Lunar Park (15 page)

After the movie I just went through the motions: soft-serve frozen yogurt in the food court, a game of laser tag in the arcade, and Sarah wanted to go to Abercrombie and Fitch, where I flipped through a catalogue, clutching my cell phone and willing it to ring and the kids tried on clothes until Robby told me he wanted to stop by Mail Boxes Etc. I remember asking him why but don’t remember his answer (this would prove to be a key mistake on my part). Sarah and I followed him to the other side of the mall. Sarah was numbering her steps and telling me that she wanted lots of neon and a curtain made of beads in her room. Outside Mail Boxes Etc., Robby ran into a group of his disaffected clique, who were exiting the same upscale post office that Robby was (coincidentally) heading into and where he was forced to introduce me.

“This is Bret,” he said.

“I’m his father,” I offered the group of boys.

“Yeah, he’s my dad,” Robby said tonelessly.

Robby’s face was suddenly flushed. He nodded even though his expression suggested that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what that exchange signified. That this was the first time he had called me Dad. When I realized he was not going to introduce the boys (there were four of them) individually, I sat down with Sarah on a nearby bench and watched them interact. A discussion ensued about the school’s banning of dodgeball and then they compared notes on Halloween. The boys glared at one another as they talked yet everything was said with a marked lack of enthusiasm, and they made vain, halfhearted threats at one another. All of them had headphones dangling around their necks and cargo pants from Banana Republic and they all wore the same orange-tinted wraparound sunglasses that Robby was wearing. When one of the boys glanced over at me as if I were contagious I finally understood that I was The Distraction—the reason this conversation was not going to last much longer. Once they realized I was observing them, the one I instinctively loathed the most gave me a look that said “Who the fuck are you?” and I overheard the term “dickweed”—though in relation to whom I wasn’t sure. The hard smooth faces barely touched by acne, the fashionable crew cuts, the hands jittery because of the meds, their uncertainty with one another—it all led to one thing for me: I did not trust any of them. And then, without warning, the group of boys broke up. Whatever interest they had in each other evaporated so rapidly that it seemed not to have existed at all. Robby trudged toward us under the glare of the mall light and it suddenly bothered me that so little of his life revolved around poetry or romance. Everything was grounded in the dull and anxious day-to-day. Everything was a performance. But what bothered me more—the thing that actually was the reason I became riveted by the boys—was that I’d heard one of them—as I turned away to guide Sarah to that nearby bench—say the name Maer Cohen. When I heard that name uttered I quickly glanced back as two of the boys made a hushing motion to the boy who’d spoken the name. Once they saw the startled expression on my face they perfected their poses. Poses they maintained despite the fact that Maer Cohen was one of them, was their age, was a boy who had lived only minutes from this mall, but now had vanished. And the thing that made me squirm with unease on that bench was the fact that not one of the five boys, including my son, had seemed frightened. None of them seemed scared. What bothered me most was how they had to dampen their enthusiasm—their glee—in front of the adult.

And then: an adrenaline rush interrupted by a question from Sarah.

“Daddy?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you help people?”

But I wasn’t answering her anymore because I realized who was in the passenger seat of Aimee Light’s BMW.

It was the boy who had come to my office wanting me to sign a book.

It was the boy who came to a Halloween party dressed as Patrick Bateman.

The same boy that Aimee Light claimed she had never seen before.

It was Clayton.

“Daddy . . . do you help people?” Sarah asked again.

11. detective

E
verything was suddenly a mirage. I drove Robby and Sarah home while replaying the first time I met Aimee Light: a girl staring at me blankly from across a campus party, the cocaine I’d snorted in the dingy bathroom giving me a burly, reckless confidence, the ensuing conversation about her thesis during which I realized I could probably control her even though she was throwing off the opposite vibe—I located it in the yawn after she told me its title (“Destination Nowhere”), and it was in the studied indifference, the (ho-hum) calculated laughter, her “boredom”: all just defense mechanisms—but I was patient, and was so adept at pretending to be interested in women I simply wanted to sleep with that I had perfected my own performance: the devil grin, the deep and persuasive nodding, the off-the-cuff comments about other girlfriends and my famous wife. Ultimately, everything was an act. We were on a stage. The cup of beer she sipped from was a prop, and the subsequent foam cresting her upper lip caused my eyes, as if rehearsed, to hone in on her mouth, and when she realized I was gazing at her she swayed toward—and complimented—a sculpture made of wire hanging in a corner of Booth House. Male undergrads were slithering around her, merely outlines in the darkness, and her face was streaked orange by the glow of a lava lamp, and an hour later I had followed her around the entire room without realizing it and she was now smiling the whole time, even when I walked away since it was late and I was a family man who had to get home and it was wrenching and I had already lost my faith. But I regained it when I looked back and saw that her face was creased with a frown. Had she known Clayton then? Had Clayton stopped by my office knowing she’d be there? Had—

“Daddy, the light’s green again,” I heard Sarah whimper, and I shot forward.

As if guided by radar I drove to Ira’s Spirits and parked in front. I told Robby to watch his sister but he had his Discman on, tuning out the world, his future flattened by my presence, and I mumbled something to Sarah and closed the door before she could say anything and rushed into the liquor store and purchased a bottle of Ketel One. Barely a minute passed before I was back in the Range Rover—the transaction occurred with that much urgency.

At Elsinore: Jayne wouldn’t be home for an hour, Marta was conferring with Rosa about dinner, Robby ambled upstairs ostensibly to study for a test, Sarah went to the media room to play Pinobee, a video game about a flight-challenged and oddly charmless bumblebee whose expression of disgust always managed to fill me with alarm. I went to my office and locked the door, and filled a large coffee mug with vodka (I didn’t need a mixer anymore, I didn’t even need ice) and drank half of it before trying Aimee Light again on her cell. Waiting for an answer I sat at the desk and went over e-mails left unchecked from yesterday. One from Jay, one from Binky informing me that Harrison Ford’s people were delighted by my interest and had inquired when I could get out to L.A., and there was an odd one from Gary Fisketjon, my editor at Knopf, who wrote that a detective saying he was from the Midland County Sheriff’s Department had called his office asking how they could get in touch with me, and Gary hoped it was all right if he gave them my number. Before the fear began creeping in again I found another e-mail that arrived last night from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. Its arrival time: 2:40 a.m.

I scrolled down the blank page until Aimee’s phone stopped ringing and her message played out. I clicked off the cell after the beep when I noticed that the light on my answering machine was blinking. I reached over and pressed Play.

“Mr. Ellis, this is Detective Donald Kimball. I’m with the Midland County Sheriff’s Department and I’d like to talk to you about something that’s, well, rather urgent . . . and so we should probably talk as soon as you can.” Pause, static. “If you want we can meet here, in Midland, though considering what I want to talk to you about I think it might be best if I dropped by your place.” He left a cell phone number. “Again, please call me as soon as you can.”

I finished the mug of vodka and poured myself another.

When I called Kimball back he didn’t want to discuss whatever “this” was over the phone, and I didn’t want to discuss it in Midland, so I gave him our address. Kimball said he could be at the house in thirty minutes, but Kimball showed up fifteen minutes after we hung up, a discrepancy which forced me to realize vaguely, uneasily, that this was probably more important than I’d first thought. I was hoping for a welcome distraction from fretting about Aimee. But what Kimball presented me with was not the respite I was hoping for. I was drunk when he arrived. I was sober by the time he left.

There was nothing much to notice about Donald Kimball—my age, vaguely handsome (
I’d do him,
I thought drunkenly, and then:
Do . . . what?
), dressed casually in jeans and a Nike sweatshirt, cropped blond hair, Wayfarer sunglasses he whipped off as soon as I opened the front door—and except for the nondescript sedan parked behind him at the curb he could have passed for any one of the handsome, affluent suburban dads who resided in the neighborhood. What singled him out was that he held a copy of
American Psycho.
It was frayed and yellowed and ominously dotted with Post-its. We shook hands and I ushered him into the house and after offering him a drink (which he declined) led him to my office while I kept glancing at the copy of the book. When I asked if he wanted it signed, Kimball paused grimly, thanked me and said that he did not.

I sat in my swivel chair and took little sips from the coffee mug. Kimball sat across from me on a sleek, modern Italian couch that should have been on the other side of the room but now had been moved beneath the movie poster for
Less Than Zero.
My office had been rearranged yet again. While Kimball began talking I drank the vodka and tried to understand why I was at a standstill about the room and the placement of the furniture within it.

“If you’d like to check in with the sheriff’s department, please feel free to do so,” Kimball was saying.

I started paying attention. “About . . . what?”

Kimball paused. “About my being here, Mr. Ellis.”

“Well, I’m assuming my publishing house made sure everything was in order, no?” I asked. “I mean, my editor didn’t seem to think anything was unusual.” I stopped. “I mean, if you are who you’re saying then I’m prone to believe you.” I stopped again. “I’m a very trusting person.” Another pause. “Unless, um, you’re a deranged fan and you’re after my wife.” Pause. “You aren’t . . . are you?”

Kimball smiled tightly. “No, no, nothing like that. We knew your wife lived in town but we weren’t sure if you were here or in New York, and your publishing house simply gave us your business number and so, well, here we are.” His expression became one of casual concern. “Do you get a lot of that—crazy fans and stalkers and all that?”

At that moment I instantly trusted him. “Nothing too unusual,” I said, searching my desk for the pack of cigarettes that was never there. “Just the typical restraining order, y’know, nothing too scary. Just the average life of the . . . um, average celebrity couple.”

Yes, this came out of my mouth. Yes, Kimball smiled awkwardly.

He breathed in and leaned forward, still holding the book, studying me. I took another sip from the coffee mug and saw him open a brown notepad he was holding along with my book.

“So, a detective is in my office with a copy of
American Psycho,
” I rambled. “I hope you liked it, since I had something very special to say with that book.” I tried to conceal a belch and failed.

“Well, I am a fan, Mr. Ellis, but that’s not exactly why I’m here.”

“So what’s up, then?” Another small sip.

He looked down at the opened notebook resting on his lap. It seemed as if he was reluctant to proceed, as if Kimball was still making up his mind about how much he should reveal in order to gain my compliance. But his demeanor suddenly changed and he cleared his throat. “What I’m about to present you with will probably be upsetting, which is why I thought we should talk privately.”

I immediately reached into my pocket and popped a Xanax.

Kimball waited politely.

After a moment of throat clearing, I eked out: “I’m ready.”

Kimball now had his game face on. “Recently—very recently—my colleagues and I became convinced that a theory about a case Midland County has been investigating for the last four months was in fact no longer a theory and—”

I flashed on something and interrupted him. “Wait, this isn’t about the missing children, is it?”

“No,” Kimball said carefully. “It’s not about the missing boys. Both cases did begin around the same time, at or near the beginning of summer, but we don’t believe they’re connected.”

I did not feel the need to tell Kimball that the beginning of summer was when I first arrived in this town. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Kimball cleared his throat. He skimmed a page in his notebook and then turned it over to inspect the next page. “A Mr. Robert Rabin was killed on June first on Commonwealth Avenue at approximately nine-thirty in the evening. He’d taken his dog out for a walk and was attacked on the street, and stabbed randomly in his upper body area and his throat was cut—”

“Jesus Christ.”

“There was no motive for the crime. It was not a robbery. Mr. Rabin had no enemies as far as we could ascertain. It was just a random killing. He was—we thought—simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused. “But there was something strange about the crime besides the viciousness of the attack and its apparent lack of motive.” Kimball paused again. “The dog he was walking was also killed.”

Another pause filled the office. “That’s . . . also terrible,” I finally said, guessing.

The length of Kimball’s next pause was painting the room with a distinct and palatable anxiety.

“It was a Shar-Pei,” he said.

I paused, taking this in. “That’s . . . even worse?” I asked meekly, and automatically took another sip of vodka.

“Well, it’s a very rare breed of dog and even rarer in this neck of the woods.”

“I . . . see.” I suddenly realized I had not hidden the vodka bottle. It was out in the open, sitting on my desk, half-empty and with its top off. Kimball glanced at it briefly before looking down at a page in his notebook. Sitting across from him I could make out a chart, lists, numbers, a graph.

“In the Vintage edition of
American Psycho,
” he said, “on pages one sixty-four through one sixty-six a man is murdered in much the same way that Robert Rabin was.”

A pause in which I was supposed to locate something and make a connection.

Kimball continued. “The man in your book was also walking a dog.”

We both breathed in, knowing what was coming next.

“It was a Shar-Pei.”

“Wait a minute,” I automatically said, wanting to stop the fear that kept increasing as Kimball neared the information he wanted to impart.

“Yes?”

I stared at him blankly.

When he realized I had nothing further to say he looked back at his notes. “A transient—named Albert Lawrence—was blinded last December, six months before the Rabin murder. The case remained unsolved but there were certain elements that kept bothering me.” Pause. “There were certain similarities that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first.”

The atmosphere in the room had flown past anxiety and was now officially entering into dread. The vodka was not going to work anymore and I tried to set the mug back on my desk without trembling. I didn’t want to hear anything else but I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

“Mr. Lawrence had been inebriated at the time of the attack. In fact he was passed out in an alley off Sutton Street in Coleman.”

Coleman. A small town about thirty miles from Midland.

“Mr. Lawrence’s account was considered somewhat unreliable due to the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, and we had very little to go on in the way of an accurate physical description of his assailant.” Kimball turned a page. “He said the man who attacked him was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase but he couldn’t recall any physical characteristics as to the man’s face, his height, weight, hair color, etcetera.” Kimball continued studying his notes before looking up at me. “There had been a couple of articles about the case in the local press but considering what was happening in Coleman at that time—the bomb scares and all the attention those were receiving—the attack on Mr. Lawrence didn’t really register, even though there were some murmurings that the attack had been racially motivated.”

“Racially motivated?” And bomb scares? In Coleman? Where had I been last December? Either drugged out or in rehab was all I could come up with.

“According to Mr. Lawrence, his assailant apparently used a racial epithet before leaving the scene.”

Kimball kept pausing, which I was now grateful for since it was helping me put myself back together after each new byte of information was handed out.

“So, this Mr. Lawrence . . . was black?”

After another pause, Kimball nodded. “He also had a dog. A small mutt that the assailant also attacked.” He glanced down at his notebook again. “The assailant broke the dog’s two front legs.”

I did not want it to, but the point of Kimball’s visit was becoming clearer to me.

“Mr. Lawrence also had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized various times, and since Midland County doesn’t have a large black community, the theory that this crime was racially motivated didn’t really play out. And the case remains unsolved.” Kimball paused. “But, again, there was something about it that kept bothering me. It seemed like I had read about this case before. And”—Kimball opened the copy of my book that sat in his lap—“on pages one thirty-one and one thirty-two in
American Psycho
—”

“A black homeless man was blinded.” I murmured this to myself.

Kimball nodded. “And he had a dog that Patrick Bateman broke the legs of.” He glanced again at his notebook and continued. “In July, a Sandy Wu, a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant in Brigham, was murdered. Like Mr. Rabin, his throat was slashed.”