Mystery Girl: A Novel (11 page)

Then she returned, without the drinks, looking pale and unsteady herself, as if the whole deck had tilted on a rising wave. She leaned into me, muttering swiftly under her breath, “I have to go. Right now.”

“Sorry?”

She gripped my wrist and whispered in my ear. I smelled perfume and shampoo and behind that something sharper, sweet and sour—late afternoon cocktails and sweat. But her voice was sober and serious. “I have to leave right now. Walk out with me. Please.”

I remembered suddenly that I really was a detective (sort of), following a mystery woman, not just a writer pretending to be one to make a mystery woman smile. Was this the danger I was here to fight? Whom was she hiding from? A husband? A stalker? A spy? I
looked around, but it was just the same lame crew as before. Unless they were in disguise.

“Don’t look,” she hissed. “Let’s just go, this way.” She guided me toward the back of the deck and down a stairway that led to the parking lot. “Where is your car?”

“There,” I said. “But what’s wrong? Who was it?”

“Please. Not now. Let’s just get out of here. Please.”

She hurried ahead to my car, so I unlocked it and we got in. As I rolled toward the highway, she slid low in the seat, shielding her face.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Someplace quiet where I can breathe.”

“OK.” I made a right onto the One, headed south.

“No,” she said. “Turn around. Let’s go to the forest. You know, the redwoods.”

“OK.” Glancing quickly, I U-turned in a driveway and headed north. She relaxed after I passed the hotel, taking a lipstick from her purse and touching up her mouth in the mirror.

“So,” I asked, “what was all that about?”

“Please don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ask. Don’t ask me anything ever. That way I won’t have to lie to you. I haven’t yet, well not really, not much, and it feels good for once. I’m such a dirty liar. Maybe that’s why I feel close to you, even though we’re strangers. I feel like you’re the one person who I’m honest with. Just myself. Without any lies or masks.” She gripped my knee and looked at me intently. “Don’t even ask my name. Please?”

“Sure. No problem.” I chuckled assuredly, like a man of the world. She was making me a little nervous. “We’ll be anonymous. And don’t go asking me anything either,” I warned, poking her leg. “I’m very deep and troubled and I don’t want to talk about it.”

She giggled happily. “Go ahead. Make fun of me. I deserve it.” She finished her lipstick, and sat back, gazing at the scenery. “I’m happy here, with you,” she sighed. “I feel safe.”

That was good enough for me. I turned into the entrance for the national forest, paid the attendant, and parked. We got out and walked up the path. We spoke not, but she touched my arm once or twice to steady herself as her red heels sank into the earth and we hiked into the broken shadows under the giant trees. They soared above us, hundreds of feet high, like cathedral pillars reaching for some vanished vault. These were the oldest living things on earth. In their history, we barely registered, our whole lives brief as a bug’s. And as for our thoughts and feelings, our little victories and dramas, these were less than nothing. Yet, that odd growth, the human mind, still clung to a vain idea, that our self-consciousness, the source of so much trouble for ourselves and our fellow life-forms, had to serve some purpose, some need of nature’s own. Perhaps we were flowers, brains on fragile stems, seeded here as the one creature aware of all this pointless beauty and its loss: our minds, nature’s weirdest blossoms, petals that open only to see the sun, and then go dark.

“What are you thinking?” she asked me as we stood together among the waist-high roots. Our bodies were closer than I’d noticed. We nearly touched.

“I don’t know,” I said, afraid to say. “What were you thinking?”

“This,” she said, and kissed me.

28

LATER, WHEN I THOUGHT
back to that moment, it felt unreal, but at the time it seemed, if by no means normal, then natural, as if for once everything were working out just like it should. I took her face in my hands and kissed her back. Now that I held her, she seemed so much smaller. Her mouth tasted like sugared strawberries and vermouth. She pushed her body against mine, arms clutching at my neck, and I felt her heart beating in her chest. Breathing hard, we grasped and
shoved, as though we were struggling. It was like a slow-motion fight. Her tooth cut my lip and I tasted blood. I pulled back and saw her eyes glitter wildly like a cat’s. Then she shut them and reached her mouth for mine again. We leaned against the tree, blind and unspeaking, and my hands found her body, touched her waist and hips and thighs, her breasts and shoulders and the small of her back, feverish and alive. Then a parade of Asian tourists came around the path. I suppose I hadn’t heard them approaching over the pounding of my own blood in my head. Blushing and panting, hand in hand, we stumbled back down to the car and began grappling again inside. Whispering hoarsely in my ear she told me to look at her and I looked in her eyes, but she pushed me back and pulled up her dress. She wore the things that I saw her buy in the shop, the black stockings, the garter belt, the flimsy triangle of lace split to show her shining wet and pink as her mouth was after my kisses, then red inside like her mouth was, swollen and raw. Touch me, she ordered. Hypnotized, I reached out and touched her pussy just slightly and she flinched and groaned, yelping as if I’d hurt her, and pushed my hand away. She squirmed away and said not here, no please, take me back to the hotel and I started the car and I drove, though once we were moving she grabbed my hand and thrust it between her legs again. I drove like that with one hand, fighting the curves. We went back to the Cliffside Inn and parked around back in the guests’ lot, where the rooms were perched over the cliff, and I could see the sweat gluing her dress to the small of her back as I followed her upstairs to her room. The smell of her hair and perfume was in my nose, the taste of her mouth and my own blood was in my mouth, and the image of how she’d looked with her legs spread in my car was blazing in my brain so brightly I could barely see and I walked right into her as she reached her door. She dropped the key and cursed softly and I picked it up. Shaking, I opened the door and we entered the room, with its tightly made white bed and the white curtain blowing in the open balcony door and beyond that the ocean crashing far below, and I brushed the straps from her shoulders and she slid out of the dress
and pulled me toward her, unhooking my belt and yanking at the buttons on my shirt till I took it off over my head, then pushed her back onto the bed while she drew me to her, guiding my hands, and I reached for that little flag of lace, that little veil, and tore it away, and she pulled my pants off and licked my cock and then pulled me toward her, pulled me down saying please and I pushed my cock, wet with her spit, against her wet pussy, and she was saying yes, saying please, saying fuck me and then I was inside her, and she was still saying yes, fuck me, fuck me please, and I pushed harder, forcing myself as deep as I could, and feeling her breath on my face and her nails in my arms and then her teeth in my shoulder, the whole time saying, more, please, fuck me, please. After we finished we laid there for a while in silence and I might have fallen asleep, for an hour or perhaps just for a second. Maybe I just blinked my eyes. But when I opened them it was dark out, the sun was finally gone, and when I turned to kiss her, she was gone too. I sat up, still confused and dim-eyed in the dark, and saw her standing on the balcony, framed in the door, a silver silhouette, still as a statue in the moonlight, looking down at the sea. And I called to her, I just said hey there you are—since I wasn’t supposed to know her name—and she might have heard me, or perhaps not, since she did not look back, she just stepped over the side and I heard her scream.

For a moment I did nothing. I felt like my arms and legs had turned to marble. Then I jumped up and ran to the balcony naked. I pushed through the curtains, which wrapped around me in the wind, like a veil I had to tear through or a cloud that had come between me and the moon, and I felt myself panic for a second and it all began to feel real once more. I looked over the balcony’s edge. I saw nothing. Not nothing. I saw dark water beating on dark rocks and throwing up moonlit foam. I saw white foam drooling over jagged black rocks. I saw dark cliffs black with trees. I saw the vast black ocean, starred with silver sparkles under a vast black sky. I saw waves. I saw white stars. I saw the moon.

29

I WON’T BORE YOU
with the details. The cops came and at first they weren’t sure they believed me. Yes a Ramona Doon had checked in, and yes she was missing, but dead? They treated me like a befuddled boyfriend who’d been ditched, until a body washed up with the dawn tide at which point they freaked out and held me, at a far less glamorous hotel, for the inquest. Although the corpse was too mangled by the fall, and too softened by the sea, for easy identification, a Doctor Parker, who had reported a woman missing in Pasadena, eventually arrived and informed the authorities that her real name was Mona Naught. He had been treating her at his psychiatric clinic for years, until she ran away. She had been, at best, depressed and troubled. At her worst she was delusional and most definitely a threat to herself. This was not her first try. The coroner returned a verdict of suicide and sent us home.

I had called Lala from a landline and left her a message canceling therapy. This time I was the one out of town on shady business. She didn’t call back. I also called Lonsky. He took the news as he took everything, his oceanic calm unchanged, the depths revealed only by a long sigh, after which he instructed me, in his usual rumbling baritone, to listen sharply to what the cops said and report in as soon as I returned.

30

AT FIRST, WHEN I TURNED
Lonsky’s corner, I thought the flashing lights were for me. I was somehow in trouble for something. Then I saw the ambulance parked alongside the cop car and the fire truck further down the street. Maybe Lonsky’s mother had suffered a heart
attack. I parked and joined the loose group of spectators on the sidewalk. The neighbors watched from their own lawns and porches.

“What happened?” I asked a fellow audience member, a Korean kid in shorts and a baggy T-shirt. He shrugged.

“Somebody was saying the dude’s too fat for the thing.”

The dude had to be Lonsky of course, but there were any number of things he might be too fat for. Had he gotten trapped in the house somehow? Fallen through a weak floorboard? Was this a jaws-of-life situation? Against my will, I pictured his mountainous flesh floundering among the shards of a shattered toilet.

“What thing?” I asked. The kid shrugged again.

But the answer was soon revealed. A small team of firemen and EMTs emerged from the house guiding a gurney on which a foam mattress was balanced with a sheet of plywood beneath it. Atop the gurney was Lonsky, in red silk pajamas, lashed to the mattress with thick straps. A napkin was loosely knotted around his neck and he seemed to be clutching a wooden spoon in one hand. Slowly the contraption was wheeled onto the porch, carefully held in balance by men on both sides.

“Oh shit,” the kid muttered respectfully, under his breath.

“What’s on his face?” I wondered aloud.

“That shit’s batter, yo!”

Indeed, Lonsky seemed to have chocolate frosting smeared around his mouth and cheeks. He licked his lips thoughtfully as more firemen laid planks over the steps. Madams Lonsky and Moon brought up the rear of the procession, Mrs. Moon weeping openly, Mrs. L. stoic, smoking a cigarette and scolding a fireman for stomping a flower with his boots. At one point the gurney’s wheel slipped off the ramp and, as the onlookers gasped, Lonsky listed dangerously to one side. But the men heaved and, groaning together like galley slaves in a storm, they righted his lurching bulk. As they rolled down the walk, Lonsky spotted me.

“Kornberg,” he called. “Kornberg!”

I approached the gurney, but was stopped by a cop.

“Hold it.”

“He’s calling me. He’s my um…” I hesitated.

“Kornberg!” Lonsky yelled, and now the float halted as he waved his spoon and rolled from side to side. “Let my assistant through! He’s my protégé!”

“That you?” the cop asked. “You that guy’s protégé?”

“I guess,” I said and crossed the lawn.

“Mr. Lonsky,” I said. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”

“Kornberg,” he called, and as I came closer, I saw that he was not tied down simply for balance. His face was distorted, red and wet with tears. I saw their traces in the dried frosting. “Kornberg…”

“Yes sir?”

He waved me closer still. His throat was ragged. He whispered. “Who killed her?” Everyone looked curiously at me.

“Who killed who, sir?” I asked.

Suddenly he howled, like a wounded beast, like a lion pierced by a spear. “My love!” He lunged at me, tearing the button from my shirt and nearly upsetting the cart as he struggled with his keepers. I gaped in shock. “Find the killer, Kornberg,” he moaned. “Avenge my love!”

Four men lay across his limbs while another slid a needle into the meat of his arm. He thrashed wildly, like Prometheus bound. Then he seemed to subside into himself and, as his servants strained to slide him into the ambulance, the great man drifted into sleep. Huffing, the EMTs shut the door while the sweat-drenched firemen mopped themselves off. The ambulance slowly pulled out, a bit low on its wheels, and the onlookers wandered away.

Mrs. Lonsky looked me over, tapping ash from her smoke. “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said. “Solar left your pay.”

PART III

PORTRAITS OF SOME LADIES

31

THE CASE OF THE CLUELESS HUSBAND

(
FROM THE FILES OF SOLAR LONSKY, DETECTIVE
)

THE SUBJECT OF THESE NOTES,
to whom I shall refer as K., first arrived at my office seeking employment as my assistant, though even in our first meeting, which took the form of a job interview, I was readily able to discern his true motives: he was coming to me for help, for relief from his own psychic pain. His wife had recently abandoned him. He was a failed novelist who had subsisted as a used bookstore clerk before ultimately failing at that as well. Well past the age when most men have established careers, homes, families, and positions of respect, he continued to flounder like a child, lost in his life, barely able to dress like a grown-up or seek a job without spousal prompting. Yet he seemed to have no idea why his wife might leave him. On the contrary, childish, grandiose, self-centered, and riven by hysterical fears and deep unconscious struggles that rendered him helplessly, perhaps hopelessly, neurotic, he blamed her and felt like an innocent victim. He had no glimmer of what might actually be going on, least of all within himself.