Under Water

by Casey Barrett

  “You’ll protect her, won’t you, Charlie?”

  He stepped toward me in a flash of anger, the bloody knife pointed at my neck. “Watch your tone,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’ll do.” The knife tip pressed into my neck until I felt the skin opening. Convinced it was my last moment, I thought of my father seated in his prison cell, thought of my mother drowned in the bathtub, thought of Cass, and hoped to see her on the other side.

  “No,” she said.

  Charlie released the pressure and lowered the blade. “Excuse me?” he asked, turning.

  “I’m not going with you,” said Madeline.

  Her brother pressed the blade of the knife once again into his palm. He trembled before her. Blood dripped at his feet. “I would consider very carefully what you are saying,” he told her.

  “I’m not coming with you, Charlie,” she said, cold and calm. “I understand what that means. You can kill me. I should have done it myself years ago.”

  “Madeline,” I said. “Wait.”

  For what? Hell, I don’t know. For her brother to kill me first, so I didn’t have to witness that final horror.

  “Do me first,” I heard myself say.

  Charlie turned and raised the knife. His eyes had that hollow look of a man programmed to execute on command, a look devoid of self-doubt. I recognized that look. It was the same impenetrable mask that he wore behind the starting blocks of all his races. He drew the blade back, his eyes alight. I closed mine and accepted my fate.

  I opened them to a wail of hate that will forever scar the memory. Madeline launched herself at her brother, head down, arms bound behind her back. The crown of her head connected with Charlie’s chest and sent him falling backward into me. He thrashed at the air with the knife as the three of us went sprawling to the floor.

  Madeline was on top of him, and without the use of her arms, she fought with the only weapons at her disposal. She kneed him in fury between the legs, flung her head back and brought it down in a driving head butt. Their foreheads connected with a loud crack. As Madeline raised her head once more, Charlie managed to lift his arm.

  The knife hovered above them, the metal shining in the new morning light. As Charlie drove it down, I threw my body into its path. The blade broke flesh just below my shoulder. He brought it out and stabbed down again as his sister continued her frenzied assault. I felt a cold sensation rushing through me, blood flowing from my body from multiple points.

  Madeline let out another wail and delivered another strike of her head. The fight went out of Charlie, and his body went limp, the knife still embedded in my body.

  Chapter 33

  Madeline rolled onto her back and lay panting beside her brother for some time. I felt myself drifting toward death, knew that a loss of consciousness meant end of life. I forced my eyes to stay open. I called over to her. She looked at me in a daze.

  “The knife,” I gasped. “Help.”

  She managed to sit up, scooted toward me, her wrists still bound. She pressed her back against my chest and felt around blind for the blade. Her hands finally found it. I cried out as she yanked it up, felt more blood burst through the wound. Then she maneuvered it upside down and tried to cut herself free. She missed, slashed herself across the hands, her forearms. She never flinched. Continued pressing herself against the blade until it found her ties and sliced through the binds. Madeline slumped forward, picked up the knife.

  She looked at her brother knocked out beside her, looked at Marks dead across the room. She held the knife before her eyes; then turned it with the tip facing her heart.

  “Madeline,” I whispered. “Don’t. You’re free.”

  She glanced at me, knife still positioned one thrust from suicide. It stayed there as she considered my words. Then, slowly, it began to lower. The body between us began to stir. I was too weakened to react. I didn’t think Madeline registered the movement. I tried to warn her, felt consciousness slipping away.

  Charlie gave a roar and leapt at her, alive and murderous. Madeline turned to him, and their eyes met. The years of abuse and unholy union passed between them. Then she drove the knife into Charlie’s throat. Blood sprayed from his neck across her face as his jugular was severed. She kept pressing it in until his eyes went wide in final truth.

  I passed out soon after. I wish I could say I saw my entire troubled life flash before my eyes. I wish I could report that I saw some kind of light. No such luck. All I felt was relief.

  When I woke, under too-bright hospital lights, in a full house of pain, I can’t say I felt lucky to be alive. I hated that cliché as much as Lucy must have, as much as any damaged soul who’s felt the pull toward the final silence. A small army of cops and docs soon surrounded my bedside, asking too many questions, delivering the litany of injuries. More scars, more stitches, more reasons for nice, fat pills that killed the pain. I was told to expect a limp for life, or at least a few years if I took my rehab seriously.

  I was swooning in an opiate haze, trying to white-out memory, when I had a visitor. I thought I must be dreaming. There she was, seated in a wheelchair before my bed. A young nurse averted her eyes and left us in private.

  “You look like shit, cowboy,” Cass said.

  “She’s alive.”

  Cass nodded, wheeled closer to my bedside. She leaned forward and touched my cheek. “Poor Duck,” she said. “How bad was it?”

  I didn’t have to answer, just looked back into her bottomless black eyes and held her gaze. She nodded, understanding. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Guess we’re even,” I said.

  She glanced down at her wounds, covered by the flimsy hospital gown. Somehow she pulled it off, still looked gorgeous. Cass shook her head.

  “It was never about that,” she said.

  “Sure, it was. And now the debt has been cleared.”

  “I’m too selfish for it to be that simple,” she said. “I never felt like I owed you anything.”

  “Then why . . .”

  “Same reason I go to the dungeon. I was drawn to the darkness.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” I said, waving an IV’d hand around the small room. “What else would you like to know?”

  “Charlie and Madeline?”

  “He’d been abusing her since she was twelve years old. Killed anyone who got in the way. Starting with her first boyfriend, six years ago.”

  “His own sister.”

  “Sick as they come.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Cass.

  “Madeline got her revenge, as she promised Lucy. She filmed herself blowing Marks. Charlie saw the video—at their last meeting upstate. Turned out he’d been blackmailing him already, for sins real and imagined. The video just guaranteed his death.”

  “And Anna, her brothers?”

  “Enlisted to help in the cause,” I said. “They didn’t like what I did to brother Denis on that Williamsburg sidewalk.”

  “I knew you went too far,” she said.

  “I always do.”

  We let that linger between us. Then I asked, “When do you think they’ll let us out of here? I gotta see how Elvis is doing.”

  Cass looked out the window, avoided my eyes. She tilted her head in sorrow as a bright glow of sunlight shined against her high cheeks. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I think I’m done.”

  “With what?”

  “All of this: the city, the dungeon, playing the sidekick detective, everything. I need to go away for a while. I need to find some balance, some light against the darkness. There’s a Buddhist retreat, upstate near Woodstock, I think I need . . .”

  “Marry me.”

  She smiled. A little. “Don’t ask for things you can’t take,” she said.

  “I can take it. Look at me. Is this not a guy who can take a beating?” I motioned to the masochistic evidence across my body.

  “Poor Duck,” she said. She reached out and touched my temple, let it linger, traced a finger down my fa
ce. She removed it before it could reach my lips, before my heart could beat any harder. “You’ll never understand, will you?”

  “I understand that the facts never make sense.”

  “Sense is another universe,” she said.

  “Don’t leave.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Please try to take better care of yourself,” she said. Then she turned the wheelchair and rolled herself away.

  Detectives Miller and Sullivan stopped by and questioned me sometime later. Sully managed to treat me without contempt. Over an eight-day span, I had been directly linked to six deaths, witnessed every body up close. Now that they were able to identify the killer in each one, they’d lost that cop edge. They seemed almost human. Miller and I even made a tentative play date for our dogs to meet in the Union Square dog run.

  I’d made another appearance on the cover of the Post. They were calling me “Death Darley” now. I sent a text to Roy Perry, telling him that his exclusive would have to wait.

  * * *

  While the slow healing process began, they went to work on my broken mind. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by a well-meaning shrink who treated me like an Iraq war veteran past the point of redemption. I was informed that my apartment was no longer a crime scene. A company called Gotham Trauma Services had been hired to scrub the floors clean of blood, brain tissue, and assorted human debris. I’d need a new couch, rug, and coffee table. I was told that the city’s Office of Victim Services covered $2,500 of the cleanup cost, but that Gotham had charged $7,500 for a particularly messy job. The other five grand was on me. Maybe I’d pass the bill on to Margaret McKay.

  Eventually they let me out of there. On my way home, I picked up Elvis at the vet’s and limped by the liquor store without looking. I wasn’t sure how long I’d manage. There were no grand resolutions haunting my battered head. I didn’t believe in “rock bottom” or any of the wake-up call platitudes served up by the suffering souls in AA. I’d gone deep enough to know that there was no such thing as the bottom. But I also knew it was time I took a look at my passions for dissipation.

  When I reached my place, I intended to hunker in, order delivery for every meal, deny my thirst, and avoid the world for as long as possible. But home had lost its charm. The living room reeked of disinfectant. Every dish and glass was sitting out on the kitchen counter, scrubbed clean of blood splatters. The only unsoiled piece of furniture was the club chair that was always reserved for Cass. It didn’t feel right to sit in it.

  So Elvis and I settled out in the garden with a stack of books full of blood and suffering. The September sun was a lost memory, and the city was showing its true cold colors. Heavy clouds gathered overhead, and the last leaves blew from the trees. The garden was nothing but shadows, with no false hope. I opened a book by James Ellroy. He seemed to know a bit about dark places. I sipped at tasteless seltzer water and waited to hear from Margaret McKay.

  I sat out there each day until I could no longer stand the chill. Then I’d stumble inside for a few hours of fitful sleep before returning to my silent page-turning vigil out back.

  Finally, I woke one morning and gave Elvis a long proper walk around the neighborhood. Then I showered and stepped into a clean pair of clothes. I found myself limping the three blocks north to Gramercy Park.

  She wasn’t too happy to see me. There was the threat of a scene when Raymond the doorman refused to let me up. When I offered to call the cops for them, they reconsidered, and I was permitted to board the elevator. Now Margaret McKay stood in her doorway like a mummified Cleopatra. All the work she’d had done stood out in relief against a suddenly elderly face. Her dark eyes looked out at me from some lost place beyond the living. She steadied herself with an aged hand against the door frame. The other clutched at a large emerald stone hanging from her neck. She wore a simple black dress that hung over a skeletal frame. Her feet were bare, her toes unpainted.

  “May I come in?” I asked.

  “If you must,” said Margaret. She turned and walked back down the hall of the darkened apartment. I followed.

  The place held its breath in mourning. The curtains were drawn. The only light in the room came from an antique lamp on a small table beside a leather club chair. A Durrell novel was folded open under the light, next to a half-empty glass of white wine. Margaret lifted the glass, drained it, and moved deeper into the shadows of the living room.

  I heard her sigh out of the darkness. “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  She raised an eyebrow and padded off toward the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open, a bottle being removed, a glass refilled. I sat down in her chair and examined her reading material. It was Durrell’s Clea, the last of the Alexandria Quartet. I turned to the beginning and found a quote from the Marquis de Sade. Something about “the perpetual consequence of crimes.” She returned with her wine before I could turn to the first page.

  “I hope you didn’t lose my place,” she said.

  I had. I closed the book and set it back down under the light. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I watched her drink. I considered ending my experiment with abstinence. It would be a fitting setting to return to the sauce. No higher power could deny that.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About how everything . . .”

  “She’s missing,” said Margaret. “Again.”

  “Madeline?”

  She nodded, her grip tight around the slim glass. “She left her room at New York Presbyterian, where she was undergoing psychiatric care.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A few weeks. It seemed she was making progress.”

  “And no word from her since?”

  “None,” she said. “She emptied her account this time.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Lawrence, I hope you won’t be offended if I don’t enlist your services once more.”

  “Don’t think I’d be up to the challenge even if you asked.”

  Margaret took a long drink. I watched the wine slide down her slim, creased throat. Then she brought it down and frowned into the remains. Her body was dying before me, her spirit dead already. She straightened her spine, rolled back her shoulders, but it was no use. Despite the continued beating of her heart, she had already crossed over. I wanted to go to her and wrap her lifeless figure in my arms. She was a wealthy woman with an Olympic champion for a son and a talented, beautiful daughter. Where had it all gone wrong? From the beginning, I supposed. She’d married the wrong man. Then he died young, and she sent her children to another wrong man, one who couldn’t keep his hands off of the not-yet-women he coached. And she had produced the smartest and most talented man of all. A force of nature that took what he wanted, set monstrous goals, and achieved them all. A monster he was, a sick man beneath the surface. A man who’d turned his sickness on the closest innocent he could find. Poor Madeline, she never had a chance.

  “Charlie,” I said. “Did you ever suspect?”

  Her body didn’t react. She sipped at her glass.

  “Lawrence, I have been blind to many things in my life. Perhaps it is my greatest strength, the ability to ignore the darkness in men and continue living. I knew about Teddy’s history, as I told you. And I knew about my late husband’s activities, before him. But there is some darkness that is impossible to see through.”

  Margaret turned her back to me and returned to the shadows of the dark room. A thin streak of light snuck through the high curtains and caught her pale skin as she moved past.

  “I think you should go,” she said.

  I turned to leave. Down the hall, framed photos of Charlie in Olympic triumph still hung on the walls. I stopped in front of one; he stood on top of a podium, hand over his heart, eyes damp. I could almost hear the national anthem as it played in his honor. The peak of any life. Before it all started, when his sister was still an innocent little girl, their father newly dead. The re
semblance to Madeline leapt out at me, in their wide mouths and high, sculpted cheeks. I had to look away.

  Epilogue

  In the months that followed, the media requests poured in, as did the job offers. My well-publicized dealings with death shot me to the top of the Google results anytime someone searched for “private investigator NYC.” I guess they equated front-page experience with competence. Never mind the PTSD or my tenuous sobriety. Never mind that I wasn’t even licensed. I turned them all down, every job, every eager news outlet desperate to hear my story.

  Instead I took Elvis on long, limping walks and read book after book, the bleaker the better. I grew out a beard to cover the scars. Cass called to say she’d decided to extend her stay at the Buddhist retreat upstate. She suggested I join her. I told her that wasn’t happening. Like Madeline, I seemed to have developed a phobia of travel, of leaving the unsafe confines of the city. I needed the people and the perpetual light around me at all times. The thought of a dark, empty night in the country filled me with a dread I was in no rush to address.

  I stayed out of work through the new year, living off credit cards, until a case arrived that suited my comfort zone. It was a painless gig covering a painful divorce. My specialty. There were no personal ties to complicate matters, no reminders of a past I’d rather forget. Just a rich cheating husband and a sad-eyed wife named Jamie who’d had enough. I followed him for a few days. It didn’t take long. His wife really could have done it herself. Every Tuesday and Thursday he would go to the Standard for lunch, and after his Cobb salad he would walk a few blocks west to the Liberty Motel. A few minutes later, the cocktail waitress from the hotel bar would take her lunch break and meet him there. She was a leggy young blonde who was clearly in thrall with the illicit thrill. He was a swarthy, sporty Italian who didn’t take much precaution, the sort who could compartmentalize and shrug off the simple sins. I took the necessary pictures and brought them to Jamie with all due sympathy. Then I succumbed to a revenge romp with her in their marital bed. It didn’t make either of us feel much better, but her payment helped me replace the furniture in my empty living room.