The Binding

by E. Z. Rinsky

  The fat guy is pale, with black eyes sunk deep into his rubbery face. He’s built like a 350-pound teapot, and his face bulges and bloats in all the worst places. Gives me a greasy handshake, introduces himself as Matty Julius, but everyone calls him Orange. He’s doused in expensive cologne, and I catch the monogram on his silk pocket square. I think he puts in a lot of effort to draw attention from the parts of his appearance he can’t change. I also think he might be wearing a toupee.

  He explains he’s seen me out here taking pictures of his facade over the last few nights, and if I’d be so kind as to turn those photos over to him, he’d be happy to offer double whatever my current employer is paying me. I casually note the size of the rocks on his stubby fingers, think I could probably ask for triple and he wouldn’t blink, but explain that I already signed a contract—I’m an investigator, not a mercenary. But he needn’t worry; the pictures will never be seen by anyone but my client.

  He nods, satisfied, impressed even. I can tell he’s one of these guys who takes a lot of pride in being a man of his word. Unbelievable how many dirtbags consider themselves men of honor. He’s about to sidle back into his nether-lair when he stops and asks if I have a card, says he’s actually in need of a snooper. Especially one he knows won’t sell him down the river to a higher bidder.

  Matty “Orange” Julius calls me two weeks later. He and his goons pick me up in a black Escalade and drive me around town while he describes the job. He wants me to hunt down a pair of Italians who sold him what he claims is a fake Rembrandt. I say I don’t know jack about art, and he replies all I have to know is how to track down shitbags. Cuts me a check for the down payment right there in the car, catches my smirk when I see Midtown Fitness, DBA in the upper left-hand corner, and then I’m off, Orange never clueing me in to the precise nature of his apparently very well-decorated subterranean operation.

  It was two months before I busted in on the Italians in their recently acquired Miami penthouse, brandishing my Magnum and screaming to drop the prosecco and kiss the fucking carpet. Finding them had required less blurring than straight-up mauling of certain laws. Notably: those against breaking and entering, aggressive interrogation techniques, and whichever amendment preserves an immigrant’s right to not be knocked unconscious, bound with duct tape, and hauled back to Manhattan in the trunk of a rented Hyundai with very bad shocks.

  “Look,” I tell Greta, handing her back her license, “you should know that’s not my usual purview. I got caught a little deep in that mess and ended up doing some things I’m not proud of. If you’re looking to hurt someone, I’m not your guy. Hurting happens incidentally, but I try to avoid it. And if you want someone killed, I’m going to advise you to just turn around, as I’d be legally obliged to report that.”

  In the silence that follows, I find myself desperately hoping she doesn’t take my advice. I really need the work. I try to keep my gaze level with hers, but it’s like looking into the sun.

  Finally she licks her lips. It’s subtle and quick but doesn’t escape my attention.

  “Nothing like that, Mr. Lamb.” She interlocks her gloved hands in front of her on the table, still sitting straight as a flagpole. Maybe she does yoga. “I want you to find something for me. And Orange Julius spoke very highly of your tracking abilities. As for the legality of the methods you employ, I couldn’t care less. I care only about results.”

  I swallow hard. I’ve never met a woman like this. She’s beyond gorgeous, sure, but something about her unnerves me. Her skin is too perfect, her wide, unblinking green eyes coldly calculating. It’s like aliens created a flawless synthetic human from silicone. She’s like a parody of beauty.

  “Alright,” I say. “I’m listening.”

  She reaches a gloved hand into her black leather handbag and removes a thick folder. She’s about to open it but seems to think better of it and looks at me. The dying January day seeps in from the window behind me, casting half her face in pale, orange light. Her eyes are locked in a subtle—but fierce—glare that, with a little imagination, could be construed as sexual. I try to force that thought out of my head; I’ve seen guys crush on their clients, and it never ends well. Sure, Sadie could use a mom, but Greta doesn’t quite strike me as the nurturing type.

  “The first and most important thing to understand, Mr. Lamb, is that I value discretion. Nothing I tell you can be mentioned to anyone, even if you don’t decide to accept my case. Is that clear?”

  I’ve already lost control of this situation. Usually I’m the one laying down the ground rules, telling the flustered client how it’s gonna be.

  “That’s actually very standard with PIs,” I say, trying to sound authoritative. “If you’d like me to sign some type of nondisclosure though, I’d be happy to.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she says, then reaches back into her purse and pulls out five crisp hundred-dollar bills. She drops them on the table and slides them toward me, her tightly gloved hand dragging sensuously across my shitty Ikea tabletop. “But I’d like you to have this in advance, as a way of thanking you for not sharing this with anyone.”

  I can feel my forehead crinkling of its own volition. Five hundred bucks just to keep this quiet? Must be plenty more where that came from.

  But I slide the bills back to her.

  “I haven’t agreed to work for you yet, Greta. But I assure you that nothing you say to me leaves this room.” With a smile, I add, “Again, unless you ask me to kill someone.”

  She frowns but leaves the bills out in plain sight, as if to remind me that they’re there if I want them. Then she hands me the folder, grimacing like she’s giving up her child for adoption. It’s a police report, at least three hundred pages thick, stuffed with typed memos, glossy pictures and court documents.

  The front page says simply, Savannah Kanter. Homicide. 7/21/08.

  “Your . . .”

  “Sister,” she says. I shift in my chair. Before I can express my condolences, she clarifies: “I’m not asking you to investigate a murder. The case was closed two weeks after her death. The murderer turned himself in and has been incarcerated ever since.”

  “Okay.” I make a triangle with my fingertips and try to ignore the way her chest slowly expands and contracts beneath that tight turtleneck. It’s weird that she has a copy of the police report. Detectives’ offices will usually give relatives a copy eventually if they ask for it, but the last thing most families want is to dwell on the grisly details. “Then . . . ?”

  “I need you to find a by-product of the murder.”

  By-product?

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I say. It feels like a feeble attempt to take control of this dialogue. Her unblinking eyes, low breathing, rigid posture . . . She’s like a magnet, sending my usually trusty compass spinning. I’ve never met a person who carries themselves like she does. “What happened to your sister?”

  She hesitates, like she’s summoning the strength for whatever’s about to come out of her mouth next. She’s so fucking beautiful. I’m trying to not imagine kissing her but can’t help myself. Imagine sliding my hands down her hips, the weight of her heaving form on top of me—

  “My family was on vacation. Me, Savannah and our parents. We rented a beach house a few miles south of Bangor. Maine. I was twenty-eight, Savannah was twenty-four—”

  This was five years ago, so she’s only thirty-three now? I had her pegged for early forties.

  “We’d been there for three days, the four of us just relaxing. Swimming and lounging on the beach during the day. Playing cards and drinking at night. We hadn’t been together for a while. My father’s job requires constant travel, and he and my mother are always in Europe, Asia—”

  “What does he do exactly?”

  “Journalist. Writes international news for an English periodical. On day four of our trip we went into town. We got ice cream on the boardwalk and sat down on a picnic bench. Savannah handed me her cone and said she was going to run to t
he bathroom. She never came back.”

  She pauses and gazes at the back of her gloved hand. I make a mental note to mention this to Sadie as a cautionary tale—this is why you always hold Daddy’s hand in public.

  “Are you alright?” I ask. “Would you like a glass of water?”

  Yeah, that will fix everything. Idiot.

  She ignores me anyways:

  “For twelve days, nothing. It still seems impossible, given the scope of the search, that we didn’t find her. Every hotel in the state was emailed her picture. Police barricades on all major highways stopped cars at random. My father got on the local news and offered a half-million-dollar reward.” She smiles emptily. “My parents had money. The police took it very seriously. They found some of Savannah’s hairs in a parking lot about a hundred fifty feet from where we were sitting. There must have been a struggle while she was forced into a car. That was all they had to go on.”

  I’m struck by how impassively she describes all this; the same detached tone in which one might read a dense legal document or narrate a documentary on indigenous Indians. It’s been years, so maybe she’s just recited this so many times that it’s become rote, devoid of emotion, the facts no longer resonant of the horror she must have gone through.

  “No eyewitnesses saw her being shoved in the car?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Identifiable tire tracks near the hair?” I ask. “Anything caught on camera?”

  “No,” she shakes her head. “Gravel parking lot. Too vague. And we’re talking about rural Maine. Not cameras on every corner, like here.”

  “Okay, so then?”

  “Twelve days later a man approached a traffic cop in Portland and said he killed Savannah. He showed him a Polaroid of her corpse and told him where he could find the body. It was there. In the cellar of a cabin seven miles south of the boardwalk.”

  “Just a second,” I say and quickly jump from my chair to stick my head into the living room, making sure that Sadie isn’t eavesdropping on this. Kids should learn about murder the right way: on television, when their parents aren’t around. I return to my seat. Greta’s face is unwavering.

  “Why her?” I ask, figuring the answer is that she was as beautiful as her sister.

  “The police thought it was because she was small, much shorter than me, and skinnier. She weighed around a hundred pounds. She would have been relatively easy to drag back to the car.” She pauses, and then, as if anticipating my next question, adds, “She wasn’t raped.”

  “I don’t have much experience with homicide, but I imagine that’s unusual.”

  Greta’s nostrils flare. “That is perhaps the least unusual part of the whole thing. She was asphyxiated,” she continues. “In court, he explained that he tied a plastic bag around her head until she stopped breathing.”

  I’m suddenly seized by an overpowering desire for a drink. There’s a bottle of rye on the bookcase, visible over Greta’s right shoulder, but it’s not even dark out yet, and I’m pretty sure that day drinking isn’t the kind of unprofessionalism she had in mind. From the window behind me I hear somebody on East Broadway screaming in Spanish and what sounds like the clattering of a metal trashcan.

  “I don’t understand what you want me to do,” I say, imagining an iced double shot burning its way down my throat.

  “You’re not very patient, are you?” she asks, without the slightest hint of flirtation in her voice. She speaks slowly and deliberately, mechanically, like someone keeps pulling a drawstring on her back to trigger prerecorded phrases. Images of her in the throes of passion keep trying to burrow in through my ear and nest in my brain, and I keep mentally swatting them away like mosquitoes.

  “No, I’m not,” I say. “I seriously might have ADD. I hope that’s not a deal breaker.”

  Again, she ignores my pathetic attempt at humor. This reminds me of every bad first date I’ve ever been on.

  Greta grabs the folder back from me. She flips through it for half a minute—I desperately want to ask her about the gloves but resist—and finds a photocopy of an article from a local Maine newspaper. I scan the first paragraph.

  “Silas Graham. Even sounds like a murderer. He pleaded insanity?”

  “Yes. And it held up.”

  “Because he turned himself in?”

  “There’s more. He also confessed to killing his parents twenty-two years before and told them where they could find those bodies. Their decomposed bodies were buried in a scrap yard in rural Alabama, identifiable only by dental records. But indeed, it didn’t take long to discover that the two of them were declared missing when Silas was around eleven. Silas was taken into foster care shortly thereafter. It took less than two weeks of court time to determine that he was likely a paranoid schizophrenic, and he was committed to an institution for the criminally insane.”

  That bottle is looking better and better. I’m no prude, but this kind of shit—kidnapped and murdered girls—isn’t exactly my wheelhouse.

  “I was on the force for a few years before going solo,” I say. “In my very limited experience with this sort of thing, the ‘criminally insane’ verdict is usually indicative of little more than an expensive team of lawyers.”

  She smirks ever so slightly and flips a few pages deeper into the folder. “Not this time. Look at his face.”

  I inspect the grainy black-and-white photo she’s pointing at for a moment, then recoil.

  “Oh my god.” I have to look away, the picture is making me a little ill. “Are those burns?”

  “Tattoos. All over his face.”

  Greta continues flipping through the folder and stops at a full glossy. She stares at it a moment, taking in slowly what must be a picture of her sister. She breathes deeply, then rotates it in my direction. What I see makes my stomach tingle with cold. Savannah lying faceup on a coroner’s slab. Her face has the exact same tattoos as her killer.

  “Jesus,” I gasp.

  Greta nods and mercifully flips to another page.

  “What the fuck?” I ask. “Why would he do that to her, then kill her?”

  Her green eyes seem to be staring at something very far away. A siren screams down East Broadway and then fades.

  “I’ve long since given up trying to understand,” she says, her words sounding weighed down. “But here’s the important thing.” She flips to another article about Silas’s trial and points to a circled paragraph. “Read,” she says.

  . . . next to the body was found a Sony tape recorder, a model discontinued in 1992. Throughout the brief trial, Mr. Graham displayed an exceptional willingness to cooperate. The only exception being when asked about the purpose of this device, to which Mr. Graham repeated only, “I made a tape. I made a tape of her dying.” When pressed as to the nature of this tape, Graham showed uncharacteristic reticence, shaking his head and occasionally appearing close to tears . . .

  I look up into Greta’s glowing eyes.

  “I want you to find the tape,” she says.

  I can’t contain a snort. “The guy was nuts. He probably didn’t even know what he was saying.”

  She stares past me, out the living room window. Not much of a view beyond the brick co-op towers across the street.

  “He knew,” she says.

  What little willpower I have evaporates. I shoot out of my chair, return with two lowballs and the bottle of rye. Pour myself four fingers.

  “Want any?” I ask.

  She purses her lips. “No.”

  I shoot down half of it. Instantly I’m hit with a little hazy relief, and lean back in my chair.

  “Alright, so let’s pretend you’re right. It exists. What do you want with this alleged cassette tape?”

  She doesn’t respond. Stares unblinking over my right shoulder.

  “Greta, if you want me to find this—”

  “On the last day of the trial the verdict was read,” she starts. “Life in an institution for the criminally insane. I remember his face when this was announce
d. He seemed relieved—or pleased perhaps. Don’t ask me why. As they were leading him down the aisle, out of the courtroom, he stopped at the front row, where I was sitting with my parents, and leaned in close to me. He was so close I could smell his breath—his teeth were rotting brown, and it smelled like he hadn’t brushed them for years.” The first traces of emotion I’ve heard from Greta so far. Voice wavering slightly in anger. “And his tattoos . . . he didn’t even seem human. His voice was so awful. Throaty and raw.”

  She stops and looks at me for a painfully long moment. I shiver involuntarily. She seems to be deliberating whether or not to continue.

  She says, “He leaned in close and whispered, ‘It was worth it. I got what I wanted.’”

  I polish off my rye and have to tuck my fingers under my thighs to resist a refill.

  I say, “Like I said, he’s crazy.”

  “He made a tape of her dying, Lamb. That’s what he said.”

  I raise an eyebrow. Greta’s face is cracking slightly with emotion. Yet there’s something about the way she’s telling this story that doesn’t quite ring true with me. It seems rehearsed, though that could just be because she’s gone through this so many times. But I can’t shake the feeling that she’s omitting crucial details. And why hasn’t she taken off those gloves?

  As the light fades outside, Greta’s pale skin seems to turn luminescent, glowing like a jack-o’-lantern filled with blue ice.

  “Sure you don’t want a drink?” I ask, my left leg fidgeting uncontrollably.