The Next (24 page)

“Hello, Mrs. Abraham,” he said. “We don’t have any facts at all about anything. He’s not even legally missing.”

“He never ignores my phone call,” MinHee said. “He never flakes on our rehearsals. I can’t graduate unless he plays for my solo. He knows that. He’d never do that to me. He’s missing. Something happened to him.”

“Sweetie,” Mrs. Abraham offered, “he could be out tricking. You know how boys in New York are.”

I gasped in surprise at the little old lady volunteering that info in that way.

“You said his body is in a closet. Why? Where? I’m going to the popo!”

“Oh! Dear me!” Mrs. Abraham exclaimed. “Another one murdered? From the same apartment?”

“What!” MinHee barked. “What do you mean another one? Was this disclosed to Ruben? Isn’t the landlord supposed to tell tenants of murders in apartments? Ruben never would have moved in if…OMG!…I’m going to the popo!”

Marzoli finally raised his voice above the panicked Korean girl. “I work for the New York Police Department. I’m a detective. I’m on top of the investigation.”

Specious, but all factually true.

“What’s your cell?” he asked as comfortingly as possible.

“I don’t know you.”

At last he employed a deep, powerful no-nonsense tone of voice. “If you want to know what happened to Ruben when I find out, you will give me your number.”

MinHee released a breath of exasperation.

With a sharp rip of a Velcro flap on a pocket of her violin case, MinHee whipped out a glossy business card with pink lettering.

“I play for weddings,” she stated.

“Oh!” Mrs. Abraham exclaimed in sudden delight. “Every wedding should have a violinist. You two boys should consider her.”

I replied, “What makes you think…”

“Dear…” Mrs. Abraham informed us, lowering her eyes to our crotches.

MinHee followed the old woman’s eyes down to our inappropriate bulges. Although they had deflated somewhat since the interruption, they were still too engorged not to be noticed. Flamingo Pink’s almond eyes widened as she covered her mouth with both hands, yelping with high-pitched horror.

Any shame at displaying my engorged boy-bulge was hijacked by embarrassment. To slap my face with the notion of getting homo-hitched only milliseconds after crossing that gargantuan threshold of acknowledging my attraction to a male.

Too much! Too fast! Too…too…too fucking delicious…

Marzoli had to be feeling equally awkward for his cheeks were rose red, and he was not looking anybody in the eye. Mrs. Abraham seemed to register the flushes in our cheeks.

“Come, love,” Mrs. Abraham said, putting her arm around the shocked flamingo pink Korean, guiding her down the hall. “Men are pigs, and we’d have them no other way. Are you hungry?”

“I have to rehearse!”

“Hot apple strudel.”

“I love apple strudel!”

They disappeared into Mrs. Abraham’s apartment and the door closed.

The yapping ended.

I owed Mrs. Abraham so much.

I looked at Marzoli from the side of my eyes. I smirked, then grinned, then smiled, then…then…

There was so much unresolved, so much unanswered, and so much fucking uncertainty, but shit! This larger-than-life mofo in the perfectly fitted jeans and polo shirt was attracted to me! He actually loitered in my doorway because he was drawn toward me! Needed nothing from me but…Goddamn…me! I was actually laughing…audibly laughing….fucking laughing!

This was…this had to be…it.

The Next.

Marzoli observed how totally out of control I’d become. His eyes started sparkling too. I held my stomach with my hands, trying but failing to regain control. As I ran out of breath, I started snorting like a hog. This immediately thrust Marzoli into bowel-constricting raucous laughter.

Marzoli pushed me inside the apartment, following me as he closed the door and grabbed his side in laughter.

“My sides! Cramping!” he exclaimed.

This only fueled our uproarious belching. As I collapsed on the couch, my foot stubbed against Marzoli’s foot, destabilizing him. My back sank into the cushions as his barrel arms caught the back and arm of the couch to prevent him from landing all two-hundred pounds of muscle on top of me.

My eyes were streaming with tears. As I wiped them away, Marzoli remained hovered above me, bathing my soul like warm sunlight on a frosty morning. My laughter stumbled its way to a slow halt.

“Normally,” he said, “I’d tell uptight, depressed sons-of-bitches like you all you really need is a month of Outward Bound in Australia. Snakes and starvation and shit. But you…god almighty…you needed that.”

His full lips glistened. I felt mine pulling towards them like a tidal wave toward a pink shore. He lowered his head just an inch toward mine.

Then another inch…

A cold breeze suddenly gushed through the window, and the curtains whipped like a flag. His eyes became sterner. The heaviness of a new moment rolled over him. He reversed the slow fall of his lips toward mine, distancing himself an inch.

What suddenly repelled him? Was it me? Was it my body? Come back! Let the fucking wind blow!

Marzoli pushed himself upright with a strong thrust and walked to the window. He closed it with a clunk. He peered out the crack in the curtain to the courtyard.

It had been the perfect moment to kiss. The perfect one. Why did he stop?

“It won’t be long,” he said quietly, “before a real, sanctioned investigation into Ruben’s murder begins. That girl won’t stay away from the
popo
for long. If they don’t assign me, they’ll discover how much protocol I’ve disregarded. I already entered a victim’s apartment without even knowing he was a victim. I contaminated a crime scene of a murder. Possibly two. This is not good. I’m in trouble. We…if you’ll help me…and I have no expectation you will…we must get more than evidence the Layworths killed Ruben. We
must
uncover Ruben’s body in that apartment. Catch them red handed. Go for broke. Otherwise…”

He let out air like a deflating balloon. On the other side of that word
otherwise
was a whole world of struggle to move up in the world from his scrappy childhood: years of night school after twelve-hour work days, years of racial slurs by his asshole white peers, and a whole slough of abandonment crap he’d struggled to rise above his whole life. All the shit he sympathized with Nathan about. All flushed down the toilet if we didn’t take action.

I heard his words, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that his redirect from kissing me to these ominous suppositions had something...everything…to do with me. Against me. I lay on that couch, looking at this beautiful, intelligent man, feeling like I’d just been politely rejected. An invisible boot on my rear urging me gently but firmly toward the exit door. I’d been asked to abandon a delicate, rare, and precious voyage I’d hardly set sail on.

Worst of all, I did not understand why.

He turned toward me briefly, but wouldn’t make eye contact.

“Remember that letter we found in the garbage?” he began.

“Layworth has a meeting with the Tea Party Fundamentalist Coalition in Salt Lake City on Thursday.”

“I think it’s a safe bet he’s got until Wednesday afternoon before the kids come home from school to get rid of Ruben. Didn’t it seem like that angry phone call we watched him make was about scheduling the removal of the body?”

At that moment, I couldn’t get myself to care a fuck.

I’d been mistaken about his motivation to get into my apartment these last couple of days. I’d talked myself into thinking he was merely working this sucker for information via a manipulated undercurrent of sexual attraction. Yet in spite of my crap, he wanted more from me, and this attraction had been drawing him farther inside my lair since the first second he knocked on my door days ago. It was all the more wrenching to learn that, when push came to shove, I was not what he really wanted. Or I was not what he’d ever let himself really want. What the fuck else could I conclude? Why else would he have pushed away from me?

I could feel that morbid, deflating feeling once again creep from the grimy apartment walls, across the lumpy, shadowy floor, through my bare feet, and up my legs toward my core.

But there was a new twist on this invasion. I now had in my possession a new way of battling it. This time…
this time
it was not I who backed off. This time it had been Marzoli. Instinctively, I realized helping his investigation into the deaths of Nathan and Ruben was the only way to break Marzoli’s resistance to me.

“How do you plan on uncovering the body?” I asked.

“By getting into that damn apartment.”

“But Layworth never leaves.”

“Then I’ll get invited in.”

“Into his bedroom?”

He paused, thinking, cogs clicking their teeth into grooves. His eyes darted to the floor, to the window, then paused up at the ceiling. Finally he stared directly at me and responded to my last question with pulse-elevating conviction.

“Yes.”

I looked up at him blankly, then realized what the fucker was intending to do.

He’d get invited over the way Ruben had gotten invited over. The way Nathan had gotten invited over. By being the next to put on a show for Mr. Perfect and then the next to be hailed to traverse the courtyard.

In bullet points, it made sense. He’d not be breaking any law by uncovering a body if he were invited to enter the apartment. Marzoli had the kind of irresistible physique that could start a war. I had no doubt he had abs whose definition could be seen all the way from Staten Island. Layworth hadn’t gotten his rocks off in days, and was obviously pent up like a loaded cum cannon. There was no one in a better position to light that fuse than Marzoli.

But all the same…holy shit!

Marzoli gathered one of many piles of clothing on the floor in his arms and said, “We’ve got about five hours before the kids come home from school. Time to do the laundry.”

Although I adored his infuriating, leap-frogging logic, the connection between those kids and my laundry was beyond me.

“You start with that pile of shit on your piano,” he ordered.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’re opening the curtain all the way. I’m not about to be seen as a slob, you slob,” he winked with a grin and added, “Do as Miss Hannigan tells you.”

In spite of my apprehension, I laughed.

After all, what the fuck kind of Puerto Rican Sicilian makes an
Annie
reference?

Chapter Nineteen

Four busy, sweaty hours later I was standing in a brand-spanking new crib.

On the way back from dropping four large trash bags full of laundry to Rosalinda at the laundromat, Marzoli picked up a bottle of wood polish. The spotless shiny piano reflected the gleaming mopped floor, the neatly placed books on the dusted bookshelves, and the litter-free desk. Every square inch of the kitchen counter was completely visible, the dishes having been washed, dried, and placed in the cupboards. The mounds of yellowed music scores were sorted in orderly fashion in drawers. No less than eight trash bags of refuse and recycling had been hauled down to the curb as I Windexed the smudges of grime and mold off the walls as best I could.

We had to open the window again to cool the room, ripe and muggy from the heat of our bodies. The more we’d worked, the damper his polo shirt had become, sealing tighter and tighter to his form. Who knew hard work could make someone look even hotter? The more he labored, the more I realized his efforts were fueled by far more than setting the stage for his upcoming performance. Far more than an anal retentive need to cleanse his environment. His subtle glances in my direction as he tied trash bags, hoisted piles of books, and scraped hardened soda off the counter were accompanied by warm looks and toothy dimpled grins. He was magnanimously cleaning for my own well-being, and in turn, he was deriving joy from my reactions to his generosity. We were in some marvelous feedback loop of rowdy, sweaty labor and buoyant glee.

And then it was done.

The apartment was as immaculate as it was possible to get in four hours. Every surface was as smooth and unwrinkled as the crisp shirt Marzoli had worn when I first laid on eyes on him. My eyes reddened with tears of disbelief. As much as Richard Dreyfus’s slimy mashed potato mound of my apartment had once been an extension of my slimy disheveled emotional state, my brain seemed to relish this new, gleaming, orderly landscape. It sparkled, it was orderly, and it smelled like lemon and clean linen. It felt healthy, and it was mine. I took a large, full breath and released it. I was still imprisoned in a six-hundred fifty square foot box, but feeling freer than I had in a long time.

If I gained nothing else from Marzoli than this, I was damned grateful.

Marzoli handed me a soft fresh white towel and directed me to take a shower. God. To start clean. To wash into the drain the anger, the regret, the confusion, the hostility, and the repression. As the water poured over me, I kept my ears open for the squeak of the bathroom door. For the rush of cool air that would indicate Marzoli was joining me.