Body Language

by James W. Hall

  She got back on her feet. She felt nauseated and empty and even farther away from her body than she’d been before—up above the ceiling, beyond the roof, way up in the air and the high, streaming clouds. But she couldn’t stop staring at Darnel, at the open place where his jaw had been. In her hand, the pistol hung heavy, tilting her sideways. She saw the blood running down his hairless chest, the angle of his neck as it hung to the side. Her eyes burned from staring, but she could not pull away.

  Then she was crying, dragging in gulps of air between sobs, but at the same time she floated high up in the air like a peaceful mist, looking down at the girl who sobbed and was frozen in place, a gun in her hand.

  In the Flints’ hallway, there were heavy steps. She stopped crying, but Alexandra didn’t move, didn’t turn from the faceless thing before her. Her eyes ached, but she continued to stare at the dead boy.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” Her father, Lawton, was behind her, breathing hard. He smelled of cut grass and sweat. “Christ Almighty.”

  He stood unmoving for a few moments; then his hands were gentle but commanding as he drew Alexandra into the hallway and pried the pistol from her hand and ordered her to stay put, not to move. He sprinted down the hallway and out the back door of the Flints’ house.

  Alexandra wiped her nose and stared at a rectangle of copper that sat on the hallway bookshelf. Etched into it was a quote from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

  She looked at the words from the Bible, read them over and over to herself for whatever comfort they might provide, but she had no idea what they meant. She was cold and vacant and the buzzing had completely ceased.

  When her father returned, he was carrying a plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. He held it inside a blue bandanna.

  “You stay here,” he said.

  He went into Darnel’s room, and Alexandra moved to the doorway to see.

  She watched him step around the widening circle of blood and stoop over Darnel and dump the powdery dust across his shirt. He stood up and dropped the empty bag near his lifeless hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “A drug,” he said. “An illegal substance.”

  “Why do you have it?”

  “For emergencies,” he said, “occasions like this.”

  He stared down at the body, the sweat sheening his face.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  “I don’t need to hear it, sweetheart. I can see.”

  “I just wanted to scare him. That’s all.”

  “I know, I know. It’s all right. We’ll fix this. We will.”

  “He killed Pugsy, Dad. He murdered the dog.”

  Her father stepped over to Darnel’s dresser and, using the blue bandanna, opened each of the drawers and dumped them onto the floor.

  “But it wasn’t just about Pugsy,” she said. “It was about me.”

  Her father drew a long breath and stared at the dead boy.

  “Did he touch you, Alexandra?” he asked quietly, his eyes hidden from her. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Yes.”

  Her father tried to say something, but the words failed in his throat and he swallowed hard.

  “Am I going to the electric chair?”

  He shook his head and stepped over to her and squatted down to look squarely into her eyes.

  “No,” he said. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  She hugged him and he patted her back as she wept. Finally, he rose and took her by the arm, then drew her away and guided her out of the room, down the hallway and toward the back door.

  At the door, she halted.

  “There’s somebody else in the house.”

  Her father turned and knelt down to peer into her eyes. His eyes were bruised and misty. She had never seen him look so naked before.

  “I heard a toilet flush,” she said. “There’s someone else here.”

  Her father gazed past her, down the hallway, and swallowed hard. Then he rose, walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and went inside. He came back out a few moments later. Next, he went into the Flints’ bedroom, then the girls’ room. When he came back down the hall, he was shaking his head.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Alexandra, listen to me. Nothing happened here. It’s all going to go away and we’ll forget it and things will be the way they were before. I promise you that. Exactly the way they were. This didn’t happen, Alex. This simply didn’t occur.”

  They walked back to their yard and Alexandra sat in the shade of a mango tree, and through the blur of her tears she watched her father finish mowing the grass. Her body felt heavy and old, as if the part of her that had been floating above had stolen all the buoyancy from her flesh.

  She watched him, shirtless in the sun, a scattering of gray hairs showing among the dense forest on his chest. He pushed the mower through the tall grass by the canal. And she thought about men, how they could do such terrible things, then go right back to eating ice cream, mowing the grass. She watched her father and tried to picture herself as a grown woman married to a man like him, someone strong and sheltering.

  The flesh of her face felt heavy. She couldn’t imagine laughing again, or even smiling. It was the first time in her life she had noticed the dreadful pull of gravity.

  A half hour later when the Flints returned home, the twins ran over to Alexandra and began to chatter while they ate their raspberry Popsicles. Alex tried to act natural, listening and nodding. Molly asked her about her reddened eyes, and Alexandra said her allergies were acting up. A few minutes later, Mrs. Flint screamed and screamed again, and the girls went flying into their house.

  Then the police arrived, and while Darnel’s body was wheeled away, one of the plainclothes detectives spoke with her father on the sidewalk. Alexandra watched from the living room window.

  “Are you all right, sweet pea?” Her mother put an arm over her shoulder and tried to turn her away from the activity in the street. But Alexandra told her she wanted to watch. She didn’t say it, but she was afraid this would be the last moment she would see her father outside of a jail cell.

  A short while later, the police left. Her father spent the rest of the afternoon clipping the hedges, and Alexandra lay in her bed and watched the curtains swell and fall and listened to the snip of her father’s blade.

  That evening, Mrs. Flint wailed on her back porch and she broke glass after glass against the cement floor. It was that noise Alexandra would hear forever, the crash and clatter whenever she began to drift off to sleep. The beginning of a lifetime of insomnia.

  By Christmas, the Flints had moved away. Alex decided that the flushing toilet had been in her imagination, a product of her panic, or maybe just some peculiarity of the Flints’ plumbing, something she didn’t understand.

  Her father never spoke of the event again, and though once or twice in the weeks that followed Alexandra was on the verge of confessing to her mother, she never found a way to begin. Apparently, her mother didn’t know. She continued to refer to Darnel’s death as “a drug deal gone bad,” saying it was a lesson about the effects of heavy-metal music and shiftlessness.

  ONE

  Alexandra began shooting at fifty yards. She worked slowly toward the four-story building, taking several wide-angle shots of the whole structure. A stucco apartment building with red tile roof and dark green stairways and landings, here and there a coral rock facade. In that part of Coconut Grove, two bedrooms started at eight hundred a month. Sporty compacts filled the parking lot, owned by the young lawyers and stockbrokers who populated these buildings, twenty-something singles with more expendable income than Alexandra had take-home pay.

  She got a wide-angle shot of the cars. You never knew when a perp might leave his vehicle behind. Car trouble, panic, even arrogance. A year earlier, after studying hundreds
of photos of two different murder scenes, Alexandra had spotted the same car parked at both, a fact that broke the case.

  It took her four shots to get all the cars near the apartment. The Minolta 700 SI she was using was motor-driven, had an autofocus, auto everything. Nearly impossible to make a mistake.

  Alexandra Rafferty was an ID tech with the Miami PD, photographic specialist. Not being a sworn police officer meant, among other things, that she wasn’t authorized to carry a gun. Which was fine by her. She’d had more than enough of guns. Her only weapon was the telescoping baton she carried on her belt. Her counterparts with Metro-Dade, the county ID techs, were sworn officers, and they were paid even more than the detectives. They carried the latest Glocks, ran the crime scene, bossed the homicide guys around. But not the City of Miami PD. Exactly the same job, only Alexandra and her colleagues were considered technicians, bottom of the totem.

  Night after night, she ghosted through rooms, took her shots, and when she was finished, she moved on to the next scene. Hardly noticed. Which was fine. She had no aspiration to run things. That wasn’t her. She had her attitude, her opinion. Had no problem speaking up if one of the homicide guys missed something or asked for her view. But she didn’t aspire to run the show or get involved with the daily dick-measuring that went on all around her. She took her rolls of film, sent them to processing, got them back, arranged them, put together her files, and then moved on, and moved on again.

  Her B.A. was from the local state university, criminal justice, psychology minor, 3.8 average, her only Bs a couple of painting courses she’d attempted. Some of her college friends were horrified at her career choice. But she wouldn’t be anywhere else. In a cheap blue shirt and matching trousers, a uniform shabbier than the ones the inmates got, working impossible hours at insultingly low pay. But none of that mattered. She liked her job. It made a difference in the world, a modest one perhaps, but essential. And the job kept her alert, focused, living close to the bone. And she liked using the camera, being a photographer who never had to tell her subjects to hold still, never got a complaint about unflattering angles.

  Alexandra was twenty-nine and had been doing this work for eight years. It still felt new. Every night, every scene, something different, something human and extreme. From eleven till seven, alert for eight hours. Wired. Just after dawn, she’d take her run on the beach, then go home, still pumped from the night before, and make breakfast for Stan and her father. She’d ride that high most of the morning. Just steal a few hours of sleep in the afternoon while Stan was at work and her dad was doing basket-weaving at Harbor House, four or five hours at the most; then by eleven the next night, she was ready to go again.

  It was a little before midnight, Wednesday, October the seventh. No traffic on Tigertail Avenue. No human noises. Only the jittery fizz of the sulfurous streetlights. She lowered her camera, stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape, walked forward five paces, raised the Minolta again, and took half a dozen medium-distance flash shots of bloodstains on the asphalt parking lot. Several drops gleamed near the rear bumper of a Corvette with dark windows and a BAD BOY logo. She got a shot of the Vette, its license plate. A wide-angle shot of the other four cars parked beside it. Then she knelt down for a few close-ups of the blood. It was dry now but still gleamed in the yellow streetlights.

  She got back to her feet and scanned the pavement with her Maglite. She worked between the cars, found more blood near the sidewalk, a bloody footprint. She took one establishing shot of the footprint from five feet out, then placed her ruler down next to the print for accurate perspective and took one shot, then another just to be sure she had something.

  Eyes neutral. No personality, no throb of self. The flat, disinterested perspective of an android whose assignment was simply to see and document. No Alexandra, no daughter, no wife, no bundle of dreams and wishes and memories. Nothing but the viewfinder, the square frame, the footprints. Step by step, moving closer to the heart of the crime.

  On the sidewalk in front of the apartment, she popped out the used film, marked it, and threaded a new roll into the Minolta. Kodak Plus 200. From the window of the bottom apartment, a cat watched her. It was a gold tabby with a bell on its collar. As she came near, the cat stood up on the inside windowsill and stretched itself, then slid away into the dark apartment as if it had witnessed its quota of misery for one night.

  Alexandra took another flash shot at the bottom of the stairway. More speckles of blood and more footprints. She found the bloody outline of a hand on the wood rail and got a medium shot and a five-inch close-up of it. Clear enough to blow up later and use the fluorescent-light enhancement to get a usable print. She took one more shot as she was going up the stairs. The bottom of the bleeder’s shoes had deep waffle patterns. The same size-ten Nikes he’d worn on the four previous occasions.

  The killer had walked down the stairway, dripping blood in front of him, then stepping into the spatters he’d made. His fifth assault in as many months, identical MO as the others. Lots of theories were circulating about why a guy who’d just raped and murdered took such care to leave his bloody prints behind. A taunt, perhaps. A wish to be caught. Or some ritualistic fantasy he was dramatizing. The Miami Herald and one of the TV stations had dubbed him “the Bloody Rapist” and theorized that he was trying to show the incompetence of law enforcement. A former cop perhaps thumbing his nose at his old colleagues. Here’re my fingerprints all over the place, my DNA, my shoe prints, and you idiots still can’t catch me.

  But Alex didn’t buy the profile. As usual, the media jocks assumed everyone else wanted what they themselves hungered so deeply for: publicity, high ratings. But this guy didn’t strike her that way at all. No headline hound. His whole scenario was too intense, too private for that. To Alex, that blood seemed fiercely primal, like the spoor of some fatally wounded animal, a beast too blinded by its hurt to care about the trail it was leaving.

  Higher up the wooden railing was another bloody handprint. Alexandra got an establishing shot from five feet away, then two close-in shots. Good clear prints. She moved slowly, warily, eyes roaming in precise concentric circles, five feet out, ten feet, farther. As she’d been trained to look. Second nature now.

  Down the hallway, Dan Romano was smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the night sky. Heavy guy with white hair swept back. Thirty years on the force. Homicide lieutenant who was running the Bloody Rapist investigation. Dan was due to retire any day now. Getting philosophical these last few months on the job, bugging everyone with big unanswerable questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does the ivy twine?

  “Place is pretty quiet,” she said. “You run everybody off, Dan? Your charisma on the fritz again?”

  Dan flicked his cigarette out into the night, turned to look at her.

  “ME’s getting his pants on; everybody else is rolling. Be here momentarily.”

  “What do we have?”

  Dan gave her a wan smile.

  “Your guy’s been naughty again.”

  Alexandra shook her head.

  “You can drop that crap. It’s not funny anymore.”

  “Hey, I’m not the only one to notice. Folks are starting to talk.”

  “He’s not mine any more than he’s yours or anybody else’s, so cut the shit.”

  Alexandra checked the settings on the Minolta.

  “Like right now, Alex. How tightened up you are. Stiff-jointed. That thing happening with your eye.”

  She stared at him.

  “Yeah? And what thing is that?”

  “That twitch, right there in the corner of your left eye. I’m not the only one to notice it. You got a reaction going on, Alex. This guy’s hit a nerve.”

  “I was winking at you, Dan. Flirting. You couldn’t tell?”

  He gazed at her for a few seconds and his voice softened.

  “I don’t think so, Alex. I think this is getting to you. I think you need to talk about this to somebody with some training.”

  She sh
ook her head, lowered her camera.

  “Come on, Dan. All the shit we wade through every day, I guess I’m entitled to a goddamn eye twitch now and then, don’t you think?”

  He kept staring at her for a moment or two; then he sighed and his eyes drifted off to the horizon. He lit another cigarette, took a hungry pull.

  She said, “I’m finished shooting out here. You want to show me around inside? Or just do it on my own?”

  Dan blew out a cloud of smoke and didn’t move. His eyes were scanning the dark heavens.

  “Tell me something, Alex. I been meaning to ask you.” His voice with that dreamy edge.

  “Oh, brother, here it comes.”

  He drew in another hit and let the smoke drift out with his words.

  “Why do you do this shit? You’re a smart, good-looking woman. You got skills, a college diploma; you could do anything. What the hell motivates you?”

  He brought his eyes back from the dark and peered at her.

  “It was either this or a nunnery.” She gave him a light smile, but he didn’t notice.

  “I’d hate to see you wind up like me. Because you know what I’m starting to think, Alex? I’m starting to think I fucking wasted my life. That’s where I am these days. Standing here, on the goddamn threshold of my golden years, I been running these same laps three decades now, and I ask myself what it’s all added up to. And the answer keeps coming up the same. Not a hill of shit.”

  “What do you want, Dan? Want me to try to cheer you up?”

  He looked down at the sprinkle of blood near his feet.

  “It won’t work. I’m inconsolable.” He cocked his head and smiled. “I pronounce that right? Inconsolable?”

  “Sounded right to me.”

  “I’m working on my vocabulary. One of my new hobbies, getting ready for retirement. Hell, I never needed a fucking vocabulary on this job.”

  “Well,” Alex said. “Inconsolable seems like a pretty good place to start.”

  Dan tilted his head back, stared up at the sky, getting that look again.

  Alexandra stepped into the apartment.