Authors: Reed Farrel Coleman
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #General, #Mystery & Detective
Everything was different tonight. Not because the world had changed, but because it hadn’t. She had. Tonight would mark the sixth time she would lure someone to their death.
Cosmo’s was different in name only from the other two bars in which Zoe had trolled for her prey: dark, smoke-filled, and crowded, with plank flooring rank with spilled beer, and the stink of toilet backwash. Good, she thought. Her aim was to attract attention without being at its center. She could not afford the spotlight and had so far been able to avoid it. The descriptions in the papers were always pretty vague. It was amazing what different color wigs and makeup could do.
Someone once wrote that God was his most cruel in his use of imperfection, in that he used it to such varied ends. So it was for Zoe—a dollar-store demigoddess with electric blue eyes, but unruly blond hair; pleasing curves, but a slightly thick waist; long legs, but one just slightly longer than the other. Yet her imperfections made her alluring in a way that unadorned beauty could not match. Unwanted attention and unwanted touches had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. She didn’t like thinking about that, about her father putting himself inside her before she’d even gotten to middle school. Now the touching, all the touching, was on her terms.
The deafening music in Cosmo’s that night was a bizarre intergenerational mishmash that blended into an emulsified roar. For Zoe, the louder, the better. Her prey would have to get in close to talk to her, and when the preliminary chitchat was over they would have to move on to conduct business elsewhere. She would press her way through the crowd, taking notice of who noticed her. Then she would work her way to the bar and order a drink. The first time, that was all it took. She was so nervous that she picked up the first man—a college kid, really—who approached her. He proved to be too easy a target. He came almost before she had him fully inside her, and then it took barely fifteen minutes for him to run himself straight into a killing zone. That’s why she had chosen more wisely the next time. He proved to be a real challenge. Took him a long time to come and nearly two hours to kill.
Zoe dreamed of the victim’s kiss. It had been different this week because she knew they were thinking of executing McGuinn tonight as well, that the prey was only meant as a distraction. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to McGuinn. She didn’t love him. She didn’t have love in her. Her father had seen to that, but McGuinn was the only man whose touch didn’t make her retreat into that dark place. So she moved through the bar, her face neutral as a spider’s. Circling back through the crowd, she found her prey. They wanted a distraction and she meant to give it to them, only not the distraction they’d had in mind.
“Hi,” Zoe said, moving in close to a petite brunette seated near the beer pulls. “I don’t even know why I bothered coming here.”
When the brunette looked up and took a close look, Zoe knew she was already entwined in her web.
The pages of
Gun Church
seemed to be my only retreat for those first few weeks and, like everything else in the surreal world I’d inhabited since September, Stan’s death helped push me to take risks with my work, to edge the plot further out on the limb. That fusion of me and McGuinn that began in the berry patch was nearly complete. The lines between my life and my work were getting awfully blurry. What had started out as a vehicle to tell McGuinn’s story was veering perilously close to autobiography and myth-making, to auto-mythology.
For the first week, I shut myself in my new apartment, unpacking only my laptop and toiletries. I even slept on the floor. Meg tried to get me to come into Manhattan for dinner, but I begged off, explaining to her that I needed time to adjust. Eventually, she stopped asking. I called both Renee and Jim so many times I lost count. I wanted reassurance that everything was all right, that Stan was buried and forgotten, that there was nothing that could lead from him to me. They never answered. They never called back. I found a kind of reassurance in their silence. Whether or not I wanted to put Brixton behind me was beside the point. It seemed Jim and Renee were determined to do it for me, and I stopped calling altogether.
Mid-February in Brooklyn isn’t exactly Paris in the springtime, but that first morning I woke up without Stan Petrovic’s corpse on my back felt like the best spring day ever, in spite of the snow.
That
was the morning I returned Meg’s calls.
“So, you
are
alive, Weiler? I was beginning to get concerned.”
“Concerned? No need to speak in code to me anymore, Donovan. I’m not using. The only thing I’ve put in my nose in seven years was a Kleenex and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I’ve just shut myself in to do my work. You’ve gotten the pages I sent you, right?”
“I guess that’s what alarms me,” she said. “Very scary stuff.”
“You have no idea, Meg. No idea.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No, and don’t ever bring it up!” I snapped.
“No need to bite my head off.”
“Sorry. It’s just safer if you think of it as purely fictional, Meg.”
“Safer? Safer for whom?”
“Just safer. Leave it alone,” I said more to myself than to her.
“So I see the book is moving along.”
“It’s getting there.”
“But where is ‘there’ exactly? You were pretty vague about the ending in your plot synopsis and I’m not sure where you’re taking it.”
“You’re worried?”
“It’s my job to worry.”
“Well, stop it. You’re my agent, not my editor.”
“I’m your friend.”
“The ending will be as good as the rest of the book,” I said.
“I think that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“I didn’t call to talk about the book.”
“What then?”
“What’s Amy’s cell number?”
The question has been raised a thousand times: Would Romeo and Juliet’s love have endured had they survived? In Kip Weiler’s uproariously profane and deliciously cruel second novel,
Romeo vs. Juliet
, he not only restates the question, but uses the answer to absolutely flay the American body politic. Weiler takes to task all the parties insinuating themselves in the divorce proceedings. No group or individual is immune from his scathing wit. With demonic delight, he skewers the Knights of Columbus, ACT UP, Sinatra, Streisand, Jerry Falwell, and even poor Larry King.
—JACKSON DRUM,
THE MERTON REVIEW
She didn’t bother hiding the anger. I hadn’t expected her to and she was never very good at faking it. There was never any doubt about when Amy was pissed off. I’d given her ample opportunity to display her many and varied expressions of anger—from slow boil to rage—and by the end of our marriage, angry was her baseline state of being. But there was something else in her tone, a grudging joy at the sound of my voice that made me push her to see me again. I didn’t have to say
Please
more than ten or fifteen times and I didn’t try to explain why I’d left her standing in the lobby of the Algonquin.
We met on neutral ground, a coffee bar in the West Village. Dressed in paint-speckled jeans, torn running shoes, a back-to-front black Kangol cap, and the weathered Schott motorcycle jacket I’d given to her as a birthday gift twenty years ago, Amy looked more like her old self, more like the woman I fell in love with than the woman I’d fled from eight weeks ago. Just seeing her, her eyes afire, brought it all back—how stupid we’d been for each other, how much we still were. It was as obvious on her face as it must have been on mine.
“God,” she said, taking her green tea from the barista. “I will never understand how you do this to me. Even when I hated you, Kip Weiler, I loved you. That night after the country club, when I told you I couldn’t take it anymore, I would have stayed with you if you had persisted a little longer.”
“I know, but you were right to push me away. I’d been scuttling my ship for a long time and you were getting pulled down in the suck. That last year together was terrible. I was empty and you didn’t even want me anymore. That’s how I knew we were over.”
“Is that introspection I hear from the lips of the Kipster?”
“No … I mean, yes … I mean, it’s introspection but not from the lips of the Kipster. He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything.”
“You used to be succinct.”
“Believe me, that is succinct,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Everything
has
changed. Let’s walk.”
“Walk? You used to take a cab to go to the bathroom. Do you have a fever? What have you done with my ex-husband and who are you?”
“Cut it out, Amy.”
“Fine.”
“I even run these days. Well, not for the last month, but I’m getting back to it this week.”
“Not if it keeps snowing like this you’re not.”
We’d both heard the forecast for a lot of snow, but I guess we both sensed that we needed to get this first get-together over with as soon as we could. It was easy to ignore the snow before it started falling. Now, it was fairly impossible to ignore.
We turned south toward Tribeca, snow falling pretty heavily as we walked. There was already more snow on the sidewalk than the combined snowfall in Brixton over the last year. New York City is beautiful in the snow, but it’s a very transient beauty. Nothing stays pure very long in the city once it touches down.
“That night at the Algonquin, when you just showed up like that, what was that about?” I asked.
“I miss you. I’ve missed you.”
“Ain’t memory grand, how time sands off the bitter edges? But you couldn’t miss the Kipster, not really. In the beginning of us, I acted like a sex- and drug-addicted fool because that’s who I was. At the end, I was doing it to hurt you, to make you push me away.”
“I know.”
“So, I don’t get it. I get why you dumped my ass. Best thing, really, but why marry Peter fucking Moreland?”
“I married Peter for several reasons, all good ones, I thought at the time, but none of them having to do with love. He was stable. He understood my work and—”
“—he wasn’t me.”
“Exactly,” she confessed. “He wasn’t you. I married him to punish you.”
“Yeah, and how did that work out?”
“Somebody got punished.”
“Not somebody, everybody.”
She stopped in her tracks, playfully pulling my coat sleeve so that I’d turn to face her. “Okay, this is the last time I’m going to ask: What have you done with my ex-husband?”
“I told you, everything’s changed. Weird thing is, most of it happened in the last few months. I got straight a long time ago, after my second trip to rehab. But I hadn’t really started exorcising the Kipster until about a year ago. I finally got sick of all my old bullshit. In Brixton, I’d had a long series of one-night stands and loveless affairs just like at all the other schools. I had this one terrible affair with a colleague named Janice Nadir. One afternoon, we were lying around in bed in one of those motel rooms with mirrors on the ceiling and I was staring up at myself. I was thinking about you, wondering what you would think of me there doing what the Kipster always did.”
“And what did I think?”
“You were sorely disappointed, but not surprised. I imagined you shaking your head and saying, ‘Same old Kipster.’ I got this notion in my head that I wanted to earn back your respect whether or not you ever knew about it. I didn’t think I would ever write again, but I thought I could at least start acting like a grownup. Your unknowing respect became the central theme of my boring life in Nowheresville.”
Amy stepped close to me, slowly worked her arms around me, and rested her head on the wet, snow-covered shoulder of my jacket. She let her tea fall to the ground. I dropped my coffee too. We didn’t kiss. I didn’t take off her cap and stroke her hair. She didn’t brush her hand against my cheek. We didn’t even move much. We just stood there like that, her head on my shoulder, ten years of hurt and longing condensed into a silent, snow-covered moment on the street.
Then a strange voice broke the trance. “You guys wanna go get a room or something?”
The first thing I saw when I turned around was his badge. The first thing he saw was the panic in my eyes.
“Yo, buddy, relax,” he said. “I was only busting your chops.”
“Sorry, officer. You startled me.”
“No problem, but I think you and your girlfriend better get going anyways unless you wanna become Mr. and Mrs. Snowman. It’s coming down pretty good. S’posed to get at least two feet.”
“Thanks.”
“And you might wanna pick up these cups. Love ain’t an excuse for littering. You know what I mean?” He winked as he walked past us. “Have a nice day.”
We watched his dark blue figure disappear into the snow. Finally breaking our embrace, Amy scooped up the cups and threw them in the corner trash basket. I used those few seconds to get my heart out of my throat. My breathing was almost normal when Amy got back to me, but she wasn’t fooled.
“What was that about, Kip? You nearly jumped out of your skin when you saw the cop. I could feel your heart pounding through your coat. You’re not carrying, are you?”
Carrying?
I panicked again, then realized she was talking about drugs, not guns.
“I told you, I’ve been clean for a long time.”
“Then what? You can’t tell me that reaction was nothing. You were scared to death.”
See, about a month ago, I killed a man. Shot the motherfucker right through his heart in front of witnesses
.
No, somehow I didn’t think this was the appropriate time or the place for that confession, but I had to tell her something.
“This sheriff’s deputy in Brixton used to harass the shit out of me because I slept with a woman he was hot for. It was years ago and it didn’t last, but he could never let it go. So when he found out I was moving back here, he promised to make sure the bullshit would follow me north.”