I’d love to, Serena. He almost hit himself in the head with the palm of his hand. But she didn’t correct him. Serena was proffered and Serena was accepted. Maybe she didn’t notice, or care enough to.
Or maybe she did.
She lifted the yellow crime-scene tape and waited for him to stoop under it.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said. “Eyes only, okay? I’m bending the rules now as it is.”
He nodded, just a half step behind her now, Serena’s two-way radio snapping and crackling, advertising other crimes in other places. She was quiet, too. On display was the Thomas Edison Collection: beer bottles, ashtrays fat with cigarettes (some of which appeared to be homemade), a broken wine bottle, stacks of newspaper inserts, socks and shoes and blue jeans piled in a corner, an oversized yellow blanket on the couch, a wooden African mask with hollowed-out eyes and puckered lips leaning against the coffee table. It had been here before, he remembered, the sole decoration, hanging above the couch like the stolen face of God. And the Christmas tree, still lit.
Then he looked down at his feet. “Serena,” he said. “Look.”
He pointed to the spot where it appeared that a teeny amount of red wine had spilled. But it wasn’t wine; even he knew that. Serena gently encircled the wrist on his right hand and pulled him back. “Thank you,” she said softly. “But we saw this and got a sample.” Even so, she kneeled to take a closer look, and, as she did, the reality of what had happened hit Bronfman hard. A man had been killed here. Right here. Feet from his own apartment. Shot three times. What if Bronfman had been home when it happened? What if he had left his apartment to investigate? It was highly unlikely that he would have left the relative safety of his own apartment to investigate the source of gunfire—but what if? Sheila was right. He should move.
Bronfman shuddered, dizzy, but not Serena. She had been in places like this a dozen times, he suspected. To her this was nothing, the same way filling out a shipping form at work was nothing to Bronfman. This was a thought he’d have much later; now his mind was an immense blank canvas. He didn’t even realize that he was in the early stages of falling apart until Serena placed a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“What?” he said. “Oh, I know. It’s just—”
“I know.” She kept her hand on his shoulder for a few more moments, and then a moment more, her hand still there on his shoulder, and still there still—what an amazing gentle strength she had, her hand not moving until his shaking subsided. “I remember my first time. We were in someone’s bedroom, and it was so dark, and I barely knew my partner. Didn’t know what to expect. It was scary.”
Her hand was still on his shoulder. “Have you been working out?” she said.
“A little.”
“I can tell.” She winked, playfully for a woman at a murder scene. “Keep it up.”
She removed her hand and turned down the dials on her walkie-talkie.
“So is there anything, Bronfman? Anything you notice at all?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t—it was always like this, I think.”
“Do you mind coming into the bedroom with me?” She could tell that he was fragile and treated him accordingly. “Just for a minute?”
“Yes,” he said. “I mean no.”
They walked in together. What a squalid place it was. He remembered the mattress on the floor, the clothes strewn hither and yon, a book about kickboxing, a People magazine, more beer cans and wine bottles and cigarettes.
But no rug. The rug was gone.
“Nothing?” she asked.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I wish I could help.”
“It was a long shot,” she said. “But everything’s a long shot in this business.”
She took another long, slow look around and sighed. “I hate it,” she said. “I hate it when it comes to this. I knew him a little bit, you know, took him in a couple of times. He was an okay guy.”
“He told me,” Bronfman said. “That he knew you.”
“He did?” She turned to Bronfman as if he could be of real help, at last, could give her something she needed. “He remembered me?”
“He did,” Bronfman said. “He remembered you with a sort of … fond respect.”
Serena nodded. “That’s nice,” she said. “That’s really nice.” She sighed. “But someone was going to kill him sooner or later. You know? He had the mark. Some people are just born to be killed.”
And she didn’t move. Neither of them did until they heard a pound dog bark, a lone howler, snapping them back into the world. “Do you ever just want to get away from all this?” she said. “The world can be such a seedy place. Sometimes I just want to get in the car and go.” She smiled. “Don’t tell my sergeant I said that, though.”
“Like where?”
“Where what?”
“Where do you want to go?”
She raised her face and stared up and away toward some idea or feeling that only she could see hovering there. “That’s an easy one,” she said. “The beach. I love the beach. The sound the ocean makes. The wind blowing through the sea oats. The smell of sunblock—I even love that.” Then she sort of laughed, moving toward the exit. “We can dream, right?”
“Right,” he said. “Because how else can a dream come true?” He had read that on a greeting card, and he believed it. His dream, for instance, had been to go to the beach with a companion. That had been his dream since he first spoke to Carla D’Angelo, Operator 61217. For so long it had seemed that his companion was going to be Sheila, but now that seemed more and more remote. Enter Serena, who loved the beach and who, even Bronfman could tell, liked him, at least a little bit.
This time he lifted the crime-scene tape for her, because it was the gentlemanly thing to do. Then he said, “Let me walk you to your car,” and he felt, as he said it, that he could not have come up with a more absurd thing to say. Who walks a policewoman to her car?
But she let him. He even opened the door, though he wondered if he was breaking the law again by doing so. But she seemed pleased by the gesture.
“Thank you, Bronfman,” she said. “No one has ever done that for me before.”
“Really?”
“Not my police-car door.”
“I bet men are opening your regular car door all the time.”
She laughed. “Oh, yeah. All the time. Because I go on so many dates.”
She waited. His hand was still on the top edge of the door, holding it open, and she placed her hand next to his, preparing to close it. His hand and her hand were touching, and neither of them made a move to change their positions.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” she said.
“Do you think I was born to get killed?”
Not the question she expected, but she recovered quickly. She looked him over, thinking about it. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. You’ll live to a ripe old age and die in your sleep, surrounded by people you love.”
“Sounds good,” he said.
“Doesn’t it?”
Then she got into her car and started the engine and rolled away, and waved to him as she was leaving, her arm fully extended out of her window, swaying back and forth like a tree in a hard wind.
SEVEN
Bronfman did not call Sheila the moment he got home, as he had told her he would. It wasn’t that he forgot to. It was that he didn’t have room for her, or for anything else, in his head right now. There were too many things in there already, too many images, thoughts, ideas, blood-curdling action scenes: Serena’s hand on his shoulder, Skip Sorsby lugging his box of stuff to his lousy Roebuck apartment, Mary Day’s service that morning, his mother asleep on the bed where he was conceived—it was all floating around in there like chunks of space debris. His mind was a gloppy broth. He couldn’t call her. But the idea that he was supposed to call her hovered around the outside of his head like a cartoon fly, buzzing in endless circles. He recognized
this fly. It was the same one that buzzed around his head when he knew that he should call his mother, when he would imagine her at the kitchen table with the telephone in her hand, ready to pick up after the third ring—waiting, so as not to appear too needy. He would try to ignore the fly, try swatting it away, but eventually he would give in and call.
Just as he did tonight.
As predicted, the telephone rang three times before she picked up.
“Hello?” Bronfman said. “Mom?”
He called her, on average, every other night, and went to see her between two and three times a week. He had, of course, been raised by her, and had really never been more than a few hours away from her since the day he was born. Still, he didn’t know this woman anymore, if he ever did. He didn’t know which Muriel Bronfman he would get when he called, who she would show him, which one of the million new selves she had access to now that she’d lost track of who she really was.
Pause. Then a tentative, “Yes? Who is this?”
“This is Edsel, Mom,” he said. “Your son.”
Beat. “Of course it is,” she said, clearly relieved, as if there were other children out there she hadn’t wanted to hear from. “The phone rings constantly. Bettina refuses to answer it; I don’t know why. Yes, I’m talking about you, Bettina!” she screamed to some distant corner of the house. She came back to the phone with a softer voice. “Thank you so much for calling, and for thinking of your old mother.”
“I think of you all the time.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t. And you shouldn’t. I’d just be a distraction from your extraordinary adventures.”
“My extraordinary adventures?”
Had he told her the name of the company? He couldn’t remember. Maybe. But, even if he had, that would have been weeks and weeks ago. How could she have remembered it?
“Yes,” she said. He felt her easing back into her pillow, settling in. “Tell me all about them. Tell me a tale.”
“Well,” he said. “Okay. I’ll tell you something. But don’t let it frighten you, because I’m fine. I wasn’t here when it happened, and it’s all over now. But the man who lived in the apartment next to me was murdered today.”
“What?? Holy shit! That’s fantastic!” she said. “Bettina! Someone was murdered in the apartment next door to my son!”
It was as if he’d won another prize, or been elected to high office.
“What happened? Tell me!”
“Well, I went over there, just now, with the police, because they thought I might be able to help them solve the crime.”
“And? Did you, Detective Bronfman?”
“There was blood on the carpet.”
“Oh, my God!” she said. “That’s horrific. Blood. A lot of it?”
“No,” he said. “Just a few drops.”
“Even so,” she said. “Blood is blood. Methinks I would have fainted dead away. Were they nice—the police? Sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not. I’m interested in how they were with you. Did he thank you?”
“It was a policewoman,” he said. “You met her, remember? Serena? Serena Stanton.”
“Serena fucking Stanton!” She laughed. “Do I remember her? Do I ever. It’s a cliché, I know, but good Lord, uniforms are sexy. There’s something in our snake brain that just loves a uniform. The Orkin man was here the other day, and I had a thing just watching him walk around the front yard with his tool in his hand. Are you going to see her again?”
“Who?”
“The policewoman,” she said. “Stay with the program! Pay attention!”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe. She’ll probably come back.”
“I love it that you’re out there doing all these things. Solving crimes and breaking hearts.”
“That’s me,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve always known who you were. Bettina! The show is back on! Parker just got on the plane. Look who he’s sitting next to!” She laughed. “I have to go, honey, but, really quick—Tell me how Sheila is.”
“Sheila,” he said.
“She was sweet on you, if I remember correctly. Cute as a button.” She paused. “There is a Sheila, isn’t there? I’m not making her up.”
“No,” he said. “She makes herself up.”
His mother said something, but her words were muted. Her voice became small and distant. He could imagine the phone being dropped into the folds of the bed covers, totally forgotten. If he wanted, he could listen to them watch the television all night. But he didn’t want to.
Bronfman shut his phone, and everything was quiet and still and he felt a little more settled until a moth crashed into the windowpane. Maybe the moth was the ghost of Thomas Edison. The spirits of the recently departed were known to come back in the form of animals that couldn’t talk. On cue, a sliver of ghostly yellow light shot into the room. But there was no mystery about its true source. Bronfman had seen this light many times before, and he knew exactly what it was.
It was Thomas Edison’s porch light. Somebody had turned it on.
EIGHT
It was one of those errant June nights, heavy and warm but with a layer of cool beneath it, a night that should have been a name all its own, something like Echtenburger or Morgansturgen, one of those ridiculously precise German words. Bronfman walked outside and unfastened his shirt a button to let the air filter in through his collar. He could feel the sweat dripping down his chest like raindrops sliding down a windowpane. He could feel his blood thrumming in his ears.
Yes, Edison’s porch light was on, and the door was open, and there was someone inside. He couldn’t tell who was inside, or how many of them there were. All he saw was an eerie shadow floating across a wall. Like a ghost, really. Like the ghost of Thomas Edison. He knew it wasn’t a ghost—because there were no such things as ghosts, something he had to tell himself more often than a grown man should—but certainly it could have passed for one. The crime-scene tape had been ripped away. The shadow loomed large against the living-room wall. A big guy, he surmised, broad, muscular, pitiless. Bronfman froze, watching the man’s dark reflection. What was he doing? Impossible to say. Looking for more drugs? Money taped to the bottom of the couch? Or simply removing clues he knew had been left behind, because this might very well be the killer returning to the scene. Because returning was what killers did.
These were his choices, then: a thief, a drug addict, or a murderer. Who else could it have been?
It was Coco. She was sitting on the couch, her miniature body engulfed by the cushions, her cowboy-booted feet resting atop the glass living-room table, the overwhelmed ashtray on one side and a half-crushed can of Miller High Life on the other, the can covered in ash and stuffed so full of butts that one of them couldn’t even get all the way in. She glanced at Bronfman without expression. She was wearing a green T-shirt with a drawing of a roller coaster and dates and times for the 2005 State Fair—many years ago. Brown corduroys, the boots. And looking at Bronfman as if she had expected him, or—more likely—didn’t care that he was there at all.
“Hi,” he said. “Coco.”
“Bronfman,” she said. “Being neighborly, are you?”
She pushed a beer can over with her foot, and the gross liquid spread across the glass. Bronfman could smell it from where he was.
There was only one light on in the entire room, a table lamp to her left. He could see one side of her face, but the other was in shadow. It looked dramatic, even felt dramatic, to Bronfman.
“You’re breaking the law,” she said. “Being in here. You know that, right?”
“I guess so,” he said. “But so are you.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. Breaking the law is one of my pastimes.” For about half a second, she smiled. “Sit.”
She pointed at the La-Z-Boy facing her. He sat. Coco almost laughed.
“That was his chair,” she said. She looked numb, her eyes flat. “Nobody sat in that chair but him, and if the
y did he opened up a can of shit on them.” She bit her lower lip, quivering as if from the cold. “He could be un-pre-dictable.”
“Do you want me to get out of the chair?”
“Naw. He’s dead,” she said, winking. Her eyes were almost black. “I think you’re safe.”
Bronfman had never met anyone like Coco. She reminded him of a field mouse, even though he had never seen a field mouse and wasn’t entirely sure what one was, or how it might be different from a house mouse. He just thought of this scared little thing lost in a vastness. That was her. He felt the same now, and she saw it.
“You couldn’t have saved him, Bronfman,” she said.
“I know it,” he said. But he didn’t know. Had he been here instead of taking Sorsby to Roebuck, he might have been able to do something. He might have heard a scuffle taking place through the paper-thin walls, gotten on the phone with Serena, who would have come immediately, with backup.
She shook her head. “This is the last time you’ll see me here,” she said, but not, it appeared, to Bronfman. She was talking to the apartment itself—to the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and whatever invisible spirit lived within them now. “Last time you’ll see me on this crappy old couch, waiting for whatever comes next, whatever it was Tommy thought up to do.” She turned to Bronfman. “He had all these great ideas,” she said. “I called him Ben Franklin sometimes, just to fuck with him. For some reason, that really pissed him off.”
He watched her glow a little in the sad memory of that world, gone now, where Benjamin Franklin pissed Thomas Edison off. Bronfman watched her the same way he would be watching TV, on a channel he had accidentally surfed to, curious, about to click—but then gradually becoming absorbed. Really, who was she? What weird subcultural group (hoarder, angry ex-wife, addicted to hairspray or Styrofoam, secretly famous) did she belong to? He was mystified by her very existence.
“Well, he was always nice to me,” Bronfman said.
She laughed. “Except for the time he broke into your apartment and stole all your shit.”