The Darkest Place

by Daniel Judson

  “Yeah?” He waited, then said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He listened, then said, “That may explain why we couldn’t find her anywhere. Yeah, I’ll go right now. Give me the address.” He waved again to Miller. Miller got out the notebook and opened it. Clay repeated the address aloud. Miller wrote it down. He knew Clay was talking to Gregor, that Clay didn’t want Gregor to know Miller was there with him. Miller wasn’t bothered by that, didn’t blame Clay one bit. One step at a time.

  “I’ll call you with what I find out.” Clay hung up, slipped the cell phone into his coat pocket.

  “What’s going on?” Miller said.

  “The number that called Kane twice in the last hour belongs to a woman named—get this—Colleen Auger.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Sounds pretty close to Colette Auster, doesn’t it? That’s her address. We’re going to check it out right now.”

  “We?”

  Clay buckled his seat belt. “You’ve met Colette Auster. I haven’t. I’m going to need you to tell me if she and this Colleen Auger are in fact the same woman. I assume you’re willing to do that.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “If we’re lucky, this Kane guy will be there with her.”

  “You think they’re in this together?”

  “I think they’ve been playing us like a pair of plywood violins.”

  Clay shifted into gear, pressed down on the accelerator. Miller pulled the seat belt across his chest as the car lurched forward and headed down the dark, empty street.

  Seven

  KANE LOOKED UP, DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HIS SURROUNDINGS AT first. He saw darkness, small roadside motels and cottages whisking by faster than his eyes could focus. Then suddenly all that gave way and he saw that he was moving across a bridge above a narrow body of water. The area around the water was lit up like a border crossing. The Shinnecock Canal, he thought.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  The inside of Colette’s Cherokee was dim, the green dashboard lights turned low.

  “You said you didn’t want to go back to your place,” she said as she drove. “And my place is definitely out of the question. So I figured we could come here. You need some looking after, I think.”

  “Where’s here?”

  She didn’t answer. Once across the bridge she made a sharp right turn, steering the Cherokee off Montauk Highway. She made a couple more turns, then pulled into the parking lot outside a large, run-down building. Three stories, immense, a wreck of a place. When she parked, Kane saw the entrance, and the sign above it.

  The Water’s Edge.

  “We’ll be okay here,” Colette said.

  “I don’t really want to be around people right now.”

  “We won’t be. Trust me. I’ll take care of you.”

  They entered through a side door, around the corner from the entrance with the sign above it. This door, concealed in the heavy shadow of several large trees, on the side farthest from the bright lights of the canal, wasn’t marked in any way. Kane and Colette entered a dark, narrow hallway, at the end of which stood another unmarked door. She led Kane to it, knocked on it. It was opened by a large man dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, wearing heavy boots. His head was shaved. He wasn’t the largest man Kane had seen recently, but he’d do. The man looked at Colette, then at Kane, nodded once, almost indifferently, and sat down on a stool that stood just inside the door. There was a bulge in the man’s sweatshirt, where it hung over his belt. Kane was fairly certain that it was a gun. Colette smiled at the doorman, a warm smile, devoid, Kane thought, of her usual tricks, of those things of hers that all men and some women fell for. It was a smile of sincere appreciation, of thanks. Nothing hidden by it, nothing hidden in it. But maybe that was the trick, that was what worked on this particular man. But Kane didn’t think too much about that. He needed to sit down, needed to recover. It had only been a half hour at the most since he was pinned under a heavy boot in the chapel. He was still shaken, and every now and then new pains would report themselves to him, find their way across already crowded nerves to his brain.

  Colette led him past the bald man and through the door, then up a set of steep, noisy stairs to the floor above. This hallway wasn’t any better lit than the one downstairs. They walked past several closed doors, Colette leading the way, the floor creaking beneath their feet every now and then. Paint was peeling from the doors, flakes curled like dead leaves, and there were small brass numbers set at eye level, and new-looking locks. At the end of the hall Colette stopped at a door that was marked 14. She opened it, they moved inside, then she closed the door behind them, locking it.

  The room was murky till Colette found the light switch, and then suddenly, a soft red glow, as incomplete as candlelight, surrounded them. Kane saw a bed and a chair, and next to the chair, a small wall-mounted sink with some folded towels placed on its edge. There was nothing else in the room, except for two windows on perpendicular walls, set not all that far from each other. This was obviously a corner room. One of the windows was boarded up, but the other was only partially covered. A small rectangle of night was visible through a single pane of dirty glass. By the fact that they had walked the length of the building, and that beyond this smeared window was unnaturally bright light, Kane was certain that this room looked out over the canal.

  “What is this place?” he said.

  Colette didn’t answer. She sat him down on the edge of the narrow bed, looking closely at the cuts on his head. Maybe she was so preoccupied that she hadn’t heard the question.

  “The bleeding has stopped,” she said. “I should try to clean you up a little.”

  She went to the sink, ran a towel under the faucet, then brought it back, sat beside Kane. The worn mattress sagged beneath their combined weight. She touched his head, turning it slightly, and applied the warm, wet towel to the area around his cuts, trying to clean the dried blood out of his hair. She could see two gashes, not very big, but big enough.

  “How did you get these?” she said softly.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  She smiled. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was at the way he had said that, with a kind of sighing grunt, like he was some kind of tough guy. He supposed she knew him well enough to see the humor in the idea of that.

  “You look like you could use a drink.”

  Kane didn’t say anything. He waited till she finished cleaning him up, then said again, “What is this place, Colette?”

  “I work downstairs,” she said. “I tend bar.”

  “Is this a hotel?”

  She shook her head, went back to tending his cuts. He knew for certain then that she was trying to avoid the subject.

  “You know, I was looking for you tonight,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d want to get together and go out and have a drink, toast poor Larry.”

  Kane wasn’t in a hurry for an answer, didn’t want to push her. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to tell him what this place was. Anyway, he already knew more than he needed or wanted to know. This was someone else’s business, he didn’t really care one way or another. He decided to let his question drop for now.

  “How’d you know I’d be in my office just now?”

  “I didn’t. I saw your Jeep in the parking lot, then saw that your light was on.”

  “What were you doing on campus? I mean, at this time of night.”

  “I model for the art students once in a while.”

  Kane nodded. She had the figure for it, and he didn’t have a difficult time at all imagining her taking off her clothes in front of a roomful of people. She was bold, he knew that about her, had seen the way everyone in his class was drawn to her because of her boldness. Even the women. Like a siren, he had heard one woman, in her forties, divorced, taking the course as audit, say to another in the hallway. Like a siren, not said with contempt or rancor but with a little bit of awe, a little bit of envy. Colette’s “fictional memoir” was full
of sexuality, all of it frankly handled. Often, though, it wasn’t flattering to her, and Kane had given her credit for that, for writing honestly about the fucks-ups as well as the fucks. If things had been different for Kane, if it hadn’t been for Meg, for the hold she had on him, the hold he wanted her to have on him, needed, to keep him from falling to pieces—if it weren’t for Meg, Kane probably would have acted around Colette a little more like all the others, like Larry Foster, poor Larry Foster, all the Larry Fosters. If it weren’t for Meg, Kane would certainly have had some hope of contributing in a significant way to her “memoir.”

  “You were modeling tonight?”

  She nodded, got up from the bed, rinsed the towel in the sink, sat next to him, went back to work.

  “These are pretty deep. Maybe I should see if they have any bandages.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t leave. I don’t feel so hot right now.”

  There was strength in Colette’s hands, Kane noticed then, authority. She was strong, but strong in a precise way, not sloppy or rough, not careless. Meg was sloppy-rough, and he had the scratches on his face to prove it. Colette cleaned around his wounds, scrubbed around them, without touching them, without causing him much pain at all. Her strength—powerful hands lined with thick veins, forearm muscles that flexed with every movement—only emphasized his own overall weakness, made even more so now by the beating he had just taken.

  “I think I need to lie down,” he said.

  “You okay?”

  “I’d just like to lie down.”

  “Yeah, sure. Take off your coat.”

  Kane began to but stopped suddenly, wincing, drawing in a sharp breath.

  “What?” she said.

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “Let me help you.” She placed the damp towel on the bed, then opened Kane’s jacket as wide as it would go. This gave him enough room to slip out of it without having to wriggle so much. Still, it was slow going. When it was finally off, she tossed the jacket aside. Kane lowered himself down onto his back. He winced again, drew in a breath, more sharply than before. Once he was flat, Colette leaned over him and unbuttoned his shirt, opening it up. She saw several bruises on his chest—three of them, but so large they had almost merged into one giant mass. In the red light they looked like wide gashes, like flesh that had been cut and spread open.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What happened?”

  Kane didn’t answer, just lay there, breathing.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “I never saw his face.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Just before you knocked on my door.”

  “At the college?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He paused, thought about saying nothing. But there was no reason to keep this from her.

  “I went out to the chapel,” Kane said.

  “What for?”

  “To find out if what you had said would be inside was inside.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I was asked to go.”

  “By who?”

  “Some private investigator. He was hired by Larry’s family to prove that Larry hadn’t killed himself.”

  “Why you, though?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He just walked up to you out of the blue and asked you to do this?”

  “No. Mercer knows him.”

  “Professor Mercer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He put you and this private investigator together?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  She ignored the question. “So who did this to you?” She seemed almost afraid to ask the question for a second time, as if suddenly she was afraid of what the answer just might be.

  “I didn’t see his face.”

  “Did he come up behind you or something?”

  “No, he stood right there in front of me. It was pretty dark in there.”

  “But you saw him? I mean, you could see the shape of him?” She stopped short.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he big?”

  Kane nodded.

  “How big?”

  “Jolly Green Giant big. I thought at first maybe it was this guy I met yesterday, a guy named Clay. But Clay has an accent, and the guy who used me like a doormat didn’t.”

  “He spoke to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “A lot of shit.”

  “What exactly?”

  Kane shrugged. He didn’t really want to think about it or repeat it.

  Colette waited a moment, thinking, then said, “Was anyone with him?”

  “No. He was alone. He was enough. He spoke to someone on the phone, though.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to know whether he should kill me or not.”

  “And?”

  “Obviously he didn’t kill me.”

  “Do you know why he didn’t?”

  “I heard something about them needing me, that everything hinged on me. Something like that.”

  Colette paused to think again. Kane was grateful for the break, though it didn’t last all that long.

  “So what did you see in the chapel?” Colette said.

  “Exactly what you had told them would be there.”

  Another silence. Kane looked around the sparse room, saw the peeling walls, the boarded-over windows. He thought of the numbers on the door and the armed man at the bottom of the stairs. He wanted to avoid talking any more about what had just happened to him and asked the first question that came to his mind, the question that Colette had twice so far avoided. Suddenly, without knowing why, Kane decided that he needed it answered.

  “What exactly is this place, Colette?”

  “It’s just the bar where I work.”

  She got up, this time ran a clean towel under the faucet, brought it back and laid it across Kane’s chest. This had worked before. The water was cold, not warm, and Kane would have moved in reaction against it if the cold wasn’t less painful than what he would have felt trying to avoid it. Colette was careful not to move too much, careful not to touch the bruises on his chest directly, or even the area around them.

  “God, that looks so bad,” she said.

  Kane wondered then if there was maybe something sinister in her avoidance. He’d already felt helpless once tonight, didn’t really care to feel that way again.

  He spoke as firmly as he could. “What are these rooms for, Colette?”

  She shrugged, thought for a moment, then looked at him and said, “What do you think?”

  He looked around the room again, not that he needed to. Bed, sink, chair. Boarded-over windows. Red light mounted on the wall. If he hadn’t already known, it wouldn’t have taken him long to do the math.

  “It’s a brothel,” he said. He couldn’t think of another word, at least not one that wasn’t derogatory. He felt for some reason compelled to make where he was seem less notorious.

  Colette nodded, looked at the unpainted walls. “It’s amazing how many men are willing to pay top dollar to pretend they’re slumming it. I don’t know, maybe it adds to the thrill. The owner calls the decor ‘A Bit of Old New Orleans.’ I think that’s being charitable, don’t you?”

  “And you tend bar here?”

  “Yeah. The bar’s just the cover, and a profitable one at that. I didn’t know what went on up here when I was hired. I don’t think I was ever supposed to find out. But I did.”

  “How can a place like this be in business?”

  “The owner is connected.”

  “But don’t people talk? I mean, customers, johns, whatever they’re called. How can this be a secret?”

  “The people who drink themselves stupid downstairs every night have no idea what goes on up here. Up here is a private-club kind of thing. Only a handful of people b
elong to it. Rich people, influential. They come from all over to get pretty much whatever they want. Who was it that said a writer should live in a monastery by day and a whorehouse by night?”

  “Gabriel García Márquez.”

  “Yeah. I love him. When I found out about what went on up here, I figured that maybe I’d write about it someday. It’s the kind of story that can make a person rich and famous, you know?”

  “If it’s supposed to be such a secret, how did you find out?”

  “Everyone who works here, everyone but me pretty much, is part of this big South American family. The son of the owner runs the bar. He was the one who hired me. I think he told me to impress me. He was drunk, and the next day he called me, all scared, begged me not to repeat to anyone what he had said. He made it pretty clear what would happen to both of us if anyone found out that he had shot his mouth off to me.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “About six months.”

  “How long ago did you find out?”

  “After I’d been here a month.”

  She looked down at Kane’s chest, then said, “Listen, I’m sorry I got you into this. It’s all my fault.”

  “You know the guy who did this to me, don’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You asked some pretty specific questions about him.”

  She looked at Kane, looked at his eyes, then nodded. “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Dean, or at least that’s what he said his name was. Just Dean, nothing else. Like Dean Moriarty from On the Road. That’s what he told me, anyway. He loved Kerouac, loved all things from the fifties. He had one serious Brando fixation. Too serious, if you know what I mean.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He’s someone from my past.”

  “An ex-boyfriend.”

  “No. We used to be in the same business together.”

  “What business?”

  “Drugs, mainly.”

  “You sold drugs?”