The Parallel Apartments (43 page)

“Oh,” she said. “I see. Well, we must be content to disagree. May I leave you my name? Just in case you come across one?”

Murphy huffed mightily.

“Fine.”

She dug around in her little-old-lady purse, located a Tiger Mart receipt, scribbled thereon, and handed it to Murphy.

         
Cynthia Braden

         
3903 North Loop

         
City, 78751

         
455.6702

“This is your real name?”

“Why, yes. Oh, I forgot to mention I will pay up to a thousand dollars for a good copy.”

This got Murphy's attention. He would ask Granny if she knew about this stupid magazine. Maybe she even had one.

And she did. She
had
owned the
Annals
going back to about 1940.

“But those burned up after somebody forgot to clean the lint filter,” she said, looking peeved and uncomfortable at her forty-five-degree angle of repose in the big, adjustable sick-person bed. “I had to start again. That issue's probably in the attic. Don't make a mess.”

“I won't! Jeez!”

“What do you want it for, anyway?”

Murphy explained that he wanted to loan it to someone.

“A woman? Murphy, have you got a special lady friend?”

“No way!” An image of himself doing it with Cynthia Braden, her pink bun rhythmically whacking a headboard, came unsolicited. He shuddered. “Never!”

“What about that darling Arabic girl at…”

“Granny!” Murphy had never told her he'd quit Crammed Shelf to become a serial killer.

“Well, you make durn sure you get that journal back.”

Granny began to cough, jiggling her “boobs.” She'd had her second mastectomy a few weeks before, and had taken to wearing, beneath her rather snug nightgowns, prostheses that Murphy estimated, based on his deep acumen of internet porn, to be at least double-Ds, and, given the slight lag between a boob's action and its reaction, he suspected they were composed of a heavy material such as silicone. If Granny wanted to spend the rest of her meager life with a nice rack, more power. Murphy wondered what they cost. He wondered what they looked like. He wondered what they felt like. Were they just water balloons in a bra? Or were they stuck to her somehow, installed beneath some skin grafted from her ass? Or maybe they just hollowed out the originals and filled them with something else, turducken-style. Could a fellah put his dick between them? Cameth then an image, also unsolicited, and just as unwelcome, of himself in a jiggly threesome with Cynthia and Granny. Murphy clawed at his face and groaned.

“Oh, stop that, Murphy Lee,” said Granny, reaching for a bottle of water on her bedside table. “Open this for me.”

Murphy did. She took a long drink, right from the bottle. When she put it down, Murphy noticed that the water was tinted red.

“Jesus, Granny, you're bleeding.”

“I—”

“Is that from coughing?”

“No, it's—”

“It is.”

And so began a short ado that ended when Murphy agreed not to tell Dr. Moutmelth about her lung-cancer symptom, and in exchange Granny agreed to transfer Volume 141, No. 3 of the
Annals of Mathematics
into Murphy's permanent custody. Win-win, psych!

Just around dusk on a hot night some days later, Murphy paid Cynthia Braden a visit. She greeted him with delight, made him a cup of tea, wrote him a check for a thousand bucks, accepted the valuable journal, turned away, and began to rifle through her kitchen cabinets, where she was sure she had stored some peach preserves; at this instant Murphy stood up, clicked his heels together, which caused a four-inch stiletto to spring from the toe of his right shoe, took sight of Cynthia's right temple, stepped back, wound up, kicked, and missed, succeeding only in ruffling her gentian-violet bun with the gentle breeze of failure. The momentum of the unexpected
follow-through (1) disengaged Murphy's knife shoe, which went sailing out an open window into the night, and (2) spun Murphy 270 degrees while his left foot remained stationary, twisting his knee and ankle and sending him to the floor, which greeted him with a concussion.

Cynthia brought him to the hospital, evidently without ever having any idea what might have been.

Her check bounced.

The third “victim,” Bobby Brudi, whom he'd found listed in an old-fashioned paper phone book in probably the last phone booth in Texas, was a “technical stylist” at Trim and Pluck, a depilatory spa in North Austin near the I-183 overpass at Burnet Road that specialized in Hollywood waxes for men. Inspired by a trademark method of an infamous hit man, Murphy decided he would dispatch Bobby with a squirt of cyanide salts right in the face. After getting ripped off a dozen times by internet cyanide dealers trawling for desperate dupes on provocative suicide websites, Murphy finally got lucky, receiving genuine cyanide salts in the mail for less than fifty bucks. He prepared a small spray bottle of the salts dissolved in acid, put on his standard black beard, sunglasses, and ball cap disguise, allowed himself to be waxed by Bobby—easily the most excruciating pain of his life—then tried to squirt him, but the nozzle was aimed sideways so nobody got offed. Murphy bolted to his car hidden behind the strip mall and drove off, his crotch still screeching helplessly at its recent brimstone rapine.

Murphy's fourth attempt was an actual firearms assault on a certain Grady Gregg, a bouncer, ID-checker, and noted asshole, whose shift at Antone's ended around 3 a.m., at which time, Murphy had discovered after several weeks' surveillance, the man would walk to a dark, deserted street corner nearby, the same one every time, lean against the street lamp there, light and smoke a cigarette in a rapid, assholey, cool-gesture-polluted way. Murphy planned to extinguish this Grady Gregg in an AK-47 strafing from his Chevette parked forty yards away. But when the time came, Murphy missed with every single shot in his thirty-round magazine. Later, in his apartment, Murphy disintegrated the disappointing instrument with a hacksaw and sledgehammer, and, as a final rain of disrespect, threw its fragments into the tub and urinated on them.

* * *

No more. The next victim, whom Murphy Lee Crockett would start looking for tomorrow, would die, maybe sooner, maybe later, but definitely, and definitely in pieces. It would be his first try at up-close, blood-spurting despatch.

PART TWO

XV

June 2004

Justine had now been at the Frito Motel for more than a month. She watched her bank account drop and credit-card balance rise, weekly, by the price of two Mr. Gatti's three-topping pizzas or a Sonic #2 Combo or a twelve-pack of Dr Pepper cans plus forty dollars cash back. She visited Amy the desk clerk once a week to tell her she was staying, and she called Middling Car Rentals in New York every two weeks to renew her car lease. She collaged, she slept, she masturbated, she contemplated suicide, she rented movies from I Heart Video, she bought books at Crammed Shelf about pregnancy and childbirth and abortion and adoption. She solved Black Belt Sudoku with a rapidity and accuracy that made her wonder whether she had found something she was good enough at that she might take it up professionally, become wealthy from international tournament wipeouts, and famous and lovable for her humble beginnings, so famous that she appeared on an episode of
Letterman
that Livia and Charlotte happened to see and which made them feel awful and guilty and penitent.

One morning Justine parked on Threepenny Street in front of the house she'd been conceived in, thirty-five years ago. Where Livia had screwed her
three-day husband, Burt, and gotten Justine started.

A flat ranch, small and brittle-looking. Torn screens, cracked windows, clots of mud-dauber nests stuck to the gutters.

Justine knocked. When nobody came to the door, she took the hot, corroded doorknob in both hands and twisted, but it wouldn't move. After a careful look around the seemingly dead and unpeopled neighborhood, Justine climbed over the iron railing at the end of the porch and dropped into the weeds. She felt her way around the perimeter. In the back was a large window, partly open.

She climbed inside, finding herself in the kitchen. A ray of sun illuminated the stirred-up dust motes. She headed toward the east end of the tiny house, pausing every few steps to see if anything felt familiar. Nothing did.

A closed door. Justine pushed. It opened soundlessly into a small room, the walls pierced with hundreds of thumbtacks, some pinning down torn corners of paper. From the ceiling hung a fan, one of the ornate, shoddy fake antiques you can buy nowadays at Home Depot for thirty bucks. The room was emotionless, without personality, memory, import.

A bed—a made twin bed—sat in the middle of the room. Red, white, and green comforter, lacy bed skirt, healthily fluffy pillows leaning against the headboard. Surely not the original bed, the one in which the regrettable conception must have occurred thirty-five years ago. Burt, no longer Livia's obscure and revered three-day hubby, but Justine's fucking
dad.
A few moments of newlywed flailing, and Justine was started.

Justine mourned for her stupid, naive self. For disfigured Quentinforce. For her soulless, hateful
real
mother. For her weakling
real
grandmother. For dead Burt. For insane Betsey, who was not her mother, but who loved her.

No one would hear her threnody here. She wrecked her throat with dry screams at the airless, dirty box broken up with a perfectly ordinary bed and sophisticated with a shitty fan.

Justine left, feeling like she'd committed a rape.

In the afternoon she drove to her old neighborhood. She turned down an alley. Unlike much of the city, this alley was unchanged. As was the next, and the next, and the next. Soon she was in her old alley.

It was not much changed either, but the yellow Camaro was gone. It had apparently been taken away long ago; there was no evidence that a car of any kind had been there.

Justine idled by the Camaro's old spot.

She got out and crawled to the fence, where she found a three-inch gap. Justine chamfered her fists into her eye sockets. She bit her cheek and issued a low, private growl of resolve.

Something growled back. Justine noticed racing toward her across the lawn the soggy black muzzle and pork-pink tongue of a graying, incontinently excited pug dog. Justine willed herself to look only at her dog; she wasn't quite ready to scan the back of the house for the wandering, smoking figure of her grandmother. She put her hand through the fence; Dartmouth instantly demerged it with stringy slop.

She thought about kicking out a slat and stealing him so they could live at the Frito together, but Dartmouth remembered something and evacuated the yard in a sandy blur.

She glanced. Just a sliver of an instant, and then fists back in the sockets, but a glance nonetheless. The Château Frontenac, visible in the moonlight. Overgrown yard. Charlotte's picture window. In the window, the edge of Charlotte's table. And the old refrigerator. The same one, with rounded corners and a big handle shaped like a 7. Something about the quality of the light inside suggested it was just Charlotte and Dartmouth who lived there, that she had never married. But today no Charlotte was in evidence.

Justine got into her car and drove back to the motel. Inside, she undressed, reached for the remote, and turned on the weather. She pointed and fake-clicked the remote at various imperfections in the Room—the blinds, which, infuriatingly, never quite closed, the lampshade vaguely smeared with a fawn paste, the derailed sliding closet door, her belly, and, in the corner over the closet, the small flag of soiled, artificially linen-grained wallpaper that had recently peeled away from the wall and was now flopped over itself like a Rottweiler's ear.

Maybe there was spatter on the walls behind the wallpaper. Justine wished she'd been one of the victims. Being a murder victim was one of Justine's principal nonerotic fantasies (along with auto-da-fé, post-Armageddon survival, and being the world's first trillionaire so she could help defeat AIDS and malaria and order all the billionaires around). Murdered: so many problems that would solve!

Justine watched the wallpaper ear for a blinkless minute. She fell asleep.

In the morning she went downstairs.

“There's a book on it,” said Amy, whose ring and middle fingers were splinted together with an apparatus of sheet metal and blue foam. “I can't remember what it's called. The pictures are really nauseating. I can't look at it.”

“I need the book about the murders at the Frito Motel, please,” said Justine, addressing the man behind the welcome counter at Crammed Shelf Books.

“Bag,” he said. On his wrist a bruise-like tattoo of a crucified grotesque was uttering something in Latin.

“Bag… of Fritos?” said Justine. “No, murder. Motel Frito. Book, about. It.”

The welcome man lowered his eyelids until one eye was just barely open, like someone under general anesthesia. Then he snapped awake and pointed at Justine's big, brand-new straw purse, which she'd bought as a consolation after her screamy meltdown at the house on Threepenny Street. A costly, fettering consolation from Urban Outfitters.