Death's Doorway

by Crin Claxton

  “In my apartment I have a parking mirror. You know when you live off a busy road and you need to see what’s coming around the corner? Someone gave it to me because I have a habit of pulling out of side roads without looking. But I don’t have a driveway, so I put it up in my apartment where the hallway turns onto my kitchen. Well, thank God. Suni left the bedroom and went to fix some drinks. I decided to surprise her. As I turned into the kitchen, I peeked up at the mirror and Suni was pouring something from a small bottle into my glass. I knew it was my glass because I like to drink from a special one my friend had hand-painted for me. I went straight in and took the bottle out of her hand. She looked shocked, but she didn’t say a word. She marched past me back into the bedroom and started putting her clothes back on.

  “I stuffed the bottle in my kitchen drawer and followed Suni. I wanted some kind of explanation. What the stuff was, what she was doing, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I’ve never seen someone get dressed so fast. She hightailed it out of my apartment even though I was practically hanging off her arm at one point. She shook me off and disappeared. I was left sitting on my bed, holding the little bottle of clear liquid up to the light, wondering what it was. I felt like Alice in Wonderland gone wrong.” Telitha took a breath. Then she shook her head. Clearly, the memory still disturbed her.

  Maya swallowed. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t that. “Did you get the liquid analyzed?”

  “Sure did. GHB.”

  “No.” Maya felt sick.

  “Some people take it recreationally. It doesn’t automatically mean she was trying to knock me out for some sinister purpose.”

  “No, I guess not.” Maya said the words, but she wasn’t convinced. From the way Telitha spoke, it didn’t sound like she was sure either.

  “The whole episode scared me. Whatever Suni was doing, the way she ran out of my apartment made her look guilty of something.”

  “Did you try to talk to her again, or call the police?”

  Telitha screwed her face up. “Maybe I should have gone to the police, but, well, I’m not a huge fan. I know it’s a stereotype, black people and the police, but my brothers have had a lot of shit over the years. And I knew a woman who was sexually assaulted. The police were no help, and they were my local cops so I wasn’t going to rush to call them.”

  “What about Suni?”

  “She disappeared. I found a place online to send off the liquid to. I dropped it in the mail the next day on my way over to Suni’s place. She’d gone. The apartment owner was kind enough to let me in because I had some stuff there. It was completely cleaned out.”

  “She’d gone by the next day?”

  “I think she went straight home, packed up, and left. I didn’t sleep well. It was early, around nine a.m. when I went there. Suni had run out on me about two in the morning.”

  “Do you think she drugged you at any other time?” Maya asked.

  Telitha put her hands over her face. “Oh God. That’s what I’ve been wondering.” She thought for a minute. “I don’t think so. I never felt weird. I never had lapses in time that I couldn’t explain. I never woke up wondering where I was or what had happened to me. Of course it’s possible I might not have realized or remembered. That’s the thing with GHB apparently, but wouldn’t there have been a bunch of hours I couldn’t place?”

  “I guess.” What Maya didn’t say was that Telitha might not realize if it happened at nighttime. She might have just thought she was sleeping. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  Telitha laughed. “Isn’t that enough? No, that’s about it. She put me off dating for a long while. It was a shock to get your message. Even reading her name made me feel weird.”

  “Thank you for speaking to me. I’m really lucky I found you and that you got back to me.”

  “You need to check that your friend is okay.”

  “I sure do.”

  Maya stared at the computer screen long after Telitha had gone. She wanted to rush over to Jade’s, but she needed to think. She wasn’t happy that her instincts were right. She wasn’t happy at all.

  Chapter Nine

  Tony tried to shift the van into third gear. It complained loudly and spat the gear stick into neutral. Tony grunted as the van shuddered. She grabbed the stick more forcefully, pressed her foot down as far as she could, and shoved it hard. The van protested with a shriek before finally accepting the gear change.

  “Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Deirdre was sitting in the passenger seat, her legs crossed neatly in front of her. She patted the back of her floral headscarf and smoothed down her tight orange sweater. She flicked a bit of fluff off what would have been called Capri pants back in the 1950s. Then she took out a pair of huge tortoiseshell sunglasses from her purse. She popped them on, even though the day was gray and drizzly.

  “Yes,” Tony grunted, flooring the accelerator. The van responded by moving ever so slightly faster.

  Deirdre’s foot tapped the dashboard rhythmically. Tony tried not to let Deirdre’s pink stiletto distract her eyes from the road.

  “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what outfit have you got on now?”

  “Oh, I love it when you notice what I’m wearing.” Deirdre beamed. “I put my favorite driving outfit on. No one did outdoors and feminine like the fifties. I love vintage clothes.”

  “All your clothes are vintage,” Tony pointed out.

  “So you say,” Deirdre muttered childishly. Her eyes moved over the interior of the transit van. “I know funds are tight, but did you have to pick the biggest heap of trash on the car lot? Someone needs to go over this with a wet dishcloth and a gallon of disinfectant.” She pointed at the cup holder. “What have they been transporting in that? Pig fertilizer? And when I say fertilizer you know I mean sh—”

  “Yes. I know what you mean,” Tony said quickly. “It’s all they had at short notice. And you’re right about funds, seeing as I’m paying for this myself. I don’t see you or Frankie White coughing up any money any time soon.”

  “I think people who drive transit vans must be a filthy bunch. I’ve gone right off The A-Team.”

  “Don’t remember a profusion of transit vans in The A-Team.”

  “Well, you get the point. I’m not going to be making eyes at any removal men for a long time after this experience. I don’t care how tight their buns are. All I’m going to be thinking about is that crinkly brown splodge next to the half-crushed fly.”

  Tony didn’t say anything. She sometimes wondered what world Deirdre lived in when she wasn’t dropping in on Tony’s life. She frowned at the sat nav device stuck onto the windscreen. It said they were a few minutes away from their destination.

  Tony had called round to Smith’s nephew’s house that morning, posing as a house clearance agent. To her surprise, the nephew had jumped at the chance of getting rid of stuff from his loft. Keen to act on the information as soon as possible, Tony had arranged to return in the afternoon. She had thought of asking Maya to come with her, but it was one of Maya’s clinic days. She had then dropped round at Jade’s but got no answer at all. Tony was disappointed but had decided to get on with the job at hand.

  “You have reached your destination.” The newsreader-type voice of the sat nav announced their arrival.

  John Smith’s house was a Victorian mid-terrace that would once have looked lovely with red brickwork and sash windows like the house next door. Smith’s house had been covered with fake stone cladding, and the original windows replaced with mock leaded UPVC ones.

  “Good God. Smith should have been in prison for what he did to that house,” Deirdre muttered. “Do I have to come in? It’s bad enough being seen in this van, let alone a monstrosity like that.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but no one’s going to see you,” Tony said bluntly.

  Deirdre sniffed and then fizzed through the van door to the street.

  Tony walked past a rusty gate hanging off it
s hinges and then walked carefully across loose tiles to the off-white UPVC front door. She pressed the doorbell.

  John Smith’s nephew opened the door a few minutes later. He had light gray jogging bottoms on below a stained brown T-shirt. He didn’t smell like he washed often. He had stubble that could in no way be described as designer. It emphasized his square jaw and contrasted sharply with his bald head. He was of medium height and paunchy. He nodded at Tony and then turned away without a word of greeting.

  Tony followed him along a dim hallway to a flight of stairs covered in carpet that didn’t look like it had seen a Hoover for many a decade.

  “My God, Tony, hanging out with you is like being in a scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof only with exceptionally unattractive characters,” Deirdre said, two steps behind her. “Your version is Filthy Cat on a Shabby Tin Roof.”

  Smith’s nephew paused on the first floor landing. He reached into the side of a cupboard and pulled out a long pole with a hook on the end of it. He used it to twist the latch on a square access door set into the ceiling. It swung down, resting on a long hinge to reveal an opening about half a meter square. Smith’s nephew pulled out a stepladder from behind the same cupboard and thrust it toward her.

  “There you go,” he said brusquely.

  Tony deduced that he expected her to climb up into the loft by way of it.

  “Don’t you have a loft ladder?” she asked, looking up into the dark opening.

  “Stepladder’s always been good enough for me,” Smith’s nephew said. “Candle and matches to the left of the trap as you go in.”

  Tony gawped at him as he left. She pulled her head torch from her back pocket. Thank heavens she’d decided to wear her work black 501s.

  She made her way up the rickety stepladder and poked her head into the loft space. The loft wasn’t boarded. Here and there sheets of hardboard had been laid over the joists and then boxes sat on them, but all the walkways were across the wooden joists. Great, so Tony would have to stumble about in the light of one head torch and a candle, balancing on beams, and then carry anything she found down a dodgy stepladder.

  With a sigh of resignation, she heaved herself up into the dark space.

  Specks of daylight shone through ventilation bricks and a couple of places where presumably tiles were missing and the roofing felt below had become damaged. Dust spun in the thin shafts of light. As Tony’s eyes adjusted, she started to make out objects in the room. Apart from two narrow pathways, the entire space was full with stuff. Boxes were piled on top of each other, some stacked right up to the sloping roof. Near the access hatch were Christmas decorations. Old-fashioned tinsel dangled over the edge of cardboard boxes that brimmed with multicolored glass baubles and fairy lights. Various lengths of wood were stacked against the wall nearest the hatch. They nestled against old kitchen cupboards, a heap of tiles, and sections of plastic pipe.

  On the other straight wall were half a dozen wall heaters, including an ancient gas fire and an electric fire with pretend plastic coal on it. Tony remembered her grandmother having a similar one. The pretend coal lit up when the fire was on.

  Spanning the distance between the two walls were more boxes, a wooden clotheshorse, a broken chair, a radio sitting on a tattered armchair, a typewriter, and piles and piles of flattened, empty cardboard boxes that had once held appliances.

  It was quiet. The street noise below was faint and muffled. Even Deirdre was unusually silent. Tony half expected to hear the scuttle of mice.

  “He’s a lazy bugger, that boy.”

  Tony jumped. She spun her head toward Smith’s voice. He was sitting on the armchair. Tony didn’t want to mention that he had an old Roberts radio interweaved with his crotch. To be honest, she didn’t want to think too hard about his crotch.

  “Look at all this rubbish. He should have chucked it out years ago.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve turned up. Where’s the tape and the tape recorder?” Tony asked.

  “He may have moved it, I suppose.” Smith walked through the bric-a-brac to a dark corner under the eaves. “This was where I put it. Oh, whaddaya know? There it is. There’s my old Revox.”

  Tony picked her way carefully over to Smith. She pulled out several bits of old stair carpet that were cleaner than the one she’d just walked over, until she was staring at a rectangular machine. Tony judged it to be forty centimeters wide by thirty-five centimeters high. Two large dark gray reels sat on two prongs centered about a quarter of the way down from the top edge. The bottom third of the machine was taken up by a steel panel, housing a series of large steel-faced rotary switches for play, volume, balance, and two combined input selection and level switches, one for each of the two tracks. On the extreme right was a chunky on / off power switch. Above the volume and balance controls were a set of rectangular black buttons as thick as Tony’s finger, marked Rewind, Forward, Play, and Stop, and a fifth red one for Record. Two analogue meters sat above the recording level switches on the right. The needles rested at the extreme left. The tape recorder was huge and beautiful. Even though it was covered in dust and cobwebs, Tony longed to touch the dials and switches.

  “How the hell did you conceal that from Ron Somers? It’s not exactly surveillance equipment.”

  “Actually, MI5 and the FBI used reel-to-reel recorders. They recorded phone conversations with them. I had a microphone setup with a long cord, that’s all.”

  “I see. So that’s the machine. Where’s the tape with Ron Somers’s confession on it?”

  “The tapes were next to it. Oh yeah. They still are, in that little trunk.”

  Tony opened a small gray trunk to reveal a stack of red cardboard cases about twenty-five centimeters square. She lifted the lid off the top one. Inside was a large clear spool of dark, dull brown tape. On the underside of the lid was written: Conversation with Ron, 17 July 1967.

  “Bingo,” Tony said.

  “Great,” Deirdre said. “That means we can get out of here. Drag that antique machine across this treacherous pathway and let us be gone.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” Tony asked.

  “It seemed appropriate. We are standing in the middle of a Victorian junkyard aren’t we?”

  “Hardly, and you’re a bit of an antique yourself, these days, luv,” Smith muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?” Deirdre stormed off in a wafty way in the direction of the access hatch.

  “What strange, made-up language was that? And don’t even get me started on your attempt at a British accent,” Tony said, lifting the tape recorder by a carry handle on the top of it. “Arff! This is heavy.”

  Deirdre snickered. “Not so butch now, are we?”

  Tony panted after her, heaving the recorder above her knee. “I never said I was. This is so much heavier than equipment is now. Jesus.”

  “That’s the trouble with you dykes,” Smith growled behind her. “You think you’re men, but you ain’t.”

  “I never thought I was a man,” Tony grumbled.

  “Well, you look like one from where I’m standing,” Smith said.

  “Heaven help me. Now shut up, both of you. I need to concentrate on getting this thing down that stepladder without breaking my neck.” Tony balanced the machine on a beam at the edge of the hatch, maneuvered herself down, and then, balancing on the ladder, pulled the recorder after her.

  She went back up for the trunk of tapes and then lugged both things down to the ground floor. She could hear noises of a football match through the sitting room door. She knocked.

  Smith’s nephew appeared a minute later.

  “That was quick,” he said, frowning at her.

  “Well, this is all I want, really,” Tony said.

  He frowned harder. Then he ran his eyes over the tape recorder, before taking the trunk out of her hand. He opened the lid, frowned inside, coughed, and sniffed.

  “That must be worth a bob or two then,” he decided.

  “I doubt it.”

>   “What do you want it for then?”

  “I collect old audio equipment. It’s a hobby of mine.”

  “I thought you were a house clearance agent.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, you’re not a very good one. The clue’s in the name. House clearance, not the odd bit of equipment clearance.”

  God, is everybody a comedian today? Tony sighed. “I’m prepared to take this off your hands.”

  “Five thousand pounds,” Smith’s nephew said.

  “What?” Tony nearly dropped the tape recorder. “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?”

  “One hundred pounds.”

  Tony thought about telling him not to go to Marrakesh anytime soon, but she stopped herself. She didn’t want to have to pay out any more money.

  “Five hundred pounds.”

  “What? You’re going back up now. You need to learn how to barter.”

  “I had my heart set on getting that stuff out of the house. Loft clearance you said. I want the loft to look as nice as the rest of the house.” He swung the sitting room door open to reveal a ripped sofa covered in empty beer cans. One was half on its side and spilling its contents into swirly purple seat cushions.

  “I’m never going to rely on the kindness of strangers ever again,” Deirdre moaned softly.