Against Nature

by Casey Barrett

  “Where were you the other night? You never called.”

  “There was a storm up here,” she said. “Blew the power out for a couple hours. I checked into an inn nearby, but it didn’t have a generator.” I heard her exhale into the phone, pictured the angry shake of that beautiful head. “Poor Carl,” she said. “He was a good man. And Uli, I need to reach her.”

  “Did you manage to get back into the house to get your things?”

  “For a supervised few minutes,” she said. “When I got back Susie had called the cops. There were a couple uniforms waiting with her. One of them finally convinced her to let me in so I could pack a bag.”

  “Any chance you can get back in there when she’s gone?”

  “That would be breaking and entering.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be changing the locks, but I could probably find a way back inside. Why?”

  “It would be helpful to take a look at Wingate’s laptop.”

  “We might not need the computer itself,” she said. “I’m sure Victor had everything saved in his email, or in the Cloud. He was fastidious about backing up his work. I might have another way in.”

  “Which is? You know his passwords?”

  “No. I’ll tell you later. But you’re right. A sweep of the house might turn something up. Until you got there, I could barely bring myself to set foot inside. I just sat on the porch staring into the trees.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t even let me take Filly. That dog was mine as much as Victor’s, and Susie refused, said her brother had left her everything. The poor pup was crying by the door when I left.”

  “Listen, why don’t you come back down to the city?” I asked. “Just for the time being. Staying alone up there in some inn can’t be healthy. You can stay with me. There’s plenty for us to look into here. We can head back up together and get into the house in a few days. And we’ll bring Filly with us, I promise.”

  I listened to her breathe in my ear. Then she whispered, as if someone was listening in the next room, “First they killed Victor. And now they killed Carl.”

  Chapter 10

  I arrived at the pool an hour later, strapped on the cap and goggles for the first time in too long. Old lane-mates welcomed me back warily. I wondered if any had seen the news today, or if it was just the old stuff—the torture and the multiple murder scenes I’d been a part of—that spooked them. I offered empty smiles, kept the smoked goggles over my eyes. At least I didn’t smell like booze. The sense memory swallowed me back in. It was ingrained down to the soul, the smell and taste and texture of an indoor pool, something I could never shed. I kept my head down and tried to make the intervals. It was what I needed: to be released into the swirl of a morning workout, lost in the present tense as the seconds swept away on the clock.

  Before she hung up, Cass agreed to return to the city. I told her to wait until dawn, try to get a few hours of sleep. She said that wasn’t happening, she might as well leave now. The thought of her driving sleepless down the blurred line of the Thruway worried me.

  Maybe killing the writer and the source was enough. Others would hear about it, but, with those two freshly dead, would anyone have the courage to come forward? They had been playing a dangerous game. For every high-profile scandal and public shaming of an athlete who crossed the line and cheated in pursuit of success, there were scores of others who did it without detection. Hall of Fame careers, public hero worship, stadiums built on the backs of brands they helped create. It was in the best interest of many powerful folks to keep these things quiet. Lawsuits were a given. That was the easiest weapon, and often the most effective. When someone with less financial might wrote something you didn’t like, use libel law as a weapon. Sue their ass. Even if you were guaranteed to lose, that wasn’t the point. You’ll injure the erstwhile whistle-blower financially, and you can crow about defending your proclaimed innocence. I wondered if Wingate had already been threatened with that prospect. Maybe he was so blinded by his righteous reporting that he declared it wouldn’t stop him. Maybe he already had proof.

  Accusations of doping went on daily, in every sport, across every country. It was a parlor game by this point. Rivals point fingers back and forth, certain countries are more suspicious than others, but it was mostly impotent outrage. It usually amounted to nothing. There was too much at stake for it ever to stop. Those enhanced athletes were part of an economy and a culture that would not be permitted to fail. As long as fans delighted in seeing outsized achievements, there would be those committed to delivering them—through any means necessary. Notions of cleanliness and fair play were quaint in the end. Lock the doors to a Hall, threaten lifetime bans, it would never be enough. Not with all the money up for grabs, not when the world would forever hunger to witness eye-popping performance. Money, I knew, was only part of it. It motivated, of course, but as much as standing up and doing something with your body that had never been done before, by any human in history? No, the ego that drove athletes could never be measured by any dollar amount. The same went for the coaches and the doctors and the team owners that all prospered from that performance.

  I remembered a story about the soaring value of sports franchises not long ago. It seemed there was no better investment on earth, for those with a couple hundred million to spend prior to the year 2000. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the value of those teams—even loser franchises that rarely made the play-offs—was rising well over a billion dollars. It came down to eyeballs and the ultimate value of seeing something live. The only time the suckers on the couch were willing to watch a commercial was during a live competition. The rest of the world’s small-screen entertainments were scheduled at whim, but not sports. Watching athletes play their games, live, that was the highest currency there was on television. Combine that with the almighty athlete ego. There was only one sin left: getting caught.

  An hour later I touched the wall for the last time and removed my goggles and listened to my heart hammering through my chest. I took my pulse, found it soaring over 180, worried about cardiac arrest. I climbed from the pool and staggered to a bench and sat slumped over with my elbows on my knees. Water dripped from my face and pooled at my feet. The other swimmers shuffled past to the locker rooms, giving me a wide berth. I sat there air-drying, listening to my heart settle, until I heard them clearing out, headed for offices or airports or God knows where. Then I limped to my clothes, stripped and changed, and wondered if I felt better or worse than before.

  Outside, the blossoms were bursting. The leaves were speckled with night rain, the sky a soft blue streaked with pink. It was the time of year when the city was forgiven again. After the months of freeze and hunched punishment, pressing against winter winds and bad spirits, when everyone contemplated flight to warmer, saner ways of life, finally there was reprieve. We all fell for it, every time. Spring in New York—it’s an illusion of a season, one that may last no more than a week, before the oppressions of summer take over. I even caught smiles on the sidewalk. Amnesiac fools slipping into light coats with a lighter step as they skipped down to the subway and off to the same cubicles.

  I told myself to savor the brief bliss. Circling Gramercy Park, I stopped and admired the blooming patches of yellow tulips erupting from tree stands in formations. Dogs pulled at leashes and sprayed them before being yanked away by owners. Behind the iron gates of the park, gardens flowered while the old and the rich lingered on benches with the Times spread before them. Strollers rolled past carrying children no longer zipped in coats and sealed like contraband. It was a time of fresh starts, of forgetting, but only for the foolish. As I turned on Third Avenue, I confronted a newspaper stand outside a green grocer. My spring reverie slipped away on a breeze. There was the headline horror:

  STAFF OF DEATH, read the Post.

  IMPALED, said the less-clever Daily News.

  I kept walking. I’d learne
d to ignore the tabloids whenever I was a recurring character. A year and a half ago I made a series of covers, had my fifteen minutes in the darkest of ways. The McKay case was now a part of the New York roll call of scandal known by shorthand: the “Preppy Murder,” the “Central Park Jogger,” the “Mob Cops,” the “Millionaire Madam.” They were the stories that revealed the sinful undercurrents of the city, and just as much, the unique hunger of New Yorkers for a certain kind of high-profile cruelty. Money and power and privilege, rough sex and lurid violence, madness that cracked open into the light with that special resonant something. The McKay case joined the pantheon recognized as the “Sicko Swimmer.” Dateline and 20/20 did segments on it. Law & Order: SVU did the requisite ripped-from-the-headlines episode based upon it. And then it drifted away, leaving the characters destroyed in its wake, remembered by the rest at dinner parties, preserved for posterity on Wikipedia and true-crime compilations.

  Maybe this would be another. Or maybe it would lack that sticky ingredient that those master story chefs at the Post were so brilliant at sniffing out. Aside from the murder weapon—and my presence on the scene—it looked on the surface like another bar robbery gone wrong. Carl Kruger’s backstory would raise the dial, but he wasn’t the only trans bar owner in town, and I wondered if his background would even come out. Who was I kidding? The broad strokes of his past were a Google away. This one could unravel all over again. I wanted no part of it.

  A block from home I spotted Cass’s Land Cruiser parked on the corner. I was still incredulous that she traded in the old Benz, winter roads or not. It was more proof of the way she shed her city life, her life with me. No longer the Downtown dominatrix and detective sidekick, Cass had settled into her quiet country idyll, in love, a hundred miles and a universe away. But then her lover went over those falls, and now she was back. I smiled to myself. The great magnet of Manhattan will always pull you back.

  I saw her waiting in front of my place. She leaned against the gate along my stoop and placed her Parliament between her lips. She blew smoke at the sidewalk and did not look up. She was dressed in jeans, black hoodie, her style careless, a long way from her curated city look. Her straight black hair was tied back in a ponytail, setting off her sharp profile. She was a woman rarely without makeup. I noted her exposed beauty without it. She looked less severe, more vulnerable. Cass took a final drag, lifted her chin as she flicked it into the street, and turned to me.

  “’Bout time,” she said.

  “Went for a swim.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You eaten?” I asked.

  “Not hungry.”

  I remembered her diet of energy bars, coffee, and wine. I’d never seen her ingest anything else, aside from the endless string of cigarettes. I stepped past and opened the gate, unlocked the door, and welcomed her in. She stopped in the doorway, scanned the sparse room. On her last visit she lay dying on the floor, a bullet in her stomach, two dead Ukrainians around us. The ghosts still lingered.

  “Place feels different without Elvis,” she said.

  “I know, I’m thinking of moving.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  I shrugged. Went to the kitchen and filled a kettle with tap water and turned on a burner. I opened the fridge and took out the coffee, poured a half-dozen scoops into the French press. She joined me in the kitchen, peeked over my shoulder, and scanned the countertops.

  “No bourbon in sight,” she said. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Been cutting back.”

  “Good for you.”

  She turned and paced the apartment. I could sense her reenacting the past violence. Cass had flatlined in the ambulance that day. They managed to restart her heart, but that had marked the end of our partnership. Now we were even, or so I thought. Years before I’d taken a bullet for her too.

  We didn’t speak as I let her absorb the remembered horror. When you’ve lain in a pool of your own blood and felt life seeping away, you know there is little to say. It’s a memory that will forever feel disembodied, as if it happened to someone else. You can look down at the spot where it happened and sense that other self there on the ground dying, and you’ll realize that past, present, and future are all delusions, and self, the grandest illusion of all. Cass stood over that spot by the door and looked at it for a long while, until the kettle whistled and she shuddered out of herself.

  “Milk, please,” she said. “No sugar.”

  I poured our coffees and settled onto the couch and waited until she was ready. Set out an ashtray for her. She came over and lowered herself into the leather chair that was always hers; I hadn’t sat in it since. Cass raised the mug and took a sip, set it down, and sparked a cigarette.

  “How does it feel to have me back?” she asked through a plume of smoke.

  “Feels good.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “It’s a curse,” she said. She looked back over at that spot. “It’s good to see you, Duck, it is, just not here. I agree . . . I think you should move. I don’t know how you’ve been able to stay.”

  “I haven’t really been spending much time here,” I told her. “Not since Elvis died.”

  “And where have you been staying?” She ground out her cigarette with an arched eyebrow.

  “I was seeing someone.” I pictured Juliette and Stevie, the three of us seated around their dining table like an actual family. “I was staying at her place.”

  She smiled with her eyes over her raised mug. “I’m glad. You needed someone to bring you out of all that.” She gave another glance over at the spot by the door. “We both did.”

  “Yeah, well, now that’s over and I’m back to this humble, haunted abode.”

  “How long ago did you break up?”

  “When you called,” I said.

  “Oh, Duck, really? That is ridiculous.”

  I pushed myself up, went back to the fridge. I stared at the empty shelves and longed for a nice long row of green Beck’s bottles. I closed it and poured myself water from the tap.

  “She saw your text before I did,” I said. “She took it the wrong way and threw me out.”

  Cass shook her head, lit another cigarette. “You need to fix that shit,” she said. “Want me to talk to her?”

  “No thanks.”

  She stood and went back to the spot by the door, transfixed by the memory of her near death. I pictured her there, bleeding, with eyes resigned, the gunshots echoing through the small room.

  “It wasn’t easy to get all your blood out of the floorboards,” I said.

  “Is that why you stayed?” she asked. “To keep the trace of me left behind?”

  Chapter 11

  We were sitting at the counter of Coffee Shop on Union Square, waiting on my California wrap, and Cass was talking about what happens to email when you die. It used to be old letters in a trunk that gave voice to the dead as survivors picked through past correspondence. Now it was the mountain of data left behind, and it wasn’t as easy as opening a trunk to find it. If you were without the passwords of the dead, Google and the other guardians of the gates required a long, legal process of discovery.

  “I need to get into his Gmail,” said Cass. “His iCloud too. There might be some drafts or transcripts saved to his desktop, but Victor was diligent about sending his work to himself. He said it was the best way not to lose anything.”

  “You never asked to see some of what he was working on?”

  She gave me a look. “No, Duck, I didn’t.”

  Secrets, I remembered, were her lifeblood. The Cass I remembered demanded souls lay bare, be it kinky desires or daily communications. I couldn’t imagine her alone in that house and not indulging her curiosity. I also couldn’t conceive of any man hiding things from her. Not when she set those dark eyes upon him and asked . . . for anything.

  The waitress brought my food, grapefruit juice, and more coffee. She refilled Cass’s wa
ter glass, asked again if there was anything she could get her. Cass ignored her. She was a tall redhead with translucent, lightly freckled skin and high, sharp hips that jutted over a pair of low-cut jeans. An expanse of pale bone and belly was offered at the midriff. A small chest without a bra pressed beneath a white t-shirt. Her green eyes sparkled with an innocence that wouldn’t last long. Coffee Shop was a long way from the lower-case version of your classic greasy spoon. Situated on the western border of Union Square, it was more Brazilian bistro, staffed by aspiring models and actresses forever on audition. The décor was Art Deco, dominated by a curving bar through the center, where assorted cute young things lingered in every eye line. It was open seventeen hours a day, and full for most of them.

  The waitress retreated, but not before an appraising glance in my direction. Interested by association, I’d forgotten how much attention was refracted my way anytime I sat with my partner. Cass pretended not to notice.

  “Did Susie know what her brother was working on?” I asked.

  “All Susie knows is that big brother wasn’t floating her the way he used to. She blamed me for it. The fact is Victor was almost broke. He worried all the time about what was going to happen to his sister when he couldn’t support her anymore. Not that she showed any gratitude.”

  “Is there any chance she could have been involved?”

  She shook her head. “I thought so at first. The woman’s a full-on nutter. You should see how she lives down at the place in Bearsville. She needs to be committed, but Victor would never consider it. He paid for her doctors and all her meds and basic living expenses, but insisted that she was better off in the family home. Susie Wingate might be capable of plenty of fucked-up shit, but she didn’t kill her brother. I checked—she was drinking at Landau’s in Woodstock all day on the afternoon Victor died. I was told she got there at noon. A bartender drove her home when they closed at ten. She was passed out in her living room when the cops went by the next morning to break the news.”