Lust Demented (2 page)

Missy showed up in full evening wear ready for confrontation. Featherton was at her side with his hand extended, waiting for me to shake it. Missy had a glowing, almost blinding smile, proud of her accomplishments. I turned my back on them both without saying a word.

“Fucking caldron.” Detective Anderson’s accent shifted guttural as his body twitched in preparation.

“Temperature’s rising.” Sgt. Bethany Powers’ eyes drilled inward as we weaved in and out of downtown traffic.

I could hear Missy’s heels clicking on marble museum floors. We were surrounded by valuable art. Then the sound of her heels disappeared. Then the art disappeared.

No more than another set of wheels click-clacking across the river: That’s all we were. The Brooklyn Bridge echoed with taunts. What the hell was Missy doing on the other side of the river in the first place? She always complained about the boroughs, the subways, the stoops, and anything New York that wasn’t Manhattan. Maybe she had some premonition that Brooklyn would be her final resting place.

Missy didn’t know I was choking on her perfume. It was the first time I followed anyone. Let alone a lover. The moment was romantically cinematic, except for the spy behind the invisible curtains. I didn’t have to hide. They couldn’t see me even if they wanted to. They couldn’t see anybody, but each other. When he kissed her, the flavor of his lips filled my mouth. It tasted like saying hello again to a dead relative at a wake.

A final tear rolled down my cheek. There was a commotion on Coffey Street. I always envisioned the confrontation with Missy differently. I would see her from across the room, slowly gravitating towards her, melting every step of the way in her incendiary gaze until I was a pool of truth at her feet and she would bathe in me… drink me, until we were one again.

This city keeps its cops busy. Sgt. Powers and Det. Anderson left me in the car while they mingled on the miniature lawn similar to a couple at an East Hampton benefit dinner. Something about the casualness of their gestures offended me. Both officers appeared to know everybody on the scene. From the backseat the sounds of their voices were distorted, struggling futilely to be heard over the rest.

“We need you to identify the body.” Det. Anderson offered up a polite invitation to the gore and emptiness waiting inside.

L
ITTLE
STONES TRAPPED IN CONCRETE
slabs forced into the grass. The path to the front door disintegrated before it materialized. With a somber greeting, Sgt. Bethany Powers quickly ushered us to the back of the house. Center of gravity shaken, it occurred to me the amount of time that passed since I stepped foot inside an actual house and not an apartment.

Stories hidden within stories. Trails of reality dosing dream logic. From the outside the three-story shell looked no different than the other dilapidated shitshacks that the longshoreman used to stain with sweat. But inside the ceilings were strangely arched. The second and third floors were completely removed and the walls reinforced. The three of us exchanged glances under slices of light. Gothic stone statues and heavily carved furniture were scattered everywhere allowing very little room to move.

The officers stopped short, releasing air from their constricted lungs. It was time. I looked down at the body and quickly looked away.

“That’s not Missy.” An unfathomable error. They must’ve already known. Fury built up inside of me. I felt stretched vertically as if the devil was kicking her high heel up my ass.

“What do you mean?”

“Who is it?” Sgt. Bethany Powers and Det. Anderson studied my reaction, all but taking notes.

Light through the stained glass ceiling divided the victim’s body into occult fractals. The dead writer lying on the ground, skull split, body thrashed by an evaporated predator was a polar opposite of Missy.

“Monika Gloom.” There was a strange silent understanding between the icy amazon and I. The sensation carried true into her death.

“It looks like her vocal chords were cut out with a pair of scissors.” Sgt. Bethany Powers traced an imaginary line centimeters above Monika’s throat, snipping away with long spindly fingers.

“Whoever did this tore the folds of flesh right through her neck after they were done peeling her open.” Detective Anderson’s intellectual tone conjured images of the scores of fatal wounds a person would have to examine before gaining such expertise.

“Pages thrown all over her. Once again all the books ripped off the shelves…”

“… separated from their binding.” I was turning into one of them. Finishing their sentences for them in the fashion they originally hoped.

“Okay… Farrow let’s get it over with now and not at the station. Tell us everything you know about her.” We were all playing the same game in different ways. Certain facts had to be left out to allow myself the greatest available freedom, which seemed to be diminishing in violent flashes of time. I had to give the cops something.

“She wrote the dark stuff. Her talent… her presence was intimidating.” The more I looked at Gloom, the more I zoned out. The place I entered, I didn’t want to go. I tried to drift back, but it wasn’t happening quickly enough.

“D.O.A. had a reading scheduled tonight on the Bowery.” A random cop appeared to be a fan of Gloom’s schlock. “It starts in a half hour.”

“Get moving then!” Red hair whipped me in the face, nearly stripping me of my unalienable rights.

“Farrow! Let’s get shaking, huh.” Detective Anderson nudged me away from Monika’s body.

“No chance. I’m done with you guys.” Bloody pages of
A Greater Truth
were stuck to my shoe. It took a few Radio City kicks and half the Harlem shuffle to shake them off.

“Have it your way.” Detective Anderson exaggerated his huffs, theatrically storming off, leaving me in the room alone with Sergeant Powers and Gloom.

“You artists are always broke, but usually can still lose yourself in a good fuck.” She grabbed my belt buckle pulling me close enough that I could smell the napalm on her breath. One hand slid between my underwear and my skin. The other she kept closed in a fist. Slowly she uncurled her fingers, revealing a crumbled twenty dollar bill in her palm. I took it and she pushed me away. Then something hit her. Her brain was storming. Lizardish oracle eyes locked on my belt buckle. Somehow she knew Percy kept my pants from falling around my ankles. Somehow she already knew.

“I don’t want to get involved.” Clearly writer genocide. Slit throats flooding, screaming vowels and owl eyes of frozen cadavers. Burn all books, drain all ink, smash all screens.

“We have nothing. Believe me when I tell you this. Remember you or someone you love will be next. Go to the reading. Just go and see if anything feels strange.” Damn sexy how she mixed her bullshit with sincerity as she found a better grip, stroking me.

R
UMBLING.
A STORM WAS CREEPING
up. Not bolts, but white flashes ready to blanket Brooklyn’s bellyland. The first drops sounded like the neighborhood kids were dumping pails off the deserted factory rooftops. Outside Gloom’s house a cop chatted up the driver of a yellow cab. I got in without bothering to say where I was going. It was a relief to be free of the dicks breathing down my neck. Anytime I tried to envision Percy’s ceremonious corpse, I could only see my own.

“Some writer’s bar on Bowery and Houston is where the cop told me to drop you. That okay with you?” The transsexual cabbie’s raspy Macy’s fragrance aisle accent shook with the cab as we rattled through the potholes. Long hair dangled on the divider.

“Yeah, but take your time. No rush.” I wanted to get back to it. I needed to write. Make sense of it all.

“I spit verse there sometimes.” The cabbie took both hands off the wheel, interlocking ten fingers and flexing both biceps.

“Oh…”

“Taxi-poems, I guess you’d call them.”

“Yeah…” My brain was leaking all over its empty page. The chaos crackling above felt right on target. All I needed was the rain.

“I saw you made the news.” The driver turned completely facing me in an effort to engage me. “Curiousity got the better of me and I took a spin to see for myself.”

A small flat screen television was pinned smack dab in the middle of the back of the front seat, strategically below the partition which had a little moveable drawer where you could slide the money through the bulletproof glass like a late night liquor store.

“TV repeats every fifteen minutes or so. Gives me a fucking migraine. Every time I turn the volume off, a fare turns it back on. I hear this city’s sickness in my sleep. It’s one thing to read the paper in the morning… another thing to listen to it for your entire shift.” The cabbie was really able to carry on a conversation with herself. Definitely a writer.

“Wait. This is it… here it comes.” The rain began to come down harder. A smooth layer of careening water covered the windows erasing the outside world. A hotel restaurant scene appeared and disappeared in a matter of seconds replaced by a pearly-smiled reporter who appeared a little too joyful to be reporting a murder. The little screen filled with images of Percy’s townhouse.

*****Today steps from Gramercy Park a typically peaceful street was the site of a vicious, cold-blooded homicide. It was here where publishing czar Percy Featherton was found savagely murdered in his lavish townhouse. The pages from his most recent success
A Greater Truth
were found torn and scattered over his dead body. The book was a stylish mystery written by his wife and protégé Missy Featherton. Police have taken into custody Michele Giacomo Aurelio Faro who was discovered at the scene in a state of confusion. Bizarrely he seems to be attempting to take credit for a book he didn’t write*****

“That’s some long name you got.” The driver looked back at me instead of the road, bulldozing forward.

“Yeah. I’m surprised they didn’t butcher it. Did it sound like I was guilty?”

“I don’t know I just met you. In this country…”

“She made me sound guilty. Didn’t she?”

“Mr. Farrow it made you sound like a man who’s seen better days.”

“Why didn’t they say I wrote the book? Why did they give Missy credit as the author?”

“I suppose because her name is on the cover.”

“I wrote it.”

“No shit?”

“The cops believed me.”

“You believe that they believed you? You wouldn’t be the first killer to ride in this car… this planet’s outside its head. Just when you let your guard down…. WA-BAM!” Electric sky followed by a thunderous boom.

“I’m no killer. I’m just a… just a friend of the dead.” Construction cranes hung above us. The overseers were forcing futuristic change. A neighborhood famous for its anonymity in the past was transformed see-through. All the buildings going up were all windows. You could see the new neighbors cozying in. You could hear them pop their corks.

“Afraid somebody’s after you in particular or just all the writers they can find?”

“Somebody’s exterminating writers and I’m heading to a room full of them. What are your plans for the night?”

“What do you want to take me out on the town or use me for a shield?”

“A shield from the shield.”

“Gotta keep the meter moving. I suggest the same to you.” The driver shrugged me off, pulling over across the street from the club. I placed the twenty in the partition’s pay slot only to be refused.

“Nothing disgusts me more than a bum scheming to take credit for someone else’s work. I hope you finally get picked out of the crowd.” The cabbie grilled me with a lippy smile through the rearview. I lifted the bill high like a hypnotist. Gently laying the green on the back seat followed with a middle finger.

It was always raining on the Bowery. The door slammed. The cab’s spinning wheels showered me. I was alone for the first time since I stumbled upon Percy’s cold cadaver. I found a seat on the curb. The entire city was just a fucking puddle to make a mess in. I became fixated on a paper coffee cup overflowing water from the storm. The soiled cup wouldn’t fall over no matter how hard the rain came down. I put the cup to my lips and sipped. I was drinking the city itself. The familiar taste of millions of overflowing dreams. It tasted natural, like licking your own blood to stop the bleeding.

I
T
WAS AN ILLUSION THAT
I was drinking anything more than air. I watched the drops build at the bottom of the empty cup, but didn’t have the patience to allow them to grow into something substantial. Crushing the cup, I placed it in the gutter, and booted it into the middle of the street. A few cars ran it over. I waited for the avenue to open up, making a point to step on the dirty flat cardboard before slipping through the doors of the poetry club.

Some people are ghosts… able to float aimlessly without ever truly compromising their ideals to the world of flesh. It was no secret that Monika Gloom chose a spectral image to boost her circulation. Nonetheless, her fans were the authentic living dead, feasting on one of their own. I scanned the room for Detective Anderson and found him talking up a thin woman with huge glasses that made her look like the human fly. There was a buzz in the room and the conversations seemed to blend together into some foul concoction of spirit.

“….who could’ve done this?… it doesn’t make sense… writers feign suicide … musicians get drained by love…. painters turn into vegetables…” The auditory select herd had some interesting philosophies on the final days of an artist. A hovering impatience called for an orator to stand above us and make sense of it all.

“What a bore.” Distinguished and distant, Lars Wildman gave off an air of self-destructive royalty. I should have smelled him coming.

“What’s a bore Lars?”

“This fucking senselessness. The easy ending is death. For once I want to see a story that ends with life.” Lars seemed heavily medicated as always.