Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Camera 59

  The Killer stands behind Vivica. He points his knife at the back of her neck. He moves it to the space behind her heart. He watches his knife like a man under hypnosis. Vivica’s from El Salvador. She survived the upheaval there and came to America. She stares at the drying carpet like the mere possibility of remaining discoloration is the military faction that cracked her country in two. She shuts off the hair dryer and mutters in Spanish with an El Salvadoran accent, cursing the electrician she thinks cut himself there. But that is not what happened. What happened is: a member of my team, Twombley, escaped the twentieth floor. The Killer chased him onto the fifteenth floor and caught him at the entryway to Room 1516, where Twombley was fumbling with a card key. The card key worked, but too late. The Killer grabbed Twombley, dragged him to the bathroom of Room 1516, wrestled him into the tub, and stabbed him. I don’t know how many times. I lost count in the thirties; I was distracted. As the Killer left Room 1516, his pant cuff dripped onto the carpet. Thus the blood. Now—

  Vivica unplugs the hair dryer and strokes the carpet as if it were a cranky toddler’s hot head: There, see, isn’t it easier if you behave? She probably feels lucky she found the blood when it was fresh, at five fifteen. It is now ten minutes to seven. She winds the cord around the hair dryer. She’s turning around as she does it—she is fifty-seven years old, married thirty-six years, four children, seven grandchildren; one has MS, and Vivica runs a half marathon every spring, fund-raising for a cure—but the Killer is not there. She walks toward the cleaning closet to throw away the rubber gloves she used, in compliance with OSHA protocol. Delores forwarded the joke about OSHA and Henri to the entire housekeeping crew. It made the housekeeping crew like and feel loyal toward Tessa, and also motivated them to comply with the protocol. Tessa’s a genius.

  Vivica opens the cleaning closet. The Killer is not there. The shelves are in place. The hallway is empt—The Killer comes down the hallway behind Vivica as she peels off her gloves and bags them in plastic. He was sitting on the bed in Room 1512. He has a card key that unlocks every guest room in the hotel, except Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. The Killer doesn’t know his card key won’t unlock Room 1802. The Killer stole his card key from Twombley, whose blood Vivica just finished cleaning out of the carpet. There are only two people with card keys that access Room 1802.

  Vivica is humming a pop song. The Killer is directly behind her. She’s throwing her bagged gloves down the trash chute. She sets the carpet cleaner in its place on the shelf, drops the rag into a dirty linens hamper, straightens a bottle of furniture polish, and turns around. She jumps, screams. Then she laughs. “You scare me, Mr. Franklin.” Franklin likes to play pranks. “Mr. Franklin, you a bad man.” Vivica pokes him. It occurs to her, abruptly, that this man is a foot and a half taller than Franklin. The Killer has pressed the controller’s single button. The shelves behind Vivica move. “Mr. Franklin?” The Killer pushes Vivica into the secret elevator. He shoves her so hard, she bounces off the secret elevator’s far wall. She cradles her elbow and sinks against the dull wood paneling. The Killer follows her inside.

  “Knife, looks like,” says Brian, who has reappeared from under the dishwasher, “or scissors.”

  “Seriously?” Justin says.

  Brian gets up and sorts through the tool kit. “It’s a good thing whoever did it cut the wires, because he cut the hoses and piping, too. There’d have been water all over this floor if he’d left the power connected.”

  Justin watches Brian’s hands. They’re grimed black. They push bolts and screwdrivers and pliers through the toolbox’s pristine tiers, rejecting them in pursuit of something else.

  Justin says, “So you’re the foster brother.”

  “I could patch it if I had duct tape. MacGyver it for now.” He keeps searching the toolbox, though he’s done so already, and effectively. “You’ll still need a repairman out here tomorrow. It’ll be a temporary fix, hold for a day or two, max.”

  Justin goes to a cabinet beside the industrial stove, where ingredients for cherry coulis are flung and dribbled everywhere, as if there’s been a food fight. “Heads up,” Justin says, and Brian catches a roll of duct tape still wrapped in cellophane.

  “Nice.” His face lights. He stabs a box cutter through the plastic. His phony offhandedness is revolting as he asks, “Tess talked about me?”

  “To Jules,” Justin says, “not to me. Tessa isn’t exactly an open book.”

  Brian laughs through his nose. He cuts lengths of tape. His swipes with the blade are expert, practiced. “Depends who’s reading.”

  Justin waits. He has a master’s in psychology from UC Davis. That’s where he and Jules met. Jules was doing a double master’s in psychology and business management, after quitting nursing school and earning a BA in art history. They both like to cook. Justin is a better cook than Jules. Jules does a kind of cooking there’s a special word for; it means she makes everything with a side of foam. The foam is supposed to improve or contrast or enhance the flavor of whatever it’s served beside, but the main thing one thinks when being served steak with a side of mushroom foam is: Weird. Justin and Jules opened a catering business straight out of grad school. It was foundering when they met Tessa at a catering conference three years ago. Tessa folded them into Destin Management Group, but they still do side projects on their own. Weddings, mainly. Justin now owns a hang glider, and Jules teaches Pilates. They like to rib Tessa by saying she saved them. This wouldn’t count as ribbing, except Tessa hates it, because it’s a compliment.

  “I was ten,” Brian says. “She was eight.” He’s still cutting duct tape. Flaps of it hang like silver tongues off the counter. “Me and Mitch—that’s my twin brother. Did she tell you I had—?”

  Justin nods.

  “Me and Mitch—I mean, it’s, ‘Boys, say hi to your new little sister.’ You’re a foster, you’re laughing at that. It’s funny, because she’ll be gone. You’ll never see her again. Six months, nine months. Maybe a year. Maybe.” He points at the fifteen or so strips of duct tape. “Hand me one every time I say, okay? You got a bigger flashlight? Something that can stand on its own?”

  Brian could hold the small flashlight in his mouth. But Justin unclips a large one from the wall, by the fire extinguisher. Brian disappears under the counter again, only his legs and groin visible, but his voice continues, bolder. “First day of school? Tessa’s first day—it’s the middle of the year, February, I think. She’s a second grader, got all the body fat of wheat chaff, just tiny. Tape.”

  Justin sticks a strip to Brian’s outstretched finger.

  “And we’re taking the bus, because Lorraine’s lazy as shit. Me and Mitch sit in the back. We’re cocks of the walk on that bus. You know, made it clear early that if you messed with one of us, you messed with both of us. We weren’t big guys, not ever, but there’s a mystique with identical twins, and we played it way up. Tape.”

  Justin sticks a strip.

  “Now, Tess hasn’t said a word. Not to me, Mitch, Lorraine, nobody. And me and Mitch, we’re fine with that. Whatever, right? She’ll be history pretty soon. Tape. But there’s this bully. His name’s Lance. Swear to God, a bully named Lance. I mean, polo shirts, gel in his hair. Kid’s eleven, and he gels his hair. Tape. Tess is wearing this hat. Blue with green polka dots. Got a little pom-pom on top, blue and green yarn. It’s a funky shape, looks handmade. I’d bet anything a foster made it for her. And Lance starts in on her, calling her names, making fun of her secondhand clothes, and—tape—and Tess doesn’t say anything. Won’t even look at him. So Lance takes her hat and throws it out the window. I start getting up, but Mitch pulls me back in my seat, looks at me like I’m nuts. I still should’ve—tape—I mean, she didn’t cry. She didn’t do anything. She just sat there, her hair sticking up, static-y. Her hair—even then, you couldn’t look at Tess and not kind of—even then, she was—her hair was really nice, but that’s . . . So we get to school, and the bus’s door opens, and Lance i
s at the door first because he’s a d-bag like that. Tape. And Tess just—wham! Out of nowhere. Shoves him with everything she’s got. He goes flying off the top step—”

  Justin laughs, because Brian is laughing.

  “Face-first into a snowbank. Breaks his nose. Except Tess isn’t done. Tess runs down to him, starts stuffing snow in his mouth, down his coat. I’m sure as hell out of my seat now, got Mitch right behind me, and we pull her off him. It’s like pulling a pit bull off a ham bone. Tape. Lance tried to tell on her, but me and Mitch both said he tripped. The bus driver was this deadhead who didn’t care one way or the other, so Tess never got so much as a hard look about it.”

  Brian scoots out from under the dishwasher. Justin gives him a hand up.

  “There a load in here?” Brian says, knocking on the dishwasher’s shut door.

  “Yeah.”

  Brian presses the power switch. Sound of spraying water. He peels the remaining strips of tape off the sink and makes a silver ball. “After that, if you messed with one of us, you messed with all three of us.”

  “And that’s when Tessa started talking?”

  “Call a repairman anyway. This’ll hold three days, absolute maximum.” Brian starts scrubbing his hands in the sink.

  Justin realizes that’s his answer. “I’ll go get Henri so he can kiss your feet.”

  “It’s no big deal, honestly,” says Brian. “Some tape in the right places.”

  Justin leaves the kitchen and crosses the ballroom, widthwise, to where Henri is still berating his sous-chefs, who have banded their playing cards so as not to incense their boss further. Justin winks across the ballroom, lengthwise, to where Jules is cleaning Tessa’s hand with hydrogen peroxide. Tessa must have insisted they sit as far from the dining tables as possible, so as to avoid getting blood on the linens. She must have insisted they not use the kitchen sink, so as to comply with OSHA protocol. She didn’t want to get on the elevator again and use the break room or housekeeping storage area, in case she bled on more marble, which Delores would then have to clean.

  Delores is cleaning Tessa’s blood off the foyer floor. She wrapped Henri’s knife in a hand towel from her apron pocket. Delores has everything imaginable in her apron pocket, now including the knife. She turns on the chandelier, because the lobby, facing east, is now dark.

  Franklin, at his desk, is drinking more scotch. When the chandelier brightens his dark office, he squints, annoyed.

  The Killer finally delivers a fatal wound to Vivica’s heaving chest. Blood spurts outward in a foul, black splash. It would create a horrible red stain, but the entirety of the secret elevator is horribly stained already. It looks like a slaughtering pen.

  “So,” Jules says, “that’s him.”

  A pile of cheap paper napkins, as opposed to expensive cloth napkins, catches the blood from Tessa’s hand. She and Jules are sitting on cheap folding chairs equidistant between the dining tables and a long table against the east wall. The long table is there to hold upscale items for a silent auction, proceeds of which are earmarked to benefit foster children in the state of California. Destin does not know or care where the proceeds of the silent auction go. It’s likely that Tessa’s insistence on cheap napkins and cheap folding chairs meant more time required to set up this makeshift triage station, and that Tessa’s insistence on cheapness vis-à-vis treating her injury made Jules impatient, which—even though Tessa hasn’t answered right away whether that’s “him”—is why Jules’s voice has an uncharacteristic edge when she says, “The foster brother? Brian?”

  “You’re a sleuth, Jules.” Tessa hears Henri’s overjoyed “Grâce à Dieu!” and tries, again, not to smile. “He fixed it.”

  Jules exchanges a cotton pad for a cotton swab. She’s exacting. This is probably why she cooks with foam. “You didn’t mention he was hot.”

  “It’s the motorcycle jacket.”

  “That helps. He looks about twenty years old. He’s our age?”

  “Older. Thirty-two. Ow, Jules—okay. Okay, it’s clean.”

  “It’s clean when I say it’s clean, kid.” But Jules changes back to the cotton pad. “And there were two of that hotness? Mmm, double trouble. You were a lucky little girl.”

  Henri doesn’t kiss Brian’s feet, but he does kiss each of Brian’s cheeks, twice, though Brian still has his hands under the kitchen tap, trying and failing to get the grease out of his knuckles and nails. Water from Brian’s hands splashes his motorcycle jacket as he tries and fails —also—to angle his face so that Henri’s kisses land far away from his mouth. Justin and the sous-chefs watch all this with extreme amusement, because Henri hates everyone, except Tessa.

  Tessa says, “One of that hotness is dead.” Now her voice has an edge. “Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. That’s all you’d tell me, though.”

  Tessa is a wretched storyteller—unless the story is about lost shoes and music fests and Walgreens. If it’s Jules asking, Tessa usually tells, but obfuscation is such a habit with her that she leaves things out and doesn’t know she’s doing it. “Troy was a—”

  “Troy? Was that the other twin?”

  “No, the other twin was Mitch.” Tessa doesn’t mind Jules interrupting; she finds the interruptions a welcome relief. “Troy was our foster father. Lorraine was his wife. Troy was a professional motocross racer.”

  “Motocross?” Jules says, scissoring bandages and gauze. “Like motorcycles?”

  “Right. He was on the road something like three hundred twenty days a year.” Tessa’s body shifts around in the folding chair, as though the story’s a cocoon she wants to be free of. “But when he was home, it was like a different house.”

  “Different how?”

  “Lorraine was a bitch, that’s how. No, not like that. She didn’t hit, she yelled. A lot. A lot a lot. But when Troy was home, she was a saint. It was so bizarre.”

  “Why would a bitch take in foster kids?”

  Tessa laughs bitterly. “Functional adults don’t take in fosters. No, that’s not true. Very few functional adults take in fosters. Jules, I didn’t sever my jugular here—I think you’ve cut enough gauze.”

  “Let the nurse work, control freak. So, what? She yelled Mitch to death?”

  “No. Troy taught Mitch and Brian motorcycles whenever he was home. Riding, repairing, racing. It was crazy. They were ten years old, racing hunks of junk in the fields behind the house.” Tessa pauses, maybe so Jules can ask a question.

  Jules doesn’t.

  “They built a ramp,” Tessa says. “I helped. They started doing tricks.”

  Jules tapes the bandages. She’s slow about it. She watches her work and not Tessa’s face. Tessa doesn’t like being watched.

  Brian is attacking the grease on his hands with a kitchen towel. The towel has red stains on it, most likely cherry coulis. One cannot rule out the possibility that the stains are not cherry coulis. He goes to the swinging door and peeks out at Tessa and Jules across the ballroom. He lets the door swing shut and watches Henri direct the sous-chefs through desperate slicing and spicing of volatile fruit. Justin pulls a rack of dishes from the dishwasher, and Brian, tossing the towel aside, goes to the sink. He starts rinsing red-soiled plates and bowls.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Justin says. “You can go find Tessa if you want.”

  “They’re girl-talking. I don’t mind.” He arranges rinsed dishes in an empty tray.

  “So,” Jules says, after a long silence, “he died doing a trick in the backyard?”

  Tessa shakes her head. “They dropped out of school when they were sixteen and joined the circuit. The Domini Twins.” Her eyes sparkle, half sarcastically. “They did things the sport had never seen. This one, they’d—” Tessa stands up and sits on her left foot. “They’d swap motorcycles in midair. It was terrifying. They brought me on tour whenever they could. Whenever it didn’t mess with school. They were nuts about me staying in school, Brian especially. He and Mitch set up a college fu
nd for me. That’s how I got through UCLA with zero debt.”

  Jules raises her eyebrows. “So Mitch died—doing one of those tricks with Brian?”

  “No,” Tessa says. “The most flips anyone ever did in midair was two. A couple of weeks before my eighteenth birthday, Mitch makes an announcement he’s gonna do three. Three midair rotations.”

  The Killer gets out of the secret elevator on the seventh floor and returns to Room 717. He’s wearing plastic bags over his shoes, secured with rubber bands above the pant cuffs. He must have gotten them from a cleaning closet to avoid dripping more blood on the carpet. He goes to the bathroom in Room 717 and rinses his knife. There’s blood on his coveralls and his mask. He gets into the shower fully clothed.

  Jules says, “And Mitch—”

  “He under-rotated going into the third turn. He landed on his back, crushed his spine from the midthoracic all the way up to C3. He was alive for about five minutes, after. Brian got to him, got to talk to him. I wasn’t there—I was in school.”

  “God. Could he talk? Did Mitch say anything?”

  Tessa doesn’t seem to hear. “I begged Brian to quit. At the funeral. I literally got down on my knees, crying, screaming. He got on his knees, too, and he hugged me as tight as he could.” Tessa doesn’t seem to be in the ballroom anymore. Her voice is far away. She isn’t crying or screaming; it’s as if doing neither highlights how loudly, back then, she did both. She doesn’t notice when Jules applies a last piece of tape and simply holds her hand. “He told me no, he needed to keep it up. Not only that, he had to do the triple rotation. He said he didn’t have a choice.” Tessa jumps like she hears a door slam and pulls her hand out of Jules’s.