Palindrome (35 page)

Courtney steps in to the front desk to look at the CC TVs and emits a mouselike squeak. I rush to his side. The guy with the crew cut who was managing the front desk last time we were here is slumped on the floor faceup. There's a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead and a trail of dried blood leading down the side of his face, terminating in a sticky, wine-­colored lake surrounding his head.

“It's been a few days at least,” Courtney wheezes, trying to appear unfazed. I wonder when the last time he saw a dead body was. After the freezer, I've got a little more filler for the old stiff resumé than I'd like. “You can tell from the smell.”

“Christ,” I say. Were I compelled to find a silver lining in even the most sordid of situations, I'd admit that at least in that cellar the corpses didn't smell.

Courtney jerks up from the corpse and scans the dimly lit gym like an eagle.

“Drug deal gone bad? Robbery? Assassination?” I ask.

“Don't know,” he replies.

“Hello?” I cup my hands over my mouth and yell. Courtney freezes, as if expecting a vicious criminal to suddenly pop out of the woodwork. But only silence. He relaxes and frowns at me.

“That wasn't very thoughtful.”

“C'mon, let's look around.”

“Text Helen,” he commands. “It's a proper crime scene now.”

“No,” I say, “she's staying outside. You have latex gloves with you?”

Courtney summons two pairs from his acrylic bag. I snap one on and pick up Crew Cut's weapon. It's empty, but there's a magazine nearby on his desk. Look over my shoulder at the entranceway and try to imagine what happened.

“Someone got buzzed in,” I say. “Pulled their gun and shot this guy before he could load his weapon.”

“So it wasn't a robbery,” Courtney muses. “Shot him before even asking him to open the cash box.”

I pack the magazine into Crew's old weapon and flip off the safety.

“Guess we might as well inspect the scope of damage,” I say, heading for the door marked Supplies. Courtney stands behind me as I turn the knob, put my shoulder into the door, and burst through, gun up high, ready to shoot.

No bodies, alive or otherwise.

I relax and lower my gun. There was a scrum here of some kind: spilled drinks everywhere, poker table overturned. A lone high heel lies sadly on the red carpet, perhaps abandoned in the chaos. Only the leather-­bound books in the cases stretching to the high ceiling look as untouched as ever.

A smashed tumbler lies on Orange's leather chaise, drops of whiskey pooled in chunks of broken glass. Courtney looks up at the ceiling.

“There's a broken bulb in the chandelier,” he says, and I follow his finger as he points to the far wall. “And bullet holes over there. They came in here and fired warning shots. Then let everyone flee.”

“Not a pistol . . .” I say.

“No. Some sort of automatic weapon.”

“So they weren't after money,” I say, clicking my tongue. “And they didn't just want to kill ­people. So . . .”

“Looking for Orange, maybe?” Courtney says.

We move wordlessly through the wreckage. Wading through cards, chips and cash. Coats still sit on the backs of chairs. I nearly step in a half-­eaten tuna sub. Bullet holes on the walls, but they start around seven feet up; not meant to hit anyone.

I push aside the beaded curtain that Orange led us through last time. A dark, narrow hallway that leads to the kitchen and the stairway up to his office. Air was stale in the salon, but even worse back here. Bad ventilation system.

I grip my gun as I ascend to Orange's office, Courtney close behind. We can see the door at the top is ajar. Not sure why I'm ready to shoot—­odds of finding someone alive in there are dubious—­but Courtney and I both stay silent, as if to surprise whatever is waiting in there for us.

I kick the door wide open and scan the office. No bodies. But definitely evidence of foul play.

All of Orange's desk drawers are pulled out, and his papers are strewn angrily all over the floor. You can practically feel the desperation, feverishness of the search. His file cabinets are knocked over and their contents similarly dispersed.

“Robbery. Or attempted robbery, anyways,” I say.

“The tape?” Courtney says.

“Wouldn't surprise me.”

We retreat down the stairs. As my adrenaline tapers off I check my watch. It's been only fifteen minutes since we walked through the metal grate but feels much longer. I text Helen:
All good. For us, anyway. See you in a few w/o Orange
.

“What happened to Orange?” I say as we exit back into the salon.

Courtney rubs his cheeks, doesn't respond.

“And looks like the girls ended up getting out of here anyways, eh?” I add.

Courtney grunts. “I mean, allowed up onto the surface, perhaps. But without enough cash to get home and being addicted to drugs, they'll probably just find a new pimp.”

As we pass back through the salon, I pick up a few fifties that must have been on the poker table when the shooting started. Courtney notices, raises an eyebrow, but lets it go.

Out in the front gym area, the whole sad room smells a little like Crew rotting behind the front desk.

“Let's get out of here,” Courtney says, heading for the glass doors.

“Wait,” I say, still standing in the center of the room. I point to the locker room, my gut experiencing a visceral reaction at the memory of that hairy communal shower. “We didn't look in there.”

“Looked for what?” Courtney asks. “We have the tape already.”

“Orange,” I say. I take Crew's gun out of the back of my jeans. “We still have to make sure he doesn't come after us.”

Courtney nods in reluctant agreement. Holding the gun out in front of me, I lead the way. Wet tile floor that reeks of mildew. Not that this place was exactly an exemplar of cleanliness, but a few days without any sort of maintenance has noticeably magnified the smell. We turn the corner into the changing area lined with shitty wood lockers. Empty.

I peer into the shower. Empty.

“Okay,” I say. “Let's go.”

“Just one more place to check,” Courtney says, walking through the shower, around the corner, toward the telltale hiss of steam.

I follow him, find him with his nose against the steamed-­up glass, squinting, trying to discern any gorillas in the mist.

“You really think Orange is just chilling here, s
hvitzing
?” I laugh and grab the handle to pull open the door. It doesn't budge.

“What the fuck?” I say. Tug again. Then I see why: A metal hook has been bored into the base of the door, and another is screwed into the wall beside it. A slice of black ribbon is strung between them, effectively locking the door from the outside.

Courtney kneels with me to inspect it. Adrenaline picks up again as I consider the very limited number of reasons why someone would lock a steam-­room door in this fashion. I untie the ribbon and fling the door open, getting blasted in the face with rancid steam.

I throw my sleeved arm over my mouth and cough. The hot steam carries the worst smell I've ever experienced. It's like powerful mold mixed with sewage. Courtney also is coughing uncontrollably; my eyes are watering.

“Oh god,” I moan as the steam pours out, dissipating into the locker room way too slowly. “What is that smell?”

Courtney steels himself and takes a step into the
shvitz
,
momentarily disappearing into the white cloud. Then he reappears, face the color of milk. Rushes past me into the shower room and pukes his guts out.

My disgust at the smell, at seeing the bile pouring from Courtney, is surpassed only by morbid curiosity. I take a deep breath and plunge into the steam. The smell intensifies, but for a moment I look around and see nothing. I step in it before I see it, my boot sinking into something the texture of rotting melon.

It's not immediately identifiable as a body. It's contorted and bloated beyond belief, an order of magnitude far beyond even Orange's living proportions. The form on the ground is like an enormous pink grape that was dried, left out in the sun to wrinkle into a raisin, and then puffed up with some sulfuric gas.

His arms, now inflated with moisture, are like two tubular pink pillows groping for the door, his sausage-­link fingers frozen in his pathetic last gasp of strength. His stomach is a huge bubble of flesh that looks like I could pop it with a pin and his liquefied innards would come gushing out.

The smell is pure death, and I'm dry heaving within moments as I drop to my knees. I want only to get as far from this as I can but am getting light-­headed and weak.

But it's only when I'm on my knees, once I'm close enough to what used to be Orange's face to see it through the steam, that I grasp the true import of what's happened here.

His eyes are oversized, bloated by steam and literally bulging from their sockets in what looks like an exaggerated mask of terror. His lips are puffed up so thick that it looks like he couldn't really open his mouth by the end. But these are secondary.

Orange's face and shaved head are covered in a colorful tattoo. A bright painting that covers every surface, from his chin, up through his cheeks, wide forehead, the entirety of his scalp. Faces, all of them, bright faces. And a black snake wrapped around the circumference of his head, from his temples past his ears. A black snake eating its own tail.

B
ACK IN
H
ELEN'S
apartment. Five in the afternoon. Just a few hours until Greta is supposed to call. I sit on the floor of the shower, let the warm water dribble down what's turning into a beard and pour down my back.

I stare at my phone resting on the sink, turned to maximum ring volume. Beside it is the tape, still in the case I found it in.

I crack my knuckles and lean against the white porcelain siding, run through the path of destruction again in my head. Savannah, Silas, Candy, Lincoln and the rest of the Beulah Twelve, Orange . . . Where does Greta fit into this?

I feel small and weak. I want to give up. Why can't I just fucking surrender? I don't want anything from anybody, except my daughter back. Greta must understand that. I don't want anything more from her. I wouldn't dare bring the cops despite Helen subtly but firmly implying that
of course
I have to tell her where I'm going to meet Greta. What if something happens to me? What if the handoff is botched?

But Helen doesn't understand Greta. Neither does Courtney. They can't. Without meeting her face-­to-­face it's impossible to understand the way she seemed powered by a bronze steam engine in her chest, the hunger in her green eyes, her otherworldly affect, the way her presence seemed to make the temperature in the room drop.

I look up at the showerhead and let it sprinkle my cheeks.

A knock on the door, Helen's voice: “Frank? You okay? Been in there for like a half hour.”

“I'm fine,” I groan.

“Okay, well when you come out, Courtney and I might have figured something out.”

I snort under my breath. Nothing is ever figured out. The only thing to understand about the past three weeks is that the tape leads you down a dark, cold hole that never ends. False bottom after false bottom; just when I think it's done, there's another trapdoor and I tumble into deeper, thicker darkness.

What if I just destroyed the tape?

It would be idiocy, obviously, since I need it to get back Sadie, but there's a part of me that is certain that as soon as it ceases to exist, so will all my problems. That everything will be undone, like that Superman movie where he reverses the Earth's rotation and makes time go backwards. The last three weeks will all be a bad dream. Hands still trembling from yoga, I'll be watching Sadie eat ice cream in Washington Square Park, when my phone rings. But this time I don't pick up.

Hot water is running out. I take my time standing up, imagining the sad irony of making it this far only to slip and die in the fucking shower a few hours before the meet-­up. Turn off the water and gingerly step out of the shower. I hold my face in one of Helen's fuzzy towels for a long moment, exhaling into it, then dry off my hair and wrap a different towel around my waist. Grab the tape and phone and walk out.

Helen and Courtney are sitting side by side on the black leather couch. Helen has her laptop out, looking at the pictures Courtney insisted on snapping of Orange's corpse once the steam cleared.

“Frank,” Courtney says. At first I think he's half smiling, but that's not quite right. Weird expression. Painful bewilderment, perhaps. “We are idiots.”

“Why, Courtney,” I sigh, pulling a chair in from the kitchen and sitting to face them, not even self-­conscious about the wretched state of my physique or the possibility of them catching a glimpse of my genitals under my towel—­they've both seen it all before. Feels like my body has become something external to me, simply a burden that I must drag along with my consciousness.

“Not just you,” Helen adds. “Everyone on the case.”

“What case?” I ask, setting my phone and the tape on the coffee table.

“Silas Graham's murder case.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“I don't think Silas killed Savannah,” Courtney says. “Or at the very least, he didn't do it alone. It should have been obvious all along, but it didn't click until I saw what happened to Orange.”

I cross my arms. Helen is giving me a look like
your friend is pretty sharp.

“Explain,” I say.

“Silas's tattoos are exactly the same as Savannah's, right? Based on the pictures,” Courtney says. “Not similar,
exact
. And then Orange's are the same, too, which was what made it click. If Silas had tattooed Savannah, then he couldn't have also tattooed himself. At least, certainly not in the
exact same way.
Think about it. A barber can't cut his hair the exact same way he cuts yours, right? At the very least, maybe it would be a mirror image. But no. Exactly the same images. And the same person who tattooed Savannah also tattooed Silas and, presumably, Orange.”