Speak for yourself.
After Pierce took his slices and left, I started stacking up the plates and empty beer cans to bring into the kitchen.
“I’ll clean up,” Krull said. “You should relax. You’ve had a tough day.”
For the first time since I’d come home, I remembered my phone conversation with the stranger from Starbucks. I was sure Yale was right—I was dealing with a low-aiming obsessed fan who realized it was easier to get responses from Good Samaritans than from movie stars. Why had I called him, anyway?
Right now, what he’d said to me seemed irrelevant—even a little embarrassing, like those obscene calls I used to get when my full first name was listed in the book. “Hi, Samantha. Are you naked right now?”
“My day hasn’t been that tough,” I said.
“Two fights? One involving a poisonous substance? That’s more action than I’ve seen, and I’m the cop.”
I smiled.
“Sit on the couch. Read. I got you that New Yorker on my way home from work.” He grabbed the magazine from atop the dinette near the window, and handed it to me.
“I forgot about that,” I said. There was supposedly an item in the “Talk of the Town” column about the block-long ticket lines for Shakespearean Idol. Roland had even been interviewed for it—the first and last time the Space would make the New Yorker, I was certain.
I opened the magazine as Krull took the plates into the kitchen, and turned to “Talk of the Town.” Sure enough, the Shakespearean Idol piece, “A Winner’s Tale,” was right up front, following an editorial about the upcoming September 11 anniversary, titled, “Are We Any Safer?”
“Did you read this?” I said.
“Didn’t get a chance,” Krull called out from the kitchen. “Pierce was waiting outside the door when I got home.” After a short pause, he said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes, I do, but he’ll get over it.”
Krull walked back into the room. “Huh?”
“Weren’t you going to ask me if I thought you were too hard on Zachary?”
“No.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I’m still not psychic, huh?”
“I was going to ask if you meant what you said about boys—men—being naturally more violent?”
“Well…yeah, of course.”
“Look at me, Sam. I’m a man.” I glanced up at him. His eyes locked onto mine, as if he were offering me some sort of challenge. “Do you think violence is a part of my DNA?”
“If it is,” I said slowly, “you’re obviously able to fight against it.”
He sat next to me on the couch.
I heard myself say, “You know what else is supposed to be hardwired into male DNA?”
“What?”
“The urge to sleep with many different women in order to propagate the species.” I stared into his eyes. “You fight against that, don’t you?”
He moved a little closer.
“Don’t you?”
Krull kissed me gently on the mouth. It was like a sip of cold water after a long, draining run, and I wanted more. I wanted the whole bottle. “What urges do women have?” he said.
“Well.” I kissed his face, trailed my fingers through his thick, clean hair. “There’s the urge to get pregnant.”
“That’s a pretty serious urge.” Krull’s voice hummed into the back of my neck, spreading a tingling warmth throughout my body, and as he scooped me up in his arms and carried me into the bedroom, I thought, You never answered my previous question, but who gives a damn?
We made love like two people who would never leave each other.
“A Winner’s Tale” started out with an anecdote about a nineteen-year-old girl from New Jersey who had seen the show a hundred times. I had met this girl, of course—sold her at least fifty of those tickets. Her name was Tabitha Meeks, and she was big and chesty, with dyed black hair and an entire wardrobe of billowing black gauze. She spoke very softly for someone so large, and her clothes seemed not so much a fashion statement as an effort to disappear, to fade into the darkness of the theater once the houselights went down.
But in this article, which I read in bed while Krull finished in the kitchen, she came across as a different person—the media-savvy doppelgänger of the Tabitha I knew. She repeatedly called the reporter honeychild (as in, “Honeychild, I sniffed this show out as a hit from day one!”), used expressions like boffo and claimed a “special friendship” with Corky, Juliana and the whole “SI family.”
While the accompanying illustration was a caricature of Corky, belting out a number in front of an arm-waving throng, Tabitha was the article’s true star. “Ms. Meeks opens her pocketbook and produces a bumper sticker she’s made herself,” the last paragraph read. “In hot-pink letters against a solid-gold background is the slogan she calls the ’Keep on Truckin” of the new millennium: ’Corky and Juliana: ‘Til Death.’”
“Unbelievable.”
“What’s unbelievable?” said Krull, who had a way of sneaking into rooms so quietly, it was almost as if he’d materialized out of nowhere. It was a habit he’d picked up as a uniformed cop, sneaking into meth labs, and it never failed to give me palpitations.
“Jeez, ninja lawman, try clearing your throat sometime.”
“Sorry.” He was standing over me wearing his boxers and a gray NYPD T-shirt spattered with sink water. I thought about him the previous night, absent for hours and then wet from the rain.
I exhaled. “This fan from the theater, Tabitha? She’s in this article and she sounds so…different.”
“Maybe she was misquoted.”
“The New Yorker would never misquote someone,” I said. “Especially someone saying things like honeychild and boffo. That’s grounds for a lawsuit.”
Krull shrugged his shoulders, then pulled off his shirt. “Maybe you don’t know this fan as well as you thought you did.”
I looked at him. “Maybe not.”
He slipped into bed beside me. “Are you still reading or do you mind if I turn off the light?”
“You can turn it off…. John?”
“Mmm-hmm?”
Where were you last night? Ask now. It’s easier in the dark. “Where…Was Marla really cheating on her fiancé?”
The question hung in the room for what seemed like an unnaturally long time. I listened to the hum of the air conditioner, wondering if Krull hadn’t fallen asleep, until finally, he said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, it sounded like everyone—”
“She kept a journal,” said Krull. “And…I’m sorry, Sam. I really don’t want to talk about her. I can’t.”
I heard a crash in the living room and jumped a little, even though I knew it was only the massive cat, landing on the floor. Predictably, the thump of his paws moved closer and closer to our room, like something out of a monster movie. “He’s late,” I said.
“I gave him more pizza crust when I was cleaning up. He must’ve just finished.”
When he reached our bed, Jake jumped up on the sheet covering my stomach and knocked the breath out of me.
Then he stood up and began to knead the area with all four paws—something cats supposedly do when they’ve been separated from their mothers too early.
Jake did this deliberately enough so that his needly claws pierced the sheet and dug into my skin. This was something of a nightly ritual, but that didn’t make it any less irritating. Sydney—who wasn’t above analyzing anyone, even a cat—had become claw fodder herself during a visit the previous year, and determined it was “an orphan’s revenge against female authority figures.”
Finally, Jake completed the ritual and collapsed. I gasped. “You might want to ease up on the pizza crusts.”
Krull said, “He’s just big boned.”
“Like a woolly mammoth is big boned.”
“I love you, you know.”
I turned my head, watched his face. He was staring at the ceiling in a way that reminded me of someone floatin
g on his back in the middle of the ocean, looking up at the night sky. Who knew what lurked in the deep water beneath him, or when it would rise up to the surface? He was comfortable now, and for him, that was enough.
“I love you, too,” I said.
I was starting to fall asleep when I heard the slam of a door and a shrill female voice: “…the fuck have you been?!”
Our neighbors. Krull and I had such a strange relationship with these people. We’d never seen them—they entered the building through the east entrance, while we used the west. We didn’t know their names or how old they were. But thanks to the thin wall between our apartment and theirs, we knew their most intimate secrets. We didn’t know what he did for a living, but we knew she suspected him of cheating on her with the receptionist at his office. We had no idea what she looked like, but we knew she drank enough to ruin her face. We knew they had no children. We knew it was his fault she couldn’t get pregnant.
This couple fought almost every night at midnight. When I’d first moved in, Krull had told me you could set a watch by them. I looked at the digital clock on my nightstand. Twelve o’clock. They never fail.
“You were with her, weren’t you? Don’t try to lie, you fuck!”
She could break glass with that voice. Was that why I couldn’t ask Krull where he’d been last night—because I was afraid of sounding like her?
“…off my back, you churchin’ bitch!” Churching? He must have said something else. Turgid? Merchant? He was often hard to hear, unlike his wife, who was clear as a local radio signal.
I want to say the arguing bothered me. It’s what I told Krull, what I told all my friends. But the truth was, I found it fascinating. And that’s what really bothered me—not the fighting, but the way I reacted to it.
“You know what you are?” she shrieked. “A goddamn sympathy vulture!”
She’s quoting my mother. I almost started to laugh, until I heard a meaty clap…skin hitting skin. I’d never heard that sound out of them before. My breath caught in my throat.
“Aaaahhh…” Call the police. But it was just one slap. One sob. Do I need to get involved? They’d probably get mad. Maybe she slapped herself.
“You hurt me!”
Then a crash, and my mind went to my old apartment, the four dead bolts on the door, the thin wall behind the pullout couch.
What did Marla’s neighbors hear?
“Get away…”
Call the police.
“…gonna kill you!”
Did she say anything to her killer? Did anyone hear her, begging for her life?
I started to get out of bed, but then he said something—I couldn’t tell what. He was saying it softly, though. Was he apologizing? Or was it a threat? Who knew? Who even knew what their apartment number was?
“Go to hell, you fat, sterile motherfucker,” she said, clear as ever. Okay, she’s fine.
I put my head on Krull’s chest, listening to them yelling at each other, just like always, until I fell back to sleep.
Just as I was drifting off, the thought came to me again. What did Marla’s neighbors hear? But this time I knew the answer, and with that absolute certainty you feel only when you’re not conscious enough to move, let alone doubt. The answer was this: The neighbors didn’t hear anything. She died before making a sound.
5
Bloody Valentine
He was shirtless, with the smooth, pale musculature of an Italian statue. He wore tight black jeans, and his hair was black, too, but I couldn’t see his face, because I was following him through the lobby of a building, into an elevator—both of which were so full of blossoming plants it was difficult to move. The blooms looked fake. They glowed like neon.
The elevator went up, up, up. He plucked a flower from one of the plants and handed it to me. It was black and fist shaped, and when I looked at it, it crumbled. “It’s called a Marla,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
The elevator door opened, and I kept following him down a long, narrow hallway until he stopped at a door: twelve-B.
“Check this out.” He spun around. He had no face, but I had only a second to register this before the apartment door flew open and we were both hit with a torrent of blood.
I opened my eyes fast on the nightstand clock blinking seven a.m. It took me a few panicky seconds to verify where I was, and that I’d been dreaming. I stretched out, but all I felt next to me was Jake, who, as it turned out, was sprawled across my boyfriend’s vacated pillow. Where did he go now?
I sat up in bed and saw Krull, fully dressed for work in a beige suit coat and pants, hunched over the closet safe. But rather than taking his gun out to wear to work, he seemed to be putting something away. Interesting. I watched him closing the small door and spinning the lock.
“Hiding a present from me?” I said.
He spun around fast, just like the faceless man in my dream. “You scared me.”
I stretched. “What are you doing up so early?”
“Well,” he said, “I woke up at six and couldn’t sleep, so I went out. Did some shopping.”
From the floor next to the safe, he produced a swirl of green tissue paper, and I knew what was inside before he handed it to me. Three Sterling roses.
“One for ‘I,’ one for ‘love’ and one for ‘you,’” Krull said.
I put the lavender flowers up to my face, inhaling deeply. “My favorites.” Sterling roses had been my favorite for a long time—ever since my grandmother gave me a bouquet of them as a thirteenth birthday present. “They’re like you,” she’d said, pointing to blooms a color you’d never expect from a rose. “Surprising.”
Krull said, “I don’t know why you couldn’t like red or white or yellow roses instead. I had to go to four different florists to find these.”
I grinned at him. “I appreciate the effort.”
“There’s bagels in the kitchen, too. And I made coffee, and put food out for Jake.”
“To what do I owe all this?” Do you feel guilty for cheating on me two nights ago?
“To me having too much time on my hands.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Listen, I don’t want to freak you out.”
My spine straightened a little. “Usually when you say something like that, it’s sort of like a backhanded prophecy.”
“I know.” Krull took a deep breath. “This probably isn’t anything at all, but…”
“What, John?”
“Louise, at the newsstand? She…says hi, by the way.”
I just stared at him.
“Okay…Louise said she thought she might have heard your mother might be moving to New York. Just for a short time…for some radio thing.”
“Oh, my God it’s actually true?”
“She didn’t know for sure—a friend had mentioned it. Come to think of it, I bet she heard it from Pierce. He goes to that newsstand all the time.”
“Really? You’re not just saying that to—”
“Your mother would call you if she were coming out here, Sam. She’s not that much of a bitch. I just wanted to give you a heads-up, in case Louise says something to you about it.”
“Ummm…thanks.”
He kissed me. “I gotta go.”
“But it’s so early.”
“Press conference,” he said.
“Marla?”
“Yeah…How’s the suit?”
I smiled at him. The fact that he looked great in head-to-toe beige polyester said a lot more about his body—or at least, how I felt about his body—than it did about what happened to be covering it. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Good luck.”
Marla Soble’s picture was on the cover of that day’s Post and the Daily News. I bought both on my way to Sunny Side, staring at her face as I handed quarters to Louise.
“Would you look at that,” said Louise. “A 1947 quarter. Know what I was doing in 1947?”
“Being born?”
“Getting divorced, you sweet, wonderful girl.”
I cou
ldn’t take my eyes off Marla’s face.
“You know, Sam, she looks a little like you,” said Louise. “I mean…looked. Poor thing.”
Both newspapers had chosen the same cover picture—smiling, dark-haired, vaguely Semitic Marla, her arm thrown around the neck of a large golden retriever. They were on a beach together and the sun made halos around their heads. According to the captions, the dog’s name was Lucky.
Who took this photo? Who told the papers Lucky’s name?
Marla had soulful brown eyes like her dog, a glowing tan that looked like it came from the sun, not a salon. She probably bicycled everywhere, didn’t need caffeine in the morning, ate three healthy meals a day. She had another sixty years ahead of her, at least.
“They think her fiancé did it,” Louise said.
“Who told you that, Zachary Pierce?”
“How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“Fatal Attraction?” asked the Daily News headline. But the Post’s was more specific: “Her Killer Left a Bloody Valentine.”
I opened the paper and skimmed the printed columns for an explanation until I noticed the black-and-white photograph in the lower right-hand corner of the spread.
It was the outline of a large heart, drawn in dripping blood on an exposed brick wall.
I gasped. “Jesus.”
“And they call themselves a fuckin’ family newspaper,” said Louise.
“I used to live there, Louise,” I said. “In that apartment.”
“Shit…I didn’t know that. John didn’t tell me—”
“I…I put my dinette set in front of that wall, so when I drank my coffee in the morning, I’d feel like I was in a downtown café.”
“Honey, I’m sorry.”
“When I moved out, I…” I said to Krull, “That wall is the one thing I’ll miss about this place.”
“You what, honey?”
“Nothing.” Why didn’t he tell me? He must’ve known. “Who would do something like this?”
“A very sick, very angry motherfucker,” Louise said, and as she said it my eyes went to the picture on the following page—the picture of Marla and her fiancé, a slim, bespectacled NYU photography professor named Gil Valdez who looked neither sick nor angry.
You Kill Me Page 6
