The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  In order to study himself without his glasses Ben had to put his face only inches from the mirror. After a few minutes of peering, Ben patted his scalp and smiled to me in the glass. “Why not get a toupee while I’m at it?”

  Presumably he had wigs. This didn’t seem like much of a joke to me. “That would send a different message. They’d spot it and know you were faking. Contacts aren’t that noticeable.”

  Solemn again, he studied one profile, then the other, still squinting a bit, even though he was so close to his reflection. “I look that much better without them?”

  “They can see your eyes better. Your face looks thinner.”

  He pulled the bottom lids of his eyes down. “My eyes are bloodshot,” he mumbled.

  “A beard would also help.”

  “Everybody who’s lost their hair grows a beard!”

  “Because it looks better. That’s why. Soften you. Make you look gentler.”

  “My beard is reddish,” he said. “I tried to grow one when I was just out of college. Came in kind of red.”

  “Well, that’s great.” Unbelievably, I felt enthusiastic. “You should definitely grow one, then.”

  “Really? Maybe it won’t be red now.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m older…I don’t know.”

  He was like a child. “It might be a little gray, but if it was reddish then, it’ll be reddish now.”

  “Okay,” he said, turning to me, stroking his jaw and chin as if he could summon the hairs. “Could you do me a favor? Could you come with me to get the contacts?”

  I don’t know if the difference was his blindness (his eyebrows squashed together in a squint), but he appeared heartbreakingly worried and childlike. “Sure.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and then chuckled helplessly, scanning the floor. “Where are my glasses?”

  I pointed them out (he had put them on the windowsill) and said I thought I should check on Naomi. I wanted to escape from this intimacy with him.

  “Leave her alone,” he said, not an order. “She wants to be alone. Believe me, if she wanted one of us, she’d be out here.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit,” he said. “I’ll put on the tape.” Now he was happy, trotting merrily to where he had left the camera and portable recorder. “I’m gonna heat coffee,” he called. “Want some?” I said yes and Ben had to ask me how I liked it. Perhaps I’m making too much of little things, but that seemed to me indicative of his self-involvement—he had known me for eight years, we had had countless meals together, and he didn’t know I took it black?

  They had no den, so the television and VCR were hidden in a cabinet opposite the couch. When Ben came back, tape under his arm, carrying two coffee cups, he recited his actions as he did each thing, like a NASA lift-off checklist: “Your coffee, my coffee, machine on, tape in, memory on, hit rewind, and go!”

  The coffee wasn’t hot enough; I wanted to encourage this feeble attempt at graciousness, so I didn’t complain. Ben collapsed on the sofa and sipped his while we listened to the tape whirring backward. “Thanks for today,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  I nodded toward Naomi’s quarters: “But was it worth it?”

  “Oh yeah.” The machine clicked, thudded, and stopped. “She had as good a time as she could possibly have.”

  Ben aimed the remote control and the video recorder started.

  Wendy appeared on the screen. Behind her was the green lawn of their country house. She was wearing a swimming suit. It was summer. Her face was dotted with suntan lotion. She shouted at the camera: “Ben! For God’s sake! Don’t take me like this!” She raised a hand to rub in the yellowish white—

  The tape went off. I had my eyes focused on the television. I didn’t move. My cheeks were hot from shame.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. The recorder whirred again. “I see what happened—I’ve got it now.”

  “Forget it,” I told him, and got up and walked out.

  I DIDN’T FEEL TOO BAD WHEN I REACHED MY PLACE. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t trembling. But I couldn’t fool myself after the rebuke of seeing my dead friend come to life. She had sent a message: I was drifting into aiding Ben, not rescuing Naomi.

  My apartment sounded empty: I wished Stefan was there. And I was glad he wasn’t. In my kitchen the sink was dry, every cup and plate was put away, the counters stainless, spotless, and cleared.

  I felt no one lived there.

  So what? Let’s mess it up, I decided, and I made myself a sandwich, leaving the cheese, meat, bread, mustard, head of lettuce, bottle of soda all out. I brewed coffee and didn’t wipe up the trail of stray grounds spilled by the measuring.

  In the middle of eating, the phone rang. It was Naomi.

  “Hi…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Hi honey,” I said. “How were the presents? What did you get?”

  She babbled about them, asked if I wanted to see the “radical” sweater Holly had given her.

  “Sure,” I said through a mouthful of messy sandwich. I had an impulse to turn the mustard jar upside down and spread the contents everywhere. “Come over.”

  “Okay—uh, wait a second. Dad!” she called. “Dad, she wants me to come over.” Open like that, the bread would go stale. I twirled the bag closed, remembered the Hefty bag, and dropped the package angrily, blaming it for the memory.

  Naomi was back in my ear: “Dad wants to know if you still feel like going to Chinatown.”

  “I’m eating.” That was obvious but she was a child.

  “Oh.” Crushed. “She’s already eaten,” Naomi called.

  “Forget about your father,” I said. “Come over.” I could do it, I thought. A year is not long to hide. After that he would be put away.

  “What?” She was concentrating on him.

  “Tell your father to rest. Come over, we’ll go to a movie. Tell him we’ll be back around bedtime.”

  “Dad—what…? Wait,” she said, and I heard her moving away from the phone. She must have put it down.

  Come on, come on, let her go, I rooted in my head. Arbitrarily—like a godless savage—I was convinced that this choice was an omen and would determine everything.

  “Molly?” Ben this time. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. Listen, I thought I’d give you the after—” My voice quaked and I never pronounced the rest of the word. “Excuse me,” I said about my choking.

  “You’ll never, ever forgive me.” He snorted. “Well, that’s dumb. Of course you won’t. Okay, I’d really like to come along—”

  “You take a nap,” I said, idiotically.

  “Yeah right. You win. I’ll send her across.”

  “Listen, Ben, I’ll bring her back around bedtime, okay? I thought maybe we’d go uptown and look at the Christmas decorations.”

  “So…I’ll expect you about eight-thirty.”

  “Right.” I was clumsy. “Maybe even nine. I’ll call.”

  He was dull and suspected nothing.

  I jumped for joy after I hung up. Like an athlete celebrating a championship—like someone in a beer commercial. I knew this was the answer, had been the answer all along. How could I have missed it?

  There was little time before Naomi arrived to get the things I needed. I couldn’t pack anything, of course, but I got the emergency cash (five thousand dollars) I had kept in the apartment since Stefan moved out, as well as my valuable jewels (probably trifling), and the gold coins Stefan had bought at one point when the world was supposed to come to an end and somehow we could endure the death of everything if we had a Krugerrand handy. I didn’t know what the South African gilt was worth, or how to reliably and discreetly convert them to cash. I took all my credit cards, the checkbook, and a passbook for another certificate of deposit worth fifty thousand dollars. That left two more which (in consideration of equitable distribution) rightfully belonged to Stefan.

  Whether I would be able to make use of the bank stuff was doubtful. The murderer, after all, would call t
he police by midnight. I couldn’t take the chance of staying in the city and trying the bank in the morning. The credit cards would soon be useless. So would the checkbook. Unless Stefan helped. That was the hope I clung to.

  Why not wait until the next day? you ask. Get my money, and then Naomi? I didn’t trust the endurance of my nerves: a night of consideration and I might weaken.

  Naomi wore the “radical” sweater. There were no political slogans: it had a glistening array of rhinestones sewn into leather patches on both shoulders. There was a Western flavor to the look.

  Santa Fe, I thought. That’s where we’ll go. Out west where there’s no law and plenty of space. Crazy, right? Although I laughed at myself (Naomi said, “Don’t laugh,” thinking I ridiculed her sweater) I liked the idea. Warm, inexpensive, and far away—the West was a good choice.

  “Let’s go to F. A. O. Schwarz and buy you another birthday gift”

  She was staggered, her eyes wide. “Really?”

  “Yeah, why not? You’re seven. I should get you six more gifts. One for each year.”

  Naomi frowned at me, skeptical but compassionate. She tilted her head doubtfully: “You okay, Molly?”

  On the elevator ride down, going out through our lobby (hailed with unusual enthusiasm by our sleepy-eyed weekend doorman, glad to see Naomi without you-know-who) and during our stroll to my garage, I babbled about buying her gifts and wanting to see all the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue. When I turned into the parking lot, Naomi, not suspiciously, merely curious, questioned why we were taking the Volvo instead of a cab to midtown. “Where are you going to park?” she asked with the pragmatic precocity of a New York kid.

  “In a parking lot.”

  She whistled. “The midtown lots cost a fortune!” she said vehemently, mimicking her mother.

  “You know how much they cost?”

  “No. But I know they cost a lot. That’s why Mommy and I take the bus.” She used the present tense unselfconsciously. I waited for a realization of that, but none came.

  In the car, Naomi dangled her legs, placed her right arm decorously on the rest (their design is perfect for a child’s size), chin up, head scanning like a periscope on her long skinny neck. “The snow’s all gone,” she reported of the outer world.

  That was a help. “I have a good idea! Why don’t we drive out of the city and see if the snow stuck there?”

  “Okay,” she said, not enthusiastic.

  I puzzled over her lack of excitement. “It’ll be fun. We can make a snowman.”

  “Snowwoman,“ she said, and smiled at me. “Remember?” she urged.

  I didn’t.

  “Remember!” She hopped on the seat urgently. “Last winter. It was Mommy’s idea. You and me and her, we made a snowwoman at my country house!”

  “I’ve never been to your country house.”

  Naomi took this hard. Her bright face darkened, overcast by the cloud of mourning. “Mommy put an apron on it. Remember?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Yes!” Tears filled her shining eyes and they were also dimmed. “Yes you were! You showed me how to make snow bunnies!”

  “That was in Central Park.” She was so little then, her snow bunnies were truly bunny size. “You were four.”

  She sobbed.

  “Honey!” I cried, and almost crashed us into a parked car in my hurry to pull over.

  “You were there!” She heaved the accusation with the weeping. “I remember!” Double-parked now, I reached for her. The seat belt pulled against my embrace—and so did she. “I remember everything I ever did with Mommy!” she yelled at me, furious and heartbroken. “I never forget!”

  “Okay, honey.”

  “I’m right!” she screamed.

  “Okay, you’re right,” I begged her.

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “Yes, I do. You’re right. I forgot. We built a snowwoman.”

  “It had an apron, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what else?” Naomi’s face was ruined by tears and anger.

  I didn’t know what else. Hadn’t Wendy told me about it? A feminist snowwoman, that had a familiar ring, suggesting to me that she had. I wouldn’t have paid much attention, especially if she told me over the phone while I was at work. Sometimes (well, more than sometimes) I tuned out Wendy’s reveries on the happy life of a mother and wife. Envy? Disbelief? Hostility? I don’t care why. I just wished, during this painful moment in the car, that I could remember everything. “What else!” Naomi demanded, and banged her fists into the cream-colored leather seats.

  “Lipstick…?” I guessed hopelessly.

  She laughed. Like a tropical storm breaking in midrain, the sun shone: “We didn’t use lipstick.” She giggled. “Don’t you remember what it was?”

  “No,” I lied. “Just that it was very red.”

  “Not so red. Pink lemonade. We poured it into those lip things.”

  “And froze them in the freezer,” I said, not knowing where this came from. Was Wendy with me, after all? Had she come to help me?

  “Right. We put them on the next morning.”

  “I remember. And you ate them for dessert.”

  “I told you you were there!”

  Thank you, Wendy. “Sorry.” I hugged her, kissed her sweet cheek.

  I got us moving again. Naomi returned to her periscope self, commenting on pedestrians. Stopped at a light on Park Avenue and Fiftieth, she asked: “Where are we going?” in a sharp tone of surprise.

  For a nervous second I worried she had figured it out. I tried a bluff: “F. A. O. Schwarz.”

  “Oh, that’s great! I thought you said we were going to the country to build a snowman.”

  “After F. A. O. Schwarz.”

  “Oh…great!” You would never have guessed she had been in pieces fifteen minutes before. That’s the cruelest and strongest muscle people have—the forgetful heart—and I hate us for it, even if Naomi and I needed one desperately.

  What an amazing place F. A. O. Schwarz is: a child’s pyramid of Cheops, a death sentence for the adult will. I stood beneath the gay display of gigantic stuffed animals, listening to a Disney theme I faintly recognized playing through a fifteen-foot-high music box. Faces passed me in a processional dance: frozen looks of happiness on the inanimate jungle; ironic dismay on the parents; children stunned, awed by the prospect of achieving perfect fulfillment. It’s greed, I thought at first, that dazed look on the little faces. No, I decided while riding the escalator to the second floor, not greed—appetite. I was happy. I felt free. In that store everyone was naked.

  I charged three hundred and forty-six dollars on my American Express card, buying Naomi’s preoccupation and tranquility for the first hour of driving. While we left the city she disemboweled the plastic bubble packaging, and looked to be a very modern girl, surrounded by Barbie’s hot new denim outfit and her black girlfriend. Later, Naomi groaned or cheered, chin tight, eyes fixed on a beeping hand-held video game, her task to save someone or something (not Fay Wray) from a gigantic ape.

  I sealed our windows and ran the heater on low, almost off. Only a hum from the spinning wheels penetrated from outside and just a slight bump from the concrete’s seams could be felt. Naomi read the Barbie comic which accompanied the toy. Her eyes lingered on the illustration. Barbie may be a hip girl now, but her body is still establishment perfect. No, not perfect—unattainable. Cosmetics will bury you, Raisa Gorbachev.

  My fingers gripped the wheel tightly, elbows locked, arms rigid. I waited for Naomi to put down her toys and question my nonstop pace out of the city. About five, exhausted by celebration, sorrow, and cake, Naomi passed out, slumping forward into the sling of her seat belt. I relaxed and drove her away even faster, pitilessly, from her father.

  AT NIGHT ALL HIGHWAYS LOOK ALIKE. I DROVE IN A tunnel of light, flowing in a red river, passing a white one.

  I heard her voice first, deep and calm and knowing: “Where are we going, Molly?”


  I gasped. “You scared me.” A glance at the passenger seat revealed her in the passing headlights as a cat—aloof, puffy cheeks ominously shut, eyes glowing. Her head had flopped back onto the seat a while ago; she rested it sideways on the leather, studying me with her profile.

  She yawned. “Where are we?” she said, squinting at the glare and the dark.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

  “It’s night.” She yawned again. “What time—?” She leaned forward to get a view of the dashboard clock. “Daddy expects me to be home,” she commented on seeing the hour—7:00.

  “I called and told him we’d be late,” I lied.

  “You stopped?”

  I nodded. “Want something to eat?” I asked.

  “Are we going home? Did we make a snowman?”

  “Snowwoman,” I joked.

  “Okay,” she grumbled, unaccountably irritated to be reminded of her own distinction. “Who cares whether it’s a man or a woman? It’s just snow.”

  “Sorry.” I made allowances for her response. It was normal for her to wake up crabby from naps; probably she felt wrinkled from sleeping in a car, she didn’t know where we were going, and her head no doubt throbbed, hung over from the birthday’s excitement.

  “We didn’t make one, right?” she said, and yawned mightily. She collapsed against the seat after it was done, cat’s eyes glowing at me.

  “You were tired.”

  “No,” she argued mildly, unable to lift her head.

  “Want to eat?”

  She groaned, still not ready for the things of the world. I touched her head. Her skin was baked and swollen. Did she have a fever? What if she became ill? I would have to take her to doctors, to a hospital, give her name, explain who I am. How long could we live on the money and coins I had taken? No trouble to get a job (as a legal secretary; as a waitress if everything else failed) but what about Social Security numbers and so on?