by Rick Wayne
“And if I wasn’t? What then? What kinda life is there as a civilian for someone like me?”
He looked at me. “Seriously?”
I nodded.
He sighed loudly and strummed his fingers on his desk. “Garbage person?”
He saw my face. “I don’t know!” he protested. “Did you ask your friends?”
“What friends?”
“Oh, whatever. You have friends. Everyone has friends. What about Kinney?”
“What about her?” I asked.
“Don’t tell me she’s gone already.”
I turned and looked out the window.
“Shit.” He sighed. “How long was it? Six months?”
Almost a year.
“You know,” he said, “you should probably talk to a professional about that.”
“I was.”
“And?”
“He’s the one throwing me under the bus.”
He laughed. Loudly. And he kept laughing. He laughed so hard, it took him a minute or two to calm down.
“I’m sorry. Really. I am.” He wiped his eyes. “It’s terrible. It’s just . . . it’s so you to alienate your own therapist! Babe, seriously, if a professional couldn’t help you, I don’t know why you would think I could. This is why it’s worth holding on to someone, you know, no matter how hard it gets. People are occasionally useful.”
I looked at the sole picture in the office. Him and Chester. Chesty Chester with the receding hairline and pecs bigger than my boobs.
“It’s harder when you’re lesbian,” I said softly. “Harder to find the right person.”
“I suspect that’s true—and not nearly as important as you make it. What about your old partner, the erstwhile Mr. Hammond? Seems to me he was the closest thing to a real friend you’ve ever had.”
I shook my head, still staring out the window. “He’s a cop. I can’t ask him to get involved.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d help.”
I watched a tiny ferry slide across the East River. It left a white V in its wake.
“Fine. Then by process of elimination, Kinney it is.” He crossed his hands on his desk, like this was a negotiation and he’d just resolved it. “Are you supposed to be taking those?” he asked after a moment.
I had been knocking my bottle of pills against my palm: once, twice, thrice. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until he made a comment. I looked at the white-capped bottle in my hand.
My sessions with the department shrink were supposed to be covered under the same patient confidentiality as anyone else. The bureaucrats made a big deal out of that. They wanted to be sure the rank-and-file felt safe opening up, which was already hard enough. If any of us believed what was said in those sessions could come back to haunt us, they’d be even more useless than they already were. The docs issued reports, of course. That was the whole point. But the idea behind soliciting the opinion of an expert is that normal folks aren’t competent to interpret someone’s medical history, not to mention their deeply private thoughts and personal ramblings. But mine had been excerpted verbatim, and in what was supposed to be an interim report only—a “checkpoint,” they called it. That was why Lieutenant Miller shared the file with me while it was still being routed to the managers in a clear violation of protocol. From her standpoint, protocol had already been violated. She was doing her part to even things out.
I knocked the orange plastic pill bottle against my palm again: once, twice, thrice. The caplets rattled inside like beans in a maraca.
Once, twice, thrice.
“Harriet?”
“Would it kill you to be my brother?”
“I am. This is what siblings do. They give each other a hard time to hide the painfully deep feelings they have for each other.” He clutched at his heart.
I went to stand.
“Fine,” he said to stop me. “You know this kind of thing isn’t me. I don’t do . . . whatever this is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. You know I do. It’s why you’re here interrupting me at the absolute busiest time. So I’m telling you, as your brother, that I think you should talk to Kinney.”
“She made it clear she doesn’t want to see me.”
“As a lover, probably not. I can’t imagine you were any good.”
I scowled.
“I didn’t mean orgasms,” he said with a lilt in his voice. “I’m sure you were queen of the meaty slurp.” He raised his chin in the air. “God knows you're tenacious enough for that kind of thing. Talk to her as a friend. Someone you used to be close to. Someone who knows you.”
I stood.
“For fuck’s sake, Harriet, at least ask. She might surprise you. She liked you an awful lot, which, you know, is probably why she left.”
“People don’t leave because they care. They leave because they’ve stopped caring.”
He pointed at me dramatically. “And that is why you’re still single.”
I stepped for the door.
“At least ask,” he repeated, this time with a hint of compassion. “If she turns you away, come back and I’ll see if I can sit quietly for thirty or forty minutes.” He motioned to the stacks of files on his desk.
“You’re a real saint.”
He raised his hands in protest. “Maybe an hour.”
“A whole hour?”
“Please don’t quit,” he blurted.
I stopped with my hand on the knob.
“I’m not sure I could do what I do, you know, if you weren’t out there catching murderers and making the world a better place. For the both of us. I’m not sure I could live with myself, and if I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t bring home the bacon and give Chesty the life to which he’s become accustomed, which means he’d leave me and I’d probably kill myself. I’ll find you a good attorney. I’ll give you money. Ten thousand. Twenty thousand. Whatever you need. Just fight this. Whatever it is. Okay? Please.”
I nodded.
“I love you, sis,” he said. He meant it, too.
“I know.” I opened the door and stepped into the hall.
I looked both ways, up and down the narrow dirt gap between the brick building and the high fence behind me. Bits of litter were strewn about, trapped by the tufts of grass that grew from cracks and corners. I checked the roofs and the windows—those that weren’t boarded up, anyway—before setting the plastic grocery bags on the ground and leaning over the slant basement doors. I pulled the wobbly handles and the wood dropped paint flecks like dandruff. The hinges creaked loudly, which let anyone within earshot know someone was there. But for me, that was a feature rather than a bug. Since that was the only way in or out, it made sneaking up on anyone inside very difficult.
I picked up the groceries and walked down the slat steps, my boots crunching tiny pieces of 50-year-old paint. I stopped at the bottom and listened carefully.
Nothing.
The building rose two stories above me and had once been some kind of church assembly. The church itself stood across the weed-filled lot and was now sealed, having served as a crack house of some renown before recently becoming the scene of a double homicide. Police warnings were plastered all over it. They wouldn’t keep the junkies out forever—only as long as the folks in the neighborhood believed my colleagues and I were still likely to show up for whatever reason. That meant my visits, if noticed, wouldn’t appear terribly out of place—for a while anyway.
In front of me was an old boiler room whose walls at the front and sides didn’t quite make it to the ceiling for some reason. I was making my way to the back when I heard his voice.
“How much longer do I have to stay locked in here?”
I walked around the corner. An old bike with stripped tires and one badly bent wheel lay on its side to my right. In front of me, a sturdy crosshatched metal fence, like a grate, ran from floor to ceiling, separating me from the rest of the space. There was a single gate in the middle, painted the same sea green as the rest of t
he metal. The room had two thin windows on the left wall, near the ceiling, not more than five or six inches high. Sunlight entered as a pair of angled shafts that struck the opposite wall, just above a homemade wooden workbench. There was a hutch at the near end with water damage at it base. Rags were piled underneath it, next to a few boxes.
Directly under the windows was a single fold-out cot with a striped mattress, two old blankets, and one new one, which covered the sole occupant, an African man near 60.
I took the carton of cigarettes I’d bought out of its bag and pressed it against the grate as a peace offering.
“Is that supposed to make me want to let you in?” the man said without getting up.
He had a heavy African accent—I didn’t know what language he spoke—and wore a pair of jeans that were too big for his narrow frame, held by a woven belt, into which had been tucked a brand new Statue of Liberty T-shirt, complete with waving flag behind. The cuffs of his jeans were rolled over white tube socks. His beard was grizzled, and he had a $5 Casio watch on his wrist. Covering his head was the same white kufi cap he’d been wearing when we first met.
All other things being equal, his encounter with the ghoul hadn’t left him any worse for wear—at least not physically.
“You want me to leave all this out here?” I asked, lifting the bags.
He rose from the bed and slipped his socked feet into a pair of black Adidas sandals and shuffled across the concrete to unlock the gate. In the middle of the room, a brown card table stood defiantly on three fold-down legs next to a pair of matching chairs, one of which had been overturned. The top of the table was nearly covered in torn wrappers, empty food bags, dirty glasses, and a bunch of crumpled cigarette packs. There was a little ceramic ashtray as well, piled high with butts and ash. On the side it said Greetings from the Grand Canyon.
I caught of whiff of human waste then. It wasn’t strong, but it was insistent. Like the smell that wafted from the bathroom when I was a kid after my dad was done with it. I resisted the urge to cover my nose. There was tall white bucket near the back wall. It has a plastic toilet seat fitted on top with a tight rubber seal locking it over the lip of the bucket, the kind sold to hunters for a long-term camp.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, opening the door with a clatter. A broken mirror hung from it, next to a strand of garlic, and he glanced at my shattered reflection. “How much longer do I have to stay in here? Like a prisoner.”
I pointed to the latch on the inside of the door, opposite the keyhole on the outside. Anyone with fingers small enough to fit through the grate wouldn’t have fingers long enough to reach the latch. But then, it wasn’t built to be a vault. It was a storage cage. The lock was only meant to discourage the casual thief.
“You’re not a prisoner,” I said. “If you don’t like it here, you’re welcome to take your chances on the street. I doubt she’s going to waste too much energy trying to find you, not if you’re keeping yourself scarce. From her point of view, that’s a win. But if you’re out wandering around, flaunting the fact that—”
“Yes, yes.” He waved me off. “So you said. But here I am living in my own filth.” He motioned to the bucket. “I am not an animal.”
Since the bucket was white and had minimal writing, it was very slightly translucent, and I could see where the bottom was slightly darker, indicating it was roughly half full. Several bare rolls of toilet paper lay on the ground next to it. They had been picked clean of every last scrap.
“He’s supposed to come empty that every day,” I said, lifting a fresh package of rolls from the bag and tossing them to him. They were pink and scented.
“It has been five days,” he said, catching it. “That creature scratches his arms and smells of his own urine. He thinks I am as unclean as he, that it means nothing for me to live like this.”
“Yeah, that’s Benny. He’s a junkie.”
“He’s a troll.”
“That, too. He owes me, big time, for keeping him and his pals secret. I’ll talk to him about the toilet.”
My guest waved dismissively to the stack of old paperbacks near the gate. Several were printed yellow at the sides of the pages. I had found them in a pile upstairs. All late ’70s to early ’80s.
“I don’t read English well, you know. What I can make out, it’s no sense. Silly stories about fairies and magic.” He huffed. “They don’t get anything right! I’d rather read nonsense.” He set the package of toilet paper by the bucket. Then he shuffled back to the table.
“Fine. I’ll bring you some Carroll, then.”
“I thought this was supposed to be the land of opportunity,” he said with an exasperated chuckle, as if that were the furthest possible thing from the truth.
“Doesn’t opportunity usually entail risk?”
“Perhaps. But not at a fool’s wages. I was only trying to help that woman, not take anyone’s business. There’s a reason we burn witches in my country.”
“Centuries of sexism?” I asked.
I set my phone on the table, near the ashtray, and motioned to the image on the screen. “What can you tell me about that?”
He sat down and leaned over it as he ripped open the carton of cigarettes. I had zoomed in on the underside of the tongue, which made the picture slightly blurry. He squinted and reached a finger hesitantly toward the screen.
“Pinch two fingers on the screen to zoom out,” I explained.
He looked up at me, unamused. “We do have smart phones in Africa. We’re not all chauvinist barbarians.”
He zoomed out and then back in again, sliding the picture up and down. “I’m not familiar with the sigil, but see how the interlocking pattern is all part of the same line? No ends. I would guess it’s a binding.”
He pulled out a pack and tossed the carton on the table. He ripped the plastic immediately.
“You mean like to prevent her from revealing something?”
He nodded and handed my phone back. “It was not uncommon in the old days to give similar bindings to young people. To prevent them from speaking ill of their ancestors and so inviting their wrath. That is how lip piercings originated.”
“If only grandma and grandpa could see them now.”
He had removed the 30-year-old nudie poster from the wall and left it folded neatly on the workbench. However, he’d left the 1988 Beaches of the World calendar hanging. September was Hatteras.
He pulled a cig from the pack. “There are places where people honor their elders, where inviting them into the home in old age is an honor reserved for the first born.”
“Sorry, man. My parents more or less disowned me when I was 17, so you’re not gonna get a lot of sympathy from me.”
“I see,” he said. He glanced over me once. His face suggested he was just realizing I was gay. “In the days when everyone lived and died in the same place,” he went on, “for generation after generation, it was easy for old spirits to find their distant offspring. They merely had to lift their heads from the grave.” He lit the cig and took a draw. “So appeasing them was vital to the health of the village. The dead could intervene, if necessary, on behalf of the community. There was a community. Versus this place.” He waved out the windows. “Where you lock your old people away in cages to die alone. Unmourned.”
“You’re not gonna die here. That’s what that’s for.” I nodded to the shotgun on the workbench. It rested next to a flip phone, a burner paid in cash.
He started coughing uncontrollably and I lifted the rest of the grocery bags from the floor and set them on the table.
“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’ll make sure Benny cleans that thing more often. Hopefully you won’t have to be here too much longer.”
He nodded resolutely, face red, and I opened the gate, which shuddered in its rusty hinges every time I swung it. Some kind of dried herb was woven into the strand that held the garlic. Was supposed to repel witches—or really annoy them anyway, kinda like teargas, or so I gat
hered. I made a mental note to ask him about it next time.
“We could ask the dead woman,” he said hoarsely, shaking the cigarette wedged between his fingers.
He must have guessed the picture was a homicide.
“We could ask what happened to her, who killed her, if not for the binding on her tongue. I would need a bit of her flesh or hair, which means the binding would follow. A strong medium could do it by reaching to the other side, where the binding would not reach, someone like my grandmother. But I’m afraid I don’t know many people here, and no one with that kind of ability.”
I stood with the open gate in my hand and waited for him. His face suggested he was thinking and might have more to say. Then he started coughing again. He set his cig on the lip of the ashtray and got up from the table and shuffled to the bench. He opened a white plastic grocery bag and found the anti-mucus tablets I’d been giving him and a bottle of water. He cleared his throat after swallowing the pill and sat back down, picking up his cigarette immediately and taking a drag.
“You can’t figure out who she is, can you?” he asked with a single cough. “That’s why you came here. Grasping for hay.”
“Straw,” I corrected.
“Straw? I thought that was to drink Coke.”
I had to think for a second. I wasn’t sure how to explain it.
He made a sour face. “English . . .” he scoffed.
I waited for him to snuff the cig and light another. I leaned against the metal door frame.
“But . . .” He raised a finger. “Others would not share her binding.”
“Others?”
“Witnesses,” he explained.
I shook my head. “We canvassed the whole area. No one saw anything. Her body went into a drainage channel during a big storm, probably at night. We figure the place was pretty deserted.”
“Of people, perhaps. But I have been trying to explain to you, there are more souls in the city than just people. There are animals. Spirits.”
“Spirits?”
“Asking them is not without danger. The spirits most willing to help, the ones who rush to come forward, are often the most dangerous. You must be careful. You must be prepared. Here”—he waved me back—”I will show you how.”
