A Shadow in the Water

by April Hill

  I remember once, as a kid, I was swimming at a beach not far from here, called Paradise Cove. I had fallen asleep on the park’s wooden raft, around thirty yards off shore. The raft was a “captive,” in that it was anchored to the bottom, and attached by a long steel cable from the beach that kept it from completely floating away. My mother had already called me to come in, and I was about to start back for shore when people on the nearby pier began shouting with excitement. Someone fishing off the end of the pier had hooked a large white shark, and since the raft was farther out than the spot where the shark had been caught, I was now going to have to swim ashore in the dark, through what might be—in my thirteen-year-old imagination—shark alley.

  It took me a while to get up the nerve, but I finally eased myself into the water and headed for the beach, mostly dragging myself along on the cable, since it was faster than swimming. Every time I kicked my legs, though, I saw something large and white—a pale, shadowy shape, just under the water. And then, something brushed against my lower legs.

  Later, of course, I realized that the ghostly white mass was nothing but churned-up water from my own frantic kicking, and that if I had actually felt anything touching me, it was probably seaweed.

  But, I had never been so scared in my life, and I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean after dark, since. And whenever I see—or think I see—something large and dark in the water, I remember that night, and the terror.

  Anyway, my less than scientific conclusion that my former employer had been the victim of a shark attack was supported by certain facts:

  A. What was left of Gabe was located directly in front of Gabe’s house, almost like UPS had delivered it there.

  B. Gabe was known to enjoy early morning romps in the surf, sans attire.

  C. The remains bore a number of what the cops like to call “distinguishing features”—the details of which I will go into a bit later.

  Not being a fish scientist, like Richard Dreyfus in Jaws, I couldn’t have absolutely guaranteed my forensic analysis of the corpse’s truncated condition, but he/it certainly looked eaten to me. The sight had even upset Benjamin’s digestive tract, and Benjamin has been known to consume long-dead horseshoe crabs, rotting pineapple pepperoni pizza, and huge quantities of unattended garbage with no hesitation whatsoever. (Please don’t assume that Benjamin’s lack of culinary sophistication accounts for his rotund figure, by the way. Benjamin may not be a gourmet, but he’s not a glutton, either. I prefer to believe that Ben and I share an undiagnosed glandular problem.)

  When I recovered enough of my composure to think clearly, I dashed home (two doors away) as fast as my broken toe and Benjamin’s portliness would permit, and attempted to call 911.

  Did you know that dialing 911 doesn’t work when your phone service has been shut off? Well, it doesn’t, which hardly seems fair to me, but then, I don’t make the rules, do I? I ask you, though, what are the deadbeats in this world supposed to do, just stand around and burn to death? Ultimately, I had to limp next door to make the call from Barry’s place.

  And so, leaving Benjamin prostrate on the kitchen floor, I limped over to Barry’s to report what had happened and call the police. Barry Halliburton was my next door neighbor, then, a well-known screenwriter and fabulous cook. He’s also drop-dead handsome. Barry looks like a younger Richard Gere on younger Richard Gere’s best day. He also happens to be, as they say, “hung like a bull,” something I know because Barry isn’t the least bit shy, and often sunbathes in the nude during my visits. All of these things would make him perfect for me, if he weren’t gay. Besides, Barry doesn’t care much for what he insists upon calling—with some justification—my “abysmal” housekeeping.

  I had barely gotten my good foot on the bottom step of Barry’s deck when a bloodcurdling scream arose from the beach, which told me that Regina had also found what remained of our late neighbor-in-common. Regina Vanderplum was another of my close neighbors, but she wasn’t quite as neighborly as Barry. Regina lived on the other side of my humble cottage, between me and the recently deceased. Her habit, then, was to walk her poodle, Puddle, at approximately the same time I took Benjamin out each morning, and I had it on excellent authority that she spent the remainder of each day trying to get my landlady and me blackballed from lovely Encantada Cove, where we all lived, and which Regina and Barry could afford, and I couldn’t. At the time, I was a member of that social class generally referred to as the working poor, meaning I worked my ass off, and got poorer each day.

  The police showed up lightning fast, which is how things usually work in wealthy, gated communities. They interviewed me at length, and expressed a good deal of curiosity about how I was able to so easily identify the victim, in the absence of his head. (Oh, did I forget to mention that Gabe’s head had gone missing?) Anyway, I was forced to admit with some embarrassment that I had lived briefly with the deceased, and was therefore familiar with certain distinctive aspects of his person. For one thing, Gabe was the only guy I’ve ever known who claimed to be Jewish, but who wasn’t circumcised. In addition to that small (Okay, not so small) anomaly, Gabe was a devotee of the art of tattooing, and shortly before we parted company, he came home with this gigantic tattoo on his back. The tattoo was the approximate size of Rhode Island, and depicted a green dragon in the act of swallowing a very pink young woman with gigantic breasts. Being an artist myself, I felt compelled to point out to him that the perspective was way off, and that the dragon was sure to choke to death on those breasts, when he finally got up that far.

  Anyway, I explained to the police that while I’d once been employed by the deceased for several months as an artist, photographic assistant, laundress, housekeeper, and what he persisted in calling his “Girl Friday,” I had no reason to kill him. Yes, I had left his employ under strained circumstances, when he stopped paying me, and when his “models” started showing up drunk, disorderly and naked in my bedroom at odd hours of the night. (There were a few minor details of my business dealings with Gabe that I chose not to divulge, for the very good reason that I didn’t care to spend what remained of my fading youth in prison.)

  After I’d answered the first round of questions, I was still feeling shaky, so I wandered back over to Barry’s to watch the goings-on from neutral territory. By this time, the beach was crawling with cops, and since I was still just a witness, and not yet a “person of interest,” Barry and I sat on his deck, drank iced green tea, and chatted while Gabe was being scooped up into a variety of plastic bags and bins. The lucky guys assigned this disagreeable duty had to keep going back to their van for containers, since the shark apparently hadn’t been a tidy eater. They took a lot of pictures too, in which the usually photogenic Gabe never smiled for the camera, even once, for reasons that I mentioned previously.

  “If it wasn’t a shark, who do you think would want to kill an asshole like Tannhauser?” Barry asked, with a wide yawn.

  “Get out the phone book and throw a dart,” I suggested. I knew that Barry wasn’t especially interested in what had happened to Gabe. He was just making idle conversation while he got brunch on the table, and, as always, whatever he was cooking smelled heavenly. (Yeah, I know, but I’m not as sensitive as Ben. It takes a lot to ruin my appetite.) Besides, Barry was a good pal who was always willing to feed me when I crawl to his door, flat broke and hinting for a free meal. I simply didn’t want to hurt his feelings by turning down his Chicken Masala.

  Barry waved me to sit down. “I only knew him from those parties he gave,” he said, setting two plates on the table. “Remember the one where everyone had to show up dressed like silent movie stars?”

  I groaned. “I’m sorry. That was Gabe’s idea for the movie crowd. I just did the decorating.”

  “Then justice has been done,” he said. “That was the worst party I’ve ever been to, even worse than that first party—the Halloween debacle? That’s where I first met you, you know, at that Vampire Barbecue, or whatever it was. I remember that Monic
a Howard came dressed up like a slutty bondage freak, got into a screaming match with Tannhauser about something, and then got shit-faced someone had to drive her home. And wasn’t that the party where you set the living room on fire?”

  Ah, yes, the infamous Vampire Barbecue/house fire. Looking back, a lot of what happened had actually started around that time—I think.

  After Barry’s excellent brunch, I went back to the house to explain to Benjamin what was going on. (He always hates not being in the loop.) Our chat concluded, we had just settled down on the couch for a short nap when someone pounded on the door.

  I hobbled over, only to be rudely informed by yet another cop that my defunct Kia was blocking access to the crime scene, was about to be towed, and incidentally, there were so many past-due tickets on the windshield he couldn’t see the VIN number. The Kia’s dented hindquarters were obstructing the driveway, he explained, to which I replied that since I never have company, the car situation had never before created a problem. Moreover, the only other occupant of the house besides me was my landlady/employer, the winsome Carlotta, who was rarely at home, and even when she was, normally came and went on an elderly, hiccupping Vespa.

  “Do you have the vehicle’s license and registration?” The officer’s voice was very stern, now, but he was about to discover that I am not a woman easily intimidated.

  “No, but it’s had its rabies vaccination,” I said sweetly. “I can probably find proof of that, if you’ll give me a few minutes.” I pointed to the cast on my foot. “You may have noticed, officer, that I am a helpless cripple, so the document search may take some time.”

  Okay, I was being rude and uncooperative, but it had been a very bad day. I was tired, Benjamin had just barfed again on the couch, and I needed to get back to work. Enough, for God’s sake!

  The officer evinced no interest whatever in my tale of woe, other than a grunt. “Did you know someone slashed your tires?

  I tried to register a degree of shock at this information, but the tire-slashing atrocity was old news. I suspected Regina. At a spry seventy-nine, the woman bears one hell of a grudge, and the rumor is that she works out regularly at Gold’s Gym.

  The officer droned on. “You’re in violation of about ten local ordinances, you know, starting with all these missing documents. The vehicle is unregistered, uninspected, uninsured–”

  “Unbaptized, unwashed, and unloved,” I added, always ready to be helpful. “Anyway, you can’t ticket me for stuff like that. This is private property, isn’t it?” Hey, it couldn’t hurt to try.

  “The damned car is sticking out two feet onto the Coast Highway,” he snarled, and once again, I did my best to look surprised.

  At that point, he peered around me to get a better look at the room, obviously dazzled by Carlotta’s unique take on decorating, which involves hubcaps, empty tomato sauce cans, gnarly driftwood, and oily hunks of rusted metal. I should probably explain here that I share my cramped living quarters with extraordinary amounts of trash—including the vast numbers of dented hubcaps that are always stacked up on every available surface. Carlotta wears many hats, you see, and finds genuine beauty in all varieties of urban debris. She once explained to me that trash actually has a soul, which it takes on from the people it lives with. The hubcaps, on the other hand, she simply sold to a guy she calls Oovie. I didn’t know what Oovie was short for, because I always tried to stay out of Carlotta’s business arrangements, too many of which involve people named Sammy the Purse, Dirtynose, and an ubiquitous creature called Big Bubba, who turned up sleeping on the couch several nights each month.

  “Just spit it out, lady,” the cop snapped. “Do you own this property, or don’t you? The vehicle is parked in the street, not on private property, so it’s about to get towed at the owner’s expense. Is she here?”

  “The house is hers, but the car is mine,” I conceded glumly.

  “You want to come out here and unlock the trunk for us, then?” It didn’t sound like a question. “The tail lights are busted out, by the way.”

  I sighed. “It’s not locked. The lock quit locking eight years ago, just after the radio died and the clock ticked its last minute. There was sort of an epidemic that month. It started with the air conditioner, and spread like wildfire.” All of this was true. I had bought the Kia used, with my first paycheck, back when I was a real person, with a real job.

  And so, the police opened the trunk, and guess what? It was full of a lot of stuff that belonged to Gabe—including his golf clubs, his snorkeling equipment, and his missing head. One foot, and several fingers, as well. That’s when they began asking me a lot more questions about Gabe—mainly about how all those random parts of him had ended up in the trunk of my car. I had no idea, I insisted, and then shut up like a wise clam. I’ve never missed an episode of Law and Order, so I knew my rights. Besides, I didn’t want to get involved. If someone had offed Gabe, good luck to them. Okay, I don’t really mean that—not exactly, anyway. I never wish anyone dead who still owes me money.

  Things like this are bound to happen, I suppose, when you leave your car parked for too long in a no-parking area with eleven fading parking tickets on the windshield, announcing to the world your sloth and civic irresponsibility. The truth is, I had gotten blasé about the accumulated parking tickets, since they’d been collecting for quite a while with no apparent consequences other than several warrants being issued for my arrest. I was assured later that I had been notified by mail of these outstanding warrants and all the unpleasant things that could happen if I didn’t respond in a timely fashion, but the thing is, Carlotta and I didn’t have a mailbox. We had a mailbox, but it became severely disabled when it was run over by the very same vehicle, in an unfortunate parallel parking incident. It came to rest at the bottom of a shallow ditch—the mailbox, not the car—and not a day passed that I didn’t make a promise to myself to fix it. But then, if you can’t break promises to yourself without guilt, to whom else can you break promises? Anyway, after Carlotta’s poodle/pit bull mix bit our mailpersons two separate times, they stopped delivering the mail to the house, at all. It was delivered to and then slept peacefully at the post office until I went and picked it up, which I didn’t, because my car was deceased. It was kind of a vicious cycle, you know? Don’t laugh. You might be surprised to learn just how tranquil life can be when you have no mail or phone service

  * * * *

  Before we go any further, I want to make it clear that I have never personally murdered anyone—not yet, anyway—despite a number of severe provocations that I’m pretty sure would have gotten me off in any unbiased court of law in the country. I didn’t murder Gabriel Tannhauser, either, although I will admit to having fantasized about it once or twice. Okay, so maybe more than once or twice. There were periods when I whiled away a number of languid afternoons plotting various grisly scenarios in which Gabe got his just desserts. But hey! I wasn’t alone. The L.A. basin was crawling with people who would have liked to see Gabe made extinct. So, I was a bit put out when the LAPD began to suggest that I might be involved in his demise.

  I pointed out to them that the Hollywood art world—on whose glittering periphery we all lived, was positively infested with women who would have jumped at the chance to disembowel Gabe with rusty spoons, or back over him with their cute little red or green Mini Coopers. A lot of these women were not flesh and blood women at all, of course, but surgically altered and inflated starlets. There were also a bevy of models of the “art” variety, who used to wind their way in and out of Gabe’s photo studio like an endless line of grease-eating ants. I had learned the hard way that in a world where sleaze balls are pretty standard issue, Gabe was a world-class champion sleaze ball. But I didn’t kill him—Girl Scout’s honor. And even if I had wanted to, I would have been at the end of a very, very long line.

  At that point, having already been through several variations on the third degree from L.A.’s finest, I finally retreated to my living room for a nap, refusing
to answer any more questions without my lawyer being present. I doffed my blouse and damp jeans, slipped into the same frumpy flowered muumuu that I’d slept in the night before, and sacked out on the couch. (You see this all the time on TV, but if I were you, I wouldn’t try it. All they do is call someone else to come and pound on your door.)

  And when I finally threw open the door being pounded, prepared to do battle, there was Matt, standing on my back porch and scolding me for being disrespectful to his fellow officers.

  The day that had begun badly was about to get better—before it got even worse.

  * * * *

  Since Matt and I stopped seeing one another, and in an effort to save what little face I had left to save, I had worked out this terrifically clever way of handling what had happened between us. What I did was this: I brought up the spanking incident incessantly, and then made a joke of the whole episode, as if we had both only kidding around, and I knew it the whole time. Lame, huh? Anyway, it was in this whimsical and light-hearted manner that I greeted him that day.

  “My, my, what a surprise!” I chirped. “And what brings you to my door on this bright, smoggy morning, Detective de Sade? Are you collecting for the Abusive Policemen’s Benevolent Society, for the National Association to Encourage Public Caning?”

  Matt ignored my witty remarks and looked down at my foot. It was still in its humongous cast, mainly because I kept stumbling on things and re-breaking it. “What happened to your foot?”

  “A freak automobile accident,” I groaned, adding a small wince of pain to elicit a bit of sympathy.

  He grinned. “You kicked your car, again, didn’t you?”

  God, how could this man know me so well? Did he have a network of spies? Was he stalking me, the way I stalked him? Did he lurk in my shrubbery, like I did in his? Anyway, he was right about my foot. I had kicked my car. I watch a lot of TV, and I absolutely dote on Judge Judy. It’s like a window on the world, a slice of life. People on Judge Judy’s show are always kicking someone’s car, out of frustration, anger, revenge, whatever. Kicking a car seems to make them feel better. So, I tried it—and broke my big toe.