The Next (15 page)

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

My jaw stiffened in irritation. Why unearth my failure? My humiliation? What pleasure would this mofo get out of pointing out how inadequate a person I am? Marzoli eyed me as I flailed like a deer on the side of the road whose hind was legs were just hit and shattered by a speeding Lamborghini. His mere presence had me incapacitated, and I was barely mobile to begin with.

Stop eyeing me! What do you want from me?

I wanted to retaliate, but I had no immediate means to. My face was reddening from anger.

“His laptop had no screen saver,” he stated.

Huh?

He waited deliberately again, once more leaving me feeling like a walrus in a chess tournament. I’m a dunce. Thanks. He crossed his arms and averted his eyes patiently. He had a slight smirk.

Was he enjoying this?

The motherfucker knew he was confusing me. He was deliberately teasing me, engaging in another form of flirting. I didn’t understand. Why the hell would Marzoli feel the need to do anything more than exchange information? Just for his entertainment?

He continued at last, “His MacBook was on the piano with the score to Barber’s
Violin Concerto
. He’d turned off the screen saver so he could practice from his laptop without interrupting the score. I think your instincts were correct. He never returned to his apartment, but he’d intended to.”

“He was murdered.”

“All we know is he left and did not come back.”

“My instincts say he was
murdered
,” I insisted.

“Why?”

I looked him squarely the eyes and stated with retaliatory conclusiveness, “The wire cutters.”

I said no more and waited. He was confused. I relished it.

His brain began tick tick ticking as it tried to understand this apparent non sequitur, and when it finally dawned on the fucker that he was receiving a taste of his own cryptic medicine, he grinned and looked away.

Oh. My. God.

He was blushing. His dimples pitted even deeper than before. I’d no idea this tough son of a bitch had the genetic disposition to blush. His lips were skewed to one side in puckered embarrassment. I had the impulse to either squeeze his cheeks like a five-year-old or face-fuck him like a twenty-five year old.

“Ah, the wire cutters,” his ego responded, grinning with false comprehension.

My tongue needs to know how deep those dimples are.

“Mr. Layworth wiped the wire cutters clean with a paper towel, placed the wire cutters way in the back of a kitchen drawer, then flushed the towels.”

Marzoli absorbed the info and tried to make sense of it just as I had.

My previous anxiety about failing to find ample proof of Ruben’s murder surfaced again. I took a controlled breath and exhaled, but that only sent the anxiety deeper down in my belly.

“And I’d been thinking,” I added, “that Nathan’s open window on the night I cleaned his nipple and Ruben’s open window might be linked. Until a day ago, my curtain had been closed for more than half a year. I wouldn’t have seen anything, but what if Nathan had flirted with Mr. Layworth just like Ruben, and what if…”

Oh my god! I’m rambling!

Marzoli crossed his arms and rumbled quietly, politely refraining from incredulity, “You think Mr. Layworth killed and disposed of two neighbors from the same apartment in the space of a couple months just for putting on a show?”

“Mr. Layworth
and
Mrs. Layworth,” I stuttered. “Maybe.”

Fuck!

I must have sounded like I belonged in the zipcode of Tune Town. I wanted to sink a fist through the wallboard.

Marzoli looked out the window at the view I had of the neighbors. In the short time I’d known him, he’d turned away from me in this manner a couple times before. I now realized that that this act was the equivalent of saying, “The emotional state of the pathetically psychotic man talking to me will not play a role in my assessment of the facts.” I swallowed painfully. A lathe shaved slender slices of my vocal chords one pass at a time. Nothing is more injurious to your pride than knowing your very presence impedes the pursuit of truth. God, what he must think about me…

I’ve lost any chance. I’ve blown it.

If I remained stationary one second longer, I felt I would shrivel up and disappear like a dime between the cushions of this couch. I stood up to view whatever he was viewing.

Mr. Perfect was still asleep on his bed, atop the shiny quilt he’d previously been stuffing into his mouth to stifle his moans of ass-pummeling ecstasy. His open laptop rested on his chest. Mrs. Perfect had still not returned. The children were still not back from their weekend in the snow. The door to the bathroom was closed. The door to the walk-in closet was closed. The windows were closed. The wood trimmings of the apartment all gleamed with polished shine, contrasting with the rich deep tones of the furniture fabric, curtains, paintings, and fabric wallpaper. The Architectural Digest cutout was as resplendent as ever, right down to the handsome executive posing casually and dashingly.

His laptop slid off to his side, rousing him. He sat up, yawned, wiped his eyes, and walked from the bedroom through the dividing hallway to the kitchen. He retrieved from the refrigerator and cupboard a loaf of bread and honey, and scoured the cupboards for a clean plate. I recalled from my earlier days of open curtains that the Layworths’ cleaning lady came weekly on Monday mornings, thus it made sense that the sink, dishwasher, and counter were presently piled with the week’s dishes. In Manhattan, couples as busy and successful as the Layworths wash their own dishes only when avoiding undesirable conversations.

For the first time, a new association occurred to me. Marzoli belonged with that kind of perfection. He belonged with a partner as successful and as polished as Mr. or Mrs. Layworth. He deserved a setting that framed his innate nobility and spotlessness. He belonged in the privileged slice of the world where men craned their necks to listen to his every notion, assuming the leading role in any situation with the naturalness and relaxed authority that superior intellect, experience, and emotional alignment grants to men of his sort. Like Mr. and Mrs. Layworth, Marzoli belonged with someone who was equally elevated by the gods of destiny to the top of the ladder.

Did Johanna truly see potential for me to join this distinct group, or was her pressure-cooker timeline forcing her to skew her perspective of the truth to get the man to get the baby to get the marble kitchen island in the Hamptons? As Marzoli stood looking at Mr. Layworth across the courtyard, the truth was as glaringly different from Johanna’s wishful thinking as a basement mailroom is to a penthouse office suite. All I had to do was look around at the claustrophobic pigsty, the unpaid bills, and all the dusty unfinished scores. The brutality of this realization was so real, I no longer felt the pain of it. I no longer felt my Adam’s apple swell and plummet into my stomach like a cement block off the edge of a pier. My ego was too numb to react any more than a nod of my head—a sign of acceptance.

It was so easy not to fight it. So easy.

After combing through all the cupboards, Mr. Perfect retrieved the only clean dishes available—his daughter’s pink Disneyland plastic cup and glittery Cinderella plate.

Marzoli was still silent, and the longer he hesitated in responding to my theory about Ruben, Nathan, and the wire cutter, the more doubtful I grew about my suspicious. Maybe I’m woefully incorrect about the Layworths’ guilt.

God. Maybe I’m nuts.

Unprompted, Marzoli reached for the pillow and withdrew it from the window. Marzoli wrapped his arms around it, squeezing it tight against his chest. What was going through his brain that caused him to hug a pillow against his chest? Did the sight of Mr. Perfect trigger a vision of Nathan getting his throat sliced? Was he so saddened by the cruelty of a powerful man?

With the pillow taken from the window, the Little Old Man’s apartment was visible again. Marzoli’s eyes dropped to the courtyard level as the Little Old Man answered a knock on his door. He had pajamas on for a change, as if he’d been expecting the visitor. He trembled as he opened the door, admitting the old black man with the white mustache. His visitor stepped in and placed a bag full of soup cans on the small kitchenette counter. From his brown leather jacket pocket, he withdrew a small bag of weed and presented it to his customer.

The Little Old man did something unexpected.

He shook his head, rejecting the bag of pot.

The dealer returned the Ziploc bag back to his pocket with a suspect look in his eyes. He watched the Little Old Man reach beneath the sink and withdraw the Chock Full O’ Nuts piggybank. The mustached black man opened his hands out and as the Little Old Man proceeded to empty the entire contents of the can into his hands until the can was upside down and verifiably empty.

The Little Old Man put the Chock Full ‘O Nuts can in the garbage. The slowness of this activity had the profundity of a final act. He’d just placed every last cent of his life’s savings into the two old outstretched hands of the black man.

What was he asking the white mustached man to buy?

The black man put the money into his pocket. The Little Old Man spoke, the black man nodded and exited. He was alone again. He huddled into his bed and pulled the maroon sheet over his body.

Marzoli placed the pillow back against the window, blocking the view of the old man’s apartment yet again. I could feel he knew I’d intentionally blocked the view with the pillow. I had to turn my eyes away from him.

“You’re turning white again,” Marzoli interrupted the silence. “You’re dehydrated from freezing your ass off out there.”

No, I wasn’t feeling that. I hadn’t realized I was breathing in Marzoli’s scent again. Once again, I started to hyperventilate. Once again…

Bits of the old man’s brain smeared down the wall and plopped onto the floor.

“Sit,” commanded Marzoli.

He put his large guns around my back and lowered me onto the couch. He covered me with the blanket again…

Close your eyes, Paul…

Marzoli’s mass hovered above me after my spine sank into the cushion of the couch, propping himself with a thick arm on the back of the couch. I felt him inspecting me as I tried to regain control of my breathing and my thoughts. No doubt he was thinking that this freak in need of a straightjacket must be goddamn fascinating. His scent oozed into my skull as he lingered.

Marzoli finally backed away, padding to the kitchen.

I heard him filling a glass of water…

He returned from the closet back down the hall towards us, cocking a second rifle. Grandfather had a Winchester 223 bolt action rifle in each hand. Paul looked at me with his mouth open and eyes as round as pies. I was handed one and Paul the other. They were heavy, cold, and solidly built of black steel and shiny dark brown wood.

Grandfather disappeared down the hall again, opened the closet door, and returned holding four framed glass photos he placed on the kitchen counter for Paul and me to see.

One was a photo of my father as an adult. It was taken when he was younger, around thirty-five perhaps. He was old enough to have a beer gut, but young enough to suck it in and hide it beneath an ill-fitting sports coat. He looked tired and angry in the photo, but he condescended to smile for the photographer.

Another photo was of our mother. She had longer hair then. I couldn’t call her beautiful. Her dress and hair and makeup were sloppy and hastily thrown together. She seemed unhappy in the photo, like Dad, but a little more successful in hiding those feelings. Her cheeks were fat, and her arms were puffy. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white sunflowers on it, and she looked rather uncomfortable. Judging by the oak tree behind them, both photos seemed to have been taken at the same event in the same exact spot. A wedding? A funeral? They were obviously taken by a professional photographer hired to formally record whatever event Mom and Dad had been invited to.

What occurred to me now but didn’t then was the very odd notion that a married couple would attend this event together and not appear in one formal photo together. Instead, it seemed, they elected to appear in two separate photos. Could they not stand the sight of each other even back then? Had they just had a significant spat en route to the event? Was the undercurrent of hate so strong that recording their togetherness was too repugnant a notion at that moment?

I then took a closer look at the other two photos placed to the left of the other two. One photo was of a boy, and the other was a girl, both around our age. At first we did not recognize who they were, and then we realized they were Mom and Dad as children. We’d never seen them as anything but adults. Our house had no remnants of the past. No attic full of boxes of photos. No small box full of eight millimeter family films. No albums to link us to a continuum of previous lives. And yet out of nowhere, Grandfather presented two photos of very happy, lively, fresh, innocent children. They seemed authentically joyful. Optimistic. Playful. Energetic. Happy.

The girl was wearing a bright yellow play dress, covering her mouth while giggling. The boy grinned with gleeful wickedness in bright blue Osh-Kosh overalls holding a dark green frog near his tongue, pretending he was about to lick it. Quite possibly he did.