The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  Around the corner was the site of that clubwear store where she and I had ducked into the photo booth and I had tried to feign interest in the glittery hot pants and feather boas that delighted her. The place was empty now, but the facade looked exactly the same, and I’d pass by it on the way to my favorite coffee place on Spring Street and catch my reflection in the glass. The feeling of the area had changed a bit, too, becoming slightly more homogenous and monied. There seemed to be more European tourists around, and, of course, there was no more shadow from the Twin Towers.

  In the afternoon, I made a copy of the report and dropped it off with my coworker who had asked for it, even before I had finished reading it myself. “Cool!” he said. I had a fleeting thought that perhaps I should be protective of the thing, that maybe it was a bit unseemly to be sharing it with someone who would take it in like some spooky campfire tale. Whatever. He was interested in his own way, and he was a good guy. I was more worried that I had accidentally left a page in the photocopy machine and someone in the office would find it. I returned to double-check, twice.

  I went back to the interview room to read the next section. It was dense and medical, twelve pages cataloguing the external examination of Ashley’s body as well as detailed descriptions of her injuries. “There are a total of forty-seven (47) sharp force traumatic injuries including stab wounds and incised wounds. Twelve fatal wounds will be discussed in detail.” Forty-seven stab wounds! It was impossible to fathom. As an experiment, I began tapping my left hand against my chest, counting up from one to forty-seven. My arm got tired at around twenty-three. By thirty it felt as if things had gone on forever. After forty I began to feel silly, but I continued to the end.

  I could close my eyes and picture a girl in a bathrobe and camisole being knocked down to the carpet and pummeled with a riot of force. There were sounds at first, I could hear them. Cries and tears and then later just his grunts and the sickening whoosh of velocity and tearing flesh. Her body was devastated and mangled. I was viewing it from far away, so I could only really register the energy leaving her. The rising of the chest getting slower and slower. She was unconscious. It was not Ashley. It couldn’t be. I tried to picture someone else, someone I had been with more recently, or even myself, and I couldn’t do that either. “The soft tissues of the neck have been entirely transected, and this incised wound extends into the right aspect of the cervical spine.” I couldn’t do it because it was so far out of my frame of reference, so far beyond anything I had ever seen before. I had never been in a war zone. I had never even seen a dead body. I could imagine details from plenty of other things that I hadn’t seen happen—the future birth of my first child, hitting a deer with my car—but Ashley’s head being nearly severed from her body, her neck completely flayed? No. Sorry.

  Wound no. 20 had punctured her spleen and gone approximately six inches deep. Where was your spleen? I made a note to google it when I got back to my desk. Wound no. 26 was to her spine, from the side. Wound no. 27 had gone through Ashley’s right lung and was six and a half inches deep. Six inches was longer than the length of my hand. So that meant something had gone that deep straight into her chest from the outside? No. 19 was through the back, but it had also hit the right lung. How was she being stabbed from all sides at once? Was he rolling her over and back again? This was getting too abstract. I was no longer light-headed, no longer dizzy. I was simply numb.

  • • •

  At dinner parties or on a date or in one of those long conversations with someone new where it feels as though you’re really showing each other essential parts of yourself or telling your sad stories, I’d begun to practice talking about her in different ways.

  “My childhood best friend was murdered at twenty-two,” I’d say. Thank you, yeah, I know. It was a while ago, and we were sort of estranged at the time.

  Or “My friend who was killed, there were some things about her life that were kind of shocking, that she told me about the year before and I didn’t know what to do.” Yeah. It’s kind of heavy. I still don’t really know if I’ve processed it. It can make me feel like an asshole sometimes.

  Occasionally I’d go a little further at the outset. “Did you ever have a friend who you were really close to as a kid and then you went in different directions and thinking of them felt sort of complicated?” Everyone did. “I’m not sure how it is for guys,” I’d say if I was speaking to one, “but to girls, there always seems to be this thread of competitiveness that sneaks into things when boys enter the picture, like one of you has to be the pretty one and the other is the smart one.” People seemed to grasp that concept. “But Ashley and me,” I’d go on, “we were sort of bonded before all of that started to happen . . .” I’d trail off, feeling self-conscious. “But then . . . well, she represented a lot of things,” I’d say, and then look up, searching.

  Did I feel guilty that I had let our friendship go? People would always ask, a little sheepishly usually. Time went by, and the answer changed. In the years directly following her death, it was no. I thought of her all the time, but I hadn’t really cried. “I was young, too,” I’d say. “I didn’t know how to start the hard conversations, like asking her if she was happy or felt safe or what she really wanted to do with her life and was this really it? I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.”

  The female friends I had in my life now I loved enthusiastically, sincerely. We showed up for one another—breakups, moves, family funerals—and frustrated one another, but most of all we saw one another, in the truest sense of the word. We bore witness to one another’s lives and struggles. We asked one another the tough questions and stuck around for the answers, even if we didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t fault myself for not having seen things that way when I was younger, however. It had been a process of trial and error to get to this place.

  It was easy to lose people to the tides of New York City, but by the end of my twenties I had figured out who was worth holding on to, and hold on I did. I let my friends know how much they meant to me and felt genuinely invested in their happiness. Most of these people I had known only since after college, though. A few went back to high school, but no one earlier than that. No one went as far back as Ashley would have. Not even close.

  • • •

  Later I found an anthology online called Headless Man in Topless Bar: Studies of 725 Cases of Strip Club Related Criminal Homicides, and I read through it in a week. It was telephone-book thick. Ashley wasn’t in it, but dozens of other dancers, clients, and escorts were, and many of the cases were unsolved. The fact that the book even existed, and that killings would be grouped together in that way, felt sickeningly cynical. The tone of the book left me cold, as though people saw the murder of women who worked in the sex industry as all the same and that they got what was coming to them for having slipped into this dark and shameful underworld.

  But part of me understood that I was trying to make my own sort of calculation. I never once thought that Ashley was to blame for her own death, but I couldn’t help wondering about the ways in which her lifestyle might have put her in harm’s way. It was a risk assessment we all did, a way to pretend we saw bad things coming after the fact while trying to make sense of the world. He died of lung cancer, yup, smoked a pack a day . . . It was a mugging, yeah, Bushwick at four in the morning—no good. Ashley was beautiful and wild and teased men and used them, and danger came knocking. There had to be a connection, right?

  Someone, somewhere knew the answer. I’d drive by her old house in Peapack when I went home to visit my parents and park my car at the end of her driveway, sitting for twenty minutes at a stretch without really knowing why. I’d stare at our class pictures and snapshots from concerts and trips, hoping to have some epiphany, though I had no idea what kind. Someday I’d put together exactly what stories I attached to that last week in New York, I’d tell people. I’d figure out what it all meant to me and why it still felt so alive. Someday, yeah, I would do all that.
/>   • • •

  The final part was the drawings—the location of her wounds marked up on a body diagram with arrows numbering each one that referenced an earlier form. The visual effect was like a game of Operation crossed with the acupuncture posters I’d seen in storefronts in Chinatown. By this point, I had been immersed in the language, the phrases, and the protocol of violence made clinical for the better part of a day. I had read detailed descriptions of the state of each of Ashley’s excised, traumatized organs, followed along as the neuropathologist used a Stryker saw to cut a cross section through her brain, and learned that her heart weighed 210 grams. After looking through dozens of pages, I felt as if I had moved from emotional engagement to dissociation again. I was ready for this to be over.

  The diagram was a bald, androgynous figure, with the outline of his/her body from the back and the front splayed out. There were no breasts or genitals; however, the curve of the ass from the back looked decidedly feminine. The wounds on the front of the body, the ones marked “gaping,” were drawn in a leaf shape, almost as if this hairless, genital-less naked person had fallen asleep under an elm tree and the wind had blown a few stray leaves down upon her chest.

  • • •

  That evening, at the end of work, I put all the coroner’s pages back into the FedEx envelope and slipped the whole thing into my purse. I got on my bike and headed across town to meet my chef friend Dan at a cocktail party. There was aquavit in little crystal glasses, and I drank many. There were tiny canapés such as tuna tartare with smoked salt, and I ate many. There were flirting and toasting and I had almost let the feelings and the images of earlier in the day slip my mind until I reached into my bag for something and felt the hard edges of that envelope.

  On nights like these, it was impossible to ignore the guilt question. But even when I wasn’t having a rosy, buzzy, fortunate sort of time, I recognized that my perspective had shifted over the years. It wasn’t just that it looked as if they had found the guy and that he didn’t seem to have had anything to do with Ashley’s “secret life.” I felt a little guilty that I had assumed that it would all add up. But there were other feelings that were more insidious.

  It’s a complex thing, guilt. I knew that now, whereas before it used to seem a lot more discrete. I thought you either felt it or you didn’t and that it would be obvious which was which. But now—survivor’s guilt, bargaining, there were so many different kinds that ebbed and flowed, and when you went looking you could find them everywhere. It would be Ashley’s birthday, and I’d wonder if I had said X to her on Y date, maybe she and I would have been closer in her last year. Boom: guilt. But . . . who knows if that had happened, if she still wouldn’t be dead today? It would be naive to think that could have changed the outcome. Or I’d be disappointed by someone and think that if Ashley were alive we’d have been friends for more than two decades, and you really don’t get too many chances for long relationships like that. I should have valued that more, been around, reconnected, found out what she really wanted from life, and given her my support. Maybe she needed more of that back then. Boom: guilt. But . . . most people don’t think like that at age twenty. That’s one of the defining features of being twenty, actually.

  It was excruciatingly unknowable: why she was her and I was me and she was there and I was here. That was really what guilt felt like to me, I understood now: trying to organize that impossible pile into a shape I could live with. I had been doing it all along.

  There were many times when I’d felt just outside the events of my own life, including some of the time I had spent with Ashley. She was someone who jumped in without caring what people thought—sailing down Broadway on heels of chunky Lucite—and now, without intending to, I realized she’d given me a reason to take some pretty bold actions of my own.

  I could feel myself picking up speed. I now had the precise outline of the violence and pain Ashley had faced at the end, the terrifying, unfathomable wounds she had suffered, but it still felt like just the beginning. Who was she, really, to the people who knew her and loved her that final year? Who was the killer, and how did they cross paths?

  I didn’t want to wait for the next judicial proceeding for more information. Though I wasn’t quite ready to dive headfirst into Ashley’s LA world, I could reach out to someone I already knew to see how it felt as practice, someone I didn’t need to be intimidated by. He might not have much to offer me, but in many ways he’d be a perfect test case for helping me to learn about a side of Ashley I had never seen on my own. I would start with Oliver.

  7

  THE DAY MICHAEL JACKSON DIED

  “YOU’RE A LONG way from home,” a woman is saying to me, both of us seated in an empty movie theater, waiting for the show to start. It is the summer of 2009, and I’m in Seattle to meet my old friend Oliver and ask him what he remembers about Ashley—only he doesn’t know it yet. The anticipation is making me anxious, fidgety, more talkative than normal, and unable to eat more than a few bites.

  Seattleites are reasonably friendly, I am finding, so when they ask me where I’m from and what brings me to their city, I tell them the truth. I tell the truth in varying degrees of detail, though, depending on my audience. To the cab driver who picks me up from the airport, a stoner girl with dreads, younger than me, I play up the friendship angle. To the U-Dub professor I meet sitting at the counter of one of Seattle’s better tattooed-chef-small-plates spots, I talk more about research and interviewing. To the guy I meet at a wine bar around the corner from the restaurant, I talk about crime and secret lives. He asks me to go to a jazz club with him later that night, and I can tell it’s a bolder move than he’s used to making. I decline.

  Michael Jackson died the day before, just as I was leaving my office at New York for JFK. From the time it takes me to get from lower Manhattan to Queens, the news has mutated from “developing” to “nobody in the world anywhere could be caring about anything other than this.”

  On the flight out west, everyone’s seat-back mini-televisions flash the same pictures: crowds up in Harlem; crowds outside the Los Angeles home; the young, hopeful kid in bell-bottoms; the emaciated man at the end. Commentators speak solemnly about Michael’s demons, his loose grasp on reality, and the outpouring of public grief not seen since the death of Princess Diana. The cultural footnote seems oddly fitting as a backdrop to what’s going on in my head. Something big is happening out there, too.

  • • •

  Oliver and I haven’t spoken in almost a decade, not since a short while after that weekend he slept with Ashley, my last weekend with her. My breakup with his roommate had been messy, and I’d told myself I needed to cut all ties.

  Oliver did know Ashley was dead, because I’d told him with a melodramatic flourish when I’d run into him on the subway a few months after it happened. “Remember my friend from LA who you fucked when she visited me two summers ago? She was murdered.” And then I just about turned on my heel and exited stage left. I took some satisfaction in the shock I got to wield like a weapon. Girls whom you have one-night stands with are people, too, I was trying to say. Their lives continue even if you forget them. They are flawed humans just like you who shit and cry and sometimes end up stabbed to death in their living rooms.

  I didn’t blame him for being a bit of an aggressive dick on his date with Ashley, though. Not anymore. I had seen enough to understand that most people back then, all of us in our early twenties, really, had never given too much thought to the marks they were leaving on each other—the flake-outs, the fights, the betrayals. No one seemed to remember that there might not be a chance for a do-over, and they certainly weren’t making time for one. We were all living in the moment, just like Oprah had taught us to do. We all thought we had but world enough and time to screw up, fuck up, cheat, and mistreat each other and still have it turn out okay in the end. It had to, right?

  • • •

  Oliver comes to meet me in the lobby of the Ace, the trendy boutique hotel
where I’m staying for the weekend. He knows I’m in town on some kind of writing assignment, but I’ve intentionally kept the details vague. I feel a bit like an undercover operative as I walk down the stairs from my room, my stomach and head buzzing, having downed a glass of wine in my room while getting dressed.

  I reach the ground floor and there he is, standing three feet in front of me with the six o’clock sunlight coming in through the windows as a backdrop. He looks older, softer, slightly worn down by life. He’s dressed like a student, a messenger bag slung across his chest, a rumpled plaid button-down peeking out from beneath an outdoorsy-looking jacket. I can see his recent divorce in the lines around his temples, and he has a bit of a paunch where there was once only stocky muscle. I exhale. I remember this guy.

  We lock eyes, and in that moment I see a flash of myself the way he must see me. I’m no longer the insecure twenty-year-old who cried over his narcissistic roommate way back when. I’m not the girl he used to eat ice cream sandwiches with on his tar-covered roof or visit late at night at the crappy French place where I bartended badly. I’m a woman, unmistakably, wearing four-inch heels and a blue silk slip dress, walking toward him to take his hand. Suddenly the night feels full of possibility.

  Oliver has an itinerary in mind for us, and he links his arm with mine as we walk toward the waterfront. We get beers at a bar in a converted warehouse with a big back garden, and almost right away we’re laughing. There’s an excited, flirtatious energy to it all, part of it coming from the realization that we are both now adult, we’ve given ourselves permission and agency to get what we want. I had forgotten how well I used to get along with him and that he had once told me he loved me on a rainy night while crossing Broadway at 102nd Street. Things feel familiar and new at once, and it occurs to me that the reason I’m here may not be what I thought it was when I got on the plane.