Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  The word shit sounds weird coming out of his mouth. I take a few seconds to collect myself, then sit up, roll my legs onto the faux Oriental rug. Rub some sleep out of my eyes.

  “Talk to me.”

  Courtney sits down on his own bed, across from me. Papers are scattered all over his blanket. He hasn’t slept at all tonight.

  “You said yourself at dinner, something must have happened two years into Silas’s sentence, right? He sends the tape to Candy, then tries to kill himself, and withdraws. That can’t be a coincidence, all those things just happening together, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So I read all the notes that Dr. Nancy took during that period. And there was nothing I could figure. It was just like, same old, then bam, he tries to asphyxiate himself. As far as she could tell, it was spontaneous, I think.”

  “Okay, so what did you find?” I ask.

  “A copy of his visitor log was near the back of his file. At first I didn’t think much of it. A few dozen women, girls like Candy that thought they loved him. But look.” In an instant, Courtney is at my side, jabbing at the bottom of the list. “Look who his last visitor was, Frank. Three days before he tried to kill himself. Last visitor he ever agreed to speak to.”

  My blood goes cold.

  Last name on the list is Greta Kanter.

  I look up at Courtney. “Maybe it wasn’t really her, you know.”

  “It had to be her. They record these officially. Take your ID and stuff. They don’t just let you sign yourself in.”

  “Christ.” I rub my temples. “So what does this mean, Court?”

  “It’s not entirely unsurprising that she would go there herself and try to find the tape. What is, well, infuriating, and more than a little disconcerting, is that she didn’t tell us that she’d ever been there.”

  “Fuck,” I groan, the import of this sinking in. What else don’t we know about her?

  “Plus,” Courtney adds, “why did her visit disturb him so much, so much that it prompted him to mail the tape to Cand—­”

  “Shit!” I grab a wastebasket and hurl it against the wall. “That fucking bitch. We could have been arrested or killed breaking into that place!”

  “Believe me, I’m as upset as you are—­”

  “Fuck.” I punch Courtney’s mattress as hard as I can. “Fucking bitch!”

  “Okay, but the important thing is to think about how we’re going to proceed now, in light of this development.”

  “I’ll tell you how we’re gonna proceed.” I snatch my cell phone off the nightstand. “Gonna give that bitch a piece of my mind.”

  “Frank, let’s talk about this, please.”

  I ignore him, key in Greta’s cell number. Four rings and then, big surprise, it goes to her message machine.

  “Greta,” I growl into the phone. “It’s Frank Lamb. I am very perturbed by some information that has recently been brought to my attention. It seems that you visited Silas at the Berkley Clinic a few years ago, yet for some reason, you conveniently neglected to share this critical fucking information with us before we broke into the goddamn place for you! I suppose it didn’t occur to you that this might be helpful? Useful to know? We could have been arrested. Five years in the can. If you don’t call me back by noon, it’s over. We’re keeping the fifteen grand and billing you another fifteen for ten days of wasted time. Have a great fucking evening.”

  I hang up and nearly throw the cell phone against the wall in frustration, but I stop myself with what little is left of my clear thinking. I feel drunk again. Breathing heavily. I can feel my face flushing.

  Courtney is looking at me. “We should have talked that over. That’s not a decision you make unilaterally. We’re partners.”

  “Well I’m the one she hired. So we’re partners, but not equal partners, capiche?”

  Courtney shakes his head sadly. “Whatever you say.”

  I snort. “What. You’re not gonna rub it in my face? How I would have gotten nowhere without you? How you’re the brains of this operation, and I’m the fucking idiot just tagging along because I’m the one whose number she got from Orange?”

  Courtney’s face falls. “That’s really how you feel, Frank?”

  I collapse on the bed. “It’s not how I feel. It’s how it is. You know it, I know it. Let’s just leave it.”

  Courtney sits back down on his bed. “I don’t feel that way at all. I think you have a lot to offer. Really. You’re good at this.”

  “Shut up,” I groan, feeling a little physically ill, bile rising in my throat again. Can’t believe I have any left. “Just shut up. It’s fucked. Everything is fucked.”

  I switch off the bedside lamp. Hear Courtney shuffling papers in darkness, making some space to sleep. A little glow from the moon seeping in through a slit in the curtains. There’s no way I’m gonna sleep another wink tonight. I stretch my imagination, but it’s hard to conceive of tomorrow bringing anything but more bad news.

  BREAKFAST IN THE dining room. Place smells like roasting meat and smoke around the clock. I force some eggs down my throat. Objectively, they are some of the freshest eggs I’ve ever eaten. But they taste stale and drab in my cotton mouth.

  Courtney gingerly peels an apple—­worried it’s not organic probably—­then cuts it up into little bite-­sized pieces.

  My cell phone rests on the table between us. It’s a little after nine. It occurred to me sometime around dawn that I didn’t specify whether I meant noon eastern time or mountain. Don’t get the feeling it’s gonna make much difference.

  “I had to give her that ultimatum,” I tell Courtney. “We can’t keep going on this if we don’t get some more assurance that she’s gonna pay us.”

  Courtney nods silently. Sagging blue bags under his wide eyes. Guess he didn’t sleep much last night either.

  “We’ve only spent three grand,” I say. “So really, six grand each for ten days of work isn’t awful.”

  Courtney shoots me a quick look, then returns to the apple on his plate. I’ve never seen anyone cut an apple up with a knife and fork before.

  I’m pretty sure I know what he’s thinking: Even if Greta bails on us, he wants to keep looking. He wants that tape. I do, too, I guess, but I’ve got Sadie waiting back at home and a healthy dose of skepticism regarding our prospects of finding the Beulah Twelve. Part of me would be ecstatic to just wash my hands of all this shit. I don’t like the way following this trail is making me feel. I feel like every day, I’m seeing shit that can never be unseen, no matter how much I drink. And what Courtney said yesterday about us not having a choice, about us being carried here by some kind of cosmic force, I sort of feel that too. And I don’t like it.

  My phone buzzes. I snatch it. Unknown number.

  “It’s her,” I tell Courtney, heart thumping. “Taking it outside.”

  I dash out past the reception desk—­little more than a wall of keys and lockbox—­out into the frigid Colorado morning. Answer it on the porch.

  “Hello?” My voice is trembling. With rage, or fear? I try to control it.

  It’s snowing lightly, and there’s a faint, dry breeze that cuts through my jeans, but it feels refreshing.

  “Where are you?” she says. Her voice makes me shiver. I’m staring at Paula Anderson’s Escherian house across the street. Candy is back in her chair again. Twine wrapped around her ankle, little porcelain statues of Mary gathered around, facing her like it’s story time.

  “Colorado.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your goddamn business,” I snap.

  “I received your message,” she says. “You’ve been dreaming about me, haven’t you?”

  My vision goes a little crooked as a bunch of dreams I’ve had of her—­and forgotten—­return to me. There’s been a lot of them, and if memory serves, they’ve all ta
ken place in that cold cellar, and all involved a certain indecent proposal.

  “Excuse me?” I say weakly.

  Long pause. I’m sweating despite the cold. Candy sitting as still as the statues around her feet. A beat-­up Volvo slowly drives down Main Street.

  Greta finally breathes hard into the phone and says, “Do you have it?”

  “No, but we’re close,” I lie. The cold stings my eyes but seems to help me focus.

  An image from a dream flashes through my head: Greta heaving on top of me, firm breasts rising and falling. The memory evokes a strange kind of terror.

  “You’ve made a big mistake, Lamb,” she says. I clench my jaw. I realize Courtney is beside me, staring at me imploringly, like what’s she saying?

  “You lied to us—­” I say.

  “You broke our deal first,” she says. “You talked to Orange. I specifically requested discretion.”

  A dead moment on the air. A woman walks past me down Main Street, a child bundled to her chest. Those scrambled eggs already want out. My face must look pretty bad, because Courtney looks horrified.

  “How could you not tell us that you visited Silas?” I gasp. “What happened during that visit?”

  A pregnant silence. Her voice finally crackles over the phone, an ice pick chipping away at my heart.

  “You broke our agreement by speaking to Orange. So I’m perfectly within my rights to restructure our arrangement.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I try to force some oomph into my voice.

  Courtney’s scratching his cheeks frantically, intuiting things going south.

  Another brooding silence on the other end. I dance back and forth to get some blood going in my legs. Jesus. Please say something, anything. Terrified curiosity on Courtney’s face.

  Her sudden baritone cuts deep and makes the skin on the back of my neck tingle.

  “Your daughter, Sadie, attends P.S. 134 on the Lower East Side, on East Broadway. She carries a blue lunch box with horses on it. She was dropped off outside the school this morning, but if you call the school, you’ll confirm that she was marked absent today.”

  It takes me a second to process this, and then the ground falls out from under me. I stagger to a freezing metal railing and throw my weight against it.

  “Is . . .” I gasp. “How dare you,” I whisper. “How dare—­”

  “I haven’t hurt her. You have until Sunday evening to get me the tape,” she says. “Don’t call the police. Don’t come back to the city without it. If you do either, I’ll kill her. Don’t do anything stupid, Lamb. Bring me the tape and this all goes away.”

  “You’re lying,” I wheeze. “You don’t know—­”

  “500 Grand Street, apartment 3B. That’s where she was staying. She has a little discoloration on the big toe on her right foot. She said it’s from when you dropped a couch on her foot. Don’t call me until you have the tape.”

  She hangs up.

  “Frank? Frank!”

  I’m on my knees, Courtney standing over me. It takes me a moment to remember who, where I am. I feel like I just got kicked hard in the stomach.

  “Frank, what the hell just happened?”

  “She . . .” Hot tears running down my cheeks. “She has Sadie.”

  Courtney looks like he was just stung with a cattle prod. His face frozen mid-­gasp.

  “What?” He can hardly speak. “What do you mean she has Sadie?”

  I hear my mouth talking, but I’m somewhere else. Somewhere very dark.

  “She says she got her on the way to school. We have a week to get her the tape.”

  “Oh no.” Courtney shakes his head. “Oh no. Oh god. Oh no.”

  “How did I let this happen?” Blood pumps through my temples. Nonsensical scenes of violence flash then disappear in my mind’s eye.

  “Okay, okay.” Courtney is trying to calm himself down. “Give me your phone, I’ll call the family she was staying with, have them check with the school. If she’s really missing, we’ll go straight to Denver to fly back, I’ll call some old cop friends—­”

  “She said not to call the cops,” I say. “Said not to come back to the city without the tape. She means it. You can hear it in her voice. She’ll do anything for this thing. It’s all that matters to her.”

  “Just give me your phone, Frank. You’re not thinking straight—­”

  “You’re not calling the fucking cops,” I snap. “She means it.”

  An older ­couple leaving the Ritz stares at us, me on my knees spitting out phlegm, Courtney tugging anxiously on his thin hair.

  “I’ll call the Feinsods in a sec,” I say.

  I roll onto my side. An emptiness in my stomach, a black hole sucking all feeling out of me, leaving only dread. I pull my knees to my chest, shivering, body quaking, convulsing, my ribs hurting each time I breathe. Through the railing of the porch fence I see Candy, unmoving. Those dead eyes. She can see, but she can’t process anything. It must be like staring into bright light all the time. I envy that. My eyes flit to the broken window of the attic above her. I think there are indeed moments so painful that it would have been better to have never been born.

  AN HOUR LATER, sitting on my hotel bed, blanket pulled over my head, actual double shot in hand, second of the day. Popped three aspirin too. Eyes puffy. Throat raw. I barely managed to keep it together long enough to tell Tammy Feinsod that there was a family emergency, and Sadie’s aunt picked her up from school. That she’d come back next week to pick up her stuff.

  Keep thinking about this time a ­couple years ago when Sadie and I were in some park on the Lower East Side, and she tripped, and I heard a horrible crack as her head collided with the cement. She was fine, as little kids usually are, but in that split second when she was on the ground I felt something I’d never felt before. It was the most awful feeling of helplessness, so potent that it actually manifested itself physically—­as a burning pain in my stomach and groin. A million times worse than actually getting hurt myself.

  I hear Courtney enter, gently close the door, sit down on his bed across from me.

  I rip off the blanket and with my eyes ask him the only question there is to ask.

  Courtney bites his lip. “She’s not at school.”

  I shoot down the rest of the shot and pull the blanket back over my head.

  “If Greta touches her,” I say, “I’ll kill her. I mean it. I’ll kill her.”

  Courtney touches my knee. “I won’t pretend to know how this feels, Frank.”

  “I actually appreciate that.”

  Courtney rips the blanket off my head. His face is way too close to mine.

  “I’m gonna help you with this.”

  I nod, tight-­lipped. “Thanks.”

  “So.” I can smell Courtney’s breath. Better than most; I attribute it to tea over coffee. “So what are we gonna do, Frank? Your call. You say we don’t call the cops, we don’t call the cops.”

  I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you the first thing you need to do,” Courtney says evenly. “You need to stop getting drunk. That’s not helping anything.”

  I return his level gaze.

  “Fine,” I say, dropping the empty glass onto the floor.

  “Okay then.” Courtney nods, satisfied. Sits back down across from me. “This is hard to hear, but emotion is the enemy right now. We need to be logical. Patient, thoughtful and subtle.”

  These are mantras I could get behind right about now. Easier said than done.

  “First, we need to find out who we’re really dealing with here,” I say. “Who knows how much of what she told us is lies? One thing is for sure”—­I swallow—­“she definitely lied about why she wants the tape. And maybe if we can figure out the real reason, we’ll be a
ble to get inside her head.”

  Courtney expresses approval with a puffed-­out lower lip. “Sounds good.”

  “Give me my phone back,” I say. Courtney obliges, though he gives me a wary look, like you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?

  I ignore him and dial Helen Langdon.

  Please pick up . . . Please . . .

  Five rings. Then my prayers are answered.

  “Helen Langdon,” she answers.

  “Helen.” The relief in my voice must be tangible; I’m vaguely aware of how crazed I sound. “Listen, it’s Frank again. Please don’t hang up. I’m begging you.”

  An eternal silence.

  “Frank. I’m at work. What do you want?”

  “Helen,” I say. “I’m in deep. Real deep. And I really need you to run a way wider check on that woman. Greta Kanter. I need the real shit. Credit card and phone bills, all associations from the last five yea—­”

  “Christ, Frank. Settle down. What the hell is going on?”

  I’m trying not to sound too hysterical. I can’t tell her. If I tell her, she’ll be legally obliged to start the manhunt, and if Greta gets a whiff of that, she’ll kill my daughter. I know it. I could hear it in her voice.

  “I made a big mistake, that’s the bottom line. I fucked everything up, and now . . .” I lose it, choking on sobs. “And I need to know about her.”

  “Frank, get a grip. What the hell is going on?”

  I bite my lip. “I can’t tell you. I can’t get the cops or feds involved.”

  Helen kind of half laughs. “A criminal told you not to call the cops? Buddy, that’s what they all say. What is this, blackmail? Kidnapping? You can’t—­”

  “Helen, I heard it in her voice. I know she means it. I know. I feel like I’m risking so much even by telling you.”

  Another deep breath.

  “Her? This Greta woman is the perp?”

  Goddamn it. I’ve said way too much. Or maybe Helen is just way too sharp.

  “I know what I’m asking you to do is illegal without a warrant,” I say. “I’m begging you. I need your help.” I sigh and pull out my last card. “It’s my daughter.”