M
orning in Manhattan. Excellent and fair. Washed yellow taxis speeding downtown. Mexican men trimming tulips outside Korean delis. The early walkers to work, pleased with themselves. Subways flashing like information. Brightness unfurling almost perceptibly down the faces of buildings. In the back of the bars and clubs and restaurants, a hundred thousand conversations are swept up, hosed down, hauled off. A mother brushes her daughter's hair. Millions to be made today, pal. The city's Greek chorus reads the op-ed page. A street-cleaning machine passes, whisks up an empty wallet. Sunlight penetrates the irises. The pleasure of blinking. A man looks at his stomach, sees a pile of ruin. A woman is pleased by her lipstick. What shoes will she wear? Coffee dreams of sunlight and redemption. Battered vans full of fish speeding uptown. Formation and decay. I'm losing money here. Get to the office early. This could be the day. This is not the day. FedEx it. A Chinese woman sits at her industrial sewing machine. A stack of models' photos blow down an alley behind the agency. Somebody robbed the corner deli, took two stale bagels with him. I'll fax it to you. Smoke condition at Forty-ninth Street. Woody Allen is washed up. Bicycle messenger hanging on to a city bus going forty down Broadway. They raised the rent on me. Rikers Island guard issues instructions to the night's catch: “Lift your arms, show your pits, open your mouth, show your tongue,
lift your nutsack, then bend over, spread your ass, and cough five times hard.” Please hold. I'm going to try a new antidepressant. An account executive looks at the business card a woman handed him last night. Fire in Harlem, six dead, five children. I'll put you through. Ewing is getting old, man. Please go see a doctor, Harry. What credit card will you be using for this transaction? This is Sal from Brooklyn calling. The ferry from Staten Island bumps against the piling. There's no respect anymore. In the big lot off the West Side Highway, a man puts air into the tires of garbage trucks. Don't forget your lunch box. A woman sits on the edge of the bed, remembering that yesterday's AIDS test was positive. I'm telling you the MTA wastes millions. The methadone clinic has a line out the door. Times Square ain't the same. We got serious racial problems in this city. The president is in town; traffic will be a nightmare. You owe us the money. It didn't make any money. It's not about the money. You can have the money. I don't have any money. It costs a lot of money. Tour buses full of Midwesterners. They moved to New Jersey. The medical examiner pulls on his plastic gloves, turns on the radio. I'm not gay, I'm queer, explains a man to his mother in her apartment on Riverside Drive. The cocaine is safely delivered, and today Spanish Harlem looks like paradise. I'm watching too much television. A beautiful apartment in this price range. Please sign here. It's not really a democracy anymore. In an office in Midtown all the doors are closed: the boss was fired. Call and get tickets, why don't you. Outside the Plaza Hotel, a cabbie shortchanges his customer, smiling. I'm going to get liposuction. A man briskly walks south on Lafayette, feeling a key in one pants pocket, a stone fragment in the other, then steps into a corner restaurant, the first patron. He is not shaven. He is befouled with dried mud. He carries a small package. A waiter is folding the fresh linen.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning.” I made a show of checking my cash. “I know I'm dirty as hell.”
“We'll let it go.”
I sat watching the world go by, a few patrons coming in.
Breakfast is the most optimistic of meals, and you could see it on the faces of the men and women. In the restroom I looked into the mirror. The dirt was in my hair, in the creases around my eyes, in my ears. My gums were receding, my teeth turning brown, my hair going gray. There's only one direction.
Was it murder? Caroline had stabbed Simon in the neck as he lowered an unloaded gun. That wasn't self-defense. No doubt the moment was one of extreme agitation, with Simon screaming and acting strange, but I wonder why she did not walk to the elevator and use it, since Simon had told her the code that would make it work. Or perhaps she could have hollered out of a window. The swallowing of the key must have been for effect. Simon must have had another way to get out of the building. All he would need was a pair of bolt cutters secreted somewhere. If he had gone to the trouble to have the water in the milk carton and the bed and the electric battery and the light and the videotape device, it would not have been much extra effort to have a pair of bolt cutters. Billy Munson had said that there was all sorts of equipment in Simon's father's van. Caroline could not have been expected to think of all these things right then, but neither could she have been expected to stab Simon simply because he was raving. I had replayed that moment ten or twelve times in my office. There was a pause, a long beat, between the moment that Simon lowered the gun and the moment that Caroline lunged with the knife. It was a pause during which each looked at the other to see what came next. It was also a pause in which he was vulnerable, and she took advantage of the opportunity. That is how I saw it; that is what she had always done.
And what had happened next? I imagined that she had waited as long as she could in the dark vault beneath the sidewalk doors, waited until the hour was late and few people were outside. Then, when she heard no sound, she had clicked the lock with the key, opened one of the doors, and silently sprung up the stairs carrying her little milk carton with the gun and knife in it, locked the doors from the outside, and
then darted around the corner. You could do it in under a minute. This had transpired either in the last hours of August 6 or the early hours of August 7. If the time had been late enough, it was possible that no one had noticed her or remembered that they had noticed her. After all, Simon's body was not discovered until August 15, and that interval was certainly long enough for someone to forget what they had seen. But Caroline's immediate actions were not the only indication of her guilt. She had gone to elaborate lengths to cover up what had happened. She had lied to the police about the nature of Simon's disappearance. She had told them that she didn't recognize the little piece of the jade figurine. She had the cleverness to hire a private investigator to try and determine what had happened to Simon. That was smart, for the investigator might unknowingly report to her information that might implicate her, allowing her to anticipate problems. Even more ingenious was that such an arrangement, should it come to the attention of the police, would seem to indicate that she was not the culprit. The investigator found no useful information, of course, because if he had checked the ownership of 537 East Eleventh Street, he would have found out that a Korean owned it, not the Segals. If, like the police, he had talked to the Korean owner, the owner would have been able to tell him nothing, because, being unfamiliar with the building that was about to be demolished, the owner did not know about the quirky sidewalk doors. Nor did the foreman from Jack-E Demolition, who was obsessed with a piece of rope he'd found. The detectives had no reason to seek out the Segals, and Mrs. Segal, because of her questionable deal with the Koreans, had what she believed to be a good reason not to seek out them. The police did talk with the superintendent of 535, but their conversation had centered on access to the roof door of 535, not on the sidewalk door to 537. It was true that if the police had looked through the paperwork to Simon's estate, they might have been led to Mrs. Segal, as I had been. But I had been looking for a singular item, namely the Hobbs tape, when I found her and not, as the police would have been, for information about how Simon had entered a
building. It was a logical contraption of chance and intent. No one had acted with full knowledge; no one had planned on the events as they occurred, including Caroline. So was it murder? In my mind, yes.
A beautiful woman in a mink and jeans walked in through the sunlight. One black lizard cowboy boot crossing in front of another, she smiled confidently at the world, at the waiter, at me. “Hey, baby,” she said, presenting her cool cheek, and this I kissed with great interest, having never knowingly kissed a murderess before, and the softness of her skin seemed even softer for the hardness of the woman. I cannot report that I was filled with revulsion. No, I cannot say that at all.
“You've been rolling in the mud?”
“I'm a dirty guy, you know that.”
“What happened?”
I fingered the head of the broken figurine in my pocket. “It's a long story.”
“Can I hear it?”
“Sure.”
The restaurant was starting to fill up. “We'll order breakfast first.”
We sat, and I watched her gladness. I had liberated her from Hobbs yesterday, and she was leaving for China today; it was the first time since we'd met that she believed she had nothing to worry about. Her eyes were bright and her lips ready to smile. She didn't need me anymore; she needed only to close it off with no trouble. The music from the back of the restaurant was Vivaldi, bright and clear, and I knew we both were going to be different only minutes hence, and so I simply watched her. It was no small pleasure as she talked about this, about that, leaving a bit of lipstick smudged on the rim of her water glass, and while she talked, my mind imagined itself to be a silver pool of lust at her feet, a pool that morphed into a moving film of desire that flowed up her shoes and ankles and over her knees and thighs and between her legs and right up deep into her, plunging deep and deep and deep again, and then, withdrawing, brushing the tiny secret scar, then continuing upward past her hipbones and belly button
and along the contours of her back and stomach, lingering helplessly at the heavy crease of her breasts against her rib cage, and then flowing out and up and over them, rubbing the palms of my imagination over her nipples, and then, upward to the delicate bones of the neck, out to and around the shoulders and down the arms to the fingers that had held the knife. To the tips. To the lovely, clean, manicured fingernails. And then, sweeping back up the arms, cupping her chin and jaw and pressing deep into her mouth past her pink tongue, which itself had touched me, and then, withdrawn from her mouth, sliding the bright film of my desire slowly up over her cheekbones and eyesâher eyelids blinking, lashes brushing softlyâand then up past the forehead and like fingers through the sweet thick length of blonde hair, and then up, my desire for her flowing up and away forever, letting go of her forever. This I did as I looked at her there. I would miss her. When I was an old man, I would miss this woman.
“I've got something to show you,” she said.
It was one of those glossy brochures that the real-estate firms in the better neighborhoods have printed. “I was just looking at it in the taxi.” She flopped it open. “Look at that.” It was a color photo of a big white house with a long lawn, a lot of windows, porches, eaves, gables. It looked like a yacht, or maybe a wedding cake. “Charlie will like it,” she noted. “The real-estate agent says it's a seven-minute walk to the train station.”
She continued to study the photo, and as I looked upward to her face, I saw that time was starting to accrue around her eyes. I didn't really believe that she wanted to end up in a big white house or that she wanted a life with Charlie. I think that the idea of these things represented a kind of oblivion into which she could become lost for a while. But appetites always return, and if there was anything I understood about Caroline Crowley, it was that her appetites would continue to carry her away from, not toward, what safe white houses still exist in this society. On the other hand, I understood now how desperately she might desire a new life; here it was, in front of her, and I could see that it seemed almost close enough for
her to touch, and that perhaps she truly believed her long, strange journey to be over. It is not fashionable for a young woman to depend completely upon the support of a man, and for a woman such as my wife, who has been the beneficiary of a premier education, the idea of such dependence understandably smacks of a kind of existential death. But if Caroline harbored a desire for a career or work, it was subordinate to a more basic drive to be delivered into a life discontinuous from the one she had long inhabited, a life in which, for the first time, she might be safeâfrom others and from herself.
“I've got some things to show you, too,” I said.
“You do? Are they as interesting as what I showed you?”
“Tough call.”
“Let me see the first one.”
I slipped my hand in my pocket, pinched the fragment of jade. I could stop it right here, I could say I was kidding and it would all just drift away. I put the jade fragment on the table. The ears were broken, but the eyes and mouth were still perfect.
She frowned, then picked it up. “It's beautiful,” she said. “What is it? I mean, where's it from?”
I looked at this lovely face, these blue eyes, this mask, and I felt that I had never known her and never would.
I whispered, “Don't lie to me now, Caroline.”
She looked down and then away.
“It was the gift,” I said. “To you, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“From Hobbs.”
“Yes.”
“Very valuable.”
“I guess. He'd owned it for a long time.”
“Simon found out and got pissed off.”