The Big Rewind (2 page)

W
hen the cops swarmed the building to take statements, Linda in 2B got the cute, spiky-haired blond in the sharply pressed uniform. I got interviewed by a thick, balding detective with a doughnut gut and a bad tie knotted so tightly his neck had a muffin top. He asked about the body. I told him how I'd found her. He asked about her visitors. I hadn't seen any since her boyfriend, Bronco, left this morning. He asked about the oven. I wove him a tale of flaming cupcakes I bravely doused in the sink and threw out the window so as not to endanger the other residents. He asked about the smell of weed. I told him I knew nothing.

A woman from Animal Control checked Baldrick for injuries and wiped blood from his paws. Detective Muffin Top took my fingerprints for crime scene elimination. “Did you hear anything that sounded like a struggle?” he asked.

“I just got home from work,” I said. “I didn't hear anything.”

“Where do you work?” He tried to make it sound like a casual conversation, but I knew better.

Still, I wasn't going to dick around. “I'm a temp with MetroReaders,” I said. “I can give you their number, if you want.”

That answer seemed to satisfy him. “Any idea who might have done this?” he tried. “Did she have any ex-boyfriends, bad neighbors . . . ?”

I shook my head. “Everyone loved KitKat,” I said. The sad truth was that I didn't know that for sure. She had lots of friends, plenty on Facebook, a thousand or so Twitter followers, but we'd never exchanged anything beyond neighborly laughs and the occasional cup of tea. For all I knew, she had a stalker or a customer who felt screwed, deep gambling debts, or a side business selling goods a lot harder than grass and gluten.

He flipped his notebook closed and flattened his lips in something between concern and an attempt at comfort. “You got someplace safe to stay tonight?”

“I've got some people I can call,” I said. “You need that phone number?”

He nodded and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. I hoped he wouldn't call. The last thing I needed was to lose this job because the dispatcher at MetroReaders got skittish. He gave me his card and put on his coat and was gone.

But I didn't call anyone. I wasn't ready to explain what I'd seen. I didn't want to be the one to set off the chain of information:
KitKat's dead. OMG, KitKat was murdered. Did you hear about KitKat?

I took a walk down to the Key Food and bought cat food and some litter. I bought a foil turkey pan to use as a cat box. I bought some Doritos because, fuck, I deserved them. I started to buy chocolate cupcakes, but just that word on the package reminded me of her bloody face. I put them back on the rack. My hands were shaking as I counted out the bills at the register, and as I approached my building, I had to force myself to go inside. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. Crying required breath, and I couldn't get enough air in my lungs.

At home I set up Baldrick and put
Warren Zevon
on my suitcase record player. Normally, the opening notes of “Frank and Jesse
James” were narcotic enough to send me into a blissful music coma, but today I couldn't sit still long enough to let Zevon's deceptively simple piano tranquilize me. I let the record play out the A-side and paced around the apartment in spinning silence, trying to sort out my head.

What are the stages of grief when you hardly knew a person? KitKat and I were friends enough to chat, sure, but the most intimate moment we'd shared was one she hadn't been alive to experience. I had the honor and the horror of finding her body. Not the cleaning lady or the cops, just a neighbor with a mistaken piece of mail. Maybe I'd spared Bronco or KitKat's sister, Hillary, from seeing her like that, but in sparing them, I was assured that I'd never forget what I saw.

I finally called Sid. I didn't tell him anything, just asked if we could meet. He suggested a burger at the Happy Days Diner in Brooklyn Heights. I agreed even though I didn't feel like eating. The Doritos still sat, unopened, on my kitchen table.

By the time I got to the subway, word of KitKat's death had already gotten out. Girls in floral-print dresses and Laura Ingalls boots were sobbing over her Tumblr, and guys in bright cardigans were faking their grief to try to get laid. I dug my fingers into the plastic seat, choking back a scream. In the fashion show that was the L train, I was wearing my laundry-day T-shirt from the “Save Our Bluths”–themed run last fall for Habitat for Humanity, meaning that I was completely invisible in a surging tide of seafoam Toms and ModCloth skirts.

A blonde with femme fatale lipstick and a librarian blouse tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I have your seat?” she asked, holding up a picture of KitKat on her iPhone. “My best friend just died and I really need to sit down.”

I glared up at her. If there are vampires anywhere in the world, they're in this end of Brooklyn, sympathy-sucking leeches living every day like it's their own private reality show, latching on to anything that might get them a moment of attention, a warm
body, a subway seat on a ten-minute ride. “This is my seat,” I growled. “Because I'm the one who found her body.”

The train screeched into the station. Everyone stared at me as I stood and parted like the Red Sea to let me off. Fuck them all. I'd walk the rest of the way.

S
id was already waiting in a booth when I arrived, still wearing his gray vest from work, his tie slightly loosened, tobacco-colored hair soft on his widow's peak. Like the southern gentleman he was, he stood when I came in.

“You're shaking,” he said, holding my shoulders in a way that made my knees go weak. “Darlin', what's wrong?”

Darlin'.
Finally, someone who felt sorry for me instead of just for themselves. I didn't get to wallow in public angst, hoping strangers would pat my shoulder, follow me on Twitter, or fuck me all better. The regret I carried was something deeper, like a bullet lodged in bone. I fell apart in his arms, sobbing in a way that made the other patrons look up from their cheeseburgers and crossword puzzles to stare at me. I just didn't give a fuck anymore.

“Jett, Jett, easy, sweetheart, easy,” he cooed, easing me into the booth. “What happened?”

I blubbered everything—KitKat and Baldrick, the cops, the hipsters on the subway—while I wiped my tears and blew my nose on napkins that disintegrated at my touch. I even told him about getting sick. He held my hands between his, blowing warm breaths onto my frigid fingers until two coffees I hadn't heard him order arrived. He shook his head when I took a deep shak
ing breath and a sip that burned my tongue. “That's awful,” he murmured. “Just awful.”

All I could do was agree. And just as suddenly as it had all come on, I didn't want to talk about it anymore. “Change the subject,” I said. “Talk about something else. I'm sick of thinking about it.”

“Let's order first,” he said. “Sounds like you could do with something solid in your stomach.”

I cringed. Work at MetroReaders had been slow these last few weeks, and my paycheck was about as skinny as a teenage fashion model. A cup of coffee and a Danish at Egg School on Sunday was the only splurge I could afford, and having dinner with him today meant that I'd have to make an excuse not to brunch this week.

“Get surf and turf if you want,” he said, not looking at me as he glanced at the menu. “It's my turn to buy and my rent's already paid.”

My stomach grumbled. Much as I wanted to take him up on the offer, my body was not equipped to handle that much grease and fat and protein. When the waitress came back around, I got a refill on my coffee and ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Sid, tantalized by his own suggestion, got a T-bone. He winked. “Your turn next time.”

He always said that but Sid only let me pay if we were going out for something cheap: hard cider and frites, bubble tea, candy on movie night. He made a lot more than I did and had quick hands to seize a check.
I don't have a girlfriend,
he once told me.
So I might as well spoil you.
It wasn't like he didn't have offers—girls adored Sid; I don't know whether it was his electric white smile or his bouncy little ass or his peach-pie accent, but no matter where we were, I caught them staring, sneaking pictures, and whispering. If he noticed, he never took them up on the implied offers. He hadn't dated anyone since he moved here.

In the five months I'd known Sid, he'd become my favorite person in the world. We met at one of Natalie's art parties; his roommate, Terry, had dragged him along by way of introducing
him to the neighborhood, and we'd talked in the corner for most of the night. When everyone else was loud, sloppy, and drunk in that inevitable aftermath of privileged boozing, we slipped off the scene like criminals and holed up at a twenty-four-hour diner that closed about two weeks later. We had pie and coffee at eleven thirty
P.M
., and I sopped up every trace of his accent. He had a passion for New Wave unrivaled by any hipster in a Wang Chung T-shirt from Rags-A-Gogo, and it was almost hysterical to hear him talk about Devo in a drawl usually reserved for singing off-key to Toby Keith.

Like me, he was a transplant trying to make his way among natives, and it bonded us as fast friends. He traveled light, arriving with a tablet and a new phone, a few vests and ties for work, a pair of weekend jeans, and an electric razor. I reintroduced him to the physical pleasures of vinyl one night over Trader Joe's brie in puff pastry, and as he began to build his collection of XTC and Duran Duran, I let him keep his platters at my place. It assured us at least one date a week, like visitation rights to records I had primary custody of. For the first month we were friends, I hoarded those nights like pirate treasure, living in this constant fear that he would find someone cooler to hang out with. What was a bottle of wine and some old vinyl compared to the city's vast array of nightclubs and wild, willing girls? I'd already lost the last guy I loved, Catch, to such a world, and I kept waiting for it to seduce Sid into its neon arms. But he kept coming by, week after week, with a new record in hand and that same Christmas-light smile, and my fears began to settle.

“Maybe this will make you feel better,” he said, unwinding his earbuds and handing me the right one. “Tenpole Tudor, ‘What You Doing in Bombay.' I just discovered them and I'm kind of obsessed with this song. The bass line is almost identical to REM's ‘Can't Get There from Here,' but don't let that deter you.”

He queued up a cheerful post-punk track, just under three minutes of solitude, away from the other diners, away from the death I could still feel on my back. I could think of a lot of things
I could do in Bombay—Mumbai now, if I remembered anything from high school geography—chief among them not being here in Brooklyn.

I handed him back his headphones when our meal arrived and felt a little better with a new tune in my head. “So I guess that means you probably don't want to continue with our scheduled viewing of
Homicide,
” he said. “We're about to get to the Vince D'Onofrio episode and it's pretty rough.”

In addition to eighties music, Sid was obsessed with old cop shows. “
The Shield
is great, don't get me wrong,” he'd told me once, “but it completely changed the genre, and now everything's trying to be gritty. You can't just have a detective solving a crime anymore—he has to be a morally ambiguous antihero with a violent streak, and it just bores me. Vic Mackey bored me. I was always Team Dutch, myself.”

“Maybe not
Homicide,
” I agreed, blowing on a spoonful of soup too hot to swallow. “Is there any Stephen J. Cannell ground we haven't covered? I liked
The Rockford Files
.”

He gave it some serious thought and two bites of steak before he answered. “It's not my man Stephen, but
Cagney and Lacey
might not be a bad call,” he said. “Or
CHiPs
. There's no problem so terrible that Pocherello can't fix it.”

“As long as it's not
Miami Vice
and as long as you don't show up wearing an unstructured jacket and sockless loafers,” I joked, my sense of humor coming back with my appetite. “What about this weekend?”

He rolled his eyes. “This weekend's no good.” He groaned. “I told Terry I'd go out with him. He's been bugging me for weeks, keeps saying he has the perfect place to take a ‘southern gentleman' like me. It will probably be boring as hell and possibly suicidal, given what his idea of southern is, but the only way to get him to stop bugging me to go out with him is to actually go out with him. I figure this should buy me at least a month of ignoring him.”

“What, like duck hunting? Cooking meth?” I joked. “I did
pretty well in chemistry, can I come along too? Heaven knows I could use the cash.”

“Darlin', I could not live with myself if I forced you to spend an evening with him, especially after what you've been through.” He reached across the table for my hand and kissed it. “But I'll probably be texting you throughout the whole ordeal, so it will be like you're right there with me.”

I got a giddy feeling in my stomach that was normally reserved for waking up from a dream about Stephen Colbert. “And when you do come over, you can cook me a delicious barbecued squirrel,” I said, trying to mask my sudden bliss.

Sid took a bite of his T-bone and chewed for a moment. “I'm pretty sure that's what this steak is,” he said.

For one perfect moment, I forgot about KitKat. For a moment, everything was normal again, just dinner with my best friend, talking about music, mocking his idiot roommate. I thought about suggesting we slumber-party in a motel for the night, watch pay-per-view with bags of microwave popcorn and minibar booze, but I didn't have the money for dinner, let alone a night in a Manhattan high-rise.

We finished our dinners. Sid dropped me off at my subway station with a long hug and a kiss on the cheek and left me with nowhere to go but home to my crime scene.