Drawing Blood

by Deirdre Verne

  “Was he helpful?” I asked.

  “I expected he would be, but he never called back,” Frank said.

  That’s not like Bob, I thought. “Did you get anything from him?”

  Frank deconstructed the only phone conversation he had had with Bob.

  “He asked me if I wanted to trash-talk,” Frank said, and then added, “He’s quite the jokester. Am I right about that?”

  “Bob’s a pun machine.”

  “I told him I just needed to understand the players in the recycling business, and he said he’d be happy to give me the lay of the landfill.” Frank smirked.

  “That’s Bob.”

  “I mentioned my interest was e-waste,” Frank said, “and that’s where I felt like I’d lost him.”

  “The garbage business can be messy,” I said, enjoying my own pun.

  “So I’m learning,” Frank replied. “Anyway, he said to give him a day or two. I’ve left a few messages, but no response.”

  Now that was a disconnect I couldn’t let pass. “Bob is always at the recycling center. He’s a permanent fixture, like a hunk of non-compostable plastic.”

  Lamendola grunted at the comparison.

  “No, I mean it. He and his wife Barbara live about a quarter mile from the entrance.”

  Frank perked up at my input. He signaled to Lamendola and Cheski. “Check it out,” he directed as they filed out.

  Frank swung his chair next to me. He ran his fingers along the length of my forearms. I knew what he was thinking. My wrists were slender, my arms toned. I could have been any twenty-something addicted to yoga and herbal cleanses, but my look is deceptive. My strength and skin tone are honed from working Harbor House’s farm, jumping in and out of Dumpsters, and lugging cans of paint to my attic studio. Frank traced my fingers with his. It’s what he loved most, my hands. He knew my mind unfolded in the accuracy of my sketches.

  “Hey,” he started, “I screwed up. I didn’t expect a ton of e-waste to snowball.”

  “Into a missing persons case?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  I weaved my hands into his. “You get that my Dumpster diving is a ridiculously tiny piece of the larger world of garbage?”

  “I do.”

  “Reusing old furniture, digging up old car parts to fix the Gremlin, diving for an occasional meal.”

  Frank winced at the mention of eating food from a Dumpster. It was a lingering piece of my lifestyle he couldn’t quite digest.

  “That’s child’s play.” I retracted my hand. “Me, Bob, Charlie, Katrina, Jonathan—we’re simple Freegans.”

  “Garbage for the greater good.” Frank confirmed his twelve-month indoctrination into my wacky world of Dumpster diving and Freegan living. “I’m aware.”

  “You also know that some really bad people deal in garbage, exchanging a lot of dirty cash. The kind of people that carry weapons and have names that sound an awful lot like DeRosa.”

  I thought about the last time I had seen Bob. We had discussed the lead on my “previously driven” new car last Friday, exactly a week ago. Plenty of time for Bob to get back to me. Although I now realized I hadn’t heard from Bob, either.

  “So you talked to Bob on Monday?” I asked.

  Frank nodded.

  If something were wrong and bad people were involved, Bob had nothing more in his pocket for protection than the five-inch plastic doll I had given him a week ago. Not much of a weapon. Too bad I didn’t offer Bob a GI Joe with Kung Fu grip.

  “I’m with you,” Frank replied, “and I’m equally concerned about Bob’s whereabouts.”

  “How concerned?”

  Frank stood up to pace. If I had a penny for every foot this guy trod, I thought. I watched as he circled the conference room at the Cold Spring Harbor station. He settled at the windows, staring at the Long Island Sound lapping against the bay beaches.

  “It’s mesmerizing,” I said, coming up behind him. “I could look at it all day.”

  “But you don’t.” He nodded at my sketchbook, my daily distraction.

  I placed the back of my fingers at the exact point where his beard line met his cheekbone. His masculinity was palpable. I skimmed the bristle running along his jawline. “Are we going to have this conversation?” I said, referencing an issue we’d been avoiding for as long as our courtship.

  “We need to find Bob,” Frank said.

  “And then you’ll help me?”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he said.

  Later? This could get old, I thought. Not to mention boring, frustrating, and downright maddening. Frank had been the detective on my brother’s case, and although the murderer was ultimately found, Frank had made a more gruesome discovery: My father, a DNA expert and the founder of the world renowned Sound View Laboratories, had used his own children as subjects in a long-term DNA study. When Teddy had figured out that he and I had been involved, it set off a chain reaction that subsequently led to his death. My brother and I, unbeknownst to us, were not actually related, a blow I still couldn’t process. In fact, my brother had a genetically related sibling; it just wasn’t me. My father had adopted Teddy as a twin and then separated the boys as infants. Teddy was raised with all the privileges that come to the child of a wealthy doctor. My father placed the other twin with a family of poor, uneducated immigrants. Then the good doctor waited to see if these two boys with nearly identical DNA would become products of their surroundings or their genetics.

  Of course, my father, being an important and impatient man, couldn’t wait the years it would take for his multigenerational study to unfold. When Teddy hit puberty, he took a sample of Teddy’s sperm in hopes of speeding up a study of subsequent generations. At that point, he needed an egg, but human ova are tough to come by. Unless, of course, you have a daughter.

  While my father was busy mixing and matching our DNA, he was also regularly observing Teddy’s twin, who was living a decent life a few towns away from the Prentice’s palatial spread on the Gold Coast of Long Island. He hoped that little boy would repeat the pattern of poverty his parents exhibited. Nurture over nature, the ability to override the genes you’re born with. But despite a challenging environment, that boy had grown up to become a damn good cop. It must have driven my father nuts.

  Frank, as it turned out, was Teddy’s brother.

  Frank’s face was familiar although not an exact replica of my brother. Looking at him always left me with a sense of déjà vu. It was the same feeling I got when I thought about my father’s experiment. In truth, I wasn’t even sure the product of my egg and my brother’s sperm had resulted in a baby. There was no evidence to support it, yet I couldn’t shake the idea that something familiar was close by. My father, who admitted to the experiment, insisted he had lost track of my egg and my brother’s sperm—but how could I believe the man who had concocted the bizarre experiment in the first place? I couldn’t. I was only a tween when my egg was taken. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, I could have a baby out there or even a teenager.

  “I don’t want to talk about it later,” I said as I challenged Frank’s patent response.

  “I don’t want to talk about it now,” he replied.

  I’d never been to couples therapy, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t how good communication worked. Again, we were at a standstill.

  four

  The upside to building a dump in a high-end town like Cold Spring Harbor is that town leaders will go to extraordinary lengths to mask the fact that the townspeople actually produce garbage. The creation and disposal of refuse was apparently a habit practiced in lesser zip codes. Cold Spring Harbor was a town that had banned unsightly garbage pails at curbs. Residents had willingly ponied up additional tax dollars to ensure their garbage men, recently renamed “recycling engineers,” would stroll unobserved to the back of th
eir stately homes, retrieve the hidden pails, and return them to their rightful place—out of sight.

  The state-of-the-art recycling facility had been built under careful supervision by the town’s Architectural Review Board. Normally assigned to critiquing, in excruciating detail, the exterior molding on renovated Victorians, the board spent three years arguing about appropriate street signage at the entrance to the dump. The final conclusion: no sign.

  “Where the hell do I turn?” Frank barked.

  I reached across the steering wheel and yanked right. “Here, between those two pine trees.”

  The Gremlin took the road ruts like a trooper, bounding in and out of grooves like a Jeep on an African safari. Who knew? Maybe I’d get three more weeks out of the clunker.

  “Left,” I said, motioning. “Bob’s house is down this road.”

  “Road?” Frank questioned. “That’s a bit generous. This is a footpath.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror and spotted Cheski and Lamendola in their black and white. So much for a police-grade GPS. We’d beat them by two minutes. “Tell them to back off. Barbara will freak out if she sees cops.”

  Frank waved them off, and we approached the house alone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Frank mumbled under his breath as he took in the circular yurt listing precariously on one side of a small clearing. Bob and Barbara’s living quarters were nothing more than a puzzle-shaped octagon fashioned out of corrugated metal and strips of repurposed construction materials.

  I shrugged, unwilling to apologize for my fellow Freegans. Curb appeal zero; mortgage zero. How was this equation not attractive to Frank?

  Barbara was around back tending to a small garden near one of the outer buildings.

  “Barbara,” I called softly.

  Barbara stood up slowly and rested a hand on her lower back. I’d put her age at about sixty-five. The lines on her face curved gently upward. She was a smiler. “Bob likes to laugh,” I had mentioned to Frank on the car ride over. “Barbara is his biggest fan.”

  She placed the gardening shovel down and walked toward me. We embraced like the friends we were, and then she shook Frank’s hand. She was aware that Frank and I were dating, and she didn’t appear to be concerned about our visit.

  “Bob told me about the Dawn doll,” she said. “I had to pull it out of his pocket to wash his pants, and then he insisted on sticking it right back in. Are you here to drop off more?”

  “I’m fresh out, but I had hoped to show Frank around.”

  “If you find Bob, let me know. It appears we’ve been on opposite schedules. I was at a friend’s house on the North Fork, and I just got back.”

  I shot Frank a look. Barbara didn’t know where Bob was, or at least she assumed he was at work.

  Barbara motioned to a small shed, one of a few shacks dotting the property. Frank looked at me uneasily, and I’m sure he was thinking hoarders. Every police officer, at least once in his life, will respond to a call that alters his view of basic humanity. Frank had told me about his first such call, ten years earlier. He responded to what he thought was a routine domestic violence complaint. As it had turned out, the call had been made by a man so fed up with his wife’s excessive hoarding that he had barricaded himself in a room filled with rotting garbage, refusing to leave until his wife received psychiatric treatment. It took a Hazmat-clad cleaning crew a week to dismantle and detox the house, but Frank had been scarred for years.

  Barbara flicked the shed light on.

  “Holy shit,” Frank blurted out.

  The room was, in fact, filled with garbage, but it had been transformed into a gallery of sorts.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s called Outsider Art,” I responded. “Bob’s an artist. That’s how we met.”

  Barbara proceeded to give Frank a tour of Bob’s work—an intricate series of dioramas, each telling a story painstakingly rendered in pieces of discarded junk. A bent fork rejiggered into a park bench, vintage buttons for hubcaps adhered to miniature cars built from tin boxes. Barbara positioned Frank at various vantage points. From a distance, the scenes were fluid, almost fanciful. As the viewer neared the display, each carefully selected piece materialized into its true form. The art, up close, was raw and primitive.

  “This is amazing,” Frank said, bending over a scene from Cold Spring Harbor’s whaling history. Score one for the Freegans.

  Bob had created a choppy ocean of water using recycled blue plastic bags, the kind that get tossed two seconds after the newspaper is removed. Bob didn’t bother to cut around the black print, which created a sense of depth and danger in the water. “I feel like it’s an impossible task,” Frank commented.

  “Harpooning a whale?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Frank replied.

  “It’s perspective,” Barbara offered. “The whale’s tail is unnaturally large relative to the whaling boat, as is the size of the waves. He’s trying to convey a sense of futility.”

  “But whales were captured,” Frank said. “Without a successful whaling industry, these towns would have perished.”

  Barbara nodded, passing the baton to me.

  “It’s hope. Bob also allows you to feel the potential.”

  Barbara took Frank’s arm and pointed to the figure of the man holding the harpoon. “The sea and the whale are unnervingly large versus the size of the crew and their boat. But look at the harpoon.”

  Frank took in the details of Bob’s artistry. “It’s too big for the man.”

  “Now look closely at his face.”

  Frank leaned into the diorama. Bob had reformed the doll’s mouth.

  “Oversized and grinning.” Frank closed his eyes and reopened them staring straight into the whaler’s hopeful face. Big Bob wasn’t a man who just didn’t come home. I knew that, and now Frank did too.

  He stood up and faced Barbara. “We need to talk.”

  five

  “Are you here about Bob?” Barbara finally asked. Frank chose his words carefully and explained that Bob hadn’t been available to close the recycling center yesterday.

  “The recycling center is a dangerous place,” Frank said. “The town can’t afford to have it unmanned. We sent a car over when we got word there was no one there.” Of course, the police department hadn’t been notified, but Barbara seemed to buy the white lie. Maybe we’d never have to tell Barbara the truth—that Bob may have had a tip for Frank that led to his disappearance.

  “So Bob was at work yesterday morning?” Barbara asked.

  “As far as we know.”

  “We had breakfast together at seven thirty, and then we went our separate ways. I offered to drive him to work, but he likes to walk.” Barbara glanced at their metal yurt. “He’s not here, and you’re telling me that he’s not at work now. Is that right?”

  I nodded and added, “I’m guessing Jimmy is covering for Bob.” I turned to Frank. “Jimmy is Bob’s second-in-command.”

  Barbara appeared calm, but her hands were restless. She puttered around Bob’s workspace reorganizing his piles of art supplies. “It’s never been easy being married to Bob,” she said. “I’ve learned to appreciate an artist’s temperament, because I know at the end I’ll be rewarded with these wonderful creations. You can’t box him in. His mind is constantly moving, so I’ve learned to be flexible and give him the space he needs.”

  “Does Bob spend the night out often?”

  Silence.

  “Barbara?”

  “Years ago”—she paused—“when we first met, in our twenties, Bob was a bit of a drinker.”

  “Drugs?”

  Barbara tilted her head from side to side. A noncommittal motion. “Everyone did drugs back then. Bob wasn’t called up, but his friends were coming home with limbs shot off and their brains blown out. Drugs seemed to be a solution.” />
  “So a few weekend benders as a young man?”

  “You could say that.” Barbara’s shoulders released as tears rolled down her face. “Maybe a few times when we got older, but really not in years. Lately, it seemed he was distracted by his art. His mind seemed to always be somewhere except here.” She was worried but not panicked. Of course, she didn’t know about the warehouses stocked with leaking toxic tech equipment. She didn’t know Frank had called Bob before he went missing.

  Almost a day had passed, and Bob’s wife deserved an answer. We all wanted an answer. This was a woman who thought maybe her husband had slipped up—a handful of pills, some beers, and a night on someone’s couch or an artistic excursion that kept him away from home. It wasn’t completely out of character, given Bob’s previous behaviors.

  Here’s hoping she’s right, I thought.

  six

  “Jimmy,” I yelled from the unloading dock.

  Jimmy gave me the thumbs-up, and I grabbed at a pile of yellow hard hats stacked on a shelf at the entrance, passing them out to Frank, Lamendola, and Cheski. The snap, crackle, pop of crushing cans and glass was partially muffled by the deafening roar of grinding machinery. I tugged the construction helmet down over my ears, demonstrating for my recycling-center neophytes.

  Lamendola placed his hands on my shoulders. “I feel like everything is moving.”

  “It is,” I said. Using hand signals, I directed our group through the airplane-sized hangar.

  The routine was relatively simple. Trucks drove directly into the facility and deposited heaps of paper-related items in one half of the hangar. The other half was reserved for plastics and glass. Non-­recyclables got deposited in containers outside the facility. Recycled materials were sorted, flattened, and tied in bales the size of a single wide trailer. The bales were sold based on the fluctuating market for reusable materials. As we made our way up a grooved metal ramp, men and woman in orange suits nodded.

  “Pickers,” I shouted at Frank. “They sort items the mechanical sorters miss.” Conveyer belts lining the perimeter moved bits and pieces in a never-ending stream of refuse toward a monstrous machine. One second faster and Lucille Ball would have been cramming the garbage down her shirt. Without missing a beat, one of the orange-suited women handed me a Bloomingdale’s bag. It was a treasure trove of interestingly shaped glass jars—with matching tops.