“You killed my plant,” I said.
Leif raised his head. His eyes were slow in the sockets, but I could almost see his heartbeat through his thin white shirt. He was drunk and speeding. I knew about this mixture: It was a toxic combination that allowed him to keep drinking long after he poisoned himself.
“You left,” he said. Leif was a child; he lived in a tit-for-tat world.
“Dee’s gone.”
“I’m going to lose my job.”
“Jesus, you’re self-centered.”
Without taking his eyes off me, he groped around on the kitchen table for his whiskey. He finished what was left in the glass and beckoned for me to come to him.
“Did you hear me?”
He stretched his arms out toward me.
“Dee’s gone.”
He said nothing, but the lovely length of his arms pleaded for me.
I yelled, “What if she’s dead.” It was the first time I had allowed myself to voice this possibility, which had begun to seem probable, after we’d learned of Frank’s real identity and seen the long, winding funnels of smoke rising from his parents’ crematorium. I had begun, at that point, to take Frank’s involvement in Dee’s disappearance for granted.
I began to sob. Leif blinked with wet and bleary eyes, and still he held his arms up for me to come to him. I stared at the shriveled plant on the ground. I went to him. I climbed into his lap, straddling him in the chair, and he pulled me into him hard and fast. I buried my face in his neck, where his pores sweated out whiskey. The smell made me a little sick, so I pulled away, but he held me tight against him. Was the Fourth the last time we’d touched like this?
“Would you kill me?” I asked, forming the words like dark shapes pressed into the skin of his neck. Kill me. When I was a little girl, Ma used to say she was going to kill my father all the time: If your father doesn’t come home soon, I’m going to kill him.
“Baby,” he said. He held my face in his hands. “Oh, baby. What the fuck is wrong with me?” He kissed my face gently with tight, pursed lips; he kissed my eyelids and both my nostrils, the tip of my nose, my cheeks, the corners of my lips, he opened my mouth and kissed my teeth and my gums, he kissed both earlobes. “I can’t believe I hurt you.” I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was: I can.
I spent the rest of the night coaxing him to drink water and trying to put him to bed, but his heart raced like an infant’s at birth. And so he wrote and wrote, filling his tattered notebook with illegible script. Eventually, I collapsed in a tangle of dirty sheets in the bedroom. The mattress was half exposed and filthy beneath the sheets—sweat stains and cum stains and wine stains were brown continents spilling across the sagging mattress. I slept in my clothes.
Leif woke me at six a.m., took off all my clothes, and while I was still half asleep, and the city outside was night-dusted and groggy too, he licked me so gently, and with such a singularity of mind, such an intense focus and fervor, I must have come five times. I put my fingers deep into his ears each time.
He crawled up me and collapsed on my chest. He laid his head on that flat part of me, kissing the place between my breasts and burying his face there. I love you, I love you, I love you. I felt his mouth moving. I kissed the sweetest part of his body, that lovely, oily place on his neck, but it still reeked of whiskey.
After Leif fell into an agitated sleep (his eyes moved fast beneath their lids), I walked around the apartment with intentions of tidying up. The rooms felt strange and dangerous; Leif’s life without me was one of uninhibited consumption. I poured myself a finger of whiskey and sat at the kitchen table. I wanted to talk to Dee so badly, the need felt like a large, heavy hand pressing down on my chest. In the bedroom, Leif groaned, and I finished the whiskey.
A fist on the apartment door roused me in the morning. Hard white sunshine lit the kitchen like the inside of a bulb. I forgot about the peephole. Leif said to always look first and open second, and I wished I’d remembered this when I swung open the door and found Wolski’s grim face on the other side. His fist was half raised, poised to pound on the door a second time; with him was a young man, a boy almost, in a crisp police uniform.
“Backup?” I asked. The boy blushed and lifted his chin a millimeter higher.
Wolski frowned and scanned the apartment behind me. The living room was in shambles. The overturned bookshelf spilled dusty paperbacks into a heap on the floor. The turntable was upside down. There were takeout containers strewn across the coffee table and leaking onto the brown carpet.
Wolski turned to the boy. “Get him.”
Leif became the primary suspect in Dee’s case. Wolski liked him for a perp. And there’s no denying he fit the bill rather well—a drunk, a poet, a foreign name. I’m not sure they had a sound legal case for his arrest, but I don’t think Wolski needed one. There wasn’t a police officer or higher-up in that building who gave a damn about what Wolski was up to on the fifteenth floor. I followed the cop car to the station, and Leif’s face was ruddy with whiskey, either speed or fear twitching the muscles at the corners of his eyes, and I waved as they took him through booking because I didn’t know what to do with my hands. As soon as my hand was in the air, I knew it was the wrong gesture.
Wolski took me to his office and handed me a manila folder.
“You people are so fucking stupid,” I said. “Why haven’t you found Frank yet?”
He shook the folder at me. I took it and had the urge to shake it in his face. His breath smelled of coffee and grease.
“What the hell is this?” Wolski asked.
It was the picture: I’m kneeling on Leif’s bedroom floor; the floorboards have a harsh, knotty grain to them, whorls of wood beneath my knees. Leif stands in front of me with one hand on his dick and another on the back of my neck, where he has a tight fistful of my hair. My body is twisted grotesquely away from him and toward the camera. (Toward Dee.) My face is messy—swollen, and sticky with my own spit and tears, and puffing in anticipation of bruising. Leif’s fist is at the back of my head, up his long, taut arm. He is naked. (And even then, in that photo, the pull of his body on my own was strong. Was it shameful that this photo awoke a want in me?) Leif doesn’t look surprised, he’s so alive in the moment, a picture couldn’t have seemed more natural to him. How was it that nothing about him looked out of place in this picture, not his nakedness or his sure expression, not his hand on his cock or his heavy fist at the back of my neck. Meanwhile, I couldn’t have looked more out of place or more afraid. My pupils are large, black holes. They eat all of the light in the room. I felt, looking at my own eyes, as if I were falling into a black hole. I’ve read that it’s not entirely clear how we would die if we fell into a black hole. When I’d had my fill of my own dark gaze, I held the folder close to me.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“Anonymous mailer. Return address in Illinois. When was this photo taken, Peg?”
I paused. “The Fourth,” I said. Wolski began annotating the back of the photo furiously. “But Frank, he sent it. Are you even looking for him?” (Though we understood, after Wolski had met the guy’s parents, that he had been lying about his name, I was unable, ever, to call him anything except Frank.)
“How do you know Candace didn’t send it?”
Candace. I felt my face get hot; I was getting angry, which usually had two effects on my ability to converse. Option one: shockingly articulate. Option two: shockingly inarticulate.
“Jesus. Christ. Dee . . . She wouldn’t have sent that to you.” (Option two.)
“She took the picture, didn’t she?”
“What’s Leif arrested for?”
“Illegal possession of amphetamine. Illegal possession of a firearm. Evading arrest. But look, Peg, I’m going to level with you. He’s the best suspect we’ve got. You show up here more or less black and blue two weeks after Dee goes missing; meanwhile, Frank’s nowhere to be seen. We get this picture, which presumably Dee took, because you said it w
as only you three together on the Fourth, and that means she saw Leif beating the living hell out of you. Maybe Leif didn’t want Dee to tell the world about all this; maybe he knew she’d go to your family.” Wolski leaned back in his chair, satisfied with the story he’d just spun.
“Leif’s got nothing to do with Dee,” I said. “We drank too much. I already told you that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Dee’s disappearance.”
Wolski shrugged skeptically. “It’s going to be a lot easier to find your sister when you start telling the truth. That’s one thing I’m certain of,” he said. What passed for Wolski’s police work was unbelievable to me.
“You’ve got to understand, Leif didn’t do this. He’s got alibis and he won’t stay locked up, I know that. But you have to understand, he would never do this.”
Even as I said it, I knew. Wolski didn’t have to understand anything.
“He hit you, didn’t he?” Wolski knitted his hands behind his head, and his breath left a thick scent of bacon grease hanging in the air between us. I could not deny this, not only because Wolski had the picture but also because the connection hadn’t been entirely clear to me before now.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Wolski bowed his head. He gestured at the closed door.
I left Wolski’s office, clutching the manila folder against my chest. I knew he’d made copies, probably many copies, and that he wouldn’t miss this one. I wondered if Wolksi had shown the photo to Leif. If Leif had seen it, he was, right now, I suspected, writing a long poem about the photo. I imagined him somewhere in the building, coming down harder than ever, steadying his hands on the bars so no one would see him shake. Were they still holding the serial killer here too?
The media camp outside the police department had withered since I’d been there last with Peter. I supposed they were following the proceedings at the courthouse, or harassing families, or canvassing the serial killer’s old neighborhood. On North Twenty-fifth Street, national gossip rags were paying the locals five hundred a piece for exclusives.
The serial killer had offered many of the men he murdered money, fifty or a hundred bucks, if they’d come back to his apartment with him and pose for a few pictures. In the newspapers, the detectives called the victims facilitating victims because they’d lived lives of poverty, and risk, and sexual deviance. The police union lobbyist said, “These men all chose the lifestyle that got them killed.” And one Milwaukee Journal reporter, Anne Schwartz, wrote that of course these men didn’t deserve to die, but that their lifestyles and unnecessary risk-taking contributed to their deaths. She prided herself not only for being the reporter who broke the case, but also for being the first in the media to publish the victims’ criminal records.
On the news, State Representative Polly Williams defended the men, saying, “Because of the conditions here, we have our Black men now that will fall prey to this kind of stuff because they don’t have jobs, they don’t have money. So if somebody comes and offers them a hundred bucks to pose for a picture, they’ll take it, because they need to live.”
I’d expected Peter and Ma to be in hysterics at home, but when I got back, the house was empty. The living room was covered in notes and newspapers and pie plates and crumby maps. The house smelled like it needed to be cleaned—stale crust and damp dishrags and stewing garbage. I paced the house, nervously waiting for Peter or Ma to come home. When it started to get late, I called Suze at her house, but I got the machine. Where the fuck was everyone?
Night shadows had begun to spread in the house, throwing the mess of the living room into darkness. I left the lights off but turned on the TV. Fox 6 News was doing a segment on a local Baptist minister and his wife who had taken it upon themselves to exorcise the evil from the serial killer’s apartment building. Maybe they could exorcise the chocolate factory too, so people wouldn’t lose their jobs. The couple was standing in front of the lot with their arms raised. They weren’t speaking English or any other language I recognized. The sidewalk was dusty with dry summer heat, and the wind off the lake whipped the dust around their ankles. A little boy was playing in the corner of the camera’s frame with a plastic fire truck. He didn’t seem fazed by the Baptist minister and his wife, who’d begun jerking their arms above their heads and stamping their feet. The boy didn’t seem to notice the cameras trained on the minister. The exorcism was without commercial break, so I watched and I watched and I watched. I realized I wasn’t watching to see the lot relieved of its evil (I was convinced this was an impossible endeavor); I was watching for the little boy in the corner to look up, to notice the cameras, to notice I was watching. I watched and I waited and he never looked, and I thought I would cry.
The minister’s wife was now flailing in the dust. Some of the church volunteers held her so she didn’t bite her own tongue or smash her head open on the curb. The minister was still at it on his feet. I didn’t think it could end. The camera cut back to the news station, and I jumped because Peter coughed beside me. I whipped around, and Ma and Peter were standing on either side of me. The gray light of the TV shone on their faces and made them look sick. It was deep night now, and the lights of the house were still off. I’d let the night take the house completely.
“How long have you been there?” I asked. I croaked on the words, and Peter held my shoulder.
“Ten minutes,” he said.
Ma went from room to room, turning on lights and closing blinds. I thought I heard her in the kitchen reheating leftovers—the opening and closing of the fridge door, the microwave humming awake.
“They took Leif,” I told Peter.
He sank to the living room carpet with me, crossed his legs, and faced me. Without turning from me, he switched off the TV. “We know,” he said. “We talked to Wolski.”
“Where have you been?”
Peter sucked on his bottom lip, which made his chin look weak and vulnerable. “We went to your place.”
I felt like I’d swallowed an ice cube. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I rubbed my temples. “Is there no one I can trust?”
“Peg.” He paused. He inched closer to me. “We just want to know.”
I inched back. “You think he did it?”
Before I could hold them in, I felt thick hot tears on my cheeks, pooling at the tip of my nose, and dripping into my lips, where I licked them off. I started to shake, but I made a point to stay silent. I’d conceded something with the word it. I wanted suddenly to be exorcised as well, to be cleansed of the parts of me that were always fucking up, the part of me that had been lost to Leif, to bad wants, and which had cost me Dee.
“Please.” I spit tears at Peter. He didn’t wipe them from his cheeks. “You know it’s Frank, Ma knows it’s Frank, please help me fix this with Leif. I know you can fix it.”
Peter shook his head. “But what happened?”
“We had a fight. Like I said.” My cheeks were hot. “Please, Leif would never hurt Dee.”
“Did he hurt you?” Peter reached out to graze the fresh scar on my cheekbone with his fingertips, and I recoiled.
“Never,” I lied.
Peter’s hand was suspended in the space between us, and he let it drop down onto my knee. He tugged at my knee and pulled me toward him, and I let him. He wrapped me up, holding me tighter than I ever remembered him holding me. He rocked me, and I went limp.
Peter carried me to bed, the one next to Dee’s, and tucked me in tight. I fell asleep fast and dreamed of Leif speeding and licking my clit and I came in my sleep, which woke me up. I cried because I felt guilty about the dream and because I hadn’t dreamed of Dee, and in the dark I grew afraid I’d forgotten her face already. I went downstairs to stare at our high school portraits. Ma had all of our pictures lined up in age progressions on the walls of the foyer. Dee’s high school portrait was like a punch in the gut. I couldn’t look long at all.
I wandered into the living room and turned the news back on; it was still showing the footage o
f the minister exorcising the building. The next day the newspapers reported he’d been there all night long. His wife had grown tired and gone to sleep in the car, but he’d stayed on that dusty sidewalk through the night, demanding that the devil release this lot, release this neighborhood, release Milwaukee. He’d collapsed at sunrise, is what they’d said. I imagined the little boy with the fire truck had been called in for supper while the minister was still at it, had been bathed, and read to, and put to bed, while the minister was still at it. Something evil has gripped our city.
Interstitial
Name: Leif Gunnarson
Relation: Peg’s boyfriend
Date: July 29, 1991
Interviewer: Peter
Location: Milwaukee County Jail
Leif: Where’s Peg?
Peter: I’m asking the questions. When was the last time you saw Dee?
Leif: July Fourth.
Peter: What did you do on the Fourth?
Leif: Dee called Peg crying the day before because Frank was cheating on her. So Peg invited her to spend the Fourth with us. I worked third shift that night, as usual, but we stayed up and celebrated the Fourth together.
Peter: Celebrated how?
[Pause]
Leif: Sparklers and apple pie and shit. You know.
Peter: Why did Dee leave?
Leif: She walked in on Peg and me having sex. They got into a fight. Dee left.
Peter: Did she say where she was going?
Leif: No.
Peter: Look, cut the crap, Leif. I know you guys dropped acid. Did Dee do it too?
The Comfort of Monsters Page 22