Hide Your Eyes

by Alison Gaylin

  I increased my pace, focused on the clear, flat stretch of sidewalk ahead of me. Maybe Yale was right. Maybe I was a paranoid, relationship-ruining nightmare.

  My bag tugged at my shoulder, and I realized it was because the Post was still in there. I pulled it out and looked at Nate, eyeing the camera in all his shirtless, gleaming celebrity, framed by Veronica’s studiously drawn outline. Much as I hated the photo and the headline and the article, Veronica’s outline irritated me most of all. She had actually used a ruler.

  Without thinking, I ripped the page in half. It felt better than I’d expected. I tore it into quarters, then eighths, then random little bits. The tension in my chest began to lift; I almost wanted to laugh. There was a trash can nearby, so I decimated the entire tabloid and tossed it up and in, like confetti. It felt so good I considered buying another Post, just so I could do it again. Then I felt two hands on my shoulders and my heart jumped into my mouth.

  “What the—” I spun around. It took me a few seconds to recognize the pinkish face, the burgundy hair. “Tredwell?”

  “Sorry, dude,” the young waiter said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Did I forget something?” I grasped my bag.

  “No . . . You walk fast.” He smiled broadly and panted. “Ummmm . . . Where’d your friend go?”

  “Yale? He’s . . . smoking. Did he not pay his share of the bill?”

  “No, no, no, no . . . It’s not that. I . . . I wanted to talk to you,” Tredwell finally caught his breath and smiled again. “Whew!” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his red butcher’s apron. He wasn’t wearing a coat. “Whoosh! Cold! Hooo boy!”

  The conversation was starting to annoy me, and I was about to tell this AWOL waiter as much, but when I looked into his eyes, I detected an emotion that didn’t match the grin, the slouch, the ridiculous exclamations. It was fear, and it shut me right up.

  When his fake smile dropped away, Tredwell looked about ten years older and suddenly intelligent. “I need to talk to you about Peter,” he said.

  6

  Verbal Judo

  Tredwell was on the verge of hypothermia, so we ducked into the nearest bar—a windowless crater called Cheap Trix that had no business being open during the day. Since it was empty, the bartender noticed us immediately. “Nice apron,” he shouted over needlessly loud techno music as he eyed the shivering Tredwell. “You know you can’t just come in here for the heater. You have to order something.” I thought, What the hell? I need it, and asked for a draft beer while Tredwell ran to the bathroom, explaining, “I’ll be right back. I just g-g-gotta put hot water on my hands.”

  By the time Tredwell returned, I’d finished around three quarters of the beer and was considering ordering another. “What took you so long?” I said, but when he launched into a speech about thinking the door was locked, even though it wasn’t, it was just sticky, you know how old doors get sticky sometimes and you think they’re locked even though they’re not, I’d already heard too much. “Tell me about Peter.”

  Tredwell took a swallow of my beer before replying, “Peter Steele is evil.”

  I held my breath and waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just looked at me until frustration seeped out of my skin.

  “Are you going to maybe elaborate on that? Because you can’t just say somebody’s evil. It’s not like saying he’s got brown hair or that he’s a Methodist or something. You say somebody’s evil, you have to give examples.”

  “All right . . . Ummm. He gives off bad energy? I know you felt it; otherwise you wouldn’t have run to the bathroom like you did. And, shit, man, those contacts. You can’t tell me you didn’t notice those freaky, freaky contacts. Whoa. I can’t believe he bought those . . .”

  “I noticed the contacts, Tredwell. And I felt the energy.” I polished off the beer and leveled my eyes at him. “What I’m trying to figure out right now is why you chased me three blocks in the freezing cold with no coat on, just to tell me stuff I already know.”

  “To tell you stuff you already know,” he repeated—or replied, I wasn’t sure. My headache was back again, and I felt a dull pain at the core of my stomach. If there were two things I didn’t need, they were a beer on top of a cheese omelet and the company of this kid.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said. “I have to go now.”

  I started to put my coat back on, but he grabbed my arm. Tredwell’s grip was surprisingly strong. “There’s more,” he said. “It’s just a little difficult to express.”

  “I’ll give you thirty seconds.”

  “I’m not totally gay.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “But I used to . . . I used to be with Peter. And . . . and he made me . . . do things I didn’t want to do.” Tredwell eased me back onto the barstool.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Name it,” he said. “Drugs I’d never done before. K. Crystal meth. Lots and lots of amyl.” He watched my face warily, like he expected it to detonate.

  “I’m pretty sure Yale is beyond drug peer pressure.”

  “The amyl was for the sex. Because it kills the pain—”

  “All right, now you’re giving me too much information.”

  “No, wait. This is important . . . Peter got me to . . . experience real pain.” He glanced at the bartender, then leaned in close. “Peter hurt me,” he whispered. “I let him.”

  Tredwell stared at me so intently that I had to look away. “I didn’t want to, but I did. It was like I . . . couldn’t move.”

  There was a sudden, strange intimacy between us—between me and this twenty-year-old, one-named guy who had spilled coffee on me less than half an hour earlier—and it made me feel raw and embarrassed. “He hurt you,” I said, more to myself than to him.

  Tredwell rubbed his eyelids with his palms. “He’d look at you, look inside you more like . . . and you’d be forced into doing whatever he said. Bondage. S and M . . .”

  I put a hand on his arm, frail as a bird’s wing under the long, white sleeve.

  “I have scars.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, like you would to a frightened child. “It’s okay, honey.”

  Tredwell drew a shallow, trembling breath and placed his hand over mine. His palm was cold and sweaty.

  “What, honey? You can tell me.”

  Suddenly, he squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. When he looked up at me, I noticed his eyes were wet. “Peter convinced me to worship Satan.”

  I couldn’t believe I was going to actually say the words Satan worship to anyone, much less a cop, but I was.

  What I’d seen at the river had been Peter and a woman involved in a Satanic rite. I was now sure of it. I remembered the scraping sound I’d heard, the ice chest’s heaviness. It had been small, but large enough to hold a severed body part, or a collection of them. I remembered the woman’s exposed arms, shaking uncontrollably. Shaking like Tredwell’s hand.

  Back at Cheap Trix, I’d stared at Tredwell, who, like the woman, wore clothes that surrendered his body to the cold. I’d looked at his red apron and recalled the woman’s red dress. I’d listened to him tell me about Black Masses and inverted crosses and red robes and red candles “signifying virgin blood” and thought of all that red light in Ruby’s, how comfortable Peter had seemed there. I’d remembered the bloodred pentagram branded into Peter’s neck, and how he’d laughed at me for trying to blind the devil, and the question had floated out of my mouth so effortlessly, like a ghost: Did you and Peter ever sacrifice anything?

  And Tredwell had said nothing, just looked away.

  “Sorry to freak you out. I just wanted to warn your friend,” he told me after we left the bar. “I was Peter’s slave, and I’m not anymore, so he’s looking for a new one.”

  I envisioned the woman again, trembling in her uncomfortable dress. “What makes you think he doesn’t already have one?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
/>   Tredwell smiled. “I think you will.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek, which didn’t feel strange at all. And I watched him run back to work in the freezing cold, weaving around clusters of pedestrians with the grace of a new angel.

  The bartender at Cheap Trix had given me directions to the Sixth Precinct, and it was surprisingly close. Half a block past Ruby Redd’s Brewing Company, in the other direction.

  When I passed the restaurant on my way to the precinct house, I pulled my hood over my head, a poor attempt to disguise myself lest Peter catch sight of me through the large window—particularly poor, since I’d been wearing the hood at the river.

  A woman in a long camel coat was leaving Ruby’s as I went by, and when she asked me if I had a light, I did my best to pretend I was invisible, even though there was no one else she could have been addressing. “Hey, Patchwork Bag!” the woman shrieked. “I’m talking to you!”

  Thanks a lot, sister. I stopped and glared at her. Her hair was so smooth and gold that it looked as if it had been cast, rather than styled. She wore huge Jackie Onassis-style glasses and perfect red lipstick and looked familiar in a famous way. Local anchorwoman or soap opera actress, I decided. I wondered if she knew Nate. “I don’t have a light.”

  “Sorry. I just don’t like it when people ignore me.”

  When I turned around, I could still feel her eyes on my back.

  Across the street, four doors down, I saw a building too ugly to be anything but a precinct house. As I approached it, I saw that indeed it was—a squat, beige seventies-style fortress wedged between walk-ups with a huge blue-and-white police shield painted on the front. There was an unfurled scroll emblazoned with the words Greenwich Village at the top of the shield, an outline of the Washington Square Park Arch at the center and the words 6th Precinct in smaller, more modest letters at the bottom. It struck me as sweet and collegiate—not cop-like at all, which soothed my nerves a little.

  I crossed the street and pushed open the heavy glass door. The interior was quite a match for the facade, with its draining fluorescent lights and walls the color of old teeth. I tried to ignore the queasiness that came over me when I saw two huge cops drag a skinny boy across the bustling front room. The boy’s cheeks were striped with runny mascara. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he kept saying. The cops pushed him into what must have been the booking room as four other uniforms rushed past them and out the front door, oblivious. I noticed the guns in their holsters and it hit me that the boy and I were possibly the only two people in the building who weren’t packing.

  Think of the shield outside. Think of that adorable shield with the Washington Square Park Arch painted on it and walk up to that front desk this minute.

  The desk was manned by a tall cop with cornrowed hair who looked like African royalty, even in her uniform, and strong enough to beat the crap out of me without breaking a sweat.

  “Hi.” I cleared my throat. “I’m here to see Detective Krull?”

  “Your name?”

  “I’m Samantha Leiffer.” Even as I said it, I doubted he would remember. “I’m a prekindergarten teacher? He met me on Friday, when he came to speak at my school, which is called Sunny Side . . .”

  “Samantha Leiffer to see you,” she said into her phone.

  “Prekindergarten teacher,” I said, but the desk sergeant had already hung up.

  “He’ll be right down.”

  “He will?”

  I thought about sitting down on one of the plastic chairs near the front desk but as it turned out, I didn’t have time. A door across from us opened and there he stood, like a game show prize.

  Detective John Krull wore a brown, synthetic suit that he’d probably owned since high school graduation, without benefit of a tailor. The jacket winced against his powerful shoulders and the sleeves ended about two inches too soon, displaying the cuffs of yet another tired white shirt, adorned by yet another cheap, patternless tie—this time mud colored. “Hey,” he said. “Nice surprise.”

  “You remember me.”

  “Isn’t every day I look at someone and make them scream.”

  The desk sergeant raised her eyebrows.

  “Listen, I need to talk to you about something I . . . uh . . . witnessed.”

  “You’re reporting a crime?”

  “Um . . . sort of . . .”

  His smile faded. “Come on upstairs to the squad room.”

  I followed him back through the door, up a staircase that reeked from decades of cigarette smoke and down a hallway that housed several offices—one of which bore a red, B52-shaped sign that said Bomb Squad, in Prussian-style letters. Like the police shield out front, I found the sign out of place and charming. Very Greenwich Village, not at all Sixth Precinct. “Cute sign,” I said. Krull didn’t hear me, and I was glad. What a ridiculous thing to do, complimenting a bomb squad sign.

  The detective squad room was beyond compliments—one hundred percent government issue—and it resuscitated my anxiety. Torturous bright lights and narrow windows, fascistically lined-up Formica desks and about a dozen badly dressed men of varying ages—all of them, no doubt, packing. Despite the huge coat, most of the detectives stopped their conversations and gawked at me like I was nude. I felt dizzy from testosterone, like I’d inadvertently walked into a high-school football team’s locker room or a men’s prison. They must not see many females with a pulse in here, I thought.

  Krull guided me to one of the few detectives who wasn’t gawking—a heavy guy in his fifties with a face like a rare steak. “Nope,” he said into his phone. “You heard me . . . No . . . What part of the word no don’t you . . . Oh, really? He said that? Well, he can go fuck himself with the proverbial ham sandwich, but that’s off the record. Peas.” He hung up without saying good-bye, then turned his attention to us. Peas?

  Krull said, “I’d like you to meet one of my partners, Art Boyle. Art, this is Samantha Leiffer.”

  “Johnny’s told me a lot about you.”

  “He’s lying,” Krull said. “He has no absolutely no idea who you are.”

  Boyle chuckled and shook my hand. His grip was tourniquet strength.

  “One of your partners? I thought you guys worked in teams.”

  “We work three to a unit in this precinct,” Boyle said. “Our other partner is in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. She’s having a baby.”

  “Oh, well, that’s great.”

  “Definitely. Amanda is damn lucky. Baby born on the Aquarius/Pisces cusp like that, Mercury fresh out of retrograde. Could be president of the United States, that kid, especially if he winds up with earth rising.”

  “Art’s wife is into astrology.” Krull winked at me. “It’s rubbed off a little, hasn’t it, Art?”

  Boyle stared into his coffee cup. “You’d be surprised at how accurate some of it is . . .”

  As Krull led me into one of the adjacent interrogation rooms (which he referred to as an “interview room”), I whispered, “Why would Art say peas to someone?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear him say peas to whomever he was talking to on the phone? Right before he hung up.”

  Krull grinned. “Not peas. Peace. He always says that to reporters. Thinks it pisses them off.”

  Whatever Krull or the NYPD chose to call it, this room was no place for an interview. Granted, there was a tape recorder plugged into a wall. But the only furniture in the cramped space was a metal table and four hard chairs that had interrogation written all over them. The room had no windows, unless you counted the small piece of one-way glass on the wall that faced the squad room. It made me nervous, but I supposed that was the purpose. “Promise you won’t think I’m insane,” I said to Krull, once we were situated across from each other at the interrogation table.

  “That’s a tough promise to make.” He tried smiling at me again, but I just looked at him.

  “I’m kidding.”

&
nbsp; Besides the tape recorder, the only thing on the table was a small tin ashtray that made me wish I smoked. For several seconds, I stared at it as if it were a crystal ball that could tell me whether my suspicions about Peter were correct. But Tredwell had already been my crystal ball, hadn’t he? How lucky that he’d caught up with me, that I’d listened to him long enough to know that he was more than just an idiot with a bad dye job.

  I pictured a tiny version of Tredwell in the center of the ashtray, on his knees with his hands clasped, begging me to speak. Tentatively, I began. I told Krull about the blond woman, whose face I never saw, and the ice chest, and then I told him about the man with the mirrored eyes. I ventured a glance up at the detective, half expecting him to accuse me, as Sydney had, of being on designer hallucinogens. But his expression remained neutral, even kind.

  I opened up my bag, showed him the word hide in my book, showed him my mother’s eyes, X-ed out on the Valentine’s Day postcard she’d sent. I watched him as he carefully examined both items, running his fingertips over the pencil marks.

  It grew easier and easier to talk.

  When I got to the part about meeting Peter, Krull interrupted me. “So there are now two guys with this type of contact lens.”

  “No, it’s the same one.”

  “It is?”

  I took a deep breath, replayed my conversations with Peter and Tredwell. It was oddly cathartic, hearing my own voice say it all. Even phrases like S and M and Satan worship helped solidify the events in my mind and make them less frightening, like describing a nightmare out loud.

  After I finished, Krull said, “Okay. Now I want you to tell me something, but I want you to think hard before you say it.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think the crime was?” He sounded like I did when I spoke to my class. Where do you think Elmo is hiding? Can you make a letter B?

  Anger trickled into my veins. I felt my back stiffen. “What do you mean, what do I think the crime was?” I said. “Weren’t you listening to me at all? This guy . . . he’s a freak and he obviously sacrificed something—someone—and disposed of the body parts in the river, and he . . . he followed me, and . . . and defaced things in my purse, and then he seduced my best friend—probably to send me some kind of sick message . . . He’s a Satan worshiper, for godsakes.”