No Sleep till Wonderland (14 page)

I call Ekat’s cell and leave a message. I tell her that Eddie Ryan has been arrested (but not for what) and maybe we should consider reporting Gus missing. I tell her that Owolewa interviewed me again but not why. I wish her a happy birthday even if it isn’t happy or her birthday, and then I hang up.

Expecting an instantaneous return call that doesn’t come, I sit and stare at the phone like it’s the magic mirror on the wall, waiting for it to lie through its glass teeth and tell me I’m the fairest of all, like it’s supposed to. There’s no such thing as magic.

Maybe I don’t need magic, and it’s all as simple as a high or drunk or sober Eddie trying to burn up his estranged girlfriend and her son, with the unfortunate Aleksandar Antonov, the forgotten man, as an unintended casualty. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think Detective Owolewa believes it either. The list of people who are connected to me and the fire spreads. I can’t help but feel there’s a terrible balance to it all, it’s about to be upset, and everything will fall apart. Maybe I should go to group therapy tonight.

I leave the bench, determined to walk past my brownstone. I could go upstairs and change my jacket and out of my scrubs, but the escapee-from-an-institution look is edgy and hip and surprisingly comfortable. Besides, I need to avoid my apartment now. It’s the rabbit hole, and it leads down into a deep, dark, and empty warren. I’d get lost and never be found.

I cross Dorchester Street against the advice of the traffic lights and the red don’t-walk hand. A bus driver and an idiot in a Hummer express dissatisfaction with my chicken crossing the road. I tell them I think they’re number one. Glad we got that off our chests.

It’s the ten-thousandth consecutive day of ninety-plus-degree heat, and the city is withering, drying up, turning to bonemeal. I stick with the long walk and pass on a cab ride, even if the not-so-complex movements of right-foot-left-foot and inflating my chest with air result in spectacular fireworks of pain. Ooos and ahhs, indeed. It’s a collective and collaborative pain that’s keeping me awake and upright for the moment. Me and time, we’re marching on.

I mosey up East Broadway, past more brownstones, darkened and taped-up real estate offices, a Laundromat, court house, and bowling alley. Then I take a right at the Store 24 and onto H Street. Time to canvass the neighborhood. I’m convinced that knowing more about Aleksandar is the key to what happened the night of the fire. He’s a secret that somebody is keeping.

I ring bells and knock on doors up and down H Street. I get an answer on maybe one out of four apartments. Those who do answer their doors aren’t impressed by me or my PI ID badge. I don’t know their language or the Southie handshake. My ID photo is cracked and faded, and I’m not wearing a hat. Maybe I should replace it with the picture I drew at group therapy.

The mini-interviews are microscopic. No one knew or talked to Aleksandar. Only one old man the size of Jiminy Cricket, wearing flannel pajamas and wisps of white cotton-candy hair clinging to the top of his head, wants to chat for more than ten seconds. He recognizes me from last year’s DA case. He tells me he knew the DA wasn’t a good guy. I yawn. He tells me I should be looking into the kook who got dumped onto the Zakim Bridge. I tell him he’s right, I should. He doesn’t let me leave until I give him a sweat-damped calling card from my wallet. I sign it upon his insistence. Give the people what they want.

I try a few more buildings on H Street, but I don’t get anywhere. I limp down one more set of wooden front stairs of another swing and miss, straining the rotting handrail with my weight until I crash onto the sidewalk like an asteroid. I sit on the stairs, take off my hat, and wipe the flop sweat off my face and forehead.

I scan H Street, trying to recall which places I’ve been to already, and Jody O’Malley creeps into my vision like a forgotten memory. She’s a block away, walking down East Sixth, probably coming from Rachel’s place. She wears cutoff gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Same T-shirt she had on yesterday. The exposed skin of her thick arms and legs is pale, sun-starved, Transylvanian. Hubble telescope–sized sunglasses cover most of her face, and she looks like a wingless dragonfly.

Jody stops at the corner, sways a little, feels the world turning and tumbling under her. She roots through a black handbag slung over her shoulder, then puts her arms behind her head and wrestles with her hair. She loses the match, barks out a monosyllable, and throws a black hair elastic onto the curb. She slowly crosses H, walking like she might step into an open sewer at any moment, and continues down East Sixth.

I wonder if she knows about Eddie’s arrest, if despite everything, she was his one phone call. I wait until she’s out of sight, and I get up and follow the leader. When I hit East Sixth, I peek around the corner, and she’s there. We’ve managed to maintain our one-block distance. Like me, she isn’t walking very well.

Jody lists to the right, toward the street, and almost stumbles off the curb. She manages to correct herself, but it’s an overcorrection, and she walks into a chain-link fence on her right. She’s drunk, and by the looks of it, it’s been a long, hard drunk, the kind of drunk that’s supposed to act like sleep, a dimming or dulling of the lights until you can’t feel anything.

She turns left, onto I Street. We walk, slow and deliberate, and when we pass Ekat’s apartment I can’t help but throw a glance at her front window. The blinds are down. Then it’s past Gate of Heaven and up toward East Broadway. Jody stops at the corner of I and East Broadway and ducks into a little place called the Hub, a catchall convenience store that also sells liquor, Keno, and lottery tickets.

I don’t know if I should go inside, talk to her, confront her because she told Eddie about my appearance at Rachel’s, tell her what Eddie did to me and where he is now, maybe even mention their childhood hiding-in-the-closet story. While any sort of discussion like that wouldn’t go over well in a small public venue, I’m too fucking sore and hot to stand out here with a metaphorical thumb up my ass. I enter the Hub.

Through the door, and I’m welcomed by a blast of chilled air. I exhale for what feels like the first time since leaving the hospital. I could stand beneath the manufactured cold all day and contemplate the existential implications of air-conditioning. The rapid change in temperature also brings on a flash-flood headache. Seems I can’t win, but I knew that already.

Off to my right, there’s a group of people, almost exclusively gray-hairs, all bundled up and braced for the store’s canned winter. They’re rooted in the gambling nook, filling out their Keno cards and watching the TVs that hang from the dropped ceiling. They stare at the noiseless screens, the blue backgrounds with ordered rows of white numbers. That order belies the hidden and stacked-against-us laws of statistics and chance. No one will get lucky.

I pull my hat lower over my eyes. That way no one can see me. I head deeper into the store. Toward the back, I catch a glimpse of Jody near the refrigerated section—micro wave dinners, Push Pops, and twelve-packs of beer. She still wears the sunglasses, and she fills her arms with bags of chips and bottles of vodka. I’m now of the professional opinion that chatting with her here would not be the best way to go.

She floats toward the front of the store, and I drift back and grab something cold and loaded with caffeine. I don’t think she has seen me hiding in the stacks yet, and I keep watch from the periphery. There’s no line at the register. A large older woman is sunken in behind the counter.

Jody dumps her haul next to the register and dives into the bag slung on her shoulder. Receipts and gum wrappers spill out and flutter to the floor, a pocketbook autumn. She mutters and swears, and her hands are lost in a bog.

With Jody’s items processed and brown bagged already, the woman behind the counter stands but doesn’t increase her height by more than a few inches. She adjusts her waistband and has a go at some serious eye rolling.

This might be an in for me. I could offer to pay for the stuff, win her trust, and maybe Jody would tell me more about Aleksandar, about the night of the fire. I don’t walk. I sidle toward the counter and behind Jody, but I don’t get there in time. She pulls out the Excalibur credit card from the stone of her bag and flings it onto the counter.

Opportunity lost, I creep back, the blob shrinking away from the cold. Maybe I can lose myself among the Stonehenge of Keno players to my left, and I start to lean that way.

The woman at the register runs the card through the magic bean-counting machine that no one ever questions. She glances at the card and starts to give it back to Jody in a practiced yet indifferent motion, but she stops, swapping cartoon-eyed looks between the card in her hand and Jody. The woman’s arm recoils into her chest quicker than a cord returning to a vacuum cleaner. She brings the card up to her face, lifts her glasses, and inspects it, a jeweler appraising a flawed pearl.

She announces, “I’m not taking that; I know who you are,” and aims the card at Jody like it’s loaded.

Jody shakes her head, laughs, and wipes her face. She says, “You don’t know me.” Her voice is a desperate growl, an SOS signal with fuck-you attitude.

“I’m not taking this card.”

The barometric pressure inside the store plummets, and a blizzard warning should be issued. Even the folks blinded by Keno electric-slide away from Jody and the front register. Not sure what I should do. I don’t like confrontation.

“Fine.” Jody smacks the counter with an open hand and says, “Give it back.”

The woman behind the counter clutches it to her chest, shakes her head, and asks Jody to leave before she calls the police.

“Gimme the fuckin’ card!” Jody reaches across and rips it out of the woman’s grasp, then lumbers to the entrance/exit, head down, breathing heavy. She rips the door open and leaves. The sing-song, two-note, electronic customer-left-the-building blat echoes gently through the Hub.

The woman behind the counter is shaking, talking to herself, and dialing. I step up, flash my PI badge, the kind you can get if you send the state a check and Frosted Flakes box tops.

“I’ll take care of it. No worries.” I drop a twenty and a ten on the counter and add, “Keep the change,” without being sure that I’ve covered Jody’s tab. Doesn’t matter. The woman puts the phone down and stares at me like I’m a mirage, like she won’t believe that I was really there until after I’m gone. It’s a stare I get a lot. I snatch up the brown bag and follow Jody out the door.

She’s already a half block ahead of me, and I can’t run on my lactic acid legs to catch up. I call out, yell her name three times. Bad idea. My headache goes supernova, and white stars of varying sizes and mass invade my vision, bending time and space. I stumble and lean against the brick outer wall of the Hub. Hopefully, it’s strong enough to hold me up.

I try to put myself back together, but the pieces of me are getting more difficult to find and match. I’m afraid I’m losing pieces now, too, spreading myself thinner than skim milk.

“What? What do you want? What do you want now?” She repeats herself, as if offering an answer for each of my multiple calls of her name.

I push off the wall, desperate to escape from the Hub’s gravitational pull. I get a walking start and take a peek down I Street. Jody slowly edges back toward me, hands on her hips. She wants something, maybe the brown bag and its liquid contents, or she wants to punch me in the face like Eddie did.

“It’s me, Mark Genevich. I have your stuff.” I hold out the bag, a convenience store peace offering or a sacrifice to a pissed-off god. I say, “Can I get a little help? Your boyfriend sucker punched me a few hundred times the other night, and I’m a little sore,” which is a nice segue, I think.

Jody lunges down the street like she’s going to tackle me. “That piece of shit isn’t my boyfriend.”

“Who is he, then? Besides a piece of shit.”

She shrugs, stumbles, and knocks me up against the brick wall. She says, “Just a guy I’ve known forever.” The
er
at the end of
forever
is mugged by an
ah
.

“He’s in custody right now.”

“Fuck ’im.” Jody looks away, toward the front of the store. Maybe she’s waiting to see if the woman behind the counter is going to come out and chase us off. And maybe she isn’t.

I say, “Hold this for a sec? I need to adjust.” I give her the goody bag even though she’s unsteady on her feet. I’m afraid the added weight is going to tip her over and she’ll shatter on the pavement like the vodka bottles would.

She doesn’t fall, and she says, “What’d you do, just take the bag?”

The heat crawls inside my shirt and dies. I reapply the hat to my head and retie the belt string of my scrubs, making a pretty, showy bow that hangs limp below my navel. I reach inside the bag and take out the rapidly warming energy drink and pour half of it down my throat. It tastes terrible. I say, “No. I paid for it all. I’m a responsible guy.”

Jody laughs, and it’s messy. (I don’t laugh. That means I’m serious.) She says, “Thanks for the stuff,” and starts off, slow to gain any consistent forward momentum.

I struggle to keep up. I say, “It’s a beautiful day for a walk, and I want to ask you some more questions.”

She says, “Whatever,” and dumps the bag into my arms again, then slaps me on the shoulder twice.

“Ow. I didn’t know we were playing hot potato.”

“Stop being a pussy and carry this shit back to Rachel’s. I’ll buy you a drink, all right.” I can’t see her eyes through the sunglasses. Her head moves, almost imperceptibly, from side to side, as if she’s continually scanning for an improved state of equilibrium. She’s much drunker than I thought she was.

“Do you want to tell me why the Hub wouldn’t accept your credit card?”

“Not now. Need to drink more, then maybe. Let’s just walk.”

I don’t ask her any more questions, and she doesn’t say anything else. We walk past the hulking Gate of Heaven church, and instead of taking a shortcut down East Fifth, onto H Street, and walking past her ruined apartment building, we continue down I Street whistling past the hidden-from-view graveyard.