Naive

by Charles Royce

  “You told Officer Palino here that it was dark when you first saw your husband on the floor?”

  “Yes. I thought he was choking.”

  “You must’ve turned on these can lights above us here after you tried to save him?” He points to the ceiling.

  “I—I guess so. I don’t really remember.”

  The detective takes another step closer to Micah.

  “Let me get this straight,” he says, eyes down in his notebook, walking closer. “You walk into your house.”

  Closer.

  “Your husband is lying on the floor in a pool of blood.”

  Closer.

  “You hear him choking, possibly still alive.”

  Detective Penance is now face to face with Micah.

  “He’s got what could be over thirty stab wounds in his chest, throat, and abdomen. Thirty.”

  He cocks his head, piercing his eyes into Micah’s.

  “And your very first thought … is CPR?”

  C h a p t e r 3

  “Let me out here, please.”

  Jenna has experienced a rather wretched night at the launch party for the September issue of her former company’s most elite fashion magazine and wants to rid herself of the lingering unease. Despite the unexpectedly chilly August evening, she decided about two seconds ago that she wanted to walk the rest of the way home, and somehow a cigarette is already in her mouth.

  The car screeches to a halt at Orchard and Grand. Jenna, put together in a timeless little Armani black dress, swipes her credit card through the cab’s smudged and tilted machine, grabs her coat and purse, and exits. With an unlit Parliament Light in her mouth, she situates her Burberry trench over her left arm and her Chanel clutch under her right shoulder. The addition of trying to maneuver her Manolo Blahniks within the grooves of the cobblestone street proves too much for her tipsy condition, and she slams the taxi door like a sloppy sailor during Fleet Week.

  “Oh my God, I’m drunk, girl.” She laughs, noticing her French accent is thicker than normal. “I’m that girl, that girl who hobbles around the Lower East Side on a Friday night.” Realizing she’s mumbling out loud to herself makes her laugh even more. “Yep,” she says, affirming what she just said to herself. Her heels manage to take refuge on the sidewalk, and Jenna stops to take in a deep breath.

  It was one of those quintessential Manhattan nights … the crisp, cool air mixed with the smell of wine from restaurant patios, and the occasional whiff of the unknown. She is anxious. And because the evening has not turned out as she had planned, she congratulates herself on using the walk to clear her head.

  A French-born, mostly American-raised thirty-four-year-old, Jenna Ancelet is a tall, stunning woman, graceful in appearance, but unaware of these qualities. She carries herself like a bull in a Waterford crystal shop, is the first to light up during a nice seven-course garden dinner with the company executives, and normally dresses in J. Crew sweaters and jeans. She believes her current ensemble is a bit too much for her. Timeless, sure, but comfortable? Hell no.

  She jostles her left arm to resituate her trench and puts her Bic to the cigarette that’s been hanging off the side of her mouth. As her mind turns to earlier in the evening, one thought begins to gnaw at the back of her mind: Lennox. She remembers how Micah had been anxious all night at the party trying to get his husband on the phone and still wonders why he’d left so abruptly.

  She takes a huge drag and continues walking.

  Jenna often finds herself worrying about Lennox. Still. She first met Lennox when she became his executive assistant three years ago. Having handled everything for him during that time, both personally and professionally, she still wonders how he’s managing without her, how he ever could.

  Despite leaving Lennox under precarious circumstances to work for his competitor, they have remained friends. He’s a handful, very precise and businesslike, and not very intimate, which she has come to accept. She has grown to love him, not in spite of these qualities, but because of them. She feels safe with him, and with his husband Micah, too. They all plan dinners together, weekend jaunts to the Hamptons, and even housesit for each other.

  She puts on her coat and continues walking, ruminating. It’s so cold and quiet and peacef—.

  She sees a tall man walking toward her and stops. She holds her clutch closer to her body. The young man pivots to the opposite side of street and disappears into a bar, the door opening and closing in staccato, unleashing a brief but loud interlude of music and lively patrons that echoes down Orchard Street. The subsequent silence helps to slow her heartbeat. She exhales.

  Jenna continues walking, ruminating, swerving. Being intoxicated sometimes impairs Jenna’s sense of judgment when it comes to being alone on the streets of New York. The longer she lives here, the more confident she feels, the more potential danger she ignores. These streets are my ’hood, and the Lower East Side is not what is used to be, she muses as she turns the corner at Orchard and Canal. After all, what was once semi-abandoned real estate filled with displaced immigrants, active druggies, and extremely active prostitutes is now a gentrified playground and a young New Yorker’s dream come true.

  She passes her favorite restaurant, PM, a relatively new high-end establishment. Around five or six in the morning, the restaurant changes to AM, and becomes a breakfast/brunch place, which Jenna thinks is brilliant. She’s been wanting to catch them changing the “A” to a “P” on the sign outside, or at least the “P” to an “A,” if she could get up that early.

  “So cool,” she says, as she laughs to herself. “AM, PM.” She chuckles again. She’s completely drunk. She turns the corner at Canal and Rutgers, one block from her apartment.

  She sees red and blue lights flickering from behind the two-hundred-year-old church with the bell tower.

  C h a p t e r 4

  “Thirty times?” Micah asks.

  “Yeah. Somebody had a vendetta.” Detective Penance wants to elicit a reaction.

  “I had no idea. I mean, it looked like a lot of blood, but I didn’t know where it was coming from.”

  Detective Penance leaves a moment of silence to see if Micah will continue. Of course, Penance has his suspicions. In his experience, he has found such displays of psychotic overindulgence to be crimes of passion. And who usually commits these types of murders? Someone extremely close to the victim. New perp. Same old story.

  “What happened?” Micah breaks the silence. “Who could’ve done this to him?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Detective Penance looks at Micah. “Mind if we talk downtown? I want to hear about your night from the beginning. Why don’t you come with me, let them do their work?”

  Micah recognizes the question as a command. “Of course.”

  Detective Penance nods to the police officers and to the crime scene team that has begun to document its findings. “Keep me posted.”

  He stands behind Micah, nudging him in the small of his back as they enter the elevator. They ride down in silence and exit the building through what’s left of the front door. Glass crackles underneath their feet. Red and blue lights are now illuminating the entire city block, which is barricaded to through-traffic. A bevy of police cars begins to swarm the corner of Henry and Rutgers.

  The odd evening chill rushes through Micah’s wavy blond hair, and he realizes he is still wearing his white tux shirt, discolored to a blackened crimson. A short, auburn-haired woman Micah has never seen before is holding the door open to a black Lincoln MKZ, motioning for him to enter. Lights are flashing in his eyes. Entire news crews are also assembling, photographing and filming the worst night of his life. A familiar voice calls out from the crowd.

  “Micah!”

  He scans and spots his friend, who is waving, dressed in her trench with her clutch still in her hands.

  “Jenna!” Micah yells with a mix of excitement and relief, knowing he now has a brief link to the outside world. He locks eyes with her and makes a phone cal
l mime with his right thumb and pinkie. “Call Shawn!”

  Jenna nods and watches Micah get into the car with Detective Penance. They drive away.

  “Who’s Shawn?” Detective Penance asks, turning around from the front passenger seat of the car as they make their way to the police station.

  Micah, sitting in the middle of the back seat with his head down and his hands in his lap, never looks up.

  “My lawyer.”

  C h a p t e r 5

  A flash of light. ((Buzzz.)) Another flash. ((Buzzz.))

  “Turn to the left, and lift up your left arm,” says the female photographer, the same lady who’d opened the door to the Lincoln MKZ and driven Micah and Detective Penance to this place, a sticky little corner of Manhattan’s Seventh Precinct police station’s basement.

  Her name is Lilith McGuire. She has been Detective Penance’s right hand for less than five months. Her hope has been to be considered partner within the year, but her three-month evaluation contained Detective Penance’s handwritten remark “hit or miss” underneath “Decision-Making,” a setback that still haunts her. Standing at only five-foot-four, skinny, beautiful by any standard, with long, straight, dark auburn hair that she puts up in a ragged ponytail most of the time, she is inherently eager, which is both her biggest strength and greatest weakness. In all aspects of her life, she is the dominant one, and most often does as she pleases, which is why her last long-term relationship with a woman ended in an ugly divorce. She hates her name, and would prefer “Lil,” but no one calls her that. Everyone who works with her loves the irony of calling her Lily. It’s like calling the Pope “Franny,” they often joke.

  Having only been an investigator for a short time, she takes advantage of any opportunity to prove herself worthy of partner status. But right now, she finds herself in charge of taking nude photos in the basement of the precinct.

  “Now turn to the right, and lift up your right arm,” Lily says to Micah, who is standing naked in front of her, covering his privates with whichever hand is available. “Thank you for consenting to these photos. We’re almost done. Just a few more.”

  Micah’s muscles tense as his body shivers. “Anything you need.”

  The computer screen in front of Lily flashes Micah’s different body parts frame-by-frame while she continues to snap photos.

  Micah’s neck. ((Flash. Buzzz.)) His face. ((Flash. Buzzz.)) His hands. ((Flash. Buzzz.))

  ✽✽✽

  Lennox’s mutilated chest. ((Flash. Buzzz.)) His punctured neck. ((Flash. Buzzz.)) The crime scene photographer stops, feeling nauseous at the site of the butchered body, one of the worst he’s ever seen. He turns his head.

  Just beside the photographer stands Officer Palino on the phone with Detective Penance, filling him in on everything they’ve found thus far.

  “You got the password I sent you for the victim’s phone, right?” asks Officer Palino.

  “Yep, thanks, looking at it now. Shows texts to a Jenna, a couple of texts and voice mails from Micah, one unknown, and one that just says ‘WORK’ in all caps. Haven’t listened to them yet of course. Got the suspect’s bloody jacket. Got his bag too. We’ve also secured two laptops, looks like a work one and a personal one, and a huge iMac that has pictures of both the victim and the suspect floating on the screen saver, with a bunch of mail and papers sitting around addressed to Micah Breuer. You think the iMac uses the same password as the iPhone?”

  “If not, he’s being cooperative, so I’m sure we can get that one too. Mark ’em, bag ’em. We’ll go through them and see what we can find. The suspect has also consented to photos and DNA sampling, so we will have some documentation on bruising, blood, signs of a struggle. Keep going, but I think we’re in good shape.”

  “Wait, that’s not all,” Palino says. “I’m no detective or anything, but I’m noticing all this recovery literature on the bookshelves, and a couple of notes about sponsees and shit around one of the victim’s laptops.”

  “Yeah, so this Lennox guy was probably a recovering drunk or drug addict, or both, and he sponsored people. So, what of it?”

  “Well, one of my guys was searching through the closet in the back bedroom and found a box of old cards and letters addressed to Lennox, and at the bottom of the box were a couple of bags of what looks like heroin. One of ’em is half empty.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe this recovery thing has gone awry somehow.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, probably the dead guy fell off the wagon would be my guess.”

  “Nice work, Palino. Anything else?” asked Detective Penance, halfway to getting off the phone.

  “Yeah yeah yeah, just one more thing. There’s a sticker on each of these heroin baggies, with some sort of emblem on it. It’s one I’ve never seen before."

  “An emblem? What do you think it is?”

  “It looks like some sort of ghost or something.”

  C h a p t e r 6

  Micah is sitting alone in a holding room on the second floor of the police station. His hands are folded, his head down, the exact position as he was in the car on the way over. He is defeated, forlorn, anxious, sad, terrified. From his perspective, the room seems to be encroaching ever so slowly upon him, as if preparing to consume him. The light gray walls with fake wainscoting painted halfway up, the two-way mirror across from him that he can’t bear to look at, the camera with the flashing red light in the corner of the ceiling—all moving in, inch by inch.

  With his tux and shoes in evidence, he is now wearing navy scrub pants and a white T-shirt, with flat white shoes peering from pant legs that are way too long. He is still partially caked in blood, around his face, his hands. He stares at his fingers and begins to pick at them.

  Lily, waiting for her boss Detective Penance to arrive, sits in a cold aluminum chair across from Micah. She notices him deep in thought and allows herself to see him as the second victim of this tragic crime.

  “How old are you, Micah?”

  “Thirty-seven.” His response is obligatory.

  “We tried to find your parents but fell a little short there.”

  “Yeah. I’m all that’s left.”

  Lily reaches for some empathy. She may be known as a bit cold-hearted, but she knows hurt when she sees it.

  “I lost my mom a few years ago. Brain tumor.” She remembers a long season of life-changing decision-making.

  “Yeah?”

  Lily recognizes the connection and lets the silence do its job.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. Breast cancer for mine,” Micah says, still picking at the dried blood. “Gosh, she was great. She mostly took care of me, like from ever since I can remember, to, well, always, really. Didn’t have another job. She used to be a kindergarten teacher, but mostly she was a housewife. Painted sometimes. I like to think I got my creative side from her.”

  He relaxes his hands and places them on the stainless tabletop that separates them.

  “Boy, she was strong, too,” he says. “She’d seen her sister die after a long battle with cancer. Fucking cancer, right?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Lily says before she can rephrase.

  “We think she knew something was wrong for quite some time before she went to the hospital,” Micah says. “We think she just didn’t want us to worry.”

  Lily scoots her chair forward. “Us? What about your dad?”

  “Pssshht. That’s a whole other story. Great man, yes, but more of a pastor than a father. I mean, you know the drill, right? Christian family, gay son. That was fun. He’s the one who named me Micah. Stupid biblical name. Lenny always liked the name. But then again, he’s a Republican.” He pauses. “Was.”

  “How did you two meet?” Lily is practicing her psychological skills.

  “We met at a meeting. In AA. I was getting coffee and this really hot guy started staring at me while he was swishing around his powdered creamer.” Micah half-heartedly mimes a stirring motion with his hands. He laughs. “We smiled at each other acros
s the room the whole night. Then a group of us went out after the meeting. We started talking. Figured out that we both worked for the same company. He was some bigwig finance guy at Élan Publishing, and I did freelance art direction for the same exact company. Can you believe that?”

  “That’s quite a connection.”

  “It is,” he says, switching tenses as if he’s in transition. “It’s a classic introvert-extrovert, thinker-feeler thing, ya know? He was the thinker, which I loved. And I feel everything, like everything, which is what he loves about me. Well, most of the time.”

  He laughs, then stares at his reflection in the two-way mirror behind her. His smile turns downward.

  Lily can tell he is about to clam up. “And how did your dad die?”

  “It was pretty recent. Stage 4 kidney failure. Diabetes. He never took care of himself after Momma died.” Micah jerks his head away, wanting to scream. He runs his fingers through his hair and leans back with an audible groan.

  “Can we stop, please?” he says, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry. Just for a second.”

  Lily lets him be.

  As Micah tries to relax, his teeth begin to grind. He begins to wonder where Shawn, his lawyer and his friend, could be. He hopes Jenna has found him. Shawn was at the event tonight too, he thinks. Maybe he still is. Jesus Christ. This is going to be a really long night.

  Detective Penance enters. Lily stands.

  “Micah, thank you for coming down here with us tonight. I know it’s been a rough evening for you. You’re free to go at any time, but I would love it if you’d answer a few questions for us. Is that okay?” Detective Penance asks.

  “I have nothing to hide. I don’t mind.”

  “There’s quite a story unfolding in your home. Would you mind telling me how your story goes?” Detective Penance raises his eyebrows.

  “You mean after Lennox told me good-bye and said he’d meet me at the event later?”

  “Sure. Start there.”