Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (2 page)

I stuck my hand under the table so he could drop a Baggie into it.

“You’ll like this, Cass. Nice and easy, timed-release, no edge. And probably I shouldn’t say this, ’cause I’d hate to lose your business, but you could see your doctor, he’d give you a scrip. Then you could get your health insurance to pay for it. Some Zoloft wouldn’t kill you, either.”

“Phil. Do I look like I have fucking health insurance?”

“Good point. Here, you want this?” He set a tiny glassine envelope on the table, then flicked it at me. It landed on my lap. “Touchdown.”

“What is it?”

“Crystal meth. Very pure, Cass; we’re talking Pellegrino, Fiuggi, all that shit. No one else wants it these days, but this is the stuff. Guy who used to be in the refrigerant industry, he still cooks with Freon. He’s got a nice little stash of CHCs, but there ain’t no more where this came from. I’ll give you a deal on it, Cassie. As a Christmas present.”

“Christmas is over, Phil. But yeah, I’ll take it.” I peeled off a few bills to cover my meal, handed him a couple more, then stood. “Later.”

He pulled my plate over and began to eat the rest of my steak. “Yeah. Write if you get work.”

I walked back to my apartment, taking care that my cowboy boots didn’t send me flying as I navigated the slush-choked sidewalk. I’d taken the
Stern
payment and had the boots resoled, but they still weren’t shit in bad weather. The rest of the money had gone to cover unpaid bills, plus a small retainer set aside for Ken Wilburn so I could hang on to my place for another year or two.

And that was it. I’d already gotten fired from my longtime job at the Strand Bookstore, no great loss save for the five-finger discount I’d exercised over the years, building up a small library of expensive photography books. Even that was a victim to changing times, as store security had amped up to TSA levels, with metal detectors and bag checks before you set a foot on the floor.

But being broke wasn’t really the worst thing. I’d spent most of my adult life as a burned-out underachiever, working in the Strand’s stockroom, drifting from one bed to another. For a few years in my twenties I’d been able to trade on the flash success I’d had with
Dead Girls
, my first and only book of photographs. Everything since then had pretty much been aftermath.

Still, through it all I’d always had the Lower East Side and the shadowy image behind my retinas of what it had once been: that 3:00
A.M.
wasteland I’d fallen in love with when I was eighteen, shattered syringes and blood on the lip of a broken bottle, guitars and drunken laughter echoing through an alley where kids nodded out while I shot their pictures. The way something was always moving at the corner of my eye; the way the city was always moving, morphing into something new and terrible and beautiful.

The terror I knew on a first-name basis. On my twenty-third birthday I was raped outside CBGB. The scars are so old, as the song goes, now part of a faded tattoo I got on my lower abdomen to hide the bloody scrawl left by a zip knife. But even so, I could still sometimes find the silver-nitrate city inside the real one, if the light was right and I’d had enough to drink, scored enough amphetamine to make my heart keep pace with the strobe of my camera’s flash.

Now all that beauty was gone. I was too old and too broke to go looking for it elsewhere. I’d spent too much time alone, skating on alcohol and speed, not noticing the ice beneath me was rotten and the water killing cold.

The last person who said she loved me died on 9/11. I’d forgotten what she looked like. I was a burned-out, aging punk with a dead gaze, a faded tattoo, and a raw red scar beside one eye. In Maine I’d spent more time with other people than I had in years, maybe decades. There’d been a few moments when I’d held my battered camera and felt the way I did long ago, when I first stood in a darkroom and watched another world bloom on the emulsion paper in my hands.

But that feeling was gone; that world. Since my return to New York, I’d begun to have night terrors, paroxysms of pure horror, where I would see a black figure above my bed, smiling as he reached for my throat, and woke to my own muffled screams, heart pounding like a fist inside my chest. I felt strung out, wasted in every sense of the word, terrified of sleep and almost as afraid to leave my squalid apartment. The edge where I’d lived for all these years was starting to look like a precipice. I figured it was a good time for a short visit with my father. I crashed for a few hours back in my apartment, woke, and swallowed a couple of Phil’s white tablets; then headed to Grand Central to catch the first train to Kamensic.

2

The sleet that had made the city a skating rink turned to heavy snow when the train left Valhalla. By the time we pulled into Kamensic, I could see cars sliding across the southbound lane of the Saw Mill, and the beacons of emergency vehicles flashing like Christmas lights in the distance.

My father was waiting for me at the station. I’d called him before I left the city; he’s an early riser, up before dawn even at the darkest time of year.

“Hello, Cass.” He dipped his head to graze my cheek in a kiss, zipped his old L.L.Bean parka, then headed toward the parking lot.

“You didn’t have to pick me up. I told you I could walk.”

“Did you see it’s snowing?” he asked, and we drove home.

Since the late 1960s my father has been the Kamensic Village magistrate, holding court on alternate Tuesdays and otherwise tending to a few old legal clients from his basement office in the house where I grew up.

The town had turned into a junk-bond trader’s Disneyland since then. Most of the old colonial houses were now trophy second homes, or teardowns turned McMansions, empty save for the shriek of alarm systems set off by barking dogs, and a seasonal army of workers bused in from Stamford, wiry Latino men wielding lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and, this morning, snowblowers. Martha Stewart owned a $20-million cottage outside town, where she’d spent the last few years trademarking the name
Kamensic
for a line of outdoor furniture that cost as much as a semester at a Baby Ivy.

I hated going back, though I was cheered to see the storm had knocked a giant oak onto the most recent addition to a neighbor’s house.

“Their alarm was going all night,” my father said as we pulled into the drive. “I tried calling the owners in the city, but they won’t pick up their phone.”

“They’re getting a lot of snow inside their new addition.”

My father smiled. He’s the only person in Kamensic who still mows his own lawn.

We ate breakfast, then read
The New York Times.
We didn’t talk all that much, but I was used to that. My mother died in a car crash when I was four, an accident that left her impaled on the steering wheel and me rigid and staring, wide-eyed, when the police found the wreckage. Since then, my father’s basic rule of thumb has always been that as long as I didn’t get hauled in front of his court, he wouldn’t ask too many questions.

“How was Maine?” he asked.

“Cold.”

“Did you stop in Freeport?”

“No.”

He stood and gathered a pile of papers from the sideboard. “I have a few things to take care of downstairs.”

He started for the door to the basement, stopped, and turned. “Oh, Cass—this came for you.” He pulled an envelope from the sheaf of papers and handed it to me. “You’re not in default on your student loan, are you?”

This was a joke. I’d dropped out of NYU in my freshman year, which was about the last time I’d received any mail at this address. I looked at the envelope, puzzled. “When did it come?”

“Last week.”

He went downstairs. I walked into the living room, eerily blue-lit from the snow whirling outside, sat, and stared at the envelope. Thin, airmail-weight paper, with my name and address written in black cursive ballpoint ink. Painstaking, almost childish handwriting, like someone trying to make a good impression. I felt the tiniest frisson, somewhere between dread and exultation.

I knew that writing—or had known it, once.

But the memory was gone now. The oversize stamp showed a snow-covered expanse with bands of green and violet rippling above it.

ISLAND 120.

No return address. Who the hell did I know in Iceland? I squinted, trying to read the postmark.

REYKJAVÍK.

The fragile paper tore when I opened it. Inside was a newspaper clipping in Icelandic. It featured a grainy black-and-white image of a fir-tipped islet with a caption beneath:
PASWEGAS, MAINE, USA
. I scanned the column until I recognized my name—
CASSANDRA NEARY.

So I had a fan in Iceland; someone who read
Stern,
maybe. I frowned and examined the envelope again.

There was something else inside. I removed it carefully.

It was a photo of a naked teenage boy, sprawled on an unmade bed. Grainy black and white, 4 × 6, the edges curled and faintly browned with age. He was wiry, his chest nearly hairless, half-erect cock shadowed in his crotch. His hair fell to his shoulders and framed an androgynous face: white skin, curved ridge of cheekbone, small chin, full lips, and slightly prominent teeth.

But it was those bruised eyes that killed me, eyes so deep set they seemed lined with kohl. He had his hands locked behind his head and gazed at the viewfinder dead-on. Not a come-hither stare but a wary, challenging look, as though he were debating whether to lunge across the bed and smash the camera or pull the photographer down beside him on the gray sheets.

I knew how that particular argument ended. I knew how they all ended, because I’d been the one behind the camera.

“Fucking hell,” I whispered. “Quinn.”

Thirty years ago I’d stood beside that bed, in a room less than a mile from where I sat now. I’d shot roll after roll of Tri-X film, always pictures of Quinn O’Boyle, sometimes clothed but mostly naked; before we fucked, afterward, during. Quinn hunched over his old Royal upright typewriter, or nodding out, or poring over his dog-eared paperback of
The Return of the King
. Walking toward the Kamensic train station, slumped in a booth at the Parkway Diner. Quinn and me standing side by side, a flare where my camera’s flash ignited the mirror that held our reflection. I’d ridden my bike to Mount Kisco to have the film processed at a grimy store whose proprietor specialized in “art photos,” an old man who chain-smoked Larks and smelled like Sen-Sen. He only raised an eyebrow once, when he handed me back my contact sheets and said, “Aren’t you kinda young for this?”

I turned the picture again and stared at the boy on the bed. I’d shot scores of photos. Hundreds, maybe. I’d stashed them in a wooden Chivas Regal box, but I hadn’t seen it, or any of the photos, in almost three decades. I’d ransacked my room, the house, the basement. I never found them.

And Quinn—he’d also disappeared. The two of us had broken into a local drugstore one night when we were eighteen. We weren’t caught. My little stash of Quaaludes saw me through my first year in the city, but by then Quinn had taken off upstate with a woman he met in Harlem one night. I was sick with desire for him, sick with rage, and terrified that I’d never shoot another photo worth looking at. I channeled it all into speed and the photos that eventually became
Dead Girls.
Around the time the book came out, I heard that Quinn had gotten popped for breaking into another drugstore up in Putnam County. He wrote to me from his parents’ house, where he awaited sentencing, desperate pleading letters, handwritten or typed on lined paper torn from a composition book. Sometimes he sent fragments of a story he was working on. Once he sent a Quaalude, crushed in transit to a smear of pink powder.

I never wrote back. When he left me, I felt as though someone had jabbed my eyes with a needle. Nothing looked the same after that. I’d honed my sense of damage on him, the bitter pheromone I’d inhale as I watched him hold a spoonful of brown powder over a gas flame till it melted into the chamber of a syringe. For years after he was gone, I still carried that acrid taste in my mouth and the afterimage of his eyes, the pupils swallowed by junk.

I had assumed he was dead. His family had moved to the Midwest. I never tried to track him down.

What the hell was he doing in Iceland?

“Who’s your letter from?”

I started as my father came into the room behind me. “No one. Just a newspaper article.” I slipped the photo back into the envelope and pocketed it, tossed the news clipping into the wastebasket. “Has anything else come here for me?”

“Not a thing. I need to head over to the town office for a few hours. Are you staying for dinner?”

I stared out to where trees and stone walls dissolved into a formless blur. “No. I have to get back. Can I catch a ride with you to the station?”

While he got ready I went upstairs to my old room. Nothing there remained of me, no posters or books, no clothing or record albums; just my old bed, now sanitized with a white chenille spread and white pillows. I took out Quinn’s photo, stood by the window, and stared at it. I felt a shiver of apprehension, a dark flash at the corner of my eyes, the lingering odor of scorched metal and blood.

3

The train was delayed because of snow. By the time I finally slogged back to my apartment, it was dark. I ate some tuna fish out of the can, then settled at my ancient computer to Google Quinn O’Boyle.

I came up with nothing. No one in Iceland, no one who looked or sounded like the man he might have become, the kind of guy who’d send a nude photo of himself to the teenage lover he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

After a few minutes I gave up and scanned my e-mail. Nothing but spam.

Or almost nothing.

From: [email protected]

Subject: Photo Op

Dear Cassandra Neary,

I am a longtime admirer of your masterpiece
Dead Girls
and saw your photograph of the late Aphrodite Kamestos in
Stern.
I am wondering if you would have interest in a brief professional consultation of some photos I am considering as an acquisition.…