Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  Suddenly beside me, the landlord snatched it, handing it back to the boy. She then seized his arm, hauled him toward an apartment door. I caught a glimpse of a cluttered room, a TV playing cartoons, as she shoved the boy inside, darted in after him, the door slamming.

  Nora and Hopper were racing downstairs, the building growling with the noise. They ran straight down the hall, Nora turning, silently beckoning me to hurry. I exited after her into the cool night, realizing I was gasping for breath, as if I’d just wrenched free of something—something that, without my knowledge, had been suffocating me.

  37

  “Did you take the roots over the door?” I asked when I caught up with Nora and Hopper across the street.

  “Yep,” she said, opening up her purse to show me.

  “Okay, let’s grab a cab—”

  “We can’t. A neighbor of Ashley’s is coming down to talk to us.”

  I recalled that shard of light I’d seen outside room #13.

  “While you chased the landlady, this other woman stuck her head out, upset by all the commotion. Hopper showed her Ashley’s picture, and she recognized her. She’s coming down to talk to us in two seconds.”

  “Nice work.”

  “Here she comes,” whispered Nora, as a figure emerged from 83 Henry.

  The woman was tall, wearing a white zip-up sweatshirt and sneakers. She carried a black duffel bag over her shoulder, and whatever was in there—assault rifles, by the shape of it—appeared to be quite heavy, making her walk stooped over. She hurried across the street toward us.

  “Sorry I took so long,” she said breathlessly, skipping up onto the curb in a potent blast of perfume. “Couldn’t find my keys. I’m off to work, so I don’t have much time. What’d you want to ask me?”

  Her face was quite pretty, fringed with bleached blond curls, though wearing so much makeup, it was difficult to know where she ended and her illusion began. She looked about thirty, though I noticed she stood deliberately away from the streetlight and kept her hands shoved in the pockets of her hoodie, shoulders hunched, as if not entirely at ease with people getting a close look at her.

  “Just a few questions about your neighbor Kay.”

  She smiled. “Oh, yeah. How’s she doing? Haven’t seen her.”

  “Fine,” I answered, ignoring Nora’s look. “We’re friends of hers and want to know about her stay here. What’d she do with herself?”

  “Gee, I wouldn’t know. We barely talked.” Setting the duffel down on the sidewalk—mysterious metallic clangs—the woman removed a ball of Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “Sorry. I’m just getting over a bad cold. I only saw Kay, like, once.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “A month ago? I was just getting in from work. About five, six in the morning. I went into the bathroom to take my makeup off. There’s only one per floor. Everyone shares. I was in there, like, forty-five minutes, brushing my teeth, probably even talking to myself, when all of a sudden there was a splash behind me.” She shuddered. “Scared the shit out of me. I screamed. Probably woke up the whole building.”

  “Why?” I asked when she didn’t go on, but paused to blow her nose again.

  “She was right there,” she said, giggling, a high-pitched, jingle-bell sound. “Kay.”

  “Where?”

  “In the bathtub. She’d been behind me, taking a bath, the whole time.”

  I glanced at Hopper and Nora. They seemed to be thinking what I was—the disturbing nature of the scene she’d just described was entirely lost on the woman.

  “I introduced myself,” she went on, sniffing. “She told me her name but leaned her head back against the tub, closing her eyes like she’d had a long day and didn’t feel like talking. I finished putting on my wrinkle creams, said good night. After I heard her leave the bathroom, I went back because I’d left my toothpaste on the sink. She hadn’t drained the tub, so I stuck my hand in to unplug it.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how she was in there without her legs and arms freezing off. It was like ice.”

  “You never saw Kay again?” I asked.

  “No. I heard her, though. The walls are like paper. She seemed to keep the same hours as I did.”

  “What hours are those?”

  “I work nights.” She said it vaguely, gazing past us at the deserted street. “You know what? There was another time. Sorry. My mind’s stuffy from this cold medicine. It was my night off, so it musta been on a Saturday. I was coming back from the supermarket and passed Kay on the stairwell. She was on her way to a club. I don’t remember the name.” She shook her head. “It was feminine. Kinda French? I think she said it was being held in an old jail on Long Island. She wanted to know if I’d ever been, but I hadn’t.”

  “An old jail?” I repeated.

  She shrugged. “It was a five-second conversation. You know what? Last week I did see two guys outside her door. They stared at me like they wanted me to mind my own business, so I did.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Just guys. One was older, the other in his thirties? Later I heard Dot come upstairs and get rid of them. She doesn’t like strangers.”

  “Dot?”

  “Yeah. You were talking to her.”

  “A little boy lives with her?”

  “Lucian. He’s her nephew.”

  “How long has he been living here?”

  “Long as I’ve been at Henry. About a year.” She sniffed and pulled back her sleeve, checking her watch. “Shit. I gotta run.” She grabbed the duffel, heaving it, clanging, over her shoulder. “You’ll tell Kay I said hi?”

  “Of course.”

  “How can we get in touch if we have more questions?” asked Nora.

  After a slight hesitation, the woman unzipped the duffel, handing Nora a black business card. Then she smiled and took off down the sidewalk toward the Manhattan Bridge. Nora handed the business card to me without a word.

  IONA, it read. BACHELOR PARTY ENTERTAINMENT.

  38

  “A nightclub on Long Island,” I said. “It has a French name. It might be held in an old jail or abandoned building. Ring any bells?”

  I was on the phone with Sharon Falcone, standing outside Gitane, a temperamental little French-Moroccan café on Mott Street. After leaving 83 Henry, we’d taken a cab here to grab a bite and debrief. When a Google search of club, Long Island, French, and abandoned jail elicited no breakthrough, I decided to call Sharon on the off chance she knew what the club could be.

  “Don’t tell me you’re harassing me because you need help with your social life,” said Falcone on the other end.

  I could hear phones wailing, a TV droning NY1, which meant she was still at her desk at the police station, sitting in her beat-up swivel chair, poring over the details of a case her colleagues had long given up on, glasses perched on the tip of her nose.

  “Not quite,” I said. “It’s a lead.”

  “I know Long Island like I know my kitchen. I understand it’s there for my pleasure and enjoyment, but somehow I never manage to go there. Can’t help you. Can I get back to work now?”

  “What about occult worship in the city? How prevalent is it?”

  “Does worshipping money count as occult?”

  “I mean, strange practices, rituals. How often do you come across that kind of thing at a crime scene? Would it surprise you?”

  “McGrath. I got stabbings. I got gunshot wounds. I got a rich kid who knifed his mother in the neck, a six-month-old baby shaken to death, and a man who was castrated at the InterContinental in Times Square. Sure, we got occultism. We got it all. There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don’t worry, people are still fucking crazy. Anything else?”

  I was about to say no and apologize for bothering her, when I thought of something.

  “I might have a case for Child Protective Services.”

  She didn’t immediately respond, though I could practically see her jerking u
pright, unearthing a yellow legal pad out of the piles of witness testimonies and lab photos, flipping through her illegible scribbles to a blank page, grabbing a pen.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “I just left a woman who’s the guardian of a young deaf boy. It doesn’t look right. The building’s a shithole, might be a brothel.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “Eighty-three Henry Street, between Pike and Forsyth. The woman’s name is Dot. She runs the place.”

  “I’ll have someone look into it.”

  “Thank you. Now, when am I taking you out for a drink?”

  “When this city gets all warm and fuzzy inside.”

  “So, never?”

  “I keep hoping.” A phone bleated on her end. “I gotta take—”

  She hung up.

  It was after ten o’clock now, a Friday night. Groups of twentysomethings crowded the sidewalk, stumbling toward bars and hookups. Across the street, where the sloping redbrick wall surrounding Saint Patrick’s old cathedral cut sharply around the corner, I noticed a man in a black leather jacket talking on a cellphone, his hand cupped over the receiver.

  He was staring at me and I couldn’t shake the feeling it was me he was speaking about.

  He looked away, past the Ralph Lauren store on the corner, still muttering into his phone. I headed back into Gitane.

  I was just being paranoid.

  39

  “I was just telling Hopper,” said Nora, as I sat down in the window seat beside her. “I found a receipt in Ashley’s trashcan.”

  Hopper was inspecting the small piece of yellow paper, and with a doubtful look, he handed it to me.

  It was a handwritten receipt from Rising Dragon Tattoos, located at 51 West 14th Street. Someone—I could only assume Ashley, though no name was listed—had paid $363.24 in cash for an “American flag / portrait tat” on October 5, 2011, at 8:21 P.M. I knew from the coroner’s photos that the tattoo Ashley had on her right foot predated this receipt. So it was a mystery what American flag / portrait tat referred to.

  “We’ll go there tomorrow,” I said. “See if someone there recognizes her picture.”

  “We’ll also have to find someone who can tell us what those circles are that she put under her bed,” said Nora, taking a bite of avocado toast.

  “We don’t know she put them there,” interjected Hopper. “Any kook could have planted that.”

  “I agree,” I said. “The landlord eavesdropping—she could have easily been lying about the key. There are also the two men Iona saw outside Ashley’s door. I wonder if she was hiding from somebody, possibly her family. Why else would she take the room under a pseudonym and change the locks?”

  “It’s almost like there are two Ashleys,” said Nora thoughtfully.

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  She shoved her fork through the tower of couscous on her plate. “There’s the pianist. The woman who was fearless and wild. The girl Hopper met at Six Silver Lakes. Then there’s this other one people keep talking about. This creature with supernatural tendencies.”

  “Supernatural tendencies,” I repeated.

  She nodded, her face serious. “There’s what Guadalupe said at the Waldorf Towers. That she was marked.” She looked at Hopper. “In the coroner’s photo we saw a black dot in her left eye just like she said. Think of how she manipulated Morgan Devold without saying a word. She hypnotized him. And then Peter at Klavierhaus? He said she moved like an animal.”

  “She was admitted against her will to a mental hospital,” said Hopper, sitting low in his seat. “Who knows what meds they gave her? I’ve seen people on that shit, trying to come off that shit. They don’t know what they’re doing half the time.”

  “One other thing I noticed,” Nora continued in a subdued voice. “Ashley had some kind of weird interest in children.”

  I was impressed. I’d noticed the same thread myself.

  “Ashley read Morgan Devold’s daughter a bedtime story,” she went on. “She also babysat the landlord’s nephew. If she came to the city, hoping to meet someone at the Waldorf—and now this nightclub—why would she take the time to do that?”

  “Maybe she liked kids,” said Hopper.

  “That’s some serious interaction with children in a span of just a few days. Remember that doll Morgan Devold fished out of the pool? He told us it’d been missing for a few weeks.”

  “So?” said Hopper.

  “That’d be around the time Ashley was at his house.”

  “You think Ashley hid the doll in the pool?”

  “Maybe. Why would she put that dirt in circles under her bed? Or those roots over her door?”

  “We already established she probably didn’t do that.” He said it so angrily, a couple of models at the table beside us stopped speaking to stare at him. He leaned in, lowering his voice. “I’m sure you love the idea that Ashley was some kind of Blair Witch, cooking up stews with puppy-dog tails and little kids’ toes or whatever the fuck. But it’s a joke. Her family’s responsible. They’re the wackjobs who put her in Briarwood. She wanted to get away from them. Probably died trying.” He muttered these last words to himself, shoving his hair out of his eyes and stabbing his fork into his baked eggs, too irritated to eat.

  Nora shot me a look and mutely resumed eating. I said nothing. The way she phrased it—Ashley had some kind of weird interest in children—reminded me of my anonymous caller from five years ago. John. There’s something he does to the children, he’d said, words that had haunted me.

  What did it mean? That the entire family, or at least father and daughter, had a fixation on children? Why?

  Simply posing such a question, the mind automatically answered with the darkest responses imaginable. This dichotomy was a major theme in Cordova’s work: the malignance of adulthood, the purity of youth, and the collision of these two charges. Somewhere in an Empty Room, Thumbscrew, The Legacy, Lovechild all dealt in some way with it, though in To Breathe with Kings, Cordova turned this equation on its head, allotting depravity to the child character, sanctity to the adults. There was a line spoken by Marlowe Hughes in Lovechild, a slight variation on a quotation by William Blake:

  Better to murder an innocent child and be done with it, than mistreat one and give rise to a monster.

  I thought suddenly of Morgan Devold’s daughter, Mellie, how she’d silently tiptoed after me down the driveway and held out her hand, holding something black.

  Had I misread her? Had she silently been pleading for help, begging me not to leave? I was glad I’d told Sharon Falcone about that boy at 83 Henry Street. With a little more research, I wouldn’t hesitate making the same call for the Devold children. The thought was so unsettling, I found myself sending Cynthia a text, apologizing for the change in plan, telling her I was looking forward to having Sam for the weekend while she was in Santa Barbara.

  “That’s the third time that guy’s walked by looking in at us,” Hopper said, staring out the window behind me.

  I turned, following his gaze. It was the same man I’d noticed before—tall, dark hair, black leather jacket. He was across the street again, a few yards from where I’d first spotted him.

  “He was watching me before, when I was outside,” I said.

  Hopper suddenly leapt out of his chair, jostling a waitress, who nearly dropped her tray of food as he ran past her and outside. Seeing him coming, the man darted around the corner. I stood up and took off after them.

  40

  Hopper was halfway down the block, running in the middle of the street. I caught up with him at the corner of Lafayette.

  “He just took off,” he yelled, pointing at a cab accelerating toward Houston. Hopper stepped into the traffic, trying to flag down another, and I headed after the taxi.

  Far ahead at the intersection, the light turned yellow, and the cab, swerving into the center lane, was flooring it. He was going to fly right through—and that would be that. But then suddenly the taxi slam
med on its brakes, coming to an abrupt halt at the red light.

  I had seconds. I weaved between the cars, darting along the right-hand side. I could see the man—a dark silhouette in the backseat, looking over his shoulder—probably to see if Hopper was behind him. I tried the door.

  He whipped around, startled. His shock quickly gave way to cold calm as he realized the doors were locked. He looked distantly familiar.

  “Who are you?” I shouted. “What do you want?”

  He shook his head, shrugging as if he had no idea who I was. Did I have the wrong taxi? The cab crept forward, the man’s face slipping into the shadows. Then the light turned green and the taxi shot across Houston, cars honking as they swerved around me.

  Just as the cab pulled away, his left hand had slipped into the light.

  The man was missing three fingers.

  41

  Back at Gitane, I explained to Hopper and Nora what had happened, that I was certain it was Theo Cordova who’d been watching us.

  “It changes everything,” I said. “The family is on to us now, so we’ll have to assume our every move is being watched.”

  They responded with somber acceptance, Hopper almost immediately throwing a few crumpled bills on the table and taking off in answer to a text, Nora and I heading home. She went to bed, though I poured myself a Macallan scotch and looked up Theo Cordova.

  There were at least a thousand returns in Google images, every one a Cordova film still. He’d played small roles in At Night All Birds Are Black and A Crack in the Window, though most of the photos were from the opening scene in Wait for Me Here, when he runs half naked into the road.

  The more I scrutinized the photos, the more certain I was that it was the same man, the same long, thin nose, same pale brown eyes. I checked my notes for his birth date: born in St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany on March 12, 1977, which made him thirty-four.

  There was little more about Theo on the Blackboards. In the world of Cordova, it appeared the man’s son was basically an afterthought. According to one source, for the past eleven years he’d been living a life of total obscurity in rural Indiana, working as a landscaper, and had changed his name to Johnson.