Hide Your Eyes (7 page)

Read Hide Your Eyes Online

Authors: Alison Gaylin

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

BOOK: Hide Your Eyes
8.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘I really hate those lenses.’
‘Sam!’ said Yale. ‘You have to forgive her, Peter. She saw someone else with contacts like that and . . .’
‘Shut up, Yale.’
‘You couldn’t,’ Peter said. ‘They’re one of a kind.’
‘Then maybe it was you I saw.’
‘Maybe it was,’ he said through pearlescent teeth. ‘Maybe that’s why you look so . . . fa-mil-iar.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Sam, why don’t you sit down?’ Yale said. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
I obliged, more out of hunger than anything else, and shoved a piece of toast in my mouth.
Peter said, ‘I saw you throw salt over your shoulder before. I know a lot about old superstitions. You know what you were doing when you did that?’
I dug into the lukewarm omelet. ‘Not really.’
‘You were trying to blind the devil!’ He started to laugh.
‘What’s so funny about that?’
‘Come on. A grown, educated woman in New York City throwing sa Cty
Yale chuckled. ‘That
is
funny. Well, let me tell you, Sam is
soooo
superstitious. My God, it’s practically a psychosis. I mean, if you’re in a hurry to get somewhere, and the closest distance between two points happens to be under a ladder, then you can just forget about it. She will literally go
blocks
out of her way to avoid stepping under that ladder. I’ve seen it happen. She’s
crazy
.’
Peter stopped laughing.
I stared at Yale.
‘I don’t mean crazy. I mean . . . fun.’
I shoved more omelet in my mouth. At least my headache was starting to go away. ‘So,’ I finally said to Peter. ‘You do anything else besides wait tables and pick up complete strangers at after-hours bars?’
Peter turned his body toward me, and I felt my heart speed up. I avoided his eyes, watched his mouth. ‘I breathe,’ the mouth said. ‘I eat. I smoke. I fuck.’ Abruptly, he leaned in so close I could feel his warm, odorless breath on my skin. ‘I bet
you
don’t . . . smoke. I bet you haven’t
smoked
for
years.
’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. How can you keep your vegetables down, Yale?’
His face flushed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing. I just thought you might be feeling as nauseous as I do.’ I pulled a handful of bills out of my ugly bag and tossed them onto the counter.
Peter turned back to Yale. ‘You’ve got great friends.’
‘Whatever, good-bye.’ As I reached for my bag, I noticed a tattoo on the back of Peter’s neck. It was a dark red pentagram, just about the size of a quarter. The small shape was thickly drawn and amateurish - almost as if it had been put there with a branding iron - and it made me feel as if someone were squeezing all the air out of the room. ‘You better come too, Yale. We’re going to be late for work,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘I’ll meet you outside.’
‘Wait a minute, Sam!’ Yale said, but I kept walking until I reached the front door and stepped outside and onto the freezing gray sidewalk.
When Yale left the restaurant a few minutes later, he already had a lit cigarette in his hand. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ he said, exhaling blue-tinged smoke.
‘What’s wrong with
me
? What’s wrong with
you
? Is your brain that firmly embedded in your pants? He’s an asshole, Yale. A hostile, misogynous asshole. I can’t believe you wanted me to meet him.’
‘Number one, he is not a misogynist - he just has a slightly off sense of humor, which you might have even appreciated if you weren’t so hell-bent on hating him. Number two, you were the hostile one in there. I mean, Je Cre. hasus.
You do anything else besides wait tables and pick up complete strangers?
What kind of a question is that?’
‘Yale . . . I think he might be the same man I saw at the river.’
‘Oh, spare me. Did you feel Dead Man’s Fingers again?’
I glared at him.
‘You get chills up your spine, you see a couple dumping trash, and your mind just spins out of control. Think about it. Just do me a favor and think logically—’
‘Did you see the way he glared at me when he told me I look familiar?’
Yale blinked. ‘You know what you need? You need a good night’s sleep, you need a few healthy meals—’
‘Peter himself said the contacts were one of a kind.’
‘He bought them this morning.’
‘What?’
‘After you left, I asked.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘You think little Tredwell would’ve been that shocked if he’d worn them during his weekend shifts? Peter’s contact lens salesman lied to him, the couple was not disposing of body parts, and you are not psychic. Now, if you don’t mind, I am going to walk to work by myself and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.’
Yale buttoned up his cashmere coat. It was deliciously soft and chocolate brown and to wrap it around your shoulders was to feel unconditionally loved. His parents had given it to him for Christmas. I’d been at his apartment when he’d opened the UPS box. ‘And you don’t have to worry about Peter, because you scared him off. He says
no one’s
worth the company I keep.’
I stood there for several seconds, watching Yale’s brown cashmere back disappear up Sixth Avenue. I hadn’t mentioned the tattoo; not that it would’ve made any difference.
My throat felt raw and knotted, and pressure was building up behind my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t start crying on the corner of Sixth and West Fourth in broad daylight with thick groups of pedestrians rushing past me toward the subway, but I wanted to.
I looked at my watch. It was two minutes past ten already, with at least ten more minutes to get to the theater, even if I ran. There was a pay phone on the corner, so I fished around in my bag for a quarter and called work.
‘Thank you so much for calling the Space.’
At first, I didn’t recognize the voice, but then it hit me. ‘Hi, Hermyn. Roland’s got you answering phones now, huh?’
‘Oh, C sing hi, Samantha. I thought you were my mother.’
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. ‘Can you tell Roland that Yale and I are running late? We both had to run a few errands.’
‘Okay. He was wondering where you guys were, so he’ll be glad you called . . .’ Hermyn’s voice tilted up at the end of the sentence, like she wanted to talk. I was freezing, and although I felt sorry for her, sitting on her hard little chair near the door with Shell Clarion staring bullets through her back, I was in no mood to discuss her wedding plans. ‘Bye,’ I said, and hung up before she could respond.
 
Two minutes later, I was navigating my way through a slow-walking family of eight on West Tenth. ‘Excuse you!’ shouted the grandmother when I brushed by her mink. I stopped and examined her. Like the rest of her family, she had pink cheeks, a huge head a and a thick, sturdy body. They were, I decided, on vacation from a safe, friendly state, embraced by land on all sides. ‘Fuck you,’ I said, because I didn’t feel like saying ‘sorry’ to some landlocked old mink-wearing bitch right now.
I increased my pace, focused on the clear, flat stretch of sidewalk ahead of me. Maybe Yale was right. Maybe I was a paranoid, relationship-ruining nightmare.
My bag tugged at my shoulder, and I realized it was because the
Post
was still in there. I pulled it out and looked at Nate, eyeing the camera in all his shirtless, gleaming celebrity, framed by Veronica’s studiously drawn outline. Much as I hated the photo and the headline and the article, Veronica’s outline irritated me most of all. She had actually used a ruler.
Without thinking, I ripped the page in half. It felt better than I’d expected. I tore it into quarters, then eighths, then random little bits. The tension in my chest began to lift; I almost wanted to laugh. There was a trash can nearby, so I decimated the entire tabloid and tossed it up and in, like confetti. It felt so good I considered buying another
Post
, just so I could do it again. Then I felt two hands on my shoulders and my heart jumped into my mouth.
‘What the—’ I spun around. It took me a few seconds to recognize the pinkish face, the burgundy hair. ‘
Tredwell?
’
‘Sorry, dude,’ the young waiter said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘Did I forget something?’ I grasped my bag.
‘No . . . You walk fast.’ He smiled broadly and panted. ‘Ummmm . . . Where’d your friend go?’
‘Yale? He’s . . . smoking. Did he not pay his share of the bill?’
‘No, no, no, no . . . It’s not that. I . . . I wanted to talk to you.’ Tredwell finally caught his breath and smiled again. ‘Whew!’ He jammed his hands into the pockets of his red butcher’s apron. He wasn’t wearing a coat. ‘Whoosh! Cold! Hooo boy!’
The conversation was starting to annoy me, and I was about to tell this AWOL waiter Cs Ah="as much, but when I looked into his eyes, I detected an emotion that didn’t match the grin, the slouch, the ridiculous exclamations. It was fear, and it shut me right up.
When his fake smile dropped away, Tredwell looked about ten years older and suddenly intelligent. ‘I need to talk to you about Peter,’ he said.
¢>
6
Verbal Judo
Tredwell was on the verge of hypothermia, so we ducked into the nearest bar - a windowless crater called Cheap Trix that had no business being open during the day. Since it was empty, the bartender noticed us immediately. ‘Nice apron,’ he shouted over needlessly loud techno music as he eyed the shivering Tredwell. ‘You know you can’t just come in here for the heater. You have to order something.’ I thought,
What the hell? I need it
, and asked for a draft beer while Tredwell ran to the bathroom, explaining, ‘I’ll be right back. I just g-g-gotta put hot water on my hands.’
By the time Tredwell returned, I’d finished around three quarters of the beer and was considering ordering another. ‘What took you so long?’ I said, but when he launched into a speech about thinking the door was locked, even though it wasn’t, it was just sticky, you know how old doors get sticky sometimes and you think they’re locked even though they’re not, I’d already heard too much. ‘Tell me about Peter.’
Tredwell took a swallow of my beer before replying, ‘Peter Steele is evil.’
I held my breath and waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just looked at me until frustration seeped out of my skin.
‘Are you going to maybe elaborate on that? Because you can’t just say somebody’s evil. It’s not like saying he’s got brown hair or that he’s a Methodist or something. You say somebody’s evil, you have to give examples.’
‘All right . . . Ummm. He gives off bad energy? I know you felt it; otherwise you wouldn’t have run to the bathroom like you did. And, shit, man, those contacts. You can’t tell me you didn’t notice those freaky, freaky contacts. Whoa. I can’t believe he
bought
those . . .’
‘I noticed the contacts, Tredwell. And I felt the
energy
.’ I polished off the beer and leveled my eyes at him. ‘What I’m trying to figure out right now is why you chased me three blocks in the freezing cold with no coat on, just to tell me stuff I already know.’
‘To tell you stuff you already know,’ he repeated - or replied, I wasn’t sure. My headache was back again, and I felt a dull pain at the core of my stomach. If there were two things I didn’t need, they were a beer on top of a cheese omelet and the company of this kid.
‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’
I started to put my coat back on, but he grabbed my arm. Tredwell’s grip was surprisingly strong. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘It’s just a little difficult to express.’
‘I’ll give you thirty seconds.’
‘I’m not totally gay.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘But I used to . . . I used to
be
with Peter. And . . . and he made me . . . do things I didn’t want to do.’ Tredwell eased me back onto the barstool.
‘What kind of things?’
‘Name it,’ he said. ‘Drugs I’d never done before. K. Crystal meth. Lots and lots of amyl.’ He watched my face warily, like he expected it to detonate.
‘I’m pretty sure Yale is beyond drug peer pressure.’
‘The amyl was for the sex. Because it kills the pain—’
‘All right, now you’re giving me too much information.’
‘No, wait. This is important . . . Peter got me to . . . experience real pain.’ He glanced at the bartender, then leaned in close. ‘Peter hurt me,’ he whispered. ‘I let him.’
Tredwell stared at me so intently that I had to look away. ‘I didn’t want to, but I did. It was like I . . . couldn’t move.’
There was a sudden, strange intimacy between us - between me and this twenty-year-old, one-named guy who had spilled coffee on me less than half an hour earlier - and it made me feel raw and embarrassed. ‘He hurt you,’ I said, more to myself than to him.
Tredwell rubbed his eyelids with his palms. ‘He’d look at you, look inside you more like . . . and you’d be forced into doing whatever he said. Bondage. S and M. . .’
I put a hand on his arm, frail as a bird’s wing under the long white sleeve.
‘I have scars.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said, like you would to a frightened child. ‘It’s okay, honey.’
Tredwell drew a shallow, trembling breath and placed his hand over mine. His palm was cold and sweaty.
‘What, honey? You can tell me.’
Suddenly, he squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. When he looked up at me, I noticed his eyes were wet. ‘Peter convinced me to worship Satan.’
 
I couldn’t believe I was going to actually say the words
Satan worship
to anyone, much less a cop, but I was.
What I’d seen at the river had been Peter and a woman involved in a Satanic rite. I was now sure of it. I remembered the scraping sound I’d heard, the ice chest’s heaviness. It had been small, but la K smritrge enough to hold a severed body part, or a collection of them. I remembered the woman’s exposed arms, shaking uncontrollably. Shaking like Tredwell’s hand.
Back at Cheap Trix, I’d stared at Tredwell, who, like the woman, wore clothes that surrendered his body to the cold. I’d looked at his red apron and recalled the woman’s red dress. I’d listened to him tell me about Black Masses and inverted crosses and red robes and red candles ‘signifying virgin blood’ and thought of all that red light in Ruby’s, how comfortable Peter had seemed there. I’d remembered the bloodred pentagram branded into Peter’s neck, and how he’d laughed at me for trying to blind the devil, and the question had floated out of my mouth so effortlessly, like a ghost:
Did you and Peter ever sacrifice anything?
And Tredwell had said nothing, just looked away.
‘Sorry to freak you out. I just wanted to warn your friend,’ he told me after we left the bar. ‘I was Peter’s slave, and I’m not anymore, so he’s looking for a new one.’
I envisioned the woman again, trembling in her uncomfortable dress. ‘What makes you think he doesn’t already have one?’
‘Huh?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’
Tredwell smiled. ‘I think you will.’ He gave me a kiss on the cheek, which didn’t feel strange at all. And I watched him run back to work in the freezing cold, weaving around clusters of pedestrians with the grace of a new angel.
 
The bartender at Cheap Trix had given me directions to the Sixth Precinct, and it was surprisingly close. Half a block past Ruby Redd’s Brewing Company, in the other direction.
When I passed the restaurant on my way to the precinct house, I pulled my hood over my head, a poor attempt to disguise myself lest Peter catch sight of me through the large window - particularly poor, since I’d been wearing the hood at the river.
A woman in a long camel coat was leaving Ruby’s as I went by, and when she asked me if I had a light, I did my best to pretend I was invisible, even though there was no one else she could have been addressing. ‘Hey, Patchwork Bag!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’m talking to you!’
Thanks a lot, sister
. I stopped and glared at her. Her hair was so smooth and gold that it looked as if it had been cast, rather than styled. She wore huge Jackie Onassis-style glasses and perfect red lipstick and looked familiar in a famous way. Local anchorwoman or soap opera actress, I decided. I wondered if she knew Nate. ‘I don’t have a light.’
‘Sorry. I just don’t like it when people ignore me.’
When I turned around, I could still feel her eyes on my back.
Across the street, four doors down, I saw a building too ugly to be anything but a precinct house. As I approached it, I saw Kchecro that indeed it was - a squat, beige seventies-style fortress wedged between walk-ups with a huge blue-and-white police shield painted on the front. There was an unfurled scroll emblazoned with the words
Greenwich Village
at the top of the shield, an outline of the Washington Square Park Arch at the center and the words
6th Precinct
in smaller, more modest letters at the bottom. It struck me as sweet and collegiate - not cop-like at all, which soothed my nerves a little.
I crossed the street and pushed open the heavy glass door. The interior was quite a match for the facade, with its draining fluorescent lights and walls the color of old teeth. I tried to ignore the queasiness that came over me when I saw two huge cops drag a skinny boy across the bustling front room. The boy’s cheeks were striped with runny mascara. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he kept saying. The cops pushed him into what must have been the booking room as four other uniforms rushed past them and out the front door, oblivious. I noticed the guns in their holsters and it hit me that the boy and I were possibly the only two people in the building who weren’t packing.
Think of the shield outside. Think of that adorable shield with the Washington Square Park Arch painted on it and walk up to that front desk this minute
.
The desk was manned by a tall cop with cornrowed hair who looked like African royalty, even in her uniform, and strong enough to beat the crap out of me without breaking a sweat.
‘Hi.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m here to see Detective Krull?’
‘Your name?’
‘I’m Samantha Leiffer.’ Even as I said it, I doubted he would remember. ‘I’m a prekindergarten teacher? He met me on Friday, when he came to speak at my school, which is called Sunny Side . . .’
‘Samantha Leiffer to see you,’ she said into her phone.
‘Prekindergarten teacher,’ I said, but the desk sergeant had already hung up.
‘He’ll be right down.’
‘He
will
?’
I thought about sitting down on one of the plastic chairs near the front desk but as it turned out, I didn’t have time. A door across from us opened and there he stood, like a game show prize.
Detective John Krull wore a brown, synthetic suit that he’d probably owned since high school graduation, without benefit of a tailor. The jacket winced against his powerful shoulders and the sleeves ended about two inches too soon, displaying the cuffs of yet another tired white shirt, adorned by yet another cheap, patternless tie - this time mud colored. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Nice surprise.’
‘You remember me.’
‘Isn’t every day I look at someone and make them scream.’
The desk Ke="ke sergeant raised her eyebrows.
‘Listen, I need to talk to you about something I . . . uh . . . witnessed.’
‘You’re reporting a crime?’
‘Um . . . sort of . . .’
His smile faded. ‘Come on upstairs to the squad room.’
I followed him back through the door, up a staircase that reeked from decades of cigarette smoke and down a hallway that housed several offices - one of which bore a red, B52-shaped sign that said
Bomb Squad
, in Prussian-style letters. Like the police shield out front, I found the sign out of place and charming. Very Greenwich Village, not at all Sixth Precinct. ‘Cute sign,’ I said. Krull didn’t hear me, and I was glad. What a ridiculous thing to do, complimenting a bomb squad sign.
The detective squad room was beyond compliments - one hundred percent government issue - and it resuscitated my anxiety. Torturous bright lights and narrow windows, fascistically lined-up Formica desks and about a dozen badly dressed men of varying ages - all of them, no doubt, packing. Despite the huge coat, most of the detectives stopped their conversations and gawked at me like I was nude. I felt dizzy from testosterone, like I’d inadvertently walked into a high school football team’s locker room or a men’s prison. They must not see many females with a pulse in here, I thought.
Krull guided me to one of the few detectives who wasn’t gawking - a heavy guy in his fifties with a face like a rare steak. ‘Nope,’ he said into his phone. ‘You heard me . . . No . . . What part of the word
no
don’t you . . . Oh, really? He said that? Well, he can go fuck himself with
the proverbial ham sandwich
, but that’s off the record. Peas.’ He hung up without saying good-bye, then turned his attention to us.
Peas?
Krull said, ‘I’d like you to meet one of my partners, Art Boyle. Art, this is Samantha Leiffer.’
‘Johnny’s told me a lot about you.’
‘He’s lying,’ Krull said. ‘He has no absolutely no idea who you are.’
Boyle chuckled and shook my hand. His grip was tourniquet strength.
‘
One
of your partners? I thought you guys worked in teams.’
‘We work three to a unit in this precinct,’ Boyle said. ‘Our other partner is in the hospital.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about. She’s having a baby.’
‘Oh, well, that’s great.’
‘Definitely. Amanda is damn lucky. Baby born on the Aquarius/Pisces cusp like that, Mercury fresh out of retrograde. Could be president of the United States, that k KStaornid, especially if he winds up with earth rising.’
‘Art’s wife is into astrology.’ Krull winked at me. ‘It’s rubbed off a little, hasn’t it, Art?’
Boyle stared into his coffee cup. ‘You’d be surprised at how accurate some of it is . . .’
As Krull led me into one of the adjacent interrogation rooms (which he referred to as an ‘interview room’), I whispered, ‘Why would Art say peas to someone?’

Other books

Eye Contact by Fergus McNeill
Empty Promises by Ann Rule
Lords of the White Castle by Elizabeth Chadwick
A Memory Worth Dying For by Bruce, Joanie
Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk by James Lovegrove
The Name of This Book Is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
Born to Be Wylde by Jan Irving
The Pact by Jennifer Sturman