The Parallel Apartments (70 page)

“Who are you?” said the coroner, a shortish, walleyed man with full, pink lips that Murphy imagined women would go out of their way to be kissed by but which reminded him of the animals inside conch shells.

“Is that my granny?”

“Who are you?”

“Murphy Lee Crockett.”

“Let's find out.”

Before Murphy could protest, a lackey reached down and unzipped the bag halfway down, revealing his granny's sunken face and cornucopian bosom.

“Yeah, that's my grandmother, Lydia Theuerdank Crockett.”

“ID.”

Murphy handed it to him. “What happened?”

“Looks like a stroke. Probably didn't suffer much.”

The telephone rang. A lackey picked it up.

“What?” said the coroner.

“Boss, we got an emergency. Murder-suicide.”

“Why's that an emergency? Everybody's dead.”

“I don't know, they just said, ‘Be there. Now.'”

“Well, let's go, then. Mr. Crockett, you won't mind if we leave your gra'mama till tomorrow morning?”

Murphy spent the next few hours unpacking his car and moving into his old bedroom at the back of the house, while Granny's body lay on the divan. He set up Granny's antique Dell desktop and searched the internet for information on Texas probate law, specifically how, and how quickly, he could claim his inheritance. It all came down to lawyers. Murphy, bitter and gleeful at once, went to bed. The sheets were exactly the same ones that had been on his bed when he moved out a decade and a half ago. They felt flaky and moist all at once, like a refrigerated croissant. Murphy finally fell asleep, just as a wisp of fetor began to circulate the house.

In the morning, after the coroner—who had clearly been up all night—came to collect Granny, Murphy began to go through the house. He started with drawers and cabinets and closets, moving on to the garage, shed, and attic, keeping anything that was simultaneously of potential value or use—spare change, combs, old lottery tickets, costume jewelry, tools, the lawnmower, all of her old books and mathematical journals, a stack of crumply 1930s one-dollar silver certificates that must've somehow survived the fire and that the internet informed him were worth only a few cents over face value, a mink-like coat, pain medication, fire extinguishers, a half dozen bluebonnet paintings, checkbooks, bank cards, a gold pen-and-pencil set—and through the
Chronicle
and Craigslist he scheduled an estate sale for February 17 at 8 a.m., where he planned to sell everything else, including
linens, clothes, the carpet off the floor, silverware, and furniture, especially that carrion divan.

A month later, Murphy woke at 6 a.m. Sale day! He made coffee, checked to be sure everything had a price tag, drew a sign that read in black Magic Marker
NO EARLY BIRDS
!!, nailed it to a sharpened wooden stake, and, as he was sticking it in the front yard, found himself being arrested at gunpoint for destruction of private property. A sex doll.

“I can't believe that's all you're arresting me for,” he said, through the steel mesh separating the front seat of the cruiser from the backseat, the cops from the robbers. “There's so much you'll never know.”

“'Zat right,” said the driver, Detective Irv Thwear. “Like what else.”

“You think I'm stupid? I'm not gonna tell you.”

“I think you're making up a criminal history for attention, a cry for help. Very common.”

“No, it's true, I've done some things a lot awfuller than hacking up a sex robot—shit, that was nothing.”

“Well I guess they'll all be your little secrets, then,” said the partner, Detective Merry Gastélum. Both cops yawned.

“I'll tell you one thing I did,” said Murphy.

“No, I don't wanna know,” said one detective. “Me neither,” said the other.

“I—”

“Shut up,” said Thwear. “We know you're not a real criminal. Not a genuine psycho. Just a one-hit weirdo amateur, not capable of killing.”

“But, guys, listen! I shot a lady in the ass with a poison dart!”

“Oh yeah? What was her name?” said Thwear.

“I'm not telling you.”

“See, you're just making that shit up.”

“No! I also shot a guy, kicked at a lady, poisoned at a guy, and stuck a guy with a halberd.”

“So tell me names.”

“Right.”

“Don't worry, we can't prove anything, so, and you're already in trouble.”

“And a really minor thing, I hog-tied a lady and stuck a bayonet like a half-inch into the back of her neck.”

“Okay, pal, shut up.”

“She—”

“Shut up, blowhard liar baby.”

“I'm not falling for your reverse psychology.”

“Whatever.”

Murphy held his breath. He was starting to braise in his own sweaty desire to brag.

“I'm a serial killer.”

Threar and Gastélum fell apart in laughter so disabling they had to pull over.

“Fuck y'all!”

“I cannot,” said Gastélum,
“wait
to throw this guy outta my cruiser.”

“Jan Bardee, Grady Gregg, Cynthia Braden, Bobby Brudi, Peter Bradley.” Murphy leaned back, smiling like a clown.

“They're all dead?”

“Well. No.”

“So you're a serial fuckup.”

“They'd all be dead if not for tiny miscalculations.”

“I know Gregg,” said Thwear. “I wish you'd finished him off.”

“So,” said Gastélum, “if I'm not mistaken, you did have a little killing theme going.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy, impalsied with the ambrosial delight and relief of being understood for a change. “You're the first person to put it together.”

“But,” continued Gastélum, “the robot—Rance, he was called—doesn't fit with your pattern. Which leads me to speculate that Marcia Brodsky—who fits perfectly—was your intended victim. But it was too dark to see that it wasn't a real person you were fractioning.”

“Goddam right! God, I love you.”

“But who was the lady you stabbed in the head? Alice?”

“Oh, that would've been perfect! No, her name was April something. She just happened to be someone I ran into when I was in a bad mood. Totally random.”

“'Zat right,” said Gastélum. “Any chance her last name was Carole?”

“Yeah!”

“Hear that, Irv?”

“Yeah. Interesting. You oughta've killed her, Crockett.”

“I
know
.”

“She was arrested for murder a few days ago. She cut a baby from its mother's womb.”

“Jesus,
she
did that? Even I'm not that horrible.”

Thwear pulled over. He and Gastélum got out of the cruiser and opened a back door.

“Out.”

“What for?”

“Now.”

Murphy climbed out. Thwear turned him around, removed his cuffs, and spun Murphy back around to face the two detectives.

“You're letting me go?”

“Turn around again.”

Murphy did. One of them recuffed him.

“Murphy Lee Crocket, you are under arrest for attempted murder. Seven counts.”

“You told me…”

“We lied,” they said.

XXXIII

February 2005

What had surprised and gratified April more than anything that first week was that she'd begun to produce milk. She had been nursing Montserrat because that was what
What to Expect the First Year
had said babies did, but, since Montserrat was the product of a generous surrogate rather than April's own imperfect, monstrous, unholy body, she had expected nothing from herself but aridity and nothing from the baby but squally disappointment. And that's exactly what she got for more than a week—the short, ugly stay at her ex-conquest Veniamin's house in Tulsa, which ended with April toppling his entertainment center on the Scrabble game-in-progress and Veniamin calling the police; April fleeing in her old Mazda with the baby before they arrived; the parade of truckers' motels on the way to Washington State; the night at her old high-school boyfriend George's house in Puyallup, when he remarked on the unexpected snugness of her vagina, he having presumed that the organ in its postnatal condition would be like fucking an empty coffee can—until one afternoon, in her car, on the ferry to Bainbridge Island off Seattle, Montserrat, for the first time, began nursing in what
seemed to be profound contentment. April gently disengaged, squeezed her nipple, and watched the extraordinary liquid roll over her knuckles. April began to cry with such ululating violence that a man in a pickup truck next to her got out and tapped on her windshield,
Are you all right, Miss
? and she, nodding, tearful:
Yes! Yes! Yes!

What had also surprised her was that it all ended, and how. April had been a mother only a month.

Montserrat soon stopped nursing. She began to lose weight, she stopped crying, she never slept, her pallor-dimmed face became almost immotile. They finally left the poisonous Northwest and arrived in Detroit, where the first thing April did was go to an upscale healthful grocery store. April tucked a tightly bundled Montserrat into a corner of the grocery cart and surrounded her with produce—fresh collards, a tree of broccoli, jungle-green kale, little red new potatoes, a huge clove of garlic, a melon. They strolled past shelves of formula and jars of organic whirled peas and tubes of herbal cradle-cap remedies, finally pausing at a small display of baby blankets, foot-and-a-half squares of pastel merino, their edges foliated with multitudes of nylon tags of all sizes, how charming, a baby loves the tag on its blanket! And, oh, it was only a step April took, it was only a single step away from her baby, when a man she'd seen in the parking lot snuck up and plucked Montserrat out of the cart and ran, and a half dozen people all at once crowded the otherwise-empty aisle, all ordinary-looking citizens except for the big black pistols they pointed at April and their deep, vicious voices yelling, “
Down, down on the ground…
” How hard and cold the store's linoleum floor felt against her mouth, how filthy the cracks in the floor looked close up, how it tasted of salty tomatoes and pencil shavings, and, later, how dear and welcome that linoleum seemed compared to the black and airless interior of the police car; compared to the penetrating fluorescents in the ceiling of the interrogation room; compared to the wine-and-spoiled-cream smell of the bunk in her cell; compared to the gingivitis breath of the man who informed her that Montserrat had been dead for at least two days before April was captured; compared to the weightlessness of her empty arms and the knowledge that they would remain so until they put her to death. They would not, though. April would go to bed tonight, she would wait until the guard did his rounds, she would tie one end of the ripped-out seam of a pillowcase around a bedpost and the other end around her neck, and she
would turn to one side, then to her stomach, and to her other side and back to her back; the motion of an alligator tearing prey, but silent, and slow, around ten times, then twenty, then twenty-one, twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four

XXXIV

January 2005

After hanging up with Justine, Rose ran around Matt's apartment looking for the keys to her Jeep. She hadn't seen her girlfriend in a month, and Rose's plan to bring her back together with her family was being foiled by missing keys. She jumped onto Matt's couch and jammed her hands down between the cushions.

“Aagh! Where!”

“Chill, Rose, Jesus,” said Matt. “There's no hurry
now.
Right? You two made up, you've matchmade a whole family, so settle the fuck down.”

“Aagh! Charlotte's due
any minute
! And maybe Justine, too!”

“Did you check the front door?”

Rose paused. She ran to the door. There they were, with her copy of Matt's key still in the lock. She yanked them out, and, without even shutting his front door, she ran outside.

“Put on a coat!” Matt shouted after her.

Rose drove off, clipping a curb with a rear tire.

Rose hoped that when she got there Justine would be having her first
contractions. Oh, how exquisite it would be if Rose could race her to St. David's, where she and her grandmother could have their babies at the same time.

Oh, shit, shouldn't have run that red light. It had
just
turned, though. Rose liked to think of it as an orange light.

What had changed in the past month? Had Justine toppled all of her trophies, tossed Rose's frozen chicken tikka masala dinners, thrown out and replaced the futon mattress, plucked Rose's hairs out of the household hairbrush, subtracted from her psyche everything Rose? Had she cut herself; did she have a special internet friend, a pharmacy job, a fresh life?