Julia Shraytman, author of “On The Tip of A Needle”, has previously published stories in Litro Magazine, Suspense Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Sundial Magazine, and Wilderness House Literary Review. She is currently working on the final draft of her first novel.
*****
I awake to a sad sliver of sunlight dribbling into the room through the grimy window. Two bluish gray pigeons are cooing on the window ledge. The room sways a little. I am still wearing my street clothes, a self-imposed uniform, even though I am no longer trusted to lead cases, so no professional getup is required. I sit up, pull the knot of my tie down, and reach for the bottle.
Rent on my studio is due, I could barely scrap together two hundred dollars and I need three hundred more. Dunbarr, my old PI boss, calls me up once in a while to give me little scraps here and there, little jobs, but he hasn’t called in several weeks.
Across the room, Lena is sinking into the mouse-gray armchair, her head thrown back, and her mouth open. Her breaths come out dull and ragged, as if it takes all of her strength to just breathe. She is dressed in a yellow sundress with floating hearts, a ripped jean jacket, and black boots. Her bony knees are touching, her feet stand apart, and her hands lay in her lap palms up like two dying cockroaches on their backs, as tremors pass through the thin tentacle fingers. Her eyes are closed but for the skinny openings revealing slices of moist, white eyeballs. She resembles a saturated in alcohol marionette. She moans and licks her lips.
Across the room, Lena is sinking into the mouse-gray armchair, her head thrown back, and her mouth open.
I do not have three hundred dollars, but Lena does. She has less now than when we first met two years ago when I was assigned to her husband’s murder case, back when I was a PI, but she still has close to one hundred thousand dollars; quite a fortune for a drunkard.
I only touched her money once before, right after Dunbarr dismissed me from her husband’s murder case some two years ago, without paying me, only months after I was assigned to her case. I can’t say I disagreed with him. I had just walked out on my wife, and without her mothering me into acceptable behavior, I was drinking heavier than usual and making very little progress. Dunbarr phoned me while I had a drink in hand and asked to see me in his office. Slurring, I told him what I thought of him and his stinking office.
“You’re not special,” Dunbarr seethed through gritted teeth. “I have other PIs. You’ve stabbed my soft spot for you one too many times, Manny.”
I think about all this as I squeeze mayo from a packet onto a slice of white bread. I fold the bread in half, take a bite and watch Lena sleep. My gaze glides down Lena’s matchstick legs. Everything about Lena is impossible. From her six-foot frame to her skin-and-bones body, to her blonde hair and green eyes. The blondest and greenest I have ever seen. To her childish, clingy, unnecessary love for her murdered husband.
Two years ago, Dunbarr had a case for me. I had to find the killer of an up-and-coming model’s husband.
“This is a big one,” Dunbarr said eagerly. “This girl, Lena, isn’t famous yet, but she’s on the cusp, so she’s got some money.”
He placed a photograph of the said husband on the table in front of me. The husband was just a kid. Twenty years old. Skinny, raven-haired, and tattooed. What Lena saw in him was hard to tell. However, her greens intrigued me somewhat, as I was spending money left and right on drink and pleasure.
Two years ago, she was twenty-four when she opened the door to me and I stepped foot inside her million-dollar loft, her green eyes, a bright, shiny mess of tears. Over the last two years, her eyes dulled into a sullen, greenish swamp.
In the beginning, I visited the young widow often to give her updates on my progress, but as I was standing, barefoot, on the glass shards of my own destroyed marriage, the case began to simultaneously gnaw at me and bore me half to death, so I quit coming.
A month had passed, and Lena showed up at my apartment. The first time I saw her through the peephole, I looked around my cheap studio with the eyes of a sane man who hasn’t given into his dark vices. The furniture was gnarly, left behind by a previous tenant, and empty bottles lined the perimeter of the room like barbwire.
I grimaced with relief at her lack of interest in the deteriorating state of the apartment. She plunged into the room, threw herself on my unmade bed, and stared up at me.
“You have a lovely place,” she said, breaking the dark and heavy silence, her face childish in its sincerity. She came to get an update on her husband’s case.
“Please tell me you have something…” she whispered through pale petal lips that hardly moved as the words floated out of her like valley fog. I settled in the armchair across from her, the broken spring in the seat needling my thigh.
What could I say to her? Most certainly not the truth. Except for running down to the liquor store across the street and spending one sleepless night at a strip club on the corner, I’ve been hibernating in my apartment for the past month. A housefly, perched on a banana peel, watched me through its rusty, round eyes. I shifted my gaze to the window as I spoke, peering into the gray, muggy afternoon.
Her husband, I told Lena, was a member of an international criminal gang. He was responsible for several vicious crimes. The word on the street was that his death was payback, and the perpetrator fled the country. “It’s one of those unsolvable crimes,” I said. “Nothing concrete. Dead end. You understand.”
As I spoke, my words gorging on her emaciated flesh like a shoal of piranhas, I could not look at her. I almost began to believe those words as the dark eyes of her dead husband seemed to stare into my own out of that gray and muggy sky.
And who knows? My story might have been true. I remembered the disappointment I felt when Dunbarr placed the kid’s photograph in front of me. Blank-eyed, talentless, tattooed. Certainly useless. With neither career prospects nor a penny to his name. What Lena saw in him was hard to tell. He certainly had the potential to move in that dark, criminal direction, if he wasn’t on that path already.
“Would you like a drink?” I had offered. “It’ll take the edge off.”
She hesitantly drained her glass as she sat on my bed, her feet tucked under my blanket. She drank like a woman whose vice wasn’t alcohol. I kept her company as I drank straight out of the bottle. Lena reached for my bottle placing her cold palm over mine, and downed it fast, her forehead creasing like an accordion. Outside, clouds gathered, thick and brooding. Little by little, night crept inside and drenched us in darkness.
We awoke in my bed next to each other, my arms wrapped around her bony body. She looked at me, her face thinner than it was the previous night. Her eyes empty. She was in the grips of a hangover.
“What’s your vice?” I whispered in her ear.
But I knew. I already knew. That’s why she came to my seedy apartment and never left. Men were her vice. This was two years ago, and here she still was. Worshiping the spirits as only a drunkard knows how. Her devotion overtaking mine in its fanaticism.
So there Lena is, across the room, sinking into the mouse-gray armchair, her head thrown back, and her mouth open. Dressed in a yellow sundress with floating hearts.
The phone rings. I listen to Dunbarr’s heavy, nasal breathing. “Get over here,” is all he says.
The receptionist keeps me waiting, while giving me the side-eye. She is a gray, boring type of bird, from her suit to her complexion, gifted with unusually bland features. She blends into the gray-colored wall, like the rest of the furniture in the lobby. I give her a hard stare and watch her pluck her gaze away from me. There was a time, some years back, when entering this office gave me a jolt of joy. The previous receptionist was all perfume and bright colors, her pink lips coy against her pearly teeth. Of course, to spite me, Dunbarr let her go.
After almost an hour, the gray bird leads me down the dim hallway, its dust bunnies and carpet stains as familiar to me as the vein patterns on my hands. For a split second I pause in front of my old office, the chip of paint on the door a little bigger. That small, quiet cube with its musky scent of crime and death was my home for two decades. That was where I used to spend most Friday nights, eating stale noodles and reading through my case files. My plaque, of course, is gone, and in its place is a shiny one, with some new detective’s name. Someone I never heard of. Through that door, I could hear a young voice talking on the telephone, working his case.
“This way,” the receptionist says as she opens the door to Dunbarr’s office. I give her a grin, which is all teeth and malice, and she scutters out of the room, leaving me alone with the man.
“Hello, boss,” I say.
Dunbarr is standing with his back to me, looking out the window into the street below. Faint daylight fans around his enormous frame and settles in puddles on the floor and walls. I listen to his heavy breathing and the anxious ticking of the clock above his desk.
We have not seen each other since my firing after that drunken phone call two years back when I told him what I thought of him and his stinking office. After I sobered up, I called him and asked for my job back trying not to sound like a mutt. Over the phone I could hear his thick nostrils swelling. “Lose the booze,” he said, “and then we’ll talk.”
Soon after, however, he began to give me little projects. Just here and there. Little odd jobs. Similar to what I used to do when I was young and as yet unspoiled, just starting out as a PI office clerk at twenty-one. Trail someone. Make a phone call. Take some photos. Little jobs here and there, without any knowledge of the cases. I became just an extra in the other detectives’ noirs. It brought in money. Money for my apartment and my booze.
“There is a lot of money on the line,” Dunbarr says and turns around, his intense expression just like I remember it, as if two years does not stand between us. I glance to my right and to my left, wondering if those words are meant for someone else. He smirks, his lips quivering like worms. “That’s right,” he says, and points to his cluttered desk. There, strewn on top of coffee-stained folders and wrinkled news clippings, are a dozen or so photographs of a macabre crime scene.
My pulse quickens. My neck feels moist.
I crave a drink.
“What’s this?” I say with a mix of horrid fascination and disgust.
“Your case. All yours,” comes the soft reply, like a hiss from a snake.
I look Dunbarr in the eye. “You are giving me a dead-end case. A crime with neither an end nor a beginning. I don’t want to be your last resort.”
The silence that ensues swallows all sound, even the ticking of the clock dissolves.
He chuckles. “Well, well, detective. This is exactly why I still have a soft spot for you and why I called you here.”
Lena is sitting on the windowsill like a cat, a cigarette between her lips. Moist draft slips inside through the crack between the casement windows and licks her neck. The full moon is reflected in her eyes.
Unlike my ex-wife, she does not inquire where I had been or why I arrived home so late. She takes a long drag on her cigarette and says, “Hello there,” through the thick, gray smoke of her exhaled breath. I remove my shoes and cross the darkened room. I sit beside her, and we watch the moon until a murky cloud slowly slides over the pale sphere like an eyelid.
“I have to leave. I am going to be gone for a little while,” I say into the darkness.
I feel a stillness in the air.
“Is there news of my husband’s killer?” she tentatively asks. I touch her hand, and she says, embarrassed, “Of course not. You have a new case. I understand.”
I think of Dunbarr, and his inscrutable eyes studying mine. Giving me a chill. “How’s Lena?” he asked as I was getting up to leave. My eyebrow arched into a question. He nodded. “Yes, I know about the two of you.” I laughed as if it to say, you know nothing. “More specifically, I know what you’ve done to her.” He shook his massive head slowly. “You are like a dark, bottomless pit into which people keep falling. You should have left her alone. She’s unrecognizable, I’m told.”
“I’m sorry, Lena,” I say to her.
“Don’t be,” she says as she reaches for the bottle. “Troubled men are my vice.” But I already know that don’t I? That’s why she came to my seedy apartment two years ago, and never left. She didn’t even like alcohol in the beginning.
Lena never picks up the phone. Not once. I do not call her often, but when I do, I spend long, long minutes listening to the emptiness after the beeps die. Eventually, I wonder if she was a mirage. An invention of my guilty mind meant to haunt me. Sometimes, I think of the alternative, which is that she drank herself to death in my apartment. On my unmade bed, tucked under the old blanket, lies her shriveled corpse.
After being on the road for a month, the case begins to take its toll. Sometimes, as I sink into the silence, I have one-sided conversations with her. I tell Lena of the progress I am making on the case. In the beginning, I explain, things were slow; I followed the well-worn path of all the previous PIs. The problem is that they, of course, all failed, and I have no room to fail. My life now merged with the present case. The sustenance of my addiction tied to the resolution of the case.
“Do you know how many Danny Rogers were born in 1968?” I ask.
I imagine her cocking her head just so, as she often did, a small gesture, almost invisible to the naked eye.
“But, do you know how many Danny Rogers were born on the twenty-ninth of February of that year, and spent his childhood in Sunnyville, Virginia?”
I imagine Lena pausing, her fingers with a cigarette between them freezing two inches from her mouth, her pale lips stretching into a knowing, sad smile.
I imagine her lips forming the word, “One.”
“That’s right,” I say aloud. “Just one.”
The Sunnyville Motel reeks of roach spray and mold. I sit on the bed with the cold case file in my lap and read through the aged records. There are over two hundred pages of notes, and I am making descent progress, my mind’s eye deep in it, almost like it used to be before. Back when I was still a sane man who hasn’t given into his dark vices. Back when I was bright-eyed, my mind clear, spending every waking moment buried in my work without the need to come up for air until the case was solved.
Now, money is what I need.
I awake to the rain outside my motel window, and my heart thundering inside my chest. The room is soaked through and through in darkness. It is the third night that I have managed without so much as a drop of drink, and my skin crawls and my teeth chatter. I have to keep my sanity intact because the cold case is in my lap and the victim’s parents promised money, and after fifteen years no private eye would touch the case. A dead-end case? What sort of parents would offer a million dollars for finding their young son’s butcher, but without so much as a down payment on the job? Did they even want the killer to be brought to justice?
I cannot sleep. And just like in my old, PI days, my vice and work collide, the fusion of the two brutal in its effect on me. I grab my case file and step out into the dark mist. I wander down the empty streets in search of the strip club where the childhood girlfriend of the killer works. I realize that all the previous PIs who handled the case and failed were looking at the killer’s adult life. I make a conscious decision to look into the people of his youth. I am met by the liquor stores instead. They watch me slowly walk past. Their intense gaze something I cannot shake.
Finally, I come upon what I am searching for and like a monstrous fish, the dilapidated strip club on the corner with its pink florescent lights swallows me whole. I stare down into my glass of booze, the golden aphrodisiac winking up at me. The fish begins its slow, methodical descent into the bowels of the deep, the beats of song coursing through its bulk like blood.
I am on my fourth rum and coke at the bar. I am sure I was speaking to the bartender when I paused to take a long swallow of my drink. I replaced my glass and looked up, only to discover that the bartender isn’t there, and that I am not even at the bar.
I am seated at a red booth in the back, away from the bare, dimly lit stage.
“That’s so poetic. Such a romantic thing to say,” the blonde stripper beside me says.
“What did I say?” I ask, to which she laughs.
Something is missing. My breath catches in my throat as I feverishly pat my jacket. The stripper watches me, one penciled eyebrow lifting.
“Were you looking for that?” she asks, as she points at the yellow folder on the cushion beside me. I exhale and place the folder in front of me on the table, resting my hand on it.
“Seems like you are here on business,” she says into the air. “Are you a businessman?”
My silence does not deter her. She moves a little closer to me, her fake eyelashes brushing my cheek.
“You said the funniest thing,” she murmurs, “you said that you are reconnecting with your childhood. That I remind you of your first love.”
I almost spit my drink out as I roar with laughter. When I was eight or nine there was a little blond girl in my class whose pigtails I liked to pull. Is she a wife now? Sleeping beside a cheating husband? Or is she a stripper with whom a husband cheats?
The blonde stripper takes a sip from my glass, her dead eyes on mine. “I love this song,” she says, tracing her long, pink nail along my pantleg.
She blinks, her smile sliding off her face, as her hand grasps the grip panel of my gun.
“What’s this?” she gasps, her hand recoiling as if from a hot stove. I catch her wrist as she jumps up to leave and press my finger to my lips, my gaze as cold as the pink, fluorescent lights. She pulls her wrist and clutches it as she dashes away from me.
I order two drinks. One for me; the other for Lena.
I close my eyes. Next to me, Lena is sinking into the mouse-gray armchair, her head thrown back, and her mouth open. “Whiskey sour in the rough,” I say as I hold her drink in front of her, the ice cubes clinking against the glass. She downs it, her eyes staying closed, and wipes her lips with the back of her hand. The veins under her skin stand thick like worms and her white skin glow like a street sign on a road in the dead of night.
I open the folder and look through the photographs, examining every detail, leaving nothing out. I spread the photos on the table.
A scream and a crash at my elbow force me out of my stupor. My eyes shoot up and my mind sharpens. A stripper is pointing and screaming, her pale skin and leathered body shaking, her eyes two pools of throbbing terror. There, spread out on my red table are large photographs of a dismembered corpse. Everyone is watching me as if I am a strange beast. I grab the photographs, my hands shaking from the booze, and disappear into the dark night again.
In the pale light of dawn, the strip club surfaces from the safety of the night like an abused child, huddling, crouching on the pavement, waiting for a good kick in the rear or a slap across its shabby face.
The strippers soon emerge, covering the street like moths. Soon, they flutter quietly away. The moon above me is still hanging in the sky like a rusty hook. I doze and when I open my eyes, the moon is gone and on the seat beside me is a man waiting for the morning bus on his way to work. He glances at me, a crinkle forming between his brows. He could smell the alcohol on me. My brown suit and purple tie I have not changed in a week, and it emanate a stale odor.
I walk down the crooked streets until a crooked five story building greets. I enter through the graffiti-covered door, stepping over litter and the deadbeat sleeping on a piece of cardboard, his brown suit and purple tie soiled and ripped in places.
As I make my way up floor after floor, I hear shards of life seeping through the cracks of the apartment doors. Like peeling layers, I listen to the cries and shouts and slaps and barks and wails. I stop in front of apartment thirteen and listen to the silence on the other side. I ring the doorbell, close my eyes and in my guilty mind’s eye I see her: Lena lying under my old blanket, her breathing at times dull and ragged, at other times shallow and meek. Lena’s corpse under my old blanket. I run my palm over my face.
I watch an eye stare at me through the peephole. I hold out my expired PI badge and wait.
“Cop?”
I shake my head.
The unblinking eye continues to stare.
I push a fifty underneath the door.
“There is more where that came from,” I lie.
The eye vanishes. Just as I am starting to curse myself for parting with the money, a lock turns and the door creaks open.
She is barefoot and wearing a silky, emerald green robe. Without the armor of her blonde wig, her vampy makeup, and her six-inch heels, she stands before me small and nervous. She runs her hand through her boyish, black hair. This is my turn to stare. The only thing that let’s me know it is the same woman is the dead look crawling out of her eyes. Hard to believe that it’s the stripper that in the darkness of the night so brazenly ran her lashes along my cheek and slid her long, pink nail up my thigh.
“You are the freak from last week, with the gun and the pictures?” she asks, her gaze skidding over the suit to the small bulge at my hip. She rubs her wrist, which I had so harshly grabbed back at the club.
“Jasmine Barrera,” I say, “I meant no harm. I’m a private investigator.”
She shivers. “How do you know my name?”
“It came up. Can we talk?”
She does not ask me for my name.
I follow her through the living room into the kitchen.
From my spot on the kitchen stool, I have a partial view of her living room. The apartment is encased in heavy incense. I sneeze. Cheap wall decor covers the lime green walls. The brightly colored paintings and icons are too overwrought for her old, little apartment.
“That’s a divine incense,” I say. She accepts my compliment with a frown. “Copal, isn’t it?” I continue with a disarming smile.
“What if it is?”
“I went with my family—a wife and two adorable kids—on a little family vacation to Mexico just last month. Beautiful place. Even more beautiful people. The little hotel we stayed at smelled exactly like this.” I smack my lips for emphasis. “Lovely. Just lovely.”
She stands with her back against the counter and watches me, her arms crossed across her chest, her knuckles white.
“And the artwork? Mexican, too?” I smile wider.
She turns away from me and begins to make coffee.
“Most of it. My family’s from Guanajuato. These cheapsakes keep me sane in this country. Rooted. Like I’m not just a mirage. What do you want?” she asks.
My stomach growls. I do not remember the last time I had eaten.
“I want Danny Rogers,” I say.
She pours coffee for herself, no milk, no sugar and sits across from me, the steaming cup between her hands. She does not offer me a cup.
“I don’t know any Danny Rogers.” She shakes her head and takes a sip.
I thought she’d say exactly that, so I pull a copy of an eighth-grade yearbook, flip it open to a bookmarked page, and leave it open on the table in front of her to jug her memory, while I stand up and make myself a cup of coffee. I rummage through her cabinets until I locate sugar, and then I open her fridge, take out a milk carton and pour the last of her milk into my cup. There it is, like a prized jewel in a museum: an unopened vodka bottle. I pour half of my coffee in the sink and refill the cup with vodka. I take my seat across from her.
She looks at me, her olive skin and black hair glowing against the rising sun, which is streaming through the blotchy window behind her.
She narrows her eyes. “Back at the club you said the strangest thing. You said that you are reconnecting with your childhood. That I remind you of your first love. It was a disturbing thing to say. I am a stripper.”
“And yet, back at the club, you said it was romantic.” I swallow my coffee in three gulps. “We are never what we truly are. We say things we don’t mean and we do things we don’t mean.” For the briefest of moments, her eyes flicker.
“You’ve seen detective movies?” I ask.
She begins to fumble with her long, pink, thumbnail like a confused child.
“To help with deciphering a killer, a detective steps into the perpetrator’s perverse mind. It’s a technique that binds the two together. Danny is responsible for a brutal murder. Now I have to find him because Danny vanished. Poof! Last week, I came by your workplace—and I deeply apologize for that—to reconnect with Danny’s childhood and his first love, which it appears you might have been…”
She listens to me with laughter in her eyes and her lips parted. “A killer? Not Danny Rogers. He was a sweet kid.” She looks away. “We both were.”
She pulls the window shade down, returning the room to semi-darkness.
Her hand rests on the table. I cover her hand with mine. “You both were. What happened?”
She turns her head and when she looks at me again, her eyes seem deader still. She throws my hand off of hers as if I am the very plague. “Don’t play games. I’ve been around long enough and know how to read men. I can ask you the same question. Why did you come here stinking of sweat and booze?”
It is now my turn to let out a bitter laugh.
I stand up, reach inside my jacket, pull out the yellow folder, and carefully place it down on the table. I open the folder and scatter the photographs of the grisly crime over her kitchen table. She pushes away from the table’s edge. It takes a moment for her to catch her breath.
“There is a a nice, warm spot in hell waiting for men like you.”
“Lady, you must be blind,” I say as I spread my hand over the photos on her kitchen table. “I am in hell.”
Here is where she assumes I would get up and leave, but I remain seated, and she slowly smothers the hatred burning in her eyes for men like me until her eyes become dead again.
“Mutual sweetness, is that what drew you to each other?”
“Religion,” she says. “We met in church. We were sincere in our beliefs. People are drawn to their own kind, I suppose. And before you say anything, he wasn’t a fanatic. He was a kind soul. Very giving. His time. His money, which he had very little of at that age. He believed in sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice,” I say under my breath. It was an interesting word. “Believe it or not, but I, too, am a religious man,” I whisper, as if it is a cherished secret. “I have my vices, to be sure, but don’t we all?”
I could tell from her raised eyebrow, to the smirk on her lips, that she does not believe a word that is coming out of my mouth. She is so unlike Lena. I run my palm over my face. Lena believed me, believed in me, from the beginning all the way through until the end. There is a dull ringing in my ears. When I come to, Jasmine is removing a small painting from the wall.
“Yes, that’s the one,” she says as she comes over and places the painting on the table. “Danny Rogers painted it for me. We were just kids. It’s Guanajuato. The city in Mexico where I was born. It was our dream to live there one day.”
“Vagabundo!” A hiss in my direction penetrates my dream. I slowly regain consciousness. The light seeps through my closed eyelids, my pelvis juts into the hard asphalt. My face is bathing in the midday sun, and the sounds of many footsteps and conversations produce a kind of strange, demonic whirl. The cardboard underneath me is moist and soiled, my brown suit and purple tie are ripped in places. Empty bottles are scattered nearby. Through bleary eyes I watch the day glide past me.
Just as unrivaled thirst begins to overtake me, making my teeth chatter and my body shake, a hand rests on my shoulder. My lids slide open revealing my bloodshot eyes. I smile widely at him, I can’t help it, showing him my missing teeth. He knows my vice. He holds it in his hand, the aphrodisiac—my one true love—the gold tequila in a bottle. He doesn’t want my money. And I don’t have any to give him.
“Hola amigo. Hola hermano,” the man whispers, his blue eyes alternating between laughter and something else. My eyes are level with his brown cowboy boots. It is not the first time that he’s been here; he’s visited me many times before. He seems to have taken an interest in me for reasons I am sure I know, but cannot remember now, since brain fog has overtaken reason.
He laughs again. I know his name. “I’ve been looking for you,” I whisper. But maybe I don’t say anything at all. I stumble to my shaking feet, and there, the city of Guanajuato sprawls before me — the dusty, mountainous mosaic of brightly colored churches, veiny cobblestone roads, and eerie silence.
*****
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