Under Water

by Casey Barrett

  When it comes to drugs and drink, I have just one rule when on a case: no blow. I can function just fine, better than fine, in fact, with a steady stream of booze to keep me loose and fearless. But the moment I have a bump, all is lost. The night unravels, and I’m useless to remember a single detail when I’m into that rotten stuff. Can’t deal with the vicious hangover either. I was trying to remind myself of these things as Roy tried to press his palm into mine without discretion. “Care for a pick-me-up?” he asked.

  There had been so many mad nights that started just the same. A steady buzz exploded by the contents of my friend’s ultra pure supply. The two of us would stand there jabbering mindless wisdom at each other, then take our show on the road, chatting up any women who made the mistake of looking back.

  “Sorry, Roy,” I said. “You know my rule.”

  “Whatever,” he spat. “Another drink and you’ll change your tune. Always do.”

  I didn’t try denying it.

  “So, where we headed tonight?” he asked. “You talk to that punk boyfriend yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You said the girl’s loaded, right? College age, hot party chick? I’ve got a good idea where she’d go. Boom Boom Room, Provocateur, maybe Southside if she’s lame. Shouldn’t be too hard to pick up her scent. You got a pic?”

  I took out both pictures I’d been given. He leaned in, made a close appraisal.

  “Not bad,” he said. “She’d have no trouble getting in anywhere.”

  Roy was a Page Six reporter for the Post. Coke should be a tax-deductible work expense for a gig like that. He was expected to go out six nights a week and find boldfaced names in their natural habitats, preferably behaving poorly. He was on a first-name basis with every promoter and club owner in town, but it was his in with the bouncers that really paved the way. Roy was about their size, shared their love of violence, and had the constitution of a mammoth. They respected that.

  “So what’s the story with this kid, the boyfriend?” he asked. “You said he’s some kind of loaded wannabe director?”

  “Something like that. Named his production company Scion.”

  “Fucking tool.”

  Roy gulped at his beer, his free hand shoved inside his jeans pocket, caressing his little white bag of fuel. “You don’t want to turn this shit down, red eye,” he said. “Not speedy at all. Super clear.” Again he tried to press his palm into mine, and again I resisted. A few painkillers were one thing, no hangover there, but even a bump or two of the blow can leave an ugly impression the next day. And it’s never a bump or two. But still, I felt the pull. I wouldn’t be able to resist for much longer. I drank the rest of my beer and set it down on the bar with something like conviction.

  “I’m gonna go by his place,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “You go do that,” he said. Then he turned and stalked off in the direction of the men’s room.

  * * *

  Fealy’s apartment was a half block east in one of the finest buildings in the neighborhood. There were lush flowerboxes across the base of each floor and high loft windows that looked out onto the prettiest stretch among the alphabet streets. A cracked-out wino lounged by the building’s entrance. He raised a can of Four Loco in my direction and guzzled it down. I buzzed Fealy’s apartment and waited without response. The temptation to return to Zum’s and Roy’s goodies was growing.

  It wasn’t long before an Uber pulled up, and out climbed a kid with a black piece of Tumi luggage. He was college age, dressed carelessly in hoodie and cords, but he couldn’t shake the moneyed scent. His blond hair was full of product, and his facial hair was maintained like a Japanese garden. I stepped aside, asked if I could give him a hand. He grunted in response, dug for his keys. I held the door as he tried to shoulder past.

  “Hey buddy, hang on,” I called. “I’m looking for somebody, guy named James Fealy, you know him?”

  He stopped at the threshold. His look said he did, but he mumbled he didn’t.

  “He’s not in any trouble,” I said. “I’m looking for his ex-girlfriend. We were supposed to meet up. Appears he forgot. Now I gotta wait down here all night until he shows.”

  “Sorry, man, can’t help you.”

  He turned his back to me and moved through the small lobby. There was an unattended front desk watched by a camera in the high corner. The kid hit the elevator button three times, slouched and checked his phone with impatience. Just before the front door clicked shut, I slipped a toe against it. I waited until the elevator opened and shut before I stepped inside. There was a stairwell in the back of the lobby. I started to climb the flights to Fealy’s. I heard the screaming before I hit the first landing.

  By the time I reached him, the kid was out in the hallway in a state of bellowing shock. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” he cried over and over. He was fumbling with his phone, trying to dial 9-1-1, but not connecting with any buttons. Seeing me coming, he ran at me, blind to the memory of moments earlier. “Help me, man! You gotta help me,” he cried. “My roommate! My roommate, he’s fucking dead. Somebody, somebody . . . Oh fuck, oh fuck.”

  I went past him into the open apartment, 3W—the address Cass found listed for Scion Productions. The living room was dominated by a massive flat-screen and a sectional leather sofa. Empty beer bottles littered the glass coffee table. A laptop was open on a long dining room table. Movie posters decorated the walls, the usual college kid clichés: Woody and Quentin and Scorsese.

  The bathroom light was on, the door half closed. I approached the room like a man being sentenced for a forgotten crime. Took a breath, pushed it open. I looked down.

  James Fealy was lying naked on the shower floor. His throat had been cut almost to his spine. The gash had opened his head from his body like a wide red yawn. There were also stab wounds on his shoulders and arms and a deep slash across his chest. His long body was blocking the drain, and blood was pooled around him in the tub. His dead blue eyes were open and confused. His penis had also been cut. It was thin and flaccid and fell against his thigh, hanging by a few bloody strands.

  I stood above him, and I couldn’t look away. I had viewed the dead before, as cold slabs in the morgue or in caskets at wakes, when they are pretending to be asleep in heavy makeup, but never like this. Coming across violent death, in a literal blood bath, is a world away. It is stepping into a dark dimension. You don’t come back from it. I was conscious of these things even as I stood there paralyzed. Then I staggered back against the bathroom sink and I felt myself about to throw up. I tried to swallow down the puke, but it was too late. I lunged for the toilet, yanked up the lid, and retched until my eyes burned.

  When I returned to his roommate out in the hall, the cops were charging up the stairs.

  Chapter 6

  The kid’s name was Mike. Michael Schwartz, he’d stammered to the cops. He told them he was James Fealy’s best friend, that the two of them had lived together since freshman year. He just returned from Montauk where he’d decided to stay another week. The waves were up; the city could wait. He told them he found me outside the front door, wanting to talk to his friend, when he pulled up. Telling them this, he looked over like I was complicit in the horror he was experiencing. The detective turned and gave me a look like she agreed with him.

  Schwartz told her that James had no enemies, he was a just a chill, cool guy, man. Then he muttered a few more oh fuck, oh fucks, and lost his train of thought. The officer asked him about the girlfriend, and Schwartz snorted, shook his head. “She was psycho,” he said. “A total psycho. You don’t think? Oh fuck, fuck, man.”

  His hands shook as he tapped a Marlboro Light from a pack and stared at it unlit between his fingers.The blood had drained from his face, and his eyes wouldn’t stay still. They were darting from the detective in front of him, over to me, and back over to the open door of his apartment. A uniformed officer emerged with a wet kitchen knife sealed in a plastic bag. Schwartz let out a sick cry of recogni
tion and sunk to the floor and put his head between his knees. The cigarette fell from his hand and rolled away.

  The detective came over. She was short with hard features, built like a former gymnast, and dressed in black jeans, gray blazer. Her red hair was cut shorter than mine in a pixie style. A pair of soft blue eyes belied the rest of her cultivated efforts at toughness. She showed me her badge, told me she was Detective Miller, Homicide. I told her mine and offered a hand that she ignored.

  “Could you explain why you were on the scene, Mr. Darley?” she asked.

  “I was hired to find a missing girl,” I said. “Madeline McKay. She’s the ex-girlfriend of the poor bastard in the tub there.”

  “You were here to question him in her disappearance?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how did you gain access to the building?”

  I motioned over to the Schwartz kid. Someone had draped a blanket around his shoulders. “The roommate came home when I was standing out front,” I said.

  “And he let you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said you could come inside and up to the apartment with him?”

  “No. I followed him in. Then I responded to his screams and came up the stairs.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “He asked me to help him, said his roommate had been killed. I went past him and went into the apartment. The door was open. I found the kid, Fealy, in the bathtub, in a pool of blood. His throat had been cut. He’d been stabbed all over his body too. Then you guys showed up.”

  “You touch anything in the apartment, Mr. Darley?”

  “Maybe the dining table as I went by. And I got sick when I saw the body. You’ll find my prints on the bathroom sink and the toilet too.”

  She didn’t react to this, just made a note in a small pad and turned away. An older detective, with standard-issue cop gut and mustache, appeared at the top of the steps. Miller joined him, caught him up as they looked from me to Schwartz to the apartment. He came my way, and Miller went to speak with the uniform holding the knife in the plastic bag.

  “You a PI?” he asked without introducing himself.

  “No. Friend of the family,” I said.

  “Family of the dead kid’s?”

  “His ex. She’s missing. Her mother asked me to look for her. The boyfriend seemed like a good place to start.”

  “We’re gonna need all the info you have on this girl.”

  “Uh huh, sure,” I said.

  “How long you been looking for her?”

  “Since this morning.”

  He grunted a laugh. “Hell of a first day,” he said. “My partner tells me you puked on our crime scene? That’s always helpful.”

  “My apologies.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s a natural reaction for weak-stomached civilians.”

  He gave me an aggressive smile of crooked yellow teeth. His mustache had crumbs in it; his skin had the ashen complexion of a life lived under fluorescents and night. I had a few inches on him, but that gut put him in a higher weight class. He was still sweating after the workout up the stairs. He was the sort of sloppy power-thrilled bastard that Cass liked to turn inside out. I flashed an image of her giving it to him with a strap-on and couldn’t suppress a smirk.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Just let me know how I can help.”

  “Gonna need a statement, for starters,” he said. “And need you to hand over any information you’ve gathered on this girl. After a day on the job, not much, I’m guessing. Anything the girl’s mother may have given you to get started, anyone you may have talked to earlier today.”

  “Madeline didn’t do this,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it, or even if I believed it myself, but I knew it couldn’t be easy for an eighteen-year-old girl to damn near behead a man in the shower. Even if she was a nationally ranked athlete whacked out of her mind on drugs.

  “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t,” he said. “But that’s not for you to determine.” He examined his fingernails at the end of a puffy, hairless hand. “In any case, we’ll find her a lot faster than you will.”

  I was escorted out of the building by an earnest young uniform that kept putting his hand on my back as we walked down the stairs. A small crowd had gathered around the entrance. A news truck was already on the scene, recording the worried looks and whispered speculation and that giddy lurid energy of breaking tragedy. I spotted Roy Perry talking to a neighbor on the sidewalk. He was nodding excitedly and scribbling notes. Seeing me, Roy walked away from her in mid-sentence and moved toward me. His eyes were wild and wide, his brow bursting with drug sweat. He started to say something but I shook my head and let the uniform guide me over to his cruiser.

  * * *

  It was three a.m. by the time they were finished with me at the police station. I gave them my statement; told them enough, left out some. Said I’d been to Madeline’s apartment, didn’t mention her stash of drugs hidden in the Twilight box set. Mentioned seeing Coach Marks, didn’t mention Fred the bouncer guarding the pool deck. They could find out these details with their oh-so-fast police work.

  I texted Cass on my way out of the precinct: Fealy murdered. Saw body. They think Madeline did it . . .

  I decided to walk home. The day’s drinks and pills had settled into the soil, and my mind was muddy. My thoughts were not thoughts, only a single grisly image. Forced to describe every frame of what I’d witnessed, the memory of Fealy’s slashed naked body in the tub had lodged itself in my brain. I tried to think it through, going back to the start of the day with Mrs. McKay, following the steps that brought me to that moment, but it was no good. You wake up one morning, you go for a swim; someone asks you to look for someone else. You drink, snoop around, and catch up with your past. And all the while, that scene is waiting for you in the night. A dead young man with his throat cut open so deep I could see the bloody spinal stem that connected his head, barely, to his mutilated body.

  The bars were still open another hour; drunk kids spilled out of them, smoking on sidewalks and talking too loud. I considered popping into one and pouring whiskey down my throat until they turned on the lights and forced me to crawl home. I kept walking. Detective Miller’s partner had told me my job was done. If I had any sense, I’d stay away. Stay out of the water; it’s not safe to swim. High, rough surf out there, dangerous rip currents, big hungry fish underneath. But I knew it wasn’t a choice. My dark half couldn’t wait to paddle out.

  As usual there were zero stars visible in the city night sky. A glowing eyeball of moon looked down between nude white clouds, judging the late-night sinners below. An unending row of reds and greens lit First Avenue through the East Village and neighborhoods north. Like most city kids, I’m fundamentally afraid of the dark, the true black dark of the country, the stillness; the unsettling quiet that swallows you out there. In the city, the darkness is all within, within windowless rooms and inside the bodies of desperate souls without lightness, the color of nothing.

  When I reached my apartment on East 17th, I sensed Cass’s presence before I turned my keys in the lock. Inside, she was standing in the kitchen with her back to me, turning a sizzling skillet. Lucinda Williams played at low volume. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. The small space smelled of stir-fry, soy sauce, and burning white rice. I doubted there was anything else to add to it. The lack of ventilation filled the living room with a ghostly smoke. She was barefoot and had on a loose black sweatshirt and jeans. Cass turned, took a drag from her Parliament and, exhaling, said, “I got your text.” Then she went back to cooking.

  I nodded, slid past her, and reached for the bottle of Bulleit, gave it a long pour into a dirty glass and drank it down. Didn’t even taste it. I set down the glass and leaned against the counter opposite Cass.

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said.

  “You okay?” she asked without turning.

  “Not really, but this will hel
p.” I refilled the bourbon.

  “No, it won’t, but this should. I assume you haven’t eaten anything?” She turned off the stove and spooned the stir-fry into a soup bowl and handed it to me. “You look terrible,” she said.

  Cass lit another cigarette while she watched me eat in silence. I asked her without meaning it if she wanted any, and she said she wasn’t hungry. She never is. Cass subsists on nicotine and energy bars, as far as I can tell. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her use a fork or order anything off a menu. Doesn’t eat, but knows her way around a kitchen; go figure. I finished the bowl with tasteless relish and set it on the counter, then shuffled to the living room and collapsed on the couch. I looked up at the ceiling and felt Cass watching me like a wounded animal in the dim light. My thoughts started to move and wander again. I started to tell her about it.

  When I finished talking, she stood and emptied the overflowing ashtray. Dawn wasn’t far off. It was more tomorrow than tonight. A milky gray light filtered through the window. Elvis trudged out of the bedroom, took a few licks from his water bowl, and came over and curled at my feet. Cass opened her laptop and came over to sit beside me.

  “There’s something you need to see,” she said.

  Chapter 7

  It was a few minutes after eleven when I found myself standing in the airless lobby of Margaret McKay’s Gramercy Park co-op. I admired the prewar grace—the ornate crown molding, the black-and-white marble floors, the stained glass entry, the flower stand arranged just so by the ancient elevator. The doors opened, and a well-dressed elderly couple stepped out with a yapping Yorkie between them. They nodded their hellos to Raymond the doorman and limped into the afternoon light as he held the big oak door and averted his eyes.

  Raymond was dressed in a bad woolen suit. He was tall and black and courteous and probably hated every resident in the building with a kill-list passion. “You said the name was Duck?” he asked. “Here to see Mrs. McKay?”

  “That’s right, Duck Darley. Apartment 4B, she said.”