Done for a Dime (11 page)

Murchison thought it through. Can’t save the world, choose your fights. “Sure.” He grabbed it from his pocket and handed it back to Gilroy. “I’ll be following up. Remember.”

Stluka turned back toward the intake desk. “I’ll go track down where they’ve stuck our witness.” He started to walk away, singing under his breath:

“You got the eggs, I got the bacon.

But it ain’t breakfast that we’re makin’.”

Gilroy’s eyes followed Stluka’s exit, his face still pale. Turning back to Murchison, he said, “Nothing I can do or say to keep all this ten-twelve with you guys, is there?”

Murchison felt like choking him. “You want to rethink what you just said to me?”

Gilroy coughed up a bitter little laugh and dropped his head. “I’m gonna get ass-fucked on this.”

“I’m willing to overlook this other nonsense you were trying to pull. Even the money. But you go find that girl you were trying to impress. Tell her that routine about the toss-down was a load of crap. And then write it up just like it happened. Because if the kid you took into custody is our perp on the Carlisle killing, his defense team is gonna retrace every step he took from the time he crawled out of bed this morning to right now, this minute. And they’re gonna find everything with a pulse that saw you take the kid down, not to mention that young lady you were just here with. She gets bit by the truth bug, you know they’ll call her to the stand. Then the last thing you’ll have to worry about is what I wanna do to you.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll talk to her.”

“Damn right you will.” Murchison snapped his fingers to get Gilroy to look at him. “By the way—Arlie Thigpen. You swabbed the kid’s hands, right?”

Gilroy’s head swung up, his eyes met Murchison’s, but whatever they saw belonged to a whole different world.

“For gunshot residue.”

“I know what for.”

“Then answer me.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No.” Gilroy looked away again. “I didn’t swab his hands.”

The choking impulse, it spoke a little louder this time. “Any particular reason, Officer, why you didn’t?”

Gilroy wasn’t talking anymore. He’d set his jaw, tilted his chin up, like a kid daring you to do your worst.

“Call in,” Murchison told him. “Tell the watch commander you’re still here. And tell him to send a tech or somebody, anybody, down to the holding cell—don’t wait one minute—send him down and swab that kid’s hands.”

6

A
s Nadya blinked the grit from her eyes, the murk of half-sleep gave way to a soupy dance of broken planes suspended in a cold light. Little by little, things tapped into gravity, arranging themselves like actors searching out their marks. She lay flat on her back in a strange bed. Against her skin, the starchy sheet felt crisp as butcher paper. The too-clean smell told her:
hospital
. I don’t remember getting here, she thought, at the same time feeling little surprise.

The door was closed. Beyond it, echoes formed a dull clamor—soft-soled footfalls down a long corridor, a screeching metal cart, bottles rattling—above which two Latinas bantered as they passed the room.

“Donde hubo fuego, quedaron cenizas.”

“Amor de lejos, es de pendejos.”

The two women broke into little shrieks of laughter that faded as they moved on.

Nadya rose, struggling through haze. Drugs, she guessed, wondering which. Her throat clenched, a sandpaper tongue, she could barely swallow. Setting her feet upon the floor, she had to guess her legs would bear weight. The floor itself seemed oddly immaterial, like the surface of a pool.

Testing her balance, she clung to the bed rail, then worked herself hand by hand to the end, where she lunged toward the sink, caught it, collected her balance, and stood upright. Opening the chrome spigot, she ran the cold water at full force, and it formed a backwash as she fussed a plastic cup from its cellophane. She threw back a half dozen mouthfuls, pausing between each, the cup against her breastbone as she breathed in, breathed out. The edge of the cup thudded against her lips as she drank, like a clumsy kiss. Within the water’s mineral aftertaste she detected a hint of blood.

Only after the final swallow did she take full note of the bandage covering the inside of her left arm. Running her hand across the dressing, she wondered at its being there. The tape was rough to the touch and thick, the bandaging deep with gauze. It disturbed her—again a dull, faraway fear, but edging closer.

How much time had passed? The last thing, she was sitting at the piano in Toby’s father’s house. The image caused her heart to pound—
last thing
—her breath grew short and something coiled tight in her stomach. Other memories flashed and vanished, trailing dread, the way the water down her throat left its bloody aftertaste. Her emotions were gaining momentum, but still she couldn’t quite bring anything to bear.

She looked up into the mirror and beheld the reflection of what seemed a sickly twin. Same black hair, same deep-set eyes, but all washed out, ghostly, lost. She wondered if this odd, misremembered self now possessed the memories she could feel were missing.

She’d left the water running. Closing the faucet, she almost lost her balance, and as she steadied herself it occurred to her that if she let go with both hands, her body would drop like a stone. Her head would strike the edge of the sink with a sound like a kettledrum. She might lie there on the floor for hours. And would that be so terrible—wasn’t being left for dead precisely what was called for?

Toby and Francis had driven off; Toby’s father returned inside the house, carrying his baritone. Nadya hadn’t budged from her chosen spot—perched on the old red ottoman, hugging her knees. He closed the door gently behind him, a wistful look in his eye as he set the big brass horn down.

“You got a sweet face, know that? Your heart half as sweet as your face?”

She sat motionless, eyes wide. “I—”

“God knows that’ll change if it’s true, but for now it’s a gift and I won’t begrudge the boy that.” He smiled, staring at her as though she reminded him of someone. “Your eyes, Jesus. Kind to break an old man’s heart.”

His mood, it seemed so different from before, the storminess gone, replaced by a kind of longing, almost sorrow. “Thank you,” she said. A whisper.

“A princess.” He turned toward the kitchen. “Mr. Sensitive’s gone and found himself a little Russian princess.”

“Mr. Carlisle?”

He disappeared, and Nadya listened as he made himself fresh tea. She rose, tiptoed to the doorway, and watched from behind while he spiked the mug with brandy, just as he had before—not much, barely a shot.
Medicinal,
she imagined him telling himself. He has to know this is madness. And yet she suspected the impulse had a life all its own. He lifted the cup to his lips, shivered with the jolt, and then his entire body sagged as though with sad, fond recognition. He closed his eyes. A moment later he was chuckling.

“Fourteen-year-old nurse,” he muttered. “Pretty little white thing.”

Nadya drew back from the doorway, returned to the ottoman, and sat down again to wait.

She felt out of place in Toby’s father’s home, but that was nothing new. Most of her life, she’d felt out of place.

She’d graduated from high school at sixteen, and left home within the week. She’d not spoken to her family since and the story of that was a big fat boring book. As for college, she wanted no part of it, considered the prospect dreary, conventional, creepy. Given her grades and test scores and letters of reference, though, the choice was hers. Anytime. Anywhere.

She lived in a tiny studio apartment above the Berkeley music store where she worked, where she’d met Toby. She’d furnished it so far with one table, one chair, a futon, a space heater, and a hot plate. There was one window—she’d put up curtains and lined up potted succulents along the sunny ledge. She had five changes of clothes, hanging from the shower curtain rod above the claw-foot tub. Rather than move her clothes every time a shower was called for, she took baths. Bubble baths, if time permitted. She’d never had one before living alone.

The studio served as her hideaway with Toby the nights he could get away, and she still at times could barely endure the agony of her good fortune, having him as her lover. The great vulgar myth about shy women—there’s always a swaggering male in the picture, all hormones and sweat.
This is how it’s done
. Toby ached with a shyness almost as excruciating as her own. Almost, that was the key. Patience—that, too. A gentle suitor just slightly less clumsy than her, guiding her through the grand messy business of lips and tongues—banging their teeth like ten-year-olds sometimes, tasting each other’s saliva, feeling his breath on her face like steam from a teapot. Then his skin against hers, the contrast stunning and lovely when she lay naked in his arms. Feeling complete only in his nearness. Knowing her body had been meant for no one but him, knowing that the way she knew her name.

It was not her nature to trust happiness. Life’s gifts got stolen back, that had been her experience. But she was trying to learn otherwise, in some way knew that living itself depended on it.

Toby’s father sailed back into the living room, gripping his mug of tea. “Up off your lily pad, Froggy.” His voice struck like thunder. “Sit your skinny ass down at the piano. Got something I wanna address with you.”

He took a spot on the bass end of the piano bench and patted the spot to his right for her to sit. Nadya blinked, stunned. He cleared his throat. “Now, princess.”

She got up, sat beside him, and put her hands in her lap.

“No no no.” He placed his tea on the floor. “Get your hands up where they belong. This morning, I heard you playing something. I’d like you to try it for me again right now.”

Nadya looked at him, puzzled to the point of anguish.

“Monk,” he said. “You were playing Thelonious Monk. Put your hands on up to the keys, let me take a listen.”

Nadya flushed bright red. “Oh well, I was just—”

“Anh-anh-anh. None of that. The tune was ‘Well You Needn’t.’ The instruction is: Yes, you must. Go on.”

Nadya could not move.

“Don’t you be sitting at my mother’s piano and not do as I say. Hands up. Eyes forward. Play, girl.”

His voice was a barely contained roar. Nadya’s hands shot to the keyboard. She hesitated but, sensing his wrath, began. The melody was simple enough and one of Monk’s catchiest, with nothing but a flattened sixth to make it different from any number of Tinpan Alley standards. It was the tonal clusters in the left hand, with their minor second grinds and clustered fourths, that led her astray. Nadya knew her problem. Years of classical study had her thinking, Popular music, tonal chords. The song came off as slight. Overpretty. He stopped her.

“The reason,” he said, “a great many perfectly capable players never trouble with Monk is that if you employ too much technique, you come across as missing the point. And if you just bang at it, you come across pretty much the same.”

Her hands remained arched over the keys.

“You studied,” he remarked, nodding at the curve of her fingers. “Long time?”

“Since I was four.”

She returned her hands to her lap. He reached down and gently took her wrists, placed her hands back up on the keys.

“Competition?”

The question embarrassed her. “Tchaikovsky,” she murmured.

He laughed. “You studied for the Tchaikovsky Competition and you sit here acting like it’s a disgrace?”

“I felt like a trained monkey.”

“Well, yes, there’s that side.”

“It’s the only side.”

“You’ve got technique. You gonna sit here and tell me that’s not important?”

Her defiance softened. She felt lost.

“Play me something,” he said. “Not Monk. Not something you
want
to know. Play me something you
do
know.”

“No. I mean, thank you, this is kind, but—”

“I’m an old man. And old men do get tired of being contradicted.”

“I haven’t—it’s just that—”

His hand slammed down. “Don’t sit at my mother’s piano and tell me no. This is my home. Where’s your manners? Play, damn it.
Now.
”

Nadya could only sit there, looking up at him as though waiting to be swallowed.

He got up with a sigh of disgust. “Fine. I thought so.”

He was five steps toward the kitchen—to freshen his tea with more brandy, she guessed—when the impulse came. Whether to protect him from that next drink, draw him back, or to defy him, prove him wrong, whatever, her hands came down in a windstorm of sound.

Later that night, on the way to the club, he would tell her that had he sat and tried to imagine what it might be like for days ahead of time, he would never have conjured what he heard. Brahms,
Hungarian Dance no. 5 in F-sharp minor
. He knew the piece from Warner Brothers cartoons and comedy bits—it was one of those pieces so inherently rife with self-parody, so torturously overplayed and played badly, that few people knew what it was supposed to sound like. “But you do,” he told her. Her fingers didn’t linger on notes. The attack was bright, her arpeggios crisp, her releases and pedal work balanced. She didn’t turn it all into a drone of sappy, pseudo-gypsy mush. You could hear the wildness in the tune. The heartbreak.

The truly spooky thing, though, he told her, was when he turned around to see her bent over the keys, he’d noticed her eyes were closed. “How many thousands of times have you played that thing?” he asked.

While she’d been in the throes of it, she realized, too, how much she’d wanted to mock him.
Play what you know.
Well, Toby’s little Russian princess, what does she know? Bugs Bunny music—isn’t that what you think? That’s all I’m capable of, right? No fire, no blood, no passion. The little princess wants passion, she has to steal it from you, from your son. Just like Brahms ripped off the gypsies with these phony little dances.

But back in the moment, the fury of sound—as suddenly as she’d started, she stopped. Biting her lip, she sat there rocking a little, forward and back.

In time, he said to her, “Whatever it is that’s going on, I don’t care what it is, how bad it feels, don’t you ever, for the love of life and music, don’t you ever forget it. Do you understand?”