You Kill Me

by Alison Gaylin

  “What about Tabby?”

  “Only if she were a famous Cats fan.”

  I winced.

  As I ran the credit card of the next man in line, Yale said, “You know what? You’re right. Yesterday, I told you not to overreact to your obsessed fan, and here I am overreacting to light opera. At least the fan is real.”

  “Oh, he’s real, all right.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Get your audition over with and we’ll talk.”

  When break time finally came, I borrowed Yale’s cell and tried both Krull and my mother, but got only their voice mails. Where are you people?

  I poked my head in the theater, where Yale was onstage, singing the last lines of “To Sit in Solemn Silence” for Tabitha and six of her followers.

  “That was wonderful,” Tabitha called out as the rest of the small group applauded. “But could you try and make it, like…twenty percent sexier?”

  I put Yale’s phone on top of his stack of sheet music and crept out.

  In the courtyard, En and Shell were sitting on a checkered picnic blanket, eating slices of what appeared to be purple meat. “Red-wine chicken!” Shell called out. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I’d worked up a decent appetite, and was planning on trying a new diner at the end of the block. But the closer I got to it, the more reluctant I was to go in. It wasn’t so much the sight of Shell’s Concord-grape chicken that did it, but a vague sense of foreboding no doubt brought on by the binoculars and the new note. I couldn’t imagine sitting down in an unfamiliar place with strangers all around me.

  Don’t get him angry again.

  There was a Subway sandwich shop across the street, where I’d picked up lunch plenty of times. But that didn’t appeal either. So I turned right on Seventh and walked five blocks uptown, to Twenty-sixth Street. What I really wanted, I knew now, was to see the Marlamaniacs.

  The first thing I noticed was the shrine they’d made for her: A four-foot-tall oval of pink and white carnations with a gilt-framed newspaper photo of Marla and Lucky at the center, it was propped up next to the front door. At the top was a white banner, with black, cursive letters that leaped out at you: A new angel in heaven.

  I didn’t see the Marlamaniacs at first because they were sitting. But when I got a little closer, there they were—at least fifteen of them, on the sidewalk, on blankets and lawn chairs, eating bag lunches while listening to news stations on portable radios. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were waiting in line for Star Wars tickets.

  A year and a half ago, when I used to live here, my downstairs neighbor had knocked on my door and found a serial killer on the other side. She’d actually been the first person murdered in there, and in a very unpleasant way, but as far as I could remember, it had never earned her a fan club.

  I looked at them—more women than men, all white in the worst sense of the word—pasty and lusterless, like they’d spent their whole lives underground.

  As I got closer to the door, one of the women jumped to her feet and stepped in front of me. “Did you know her?” she asked.

  Her face was so wan and beige you could instantly forget it, even while looking at her.

  “No,” I said. “Did you?”

  I walked up to the shrine. After 9/11, I’d seen plenty of shrines around the city. Always, they gave me a lump in my throat because the items placed on them were so deeply personal—Saint Christopher’s medals and family snapshots, company softball jerseys and dried prom corsages, postcards that said, I love you and miss you, in ink that still looked wet.

  This one was different. I knew the Marlamaniacs had made it because it was so tidy, so generic. It contained no evidence of a life. Maybe Marla Soble especially liked pink and white carnations, but I doubted it. “She’s pretty and she’s dead,” Patton had said. And for this group, that was more than enough. She was their new angel in heaven.

  I thought of asking which one of them had made the shrine when I noticed something about it that I hadn’t seen before.

  Resting against the bottom of the carnation oval was a single Sterling rose, its stem bent in two. “Whoa.”

  “Murderer!” screamed the woman I’d encountered at the door. For a second, I thought she was talking to me, but then all the Marlamaniacs joined in, rising to their feet, hissing and booing.

  I whirled around and saw, moving through the double doors of my old apartment building, a slight man in wire-rimmed glasses surrounded by cops. Professor Gil Valdez.

  A man yelled, “Burn in hell, killer!”

  Three uniforms piled into a waiting van, then Marla’s fiancé, and then two more. Just before he got in, I caught a glimpse of his face—and saw a depth of pain that was beyond tears.

  Someone he loved is dead.

  Another group left the building—obviously plainclothes detectives. I didn’t see Krull, but I did spot Pierce and his two partners. “Zachary!” I called out.

  “Hey, Sam! Stopping by the old homestead?” Pierce told his partners he’d catch up with them, then signed a few autographs before sauntering up to me. “Wacky group, huh? I feel like Mick Jagger or something.”

  “Have you seen John?” I asked.

  “Not lately. I’ve been at this crime scene for a while, though.”

  I watched his face. “I wanted to find out how the press conference went.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “It never happened.”

  “You mean it was supposed to?”

  “Well, yeah. But the commissioner canceled it because I guess he realized we have nothing to say.”

  I exhaled heavily. “Oh, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”

  “That we have nothing to say?”

  “No. See, Patton knew nothing about the press conference, so I thought—”

  “No offense to her, but she’s a new mom,” Pierce said. “Her memory’s like grated cheese ’cause her kid’s such a crappy sleeper.”

  An explanation. A normal, reasonable explanation from the man who thinks terrorists are targeting branches of Starbucks and a firefighter’s ghost haunts his apartment. I kissed Pierce on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Hey.” He grinned. “We should cancel press conferences more often.”

  I glanced down at the bent Sterling rose. There’s an explanation for that, too. Maybe Marla happened to like them. Or maybe one of her fans does.

  “So,” said Pierce. “You wanna take a look at your old apartment?” And it hit me that I did, very much.

  When the elevator doors opened, and Pierce and I stepped out onto the twelfth floor, I was struck first by the complete lack of noise. Not a sound in the stairwell, no music or conversation from behind the thin apartment doors. No cooking smells, either, which was even stranger. Thinking about it now, I could hardly recall a time, traveling between the elevator and my apartment, when I hadn’t smelled bacon or frying onions.

  Did anyone live on this floor anymore? Was everyone dead?

  I coughed. It seemed to echo. And as we walked toward my old apartment, I could almost hear each individual rug fiber pressing against the soles of my shoes and springing back.

  How I hated this type of quiet, the kind that closes in on you like fog, the kind that shrieks in your ears.

  I had to say something to Pierce, just to make it go away. “So…”

  “No, it’s not haunted,” he said. “I know what a ghost feels like, and there aren’t any spirits in your old place.”

  “Okay. Well…that’s nice to know.”

  As we got closer to the apartment, I saw what looked like a typewritten note stuck to the door. For half a second, I thought, A fan letter to Marla.

  But then I realized it was just the police seal, freshly broken by Pierce and his crew.

  I remembered Professor Valdez’s face.

  As the detective produced a set of keys from his pocket, I said, “He didn’t do it, you know.”

  I watched Pierce calmly
open the five dead bolts, as if he had always lived here. “Who, Valdez?” he said as he undid the last one. “I think you’d feel different if you saw her journal.”

  Before he opened the door, he said, “It’s pretty stuffy, I’m warning you. We were only in here for a very short time—the rest of it was checking out stairwells, talking to the super, some of the neighbors, so…”

  “I can handle stuffy.”

  I followed him inside, and what hit me first was a strong smell of citrus and soap, probably Marla’s shampoo.

  How strange that a smell could outlive a person. The apartment had an air conditioner in the window, I knew. But that was turned off and the window was closed, so that lemony scent hung in the dark, still air like a solid, breathing thing. As if she were standing there, watching.

  “Was Professor Valdez in here?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “He cried, didn’t he?”

  “People cry for all sorts of reasons.”

  Pierce turned on a light, and I was glad for how normal the place looked, save the pale coating of fingerprint dust on the small coffee table, the kitchen counter, the small, French provincial desk where Marla had probably kept her computer before the police took it for clues.

  No blood spatter. No chalk outline. Of course not; her body was found in the park. Why did he move her?

  “Hey, Sam, were your floors always that crappy? Because I was thinking he might have used some kind of corrosive soap to clean up her blood.”

  “They were always that crappy.” Slowly, I walked around the room. She had a pullout couch against the same wall where I’d put mine. It was the same shape as mine too, only instead of beige velour, hers was white, with pink ribbon stripes running down it. Unlike my furniture, all of which I’d bought in two hours from a place called Rent 2 Own, Marla’s looked as if she’d put some thought into it. There was an actual color scheme. She had real candles in her candlesticks, vases that didn’t look like they came with the flowers. I spotted a drooping bouquet at the center of her coffee table that was probably stunning a week ago. A dozen roses of every color, four of them Sterlings. See, she did like them. “I bet Professor Valdez gave her those.”

  “Maybe.”

  She’d arranged everything more or less the same as I had; in a space that small, you don’t have much choice. Marla had put her dinette set near the window, too—hers was distressed white wood, with high-backed chairs. I noticed a black stripe across one of them, and realized, only then, that it was the strap of my bag. I’d hung it on the dinette chair, just as I’d always done when I got home from work.

  “I never saw this place when you lived here. I bet it looked awesome.” Pierce was standing in front of a large white bookshelf. It covered the entire wall where I’d hung Reverie, and was packed tight with books, bright and faded, paperback and hardcover—bought for reading, not decoration, because the colors didn’t mesh at all. The detective faced it, hands clasped behind his back, as if admiring a museum piece. “See? She alphabetized her books,” he said.

  But I didn’t respond. I was staring at the exposed brick wall.

  The heart looked bigger in person than it had in the paper, and had dried rusty brown. As I looked at it, it was easy to pretend it wasn’t blood at all, especially considering the way the killer had applied it. In the black-and-white newspaper picture, the line forming the heart had looked smooth and even, like it had been drawn with a paintbrush or, more likely, the victim’s bloody clothing. But looking at it now, some areas were much darker than others, and the drips were more obvious. On parts of the line, I discerned four thick grooves, which, as a preschool teacher, I recognized instantly. Finger paint.

  He had drawn the heart with his hands.

  “Sam,” said Pierce.

  I turned and saw him standing behind me, paging through one of Marla’s books.

  “Check it out,” he said, holding it up so I could see the cover. The Art of Caring. “It’s signed!”

  Suddenly the door swung open so hard that the brass knob cracked the wall. I was dimly aware of my mother’s best-selling book falling out of Pierce’s hand, as we both spun around staring like trapped, doomed rats.

  In the doorway stood Krull. His hard black gaze shot from my face to Pierce’s and back again. Even from across the room, I could smell cigarettes. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Jesus,” said Pierce. “You scared the shit out of me, dude.”

  Krull glared at me. “Sam, have you been taking night classes at the police academy?”

  “Uhhh…no. Hey, where were you all day?”

  “Because last time I checked, this was a fucking crime scene, and you were a civilian unrelated to this case!”

  Pierce said, “Whoa, man. Take a chill pill.”

  “You take a chill pill, you little prick.”

  I was aware of my stomach contracting, of my hands, balled into fists, the muscles in my calves and thighs clenching up until my whole body was tight, like a rubber band. I spoke through my teeth. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

  Krull glowered at Pierce, and all I could think of was a rattlesnake, ready to devour a mouse. “I am sick and tired of you—especially the crush you have on my girlfriend,” he said. “It gets in the way of your work. And it makes you a crappy cop.”

  For a long time, no one moved, and it felt to me like we were trapped there forever: Krull, Pierce, Marla and me. All of us frozen, angry ghosts.

  Until finally, Pierce said, “Go fuck yourself, John.” And walked out of the apartment.

  From the end of the hallway, I heard the ping of the elevator, the doors opening and closing.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said.

  His gaze was fixed on the bloody heart. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Yeah, well, I was just leaving.”

  Just before I got to the door, I turned around. “I had no idea you could be so mean,” I said.

  But Krull didn’t reply. He just kept staring at that smeared, rust-brown valentine, as if I didn’t exist.

  7

  Ready to Listen

  When I finally got back to the box office, I was half an hour late and Roland’s mouth was a thin scratch of frustration.

  “I’m so sorry; I—”

  “No excuses. You’re working the phones, and you get no breaks, even for the bathroom.”

  “I’m—”

  “No excuses.”

  At least Yale was working the other phone. If Shell were to so much as smile at me—let alone offer me a baked good right now—I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions.

  “What happened to you?” said Yale. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it.”

  “Where did you—”

  “I don’t want to talk, Yale; I just don’t.”

  Fortunately, the phone orders rolled in one on top of the next, leaving no opportunity to talk even if I’d wanted to. There was something so comfortably dispassionate about taking down credit-card numbers and expiration dates. I could have done it a lot later than six thirty p.m., when The Space’s phones officially closed.

  Yale and I alphabetized our receipts and handed them to Roland, just as En and Shell were opening up the will-call window for the final stretch of their evening.

  “Nice job, all of you,” said Roland. “Even Samantha.”

  “Thanks.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “Yeah, really,” said En. “We had dinner reservations, but we had to cancel them because you two got switched to the phones.” He looked at Roland. “Come to think of it, that’s not entirely fair.”

  “I’ll buy you guys dinner.”

  “Deal.”

  As Yale and I stepped out into the courtyard, I remembered Krull as I’d last seen him, the coldness in his eyes as he stared up at that brick wall. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t called to apologize, couldn’t
believe he’d just let me go.

  “You feel like telling me what happened?” Yale said.

  “Oh, nothing…I stopped by my old place to see the Marlamaniacs, and I wound up having a little…spat with Krull.”

  “Well, you should get home right now and talk things out. Remember, it’s the differences between us that make us realize we’re not alone.”

  “Who said that? It sounds familiar.”

  “Sydney Stark-Leiffer.”

  I smiled. “Want to get a drink or something?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Going straight home to bed. I’m rehearsing at dawn tomorrow.”

  “I really hope you get this part.”

  Yale gave me a quick hug good-night, then headed uptown to his happy home.

  Guess it’s time to go back to Stuy Town and talk things out. I started to leave the courtyard—but I was stopped by the sound of Shell shrieking my name into the box office microphone.

  When I jogged back to the front of the will-call line, Shell reached under the counter and produced a triangular note. “I almost forgot—some guy left this for you,” she said, and slipped it through the metal slot.

  Throw it away; don’t let me have it, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t keep myself from taking the note, from opening it and reading.

  “He sort of looked like a terrorist,” said Shell.

  En said, “That’s racist, honey.”

  “No, it isn’t. He’s not black.”

  The note said, HE’S ANGRY. And then, at the bottom of the paper, in letters so small the words were barely visible: WATCH YOUR BACK.

  Anger coursed up my spine, through the tangle of my nervous system. “Fucking asshole.” I ripped the note into tiny little pieces, then threw them up in the air like confetti. “I hope you’re watching now, loser!” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”

  My voice bounced off the pavement. I noticed heads turning away in the ticket takers’ line, the way heads always turn away from the insane. Then I heard En’s voice through the microphone. “Whoa, Sam. How do you really feel about this guy?”