Anything for You--A Novel

by Saul Black

  The final image was of her naked on a bed, gagged and blindfolded, hands tied above her head.

  Valerie took them out of the darkroom into the full light of the basement for a better look. They were all black and white, the first (desk) and third (bed) looked artificially lit, taken with the same high contrast. The kitchen shot was softer, the light apparently natural. None of them, unsurprisingly, was initialed.

  A cop gear shifted. She looked again at the first photograph. Even in black and white the lapis lazuli bowl in which she’d found Adam Grant’s keys was unmistakable. She climbed the basement stairs a fifth time anyway. Thighs and calves burning, she stood in the office doorway and held up the print of the blonde bent over the desk.

  This desk.

  She went to the kitchen. Checked the print. All that natural light came from a window on the blonde’s left. To the right of her bare shoulder a red Smeg fridge with a scatter of magnets and Post-its.

  This window. This fridge.

  Valerie was standing at the foot of the Grants’ king-size (and still bloodstained) bed when her phone rang. Will Fraser calling.

  “Hey.”

  “I found Sophia,” Will said.

  Valerie held the bedroom photograph up in front of her. The naked woman, black cloth blindfold, black cloth gag. Wrists fastened with curtain cord to the head of the bed.

  This bed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think maybe I did, too.”

  15

  August 1, 2017

  The night was too short and the hard work of digging had left her awash with endorphins. Of course the thing to do, once she’d finished, was get the fuck out of there. Yet she found herself in the driver’s seat with the door open, easing her boots off and pushing her bare feet into the icy sand. Bliss entered her soles and traveled up through her calves, and for a strange, indeterminate time she sat there with her eyes closed and her knees apart, receiving the earth’s cold benediction. She hadn’t known murder would be like this. She’d imagined suffocating disgust at best. At worst a continuous raging fever of guilt. At any rate not this curious sensitivity, as if her innocence had been renewed at the cellular level. The desert understood. The masculine silence kept her company without judgment. The constellations absorbed her crime as the ocean would a tear. It was awful, how clean she felt.

  But not all her wits left her. Dawn was coming. Whatever allowance this had been, it was over. She tossed the suede boots onto the passenger seat, accepting as she did it that it was a risk, grains of sand, some egghead with a microscope pinning down the exact square of earth, uniquely identifiable thanks to some geological quirk she didn’t know about—but she couldn’t care. It was enough that she was moving. She put the shovel back in the trunk. Took a last survey of the burial site. Began to tell herself it was completely undetectable—then dissolved a second time into indifference. She really couldn’t care. This new innocence courtesy of guilt was, she understood, dangerous. It would get her caught. Tried. Convicted. Sentenced to death. Well, que será, será. She was very tired.

  She expected disaster all the way back, sirens, a helicopter, the quivering searchlight, the moment of terrible stardom. But it didn’t come. The desert lightened and she felt as if the night were a friend she’d lost. Tears welled and fell. She was, she admitted, probably losing her mind.

  The house was empty when she got home. As determined. The endorphins had subsided. Now there was the purged feeling, as after a childhood afternoon of wild play and compressed dramas. She remote-opened the garage door and eased the Volvo inside. Got out and went around to the trunk, but for a moment couldn’t open it. She leaned the heels of her hands on it, waiting for the next reserve of energy to kick in—the last reserve for this night, she knew. If she didn’t get done now what she needed to get done there was no telling how long it would be before she’d have it in her again.

  A few minutes passed. Her mouth hung open, a little spittle fell and pooled on the gleaming trunk. Spit was a thing sex had appropriated. Larry had spat on her, many times, after the first time, after he’d established he could fuck her. That first time he’d done everything as if with his mind elsewhere, as if he wasn’t seeing her. Even then, young as she was, she’d thought he was trying not to see himself doing what he was doing so that afterward he could pretend he hadn’t done it. He’d kept his eyes closed. If a tree falls in the forest … But later, once he’d got past all that, it was as if he couldn’t see her clearly and vividly enough. As if he couldn’t find enough things to do and watch himself doing. The first time he spat on her it had seemed involuntary, or at least unpremeditated. It surprised both of them. Then it became something he did every time, sometimes holding her head still so he could be accurate, get it into her eyes or nose or mouth. It was only later she understood spitting was something sex had appropriated. Lots of guys paid to spit on her, or paid her to spit on them. There was nothing, her working years taught her, that sex couldn’t appropriate. By the time she was rescued she was saturated with pornography. Sexual omniscience like a dirty overcoat sewn to her skin. At nineteen.

  What’s your name, honey?

  Sophia.

  You’re just about the cutest blond thing I’ve ever seen.

  She straightened. The garage smelled of turpentine and new steel. She opened the trunk. She wanted to do it quickly. Not just because she was worried the last energy reserve would run dry too soon, but because she didn’t want to spend time handling what she’d brought back from the desert.

  In spite of which she couldn’t stop herself pausing with the plastic bag in her hands, feeling its weight, tracing the padded outlines of its contents. Your curiosity was indefatigable, it turned out. As was your sense of comedy. The absurdity of objects divorced from their natural contexts. Why medical students played pranks with cadavers, presumably. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / ’Tis that I may not weep. Byron. Another bit of educational currency. It was only ever fragments. She’d missed the window in childhood for the structural groundwork, the big building blocks of learning that would have allowed proper cohesion later on. Instead she had a whirling miscellany, party pieces, novelties, tidbits.

  Well, it didn’t matter now.

  There were two freezers, one upright in the kitchen, for daily use, small items, and one in the utility room, chest-style, for big joints of meat, some of which, she knew, had probably been in there long past even deep-freeze safe limits.

  It took her half an hour to empty it, place the plastic bag in the bottom, then refill.

  And that really was the last of the energy gone. Burning the scrubs, the clothes, the props, it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  In the shower, simple soap and water sloughed the last vestiges of her violence and she emerged as if prosaically reborn. The soft white towel she wrapped around herself might have been woven by angels. She had thirty-six hours yet of solitary freedom. She was very hungry. She went back down through the clean spaces of the house to the gleaming kitchen. Made herself a cup of black coffee and devoured random food from the fridge: a roast chicken leg; a peach yogurt; a slice of leftover quiche. She ate in blank animal need, standing at the window watching birds flitting to and from the feeders on the sunlit lawn.

  Naked, she lay on her bed, limbs spread as if for tanning, though in fact it was the house’s cool conditioned air that moved over her like a beneficent spirit. She felt a great tenderness toward herself, a sympathetic exhaustion that tingled from her eyelids to her fingernails. The closed curtains showed pearly blue dawn light. Sleep was very near.

  The first part of her giant labor was over—but she knew the worst was still to come.

  16

  August 7, 2017

  “So they were both screwing Sophia,” Will Fraser said.

  “Not necessarily at the same time,” Valerie answered.

  “I wasn’t picturing a three-way.”

  “Not seeing her at the same time, fuckhead.”

  They were at their share
d desk at the station, comparing stills of Will’s gathered CCTV with the photographs Valerie had found in the Grants’ basement. All but conclusively the same woman, though her face was maddeningly obscured in the photos and behind the giant shades in the CCTV.

  “Well, maybe if Jenner hadn’t done our guy there’d be mileage in that,” Will said. “As it stands it’s a no-brainer.”

  “I can’t believe Jenner’s that dumb.”

  “Are we looking at the same woman? I don’t go for white girls, but I’d be dumb for this one. And why’re you so convinced Jenner’s smarter than that? Because his handsome half brother reads Norman Mailer?”

  Valerie took a sip of her cappuccino. Here it was again: In among the legitimate reasoning was the irritating fact that Adam Grant had been, it turned out, capable of cheating on his wife. Just not with Valerie. Was there no end to the durability of her ego?

  “Okay, look at it another way,” she said. “What’s a blonde hot enough to turn you into a cretin doing with a roach like Jenner? You’re sleeping with a lawyer, chances are you’re not sleeping with a recently released ex-con.”

  “Hooker?” Will asked.

  “Not the type you could afford on Gold Star Valet wages.”

  “Unless you got five grand in cash from God knows where. That’d buy you a session or two.”

  “Check the escort agencies. Assuming you can handle that without falling in love or picking up an STD.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Valerie straightened, put her hands in the small of her back and stretched. Heard her vertebrae tick. She’d missed her hour in the gym two days running. If she didn’t get in there soon there was a very good chance she’d find herself smoking a cigarette. Followed by twenty more. And a bottle of vodka.

  “Well, since I’m not in a hurry to tell Rachel Grant her husband was screwing around,” she said, “I’m going to the gym.”

  Twenty-four hours, she thought, finding her rhythm on the cross-trainer. She’d give Rachel Grant twenty-four hours of ignorance. Then, like it or not, she was going to have to deal with it. However unlikely, it was possible Rachel knew what her husband was up to. It was further possible that she knew with whom he was up to it. And Sophia was now, in the professional parlance, material.

  She shifted from cross-trainer to treadmill, treadmill to bike. It was, she had to admit, good to be back in shape. Over the months her body’s tensions had eased. Her circulation had been surprised into forgotten efficiency. Not long ago Nick had woken to find her standing, bent from the waist with her palms flat against the bedroom floor, something she’d been unable to do since childhood. Look at me, she’d said to him. I’m nimble. Do you have any idea how much work you’d have to put in to become nimble, like me? For a few moments he’d lain there, frowning through the dregs of sleep. Then he’d said: I’m handsome. I don’t have to be nimble. Come back to bed.

  Valerie pounded through the last two minutes on the delirious edge of exhaustion, trying and failing to ignore the gym’s video screens, all of which showed music videos, all equally alien and annoying. Occasionally she was reminded of how far she’d traveled from such things. Adolescence had been filled with songs and TV shows and celebrities. Now she didn’t know who anyone was. Work had stripped her of so much everyone else took for granted. When, as now, she caught glimpses of it, it was like looking back to a prehistoric age. By rapid degrees, and with a sort of frank implacability, Being Police simply obliterated everything else. People who weren’t Police seemed like children or fantasists to people who were, diverted by toys and dreams, utterly oblivious to a reality which, unless they were very lucky, would sooner or later take a swipe at them, fracture their innocence, or smash their world to pieces. At which point, like Rachel Grant, they would need Police.

  Calories burned: 210. Plus 170 on the treadmill and 200 on the cross-trainer. 580. Plenty. In the last three months she’d dropped almost twenty pounds. She was quietly ashamed of her self-satisfaction. Not quite the body she’d had at twenty-one, but there was no denying the look and feel of rejuvenation. Enjoy it while you can, she thought, enjoy it until it all goes to shit courtesy of Getting Pregnant.

  She showered, dressed, drank a bottle of vending machine Evian (look at this, her alcoholic ghost scoffed—water!) then went to see Nick in Computer Forensics.

  “I don’t know how you guys stand this,” she said. Nick and Nathan were at their desks. The white room always felt over-air-conditioned to Valerie.

  “Each other’s company?” Nathan said.

  “Working in a windowless fridge,” Valerie said.

  “We have the warmth of our vocation,” Nathan answered. “You two got a date up against the wall—or should I stick around?”

  “Well, there’s nothing groovy here,” Nick said, leaning back in his chair. Valerie joined him to face the desktop screen. “Bank transactions all look regular. There are cash withdrawals, few hundred bucks here and there, but that’s walking-around money to a lawyer. Jenner’s cash could have come from Adam Grant, but there’s nothing here that proves it.”

  “What about escort agencies? Credit card transactions show anything like that?”

  “I wasn’t looking for it. I’ll check again. Was he doing that?”

  “Maybe. Hidden photos of a blonde who looks the part. Same woman Jenner was apparently seeing. I don’t expect the name ‘Sophia’ will crop up, but keep an eye out for it.”

  “Okay,” Nick said. “I’ll get on it. Gimme a couple of hours.”

  On her way out, Valerie ran into Laura Flynn. She was holding a sheaf of papers in her left hand, and a single sheet in her right.

  “So we know from Jenner’s phone records that Adam Grant called him,” Laura said. “But I pulled Grant’s phone records anyway. He had two phones registered.” She shook the sheaf in her left hand. “These are the calls logged for one of the phones over the last two months. Regular shit, plenty of calls.” She handed Valerie the single sheet. “That’s the record for the other phone. Two months. Total fourteen calls, all to one number.”

  “Jenner’s.”

  “It doesn’t really help, since it tells us what we already know.”

  “Different shade, though, someone using a dedicated phone.”

  “Lawyer paranoia?”

  “Probably.”

  “And that should be a title for an album, I think.”

  Valerie was back at her apartment and done for the day when Will called. Neither Adam Grant’s photos nor the CCTV footage had produced a solid candidate from the Bay Area agencies, although Will hadn’t finished his sweep.

  “I’ve got a bunch more places to see tomorrow. Christ, does anyone in this city do anything else apart from pay for sex?”

  “You want to trade with Nick and go through the bank records?”

  “You don’t want Nick keeping this sort of company, trust me. It’s lucky I love my wife. Do you know what CIMNC stands for?”

  “What?”

  “‘Come in mouth no condom.’ You need money for the escorts and money for a learning course to decipher the fucking lingo. Anyway, if Sophia’s a pro it looks like she’s freelance.”

  “All right. Check the rest tomorrow.”

  “It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.”

  Valerie hung up. Once, at a house party she and her sister Cassie had gone to in their late teens, a guy had offered her three hundred dollars to blow him. He was older, a freshman back for the first vacation since leaving home. He was drunk, but serious and quite polite. He’d taken the money from his wallet there and then and said, with what appeared to be complete sincerity: Listen. I’m not a pervert or dangerous, but you are unbelievably beautiful and I cannot think of anything I’d rather do. I realize I’m not much to look at, but would you consider it? No one, I swear, will ever have to know. It’s just that if I get run over by a truck later I’d like to die happy. She’d had a mix of feelings in response. There was a superficial sense of having been
insulted and offended. Also some amusement and even, given the lonely earnestness of his manner, a little embarrassed pity. But the bedrock was her childhood Catholicism and a deeper sense of something like personal pride. She’d known immediately that not only was she not going to do this, now, but that it was something she would never do. It simply wasn’t in her. On the other hand, the mere fact of him having put it into words forced her to visualize it—and to understand that if you were a woman in this particular world such transactions were always available. She’d understood not only that she couldn’t do it, but that other girls (with whatever damage it entailed) could. Of course she’d known, intellectually, that prostitution existed, but up until that moment the reality of what it was had never fully hit her. At the time, conscious that this story would get told, eventually (if not by him then by her), she’d laughed and said, Not if you had three million and you were the last guy on earth. But secretly it had saddened her, and revealed at a stroke the countless women who, for whatever reason, could accommodate the idea that they had a price. Later, she’d told Cassie about it. Cassie was two years older, wrapped in the armor of artificial cynicism late adolescence demanded. She’s snorted and said: Welcome to the world, kiddo. As far as men are concerned, every woman’s cunt can be burgled or bought. Get used to it.

  Nick got home with Indian takeout around nine. The summer evening was a soft deepening blue in the apartment windows. Valerie had just opened a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc. There was an unspoken understanding between her and Nick that she would restrict herself to two glasses. After the years of commitment to vodka’s rough sex this was a mere peck on the cheek. That said, the new restraint and regular workouts—the health—had lowered her tolerance. If she swallowed the first glass in a couple of gulps and then sipped the second, she could get some sort of buzz. The trouble was it was the sort of buzz that demanded the rest of the buzz. Nick wasn’t stupid: He made sure he drank the remainder of the bottle himself. Valerie had considered not drinking at all. She’d considered it—and rejected it, with a mortified inner shudder.