Follow her home, p.5
Follow Her Home, page 5
I walked into the entryway of my building and hit the button for the elevator. A doorman seated on a metal stool watched me from a corner, wedged between a courtesy phone and a wall of mailboxes. I crossed my arms and shifted my weight from foot to foot. The elevators in my building were in dire need of remodeling. A pressed button gave no light, and there was no telling when a car would arrive. The doorman stared at me for a full two minutes before letting me know that the elevators were down.
“Thanks. I’ve only been standing here since Tuesday.” I spun on a used-up heel and rounded my way through a very heavy door into the echoing concrete cave of a stairwell. The iron steps wobbled and clanged in lazy noisy baritones under my tired, plodding gait. I gripped the railing as I wound my way up.
I heard the old telephone ringing from the hallway as I approached 4J. I was the last twentysomething in the Los Angeles area who still had a landline. Even the cable guy gave me a look when I requested it, all high eyebrows and crooked smile. The phone itself was an antique—rotary dial, earpiece like a fancy black barbell, fat trapezoid body, and, of course, a ring like the angry clatter of the entire cookware section of Bed Bath & Beyond falling into the aisles at once. I loved that ring as much as everyone else hated it, and as I shimmied my keys into the lock, I was aware that I had never dreaded hearing it until now. I gave the door a shove with my upper arm and stumbled into my studio bursting with that furious tin sound.
I stood still in the doorway and let it ring, and ring, and ring, the receiver nearly jumping in its seat. The clock in the TV stand said 7:42 A.M. in rude red dots and dashes. The ringing stopped, and I slipped out of my shoes and approached the old phone where it sat, dressing up a vanilla-wooden Ikea coffee table with screw-in peg legs. I dropped onto the couch and forgot to relax, forgot to appreciate the way the old leather cushion sank in just enough to welcome a worn-out behind. I leaned forward, propped my elbows on my knees, rested nose and chin in a two-handed finger gun, and waited for the next call.
The only person who might call me on my landline, especially at this hour, was Luke, who knew there was no other way to reach me. Even so, I sat stone still as terror churned in my stomach.
The wait was short. This time I picked up after one ring. I took a deep, quiet breath, careful not to make a sound. “Hello?” The greeting did not come out as bright and clear and cool as it had in the split-second preview that played in my head, but neither did my booming heartbeat leak into the cadence.
“Welcome home, Miss Song.” The voice was gentle, teasing. I pictured a man of medium height and unknowable age with Talented Mr. Ripley hair, smiling wryly over a cup of coffee. My murderer had good PR.
I swallowed, running my tongue across the roof of my mouth. “Can you tell me what you’re driving so I can hang up and call my building manager?”
There was just the tiniest window of silence on the line, and I might have imagined that. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be in your best interest.”
“Please, tell me what is.”
“Stay out of trouble, and you might be left alone. You’re just a girl, Miss Song. I don’t know what possessed you to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Bad things happen when you do that.” His tone was sweet, but cold and stiff.
I could hear him waiting, unmoved but impatient, for a response. Marlowe always had thugs warning him to keep his nose clean—it was a requisite conversation in every book. Marlowe never listened. If I had learned one thing in the last ten hours, it was that I was no Marlowe. I couldn’t take violence and death with his even, evaluative stance, and danger did what danger does—it scared me.
“I will stay out of trouble,” I said, then put down the receiver with a passive click. I couldn’t have delayed more than a few seconds before going for the phone again to call the cops, but the bad guy had my number.
The sugar was gone from his voice, and he enunciated like he was cutting steel. “I assume that you won’t be involving the police. I will be listening.” I heard three dry taps, fingernails hitting the speaker on the other end of the line.
I hesitated, and before I could respond, he started to speak again. “My employer”—he said it just like in the movies, with utter certainty and awed loyalty—“is a busy person, but my employer is willing to take the time to meet with your family, all the way out in Texas. I’ve heard all about your beautiful little sister. Your poor mother. Two daughters who just can’t stay out of trouble.”
I could tell from the lilt in his voice that he smiled with just the corners of his mouth as he spoke. He knew he was dealing in clichés, and he knew that the clichés would do just fine. Worse, he knew about Iris, and he was taunting me, knowing it wouldn’t matter. The strongest poker hands never change, never lose. There was no need for cleverness. The bald, pulp threats glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth, and when the dial tone sounded a minute later, I realized I had no conception of when, cat-footed, he had disappeared from the other end of the line.
*
I waited a full day to approach Iris after I talked to Paul. She had been avoiding me since I came home, though not in the physical sense. We shared a room, after all, and she accepted my gentle attentions, my shy, open-ended inquiries as to her general state of mind. It felt strange to be home, knowing that for the first time, I was not in tune with my sister. She’d had experiences, important life moments, without reporting them in whispers before we fell asleep. I had moved away, left our room, and lost her confidence. Now that I was home for the next three months, I needed to win her back. I decided to let her get used to me, let her recall my smell and the sound of my voice without the filter of telephone wire. I spent those first days blending back into the space that we had shared for years.
On my fifth night home, I turned our light back on twenty minutes after we went to bed. I didn’t need to ask if she was still awake.
I cleared my throat. “Iris, do you trust me?” My words hung in the air, cold and without echo. “You trust me, don’t you?” I could hear her holding her breath, lying still, hoping I’d let her pretend to sleep. “I know you’re awake. We have to talk about this sometime.” I sat up and leaned on one elbow, facing her. Our twin beds were separated by less than three feet of carpet. Iris lay in fetal position, her head down, knees pointed toward me. “This is important. If you won’t talk to me I’m going to have to tell Mom.”
The threat tasted dirty leaving my mouth, but I knew as it did that I meant it, and that I was in the right. Iris and I had buried each other’s secrets since we were children. As much as we loved each other, we were siblings born two years apart—until at least middle school, our fights were routine and sometimes furious. Still, we never stooped to tattling. Our stern mother wasn’t a last resort so much as a nonoption.
She opened her eyes but kept them averted. “You can’t tell Mom. I will die if you do.”
“I have to do something, Iris.”
“No, you don’t.”
I collected my words. I avoided landmines like keep and baby. “What’s your plan?”
She melted into herself on the other bed, shivering with tears. I got out from under my covers and sat beside her, stroking her unwashed hair. Comforting Iris came naturally, like it was something I was born to do. I waited for her sobs to subside.
Minutes later, she whispered, “I can’t keep it.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. I want it to come back in ten years.”
She was finally talking to me, and I figured out fast that she would stop talking about her health, her pregnancy, and her state of mind if I said a word about the father. I stroked her back until she fell asleep, and I drifted off as I held her.
A few days later, she rested her hand on mine as I drove her home from the clinic. Iris, who had never had a job or a large allowance, paid for the procedure with a small number of clean bills. I waited another few nights to ask more questions.
*
Iris’s teenage face spread across my mind like a picture coming into focus. I lowered the receiver into its cradle, letting it drop gently with a slow uncurling of my fingers from around its waist.
Marlowe would’ve picked it back up and called the police. Even he didn’t mess around too much when a corpse was involved. But Marlowe never spoke of a family, or close relationships. There were few threats that could stop him cold.
I let myself linger on the edge of the couch for a few seconds before bolting upright and marching to the bathroom. I peeled myself out of my dress, unhooked my bra, and stepped out of my underwear. I picked up each article of clothing in turn and passed it inch by inch over the flat edge of my sink, scanning the cloth with two fingers. I didn’t know how high-tech criminals were these days, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it made me feel better to do something, so I settled on checking for bugs. I satisfied myself that I was clean, at least as far as I could tell, and grabbed a coarse milk-and-coffee towel and set it on top of the closed toilet.
I turned on the hot water in my bathtub and lifted the pull for a shower. I cupped a hand in the path of the spray, which this morning seemed much too limp to scour me clean. I waited for it to get warm, then I stepped in, facing away from the showerhead. My scalp stung, but I shampooed twice, conditioned twice, soaped twice, and stood soaking in the hot pour for minutes after, breathing in the antiseptic, lemon vapor before it washed down the drain with the emulsified sweat and fatigue of my body. I pondered my next move, and whether I even had a turn coming.
One important question became clear amid the steam—was my tormentor bluffing? He implied that my phone had been bugged, but he would have done that whether or not it was true. My apartment looked undisturbed, and, for all I knew, he was a bumbling one-man team with a smooth voice, a cell phone, and a rudimentary knowledge of the conventions of crime movies. If I knew he was bluffing, I could call the police right now. If I was wrong, and called the police anyway, he might be powerless even then. He was outside my building and would have to flee.
But then what? I knew nothing of his identity or whereabouts—I knew only that he was unfazed by murder, that he was a man who had ditched the norms that controlled the animal impulses of human society. I might run the risk that he would track down my family whether or not he had anything to gain.
The entire situation felt unreal, and I considered how the body in my trunk had come to be. I ran scenarios through the fuzzy projector of my mind’s eye and, squinting as water ran down my stinging head, watched them unfold on the sweaty white plaster wall in front of me.
I watched as a man in a black trench and matching fedora approached the malnourished redhead on Citrus. He held a nondescript belt in two downturned fists like bicycle handlebars, giving and taking up slack as he tiptoed toward his victim. He caught up to the tall redhead and, with a sudden fast-forward flourish, looped him from behind, kicked out the backs of his knees to get him to bend down to where he could pull up on the belt, and yanked hard and steady while the soon-to-be corpse kicked the concrete beneath him. Midstrangle, the killer saw my car pull up in front of Lori’s house, watched as I watched her to her door, watched as I almost left, watched as I watched the BMW, watched as I lurked solo in the dark street, poking into other people’s business. Maybe his eyes, gleaming and bloodshot in the velvet warmth of the night, were fixed on me as he felt the body in his arms fill with death as with so much cement. Maybe he was watching, worrying, and missed the moment when his victim made the binary leap from 1 to 0. I closed my eyes and watched him watch me as he dropped the body and crept, sliding as if he had no feet, across the street. His hand disappeared into a deep pocket and came out holding a heavy flashlight. Maybe when he caught up to me and brought the weapon down on the back of my head, he wielded it with a wrist stiffened by resentment that my interference had deprived him of his victim’s crossover moment.
Then what? He must have gone through my purse at some point, gotten my keys, and lugged the body to my trunk. Why? So it wasn’t his problem anymore? No—a corpse in my trunk wouldn’t make me the murderer, not in a competent policeman’s eye. It had to be a message, a drastic way of saying, This is what I can do.
I pulled back the shower curtain, grabbed the towel, and gave myself a rough, quick pat-dry before stepping out of the misted warmth and onto the sterile linoleum floor. I swept to my closet to swap the towel for a navy thong and a loose gray V-neck, dressing with Olympic speed. By the time I grabbed my MacBook and plopped back onto the couch, the drenched ends of my hair had left dark wet splotches on the front of my T-shirt. I opened up the laptop and woke it up by hitting the space bar. It gave a brief whirring groan and was at my service. I entered my password and opened a Web browser.
I would have to count on my computer being secure. It was one thing to put a wire on a phone, and quite another to monitor e-mail on a password-protected laptop. I clamped my teeth together and hoped I was right.
I opened a new message and addressed it to lucaswcook@gmail.com. It was just past eight thirty in the morning, and I estimated the chances of Luke being awake as fifty-fifty, solely because of what had happened during the night. I added diego.diaz@stokel.com to the recipient list. I needed to reach Luke, and I wanted Diego’s advice.
I typed: “Hi guys, I’m in a pretty urgent situation right now, and I want to talk to you in person. Diego—I know you’re up. Could you call Luke for me and make sure he’s getting this? Can we meet up as soon as possible? I’m ready to leave my apartment whenever. I don’t have a phone.”
I thought about e-mailing my mom and found I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to her. We were never officially out of touch, but I could go about my days and realize I hadn’t heard from my family in months. For now, I would do what I could to keep my mess out of their lives.
I decided to start getting ready. I had to leave the building, and I didn’t want Luke and Diego to be seen coming in. I found a black padded bra in the folds of my unmade bed and put it on under my T-shirt, feeding the straps through the armholes and hooking it in the back. I pulled open the bottom drawer of my dresser and found a pair of denim shorts and threw those on. When I sat back on the couch, there was a message from Diego in my in-box. “Come over whenever you want. I’m not getting through to Luke right now but I’ll try again in a few minutes. Is everything okay?”
I closed my laptop and got up again. I unclasped my clutch and emptied its contents into a roomy black leather shoulder bag. I glanced at the block of sharpened knives on my counter, but I knew I couldn’t wield a blade outside the kitchen. Instead, I scanned the room for something heavy and breakable, and settled on a thick, black ceramic ashtray. I put that in my bag. Its weight was reassuring. I put on my flip-flops, left my studio, and locked the door behind me.
I could have asked Diego to call the police. They may not have gotten my villain without a description, but they would have kept him away from me and taken a body off my hands. Still, I ruled out involving the law just yet. The likelihood that this man would commit violence against my family before I could get the police to protect them and track him down was very small, but greater than zero. If I had Diego call the police, he would know, and if he was a murderer, he was also part madman.
He would know because after he hung up the phone, there was nothing for him to do but watch for my next move. He would see the police pull into my garage because he would be lying in wait nearby. If I was right, I could see how crazy he was for myself, just by setting foot outside.
Five
A man in a smart blue suit and polished brown oxfords leaned on the corner of the 850’s closed trunk, his feet crossed jauntily at the ankles, relaxed as a lizard on a rock. He held one of his elbows in a cupped hand and examined his fingernails, a sculpted interpretation of nonchalance. It might have passed but for the subject’s middling height, which forced him to keep his heels tense on the ground to maintain his noncommittal perch on the car. His glazed gold-and-chestnut hair parted right at the 30/70 line of a short forehead, falling into a tall, swept-back shell around his head, the gel-crusted crest of which you could bounce a ball on. His cool eyes, black or green or both, like the chitinous shell of a housefly, were downcast as he continued looking for grime and snagged cuticles. They held a devilish gleam that wasn’t uncharming, and he had a nose that could cut glass. He looked up with a slow, exaggerated raise of the chin, a lopsided smile, and an affected widening of the eyes that spread across his face as he heard my stomping footsteps. If he’d had a hat, he would’ve tipped it, no doubt.
I stopped when his eyes met mine, and the slap of my rubber-soled foot on concrete boomed brassily around us. “You look exactly like you sound.”
“Thank you.” He pushed off the car with a backward thrust of his tailbone and his feet touched the ground with a soft pat.
My throat felt dusty and my voice was on the verge of cracking. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I would like to avoid it if possible.”
“You could have killed me last night.”
He shrugged and tilted his head to look at his fingernails.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Humphrey.”
“Do you have a last name?”
He smiled. “Bogart.”
I scanned the parking lot but Bogart and I were alone. It worried me that he showed himself, what it would mean for it not to matter that I could identify him. With my assailant before me, the ashtray in my purse felt stupid, pointless, a minute’s reach away. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to come with me.”
“Where?”
He shook his head.
I tried to stall. “Who is that in my trunk?”
“That’s none of your concern, Miss Song.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Tsk-tsk.”
I looked at the ground and perked up at the sound of a door opening. A girl around my age came through it, a neighbor going to her car. It was a brief window, but it was there and it had a witness.
