Lightning People (53 page)

She rose from the floor and carried the takeout boxes into the kitchen to dump them in the trash. After a few minutes, Joseph appeared in the doorframe. He leaned against the refrigerator, dropped his head, and calmly spoke.

“I don't want you to be unhappy,” he said. “What can I do?” She ran tap water over her chopsticks and then threw them in the garbage too. She would no longer need chopsticks. She would no longer need the plates in the cabinets or the pots hanging like rusted ornaments over the stove or the ceramic plant holders lined up on the sill.

“I don't want to stay here anymore,” she said.

WILLIAM FOUND HIMSELF in the first days of September the happiest he had ever been in New York. He watched Cecile walk from the shower with a towel tied around her waist, beating her hip with the palm of her hand, picking up a plum that matched the color of her nipples, and tearing her teeth into its meaty flesh. Joy tidal-waved over him at the sight of this woman, right here, no mirages, the frank tap of her feet coming nearer, her hair wet and her thin body wired. They had remained in her Bowery apartment for almost a week, having sex and sleeping until their bodies gathered the strength to do it all over again. William was happy to let go of the city outside her windows. He listened to Cecile play a ballad on her guitar, memorized her favorite films and the arrangement of the dresses in her closet, and clapped as she danced in only a pair of heels with a flag draped over her shoulders. He felt himself falling under a heavy spell and didn't resist.

By the fourth day, Cecile picked through a basket of needles and thread and handed him a spare key to her apartment, another of so many spare sets he had collected over the summer. He took it
greedily and kissed her for the gift. But William didn't risk leaving her place for fear he would never find his way back.

Occasionally he woke in the middle of the night, his fists swarming through her pillows from a nightmare that starred Quinn in a lumberjack shirt turning around in a small woodland cottage with car keys in his hands. The keys transformed into a flurry of flies, and William came awake on the soft down comforter to hear the traffic roaring on the Bowery. Cecile's lips glided along his collarbone as she formed sleepy French phrases he didn't understand, guiding him back into the safety of the bed.

Se coucher. J'ai la photo tire demain.
Translation: You are safe, don't think of the hell you passed through to find me. The world, this city, my arms, they're yours . . .

Such was the paradise of Cecile's loft with its old granary wheel forever bull's-eyed in the top window that William only left one early morning to mail the manila envelope that Rose Cherami had given him. He addressed it without a note or a return address to Joseph at his Twenty-Second Street address, no longer caring what effect it had on its recipient or even if it arrived. William simply wanted all traces of the past out of his hands, free to return to the vortex of Cecile Dozol's universe floating four flights above the street. Of course, her privilege was a clear attraction. William had even found the courage to call Janice and insist on arranging a meeting between her and Cecile if she'd consider letting him back into the agency. Her family name might open doors that otherwise shut in his face.

William walked up the street, located the nearest mailbox, and threw the envelope away into it. He headed back to the apartment as a cool fall wind curled around his ears, and so complete was his surrender to this magnificent dream state that he was taken aback at the sight of two middle-aged men in cheap dove-gray suits standing at the door of the building. The men eyed him, turned their attention to the buzzers on the door, and then swerved their heads in simultaneous double take.

“William Asternathy,” the bearded, coffee-toothed man said. “Are you William Asternathy?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Why?”

“I'm Detective Tasser. This is Detective Hazlett. We're from homicide.”

In that furious second, William evacuated his body in search of an outdated version of himself that he no longer recognized.

“What is this about?” William asked, training his eyes on the shape of an urn that the detectives' profiles made against the cold sunlight.

“It's about your friend, Brutus Quinn. You know him, don't you?”

“Yes,” he replied through a dry mouth. “Of course I know him. An old friend. Haven't seen him for a while. Has something happened?” His teeth chattered, ready to break into a full nervous crescendo. He clenched his hands, which were shaking in the air over his chest.

The two detectives shared worried glances.

“Do you mind coming with us down to the precinct?” Tasser asked. “Our car is just over there. We need to ask you a few questions.”

“It would be better if you came with us,” Hazlett confirmed. “It's not something you want to do right here.”

“Should I bring anything with me? You see, I've got an audition in forty-five minutes,” he lied. “Can this wait for another time? Perhaps tomorrow or next week?”

The two plainclothes detectives shared more worried glances, communicating some cop shorthand for suspect apprehended, suspect showing signs of resistance.

“You should cancel that audition,” Tasser said, bracing his fingers around William's arm.

 

THE DRIVE TOOK eight minutes, an entire lifespan. William counted the minutes on the dashboard clock from the backseat of the Cadillac. He crushed his hands between his knees, wondering why they hadn't used cuffs. The interior smelled musty and sour, although scuffed paper mats from a recent trip to the car wash carpeted the floor. There was no metal netting separating him from the officers, no guns visible in their belts, no police cars trailing closely behind.

But William had seen enough cop movies to predict what he could
expect. He knew they would take him into a bare, windowless room and work him over, picking at him slowly, politely, before rifling through him with violent accusations to pry out a confession deep in his chest.

William bent his head and forced himself not to look out of the tinted windows, as Houston Street sailed by in construction sites and mountain-high underwear ads. He stared at the green digits of the console clock, four minutes, five, six, seven, almost eight. The inside of this car was a network of windows and doors, but it was still the first of many cramped spaces he would have to share with law enforcement, a whole future of claustrophobically small enclosures. He was still simply a suspect, no confession, no lawyer, no Miranda rights. Cecile would be wondering why he hadn't already returned. He had told her he was running out to buy condoms and flowers, such embarrassing, fantastic items, purchases that told the shop clerk he was a well-loved human being, a man who cared about the body and mind of someone else, a man who wouldn't murder anyone. If he had gone to buy those items instead of mailing that envelope, would Tasser and Hazlett have let him out on the next corner?

William could hardly remember killing Quinn. But he had, way back when, at a point as faint now as an echo. His heart was pounding, and he sat on his hands to prevent them from lashing out. If the detectives were from homicide, shouldn't he already have asked if Quinn was dead? Wouldn't an innocent person have immediately asked that question? William dove forward between the front seats, but he was too late. Tasser spun the wheel, and the unmarked Cadillac found a parking space in front of a gray stone building.

Hazlett opened the back door, pulled him out by his arm, and tailed behind him, while Tasser led the way. They passed single file through the entrance, walked by the bulletproof glass humming with accident reports, and climbed a flight of stairs. Tasser punched open a swinging door on the second floor, guided him down a passage of filing cabinets and ringing cubicles and into a bare, white-walled room that held a brown Formica table and three metal chairs. It was exactly like the movies. Exactly like an episode of
Law & Order
that you turn off at the next commercial break. Exactly like a place
that purposely existed outside of the real world, where it was just William and his soul and the detectives with their questions about what that soul was doing at the time some murders took place.

“Have a seat,” Tasser ordered with a host's gesticulation. Hazlett carried in files under his beefy armpit.

“What is this about?” William asked as he sat across from them. “Quinn isn't in some kind of trouble, is he? That man wouldn't hurt a fly. He was like a father to me.
Is
like a father to me. Homicide? He couldn't have killed anyone.”

More anxious glances flew between the detectives. They declined the chairs in front of them, preferring to stand. Tasser closed his eyes. Here it comes. The first accusation, delivered in the cheap deceit of friendship, making an easy pathway for trust, just before the punches started, the shouting, the turning over of every detail. His thighs beat together, his feet tapped on the linoleum tiles, he took long breaths, he fidgeted, his body was rocketing out of control, and he kicked his chair back to unleash the energy stored in his legs.

“We have some very bad news,” Tasser started, gazing at him intently with coffee-stained eyelids that matched his teeth. “Your friend Quinn was found yesterday morning in his backhouse apartment.”

“Found?”

“He was found hanging from his shower pipe.”

William had intended to produce some effective tears, but when Tasser delivered the news, he immediately choked and tears streamed from his eyes. They had finally discovered his body. There were no more questions in the matter. The news that William had waited to hear for so long passed through him like an electric shock.

“That can't be. Not possible. Quinn couldn't have been murdered.”

Tasser squinted.

“Why would you assume he was murdered?”

Trap one.

Six consonants hissed out of William's mouth, failing to produce a word. He swallowed and tried again. “Because Quinn would never kill himself. I know that. He was a fucking survivor. He had been HIV positive for twenty years. The man wouldn't let anything stop
him. He loved life. He of all people had to fight to stay here with us, to keep himself going. Suicide. I'm telling you, he wouldn't have done that.” Everything he was saying was so horribly accurate.

“Mr. Asternathy,” Tasser said with a sigh, “we found him hanging in his shower from a cord. That would suggest a suicide.”

Cord, trap two. He had used the navy sheet stripped from his bed.

“Was there a note?”

“No,” Hazlett replied, taking over from his partner. “We didn't find a note. The coroner estimated he'd been dead for more than two weeks. The super had come to collect the back rent yesterday morning and let himself in with his key. Did you have any contact with your friend in the last month?”

“I'm sure I talked to him on the phone. No, not recently, but maybe two weeks ago, yeah. I'd call to check in on him periodically. He didn't have many friends left, you see, so I tried to be there for him. I was meaning to stop by the cottage this week. Oh, Christ. I can't believe it.”

Tasser bowed his head in sympathy. He had respectful silence down to a science: he waited ten seconds. “Can you remember the last time you spoke? It's very important. Was he acting peculiar in any way? Was he depressed or paranoid or did he mention anything troubling that had happened?”

“No. He was working on costumes for a play up in the Theater District. He hired a few tricks here and there, which kept him happy.”

“Prostitutes, you mean?”

“I don't think they call them that, but yeah, basically. He didn't make much money. But, no, I don't remember him mentioning any problems.”

“He didn't mention anything about his car?”

At Tasser's prompting, Hazlett placed a photograph in front of him. It was a shot of the Cressida parked exactly where William had left it. He could see the shoddy repair job on the hood, the hammered-out dents in the front fender, the mismatched blue paint that glimmered against the car's muted metal.

William took a breath and crossed his legs and arms to consolidate his body into the smallest amount of space.

“That's his car. He's had it for years. I never understood why he kept the thing. It barely worked.”

“He said nothing about an accident?”

“No,” William responded curtly in a pitch five octaves too high. Then he tried to reroute the conversation. “How can it take two weeks to find a body? What kind of city is this?”

“I'm not going to lie to you, Mr. Asternathy. The scene was pretty gruesome. A body decomposing for fourteen days in that kind of heat. You say that he could have been murdered, but from what we could tell, there were no signs of a struggle to indicate that he resisted in any way.”

“I can't believe it,” William repeated piteously. He looked at them for consolation but found detached detective stares. “I don't get the point of all this. If you think Quinn was a suicide, why are two homicide detectives investigating his death?”

Tasser nodded, and from a folder, Hazlett produced a copy of the
New York Post
sealed in plastic. Folded to the second page was the cell-phone photo of the hit-and-run, Madi Singh piled on the cement, the blue Cressida a blur in the background with Quinn's bumper sticker reduced to a white rectangle. Somewhere in the pixilated stew William was leaving the scene, driving away from the second-worst moment of his life.

William tried to access some deep reserve of composure, but instead his face turned white and his hands shook. He realized right then that he didn't have the strength to defend himself. The past was catching up, each action weaving and knotting into a web until there was no way to struggle out of it. The detectives knew. They were spiders familiar with the thrashing of doomed insects. They studied him as he stared at the paper, their shoulders bent forward, their eyes trained to catch the slightest tremor in his face. The bare room with its greasy Formica and hot white fluorescents didn't allow any retreat from the showdown. Hazlett tapped two nicotine fingers on the picture.