The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  She wasn’t technically Mrs. Bishop. She never took Ayer’s last name. Bishop was her maiden name. If she’d at any point been a “Mrs.,” she would have been “Mrs. Martin,” which she didn’t like as much as Bishop. Raven had both their last names Bishop-Martin, which Claudia thought sounded very big and important, and had a nice rhythm: Raven Bishop-Martin. A girl could do anything, be anything, with a name like that.

  “That’s right,” she said, not smiling, just standing her ground. It was so hard for her not to smile, not to be exuberantly friendly. It was a discipline, something she’d worked on. You don’t have to throw yourself into everybody’s arms, Claudia, Martha was fond of saying.

  He fished for something in his pocket, withdrew a sheet of paper. “You had a flier in the coffee shop for a handyman.”

  Oh, right. “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m Josh Beckham.” He ran a big hand through sandy blond hair. “Did Madge tell you about me?”

  “Oh,” she said. Madge, the lady who owned the bakery. Claudia, a talker all her life, had been mentioning that she needed some help with the house. And Madge suggested that she put up a flier. We have a lot of boomerang kids around here, looking for work. One or two of them can manage to hammer a nail into something. She had mentioned someone named Josh, living with his elderly mother, taking care of her. She hadn’t mentioned the sky-blue eyes or the muscles that pressed against the sleeves of his blue tee-shirt.

  “Not a good time?” he said. She could see that he was eyeing the barn door.

  Oh, no, she wanted to enthuse. Thank you so much for coming. It’s a perfect time. I have so much that needs doing!

  “It’s fine,” she said. Why did it feel rude to be calm and measured, to hold herself back? “Madge mentioned you.”

  He squinted at her, gave a nod.

  “I’ve been doing handyman work around here for a few years.” He pulled another piece of folded paper out of his pocket. “I brought you a list of references. Folks you can call who’ll tell you I show up, on time, and charge a fair price.”

  The sun had managed to peek out from the clouds, casting an orange-yellow glow against which he lifted a shading palm now.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Can I give you a call tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing.”

  She always jumped into things too quickly and often regretted it. She had always thought that she was just following her instincts; that’s how she rationalized it. But her instincts sometimes failed her because—as Martha was quick to remind her—Claudia was just too nice, too trusting. You think everyone you meet is as pure of heart as you are. They’re not, kid. We both know that. She wanted to hire him on the spot. Instead, she was going to do as Martha would. She would call the references and then, if he still seemed okay, she’d ask him to come out and do one thing and see where it went from there. That was the opposite of what her instincts told her—which was to hand him her list and tell him he was hired.

  He handed her a card, his list of references, and gave her a friendly nod. “Hope to hear from you.”

  He moved toward his Toyota, then turned back. “That door—just saying? It doesn’t look safe. Doesn’t have to be me. There’s a company in town, Just Old Doors. They specialize in fixing them or replacing them up to the historic code. Not cheap, but they do good work. You might get it looked at before you open it again. Okay?”

  She smiled at him. “I will. Thanks.”

  She watched him drive away. His energy. It wasn’t just careful or gentle. It was sad, too. And was there something just a little bit off? When his car was gone, she released the tension she didn’t know she’d been holding in her shoulders.

  What was that noise? Something faint and discordant on the air. She looked toward the house in time to see Raven open her window. Music poured out. The angry tones of Nine Inch Nails slicing through the darkening afternoon.

  two

  I carried the groceries up the stairs—four bags, five flights. At the landing, I put the bags down and fished the key from my pocket. Inside, the television droned. I jiggled the lock and then forced the door open with a push of my hip. East Village postwar construction, not to be confused with prewar. These were the buildings that were put up slapdash after World War II to house the burgeoning immigrant population. These days, a lot of them are sagging—doorframes crooked, floors dipping, façades crumbling. Uncle Paul has lived in this apartment for thirty years, since he was a New York City beat cop in Midtown North. I lived here, too, for a while. It’s as much a home as I have.

  He was waiting for me—sitting at the small kitchen table with a cup of coffee, his cane resting against the back of his chair, a newspaper folded open in front of him.

  I didn’t say anything as I carried the groceries to the counter and started unpacking. Neither of us is big on talking. Coffee and hummus from Sahadi’s out in Brooklyn Heights, handmade mozzarella from Russo’s on Eleventh Street, fresh fruit and vegetables from the farmers’ market on Union Square. Shopping for my uncle was an adventure, a trek through the city to purveyors of fresh foods. He has always been a foodie, but after twenty-five years of eating pizza and donuts and hot dogs and gyros on the beat, he had chosen to go fresh and organic in his retirement.

  “When did you find him?” he asked by way of greeting. “How?”

  I just kept putting the groceries away. I didn’t want to talk about it; there wasn’t anything to say. I shelved three cans of San Marzano tomatoes, closed the cabinet door.

  “I can’t condone this,” he said. There was a wheeze to his breathing that I didn’t like.

  Silence—other than the low chatter of the television, which was really just white noise for him, I think, a reminder that the world continued on even though most of his days passed in this small apartment. He drew in and released a jagged, labored breath.

  “They wouldn’t want this for you.”

  I was not so sure about that.

  “And now what?” Another rasping breath. “Have you thought about that?”

  He had smoked a pack a day for almost forty years. Now, he suffered with emphysema, had a hard time with those stairs. He could still make it, but it took ages, and he has to rest on every floor. Lately, though, he was short of breath even when he was just sitting. I was trying not to think about it. He was all I had.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  I ground some beans, put the grinds in the French press, and put on the water for coffee. I sat across from him, and he rested his ghostly blue eyes on me, ran a hand over the white cap of his shorn hair. His face was a filigree of tiny lines around his eyes and mouth. It was hard, with mountain ridges for cheekbones and a boulder for a chin.

  “I think about it,” he said. “They’d hate me for how I’ve failed you.”

  “Stop it.”

  I looked down at the article in front of him. MAN MURDERED IN HOME INVASION. He caught me looking.

  “Says here he was sixty-five years old. He had cancer, a bad leg, couldn’t walk without a cane.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Quiet. Kept to himself. Just a nice old guy who fed the pigeons in the park. Who would do such a thing?”

  I’d seen the article, too. But that’s what they always say, isn’t it? About victims and perpetrators alike? What would people say about me? I wondered. My McJob du Jour was as a waitress at a place called the Sidewalk Café on Avenue A. I showed up on time, didn’t make mistakes, and left when my shift was over. I smiled blandly at anyone who caught my eye, was polite-almost-friendly to my coworkers (not one of whom I could name). If someone needed to change a shift, I always said yes. It was a busy place and the tips were good, especially on the weekend late nights when people were out partying. I never tried to hold on to the cash that came my way (these days most people tipped with credit cards), always put any money in the jar to share with the busboys and dishwashers. I’d seen a couple of the other girls pocket the random cash tips they received. Of course, I ne
ver said a word.

  What would they, my coworkers, say if they knew what I was? All the same things they said about him. That I was quiet. Kept to myself. They would have a hard time reconciling the pale, silent, nondescript girl who worked beside them.

  I usually call him Paul, not Uncle Paul. Technically, he’s not my uncle. He is my father’s stepbrother. They were raised together and were lifelong best friends. I don’t know much about their childhood in New Jersey; neither of them talked about it much. My grandfather was a city bus driver. My grandmother was a teacher who died of pancreatic cancer when my dad was small. My grandfather married Paul’s mother, Sherry, who was a 911 dispatcher. Their life was simple and uneventful, according to Paul. Both Paul and my father, Chad, wound up as police officers. Paul moved to New York City and stayed a beat cop by choice. My dad was a homicide detective in New Jersey. My mom was “justamom,” as she jokingly referred to herself, the rare stay-at-home mom in a world of two-career families. She made cookies and did laundry, paid the bills, cooked the dinner.

  “We’re not going to talk about this,” I said.

  “We are,” he said, tapping his finger, one hard knock, on the page. “This is wrong.”

  “Is it?” A lash of anger caused me to rise. Then I sat again, leaned into him. “How? How is it wrong? In what just universe is it wrong?”

  “When we hurt other people, we hurt ourselves, Zoey. You must know that by now.”

  He bowed his head and struggled to breathe. I put my hand on his. I slowed my breathing, hoping it would signal him to slow his. It did.

  “What do you want me to make for your dinner?” I asked. “I’m working tonight, so I’ll make it now and Betsy can heat it up when you’re hungry.”

  He didn’t answer me. So I moved over to the cabinets and removed those cans of tomatoes. “I was thinking I’d make a marinara with meatballs and sausage. I’ll make a lot so we can freeze it.”

  “Zoey.”

  Out his kitchen window, I could see right into the dining room of the loft apartment across the alley. It’s one of those newer buildings, everything espresso and white, clean lines and glittering backsplash. Cold and modern the way people seem to like things these days. My uncle’s kitchen by contrast is all Formica and peeling wallpaper, things so old and stained from use that they’ll never really be cleaned no matter how hard I scrub.

  The rest of the apartment is similarly old-school New York. No central air in this building. There’s an air-conditioning unit in the window of his bedroom. I sleep on the pullout couch when I stay here, now—which I sometimes do when I don’t like his breathing. When I moved in here with him at fourteen years old, he let me have the bedroom, and he slept on the couch until I left for the dorms at NYU. Four years he slept on a pullout couch.

  “I’ll put it in a Tupperware, and Betsy can just heat it up and make some pasta tonight. And a salad.”

  Betsy was the nurse who came in every day to check on his meds, help him with things he wouldn’t let me do, make sure he ate when I couldn’t come by.

  “Please,” he rasped.

  “It’s done.”

  “It’ll never be done, kid,” he said. “Not like this.”

  Even though I already suspected that he might be right about that, was already aware of a kind of hollow opening inside me that might never be filled, there was really nothing I could do. There are certain dark doorways in this life, and when you open one and step inside, you can’t come back out. The door locks behind you and you have to stay. No one ever tells you that. Or if they do, you don’t listen. You never really understand until it’s too late.

  I poured the olive oil in the bottom of the heavy-bottomed pot that belonged to my mother. I minced the garlic by hand and slid it from the cutting board into the oil, then put the heat on low. I opened the cans of tomatoes and sniffed the air. Only the nose can tell when the garlic is ready, right before it turns brown and has to be thrown out.

  When it was time, I dumped the crushed tomatoes (my mother would have picked them from our garden, but I’m less ambitious about things like that—and I don’t have a garden) into the oil and listened to the sizzle. I tore up leaves of fresh basil and watched them flutter into the red. Salt. Pepper. A tiny bit of sugar to cut the bitterness. And let it simmer. Like all good recipes, there’s almost nothing to it, just quality ingredients, a little attention, and time.

  When I turned back to my uncle, he had his head in his hand, the rasping growing worse.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  He shook his head, didn’t seem able to talk. So I helped him into the bedroom. The air conditioning was on in there, the shades drawn, so it was cool and dark. I tried not to notice that he looked thinner, that his arm felt smaller in my grip. I could hear the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street, faintly over the hum of the window unit.

  “Do you want the oxygen?” There was a green and silver tank by the bed. He nodded and sat heavily on the mattress. I lifted his legs onto the bed and helped him get the oxygen on. He used to lift me up over his head and spin me around in my parents’ backyard. I used to ride on his back, or make him drag me in stocking feet across the hardwood floors in our great room in a game we called Airplane.

  You’re too big for that, Zoey! My mother would chide. Uncle Paul has a bad back. But he would just smile and shake his head, and I knew it was okay.

  I didn’t know anything about emphysema until my uncle got it. It had seemed to my ignorant mind innocuous, a little trouble breathing. I didn’t know that it slowly destroyed your lung function, that it wasted you. The lungs eventually lose so much function that they can no longer support the metabolic processes of the body and supply oxygen. I think it’s one of those ugly things that no one ever talks about. It’s such a quiet, nasty way to slowly die.

  I covered him with the blanket resting over the chair in the corner. He pointed over to the television, and I switched it on, handing him the remote. I checked the inhalers on his bedside table—Advair, Combivent, Flovent. He took Accolate twice a day and has prednisone for flare-ups. He was at less than 50 percent lung function, and it was only going to get worse.

  There was a picture in a cheap plastic frame by the bed of my parents and me, next to his retired shield and his department ring. Other than that, there was just the bed, his reading chair, two bedside tables, and shelves and shelves of books, kiltered every which way, in checkered, colored stacks—history, biographies, detective fiction, science. My uncle never stopped reading. He had a stack of three by his bed: the new Lee Child, a book about birds, and a biography of Alexander Hamilton.

  “Police have no leads in the home invasion death of an elderly man,” said the pert blonde NY 1 News reporter from outside an apartment building.

  I pretended not to be listening, fixed his blanket, went to refill his water jug.

  “John Martin Didion lived alone. According to the building super Anthony Ruiz, he was quiet and polite, had lived in the building for several years, a rent-controlled unit grandfathered to him by his elderly mother, who he cared for until she died.”

  “He kept to himself, you know. Never any trouble,” said the middle-aged Latino man, wringing his hands self-consciously and staring off camera. “I don’t get this city. Who would do such a thing?”

  The newscast cut to grainy footage. It took me a second to realize it was the front door of Didion’s building. He limps up to the doorway as a slender hooded figure approaches from behind, then the two disappear through the door.

  “Footage captured from a convenience store security camera across the street shows Mr. Didion being accosted at the doorway. Inside his apartment, he was stabbed once through the heart. His body was discovered by a neighbor, concerned that the door was ajar.”

  The camera cut back to the young reporter. Her hair blew prettily in the breeze; her makeup was perfect. She looked like a doll, something you would dress up and put in a sports car. She’d have a perfect plasti
c boyfriend, a dream house with a pool.

  “Sloppy,” said Paul. He drew in deeply through the nasal cannula. “You know there are eyes everywhere in this city.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I tucked the blanket around him and gave him a kiss on the head. “You’re an old man. Stop making up stories.”

  My pulse was racing, though. To see myself like that; it was odd. An out-of-body experience. And, yes, very, very careless. I’d done my recon. How could I have missed that camera?

  “Police continue their investigation and ask that anyone with information about the hooded figure in the doorway come forward,” the plastic newscaster continued.

  Shit.

  He closed his eyes, shook his head. He leaned his head back, arms slack at his side, his chest rising and falling, that rasping like he was sipping air through a tiny straw. Sometimes he just fell asleep like that and slept for hours exhausted from the effort of just being alive. I moved toward the door looking back at him. Before I closed it completely, he caught my eyes, and I heard him whisper:

  “Be more careful.”

  I finished the cooking, then cleaned up, left a note for Betsy about what to do for his dinner. When I checked on him again, he was sleeping. I hoped he’d stay asleep until Betsy came. I’d feel better if he’d have twenty-four-hour care, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not an invalid. I can take care of myself. This was increasingly untrue. But it’s hard to argue with the people who used to give you piggyback rides.

  • • •

  IN ADDITION TO MY ILLUSTRIOUS waitressing career, I was also a serial cat sitter, plant waterer, house watcher. For the last month and for possibly the next six, I had stayed in a loft on Greenwich and Vestry. The kind of place where about 1 percent of the population, less, might ever be able to consider living. I headed there after leaving Paul’s East Village walk-up.

  The doorman in the cool museum of a lobby acknowledged me with the slight nod reserved for the help—nannies, housekeepers, cooks, personal trainers, massage therapists, cat sitters. His dark, lidded eyes slid past me, not lingering, as I drifted over marble and past snow-white walls adorned with towering modern art oils in shining white frames. I knew his name, Bruno—tight black curls and a nasty scar on his neck. He had bulk, standing nearly six feet, and edge. In a fight, he’d get dirty. I bet he carried a knife, which is a highly effective weapon if you have nerve, aren’t afraid to get in close.