delighted to see me.

  James was considered a low security risk, but apparently, I was a high one. Despite Gregory’s badge, I had been put through the ringer by a wall of a woman manning the X-ray scanner. In another life, Corrections Officer Dredgeholz must have worked Checkpoint Charlie. She clearly pined for the fine, orderly days she had enjoyed in the eastern sector. She patted me down three times, ran her hand scanner over my beeping jeans zipper three times, and made me take off my shoes and my fleece vest (picked with great care to convey a sexy, athletic look to Gregory). She ordered me to empty my backpack and pawed through my things with the delicacy of a grizzly bear in a campground.

  It was one thing to sleep with someone, but an entirely other rite of intimacy to have the contents of your backpack emptied out in front of him. I blushed hotly as Dredgeholz examined a crumpled but clean panty liner, a handful of ATM receipts broadcasting my triple- digit bank balance, a linty ChapStick with no cap, another linty ChapStick (mentholated) with no cap, a mildewed fold- up umbrella, a copy of 287 West 12th’s bylaws, which I’d been meaning to read, and a coffee-stained Times article about cervical cancer my mother had clipped, with “You get your paps every year, right???” scrawled across it in red ink.