Losers Live Longer hcc-59

by Russell Atwood

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on it.” She plugged the iPod into a USB shell in front of the right-hand monitor and her computer began a virus check on the device.

  Tigger flashed me a grin, her nose ring tinkling in contact with her two front teeth, giving off a silvery ping.

  She said, “I feel like Nancy Drew.”

  “The Clue in the Crumbling Cock,” I chimed in.

  “Get out, that isn’t one.” She laughed. I was a bad person, but still my bad jokes tickled her. Hell, I’d miss her.

  After a few more seconds of chugging away, her computer gave the device an all-clear. We leaned our heads together as the contents of the iPod opened up on her screen.

  Stacks of files folders appeared, 183 in all.

  Tigger blew a feathery lock of hair from her brow.

  “So, you know what you’re looking for here?”

  “Nope.” I looked and looked and kept looking, reading the names of the folders one by one. Many were just meaningless series of characters like L77JPLEQIN.

  Tigger said, “Look, I’d like to help, but my peeps will be waking from their naps soon, and I know someone’s going to want her snack.”

  “I hear you. Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “Can you sort all the folders by date? Oldest first?”

  It was done before I’d finished asking her for it. Tigger studied the screen and said, “Interesting. The two oldest are from 2001, but after that there are none that are older than last year.”

  I had her open the first folder, the oldest one, dated 2 /4/2001. It contained one item, a single Excel file.

  Tigger double-clicked on the icon and a spreadsheet opened up. The field headings were all in Cyrillic characters, except for a logo at the top: TWEENSLAND. The alphabetical entries in the columns below were written in English, though. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, e-mail and IP addresses. The names all looked to be male; the addresses covered some two dozen states. There was a column of dates (1999 through 2001), another showing durations in minutes, and one containing what appeared to be usernames, aliases like yancy77 and popeyespappy. The final column was what looked like a comments field filled with tidbits like “school principal,” “deputy sheriff,” “doctor,” “seminarian,” and more, entries like “softball coach,” “scout master,” and “two boys, Mike & Joseph.”

  It all looked so innocent, unless you knew what you were looking at. Which Tigger didn’t—I’d told her about seeing Elena, but not what Elena had told me about the childhood Owl had rescued her from. For all Tigger knew, Tweensland was second cousin to McDonaldland.

  Tigger started printing up the spreadsheet for me.

  “Shit, Payton, there’s ninety-two pages of this. You’re going to owe me a ream.”

  I smiled at her. “Saucy wench, and you a mother now.”

  She giggled through her nose, it came out a snort.

  “Let’s see what’s in the other 2001 folder,” I told her.

  She clicked to open it. Inside were over forty mpeg files. Video. Before I could say anything, Tigger double-clicked one at random. “Wait!” I yelped.

  Had it been my computer, there would’ve been a time lapse of anywhere from five seconds to fifteen minutes during which I could’ve stopped it or at least given her a more coherent warning. But Tigger’s computer was a hundred times faster and more modern, and so with ruthless efficiency the video clip sprang to life on the screen.

  In the upper-right corner of the picture appeared superimposed the same logo from the Excel file: TWEENSLAND. A line at the bottom said Copyright 1999. The time-counter on the computer’s media player showed that the clip ran just over nine minutes.

  A rangy twelve-year-old girl with shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair entered the frame beside an afghan-covered couch. She mumbled something, but it wasn’t in English, nor was the reply she got from a coaxing female voice from behind the camera’s lens.

  Sweeping her hair out of her face, the girl looked into the camera, then unbuttoned and stepped out of her loose-fitting blue jeans. They fell in a heap at her bare feet. She tugged her brown sweater up over her head in a single cross-armed motion, ruffling her hair and revealing early breasts, small and nubby. Her skin was pale and smooth and iridescent; the curving innerwall of a seashell. Behind her on a small table stood three narrow cylinders on end—one flesh-colored, one kitchen-utensil white, one silver-enamel like a child’s toy missile—and an uncapped bottle of baby oil. She lay down naked on the couch and reached for—

  Tigger shut down the media player and the image instantly vanished—from the screen, at least. I had expected something like it but still been unprepared. I was frozen, transfixed—like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board.

  Only 20 seconds into the clip, longer if measured in heartbeats. I felt wrung out, twisted.

  Tigger didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare say anything.

  Her printer went on spitting out the 92-page document.

  She pushed back her swivel chair, steadied it, and stood up. She walked into her kitchen, where I saw her bend to take something from under her sink. She came back carrying a claw-head hammer.

  I was tempted to defend my head with my hands, but she walked right by me, plucked the iPod out of the docking cradle and dropped it on the floor. She squatted beside it and smashed it with the hammer. I didn’t stop her. After five direct hits, it was ground up pretty good.

  I said, “I think you got it.”

  She turned on me in a flash, such a look of black fury on her face, I did cover my head suddenly with my hands, afraid that she might lash out indiscriminately.

  She shook the hammer like Thor.

  “Payton, whatever you’re involved in, take it out of here!”

  “Look, I had no idea—”

  She raised the hammer and I shut up. I heard her baby-daddy groan in the bathroom, but if any of the others had woken up, they remained quiet.

  Tigger said in a tense whisper, “People lose their kids for having shit like that on their computer, and you brought it in here—”

  The last page sent to the printer stopped abruptly. The sheet of paper came out only three-quarters complete. The machine made a frustrated grinding sound, like a gnashing of teeth, before finally spitting out the interrupted page unfinished.

  I took the pages from the tray, squared them on the desk like a deck of cards. Tigger put her hammer down on the nearest mousepad. We both just breathed in and out for a bit.

  She said, “Sorry, Payton, but—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Everyone has lines they don’t cross. Or they should.”

  Tigger asked, “Was it important evidence?”

  I shrugged. “I saw more than enough.”

  The girl’s nakedness flashed in my mind again and I re-squared the printed pages.

  “What’s going on anyway?” Tigger asked. “All the dates are like seven or eight years ago. Is the outfit that made those videos still in business?”

  I shook my head. If the stories I’d heard were true, the head of the modeling agency had been arrested shortly after Owl left the country and the whole operation shut down.

  “I think we’re looking at a different sort of business now,” I said. “I think someone’s using this info to contact former customers. Maybe asking them how much they value their wives, their bosses, their parishioners never finding out what sort of videos they like looking at.”

  “Someone,” Tigger said.

  “Sayre,” I said.

  “Well, I’m no fan of blackmail normally, but if your girl’s out there blackmailing pedophiles, making their lives hell, she’s aces in my book.” Her voice dropped. “But I don’t know, Payton. I don’t much like this. I just hope you’re on the right side of it.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Listen, Tig. I’m sorry about—”

  “—the mess? I made it.” She prodded some of the fragments that had once been an iPod. “But do you see now why I�
�m moving out of New York? I don’t want my daughter growing up in the middle of…all this.”

  There are bad men in the suburbs, too, I almost said. But didn’t. Why piss in her bouillabaisse?

  I thanked her, apologized again, told her I’d call her later. But I wouldn’t, not unless she called first. I’d brought kiddie porn into her home—unintentionally, but I done it. I’d tainted her sacred trinity of computers with it. A stain, worse than any physical one I could’ve left. She would have found it easier to forgive me puking on her rug.

  It felt like my bridges were burning, behind me as well as in front. But more important to me than making sure I landed on the right side when the smoke cleared, was not getting stuck anywhere in the middle with flames rising at either end.

  I scooped up the bits of smashed iPod onto the stack of printed pages. I felt like that hapless rube left holding the bag at the end of the magic trick involving the handkerchief, the pocket watch, and the mallet. May I have a volunteer from the audience? Now, sir, we’ve never met before…

  I walked away, leaving Tigger in front of her computers. The screensaver reappeared on the monitors, but the little train would have to roll over a lot of track before that other image was completely erased.

  I went back down to my office.

  No more Googling for answers. I was sick of what the Internet had to offer. I was going to get my information the old-fashioned way.

  Earn it.

  Chapter Fourteen: RESULTS MAY VARY

  It was four o’clock. I called Paul Windmann to tell him that I was coming to return his stolen iPod. He said it wasn’t a good time, that he’d come to my office later and get it.

  I said I’d see him in ten minutes and hung up.

  I put his four orange 50 Euro notes in my pocket in case he wanted a refund. And I took my gun, if the money wasn’t enough.

  Outside my building, the blond kid, FL!P, was loitering, seated on the brass-covered Siamese standpipe. He was holding his skateboard with two hands, scraping one edge against the concrete. Engrossed in what he was doing, he didn’t see me until I was flagging down a cab. He ran over shouting, “Hey, dude, wait. I got something to give you.”

  He reached into a pocket of his baggy pants and tugged out a square cream-colored envelope and handed it to me.

  The envelope was blank except for the embossed return address: The Peer Group, on West 21st Street in Chelsea. Peer. I remembered the call I’d answered in Owl’s hotel room, the message that Michael Cassidy should call the pier office. Not pier, Peer.

  The P.R. firm Tigger had mentioned, run by the un-French Coy d’Loy. West 21st Street in Chelsea. It was the same block as on those sales handbills I’d found in Owl’s pocket.

  The envelope’s flap was unsealed. Inside was an invitation to a film festival screening that evening and the afterparty being held at The Wiggle Room on Rivington.

  I folded it into my pocket.

  “You’ll go, right?” he asked. “I’m supposed to find out.”

  “Find out for whom? Your sugar mama?”

  “Look, you goin’ or not? It’ll be worth it to you.”

  A cab pulled to the curb. I got in, but before I shut the door, I asked the kid, “You sic those three heavies on me? The Russians looking for Michael Cassidy?”

  “You know where she is?” he asked eagerly, his eyes lighting up.

  I slammed the door and gave the driver the address for the Crystalview, leaving the kid standing there.

  I leaned back, reread the invitation. It was for a screening of Reneg, the new film by Ethan Ore.

  The Peer Group. Chelsea. Michael Cassidy’s ex-husband.

  Yeh, I’d be going to the movies tonight.

  The cabbie let me off right in front of Windmann’s building, just below the Holland Tunnel entrance, on Washington Street between Vestry and Debrosses. I’d never seen it before, but I’d read about its construction. One of the luxury condo high-rises that had gone up in recent years on a newly redeveloped waterfront, an area so beautiful it made you think you’d stumbled upon a completely different city.

  The Crystalview had been open for business for over a year, but a postman friend of mine told me that so far they only had a twenty percent occupancy, or what only amounted to four full floors of the twenty-story stovepipe-shaped monstrosity.

  Security cameras in the lobby, but no doorman and no one behind the obsidian-topped maplewood front desk. If eighty percent of their units were empty, they probably didn’t have enough to cover the expense of a full staff yet.

  To let people in, there was a fancy, high-tech house-phone system by the front door, with a keypad and a directory showing apartment numbers with spaces beside them for names, most of which were blank. I found Windmann’s name and entered the corresponding number on the pad. No answer. I tried again, but still no response. I guessed he didn’t want to see me. Well, too bad, I was going to see him.

  I entered the numbers of a few other units with names showing, but no one else answered me either. Maybe the place was a Marie Celeste.

  An elevator door opened and a Chinese deliveryman stepped into the lobby. He left a stack of menus at the front desk, then held the door open for me on his way out.

  I considered taking the stairs up to Windmann’s, but his apartment was on the nineteenth floor. I’d never make it. I hadn’t eaten anything since Wednesday dinner. I’d been operating solely on stored fats and the buzz of the hunt.

  My lonely elevator ride up to nineteen was uninterrupted. I felt the oppression of all those empty units around me as I rose by and above them. Unhaunted spaces. It gave me the willies, that vacancy, that vacuum, like a potent sample of the nothingness that may attend us all after death. Then my ears popped and I yawned some to clear them. I hated elevators.

  Ding. At the nineteenth floor, I walked down the hall past five closed doors until I got to Windmann’s and stopped.

  His door was ajar.

  As a kid, I never got that pun, the door is a jar, whenever I came across it in one of the jokes-and-riddles books I used to pore over, trying to figure out the answers. At first I didn’t understand it, but even once I did “get it,” I never thought it very funny.

  I didn’t think so now either.

  I’d been encountering too many partially open doors today. Normally in New York City that didn’t happen so often, especially not with a pneumatic-hinged door like this, which should’ve closed silently of its own weight.

  I could see why it hadn’t: a corner of the inside front mat stuck out and blocked it. I couldn’t tell if it had been placed that way intentionally or was just something that happened to happen.

  After all, accidents happened.

  I took out my gun and, keeping to one side, eased the door open with my fingertips before poking my head in. Nothing, no movement, no sound. A tall urn with three umbrellas in it stood under a hall mirror.

  I entered crabwise, letting the door shut behind me, re-straightening the floor mat so it closed completely this time.

  I inhaled through my nose and smelled it. An acrid odor wafting on the climate-controlled air. Sulfurous, it prickled my nostrils. The residue of a certain kind of burning. Cordite. Gunsmoke.

  I lifted my gun and, very carefully, slid a live one into the chamber, trying to be quiet about it. But within that silent apartment it was like chiseling my name in stone.

  I looked, I listened, I waited. More silence, more stillness, not even a reassuring gurgle from the pipes in the walls, everything was triple-insulated.

  I walked forward, my sneakers whispering softly. There was a dusty outline on the parquet floor as if a narrow rug used to lie there.

  At the end of the hallway, I came to a perfectly ordinary, empty room, lit a caustic orange by late-afternoon sunshine.

  I stayed in the mouth of the hallway and helloed a few times, listening after each hello like I was measuring the depths and outer reaches with sonar. I got no response.

  After a while, I fel
t a little silly, but only a little. I’d have felt a lot sillier getting shot. That stink in the air wasn’t Etruscan Musk, a gun had gone off recently. So I waited some more before finally going in.

  No one home. I walked around. No one in the kitchen or bedroom, or bedroom closet or bathroom. I returned to the living room, at a loss for what to do. Wait with folded hands? Start poking around? Raid the fridge?

  I was drawn to the south-facing floor-to-ceiling window of high-stress glass. It overlooked the skyline of lower Manhattan and, at this height, provided a view of Ground Zero.

  Prophetically named. Seven years later, still nothing more than ground, a zero. Just two days before, the first steel beam of the memorial museum had finally been put in place. Great, I thought, now if only they can agree on the curtains. What really should’ve been done was transform it into a memorial park. At least now it would be something, instead of a pit, an unfilled hole, an open grave. Not an idle allusion: the people who died that day were crushed and their remains remained, now permanently a part of the island itself.

  I’d won $50 on a scratch ticket the night before and cashed it that morning. How lucky can you get? Saw the first tower hit on TV, thought it had to be a hoax. Tigger was already up on the roof standing against the maddeningly clear blue sky. Not one single fiber of cloud to obscure the southern view. No hoax, it was all really happening. Then it happened again. Later, when I had binoculars to my eyes and Tigger asked, “Are those ribbons? What are those swatches of color falling from the south tower?” I put the binoculars down, and with the naked eye they did look like bright ribbons or banners fluttering in descent, and the falling glass and tumbling metal shards only a tinsel and confetti cascade. Tigger wept. I couldn’t. Nothing surprised me after a while, until the next morning when the sun came up—I’d have taken odds that that was no longer a sure thing. I went out for the paper at dawn. Had to go to Grand Central for it, walking thirty blocks up a vacant First Avenue empty of traffic but teeming with ghosts, an invisible legion of thousands marching shoulder-to-shoulder toward their common commute. Along the way, every available surface—bus kiosk, plywood construction wall, payphone window—was papered with MISSING posters. Once upon a time, a missing poster would’ve quickened my pulse with the hint of a case, the scent of a chase. But no one was missing, they just weren’t coming home.