The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  The sun burned past the buildings. The buildings burned, too, though maybe this was only the reflection. I kept hearing sirens. Were they police or fire? Things were creeping from behind the street signs, even as the signs themselves were changing. I couldn’t see the word STOP. I must have run through red lights. People on the streets kept waving at me, which I thought meant something terrible. Did they see that I was burning? Did they know that I had killed a man?

  It was only later that I realized I was driving a cab.

  65.

  I parked outside Verona Gardens and went straight through the lobby up the stairs. I was looking for Max. I was going to take Max. It wasn’t far to the border, and if I hurried I could make it. Then I could disappear. The door to 203 was ajar.

  The place had been ransacked. The TV was on. Steam came from the bathroom past the closet filled with hangers. The bathroom door was open, neon strips bracketing a fogged mirror. Water shrieked through the hooked sink faucet and hissed from the shower. The toilet was open and running. The rug on the floor was spattered with blood.

  A porkpie hat sat on the nap.

  I pulled the curtain back.

  My wife lay in the bathtub, naked and hogtied with hose. A sock had been stuffed in her mouth. Her skin was stained with broad burns from the water, which I turned off.

  I pulled the sock from her mouth.

  “Jesus—”

  “They broke down the door.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “People. Looking for Max.”

  “Where’s Max?”

  “With Johnny.”

  “Where?”

  “Santa Anita.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “They hurt me.”

  “Rose. Did you tell them?”

  I ran to her phone and called: “Operator,” I said, “we need help. In Verona on the Boulevard. She’s . . . Man, she’s really . . . Jesus. Burned—”

  She wanted me to leave her.

  She told me to find Max.

  I picked up the hat.

  That’s how you found the fingerprints.

  66.

  I took two more tubes from the glove compartment and broke them and swallowed the strips. The metal spread through my blood again, coating the back of my throat. I kept swallowing. I wanted to wash it out, but I didn’t have a water glass.

  The fire started up inside, but outside it was gone, replaced by sudden storms. Lightning danced as I drove to Santa Anita. I never saw it cut the sky, just the black clouds booming behind the Santa Monicas. It was secondhand evidence, like a shadow on a wall instead of a person walking.

  But people were walking everywhere. They were waving, too.

  I parked and, well, didn’t have an umbrella—or a hat, thanks to the pie—and by the time I made it through the gate and bought a racing form, my suit was soaked. I figured I needed it. It cut the metal out.

  I went up to the main line, diary and tape in hand, the beer stands and the monitors, the haze of smoke, men in straw hats and bad shorts, losing tickets on the floor, tellers behind the windows.

  I found Johnny and Max in the ticket line and pretended to read the racing form as I watched the gangster spread a sheaf of Hamiltons at the window: “Five dimes on six to show in the second.”

  Johnny opened his black umbrella and walked with Max into the grandstand apron, toward the stretch, and sat on one of the benches. I lit a Kent and walked into the sea of bobbing umbrellas as the horses filed out to the gate.

  “Johnny,” I said.

  He flicked his cigarette, still burning, to the ground, and looked up, giving me that Mafia stare.

  “Dad!” Max shouted.

  Johnny smiled. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “It’s like Davy Crockett said: Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”

  “You’re not Davy Crockett,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  My hand was in my pocket. “Your girlfriend is burned in the bathtub. She said you were here. They were looking for Max.”

  “Who?”

  “The people who hurt her.”

  “LAPD,” he said.

  “How do you—?”

  “On the one hand you have the Chicago outfit, Ben. On the other hand you have the LAPD. One is trying to protect the Kennedys. The other is trying to fuck them. Guess which one is on your side?”

  “He isn’t wearing a hat,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The man who hurt my wife isn’t wearing a hat. And he’s here. He must be. She said—”

  He looked around. “All these umbrellas—”

  The nasal track announcer’s voice came over tinny speakers: “Dagger’s Point still in front, Dagger’s Point by a length and a half, here comes Bullet Proof on the outside, Dagger’s Point coming after him—”

  People were standing. They were shouting. You could shoot someone in that noise and no one would hear.

  “Wait a second!” Johnny stood. He shouted, too. He had won on Dagger’s Point. Max sat quietly staring into his lap. The crowd pressed in as I stood on the bench and looked over the umbrellas and saw nothing except Johnny leading Max back to the ticket window.

  I ran after them, tripping on a stair, and when I stood I saw the man.

  Cagney sat under a black umbrella at the edge of the stairs to the right.

  He didn’t have his porkpie hat, but his umbrella followed me as I walked to the window—and put the gun to my son’s head.

  • • •

  You need to change the tape again.

  “Are we almost done?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one who kidnapped your son.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s not what the Mirror said.”

  “The Mirror lies.”

  “Oh? They said—do I need to quote?—‘a deranged drugged man put a gun to his son’s head at Santa Anita—’”

  “To stop them from hurting him the way they hurt my wife.”

  “You hurt your wife. You were stoned.”

  “—trying to stay awake.”

  “You hurt Max, too.”

  “No.”

  “You threatened to.”

  “To get him out of there.”

  “—gun pointing to his temple, left hand hooked under his neck. You punched—”

  “He fell.”

  “—was bleeding.”

  “Look,” I said. “I tried to stop it.”

  67.

  Umbrellas rippled in the stands and men ducked and fell in the lines that snaked from the ticket windows. They were screaming. Well, that was my impression. It’s hard for me to piece it all together, since time changed in those few moments. The drug wasn’t helping. Everything happened in seconds but the seconds kept stretching. A hundred different things unspooled at once, like drama dioramas playing out across the track; you could rewind the film, and each time you would see something new:

  STOP, REWIND, PLAY.

  Yes, I grabbed my son and held him. Yes, I put the gun to his temple, and yes, I had my hand around his neck and Johnny reached for his gun and Cagney reached for his, and I think I said one of those clichéd things like “Don’t move or I’ll shoot!” or “One false move and he’s dead!”

  I led Max to the parking lot as screams and cheering filled the track, and when I tripped he fell straight to the ground.

  • • •

  Calm down, calm down, I told myself as I parked the cab at a gas station near Evansville. There were oil stains like bats on the cement and a service island with pumps painted pastel green. I brought Max to the restroom. It smelled of urine and chlorine. The faucet shrieked as I washed his bloody face and took his shirt off and rinsed and wrung it in the sink. It was still wet, so I carried it as I led him shirtless back into the lot.

  I swear I saw a flash come from an El Dorado parked at an angle along the belled fence facing the Tastee Freez. I turned and looked behind me as we passed the car and I swore I saw anoth
er flash come from the back.

  But there was nothing.

  It wasn’t long before we were outside Mission Viejo, but the streets weren’t clearly marked. I was on the back roads, passing hotels and the gas stations that had been abandoned when the highway was first built. The world is changing: You know that, Doc. Gray fluorescence bloomed in convenience stores and red neon reflected in electric waves on the streets that looked like oil.

  I was falling asleep. I pulled out an inhaler and swallowed the strips, but this time the fire and the metal were gone. I nodded off, crossing the center divide near Encinitas when the semi blew its horn, and I looked up just in time to see the big rig looming, blades of rain like translucent grass in the lights—and it’s true what they say: Everything slows. I even had time to say, aloud, “You’re doing okay,” which woke Max as I yanked the wheel to the right, so hard that I went into the ditch.

  “Shit,” I said, climbing from the car. The cars hummed past.

  I heard sirens.

  “That’s no good, Dad,” Max said.

  “I know: car’s stuck.”

  “I mean your language,” he said, stepping toward the road and raising his right hand, flagging down a car.

  “Don’t, Max.”

  “Why?”

  “No one knows we’re here.”

  68.

  The hotel was one of those creaky Victorian structures they call California Gingerbread. There was a wooden porch with a swing that drifted in the wind. The steps that led to the WELCOME mat at the front door belled in the middle. Turns out it wasn’t a hotel so much as a bed-and-breakfast in a part of Titusville now visited only by people who had gotten lost or, like us, had too few options.

  I rang the bell.

  The owner was one Carol McFadden, a plump widow in a nightgown and fringed cap that covered her curlers. Traces of cream slicked her skin and smelled of cough drops. She greeted us at the front door, yawning, having already been to bed. But she was “glad to see” us, she said. “It must be good to get out of the rain.”

  “Sure is,” I said, shaking off in the front parlor. A front desk with a brass bell and a guest book fronted the side of a staircase that led up to the rooms.

  “How did you find us?”

  “The truth, ma’am,” I said, “is we got lost.”

  “That seems to be the only way these days. Just the two of you?” she said brightly, stepping behind the desk.

  “Sure enough.”

  She frowned at Max. “Your boy okay?”

  “He fell off his bike.”

  “Sorry to hear it, son.” She looked back up at me. “Deposit in cash?”

  Shit, I had no money. Somehow I’d forgotten that.

  “Sure,” Max said, taking a wad of bills from his plastic cowboy wallet and handing it to the woman.

  It was Monopoly money.

  The woman looked at me. “Surely the boy is joking.”

  “Wait!” He dug into his wallet again. “Sorry.”

  He handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll be!”

  “Where did you get that?” I asked my son.

  “Horse books,” he said.

  We signed in. I used the names “John and Al Rawlston.”

  “Is there any place to eat around here?” I asked.

  “There’s an all-night café about ten miles back, but you don’t exactly look in the mood for another trip. Hmm, I didn’t hear a car, either.”

  “We parked around the block.”

  “You could have used the lot.”

  “If it’s all right with you, ma’am, we’ll leave the car where it is. We really just need a shower and sleep.”

  She hesitated. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll cook you something up myself.”

  “You sure? It’s late.”

  “Don’t mind,” she said. “I like the company.”

  We went up to dry off in the room. There were two single beds facing a Zenith, a double window looking out over a fire escape with a view of the parking lot below and, past it, the wharfs and the docks off the beach. The room was decorated like a dollhouse, with pointless small tables, lacy pillows, and pastels.

  It was like being inside an Easter egg.

  I put the tape and the diary on the bedside table. Max took a bath and I took a shower and we climbed into the bed, wet clothes over the shower rod, and watched the TV that hardly worked. Well, it was past sign-off anyway. They had already shown the American flag.

  “So what did you do with the tape?” you say.

  “You’re like a broken record, Doc.”

  “Because you’re not telling the truth.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  You stop the current tape, take one of the others from the unending pile, cue it up, and hit PLAY:

  “—called the cops.” It was Carol McFadden’s voice. “Well, they were asking—”

  STOP. REWIND. PLAY:

  “It did strike me as strange,” Carol says, “that this fellow with the son was so interested in listening to some silly tape, but what can I say? Maybe he was a music fan. I like 101 Strings myself. Do you?”

  “Can’t say that I know them. Please continue.”

  “Well, you should hear ‘Gypsy Campfires.’ You haven’t heard a thing until you’ve heard ‘Gypsy Campfires.’ Well, I try to be helpful. It was my late husband’s machine. I don’t even know how to work it, and I wasn’t sure it did work, but this gentleman just seemed so keen on it. That’s all I can say. I’ve never felt that way about music, have you?”

  “Now, please—”

  “It wasn’t music. That’s the strange thing. At least if it was, it was like no music I’ve ever heard. Well, I heard him listening to this, and some of it—!”

  “What?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure, but . . . sighs. And moans. Well, if the man hadn’t had his young son with him, I could have sworn.”

  “What?”

  “It was the sound of carnal love.”

  • • •

  There are three distinct sections on the tape, Doctor. I am not sure why I think there are three sections, but they seem to reflect different times.

  The first is just sex: loud and vocal. The less said about this the better, as I’m sure you can imagine it.

  The rest of the tape lasts about sixty minutes and was recorded, I think, on the afternoon of August 4 and then again in the early morning hours of August 5. During the first twenty minutes, you can hear Marilyn and Eunice Murray talking.

  “Marilyn?” the housekeeper says. “He won’t go away. He’s outside.”

  “Tell him I’m not here.”

  “He knows you’re here.”

  “Tell him I’m sleeping.”

  Shouting.

  “He won’t believe you. He’s upset. You never sleep. He needs to see you.”

  “Well, then, tell him to wait. Tell him—”

  About five minutes later, you can hear Marilyn and Kennedy talking. It’s not always clear. The sounds seem to come from a long way off, as if the interaction took place far from the transmitter in Monroe’s closet. See, the quality is poor. Listen, however, to what happens when you reach 1406. At this precise spot, Marilyn says what is almost certainly “promised me.” Rewind a few times, and you’ll hear the “you”:

  “You promised me.”

  This is followed by Kennedy saying, “I promised you nothing.”

  “You [inaudible] me,” she says.

  I am sure the missing word here is “fucked.” Though I do not expect the word that I have just written to survive. It will no doubt be crossed out, as it most likely is as you are reading [redacted]

  “I feel passed around!” She sounds agitated, drugged, or drunk. “I feel used! I feel like a piece of meat!”

  At 1506 (pay attention, now—there is a lot of static), you will hear Kennedy say, “Where is it?”

  Marilyn screams something.

  “It has to be
here.”

  The sound quality is poor. As the people move about the bedroom, now near to and now far from the mics, the quality fluctuates. What is clear is the fact that the voices grow louder, angrier, until it’s obvious that they are arguing. At, say, 1708, Kennedy sounds shrill, like a querulous old lady as he asks repeatedly, “Where is it? Where the fuck is it?”

  You will notice that this portion of the tape ends with the sound of a slamming door.

  From 1897 to 1945, the tape is silent. You will hear only white noise, a few clicking sounds, no clues, no evidence. Believe me. I have heard it. The silence is so long you may be tempted to turn the tape off, thinking it is over. Do not do this. Instead, fast-forward to the point at which the counter turns from 1430 to 1431. Here, you will hear feedback, an odd clicking sound, and voices.

  I believe they are the voices of Robert Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and Marilyn Monroe.

  Kennedy is angrier and louder now. Marilyn sounds drunk or stoned. She is probably both.

  In the fifty-five minutes that follow, from 2123 to 3001, three things are clear. The first is that, right off the bat, Kennedy says, “We have to know. We can make any arrangements that you want, but we must find it. It’s important to the family.”

  They must have gotten close to the rice-sized transmitter, because you hear a clacking on the tape, which I insist is the sound of hangers moving back on the rack in the closet, clothes being shuffled around as Kennedy and Lawford search for the bug that, they believe, was installed at Marilyn’s request. They had their own bug; they had their own tape. But Marilyn’s?

  They are still searching.

  Next through the static is what I can only call a flopping sound, followed again by that Kennedy old-lady voice and Lawford saying, “Calm down. Calm—”

  “Get out!” Marilyn shouts. “Get the fuck out of the—”

  “Calm down!”

  Here, from 2104 to 2540, you’ll hear crashing, then whispered comforting sounds, as if someone is putting a child to bed.

  Then there is a long silence.