Disturbed Earth (17 page)

21

"You were bleeding and you stopped for donuts?"

"Yeah," I said and closed my eyes. "I wasn't sure you'd want to see me so I got an offering. I couldn't find a pizza place."

"You're an idiot," Maxine said. "Get in the shower."

After I took a hot shower, and Maxie smeared some antiseptic on my face and put on Band-Aids and gave me a couple of Advil, she made me a steak sandwich, poured out some wine and brought it all into the living room, where I sat wrapped in a blanket. She set the tray on the coffee table.

"Listen, I'm sorry to come so late. I'm sorry I never showed last night, too. I'm just generally sorry."

"Who else would take you in?" She smiled. "I was up anyway. Honest. I was watching TV."

I bit into the sandwich. "I'll just eat this and then I'll go."

"Don't be an asshole."

"I have to go back."

"You're not going anywhere tonight. You look like shit." She put her hand on my forehead. "You have a lousy fever."

I drank and the wine tasted wonderful.

"Where are the girls?"

"I let them stay on with Mark's mother upstate for a few days," she said. "I was a little freaked after they found that girl dead out by Sheepshead Bay." Maxie settled on the couch next to me. She was wearing jeans and an old red plaid flannel shirt that must have belonged to Mark. "What's going on, Artie? What do you need?"

"You," I said.

Maxie sampled a donut.

"These are good," she said. "Krispy Kreme, right? Listen, I was thinking that you might be onto something with Totonno's pizza."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, Totonno's is great, it's more like artisan pizza, really light, I mean you can eat a whole pie by yourself, it doesn't amount to more than two slices it's so light, but I'm still a Grimaldi's girl." She held up the donut that was covered with pink frosting and colored sprinkles and bit into it and the frosting left a pink sugar mustache on her upper lip. Maxine looked about twelve.

She tried to distract me, cheer me up, keep me focused on eating and resting. The pizza talk was code. With me and Max, it was the way we ran the relationship. We invested way too much in the relative merits of pizza and we both knew it, but it made us laugh. It made things easy. For me. Maybe it was only easy for me.

She kicked off her loafers and pulled her long legs under her.

"Can I ask you something, Artie? You feel up to it, I mean you don't want to just go to sleep?"

"I want to sit here with you. Talk to me."

But first she got back up and went to the stereo and put on
The Steamer,
an old Stan Getz album I bought her. Maxie was a rock chick; she liked Melissa Etheridge, she liked girl bands; she liked, though she never actually admitted it, Britney and Madonna and Jewel. For me, though, she listened to Stan and I liked her for it.

She sat down, leaned against me, listened for a few minutes and said, "It's nice. The music. I'm getting into it."

"I'm really glad. But what? You said could you ask me something."

"Did you like Mark?"

"Why?" I drank my wine down and poured some more then held up a pack of cigarettes.

She shook her head. "I think I really quit this time. I promised the girls. You go ahead. So, did you?"

"What?"

"Like him. I mean tell me the truth."

"I liked him OK. I think I was jealous, you know? You'd found this big handsome guy and you got married and had the girls. You had it figured out."

"You met Lily."

"That was after you married Mark," I said. "A lot later."

"Come on, Artie. You didn't want to settle down, not back then and not with me. Probably not with me at all. But, listen, I mean about Mark."

"He was OK. He did a good job. I thought he was kind of obsessive if you're asking. You went fishing with him, the gear had to be in perfect order. You played some pick-up ball, he counted points. The rest of us sat around and guzzled beer, he went to the gym. It was like he was keeping stuff in or something."

"You think he was smart?"

"How do you mean? What is this anyway, what's going on with you?"

Restless, Maxie got up again and changed the music and sat down again. The shirt she wore was too big on her, the neckline gaped. I could see her breasts.

She shrugged and said, "I feel guilty."

"Because he died?"

"Because I'm tired of feeling guilty. Because I want to sort of get on with my life. Because I like sleeping with you, and I keep feeling like I have to go on being a widow, like I have to be in mourning, not for me but for other people. It's eighteen months." She hesitated. "Maybe I'm shallow, maybe I'm unfeeling, I don't fucking know, but I don't want to go to any more public events, any more memorials, any more anniversaries. I don't want to be some kind of pawn for politicians. I know other women who feel the same way. OK, I loved Mark, but the last few years were crummy and maybe we would have split up except I have enough Catholic guilt not to." Maxie was speeding.

"I'm sorry." I put my arms around her.

"You know what my mother said to me when I was twenty-three, she said, honey, you are twenty-three years old, this was a long time ago, she was a cleaning lady, you know, she never got an education so she cleaned people's houses, she said, when you are twenty-seven you should find a nice Asian guy and you marry him and you have some kids, even if the marriage don't last, that's what she said. But you get an Asian boy because they are smart and the genes, you know, they rub off." She laughed. "Mark wasn't really smart. He was a good guy, though. You want me to get another bottle of wine out?"

I shook my head, finished the food and sat back.

"So you want to talk about the case, or not, it's OK, either way."

"I think I know who the clothes from the beach belong to."

Maxie sat up. "Who is she?"

"It's not a girl. I think it's my cousin's kid."

"Billy? That kid you take fishing with the mother who married the restaurant guy? Shit, Artie. You're kidding. He got snatched? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Yeah. I was only sure today, sure enough anyhow."

"You think it has something to do with you?"

"What makes you ask that?"

"I don't know, but you talk about that boy a lot, I mean I know he matters a lot, and I know you worked some cases out by Brighton Beach back when and the creeps there probably have it in for you, they can be very personal when it comes to someone they don't like. Remind me how old Billy is?"

"Almost twelve," I said. "Twelve in a few weeks, but smart. Maybe he'll be OK, he's really smart, he could maybe think his way out of trouble."

Maxine took my hand. "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry."

My head hurt, my tongue was furry with fever and wine. I felt like crying. I put my head down on Maxie's shoulder.

"Artie? Listen, I have to tell you something and I can't, officially, because I was asked to keep my mouth shut. I saw the clothes from the beach."

I stared at her.

"A friend of mine in my old forensics lab was working on the ID. She asked my opinion."

"You didn't mention it yesterday."

"She told me to keep it to myself, she shouldn't have asked me, maybe, or they told her not to and you didn't ask me to get involved officially. And anyhow, it only happened yesterday afternoon." Maxie was rambling.

"It's OK," I said. "It's OK. What do you think?"

"Unofficially?"

I nodded.

"I think that the kid who wore those clothes was a sacrifice. The way the cut marks looked, the way the T-shirt was cut off with a razor, I'm sure it was a razor blade. There was so much blood," Maxie said. "There's something ritualistic and horrible about the way they took the clothes and hid them, a clue, a sign, so we'd know the next thing we found would be the feet or the hands. You remember that case a while back? I saw the body on that case. The clothes here look similar."

For a few minutes we sat together on the couch, holding hands, silent. Then Maxine leaned over and said, "Do you want to sleep with me?" She reached up and kissed me lightly.

For a minute I was distracted. Genia's face, her old woman's face, pale and bleak, floated in front of my eyes.

Maxie said irritably, "Never mind."

"I want to."

"I don't need a mercy fuck, OK?"

I kissed her back. "That never crossed my mind."

By the time we got to her bedroom, most of our clothes were on the floor and we were laughing.

Later, half asleep, the snow sliding down her bedroom window, listening to Maxie breathe, I stared at the ceiling and felt, for the first time in years, content. Contentment's not something I was on regular terms with. It was good. Funny how it could come over you in the middle of all the shit.

Lying in the tangled sheets and blankets, Maxie exhaled and made warm mewing noises. It was like sleeping with a comfortable cat. I dozed off.

I couldn't tell if it was five minutes or a couple of hours, but I woke up suddenly, aware of another noise. Something different, something that had disturbed the balance, a noise coming from the other room.

It was dark in the apartment. I glanced at the window; outside it was completely white. There was nothing except snow.

Again from the living room came a noise, the faint creak of floorboards; the boards were laid over concrete and not nailed down and in certain places they creaked when you walked on them.

Maxie was fast asleep, unreachable, impervious. I didn't wake her. My clothes, my gun, were in the other room. I lay still, listening. Someone was in the apartment.

Silently, I rolled to the side of the bed and then off it. In the dark, I fumbled for the flashlight on the bedside table. My hand wrapped around it.

My fingers felt the heavy metal tube. From the girls' room now I heard footsteps. Someone moving from room to room, coming in our direction.

Naked, with the flashlight in my hand and a blanket stuffed under my arm, I moved slowly towards the door.

Did he follow me from Breezy Point? Was someone on my tail? Did they want me bad enough to come for me miles away at Maxine's apartment? It was a couple of miles so they had come by car.

The way Maxie's building was set up always worried me. It was two stories high with two apartments, one upstairs, one down. You reached the upper floor—Maxie's—by an outside staircase to the street. On the other side of the building was a stretch of grass, a few trees, then Shore Drive and the river. You could come across the grass easy if you wanted to. You could get around to the front of the building and up those outside stairs without much trouble.

Throw a blanket, they told us. You suspect a terrorist on a plane, they had said, throw things. Water bottles. Fruit. Throw blankets. It was crazy, me, naked, with a flashlight and a blanket; I caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror. I wanted to laugh out loud. I was feverish. My head was burning.

Artemy often makes inappropriate jokes in class, the music teacher told my mother when I was thirteen. She was a pretty woman and I had asked if her G-string was tight enough. I had read about this G-string item in a Mickey Spillane novel I found in a black market bookshop near the Arbat in Moscow.

The floor creaked harder. The footsteps belonged to someone heavy. I positioned myself flat against the wall at the entrance to the living room and waited in the dark. Then I saw him.

The dark figure was tall and bulky, as big as Tolya Sverdloff. I saw him emerge from the children's room and move towards me. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw now that the front door was ajar. He seemed to see me at the same time I saw him and he lunged, but I was faster. I threw the blanket over him and he fought it for a moment and I tried to shove him onto the floor, but he was huge; it was like pushing a mountain.

From the street somewhere came the sudden sound of a siren, and it distracted me for a split second. The monster in my arms was as agile as he was big; graceful as a dancer even under the blanket, he slipped from my grasp, got to the front door and ran. I found my jeans, pulled them on, got my gun from the coffee table, and went after him, but he was fast. By the time I got down the stairs from Maxie's place to the path outside, he was halfway down across the snow-covered grass. He reached the highway. He skidded across the road in spite of the on-coming traffic and disappeared and I couldn't tell if he'd been run over or if he made it to the walkway along the river. The snow blotted out everything.

I ran. The snow under my bare feet. I reached the highway but he was gone. By the time I got back, Maxine was already in the living room, phone in her hands, clutching a terry bathrobe around her.

"You're shaking," she said.

"It's alright," I said.

"I'm glad you were here," she said. "They came for the girls, didn't they?"

I thought about the creep who stuffed me into the garbage can out by Breezy Point and wondered again if I'd been followed.