Lightning People (37 page)

William wiped his hand on the cushion and dug his head into the pillow to block out the image of Quinn's body hanging in the bathroom. But when one body disappeared, another took its place. Madi Singh, dead and buried, but right now still on the hood of the car, a flash of black hair and white fingernails tangled together in wet sunlight. William glanced at the door of the bedroom, behind which Joseph and Del slept unconscious to the mosquitoes waiting on the ceiling for their turn with them. He stared into that column of darkness, waiting for it to open and for Del to walk out in her white T-shirt pointing her finger—
You did it. You were the one.
How many days could he go on waiting? Waiting for Quinn to be discovered, waiting for the connections like barrels in a combination lock to click, waiting for the traces of him to be added up until Del and Joseph pointed their fingers.
You did it. You, who slept under our roof, you with the blood of our friend on your hands, you who we took in when no one else would.

He pulled his hair until loose strands stuck to his fingers. He tasted the bile in the back of his throat.

What had he done? He had been asking himself that question all night as if he didn't know the answer. He had only tried to save himself. Wasn't that the essence of survival? Keep moving, keep fighting, buy time, and, with time, a way out. His head hurt and he desperately needed sleep, but the single fact returned, so real it made little difference what excuses he could offer: Quinn's body hanging from a shower pipe.

Earlier that night, William had already tried to turn his brain off. He had gone to his dealer at NYU, a nineteen-year-old sophomore with trademark acne and a felony-conviction's worth of speed and hallucinogens. William had met him around the corner from his dorm and bought a bag of pot for fifty bucks. The kid kindly threw in a small baggie of cocaine as a present for being such a good customer. William was thankful for the gift. His mind was raw three hours after leaving the cottage, a garbage dump picked by birds for the last sustaining meat. He needed the fuel and the fracture to see him through the next few hours. He smoked a joint and snorted a few bumps of the chalky white powder from the slug of his fingernail while he sat on a park bench in Union Square trying to figure out what options he had left. Soon, the marijuana and speed were competing motor engines, one on warp and the other on propulsion, but neither drug was succeeding in erasing him into his own shadow. Panicked, William kept turning around to find a woman walking her dog or the grating whizz of skateboarders flipping their decks on the concrete. The entire park was loud with panic, repeating his own anxiety back to him, mirroring his heartbeat in screaming teenagers and police sirens. Union Square had once been nicknamed “Death Park” for all of the shootings that occurred there, until the mayor cut down most of the trees and manicured its grass into a safe, Broadway harbor. But, for William, sitting huddled on a bench with his chest against his knees, Death Park had not succeeded in its conversion. The glare of streetlights against the metal storefront grates made the whole city look like a prison yard. How, in all of his years living in New York, had he not seen it for what it really was? He had nowhere to go, not a single place to hole himself up for the night, and he jumped from the bench in panic and began walking north. Then he remembered that Joseph lived five blocks away.

Now he stood at the window of Joseph's apartment, safe, he supposed, if being inside counted as safe. His brain was still rocketing on the drugs' cheap gasoline, mowing through his exhaustion. Outside, Twenty-Second Street hummed in silence, so calm he wished for a car crash or a mugging to call his attention away from the quiet of the apartment. The silence offered too much room to think. Joseph, on the other side of the wall, was sweating out his sickness in sleep. Tomorrow he would wake in the safety of his bed, the fever broken and that opium sense of health returning to his body with his wife beside him. He'd wake to the careless, blind comfort that only the innocent own. The thought disgusted him, and William wrenched his ears as if still battling mosquitoes.

Joseph was the last person in the city he had wanted to ask for help. But he had come to him and what he got was Madi Singh. He had come to Joseph to escape—a few hours, one night of blessed unconsciousness—and instead he found her waiting here for him. It had been so much easier when he didn't know who she was, no connections, no life before death. In William's distorted 2 AM logic, he saw very clearly one key piece to his own situation that had eluded him in the bathroom: every bad event met at a point that was Joseph. Never mind the fact that Joseph had beaten him at his own career. It had been Joseph who ripped down all the promise of his good-bye party. It had been Joseph who had refused to call him back with an offer of support, forcing William to grovel for a loan from his wife. And what had she given him? A check that was now in Madi Singh's bank file, with his own name written and signed on the back like the answer to the intractable question of blame. And now it was Joseph who brought her death back to touch him, leaving him alone in the darkness, while he slept guiltlessly in the next room. If Joseph had stopped for one second to help him, to treat him as a friend, to lift his arm out in rescue, none of it would have happened.

William thought of the loaded gun underneath Joseph's bed but knew he wouldn't use it. He just wanted to look at him for a second, to look at them both, to stand at the foot of their bed and stare down at them, to see just how blameless they were, how beautiful with
their skinny legs wrapped around each other and their eyelids as smooth as shells. He walked to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against the wood. He listened for voices on the other side. Hearing only the metronome of slow breathing, he turned the knob to enter. The door was locked.

THE FIRST PRECINCT building in Tribeca was the color of a faded dollar bill, with windows covered in beige aluminum blinds and green office air-conditioners leaking antifreeze. Unlike the glory of its Renaissance Revival facade, the precinct's chipped linoleum and faux-oak metal desks suggested not money but a lack of it. Raj stepped up to the desk and met the incurious eyes of a saturnine Latina officer crumbling a burger wrapper on top of arrest warrants.

“I'd like to speak to Detective Tasser, please.”

“You got an appointment?”

Raj shook his head and proceeded to dig through his wallet for his driver's license.

“You see, he's working a case that involves the hit-and-run of my sister. She was killed over a week ago coming out of ... ”

“Alright, alright. I don't need your life story.” She was already reaching for the phone with extensions penciled on speed dial. “Tasser, got a young man down here, says he wants words on his case. His name—” She lifted her chin over the receiver. “What did you say your name was?”

“Rajveer Singh.”

Her eyes quickly scanned him waist to forehead. “Second floor. Turn left at the staircase.”

Raj had been putting off the detective for two days since returning from Florida. A pestilence of fruit flies had taken root in his kitchen, conducting traffic by air on a small beltway of miniature cockroaches that always sprang from the cracks in August. For two days he battled bugs, and he battled calls from gallery assistants who were demanding answers on when his prints would be ready for the framer. It took twenty-four hours to reach his dealer, back with a bout of heat exhaustion from her house in the Hamptons, and she greeted the news that he didn't know if he could
do
a show anymore with a victimized sigh. “If you give me the photographs I'll do the installation myself. All
you
have to do is come to the opening. Don't do this to me, Raj. Please. The market is already awful right now. I can't go through a cancellation. Please don't make me wish I hadn't taken a chance on you.” He wanted to tell Mirabelle Petz that he didn't give a damn what she was going though, didn't care about the work or the art-world repercussions. Instead he agreed and hung up before she could thank him.

The truth was Raj needed something to occupy his attention, and it wasn't the messages from the gallery on his answering machine that left him staring for hours into the corners of his studio, disgusted at the uselessness of his own hands. It was the messages left by his father, five of them, the first recorded when he was still in midair on the flight back from Miami: “Rajveer, now remember. You must go to the police. You must insist they keep looking. That is what you owe your sister.” Madi's lawyer had sent a copy of her will, its envelope leaning in his mailbox when he pushed his luggage through the entryway. A typed note on law-firm stationery explained in three short sentences that Raj was the sole beneficiary of her estate. If he could schedule an appointment, they could start processing the paperwork on the transfer of funds and sign over the deed to her apartment.

Raj stretched his hand across the detective's desk littered with paper coffee cups. Tasser, bearded with brown saddlebags under his eyes from years of squinting at accident reports, followed the hand
to the arm and up to Raj's face. He smiled in exhaustion. The beard did little to hide the sharpness of the detective's jaw, and his coffee-stained burgundy tie was knotted so low that the top tier of collar buttons looked oddly fragile and boyish against his neck.

“We've spoken on the phone,” Raj said, taking the seat across from him. “But I wanted to come down in person to see if there were any leads in the case. I know you've been hearing from my father.”

Tasser nodded, perhaps understanding how the grief of a parent inevitably brought a younger family member before him to plead for a resolution. He dutifully dug through his files and flipped open the paperwork on the Singh hit-and-run, pretending an answer might suddenly materialize on the page if his audience willed it enough.

“Your father is like my ex-wife,” Tasser laughed. “He calls every day just to tell me how inadequate I am. Thankfully, I don't owe him child support.”

Raj coughed, thinking that was precisely what Tasser did owe him. “I'm sorry if he's troubling you.”

“No, I understand. We all want the same thing here. But I'm afraid at this point we're still in the dark.”

Raj grimaced. “So it's gone cold?”

“Cold as February. We've interviewed every person in the vicinity who might have seen anything. We even went over traffic violations in a ten-block radius, speed cameras, 911 calls, security street video, you name it. Usually if we don't catch the driver in the first twenty-four hours—and mind you half turn themselves in out of guilt—the chances . . . well, they aren't too good.”

Raj crossed his legs and controlled his impulse to reach across the desk and grab the file from the detective.

“You said you conducted interviews. Would you mind if I read the transcripts?”

“They aren't
Playboy
interviews, Mr. Singh. They aren't transcribed. You'd read a lot of yeses and nos. People either saw something or they didn't.”

“But it was the middle of the day in downtown Manhattan,” Raj replied, trying not to sound like he was accusing the entire police force of negligence. “Surely there were people around. Christ, there
was a protest march earlier that morning, and there were cops swarming all over the place. How can you be surrounded by NYPD and a mob of people and no one sees a woman struck by a car?”

Tasser leaned back, yanked his necktie lower on his belly and scrounged for a ballpoint pen to weave through his fingers.

“Do you know how many crimes go unsolved in this city in the middle of the day? It's worse than at night because no one thinks to notice. Crimes in broad daylight are the hardest to solve. We love crimes at night. Shit, we pray for them, because everyone's on the lookout.”

“What about the cell phone picture? You got that from a witness, didn't you?”

Tasser rubbed his beard and pulled out a copy of the pixilated image that had circulated in the newspapers.

“It was taken by a young woman about a half a block away. We sent it to the geek department but they couldn't get a read on the plates. It's a blue car all right, an older model, probably late '80s or early '90s, but we can't even decipher the make. You do a DMV search on blue cars, you get about half the traffic choking up the bridges. And that's just local registries.”

“It said in the paper your team could blow it up.”

Tasser snorted and shook his head. He tried to balance the pen on its clicker and watched it fall on the blotter pad.

“A lot of wishful PR. Technology isn't as advanced as you think. When you put the microscope to it, it's just a bunch of colored dots. We placed that on the news, hoping the driver would get scared and turn himself in. Sometimes you've got to frighten these guys into confessing. Truth is, the closer you get the less you see.”

Raj uncrossed his legs, uncertain what more he could ask but terrified that he would leave the precinct as empty as he came. He feared returning home to find another message from his father waiting for him, his voice filled with so much reborn belief in his only son.

“Please, there must be something. I could go through the evidence with you . . . ”

“Mr. Singh, I'm sorry to say it, but it was an accident. It was homicide, but it wasn't premeditated murder. We've got no suspects.
Without suspects we've got nowhere to turn. I know your family is hoping for answers, but when you're dealing with accidents, it's near to impossible. Unless someone else comes forward, I'm afraid it was a matter of someone reckless getting away with something bad.”

Raj wondered how many of the case files on his desk were kept as decoration for families whose couldn't accept open endings. He realized that his presence here wasn't one step toward discovery, it was a step toward the Singhs coming to terms with inexplicable loss. Tasser closed the file, placed it on top of the stack, and netted his fingers together on his desk.