Every Man a Menace (12 page)

“These days, you gotta watch out for a person like that,” Jimmy Congo said.

He saw her two nights after that. She’d told him she lived in Kendall, and he said he’d pick her up out there. He wanted to see her house, even if it was just from the outside. But at lunch, he got a text from her:
Get me instead in Calle Ocho mall. Shopping pretty clothes crazy.

He picked her up at the mall. “Ave Maria!” she said, jumping in his Range Rover with two large shopping bags. “So much shopping! Look, look, look,” she said, waving her painted nails. “I got my nails painted for you!” She leaned in for a kiss, received it on her cheek, leaned back, and looked at him. “What?” she said. “You looking at me like I’m crazy!”

“You are crazy,” he said.

“Shh, no, he found out! Let me out of here!” She pretended to bang on the window. “And you? Oy! You crazy! Where we going, McDonald’s?”

In fact, he did take her to a cheap place, El Palacio de Los Jugos. He wanted to see how she reacted to a regular
restaurant. When he pulled into the parking lot she grabbed his arm and said, “No!” She stared at him with what seemed at first like horror, but was actually joy. “I love El Palacio,” she said. “How you know about it? It’s my favorite place!”

They ate fufu, salmon horneado, arroz con camarones, pollo a la milanesa. They drank guayaba juice and finished with flan. Vanya was in heaven. “Like Brazil!” she said. “How you know me so much?”

“I just do,” he said.

“You do?” she asked, looking at him from across the table, her eyebrow raised. A car honked from the street, and a child cried from a nearby table, but all Semion could comprehend was her face. Her beautiful, perfect face. Something about it reminded him of his grandmother.

When they got in the car, she pointed at her stomach, round with food. “I’m pregnant!” she said.

He took her to one of their other clubs, a place called the Factory. It was early in the evening; a few groups of people dressed in work clothes sat at scattered tables. The bartenders stood at attention when he walked in.

He had chosen this club because he knew Isaak wouldn’t be there. He ordered two drinks and took Vanya to a small windowless office in the back.

“Do you want to do something crazy?” he asked.

“I am crazy,” she said, stepping right in front of him.

“You like to sniff Molly?” he asked.

“Oh, my—what?”

“Does that mean yes?” he asked. He pulled out a small glass vial just like the one Jimmy Congo had used two days earlier.

“Yes!” she said. She danced with her shoulders. “Then we dancing, we talking,” she said. “All night, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

He tapped a small pile of powder out onto a desk, then touched the pockets of his pants. “Do you have a card I could use?” he said.

A shadow passed over her face and vanished. “Yeah, yes,” she said.

She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. The same one she’d had in his apartment. Her face looked calm, but she was quiet. She handed him her driver’s license.

“How cute,” he said, then made himself pause. “Candy Hall-Garcia?”

She sniffed, breathed, thought. “My fake ID,” she said finally, and seemed to blush. Then she looked him in the eyes.

“I need a green card,” she said, her accent disappearing. “Need a green card,” she said again, sounding like an American. A chill passed through him. She smiled big. “Ha ha, you like my American voice?” she said, switching back to her Brazilian accent. She brushed her chin, blinked like she was thinking, then sang: “I wear my stunna glasses at night” in accentless English. She looked at the drugs.

“I’m an actress,” she said, reverting to the voice he knew. “I do voices. You like?”

He did like it. It thrilled him. He liked it so much that he forgot his doubts.

They sniffed the drugs. Drank their drinks. He hugged her. She put her mouth near his ear. “I’m going to fuck you tonight,” she said.

He didn’t want to wait. Normally, he didn’t feel particularly sexual on Molly; tonight was different. He backed her against the desk. He could taste the guayaba juice in her mouth when they kissed, a hint of the drug underneath it. He kissed her neck, smelling her skin, her hair. She breathed loudly. He reached under her skirt and touched her thighs. But when he tried to pull her underwear down she pulled away, fanned her face, and said they needed another drink.

For Semion, it was a perfect evening. They went to different spots, places he’d never been, little bars with outdoor seating. Old men sat gathered in groups. They walked in together, his arm over her shoulder, her hip pressed to his. He listened to her talk, watched her eyes while she told stories. They sniffed more Molly, and even that felt new. It felt youthful.

He told jokes, and laughed at hers. He felt loose instead of rigid. The people around him all seemed lovely—perfectly lovely people in a lovely city. The weather matched his mood. The air, carried past them by a breeze, smelled like the sea. The only thing that seemed strange was the way Vanya kept checking the time.

If Semion’s romantic history was to receive a grade, it would read:
incomplete.
He’d had only a handful of meaningful relationships. The most serious was with an Israeli named Bina. He’d lived with her after the army for two and a half years. The rest had lasted a night, a week, a month.
You’re a coward,
Bina had said. Perhaps he was. He’d been beaten enough times—as a boy, a teen, a young man—for it to have had an effect on his psyche. His face,
when he looked in the mirror, reminded him of this: the nose crushed by the older Russian boy who’d taken his first skateboard, the eyebrow scarred in a drunken brawl in high school, the pale line above his lip, earned in a fight with a fellow soldier.

So why, on that night with Vanya, was he feeling such optimism? There was something about her that made him want to do things he never did. He wanted to cook for her, drive her somewhere, take a trip. He wanted to confess everything he’d done and start over. All because of some combination of voice, look, smell, spirit. He couldn’t make sense of it.

“Why you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her again. He couldn’t help himself. He smiled, but she pulled back.

“You seem crazy!” she said. “Let’s go,
bagacera,
come on.” She banged on the table. “You said we go dancing.”

She directed him to a Brazilian club. After pulling over a block away to sniff more Molly, they valeted the car. Inside, a small crowd was dancing to a battery of drummers onstage. She pulled him forward. Brazilian men pointed at him, smiled, gave him the thumbs up. He felt inspired. She was laughing and dancing; the drumming filled the room. Everything was perfect.

The last thing he remembered was her standing in the kitchen of his apartment—her hair tied back, her forehead slightly damp, her eyes dark. She’d said, “I make us one more drink.”

Pain in his head. Sharp, like nothing Semion had ever felt before. It was worse than a hangover. He stayed still for a moment, his eyes closed, as a wave of nausea passed through him. Guilty feelings, shame. A vague memory of a dream, something about a crowded room. He moaned quietly, touched his face, and wondered what the hell had happened.

He tried to open his eyes, but even in the dark, even with the blackout curtains drawn, it felt too bright.
Fuck me.
He reached out to where the girl should have been, but she wasn’t there. Empty space on the bed, and something wet. The bed was wet. He cracked his eyes open; the bed was covered in black paint.
Why is the bed covered in black paint?
He sat up a little more, then reached for the lamp and switched it on. The black became red. The paint became blood. The bed looked as though someone had butchered a lamb on it.

He cried out, fell to the floor, and dry heaved a few times. The pain in his head was unbearable. “Vanya!” he called out.
Shit, shit, shit.
He pushed himself up, the ground tipping and heaving, and stumbled out of the bedroom. The hallway, blindingly bright, stretched in front of him; he staggered to the bathroom, and in a slow movement, as though frightened of what might be on the other side, he pushed the door open.

The bathroom was empty and clean. He had expected to find her in there. Impossibly, he had convinced himself that the blood in his bedroom was somehow related to her period; now, the idea was absurd.

“Vanya!” he called out again.

He looked down at himself; he was wearing only his underwear. He realized now that there was blood on him, as well, blood on his right leg, his right arm. He lifted his
right hand and twisted it. It looked like it had been dipped in blood.

He searched every room in the apartment and found nothing. Besides the blood on the bed, and the blood on him, there was no sign of violence anywhere. Vanya’s bag was gone, along with her clothes. He checked the closets, pulled the couches away from the walls. She was nowhere.

He went to the front door, examining it for blood, and peeked out into the hallway. Nothing. He closed the door and locked the bolt and the chain. The pain in his head was unbearable. There was a bitter taste in his mouth he couldn’t place. His stomach cramped.

Okay,
he thought.
Okay, breathe.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to calm down.
Steps,
he told himself.
There are steps that need to be taken.

He went back to his bedroom and turned the overhead light on. There was even more blood than he’d thought: It had pooled in the middle of the bed and dripped and smeared all over the floor. There were spatters on the wall above the headboard. Even the ceiling—fourteen feet up—had been specked with blood. He bent down near the bed and sniffed: it was real, unmistakable.

In the bathroom he found two Xanax and four Advil. He took them with a glass of water. He found his phone in his pants and took it with him to the kitchen.
Think now,
he told himself.
Before you do anything, think.
He pressed the button on top of his phone and entered his passcode. It was 11:14 a.m. Nobody had called or texted. He checked his call history and confirmed that no calls had been placed from his phone since he’d met Vanya last night.

He weighed the pros and cons of calling her. There would be an electronic trail, the call’s time and location. He had called her last night, so he had already placed himself on that list. His hands sweated. He breathed in and out.
What are the scenarios?
An intruder could have broken in, killed her in the bed, and then taken her body away. It didn’t make sense, but nothing did. He could have killed her in the bed himself, in a blackout state, then called someone to collect the body—but there had been no calls from his phone. She could have hurt herself, somehow, packed up her bag, and walked out. But there was too much blood in the bed, and not enough anywhere else. He closed his eyes and tried to remember.

There was something just out of reach. He could see her face, a knife. She was laughing. A knife, a ceramic knife.

He stepped to the counter and opened a drawer. Six slots, five knives.
Motherfucker.

He thought back again. Before she’d jumped in his car, he had called her: she had a cell phone, he had a cell phone, they’d been together most of the night. The records would show them moving through Miami and returning to the apartment, both of their phones pinging cell phone towers as they went. He certainly wasn’t going to call the police now, not with a bed covered in blood and a missing woman they could tie him to.
Fuck me,
he thought.

He’d clean the place, then. He’d say they had returned here, gotten into an argument, and she’d left. That was it. That was the last time he’d seen her. That was his story.

But first he would call her.
Why would a man who killed a woman try to call her?
He opened his phone, breathed in
deep, and hit her number. It went straight to voice mail:
Hello, you have reached Vanya Rodriguez. Please leave me a message and I call you back soon, baby.
Her voice, the joy in it, shocked him. The phone beeped, and he left a message: “Hey Vanya, what’s up, lady? Just making sure you made it home safe last night. Call me back, okay? Ciao!” He hung up.

The Xanax kicked in. He drank another glass of water, then walked to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and got in. He scrubbed his hands, his arms, his legs, watching the blood turn pink on the tile.

He dressed for the gym: sweatpants, a long-sleeve T-shirt, running shoes. He grabbed his phone from the kitchen—still no calls—walked to the door of the apartment, and realized two things at the same time: first, as soon as he stepped outside, he was going to appear on the hallway security camera, and second, the same camera would have recorded whatever happened out there last night.

He stepped out and walked to the elevator. When the doors opened, he stepped in and hit 28, Isaak’s floor. The doors slid shut. A camera in the upper corner recorded him standing perfectly still.
Ding.
He stepped out and walked to Isaak’s door, aware of the camera in the hallway. He pressed the black buzzer.

Almost instantly, the door swung open. Isaak—freshly rested, showered, shaven, and composed—started to speak and then stopped. Semion watched his face—his mouth, in particular—as it transformed from a friendly smile to something more concerned.

“What the fuck?” Isaak said in English. “You look like fucking hell.”

Semion walked into the apartment and started crying. He couldn’t help it. He went to the couch and sat down. A moment later Isaak was standing over him, one hand on his shoulder and asking what was wrong.

Semion gathered himself. “Shit is really bad. Really fucked up. I don’t know what happened.”

“Cousin, cousin,” said Isaak. “Listen to me, from the beginning—tell me what the hell is going on.”

“The girl,” said Semion. “The Brazilian, Vanya. I saw her last night. I took her back to my place. We were fucked up. I passed out. When I woke up this morning, my bed …” He stopped talking for a moment, took a deep breath, and then continued. “My bed was covered in fucking blood. Everywhere, like a fucking—just blood, sheets, blanket, everything. And she was gone. Just gone. No sign of her.”