Authors: Daphne Uviller
I stood in the middle of James’s living room. Looking out his window was a slightly itchy experience because the view was just past what I could see out my own window, like being able to see beyond the borders of a photograph. He could see right into the lobby of the apartment building across the street, whereas I could just glimpse the door opening and closing and the occasional flash of the doorman’s brown- and- gold uniform. His window only had the outermost branches of Mrs. Hannaham’s apple tree in front of it, but my view was cluttered by leaves in the summer.
I wasn’t the only one titillated by unfettered access. Mercedes was on her tiptoes, leaning as far through the tape as she could without actually entering the apartment.
“Oh, for God’s sake, just come in,” I told her. “Help me look for the keys.”
Mercedes put her feet down flat and backed away. “I’m not taking any chances. If Denzel could get pulled over by police, then I can, too.”
“You, my friend, are no Denzel Washington. And it wasn’t him, it was some other guy. You should keep your peeps straight.”
“Don’t say ‘peeps,’ cracker. If you don’t start looking around, I’m leaving.”
“Okay, okay! Don’t go!” I decided to check the kitchen
drawers first, since in my apartment that was where I kept spare keys, expired coupons, and a protractor that had stayed with me since eighth grade geometry class. I practically tiptoed down the hall.
“Do you see anything?” Mercedes stage- whispered.
“Other than the dead body?”
Annoyed silence.
“No, nothing yet.” I tentatively pulled out a drawer. Flat ware! The next drawer had … a bottle opener! I opened some equally unrevealing cabinets with a growing fear/excitement that I’d be required to look around the rest of the apartment. I now knew that James had only four plates, none of which matched, though he had four shelves loaded with glasses.
I opened his refrigerator. An unremarkable jumble of stained take- out containers, crusty condiments, and a stash of film and batteries took up most of the space. But the bottom shelf made my breath catch. On one side were ten perfectly aligned bottles of Brooklyn Lager while the other held ten equally organized jars of Marmite, that noxious, dun- colored yeast spread, beloved only by Brits and likely the real cause of the Revolutionary War.
Here was my first encounter with a psychopath’s refrigerator. It made me revise my developing theories about who the real James was. After last night, I had assumed that the British accent was the act, or the secondary persona, but now I wondered. What if no psych researcher had ever done a study of multiple personality patients’ refrigerators? Maybe I had before me a crucial diagnostic tool. How many new credits would I need to apply for a doctorate in psychology? I had my dissertation right in front of me. It could be a breakthrough in mental health studies …
“Zeph?” Mercedes sounded nervous.
I quickly shut the refrigerator door.
“Nothing in the kitchen. I’m going to the bedroom.”
“Okaaay.”
“What, you think I shouldn’t?” I hustled back to the front door, where Mercedes was still standing guard.
“No, I think you should hurry up.” She paused. “Did you find anything?”
“Mismatched plates and ten jars of Marmite.”
“What?”
“Marmite!” I was getting antsy and energized. A breeze blew through the apartment, bringing with it the stench of garbage from the holds below, and I realized the window had been left open all night. I went to shut it, kneeling on the comfy window seat James had built for himself. I thought of window seats as furniture for pensive, sedentary people, not psychotic supers. Maybe when he was done caulking the leak in the water heater, the British James took over and read sonnets aloud to himself, looking outside and conjuring up the windblown cliffs of Dover.
James had a small fireplace. On his marble mantel were some girly- looking scented candles that accounted for the spicy smell of the living room, and two framed photographs sitting side by side. An innocuous family reunion photo of old aunts with stale smiles gathered on an anonymous porch? A big- haired, underdressed girlfriend? Some slovenly buddies with cans of beer and a big fish on a dock? Oh, how I wished.
They were two identical photos of James. Just James. Big, smiling, identical portraits of just James grinning out at his apartment. Flanked by candles, like a shrine.
“Euww! Euw, euw. Euwwwwww!” Shivers propelled me back toward the front door.
“What?!” Mercedes poked her head through the tape. “What euw?!”
“Photos.”
“Of… ?” I watched her imagination run wild.
“Himself.”
“Naked?”
“No! But just him, two photos of just him. And they’re the same photo.”
“What!” At that, Mercedes climbed over the tape and headed for the hearth. She stood openmouthed at the little alter ego altar. Mercedes’s firm presence and the discovery of the all- bets- are- off photo gallery made me relax. I uncurled my toes, brought my shoulders down from my ears, and started moving through the apartment with more confidence. My parents owned this place. James was a crook. I had a mission. If I didn’t look at the yellow police tape, there was nothing wrong with this picture.
Keys, I reminded myself firmly I needed to find the keys to the garbage hold. I was not snooping.
I left Mercedes to gawk at the pictures and headed for James’s bedroom. The stench hit me the second I opened the door. The room smelled like guy. Not the good guy smell, not the kind that makes you think of the spot on his neck where the hair ends in a barber’s neat line, and smooth, innocent skin beckons for a nuzzle. Not the smell that makes you think of tendony tan wrists and a T-shirt hanging just the right way off a trim back. No. This was the smell of yesterday’s boxers and last month’s sheets. Of solo sex and dank carpet. It brought to mind hair- clogged razors, and toothpaste splatters on the mirror.
I held my breath and picked my way across the sticky carpet, trying not to step on the piles of tangled clothes emitting deadly fumes. The nightstand was strewn with tattered
Hustlers
fighting for space with pulp- encrusted juice glasses. I grimaced and peered under the bed. It was home to dust bunnies
and a bowl with once- soggy cornflakes stuck to the sides. Gingerly, I pulled out a couple of plastic bins that looked promising, but they yielded only boxes of screws, nails, tape, and tape measures.
I stood up and opened one of the two closet doors. Or tried to. I gave it another tug before realizing it was locked. A locked closet in a criminal’s—well, an
alleged
criminal’s—home. What was in there? If I pried open the door and discovered stacks of crisp hundred- dollar bills, would my ethics withstand the test? Here I was, living a life of comfort and health and good fortune. Still, I was pretty sure I might try taking a stack of bills. In my defense, though, after I’d allotted a budget for a ten-minute—no, fifteen- minute—chair massage at a local nail salon once a week—no, once a month; no, once a week—I would do really good things with that money. Rescue abandoned dogs, fund Doctors Without Borders, take out full- page ads warning all women not to date Hayden Briggs.
But how much was actually in the closet? And what if it was marked? The phrase had always brought to mind a big black spot on the corner of the bill, but my keen legal instinct sensed that that was probably an inaccurate image. Was this money planted by cops who had recorded the serial numbers? Oh, the shame that would befall my parents if I was found stealing stolen money!
The bedroom door creaked and I gasped.
“Nervous Nelly. Stealing contraband?” Mercedes asked. She pressed her lips together. “Mmm, I smell vintage pizza somewhere.”
“This door is
locked,”
I told her ominously. She came over and rattled it. She squatted down and studied the doorjamb. Then she pulled harder and the door flung open. My heart jumped and for a moment I actually conjured up stacks of
cash. Then my brain righted itself and my excitement abated. There were clothes in the closet. Shoes, belts, shirts, baseball caps, jeans, work gloves.
“Nervous
and
weak,” Mercedes concluded.
“You know, with friends like you—”
“You’re so much more interesting. Any keys, Sherlock?”
Just as I was shaking my head, we heard a raspy French voice call from the front door.
“Allo? Ees anyone zair?”
I darted out of the bedroom and found Roxana poking her perfectly messy topknot through the police tape.
“Mrs. Hannaham thought she smelled smoke!” I burbled, my face heating with unwarranted guilt. I had a legitimate reason for traipsing around a crime scene, damn it. “And also, I needed to look for the keys to the garbage hold.” I nodded my head toward the window and wrinkled my nose for emphasis.
“What happeent last night?” She furrowed her pretty little brow, scanning the living room nervously.
I shrugged, feeling, as I always did with her, inexplicably eager for some sign that she liked me.
“James was arrested.”
She nodded, waiting for more.
“Uh, it turns out he was embezzling? From the oil delivery company?”
She shook her head slightly and raised her eyebrows as if to say, And?
I racked my brain, wanting to appear knowledgeable. “Well, we’re going to look into whether he was stealing from the building,” I added, realizing at that moment that we should look into whether he was stealing from the building.
“Do you sink I could … ?” She gestured at the apartment, and a shock of adrenaline jerked through me.
“No ! I mean …” Although I was entirely comfortable with my own nosiness, I held others to higher standards. I was the co- heir to these four stories, and now the overseer of them, but Roxana had no business poking around a crime scene. I was disappointed in her.
My disapproval must have shown, because she stepped back and said, “Naw, naw, of course nut. I was jus kewriaus.” Her instant demurral made me feel like I had the upper hand at something.
Mercedes appeared from behind me, triumphantly brandishing an enormous ring of keys.
“Roxana, Mercedes. Mercedes, Roxana,” I said.
“We’ve met before.” Mercedes nodded agreeably.
Mercedes and Tag and Lucy and Abigail had only ever encountered Roxana while passing her on the stairs, but the Gaul Gal, as Abigail had dubbed her, was a never- ending source of fascination for the Sterling Girls. She exuded a smoky, husky aura that we could only ever hope to achieve via a DNA transplant. We wanted the gravelly voice without having to smoke. The lissome figure without having to forgo Oreos. The cheekbones without getting implants.
But more than her looks, we wanted her air of mystery. She was reserved, private, and, therefore, sophisticated. In contrast, the five of us couldn’t keep a secret from one another for more than the time it took to think “I’m going to keep this to myself.” We were open books, and nothing was off- limits. Not the unrequited crush Abigail had nursed for her married thesis advisor. Not the gruesome details of Lucy’s father’s fatal cancer. Not the description of the stomach virus Tag acquired during a twenty- four- hour journey to the east coast of Africa. Not the blow- by- blow accounts of the shedding of our respective virginities.
We also never hesitated, with Lucy’s embryonic expertise at the helm, to analyze anyone’s relationship with her mother, or her approach to dating, or to make sweeping declarations about how each of us ought to approach life.
“Abigail, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to be the academic star your mother is. Just be good to yourself.”
“Mercedes, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to be someone your father wouldn’t have left, but it was his fault, not yours. Be good to yourself.”
“Lucy, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy telling people to be good to themselves. Some of your clients really are homicidal criminals who don’t deserve to be good to themselves.”
To anyone else, we would be deathly repetitive and unforgivably self- involved. But we never tired of ourselves. I was pretty sure, on the other hand, that Roxana and her friends didn’t analyze one another ad nauseam and without a license. Come to think of it, I’d never seen her in the company of anyone else, Mrs. Hannaham’s accusations of promiscuity notwithstanding. Did you have to drop all your friends to be sophisticated?
Was
it immature to have so many people to keep track of, as though you weren’t discerning enough? Was I guilty of quantity and not quality? Which of my girls could I possibly live without?
“Ah, yis, how are you?” Roxana said now, eyeing the jangling tangle Mercedes was clutching. There were about twenty keys on the ring.
“One of these has to be for the garbage bins, right?” Mercedes asked.
“Are those James’s?” Roxana asked.
I nodded, but Mercedes said, “Well, technically, they belong to the building. They belong to the Zuckermans.”
Roxana raised her arm as if she was going to ask something else, but changed her mind.
“Aw kay. Well,” she gazed at the keys, “keep me on zuh post.”
Mercedes looked confused, but I answered, “We will, we’ll keep everyone posted.”
I should get a job at the U.N., I thought. I was really good at bridging cultural divides. I could start out as a hostess of some sort, shepherding the wives of foreign leaders around the city, showing them the true gems. Not the Olive Gardens and the Gaps and the other insidious chain predators that had tragically devoured New York. Not the stifling department stores or the Empire State Building, but the excavated, 17
th
-century ruins beneath Broad Street and the spice markets in Jackson Heights. The hidden gardens behind the Church of St. Luke in the Fields on Hudson Street and the peaceful, abandoned stretch of Pier 40’s western end, one of the few places a New Yorker could be alone outside. The ex-cons playing chess with the stockbrokers in City Hall Park and the sunset on the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The aquatic memorial of the Merchant Marine who drowned over and over, each time the Hudson River lapped over his head.
The first lady of Iran/Iraq/Libya would confess during a stroll past the Chelsea Market waterfall how refreshing it was to speak candidly—a decade and a half with the Sterling Girls would turn out to have been training for my true calling—and we’d forge a plan for peace between our countries. I would pitch my idea to save the world by getting young boys in aggressive countries to read novels. If these potential terrorists could only read something besides the Bible or the Koran, all the energy spent learning how to blow themselves up would instead be spent blowing their minds with Steinbeck, Defoe, Marquez, Dickens, Lahiri, Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Patchett. We would share the Nobel Peace Prize.