The detectives settle on entrées as follows: media noche and paillard of chicken. They each order a mochaccino beverage. Then they eat and listen. Christmas lights festoon the walls. Synthetic hits of the nineteen-eighties throb on the sound system.
“It’s . . . I . . . just thought, you know. I, uh,” Annabel Duffy replies. The detectives have missed the opening of the exchange. However, exact transcription of the remaining conversation follows: “I mean. It’s stupid that we never get together at all. We’re . . . I mean, working together in the same office and everything. We should be . . . And especially with all the pressure that this—”
“Television thing —”
“Yeah,” Annabel Duffy replies. A waitress saunters by, and the detectives begin to speak to the idea that there are secret affiliations between these women who don’t eat enough food. Look at that waitress. It’s as if they recognize one another or something. They are morphological kin. They are like greyhounds. And they are exchanging secret signals about what might be eaten without danger of caloric intake.
“I don’t know what to think. I hate television, know what I mean? I don’t even want to work there if we’re just going to be thinking up television shows.”
“I don’t even have one. A TV. I mean, I have one, I guess, but I don’t have it on very much. No cable or anything. I watch what’s that show the —”
Stampfel mentions the name of a certain show, and this show is not as audible as might be wished, and yet, using the most up-to-date digital editing tools, the detectives will later be able to surmise that Stampfel mentioned a popular television show about a pack of werewolves,
The Werewolves of Fairfield County.
By night, suburbanites are transformed into baying, lonely lycanthropes, and so forth. It’s a program that the detectives have not seen, though they have heard it is very popular among the young, for nearly four seasons now. In four years, many things can befall a lycanthrope. Meteor showers, droughts, floods, spontaneous forest fires, suburban sprawl, the complete elimination of nature, mad love. Such things make for ratings, which make for syndication.
“I watched some of one of the World Series games,” Jeanine says. “With a man.”
“Right. With —”
“How are we going to develop television stuff if neither of us watches any television? And Madison is going out to parties all night?” To the waitress: “Another one of these? When you get a chance?”
“Minivan is acting weird.”
“Totally.”
“She’s totally out of her mind, even on a good day.”
“I go home and cry,” Stampfel says. “I can’t do anything. My parents are worried. They’re saying I should just come back to Arizona. What’s so great about the movie business? Why do you have to be so far from home? Arizona is not as glamorous, but it’s . . . it’s —”
“We should film
there,
” Duffy says. “I mean, Arizona would be great. We could stay at some really good hotels, right? We could get massages.”
“Have you read the coverage?”
“Sure.”
“I thought it was really
junky,
personally. I don’t even think Madison reads the stuff. She just passes it on.”
“I didn’t think it was so bad,” Duffy says. The detectives turn, as if to signal for more hot sauce. It’s part of their undercover cloak of veracity. They only briefly attempt to catch a look at the awkward conversation of Annabel Duffy and her friend. The two of them are stabbing at salads as if they’re trying to put the salads out of some misery. “I like epics, big things, politics. And maybe it’s sort of fun to think of stories that anyone could like.”
“That’s so cynical. I don’t mind being, you know, the priss on the staff, so that everyone can feel all superior, and, well, yes, I guess I
do
mind it, it kind of hurts my feelings, but don’t expect me to pretend everything is fine. The story sounds like it was written by some romance novelist or something. In fact, Madison was telling me that the author
is
a romance novelist.”
“Come on, Jeanine. You know I —”
“Sorry . . . I’m —”
“Maybe it’s just, like I said, I’m worried that if we’re just doing television, then we’re all going to become —”
The suspect’s sister signals the waitress again, plunks down a large ring of keys on the table, keys as numerous as if she were a prison guard at a county jail.
Stampfel says, “I dated this guy from Harvard one time, and now he’s writing a reality show where people try to inform on their coworkers.”
“You don’t really —”
“No, you’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Look,” Annabel remarks, “Minivan wants us to hate each other; it’s like, it’s really easy to hate each other. That’s what professional women do, you know. They’re like, they’re supposed to hate each other and fight over the same men, all of that,” Duffy says. “I’m supposed to hate your projects, you’re supposed to hate mine. We’re both supposed to hate Madison’s projects, and we’re supposed to talk about what a bitch she is.”
“She is kind of a bitch.”
“And we’re not supposed to talk about Thaddeus.”
The detectives asphyxiate, momentarily, on extremely spicy Brazilian fare, because one bit of information available to the detectives that is perhaps not available to the two employees of Means of Production in the next booth is that a Casanova named Thaddeus Griffin has been romantically involved with
both
of these women. And that’s the least of it. One of the detectives tailed Mr. Thaddeus Griffin very recently, just for fun, and went to the gentlemen’s club with him and, just for fun, asked Thaddeus Griffin for an autograph in this gentlemen’s club. Contrary to stakeout protocol, of course, endangering the security of the investigation, et cetera, but the detective in question considered it information of a kind. Would Griffin bolt if recognized by an action film fan in a mob-owned strip club? Or would he return to the Asian lap dancer, the one who looked much like the victim of the crime they are investigating? Griffin brushed off the overture of the detective, shoved aside his black laundry-proof marker without comment. Later the same night, Griffin was observed outside the building of Annabel Duffy.
“You aren’t . . .” Stampfel stutters, can’t get it out. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Big deal. So we both slept with him,” Duffy observes. “He gave me chlamydia. That’s a boundary for me.”
“Do you think he slept with Madison? This is so embarrassing. I can think of some embarrassing things in my life, but I have never talked with someone who slept with the same guy as me. It’s just, uh, you know.”
What the waitress brings now is carrot cake and dessert forks, and the two women appear to have arrived at complete unanimity in the matter of dessert, the better to negotiate the awkwardness of their revelations. Further commentary on Griffin follows, some of it extremely embarrassing, as in the portion of the recording wherein Duffy asks Stampfel if Thaddeus Griffin started talking with her about “taking it to the next level.” Duffy guffaws at the recollection. No, Stampfel did not have any discussion about the next level, but Stampfel naturally asks, What is the next level?
“The next level is the level of
pain.
”
Which means? According to Duffy, as summarized briefly in the report of the detectives, the level of pain is chiefly the level of clothespins. And it is not the woman who must wear the clothespins, it is the woman who must apply the clothespins. Which means, deductively, that Griffin is the wearer of the clothespins. The target area for the clothespins is apparently the nipples of Griffin. At first. Then later, when the nipples have too reliably become the target area, the scrotal region becomes the target area for the clothespins. “It’s a lark,” according to Duffy, applying the clothespins to the scrotal region of Griffin. Maybe the scrotal application of clothespins to a major Hollywood action film star makes Annabel Duffy want to jangle her keys—this is more than audible on the tape. And yet the detectives also wonder how Duffy, sister of the suspect in a major felonious assault, can casually eat a luncheon and discourse on scrotal application of clothespins. And yet they are enough bemused by the scrotal application, and the application of clothespins to inner thigh, likewise the words
binder clip,
which in this context must be considered extremely painful, that they fail to notice some of the rather strange twists and turns of this conversation.
“He never asked any of that sort of thing of me,” Jeanine says, devouring the last bite of cake. “I guess it didn’t get that far. I started to feel guilty about his wife.”
“That’s the thing that made me
want
to attach the clothespins. The fact that he hurt so much when they were on, it was like he was feeling as bad as he should have felt about his wife. He’d be sweating and whining and saying ‘ouch’ over and over. It was kind of funny. The worst part, you know, is the part where you take the clothespins off. That’s the part that really hurts. You get used to them while they’re on, I mean, not that I know personally, but that’s what he said. But then he would take the clothespins off, and he would just be crying out when he did it. I put all this in my screenplay. You know, he promised to help me with my screenplay, that liar, so I guess maybe he finally did, because at least now I know that clothespins hurt more when you take them off.”
“If my parents found out about this, they’d make me get on a plane immediately. If I said New York was like a man who can’t get an erection and who wants you to attach clothespins to him.”
“He couldn’t —”
“He tried to make up for it in other ways.”
“I mean, not like I’m a size queen or anything. It’s a cute little one.”
Another piece of carrot cake appears, as though agreed upon earlier in the secret signals of the union of anorexic women. Where the conversation seemed awkward and even tense before, now a common ground has been established between the sister of the suspect and her coworker, and the detectives are beginning to feel as though they have held their table longer than they ought. They are wondering whether they might repair to Union Square Park, there to await the next move of Duffy. One of the detectives stands, stretches languorously, heads for the men’s room. Here is what he glimpses as he strides past: He glimpses the moment when Annabel Duffy has taken the hand of Jeanine Stampfel in her own and is examining the “life line” of Jeanine Stampfel as if they were thirteen-year-old girls engaged in teen occult behavior. What’s with young people these days? Is adolescence now decades long? Thinking of none of this, the detective takes a deluxe leak. Much needed after sitting in the car all that time. While soaping up, he wonders if his wife will have the football game on when he gets home. Will there be chips?
Back at the booth, his partner is ready to leave. The audio recorder is hidden away on his person. After paying, one detective says to the other that they have a lot of paperwork ahead. The other replies that they should cut it short. There’s always tomorrow. All of this while they are walking past the two women, as if they and the women have no connection at all, as if the city is not a chaotic network of lost connections and near misses. Only after they pass the hostess does one detective look back, one last time, to see that the Duffy woman has now rolled up the sleeve of the other, the Stampfel woman, and what she has revealed on the arm of Stampfel are tremendous third-degree-burn scars.
Burn scars? Is that really what he saw? Did he really see what he thought he saw? wonders the detective. A man of inexhaustible fact, our detective, a man of inches and yards, a man who admits to nothing in the way of uncertainties. A man who is now seeing a beautiful blonde with third-degree-burn scars over the majority of her arm, perhaps both arms. And what about the high-necked blouse she’s wearing? Because of burns? Where do you get that kind of burn? And what does that kind of burn feel like, and how many weeks are you in the burn ward with that kind of a burn? Sometimes he is suffocated by the darkness of his job. He thinks longingly of the purity of the original glazed doughnut.
The door swings in, and an I formation of hungover Europeans clogs in the threshold, impeding the progress of the two detectives. Bound for Bloody Marys and football games on inaudible monitors. Were they as observant as detectives, these carousers would overhear the end of the conversation, would overhear the Duffy woman ask the Stampfel woman how she got this, this molten bubbling along the length of her forearm.
“Because I noticed the, uh, you know, in the office, I think I noticed like the first or second day, how could I not notice.”
Quietly. “I was in a fire.” And then, inexplicably, the Stampfel woman asks: “Are they gone?”
To which the Duffy woman replies, “Yeah, I think.” In the lowest of tones, while the scars lay exposed to the air, the drama of burns. “They always
look
like police, you know? Not like I had any doubt. Their sneakers are too new.”
“Where is he?”
“In Massachusetts. I think. Or he was there Friday. He might be still moving around. He knows not to call me now. But that only makes me more worried.”
“And he didn’t do it? Whatever they’re saying he did?”
“Guess how many black bike messengers there are in New York City?” Annabel says. “Okay, look, what I want you to do, I mean, if you feel like you
can
do it, is to take the key to his studio, see if you can get into his studio, get his computer and his cell phone. Because he says he was in his studio during the time when the woman was, uh, assaulted. Then if you can, just bring it all to work tomorrow. The computer and the phone. Just bring them in. There should be stuff on the computer that will prove —”
Even more urgent is the confederacy of the moment.
“His computer has everything on it, lots of his work, lists of things he ate, proposals for new works, and it’ll have some kind of alibi on it, and the phone bill will have his phone records on it. I’m supposed to take the computer and the phone to a lawyer in midtown. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I won’t, you know, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you can’t do it. But if you can, it’s like the sweetest thing anyone ever did.”