The Next (30 page)

The room had grown cold. My shirt was wet from old sweat and cum which exacerbated the chill. I peeled it off and threw it into the laundry basket. I wrapped myself in a blanket and approached the curtain. I slid it open a crack and peered out into the courtyard.

The courtyard felt like Ringling Brothers Circus compared to the stillness of my apartment. Mrs. Layworth was washing the dishes furiously. She seemed to be seething as she scrubbed plates clean in soapy water. Had she just been fighting with Mr. Perfect again? She reached a spot that would not scrub off with a sponge. Irritated, she scraped it with a fork, gave up, and threw the whole damn dish in the recycling in disgust. I could hear it across the courtyard shatter against bottles.

Little Miss Perfect was chaperoning The Little Mermaid’s first date with Spongebob, and Little Perfect Junior was sending his remote controlled car off the steps of the stairs and laughing with glee. Lovely little things. Mr. Layworth ignored his wife and children, walking through the hall to their bedroom entrenched in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Peeping into their private world, how could anyone conclude that their normalcy belied such horror?

The Couch Potatoes had plumped themselves to sleep with ravioli, bread, and bottles of beer. The television flashed blue and white lights on their faces like a distant police raid. Against the front door hung a traveling carry-on wardrobe bag. It looked one of them would be leaving for a short business trip.

A wardrobe bag…

It occurred to me that that’s probably what the Layworths put Ruben into. Mrs. Layworth worked in fashion and always seemed to be withdrawing and inserting dresses into thick, transparent, plastic, full-length wardrobe bags. If I had to contain the blood and smell of a dead body, it’d make sense to zip it up in one of those.

I glanced below the Couch Potatoes apartment. Schlongzilla was alone for once, reading a script on his side on his bed. By ironic contrast, the Beached Whale was for once not on her futon watching television. She was standing up, fitting herself with a large bright blue and white satin dress. It strained at the seams as she pulled it over her sides, clinging to her rolls of flesh. She turned to look at herself in the mirror, and the dress rode up her thighs like a squirming boa constrictor. She yanked it down again, straining to pull it to its correct length around the knees. Yoked by the tightness around her shoulders, the seams stretched at her back. She froze. She was stuck. She could neither remove it nor pull it all the way down. I saw the disappointment and frustration in her eyes. Whatever event she was preparing for would not happen in that frock. Sadness washed over her face. She got a pair of scissors from the table and cut her way out of the blue and white satin straight jacket.

Below her the Little Old Man sat against his headboard, staring with reverence into the painting still propped against the television. Was he enraptured with an image that captured his future or his past? Or something disconnected from reality altogether?

The Princess’s door opened. Her hair was disheveled, as if she had just struggled to get away from something. A pink silk blossom hung sloppily from a thread off the right shoulder of her slim, cotton, calf-length, Kelly-green dress, as if it had been partially ripped away. Her pink lipstick was smeared from the corner of her mouth onto one cheek. Since it was only nine at night, she obviously terminated the evening early. It was not hard to surmise just how and why she ended her date. The girl locked her door, threw her white and pink leather clutch onto the silver dresser, and collapsed onto her white quilt, burying her face in her hands.

I wanted so much for her to taste happiness. To give her one-quarter of the beautiful intimacy Marzoli and I had just had. She deserved that happiness. Or at the very least, nobody deserved that much unhappiness night after night. Nobody.

Two days ago, I couldn’t have given two flying shits about the neighbors. Who would have guessed how transformative meeting Marzoli would turn out to be?

The buzzer rang abruptly in the Couch Potatoes’ apartment. One of them stirred and shook the other’s shoulder. The buzzer rang again and one of them righted himself on his squat legs and wobbled to the door. He spoke into the speaker. He took the wardrobe bag from the door, folded it in half, pecked his partner on the cheek, and then departed. I smiled to myself. This little act of goodbye had been the most physically active I think I’d ever seen the Potatoes.

When the other Couch Potato was left alone, I saw him pick up his cell phone and dial a number. Simultaneously, below him, Schlongzilla answered his phone.

No fucking way! Surely they’re not talking to each other!

Schlongzilla looked at his calendar, and then spoke. After several head noddings on both their parts, they both hung up at the same time. The very second his partner left, the Couch Potato had scheduled a massage! I would guess by lightness of the wardrobe carry-on bag the partner had taken, the massage had to be scheduled sooner than later. The Couch Potato adjusted his crotch. He was already excited. It made total sense Schlongzilla and the Couch Potatoes would frequently run into each other since they lived in the same building, but who would have guessed that this particular mouse would play when that particular cat was away? Schlongzilla resumed reading his script, and the Couch Potato proceeded to lick the tomato sauce off his plate.

The Beached Whale sunk into her futon to watch television, now dressed again in her old faded muumuu. In her hand were strips of blue and white satin, which she was absentmindedly shredding into confetti with the scissors as the TV light glowed on her fleshy face.

Mrs. Layworth now proceeded to attack the mound of silverware soaking in the glittery pink Tinkerbell cup. She clanged the forks and spoons into the dishwasher with haste and frustration. Mr. Layworth locked the door to the bathroom as he unfastened his pants and lowered with his newspaper out of view.

Then it happened.

Little Hunter Layworth raced his remote car into the master bedroom. Little Felicity Layworth followed him, demanding the remote control, which Hunter refused to relinquish. It sped under the bed, rounded left, then smacked into the walk-in closet door. Apparently, whatever the car was escaping from or speeding toward required it to access this portion of the apartment. The boy opened the closet door and followed his car into it. The girl followed after him. Fifteen seconds later the car accelerated out, and the boy emerged with his sister at his heels still begging for the control. They were both unfazed by anything they’d encountered in the closet.

That made no sense.

Ruben was not a small-framed man. Even bagged in a full-length garment bag, he would not have been skipped over. He could not have been suspended from the clothes rod without breaking the damn thing from his weight. Rigor mortis would have reached maximum stiffness after twelve hours then dissipated almost completely over the next two days, so Ruben could no longer be propped upright against the wall like a board between other clothes. He would have had to be lying horizontally on the floor, and the plastic garment bags Mrs. Layworth always brought home were transparent. And yet the children made no fuss over any such morbid presence. What could I conclude from this other than…

Ruben was not there!

Had the Layworths already removed the body? And if so, when had they that opportunity? They’d been under our microscope almost constantly since he’d disappeared. No trunks or coffin-sized crates had left the apartment.

How in New York City could anyone remove a body from a doorman building without being seen? Or from any building in Manhattan?

Had they removed it piece by piece?

No, I would have seen knives and saws. Instead, all I saw was a wire cutter, and the only thing that could have concealed body parts that entered and exited their apartment was Mrs. Layworth’s computer tote. It opened at the top and its contents could be easily viewed by anyone passing by. Or their children’s knapsacks and lunchboxes.

Could they have dissolved the body in the bathtub?

Possibly, but it would have taken gallons of sulfuric acid to completely liquefy every bone and bit. I saw no gallon-sized cans of anything in their apartment.

Where the hell was Ruben’s body then? What else could I conclude other than Ruben had never been killed? That in spite of the flamingo-pink Korean’s fears and my suspicions, Ruben had walked away that night and, for whatever reason, decided not to return to his apartment?

We were wrong. We had to be.

I heard Marzoli stir on the couch behind me.

I needed to tell him. If he was wasting his time pursuing the wrong subjects over a crime that was never committed, he had to know. He opened his eyes and the whites sparkled in the glow of the light from the courtyard, pure, deep, and honest. He roused himself and walked over to me.

A coldness hit my heart.

If I told him that we were barking up the wrong tree, would I see him again?

I was barely necessary to his investigation as it stood. Would he not assume my involvement in this case to be altogether superfluous? Would he not by necessity need to leave this courtyard in pursuit of a whole city of suspects, leaving no time for this pathetic man-boy trapped in the six-hundred fifty square foot rear prison on the third floor?

Marzoli approached me, wrapping one arm around my shoulder and the other around my waist. He stared over my shoulders at the activities in the glowing apartments. The Layworth girl had gotten the remote from her brother and sent the car careening underneath her mother’s feet, who stepped on it accidently. Crying and high-pitched screaming commenced. Mr. Layworth stood in the bathroom, flushing, and washing only one hand. This family appeared as ordinary and dysfunctional as every other family. It now seemed perfectly natural to view them as innocent.

Marzoli’s arms felt smoother on my bare shoulders and waist than any cashmere. I kept my mouth closed, knowing full well I was compromising so much by not disclosing what I’d seen.

I would tell him in the morning.

“I feel selfish,” he said softly.

“Why?” I asked, swallowing the jagged irony.

His fingers snaked around my waist, underneath the blanket, and wrapped around my warm member.

“You took care of me, but I kind of left you hanging…”

I turned to his rugged face, just as sexy as before but fantastically more approachable. His smell was musky and hmm hmm hmm yummy.
The terse whining and arguing of the Layworth family grew faint as Marzoli locked his muscular lips on mine and pushed me toward the couch…

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Look!” Marzoli whispered, pointing in the direction of the Little Old Man’s apartment.

I stared through the falling snow toward his apartment and spied him still sitting against his headboard facing the gold-framed painting. The light of the courtyard outside his apartment filtered through the snow romantically, bouncing off white-capped ledges and windowsills.

I’d been crouched below Marzoli, applying skin-toned makeup onto his thigh, scrotum, and shaft. He knew that today’s performance had to seal the deal, and he couldn’t avoid complete nudity. At a distance, with Mac cover-up, Layworth would never know to what extent the splattered battery acid had deformed him.

“How,” I asked, “will you disguise it when you’re invited over?”

“Dunno,” he said with a wink. “Just go by the seat of my pants.”

He was acting brave, but he was as apprehensive as a rookie soldier crouched low in a trench smearing black mud on his face to disappear.

I could not blame him. There was no roadmap in life for overcoming people’s disgust for sexual organs melted by battery acid. I had anomalously embraced his damage as a tool for greater intimacy with the man who had enough cojones to allow me to see his flaws, but others would not have that incentive.

Layworth would probably react in horror and reject him. Marzoli had worked his entire life to compensate for his distortions, and now for the sake of the investigation as well as his own career, he was probably about to be humiliated in the worst possible way by the kind of successful, educated, prosperous, white man he’d worked his entire scrappy life to measure up to. To top it off, another man he’d only recently started to care for would be witnessing his humiliation from across the courtyard.

As I applied cover-up to his inner thigh, he started to giggle from the tickle. He interrupted by cupping my jaw in his hands and curling down to plant a kiss on my lips.

“Continue,” he said, straightening back up.

I patted more of the makeup on a particularly spider-webbed portion of skin on this upper thigh, robbed of any hair. I hadn’t yet drummed up the strength to tell him what I’d seen the night before and felt horrible. I could spare him this humiliation. I could
,
and possibly lose him in the process.

Does every good thing come with a sacrifice?

Layworth had spent the morning ushering his wife and kids out the door and participating in a conference call, adding the element of suspense as to whether or not we’d get round two with Layworth before the kids came back from school again.

When one o’clock rolled around, we saw the Couch Potato open his front door. Tall, smooth, sly, and steamy, Schlongzilla sauntered into his apartment carrying his off-white collapsible massage table. They shook hands. The Couch Potato was clearly frenetic with excitement, while Schlongzilla was so supremely confident he might as well have been folding laundry.