Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  The back of 9 Mott Street abutted this building, the space between them only a foot wide but cutting straight down to the street. I stepped onto the low wall ringing the roof’s perimeter, and after making the mistake of looking down—if I fell, I’d die lodged like human parsley between brick teeth—I jumped onto the adjacent roof.

  I made my way around a massive water tower—and there was the skylight. It was a rectangular pyramid, most of the glass missing. I walked over to it and, crouching down, looked through one of the shattered casements.

  About twelve feet below me was a dark floor. Farther to my left, I could see directly into the empty shaft of a freight elevator, which extended seven stories below, the concrete brightly lit at the very bottom. It was like gazing down a throat, a corridor between two dimensions. The fall looked to be about a hundred feet. Even from this high angle, I could make out patches of rusty stains on the floor. Ashley’s blood.

  She’d allegedly climbed in through this skylight, removed her boots and socks, and stepped to the elevator’s ledge. It must have been so fast, wind in her ears, her dark hair protesting in her face—and then nothing.

  Falcone was absolutely right. The skylight’s blown-out metal casements were so narrow, it would’ve been hard to force Ashley down there against her will. Hard, but not impossible.

  I stood up, inspecting the ground. There was no evidence, no cigarette butts or scraps, no debris of any kind. I was about to leave, heading back to the Hanging Gardens, when suddenly something moved, far below at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

  A shadow had just swept across the floor.

  I waited, wondering if I’d imagined it, staring at that empty, lit-up space.

  But then, again, a silhouette slowly slid into view.

  Someone was standing in the mouth of the elevator, his shadow tossed in front of him. He remained there for a minute, immobile, and then stepped all the way inside.

  I spotted dirty-blond hair, a gray overcoat. He had to be a detective, back to inspect the scene. He ducked down, ostensibly to study the blood patterns on the concrete. Then, to my surprise, he actually sat down in the corner, propping his elbows on his knees.

  He didn’t move for some time.

  I leaned forward to get a better view, dislodging a shard of glass. It fell, smashing to the landing just below.

  Startled, he looked up, then scrambled out of sight.

  I lurched to my feet and took off across the roof.

  He couldn’t be a detective. No detective I knew—with the exception of Sharon Falcone—moved that quickly.

  10

  I raced around the corner back to 9 Mott Street, fully expecting to find the entrance unsealed.

  But the police tape remained intact, the door still padlocked.

  How had he gotten in? And who the hell was it? A Cordovite? Some death-scene gawker? I checked the windows—every one nailed shut. The only other possibility was a narrow alleyway blocked with mountains of garbage. I pushed some of it aside, trying not to inhale, squeezing through. Sure enough, in the very back was an open window casting light on the opposite wall.

  Whoever he was, he’d used a crowbar—lying on the ground—to pry away the old boards, leaving a space just wide enough to crawl through.

  I stepped over, looking inside.

  It was a brightly lit construction site, bare white neon bulbs dangling from an unfinished ceiling, plastic barrels and tarps piled by the front entrance. Hundreds of studs for building walls lined the expanse. Toward the back, on the right-hand side, a band of yellow POLICE LINE tape was strung across the elevator’s entrance.

  There was no sign of the man.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  Silence. The only noise was the insect buzz of the lights. I grabbed the crowbar—just in case—and scrambled through, falling into a pile of concrete bags.

  It was a wide-open expanse. Along the back wall there was just a stack of metal beams and mixing barrels, a plastic tarp covering something.

  I stepped cautiously toward it and yanked it aside.

  It was a wheelbarrow.

  “Anyone here?” I called out, looking around.

  There was no answer, no movement.

  The guy probably got scared off.

  I stepped toward the police tape, was about to duck it, when suddenly a hand seized my shoulder and something hard hit me on the side of the head. I wheeled around but was shoved to the ground, dropping the crowbar.

  My eyes went white, blinded, though I managed to make out a man staring down at me. He shoved his foot onto my chest.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he shouted. It was a young voice, slurred with rage. Bending over me again, he reached out as if to grab my throat, though I wrenched free, pushing him off balance, grabbed the crowbar, and socked him with it in the shoulder.

  It wouldn’t exactly have made Muhammad Ali proud, but it worked. He tried to grab a metal stud for support, missed, and stumbled backward.

  I staggered over to him. To my surprise, he was too wasted to stand. He reeked of booze and cigarettes, and he was just a punk—mid-twenties, shaggy hair, dirty white Converse sneakers, a faded green T-shirt that read HAS-BEEN. His eyes were watery and bloodshot, seemingly unable to focus as they stared up at me.

  “My turn,” I said. “Who the fuck are you?”

  He closed his eyes and appeared to pass out cold.

  My first impulse was to strangle the kid. Touching the spot where he’d cracked me on the head, I could feel blood. He wasn’t a cop, so that left random derelict or a Cordovite. Or, he knew Ashley.

  I pulled his gray tweed coat out from under him, checking his pockets. There was a pack of Marlboros, three cigarettes left, a lighter, a set of apartment keys. I put them back. In the other, I pulled out an iPhone, the screen cracked, locked with a security code, the background a snapshot of a half-naked blonde.

  I checked the inside pocket. It was empty. Yet, I felt something else and realized there was another compartment sewn into the ripped lining.

  I reached inside, pulling out two tiny Ziploc bags. Both contained pills, one set yellow, the other green, letters and numbers stamped on the sides—OC 40 and 80. OxyContin.

  So, he was a drug dealer—and pretty small-time, given the fact that he was snoozing through a body search. I returned the pills to the pocket and stood up.

  “Can you hear me, Scarface?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hands in the air. FBI raid!” I shouted.

  Nothing.

  As gently as I could—though I don’t know why I bothered; he’d siesta through an apocalypse—I rolled him onto his side, removing his wallet from his back pocket. No driver’s license, no credit cards, only cash—seven hundred and forty bucks, mostly twenties.

  I put the money and wallet back, but zipped his iPhone into my own pocket. Then I stepped around him to inspect the elevator.

  There was nothing there but the dark pools of dried blood, a few tendrils spreading into the cracks of the concrete.

  I took a few shots and then moved back to the kid, checking his breathing. He appeared to be only drunk—not on anything else. I pushed him deeper onto his side, so he wouldn’t suffocate if he got sick, and headed back to the window and climbed out, darting through the alley and back onto Mott Street.

  I assumed I’d learn nothing more about him until tomorrow, when he discovered his phone missing. Yet during the cab ride home and even hours later, after I’d taken a shower, downed two Tylenol (given the immense pain from Beckman’s vodka and getting cracked in the side of the head, I should have swiped an OxyContin)—the kid’s phone was bombarded with texts.

  That was Chloe. She wrote again six minutes later.

  Then it was Reinking (I couldn’t help but visualize her: Nordic, legs like ice picks):

  Two minutes later:

  Twelve minutes later:

  Then she appeared to sext a picture, which I couldn’t open. It was followed with:

  Th
en a text from Arden:

  Interspersed with all of this, a highly obsessive girl named Jessica called eleven times. I let her go to voicemail.

  Then Arden again:

  It had to be his name. Hopper.

  Small-time drug dealer in a faded coat, crouched in the corner of that freight elevator—he’d have something to tell me about Ashley, whoever he was.

  11

  “Hello?” I answered. I heard plates clattering on the other end.

  “Hey. You found my phone.”

  “So I did.” I took a sip of my coffee.

  “Cool. Where?”

  “Backseat of a taxi. I’m in the West Village. You want to come pick it up?”

  Twenty minutes later, my buzzer rang. I pulled aside the living-room curtains, the window affording a clear view of the front stoop. There he was, Hopper: wearing the same coat from last night, the same faded jeans and Converse sneakers. He was smoking a cigarette, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

  When I opened the door for him, I realized in the stark light of day, even with the greasy hair, the brown eyes hollowed out from booze, women—who knew what else—he was a good-looking kid. I didn’t know how I’d missed it before. It was as glaring as a silver silo piercing a cornfield horizon. He was about 510, a few inches shorter than me, slight, with a mangy scruff of beard and the raw, beautiful features of some brooding actor from the fifties, the ones who cry when drunk and die young.

  “Hey.” He smiled. “I’m here for my phone.”

  He clearly had no recollection of the previous night; he was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before.

  “Right.” I stepped aside to let him enter, and after sizing me up and apparently deciding I wasn’t going to jump him, he shoved his hands in his coat pockets and came in. I closed the door, heading into the living room, indicating his phone on the coffee table.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Don’t mention it. Now, what were you doing at that warehouse?”

  He was startled.

  “In Chinatown. Your name’s Hopper, right?”

  He opened his mouth to speak—but stopped himself, his eyes flitting past me to the door.

  “I’m a reporter, looking into Ashley’s death.” I gestured toward the bookcase. “Some of my old cases are there, if you want to take a look.”

  With a doubtful glance, he stepped to the bookshelf, pulling out Cocaine Carnivals. “ ‘A page-turning tour de force,’ ” he read, “ ‘about the drug’s billion-dollar business and the millions of mangled lives it sucks into its deadly machinery.’ ” He glanced at me. “Sounds epic.”

  He’d said it with sarcasm.

  “I try.”

  “And now you’re gonna write about Ashley.”

  “Depends on what I find. What do you know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s your connection to her?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Then why’d you break into the warehouse where she died?”

  He didn’t answer, only returned the book to the shelf. After browsing a few other titles, he turned back, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

  “What magazine do you work for?” he asked.

  “Myself. Anything you tell me can be off the record.”

  “Like attorney-client privilege.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He smirked skeptically at this, but then his face fell as he stared at me. It was a look I knew well. He was dying to talk, but he was trying to decide if he could trust me.

  “Got some free time?” he asked quietly, rubbing his nose.

  12

  I followed Hopper up the stairs of a dingy Ludlow Street walk-up and into his apartment, #3B. Slinging his gray coat over a beach chair, he disappeared into a back bedroom—there didn’t seem to be anything in there except a mattress on the floor—leaving me by the front door.

  The place was tiny, with the woozy, stale air of a flophouse.

  The sagging green couch along the far wall was covered with an old blue comforter where someone had recently crashed—maybe literally. In a plate on the coffee table there was an outbreak of cigarette butts; next to that, rolling papers, a packet of Golden Virginia tobacco, an open package of Chips Ahoy!, a mangled copy of Interview, some emaciated starlet on the cover. His green HAS-BEEN T-shirt from last night was flung on the floor along with a white sweatshirt and some other clothes. (As if to expressly avoid this pile, a woman’s pair of black pantyhose clung for dear life to the back of the other beach chair.) A girl had kissed one wall while wearing black lipstick. An acoustic guitar was propped in the corner beside an old hiker’s backpack, the faded red nylon covered with handwriting.

  I stepped over to read some of it: If this gets lost return it with all contents to Hopper C. Cole, 90 Todd Street, Mission, South Dakota 57555.

  Hopper Cole from South Dakota. He was a hell of a long way from home.

  Scribbled above that, beside a woman named Jade’s 310 phone number and a hand-drawn Egyptian eye, were the words: “But now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s heading my way. Sometimes I grow so tired. But I know I’ve got one thing I got to do. Ramble on.”

  So he was a Led Zeppelin fan.

  Hopper emerged from the bedroom carrying a manila envelope. With a wary glance, he handed it to me.

  It was addressed to: HOPPER COLE, 165 LUDLOW STREET, 3B—the address scribbled in all caps in black permanent marker. It had been stamped and mailed from New York, NY, on October 10 of this year. I recognized it as the last day Ashley Cordova had been seen alive by the girl in the Four Seasons coat check. The return address featured no name, reading simply 9 MOTT STREET—the address of the warehouse where Ashley’s body had been found.

  Surprised, I looked at Hopper, but he said nothing, only watched me intently, as if it were some sort of test.

  I pulled out what was inside. It was a stuffed monkey, old, with matted brown fur, stitching coming out of its eyes, a red felt mouth half gone, its neck limp, probably from some child’s hand clamped around it. The whole thing was encrusted with dried red mud.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ve never seen it before?” he asked.

  “No. Whose is it?”

  “No clue.” He moved away, yanking aside the blue comforter and sitting on the couch.

  “Who sent it?”

  “She did.”

  “Ashley.”

  He nodded and then, hunching forward, grabbed the package of rolling papers off the table, pulled one out.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Some kinda sick joke.”

  “Then you were friends with her.”

  “Not exactly,” he said, reaching across the table for his gray coat, fumbling in the pockets for the pack of Marlboros. “Not friends. More like acquaintances. But even that’s a stretch.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  He sat back down, tapping out a cigarette. “Camp.”

  “Camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What camp?”

  “Six Silver Lakes Wilderness Therapy in Utah.” He glanced at me, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he began to dissect the cigarette, peeling the filter away from the paper. “You’ve heard of this first-class institution.”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re missing out. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. Especially if you want your kid to grow up to be a great American maniac.”

  I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “You met Ashley there?”

  He nodded.

  “When?”

  “I was seventeen. She was, like, sixteen. Summer of ’03.”

  That made Hopper twenty-five.

  “It’s one of these juvenile therapy scams,” he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. “They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ Instead, it’s a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of
the craziest kids I’ve ever seen in my life—bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went on.” He shook his head. “Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That’d be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive.”

  He said this with such pissed-off defiance, I gathered he wasn’t talking about any of the campers but about himself. I stepped around the white sweatshirt on the floor to one of the beach chairs—the one with pantyhose climbing up the back—and sat down.

  “Who knows where they found the counselors,” Hopper went on, tucking the filter into the end, leaning down to lick the paper. “Rikers Island, probably. There was this one fat Asian kid, Orlando? They tortured him. He was some kind of born-again Baptist, so he was always talking about Jesus. They made him go without eating. Kid had never gone ten minutes without a Twinkie in his life. He couldn’t keep up, got heat stroke. Still, they kept telling him to find his inner strength, ask God for help. God was busy. Didn’t have anything for him. The whole thing was Lord of the Flies on steroids. I still get nightmares.”

  “Why were you there?” I asked.

  He sat back against the couch, amused. He stuck the hand-rolled cigarette into the side of his mouth, lighting it. He inhaled, wincing, and exhaled in a long stream of smoke.

  “My uncle,” he said, stretching his legs out. “I’d been traveling with my mom in South America for this missionary cult shit she was into. I ran the fuck away. My uncle lives in New Mexico. Hired some goon to track me down. I was crashing at a friend’s in Atlanta. One morning I’m eating Cheerios. This brown van pulls up. If the Grim Reaper had wheels it’d be this thing. No windows except two in the back door, behind which you just knew some innocent kid had been kidnapped and, like, decapitated. Next thing I know I’m in the back with a male nurse.” He shook his head. “If that dude was a licensed nurse, I’m a fucking congressman.”