by Rob Hart
“Both of you, come down to the office in a few,” I tell them.
The two of them look at me like I’m calculus. Maybe they’re expecting me to be more broken up about this, but I have work to do.
Dave is shirtless behind the bar, bones sticking out of his emaciated frame at odd angles. He reaches to the ground and comes up with a bottle of Jay. I put my hand around the base, considering the forked tongue licking the back of my skull. I slide it back toward him.
“Need a clear head right now,” I tell him. “Can you get some relief, come down to the office in a few?” He nods, doesn’t judge. Like a good bartender should.
People stop me and try to talk. They want to know how I’m holding up. Which is bad enough. Worse are the looks. That ‘I can’t believe he lost someone else under horrific circumstances’ look.
Before anyone can make the mistake of asking me how I’m doing, I head downstairs.
Despite the crowd upstairs, the concrete-walled basement is empty, the two unisex bathrooms under the stairs vacant. I slip into the one on the right, hang the ‘out of order’ sign on the knob, and close the door behind me.
The bathroom is wallpapered with band stickers, from the sink to the exposed piping. Everything except the empty wooden bookshelf set into the far corner opposite the toilet, which is scuffed but clean, holding a few spare rolls of toilet paper and some old issues of Good Housekeeping.
I slide my hand under the third shelf from the bottom and unhook the metal clasp and push the bookshelf into an unlit hallway. I step into the void and grope for the handle to open the reinforced steel door into my office.
I call it my office, even though it’s not really mine. It’s just where I work. It doesn’t have a name, and truly it belongs to all of us who know about it.
The room isn’t much, able to fit eight people comfortably. The floor is covered in a brown floral area rug that’s flanked by two black leather couches. The eggplant-colored paint on the walls makes the room feel bigger and smaller at the same time. The frosted glass ashtray on the coffee table is empty. I pull it toward me, light a smoke, put my feet up, and wait.
Bombay, Lunette, and Dave come in together and sit on the couch across from me. No one wants to start, balancing on sharp edges and waiting for me to say something. They want some kind of assurance I’m still human.
I rub the palm of my hand, the words you promised cracked and faded but not completely washed away in the shower. I ask, “Did any of you see me after I left here last night?”
I’m met by a collection of blank stares. I tell them, “That’s fine. Moving on. Chell disappeared from Fourth and B. Someone must have heard something. I need to know when each of you last saw Chell. If she said anything I should know about.”
Dave rubs his thighs and looks at the floor saying, “She was in here two nights ago. I don’t think she said anything interesting. I’m sorry, I have to get back to the bar. I can’t trust Bess up there too long.”
Dave leaves and Lunette nods up to my hat, her dwindling Russian accent twisting through her words like roots. “It suits you.”
“Does it? I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I thought you were going to give me shit for it.”
“Not on a day like today.” She looks away from me, and when she turns back, her face is pointed at the floor. “The body is still warm. Don’t you want to take a few minutes to grieve?”
“Whoever did this is still out there. If he hurts someone else, it’s on me.”
“Let the cops handle it,” says Bombay.
“I don’t trust the cops to handle it. And this is our neighborhood.”
Lunette nods, not agreeing but accepting my stance. She says, “Me and Chell did drunk brunch on Sunday. She seemed fine.”
“What did she talk about? Anyone bothering her?”
“She didn’t say anything like that.”
I finish my cigarette and stamp it out in the ashtray. Bombay asks, “What are you going to do?”
“Not sure yet. I’ve been brushing up on the Old Testament for ideas.”
“You’re going to kill the guy?”
“If I’m fortunate enough to find him before the police do.”
“You can’t do that.” I get to my feet. Bombay flinches. I would never hit him, but sometimes I’m not sure he knows that. I tell him, “This is America. I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
Lunette says, “Ash, you need to talk about this. Can we please just talk?”
I shouldn’t take this out on them. Besides my mom and Chell, Bombay and Lunette are the only two people who matter. And they mean well. I know they do. But I don’t need to talk. Talking about dead people doesn’t bring them back.
Neither would what I have planned, but it would make me feel a hell of a lot better.
“There’s nothing to say right now,” I tell them.
Tibo is at the bar’s single booth, set back in an alcove across from the stairwell. He lives down the block from Fourth and B, so I march over. He’s poring over nautical maps while Mikey talks at him. I stand in front of the table and Mikey looks up but Tibo doesn’t, his face hidden behind a cascade of dreadlocks.
Mikey says, “Ash, I’m so sorry. I just can’t believe it about Chell. Listen, if you want to talk man, I’m here for you, I really am.”
“Shut the fuck up, Mikey.” I rap my knuckles on the table and Tibo looks up, surprised to be in a bar. “You see Chell lately?”
He nods. “Last night.”
“Outside. Conference.”
We push through the crowd and step to the curb. Tibo produces a rolled cigarette from thin air and lights it. He doesn’t wait for me to prompt him. “I was sitting by the window, saw her go walking down the block. Late, I don’t remember what time. I was blazed, so, you know.” He shrugs. “Definitely after midnight. I got home at midnight.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“Couple of people.”
“Did you recognize them?”
He eyes bounce back and forth like he’s flipping through a filing cabinet. “They’re sort of familiar. A guy. I’d recognize him if I saw him. Older guy, handsome.” Then he smacks his head. “Wait. There was another guy with them. But he had a bag over his head.”
“What do you mean a bag?”
“Like a sack. A black sack.”
“Did you see where they went?”
“East. I can only see so much from my window.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me about it? Anything else that stood out?”
He cringes like it hurts to think. “Chell had on this old dress, like vintage. Some 1930s-type get-up, hat and everything.”
That’s not something I associate with her. She preferred bondage to vintage.
Tibo says, “If you want, I can ask around, see what the deal is. And listen man, something else. The cops were here asking about you.”
I’m suddenly aware of everyone standing on the sidewalk, scanning faces for people who aren’t familiar, or who just look too serious. “When?”
“Ten minutes ago. Everyone played dumb. They left cards with a few people. Do you want one?”
“Fuck no. But thanks for telling me.”
As I’m turning to leave he asks, “Do you own scuba gear?”
My ability to deliver a witty retort is rendered powerless. “Why?”
“Long story. Don’t worry about it.”
With that, he walks down the block, back to his home planet.
Chell was in the neighborhood last night. I can work with that.
People call me a private investigator. That’s not accurate. To become a private investigator in New York City, you need three years of experience. I don’t know where to get that. Then you need to take a test administered by the state, which costs several hundred dollars. Then you have to renew the license every two years.
That’s far more money and effort than I’m willing to commit to anything. And anyway, having a license means I’d have to play this
game aboveboard, which would really cut into my business plan.
I prefer to think of myself as a blunt instrument. Point me at a job—find people, find things, transport stuff, look disagreeable—I get it done, and I accept money upon completion. Sometimes I accept alcohol or drugs because I’m comfortable operating on a barter system.
Bombay has joked that I should advertise, but I never really needed to. My number gets passed around by people who are happy with my work. Every now and again my phone rings and someone offers me a job. I take it or I don’t.
It’s not the job I dreamt about as a kid (archeologist), but it pays my bills often enough to indicate I’m pretty good at it.
My stomach twists on itself, reminding me I haven’t eaten today. I stop into the pizza place on the corner and find Good Kelly seated at a white Formica tabletop in the back, digging into a spinach roll. She waves me over. Her neon green coat and jet black hair make her pale skin pop in the florescent light.
“Hey,” she says. A shadow passes over her face and she remembers we’re supposed to be sad. “How are you holding up?”
“I don’t know how to answer that without sounding like an asshole,” I tell her.
“I’m so sorry. And I feel like a dick for having to ask this right now, but I was actually planning on calling you. I need a favor.” She wipes her mouth and puts the napkin over the half-finished roll, says, “I’m moving in the next few days, and I need a hand loading stuff onto a truck.”
“What neighborhood are you moving to?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Soho?”
“New York.”
“What now?”
She gets up and pushes in her chair. “I wish I could explain more, but I have to go meet Harley. I think I’m late. But if you could come give me a hand, I would appreciate it. Can I let you know when?”
“I’ll help. But where are you moving to?”
“Austin, Texas.”
“That’s madness.”
“I can rent a house down there for what it costs to rent bowling shoes up here. I’ll tell you all about it when you come over.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Can I count on you?”
“Always. But why the hell would you leave all this for Texas?”
“It’s time.”
“Before you go, did you see me or Chell last night?”
She frowns. “Neither.”
She looks like she wants to say something, but settles for kissing me on the cheek. Her lips are warm and a little greasy from the spinach roll.
Kelly is native. Her blood is made up of the same thing as mine: The limescale water that drips from the ceilings of the subway. I can’t accept what she’s saying as truth.
The guy behind the counter gives me a slice without me having to ask, and I pass two dollars across the glass to him. I step outside with it, balancing it on a white paper plate, and watch Kelly disappear into the crowd. The traffic is backed up on the streets and the lights and the sounds and the movement and I wonder how anyone could live without this. The silence must be deafening.
The last number I had for Ginny doesn’t work so I walk by Chanticleer and find a bored queen standing behind the velvet rope marking off the smoking area. I ask, “Ginny around?”
She exhales in my direction, the streetlight catching the glitter in her blonde wig. “Who?”
“Right then.”
That’ll be enough. Word will get back. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re going to talk to the Queen of the Lower East Side, it helps to have some time to work up the nerve.
After that I wander a bit, sorting through what I know about this.
I’m operating on a fair assumption Chell knew her killer. Probably someone with a car, or at least access to one. She called me at 4 a.m. and the news said she was found around 9 a.m. She was snatched and assaulted in the space of five hours. Which means the attack happened someplace in the neighborhood or in the car. If it happened in the car, it was probably a van. Something private, without windows.
The dress she was wearing, and the man with the sack on his head, that has me cold. But it happened before she called me, so if I can figure it out, I can pinpoint who was with her when she got killed.
I don’t realize where I’m walking until I find myself at the corner of Fourth and B. Where Chell called me from. I stand there a long time, chain smoking cigarettes until my head hurts, even though there’s not much to see.
There’s a Korean deli that’s closed more than its open. Probably would have been closed when she called last night. There’s a bar across the street, one that’s too trendy for me. No one is smoking outside so they must have a back patio, which means less of a chance someone saw something. Then there’s a jumble of apartments and a building that’s maybe a school.
There are a lot of windows looking down here. Most of them are dark now. A few are lit up and in one I see a figure sweep across beige blinds. It would take a year and a day to knock on all these doors.
The street is end-of-the-world deserted. Someone could throw me in the back of a van right now and no one would notice. There’s no police tape. The cops must have combed through here. Maybe they didn’t even check, considering it’s not where she died.
I drop to my knees, run my fingers over the rough sidewalk. The pavement is cold and I know it’s not possible, but I smell lavender in the sharp autumn air. The slice of pizza feels like a chunk of granite in my stomach, and I fight to keep it down.
She was right here less than twenty-four hours ago and then she was gone, like she phased out of existence. She reappeared dead in Queens, and I hope she took a chunk out of him during the time in between.
He can consider it a preview.
A bouncer comes out of the club across the street and stands guard outside the door. Big guy, with a neck the size of my thigh and a haircut like someone hacked at his head with a lawnmower. The kind of haircut that says ‘I’m too big to care.’
“Hey,” I call over to him as I cross the street. “You work last night?”
He doesn’t budge. I stand in front of him and ask, “Incredible Hulk, how about a little courtesy?”
He whips off his sunglasses, moving faster than I would expect a guy his size could. His eyes are bloodshot and as wide as dinner plates. Juicer, probably. He says, “What do you think, talking to me like that?”
“I’m not sure that was a complete sentence, but fine.” I point over my shoulder. “There was a girl across the street, on that corner, last night. She called me and then she got killed. I need to know if you were working last night so I can ask you if you saw anything.”
“No.”
“This is my fault for being unclear. I can’t ask you, or you didn’t see anything?”
“I didn’t work last night.”
“Should I even bother asking who was?”
“Why don’t you get out of here?”
I take a step toward him and he flinches, but only because he’s too big to be used to signs of aggression. “I know you’re a tough guy, but you need to know I’m not smart enough to let that stop me. All I want is a name. If you can find it in your big teddy-bear heart to give it to me, I’ll leave.”
His eyes light up and he’s wondering if he should drop me. I set my feet. If he comes at me, I’ll go for his throat. Doesn’t matter how much you can lift, your trachea doesn’t get much out of that. But I’d rather not go down that road, so when the tension disappears from his shoulders and he puts his sunglasses back on, I’m pretty psyched.
“Guy named Steve,” he says. “Not working again for a few days. Sunday, I think.”
“Thanks, pal. I appreciate that.” I extend my hand, but he goes back to statue mode. I take it as my cue to get the hell away from him.
This city. It takes and takes and pieces of it fall away and we get lost trying to put it back together.
Christ, my thoughts are getting blurry. I need sleep. Real sleep, because blacking out after drinking too
much whiskey is not nearly the same thing.
I pull out my cell phone to check the time, but I forgot to charge it so it’s dead.
The siren of a fire truck echoes down the street, coming closer. As the rig passes, I take off my hat and hold it to my chest. One of the firefighters riding in the side cabin sees this and gives me a thumbs-up. I nod at him and when the truck is gone I put my hat back on and keep going.
When I hit the corner of Tenth, I light a smoke and consider my options. Which are sort of slim. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve found missing people before, but that’s easy when you have a name and a picture.
I need newspapers. It’s late, and the morning edition of the Post will be released soon. The Post may have a bad rep in this town, but they leave the other tabs in the dust when it comes to crime coverage.
First, I need to charge my phone.
Then I remember Chell’s apartment. I keep a spare charger there.
I should go to Chell’s apartment.
The cops must have checked it, but it’s not a crime scene so they can’t still be there.
Cup of coffee and I’ll be good to go. Maybe two, and my brain will fire back up and I can make the trip out to Brooklyn. It would be even nicer to blow a couple lines of coke because then I’ll solve the case and build a house by sunup, but I keep thinking: Clear head.
First, bathroom break. I turn the corner to my block. There’s a black, late-model Impala with tinted windows idling outside my building, which can only mean one thing. I consider running, but that’ll look bad, and I really have to pee. So I hedge and hope they don’t know what I look like.
Of course, they’re in my back as I’m opening my front door.
There’s two of them. A tall, cigarette-thin Latino and a shorter white guy carved out of an uneven block of sandstone. The tall one is the talker.
“Mister McKenna,” he says, flipping out his wallet to show off his shield. “I’m Detective Medina, and this is Detective Grabowski. We’ve been looking for you.”