“Everyone already thinks I’m a murderer,” I said, “so why not start now? And if you get Katie Poole fired, I promise I will fucking kill you.”
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists!” Sebastian said. He spit the blood streaming across his mouth onto the floor.
Whatever self-image I’d imagined—that I was a nonviolent person—seemed very ten minutes ago. Despite the difficulty getting traction on this skating rink of a floor, I managed to pick up Sebastian by the now-bloody lapels of his now-bloody pelt and slam him into the icy wall. He flopped around on impact like a crash-test dummy. Though I’m about two or three inches shorter I had twenty pounds more muscle, thanks to a year living out of hotels with nothing better to do than hit the fitness center ever day. It was dark and loud and no one paid us the slightest attention. From a distance we probably looked like two giant chest-bumping Tribbles; whether we were scuffling or making out was a total mystery.
“Why’d you show up at Christine’s party past midnight? Where were you before that?”
“I—I don’t think I did,” Sebastian said, pulling away from me. He yanked some wadded-up napkins out of his pocket and pinched them over his gushing nose. “No, I didn’t. I had Indian food with my agents from UTA, then I went straight to the Gaslighter. I couldn’t have been there later than eleven forty-five.”
“That’s not what Christine said.”
“How the hell would she know? She wasn’t there when I showed up.”
I blinked. “What?”
“I couldn’t find her. Everyone said she was in the bathroom, but I didn’t see her for a good twenty minutes. When she showed up, she was out of breath. I thought maybe she had a quickee with you. Why do you think I’ve been avoiding her this whole weekend?” He let go of the napkins to gesticulate for effect but the wad remained stuck, soaked through with crimson, like the nose of a horror-movie clown.
I turned away and headed for the Bayfront. An enormous cloud of roaring darkness was billowing over me, and even though I knew I couldn’t outrun it, I was still going to try.
I could hear Mod’s croaking defiance behind me. “You’ve screwed yourself, man! You hear me? I’m gonna make sure no one in this business hires you! No con will book you! By the time I’m finished, you’ll be sketching caricatures of tourists at fucking Sea World!”
* * *
– – – –
The Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic” thrummed through the hallway of the eleventh floor when I stepped off the Bayfront’s Space Elevator and headed to my room.
Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension
Three doors down from mine the walls erupted with high-pitched teen laughter and the steady beat of retro hiphop that had debuted five years before anyone inside the room was born. Nerds always rightly exercise their right to cherish the just-new and the never-old. As I passed by, I could hear the clink of beer bottles and sped-up chipmunk conversation and a brief scream. It was easy to picture the party: Half a dozen high school students in a room with a single queen bed, sleeping ass-to-elbow on the floor like illegal migrant workers, happy to be out of the house, dropped off by Mom and Dad, wearing their costumes like their one, true skins, getting drunk and high, not to deaden the edge of life but to sharpen it. Every few cons I would get a room next to the biggest, loudest fan party on the floor, but about halfway through my rootless odyssey of show appearances I stopped huffily stomping to the front desk to ask to be relocated. I stopped hearing in their revelries a personal annoyance and instead started to understand the joy as it was; it reminded me that the humdrum for me was a reason to celebrate for them. Their youthful ecstasy renewed my vigor, like a proud mentor passing the torch. Or maybe more like a vampire leeching off youthful vigor. I knew which interpretation I preferred.
Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension
In this specific instance I was grateful for the cacophony because even I couldn’t hear myself sliding my extra key card through the lock and opening my hotel room door. I wanted to take Christine by surprise, and more importantly to catch me by surprise. I wasn’t sure which question I wanted to ask first because I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted to hear least.
Hey babe, did you know your current boyfriend sees you as little more than a disposable receptacle for his dick, and so in light of these new revelations what do you say we fly to Newark and rip up those divorce papers together and P.S. I love you?
Or:
Why did you lie to me about when you were at your own party?
I chose to table the decision until I was looking Christine in the eyes. She wasn’t in the short hallway that led from the door past the bathroom; its door was open, lights off. I didn’t see her on the bed watching TV or checking email at the open laptop on the writing desk, and for a second my heart sank. She had given up waiting for me, again, and left, again, and I had missed her, again.
Then I saw her foot sticking off the end of the bed and my brain told me it must be at that angle because she was falling off. I took one step forward to help her but then stopped because that didn’t make any sense at all, because that couldn’t be her foot, because a live human foot wouldn’t ever be twisted that way.
I knew. Even before I knew, I knew. My stomach twisted like it was wringing all the bile out of itself. Spots swarmed at the edges of my vision, along with some kind of static blizzard in my brain, but not enough to block my view before I reached the edge of the bed and saw the bloody pile heaped on the narrow strip of floor. Something that used to be a woman I had laughed with and thrilled to her kisses and held while she cried. Someone who sat with me in a hospital emergency room and fell asleep on my shoulder while flying across the Atlantic, someone who screamed at me in fury and made love with me outside in the rain.
She used to be a human being but now she was a just a thing, a facsimile in the same basic shape as my wife. Except no one bothered to finish her face, to put bone and skin on it—instead there was just a sloppy purple-reddish mush where all of that should be.
It was then that I saw the bloody stump on the bed. It was the Kirby trophy, that lumpy monolith of cosmic ephemera. On the base, where my name and the name of my comic book were engraved, glistened crimson of various darkening stages.
Nope, nada, nyet, no thank you, that’s enough for us, I’m outta here my consciousness decided, and the brain static was quickly accompanied by a high-pitched whine and the swarming black dots shrouded my vision. My knees failed and I sat backward, into air, my back crashing into the writing desk and dragging half of what was in it onto the floor with me.
I did not lose consciousness, not entirely. I didn’t throw up, either; my throat constricted like a fist, too tight for that. My chest heaved painfully and my ragged breaths drowned out all other sounds. Then a girl screamed in the party across the hall, not in fear but delighted surprise, and it was enough to jar me back into myself.
Hey, Sam and Twitch, it’s me. No, no, not calling to turn myself in. I just want to report that my estranged ex-wife—yeah, the lover of the guy you think I killed, yeah, funny thing that—she was just murdered too, in my hotel room, with my Kirby that has my fingerprints all over it.
Nope, no, it wasn’t me, wrong again, stop jumping to conclusions, you guys.
Good news, though! I actually have a real alibi this time: I couldn’t have done this murder because I was on the other side of the tracks physically assaulting the most famous comic book writer in the world.
Oh, Sebastian Mod is definitely pressing charges? So even if you believed me about Christine you have to take me into custody anyway and therefore there’s no way I can help find info that will prove my own innocence? Okay, got it, here’s my wrists. Cuff ’em.
I went back over the scenario a couple times, trying to find a way out of this maze of Being Completely Screwed, but failed. The best thing that had ever happened to me in the p
ast was lying dead on the floor, and the future looked to be a giant leaden cube, an obstacle there was no path around.
Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension-Another-Dimension
My eyes regained focus and alighted on the black rectangle of an iPhone lying among the various desktop detritus scattered on the floor.
I picked it up in its Paul Frank monkey-skull case and punched the Home bottom. The phone vibrated irritably and presented me with a keypad. “Try Again.”
I punched in four random numbers and it shuddered again: “Touch ID or Enter Passcode.”
I took a deep breath.
Touch ID.
I looked at Christine’s shoe sticking out from the bed, as inert and lifeless as the foot inside it.
I knew I had to make a decision. Either option could easily lead to my personal destruction. But only one involved me giving up my freedom, to sit and stew in a cell while entrusting others to help me. People who, let’s face it, had very little motivation to help me at all, and in fact could help themselves by making sure I never saw the outside of a prison again.
So my decision was simple. But that didn’t make it easy.
The bottom line was, I just couldn’t trust anyone to do this but me. And I was going to take this thing, whatever it was, as far as I could on my own before someone stopped me. I owed it to Christine, to Ben K, hell, even to Danny Lieber. But most of all I owed it to myself. I had drifted for the last three years on a stagnant stream of self-pity and apathy. It was time to get out of the goddamn pool.
I stood up on knees still uncertain, and swallowed. I forced myself to go back over to what used to be Christine, looking at her still form out of the corner of my eye, nausea building.
When I reached down for her hand, a stifled “no” audibly escaped my lips. Mouth, nose, brain, knees, stomach—all individual body parts cried out in protest.
It wasn’t until I touched her that I had to choke back tears. Her fingers so limp, her skin so cold.
But her thumb was still warm enough for me to unlock her iPhone.
* * *
– – – –
I walked out of my room and down the corridor and even managed to nod politely at the desk clerk I passed in the hall, who I correctly guessed was heading to the Beastie Boys fans’ room to ask them to turn down the music.
I punched the call button for the Space Elevator and waited for it and got in it when it arrived and rode it to the Space Mezzanine, where I smiled at the two teenaged girls who got in dressed as Sherlock (Cumberbatch) and Watson (Freeman) and rode the rest of the way down to the Space Lobby.
I walked through the Space Lobby and the Space Restaurant and the Space Bar and outside to the Space Patio, and once the salty sea air of the harbor surrounded me there was something anciently maternal about its embrace that gave me the freedom to cry.
It was an excessively manly cry, short and silent, mouth closed and mostly swallowed in the throat, to not draw the attention of the con-goers and unaffiliated lovers strolling along the harbor walk; likewise tears were allowed to roll down my face and dry in the ocean breeze in case one too many reached my cheeks.
Then a police siren, and then another, pierced the unseen horizon behind me, and with a sniffle and a backhand across my eyes I was walking not-too-fast-hopefully along the water, just another face in the night.
I took Christine’s phone out of my pocket and had the presence of mind to go into Settings to tell it to never go into sleep mode; this would mean I would not be challenged again for the password. Unfortunately, that would also mean a constant drain on the battery, which currently stood at 36 percent and was dropping fast.
Nevertheless, I curiously thumbed through a few apps just to see what was there to be seen, and my heart quickly sank: Not because of what I found, but because I found nothing at all. Christine had meticulously erased the browser history on Safari and the recent call traffic on her phone; her Maps location notifications had been turned off, so it wasn’t keeping an ambient record of her movements. Just as she had no reason to lie to me about the party, she had no reason to purge her phone of a data trail unless she was trying to hide something. Not Christine, the original Hyper-Competent Spouse who kept track of our taxes in a baffling color-coded folder system that separated home-office expenses from expenses for the whole house for which you could claim only a partial deduction based on the percentage of the house taken up by your home office. To call Christine anal retentive would be an insult to her and to Freud. She wasn’t retentive; she was hermetically sealed.
I went into her email. Based on what I had already seen I was not surprised to find the Inbox empty, but it occurred to me to look in the Trash: the app only deleted discarded messages every thirty days.
I found a bunch of polite rejection letters from various entertainment companies not hiring her and some coupons for that week’s deal on running pants at Lululemon (Christine was a huge runner), a cancellation for a pistol range class three months ago (pistol range?) and a few messages from artist clients asking about sales and queries from prospective buyers. I also found an entire genre of deleted emails that were quite interesting: A dozen or so listing songs and bands, all replying to the same initial missive appended at the bottom:
»On July 16, 8:45 AM, Christine Black wrote:
»Hey guys, just a quick reminder I’d like to get as many of your karaoke songs (artists names too please!!) before we all arrive at Gaslighter Wednesday night so A) I can make sure the bar has them and B) we can get this party rolling IMMEDIATELY before jetlag sets in for any of us.
»I know most of you are going to think this is my OCD acting up again (and you’re totally right) but I miss so many of you and I want this night to go off without a hitch!!
»Thx in advance xxxooo cb
The set list. She knew the set list for her karaoke party.
That set list, from beginning to end, ran about twenty-five minutes. The Gaslighter guy’s printout was still folded in half in my sketchbook. I compared it to the timestamps on the drawing I’d made of the image captures from the Baptist’s body-cam footage. There was just a few minutes’ difference between the two captures of the Ulee-o running to the convention center and back again. It would only take fifteen, twenty minutes for someone to run from here to the Gaslighter and back.
An experienced runner.
All I needed to do was thumbnail-sketch it in my head, the way I would rough out a sequence of comics pages.
Panel 1: Christine greets guests as they arrive, makes sure everyone sees her.
Panel 2: Sings the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang,” waits for everyone else to sing too. People are getting drunker and drunker, having a great time. Does anyone notice Christine isn’t drinking? She says it’s a rum and Coke but really it’s a diet soda with nothing in it.
Panel 3: Now it’s time. She’s just belted her second number—“My Shot” from Hamilton, according to the set list. The next person leaps up—the marketing guy at Boom Studios, what’s his name. Everyone is focused on him. She slips out the back. Or maybe even just to the ladies’ room because she knows there’s a side door that leads to the alley.
Panel 4: She changes into her Dante’s Fire costume.
Panel 5: She runs from the Gaslighter to the convention center. A person of ambiguous gender completely covered in black ninja gear would look startling anywhere else except in San Diego during con week. It looks like she’s hustling to make the Guinness World Records shoot.
Panel 6: She’s halfway there. No more than ten minutes have passed. She has time, but not a lot. Back at the Gaslighter, everyone is still singing. Everyone is paying attention to the stage. It’s doubtless anyone has noticed she’s left. If they did, no one told the cops about it.
Here, I have to start a new page. Six panels, while once the standard number on a page in, say, the Silver Age, have fallen o
ut of fashion. But I’ve always been a traditionalist.
This is a good place to end the page to build suspense though. The big reveal is coming and you want it to surprise the reader, that’s why you put the cliffhanger as the last panel on the right-facing page, so they have to turn it over to see what happens next:
Panel 1: Danny fidgets nervously behind the Marriott, where he waits with his portfolio.
Panel 2: Whoever he was planning on meeting, it was probably not a runner in full body costume. Here she comes into frame, emerging suddenly out of the darkness, illuminated by a streetlamp. Does she approach stealthily or run right up to him? One thing is obvious: She does not have much time. Her identity is completely covered. So there is only one conclusion:
Panel 3: Christine shoots Danny. She’s not there to chat or to argue. Presumably this is where her shooting-range classes come in.
But still. I was with this woman for over a decade. Sure, she could be a little tightly wound, and she knew how to nurse a grudge, or five. But was she really capable of blasting another person to death? This was the only part of the evidence that didn’t fit: Christine herself, and what I knew about her.
Or…did I really not know her at all? And was that the possibility I didn’t want to believe?
Panel 4: The same thing as the first page, but spooled backward. (Combined, this grouping could make a pretty good double-page spread.) This panel is the same as the second shot from the Baptist’s bodycam: Ulee-o running back toward the Gaslighter.
Panel 5: Christine whips off the costume in the alley. But where does she put it and the gun? Somewhere no one would look. Simply throwing it out is too risky…Ah, yes. In the Instagram pictures of the party you can see all those oversized con bags. Just stuff it in there, carry it back into the bar.
The Con Artist Page 18