Hidden Bodies (39 page)

After I checked into my shitty motel, I went into a sleep coma. Vegas will fuck you up. I think I went twenty-eight hours without so much as a nap. I woke up on the cruddy, low-thread-count
bedspread in a pile of my own drool. I showered in the stifling, tiny shower and I used the terrible small rectangles of bad soap, and I drove to the public parking lot that’s closest to the
beach near the Salinger house. And I started walking. As if you can just walk into a fucking crime scene. Before I even got there, I saw the activity, the police cruisers and the TV news vans, the
various Salingers in their winter clothes, and I had to back off.

I pretend to be a guy walking on a beach relaxing and meanwhile, that fucking house fills up with people who might find my mug of piss. I need to get in there so I try to get in there.

I drive to Crowther’s and order a shit ton of food to go. I buy one of their T-shirts. I go to the Salinger house and park as close as I can. The TV vans are gone—news is only news
for a little while—and there is only one cop. I put on my Red Sox cap and I lift the heaving box of food and I trot toward the house, the way any delivery guy would. I knock on the door, the
way any delivery guy would. Nobody answers so I ring the bell, the way any delivery guy would.

A guy who can’t be more than twenty and looks exactly like Peach walks up. He’s wearing a Yale T-shirt and scratching his head. He looks like he’s never held a rake or
scratched a lottery ticket in a 7-Eleven. “What’s up?” he asks.

“I have a delivery,” I say, as if this isn’t completely fucking obvious. “Can I get in there and put this down?”

The Salinger’s eyes roll to the side of his oval head. “Mommmmmm!” he calls out.

“Buddy,” I say. “My back’s breaking here. If I could get in there and get this down.”

But now his mother is here. “Trot,” she says. “Don’t scream.” She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We’re requesting that all
flowers and food and gifts be sent to the battered women’s shelter in Fall River. Peach was very passionate about women’s rights and we just don’t need the food.”

Peach was not very passionate about women’s rights. She was passionate about women’s pussies. She wanted to fuck Beck, which is why I killed her.
Salingers.
This bitch just
stares at me. “Do . . . you . . . speak . . . English?” she asks.

NO, BUT I SPEAK CUNT. “That’s so great of you,” I say. “But my boss would have my ass if I drove to Fall River. You sure I can’t just get in there and leave this
with you?” Meaning, get in there and steal the keys that are undoubtedly on the kitchen table because rich people, particularly the ones on the East Coast, really like to throw their shit on
the kitchen table.

The bitch sighs. “You poor thing.” She reaches for her purse. She thinks I want a tip. “You take this and you keep that food.” She slips me a
five-dollar bill
and gives me a fake smile, the kind people do when they want you to know you’re faking it. She closes the door and locks it and now I’ve been made by not one but
two
fucking
Salingers, so it’s not like I can show up here tomorrow in a UPS uniform. Not that I have a UPS uniform. All I have is a heaving box of food.

I drive to my shitty motel room. I eat. I text Love:
Still nothing and
yes I am the asshole who got sucked into a blackjack table for hours

She writes back:
I’m not your parole officer. You don’t have to report to me! I know you’re working hard. I’m helping my dad with some Pantry stuff.

This was the wrong time for her to use the phrase
parole officer
and I don’t want to talk to her until I’ve destroyed that mug of piss. I wish I could change things. I wish
I had taken care of this mug before we met.

Miss you
, she writes, and most girls would throw hissy fits if their boyfriend went into silent mode in
Las Fucking Vegas
for several hours, especially while said girl was in
the middle of a family crisis.

My phone buzzes and now she’s calling me.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says when I answer.

“How you doing?” I ask her. She starts in about a difficult woman at work, Sam, and I yawn and the room is cold and I walk to the window to close the blinds and I left my headlights
on. “Fuck,” I say.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I left my lights on. It’s fine.”

I grab the keys and go outside—the bitter cold—and I turn off the lights and I run back inside and Love asks me where I am. “A diner,” I say. “The
Peppermill.”

She says she’s glad I’m eating and she wants me to rest. She says I sound tense. I tell her I sound tense because I am tense. She tells me that when they were in college, Forty
disappeared for
two months.
“Right after I got married,” she says. “
Two months
, Joe. You know you can’t stay in Vegas for two months.”

“I won’t, but I can’t give up yet,” I say.

“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” she says.

I promise her. And then I make shitty motel coffee and go on Tinder. Fortunately, there aren’t
that
many girls in the area. I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. I swipe while I piss
and I swipe in the bed and I swipe in the car and then I find her.
Jessica Salinger.
I recognize her from a picture of the family in the article. She’s a prettier version of Peach
and she’s
less than a mile away.
This is what I needed to know, that she was still here; her fucking Facebook and Twitter are private but her pussy, apparently, is open. Humans. I
will never understand.

I shower. I shave. I dress. I run out to my car and thank God I noticed the lights because my battery works and I need it to work, I need to get to Scuppers now, the place I went with Supercunt.
It’s the only joint in town, really, this time of year and I go in and the first thing I notice are the tall chairs at the bar, brown as opposed to the white leather chairs at the Bellagio.
And two chairs are of particular interest to me because one contains Jessica Salinger, the other has the friend I was banking on, and there is plenty of room for me at the bar.

It’s quiet—some fucking Sade in the background; really, Rhode Island?—and I have no competition. There are two other dudes here, construction workers I think, they’re
both wearing rings, more interested in the news than the girls. There’s no band to get in the way of things and tease the young girls, there’s no crowd, not even with all the excitement
involving
the dead girl.
New Englanders are stingy and they hibernate at night, as if going out makes you into some kind of whore.

Of course I am not gonna go for Jessica Salinger. That would be too creepy since I was just at their house today. I have to put the moves on the friend, the one I knew she’d be out with,
because girls like Jessica
always
have a friend around, and she’s always a little shorter, a little more drunk, a little more down to earth, literally. This friend is tapping her
straw and removing it from her cocktail. This friend is bored. This friend is gonna be mine. Easy.

It’s been so long since I hit on a girl in a bar, but I know how it works. All you do is stare into the girl’s face, reflected in the mirror ahead. You let her friend notice you
staring. You don’t look away. She meets your gaze in the mirror and you crack up and you apologize—it’s so good to start with
sorry
—and you tell her that you
didn’t mean to stare but you couldn’t help it.

“You’re just so gorgeous,” I say. “And I don’t mean that in a creepy douche kind of way and I’m not gonna try and pick you up when I see you’re very
clearly here with your friend.”

And then I take all my marbles away and flag the bartender and order a
gimlet
—I want to know why Forty was so into them—and now the girl puts her hand on my arm.
“What’s your name?”

“Brian,” I say. Like Brian from Cabo. “Brian Stanley.”

“Well,” she says. “I’m Dana and this is my girlfriend Jessica. Are you here by yourself?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What about you girls? Are you here by yourselves?”

Jessica rolls her eyes and this is exactly what I want. My gimlet comes. I sip. I ask Dana what she’s doing here and she tells me she’s here to provide moral support for her friend
Jessica. Jessica is feeling more invisible by the second—it won’t be long now—and I sip my gimlet slowly. Dana is Jessica’s roommate in New York and Dana is a first-year law
student and Dana loves this cute little town and Dana loves this song and she loves this bar and Jessica does not love being a third wheel. She stands. “Do you guys mind if I get out of
here?”

I apologize—I am Mr. Manners—and Dana says she should go and Jessica says that’s ridiculous. She says she’s tired. Dana doesn’t know how she’ll get home.
“It’s not like New York where you can just call a cab,” she says. “No, I should go.”

Jessica says she’ll be in the car. Jessica Salinger has no use for me. I tell Dana it’s unorthodox and presumptuous but I
could
give her a lift home if she wanted to
stay.

“Thank you,” she says. “But I don’t even know you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to . . .”

Two hours later, Dana is a teetering drunk girl and she’s in good hands with me. I help her out of the bar. I open the car door for her. “Just like
Say Anything
!” she
says.

I start the car. This is it. I’ll have to keep up the gentleman act and escort her into the Salinger house. And she’s so drunk, she won’t be able to make it up the stairs
alone. “So,” I say. “Where am I taking you?”

“Ugh,” she says. “Hang on. I have to find the address in my phone.”

I almost fuck up and tell her I already know the address. But she unlocks her phone—1267—and she bites her lip and she scrolls through her e-mail. “Got it,” she says.
“Thirty-two Starboard Way.”

My head snaps up. That’s not Peach’s address. “Are you sure?”

She raises her phone and shows me the Airbnb page and I am fucked. A whole night wasted. “I usually stay with Jess and her family,” she says. “But they have some crazy shit
going on right now. Did you see the news about the girl who they think was
killed
here? That was her cousin.”

“Really,” I say. And I look both ways and I use my blinker and I curse Tinder. “That’s some scary shit.”

When I escort Dana into her Airbnb, she tries to kiss me. I tell her I’m sorry. “I’m getting over someone,” I say. “I’m really sorry. I just can’t now,
you know?”

Dana gets it. She says she’s been there. But she has no fucking idea. I go back to my shitty motel. I should have gotten an Airbnb.

I
go down to breakfast the next morning and why in the fuck would I ever want to make my own waffles? Do I look Belgian? I itch and I think my room
has bedbugs. And the number one thing I did not miss about the East Coast: the
humidity.
After the brisk chill of yesterday, Little Compton, Rhode Island, is suddenly in the midst of an
unplanned natural event they call
Indian summah!
The girl at the front desk beams, sunburnt, small-minded: “Didja come heeah foah the Indian summah? It’s a wicked
pissah!”

I came here to get my
mugofurine
, thank you very much, and my hole in the wall is a fetid hot zone of bacteria, I know it, and this morning when I showered, I felt like I wasn’t
alone. I feel very cramped in here, as if my civil liberties have been chopped up by the bitch at the front desk, by the eleven-year-old kid who cut in front of me in the waffle line.

I am nervous. The kid’s fat dad whistles. “I think you’re beeping.”

I yank the top of the waffle iron and my waffle is blackened and there is a long line; it would be a dick move to make another. I remove my raw-on-the-inside, black-on-the-outside freebie carb
from the old machine and stick it onto a plate that is sticky, that clearly didn’t make it into the dishwasher. There are kids everywhere, talk of water parks and a drive-in an hour out and
isn’t it
October
? What are all these people doing here? I didn’t anticipate the crowds, the talk of blueberry syrup and gas prices, the
New England
of it all
.
The coffee is weak—no shit, Sherlock, I know—and the dad plops a waffle onto my plate.

“You look like you could use a lift,” he says, and he winks and it is a kind world, a fair world. I need my energy. I eat the waffle and I drink the coffee and then I do a drive-by
at Peach’s house. It’s more crowded today than it was yesterday and I can’t go anywhere near it now that I fucked up with my special delivery and Jessica Salinger thinks my name
is Brian. Is someone finding that mug of piss right now? I get out of the car. A couple of old ladies are power walking.

The skinny one: “And you know apparently she was a
lezzie.
”

The skinnier one: “Do they think that awful mother of hers might have killed her? You know I wouldn’t put it past her.”

The skinny one: “She’s putting on weight.”

The skinnier one: “She shouldn’t be going around in those flats. She needs lift.”

At least Peach didn’t come from one of those happy families where nobody can conceive of anyone in the family committing a crime. New Englanders like murder as much as they enjoy the music
of Taylor Swift and the antics of the Kennedys. I want to hear more parking lot banter so I go to town, where it’s more crowded.

I enter the Art Café and Gallery and immediately I know this was a mistake. Heads turn. Elderly locals bemoan the
nosy New Yorkers sniffing around
and look me up and down. Were
it not for my California tan I’d probably be strung up on the flagpole outside but fortunately there is a distraction. A flock of grown men in spandex enter,
cyclists
, and they are
regulars here and they are welcome and I am invisible again. I purchase a coffee. I wrestle with the bad pump on the milk dispenser and a cyclist advises me to hit it once, hard. It works. My luck
is turning.

“Thanks,” I say. I look at him and my luck is turning back again, the way every session at a blackjack table eventually concludes with the dealer making twenty-one. Luke Skywalker
knows that he might die in battle and Eminem knows that he might get too choked up to make rhymes and I, Joe Goldberg, know that when I fly to Rhode Island and reenter my bad place, Little Fucking
Compton, it is possible that I might wander into a store, let my guard down, and find myself face to face with the cop I met on my first visit. Yes, it’s Officer Nico, in purple spandex and a
blue helmet. Already, his eyes are narrowing.