The Parallel Apartments (8 page)

“Fifty-two ninety-nine?” said Justine, who hated to quibble; she usually just caved quietly when overcharged or otherwise ripped off. “I think I heard you tell those guys $32.99.”

“Yes, but you have the Room,” said Amy, glancing out of the heavily tinted window into the parking lot, where Jimbo and his dad were taking a cauldron out of the trunk of a hail-damaged Lexus. “The Room is $52.99.”

“‘The Room'?” said Justine. “It sounded like you said that with capitals. Did a rock-and-roll star stay there?”

“Don't you know? The Room is where there was a murder once, a really nauseating and out-of-control mass murder,” said Amy. “They wrote a book about it. People rent the Room just because of that, you know, true-crime people? So it costs more. The new clerk we have working here, Angel, who gave the Room to you when you made your reservation a couple of days ago must not have known.”

“And,” continued Amy, “it looks like Mr. Huppholtz, the manager, is going to raise the rate
again
when you check out. The Room is a very desirable room. Fifty-two ninety-nine is a bargain. You lucked out.”

“Gross,” said Justine, thinking she'd have to stop by the library or a bookshop later to brush up on mass-killer profiling so she wouldn't get caught unawares in a Dan's Hamburgers or someplace when a maniac came in and took down all the diners with automatic-weapon-fire. “I would like another room, please. A $32.99 room. Like the Pelletiers.”

“I'm so sorry, we're booked,” said Amy. “Probably no more rooms in the whole city, with the Symposium and the Sackbut Six reunion concert at the Erwin Center tonight. Like I was saying, you were very lucky to get a room at all. There must have been a cancellation, since you got it on such short notice.”

The phone rang. Amy answered it instantly.

“Frito.”

Justine hopped over to look at the sightseeing-brochure rack and piles of free weeklies while Amy embarked on what sounded like a non-business-related conversation, with tears and accusatory shrieks. On the cover of the
Chronicle
was something about the many icy swimming holes around town. Justine flipped the pages till she arrived at
News of the Weird,
a compelling feuilleton reporting just what it announced it would.

Amy slammed down the receiver, which promptly rang again and which Amy answered with a colorful oath.

“Oh. I am so sorry. I thought you were someone else, Oh my god, sorry…”

One
Weird
item featured an awful man, an attorney named Peter Bradley, who'd donated a kidney to a friend, but when Peter got stabbed in his remaining kidney by a madman a few weeks later, he sued to get his original kidney back. He succeeded, and was alive and prospering. The man he'd donated to died. People were so awful. Justine would never Indian-give an organ. But, she admitted to herself, she might not part with one in the first place. Except Gracie. She'd give Gracie both kidneys and an ear and her Islets of Langerhans if she needed them. Maybe more.

“Miss? Miss Moppett?” called Amy. “Are you going to keep your room? Because I have a customer on the phone here who wants it if you don't.”

“I'd like to keep it, please.”

The Room didn't seem all that special. Not twenty-extra-dollars special. There wasn't a diorama or framed crime-scene photos or even a copy of the book about the murder next to the faux-morocco Gideon in the bedside-table drawer. There was certainly no evidence of a crime. No holes in the walls. No disorder. No spatter. No creepy vibe. Justine was sure that there had been a lot of true-crime thrill-seekers disappointed with the Room. But maybe if she ripped up the carpet she'd find a rust-colored stain. Justine wondered if she could get some Luminol on eBay. Probably not. It was surely a controlled substance, available only to those with a license and a good reason to need it.

Justine tossed her Macy's bags on the bed, checked the number of channels the TV got (twenty-seven), hop-limped next door to a diner, where she remembered once having been served a plate of huevos rancheros in which she discovered the spring from a clothespin. She had not complained and had overtipped.

Justine poked at a plate of migas, and tried not to get caught looking at her waitress as she and her rope-muscled calves darted around the diner. Her face was decorated with a vivid port-wine stain that Justine found beautiful, wondering if by some chance it also tasted of tawny port, or something even better.

Back at the Frito, Justine fetched ice and a couple of Dr Peppers from the machines outside the lobby, went into her Room, poured the ice into
the sink, stuck the cans in, and lay on the bed. She kicked off her shoes and turned on the TV to see if a
Law & Order
could be found. No, nothing. And no TV-channel schedule channel, either. Patience; an episode would be on in the next two hours, she was sure. She tuned in to TNT, turned the sound down low, shut her eyes, and decided to get the day's panic attack over with. She summoned it.

But the panic did not come.

Justine analyzed:

1. She had a car. She couldn't rightly return the Chevy Meagre to Middling Car Rentals in New York. She could just leave it in an H-E-B grocery store parking lot and call Middling to tell them where it was and that she wouldn't be able to return it. What could they do? Charge her extra? Fine. Maybe she'd just extend her rental indefinitely. At $48.99 a week, Justine had enough credit to rent a car, and the Room, for
six months.

2. She was not in a relationship. She was single, like people sometimes were on TV. People in such a state seemed to enjoy no end of fun and sex and restaurants, and appeared to have more money.

3. She had RU-486. And abortion, for the moment, was, she was pretty sure, legal in Texas. And if it wasn't, she did not care.

4. No one knew where she was. No one except Amy downstairs. And it wasn't like she was alone in Pampa or Lahore or the Kuiper Belt; she was free in a city she knew well. Or
had
known—Austin seemed a hell of lot bigger and meaner than it had been in 1988.

Conclusion: the panic hadn't come, because there was nothing to panic about.

          
In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses

Justine opened her eyes.

          
are considered especially heinous. In New York City

She turned up the sound, chose the iciest Dr Pepper, and eased back into bed, trembling with sudden excitement and optimism. Ah, there, on TV, a tiny foot poking out of a trash bag. At the commercial break she tapped out a particolored sparkler of an orgasm, the last shivers of which dissipated just
as
SVU
returned to find Olivia Benson in morbid trialogue with Stabler and Dr. Melinda Warner, the show's brilliant medical examiner.

“I can start again,” Justine told Olivia.

Right after you settle all of your family accounts,
Olivia seemed to scold.
Including your own little inner family.

“I will.”

You're going to keep her, right? Start your new life as two?

“I don't know.”

Those pills could kill you both,
the brilliant Dr. Warner seemed to say.

“Yeah, I know.”

And you're no good to us dead,
said Stabler.

“Huh?”

We need you here at the precinct,
said all three at once.

“Me? Why?”

Just come with us.

The elite SVU force all call her Justine except for the Captain, who calls her Just, and Fin, who calls her Baby, and Justine wears tight dresses and fuzzy tops and vintage Tiffany earrings with little golden clapperless bells, and she mans a big desk, sips tarry black precinct coffee from an
ILOVEAUSTEX
coffee mug, and reads stacks of
New York Posts, Austin American-Statesmans, Der Spiegels, Le Mondes, Village Voices
, etc., because her job is to hunt for signs of child abuse and sexual crime in the funnies. She is good at her job. She saves lives every day. She's saved at least a dozen in the past week. In the last panel of Monday's
Curtis,
little brother Barry gets chased into a garage by a stereo salesman bent on abduction and ritual trepanning but Justine is able to get a SWAT team to the garage before Tuesday's installment; Larry Lockhorn, disguised as a perverted Santa, turns up in
For Better or For Worse
with unspeakable conduct on his mind, but Justine clips him out and pastes him into
Mark Trail,
where he drowns in a trout stream;
Cathy
appears manacled upside down to a stone wall in a secret dungeon in the
Wizard of Id,
but is freed when Dr. Huang awakens the king's buried abuse; a new child, Kevin, turns up in
Family Circus
without explanation, and Justine, on a hunch, sends Munch to Bil Keane's house, where he finds all the
Peanuts
on choke chains in little basement corrals, living on doodlebugs and belt leather. Schroeder is found dead; Justine and the rest of the SVU crew must submit to Huang for grief counseling. Huang makes a sudden
pass at Justine; she submits. But before he can lift her elite SVU skirt and take her, Justine wakes up in a sweat, humping the Frito bedspread, which indeed appears Huang-shaped in the blue glow of the TV.

Justine fetched a Dr Pepper floating in the tepid sink-water. She pulled up her nightgown and used the hem to swab her forehead and underarms. She examined herself in the mirror. Her belly did not appear to have swelled. It was only forty-three days, after all. She shouldn't be showing yet… should she? Justine couldn't remember. After Valeria's death, her mind had shed every baby-book fact there was to know.

She leaned as far over as possible to sniff at her nethers. Not unlike mutton bouillon, the aroma. She hadn't stopped to bathe on her whole trip (except once, arguably, when she stopped at a Chevron someplace in Virginia to rasp Doritos residue off her hands with dry paper towels), so Justine took a long soak, eroding to slivers two credit-card-sized bars of Frito Motel deluxe marionberry-verbena soap.

She got out, refilled the tub, this time with scalding water, squeezed a one-ounce bottle of Frito Motel deluxe shampoo into it, then submerged her clothes, including her faded and flaking Frank Frazetta warrior T-shirt. She stirred and agitated the laundry with a Dr Pepper can for a few minutes, squeezed and wrung them, three-rinsed, then draped them over the balcony railing. The direct sun dried everything in less than fifteen minutes. The warrior was hot as burned toast. The heat of it reminded her of the day she bought it, when the decal was brand-new and still hot from the T-shirt shop's mangle.

She'd bought the shirt in 1990, shortly after a public, hissing argument with Franklin at Mulda's Eatery about the nature of the perfect fleur-de-lis-shaped scar on their waitress's belly, which was audaciously visible between the belt of her jeans and the knot of her Hee-Haw country-girl red-gingham tied-up halter top.

“Brand,” Franklin had whispered to Justine while the waitress was busy marrying bottles of ketchup at a vacant table, her scar plainly visible, highlighted by the raking light of a warm, sunny fall afternoon.

“I think it's a bunch of little cuts.”

“It's a brand,” he said again, a bit distantly, as he was obviously in deep study of every aspect of the waitress's body. “French brand.”

“Little cuts she did herself,” said Justine. “In the mirror, I bet. Maybe she's from Quebec, or New Orleans.”

Franklin flared his nostrils just enough to indicate incredulous distaste.

“God.”

The waitress came over and refilled their ice teas, leaning over enough so that both Franklin and Justine got a look at the fleur-de-lis scar with almost peep-show intimacy.

“Okay, maybe it is a scar from cuts,” said Franklin after the waitress left. “She wouldn't've done that to herself, though.”

“Wasn't an accident.”

“The cutter nonpareil issues her verdict.”

“Shut up, Franklin. Why do you make me out to be wrong about every single thing?”

“She had a pro do it. A scarifier. Besides, she doesn't have cuts all over the rest of her.”

“You don't know that.”

“Why would anyone disfigure their bod like that? A lacy, meaningless tramp stamp, or Star-Belly Sneetches–style nipple stars, mayb—”

Justine stood up.

“Sit.”

Justine walked over to the waitress, who was sitting at her ketchup-bottle table. Dozens of ketchup-bottle towers, each with one bottle inverted and standing lip to lip on another, stood before her like bloody chess pieces.

“Did you cut your fleur-de-lis yourself?”

Justine had not initiated many conversations in her life.

The waitress smiled.

“Yes. X-ACTO.”

“It's pretty.”

She stood up.

“Yeah. See, sixty-two slits.”

“Wow. You're a really good artist.”

She looked at Justine's arms.

“You, too,” the waitress said, in a timbre that was all at once decorous and dallying and art-critical. “Action painting.”