“I look beautiful,” she repeats in the same tone as her brother.
Ike nods.
“I look beautiful,” Lenore says again, now rising upright in the chair.
Ike continues to nod.
Lenore takes a breath and yells, “I look like shit, you stupid bastard. I look like hell. Look at me, for Christ sake. I haven’t slept in six goddamn months. My eyes are coming out of my head. I’m losing weight like there’s no tomorrow. ‘You look beautiful.’ You son of a bitch.”
Ike is startled into breathing heavy. He gets up and walks back to the toaster and says, “To me.”
“And when did your goddamn brain die?” Lenore yells, jerking out of her chair and moving over to the counter.
Ike turns to her, bites on his lip, then asks quietly, “Who is he?”
“So you were in my apartment?”
“It wasn’t Zarelli, was it?”
“You like that? You get a kick out of spying on me?”
“Have you known him a long time?”
“You little pervert,” she screams.
He tries to stop it, but it comes out. “You little slut.”
She flies across the small space between them and slaps him, open-palmed but with enough power and surprise to knock him backward to the table. He bumps a chair, tries to gain his balance, and falls to the floor on one knee. She reacts immediately, running over to him, tries to put her arms around him and help him up, starting to cry, “I’m sorry, Ike, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
He struggles away from her, holds her at a distance with an outstretched arm. She sees the tears coming down his face, his nose starting to run. “Leave me alone,” he tries to choke out.
They’re both crying now, sobbing like kids still half in a nightmare, breath-halting sobs.
He keeps stammering, “Stay away,” and pushing off her. She keeps trying to hold him, to latch onto his chest like a drunken, messy madonna, repeating, “No, Ike, I didn’t mean it.”
Finally, he jerks free and stumbles to the bathroom. She hears the door lock and then running water. She can’t stop crying. This is pathetic, she tells herself. Control this, get a grip here, pull it together. But her breath is irregular and her head is pounding and the tears continue to roll out of her swollen eyes like there was an endless supply.
She moves back to her chair, sits down, then hunches, shivers, tries to yell over the crying, “Please, Ike, I want to talk to you. Can’t we talk anymore?”
He doesn’t answer and she lowers her voice but continues to say the words. “I just want to talk to you. Can’t we just speak with each other?”
Speak with each other.
She tries to shake off the shiver, comes up a little in the chair. The only sound from the bathroom is water pouring into the sink.
She leans back in the chair and pushes a hand into her jeans pocket, the same jeans she’s worn for three days now. The same jeans she was wearing when she watched the girl, Vicky, pitch from the phone pole.
She pulls the Lingo from her pocket and stares at it in her palm. A red Q, dusted with a little lint, some of its rubbery skin rubbed away, but still intact. She lays it on the table in front of her and pokes it once, lightly, with her index finger. Then she reaches across the table for Ike’s butter knife. She doesn’t bother to wipe the knife clean. She lays its blade down on the Q and starts to press. It separates, though she loses a lot of it to powder along the edges.
She lifts one half on the blade, brings it over her coffee mug, and tilts it in. Then she lifts the second half, leans across the table to Ike’s mug, submerges the whole knife blade, and stirs.
She withdraws the knife, brings it to her mouth, and runs it between her lips, wiping off excess Lingo and coffee. She lays it back down on the table, lifts her mug up, and takes a deep swallow. There’s no perceptible taste.
The sound of the running water stops. The bathroom door unlocks and Ike steps into the hall, wiping his face with a towel. Lenore turns her head as far as it will go to look at him. He brings the towel down from his face and stares back at her, hesitates, then moves slowly back into the kitchen and takes his seat at the table. He rolls the towel and drapes it around his neck like he’s just finished a workout.
Lenore lets a few seconds go by. They continue to look at each other in silence. The look on Ike’s face tells her nothing. When he opens his mouth, he might fill the room with screams or apologies, rational talk or more crying.
“We’re both pretty over the edge here,” Lenore says as slowly and softly as she can and still manage to sound normal. “Let’s just take a second here, okay? Just take a minute and cool down. Both of us. We’ll figure out what’s going on around here. This isn’t like us, Ike. You know that. Let’s just slow down and drink a little coffee here and talk like two people who care about each other, all right?”
Ike nods slowly, rubs a hand over his forehead, then nods again and lifts his mug to his lips. He takes a sip of coffee, puts the mug down, and says, “I don’t know what’s going on, Lenore. “I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”
Lenore starts to blink her eyes. The kitchen seems to be getting brighter. “Just tell me what’s happened,” she says.
Ike takes another sip. “The things that have happened at work the past couple of days,” he says. “I don’t know where to start.”
Just the thought of the packages destined for box nine is enough to rattle him. He can picture the pile of oozing, stubby fingers and his heart starts to pump faster.
Lenore takes breath in suddenly and harshly through her nose. Her mouth starts to feel cottony. “Was there trouble at work?” she asks.
Ike nods rapidly. He begins to feel a dull throb at his left temple. “These things started going wrong,” he says. “I was sorting and there were these packages, two packages, and they were sort of damp, sort of wet underneath …”
His voice starts to crack and go high and he can’t bring it back to its normal level.
Lenore feels her pulse starting to race a little, but it’s different from a kick of crank, unlike the boost from speed. “There were packages,” she says. “Something was wrong with them.”
“Lenore,” Ike says, “I’m not feeling so well—”
“Just concentrate,” she snaps. “All you’ve got to do is talk to me here, Ike. Just keep going. You’re at work. You open these boxes. Go on, now. Talk to me.”
Ike gets up from his chair and starts to pace the kitchen. His voice makes him sound like some disturbed adolescent playing with nitrous oxide.
“I used the X-acto knife,” he says. “I cut them open.”
“You cut open the packages.”
He’s shaking his head in a frenzy. He says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I cut them open. I opened the boxes.”
Lenore gets up from her chair and starts to walk next to him, like they’re a vaudeville team ready to break into “Me and My Shadow.”
“And you looked inside,” she squawks.
“I looked inside,” he stammers.
“And you saw …”
“I saw—”
“Yeah, you saw, what, what did you see?”
He reaches the sink and grabs the countertop with both hands and his body starts to shake. He wheels around and grabs her by the wrist, pulls her up against him. She sees his Adam’s apple pumping nonstop, his lips quivering out of control. His words come out so fast and breathless, she’s barely able to decipher them. “I saw you and that man, you on top of that man, why did you, why did you do it, Lenore, why, how, why, you were on top, he was in your bed, your, why—”
She tries to pull her hands free and when she can’t, the anger comes up like a geyser. She pulls back to make him resist, then shoots her fists forward into his stomach. He doubles over and breaks the hold immediately, sucking air but still trying to babble on about seeing Woo and her last night. He keeps repeating the word why until it’s nonsensical, until it’s just some awful, annoying sound, like nails down a blackb
oard or knuckles being cracked.
Without thinking, Lenore lets her body go into a series of too-practiced motions. She extends her leg across both of her brother’s, then reaches around him, gets a grip on his belt and shirt, and trips him to the kitchen floor. He goes down with the force of a much heavier guy. His stomach takes the full impact of the fall, but his chin manages a good whack on linoleum. And it doesn’t end there. She’s on his back, a knee into the small of his back, a full armlock around his throat so that his head and shoulders are arched uncomfortably backward.
She interrogates him through gritted teeth, forgetting, as quickly as he did, about the events at the post office, the rental box and its contents.
“What were you doing in my apartment last night, asshole? Where do you come off breaking into my apartment? Spying on me. Spying, sneaking around, spying on me, watching Fred and me, spying, spying—”
She hears herself repeat the word and breaks off both the hold and the questions. She remains on his back for a second, trying to slow down her mind, trying to make sheer will revoke the Lingo. But her mouth continues to dry up and the words continue to come, nonstop, one after another. She doesn’t let them out. She bites her lips together, closes and opens her eyes.
He shakes her off his back and rolls onto his side. She sees his mouth moving, but doesn’t hear a thing. She wants to say, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t …
But instead, she reaches behind her back, grabs the doorknob, pulls the back door open, and runs around the house to the car. She cranks the engine and wheels into the street, turns on the radio, and ups the volume.
A talk-show host is ranting on, a diatribe about a recent spate of unrest at the Harrington Projects in Bangkok. She starts to drive and talk back to the radio, bringing short pockets of air to the lungs between words. She hears her speech begin to lose definition, become slightly garbled, not like the soft consonant-dropping of a deaf person, but almost the opposite, like she’s enunciating too much, like she’s become some Jerry Lewis imitation of a kamikaze pilot, all harsh, chopping sounds from overtaut mouth muscles, and all at a sickening speed.
The words start to pile up like a record-breaking freeway crash, the front of one adjective slamming into the rear of the next noun. And though her jaw and throat both already ache, she knows there won’t be any stopping for some time.
ItwaslessthanhalfaQhowmuchdamagecoulditdoandforhowlong …
Peirce unlocks her apartment door and steps inside, weaves a bit, puts a hand against a wall to steady herself. After a minute, she closes and locks the door behind her, shuffles out of her jacket and shoes, and moves into the bedroom. She leaves all the lights off and stands still at the foot of her bed, quiets her breathing, strains to hear any foreign sounds, any suggestion of noise.
And though she hears nothing, she takes her service revolver from her bag, moves to the closet, pulls back the hammer on her gun, and yanks open the closet door. She fans the line of her hanging clothes with the nose of the .38, then eases the hammer back down into its cradle, moves back to the bed, and feels the strain of suppressed weeping start to well behind her eyes.
She puts her revolver on the nightstand, takes the microrecorder from her bag, and throws the bag into the darkness in the corner of the room. Then she tosses the recorder onto her pillow and takes off all her clothes.
She steps up to the TV set, turns it on, and turns the volume all the way down. She sits back down on the edge of the bed, folds her arms across her chest, and wedges her hands up into her armpits, tries to concentrate on her breathing. She manages to hold back tears by staring at the image on the screen in front of her: a man and a woman, seated at an anchor desk, crisp sheets of paper held tautly in their hands, vague, pleasant looks on their faces, an occasional nod of the head. What can they possibly be talking about?
She thinks if she still had the revolver in her hands she’d put a bullet into the picture tube, fill the room with blue-white fireworks of spitting electric current. The thought gives her some control and she smiles at herself, leans forward and turns off the TV, pulls back the covers, climbs into the bed, picks up the tape recorder, and turns it on.
It’s eleven-fifteen, Victor. Forty-five minutes to go. I’m glad the day’s almost over. I’m in bed, Victor. Alone. pitch-dark. My lousy little apartment that you had the nerve to call quaint that one time. Remember that one time, Victor? Mr. Mayor? You remember that one lunch hour when I couldn’t stand the desk in your office anymore? When I’d go back to work with my hair all smelling like Lemon Pledge? And you took the big chance of a lifetime and actually drove, in public, in my Honda, back to my place and you took so long making sure all the doors were locked and curtains pulled down that we ended up having about five minutes to jump on each other. You went back to City Hall happy, Victor. But I spent the rest of the day writing a report on some pathetic Bangkok bust, frustrated to hell, uncomfortable. Story of this whole thing with you and me. I just turned off the TV, thank God. I can’t take it anymore—the eleven o’clock news. I can’t stand it. These people sit behind this long desk and look into the camera and tell these horrible stories every night and then smile or nod or sort of shake their heads very slightly. Like their telling about this thing, this horror, has made sense out of it, has summed it up and put it in the past. And the thing is, I see everything up close. I’m a goddamn cop, for Christ sake. And so far I can take it in Bangkok. I can do the job. But I can’t take it on TV anymore. You figure it out, Mr. Mayor. You’re the brain here. You’re the guy that makes the city work, right? And now something’s bugging you, Victor? And you can’t just come out and tell me what it is. You can’t have me down to one of your little stale-donut lunches in your Lincoln Town Car, driving down the expressway, donut crumbs all over the lapels of your grey banker’s suit, talking with your mouth full, telling Charlotte everything you know about your enemies on the City Council. Councilor Searle’s tax problems. Councilor Adams’s questionable relatives. And then we’d park in the rubble of old Gomper’s train station and you’d always have to comment about how much room there was in the Town Car. Weren’t you ever afraid of someone pulling into the station someday? Some prospective developer checking out the place? Or maybe that just added to the excitement for you. I would’ve rather been back here at my place. [Pause] I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of thinking. Last week someone, Richmond maybe, although it seems too witty to come from Richmond, anyway, they said to me, “You know what a detective’s first priority is?” and I bit and said, “What?” and they said, “Pray for confessions,” and I laughed and then caught on that the joke wasn’t over yet and they said, “You know what a narcotics detective’s first priority is?” and I bit again and they said, “Pray for a mute suspect.” And I laughed, I put on the good laugh. That laugh you told me once you thought was exciting and to this day I take that to mean erotic, though I have my doubts. I think I’m a little drunk, Mayor Welby. What do you think Richmond’s joke means? That everybody gets a little filthy when the money’s that easy? Or does it mean something else? Something obvious I’m just not picking up on here? Richmond said you told him that joke. [Pause] I couldn’t stop and turn off my brain on the ride home from the Synaboost lab. Your little tape recorder job has done something to me that I’ve been fighting since day one as a narc. This little Panasonic cinched it. I’m full-blown paranoid now. And as much as I reject it, I can’t help feeling that this is the most [pause] what’s the word, appropriate, the most appropriate view of my life right now. Maybe from now on. I think maybe I’m paying the exact price, the perfect price, for hooking up with you, Victor. The funny thing is, I’m ready to fink on myself. At the beginning, right after that briefing with Lehmann and Dr. Woo there, you told me this would be the investigation within the investigation. But as an investigation this whole thing has been an absolute and total failure. I gathered information for you, Victor. I found out little scraps of information. We both think, thought, I thought, that that’s a
ll you have to do. There are just two steps—you go out and, with a trained eye, a logical eye, you pick up scraps, clues, links, anything pertinent, then you bring it all back home and piece it together in ways that fit and when you’re done you step back and look and you’ve got the whole, big picture. But this Lingo thing hasn’t worked that way, has it? Nothing really led to anything else. For me it just seems to be spreading out more instead of closing in, coming together. [Pause] Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m burned out and I’ve lost any skill I had in this line of work. That’s a real possibility. I’d almost rather that be true than think that … [Long pause] Victor. Victor, I’ve always thought that people read mysteries for a good and simple reason. Because they confirmed, good word, confirmed, they confirmed a way of looking at life. In general. A positive way. Even through all the pages of bloodshed and lies and betrayals and corruption, if you pay attention and follow the link and clues, you come up with the truth. [Pause] I am loaded, Victor. No doubt about it. Bed spins. I’m going to have to run for the john any second, I think. Driving home from the lab tonight, coming down the hill from the airport, this is all the stuff that was going through my head. I’m praying, I’d like to pray, that this feeling I have right now, aside from the bed spinning, this feeling that I need to look over my shoulder, won’t last. And I’m scared to death that it will. That I’ll feel this way from now on. That no one can be trusted. That nothing will make much sense. For me, the problem with this case was that there were too many possibilities and my brain couldn’t seem to discard any. Instead, it kept adding more. On the drive home, down that endless airport hill, I kept thinking of other people. You got me started. I was thinking that any one of my brother detectives, sister detectives, you know, that they could be involved. That Lehmann, Mr. Closed Mouth, Mr. Arrogant, that he could be on both sides of the fence. The brilliant Dr. Woo could be behind the whole thing, murdering the Swanns, stealing the drug formula. I even thought it could be you, Victor. The mayor. The guy who knows everyone, controls everything. Why not Victor Welby? Could be Victor Welby. Or any combination of people. [Pause] I know it’s only been a day, Victor, but what a goddamn day. I’m out of it. I’m off the investigation within the investigation. I’m done. I’m no good to you. I haven’t found anything out. I need some sleep. Long day. I’m too tired to talk anymore. I’m
Box Nine Page 28
