New Yorked Page 3

  Medina asks, “Can we go inside?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  Medina sighs. “We’re the good guys.”

  “Did your buddies say that to Abner Louima before they gave him a prostate exam with a broom handle?”

  He bristles when I say this. He’s about to snap at me but takes a moment and says, “You can’t judge all cops based on one guy’s stupid decision.”

  “Sure I can. Now, what are we talking about?”

  I’m stalling. I think they can tell. I’d rather give them the semblance of an answer about where I was last night, but I’m having a hard time coming up with something.

  You promised.

  Who promised?

  More questions raised: How much did I drink? And what does that say about me as a person?

  The way Medina is talking, it’s like he wants to be my friend. But he’s standing too far away, his body too tense. He’s a bad actor. He says, “We want to know where you were last night.”

  I want to ask him if he checked with his wife. Instead I say, “I was here most of the night. Before that I was out at a bar.”

  “Which bar?”

  “Most of them, apparently.”

  “How about some specifics?”

  “What is this about?”

  “You know what this is about.”

  I put up my hands in mock-surrender. “Actually I don’t, so why don’t you fill me in?”

  He flips open a worn notebook the size of his palm and reads off Chell’s real name, like he doesn’t remember it. “She called you last night?”

  “She did.”

  “About what?”

  “Doesn’t matter at this point, does it?”

  Medina pulls out a cigarette and lights it. He holds the pack in my direction, and I wave him off. He says, “Any reason you’re being so combative?”

  The way he says it, it’s pretty combative.

  I say, “Could be that I’m emotionally distraught and exhausted and you’re keeping me awake. Maybe you’re wasting your time when you should be out catching the idiot who killed her. Maybe I just don’t like cops all that much. I also really have to pee. It may be a combination of all those things.”

  “You’re not the only one who’s been up late. This can all be over in a couple of minutes. Just tell us what she said to you when she called you last night.”

  Grabowski jumps in. He crushes his words under his heel like a spent butt. “Just play along, kid. This doesn’t have to be hard.”

  They can’t have checked my background because they’re being way too nice. I sit on the cold stone of the stoop and light a cigarette. Maybe if I cooperate a little, they’ll leave me alone.

  “She said she thought she was being followed,” I say. “She called me and asked me to walk her home. As you can probably guess, I didn’t get the message.”

  “Can we listen to it?”

  “There wasn’t anything helpful.”

  “We’ll determine that. How about you play it for us?”

  I think about it. I really do. They don’t seem so bad. But none of them ever really do. If they want to listen, they’ll have to work for it. It’s not like they can’t track it down on their own. Fucking Patriot Act.

  “No,” I tell them. “That you can’t do.”

  “We could get a warrant,” Medina says.

  “Do it then.”

  “You know.” Medina flicks his cigarette into the street. “We’ve interviewed a few people already, and they all say you knew her pretty well. If you cared about her so much, why don’t you want us to find out who killed her?”

  “That’s not really the point, but rationalize it however you want.”

  Grabowski mutters loud enough for us all to hear. “You don’t seem too upset.”

  I lean around Medina and look Grabowski in the eye. “We all deal with grief in our own way. I prefer to take my feelings and ball them up and push them down so that I explode in fits of rage.”

  He’s stopped listening. “Was there anyone here with you last night who can vouch for you?”

  “Nope.” I reach my arms over my head to stretch. “Now why don’t you guys go get yourself that warrant. Because lucky thing for me, being an asshole isn’t an arrestable offense. Which means I don’t need to keep talking to you right now.”

  “If you didn’t do it, you have nothing to worry about,” Medina says.

  “I have nothing to worry about.”

  Grabowski asks, “What’s your problem, kid?”

  I’m out of clever things to say so I shrug.

  They both stand there, tired and frustrated. Medina hands me a business card, doesn’t even bother to say anything, and they turn to leave.

  Over his shoulder Grabowski says, “Stay in touch.”

  Those guys might be on the level, but I’m not taking a chance. Not after the last time I tried to do the right thing. I wait until Medina glances back so he can see me toss the card onto the ground.

  I’ll never understand why Chell insisted on living in Brooklyn.

  I have a theory, that it was an easier transition coming from Ohio to New York City. The buildings in Brooklyn are tall, but not too tall.

  Her apartment was bigger than mine but barely a day went by when she wasn’t in my neighborhood. For what she was paying in MetroCards and cab rides, she could have bought the building next to mine.

  Brooklyn is nice enough, and maybe it would be a good place to retire, but it’s not even last call and already it feels like a ghost town. Only six people walked by in the time it took me to finish a cup of burnt coffee from the bodega down the street. And I still can’t tell if the guy in the black car in front of her building is a cop or if he’s waiting for someone.

  He’s been making a little pile of cigarettes outside his window. His car is a Ford Focus, not an Impala, but that doesn’t mean he’s not undercover. Which means using the spare key at the bottom of the potted basil plant outside her front door is not a good idea.

  There’s an apartment building at the end of the street, out of sight of the Ford. The building’s door is locked so I ring bells. Angry voices crackle on the intercom until someone too lazy to care buzzes me through. I climb the five flights to the top floor and find the door to the roof isn’t alarmed or locked, so I step outside.

  It’s a clear night, and I can see all twelve stars.

  I turn away from the sinkhole in my stomach, climb across the connected roofs to Chell’s, stepping over the knee-high walls that separate the buildings. I know I’m on the right one when I see a pile of discarded cigarette butts in the corner, gray and swollen from age and wet weather.

  The fire escape leads down into the back courtyard. I take it slow and quiet, hoping no one looks out and sees me. At the bottom I’ve got a choice I don’t love. I could lower the ladder but it would make too much noise and probably wake the neighbors.

  The other option is: Drop and pray.

  It doesn’t look too far so I grab a solid section of the fire escape and lower myself down, until my arms are fully extended and my feet are hanging in the air. The rusted metal tears at my hands. I let go, land hard on my ankle, pain jetting through my leg. Bend at my knees, and roll onto my side to disperse the impact. Get up and shake it out.

  Hurt, but nothing’s broken. The force of landing knocked off my hat. I root around in the yard until I find it, then dust it off and put it back on.

  There’s another spare key back here, under the mat. Chell put it there the first time she went out for a smoke and the door locked behind her. It still works and, lucky for me, the chain isn’t on the door so I don’t have to kick it in. She never listened to me about keeping it fastened, but you’d have to be very clever or very dumb to make it down here in one piece.

  Hence the shitty hiding place for the key.

  Luckily, I’m a strong mix of clever and dumb.

  The white venetian blinds are d
rawn, so the apartment is barely lit by the light sneaking in though the thin white slats. I stand in the corner, give my eyes a minute to adjust. When they do, I can see that not much has changed, not that it’s been so long.

  From the back door, the apartment is laid out like a cross. I’m in the bedroom, and the living room lies past it. Kitchen on the right, bathroom on the left. There’s a rug, a bed, some paperbacks, wineglasses, and candles. Not much else. She never furnished her apartment. It’s still nearly as bare as the first night I was here.

  We were the same like that, both living Spartan lifestyles. Chell would say she did it because it encouraged her to go out more. I can’t say I did it for the same reasons. I totally read Fight Club.

  I find my spare charger in the kitchen junk drawer. I plug in my phone and float through the bedroom and the kitchen, running my fingers over spotless, smooth surfaces, then think better about it and wipe down what I’ve touched. My fingerprints wouldn’t be easy to explain postmortem.

  In the bathroom I stop.

  I can feel the warmth of the candles she lit the first night I was here.

  We met in a broken-down burlesque parlor in Coney Island. I don’t remember the name of it. I wasn’t even planning to be there. Coney is so far away it should require a passport. But it was summer and Adam was bartending so that meant free drinks. Enough to get me to the badlands of Brooklyn.

  I was sitting there in the corner, nursing a bottomless glass of whiskey, the crowd crushing in on me in the slight space, weighing the pros and cons of the bar versus my couch. I might have been pushing my way toward the door when the music started.

  It was a cover of the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself, a hardcore industrial mix pumped through a grinder and played on speakers drenched in blood.

  The lights dimmed, and you took the stage. The way you looked made me want to find religion just so I could renounce it.

  You wore a patchwork leather outfit that covered you from the neck down, carrying two pink candles in small glass jars. You floated across the stage to a lone folding chair set in the middle. You lit the candles and put them on the floor and started a slow grind of a dance that stopped every conversation in the bar.

  Your leather outfit was a jigsaw puzzle. You would reach up and rip, and a portion of your breast would be revealed.

  Your forearm.

  The flat expanse of your stomach.

  Every piece of leather that disappeared revealed something about you.

  The tiger outlined in black stripes on your right shoulder blade. The cat standing on the skull standing on the owl, on your left arm. The strand of DNA down your back. The stars mapped across the front of your hips. The small, barbell-shaped lumps in the black electrical tape covering your handful-sized breasts.

  I like brunettes, and I like curves. You had the body of a swimmer, your legs narrow and deadly as poison darts. And then there was that red hair, done in a bob that wrapped around your head and splayed out across your right eye.

  You were so far from what I consider my type. But I also can’t get on the subway without falling in love.

  After stripping off the leather outfit, you were barefoot, wearing the electrical tape and a black thong. You pulled a neon pink bandana from thin air and blindfolded yourself, then kept dancing. Falling backwards over the chair until just at the moment of impact, pulling yourself upright before you were about to smash your head on the floor. Every time your head snapped back, the crowd held its collective breath, until we knew you were safe.

  Then you picked up those candles, blindfolded, and poured the hot wax down your chest and onto your stomach. It dried into pink ribbons that hugged your skin like everyone in the room wished they could.

  The song ended and the trance broke. You flinched a little and peeked out from under the bandana, like you were surprised by the audience being there. The crowd erupted.

  You left the applause like it didn’t matter and disappeared through a gray curtain. Ten minutes later you were standing at the bar, wearing leather pants and a white t-shirt, sipping a vodka soda and gazing up at the television playing The Forbidden Zone on mute. There was a line of guys behind you. You had short, tense conversations with them, and they left with their egos bleeding onto the floor.

  I fought through the crowd and told you, I’d like to buy you a drink.

  Why?

  Because everyone likes free drinks.

  You pointed to the television and said, Tell me what movie that is.

  The Forbidden Zone.

  You can buy me a drink.

  That’s your benchmark?

  That’s my benchmark.

  I waved over Adam and got you another round, myself a Jay. You looked up and I saw tendrils of purple in the white part of your left eye, the eye that wasn’t covered by the brush of red hair. It looked bruised but not damaged. Like your iris was a light bulb and someone blew smoke around it. Later on you told me it was a rare kind of birthmark. That night I was just trying not to stare too much.

  Your lips wrapped around the thin red straw in your drink. I said the first thing that came to my mind. I’m not even sure it was that good a line, but it seemed to work.

  I said, I’m sure a lot of guys would pretend they didn’t just see you mostly naked, and it would come off as insincere. I came over because I think you’re pretty, and I’m hoping you’re smart enough to match.

  You smiled. It was the smile of a viper circling a field mouse. That’s exactly what you saw when you looked at me, and I did nothing to correct you.

  You asked, Are you usually this bold?

  Not really. I’m prone to indifference but lately, I can’t be bothered.

  I’m just going to end up breaking your heart.

  Do your worst.

  I will, but only because I think you can take it.

  You told me you had just arrived from Ohio and were living in Greenpoint. That made you a gent, not that I couldn’t call it from across the room, but I liked you anyway. You told me you weren’t sure what you wanted to do with your life so you were dancing and working odd jobs until you figured it out.

  I raised my glass, toasted you, and said, Join the club.

  You told me your name was Chell.

  Like cello, minus the ‘oh,’ you said.

  When I told you my name was Ashley, you giggled. I pointed out it was a good Irish name back when my great-grandfather was using it. Then Ashley Abbot on The Young and the Restless ruined it. I told you everyone called me Ash, and we both know how that turned out.

  It got late. We didn’t notice until chairs were getting flipped onto tables. Without making any kind of agreement, I walked you to the Stillwell subway station. Coney Island is a dangerous place, especially at night, especially more during the summer.

  We rode the train north. You didn’t invite me, but you expected me to follow. It was a warm night so we wandered through the squat caverns of Brooklyn. We wound up in front of your apartment, in the basement of a three-story townhouse. On the steps, you turned to me and your face went slack.

  You said, I’m not going to sleep with you. I’m not looking for that kind of thing right now.

  That’s fine, I said, hoping you were lying, and followed you inside.

  Your apartment was sparse. There was a rug in the living room and some old paperbacks piled in one corner. No furniture. You told me to sit on the rug and you disappeared, came back in wearing a baby blue Mickey Mouse t-shirt and plaid short-shorts, hoisting two mugs and a bottle of white wine.

  We talked some more. You liked to talk and liked even more when someone listened. Half the bottle later you leaned back and exhaled.

  You asked, We’re adults, correct?

  I believe so.

  I’m dying for a bath. If we can be adults about me being naked then you can stay and we can talk more.

  It was raining outside, but that’s not why I wanted to stay.

  You got up to fill the bathtub, and I still didn’t think you were seri
ous.

  You walked out of the bathroom pulling your shirt over your head, came out bare and white. Nothing was shocking because I had seen most of it at the show. My mind had filled in the blanks.

  But your whole attitude shifted. Up on that stage your control over the crowd was complete and infinite. But here, alone, you looked down and away from me. Your stomach stuck out a little like your spine was curved. Your knees were bony and your feet pointed inward.

  You climbed into the tub and lit lavender candles that lined the back wall. The way the amber light careened up the walls and down your skin, it was like seeing a sunrise for the first time.

  You handed me a bottle of pills that had been resting on the edge of the tub. I sat in the doorway and popped the cap.

  Klonopin, you said. It’s for anxiety. Take two at most. You’ll be so screwed you won’t be able to pee straight.

  I popped three and washed them down with a sip of wine. Sat in the doorway and listened to you talk while the drugs wrapped my brain in gauze and the sun stretched its blue eyes over the horizon.

  The glossy porcelain at the base of the tub is dry.

  There doesn’t seem to be anything else in the apartment that might help me, but I can’t leave with nothing, so I sit on the edge of the bed. Comb through my memory. There’s got to be something in here I missed. I can feel it on the edge of my brain, dangling a foot in the air. Prodding me.

  We were getting ready to go out. I had my coat on and was standing by the front door, checking my pockets to make sure I had my phone, wallet, and smokes. Chell was in the bedroom on her knees facing away from me. She called over her shoulder that she needed a second. There was a sound. A hollow knock.

  In the corner of the bedroom there’s a notch in one of the floorboards, big enough for a finger to fit in. I pull it up, and there’s an alcove underneath. Inside there’s a wad of bills, a stack of racy polaroids, a half-full vial of coke, a thumb drive, and a business card.

  The card reads Noir York with a URL, www.noir-york.com. Nothing else on it, front or back, but it’s heavy stock, professionally printed.