Palindrome (32 page)

Suicide. I'm the closest I've ever been to understanding it now. I'd give almost anything not to feel the way I feel right now. No question that feeling
nothing
would be an improvement.

Better to have never been born . . .

God, she better not have touched a hair on Sadie's head. If she has, I won't be able to contain myself. How do you negotiate reasonably with someone who has hurt your daughter?

Who is she—­and why does she want the tape—­if she's not Savannah's sister?

If she's not Savannah's sister, the whole story about speaking to Silas at the trial was probably bullshit, so how does she even know about it? Maybe she just saw that grainy video online? Because it was certainly never in her possession: Silas turned himself in with it, then sent it to Candy, then Candy's father got it and carried it back to the cabin for what must have been a weird ­couple hours, communally freezing themselves to death.

“Greta” fabricated an identity and visited Silas in prison before he sent it to Candy, which is a lot of dedication for someone who's only seen a twenty second video clip. In fact, nothing makes sense if she's never heard the tape herself, and knows for sure that it exists.

Could she have heard it between when Silas killed Savannah and turned himself in ten days later?

That seems like the only possibility.

I think about that first dream I had of Savannah in the motel room, where she was pleading incomprehensibly. Then imagine her leading me down the mountain, stopping at the edge of the meadow and pointing. I know she has more to tell me. She has the answers to all these questions. I close my eyes and hope she'll reappear, to guide me to the end of this. But no sleep and no Savannah. Just those eleven naked frozen figures, sitting stiff on cold cement, where I suppose they'll remain indefinitely.

I remembered to close the freezer door, right?

F
ROSTY DAWN.
C
OURTNEY
drives. I call Helen to tell her she can expect us in a few hours. I'm relieved to hear that I preempted the manhunt. Maybe I'll actually be able to pull this exchange off smoothly. She instructs me to meet her at her apartment on the Upper West Side and to not call Greta until we get there so that she can help me work out a swap.

I promise to hold off, then hang up.

It's felt like I've been in a bad dream for a while now. And not a lucid one. A dream that's carrying Courtney and me like leaves atop a white-­water creek, hurling us downstream faster than we're able to understand what's happening. And I certainly haven't had the strength to resist for days. Wonder if I ever will again.

Courtney's face is hard, his motions at the wheel mechanical. I wonder what he's thinking but am scared to break the silence. I glare at my phone. The thought of calling Greta twists my balls in a knot. What if she tells me it's too late? What if she just doesn't pick up and I never hear from her—­or Sadie—­again?

Courtney, prescient, talks to me for the first time today, without taking his eyes off the road. “Think she'll keep her word?”

I sigh in falsetto, tremolo in my chest.

“I want to say yes.” My voice sounds like a squeeze-­toy getting mauled by a puppy. “What good does Sadie do her?”

Courtney nods. “Right,” he says metallically.

I'm glad I can't see what's going on in his head right now. Bad enough I have to see what's in my own.

No words for another hour. I just stare at my phone, getting more and more nervous as we approach the city. Images of the woman who calls herself Greta floating in my mind's eye. Seeing her beauty in my head is like drinking a sickeningly sweet syrup. Picture Sadie drowning in that syrup.

Break the silence when I see the Bronx Bridge rising to our right. “Helen lives on 86th and Amsterdam,” I say.

“Mmk.”

“You thinking about taking me to a back alley and killing me?” I ask wearily. “Taking the tape?”

Courtney frowns and says, “Shut up.”

I laugh mirthlessly.

“If I was going to kill you and take the tape, I would have just smothered you last night in the motel room. If you have a choice, you don't kill someone in the city. I'd much rather have the Bangor, Maine PD on my tail.”

He picks up Broadway, takes us past block after block of Bronx: auto-­repair shops, redbrick projects, kids sitting laughing on benches, pizza joints, ninety-­nine-­cent shops. Press my face against the cold window, try to reconcile faces of ­people on the street with the heavy cassette tape in my jacket pocket, the pale blue faces of the corpses sitting below the cabin.

I do want to hear it. No doubt. If it wasn't for Sadie, I would have popped it right in. So who exactly is saving who?

The streets move into double digits. Projects turn to high-­rise luxury apartments. Garages turn to boutiques, Hispanic kids in beanies turn to white women in heels and waistcoats. In two and a half weeks I forgot how crowded New York is. The humanity is disgusting; thousands of maggots swarming atop the rotting corpse of this city, all trying to get their bite. Pouring from subway stops, from upscale delis, sitting in the sea of taxis around us.

I stare down helplessly at my phone. Chest empty.

Courtney turns off Broadway at 86th.

Pulls into a parking garage, takes a ticket, and slides the minivan into the first available spot. Turns the ignition off and looks at me.

“You totally trust her, right?”

“Totally,” I say.

“Because if you don't, you could leave the tape here. In the car.”

“No way,” I say and pop out the door.

Take a sharp breath of Manhattan parking garage stink. I follow Courtney out of the garage, thinking,
Let the stream do its thing.
Who knows. Maybe it will lead somewhere okay. Maybe somebody up there likes me and just has a real dark sense of humor.

My heart flutters as I ring her bell. She lives on the fourth floor of a walk-­up, and it's embarrassing how out of breath both Courtney and I are from the steps. Haven't been taking great care of ourselves the last week. Cut-­up ankle pulses beneath the bandage Courtney hasn't changed for two days. It's getting pretty rank down there. In fact—­I sniff the armpit of my Pink Floyd T-­shirt to confirm—­I'm pretty rank everywhere. I'm considering fleeing down to the drugstore to pick up some deodorant, when the door swings in.

Helen sizes me up in an instant. The first thing she says to my face after ten years is “You look like total shit.”

“Good to see you too,” I say.

I don't wait for an invitation, just limp straight past her into the apartment and collapse on a black leather couch. Rub my tender ribs. Courtney is still standing on the threshold. He extends a clammy hand to Helen, who's staring at him with trepidation. I can't blame her. I've gotten used to Courtney's appearance, having spent nearly every waking moment with him since embarking on this thing. But objectively . . . he is pale and sickly looking, hair unkempt, long face unshaven and prickly with stubble, eyes turning yellow from sleep deprivation.

“Helen.” I sigh. “This is my partner, Courtney Lavagnino. Courtney, allow me to introduce NYPD Detective Second Grade and former paramour, Helen Langdon.”

Helen glares at me, gives Courtney a perfunctory handshake and forces a smile.

“Welcome,” she says. “Come in and sit down on the couch. Gonna have to get that thing steam-­cleaned now anyways.”

She strides into the kitchen and returns with a chair, two bottles of water and two cork coasters. Sets the coasters on the glass coffee table in front of us, the bottles on the coasters. Then she sits down facing us, hunched, with her elbows on her thighs.

She says, “Alright. Let's hear it.”

Helen is still very pretty. She's aged, obviously, but the few additional lines on her face and strings of grey hair look right on her. Some ­people were born to be middle-­aged, and it breaks my heart a little to see that Helen is one of them.

I try to keep my emotions in check as I steal looks at her face. She never wore makeup when we were together, but now she's wearing just a touch of blue eyeliner beneath her wide brown eyes. Her cheeks have tightened a little, as if she's spent the better part of the last decade exasperated, but they still have that pink flush of youth I always loved. And her nose is, of course, still perfect. She has the best nose I've ever seen. A delicate, tender nose. After Helen, every nose I look at is just a two-­holed smelling beak. Crude, crooked.

I pull the plastic case that contains the tape out of my jacket pocket and place it on the glass coffee table between us.

“This is it. This is what she wants.”

Helen raises an eyebrow. Courtney sits beside me, arms crossed, still not entirely sold on Helen's trustworthiness. Keeps covertly glancing around the contents of Helen's living room, as if to uncover hidden cameras. Looks pretty innocuous though: sparkling white floors; sleek, hypermodern lights; flat-­screen TV; every surface pristine and clear of clutter. Modern, minimalist, efficient. I can easily picture Helen laboring over every square inch with a baby wipe, like she used to do in the much smaller apartment she lived in when we dated. She's the first to admit that she's obsessive about cleanliness but used to argue that taking it out on her living space helped keep her anality out of the other parts of her life.

“That's the tape?” she says.

“That's it,” I reply. “Not much to look at, I know. That's the nature of audio devices.”

She looks first at me, then at Courtney. “What does it say?”

“We don't know,” Courtney responds in an exasperated drawl, rolling his eyes. “We haven't
listened
.”

“Well I could probably scrounge up a tape player some—­”

“We're not listening to it,” I interrupt firmly. I think I catch Courtney tightening in my peripheral vision.

Helen looks at me, confused. “What?”

I rub a hand through my hair—­feels thinner than I remember—­and just shake my head in response.

Helen claps her palms to her cheeks and summons a look that under different circumstances I might interpret as semi-­flirtatious.

“We have to listen, Frank. Otherwise you're risking giving this woman the wrong thing. She won't be happy about that. What is it? Evidence or something?”

I shake my head adamantly. “It's nothing like that. And this is the right tape. Trust me.”

Helen gives me the once-­over, then Courtney, maybe questioning for the first time if we're both just heroin addicts that have totally lost it. I swallow, looking at Courtney desperately scratching at his pointy chin. I rub my forehead and exhale.

“What is this thing?” she asks. “Where did you find it?”

I laugh to myself, shake my head. No way to not come off nuts with this whole thing.

“I found it . . . with the Beulah Twelve.”

She stares at me. Takes her a second to process the name, recall the details. “I—­what? What the hell are you talking about? Don't fuck with me, Frankie.”

“I'm not. We'll take you to them first thing, once we get this straightened out.”

She looks to Courtney, as if to verify what I'm saying, but then seems to remember that there's no reason to believe that this Italian scarecrow is any more coherent than I am.

“You're saying that you . . . that you found the
Beulah Twelve
?”

We both nod.

“And . . . dead?” she asks.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “Very, very dead. Okay, but let's get this show on the road—­”

Helen interrupts with a glare, leans in closer, like she'll be able to better assess my verity with the aid of another few inches. Pulls an already mauled pen out of some crevice of her blue jeans and sticks the business end in her mouth, chews intently as she stares at us.

“I'm gonna help you with this situation, Frank, but you have to tell me exactly what the fuck is going on here. You didn't mention all of this on the phone.”

I check my watch. Ten twenty in the morning.

“I need to call her,” I say.

“You can spare fifteen minutes. Spill. Don't leave anything out,” she says. “I want to hear it all.”

“Jesus.” I rub my eyes, sigh, and then launch into a feverish explanation of everything since I got that phone call in Washington Square Park, rehashing what I'd already explained, and now adding the events of the last two days. Helen's face becomes harder and harder to read as I go on. Courtney bites his nails as I describe stealing the drill, then he chimes in to assure her that though admittedly we just left it out in the woods, we have every intention of returning it. When I'm done, she purses her lips and stares first at me, then Courtney, then back at me.

“I would think that you're lying,” she sighs, “except for two things: First, you don't want to lie to me when your daughter's life is on the line, assuming, of course, that you're not lying about that, too, for some deranged reason. And second, that's an
elaborate
fucking lie. That's some
Beautiful Mind
shit right there,” she says. “So you're telling me those bodies are still sitting right where you left them? Frozen? The crime of the decade solved by you two sad sacks.” She laughs to herself. “I wouldn't hire you two to pick me up a sandwich from the corner deli right now.”

“Helen, every word is true,” I say. “I swear.” I point to the tape. “And all the proof is right there.”

“But you won't let me listen.” She smirks.

I shake my head in disbelief, look first at her, then at Courtney. “Weren't you listening to me? Don't you see what that thing does to you? It drove twelve perfectly normal men to murder and suicide!”

Helen raises an eyebrow, then says calmly, like she's talking to a child, “Even if everything you said is true, I don't see what could possibly be on a
cassette
tape that would spontaneously turn men into
murderers,
Frank.”