Square Wave (17 page)

Mariela leaned on the sofa arm farthest from Jen. Stagg raised his eyes to hers, but the throat reaming came back to him. He turned away from her too.

“Okay, I’ll be back in an hour, maybe two?” Mariela said. “Enough time I hope.”

Looking only at the peach floor, he nodded with a delicacy of significance lost on the Latina. The door was noisy, the hinges on the jamb squeaking, the metal of the loose knob rattling and clicking as Mariela twisted it and pulled the door closed twice to get it to shut.

From an inner pocket Stagg pulled a spiral pad of unlined paper, pale green. He scrawled the date on the first blank page. “You wouldn’t mind,” he said, moving toward a tall halogen tower near where Mariela had stood.

“It’s dark,” Jen said, nodding at the tower. These were the first words she’d spoken to him, now or at the crime scene. He twisted on the light and followed her gaze out the slatted blinds, still open, a second geometry overlying the gridded glass. Dusk was passing. The apartments were mostly lit.

Stagg sat down in a cavernous chair the color of cognac and faced Jen across the coffee table.

“You know the man that did this?” Stagg asked.

“No. Or only by reputation.” A pained half-smile flitted across her face.

“And this issue, the violence, it’s well known.”

“To the girls?”

“Right.”

“You couldn’t not know, really. I don’t see how you could. Well,
you
, I can’t say. But us.”

“I’d still have to start somewhere, whatever I know.”

“There’s been no chance to forget either,” she continued. “Two months go by, then this,” she said, with a look at her braced collarbones. “And the start?”

“Yes?”

“That must go back a long time.”

“The first woman you heard about like this.”

“Oh, that’s simpler. Nine months, I think. Mariela will know better. She’s been around longer.”

“And you?”

“Yes?”

“You started when? The workers involved, who might have information, the department’s not going to bother them.”

“The workers.”

“The sex workers.”

She brushed away a long dark curl of hair that fell from behind her ear across her mouth. “Not long ago, at least around here. Three months maybe. Three and a half months.”

“You started working the neighborhood where you were found.”

“I’m not a walker.”

“Okay.”

There was a tightening in the exchange. Stagg could smell his shoes lost to the deluge, the rot. He wondered if she could too.

“He took me there,” she said. “I was working out of a club. No dancing, just escorting. Most of the dancers do it. The club’s mainly a brothel. The dancing is for show.”

“It has rooms.”

“The usual private dance ones. But not that many, and not the kind a lot of johns want, real bedrooms. The girls will go with them then. The hotel we use is down a few blocks. Someone had called and scheduled with me, asked for me, from the club. The hotel knows what we use it for, so it’s safe for us, in a way, because of that. So they sent me off to meet him, in the lobby. But he was waiting for me at the intersection, outside the hotel.”

“In a car.”

“He was standing outside it with the door open. And he called me by my name, my work name. Lisa.”

The ordinariness of the name struck him hard.

“You knew it was him?”

“I thought I recognized his face. But not really. I hesitated near the car. He said we could just do things there, down the road, no need for a room. Normally you don’t do that, it exposes you, like the girls in the street. But this was arranged through the club. Anyway I couldn’t really deal with a cancellation that night. I couldn’t. And he was clean cut, a pressed suit, seemed like a businessman or a lawyer taking care of himself for the night. Handsome too. The tip was going to be good. So I got in, this sedan, a Lexus, I think.”

“And the color?”

“Green, but like it was black. It took lights to see what it was, and—I’m not sure how to put it—it had this depth to it. Then inside it was all white leather. He started the engine, I asked him what he needed. He said he was thinking about it, had to see the girl before he knew, and maybe we should drive, find the right place first. That didn’t sound so strange, from a man looking like he did. So he took me out past the tenements, the cash-check shops, all the dust and dirt, toward the freeway. The luxe hotels were just across the way, two or three exits. Maybe he only wanted something nice.

“But just as it looked like we were going to get on the freeway, he pulled up under the overpass. I looked at him, a little surprised. But not really, he hadn’t said we were going anywhere in particular.

“He said he’d figured it out, what he needed. ‘From what,’ I asked with a light little laugh. ‘You haven’t looked at me since we got in.’ He said just from breathing me in. The air, that was all it took, most of the time. ‘What, then?’ I said. He said he needed to talk to me. ‘That’s all?’ He said he wasn’t sure, that ‘the air doesn’t settle everything.’ Which was a pretty thing to say, I thought.

“Finally he turned to me. He hadn’t looked at me once yet in the car. His eyes were calm. There was even a warmth in them, on and off. He started asking me how long I’d been working, doing this, the reasons, how long I intended to carry on. You know, up until the questions, I hadn’t really been concerned, but I started to think—”

“He spoke with the other women at length too,” Stagg said, thinking aloud more than talking to her. “That’s what they’ve said.”

“But that wasn’t it, some pattern. Even if nothing at all had happened, the questions, the extent, it would have still stuck out as… unnecessary. From a john. They do want to talk sometimes, even
just
talk, that’s not that strange. But there was no charge, no tinge of sex in his voice. There wasn’t any pain in it either. He wasn’t looking for a listener, confiding in strangers—that happens too. He just seemed interested, intellectually, I guess, in my… history. And that doesn’t really happen. So I started to feel a problem coming, whether it was actually him, or just someone like him.

“You’re already all nerves if you’re sleeping with people for money. That’s what the drugs are for, the ones to sleep, the ones to get out of bed. And now, what’s happened to ten girls, your nerves, they’re just searching for a trigger.”

She coughed and put her hand to her eye. “But I was right. And it was too late.”

Stagg stirred. He looked at his pad and a bear stared back. He’d been doodling, apparently, though only now, scanning the immediate past, at the margins of memory, could he recover any experience, and even then it was faint, of laying down the lines of the animal’s face, its wide tongue, its teeth drawn tiny.

It was difficult for him to see the drawing as his. He’d been listening carefully, raptly, to her story. He was paid to listen, after all, and he wasn’t going to lose this gig. But it was more than that. Her story, her way of telling it… he liked the way she spoke. That’s how Renna would have put it. Everything was balanced just so. Whatever exactly he asked, she would look inward the way you could only look outward, at someone else’s situation. It’s how he was too. You saw more that way, even if after a while, you looked around for something to blind you. A pill, a drink. Still, before that happened, you could see the art in things that were ugly and vile. Like tragic verse. That’s what she’d been making him see now.

But as hard as he’d been listening, by the looks of it he’d also been drawing, and quite carefully too. It seemed incredible to him, but there it was: the contours of the bear’s head natural and subtle, the expression of the beast equanimous, if beasts were capable of such. The eyes, though, had not been finished. But then, being unsure of his intentions, he couldn’t say if this wasn’t the full picture. Whatever it was, the eyes were mere circles in the pale green of the paper, not the black of the pen. Perhaps that’s where the equanimity resided.

Stagg turned back to Jen. She had paused, noticing his involvement with the pad. Probably she thought something important was written there, about her case. Perhaps a relation to the other cases, or some interpretation of her words. A key. Even he expected better of himself: something about his essays, if he had to drift. Not a bear.

He flipped the sheet. “And then, the attack itself?”

“I answered his questions, told him I’d been doing this for a while, on and off, that I didn’t know how long I would keep doing it. It depended on what alternatives came up. He said he knew young women who worked as clerks, waitresses, baristas, that sort of thing, and aren’t those alternatives. I told him I had done some of those jobs, that they humiliated me in certain ways that felt worse than giving head.

“He gripped the steering wheel tightly and stared out the windshield. He said, ‘Then why don’t you do that, right now?’ I was a little surprised, given his tone up to now. But that’s why I went on the ride, right? So I leaned over his lap and undid his belt. He gently put his hand on my shoulder. I pulled his cock out and started stroking it. I was about to put it in my mouth when I felt a terrible pain in my back. He’d hit me with a blackjack.

“I knew it was him then, and my fears—some of them—grew. I knew there was going to be pain. I knew there’d be the hospital. But some of my fears shrank. I knew I’d be left alive like the others.

“Anyway, that’s how he pulped me that night, with the blackjack. I thought it was like an especially bad beating by a loan shark, except you’d never borrowed money from him in your life. I think he kicked me a few times too. I can’t remember everything after it started. I gave way at that first shot, collapsed in his lap, with my face resting on his cock. He pulled me from the car, from the driver’s side, and lashed me with the sap, all over. I remember seeing the tool, the woven leather, the springy handle.

“And the sting of each hit. It would ripple out until it met the stings of all the other hits, until eventually, these circles of pain, they overlapped, turned into one thing. And then it stopped. He left. I started to feel less. It was very cold, and I remember feeling grateful for that. Then, later, I was dragged along the ground again, but more gently, by a different man.” She looked at Stagg as she said this. “And I remember being unloaded from the ambulance at the hospital.”

“He said nothing to you, during or after.”

“I don’t think he had anything left to say.”

Stagg started to summarize these details in his notes, the bullet points Penerin would want, how all this might compare to Ravan’s cases. But the image of Jen collapsing on the man’s cock, at the strike to her back, divided his mind, and half of it turned toward the double-axe handle.

His freshman-year roommate once told him about someone he grew up with, Chris, who was, at the time, a Sigma Chi brother at Cornell. He’d met a thick black girl one January night—Lena, a student at Ithaca College, he thought—in a pickup bar in town. She wore a bob cut, with shiny, waterproof hair, the sort that had been relaxed in an attempt to mimic the hair of other races. But in this respect it failed. It looked only like distressed African hair. She wore black skintight leggings, and a black blouse meant to be flowing that was instead packed tight with flesh. Her belly appeared to begin at her sternum and it rolled in waves down her front as she moved.

Chris showed up at the bar already loose from the four pints he’d had at the frat house, around the pool table. It was Sunday night and the bar was less than half full. He sat down, asking for a double Maker’s, one cube. Lena was three stools down talking with another black woman, this one of more common proportions. There was a moderately attractive white girl next to Lena, then an empty stool, then Chris. The girl reminded him just slightly of an ex, her small breasts pressed against a fitting wool sweater. He caught the ex’s eyes—they might as well have been—and nerves seemed to stir in her. A sense of possibility came over her face; he let it be for a minute, in small talk. He made it grow when he asked if she’d like to move down a stool. She did.

The bartender came to see if she could use a drink Chris would pay for. But as she ordered, he slipped around her, bourbon in hand, to the stool she’d vacated. He thanked her for moving and watched vague hopes seep from her face. Seamlessly he chatted up Lena. A few vodka spritzers, some talk about the formative influence of
Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
on his life, and then outside, pushing past six-foot snowbanks on the narrow road. To an Ithaca dorm? No, turns out she’s not a student anywhere, just a townie. The fraternity was no place for her. So they made their way to her apartment at the base of the hill.

He watched Lena jiggle up the stairs from behind. The place was clean, it surprised him to see. But the materials were poor: linoleum, plywood, dollar-store spackling, wood-patterned plastic for the table, chairs in aluminum with vinyl cushions, and a couch upholstered in cloth only slightly smoother than burlap.

He thought of his ex as he pulled the clothes from her. The mess of rolling flesh made him smile. He pulled out his cock and pushed it between those heavy lips. Too much tooth. Can’t even suck a dick right. He reverse-fishhooked her with his thumbs, felt the grooves of her molars worn away by ten thousand Slim Jims. With his hands gripping her face, he wrenched open the jaws and pushed himself into the space he’d made. She gagged and tried to close it, but his thumbs were there. He carried on in her mouth this way until she began to froth. He rolled the woman over, told her to fold out the burlap couch. She said some words that didn’t interest him. He was more concerned with the two condom coins he’d pulled from his pocket, for double bagging. The diseases he imagined she had then were many, and the thought of each brought more blood to his groin. He finished his preparations and worked her over from behind. She rocked and rolled and the couch threatened to collapse, but he was determined to finish before the fall.

He did. But as he came, he gave her two sharp shots to the kidney, gripped his hands high above his head around the handle of an imaginary axe, and launched himself into the air with a roar. He brought his fists down on the stem of her neck, his full weight behind them. The metal struts of the couch seemed to crumple as her arms splayed out and she came down in stages under him.