Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

  Closes it.

  Second drawer.

  Closes it.

  Third drawer.

  Closes it.

  Fourth drawer.

  Bingo.

  28

  Death of a Pineapple Cutter

  ***

  Freya’s smirk defies the pineapple cutter’s offensive yellow veneer. She feels the cheap plastic through her gloves, places it on the wooden cutting board and then smashes it with the meat pounder. She carries the board, careful not to drop the pieces and slides them into the bin, shoving them deep in the trash to conceal them. As she does this, the cutter’s blade tears at a black plastic bag half-buried under coffee grinds and fruit scraps and she glimpses a tiny glint of silver.

  She rips the bag open, revealing a syringe. She removes it carefully, folds it into a tea towel and walks briskly out of the kitchen and towards the stairs. As her foot hits the first step, a quiet whistling from somewhere down the hall creates a spectral Lovecraftian fog in front of her.

  The dark tendrils clamber over the walls and stairs. The tune is calm, malevolent. A serial killer’s “Whistle While You Work.” Her chest tightens. Her legs melt into hot, wet rubber. The floor comes rushing up to greet her face. The darkness swirls and swarms around her, slowly consuming every trace of colour and light. All that’s around her is a solid, ceaseless void. And that hideous melody.

  She lies there, the sound and darkness flooding her eyes, ears, and mind. She feels hands on her. Warm fingers moving over her cold, confused flesh.

  And then there is only silence.

  ***

  Harland and Evelyn stare at the pool. Sun beats down on their skin. A breeze ambles through the air.

  Evelyn sips at her drink. “Is everything ready for the wedding, Harland?”

  “Are you kidding? Rosaline has had the whole thing sewn up for months. The poor doll has been planning it since before your face was unmodified.”

  “You know I hate those vulgar vilifications.”

  “But you love me just the same.”

  “Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste, is there?”

  Harland removes a cigar from his jacket pocket and snips the end off with his handcrafted silver cutter, a gift from the Queen of Denmark. He’d never even known Denmark had a monarchy until he’d received it as a gift from the Queen’s personal assistant accompanying an invitation to a trade meeting. He lights the cigar and puffs, and feels that familiar pang of disappointment as the bitterness hits his lips. He’s still waiting for the pleasure he’s supposed to feel. He is a stupendously wealthy man, smoking expensive tobacco is supposed to go with the territory.

  He ponders what he will do tomorrow, when he controls much of the globe’s pharmaceutical industry. When billions of lives depend on him to ease their aches, pains, and maladies. From AIDS sufferers to men with erectile dysfunction, young women trying the latest get-thin-quick concoction and high-powered executives looking for a painkiller to destroy their headaches faster than their lackeys can run to get them their next mocha latte. All those people will be clutched in the palm of his not-quite-comfortable-holding-a-cigar hand.

  He will wield more power than he could attain from any petty crown or government seat. Genghis Khan would have thrown down arms and taken up a business degree if he’d known that he could control nations and populations simply by acquiring brands and trademarks. Politics and warfare are fine for pastimes, but capitalism? Now there’s a man’s game.

  So what will he do when he controls the game, and all its players? Cigars will be passé for a man of such stature. Perhaps he will have to indulge in the higher levels of bourgeois recreation. Romanesque orgies, that sort of thing.

  “What are you thinking?” Evelyn’s voice cuts through his reverie.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “I meant nothing as in, nothing I want to tell you about.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  The blue light from the pool plays across her face. Harland imagines her as a faded beauty in an underground theatre, her lips poised ahead of a soliloquy. Evelyn drains the last of her glass and says, “Do you ever feel guilty about what we’ve done? What we’re going to do?”

  “Does a lion feel guilty for devouring a zebra when it’s hungry? Does it apologise for being the superior animal? For having the strength and ambition to survive?”

  “I hardly think that controlling a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical monopoly is like an animal hunting for sustenance. No lion ever needed holiday homes in seventeen countries.”

  “True. Though I never did have much of a gift for metaphor. That’s Jack’s field. Good thing I have other, more practical talents.”

  Harland gives up on the cigar and stubs it into the ashtray beside him.

  ***

  Freya wakes to the sound of rattling computer keys. She watches his hands moving at nearly imperceptible speed, the clicking and clacking forming a musical rhythm that bounces frenetically around the room.

  “Jack?”

  He does not respond, merely continues stabbing the keys.

  She sits up in the bed, remembering the last time she woke up here. “Jack?” Her head feels like it’s been inside an industrial paint shaker. Her eyes are sore, and she can see in the mirror they are almost as red as her dishevelled hair. “How long was I out? Jack? Jack? Please don’t tell me you’ve gone all JD Salinger on me?”

  She slips off the bed and pads over to him, wraps her arms around him, not knowing or caring if this is the right thing to do. Still his hands move in their manic tap-dance across the keys. “Jack, you’re starting to creep me out.”

  He has the glazed, empty eyes of a geriatric junkie. Freya reaches her hand out to touch his face. Her fingers brush against his skin…it’s cold and clammy. She watches the words he is typing march across the page.

  had it coming, the nosy old bitch. Always sticking her beak in where it didn’t belong, like anywhere outside of a bucket of cleaning materials, for instance. Strutting around as though being a busy-bodied pervert made her some sort of Latina superhero. The way she gulped down that champagne (with my added secret ingredient) you’d think she’d never seen a glass of bubbly in her pathetic little life. She made the most ghastly coughing and belching sounds as she finally shuffled off this mortal coil. Sounded like an asthmatic puppy in a blender.

  Jack’s hand punches the last full stop and he slumps forward as though an invisible figure has struck the back of his head.

  “Mary, patron saint of motherfuckers, I thought I was supposed to be the damsel in distress here!” Freya shakes him. “Hey! Sleeping Beauty! Wake the fuck up!”

  Jack emits a primal grunt and his eyes snap open. “Freya?”

  “What the hell is this shit you’re writing?”

  His eyes squeeze tightly closed and then reopen again.

  “What?”

  “This! This! Fucking this right here!” Freya points at the page.

  Jack scans his eyes over it, his lips moving as he does so. “Jesus. That’s awful.”

  “It is! How can you be—?”

  “I mean, the use of simile…it’s atrocious. The pacing is all over the place…”

  “Jack! It’s awful because it’s about Maria!”

  “What?” Jack reads it again and rubs his eyes. He pulls the page out, rips it into pieces and throws them at the bin, where they cascade like tiny literary snowflakes. “There. It’s gone.”

  He leans back and looks at her, the air pregnant with a demand for explanation. “I don’t know where this stuff is coming from, Freya. And it’s getting worse. I can’t write anything else. Every time I sit down at the keyboard I just, I watch my hands start to move and then I…the rest of me… I disappear. When I come round again, the page is filled with stuff like that…th
is horrendous person talking about killing and…other things. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  He lapses into stillness, then with sudden and surprising speed he picks up the typewriter and hurls it across the room, where it smashes against the wall and sprays keys over the floor.

  “Just like the first time we met. How sweet,” Freya says sardonically. “Enough with the melodrama. We’ve got enough problems as it is. We should be looking for some answers, not redecorating your room.”

  Jack grabs a document folder from his desk and throws it on the bed. “How’s that for answers? And before you start interrogating me about my little peculiarities, maybe you’d like to tell me why I found you passed out near the Danger Room holding a syringe wrapped in a tea towel?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. There was a weird whistling noise coming from the Danger Room and it scrambled my circuitry. You know how you twist and contort when someone scratches fingernails down a blackboard? It felt like that blown through three-hundred-watt speakers directly into my brain.”

  “The syringe?”

  “I found it in the kitchen bin. I don’t know what’s in it or who put it there. If I could tell you any more than that, I would. Now, what the hell is in that folder?”

  “A picture tells slightly more than nine hundred and ninety-nine words, which often makes me question my career choice.”

  Freya takes up the folder and opens it on a photograph: a grotesque smear of steel and skin, shattered glass through blond and black and brown hair, blood streaked across asphalt, fingernails scratched against seatbelts.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In Daddy dearest’s private study. I borrowed his keycard.”

  No one in the photo is identifiable. Either because their faces are twisted away from the camera or because their features have been distorted like a Picasso left out in the rain. Freya fights the urge to puke and turns the picture over.

  The second shot is equally harrowing, but it’s of a girl slumped forward in the front seat of a green car, the other car in the accident, she supposes. Her dress is red, although this could be because it’s covered in blood. Her face is slammed against the dashboard, and her left hand is flung out the window towards the camera. From her wrist hangs a bracelet carrying a collection of silver charms.

  Freya drops the folder, rushes into Jack’s bathroom and expels the contents of her stomach into the sink in a fountain of reds, yellows and greens.

  Jack follows her in and places his hand on her shoulder, asking uselessly, “Are you okay?”

  Freya pukes again. An effective response, if a little indecorous. She runs the tap and rinses her mouth. Spits. “I am the exact fucking opposite of okay. What the fuck are those photos?”

  “I thought you might know something about it. It happened outside where you used to work, and you kept asking about the accident.”

  “The accident? Your brother’s? Those are photos from his accident?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “Val…” Freya whispers as she buries her head in her hands, her eyes spilling hot tears. “Jack. The girl in that photo was my friend Valerie. I’d recognise her piece of shit charm bracelet a mile under water. He killed her, Jack. Your fucking brother killed her.”

  “I know.” The words emerge from his mouth as if inscribed on tiny tombstones. A stream of curses runs through Freya’s head but she says, “You already knew…before this, didn’t you? This was the big Vincetti family secret. That their golden child killed a bunch of plebs? This is what no one would talk to me about, not even you?”

  “Freya, I’m—”

  “If the next word out of your mouth is ‘sorry’ it will be the last one you pronounce with your face intact. You knew that your brother had done this all along. The fact it was Valerie and her dad, did you know about that, too?”

  “I had my suspicions. But no, I didn’t know for sure until now, same as you.”

  “Jack, how could you hide this from me?”

  “I didn’t want to ruin…everything. I knew you were starting to understand that almost everything my family says about Elijah is a lie. They use him like Pygmalion’s statue, casting their own desires and dreams onto him, using him as a vessel for their own private delusions. Rosaline makes him out to be a charming Renaissance man, Harland claims him to be a genius, Evelyn portrays him as some sort of unimpeachable saint. Dead men tell no lies, but sleeping men nurture and protect them. I was surprised that you didn’t leave earlier, when you figured out how strange my family is…but I thought if you knew the truly horrible things that happened around here then you’d leave us. That you wouldn’t want to be here. Wouldn’t want to be with me.”

  Freya glares at him with a rancour that no one with a Y chromosome could ever hope to emulate. “How fucking dare you! You kept this from me because it would jeopardise your chances of getting laid?”

  “I wanted to know the details before I said anything. How would you have felt if I’d told you my early suspicions but I’d been wrong?” Jack stands in uneasy silence, withering in the red-hot glow of Freya’s fury. “Look, can we leave the imploring apologies and hopefully subsequent forgiveness ’til later? I haven’t shown you everything yet. Do you think you can bottle up that tempest for a bit?”

  “Do you think you could be a little more condescending?”

  “I’m sorry. Again. A hundred times. A thousand. I’ll pray with a rosary, say my Hail Marys, work in a soup kitchen, whatever I need to do to make penance. But first, could you please look at the rest of what’s in that folder?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. Do you understand that girl was like my sister? I gave up on everything after she died.”

  “I know. I get it. Really. But you need to see what I’ve found.”

  She nods, shoves some toothpaste on her finger and rubs it on her teeth to mute the acrid taste in her mouth. Rinses. Spits. Follows Jack back into his room.

  Freya picks up the folder and sits on the bed. She turns the photos over and inspects the documents beneath them. First, there’s a coroner’s report for the car crash. It’s been slashed and hacked with so much red marker pen it’s like blood strewn across a wall in a B-grade Japanese revenge film.

  Coroner’s report: 30 November ‘… alter paragraphs 1-4, 6-8 and 10. Reduce number of victims. Delete: John Doe, Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2. Omit Elijah Vincetti for transfer into alternate collision.’

  “They had the coroner’s report altered?”

  “Yes. And you can see why: paragraph seven.”

  Victim had a BAC of 0.19, also tested positive for cocaine (22 grams on his person, in left pants pocket) and phencyclidine.

  “I knew about some of this. Yvette told me. Didn’t realise Golden Boy was on PCP, though. Not so much touched by an angel as touched by angel dust. Falsifying documents like this…it’s obviously a perversion of justice.”

  “We’ve got everything we need,” says Jack. “Here. Call the cops.” He throws her his phone and her fingers hover above the keypad. Through the ceiling she can hear Rosaline’s soprano caterwaul a rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  “They’re my blood. I’m a Vincetti. I told you before, you can’t raise a hand against your own kin, the Fates forbid it. Even if I’ve loaded the gun, I can’t pull the trigger. It has to be you.”

  Rosaline’s voice reverberates, now with an impassioned version of “Going to the Chapel.” Freya puts the phone down.

  “I can’t, either. Not yet.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  She points upwards, towards the source of the song. “That. Her. I can’t bring the walls crashing down, not yet. I swear to God, Jack, if you knew her like I do, you’d understand. If we ruin this wedding, it will destroy her, and Rosaline’s already had one return trip to hell. She doesn
’t deserve another.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We wait until tomorrow night. They can have one last night of freedom before they spend the rest of their lives locked up in some minimum-security waterfront prison for rich white people. But we have to let Rosaline live out her little fantasy or it will tear her apart.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No. But I’m going with my gut. Normally it asks me to fill it with vodka and donuts, but this time I trust it.”

  The door flies open. Freya dives to cover up the documents, leaving her lying awkwardly across the bed, vainly attempting to look nonchalant. Rosaline’s halogen grin illuminates the room. She’s holding a tray of margaritas and couldn’t look more like she was auditioning for a home shopping ad if she tried. “Hey, you two! What are you doing locked away in here? Let’s get this party started!”

  “Sure thing!” says Jack as he covers the room in a few quick strides. He places his arm around Rosaline and says with a grin to match hers, “I’ll take one of those, soon-to-be-sis! Freya will be with us in a minute, I’ve asked her to read over a few pages of my manuscript for me. She’s going to need some time alone.” He guides Rosaline by the shoulders through a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and out the door.

  “Don’t be too long!” Her voice trails off.

  Thank you! mouths Freya as Jack closes the door behind him.

  Freya can’t help herself. She has to look one last time. With feeble fingers she locates the photo of Valerie, gazing once more at the red dress Val had loved so much she could have written a thesis about it. She slips the photo back into the folder and is about to close it when she spies Elijah’s face peering out from one of the other shots. She pulls it out. It’s taken from a distance, so it’s hard to make out the car’s other occupants, but it’s clearly Elijah who’s slumped behind the wheel. It’s difficult to be certain, given the pixellation and poor focus, but she could swear that through all the blood and shattered glass, Elijah is treating her to a charming, million-dollar smile.