Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery

by Maggie Estep

  I open the fridge and stare at the wilted items inside. Brown lettuce, congealed rice, and old carrots assume various poses of desperation. I sniff at some lentil soup I made two weeks ago, the last time I had the energy to cook. Ever since Sam moved out I’ve been a bit nauseated. He drove me insane and had the communication skills of a hammer, but I loved him. And was vehemently opposed to his leaving. But he went anyway, taking my appetite with him.

  I end up peeling a banana, putting it in the blender with some juice and protein powder, and calling it dinner.

  I wander into the living room and notice the little white answering machine blinking fiercely. I stare at the thing, wondering if one of the messages is from Jane, my closest friend who’s been neglecting me.

  I press Play, but no Jane. Instead, I have a series of increasingly fevered messages from the scarred blonde. None of which includes her actual name. She’s left me her many phone numbers and various elaborate instructions as to how and when to reach her. Just as I’m pondering exactly how to tell her I’m just some woman who works in an amusement park museum, the phone rings.

  “Oh hello, I’m so glad you’re there,” comes the voice.

  “Ah, you,” I say to my would-be employer.

  “I hope this isn’t a bad time,” she says, “but I just can’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t say all of this to you today, but he’s gone all night sometimes. When I say something about it, when I express any doubts at all as to the veracity of what he tells me, he calls me paranoid.”

  I sigh. “You never told me your name,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. Ariel. Ariel DiCello.”

  “Ariel DiCello, I say your boyfriend is having an affair and you should dump him.”

  Silence. Then: “You may be right, but humor me. I’ll pay you well. Find out for me.”

  I sigh again. “Look, I’m really not a private investigator. I made it up. I do that sometimes. Someone asks what I do and I get defensive and make stuff up. I should have told you right off it was a joke. I never thought it would go this far.”

  Another long silence.

  “Really?” she says after a while.

  “Really” I assure her.

  “Oh.”

  “So listen, I hope it works out for you, but there’s not much I can do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “What?”

  “I think you could help.”

  “No, I swear, I’m useless. I work at the Coney Island Museum. I’ve never followed anyone in my life.”

  “You could do it, though. You have that kind of verve.”

  “I have what?”

  “Verve.”

  “I thought you said that.”

  Verve happens to be one of my favorite words. Chances are, had Ariel not said verve, I never would have agreed to come by her apartment and meet with her. But she said it.

  I tell her I’ll come by the next day.

  “What time?” She presses.

  “I dunno. Afternoon. I got stuff to do in the morning.”

  “Work?”

  “No, I only work Friday through Sunday. Just stuff.”

  “Oh,” she says in a lost soul voice.

  “Okay,” I relent. “Late morning.” I jot down her address on West Twenty-third Street, including her apartment number.

  Ariel DiCello thanks me profusely and hangs up.

  X

  THE CATS are staring at me. The apartment is cold. Jane still hasn’t called. It’s been three days since we’ve spoken. She’s probably sitting somewhere in a yoga-induced trance and has long forgotten I exist, never mind need attention. I hear a strange thudding sound coming from next door and take a moment to ponder exactly what Ramirez might be doing in there. Then I put on a Lucinda Williams CD and lie in the middle of the living room floor, staring at the ceiling and listening to Miss Williams’s beautiful broken voice.

  Pietro Ramirez

  4 / Crazy Shit with Animals

  There’s some kind of meat smell pouring into my kitchen, and I’m not even cooking any meat. Maybe it’s from that health food meat shit Ruby brings those cats of hers. Girl’s out of her mind. Going all over the ends of the earth looking for health food meat for a couple of cats. And I know she thinks I’m the one does crazy shit with animals. One time, I had my door closed and I heard her whispering in the hall, telling one of her friends I sacrifice chickens for some kind of Santeria shit. All because my girlfriend Elsie brought over a couple of chickens one night, wanted ’em fresh and, being as she grew up in some little town in Puerto Rico, knows exactly how you kill a chicken. One of those things her Mami Esposito taught her from the time she was in pigtails. That’s just how it was, and Elsie, even though she came over from Puerto Rico more than fifteen years ago, she likes to keep up her traditions. Part of why I love the girl so much. She earns her living as an exotic dancer, letting other men look at her stuff, but she still knows how to kill and cook a chicken.

  Ain’t no other lady kept me as happy as long as she has. And I’ve had a lot of them. My mother was a white lady and even went to college, and my pops came over from the Dominican Republic and worked as a mechanic all his life. They raised me and my two brothers in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on a street that was mostly black people. As a result, I don’t have a type as far as color goes. I try ’em all. Spanish, white, black, even had a Vietnamese lady I brought back with me from ’Nam. May Ling. Found me next to dead after I’d been lying in a ditch for close to a week, and dragged me into some bunker her and her sisters were hiding in. I don’t really remember exactly what all they did to me. I know they put leaves and mud and some kind of animal shit inside my wounds and it made me heal. I fell in love with May Ling and married her right there. Three weeks out of the ditch.

  Got my honorable discharge and came back here with her, but she didn’t adjust so good. She was always running off to Chinatown and hanging around in the back of some dirty kitchen in a restaurant where some Vietnamese people she had met worked. We never even went to bed once after leaving Vietnam, and when one day she told me she was divorcing me to hook up with a dishwasher at the restaurant, I didn’t put up much fight. Easy come, easy go. There were dozens more after her, only I could never stay happy with any of them. Even had a California blonde once. Jessica. Girl was getting a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. I’d met her answering some ad for Vietnam vets. They’d pay us fifty dollars to get interviewed and tested. Psychological tests. Jessica was the one interviewed me. She was gorgeous. Out of my league. But she liked me. I lived with her on Central Park West for a good year before a saucy little Dominican girl I used to see roller-skating in Central Park got to me. I don’t even remember her name, but Jessica would. Wherever she is.

  The health food meat smell starts to really bother me, so I light up some candles to try to burn the smell out. I go back to sit at my kitchen table and think. The thing is, I’ve got a problem. My Elsie’s not doing so good. Two weeks back, for her thirty-fifth birthday, I got her some new breasts. For a long time she’d been saying she was pretty sure the dancing place where she works was gonna fire her. Thirty-five is old for a dancer, even one whose stuff is as bouncy and nice as it was when I met her five years ago. She keeps thinking they’re going to let her go and then she’ll have to dance at some low rent joint in Queens where all the girls have faces like rhinos and tits hanging down to their belly buttons.

  Elsie’s a smart girl, and for a while I’ve been on her to think about doing something else to make money, but she always tells me ain’t no other way for her to make close to two hundred dollars a night, and she has a point. During the season, she helps me with Inferno, the spook house I run over in Astroland, but that doesn’t bring in much cash. So, not wanting my lady to be unhappy, I dug around a little and found a doctor to do her operation pretty cheap. Told her about it early so she had the surgery the day before her birthday, and then, presto, at age thirty-five she had some very large and rounded breasts and she was
pretty sure they’d keep her on at the job because of it. Only now they’re infected. And we can’t get hold of the doctor. Dominican guy I know from some people in the old neighborhood. They’d all told me he was a good doctor, only doing it so cheap in light of my being from Brownsville. But now none of them knows where to find the guy either. And my girl is sick. Currently down visiting her sister in New Jersey.

  I put my head in my hands to think and then I start to get angry. I try not to because it’s no good. When I get angry, I go back to ’Nam. I can’t stop it. I throw the chair I’m sitting in against the wall. Then the other chair. I feel like a jackass when I’m doing it but I’m still doing it. A couple pictures come clattering down and their frames smash. My body is shaking and now I don’t know what to do. Then there’s a knock at the door. It’s the neighbor girl. Ruby.

  I breathe a few times and then go to the door. “Yeah?” I say to the girl as I open it.

  “You okay in here?” she wants to know.

  “Yeah,” I tell her.

  “Ramirez,” she hisses at me through her teeth, knowing I’m not okay.

  “I’m fine, girl.”

  “No you’re not. Where’s Elsie?”

  “Ain’t here.”

  “Ramirez,” she hisses at me again.

  “This isn’t a good time, lady, okay? Come talk to me later,” I say and I slam the door in her face.

  I feel bad about it. She’s a nice girl. Used to be, we didn’t really talk much at all. Once in a while I’d knock on the wall if she was playing her piano late at night. That was about it. Then one day her and Elsie got to talking in the hall and became friends, and then, before I knew it, Ruby was always coming over here or Elsie and me going over there. Ruby loves making us dinner. Damned awful health food shit that Elsie claims to like. Me, I just shovel the food around my plate a little, make it look like it’s going somewhere.

  The thing is, Ruby’s interrupting me actually made me feel a little better. I guess it got my mind off my foul thoughts. I sit back down at the kitchen table and take the paper out and go over the sports scores like I actually give a shit about them. Eventually I pick up the phone to try calling Elsie out at her sister’s. It rings and rings but no answer and no machine coming on to tell me anything. I put the phone back in its cradle and stare at the floor and suddenly remember this dog we had when I was a kid. Little gray mutt named Pepper. Dog used to make me laugh a lot, chasing its tail and whatnot. I wish I had a dog now. It might help.

  Ruby Murphy

  5 / Rite of Spring Man and the Scarred Blonde Again

  After failing to find out what’s bothering my kind but intensely strange neighbor, I retreat into my place and sit at the piano for a while. All I can think of is poor Schumann’s finger though, and this depresses me. It’s not very late yet but, since I plan to get up early, I decide to call it a day. I change into my long white nightgown, herd the cats over to the bed, and climb under the covers. Sleep comes quickly. It also leaves abruptly at eight A.M. when the alarm wakes me. I stumble into the kitchen, feed the cats, brew coffee, then go back to bed to ruminate and read, drink coffee, and smoke a somewhat foul-tasting early morning cigarette. It takes a lot to wake me up. My father was the same way. He was always in exceptional physical shape. Did manual labor most of his life and ran several miles every day. He ate pretty well and took vitamins. But he also chainsmoked and consumed endless pots of coffee. He couldn’t face the day until he’d smoked a half a pack while lying in bed reading.

  After he died, I started noticing that I’d taken on a lot of my father’s habits. I became an obsessive vitamin consumer while continuing to smoke. I ran every morning until my knees started to wear down. Then I followed my friend Jane into the world of yoga, which I now practice each morning before leaving the house. But not until I’ve smoked a few cigarettes and had three cups of coffee.

  I read twenty pages of Anna Karenina then finally get up, put on a bathing suit that doubles as a leotard, go into the living room and roll out my yoga mat.

  An hour later I pop out of lotus and rub my sweat into myself The Yoga People call sweat “nectar” and insist that it not be wiped or showered away for at least a half hour after practice. I’m not sure why, but I go along with it. It’s entertaining to go along with other people’s peculiar customs.

  After rubbing in my nectar, I put on sweatpants and two long-sleeve shirts, grab a towel, then head outside for a quick walk that will culminate in a dip in the sea, which I do from time to time, even in cold weather, to keep myself on my toes.

  I cross Surf Avenue, walking briskly toward the boardwalk. As I pass the fence surrounding Guillotine’s trailer, his pitbulls, loose in the little yard, greet me with low growls. No matter how many hundreds of times I pass by, the beasts refuse to view me as anything other than a potential threat to their kingdom of weeds, buckets, and trashed Tilt-a-Whirl seats.

  I walk past all the sleeping rides and onto the wide tan beach. A few agitated seagulls are flapping above the flat gray sea, dive-bombing the detritus that’s been spit onto the sand. I strip down to my bathing suit, put my clothes in a little pile, and jog ahead into the cold surf.

  Vicious needles of ice shoot into me, and in a few seconds I go numb. I dip my head under, listen to the sea’s wild roar for a few seconds, then emerge and race back to the beach. A man has suddenly materialized and is standing near my stuff, staring at me. This happens sometimes. I come out of the water and find a person or two on the beach looking at me with amazement. Russian ladies or fishermen or kids from the projects. This is a middle-age black guy, though, just gaping at me as he stands there.

  “Did you just come out of that there water or do I need to change my medication?” he asks as I scoop up my towel and cover myself.

  “I just came out of the water, yes.”

  The man has a boom box perched on his shoulder—though he doesn’t really look like the boom box type. He has big eyes that are radiating madness and intelligence. He’s wearing a worn-out overcoat and his shoe tongues are hanging out. His hair is clipped short and he looks clean-cut, yet somehow off his rocker.

  “That’s good for you?” he asks, squinting at me.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “I think so.”

  “Huh,” he says. “Well, God bless you, lady, and if He don’t, I will.” He turns his back to me and hits a button on his boom box.

  Music comes blaring out, and I stare after the guy because, incongruously enough, the music is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of my favorite pieces of music. And not the kind of thing you generally expect to hear blaring out of a boom box in Coney Island.

  The guy evidently feels me staring at his back. He turns around, grins wildly, points at the boom box speaker and says, “Nice, huh?”

  I nod emphatically. He keeps walking as the bassoon sings its song.

  I stand there another few moments feeling happy. It’s these tiny bits of unexpected kinship with total strangers that make life worth living.

  The wind picks up, and I grab my clothes and break into a jog as I head back toward home. I reach my building, go up the stairs two at a time, peel off my half-frozen bathing suit and plunge into the shower. I stand there for quite a long time, humming Rite of Spring as the deliciously hot water pours down on me.

  X

  AN HOUR and a half later I emerge from the subway onto West Twenty-third Street. It’s a bland street of utilitarian buildings housing magazine publishers and toy-related businesses. As I cross Sixth Avenue the sky bunches up and I get caught in a sudden violent shower. I have an umbrella at home, though I’ve never actually used it. I prefer pretending that I’m at one with the weather and that I can dodge the drops. In a few steps I’m severely drenched.

  All around me the thunderstorm is having its way with the city; umbrellas start littering the streets like dead birds and water runs in big streams while humans run in all directions.

  By the time I reach Seventh Avenue and look for the number
of Ariel’s building, the rain has soaked through the hood of my jacket and my head feels like a roll of wet toilet paper. I find 222 West Twenty-third and stand there, confused. It’s the infamous Chelsea Hotel. Where Sid Vicious died. Where countless artistic denizens have lived, worked, and sometimes died. My friend Hal, a musicologist, lives here when he’s in New York. It’s a notorious gorgeous mess of a building with loopy balconies and an old neon sign throbbing out from a red brick facade. Not at all where I’d expect my fair-haired acquaintance to live.

  I go into the lobby, a dimly lit high-ceilinged place decorated with paintings by various artists who have lived here. At the reception desk a surly-looking white woman is frowning into a magazine and a skinny Spanish guy is shouting into a telephone. Neither one of them pays any attention to me, so I walk over to the stairs and head up. As I wander the wide quiet halls, looking for number 297, a door opens and an extremely fat man peers out at me. I walk on, eventually coming to Ariel’s place. There’s a golden doorbell sticking out with a tiny golden nipple. I press it, and in a moment Ariel appears at the door.

  “Ruby, hello,” she says, looking at me with something like hunger as she gestures for me to come inside.

  “How are you, Ariel?” I ask automatically.

  She sighs. She looks on the verge of weeping but instead she shrugs.

  Her apartment is completely filled with flowers and plants. It’s nice in a sort of carpeted, civilized way that makes me feel like I’m going to leave stains and break anything I happen to touch. Including Ariel. She’s so perfectly coiffed and manicured. She’s wearing a lavender cashmere sweater and white wool pants. Her delicate feet are bare, the toenails varnished to match the lavender of her sweater. She looks like direct contact with another human would never be possible—never.