“Baby,” Lenore said. “Could you?”
She looked ready to cry.
“Sure,” I said. “After some coffee, okay?”
She nodded. She looked at me, a long look, like she was really taking me in.
“What?” I said, annoyed.
“You okay, right?” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course everything’s okay.”
She stood up and came toward me—I thought she might hug me and I stiffened, but instead she only put her hand on my head.
“Yah,” she said. “You always okay.”
Her voice sounded bitter, like I had done something wrong. Her hand tightened on the top of my head, as though she were a hawk and I were a mouse she’d found. For a minute I thought I might fall off my chair.
Lenore squeezed my head. I felt her fingernails dig in.
Finally she dropped me.
“Gimme some money,” I said after a minute. “I’ll get the boys down the block to move the car already.”
That night Tracy and I took the subway downtown to follow up on our last, best clue—the movie Chloe was supposed to see before she vanished. We took the G to the F to the East Village. New York City wasn’t all that big for us—Brooklyn, parts of Queens, and Manhattan below Fourteenth Street.
It was less than ten miles from our house to Second Avenue: on the subway it took sixty-seven minutes to get downtown. I read the
Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest
, checked out from the bookmobile that morning. Tracy had read it already. She picked up a copy of the
New York Post
that someone left on the bench.
“Fucking Koch,” she said. “Switch with me.”
“No,” I said.
Every month brought exactly one good thing, more regular than a period: a new
Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest.
We didn’t have much of a library in our corner of Brooklyn—a pale-brick storefront that was perpetually closed for renovations—but we did have a bookmobile: a shining airstream-type trailer some do-gooder stocked with comic books, romance novels, detective stories, a few Sweet Valley High paperbacks, and the
Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest.
The
Cynthia Silverton Mystery
Digest
was a five-by-seven magazine featuring the exploits of teen detective and junior college student Cynthia Silverton. Each issue featured a Cynthia Silverton story, a True Mystery Not Quite Solved, true-crime tales, and alluring advertising for home-study courses in private detection and fingerprinting and important detection tools. I already had the Cynthia Silverton Spy Camera, a tiny fourth-rate imitation Minox that fit in the palm of my hand, and the Cynthia Silverton fingerprinting kit, which had started us on the road to ruin.
This month’s unsolved mystery was the Case of the Murdered Heiress. Lana Delfont was found murdered in her Park Avenue apartment. The door was locked from the inside. Who could have done it? And why didn’t the killer steal her famous diamonds, but instead carefully arrange them on her body?
“The daughter did it,” Tracy said.
“Yep,” I said. “The earrings.”
“Exactly,” Tracy said. “No one but a daughter would put earrings on her mother like that.”
“No one but a daughter would stab her mother that many times,” I said.
Tracy nodded. She didn’t have a mother—hers had died in an accident when she was two—but she’d heard.
Finally the train pulled into the station and we bundled up for the cold outside.
That evening we went to Theatre 80. At the counter was a bored punk girl with pink hair and a leopard sweater.
SUNSET BOULEVARD
, the marquee exclaimed.
THREE NIGHTS ONLY.
“Hi,” I said to the girl through thick plastic. “Can you tell me what was playing here last Saturday night?”
“Five dollars,” she said.
“I’m not trying to buy a ticket,” I said. “I’m trying to ask you a question. Do you know what was playing here last Saturday night?”
The girl pointed to my left. I turned. I didn’t see anything.
“Can’t you just answer my question?” I said.
The girl pointed again. Then she turned around.
“Why are you such a cunt?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Fuck you,” I said. “Cunt.”
She turned back around and gave me the finger.
“Fuck you, whore,” she said.
“Look,” Tracy said. On the wall to my left was a poster for
Belle du Jour.
Underneath, a little card said
Saturdays 8-10-12.
“I never saw it,” Tracy said. “What’s it about?”
We got a slice at Stromboli’s across the street and I told her about
Belle du Jour
and the fat man with the pet crickets and the gangster with the gold teeth. After pizza we walked over to Sophie’s, the bar across the street from Reena and Chloe’s place. In Sophie’s we got dollar pints of beer. Someone put the Pogues on the jukebox. At the bar an old man muttered to himself, angry and suspicious.
We walked over to the horseshoe bar, where by now Chloe’s ex, Ben, would be on his shift.
Ben was just starting when we ordered our first round of drinks. As far as I could tell, Ben was perfect. He was twenty-one. He had short brown hair and wore Levi’s and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal perfect olive forearms, one tattooed with a broken heart and the words
LOVE KILLS.
We both knew who he was, but he didn’t remember us. He didn’t seem to care, either.
“Yeah,” he said bitterly when we said we were looking for Chloe. “I have no fucking idea where she is, and if I did, you’re the last people I would tell.”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“Who do you think we are?” Tracy said.
“I know exactly who you are,” Ben said, and walked away to perform some imaginary bar task.
Tracy and I looked at each other. Another mystery. We walked around the bar to where Ben was.
“We’re detectives,” Tracy said. “Reena asked us to help find Chloe. She’s really worried about her.”
Ben opened his mouth and then closed it, looking confused.
“I’ve known Chloe for, like, a year,” I said. “We’ve met before. Like, a million times. That time at Gas Station when Vanishing Center—”
“Oh,” Ben said. “Oh! Oh! Shit.” He shook his head. “I am so sorry. I didn’t recognize you at all. No, you, you’re—I am so sorry.”
I said it was okay. He asked why we were looking for Chloe. I told him Reena had hired us. Chloe was missing. No one had seen her since last Thursday.
“Fuck,” Ben said. “Reena did call me, but I figured. Well. You know.”
“No,” Tracy said. “We don’t.”
“You don’t know?” he said. “You don’t know about Chloe?”
We shook our heads. Ben looked at us and sighed. He closed his eyes and drew one hand down his face, like he was trying to wipe something away that wouldn’t come off.
“Dope,” he finally said, opening his eyes.
“What?” Tracy said. “Chloe? Heroin?”
Ben nodded and opened his eyes. “I thought you were her stupid little dope friends. Some of them have been in looking for her.”
“Wait,” I said. I got out my notebook and my pen. “When did Chloe start using?”
Ben raised his eyebrows. “Six month ago, maybe. Maybe longer—I don’t know anymore. She made these new friends. That’s who I thought you guys were—sorry about that. This whole crowd of little fucking sluts, fucking skeeves. These girls, Soon Yi and Nico, and all those trashy little sluts they hang out with.”
Soon Yi
, I wrote down.
Nico. Trashy little sluts.
We knew them.
“How about those other trashy little sluts?” I asked. “Know any of their names?”
“Hmm,” Ben said. “One of them is called Cathy, she’s this girl from the projects. And there’s Georgia, this little girl who I actually think is homeless—I think she stays with Cathy most of the time.”
We knew Cathy and Georgia too.
“Is that why you guys stopped seeing each other?” I asked. “Dope?”
Ben nodded. He looked sad and I was sorry I had asked. I was sorry I’d had to ask.
“I was so in love with her,” he said. “I was going to—I was hoping we would, you know. I thought we’d stay together. I mean, I know she was young, but she was so fucking mature. She was, like, you know, a regular person. Not like a kid at all. And then she started
that.
I wasn’t mad at her. Not at first. I thought she was just experimenting, just trying, and hey, I’ve done it. I’ve done pretty much everything. I couldn’t really tell her not to. But then. You know how it goes. It was every weekend and then every night and then every day.”
“You broke up with her?” I asked. “Or did she end it?”
“Neither of us did, really,” Ben said. “That’s the fucked-up thing. We just stopped. She started spending less and less time with me and then when she did, we were fighting.”
“About drugs?” Tracy asked.
“Yes,” Ben said. “No. Everything.” He sighed. “When I first met Chloe, she was this amazing, smart, together girl. She had a great job, her own place, totally responsible. She seemed totally, you know. Totally sane.”
“And then?” I asked.
“And then it started to, like, unravel,” Ben said. “Not just the drugs. Hanging out with those fucked-up girls, going out too much, not paying bills, not returning phone calls. It was like she was starting to fall apart around the edges. Or like she never was that responsible, together girl at all. Like she was always this totally fucked-up chick underneath and she had just done a really good job covering it up all this time. And she just couldn’t do it anymore. I mean, God, fuck, I felt terrible.”
“You tried to help her?” Tracy asked.
“Of course,” Ben said. “I tried talking to her, yelling at her, telling her I loved her, everything. But she just kept, like, running away. What I said mattered less and less.”
“When was the last fight?” I asked.
“The last fight,” Ben said. “Well, one night I came home and she was there with a bunch of her little skeeve friends. And they were getting high, right there in my place. Just sitting around passing a little bag of dope like it was nothing. Nodding out on my living room floor.
Mine.
And I—you guys don’t know this, but my mom is an addict. And I have a rule in my house, which is
No drugs.
Like I said, I’ve tried everything, and I don’t judge. But that’s the house I grew up in, and that’s not the house I want to live in anymore.”
We nodded. We both understood that.
“So I kicked her friends out,” Ben went on. “And Chloe, well, she was high. I guess I should have let her sleep it off or something. But I was, you know, freaking out. So I just lost it. I just started yelling at her.
I love you, what the fuck are you doing. What happened to you.
And she just
laughed.
She sat on the floor, her eyes all, like, rolling back in her head and shit. And she was
laughing.
”
Ben shook his head. There was something else. Something he wasn’t saying. I saw it in the way he wrinkled his brow, the way the whites of his eyes dimmed.
“She said something,” I said. “Something to you.”
“Yeah,” he began softly. “She said. She said. She said she knew I never really loved her anyway. And then I really lost it, and I threw a glass at her—not at her, but at the wall above her. Because, she had to know—I mean, I had done everything. Everything I could.” He frowned again. “Everything I knew about, at least. I mean, what the fuck do I know about love?”
We sat at the bar and didn’t look at each other’s eyes. For the first time I noticed the tattoo on his arm was still dark, and nearly new.
LOVE KILLS.
“There’s this book,” Tracy said, looking at her shot glass. “This guy, he says, ‘The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.’ That’s what he says in this book we like.”
This book we liked. Like this air we breathed, this sun that shone on us.
Ben frowned and looked at Tracy.
“You think so?” he said.
“Absolutely,” Tracy said.
Ben and Tracy looked at each other and something passed between them—a secret handshake, a code word. The moment passed as quickly as it’d come. Ben poured us each a shot of tequila and knocked on the bar, telling us in the ancient code of bartenders that the drinks were on the house. We thanked him and we threw back our shots and he poured us another round.
“So,” I said, bringing us back to topic. “That was the last time you saw her?
“Yeah,” he said. “I left the apartment and stayed out pretty much all night. When I came back she was gone. The next day I changed my locks. A few weeks later, I changed my phone number. I never wanted to see her again.”
“So the skeeves and whores,” I asked. “They’ve been around looking for her?”
“A few times,” Ben said. “They didn’t seem concerned or anything. Just mentioned they hadn’t heard from her.”
None of us said anything. A customer came in. Ben left to get him a drink and came back.
“Tell me something else,” Tracy said. “Tell me something about Chloe.”
Ben took a deep breath.
“I loved her,” he said. “And I never want to see her again as long as I fucking live.”
A few more customers came in and Ben left to take care of them, finishing his second shot before he did.
“You know where we can find them?” I asked Tracy. “Cathy and Georgia?”
“Maybe,” Tracy said. “Got some quarters?”
I dug some change out of my bag and Tracy went to the pay phone in the back. She came back twenty minutes later with information.
“Chris Garcia, this guy I know who slept with her a few times, says Cathy hangs out at Cherry Tavern.”
“And where Cathy is,” I said, “Georgia will be nearby.”
I knew Georgia. I hated Georgia. I thought of her pretty face and her dark eyes and something in me burned hot.
Sometimes it seemed like every teenager in New York was separated by only two or three degrees. Like it was a secret world you gained admittance to at fourteen and left at twenty, swearing never to repeat what you’d seen. No one would believe us, anyway.
San Francisco