The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  “I loved Quinn very much, more than anyone except for Clotilde maybe. I can’t even believe that she’s dead. She was out there for so long...”

  “Like you,” Joe said, not able to fight the crying anymore. Standing there with his fists clenched, crying openly, well it was enough to bring tears to my eyes too, and that meant I loved him too, right? I mean, of course it did. “When I was a kid, I worshipped you,” Joe said, his voice erratic as he sobbed. “You meet some kid in a bar and you feel important because he looks up to you. As a writer. I worshipped you for being my father.”

  I waited. Let him get it out.

  “It was hard living with Mom. And Grandma and Grandpa. Knowing you were out there, though, that you were famous...” The crying renewed itself. “And those times I flew out to California, and you couldn’t be bothered with me, and you were loud and drunk and you fought with Chloë, with everybody. What do you think that did to me?”

  I just shook my head.

  “Even after the first time and after the second time, it got harder and harder. It took me a while, but I figured it out, that I meant nothing to you and you weren’t so great, in fact, you were pretty terrible.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  I stepped forward, reaching out for him. “I’m sorry. I was, when I was drinking, horrible.”

  He snuffed at that. “When you were drinking?”

  “You can ask anybody, I’ve been sober for months. This... well, like I said, I loved Quinn, and I don’t have to tell you.” I nodded at him.

  “No. Because I don’t care.”

  “You’re the one who’s crying.”

  “You betrayed me.”

  “By being different than something you made up in your head?” I said, my voice rising again.

  “By everything!” He started forward, but he had to pass me to get to the door. I reached out to stop him, and he jerked away, and lashed out with his arm, striking mine away, but I managed to stay between him and the door. “Stop it! Let me go!”

  “Joe, I’m your father,” I said, reaching out for his shoulder again.

  “No!” He fought me, and our arms got tangled, and he landed a few accidental blows and I’m sure I did the same, and then he pushed me away and turned to the refrigerator and pulled from beside it an ice pick and then swept around at me, brandishing the ice pick as a deterrent only I’m sure.

  I pulled back. “What are you doing?”

  “Get out,” he said, panting. His eyes were red from crying, but he wasn’t crying anymore. His face was pure malice.

  “You’re not going to—” I said, walking towards him again. And don’t ask me what I was going to do. I was going to hug him, I guess, even though it sounds kind of sappy. But when you spend too long in Hollywood, what do you expect? You turn sappy. So I took a step towards him, and he lunged.

  The ice pick struck me a glancing blow, tearing my shirt, a hot flash crossed my bicep. And I guess I threw my arms up, or pushed, or something, we were so close together at that point, and I think I was probably just trying to knock the ice pick out of his hands, but instead, he tripped and he fell backwards and there was a clunk, like the sound of a grapefruit dropping, as the back of his head hit the edge of the counter, and his chin raced against his chest and he fell to the floor in a heap.

  I had my right hand over the cut in my left arm, the pain like a paper cut multiplied by a thousand if you can imagine that. And there was blood dripping down my sleeve from between my fingers, and I know from later that some of it dripped on the floor.

  Joe was unconscious. That’s what I thought. But I probably knew.

  “Joe,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Joe? Are you all right?”

  I kicked his foot, lightly, to try to wake him, but it just jostled his leg, and he didn’t move. Fear started racing up my arms and into my jaw. I bent down. The back of his head didn’t look too bad, what I could see of it, although the hair was matted from the blood, and his head was at a funny angle. “Joe?”

  I didn’t try to touch him, because by then I knew. Maybe it was the bump on his head or maybe he had broken his neck. The ice pick was on the floor only a few inches from his hand, the end spotted with blood. I was shivering all over, still gripping my cut arm, and if I hadn’t vomited so much before, I would have vomited then, my throat constricted, my mouth dry.

  I wanted to cry, but instead my heart was racing.

  I don’t know how long I crouched there. My thighs started to burn. But it was the sound of the telephone ringing that jarred me out of my stupor.

  I stood up, and I don’t know why I did it, except maybe that a phone rings and you answer, so I answered.

  7.

  “Joe? Are you still awake?” It was a whisper.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  The voice on the other end got tight and a touch louder. “Who is this?”

  It was Mary. How could I talk to Mary now? “Joe just went out to the bathroom, and then I’m going to get him in bed, I promise,” I said, it just coming out natural like that.

  “Mr. Rosenkrantz?”

  “I got to thinking I should give Joe a try anyway, and I’m glad I did, because we had a swell time. I’m just about leaving. Should I have Joe call you when he gets out of the bathroom?”

  “No, no, it’s late,” she said. And lucky for me she did. What would I have done if she’d said yes? “I’m glad you’re there. I was really worried. He shouldn’t be alone.”

  “He’s feeling better now.”

  “Good. Very good. I’m so glad things worked out.” She did sound glad about it, relieved almost. “We still have our date for the morning though?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said, and I was even grinning my patented grin, even if my throat was dry. You can hear someone smile over the telephone.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night,” I said and hung up.

  Then I was alone with my son again. Alone with his corpse. I had killed my son. I didn’t mean it. Nobody could say I meant it. He had attacked me. The blood was trickling down my arm. My son was dead. I needed to go. I needed help. If I were writing a movie, what would I have the murderer do? I didn’t know. I never got the hang of those murder stories. That’s why nobody in Hollywood would hire me.

  All this time I was trying to look everywhere but at his body, but then I saw him again, and the lump in my throat was a baseball that was choking me. Vee would know what to do. Vee was...

  I needed a drink. I needed to get out of there. That was definitely what I needed to do. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I went into action. I went back through the swinging doors, through the dining room, grabbing my coat, over the chessboard floor and out into the night. I took the stairs two at a time.

  The heat was oppressive. But I was nearly running, and I went like that the whole mile and a half or so back to George Village. The pain in my arm had dulled, maybe from the exertion, but I could see from the streetlights that it was still bleeding. I stopped to put on my coat. It was like a razor searing my arm as I slid the coat sleeve over the cut and twisted to get the other arm in. The renewed pain throbbed before settling back to a dull ache. Then, luck would have it, a car turned onto University from Caroline, heading towards me as I crossed University at St. Peter’s. The headlights resolved themselves, and I saw it was a cab. I flagged it down, and ran up to it even as it was coming to a stop in the southbound lane on St. Peter’s. The cabbie was a rare man—a driver who didn’t try to talk your ear off, so I didn’t have to try at small talk I was in no state to conduct. With no traffic, it took only ten minutes to get back to the hotel.

  Then I was in the room. The window air conditioners had been on full blast, and the place felt like a refrigerator. It made the hairs on my arms stand up, and sent a shiver across my shoulders, which shot pain through my arm. I slipped out of my jacket, pulling the right sleeve off first and
then gingerly sliding the coat off my left arm. The bleeding had stopped. My shirtsleeve was stuck to me with dried blood, and I pulled it free, a satisfying little tug, and tried to see the cut. It wasn’t anything serious, not much more than a scratch, and I guess that was something to be happy about. Yeah, thank God for the small things, never mind the—well, just never mind...

  I checked my jacket. The blood hadn’t soaked through. I turned the sleeve inside out. There was a slight black smudge there, but that was all right. I righted the sleeve and tossed the jacket at the couch, missed, and left it there.

  I kept standing there in the center of the living room with that whooshing hiss of the air conditioners deafening me as I tried to make sense of the suite. The maid had made up the bed and vacuumed the carpet and the place was so clean it was antiseptic, with that unreal sense of domesticity that hotels have, the furniture set up like someone were living here but without any of the telltale signs—a lamp off center on a side table, stubs and ashes in the ashtrays, a book laid out, hell, any books at all.

  And, of course, Vee wasn’t there.

  The sweat had dried on me, a salty skin that made me feel unclean. I started nodding my head, just nodding. At what I do not know, but nodding all the same. Joe was gone. I had killed him. I had killed a man. I was going to go to prison. Did they have the death penalty in Maryland? I couldn’t remember. I thought they did. I was going to go to the electric chair. Or maybe it was the gas chamber. And Joe was dead. I had killed him. I had killed a man? I was going to go to prison. And around and around like that for who knows how long, but you get the idea.

  Then I thought I should really get some sleep. I had a meeting with Joe’s fiancée in the morning, and I was supposed to see the Montgomery kid too. I needed to be rested. And I know it was crazy to be thinking about things like I’d be able to keep my appointments, but you kill a man and tell me you don’t think crazy things. I started unbuttoning my shirt, but I hadn’t made it two buttons when the image of Joe lying there in the kitchen came back to me strong and I rushed for the bathroom, because this time I thought I would throw up again. But when I was on the floor in the bathroom with the cold porcelain in my hands, I only gave one belch that was half cough, and then just stayed there with my head hanging down near the toilet water and the cold of the tile floor bleeding in through my pants.

  The cold woke me up again. I couldn’t go to prison. Who would look after Clotilde? I had been living in the YMCA so that the last of her movie money could go to keeping her in the hospital, but the money was running out, and I couldn’t let Clotilde go to a state hospital; they butchered the patients at those places, all of them walking around like empty spirits, drool hanging from their lips, a bunch of drug addicts and maniacs. That was why I was out here in the first place, grasping at straws, because while Vee had rescued me from the Y as a charity case, I needed to come up with Clotilde’s hospital money myself, and I couldn’t do it in prison. I had to do something. I had to—I didn’t know. I couldn’t think of anything, not one thing.

  But Vee would probably know. Vee’s friend Carlton would definitely know. He was a gangster, wasn’t he?

  I reached my hand into my pants pocket and clutched the hotel key with its plastic diamond tag that read “Suite 12-2.” They were sure to be able to help me. I didn’t need to go to prison. Nobody needed to know at all. It could have been an accident. It was an accident. I just needed somebody to show me how to...how to make it all okay.

  I was up and moving then. I went out in the hallway, forgetting that I was wearing a torn and bloody shirt, that was how out of it I was, and I went to the stairwell because it was closer than the elevators, and so I had to climb I can’t tell you how many steps, but it was a lot of steps. The stairwell wasn’t air conditioned, of course, and the sweat was pouring off of me. I kept taking breaks at the landings, checking the cut to make sure it hadn’t started bleeding again. Finally at the twelfth floor, I pulled open the door. My heart was pounding, and I was out of breath, and I was overheated and dripping, and it all put me in more of a panic.

  There were only four suites on the twelfth floor. These were the luxury suites. The grand suites. Vee had said that Carlton kept Suite 12-2 in perpetuity even though he had a house uptown and one on the Eastern Shore and spent maybe three weeks worth of nights at the hotel in a year, if that.

  The door to Suite 12-2 was twenty feet from the stairwell with maybe another fifteen feet between the door and the elevators. It was very quiet. The eternally burning hall lights felt defiant so late at night, almost as though they were saying they didn’t need people, they could do fine on their own, thank you. See, I told you I was screwy.

  I stood in front of the suite door. My heart was pounding, my arm was aching, I swallowed but my throat was dry. I raised my hand to knock, but managed nothing more than a tap, so of course there wasn’t any response. My nerves grew shakier. I couldn’t bring myself to knock again, and I couldn’t keep standing there in the hallway with a bloody shirt and a glistening brow. So I took the key, which was still in my hand, slid it into the lock, and opened the door.

  8.

  There was a light on. I could see that before I had the door open enough to see anything else. There was a galley kitchen immediately to the left of the door that ran for several feet, and there was a bank of mirrored sliding closet doors to the right. The light I had seen was a reflection in the mirror; the entryway was actually quite shadowed.

  I stepped past the kitchen into a big open space with a dining room table to the left and living room furniture a little further on. The furniture was organized around a glass coffee table, taking full advantage of the large windows that offered a wide view of the city. In the far corner there was an armchair lit by a standing lamp, and in the chair, a book closed over one finger on his lap, was an enormous man—it was hard to say just how big with him sitting. He wore a pair of blue-and-white striped pajamas with a mauve silk robe over it and a pair of leather slippers. He looked at me with open amazement.

  “Who—the hell—are you?” he said, almost biting off each word, his amazement turning fast to anger.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  He raised his bulk and he was big like a gorilla. “Who the hell are you.” He let the book fall to the floor, and it lay open in the middle.

  “I just...Mr. Carlton.”

  “Mr. Carlton? Mr. Carlton?” He was advancing on me. I thought I was going to cry. I really did. How would that have been, me crying in front of a gangster? “Those who address me,” he was yelling, “address me as Mr. Browne, but that’s just those who address me.” There was still half the room between us. He was livid, but he wasn’t too concerned about getting at me. “You better talk or you won’t be able to talk no more.”

  Vee appeared from the hallway at the left in a short robe. “Shem!” she said. “Carlton... I mean Mr. Rosenkrantz, what’s going on?”

  Carlton; Mr. Browne—how was I supposed to know Carlton was his first name?—Mr. Browne yelled without turning around, “You know this man, Victoria?”

  “No,” she said, looking at me with complete shock. “I mean, yeah. He’s my cousin.”

  “What’s your ‘cousin’ doing in my suite at nearly two in the goddamn morning?”

  She started across the room then. She had her face in a pretty good imitation of honest confusion. “I saw him this afternoon. I lost my key. Shem, you should have just left it at the front desk with a note.”

  He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her around.

  “Oh, Carlton!”

  He must have squeezed tighter, because she winced.

  “Carlton...please.”

  “This is your cousin? How old is he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She was struggling to keep her face composed. “Shem...?”

  I held the key out, like that was going to make it better. This was a man who wanted his girlfriends to carry guns and was just about breaking Vee’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I said, and
I sounded like I was going to cry. “It’s just that I killed him, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  He took a step towards me, pulling Vee with him. She was looking at me with terror, trying to shake her head so that I’d see but he wouldn’t.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “He’s dead,” I said, still holding out the key.

  “Carlton, please...” Vee said. He threw her to the side and she tripped but caught herself against the wall so she didn’t go down.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, and he was smiling as he said it, which was much worse than when he was angry. “I don’t feel much like ruining this robe, and I just had a manicure this morning, so I’m going to go back in my room for my baseball bat, and if you’re still here when I get back, I’ll show you what to do when you kill somebody.”

  Vee took a step towards him, “Carlton—”

  He punched her in the face and her head swung around and she fell into a dining room chair and then sat on the ground. “That goes for you too,” he said to her, walking away from us.

  Vee looked up at me from the ground. There was a large red blotch on the left side of her face that was already becoming puffy. “You bastard,” she said, and started to try and pull herself up with the help of the chair she had fallen into.

  “Vee, I didn’t know what else to do. I killed Joseph, and—”

  “Stop saying that!” She grabbed onto me to steady herself. “Come on, or are you really that stupid?”

  “You’re not wearing any—”

  She pushed me back towards the hall door, got it opened, and went right for the stairs, dragging me along. “I could kill you. I should kill you.”

  We were in the hot stairwell. The room key was still in my hand, and I slipped it back into my pocket as Vee started down ahead of me. “I told you I was only joking,” she yelled back up at me, her voice echoing. “You weren’t supposed to go and do it.”