The Devil You Know: A Novel (38 page)

The warrant is indeed shit. Angie threw a few loping nods in my direction. She’d had a few, or more than a few, before I got there.

There’s something else I’d rather do.

No way.

It’s a fascinating story with a personal connection, I said. Hear me out. You cannot turn this down.

Officer, Angie said. Officer, sometimes I hang around in my dark, dark apartment late at night, just wearing this little negligee, see? And the big bad wolf comes to my door.

Hey, fuck you, Angie.

No, fuck you. I really mean that. Fuck you. You’re not going to get anywhere in this business playing the fool like that, so shut the fuck up.

I lay back against the couch and let my head rest on the hard wooden arm. She’d gone mean on me and now I’d have to wait it out.

They’re digging up a dead guy, I said to the ceiling. Up near Espanola. They dug him up on Monday.

I know, Angie said.

They think it’s Robert Cameron.

I know.

Robert Cameron, Have You Seen This Man? Most Wanted Criminals Robert Cameron. I sat up and took a better look at her.

Yeah, I know. I know all that.

So it’s a story, I said.

No story, Angie said. She seemed to have cursed the booze right out of herself. She got up and made four more shots. You would have sworn she was cold sober.

Come on, I said. Way more of a story than sitting down in St. Catherines watching a bunch of guys in paper suits walk in and out of a house. You said it yourself. The warrant is shit. Their hands are fucking tied down there.

Doesn’t matter, Angie said.
That’s
the story. That house, that guy. You know why?

I didn’t answer. I lay back down and let the armrest make a bruise on the back of my skull.

That’s the story because we still remember those girls. That’s
why, Angie said. Leslie Mahaffy, that’s almost old news already. But at least she was chopped up. At least he put her in concrete and sunk her into a lake. There’s a killer. There’s a psycho for you. She handed me a shot. I plugged my nose and threw it down, still lying back like that.

Nobody the fuck remembers some little girl from 1982, Angie said. Case closed. Maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s some jerk-off hobo. What the fuck do I know? If it’s him, trust me: the cops’ PR will be on the phone to us first. They’ll be dying to let us know. She handed me a shot glass and a slice of lime. Stop living in the past, Evie. Time to get on with it.

I
woke up at six, still on Angie’s kitchen couch. Someone—me or else Angie—had moved my head off the armrest and onto the cushion. The tweed pattern pressed into my cheek. The room stank. I looked over at the counter and there were three bottles of booze standing there open, adding to the air quality. I had a blanket over my legs and my head hurt enough to make me rummage through the liner of my purse for a couple of Tylenol before I even tried to get up. I lay there, waiting for the pills to kick in.

When I managed to get on my feet, I locked myself in the powder room and brushed my teeth using a mini-sized travel toothpaste I found under the sink and a wadded-up facecloth. Because fuck you, too, Angie Cavallo. A story is a story.

I had to go through her purse to find the right keys. It was still dark out. I shut the door soft and locked it. Out on the sidewalk I turned left. The Turismo was out there on the street somewhere. I figured I’d better get looking.

B
y the time I got home the few sunrise streaks were already widening out. The sky shone white. Lit through a high, thin veil of winter cloud. I found a spot on Gladstone and left the car and crossed over to the house. I hadn’t been home in two days. It hadn’t felt like I was avoiding it on purpose, but now that I posed myself the question I was left feeling embarrassed, or somehow pressingly young. I could barely remember what it had been like to live there before everything went to hell. Something about the fear made it feel like I’d just been pretending to be a grown-up. It felt like a place I used to visit wearing shoes that were too big for me. Like wearing your mother’s best dress to play house. Only I got caught.

In the early morning sunshine, it was a nice enough building. I looked up at my own bedroom window. The curtains were drawn tight, as though whoever lived there was still sleeping. The day was going to be warmer and you could already tell. A slight drip from the icicles, the sound of little droplets falling from every high eave on the street and hitting the ice below.

Once when I was thirteen, I arrived home from school with no key in my pocket. I did that thing where you check every possible spot, the tiny coin pocket at the front of your jeans. The inside flaps of your backpack. Places you would never put a key because, in fact, you always put it in the same place. Almost always. You just don’t want to face up to what you already know: the key is on your
nightstand, next to a box of tissues and two pencils and the wrapper from a pack of Swedish Berries. My parents were both out, at work or whatever it was my mother got up to when she wasn’t at home. There had been at one time a tire swing on a rope in the backyard, but this was the year we’d taken it down, and where the swing had been there were high ferns, fresh and splayed and untrampled.

I had this idea that it would be hilarious to climb up onto the second-floor balcony. We were not a family that left doors and windows unlocked. I didn’t fool myself about that. There would be no getting in. But the joke of it, my father arriving home from work and me sitting out on the balcony in a lounge chair, taking my ease. I had to wear my backpack properly, on both shoulders, to do this, and I accomplished it by first stepping up onto the large rusty-orange air-conditioning unit and from there grabbing hold of the balcony railing and walking myself up the fence, then performing a last-minute twist that allowed me to wedge a toe onto the balcony ledge. It was simple. I’d stood up like that, on the outer edge, and swung my legs over. Ta-da.

I thought of this in the context of my own fire escape now. A kind of balcony. I wondered how he was getting up there.

Instead of heading straight up to my apartment for a change of clothes, I walked around the back of the house. I’d never been in the backyard before. It wasn’t a garden. It looked like someone had dug a few holes for geraniums and cherry tomatoes and then they gave up on life and filled them all in again. I don’t know who had rights to it. It hadn’t been shown to me the day I took the place. There was a strip of bare and stony earth around the fence line and some limp green showed through the melty snow. Earth with scattered weeds. I looked up. The stairs to the fire escape wound down along one side of the house. From where I was standing I could already see the door to my kitchen. I couldn’t see my fridge but I knew it was there, on the other side.

I had to grab tight to the railing to get up the steps. There was a tapering layer of clear ice on each one. The ice was slick with melt.

Up on the escape my feet slid around in a pleasant way, like
when you’re fooling around on a rink at recess time and you haven’t brought your skates. I let them slip side to side like I was doing a vaudeville number. The railing was high and strong, and the balcony itself was higher than the one at my parents’ place. I thought about my mute landlord, his weird whines and clicks echoing in the high-ceilinged rooms on the main floor. At suppertime, when he called for the cats. Maybe he was the lapsed gardener. I realized that in all this time I had never suspected him. The clubfoot could never have carried him up the steps. He was a cripple. The crippled quality in him weighed more than anything else. He might have had the sickest mind of anyone. His foot couldn’t close the deal.

I skated forward and peered through the window. There was a crack down one of the outer panes and I ran my finger over it. You can look at a thing a million times and never notice a crack like that. Was it old or new? Maybe it had been broken for years. The window, propped for fresh air one summer, falls with a smack and the pane cracks.

Or else it was new. I remembered his fist on the glass. Then that’s much more serious.

I looked in at the kitchen. It didn’t look like mine. It didn’t look like a place where I lived. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I lived, or what I was doing there, with the icicles dripping all around me. I imagined standing there and watching a girl come into the kitchen, open the fridge, pour a drink, sit down to write a letter or read the newspaper. She was tall and thin and wearing a man’s striped shirt and a pair of slippers meant to look like a ballerina’s. She was going to bed, or else she was getting up in the morning. I could see her but she wasn’t aware of me. She flipped the page on the newspaper and stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray on the table. When I blinked hard she was gone. I was cold. My hands against the frozen pane of glass, my hands with no gloves on them.

And then it was my house again. I could identify all my things in it: the wrinkled blue tea towel hung on the handle of the oven door, the pale yellow egg cups in the shape of chicks along the back
wall of the counter. A mustard jar, emptied out and washed clean on the drainboard. The sink I’d been painting the night my father came over, pulled to one side of the room, its center piled with the tiny pots of paint.

For a moment I saw the man from the escape. My secret admirer. He was pacing the hallway like someone in a prison. I was on the outside and he was in there, waiting. He stopped pacing and looked straight at me.

Trapped in my apartment, a thing of my own making. What if I’d imagined it every time? Someplace to put the fear, someone concrete to pin it on. What if it was just, as my father might say, a little anxiety?

I shook my hair out to get rid of this.

The way down was treacherous and I turned around to take it backward, one step at a time, hands out. One on the railing, one against the brick wall. There would be no way to do this quickly. My eyes flicked up and I noticed the ladder on the other side of the escape, and I climbed back to the landing. At the opposite corner a new set of steps stretched higher still, to the third floor. Below these there was a gap in the high railing where a retractable ladder sat open against the wall and ran down to the ground, or almost. There was no ice on it. It held my weight fine. I hopped from the last rung to the ground, a drop of maybe three feet, and gave it a shake. No way to fold it back up from there.

There was a scuff of feet on the snow behind me and another sound, high-pitched. When I turned it was the landlord. He was in shirtsleeves in the cold, and shorter than me. He gestured and made his noise again. I glanced behind me at the fence.

When he handed me his little notepad, it said, Police? Okay?

Yeah, the police have been here, I said. Asking you questions? He nodded. There was a grave look to him. Anxious, even.

I thought I saw someone up there. I pointed. Looking in my windows and stuff. The landlord snapped his fingers at me.

Police-Friend-Family, he wrote.

Like, asking if you know anyone, I said. Or do you mean, they’re asking your family? About you? I stopped myself. I already told them it couldn’t be you, I said.

He bleated at me. Combined with his sad look, the whole thing was dangerously close to a clown routine.

I have to go, I said. He pushed the notepad into my hand.

No More Police.

I get it, I said.

T
he stairwell inside was dark enough that I almost didn’t notice the door. It took a minute to wrestle the key out of my purse. Then I held back. Something was wrong. The angle looked off. Instead of sitting flush, the door was resting there, touching the frame but just slightly ajar. I gave it a gentle kick and it swung wide. The strike plate wedged out two or three centimeters. I had a heavy steel door and a heavy dead bolt, but a cheap wooden door frame. That’s a good combination for a crackhead with a jones and a crowbar. A few good wails and the door would have just sprung open. A good combination for anyone, if you think about it.

I kicked at the door again and let it bang back against the wall before walking in. It occurred to me that I wasn’t touching it with my hands. In case of fingerprints, something the cops would ask about later. The hall looked undisturbed. I thought back to when I was standing out on the escape, looking in. The kitchen had looked fine. The computer was still there. Nothing was out of line. The number one thing you’ll lose in an addict break-and-enter is gold. Rings, earrings, whatever: gold with no stones in it, gold you can melt down fast. The second thing is CDs. These are both items that convert to cash readily. An addict doesn’t want your TV or your electronics. They want ten dollars for the next fix and they want it ten minutes ago. I was working hard to believe this was a standard
B&E, executed by one of my desperate neighbors over the past two nights sometime.