Chapter 7
“Welcome back.”
The aroma of coffee was strong in my nostrils. I was seated at a small round table across from…oh, yes, Claudia Keating’s housekeeper and friend, Vin Parrish. There was half a cup of frothy coffee in front of me. Another in front of him. I looked around. Starbucks.
“Welcome back,” he said again.
“What happened?”
“You bailed, honey! You were there one minute, then that guy with the big ole yella snake walked by and you looked like death on a cracker and went to Vegas. Where did you go, anyway?”
I blinked. I remembered seeing the tubing and then the small head with its black little eyes.
“Who….”
“I met somebody very interesting.”
“Who?”
“A gal named Sugartime. We hit it off. I got the feeling she was kinda southern.” He played with an unlit cigarette.
“You met Sugartime?”
“She said you were under too much stress back at the apartment and then the snake…we had a nice chat but she had to go. Said she could only be out for about twenty minutes or so. What happens—she turns back into a pumpkin, or what? Anyway, she left. And now here you are again.”
“She doesn’t usually come out at all. She takes care of things inside.”
“Well,I guess there was a mutiny on the Shiloh or something. Honey, your body is like a timeshare! You blew my mind more than the first time I saw the Macy’s Day Parade! You must give your friends a thrill ride.” He wasn’t disturbed at all.
“I don’t have any friends.” I decided to try the coffee. As I suspected, it was sweet. I took a swallow anyway.
“You don’t have any friends?” His voice slid up an octave.
“No.” I took another swallow. I needed the sugar and the caffeine.
“Honey, why not?”
“Most people can’t stand what you just went through. Though I haven’t blacked out like that in a long time.”
“Well, honey, I didn’t go through nothin’. You’re the one went through it!”
Nobody had ever taken this attitude. “And they don’t deal well with…it wasn’t a headache I had on the street before. I just had to quiet the voices.”
He took a sip of his coffee and wiped milk foam from his upper lip and said, “Well, I figured that after I talked to Sugartime. Anyway, you got one now.”
“I’ve got what?” I really wanted to get home.
“A friend.”
“You can’t be my friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are a suspect.”
He laughed out loud. “Well, if you’re any good at all at what you do, you will soon find out that’s crazy! I love those kids more than I’ve ever loved anybody except my dog Fred. I love them as much as I loved that beagle, and that’s saying something.”
He was telling the truth. And Sugartime had talked to him. The only other person she had ever talked to was Ray. Even Leo had never met Sugartime.
Chapter 8
The light on my answering machine blinked furiously. One message would be from Ray, the others from Leo. I hit the play button and sat on the edge of my bed to pull off my boots.
“Shiloh, it’s Leo. Call me.”
“Hi, gang.” That was Ray. “Somebody give me a call when you get in.”
“Shiloh.” Leo again. His voice taut. “Call me on my cell.”
“Shiloh! Where the hell are you? Call me at home.” Full-blown annoyance with a trace of worry.
I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but if I didn’t call Leo back he’d send over a blue-and-white, and I didn’t need Hester trying to play with a couple of beat cops this evening, so I pressed his speed dial number and took the receiver back to the bed.
He answered with a bark, “Shiloh!”
“Hello, Leo.” I pulled off my socks and flexed my toes.
“You just getting home now?”
“I had a glitch.”
“What kind of glitch? What do you mean glitch?”
“Nothing serious.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what did—Keep it down! I’m on the phone!”
I heard in the background a rising swell of laughing children and yapping dogs. “Sorry,” he said. “What did—Take it outside! I can’t hear myself think. Teeeeee Naaaaah!”
I heard more background chaos and then Tina’s voice over it and then quiet. She must have herded everybody into their backyard. Leo has four children, two dogs and at least three or four neighbor kids in his house at any given time.
Not confident that the peace would last in the Gianetti house, I got right to it. “Forget Charlotte,” I said.
“What?”
“Forget Charlotte. Find Anna.”
“You know she’s dead? Charlotte?”
“I know you can’t help her. Don’t waste your time trying. Concentrate on Anna. She might still be alive. What else have you got since I looked at the file?”
“We don’t have a clue. That’s not just an expression. We really do not have a fucking clue. We’ve just about exhausted the Russian mafia angle. But we’ll leave that end open for now. We have interviewed everyone in the building again, and in the neighborhood, and still come up with squat.”
“Anything come back from the Amber Alert?”
“A few lame-ass leads and we followed them, but nada.” He paused. “No one we talked to that afternoon said there was a man in the playground that day, so we figured we were looking for a woman.”
“Or someone who could convincingly play a woman,” I said.
“Yeah, we thought of that, which is why we are back to looking for anybody at all.”
“Miriam said that Anna was in the sandbox with another child. Have you found that child?”
“No. Nobody could remember which kid it was. None of the kids we talked to played with Anna that day.”
“So, two children might be missing and only one reported?”
“Right. Except, who wouldn’t report a missing kid?”
“Maybe the other child was a plant. Brought by the kidnapper.”
“Shit.”
I couldn’t believe he really hadn’t thought of that, but it sounded like he hadn’t. I also knew that this was not Leo’s only case, and he might be relying on Feeney to do a little thinking. Guess that wasn’t working out.
“So, can you at least tell me who wasn’t telling us the truth?”
“Nobody was lying that I could tell. I didn’t get to talk to Miriam. She was still drugged up. I didn’t get the whole truth either. There were too many people there.”
“Couldn’t you get them alone and—”
“I will.” It didn’t help to interview them one at a time in the family room. It’s like when you are allergic to cats. It doesn’t matter if all the cats in the house are locked in the bedroom and you’re in the living room. You’ll still get sick. I knew that going over there. “I just wanted to see them all together. This is a strange family, Leo. I intend to speak to each of them alone, away from the others. You checked their bank accounts, the two Burkes?”
“Yeah. No large withdrawals. We don’t think they got a ransom note.”
“I don’t think so either. I don’t mean withdrawals. Did you check for large deposits?”
“Deposits?” There was some dead air. I knew Leo had clapped his hand over the receiver, and he was mentally kicking himself and cursing Feeney, who, in his defense was his junior detective, a newbie I had yet to meet. Newbie Feeney would be in for a tongue-lashing and a butt-kicking. In a second, Leo was back. “We’ll check it.”
Poor Feeney. “And don’t just check under Burke. Check under Berkowitz.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Just check.”
“All right. How much money are we looking for?”
“How much is a little girl worth these days?”
“Is that all you’re goin
g to tell me?”
“I don’t have anything else. I have to think, Leo.”
He muttered a curse as he hung up.
I didn’t undress, just stretched out on my bed and closed my eyes. I saw dolls. Dolls make me uncomfortable. The more realistic the doll, the more queasy it makes me. So many dolls in that apartment. So many doll faces. The Barbies, the baby doll, the Raggedy Ann, the curly-headed dolls in Miriam’s room. And when I thought of them, I saw Phoebe Burke among them, with her ancient, painted doll face. Then the people all gathered before me, looking at me with hope, despair, challenge. And the faces of the children, who I had only seen in pictures, along with the doll faces came alive and gazed at me. Their little mouths formed Os in silent cries, and the little Os became snake eyes, and all against the sound of barking dogs. Dolls, dolls, baby dolls, barking dogs, bouncing balls. The silence of the mothers. Miriam paralyzed with grief and drugs. Snakes walking on the streets of New York. The king cobra who curled around the Buddha, rising up behind him and over him, flaring his neck to shelter him from the rain through the night of his enlightenment. “Lance.”
Yes, Isadora.
“Tell me a story.”
Once, a long time ago, in the land of Egypt, there was a Pharaoh. A paranoid Pharaoh. A bad man, all powerful. He sent out a decree over all the land…
Thursday
Chapter 9
I woke up the next morning under the covers, in pajamas, hair still damp, reeking of Hester’s various herbal soaps, rinses, creams and powders, and with the usual taste of blood in my mouth. I did the finger check, and as usual, came up clean. When I turned on the coffeepot I found a yellow sticky note above the switch.
I called Ray.
Olive.
I don’t know why she bothers to sign her name. Even with only three words I can recognize Olive’s back slant. She is the only one of us who is left-handed. I was glad she called. It meant that I didn’t have to for a while. I didn’t feel like talking to Ray about the blackout, even though I knew that Olive would have put the worst possible construction on it. Isadora is not holding up well, Ray. I fear she is becoming unhinged. I also knew that Ray wouldn’t take Olive too seriously. She has learned to listen between the lines. She says the people who demonstrate no self-interest at all are Lance, Sugartime and Hawk. The rest of them, in spite of our contracts, still have personal agendas that have to be factored into any conversation.
I didn’t feel hungry. Hester, no doubt, had had one of her healthful breakfasts of organic something or other in soy milk. So I updated my notebook while I waited for my coffee to brew. I had a lot to think about. Vin Parrish for one. He was the only one, besides Miriam, who seemed to be expressing any normal signs of grief over the two missing children.And,he was the only person I’d ever met who was more fascinated than disturbed the first time he’d seen me switch. I bet, when it happened, he hadn’t even stopped breathing.
Usually,the least that people do when they see a switch for the first time is stop breathing. Not because our manner of speaking or our behavior changes, ordinary people do that all the time. They speak as someone else in order to be funny or to make a point or just to show off. Actors do it to make a living. No, what stops people’s breaths is not that I speak in a different manner, but that I speak in another voice; not that my face suddenly looks different, but that they are suddenly looking at a different face. There are resemblances of course, like there would be in a family. But unless you are dealing with identical twins, there is never any mistaking that family members are different people. Even Ray hasn’t been able to get us all in photographs or videos. The only reason I know what everyone else looks like is because Aurora has painted each of us.
The coffee was done. I poured a cup, topped it with milk and strolled over to Aurora’s corner of the flat. Our portraits hung on one wall, with mine in the center, a bit larger than the others; her homage, I suppose to my being the firstborn. One of the few considerations I got. Aurora’s self-portrait was very small, in the outer orbit. The first time Ray saw our gallery wall, she was stopped in her tracks and voiced her astonishment in Spanish, then in English. “Holy smoke! She’s got all of you! My God! They are perfect! Who is she?” It was the first time we told her about Aurora. Being deaf and mute, she couldn’t come out to the psychiatrist herself, and if she did, what would she do? “Paint, of course,” Ray said. “Tell her she can come to me in my office. I will have paints for her. She can paint for me.” But to Ray’s continuing disappointment, Aurora has never appeared to anyone. We only know of her existence because of her paintings.
I could see my own face in the mirror, and she had captured me as well, or better than, any camera. It was from this portrait that I first understood what Ray described as my reptilian gaze. Aurora had rendered me full face, from a slightly upward angle. Even knowing that it was my own face I was looking at, I had no feeling of me in it, any more than I had with any of the other portraits.
The first ring of portraits included Hester. Some things remain constant in most of them. The hair stays black and straight, with a shoulder-length blunt cut and bangs. The eyes remain dark, but nothing else is really the same. Hester’s lips are fuller than mine. Her cheeks are more flushed and fleshed out and she has deeper laugh lines around her eyes and smile lines around her mouth. She is just generally rounder all over. Lance is also in the first ring. He seems smaller than me. When he inhabits this body he takes up less space, and he has a dreamy, wise expression, with a heavier brow and thinner lips. He has none of the rosiness that is Hester’s (none of us have that). His skin goes flatter, though he cannot grow a beard. He knows what he is and that he cannot live life fully as a man. He has channeled his energies into being a poet and a storyteller. His voice is low and mellifluous. I have tried, but I cannot produce his sound. He sometimes goes to a small Village coffeehouse for open mike sessions. His poetry is very depressing, but well received on those few nights he has gotten up to recite it.
I am food for my guilt,
the feeding ground
for the lions of my rage.
He has not tried to publish anything. His poems are not that good, he says. He makes them for himself and whoever might want to listen, but never puts anything down on paper. I hear his voice in my head, but it is not quite the same as hearing it played back on Ray’s tape recorder, just as seeing the faces of the Company in my mind’s eye is different from seeing them in photos, or Aurora’s portraits.
I don’t understand how Aurora sees us all so much more clearly than we see each other, but she does. Olive’s face is longer, horsier, with a deep crease between her eyebrows and a downturned mouth. Her voice is lower than mine, but not into Lance’s register and just a little pinched sounding.
Hester’s voice is high, chirpy. No mistaking her soprano, which can go from breathy to shrill in the same sentence.
Hawk has never been photographed, but there she is, in the corona of portraits around my own. Ray says it’s a good likeness. Her bones are bonier. Her cheekbones are prominent, and her eyes almost black. There is something wolfy about her face. The first time Ray met her, all she heard was a snarl. Back in the state hospital while I was being weaned from all the drugs they had been giving me, I was in withdrawal and unsteady. I reached for something on the floor and Ray thought I was going to fall and hurt myself. All the intern intended to do was steady me or at least slow down my fall off the bed. She grabbed my arm and heard that snarl for the first time. Hawk whirled on her and literally bared her teeth. “I felt like a Little Latina Riding Hood with the big bad wolf,” she told me.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I squeaked. She almost broke my wrist and I almost wet my pants.” Ray laughed, but she had been scared. Hawk realized she meant no harm and growled her first words to Ray, “Till we know you better, no sudden moves.”
She agreed.
I’ve never heard Hawk speak. We do not share the body. Ray says, “Well, if
a wolf could talk—a really pissed off—you know, cornered and dangerous wolf—that’s what she’d sound like.” Hawk has never allowed herself to be recorded.
Before forming the Company we were a small anarchy ruled by confusion and self-interest, like a team of dogs all tangled up in their traces biting and snarling at each other and trying to move in different directions with nobody getting anywhere.
I had a headache. I knew it would pass in about half an hour. At least it wasn’t a hangover headache. Our Olive, you see, drinks a little.
I passed the other portraits...Cootie looking like his name— disheveled, cocky, a little goofy; Aurora with blond hair and blue eyes…that’s how she sees herself. Ray said if the others could paint themselves, they would look quite different from the way she and Aurora see them. Hester, for example, in her own mind, has bright red hair. In Aurora’s portrait, Sugartime looks a little like an ancient, but ageless Queen Latifah. Ray thinks that is because, since Sugartime is outside so seldom, Aurora has had to paint her portrait from the inside only.
I finished my coffee in front of Aurora’s easel. Ray had taken special pains to set up this studio for her. She paints mostly at night, so strong overhead lamps that simulate natural light flood her corner of the apartment, and for those rare times she is out during the day, the corner windows give her light from the east and the north.
Ray installed shelves and bought a used artist’s cabinet with drawers for canvases and paints and brushes. Aurora’s other paintings are lined up against the walls all around the apartment. Some mysterious communication passes between Aurora and Olive, and when Aurora is ready to let a painting go, Olive wraps it up, calls a cab, and takes it down to a Soho gallery run by Robin Bartholome, who loves to trace himself back to some English duke or other. Aurora’s paintings are selling for more and more money. Robin is always leaving messages asking for more paintings. At this point in time, he is fond of saying, I could sell at least ten more of those flower dealios you do so well. Think pink. Call me.
Command of Silence Page 8
