Dimly, Through Glass

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Dimly, Through Glass Page 21

by Knight, Dirk


  Dennis had hoped tonight would have had a happier ambiance, but he was suspecting that this effort by his father was too little, too late. His mother, Carla Dean, had asked for a divorce last month.

  After an uncomfortable pause, after the long loud tones of a phone left “off-hook” filled the silence, Harold hung the receiver gently into its cradle and stepped away from the telephone like a gut-shot soldier. He looked at Dennis and his eyes lightened, slightly. He told Dennis they were going to meet her there—either not realizing that Dennis had, in fact, heard the exchange, or to the point of disillusion that he didn’t care—and that he just needed to get ready for the fancy dinner. His father asked if he wanted to watch cartoons while he got dressed.

  He clipped on the TV and somberly walked back to his room. He turned on his radio and used it to drown out the boisterous raucousness of the animated series.

  Even with the symphony of noises carrying through the tiny one bedroom apartment, Dennis thought he heard his father crying, something he had never heard before, and thus abandoned the plucky animated antics to check on his pluckless father. As he entered the bedroom slowly, he could see steam starting to pour out of the open bathroom door and pooling on the popcorn ceiling. He cautiously entered to see his father, crying, but stern-faced with his bone handled razor in his hands. His grip was white-knuckled and his hands were unsteady. He looked down at Dennis, mouthed the words “I’m sorry,” and then carved his neck like a holiday ham.

  Dennis watched his father die and did nothing.

  What could he do?

  He was in shock, maybe. Or maybe he was happy to see him escape Carla. To this day, he isn’t sure why he didn’t ask for help, or turn away.

  His mother arrived forty-something minutes later to pick him up and he was still in the steam-filled bathroom, sitting next to his dad, his chinos saturated with blood as he sat in the pool, and tracing the carvings on the razor’s handle.

  The song that was playing on his dad’s state-of-the-art CD player, the song that Harold Dean had chosen to die to, was Patsy Cline’s, “I Fall to Pieces.”

  And now he has his own fall to pieces moment. He reaches over and silences the car stereo with a tear in the corner of his eye.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Yeah, I do. . . . I just have a headache, is all.”

  Moments later, she pulls into the valet receiving area of 44 West Monroe.

  When Dennis opens his door, all he can hear are dogs barking.

  Rodriguez Versus the Clock

  Eleman closes his flip phone and walks to the elevator at a good clip, but still reaches the doors a second too late.

  He turns frantically, in a full circle, surveying the room again and locating the door to the stairwell. Just near it is the service elevator, which he chooses instead. Glancing again over his shoulder to catch another satisfying look at the fleeing blonde and her trio of tiny teacup terriers, he only sees assholes and elbows as she exits and the wind ruffles her faux fur.

  He is pacing, and trying to reach Staley again, in the large elevator car, but his efforts do him no good. No signal. His chirp will not go through. When the sensation of movement ceases and he is moments away from prying the doors open himself, the bell at last dings and opens the passage into the hallway of the twenty-third floor.

  His stride is widening into a gallop, but he does not see the couple he was chasing.

  Was he too late; was the service elevator that slow?

  The elevator bay just ahead of him sounds its bell signifying the arrival of passengers, and out comes a woman; the same woman he saw getting in the car in the lobby. Perhaps the service elevator had only seemed slower than taking the stairs would have been.

  This was the same woman he was chasing; thinking she was the so called “flashdance chick” with the wandering eyes, full black hair, classless red winter coat and expensive shoes.

  He can see immediately that this woman is quite a bit older than the girl form earlier. Secondarily he realizes that the man is no longer with her. Perhaps neighbors sharing an elevator. He’d already taken his floor, which explained how Eleman had managed to reach level twenty-three ahead of the cougar.

  She turns towards him, and away from Foster’s unit, smiles warmly and says hello. He responds in kind, and he keeps marching, slower now, so as not to draw too much attention. He has to retrieve his partner, now. Staley’s wrath be damned, Eleman cannot handle the worry.

  Though Staley isn’t in immediate danger, he doesn’t want to risk another near-miss like this one, and another three-hour elevator ride during which time anything can happen.

  Seeing him approaching Dennis’s door, she asks him if he is new to the building. He tells her he is just watering some plants and feeding cats for an old friend. She smiles again with a coy and sensual expression.

  “No offense, but I wouldn’t have guessed that guy has any friends. You sure he isn’t just paying you to feed his cats?” she says, batting an eye like a flapper in a black and white Disney film.

  Her eyes are just plain huge, no matter how you skin it, but from the angle that she looks up to Eleman’s face they look comically enormous, like eyes of a cartoon cat. Her makeup is caked on so thick that she looks to be coated in a waterproof layer, her giant eyes fenced off with ridiculous fake lashes, her lips shinier than a chrome bumper on a ’53 Ford Fairlane, but her hands withered and wrinkled; the only thing that betrays her true age, and desperation.

  Does this shit really work on some guys? he wonders.

  “That might be a better assessment of our relationship.”

  “Well, it’s none of my business; I guess. . . . I’m Shari, nice to meet you.”

  “Eleman, likewise—”

  “Elle-min?” she asks timidly. “What an interesting name.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I really must be going now.”

  “Please, call me Shari.”

  “Yes ma’am. Sorry, but duty calls.”

  “Alright Eleman.” She pronounces it more confidently. “If you’d like a drink after you feed the cats, I’m here,” she points, “in twenty-three, fifteen.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop by,” he says, thinking briefly of his own mortality, and realizing that his looks would one day fade as hers had, and he’d be left crooning at younger girls to try and make himself forget the decades of loneliness.

  “I’ll be expecting you. Hurry now, it isn’t polite to keep a lady waiting,” she says over her shoulder as she walks away.

  His heart is beginning to return to its usual rhythm by the time she finally walks past him. He looks back in time to see her do the same. He thinks to himself that he really must tip his barber more, and picks up the pace around the corner.

  He reaches the unit, tries the door, and it opens. He calls to his partner, who emerges from a thicket of drapery.

  “Oh fuck, thank God, man I was shitting a gold brick just now,” breathes Carron with a sigh of relief.

  “You were? We’re getting out of here now. What if that was him? I’m not taking it in the ass over a hunch.”

  The two men exit and lock the thumb latch behind them.

  As the doors of the freight elevator open onto the marble floors of the lobby, Carron sees a woman coming into the building with a bundle of small dogs, who are barking furiously. The dogs’ owner is handing a sack of poop to the fellow at the front counter, who takes the shit with a false but convincing smile.

  Coming in behind the woman and her dogs is Dennis Foster.

  As Staley engages his feet and starts off on a course to intercept the man, Eleman restrains him.

  “Not now, bro . . . not today. Let’s just run the labs. Do you want to let him walk on this one?”

  But Staley is unable to restrain himself, bursts through the door, and hobbles on his burning thigh, torturing his swelling scrotum, over to Dennis.

  Carron hauls him in for questioning. Dennis offers no resistance, simply digs out his wallet, hands it to Libby, a
nd whispers instructions in her ear.

  “His card is in the wallet,” he is forced to say more loudly as Carron greedily tugs him toward the door and twists him unforgivingly into a pair of handcuffs.

  “Just call Whesker!” he shouts.

  Part IX:

  “There lots of other kids playing in streets around this country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day and month, because other young people are reading the kinds of things and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.”

  - Ted Bundy

  “There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel. Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these are abomination unto the LORD thy God”

  - Deuteronomy 23:17-18

  Close To The Vest

  It isn’t the same interrogation room Dennis was in last time, but it may as well be. The featureless gray cement smoothed into corners of listless walls. A single drain, in the center, under the expansive table made of oak, looks as if it may have been positioned at the room’s lowest point in order to carry blood and urine away. Dennis supposes this room is hosed down after beatings, but he’s surely exaggerating . . . the worst thing flushed down this drain would be the coffee made by Detective Rodriguez, which he isn’t offered this time, thankfully.

  Though the room is familiar, the handling and treatment of Dennis is not. It’s not just that he isn’t offered any of the shitty coffee this time, he isn’t offered any comforts whatsoever, and the cuffs are beginning to numb his hands. Secondarily he is sure there is a larger, angrier group lying in wait behind the two-way mirror.

  Why bother with the mirror? He ponders. It’s not like there’s anyone on the planet that thinks it’s really a fucking mirror. What, am I supposed to comb my hair while being grilled?

  He waives absurdly to the mirror, ignoring everything being said by Carron presently, and asks, “Why do you have this?”

  “What?”

  “That mirror, what’s it for?”

  “I don’t see that the mirror is any of your concern, Mr. Foster—”

  “It’s just that, I know there are men behind it, watching over us. And you know that I know there are men behind there. Why don’t they just come in; join the fun?”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Dennis. What is it you are trying to accomplish by ignoring my questions? If you have nothing to hide, then you should just come right out and answer me, and then I’ll be forced to let you go.”

  “If I answer your questions? But, you won’t answer mine? I’ve paid my lawyer to talk to you, and I really don’t want to make him feel as though he isn’t needed. You shouldn’t even be harassing me. I’m sure you haven’t got anything to charge me with, or you’d have arrested me. Arrested or not, I have the right to remain silent, so I will ask you again, who is on the other side of the mirror?”

  “You want to know who’s on the other side? My partner, for one. The Assistant District Attorney,” he bluffs, “for another. One or two other people you’ll never know, but the one thing they all have in common is they think it’s very odd that the father of the man you killed ended up beaten to death after you were seen lurking around the funeral like an idiot. That’s who’s behind the glass, asshole.”

  “They saw me lurking? Oh, fantastic. I’d be delighted to see the pictures they took. Do you have them on you?”

  “There are no pictures, Dennis. You and I both know that—”

  “You know, Detective Staley, I am an average looking white man. One might even say a ‘creepy-ass cracker.’ You should really think about having a photo, or hell, any evidence at all, in the future; if you expect the collar to fit, that is.”

  “How ‘bout the scratches on your face? Did your girlfriend give you those, too?”

  “Cut myself shaving, I guess—”

  “Fuck you Foster. Why’d you do it?”

  “I’m afraid that I really don’t know what you are talking about. I had nothing to do with it whatever it is. I was at home with my girlfriend—”

  “You know who was at your apartment when Carlos Diaz was smothered to death?”

  “I thought you said he was beaten,”

  “I was at your apartment, so was my partner. So, as a matter of fact, was your little skank girlfriend. Come to think of it, you are the only one who wasn’t there, Dennis; the only one we can’t account for.”

  “Did you like my home?” Dennis interjects.

  “It was lovely—”

  “What was your favorite part of my home, Mr. Staley?

  “It’s Detective Staley to you, asshole.”

  “Was your favorite part the restroom? Did you like the little Zen garden I have near the bath?” Dennis says, baiting him.

  Knowing that he doesn’t have a Zen garden, but also knowing that he isn’t supposed to know that, Carron is forced into the trap set by Dennis, and with all of his peers and his supervisor behind the veil of glass, watching.

  “I’ve not seen the restroom, Mr. Foster—”

  “And yet you are sure I wasn’t there?”

  Staley snaps when he sees the grease-ball attorney approaching the interrogation room through the blinds. He slams his fists onto the oak table with enough force to echo through the plain room. He is trying not to bring her up, for fear he will have to recuse himself from the interrogation, or be taken off the case. I’m not even officially on the fucking case, he thinks.

  “Where did you take her you sick fuck; where is she?” he shouts and grabs a fistful of Dennis’s dingy cotton shirt.

  This outburst startles Dennis. This is the first inclination he has gotten that anyone made any connection, or could possibly suspect him, for any girl. His eyes widen, and betray his veil of innocence, but Staley is distracted. Between the door opening, the shouting of his partner, and Larry Whesker, who is following close behind, he misses this damning tell bolted across Dennis’s face, and will not see it again until the recording is played.

  Until it is too late.

  The questions and dodgy tactics proceed for almost an hour after this, but the interview is effectively over when Whesker arrives. Dennis hears nothing more that is said by either party, anyhow. He is wracking his mind—How does he know about her? There is no way she was serious about her uncle being a cop. Even still, how would he know?

  Cuckolded

  After being released by the police, and arriving home to his magnificent apartment overlooking the city, Dennis scours through his belongings in search of some telltale sign of what Staley knew, and how he’d come to know it. Satisfied that Staley had in fact been in his home, but without knowing anything further, he tosses a hate fuck into Libby in the most demeaning manner, siphoning her dignity a drop at a time. In order to smooth out the rough edges he breaks out a bag of blow and crushes out a few rocks on his granite countertops, smashing them beneath a bottle of Mexican beer, rolling the cocaine out like a baker who’s spreading flour. He then licks the side of the bottle before popping the top and guzzling down half. He offers the first line to Libby, to raise her spirits, then polishes the counter.

  His chest tightens, his anticipation of the evening’s events mounting and the anxiety of Staley’s incessant questioning melting.

  He and his accomplices do one final run-through of the plan and then Dennis orders a cab to deliver them to a favorite haunt, the Martini Barn. Libby, using an elaborate fake ID to get in, had fallen in love with the bar, after the first time he’d taken her there on one of their first dates. She’s sneaked in without him many times since and has even sucked the bouncer off on one occasion, in order to prevent her ID from being confiscated, and also because she is a slut.

  The entire second level is devoted to hip-hop, while the ground floor has a stage and a rock band, The Crucified Crustacean, which plays every Saturday, doing fabulous cover songs from the ‘90s. Dennis really likes
to see how other artists can make a song their own, and often make it better. He thinks briefly of the Vayden cover song, and of his father.

  While Dennis is having a smoke, something he rarely does, he sees a tall, muscular man checking out Libby as she heads to the restroom, his eyes locked into an obvious stare as she wiggles through the crowd. The man is a thuggish looking and athletic young black man, probably from the upstairs dance room; exactly what Dennis had hoped to see when he brought her here again.

  He can think of nothing more crushing to her innocence than by pimping her out to some greasy nigger thug. And no matter how nice his clothes are, or how smooth his skin is; no matter how well-mannered this man is, or well spoken, that’s all he will ever be.

  Libby once told him that she loved to fuck black guys. Their huge rods filling her completely, their muscular bodies and great fashion sense made it hard to resist them—plus, she loved to dance—but then the next morning she would awake, alcohol worn off, and she would realize she was in bed with a smelly black guy. It was something she had to do at the time, but couldn’t live with herself after. There was no future in that, she’d said.

  “My father would kill me if he knew,” she’d said, as if that was the real reason. A father’s racism and disapproval probably intensified the taboo of it all and drove more women into the arms of a darkie than it prevented.

  His mind begins to plot. He studies the man; he sees everything to indicate he is alone. He has no attached females—lest he be caught stalking Libby—no one stopping over to offer him a shot or to give him a drunken high-five. If he came here with anyone, they are either still upstairs in the dance room or have left already.

  Upon Libby’s return, Dennis points him out to her.

  “That one looks about your size,” he says.

  He thinks of the guys she’s lingered over in magazines, or on television.

 

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