Ray followed him and leaned against Bodine’s Mustang. “Why were you going to call me?”
“I got into Susan’s cell phone records.”
“How’d you—”
“Never mind. I tracked down every number to and from her in the year before she died. Ruled out calls with her husband, work, and commercial stuff. Came up with a handful of cell numbers. All of them belong to people in New Jersey, except for one. Starting that September, she made five calls to a prepaid phone with an upstate New York area code.”
“Five-one-eight. That’s ours.”
“It is. But I dug deeper, into phone company records. Found the cell tower that cell was pinging off. It’s smack in the middle of the Helderberg Mountains.”
“Where The House is. Fuck. A while ago, you suggested she might have driven up to see him, but that he was just in the area.” Ray’s body was filled with jangly energy. He paced in a tight circuit.
“I’m afraid Karl’s there. In The House.”
So it wasn’t a new lover she was seeing. It was a very old one.
Bodine said, “The phone calls were right around the time she started spending that money.”
“But Karl was rich, a rock star.”
“Was. That was ages ago.”
“Why would she pay him?”
“Blackmail, like I said with this lover we were imagining. Her husband didn’t know about her sordid past in a cult, and Karl threatened to tell and ruin her family. Who knows, maybe he still had the old power over her.” Bodine leaned against the car.
Ray continued to pace. “So she was on her way home from there when she crashed. Why did she see him? What happened when she did? Was she…” Back with him. “Back with the group?”
“If she was, it wasn’t for long. I got into her E-Z Pass records. She only came up that way the one time.”
“So Karl sent the emails and delivered the dead cat.”
“Not necessarily. If Susan went up there, others might have too. Which suggests another possibility—that he’s started up a new group. In which case, he has a minion to do his dirty work.”
“Our postmodern teen geek.” Ray looked at Bodine. “You’ve been busy.”
“You know me. I start a job, I have to finish it.”
That made two of them. “I have to go.”
“You only had one beer.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back for more.”
When he got home, he headed straight for the laptop up on the couch.
When I got home from going to The House for the last time, I told Susan, “I’m leaving. Are you staying?” Not, Are you coming with me?
She said, “I don’t know, Ray.”
In that moment I realized that I, at least, was free of the stricture NO SEX. Maybe I was just horny, but I saw the possibility that leaving might make it right between us. I actually smiled. “If you’re leaving, we don’t need to obey the rules.”
She was already unbuttoning her shirt, backing up to our couch. But not exactly looking at me.
Ray looked up. He couldn’t write this part. He didn’t want to remember it, and what he did remember was all confused with that last sorry time with Liz.
Afterwards, we got off the couch. I reached to hug her, but she was moving to the corner of the room, where she faced me. I didn’t come closer. She was fixing her shirt, combing her hair back with her hand as she talked, finally breaking silence. Which I first thought meant she was leaving the group.
I imagine that, in some twisted sense, she believed she was giving me a gift: the gift of an explanation.
Now she looked at me. “I was with Karl.”
“With him.”
“You know.”
I’d known it for months, but still it socked me in the gut. I stopped breathing.
But she wasn’t done.
“Ray, it was so beautiful.”
How could she evoke my name in the same sentence as that execrable notion?
What could possess her to tell me this now, with what had just happened on that couch? “Susan, maybe you want to stop.”
A volcanic process stirred in me. The next day, I’d see the bruises where my fingernails had cut into my palms. But she still wasn’t done.
“Ray, you remember the sound of his voice. He spoke when he was inside of me. I could feel that sound in my whole body.”
I saw it. The great cat looming over her, all its natural grace gone. Pounding into her. Her mouth coming open, making cries she never made with me.
My face was on fire. The pressure was building, building in me. If I didn’t release it, I was going to explode. I needed to open my mouth. Except I couldn’t trust what might come out. Couldn’t be sure that once I got screaming my hands wouldn’t get involved. My eyes flicked to the poker in the fireplace.
I raced upstairs and grabbed a few things—guitars, clothes. I was almost to the car when I heard her.
“Ray.”
I turned to her.
“I’m sorry.” Her face was heavy with sorrow, yes, but also resolve. You could be sorry for what you’d done. But this was sorry for how things had worked out, like she’d had no hand in it.
I drove away. That’s the last time I saw her.
In the terrible weeks after leaving the group, leaving Susan, I had literally no idea what to do. Bodine kindly let me crash at his apartment in the city. Once he got a whiff of where I was at, he mostly hung out at his girlfriend’s while I paced the two tiny rooms and drank endless cups of instant coffee. I felt like the needle of a broken compass that no longer pointed True North, to Karl, but skittered around from one impossible question to another.
Where was I going to live? What would I do for money? What would I do with the rest of my life? Music wasn’t even an option. The idea of getting on a stage after being on the same stage Karl had performed on made me physically ill.
The rule about not talking survived in me, so I couldn’t make myself say a word to Bodine. The one about negative emotions crumbled. My rage about Karl and Susan spilled into my mind in the form of terrible sarcasm.
So, if it was Cooking that happened in The Kitchen and Eating in The Dining Hall, what went on in The Bedroom with Karl was no ordinary adultery, no mere sex, but COSMIC FUCKING. Karl’s supreme gift to my wife, for which I should thank him.
With a bullet in the head if I ever ran across him again.
The Bedroom? He’d never heard such a place mentioned, but of course Karl had to have one. Or did he call it the Love Den? Ray’s fingers hovered trembling over the keyboard for some minutes, until he realized—the story was done. He eased the laptop closed. It was the coffer that now contained his fortune, spoils of mining the past.
He’d worked through five bells, and six too. It was almost seven. But daylight saving time had come, and it was still light.
The story was done, but the process wasn’t. The last thing was to deliver it to Lou. Bodine had said Ray was going to write it. And he had. Fuck Karl. Let him bring a shit-ton of bricks and a truckload of dead cats. Ray composed an email and punched Send.
Ray headed outside and down toward the river. He squinted against the glare of the last sun. It was too bright but without an ounce of warmth. A steady wind buffeted his face. The sidewalk sucked at his feet. He stumbled on the curb, almost stepped into a turning truck.
It was always like this finishing a big project. Liz called it his post-partum depression. And it was a little sad. But usually there was a feeling of satisfaction.
Not this time. He was just bone-tired. He’d finished telling the story, but for some reason he didn’t feel done.
But he was done for today. He turned back home, lumbering like an oil tanker changing course. He fumbled with the keys, creaked the door open. Picked up the laptop, almost too heavy to carry, and trudged upstairs one
clank at a time. He climbed into bed, opened the computer, started looking at the news and was out. Though usually a light sleeper, tonight he slept the sleep of the dead.
He came wide awake, bolting up in the bed, heart pounding, listening for tinkling glass. There’d been a crash, and now silence. Dim light crept into the window. It felt like very early morning. Earlier than he usually woke, but he’d passed out last night at, what, eight?
He looked around for the computer. It was lying on the floor next to the bed. The crash hadn’t been a brick, let alone a car accident, but the computer falling on the floor.
He picked it up and punched a key. The screen stayed black for a moment then lit up with the same news site he’d last visited. The screen refreshed with a story about road rage. A moment later, an ad popped up with a car and smiling woman and the sound came on and blared some fucked-up music. He slammed the computer shut and got up.
It was freezing in here. He’d left the window open. Dank air streamed in. He needed coffee. But first he had to get warm. He padded across the icy floor to the bathroom. Funny, he’d been dreaming he was sneaking around Karl’s dark place. Something had fallen in the dream too. And then he was running. How did that work, hearing the sound before it happened? He shook his head. This is what you got with a brain and no caffeine.
He closed the bathroom door by habit—not that it mattered with no one else in the house. He stepped in the shower and cranked the knobs. A clanking of old pipes and then the stream burst from the showerhead. He stepped back, but it hit his chest. The cold always shocked, no matter how carefully you set the temperature. A moment later, the water warmed, and he melted into it. The water pressure was great here, like back when he lived in the city. A big improvement over the piddling trickle from those new green showerheads.
Growing up in the fifties, he had the notion drummed into him that history was a series of great leaps forward, science racing towards some unimaginably bright future. It hadn’t turned out that way. He’d watched “progress” swallow the remaining farmlands of his native Long Island, spawning millions of crummy little houses like the one he’d grown up in. What ex-smoker didn’t pine for the innocent days before the sixties, when you could suck down a pack a day without a worry about cancer? Pretty soon, a good shower would become just a memory too.
He thought about Art in the twentieth century. Who in their right mind could say Andy Warhol was a step up from Rembrandt? Stockhausen from Bach? Punk rock from the Beatles? History was not a great upward ramp, but a bumpy ride down a muddy track. It had the occasional up—and a lot of downs. He laughed. He’d been thinking the same exact thoughts for years in the shower. He turned the tap, water came out, and along with it his mind spewed the same cranky shit.
What the fuck? The pipes were clanking again. That was new. It was a miracle the shower was still working. It sounded like the whole business was collapsing inside the walls. That was all he needed, to hire a plumber. Those suckers didn’t come cheap. At least he had that money now. Split the bill with Liz?
Goddamn Liz.
A louder sound interrupted the stream of thoughts. It wasn’t pipes. He cranked the water off. Now came a bang. That was a door slamming, downstairs. He leapt from the shower, threw a towel around his waist, smashed the bathroom door open and tore through the kitchen and down the spiral staircase. Foul smoke streamed up from below. He ran into it, coughing. He reached the floor and stopped. The smoke was coming from the front of the gallery, obscuring the ceiling. But he could see his chair.
Someone was sitting in it, faced away from Ray. Looking out the window, which gleamed in the first morning sun. Wearing his leather jacket and wool watch cap that yesterday had been on hooks by the back door.
Smoke billowed from the figure. Ray raced towards it and skipped around to the front.
It was a man, his legs and lower stomach ablaze. Ray whipped the towel off and reached in to smother the flames, vaguely aware that he was naked to the street. He looked at the face and froze. Ray was looking at himself. A crummy version of Ray Watts. It reminded him of some Dada collage—his eyes, nose, mouth and ears were cutouts from a photo of him, pasted to a head of papier-mâché.
He tamped the flames out and carefully wrapped the towel around himself. If anyone saw him from the street, they’d probably call the police, or the men in white coats, but he couldn’t stop looking.
On the papier-mâché he made out fragments of typing: “After that initial slip, his mouth… Bassman’s funeral… no goodbye to Karl.”
It was stuff he’d just written about Karl. The head was intact. From the neck down, the figure was blackened and smoldering. Stapled to the front of Ray’s leather jacket, over the heart, was a charred fragment of a blurry black-and-white photo of a face. All that remained was an eye, a cheek, and a hank of hair.
Susan. But she didn’t look right.
He raced upstairs and threw on clothes. Back downstairs, he became aware of the stench. Breathing through his mouth, he inspected the horror in his chair, poking with a pen at the still-smoking thing. It was not a corpse, thank God. But part of one. Foot bones protruded from the legs of the pants—tibia, metatarsals? His memory of anatomy class at art school was foggy. A ribcage was visible where the coat had come open. He didn’t remember what they called these, aside from ribs, but they looked real. Human. The stink was not just of burning paper and leather, but bone.
He called Bodine. “You awake?”
“I am now. This is early for you.”
“You need to come over here, right now.”
Bodine must have heard the panic in Ray’s voice, because five minutes later, he came running down the sidewalk and banged in through the front door. He stopped. He looked at Ray then at the thing in the chair. He didn’t say anything but stepped over and studied it. He laughed. “Burning Man!”
“Huh?”
“That festival out in the desert, Woodstock for the Gen-Yers.”
“Ha.”
“Never mind.” Bodine got serious. He poked around at the mannequin. He picked up a piece of cardboard from the floor. It was a sign, made of letters torn from newspaper headlines, echoing the collage that was Ray’s face: ReliquaRAY.
“They’re still copping my style.” He pointed at the cardboard. “That’s the title. I can’t say much for their aesthetic sense. But it’s another reliquary.”
“The name is even a bad pun.”
“Touché.”
Bodine shook his head. “Karl hated ugly things, and this is nothing if not butt-ugly. But remember how down he was on ‘Ego Arts’?”
“Oh yeah.”
“No offense at all, but your sculptures would qualify in his book. This mess is him ridiculing your art.”
“Which is like him.”
“Exactly.” Bodine pulled up one of the pant legs and studied the bone.
Ray said, “That’s real, isn’t it?”
“You tell me—you’re the bone guy. But, yes. I believe it’s a human skeleton. A reliquary for you.”
“I’m not dead yet. But if I hadn’t come down just then, I might be a smoking corpse now. Because once the rest of the room caught fire…” The sense of his house, his self, being attacked had him shrinking inside to a tight ball of loathing.
Bodine must have felt it, because he groaned and shook his head.
“They didn’t only invade my shop, ruin my favorite jacket. It’s like they’ve crawled in my head. I don’t get it. Could they have copped my style so well just from my website? It’s like they know me.”
“Well Karl does, of course. At least this is more grown-up than that cat business.”
Ray scoffed. “Yeah, he’s gone from fifteen to sixteen.” He frowned. “What if Karl sent someone here, posing as a customer, and they saw my stuff?”
“Who’s been here recently?”
“A couple from the
City who bought one of Maurice’s sculptures. Some hipsters from Brooklyn.”
Bodine shook his head. “They could have gotten all this from your website. What I don’t understand is how they could have set this up with you right upstairs. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”
“I woke up, really early.”
“Tell me about it.” Bodine yawned theatrically. “What woke you?”
“I knocked my computer on the floor. No, wait. That’s what woke me. There was this crash a little earlier in my dream.”
“So another sound woke you up.”
“What else? We don’t have earthquakes around here.”
“It was the sound of whoever delivered this monstrosity.”
“I guess. Anyway, I looked at the computer for a minute, got in the shower. I thought I was hearing the pipes complaining, but it was something else. I heard a door slam and raced downstairs.”
“So they woke you up, heard the laptop fall and stopped what they were doing.”
“Then they heard me get in the shower and finished it.”
“Something’s not right here. How’d they know you went in the shower?”
“I told you, they heard it.”
“Maybe. This is an old house, with thick walls. Go upstairs and turn on the shower.”
Ray went in the bathroom, closed the door the way it had been and cranked the taps. The pipes clanked, followed by the roar of water. He came out into the bedroom and Bodine appeared in the doorway.
“From downstairs, that sound could have been anything. Radiator pipes. If I wasn’t listening for it, it might have been next door, anywhere.”
“Where are you going with this?”
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 21