Murder of Angels (7 page)

“What’s going on in there?” a man with a Middle Eastern accent shouted at her from the other side. “Don’t make me call the police.”

“I’m sick,” she shouted back at him. “I’m just sick.”

“But you were screaming,” the man said. “I heard you,” and she could tell that he didn’t believe her.

“So I’m
very
sick, okay? But I’m getting better. I’ll be out in a minute. I’m sorry.”

“I
will
call the police if you scream again,” he said, and then she listened as his angry footsteps retreated down the hallway. Niki shut her eyes, wondering if there was anything in the restroom she could use for a bandage, and waited hopelessly for whatever was going to happen next.

Another taxi ride down Fulton to the evergreen sanctuary of Golden Gate Park, and this time a driver who didn’t try to talk her ear off. He dropped Niki in front of the California Academy of Sciences, and she stood on the museum steps for a while, watched as noisy groups of schoolchildren were herded about by their teachers. She’d torn away a strip of the sweatshirt she was wearing under the blue fur coat and wrapped it tightly around her hand, not so tight that she’d cut off the circulation, but tight enough that it would stop the bleeding and stay put.

She was there because this was where the thing that had crawled inside her said to come. This drab Eisenhower-era edifice of gray stone blocks and concrete columns, an austere and secular church for modern stargazers and alchemists. In a few minutes, she would go inside and see whatever it was she was supposed to see, but for the moment, better to stand out here beneath the wide blue sky and smell the clean ocean air, the mild autumn breeze, the flowers and grass, and Niki imagined that she could smell nasturtiums and roses growing somewhere nearby.

Some of the older kids noticed her, and a few pointed rude fingers and stared, laughter for the frowzy Vietnamese woman in her coat that looked like maybe someone had skinned Grover the Muppet and sewn the pieces back together for her to wear. Her messy hair and the sloppy, bloodstained bandage on her hand, and
I bet I look like a homeless person,
she thought.
A street lunatic, a damn crack whore,
which made her sad, sad and tired, but made her smile, too, thinking about Daria’s money, Daria’s big house on Alamo Square.

“You don’t look so good, lady,” one of the boys said, bolder than the rest, sixth- or seventh-grader in a Sponge-Bob T-shirt and his red hair shaved almost down to his scalp.

“I don’t feel so hot, either,” she said and wiped sweat from her forehead, held out her rag-swaddled hand so the boy could get a better look.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asked. “You got AIDS or something?”

And then his teacher noticed, and she rushed over to reclaim the boy, a strained, unapologetic smile for Niki, and she pulled the boy away, tucked him into line with his restless classmates. But he glanced back at Niki over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out at her.

What you waiting for now, Niki? Too afraid of what you’re going to see in there?

“Leave me alone,” she said, talking to no one at all, or herself, to the boy or the muttering, colorless thing nestled somewhere inside her. “Just leave me the hell alone,” and she walked past the children, up the stairs, into the museum.

Eight dollars and fifty cents to get through the door, past guards and docents and into the
Tyrannosaurus
-haunted atrium. The skeleton loomed above her like a sentinel outside the ebony gates of Hades or Mordor or Midian, something that might lunge from its pedestal, loud clatter of bones and steel rods, to snap her apart in those petrified jaws, those long stone-dagger teeth.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered confidently to the dinosaur, not even a real fossil, remembering the first time she’d come here with Daria, and the
Tyrannosaurus
was only a clever replica, nothing but molded fiberglass and plaster and paint. Damnation’s scarecrow wired together to impress the gullible, and Niki glared defiantly up at its empty eye sockets, and the skeleton stayed right where it was.

“Can I help you find something, miss?” a girl asked her, a very polite girl wearing a plastic name tag with the museum logo printed on it, and Niki turned her back to the phony
Tyrannosaurus
. The girl’s name was Linda, and she had a smile that reminded Niki of an airline stewardess.

“Do you have spiders?” Niki asked her. “I need to see the spiders, if there are any.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said and pointed at the other side of the atrium, behind the tyrannosaur. “They’re located in the Hall of Insects,” and she smiled again and handed Niki a colorful, glossy pamphlet with a map of the museum.

“Thank you,” she said, but the girl was already busy asking if she could help someone else.

Niki Ky sat alone in the Hall of Insects, sat on a long wooden bench in front of a big display case of spiders and scorpions, mites and ticks and less familiar creepy crawlies; a hundred minuscule corpses, minute crucifixions for the curious to gawk at, sideshow for the squeamish or a nightmare for arachnophobes. Beneath the sweatshirt rag her hand had begun to itch, and she concentrated on the display, trying not to scratch at it or mess with the bandage.

Niki had read all the labels before she sat down, read them three times through because she was afraid of missing the one thing that was most important. But none of it seeming any more or less significant than the rest. Now she just sat there, waiting and thinking about the tiny bodies, about the spiders, mostly, the spiders the reason that she’d come here, after all. As if she’d ever need so obvious a reminder, about as tactful as Dickens’ Christmas ghosts or a lead pipe across her skull. She reached into the pocket of her coat and took out the first bottle that her fingertips encountered, the Klonopin, and she opened it.

“Of course, they aren’t insects, you know,” Dr. Dalby said, and she hadn’t even noticed him standing there in front of her, leaning on his silver-handled walking stick and peering at the exhibit through his bifocals. “They’re actually members of the Class Arachnida.”

“I
know
that,” Niki said, interrupting him, and she put two of the pills in her mouth. They tasted faintly sweet and made her tongue tingle, faint and not unpleasant numbness as they started to dissolve. “Spyder told me that.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “She would have, wouldn’t she?”

“I guess no one wants a Hall of Arachnids,” she mumbled, and Dr. Dalby nodded his head.

“No, I don’t suppose they do. But it does seem a shame, don’t you think? Says here there are more than…” and he paused, reading one of the labels again. “More than thirty-eight thousand species of spiders, and only about four thousand species of mammals. And, it says, arachnids were the first terrestrial animals, with scorpions dating back to the Silurian, over four hundred million years ago.”

“I read it already, Dr. Dalby,” and Niki dry swallowed the two half-dissolved pills, put three more in her mouth. “I read it
all,
three times.”

“But that little lady there,
she’s
a gem, isn’t she?” and he pointed at a dead black widow. “Family Theridiidae, genus
Latrodectus,
species
mactans
. I wish I remembered more of my Latin. I’d tell you what the heck all that means.”

“Spyder knew,” Niki said. “But I don’t. She told me once, but I can’t remember anymore. There are five species in North America,” and then Niki shut her eyes and recited them for the psychologist: “
Latrodectus mactans, Latrodectus variolus, Latrodectus geometricus, Latrodectus hesperus,
and
Latrodectus bishopi,
” and he smiled at her.

“That’s impressive, Nicolan.”

She opened her eyes, and “You’re not really Dr. Dalby, are you?” she asked the old man. “You don’t smell like him.”

“Right now, I’m who you need me to be.”

Niki laughed, louder than she’d intended to laugh, and several people in the Hall of Insects turned to stare at her.

“Sorry about that,” she said, though she wasn’t, and took two more Klonopin.

“This isn’t what you think it is,” the man who wasn’t really Dr. Dalby said and he sat down on the bench next to her and touched her gently on the shoulder. “It’s not just phantoms and hallucinations. It’s so much more than that.”

Niki didn’t look up, stayed focused on the prescription bottle because she didn’t want to see the things in his eyes and certainly didn’t want him to see the things in hers.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve had enough of everything for one fucked-up lifetime.”

“You know, Niki,” and then she was sure it wasn’t Dr. Dalby because he’d never once called her Niki. “Some people say spiders connect the world of the living with the world of the dead. They guard the underworld, and sometimes they even spin webs that connect the earth and Heaven.”

“Oh, is
that
why you’re here? To take me to Heaven?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, rubbed at his mustache like it itched and arched his eyebrows.

“No,” he said, finally. “I can’t do that.”

“Then fuck off,” and she shook four more pills out into her bandaged palm.

“There’s no way to ever finish the story without you,” he said, but not his voice now, a woman’s voice instead, and the air around Niki grew suddenly cold and smelled like dust and Old Spice aftershave, sweat and a skunky hint of marijuana smoke. Niki watched the Klonopin bottle slip from her fingers and the blue pills spill out and bounce away across the museum floor.

“You put this goddamn thing inside me,” she said and swallowed. Anger rising slow, swimming against and through the honey-thick tide of benzodiazepines clouding her brain, and she wouldn’t turn to see if it was
really
Spyder or if it was only another ghost, something pretending to be Spyder so Niki would have to pay attention. “That’s a cheap trick,” she said. “That’s a really cheap fucking trick.”

A thirsty sound like wind in dry autumn leaves then, or thunder very far away, and Niki knew that whoever had been sitting there beside her was gone. She glanced up at the spider display one more time, Plexiglas coffin for widows and tarantulas and granddaddy longlegs, and then she bent down and started picking up the scattered pills.

A
lmost noon, and Daria has lost count of how many cups of strong black coffee, how many cigarettes, since she and Marvin came downstairs, leaving Niki alone to sleep and dream beneath the painting of Ophelia. They’re sitting together in the big kitchen, and the air smells like tobacco smoke and coffee. There’s a sandwich in front of her that she hasn’t even touched, the sandwich she let Marvin make for her even though eating was the very last thing on her mind. Sprouts and low-fat gouda cheese, thick slices of ripe avocado on whole wheat, a perfect, healthy sandwich on a cobal blue glass saucer. And it’s times like these Daria wishes she’d never become a fucking vegetarian; something else that she did for Niki, indulging Niki’s guilt, and the sandwich looks about as appetizing as a field of grass.

“You might have told me these things just a little bit sooner,” Marvin says, and Daria pushes the unwanted sandwich a few inches farther away from her. “It’s hard enough without everything being on some sort of top secret, need-to-know basis.”

“I figured if Niki wanted you to know about Spyder and Danny, she’d tell you herself. Frankly, it didn’t seem like any of your business. You’re not her shrink.”

Marvin rubs his eyes and reaches for Daria’s sandwich.

“You’re not even going to eat this, are you?” he asks, and she shakes her head, glad to see the sandwich find a better home so she won’t have to sit staring at the damned thing any longer.

“I can’t stand to see food go to waste,” Marvin says, and he sniffs at it.

“I didn’t mean that the way it probably sounded, about Danny and Spyder not being any of your business. Maybe I should have told you.”

Marvin glances at her, a brief and wounded glance, then back to the sandwich, and he sniffs it again. And God, it annoys her the way he’s always sniffing at his food, sniffing like a stray dog, so she looks down at her empty coffee cup, instead.

“Hey, it’s your call, Dar,” he says. “You’re the boss. You set the terms. But I think the fact that Niki had two lovers commit suicide within five months of each other is pretty significant to anyone who wants to help her.”

“Jesus, Marvin. I’m trying to say I was wrong, if you’ll shut the hell up and listen.” And Daria picks up her coffee cup, chipped milk white mug with Edward Gorey art printed on it, pushes her chair back and stands up. She looks at the empty pot in the coffee machine and briefly considers brewing another, then thinks better of it; her stomach hurts enough already, sour and aching, faintly nauseous, and so she walks to the sink and rinses out her mug. The water is cold, clean, and she splashes some of it on her face.

“And they both
hung
themselves.” Marvin’s speaking more softly now, as if he’s afraid Niki might hear them, as if she might be listening. “That’s a hell of a thing to have to carry around for ten years.”

“Yeah,” and Daria shuts off the tap, dries her face on an orange dish towel and wipes rough terry cloth across her tingling skin, wrinkles her nose at the perfume smell of fabric softener. “She was just a kid. I don’t think she was even eighteen yet. Hell, we were
all
just kids.”

“Do you guys ever talk about it?” he asks, and when Daria turns around Marvin’s chewing a mouthful of the sandwich and watching her intently, his dark eyes so curious and concerned, and she wishes she could send him home, get through the next few hours on her own somehow.

“Not really.”

Marvin nods his head slowly and takes a sip from his coffee cup, swallows and sets the sandwich back down on the blue saucer.

“Not ever?”

“I spent the last decade trying to forget all about Birmingham. Most times it seems like all that crazy shit happened to somebody else.”

“And I suppose you’ve just been hoping it seems that way to Niki, too?”

“You know, Marvin, you’re starting to get me pissed. Maybe you better back off a little.”

So neither of them says anything for a few minutes. Daria sits back down at the kitchen table and lights another cigarette, smokes it silently while she stares at the cover of an old issue of
Bassics
magazine, Benny Rietveld glowering back at her from the glossy paper. Marvin finishes the sandwich, misses nothing but a few crumbs, one stray sprout like a huge white-green sperm; he carries the saucer to the sink and washes it, then sets it in the rack on the counter to dry.

“We’re going to be
fine,
” Daria says, to herself or Marvin or no one at all. “We’re going to make it,” and she closes her eyes and watches the indistinct blobs of not-quite-orange and not-quite-purple light floating about behind her eyelids.
As long as I don’t start crying,
she thinks and chews hard at her lower lip. Reminding herself it could have gone so much worse, the terrible thoughts that haunted her on the long flight home from Arkansas to San Francisco—finding Niki dead or a comatose vegetable for the rest of her life—and she wants to feel grateful. Wants to feel relieved, but there’s nothing left inside her but lingering shreds of fear and the familiar and smothering dread that has dogged her almost as long as Niki Ky has had to live with the memory of her dead lovers.

“Anytime you need someone to listen, all you got to do is ask,” Marvin says. “You know that you and Niki are more than just another job to me,” and she can feel his hands resting heavy as stone on her shoulders, the unwelcome, unconditional weight of his sympathy. Something she can neither accept nor return, and she squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, wants to slap his hands away, wants to tell him to take his compassion and fuck the hell off.

“There’s nothing you could say that would change that,” he says.

Daria sighs and takes a deep breath, another drag off her cigarette, and she opens her eyes as the smoke leaks from her nostrils and hangs suspended like a spent ghost disintegrating above the table.

“No, Marvin, you are definitely wrong about that,” she says. “There are things I could tell that you can’t even
imagine
…but, if I did, you’d never want to see me or Niki again—” and then Daria shakes her head, interrupting herself, because she knows that if she ever got started she wouldn’t be able to stop, and the ice is thin enough already. Her silence as much the key to sanity as her strength; not denial, not lies, but the right to keep impossible things to herself and she’s never lied to herself, or anyone else about the things she saw and heard the night that Spyder Baxter died. That terrible December night in the old house on Cullom Street, and that should have been the end of it, the moment when they all woke up and went back to living lives without suicides and secrets and regret so bottomless she’ll never stop falling.

“With all due respect, I think you’re full of it, Daria,” and Marvin takes his big hands off her shoulders and sits down again.

But that’s something, at least, a small and comfortless relief, not to have him pressing down on her, one more thing to bear, and she shrugs her shoulders and stubs out her cigarette in a pewter ashtray already overflowing with Marlboro butts.

“That’s your prerogative,” she says, trying not to sound angry or exasperated, trying not to sound anything but tired.

“I guess so.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Niki asks, and Daria turns to see her standing in the doorway, disheveled and frowzy in her tattered bathrobe and bare feet, rubbing at her eyes like a sleepy child. Her sickly, pale face and bandaged hand, the purple-red half circles beneath her eyes, and she looks small and breakable, a china-doll changeling slipped in when no one was looking.

“I really don’t think you should be out of bed yet, honey,” Daria says and Niki stops rubbing her eyes and squints at them both.

“I’m hungry. I woke up hungry,” she says and those six words better than any of Marvin’s reassurances, better than any mantra or self-talk bullshit Daria will ever come up with. Niki yawns and asks Marvin to make her toast, please, toast with Marmite and butter, toast and a glass of ice water, and he’s already busy slicing fresh bread when Daria gets up and leads Niki to a chair at the kitchen table.

She looks so tired,
Niki thinks, and finishes her toast, asks for something else, and Marvin peels a blood orange for her, pulls it apart into fleshy, seedless wedges.

“You need to get some sleep,” she says to Daria. “You’re smoking too much again.”

“I feel fine,” Daria says, but Niki knows she’s lying, always knows when Daria’s lying and not about to let her off that easily. “You
look
almost as bad as I feel,” she says, and Daria frowns at her.

“I slept on the plane.”

Marvin goes back to his chair. “Even if that were true,” he says, “which I doubt, it wouldn’t hurt you to lie down for a little while.”

“It’s okay now,” Niki says. “
I’m
okay,” and she manages a weak smile for Daria, trying to look the least bit reassuring. “Marvin’s right here, and all I’m gonna do is sit and eat my orange.”

“Do you know how many cups of coffee I’ve had? I probably couldn’t sleep now if my life depended on it.”

“Then just lie down for a little while,” and Niki wipes her sticky fingers through her snarled black hair. “I’ll come back upstairs when I’m done and lie down beside you.”

“I have to leave tonight,” Daria says, and for a moment Niki doesn’t reply, selects another wedge of the orange and nips through the thin skin with her front teeth, sucks at the pulpy, tart insides.

“I’m sorry, Niki. There’s no way we can afford to cancel another show.”

Niki wipes citrus juice the color of rose petals from her lips with the back of her good hand and swallows. “It’s all right,” she says, smiling again, pretending she means it so maybe Daria will believe her. “I’m better now. I know you have responsibilities.”

“I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to.”

And because she doesn’t know anything else to say, because her head hurts again and she’s tired of trying to remember the
right
things to say, because she doesn’t want to think about Daria leaving again, she looks away, holds the last slice of blood orange a few inches from her left eye and begins to sing “Strange Fruit” very quietly. Singing to herself and no one else except maybe the orange, singing to it the way that Siouxsie Sioux sang “Strange Fruit” more than the way Billie Holiday did.

“Maybe I’ll go lie down in the living room,” Daria says and stands up from the table. “I’ll just lie down on the couch, and maybe we can talk about it later.”

Niki stops singing and glances up at her. “I’m okay,” she says, in case Daria didn’t hear her the first time. “I’ll stay in here with Marvin. I’ll be here if you need me.”

“We’ll both be fine,” Marvin adds, and Daria nods once, yeah, whatever sort of nod, takes her pack of cigarettes and her lighter and leaves the kitchen without another word.

Niki pops the last wedge into her mouth and licks the drops of juice from the tips of her fingers. When she notices that Marvin’s watching her from his end of the table, she points at the overflowing ashtray, and he gets up, dumps it in the garbage, then sprays the smoky air with a can of Glade.

“So what did she tell you?” Niki asks him, recalling their murmuring voices as she came down the stairs, the almost-whispers, almost-anger, and Marvin sets the can of air freshener on the table and takes his seat again.

“She told me about Spyder and Danny. She told me how they died,” and for a moment Niki’s head is too full of adrenaline and her heart races, skips a beat or two, maybe, and she doesn’t look at him until it’s beating normally again and the dizzy, panicked feeling is starting to fade.

“Well, it’s not a secret, is it? I would have told you, if you’d ever asked me.”

“I didn’t know to ask, Niki. I didn’t have any idea.”

“Did she tell you
all
of it?” Niki asks him, and now there’s a bright and razor-edged flutter deep in her belly, something wicked coiled down there that’s scary, but it’s better than the panic. Marvin stares back at her from his end of the table, and she can see that he’s trying hard to figure out what to say next, whether yes or no is the wrong answer this time. Tick-tock, clockwork gears behind his eyes, and she takes a tiny sip from her glass of water. “I didn’t think so,” she says. “No, she wouldn’t ever have done that.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. She told me…” and he pauses, hesitates, looks towards the doorway like he’s hoping that Daria will reappear and get him out of this mess.

“She told me Danny was a transsexual and that Spyder was schizophrenic. And she told me about Spyder’s father.”

And the scary thing in the pit of Niki’s stomach coils itself a little tighter, the adrenaline and fear egging her on, pulling her back, leaving her to her own devices; she takes another drink of water, a big mouthful this time, watching Marvin over the rim of the glass as she drinks. When she’s done, the glass is almost empty, just a couple of melting ice cubes trapped at the bottom.

“Did she tell you about the dead boy we left in Spyder’s basement? Or the thing that attacked Mort’s van? Did she tell you about the cocoon?”

“No,” Marvin says calmly. “She didn’t,” and his eyes are fixed on hers, grade-school game, test of wills, and
Who’s going to blink first?
Niki asks herself.
Who the hell’s going to blink first?

“Did she tell you
why
she’s afraid to sleep with the lights off? Or why she’s afraid to sleep with them on?”

Marvin shakes his head, folds his hands on the tabletop in front of him, and “Niki, if you want to talk to me,” he says, “I’ll listen to whatever you want to say. But you might as well stop trying to freak me out.”

And the thing in her guts dissolves, undone by his patience, by the constant, undaunted tone of his voice, and she’s the one who blinks first, after all.

“I wasn’t,” she says, and her mouth has gone so dry, wishing there were more ice water in her glass. “I wasn’t trying to freak you out.”