“Stop. Jesus,” Oliver said. He couldn’t stop laughing.
Zachary watched him from the bed. Big smile. Nodding his head up and down. Sipping from a glass of water. In an unspoken agreement, they had turned the apartment lights out. The light of afternoon was fading from the room as well. The mounds and rows of books all around them were melting into a comfortable brown dusk.
“Oh! You asshole.” Oliver took a gulp of breath. Wiped the tears of laughter from his face with his open hand. Shook his head into his beer again. Took a sip of it. Then he just sat for a moment, staring at his little brother.
They are going to kill him, Perkins. I know this for a fact.
“So?” he said, as solemnly as he could. “Were you there?”
Zach, still grinning, puffed his cheeks. “Whew! The mews, you mean? Yeah.”
Both men nodded somberly. A long moment passed in reflection.
“So did you puke?” Oliver finally asked. “I puked. Did you puke?”
“I don’t think so. I was pretty upset though.”
“I just puked. Christ, when I saw her head right there in the toilet like that, Jesus …”
“Oh, so that’s where it was.”
Oliver just exploded with laughter, beer spraying from his mouth. He had to put the bottle down. Bow his head into both hands. Oh, so that’s where it was! He couldn’t stand it! He closed his eyes. He could see the woman’s face staring up at him from the toilet, but he didn’t care. He laughed until his voice became a thin squeak: eee eee eee. Zach laughed too, just watching him.
“Oh, man!” said Oliver finally. “That’s where it was, all right. Jesus. Right there in the toilet. I went in to throw up …”
“Oh no! You didn’t …!”
“No, but I just missed, man.”
“Oh no.”
“Jesus. Oh God.” He kept on laughing. “Wait’ll Nana finds out about this. She’s gonna flatline.”
Zach gripped his chest and stuck his tongue out: Nana having a coronary. That set Oliver off again and he actually stood up, he was laughing so hard, stamping his feet against the floor, shaking his head. When he finished, he sagged wearily against the wall. He looked down at Zach, who still sat on the mattress, all knees. Smiling. Nodding his head up and down. The same stupid Zach he’d pulled up the hill on that sled.
We’re not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie? You’re gonna ride with me, right?
Oliver had to fight the urge to cross the room and just lift him off the mattress in his arms. Just kiss him smack on the forehead. The two of them didn’t do things like that.
“Oh God!” he said instead. He tilted his head so far back he was staring up at the ceiling. “Oh God, what is happening here? I can not believe this is happening.”
“I know. It’s insane.”
“Well, what went on with you, Zach-man. All this bloodstained clothes shit and Detective Mulligan and everything? Christ!” Oliver kicked the floor with his heel. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. I mean, the FB-fucking-I … What’s happening, man?”
“Nothing!” Zach exclaimed. He put his skinny arms out, showed his empty hands. He was wide-eyed. “I had a fight with Tiffany. That’s all. That’s how it all got started. I don’t know: something’s the matter with her. She’s been acting weird for weeks. I don’t know. We had this quarrel and she got all pissed off and … she told me to leave. ‘Go back to your stupid mews and live there,’ that’s what she said. What was I gonna do? It was, like, four in the morning or something, I don’t know. And I came in—to the mews, I mean—I went to the mews and the place was all messed up and everything. So I figured it was robbed, right? And I went upstairs to check things out and … that’s when I saw the body. You know? And I got all messed up. This is the stupid part. Cause I … don’t know what I did. I ran over to it. You know, I didn’t even notice about the head. Well, I mean I noticed it, but I just … I wasn’t thinking or something, you know, because I ran over to it—the body—and I took hold of it, you know? To see if I could help or something … I took hold of it by the shoulders. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. So I got all covered in blood. And then I saw, you know, what happened to the head. And I thought, Oh shit. Oh shit, now I’m all covered with blood, you know, they’re going to think it was me. And I just … I … ran out. I ran home, back to Tiffany. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed; sagged. “Then, when I got home, you know, I told Tiffany everything that had happened, right? And she just went all—pale, like, just the red going out of her cheeks, just all gray, and I said, ‘Tiff, what’s wrong,’ but she wouldn’t tell me. And then she said, she said, ‘Just wait. Just wait here, okay?’ She said she had to go out for a little while and then … then she said she’d come back and explain everything.” He gave a slow baffled shrug. “Only she never did. She never came back at all. I haven’t seen her since.” And he just sat there, gazing at the floor. That was the end of it.
The smile was gone entirely from Oliver’s face now. He grimaced, snatched his beer bottle up by the neck. Carried it over to the window, stepping around the books. Dread—his old friend Uncle Dread—was back. In spades. Mr. Relief had moved away and good old Uncle Dread had set up camp in his stomach. Building quite a little bonfire in there too by the feel of it.
He was on the drugs, Ollie thought. He swigged the beer. Looked out the window, through the grillwork of the fire escape. Down on the little Village bystreet going shadowy in the afternoon. Two children in store-bought masks danced through the shadows behind their mother—impossible to tell which TV characters they were supposed to be. And a gay couple in studded leather and motorcycle caps followed after them, hand in hand. Oliver, watching them all, felt so alone, felt such a lonesome hankering for childhood days, that he almost spoke aloud in his bitterness: You went back on the drugs, you stupid shit. No wonder you couldn’t think straight.
He glanced over his shoulder. There was Zach, knees around his ears. Gazing off stupidly. Sort of waggling his head.
We’re not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie?
Oliver didn’t say anything. He turned to the window again. He sighed. Thank God the window was open, he thought. Zach had come up the fire escape and climbed in and thank God the window was open for him. If Mulligan got his hands on the Zach-man now, if Zach told his story—trying to revive a headless body, hugging it, getting covered with blood …
I give you my word that I will personally beat the living shit out of him until he tells me everything he knows.
Zach had been on drugs. That was the only explanation. The way he acted, the things he did. The way his stomach was all messed up. He was on drugs and Tiffany knew it and threw him out. Go back to your stupid mews and take your drugs there. That’s what she must have said. Go back to the mews like you used to.
He sent a long breath echoing into the neck of the beer bottle. Go back to your stupid mews … he thought.
Or had she known? Had she known he’d go there and find the body? Had she sent him there to find it, to set him up, just like she sent Oliver himself there later in the day—sent him there and then called the cops to report a woman screaming?
She said she’d come back and explain everything. She’s been acting weird for weeks.
She was the key to it, all right. Oliver was sure of that. She had the answers. But how were they going to convince Mulligan? Especially now with his brother on drugs again. On drugs and all bloody, his fingerprints probably all over. His idiot brother. How could they convince Mulligan to talk to Tiffany before he kicked Zach half to death?
Oliver gazed down at the crowns of the gingkos, which were slipping into the street’s shadows too. He pulled at his beer angrily. Thought of the first time Zachie had broken down. Up at SUNY. In New Paltz. Brilliant guy like Zachie killing time in a bogus little state school like that. Goofball U, Oliver used to call it to himself. People majored in tans there; rock-scrambling through the Shawangunks. Ollie himself had just finished up
at Bennington. He was bartending his way down the White River. Writing bad poems and some good poems too. When Nana called him, he was living in a tent, in a campground near Gaysville. Laura, the waitress at Hemingway’s, had come to fetch him. “It’s your grandmother. She says there’s a catastrophe.”
Oh, and it was a catastrophe, all right. Zach had been curled up in a corner of his dorm room for four days. Arms around his knees. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t talk to anyone. Even when Ollie got there, he would only lift his solemn little face and pronounce grimly, “This is not what God wants me to do, Oliver.”
Not what God wants me to do. Oliver sneered down at the gingkos. Hissed through his teeth. An old man stood under one of the trees, belly in his T-shirt like a medicine ball. Gabbing forcefully across a shopping cart with an old lady in a housedress.
Or maybe they’re cops, Oliver thought. Maybe they’re FBI and they’re watching the place and any minute they’ll come bursting in here, guns blazing.
If the feds get to him first, your brother is going to be dead.
Oh boy. Oh yes. Uncle Dread was cooking up a storm in the old breadbasket now. Oliver brought the bottle to his mouth again. Tasted the bottom suds. Wished the alcohol would take hold a little. Calm him down. Blunt the edge of this depression. This fear.
After SUNY, Zach had come home to the mews again. Nana had gotten him a psychiatrist that time too, paid all his expenses, everything. And Zach had lain in there, in the mews, in the dark. Reading Augustine and C. S. Lewis and Hans Kung, days on end. Thomas à Kempis, for Christ’s sweet sake, days on end. And finally, one day, he just took off. Joined some sort of Christian religious retreat somewhere in Pennsylvania. And wrote joyful, pious letters home for a year and a half until he broke down again and Ollie had to go fetch him …
Oliver tilted the bottle back. Drained the beer. To no avail, like the man said. His heart was still lead. His mind wouldn’t stop working. Mulligan:
I will personally beat the living shit out of him until he tells me everything he knows.
That prick. The pug-nosed detective without a trace of emotion in his voice or his face. Blinking down at him from behind the round wire rims. Laying his photographs down like playing cards, blank-eyed, poker-mugged. And those photographs. That picture of the girl with the leather mask over her head and the politician up her ass. Damn it, Ollie thought. Goddamned Tiffany. What the hell was she up to here?
She said she’d come back and explain everything.
“Ach!” He waved it all away. Turned around.
There was Zach, perched on the mattress. Arms flung over his raised knees, hands dangling. Looking up at Oliver with his big eyes and waiting for him to speak. What’re we gonna do now, Ollie? Just like after Mom died. What’re we gonna do now?
“Oh hell, Zachie. You gotta turn yourself in,” Oliver said. “You got to. There’s no other way. We’ll get you a lawyer first. Nana must know somebody. Mulligan won’t be able to touch you if you’ve got a lawyer …”
“Oh Jeeze, Ollie, I don’t know …”
“Look, man, they knew this girl, this dead girl. The cops, I mean. They knew her and they’re pissed off. If they catch you, if you run and they catch you, they’re gonna teach you new meanings of the word ‘excruciating.’ You gotta do it. You gotta turn yourself in.”
The two brothers were quiet then in the dusky room. Oliver, ashamed, shuffled at the window. Gripped his empty beer bottle, studied the floor. On the mattress, Zach considered things, his eyes moving. Glancing from one skewed stack of books to another. Lingering on the cover of The Wasteland.
Goddamned Tiffany, Oliver thought. Where the hell was she?
“Okay, Ollie,” Zach said then. “Okay.” He lifted his shoulders. “Jeeze. And I was gonna be King Death in the parade tonight and everything.”
“Yeah. Well. Next year,” Oliver said. He couldn’t meet Zachie’s eyes.
Zach tilted his chin up a little. “There’s just one thing, Ollie …”
“What’s that?”
“Well … Tiffany.”
Oliver looked at him. “Yeah? What about her?”
“Well, I mean, I think I know where she is now.”
“What?”
“I mean, she’s supposed to work at the bookstore today. I mean, there’s no place else she could go except to Trish and Joyce at the bookstore. Or maybe home to Scarsdale. But I think she’s at the bookstore. I’m almost sure of it. I’d have gone there myself except … the cops, you know, and I was so sick and all.”
Oliver said nothing. He looked away, trying to think. Running his hand up through his hair. Zach had to turn himself in. He had to. But what if … what if Oliver could find Tiffany? What if she did have some of the answers? Enough to convince Mulligan Zach was innocent, enough, at least, to keep him at bay?
“Shit,” he said aloud. He was a poet, not a cop. It was impossible to work this out.
“Maybe we could call her,” Zach said.
“No,” said Oliver at once. If they gave her warning, she might run off. “The bookstore’s right around the corner. Maybe I could go over there.”
“I sure would like to talk to her,” said Zach. His head swung back and forth slowly. He studied the empty air. “I mean, I’m really worried about her, Ollie.”
Oliver drew a long breath. He nodded, let it out. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “So the fuck am I.”
Beverly Tilden was on her way to the NYU Medical Center to visit her father, who had recently had his gallbladder removed. Mrs. Tilden had asked the taxi driver to leave her off on Second Avenue because there was a good Korean grocery there, on the corner of Thirtieth, across from the shopping center. Mrs. Tilden had popped in to the grocery and bought her dad some pink carnations and some strawberry Crumblies. He would sneer at the flowers, she knew, because he was an old-school tough guy. But he’d like them secretly. And though he probably couldn’t stomach the cookies yet, he would be able to offer them to visitors. That would make him feel more like a host, more in control.
Mrs. Tilden, tall and trim, strode down Thirtieth then in her fashionable, ankle-length black coat. The flowers, wrapped in foil, were in one gloved hand. The cookies were in a white plastic bag over her forearm. Her purse was strapped over her shoulder. She glanced at her watch as she walked and made a face. It was three-thirty already. She had to make this visit and get home by five at the latest. The Halloween party was at six, and every girl in Melissa’s class had accepted her invitation. That meant eleven six-year-olds in a two-bedroom apartment. Bobbing for apples, OD’ing on sugar. Giggling, shrieking … Even with the caterer and the hired magician, there was going to be plenty of hysteria left over for her.
She walked a little faster. She was about halfway between Second and First. A police car came speeding up behind her, sped past her, its siren howling. Mrs. Tilden wrinkled her nose a little at the noise. After the police car turned onto First, there was no other traffic on the street. There were no other pedestrians either. Mrs. Tilden was alone on Thirtieth. But she did not notice that.
Not until the dark figure stepped out into her path.
Mrs. Tilden was on the south sidewalk, passing a row of brownstones. Thin sycamores with yellowing leaves spread sun-flecked shade. A breeze from the river made the elms sway. The light and shadow played and danced. Mrs. Tilden slowed. Her eyes flashed over the strange figure before her, dark and dappled beneath the trees. Mrs. Tilden didn’t like what she saw. Not a bit.
It was a woman. She had appeared suddenly. Slipping out from behind a brownstone stoop as if she had been hiding there. She was a bedraggled creature. Brown hair in tangles to her shoulder. Mascara on her wide, pale cheeks. Lipstick smudging her chin. Her cream-colored blouse was splashed with grime, torn at the shoulder, revealing a bra strap. Her dark skirt was streaked with dust. Her feet, in flats, showed filthy, nearly black. But it wasn’t this that scared Mrs. Tilden. Homeless people were all over the city; they rarely hurt anyone. No, there was something e
lse about this woman. Her slumped, sullen, determined look. Her eyes—they were foggy—were veiled like the eyes of a snake Mrs. Tilden had once seen on a PBS nature special. Well, whatever it was, it set the alarms off, all right.
On the other hand, the alarms were always going off in this city, and Mrs. Tilden was in a hurry. She kept walking right toward the strange woman. After all, it was broad daylight. The busy corner of First Avenue was just a few steps off. There was even another police car passing by down there, its siren wild. And there had to be other people …
Mrs. Tilden glanced around nervously. No. There were no other people. The block was empty. She was alone.
And at that moment, the woman stepped toward her. Mrs. Tilden, suddenly terrified, swerved to get past. Swerved the wrong way, toward the buildings. Oh, damn it! she thought. The woman cut her off, backed her up under the stoop’s balustrade.
Good God, thought Beverly Tilden, this is it, this is the real thing, it’s really happening!
The woman stared up at her dully with those glazed eyes.
“I just escaped from Bellevue,” she said in a harsh whisper. “I have a knife. Give me bus fare.”
Mrs. Tilden was surprised to find she could still think clearly, almost calmly, though she was now icy with fear. She would just give the woman her money, that’s all. Just cooperate, that was what everyone told you.
“All right,” she said. “Just a minute.”
She fumbled for her purse, trying to open it with the flowers still in her hand. As always when she felt threatened, a New York tabloid headline screamed in her mind. MURRAY HILL MOM STABBED FOR BUS FARE! She fought the thought off. It would be all right if she just cooperated. With a quick curse, she dropped the carnations to the sidewalk. Let the bag of cookies slide off her arm as well. She snapped her purse open.
“I’ll give you whatever I have.”
“I just want bus fare,” the woman hissed. “Bus fare. I have a knife.” She held a brass letter opener up before Mrs. Tilden’s eyes. Mrs. Tilden would not have thought that would be a very scary thing to see, but it was. She fumbled her wallet open. Picked through it frantically with her gloved fingers.
The Animal Hour Page 18
