Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  “That’s right. But that house was totally redone last year and besides we do a lot of real estate work in that area.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s to appraise? We know Dedham values to the dime. Why waste the money?”

  “You mean you didn’t hire an appraiser?”

  Silence. “Listen—what was your name again?” Nina told him. “Listen, Miss Kitchener. Are you questioning, maybe, our representation of the estate? Because if that’s the case—”

  “Not at all, Mr. O’Leary. I’m sure you’re doing a fine job. I just want to know if you hired an appraiser, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “A friend of mine is thinking of selling her house. She wanted to know who I’d recommend.”

  “I don’t give advice of that sort. And the answer to your question is no. We didn’t hire an appraiser. Now if you’ll excuse me …” He hung up.

  Detective Delgado was no longer smiling. “No appraiser?”

  “That’s what he says. But there was a man in her house, a man with big hands, the same kind of …” Her voice trailed off. “You don’t believe me?”

  “You’re a … businesswoman, remember?”

  “There was a man in Laura’s house,” Nina said. “Get that straight. And I wasn’t the only one who saw him.” She called the real estate woman, and reached an answering machine that began by playing the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Nina put the phone down, hard.

  Nina and Delgado looked at each other. Nina knew what Delgado thought she was seeing: a woman knocked off the tracks who may have seen a man in Laura’s house, someone who didn’t belong there, a thief perhaps, and who later imagined his presence while she was trying to kill herself, or invented it to protect herself, when she woke up and saw she hadn’t. She searched for something to say that would change Delgado’s mind, and failing to find it, sat slowly on the bed.

  “All right, all right,” Delgado said. “Give me her number.”

  Nina handed her the real estate woman’s card. Delgado copied the number. “I’ll be in touch,” she said, and went away.

  Nina stayed where she was. She remembered a song about paranoia striking deep. It played itself over and over in her mind, until she became almost unaware of the clatter of food trays, the rolling wheelchairs, the passing conversations, rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Then Suze burst into the room.

  “Oh, Nina, are you all right?”

  She grabbed Nina, hugged her tight, sat on the bed beside her, rocking her back and forth. Nina didn’t cry; she was all cried out. She let herself be rocked back and forth.

  “I should never have gone to L.A.,” Suze said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Suze rocked her some more. Then she said: “Can you talk about it?”

  “I can talk, but no one believes me.”

  “Talk.”

  Nina talked. She told Suze all there was to tell. Suze’s face registered many things, but disbelief wasn’t one of them. “You believe me,” Nina said at the end.

  “Of course I believe you.”

  “Then what’s the explanation?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to go over everything, from start to finish. But first let’s get out of here.”

  Getting out of there involved a wait of several hours, the signing of many forms and three loud arguments, all won by Suze. She menaced the hospital bureaucracy with her spiked hair, clanked her heavy jewelry, used at least one “attorney,” “liability,” “court,” or “lawsuit” in every sentence and finally marched in triumph to the elevator, poked the DOWN button as though it were the eye of the chief resident and rode with Nina to street level. They laughed all the way to Nina’s, and were paying the driver when Nina’s mood changed: “I can’t stay here.”

  “Right,” said Suze. “Come to my place.”

  “What’s it going to be, ladies?” said the driver.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Suze said, whisking a ten-dollar bill out of his reach.

  On their way inside to get some of Nina’s things they met Jules, in street clothes, on his way out. “You were right, Miss Kitchener,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “They canned me. For booze. It’s not fair. I can hold my liquor.” He was holding some already and his eyes were watery.

  “You weren’t in very good shape the other night.”

  “That’s why they canned me. But they’re wrong. It wasn’t booze. I was sick.” Nina said nothing. Jules came closer. His breath reeked. “I only had one drink. I swear. An old guy gave me a bottle. I had one little nip. That’s all. Or two. It made me sick.”

  “What old guy?”

  “A big old guy with white hair. Walked in off the street. Said it was an early Christmas present from one of the tenants.”

  “Did you let him in?”

  “No. He didn’t want to come in. He just gave me the bottle and went away.”

  “Then you drank it?”

  “Just a nip, like I said.”

  “And it made you sick?”

  “As a dog. I passed out behind the desk.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not long. I don’t think. I was up when you came back, wasn’t I?”

  “So anyone could have come in while you were passed out?”

  Jules looked at Nina, looked at Suze, looked away. “Jeez. I thought you were on my side. On the side of the little guy.” He walked out the door, took a few steps down the block, then slowly turned and went off the other way.

  Upstairs in Nina’s apartment, the cleaners had done their job. They’d wiped up the vomit, straightened the furniture, put the typewriter away. Nina threw some clothes in a suitcase and was on her way out when she found herself pausing to look in the nursery. The cleaners had piled all the stuffed animals in the crib. Nina began rearranging them. Her hands lingered on the lion, the polar bear, Winnie. She stayed there, bent over the crib, unaware of time.

  “Let’s go, Nina,” Suze said quietly from the door.

  She went.

  In the lobby, Nina stopped to check her mailbox. It contained the latest copy of Bicycling magazine, two credit card applications, coupons from Gerber’s and a letter from Laura Bain, postmarked on the day of her death. Nina opened it where she stood. Suze read over her shoulder.

  Dear Nina,

  I called you last night, but I guess you weren’t home yet. In case we miss each other in the next day or two—I’ve got a very heavy schedule before the Accra trip—I’ll just send this off to make sure you know how glad I was to meet you. I really feel so much more hopeful since you came up here—you’re such a strong person!

  I haven’t been able to reach my obstetrician yet. He’s on vacation. Meanwhile I’m trying to get hold of the doctor from the Reproductive Research Center. Dr. Crossman. A bit creepy. He kept asking if I was part Jewish and I had to draw my whole family tree to show I wasn’t. Something about Tay-Sachs disease. I’d really like that printout. In the meantime, I have remembered one thing about the donor, at least I’m pretty sure I have—he was left-handed. I’m left-handed too, so it struck me at the time.

  I’ve also had a little thought. Did you ever find out exactly what was wrong with the phone in your hospital room? I think it’s worth looking into.

  Must run. Three lines are blinking in my face at this very moment and there’s talk of a coup in Nigeria, which we’re nicely positioned for, actually. Speak to you soon.

  Affectionately,

  Laura

  “And she committed suicide?” Suze asked. She had to repeat the question: Nina was staring at words on the middle of the page—Dr. Crossman. A bit creepy.

  “Seconal, just like me,” Nina replied. She looked at the envelope. “Probably before the stamp was canceled.”

  “Her mood must have changed awfully fast.”

  “Yeah.”

  They got into the taxi. “Where to now, ladies?” said the driver.

>   “My donor was left-handed too,” Nina said.

  “He was?” Suze replied.

  “That makes Laura right about one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got to find the father. Just as if this were a custody case.”

  “You think it was the same donor for both of you?”

  “Why not? It was the same doctor.”

  “Tick tick goes the meter,” the driver said.

  “The Human Fertility Institute,” Nina said, and told him where it was.

  “Here?” said the driver, pulling in to the curb fifteen minutes later.

  Nina glanced up from Laura’s letter. They were on the Upper East Side, on the right street, in the right part of the block. “Here,” she said. It was only when she got out of the cab that she noticed the Human Fertility Institute was gone. A rubble-filled hole in the ground had replaced the marble palace. A bulldozer was parked in the middle of it. At the controls sat a man in a checked lumberjacket, eating a sandwich. Nina ran to the chicken-wire fence at the edge of the hole.

  “What’s going on?” she shouted.

  The man looked up. “Coffee break.”

  “With the Fertility Institute, I mean. What happened?”

  “Dunno,” said the man. “Trump? Zeckendorf? One of that crowd.”

  “But it was a national landmark.”

  “I guess it got de-landmarked,” the bulldozer man replied. “That’s what makes America great.” He tossed the remains of his sandwich aside and shifted into gear. The bulldozer bumped away across the rubble.

  30

  “You look good, Suze,” Nina said as they walked up the four flights of stairs to Suze’s room.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. Things going well with Le Boucher?”

  “Mindy? She’s a jerk.”

  “Le Boucher’s name is Mindy?”

  “Mindy Sue Lubke. She beat up a bouncer in Laguna Beach the other night. She’s so pumped full of steroids she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But she’s going to be a star.”

  “In barbarian movies?”

  “That’s just the beginning. She’s up for the lead in the new Ma Barker bio.”

  “And you’re her manager?”

  “God, no,” said Suze, unlocking the door. “She’s a dangerous lunatic.”

  “But you look good anyway.” This was a question, vague to anyone else, but clear to Suze. She smiled and said nothing. They entered her room.

  Suze’s room was the entire top floor of a converted warehouse a few blocks south of her gallery. Except for the cast-iron support pillars, it would have been a good place to play polo on rainy days, or hold joint sessions of the House and Senate. Their footsteps echoed on the bare pine floors.

  “Home sweet home,” Suze said.

  Suze’s home had a kitchen area, a table, a couch, a chair, a desk, a phone, a rug and, some distance away, a king-sized bed, a glass-walled shower stall and a toilet, half-hidden by a low steel wall scavenged from a superannuated Parisian pissoir.

  “What’s that?” Nina said, pointing to the far end of the room, where coils of barbed wire surrounded little metallic human figures.

  “Auschwitz Cadillac,” Suze replied. “In storage.”

  “It didn’t sell?”

  “We got a few offers, but not what we wanted.”

  “What did you want?”

  “Seventy-five grand. But we’ll get even more when they see the stuff he’s working on now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tortured plants. It’s going to rock the art world. He’s on the cutting edge of the eco-installation movement.”

  Nina walked all the way to Auschwitz Cadillac. She didn’t see how the barbed wire, despite being pink, could have come from a 1957 Eldorado. But the huts were made of pink bumpers and doors and the prisoners had hubcap bodies and direction signal eyes and striped uniforms made from two-tone leather upholstery.

  “The eyes work, if you want me to plug it in,” Suze said.

  “That’s okay,” Nina said, lightly fingering the barbed wire. What was the artist saying? That we are all somehow implicated in Auschwitz? Or was Detroit the guilty party? Was living in a consumer culture a kind of Auschwitz? Or was it just a demonstration that scraps could be made into art, the way Picasso had turned bicycle parts into a bull?

  “Nina.”

  “What?”

  “You look tired.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why don’t you lie down?”

  “I’ve got calls to make.”

  “What calls? I’ll make them.”

  “Dr. Crossman. And I want to find out about that phone.”

  “Lie down. I’ll take care of it.”

  “That’s all right,” Nina said. “I can—”

  “Come on.” Suze took her hand, led her to the bed, not far from Auschwitz Cadillac, pushed her gently down. “Trust me.” Suze pulled the comforter over her.

  Nina heard Suze moving toward the other end of the room, heard her dialing the phone, heard her quietly talking. Outside darkness was falling. It sucked the color out of Auschwitz Cadillac and cast it in shadow. Lacking light, Auschwitz Cadillac floated closer to the line between art and reality. Nina’s eyes closed.

  Later she felt Suze slipping into bed beside her. “Suze?”

  “You’re awake.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Feel all right?”

  “Fine. Did you find out anything.”

  Suze sighed. “Dr. Crossman’s office phone is the same number as the Human Fertility Institute. It’s been disconnected. There’s no home phone listed in any of the directories. I tried all the boroughs, Long Island, Jersey, Connecticut. I called the AMA but they wouldn’t help me over the phone.”

  “They’ll help Delgado. I’ll call her in the morning.”

  “But I found out about your phone on the maternity ward.”

  “And?”

  “The wall plug was crushed.”

  “How?”

  “The maintenance man didn’t know. He said someone could have stepped on it by accident.”

  “And the volunteer could have been a madwoman off the street. And Laura Bain’s case could have nothing to do with mine. And I could have written that note, and signed it. And swallowed a bottle of Seconal. But I didn’t.”

  “I know you didn’t, Nina.”

  “Therefore?”

  But Suze had no answer. Through the windows, Nina saw falling snow. She watched it for a while, then closed her eyes. Under Suze’s warm comforter, with Suze beside her, she drifted toward sleep. Sleep was safe, as long as the Birdman stayed away.

  When Nina awoke, Suze’s hand was on her thigh and the phone was ringing. She pushed the hand away. “Suze.”

  “What is it?”

  “The phone.”

  Suze jumped out of bed and ran to the desk. Nina felt the imprint of Suze’s hand on her thigh for a few moments; then the feeling went away.

  Morning light streamed in through the many windows of Suze’s room. It transmuted Auschwitz Cadillac back into art, and made Suze’s body gleam like mother-of-pearl. Nina couldn’t make out what Suze was saying on the telephone, but she could see that Suze was watching her while she said it. In a few minutes, Suze came back across the room, pulling on a sweater.

  “Nina,” she said.

  “What?”

  “There’s something I should tell you.”

  “Tell.”

  “I’ve met someone.”

  “Someone other than Le Boucher?”

  Suze’s face wrinkled in an expression very close to wincing. “Forget her. She was just using me.” Suze smiled. “And vice versa, I suppose. No. This is different. He’s a man, for starters.” Suze sat on the edge of the bed and began pulling on a pair of jeans.

  “Continue,” Nina said.

  Suze’s back tensed. “Maybe this isn’t a good time to tell you.”

  “Why not? Is it Richard Nixon?”


  Suze laughed and turned to face Nina. “Similar eyebrows, in fact. But nothing else. He’s a film producer, potentially anyway.”

  “Potentially?”

  “He was assistant to the producer on Ten Tall Ducks.”

  “I don’t recall seeing it.”

  “It’s not out yet. It won’t be coming out either, except on video. There were problems. But Ernesto learned a lot on the shoot and now he’s got a script he wants to do on his own.”

  “Ernesto?”

  “Ernesto Cohen. Ernesto Che Cohen, actually. But everyone calls him Ernie.”

  “Except you.”

  Suze smiled, the same secretive smile she’d shown Nina the day before. “He’s twenty-five. Almost.”

  “That’s a relief. I was worried he might embarrass you by ordering Shirley Temples at Spago.”

  “I want you to look at the script, Nina.”

  “Sure. What’s it about?”

  “Dan Aykroyd and John Candy are seriously interested. And Ernesto has an uncle with a partner who knows Alec Guinness’s agent. They’re going to approach him for a cameo.”

  “Great. So the script’s about putting together a movie deal.”

  Suze laughed again. “It’s about giant rats from outer space. A spoof. But not like Mel Brooks. More like Jonathan Swift.”

  “Has Ernesto considered where the money for a Swiftian rat spoof is going to come from?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “We?”

  “I’m going to co-produce.”

  Nina had been afraid of that. Suze’s father had money, lots of it. He owned the building Suze lived in, and the building the gallery was in too. But Nina didn’t say, “Be careful,” or “What do you know about producing movies?” or “You’re out of control,” although all three thoughts passed through her mind. Instead she said: “Have you got the script?”

  “Not here. Ernesto’s a little weird about letting it out of his sight. But I’ll get you a copy.” She bent forward and kissed Nina on the forehead. “Thanks,” she said, and zipped up her jeans.

  Nina sat up. “I don’t understand why you were reluctant to tell me about this.”

  This time Suze couldn’t quite face her. “There’s a little more to it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Under the down comforter, Nina’s hands closed into fists. “Ernesto’s the father?”