Saint Homicide (Single Shot) (3 page)

Before I left, I eased open Jennifer’s door and peeked inside. She lay stiffly in the murky orange light, the expulsion of her breath like a drafty old house. I closed the door and slipped into my coat.

My breath bellowed out in gray clouds as I locked the front door. Behind the house the pale limbs of the sycamores creaked in the breeze, and their dead leaves blew across the yard. An icy wisp of wind licked at my neck as I unlocked my car. Inside, I turned up the heater, waiting there until Karen pulled up to our house and parked on the street.

She got out of the car fully dressed, wearing lipstick, eye shadow, and jewelry.

I got out and she hugged me even though I’d long since established that I don’t enjoy being hugged.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Pray,” I told her.

Karen stared at me, blinking. “I will pray,” she said. She reached over and patted my forearm. “I’ll pray for you, too.”

She smiled and opened the front door. I said nothing else to her. I went to my car and pulled out of the driveway.

Chapter 3

The night of Jennifer’s accident, I had searched the hospital corridors looking for Lynn. I found her upstairs in the dimmed waiting area outside of the obstetrics ward. Somewhere, I could hear a baby crying. Standing at a floor length window, still wearing her band jacket, Lynn looked down on the orange pools of light in the hospital parking lot.

“Lynn,” I said.

I expected her to be crying like her mother downstairs. She wasn’t. Even at the age of sixteen, she seemed sapped and old, as if this latest tragedy had simply exhausted whatever was left of her feelings. In her jeans and tennis shoes she looked like an adult dressed as a child. 

“You okay, kid?” I said. My voice shook more than I wanted it to. My wife was downstairs, broken and mangled, unrecognizable. I tried to focus on the girl in front of me instead.

She stood so close to the glass her breaths fogged it and then disappeared like glimpses of a ghost. She shook her head as if someone was trying to convince her of something absurd. “What the fuck is minimal brain damage?”

I hung my head. “Please don’t swear,” I said.

“Really?” she snapped. “That’s everything you have?”

“No, but the Lord called us to a higher conduct. Your father wouldn’t want you using that word because of something that happened to him. Neither would Jennifer.”

Lynn’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a butterfly clip. She moved toward me as deliberately as someone coming down the aisle to accept Christ. “Did you see her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

I steadied my hands by squeezing them together. “I saw my wife, one of God’s children.”

She stared into my eyes. “I saw a hole.”

I took the first downtown exit and stopped at a red light. I always hated going downtown. Growing up in the suburbs outside of town, I’d been raised to think of Little Rock as a sprawling nightmare.

Sitting in my car at that lonely concrete corner reminded me of why. The rest of the buildings on the block appeared abandoned, their broken windows vacant and dark. Storefronts were boarded up, and the sidewalks were littered with bits of Styrofoam and the clustered remains of cigarette butts and pink breast cancer ribbons. The light turned green, and I cruised slowly down the one-way street. Over a row of store fronts I could see the gleaming dome and cupola of the capitol building. Beyond it, in relative darkness, the city stretched down to the river. I had only a vague idea of where Curtis Street was and it took me several minutes of wandering until I finally found it. Once I did, it took me even longer to find a video store.

It was not what I expected.

Jay and Pat’s All Adult Store was a small, plain building hidden behind a large U-Haul rental center. Illuminated by one naked light bulb, a plain wooden sign with the store name also announced: Movies, Toys, Magazines, Videos.

I sat in the parking lot, my car still running, and stared at the front door. I wanted to go in. It was possible that this is where Randall worked.
That’s why you’re out here at midnight. You’ve got to find Lynn.
I nodded. Yes. But that was not the only reason I wanted to go inside and that scared me.

The fear didn’t matter, though. I had to go inside to look for Lynn. I locked my car and walked to the front door, opened it and stepped inside.

I was in a small, dark room. A gaunt man with a clean shaven head sat behind a window. Next to him, a sign on a scarlet door read: Members Only. Underneath, in black magic marker, someone had scrawled,
so to speak
. The man at the window had bored eyes sunk deep into tan creases. “Howdy,” he said, putting down a comic book.

I nodded.

“Cost ya three to get in, for the membership,” the man said. He lifted a burning cigarette from a whiskey-colored ashtray as I nodded and pulled out my wallet and paid him. Leaning down, the man hit a button by his knee. “Go on in.”

I opened the door and walked through. The room was surprisingly bright, illuminated by long fluorescent bulbs exposed in the ceiling. The man in the window was sitting behind a counter, at the other end of which sat a tall woman wearing a Dallas Cowboys ball cap. She glanced up at me and looked back down at a Wal-Mart sale paper. The room smelled of strawberry air freshener.

Sexual accessories lined one wall. Male and female vibrators, whips, handcuffs, and various jellies sat on shelves with different prices. Magazines and videos covered the other walls, several racks, and two display cases. I walked over and looked at the videos. The cover of just one of the video boxes would have perplexed my mind; there were hundreds. Women in bondage, men with grotesquely large penises, women kissing other women, women covered in semen, white men and black women, black men and white women, blondes, brunettes, two men having sex with one woman. An instantaneous change swept over my body. My mouth was dry and my hands were clammy. I felt as if I had to urinate.

I walked along an aisle of videos in large plastic boxes under the heading: She Males. I glanced at the hermaphrodites numbly for an instant, but before I turned away I was struck by the name of one of the videos:
Adam/Eve’s Transgender Fuck Fest
. I stepped closer to look at the she-male on the cover. I whispered, “What the hell?” before I could stop myself. Adam/Eve looked every bit like a man, with thick biceps, a bald head and hairy forearms, but he also had a vagina. At first I stepped back from the picture, but then I reached for the box as quickly as a patron at a geek show. The back cover featured a picture of Adam/Eve having sex with what looked to be a black woman with a penis. It was as if someone had assembled the actors out of spare parts. 

I put the box down and wandered away from it dazed. The picture in my head did not disgust me; it was too perplexing for that. It was like seeing a picture of the Frankenstein monster and his bride copulating.

Along one wall were four opened doors. The first compartment was equipped with an empty chair, a television screen and a one-sheet behind clear plastic with a list of movies. Beside the screen I saw a nine-digit pad and a slot for quarters. Over the slot, duct taped to the wall, was a piece of paper with writing in red magic marker:

Short Movies now $5. Get change at counter.

Oh my God
, I thought. I moved away from it. But there was nowhere to hide in this store.

Ask about Randall
, I thought.
And get out of here
.

I walked over to the counter and the woman looked up. She had a sad, plain face that reminded me of a church pianist I’d once known, but she wore contacts as green as a Sprite can. On the wall behind her were a row of VHS tapes. The covers were all the same: bodies, sex.

I rubbed my face. Digging out my wallet, I said, “May I have change for a five?” I dropped a bill in front of her and stared at the sale paper. I looked about the room until she slid the quarters over to me in a white envelope.

I tried to hide my trembling from the woman at the counter as I walked back to one of the little rooms. I closed the door, sat down in the cramped darkness, chose a number at random, and inserted the quarters. The screen turned blue. In this stained light, I noticed a small trash can and a box of Kleenex beside the chair. Staring at the wads of tissue in the trashcan I thought of the other men in the room before me, crouching there in the dark, staring at the tiny screen.

The screen turned white and then bled into a badly lit bedroom. A naked woman, with long brown hair and large breasts lay on a bed next to a wall with cheap brown paneling. She was tan, except for her breasts, and was grimacing. I realized that she was supposed to be smiling. A naked man with a small gut and long brown ponytail lay down beside her and she rolled over to him.

I stared at the screen, my face tightened as if I was watching a gruesome operation. My fists trembled on my upper thighs.

This is where you are, Daniel. Abandoned. Forsaken. In the back room of this shithole. Watch closely now. This is all you have left. No Jesus, no Jennifer. This is all there is.

Onscreen the camera angle moved just below the couple’s genitals as the penis thrust back and forth in the vagina. Except for some bad music and the exaggeration of the woman’s moaning, the film was documentational in its exactness. My small cage was cast in the poor pink and orange light of the screen. After staring at the thrusting for a few minutes, I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

Oh God, where are you? How could you leave me like this? How could you leave her? How could you abandon my poor wife?

The moans of the onscreen couple filled the room. I clamped my hands over my ears.

Please God. Please. How could you leave me like this?

*

When the movie was over, I sat in the silent, dying glow of the screen. I pulled myself to my feet. I opened the door. The woman behind the counter was still leafing through the sale paper, and the man was leaning against the wall, studying a tattered ledger. As I stepped out of the little room, the man glanced up at me and then turned back to the ledger.

I was still dazed when I stopped at the end of the row near a huge plastic case attached to the wall. The case was a five-foot-high cube in the center of which stood a naked woman. The flyer taped to the cube read:

$2,500. Soft Silicone. Moveable joints. Soft sponge Pussy and Mouth for the Best Fucking You’ll Ever Do Without the Real Thing. May even beat the real thing.
 

The silicone woman was peach-colored and had banana yellow hair teased up like a rock star’s. Her breasts were large and her nails were ketchup red. In the center of her face, beneath blue marbled eyes, a pair of thick lips pressed into the shape of a kiss around a hole in her mouth.

I didn’t want to stare at the silicone woman, but I couldn’t help it. I tried, and failed, to imagine the life that could encompass the purchase of such a thing. There was no one in my life to whom I could tell this story, but I had a powerful urge to show everyone this woman in the plastic cube. This is how low we can go, I’d say. This is how far I’ve yet to fall.

I smiled.
Turns out I haven’t hit rock bottom
.
Good to know.
  

*

When I approached the counter, the man smirked. “More change?”

“No, actually. I’m looking for a man.”

“Aisle three.”

“No. Not like that. I’m looking for a man who works here.”

He leaned forward. “Who?”

“Randall?” I asked. “You have a Randall who works here?”

“Not anymore,” the man groused. “Quit a couple of days ago. Son of a bitch.”

“I’m looking for him.”

“What for?”

“I think he ran off with my wife’s younger sister, and I need to find her.”

“That, uh, Lynn?”

The woman with the Sprite can eyes moved down the counter, glowering at me as if I was trying to trick them.

“Yes,” I said, feeling a sharp panic. “Something’s happened to my wife. She’s dying. I need to find Lynn to tell her.”

The woman grumbled, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Complications from a car accident.”

“Pretty weird,” she said “you walking around, watching a movie, before you think to ask us about Randall. Especially if your damn wife is dying.”

My cheeks burned. “It’s complicated. We haven’t been like a man and wife for a long time. We aren’t really speaking. There is quite a bit of…bad blood. And I have a pornography problem, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have to find Lynn. I have to find her before it’s too late.”

“Randall said something about the fights tonight,” the man said.

The woman nudged him.

I said, “The fights? Boxing?”

“No,” the man said. The woman nudged him again, and he snarled at her, “Will you get the fuck away from me!” She didn’t move, but her face relaxed back into its natural blandness. The man told me, “He’s at the dogfights.”

“Jesus,” the woman muttered.

“What?” the man snapped at her.

“You’re the stupidest son of a bitch I ever met,” she said. “Here some stranger walks in and you’re telling him all about the goddamn dogfights. How you know he ain’t a cop?”

The man motioned at me. “He look like a cop to you? Think he was looking for clues in the stroke room?” He waved her away as if her very existence offended him. “Look,” he told me, “Randall just works here a couple of days a week. I don’t know nothing about his business. I know he’s been up against the law a couple of times on little stuff, but I never knew nothing about it. He wasn’t much of an employee, and he wasn’t my, you know, bosom buddy or nothing, but he never did me wrong—outside of upping and quitting on me out of the blue. So there you are. He’s at the dogfights. They’re not legal, but they’re not the biggest fucking secret in the world, either.”

“Do you know where these fights are held?”

“Nope. Don’t got a clue.”

I stared at a pen on the counter. “Well, I can’t just drive around looking for a dogfight.”

The woman turned to the man. “You watch,” she told him, “now this guy’s going to want Randall’s address.”