Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and asked me, “What are you talking about? Who’s Fleischer?”

  “What do you mean, who’s Fleischer? I was worried sick about you!”

  We went into the living room and she pulled on a T-shirt. She invited me to sit on the couch and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “Oh, yes, Fleischer,” she said, “the French guy, right? Got any cigarettes?”

  “How can you not remember him?” I asked her. “He’s not French, he’s American, but you met him in France. What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  “Why would I remember him? And what if I hadn’t been alone? You can’t just come barging in like this whenever you want … I thought I’d made that clear.”

  “Yes, you did, but under the circumstances—”

  “What circumstances?”

  “A couple of hours ago I gave your number to Fleischer, and I was—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m very sorry, I shouldn’t have, but he said something, I lost my temper—”

  “You did what?”

  And it was right then, as she was yelling at me and cursing me, that I realized what I’d actually wanted from that story ever since I stumbled upon it. It had nothing to do with avenging Hale, because he was dead anyway, and it wasn’t about punishing Fleischer, who was much too powerful for a guy like me. If I’d really wanted to hurt him, physically I mean, I’d probably have tried to do it right there and then, in the bar, when we were face to face. Maybe in the beginning I wanted to, but later it morphed into something else.

  It was all about her, about Simone, from the very beginning. All that time I just wanted to figure out why she’d chosen Fleischer, back then in Paris. Okay, he was rich, but she was hardly the starving little match girl, pressing her nose against a frozen windowpane. So why did such a woman, beautiful, smart, educated, choose a dangerous predator like Fleischer, instead of a decent young man like Hale, who was head over heels in love with her? Why did she go for the bad guy? Why do women let the villains go on spreading their seed all over the world, while the good guys die lonely, defeated, and miserable? And she herself ended up rotting away in a shithole, poor and desperate, trading her body for money. I thought that maybe I could turn the clock back and make her admit that she’d made a huge mistake back then, that she’d chosen the wrong guy, and in the process destroyed the man who had loved her so much.

  But she went crazy. It wasn’t just her language, but she also tried to hurt me. She bit and scratched at me, like a mad cat, and attacked me with a knife she’d grabbed from the kitchen. I tried to calm her down. At one point, I guess, I held her wrists and immobilized her. Finally, she stopped screaming at me and asked me to leave. I wanted to listen to her, and I’d have left, but, as weird as it sounds, I didn’t know how to get home from there. I was in Woodhaven, a place I didn’t know at all, and it would have taken me two hours to get home on foot. I’d run out of money and I didn’t even have bus fare. I didn’t think it would do any harm if I stayed there for another few hours and left in the morning.

  I tried to explain it to her, but she started yelling again and asked me to leave immediately. She told me she would call the cops if I didn’t. So I tied her up with the telephone cord, trying not to hurt her, and put her in the bathtub. I was as gentle as possible. She stopped struggling. She just cried quietly and before I gagged her, she asked me not to kill her. I tried to calm her down, told her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, and that I just really needed to take a nap, because I was exhausted and confused. So I left her in the bathtub, and slept like a log on the couch until morning.

  When I woke up, at around six o’clock, she was dead.

  The first thing I noticed was the blood. It was all over my face, hands, and jacket, and shirt—big, red, sticky stains. My whole body ached, as if I had the flu. I needed to go to the toilet, so I went into the bathroom and found her lying in the tub in a pool of congealing blood. I checked for a pulse and realized she must have been dead for quite a while, because her skin was ice-cold.

  I washed her body with the shower, then carried her out to the living room and laid her face up on the floor. I removed the gag, untied her, and examined her. There were four or five deep wounds to her chest. They looked like parted ruby-red lips. I went back into the bathroom and discovered a carving knife by the toilet. The blade and handle were covered in blood. After I fell asleep, somebody must have got inside, killed her, and then vanished. She’d been tied up and gagged, so she couldn’t defend herself or cry for help.

  I was in trouble. The old lady who lived on the second floor had seen my face, and she could also recognize my voice: “Number Four, step forward!” “Oh, my God, yes, it’s him, I’m sure of it.” “Thanks, ma’am, you’ve been a great help.” The neighbors must have heard her screaming during our argument, too.

  It was an easy enough task for the police to re-enact the circumstances of the killing. A guy had arrived late at night, they’d had an argument, probably about money, because he was broke, and the guy had flown off the handle, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and stabbed her to death. But I didn’t do it, sir. You know, Jack, that’s what they all say. I mean, even when they’re caught at the scene, they still claim they’re innocent, all of them. Can you afford an attorney? I see … In that case, you’ll have a court-appointed one. Well, he won’t exactly be Johnnie Cochran, if you catch my drift, but at least you’ll have a lawyer. Listen, I don’t think you planned any of it, Jack. Let me guess, heat of the moment, right? Want a smoke? Here it goes … Maybe she said something funny and you just lost your temper. I can understand that, I’m a man too, and sometimes women know exactly how to make you crazy …”

  Over the next two hours, I washed, scrubbed the blood out of my clothes, and then searched her apartment, rummaging through her kinky lingerie, dildos, cosmetics, wigs, other bits and pieces, looking for the notebooks. In a purse, I found a Kentucky driver’s license in the name of Margaret Lucas, five-six, brown eyes. It was her face in the picture, there was no doubt about that. She’d probably changed her name after she got to the States. To Margaret Lucas, the same name the old lady upstairs had used. I didn’t find Hale’s diary and I told myself that she’d destroyed it.

  I’m not sure what I did for the next few hours, but at one point I noticed that the ashtray on the coffee table was overflowing with butts and my second pack of cigarettes was almost finished. It got dark, and a light rain was lashing at the window. I’d been sitting there for the entire day, naked, two paces from her dead body.

  I unpegged my clothes from the washing line over the tub and got dressed. I got that weird feeling that I was seeing everything from above, like I was floating next to the ceiling. Every single detail became dazzlingly clear. As if through a huge magnifying glass, I saw a splotch on the wall and below it a Japanese rose in a ceramic pot; I saw the red tattoo of a heart on her shaved pubis, a cigarette burn on the back of the couch, a single green shoe lying upside down by the closed door to the balcony, a bumblebee lost above the surface of that strange new planet, gingerly swishing its antennae.

  The guy sitting in the middle of the room wasn’t me anymore. He was nothing but a stranger I vaguely knew, and the dead woman on the floor wasn’t Simone, but a middle-aged hooker I’d never met. That guy was in trouble, and soon he was going to be the prime suspect in a murder case, but that was none of my business. Even the story about Paris had gradually vanished from my mind, piece by piece, like props from a theatre set being dismantled and carried offstage once the show is over. I was far away from all of it, and nothing mattered.

  Now the guy in trouble goes into the bathroom, turns on the lights and shaves carefully, using the double-blade razor he found on the glass shelf under the mirror. Then he takes the dead woman’s cellphone from her bag, switches it on, and calls the cops, telling them in short what has happened. He waits by the window, pale and focused, smoking one last cigarette. About five minu
tes later, he hears the sirens in the distance, and he watches the lights of the white-and-blue cars rushing to the scene.

  He goes to the door, unlocks it, and steps outside, onto the landing. When he sees the cops darting up the stairs, he takes a step backwards, putting his hands on his head. The first uniformed officer is very young, tall and as thin as a rake, with a sandy-colored mustache. He points his gun at the guy and yells, “NYPD, put your hands up, now! Keep your hands where I can see them and kneel down on the floor, now, now! Don’t move! Don’t make any move!”

  The guy kneels down in the hallway, says, “The body is in the living room,” and stretches face down on the floor. I can sense his relief as the young cop thrusts his gun back into the holster and handcuffs him. The officers—there are five or six of them now, plus a couple of paramedics, they’re milling all over the place like a swarm of big blue-and-green ants—turn on all the lights in the apartment and start doing their job, mumbling into the walkie-talkies hooked to their shoulders. I know that soon they’ll be taking him away in one of their cars, and they’ll put the dead woman’s body in a rubber sack and take it to the morgue, where she’ll be finally reunited with Abraham Hale. But I’ll stay here for a while, silent and still, observing all the incredible details I’d never noticed before, like the bumblebee, which is now up on the ceiling, creeping slowly toward the light fitting, in the hope of finding shelter.

  fourteen

  Jack Bertrand’s diary (5)

  DR. LARRY WALKER, the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, had the air of a kid in elementary school who had just solved a really difficult problem and couldn’t wait to share the news with the teacher. He’d arranged all his previous notes on the desk, in perfect order, but this time there was no voice recorder.

  I leaned against the window frame and looked outside through the knitted wire stretched over the glass pane. There wasn’t much to see: the hospital courtyard’s pavement, whitewashed by the morning light, the concrete blocks, and the high chain-link walls that encircled the buildings like a trap set for a giant. I’d been gazing at that view many times during my talks with Walker.

  His office had recently been redecorated and still smelled of bleach and paint. It was furnished plainly: a desk opposite the door, where he sat during our talks, a couple of shelves filled with heavy books, and a leather-upholstered couch with two twin chairs, their legs bolted in the floor. The walls were adorned with all kinds of drawings and paintings, probably the works of his inmate patients. Most of them were painted in dark colours and depicted landscapes devoid of any human presence, while others were nothing but abstract splotches of paint with no apparent meaning.

  “Doc, can I ask you something?”

  “Please.”

  “I heard that a nurse was attacked by a patient this morning, while she was trying to feed him. He ripped her ear off with his teeth.”

  “Yes, unfortunately it’s true.”

  “Do you really think that I belong here, I mean, to a place like this? I’m obviously not crazy.”

  “We don’t use that word here.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Jack, you’ve been committed to this hospital as a result of an assessment made by three experts and a legal ruling handed down by a judge. It is neither my duty nor my aim to decide if that sentence was right or wrong. I’m sure you understand that.”

  “Then why are you wasting your time talking to me, if it’s not going to change anything?”

  “Because I want to figure out why you did what you did.”

  I had the feeling that we understood each other less and less. I’d been trying in vain over the past few weeks to explain to him that maybe I didn’t know much about myself and about the real reasons I was there—how could someone claim to know everything about himself, anyway?—but that at least I’d been totally open and sincere with him.

  “Please listen to me carefully,” he said.

  “Sure, doc, I always do.”

  “Jack, I’ve carefully read through everything you’ve given me over the past two months, every single word. Now I want to stress a couple of things that have intrigued me. Where were you born and raised, Jack?”

  “Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey. That’s down the shore. I thought you already knew that. I presume it’s in the file.”

  “Right, but you’ve never mentioned your hometown or the names of your parents in your notes or during our talks. Nobody called you and you didn’t call anybody. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No, I’m an only child.”

  “I see, and what about your parents?”

  “What about them? They died, both of them.”

  “When and how did they die?”

  “When and how did they die? Well, mom passed away when I was eight; I barely remember her. And my old man died from a heart attack ten years ago, in eighty-eight, in August. It’s all I know, I didn’t attend the funeral. Honestly, we weren’t all that close. He was a drunk and used to kick the tar out of me when I was a kid. Why do you ask?”

  I wanted to smoke, but after begging him a couple of times to bring me some cigarettes, I’d given up trying. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the hospital and nobody could break the rules under any circumstances. Apparently, there were some guards who made hay smuggling all kinds of things inside, but my commissary deposit was empty.

  “Bear with me … What were their names?”

  “This is really weird. John and Nancy Bertrand.”

  “And you don’t have any other relatives?”

  “Maybe I do. What’s the catch, doc?”

  “You’ve never mentioned them in your story either. Now, I have a couple of questions regarding that woman, Margaret Lucas.”

  “That was an assumed name. I’d prefer it if you called her by her real name, Simone Duchamp, if you don’t mind.”

  “You told me that the two of you met when she came to Jackson Heights that Friday afternoon, looking for the guy who had died, Abraham Hale. You described her as an elegant, classy woman, with an attractive French accent and good manners. But during your second meeting, when you went to her place in Woodhaven, it seems that she made a completely different impression on you: she was now a common middle-aged prostitute, and what was more, her accent had almost vanished, along with her manners.”

  “Well, she was ill that evening, and maybe—”

  “No, Jack, it was like you were describing a different person.”

  “I just told you what I saw and thought. What do you want from me?”

  “Margaret Lucas was her real name, Jack. She was forty-one, born and raised in Rowan County, Kentucky. Back in the late eighties, she was a minor movie actress here in New York. You met her about a year ago.”

  At first, I didn’t get it. Was that some kind of a test? Sometimes, I felt like he was just messing with my mind for sport.

  “No, doc, I met her that Friday, like I told you. I’ve never lied to you, not once. I’ve got nothing to lose. Why would I lie to you?”

  A nurse entered the office and handed him a file. She was tall, skinny, and stared at me coldly. Her eyes were light blue, almost transparent, like a husky’s. I wondered if there was something connected to my case in that blue file. But the doctor just signed a sheet and returned the papers. After she left, he went on.

  “I’m not saying that you’re lying to me, Jack. It’s just … Well, I’m sure we’ll put all the pieces together. Now, about the meeting with Mr. Fleischer … What you told me isn’t exactly what really happened that evening.”

  “He told you a different story? I’m not surprised. Do you believe him?”

  “I tried to meet him, but I understand he went to Maine for a couple of months. I did manage to speak with Walter, his bodyguard, who was an eyewitness to the whole scene, and he told me what he’d told the police: that one evening you darted in front of the car out of the blue, shouting something about a French woman called Simone. You asked Mr. Fleischer to leave her alone, and th
en, after he got out of the car to see what was going on, you tried to stab him with a knife. If Walter had managed to immobilize you and to call the police, he’d have saved that woman’s life. But he couldn’t, and you ran off. Later that same night, you went to Woodhaven, argued with Ms. Lucas, and killed her. You stabbed her five times and watched her die. By the way, Mr. Fleischer recognized you.”

  “Fleischer is lying and—”

  “Jack, I don’t need to hear your side anymore, because I know what happened, from beginning to end. What I’m trying to do is to make you understand what actually happened, why it happened, and how it was possible for it to happen. I’m a doctor, not a cop. To me, you’re not a violent murderer, but a patient who needs help.”

  “Thanks, I really appreciate that, but—”

  “Listen to me, Jack! Let’s go back to the beginning, when you told me about how they found Hale’s body in Jackson Heights. You weren’t there, so how could you have known so many precise details about the scene? About how he was lying naked on the floor, about the glasses on the coffee table, one of them smeared with lipstick, suggesting that a woman had come over before his death … Do you understand? You couldn’t have known these details if you hadn’t been there, at the scene.”

  “Obviously, I wasn’t there that morning, but I went by two days later. I must have read a police report at the office or else somebody described the scene to me, I can’t remember exactly. Why’s that so important?”

  “I’ll tell you why, Jack: because they didn’t find a dead man in that apartment, stuffed with sleeping pills. There’s no such case in progress at the office of the Queens County Public Administrator, and there’s no corpse in the morgue on Jamaica Avenue with such a name on the tag. That morning, two officers came to your apartment, because one of your neighbors had called them. She’d noticed that you’d failed to move your car and obey the parking rules, which had never happened before, and you weren’t answering the door. You told them you had the flu, moved your car, and then they left.”