Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence (18 page)

The wooden door was as heavy as it looked. I needed to pull with both hands to get it open and again, once I was inside, to draw it shut. The interior of the stone igloo was dark except for the orange glow of a heat lamp recessed in the ceiling, illuminating the woven rope mats on the floor. Around the room’s periphery, a circle of wooden benches stood in shadow against the wall.

It was hot, a hundred-something degrees—there had been a digital readout outside the door, and though I hadn’t paid close attention to what it said, the number had definitely had three digits.

Near the door, a unit the size of a small stove held a layer of stones in a tray over a glowing heating coil. The couple from the changing area was sitting close to it. I took a seat on the opposite side, put my towel down beside me, kept my robe on and closed.

After a minute, the woman said, in a soft voice, “Your first time?”

Why did everyone keep asking me that? Was it that obvious that I was, as Susan had put it, vanilla? “Yes,” I said.

“That’s sweet. Brian, isn’t that sweet?” The senator agreed that it was. She turned back to me. “There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

After another minute passed, she asked, “What’s your name? I’m Grace.”

This needed to be headed off. “Grace,” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m really just here to use the sauna. That’s all.” I added, “No offense.”

She looked like I’d poured cold water on her, which under the circumstances was not an easy way to look. She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Your loss,” Brian said.

He lifted a dipperful of water out of a wooden bucket by his feet and dumped it on the hot stones. It sizzled, and a smell of menthol started to spread.

My loss, I thought. Mister, you don’t know the half of it.

I unfolded the towel, draped it over my head and shoulders, and put my forehead down in my hands. I needed to shut the world out. I needed to close my eyes and bake my bones and let the horror of the last 72 hours recede. It was hard to believe that just a few days ago I’d been talking to Dorrie, that she’d been fine, she’d been happy—well, as happy as she ever was, but certainly not unhappy, and god knows not suicidal. Friday night, over dinner, she’d even sounded excited—she was better than halfway through her last chapter for Stu Kennedy and thought she could finish it in the next week. It’s why I’d e-mailed her all the material I’d amassed, so she could pull bits and pieces from it and work them into the second draft, make it what she wanted it to be. She always felt so good, so satisfied, each time she finished a draft of anything she was working on. It was what she’d come to Columbia for, and it gave her a taste of...of accomplishment, of having set and met a goal. It was good for her.

And then Sunday morning.

And then the plastic bag and the pills and the book on the floor.

Why had I even bought that damn book? What had made me pick it up when I saw it on the dollar discard rack outside the Mercantile Library? And if I had to pick it up, why the hell hadn’t I at least put it away where Dorrie wouldn’t see it, instead of leaving it splayed open on the table by my bed? Had I
wanted
her to ask me about it, to worry that I might be thinking about suicide?
Had
I been thinking about it? If so, I hardly needed a book to tell me how.

And I hadn’t been thinking about it. Not seriously. It had just been a bad stretch—too many nights of Miranda coming to me in my dreams, too many mornings of lurching awake at 2:00 am with Miranda’s voice echoing in my ear:
You killed me, John. You killed me.
But the bad stretch had passed, they always passed, and
Final Exit
had just been part of the bad. For both of us. She hadn’t meant it seriously either.

But the son of a bitch who’d put her in that tub had meant it.

I took my glasses off, folded them, and put them in the pocket of my robe. I had to wipe my eyes. It was the heat, I told myself—and that was true, I was sweating, enormously. But I knew I was wiping tears away along with the sweat.

And what’s sweat and tears without blood? But the blood I’d spilled I couldn’t wipe away. An image of Jorge Ramos with his throat slit flashed onto the inside of my eyelids. An image of Miranda, my love, my first love—dead before she turned thirty, a horrible death, and it had been my fault, my doing.

And Susan—I saw Susan lying in my arms, in the shadows of Corlears Hook Park, her blood pouring out of her through the wounds in her chest, her sweater soaked with it, my hands covered in it.

So much blood. I couldn’t sweat enough, couldn’t cry enough, to wash it all away.

Minutes passed, hours passed, I don’t know which. Time didn’t move properly in the dark, in the heat. I just sat, searing myself from the outside in. Meanwhile, on the real outside, out in the streets, I was sure the police were drawing near, asking, Where is John Blake? Where is New York’s newest murderer?

When someone dragged the door open, I didn’t even look up, just sat with my face in my hands, my head swathed in the towel. I heard steps, then the creak of a bench as someone sat, a pair of slippers being kicked off. The hiss of another dipperful of water landing on the stones. Then Grace’s voice, soft as before, but this time in an exaggeratedly seductive purr: “Mickey. I was hoping you’d come.”

And a man’s voice replied, a voice I knew, a voice that brought the temperature of my overheated blood from a hundred-something to absolute zero.

“It’s midnight,” Miklos said, in his heavy Hungarian accent. “Where else would I be?”

I kept my head down, tried to angle my body away. I heard more footsteps, lighter ones, crossing the room.

When Grace spoke again, she was next to me, apparently sitting on the ground, her voice at the level of my waist.

“Mickey, Mickey. I didn’t mean I was hoping you’d be here. I knew you’d be here. I meant I was hoping you’d
come.”

She said this as though it were the height of wit, and Miklos rewarded her with a laugh.

“So make me come,” he said. “If you’re so worried about it.”

I heard the brush of fabric against fabric—a towel unwrapping—and then the oldest sound in the world, the stroking of flesh against flesh. “Oh, that’s nice, that’s good,” Grace murmured, as if she were talking to a pet, a well-behaved puppy perhaps. “That’s lovely.” The slow strokes quickened. And then she stopped talking, most likely because her mouth was full.

“Boy,” Brian said, and it took me a second to realize he was talking to me, “you’ll want to watch this. You might learn something.”

I didn’t turn, I didn’t look, and the three of them must have thought it was because I was embarrassed or a prude. Let them. Maybe Grace could’ve taught me something, you never know—but I didn’t need to learn it, not if it meant giving Miklos a chance to see my face.

I stood up, walked to the door. Facing away, holding the ends of the towel in my fist, keeping my head covered. But I needed both hands to push the door open, and as I pushed I felt the towel go, sliding down around my shoulders.

There was a bad moment when the rhythms of fellatio halted and I thought maybe Miklos had stopped her, had gotten up, that he’d recognized me from the back of my head and now was standing behind me, was reaching out for me with those enormous hands. The heat felt stifling suddenly, the darkness frightening, the dim orange glow hellish. And the door just wouldn’t open.

But Grace had apparently only been taking a breath, because the sounds resumed, and with one more firm shove the door did open. I stepped outside into the cooler air, swung the door closed, and fought to slow my racing pulse. I was tempted to run, to grab my clothes and get the hell out—but I knew that for all the danger I was in here, it wasn’t clear that I’d be better off on the street. Some choice: Miklos or the cops. At least the cops wouldn’t shoot me on sight—probably. But the cops could and would put me in jail. And that might just be a deferred death sentence if anyone in there with me owed Miklos a favor. It would only take one.

I put my glasses back on and walked to the front desk as calmly as I could. The woman looked up at me, smiled. “Have you changed your mind?”

“Yes,” I said. I picked up a brochure from a stack on the desk, flipped through it looking for something that might keep me out of his sight. Hydrotherapy room? No way to be sure he wouldn’t walk in. Salt scrub? The scrub rooms all seemed to be communal here. Then I came to the page for facials. “How about this?”

She looked where my finger was pointing.
Cucumber Facial.
The photo showed a woman with her entire face covered with a green paste. Each eye was covered with a cucumber slice and her hair was bound up in a towel.

“That’s for women only. For men we do this one.” The woman traced her finger down the list till she came to an item labeled
Mud Mask.
A male model was getting it done to him in the photo and you sort of assumed he had chiseled features because what male model doesn’t, but you couldn’t tell with mud covering him from hairline to throat.

“Fine,” I said.

“When would you like it?”

“Now,” I said.

She held her palm out toward me again, and I started counting out twenties before she even named the price. One hundred twenty dollars. My money was going fast.

She walked me around the short wall behind the desk to the front of the adobe meditation dome. She knocked once, opened the door and peeked in. It looked like a larger version of the sauna, only better lit and at room temperature. Over her shoulder I saw a woman catnapping against the wall. “One moment.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

I looked around. The spa was basically one large room with open lines of sight everywhere. I could see the front of the igloo from where I was standing and anyone coming out of it would be able to see me. I turned away. How long would it take for Grace to deliver on her promise? Would this be the start of an evening’s fun for the three of them or was it just a midnight quickie?

I heard a scraping sound then and saw the sauna’s heavy wooden door begin to swing outward. I didn’t wait to see who was coming out. I opened the door to the meditation room and went in.

“James,” the woman from the front desk said. “I was just going to get you.” The woman who had been catnapping was awake now and on her feet. She looked about seventeen years old. “This is Lisa. She’s going to be your therapist.”

“Great,” I said. “Can we get started?”

“You need to relax, James. Let your stress go.”

I managed a weak smile, tried not to let my panic show.

“This is going to feel wonderful, James. Take your time and enjoy it.” She said something in Korean to the other woman, who nodded.

Lisa moved slowly, painfully slowly, getting things set up. I kept waiting for the door to burst open and for Miklos to come in, one arm around Grace’s waist, laughing. I pictured him taking a moment to recognize me, but only a moment—and then the violence would begin.

“Lie down,” Lisa said. Her accent was thick.

They’d laid out a sheet of plastic on the ground with a folded-up towel for a headrest. I lay down on it. Lisa took a plastic bowl out of a cabinet while the woman from the front desk finally left the room. I took my glasses off and slipped them in my pocket again.

It took forever for Lisa to settle down beside me and stir the mixture in the bowl to the consistency she wanted. I kept glancing toward the door each time I heard a footstep outside. I didn’t feel safe until Lisa started painting the cool mud onto my cheeks and forehead. One wide swipe of the brush and my nose vanished, another and my chin was gone, a third erased my brow. Within a minute, I was covered completely. My own mother, rest her soul, wouldn’t have known me. My racing pulse finally began to slow.

And the mud felt good, soothing where the pepper spray had burned.

“How long?” I asked. A bit of the mud oozed into my mouth and I spat it out.

“Half hour,” Lisa said. “You want shorter?”

“Longer,” I said.

“Hour?”

“Two hours.”

“No more than ninety minutes,” she said. “Bad for your skin.”

“All right,” I said. “Ninety minutes.”

I thought for a moment that she might have left the room, it was so silent. But then I felt her hand on me, first the pressure of her palm on my thigh, then her fingers snaking between the folds of my robe.

I reached down, caught her wrist, gently extracted it.

“You don’t want special massage...?”

I probably couldn’t have gotten aroused anyway—fear and fatigue are better than saltpeter for killing the libido. But that wasn’t the main reason I didn’t let her proceed, nor was it a principled objection to paying for sex. If I hadn’t faulted Dorrie for selling it, I could hardly fault men for buying it. But if you were going to, you had to have the cash to pay for it—and unless it was included in the price of the mud mask, I didn’t.

I patted her hand, said “Thank you, no” like the well-brought-up young man I was, and focused my attention on getting ninety minutes of desperately needed sleep.

An hour and a half of unconsciousness doesn’t refresh you unless you were really running on fumes beforehand, but I had been. I woke to the sensation of a wet sponge delicately removing the mud from my face. Someone was kneeling behind me, Lisa presumably; my head was in her lap. She worked the corner of the sponge into the crease between my nose and my upper lip. She was very thorough.

“Thank you,” I said, when my lips were clean. And then, because I needed to know: “Let me ask you something.” She bent forward and her face loomed over mine. Lisa. “Is Miklos still here? Big man. Big hands.” I gestured at my own hand, tried to illustrate the concept of ‘bigger.’ “He was here earlier—”

“No,” she said. “Gone. Long time.”

“You’re sure.”

She nodded. “He never stay long.”

“He comes every night?”

“Yes. I think he pick up money. From Miriam.” Her voice was suddenly guarded. “Why? Friend of yours?”

I knew from her tone where she stood.

“No,” I said. “He’s not my friend.”