Lies She Told

by Cate Holahan

  I open it and slip inside. Immediately, I stumble on something. My knee lands in the dirt, saving my face. Beneath my foot lies a broken combination lock, pried loose, apparently, from the smashed door.

  I pick myself up and walk, more carefully, back toward the chain link fence, pitching my weight forward to keep the heels from pinning me to the dirt in the construction site. As soon as I get there, the door opens across the street. Jake exits. He looks over his shoulder, as though he senses me watching, before jogging down the avenue. I can imagine the need for his hurry. He hopes to find me asleep so that he can claim to have come in around midnight. Working until 12:00 AM or even one can go unquestioned. Two AM demands an explanation. What excuse has he prepared if I’m awake? Will he claim to have nodded off on his office couch?

  I watch him through the fine metal mesh, crouching, waiting until he rounds the corner before standing back up. Beating him home isn’t possible. Moreover, I don’t want to. Let him wait for me for once.

  A shuffling noise sounds behind me. Too soft to be human. Maybe a rat. Maybe a robber trying to sound like a rat. Whoever broke the lock might be living here. Hiding here. Homelessness swells in the city during the summer. People leave wherever they managed to find shelter during the winter months and return to NYC, where the constant flow of tourists provides plenty of marks for beggars. There’s probably a group of men here, all of questionable mental health, getting high. They won’t appreciate my infringement on their party.

  I scan the ground for something with which to defend myself should anyone come near. A board. A hammer. Metal catches the moonlight a few dozen feet to my right. I hurry toward it, hoping for something pointy. It’s a beam of sorts, far too heavy to lift. Behind it, covered in what appears to be pulverized ceramic, is something skinnier. I wrap my hands around its gritty exterior and yank it from the construction debris. It’s a pipe, curved like a scythe, the kind that might have once joined a sink drain to the indoor plumbing. Armed now, I retreat to the broken door, prepared to take a swing at whomever might come near.

  No one does. I step back out onto the sidewalk and cross the street to Officer Colleen’s building. A multitenant intercom is bolted to the brick beside the entrance. Only half of the ten slots have names on them. C.L. is scrawled across a label in what appears to be a sharpie next to a number sign, a 1, a letter D, and a fat gray button. I assume the letters are her initials. None of the other names start with C.

  My finger hovers over the buzzer. I want to talk to her, reason with her, appeal to her sense of justice. Surely she can understand how awful it is to be a new mom, home with an infant, while your husband spends half the night with his girlfriend. She can’t really justify her actions. She’ll have to admit that whatever feelings she has developed for my husband don’t trump my claim to him as his wife and the mother of his child. She’ll let him go.

  What if she won’t let me up?

  Music penetrates the door. Someone is having a party inside. The music is live. Lots of drums. A garage band jamming in one of the semiconverted loft spaces, most likely. Brooklyn’s underground music scene is literally underground. Again, I stare at the buzzer menu. “Flying Free” appears to own the entire basement level. Either someone had hippie celebrity parents or it’s a private venue.

  I hit Flying’s buzzer, and the door unlocks. No one asks for a name, despite the fact that there aren’t any visible cameras to check whether I’m an armed gunman. The fact that I know the location of the party is, apparently, good enough. I pull back half of the double steel door and walk up a narrow staircase.

  Each landing opens to hallways with heavy, factory doors on one side. Tribal drums pound from the basement, louder than the house music at any club. Guitars screech. I ascend the first flight, my speed fueled by the rhythm reverberating up the stairwell. Normally, my thighs would burn from the effort of running up stairs. Yet I feel nothing except my determination to make my husband’s lover see reason.

  A door opens several yards ahead. Quickly, I pivot to face the wall, holding the pipe and my purse close to my chest so it appears that I am searching for my keys. Scaring some poor tenant is the last thing I want.

  Officer Colleen fills my peripheral vision. She’s dressed now, skinny jeans and a tight black tank with a looser button-down open on top of it. It’s one of those outfits that flatters both genders as long as the wearer is on the skinny side. A black bag hangs from her shoulder. Her mouth is painted a deep red. I realize with horror that she is heading out after my husband. She intends to show up at our apartment and spill the truth. She thinks he’ll leave me and our daughter for her.

  What if she’s right?

  I whirl around as she passes. The pipe is in my hand. It connects with the back of her head with a sickening crack, the sound of a home run at a baseball game. I see my hands trembling on the metal cylinder. Red is splattered on the wall. Something sticky spills from her scalp, gluing her hair into a clump.

  What have I done?

  I reach for her as she drops to her knees, ready to apologize and promise to call an ambulance. Though my cell is back at my apartment, her purse lies half open beside her body. There must be a phone in there. It’s three easy numbers—9-1-1. I couldn’t have hit her that hard. EMTs will be able to fix this. She’ll have a concussion. Stitches.

  Her hand claws for the bag. I see a flash of something black and silver inside it.

  Before she can grab her gun, I swing the pipe again. It strikes the curve of her shoulder, and she screams as bone snaps beneath the metal. Her voice doesn’t sound human to me. The figure beneath me isn’t a person. All I see is a hand, long fingers like strange arachnid legs, crawling toward a weapon.

  If I want to live, I must stop the spider from reaching the gun.

  The pipe comes down on her back. She’s pressed flat against the floor now, still struggling to raise her broken shoulder, to bend her elbow so that her arm can snag her purse’s shoulder strap. I drop the pipe, grab the gun. I turn it over in my hands; the metal is cool and smooth. It’s so much lighter than the pipe. Like it’s barely even real.

  An animalistic, gurgling sound comes from beneath me. Her face is pressed to the concrete floor. There’s blood on my dress. Blood on the pipe. Bits of skull in her hair. Jake will never stay with me now. I’ll go to jail. She’ll go to the hospital. She’ll raise my Victoria.

  I fall back from her. Suddenly, there’s a bang, louder than any drum.

  I see myself standing over a lifeless body. Both of my hands are wrapped around the gun’s grip. My right index finger is on the trigger. A thin line of smoke curls from the barrel into the hallway. I must be imagining this. Maybe I am asleep in my apartment. Maybe I took Tyler’s advice. Went home.

  Blood pools onto the concrete. This is real. Oh, my God. I fall to the ground, head bowed, ready for the army of neighbors that will pour from the apartments and overwhelm me, pin me to the wall as they call the police. An agonizing minute passes. Nothing happens. I think of my little Victoria and look back up at the body. Maybe, just maybe, fate has other plans. Perhaps I can return home to my baby.

  I kneel and wipe the weapon on the dead woman’s shirt, trying to erase my unseen prints. All it does is smear blood across the gun. I slip the weapon back into the officer’s bag. There’s no leaving all this here. My prints are on the pipe beside the body and on the gun. My DNA must have shed all over her during the attack. I pick up the pipe and shove it into my handbag. Then I slip my purse over my shoulder and put her handbag on the other one. Balanced with a purse on each side, I grab her feet and drag her to the stairs.

  A high heel breaks as I heave the dead weight toward me. I pull off my shoes and squeeze them into my handbag. Barefoot, I yank her the rest of the way to the landing. I sit for a moment and catch my breath. My limbs vibrate from exertion. I shake out my arms and then pull the body until the torso is draped over my own and the head rests on my chest. Another moment to prepare myself, and then I scoot my butt d
own each step, hoisting her along with me while unknown body fluids leak onto my chest and bare legs. I move quickly, back banging against the edges in the process, trying to reach the landing before anyone comes through the door. Somehow, no one enters. Everyone must be at the party or staying elsewhere to avoid the noise. Or maybe the industrial factory doors have made the apartments sound proof and no one realizes that a fatal shooting has taken place.

  I prop the body against the wall while I open the front door, praying the whole time that the basement party continues blaring downstairs. God or the devil answers me. I press my back against the door, holding it open while I fit my arms beneath the dead woman’s pits and drag her from the building.

  Once outside, I head straight for the broken door and into the fenced-in construction zone. I drop the body beside a man-sized mountain of dirt. My idea is to shovel the earth on top of it, hopefully hiding her long enough that whatever physical evidence I’ve left becomes sufficiently contaminated to be unusable. But the bloody trail I’ve carved into the soil makes me realize that she’d be discovered by morning. Besides, I can’t move enough dirt without a backhoe.

  On the far side of the construction site is the East River. My arms ache from supporting the dead weight. I grab the hands and drag it across the dirt. At the riverbank, the ground gives way to an old concrete pier. Near the end is a pipe railing, erected, undoubtedly, for the safety of the construction vehicles rather than the workers. The railing is too high to hoist the form in my arms above it. Easier to push it beneath.

  I lay what was Officer Colleen down at the edge, ready to roll her off the pier. As I do, her bag slides from my shoulder to the ground. I see the gun inside. If the police find this, they’ll realize that her gun was fired. Would it be better to dump them separately and hope the current carries them miles apart? Should I take her purse with the gun so that, if she is found, police assume that someone intended to rob her and committed murder in the process?

  I move Colleen’s bag to the side and then sit next to her body. Both of my bare feet press into her sides. I bring my legs back toward my chest and then kick out with all my energy.

  The body barely makes a splash before vanishing beneath the dark water. With luck, it will be gone for good. The East River was named “Hell Gate” by early Dutch explorers because the current is stirred to rapids by the different tidal flows converging in it. It’s why so few bodies dumped here ever surface. Jake told me that after a gang case once.

  I remove Colleen’s phone from her purse and pitch it as hard as I can into the water. The splash is audible, though I can’t verify that the device has sunk in the darkness. Either way, I’m sure the salt water will destroy it soon enough. I wonder whether or not the police will be able to tell that her cell was at the construction site when they begin investigating her disappearance and track the last known signal. Maybe the phone will register as outside her apartment.

  My purse still hangs from my shoulder. I jostle the pipe from inside. Dark spots splatter the metal. In the moonlight, I can almost convince myself that the marks are rust. I hold it like a boomerang behind my head before hurling it over the railing. It makes a big splash, the kind that would be noticed by someone, if anyone was around. Watching me.

  An icy fear possesses my body at the thought. The gun is still in Colleen’s bag. I slip the shoulder strap over my left arm, feeling the weight of the weapon at my side. The loaded pistol makes me feel simultaneously more secure and panicky. I used it before to protect myself. I could do it again. But it connects me to this murder. Even if the cops never find Colleen’s body, my hands on her gun would reveal my crime. I have to get rid of it.

  Throwing it in after Colleen doesn’t feel right. I am relying on the East River to destroy too much evidence. One more item will somehow clog the drain, sending all the sewage bubbling back to the surface.

  Over my shoulder, I see the mountains of earth that had called to me before. I choose the mound farthest from the construction hole. Using my hands and the weapon itself, I tunnel into the side of the dirt hill. It has rained recently and the earth is moist. To keep the soil from spilling into my hiding place, I must keep patting the sides, like sculpting a sandcastle. When I have a space deep enough to fit my arm up to the joint, I shove the gun inside. Finally, I smash my fists into the pile until the mound crumbles in on itself, filling the cavity.

  With luck, this dirt is destined for landfill somewhere else. It will be loaded on the back of a truck and dumped at a new construction site. Everyone wants a flat piece of property, particularly by the water. The gun could end up buried beneath the new backyard of a seaside home, topped by grass and flowering weigela bushes, an iron rock beneath manicured landscaping. Every year, the soil will settle, and the gun will sink deeper into the earth.

  The idea comforts me as I head out to the street.

  LIZA

  The flight attendant tells me to shut my laptop. I plead for another moment with a raised finger and a sheepish glance as she scowls at me from the aisle. Something is wrong in the scene I finished moments ago. The gun, I think. How Beth gets rid of it is too complicated. She’s thrown everything else into the water, why not the weapon?

  Because, I need to bury it.

  I hear Beth’s voice in my head, comingled with my own writerly justifications. A death cries out for a burial. Instinctually, people will want the images of digging and soil. Hiding the gun in a mound of construction dirt will resonate more with readers than having Beth throw yet another item into the East River.

  But I can’t force Beth to do something stupid because it fits with a death aesthetic. Discarding the murder weapon in a different location from the body only makes sense if the gun itself ties the perpetrator to the crime. In this case, it doesn’t. The Glock wasn’t Beth’s; it belonged to Colleen. Even if Beth is concerned about her prints on it, submersion is far more likely to destroy them than dirt. I gave Beth a crime reporter background. She would know this.

  I murdered someone, Beth protests. I’m not thinking straight. I want to bury it.

  “Ma’am, we’re landing.” The stewardess looks as though she wants to slap the screen down on my device. “Your laptop could fly from your tray table when the wheels touch down. If you don’t store it now, I’ll have to confiscate it.”

  I have not e-mailed myself my last chapter. Apologizing, I hit the save button, close the computer, and then slide it into the purse that barely fits beneath the seat in front of me. The flight attendant watches me do all this, a mother checking up on a child’s chores after she failed to do them the first time.

  We touch down with barely a bump, which I mentally argue means I could have kept my computer out longer. I know I’m wrong, of course. Rules have reasons. A laptop probably went airborne during a particularly rough landing once and injured a litigious passenger. I don’t care, though. All I want is to get back to my story and figure out how to fix the murder scene.

  Images of earth and metal continue to plague me as I roll my suitcase across the airport to the short-term parking lot and retrieve my car. Burying the gun is too similar to how the mother hides the murder weapon in my bestseller. Well, it worked then, Beth quips. Throwing the weapon in the river makes the most sense, I argue.

  BUT I BURIED IT!

  BUT YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE!

  I get onto the highway, still thinking about the gun. That gun! I can’t leave it there, waiting in a mound of dirt like a body in a wall or a telltale heart beneath the floorboards. It will make me crazy. It is already driving me nuts. Rather than concentrating on the road, I am inventing excuses for Beth to bury the weapon. I’ve outsourced the car’s operation to an automatic part of my brain, the section that controls breathing and bathroom urges.

  There’s little traffic heading back from Queens on a Monday evening. I pull into the garage in under an hour and run to the elevator, eager to get back to my manuscript. A woman rushes in before the door closes. I know her vaguely. She has two boys, midd
le school age, and lives in one of the penthouses above me. She wears her power suit from work. In my peripheral vision, I see her smile at me as though we’ve spoken and not simply acknowledged one another’s existence with the occasional nod. Fortunately, she must sense that I’m preoccupied and doesn’t attempt small talk.

  As soon as the elevator doors shut behind me, I hurry to my apartment and twist the key in the lock. “Hi, honey,” I shout as I enter, letting David know an intruder hasn’t broken in.

  Silence responds. I don’t sense my husband’s presence. Instead, there’s a strange energy. An odd smell. Stagnant odors have been released from hidden places, as though a bin of decaying paper was uncovered and left in the center of the room. The shelving unit in the foyer has been rearranged. A glass vase with crystal roses—a wedding present from one of David’s tchotchke-loving aunts—has been put on the same shelf as a wood-framed picture of my mom. The two items do not belong together. The books, too, have been moved. My fiction stack is now squashed by one of David’s law textbooks.

  I drop my suitcase in the foyer and walk through to the living/dining area. Legal documents are scattered on the glass table. David’s briefcase is on the floor. It’s the first sign that he might be in the house, though I doubt it. If he were in the bedroom, he’d yell, “Welcome home,” or, at least, “Hello.” Our home is not big enough to hide in.

  “David?” I yell. “Babe?”

  I pile the papers up and place his briefcase on top of them. Loose leafs secured, I open the French doors out to the balcony to drive the stale scent from the house. Street noise rushes in: honking on the FDR drive, the din of voices below. I look out at the building across the street. If I dared to lean out over the railing, I’d see the East River.