Hide Your Eyes

by Alison Gaylin

  “Everybody’s getting them?”

  “Well, they’re totally going to be hot in about a week,” Miranda said. “The makeup artist on Addie? She’s got ’em too, and so does my friend William who works at Allure. I even saw this clerk at that toy and hobby store on 28th who was wearing them. Scared my poor niece half to death. ‘He’s probably a club kid, honey,’ I told her. As if a five-year-old would know what a club kid is. Anyway, I’m sure a month from now they’ll be so over it’ll be embarrassing.”

  I had a sudden urge to take my throbbing head and bang it against the wall.

  After Shell and Miranda left, Hermyn tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you okay? You look pale.”

  “I’m fine. I just realized I may have been wrong about something.”

  “You want to talk about it? I’ve got a date with Sal, but not ’til later.”

  I forced a smile. “Get out of here. Go have fun.”

  “Call me if you change your mind.” she said, disappearing out the door and into the night. It was only a little after six, but already dark outside. I’d always hated that about East Coast winters. Like someone shutting the lights off in a windowless room and lying to you that the day is over. That didn’t happen in L.A. Or maybe it did, but I hadn’t noticed.

  I glanced at Roland, busy at the computer, then looked down at the note I’d just written: NO TEARS FOR ADDIE HAS BEEN CANCELLED. NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

  I uncapped the red pen and added the word SORRY. It made me feel a little better.

  8

  Another Round

  When I got back to my apartment, I saw that the red message light on my answering machine wasn’t blinking. Big surprise. I hadn’t had a date in six months, my mother preferred e-mail and my best friend hated me. Who did I think was going to call?

  I headed for the couch, but a furious, floor-rattling banging made me freeze. Jesus Christ, Elmira.

  I wondered what she was using down there. It felt like a mop with a brick attached. She was probably ruining her ceiling. “All right! All right!” I collapsed to the floor, slipping off my boots and then my socks.

  I lay flat on my back and listened to the banging subside. The wooden floor felt grainy where it connected with the back of my head, the palms of my hands and my bare heels, but I didn’t want to move. I tended to lie on the floor whenever I got depressed. I figured it had to stem from a need for punishment, especially given how dusty my floor was. I rolled my head to the side, looked at the billowy gray poufs under my couch and felt tremendously sorry for myself. Is this what it’s going to be? Just me and my dust bunnies for all eternity?

  I closed my eyes, thought about Peter Steele, whose contact lenses were obviously not one of a kind. I could hear Yale’s voice in my head saying, What the fuck is wrong with you? I was beginning to wonder the same thing myself.

  What’s the worst thing Peter ever did to you?

  That’s hard to say . . . There were so many things.

  Did he cut you?

  Yeah . . . And then he’d taste my blood. Like Dracula, man. He’s way into blood.

  Did he bite you?

  Sometimes.

  Did he brand you?

  Brand me?

  Where did he get that tattoo?

  What tattoo?

  The one on the back of his neck. The pentagram.

  I gave him that. He made me.

  Whether or not he called it Satan worship, all Tredwell had told me about was sex—theatrical sex that was maybe distasteful, but not criminal. The only one to mention sacrifice had been me . . .

  You get chills up your spine, you see a couple dumping trash and your mind just spins out of control.

  “My fault.” I opened my eyes and went for the phone. “My fucking fault.”

  I tried Yale’s cell phone first, but it was turned off so I called him at home.

  Yale’s machine picked up. His best stage voice, with Patti LuPone belting “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in the background. Hello, you’ve reached Yale St. Germaine. Don’t keep your distance—please leave a message. I’d heard it hundreds of times; now it made me feel nostalgic.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I said. “I jumped to conclusions. If jumping to conclusions were an Olympic event, I’d win a gold medal and set a distance record.” I took a deep breath, then added, “If you forgive me, I’ll buy you a drink. Three drinks . . .”

  About thirty seconds after I hung up, the phone rang. I picked it up fast. “Do you forgive me?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing.” It wasn’t Yale’s voice. It was huskier, with a faint Jersey accent that was vaguely familiar.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s John . . . Detective Krull.”

  I wasn’t sure why I agreed to meet Krull. It was probably more curiosity than anything else—he’d been so insistent about getting together and I had no idea why. But there was also the way his words so closely mirrored the message I’d left for Yale. “I feel like I jumped to conclusions in the interview room, and I’m sorry . . .” I took it as some kind of sign.

  He’d said he supposed I didn’t want to go back to the precinct house, and I’d told him, “You got that right,” and he’d said, “Can you meet me for drinks, then? Please?” Please was the clincher.

  So here I was, doing something I never would’ve imagined myself doing an hour earlier: having a scotch on the rocks in a cop bar with Detective John Krull.

  We were sitting across from each other at a small table in a fake English pub called the Blind Lion that was about a block west of the precinct house. Krull had changed out of his coat and tie and into natural fibers—a black pullover sweater and beat-up jeans. He looked much more comfortable physically—his neck, I noticed, was better made for loose sweaters than dress shirts and ties. Nonetheless, he seemed oddly nervous, and his eyes cut into mine with an intensity that seemed inappropriate given the conversation. “So what do you think of our New York winters?” he asked me for the third time.

  “I still don’t mind them.” I took a sip of my scotch. It felt surprisingly warm and comforting as it blazed down my throat, erasing the last remnants of headache. I was tempted to drain the entire glass right there, in front of this antsy, muscular cop with his untouched bottle of light beer. I hoped I wasn’t becoming an alcoholic.

  “Those kids in your class are great. You must like kids.”

  “Yeah, I do. They’re funny, and they’re honest too, which is refreshing considering my other job, which is with a bunch of wannabe actors who, ummm . . . tend to exaggerate sometimes.”

  “I spoke to your boss at the theater. He seemed like a nice guy.”

  “Roland’s not an actor. He’s seventy-three, and he used to have a real job in advertising or something and he actually likes selling tickets.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking him for your number.”

  “No, I don’t, except why did you want my number?” I took another sip.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I like you?”

  I wasn’t buying that at all. “Did my screaming in your face do it,” I asked, “or was it the charming way I exploded at you this afternoon?”

  “Maybe I’m a masochist.”

  “Which isn’t a crime between consenting adults.”

  Krull smiled, but only briefly, and only with his mouth. His eyes remained fixed on me in that deeply unsettling way. “I just wanted to talk,” he said finally. “I was thinking about our conversation today. I was wrong to act like I did.”

  “No, you weren’t,” I said. “Sometimes I see things and I overdramatize them. I guess I expect life to be a lot more frightening than it actually is . . .” My voice trailed off. His black eyes clouded in the dim light, and I knew something had crossed his mind that I couldn’t begin to understand. It made me nervous, like I had inadvertently said something offensive but didn’t know how to apologize.

  Two uniforms passed our table. One said, “Hi, Detective,
” and Krull nodded without removing his eyes from mine.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Have I done something illegal?”

  Finally, he took a swallow of his beer. “Do you remember what the ice chest looked like?”

  “The ice chest.”

  “Yeah. I’m wondering if you could sort of . . . think about it and try to remember what size it was, what color, anything . . . distinguishing you might have seen on it.”

  “You don’t have to humor me, Detective Krull.”

  “It’s John, and I’m not humoring you.”

  I closed my eyes, if only to avoid his stare. “It was small.”

  “How small? Show me with your hands.”

  I drew both hands out and down in approximation of the shape, until I’d made a more or less accurate, invisible rectangle on the table.

  “Okay. The color?”

  “It was blue.”

  “Dark blue or light?”

  “Like a pale, metallic blue, maybe with white trim. But I’m not positive about that. About the trim.”

  “How many handles?”

  “There was one on either side. He was holding one, and she had the other.”

  “What brand was it?”

  “I don’t know Det . . . John. I really only looked at it for a few seconds. I was sort of distracted by the man.”

  “Of course.”

  I opened my eyes to find him still looking through me. “What’s this about?”

  He took one of my hands in both of his. A gesture for widows, I thought, and my pulse sped up. With my free hand, I raised my glass of scotch and downed the rest of it before repeating the question.

  “An ice chest was found near the piers a couple of hours after you left the station. It’s going to be in the papers tomorrow, so I wanted to tell you first . . . It fits your description—you won’t see that in the press. We don’t like to give too many details. It makes it easier to weed out the fake information that comes in.”

  “I . . . I take it there wasn’t medical waste in it.”

  He took my other hand, and I didn’t want to hear the answer. I wanted to run out of the bar and into the street, or, better yet, to wake up. “Samantha,” he said. “There was a child inside.”

  I started to say something, but no sound came out. A child. A small child, because the ice chest was small . . . Large enough to hold a severed body part, or a collection of them. An arm, I imagined, a pair of hands. Even a head. But an adult’s head. Not a child, not a child bent and shoved into that small, rigid box.

  “I’m not an expert,” Krull said. “But it looked to me like there were some markings of a ritual murder.”

  The woman in her red dress. Red signifies blood. Virgin blood. The woman’s shaking arms. She’s crying. But why? Her child? Her baby? “What . . . kind of markings?”

  “I’d rather not tell you right now. It wouldn’t be great for the investigation, and also I don’t think you want to hear about it. Can I get you another scotch?”

  “I do want to hear about it. I’m the one who told you about these people in the first place. And besides, what makes you think you know what I do and don’t want to hear about?”

  “Because you like kids, and I can tell you’re sensitive, and you’re only going to get upset.”

  “John. I. Am. Upset.”

  He called the waitress over, ordered another round, though his beer was still close to full. When she left, he looked at me and said, “There was something done to the child’s eyes.”

  Through Art Boyle’s press contact, Krull had managed to secure a printout of the article that was to run in the Post the following day. After I finished my second scotch and had calmed down enough to put a sentence together, he pulled it out of his briefcase and showed it to me. The tentative headline was “Child’s Watery Grave.”

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, two construction workers had found the strangled body of a three-year-old girl in a “small, picnic-sized” ice chest that had been wedged under one of the piers north of the Village by the stiff current. One of the workers, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said, “When we opened it, my buddy cried.”

  According to the Post, the girl’s identity had yet to be determined. “Because of the sensitivity of this matter, we are not releasing any further information,” Detective Arthur Boyle told the newspaper. “However, anyone with any knowledge of the crime is encouraged to contact the Sixth Precinct detective squad. There will be a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.”

  The phrase ritual murder was not mentioned in the article but serial killer was. The Post—not Boyle—had hinted that the way the girl had been killed was similar to another unsolved child murder—that of a six-year-old boy whose body had been found in a Tenth Street Dumpster two years earlier. When the reporter had asked Boyle about it, he’d refused comment. I looked up from the article, pointed to the section. Krull slowly nodded.

  “The boy’s eyes?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And other similarities as well.”

  I lifted my empty glass slowly, like I was under deep, black water. “I want another drink.”

  “I think we should get some food too. Have you eaten?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I know, but you’re too small to hold all that scotch without a buffer. How about some nachos?”

  “You think it’s Peter?”

  “We’re looking into all possibilities.” He called the waitress over again, ordered nachos, fries and wings.

  I asked for another round and watched her leave before I said, “The contacts aren’t one of a kind.”

  He nodded. “We’ve already collected more than a hundred Magic Mirrors receipts from optical stores. But I figured we would. Nothing’s one of a kind in New York . . . except maybe you.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Krull. He smiled, this time with his eyes too. “Well, you scream like nobody else . . . No, I take that back. There was an actress I saw in a Roger Corman movie once . . .”

  “Very funny.” I tried to smile, but couldn’t. Children’s eyes, widening in horror . . . Eyes . . . Mirrored Eyes . . . X-ed-out eyes. “The valentine from my mother . . .”

  “Yeah, I’ll need that. The book too.”

  I reached into my bag, handed him the card just as the waitress set down our drinks and food. I gave him the Book of Practical Cats, wondering how I was going to distract the kids into not asking for it at story time tomorrow.

  I didn’t want to think about Peter. I didn’t want to think that I could’ve sat down next to a child murderer and eaten lunch, didn’t want to think Yale could’ve slept with one. I picked up my drink, emptied half of it down my throat. “Hey, try to eat something,” Krull said. “Your blood/scotch ratio is starting to disturb me.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic.” I leaned forward and tried to focus on his face, but Krull’s eyes blurred into one and back again, as if to illustrate his point. Reluctantly, I picked up a wing. “You have beautiful eyelashes.” I couldn’t believe I had just said that.

  “Alcoholics can handle their booze better than you,” he said. “Now, take a bite.”

  I did. It wasn’t bad.

  “Good. How about one more?”

  “You know what my grandmother used to do when I wouldn’t eat my vegetables? ‘One bite for your grandpa up in heaven,’ she’d say. ‘One more bite for your great uncle Charlie who was cursed with the cancer. One for your poor cousin Lucille who got run over by a bus.’ For a long time, I couldn’t look at vegetables without thinking of dead relatives.”

  “I promise I won’t make you eat vegetables.”

  I dug into the nachos. “I appreciate that, Detective.”

  “John.”

  “Right . . . How come you care so much about whether or not I eat something?”

  “Because I’d rather not get puked on.”

  “And . . . because you like me.” I couldn’t believe I had just said that either. This last round ha
d been a bad idea, I decided, but still I felt myself leaning closer to him, attempting to look seductively into his eyes. My gaze settled on his nose instead. “You said you did, and I think I believe you now. Don’t you like me, John?” I licked my lips. “You’re not married, are you?”

  Krull squinted at me as if I were a foreign language he was trying, unsuccessfully, to decipher.

  Why was I doing this? Why did I want this cop to come home with me so badly that I was willing to make a complete ass out of myself? It wasn’t his broad shoulders. It wasn’t his kind smile or his powerful neck or his big hands or the sense that there might be an actual soul somewhere in that hard detective’s body. It wasn’t even the scotch. It was, I realized, fear. It was the fear of remembering everything Krull had told me and everything I’d read in the article, sober and alone in my dark apartment, where I knew the silence would hum in my ears, where I knew my mind would create images of dead children with X’s branded into their eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve obviously had too much to drink.”

  Krull slowly raised his beer to his lips and took a swallow. “I’m not married,” he said with a slight smile, and I felt my cheeks color. “Look. I know you drank too much because you’re scared and I don’t blame you. All I can tell you is we’re going to get this asshole. The ice chest and the body are with the Crime Scene Unit. You wouldn’t believe the kind of evidence murderers leave on their victims, and CSU can do so much with one hair, one tiny piece of fiber. Plus, there’s Art and me. Amanda too. When she heard about this, it was all we could do to get her to stay in the hospital.”

  I finished the rest of my scotch. “That makes me feel better,” I said, rather unconvincingly. “And thanks for being so understanding.”

  Krull said, “By the way, I really do like you.” Before I could reply, his cell phone rang. “Yeah?” he said. “Interesting. Wonder why he did that. Okay. Okay. Bye.”

  “That was Art,” Krull said. “He was supposed to question Peter Steele tonight at ten o’clock at the restaurant where he works. Steele stood him up.”