Drumsticks

by Charlotte Carter

  The MacLachlins had the kind of apartment most of us Manhattanites can only dream of. Endless space and skylights and peace and quiet; a brief walk away from the Hudson; and a bevy of cutting edge, if budget-busting restaurants just around the corner.

  I called out a timid hello. No answer.

  But there was a big purple tote bag in the middle of the floor. It was overflowing with clothes: jeans, T-shirts, filmy blouses, leg warmers, and leotards.

  “Do they look like they might belong to Felice?” I asked.

  He seemed transfixed by the bag. But at last he nodded yes.

  “I don’t understand,” he mumbled.

  “Understand what?”

  “Rob took the key back. He wasn’t letting anybody use the place. He swore.”

  “He was telling the truth, most likely. How hard would it be for Felice to make a key without telling him? She knows the downstairs code, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah. That makes sense.”

  “You check the bedrooms,” I said. “I guess you know right where they are.”

  He gave me a dirty look.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Just go.”

  Dan headed off down the corridor. I turned into the kitchen area.

  I didn’t scream. I know I didn’t. But the gasp I let out was obviously loud enough for him to hear it all the way down the hall.

  He came running.

  One wall of the white-tiled kitchen was slathered with dried blood. The same substance streaked the countertop like cartoon lightning bolts. I looked down then and saw the splotches on the linoleum as well. It was as if the MacLachlins were in the hog-slaughtering business rather than imported leather goods or computer chips or architecture—or whatever clean thing it was they did for a living.

  I kept my mouth covered with my hands, willing myself not to cry out. Dan looked sick to his stomach.

  “Don’t touch anything!” I warned him, backing us out of the space. “What did you find back there?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. It’s empty.”

  “No signs of blood anywhere else?”

  “No.”

  We made a quick survey of the bathroom and all the bedrooms, including their closets, careful to open the doors using our coat sleeves.

  He was right. Nothing else out of place. Only the bloody wall and counter in the kitchen.

  “What are you going to do?” Dan asked.

  “Call the police. What do you think?”

  He began to shake his head as if palsied. No need to wonder why: he was seeing his career swirling down the toilet.

  “Take it easy. I won’t call from here. We’re getting out of here now. But I have to notify somebody I know in the department.”

  “You have friends in the department?”

  “That doesn’t matter now, Dan. Let’s go. Oh, wait! You didn’t really leave anything in this place when you saw Felice up here, did you?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

  I took a precautionary look down at the street, on the chance someone might be on the way up now. It looked clear. I scanned the loft one last time and then we moved out silently.

  “You think there’s any chance?” he asked elliptically as we rode down in the elevator.

  “Any chance that blood belongs to somebody other than Felice? I doubt it. Any chance she’s still alive? I don’t want to be the one to say it. All we can do is hope.”

  We both watched the lighted panel above our heads that chimed out the floors as we descended.

  “Okay, Dan,” I added grimly. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t know this apartment exists. I got in here all on my own. But the worst is yet to come for you. You know that, right?”

  He nodded. “I know, I know. They’ll question Rob. It’s only a matter of time before it all comes out.”

  He looked every bit as tragically sorry as he should have been. Every bit as frightened.

  We bypassed the public phones of prosperous, fashionable Tribeca, and didn’t stop to call Leman Sweet until we were safely on a down-and-out corner of Canal Street. I got him on his cell phone. I told Sweet everything about Greenwich Street, everything but the fact of my companion, of course. He was on the way over there even as we spoke. He told me to put as much space between the loft and myself as humanly possible, for the time being, anyway.

  I repeated the same advice to Dan. “Go home now, Dan. The shit’s gonna hit soon enough. Just go home.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I can’t just leave you holding the bag like this.”

  “I’m not holding anything, really. I’ll be fine.”

  I couldn’t figure out why my words should set him off, but suddenly he was fuming. “Oh, aren’t you brave,” he said, sneering. “Don’t lie to me, Nan. You’re just trying to get rid of me so you can go off and do something tough and foolhardy. You’re sending cowardly old Mr. Hinton home to shiver in his apartment while you go out and do some macho shit. You go out and solve a murder with your friends in the NYPD while I drink my milk and go to bed.”

  Oh dear. Now we had a wounded male ego to deal with, on top of everything else.

  “You’re really into self-flagellation, aren’t you, Hinton? Okay, then. I’m calling you a pussy. All right? I’m saying mine are bigger than yours. Feel better now?”

  Once again my dirty mouth stopped him in his tracks.

  “Oh God,” he moaned suddenly, bringing his hands up over his face.

  “What? What is it, dear?” I asked pityingly.

  He said it again. “Oh God, Nan.”

  “Tell me, Dan. Go on.”

  “I want to fuck you so bad.”

  “What!”

  “I do. I can’t help it, I do. I’m sorry. I’m about to lose everything—everything, Nan. My life is over. I need—”

  “You need to get your ass on the subway, Dan.”

  I know it sounded mean, but I didn’t feel any enmity toward him. Far from it. I did pity him. Insane satyr that he was.

  I took his hands in mine and held them for a minute and then we kissed each other, a lot of sorrow in the gesture.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked me. “Where are you going?”

  “To Caesar’s,” I told him wearily. “Now, will you please go home.”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I have someplace else I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “To see Rob MacLachlin. He’s going to need me.”

  “I’ll speak to you tomorrow,” I said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Close Your Eyes

  The after-work crowd was gone and the all-nighters had not yet arrived. I had rarely seen the Go Go Emporium so sparsely populated.

  Thank God, I saw her right away. There was Aubrey at the end of the bar, pouring orange juice into one of the false-bottom tankards they used to serve draft beer.

  She grabbed hold of me. “Nan, what’s wrong? You look kinda crazy.”

  I brought her up to date, smoking furiously as I told the story. I was taking cigarettes from a pack someone had abandoned on the bar along with a set of keys and a pair of eyeglasses.

  “Shit,” she commented when my narrative ended. “Here we go again.”

  And didn’t that say it all.

  I ordered a Jack Daniel’s from the bartender, a white guy named Larry whom I had met a few times in the past. He was a decent sort, a pretty obliging fellow, especially when you needed a handful of amphetamines or a color TV at a price the Wiz could not beat. In fact Larry, like my friend Patrice, had once arranged for me to buy a gun. That one ended up in the hands of a man who had even less business toting it around than I did.

  He greeted me as he set down the double JD, waving away my ten-dollar bill. “Hey, Nanette. How’s it going?”

  I merely shook my head in answer.

  “Yeah, I hear that,” he said, and moved away.

  Aubrey said, “That girl is dead, isn’t she?”

>   “We don’t know that yet. But I think she’s gotta be. Oh, Lord, girl.”

  “Leman going to keep you out of this mess?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how he can—now. Maybe the best I can hope for is that Loveless, that homicide cop, won’t push for the death penalty.”

  “For the one who murdered Ida, you mean.”

  “No. For me.”

  “Fuck him. He shoulda listened to you in the first place. And old jughead Leman better look out for you, if he know what’s good for him. Don’t worry about it.”

  She began to tunnel into her handbag. “Here. Take some of these.”

  “What is all that?”

  “This one’s echinacea,” she said, filling a dropper from a big brown bottle. “It tastes pretty nasty, but it keeps you calm. And these are Vitamin C. And these here are your complex Bs.”

  “Oh, come on please, Aubrey. Don’t make me take that shit.”

  “Go ahead, Nanette. You can use all the help you can get.”

  I popped the vile pills indiscriminately and started dribbling the viscous brown liquid into my bourbon. But I stopped suddenly.

  “Finish it!”

  “Okay, okay. Just a second. You just reminded me of something.”

  “What?”

  “Justin.”

  “What about him?”

  “You said I could use all the help I could get. That’s what J said when he gave me the Mama Lou doll. Remember? Where is he anyway?” I asked.

  “That’s a good question. He didn’t show for work today.”

  “He what?”

  “You heard me, he didn’t show. They been calling his place since this afternoon, Larry said. There’s no answer.”

  I started to go cold. Lately anything out of the ordinary made me nervous. Lately it seemed that anything could happen to anybody.

  Justin was, without making it sound too too dramatic, missing. Felice Sanders was missing, wasn’t she, and from all indications she was not coming back—ever.

  “Where do you think he could be?” I asked. “Does Larry have any idea?”

  She shrugged. “Hung over, probably. Maybe laying up with somebody. But he’s never even ten minutes late getting to work. I don’t know—I guess it’s kind of weird that he wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t like this,” I said, and the phrase turned into a kind of incantation. “I don’t like this I don’t like this I don’t like this.”

  Aubrey started to laugh, but then she quickly caught on that it was no joke. “What are you acting like that for? You think something happened to him?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s just thinking about that blood all over the walls that’s got me so jumpy. But I need to know he’s all right. You know Kenny, Justin’s guy?”

  “A little.”

  “Have you got his phone number?”

  “No. But it’s probably in the book.”

  “Do me a favor, Aub. Look it up for me, would you?”

  Kenny, at least, was at home. He picked up the phone. But the minute I heard his voice, I knew something was amiss.

  “Is J with you?” I asked as soon as I had identified myself.

  “No,” he said, voice tremulous. “That’s just the trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  “He’s not here, he’s not at home, and I know he’s not at work because I’ve been calling him there for hours. I can’t find him anywhere. I’m getting worried, Nan.”

  “I know. I know. Do you have his keys by any chance?”

  “No. I’ve got a bad feeling, Nan. What should we do?”

  “For the moment, nothing. Sit tight, Kenny. I’ll call you back as soon as—”

  I looked up then. Aubrey was hovering over me. Her expression kept changing from confusion to panic and back again.

  “I’ll be in touch, Kenny,” I said, and hung up.

  “Where is he at, Nan!” she demanded. “What happened to J?”

  I reached for another cigarette.

  Shit. Here we go again.

  We talked one of the bouncers into going over to Justin’s apartment to check it out. He came back with a report that the super had gone inside J’s place and found no one at home and nothing disturbed.

  On the off chance that he had called me, I phoned my apartment and retrieved my messages. Nothing.

  We hung in at Caesar’s for another couple of hours, hoping foolishly that Justin would show up with a rational explanation for his disappearance—at least hoping to hear from him. But even as I hoped, and drank, and smoked, I knew it was no go.

  I went home about two in the morning feeling like a windup clock that was just about to pop a spring. There had been a call from Sweet telling me that the police lab was running tests on the blood in the Greenwich Street loft and that Rob MacLachlin’s parents had been contacted in Geneva. Sweet had fed the cops a story about an anonymous tip on the scene at the loft. He wanted me to call him in the morning for further updates.

  Yes, I’d surely be doing that. Everybody was frantic to locate Felice. But if Justin didn’t surface by morning, I’d have to throw myself on Sweet’s mercy and ask him for help in finding J, too. And that would mean I’d have to come clean about J’s involvement in the break-in at Ida’s.

  Here it was again: that fearful symmetry. Two people murdered by accident, so to speak. Two dolls. Two elderly black men. Two apartment break-ins. Two missing persons, one of whose happiness and safety I’d jeopardized by pulling him in on my investigation. How much more synchronicity could I bear?

  I snatched one of the dolls off the desk—Dilsey—and paced around with her for a while, staring into her face as if awaiting enlightenment. She never gave it up though. Her fierce expression never changed.

  Finally, tired beyond the telling, I fell onto the couch and tried to sleep. No luck with that either.

  I turned on the radio and got one of the night owl stations that played American pop standards throughout the night. Some Vegas tenor’s fatuous version of the great “Laura.” A medley by the often ill-used Jo Stafford. And then the Ray Conniff Singers applying themselves to “Dontcha Go ’Way Mad.”

  I sat up suddenly in the darkness.

  While I was cadging those cigarettes at the bar at Caesar’s, my hand kept hitting the eyeglasses lying next to the pack.

  Get some new glasses.

  Or something like that. That creep Lyle had said something like that to Kenny.

  I swiped the phone off the hook and dialed Kenny’s number again. Like I figured, he wasn’t sleeping.

  “Justin?” he called desperately into the receiver.

  “No, Kenny. It’s me, Nan. Listen to me. I know you’re going nuts worrying about J. But something else is wrong too, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Well …”

  “Go ahead, Kenny. Tell me.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything to you. I guess I was too ashamed. But I got … bashed. Last night. Some bastard jumped me. Right in front of my apartment building. If there hadn’t been a crowd of people coming out of a party across the street, that son of a bitch might’ve beat me to death.”

  Damn. I thought there was something else bothering him when we’d spoken earlier. “Did you see who did it?”

  “No. It was dark and he had on a ski mask. But we know who did it: some dickless homophobe.”

  “You told J about it, right?”

  “He came over here after work this morning and found me with a black eye and the world’s fattest lip. Left my apartment early today, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  There it was. I knew with absolute certainty then that Justin wasn’t off “laying up” with anybody. I knew where Justin was.

  In one movement, it seemed, I had on my shoes—and was checking the load in my Beretta and grabbing my coat and scraping the keys off the kitchen table.

  What were the chances I’d be mugged or arrested as a prostitute if I ran downstairs now and trie
d to get a cab?

  I had to risk it.

  The security guard banged heavily on the door to Lyle’s office.

  “Open it! Just open it!” I shouted.

  He fumbled for the key, found it, and unlocked the door. I rushed past him.

  Justin, kind of like Aubrey, was always conscious of the things that differentiated “classy” people from the rest of us. Rich people, he said, judged you by your footwear. He loved to buy beautiful, expensive socks.

  Tonight he had on his gray-and-white Paul Smith numbers.

  He was lying near the desk, not moving. His face was covered with blood.

  I fell to my knees, already half-blind with tears.

  I picked up his hand. How I wanted to talk to him. “Oh, friend … oh, friend,” I wailed.

  It all went rushing by my eyes—calling Aubrey to tell her the worst had happened, hearing her anguished cry. How she would blame me for it all, and rightly so. How Leman Sweet would curse me. How Loveless would lock me up for withholding evidence. How Dan would lose his job. How Pop would revile me.

  I wept horribly, so pitifully that the guard reached down and tried to comfort me with his arms.

  Then we heard a whistling sound emanate from beneath the desk. I was so startled that I let J’s hand flop back down on the floor.

  He was breathing!

  Breathing heavily through the blood in his nostrils.

  “Get help!” I screamed. The guard took off.

  I leaned over Justin, called his name.

  “Is it you, Smash?” His words were all mush.

  “Yes, it’s me. What—”

  He cried out in pain then, and clutched his side.

  “What is it—your ribs?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t move anymore, okay? Just lie still. Lyle did this to you, didn’t he?”

  Agitated, he mumbled something I couldn’t make out. I understood one thing, though: he wasn’t denying what I’d just said.

  “All right, all right, honey.” I tried to soothe him. “They’re coming. The ambulance is on the way.”

  “No,” he protested. “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  “Well, that’s tough shit, J. You’re going.”

  Now he was crying.

  I wiped the blood and tears from his face. “Just hang in there.”