Hide Your Eyes (13 page)

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Authors: Alison Gaylin

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Sagas

BOOK: Hide Your Eyes
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The piano lid slammed shut, and I heard his boots moving closer to the stage, heard them crunching against the dirt again, moving toward the diorama, then stopping, turning.
Best I could tell, he was by the foot of the coffin now, and I heard him moving,
crunch, crunch, crunch
. Closer to my face, then turning,
crunch, crunch crunch
.
kign tu
No . . .
Crunch, crunch
. . .
He was circling me.
‘I know where you are, Samantha. Do you think I’m stupid?’
I shut my eyes tight, bit my lip, jammed my fingernails into the palms of my hands until I could feel the moist sting of my own blood.
‘You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?’ Peter said. He was standing right next to my neck, and his voice was impossibly calm.
He opened the lid, and stared at me, his eyes reflecting the pale flesh of my forehead.
I swallowed hard, didn’t move.
‘Get out of the coffin.’
Slowly, I got out. My legs felt wobbly, as if I might collapse, but I managed to stand up straight. I kept my eyes on his face. I refused to look at the gun. I knew he wanted me to look at it, but I wouldn’t. That was within my control. ‘What do you want from me?’
He smiled broadly, mirrored eyes drilling into my skin. ‘What do I want from you,’ he said. ‘What do
I
want from
you
?’ He started to laugh. ‘You called the police on me. Why would you do a thing like that, Samantha? What did I ever do to you?’
I stared at him. ‘It’s not . . . it’s not what you did to
me
. It’s what you
did
. It’s what you
are
.’ I shut my eyes and waited for the gunshot. But none came.
Slowly, I opened my eyes and let them drift to his right hand. He was still grasping it, but it wasn’t a gun. It was a collapsible umbrella.
I could go for the door. I could push him over again and run back up the aisle. I started to move, but he grabbed my wrist. His grip was strong. ‘How did you find out?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Oh, it’s definitely my business.’ His gloved fingers tightened around my wrist. ‘It’s been my business ever since I saw you go into the Sixth Precinct, and ever since I got a call from that detective. It’s been my business ever since . . . we . . . met.’
‘It was in the paper,’ I said. ‘Don’t you ever read the
Post
?’
His hand loosened slightly. ‘You’re crazy.’
‘I’m crazy?
I’m crazy?
’
‘Like I really believe it was in the
New York Post
that I’m Canadian.’
I stared at him for what must have been a full minute before I found kefoighmy voice again. ‘What?’
‘Let me tell you what I think this is about. You’ve got a thing for Yale, and you’re jealous as hell that he and I got together. You act rude to me, but that doesn’t work, so you do some digging. Maybe talk to some of my friends, I don’t know. And then you run to the police and you tell them I’m an illegal alien so they can deport me, and Yale and I will never see each other again, and won’t you be hap—’
‘You’re an illegal alien?’
‘I mean, so
what
? I forgot to renew my work visa once. I’m going to take care of it.’
He let go of my wrist. I started to back up, but my ankle turned, and I fell to the dirty stage floor.
‘You okay?’
Did he really just ask me that?
I stood up, brushed myself off. Looking at Peter, I suddenly lost my urge to leave. Instead, I was overcome by a starving curiosity, a desperate need to call his bluff and prove I’d been right about him all along. ‘Where did you get that tattoo on the back of your neck?’
‘This place on St. Marks. Why?’
‘It’s a pentagram.’
‘So?’
‘That’s the sign of the devil.’
‘No, it’s not.’
My cheeks were starting to burn. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘It’s Wiccan,’ he said. ‘I was into Wicca for about five minutes three years ago.’
Peter’s face was pink, his eyes wide and perplexed behind the mirrored lenses. ‘Wicca is an earth-based, goddess religion. It has nothing to do with the devil.’
I clenched my teeth. ‘Tredwell put that pentagram there and you know it.’
‘Tredwell? From Ruby’s?’
‘What the hell other Tredwells are there?’
A metallic ringing pulsed out from beyond the lip of the stage, and we both turned to it. ‘That’s my cell phone,’ I said. Peter followed the sound and answered it. ‘It’s detective somebody.’ Eyes narrowed, he handed it to me.
Krull
.
It wasn’t Krull. It was Art Boyle. ‘Hi, Miss Leiffer. Johnny asked me to call you. Wanted me to tell you we got a match on the fingerprints from Yale St. Germaine’s apartment.’
‘That was fast.’
‘Yeah. We had ’em on file because the guy had a previous conviction for shoplifting some . . . uh . . . paraphernalia . . . from the House of Pain down on Christopher Street.’
I stared at Peter, my jaw tightening. ‘What was the name?’
‘Tredwell Hague,’ he said. ‘You know him?’
 
After I hung up with Boyle, Peter and I sat cross-legged on the edge of the stage. Odd to be sitting there with him, unafraid, but everything about these past few days had been odd.
It didn’t take us long to put it all together. Ever since Peter had taken the job at Ruby’s, Tredwell had been trying to ask him out. Peter had repeatedly turned him down. ‘He’s too young, I’m not into purple hair and have you noticed he’s kind of stupid?’ Peter said. ‘Besides, he kept trying to get me to go to these dungeon places, and I don’t do S and M.’
When he saw Yale and learned about his relationship with Peter, Tredwell had, quite literally, seen red. He’d followed me out of Ruby’s, pulled me into Cheap Trix and fed me every horror story imaginable to get me to warn off my best friend. I remembered how long he’d taken in the bathroom there. Obviously straining his brain to come up with a frightening enough plot.
Before he’d received the call from Boyle, Peter had told several people - Tredwell included - about his date with Yale at Temple Bar. That was all Tredwell could take. Since I’d clearly failed to turn my friend against the love of his life, the spurned waiter had decided to take matters into his own hands.
Yale’s address was listed. Obviously he was the only Yale St. Germaine in the phone book.
When Tredwell thought Yale was out with Peter (‘I was actually at my cousin’s place, hiding from the police’), he’d gone to the apartment and taken out twelve months’ worth of sexual frustration on Yale’s belongings. The fact that he’d left not only his fingerprints but also his bow tie behind was, for Tredwell, typical.
‘Total nut job,’ Peter said. ‘I can’t even believe he told you we were dating.’
‘First you were convincing him to do drugs. When that didn’t impress me, he said you’d coerced him into S and M—’
‘Yeah, right. What a prick.’
‘And then you’d forced him to worship the devil.’
‘You believed all that?’
I had to admit it. Out loud, it sounded ridiculous. But I’d never questioned Tredwell, never thought for a second he might be lying. ‘I wanted to believe it,’ I thought and said at the same time. ‘Because . . . if it were true, it would’ve answered a lot of questions for me. I saw something . . . a crime. And if you were the one who did it, you’d be in jail by now. Everyone would be safe.’
Peter had picked up a small handful of dirt from the stage and was slowly letting it sift through his fingers. ‘Sounds like you’ve been through a lot,’ he said, without a hint of sarcasm in his voice. I was actually starting to like this guy.
‘It’s those mirrored lenses, you know,’ I said. ‘The criminal has the same ones as you, and that’s what got me going in the first place.’
Peter removed a small plastic case from his jeans pocket and plucked the contacts out of his eyes. ‘I just thought you were trying to piss me off when you said they weren’t one of a kind, but it turns out you were right,’ he said as he did it. ‘This actress came into Ruby’s last night and she had them. Thought she was the cat’s ass because she had an audition for some dumb soap opera . . .’
I shook my head at how small New York could be.
‘I figured, a wannabe soap star who eats at Ruby’s is not exactly on the fashion forefront. I was wearing these only to avoid the cops.’ Peter snapped the box shut and looked at me. His eyes were a dark, denimy blue and as stunning as the rest of him.
‘Peter,’ I said, ‘the Sixth Precinct detective squad is not going to arrest you for being an illegal immigrant.’
‘They’re not?’
‘No. INS would be the ones to worry about, and nobody knows, anyway.’
‘Man, is that a relief . . . Now all I have to do is apologize to Yale for standing him up and kill Tredwell - not literally. What was this crime you witnessed anyway?’
I started to reply, but stopped when I heard a loud noise outside the theater door. It took only a few seconds to identify it as the sharp, leathery sound of a whip cracking. Peter and I stared at each other as the door slowly creaked open.
When it slammed shut, there was Hermyn at the back of the theater, chest thrown out to accommodate that acrobatic voice, fists pressed to her hips like a superhero.
‘Oh, it’s you, Samantha,’ she said. ‘I thought we were being robbed.’
 
I had to admit, ever since Hermyn had announced her engagement, I’d been dying to know what her fiancé, Sal, looked like. ‘Think Sid Vicious with a water pick,’ Shell had speculated during her rant at the will-call window. And that image had stuck - I’d envisioned a pale, greasy-haired dentist built like a stick of gum, maybe with a few track marks. So when I finally saw him in the flesh that night outside the theater, sitting in the front seat of his Chevy Cavalier, I couldn’t help but stare. He was emphatically
unedgy
- a sweet-faced man, not much bigger than me, with a neat, curly cap of brown hair and square, plastic-framed glasses. ‘So you’re Sal,’ I said as Hermyn opened the back door for me and Peter and eased into the front seat beside her intended.
‘Hello, there,’ he said without turning around. His head barely cleared the rest atop the driver’s seat. ‘W kver>
‘Don’t call me that in front of other people, Sal.’
‘What with proposing and all, I completely forgot to give it to her—’
‘You didn’t have to give me anything.’
‘So I left it in Bu—Hermyn’s cubbyhole last night because I wanted to surprise her at work today. Then she tells me you guys have the whole week off—’
‘Did you see anybody else at the box office last night?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Sal. ‘Was I supposed to?’
Hermyn pulled the red envelope out of her jacket pocket, and started to open it.
I figured I should probably go back for the doll’s head, take it with me to show the police, but I couldn’t stand to even think of it, let alone touch it. I’d tell the police about it later, send them to the box office without me, so they could seal the eyeless head in a clean, plastic evidence bag and take it far away.
Did that doll belong to Ariel? Did the blood on the ad?
‘We heard quite a racket there in the theater,’ Sal said. His voice was deep, especially for his size, and reminded me of a warm, heavy blanket. I imagined his patients had little need for anesthesia. ‘I guess everything carries in there. Makes for good acoustics. Hermyn does a great whip, doesn’t she? Most talented woman I’ve ever met.’
‘Sweetheart, you’re embarrassing me.’
‘I speak the truth, my love. Open your present.’
‘Tell me a joke first.’
‘Okay. What did one math book say to the other?’
‘I give up.’
‘I have a lot of problems.’
Hermyn cackled. ‘You are so funny.’
‘I hear most of them from my patient, Emmett. He’s in the second grade.’
‘It’s all in the delivery, Sal. Isn’t his delivery wonderful, Samantha?’
‘Excellent.’
‘Ohhhh, you darling man,’ Hermyn said as she gazed at the contents of the envelope.
‘Well, show us, why don’t you?’ said Peter.
Hermyn kissed Sal deeply before passing a necklace into Peter’s hands. He held it out so we could both look at it - a thin, sparklin kthisseg chain with a delicate butterfly pendant - barely bigger than the gold applique on Hermyn’s front tooth. A small diamond stood at the tip of each antenna and emerald dust had been sprinkled on its wings.
I found myself marveling at how Sal had walked into a store, noticed this sweet, fragile thing, and had immediately thought of Hermyn. No wonder she loved him. He was probably the only person in the world who looked at her boxy frame, her stern features, her spiky hair - and saw a butterfly.

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