Hidden Bodies (47 page)

“Not at all,” I tell her. “Death is weird.”

When our food is ready, I walk to the counter and I thank the guy. He’s new. He doesn’t know me and he’ll never know Forty. Love bites into her gordita and half of it falls on
her shirt and now I think
I
piss myself laughing and I pick up a chicken taco and shove it in my mouth so that half of it falls onto
my
shirt on purpose and now she’s
laughing.

I slide out of the booth and she keeps her eyes on me and only Love is sexy with gordita all over her shirt. I move to her side of the table and I feel her react to me. I actually feel the love
well up inside of her, in her legs, in the way they shift toward me, so slightly, petals to the sun. When I kiss her, she quivers like we just met and she strokes my back like we’ve known
each other forever.

“I love you,” I say.

“Me too,” she says.

I am smiling ear to ear. If this is how we are after her brother’s shocking death and our surprise pregnancy, imagine how good we’re going be when we don’t have any stress in
our lives.

“Okay, I actually do have to pee,” I say, and I nod to the guy at the counter on the way to the bathroom.

It’s one of those bathrooms with a permanently fogged mirror that’s mostly just splinters and graffiti and I can’t see my reflection. After I flush, I wash my hands more than
Amy did at Del’s that day in May. I press the button for the air to come out of the hand dryer but it’s broken.

Someday, if I meet the owner of Taco Bell, I will advise him to renovate these fucking bathrooms. I will explain that my wife and I—
wife!
—like to go to his establishment
every so often. I will tell him we would go more often if the bathrooms weren’t so disgusting.

I push through the door, excited to tell Love about my plans to renovate the bathrooms at and stop short. Her gordita is sitting there as fat as it was when I left, but she’s not at the
booth. And the guy at the counter is gone, too. The kitchen is silent and outside the PCH is empty. Nothing. Not a single BMW. Goose bumps cover my body and I run into the women’s bathroom,
but every stall is vacant.

My phone rings, echoing in the vast silence of this deserted Taco Bell. It is Love, and I silence the call because I know, now, what this is
.
Love retrieved the mug of urine but the mug
of urine was not my only mistake. I’m sure of it. The only other possible explanation for the vacuum of silence is an atomic meltdown, in which case the sky would be orange.

I turn on the faucet. The soap in here is newer, pinker. I wonder if my child will be a boy or a girl. I wash my hands with hot water and I rinse with cold water. This is my last trip to the spa
for a while and I push the dryer and the hot air blows. I close my eyes and let my hands take on the heat.

My phone is ringing again. Love. They’re making her call me to see what’s taking so long. They do shit like that in Dennis Lehane books. But you can’t hold it against them;
their job is to get me.

And they must want me very badly because the perimeter has been cleared. That’s why there’s no one at the register and no cars on the PCH. If I had been a gentleman, I would have let
Love go to the bathroom first and I would have been the one to watch the cops sweep in, stealthy and silent.

I pull the door and exit the women’s restroom. I memorize the tiles on the floor of this Taco Bell and I take one last bite of Love’s gordita and this is it. I pull the first door
and enter the vestibule. I open the second door and enter the parking lot. The sun pierces my eyes. There is a cop on the roof above me.

“Put your hands up,” he says.

I do.

He reads me my Miranda rights and cops pop up everywhere, from behind the parked cars, from around the side of the building, from the bushes. I don’t care about them. I don’t care
that I am under arrest for the murder of Guinevere Beck and the murder of Peach Salinger.

What I care about is Love and she appears now with tears streaming down her face. She is trying to run for me but they are holding her back. If she has a miscarriage because of the ridiculous,
over-the-top antics of the United States Federal Justice System, I will kill each and every one of these people.

All that evolved
Charlotte & Charles
shit about trust and optimism is good and all, but not when your pregnant wife is sobbing in the Taco Bell parking lot and she’s got
gordita
all over her shirt and you can’t do anything because you have to go to
jail
. But I don’t have to worry. I’m one of the rich people now, the untouchables.
These fuckers can’t nail me. I’m gonna have the best lawyers money can buy. And let them try proving that I killed either of those girls without a single shred of evidence, without the
mugofurine
Love got for me.

I lock eyes with Love. I tell her I love her. She nods.
Me too.
The cop asks me if I’m done and before I answer, he opens the door and shoves me into the backseat. This is real.
This is not a minor traffic infraction where they give you a warning and ask you about New York. This is not a jaywalking ticket by some power hungry cop. This is
two counts of murder one
suspect in custody, over.

Fuck you, radio. It’s not over. Not even close.

THE
police are so fixated on the past and I want to tell them that it’s all gone. I’m a changed man. I saw Amy on the beach, Amy, the
reason I moved here, the person who stole from me and broke my heart, and I didn’t kill her. I’m not that guy anymore and this seems relevant, but then legally, it isn’t. My brain
gorges with my defense, the one that I can’t reveal because the case against me is not about Amy, damn it, though I wish it were.

Here’s the gist of it. Detective Peter Brinks and the New York Police Department are not like the feminist bloggers. They took the complaints of Dr. Nick Angevine seriously. One of his
complaints was regarding Patient X, one
Danny Fox.
They were unable to locate Danny Fox. It was like he didn’t exist.

Meanwhile, in Little Compton, Rhode Island, Officer Nico was spending a lot of time around the Salinger house. In police work, there is a lot of down time, a lot of sitting around, a lot of
coffee, a lot of waiting, and while he was sitting around doing nothing, Officer Nico decided it would be fun to flip through a sailing magazine. And in that sailing magazine, he saw a picture of a
guy on a boat. The guy was identified as Spencer Hewitt. “I looked at that picture,” he says. “And I thought, what are the odds that there are
two
guys named Spencer
Hewitt?” Even though the Salingers insisted on closing the book on Peach, Officer Nico went to the garage that worked on my Buick. He wondered: Did they have a record of that transaction,
perhaps a license plate? And they did have a license plate number on a receipt. Officer Nico found that the car was registered to a Mr. Mooney. He read about the bookstore in some BuzzFeed article
about old bookstores in New York. He saw the name
Joe Goldberg
and then he found me on motherfucking Facebook.

Fucking Facebook.

He recognized me and he brought the picture to the Salingers and they knew me, of course, as the delivery boy, as the guy in the bar. So then the red flags were raised. Officer Nico is no dummy,
and he knew Peach’s
friend
Beck had also met an untimely end. I almost wish I could have been there on the day that Officer Nico visited Dr. Nicky in prison and showed him my
photograph—
fucking Facebook
—and said, “Is this Danny Fox?”

So that’s how this maelstrom came together, like any storm system in nature, a confluence of circumstances. It’s as absurd as me running into Amy on a beach in Malibu after hunting
her in Hollywood for months. How things come together in this universe, how they don’t, is unfair. I was so judicious with Amy. I let her go. I didn’t punish her. I think the justice
system should see where I am now, how far I’ve come, all the good I have to lose. They should stop prodding into my past. It’s so vengeful, so middle school, the way they want to boil
my entire life down into these two dead girls.

And I had no warning of the coming storm but because of Love, I was able to batten down the hatches. I have a lawyer named Edmund and he sits alongside me through every interrogation. He is my
counsel. He nods when it’s okay to answer and he shakes his head when he wants me to be quiet. Edmund says to focus on the facts and reminds me that the cops have yet to produce any evidence
that proves that I did anything. All they know for sure is that I like to use pseudonyms. In our first conversation, I reminded Detective Leonard Carr that
lots
of people use pseudonyms.
“Look at authors,” I said. “Look at famous people who check into hotels.”

It’s been three days and life is never how you expect it to be. The food here isn’t bad. It isn’t good, per se, but I’m not starving. In the newspapers they call me
Killer Joe
and it’s disappointing, the failure of modern media, the lack of originality. Love visits me. Her father too. At night I worry. I wonder if there are other mugs of piss,
if I forgot about them. I think about
Charlotte & Charles.
I daydream about Love. I think about the baby, running from Love to me and then back again. I dream of the baby learning to
walk and I wake up ready to face my long days of cheap coffee and interrogations.

Leonard Carr is the
good cop
. He says I’m too smart to bother with
bad cop
and he says he won’t bore me with head games. But of course he’s boring me with
head games. He thinks I’ll relax and accidentally admit to killing someone. He has kids. He should know better. But then, he’s human. We all are.

After lunch, he returns to the windowless room where we have our talks. He offers me water and he kicks his feet up. “So,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about
Wolf of
Wall Street
.”

There is something springy about him and I break my rule about looking at the camera, the one focused on me all the time, all day, the glass orb hell bent on capturing me as I incriminate
myself. Edmund nudges my leg, a reminder to stay calm. Detective Carr has new information. I know it. He’s excited, trying so hard not to show it that he’s showing it. But then, maybe
that’s part of his strategy.

“Here’s what I like about the movie,” he says. “I like it when the guy eats the goldfish. It’s so simple. Something about it. That stayed with me. I’ve never
seen anyone eat a goldfish. Have you?”

“No,” I say and I wonder what he knows. I am thirsty but I don’t drink the water.

“Not ever?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I would like to open his skull and find out what he knows so we can avoid this banter and I can get out of here and go on with my life.

He nods. “You didn’t see anything like that in Cabo?”

I look to Edmund. He nods. “No,” I say. “I didn’t see anyone eat a goldfish in Cabo.”

Fincher.
What the fuck do they know about
Fincher
? My heart beats loud. I tell it to stop. It doesn’t listen to me. I do not control my heart. Nobody does. Detective Carr
is still nodding. Torturing me. Scratching his neck. “Hey,” he says. “How’s your buddy Brian?”

Captain Fucking Dave.
I swallow. “He’s fine.”

“Now, he sounds like a party animal to me, right?” He laughs. “A guy like that, I bet
he
would swallow a goldfish, yeah?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Detective Carr stares at the wall. Edmund stares at me. There is a unique silence to this room and I know what happened. Captain Dave is a fearful man—
Rules are rules,
Joe
—and when the cops asked him about our time in Cabo, he forked over every detail. He told them about my imaginary friend
Brian
, the one I invented when I was trying to get
the boat so I could dump Fincher’s body. Now the police are going to want to talk to Brian and there are probably others on this case, cops poring over airline records, passport records, cops
trying to find Brian the American who went to Cabo San Lucas. They aren’t going to find Brian. But they are going to realize that a cop named Robin Fincher flew to Cabo. They are going to see
that he disappeared while I was in Cabo and I love Love, but this is America. If you kill a cop, they don’t let you go. Cops protect their own. They are the ultimate family, loyal to the
end.

“How’d you meet Brian?” Detective Carr asks.

“At a party,” I say.

“Henderson’s party?”

Nice try, fucker. “No,” I say. “I didn’t meet him at Henderson’s party.”

Henderson, of course, is their favorite thing to talk about, the fact that I was there, that I was in his house, on YouTube, the night that he died. They think it’s too much coincidence.
But they have no evidence.

“Sounds like you guys aren’t close,” he says.

“We aren’t,” I say. The days are long in here. I will not complain when I am free, staying up around the clock helping take care of the baby.

“Why did Love hate him so much?”

I look at him. “Huh?”

He smiles. I fucked up.
Huh
was the wrong thing to say. “They’re asking her right now,” he says. “Just one of those things, you know, we’re curious about
you, Joe, the kind of people you run with and all.”

“I don’t know why she hated him,” I say. And this is that
Newlyweds
game show from before I was born, where they test your knowledge of your partner. But it’s
not fair. We are not playing for a fucking vacation to Cabo. We are playing for my life, for my right to be a father to my child. My
child.
Love and I did not sign up for this but I have
to play.

“Take a guess,” he says. He gets a text. He reads the text. He nods. “Huh,” he says. He is imitating me. He has Love’s answer and I don’t have Love’s
answer and I don’t know what she would say.

“Joe, you don’t have to answer,” Edmund reminds me, but he’s wrong, I do. Detective Carr isn’t going to leave the room until I answer a question about someone who
doesn’t
exist
or I will be one step closer toward a life without love. Milo will raise my baby. My baby will run into his arms.