Brooklyn Gothic, page 20
Finally, she interrupted to say she would pay the prescription and the old lady was shocked into silence. Casey plunked down the Remembrance Foundation credit card and the cashier rang up the medication.
The pepper spray, she bought with cash.
And the sleeping pills.
The last stop was the worst. Back in Park Slope, the sex-toy shop hadn’t opened yet. Casey knew from checking her phone it didn’t open until noon, but it was the only place she could find nearby that had what she needed. She paced in front of the door’s metal grating until a young woman showed up, one pale as soap, with green hair.
The young woman brought her to the handcuffs display. Casey picked out a pair with leopard skin-patterned fake fur on the cuffs—they looked the largest to her. She tore open the packaging and the staffer showed her how to work the cuffs. She stuffed the tiny key in the front pocket of her jogging sweater and the cuffs went into her knapsack.
Outside, she saw a parked police car, two officers sitting inside. She glanced at the cop in the passenger seat, and thought he made eye contact with her. She looked away and kept walking.
This was what she had to do. Walk into a New York police station with a belt buckle and a police sketch? She knew from dealing with them on various stories how apathetic and disinterested some of them could be, and they wouldn’t even know about a five-year-old case in New Mexico, and likely wouldn’t care about a two-year-old case of a woman who’d been attacked in Connecticut and didn’t even die.
Fresh in her mind was her former neighbor, the one who would stand outside her door, harassing her down the hallway, until she was truly frightened and she went to the nearest police station, and how one of the cops had told her, “Want me to be honest? Move. There’s not much we can do.” So she’d found Astrid in a room rental ad and depleted her meager savings to do what he’d said. Until she got the job with Mr. Foster, she’d been in debt because of it.
Was she supposed to trust authorities to swoop in and haul off a wealthy man who could afford the best lawyers?
He’d likely cleared the belt buckle of all fingerprints. Online, she’d seen dozens of gold belt buckles with a buffalo on the front, but couldn’t find one that looked like the one in his safe, the one looking like what Hector had worn.
The police sketch. She could tell it was he in it from the eyes. His eyes in the sketch looked exactly as they did in the old photo of him at an event with Sharon: large, black, with long lashes, and ice-cold. Even the nose looked the same, with just the barest hint of a bump on its ridge. Because of the ski mask, it wasn’t his full face, and she worried he wouldn’t resemble the sketch enough for the police to take her seriously.
Her biggest fear was even if they brought him in for questioning, they’d release him—of course they would, there was simply not enough to go on—and he would disappear with his millions, off to some foreign land with no extradition treaty. It would be so easy for him.
She needed a confession, and she needed it fast, before he might decide telling her about his involvement in his father’s murder was too risky and he skipped town.
Returning to the mansion, she walked weightily up the long stoop steps, as if trudging up a hill of loose sand. When she got to the surly devil knocker, she glared back at it.
Inside, the manic adrenaline high that had kept her going all morning, going going and not truly thinking, not truly feeling, suddenly vanished.
She didn’t make it to the bathroom before stumbling to the mosaic tile of the foyer and heaving up what little she had left in her stomach.
In the kitchen, she took the fruit out of her knapsack and cut it up into small pieces. She found the blender she’d used once before.
She searched the Internet for how many sleeping pills it would take to incapacitate him, but not kill him. Six seemed about the right number, given his weight. She crushed them with a pestle, then scrubbed the pestle and returned it to the drawer. The powder went onto a small square of paper, which she folded securely and stashed inside of her jogging sweater pocket.
She went outside to the sidewalk, and looked into the windows on the foyer side. The windows had no curtains, and she may need the lights on inside later, so she had to make sure passersby couldn’t see the staircase. The foyer floor with the staircase was actually the second floor with a floor below it she’d never bothered to go into, one she imagined servants used to work from. Luckily, this made the foyer floor high up enough from the sidewalk that no one who glanced inside of the windows could see the staircase.
Back inside, she made three phone calls. The first was to her mother. Casey told her the wedding had gone splendidly and she would contact her soon. That would be enough to hold her mom for a while.
The second was to Astrid.
The third was to the Baccarat Hotel.
She cried and told him to come home.
38
“Casey,” he moaned.
She stiffened, nerves spreading frostily along her sternum. It was the first word he’d said. She’d been sitting across from him for hours. It was now nighttime. She was relieved he’d said something, had been worried about the clear band of drool oozing out of his mouth, and had been carefully watching his shallow breathing, willing him not to die.
His eyes flickered open and he stared straight ahead of him, at nothing, then he shifted again, as if he was trying to get comfortable.
“Did—did it happen?” he slurred. “My brain?”
“Shut up,” she said, though she wasn’t sure why she said it. She wanted him to talk.
She glanced at the metal circle of the handcuff around one of his wrists, again worrying if it would hold. She’d checked it so many times. Her pepper spray was still clutched in her right hand, down by her calf, her hand stiff and aching from the continual pressure.
He’d arrived in the early afternoon looking hopeful and bashful.
She’d told him she knew he didn’t mean for his father’s death to happen, and she never wanted to talk about it again.
She began getting nervous he wouldn’t go upstairs and she was about to ask him if he could get her an aspirin. That’s when he went to put away his things. She mixed the powder with a dab of honey and scraped it into his fruit smoothie. She knew he’d take the drink even if he didn’t want it, because he was so grateful she’d forgiven him.
When he came back downstairs, they stood in the kitchen, both of them drinking, those eyes of his staring at her over the rim of his glass. Please, please, please let him drink enough. Luckily, he was thirsty.
What seemed only a few minutes later, he’d staggered, dropped to one knee, and wavered back and forth like he was in a strong wind. With a thunderous crash, he’d collided with the wooden table and was down. Betrayed not with a kiss but a smoothie.
Terrified she had killed him, she’d run to him, and watched as his eyeballs spun back and his lids flickered shut, his breathing ragging out of him in reedy waves. Like in the movies, she’d placed two fingers on the side of his neck and felt the fluttery, tiny beats of his vein.
She got out the plastic painter’s drop cloth and spread it next to him. To roll his dead, heavy weight onto it, she had to bend down and push him by his middle, and it wasn’t easy, like rolling a stone wheel uphill.
She rolled him once, got him three quarters of the way on, then dragged him by the corners of the sheet over the glossy quarter-sawn wood floors. Her pepper spray was inside the front pocket of her jogging sweater, there in case his eyes popped open, filthy with anger, and he grabbed her. By the time she’d towed him into the main room and over the mosaic tiles of the foyer, her entire body was moist and the muscles of her spine burned.
Getting him to the staircase, she pinioned one ring of the handcuffs around his left wrist, then latched it to the skinniest section of a banister post. The cuffs’ fake fur fringe lent the perfect amount of absurdity to an already surreal image.
He was slumped over as she checked the cuff again and again, yanking on the metal, making sure it was locked, convinced she’d done something wrong, and worrying it might cut off his circulation. Worried! About him! Then she got far enough from him that he couldn’t reach her with his free hand, and she slunk down, a diseased, repulsive feeling creeping in her veins.
“Casey,” he said, an undertone of normality in his voice. “What’s happened?”
“Are you awake? I want you awake.”
He nodded slowly, his head lolled to one side, his mouth wide open. He wiped the glob of drool from his lips with his floppy free hand.
“We can wait,” she said.
His head swerved, like it was detached from his spine, and then he looked at her, concentrating hard on focusing.
“You’re going to explain this,” she said, picking up the belt buckle from where it lay at her side, careful to touch only the edges, though she knew it was too late to worry about corrupting prints.
His head dropped forward, fast like a string puppet. When he seemed to be going back to sleep, she stood up and inched closer. Her phone lay halfway between them, hidden from his view up on a small table, her recording app turned on. If he said the worst, he wasn’t getting out of it this time.
Her original plan, to call Astrid and video-record everything, had been foiled. She’d managed to get Astrid on the phone at ten thirty a.m. West Coast time, and told her she’d be calling her at some point in the late afternoon or early evening, but couldn’t give her a specific time.
“I need to record him. I need a witness. But I can’t tell you why and don’t ask questions.”
She couldn’t risk that Astrid, whom she remembered had the mansion’s address, would panic and call the police and disrupt everything.
“Goddamn, girl, what’s going on this time?” Astrid had demanded. “I thought you were getting out of there.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to ask questions? I need you to do what I ask, and if you’ve ever cared about me, you’ll do this. No matter what happens, stay on the phone. Don’t hang up, and don’t do anything but watch and listen. Put your phone on mute.”
“Okay, okay. I’m working my shift at the bar tonight, but I’ll find an excuse and go outside.”
“That won’t work. I need your full attention, and I don’t know how long this will take.”
“Case, they’ll make my life hell if I call in sick.”
“Please, Astrid!”
Astrid had agreed.
But the problem was when he began to awaken—making low, guttural sounds—Casey realized she couldn’t get a cell signal in the foyer. She couldn’t move him if there was a chance he’d awaken fully, and she didn’t see another place on the first floor where she could handcuff him anyway.
She’d texted Astrid from outside, telling her to forget everything. Everything was fine. Of course, Astrid followed up with a call. Casey told her she’d misunderstood something, and it was embarrassing, and she wanted to forget it. Astrid, who sounded relieved she could go into work, let her go after giving a stern but short lecture to leave him.
Casey had turned off the ringer. She resorted to a backup plan, her recording app. It was at least another half an hour before he’d moaned her name.
“Wake up,” she said, glancing at her phone, wanting to make sure the bars on the app jiggered up and down with the sound of her voice. She’d charged her phone again after the call to Astrid and she eyed her battery icon: one hundred percent.
“Tell me about this.” She held up the belt buckle.
“Casey.” His voice oozed, her name like a question as the vowels melted, as if he was burbling through a water tank. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You already know.”
This made her angry. So angry. A red-hot sizzle cloud of anger, a furnace blasting around her ears. “I want to hear it! Is this the buckle missing from Hector Nonez? Tell me!”
“Yes.”
“Why do you have it? And those wedding rings in your wallet? What are those?”
“Yooou knooow.”
“Tell it to me!”
He tried to keep his eyes open, his chin resting almost on his clavicle. “You have me handcuffed because you know. Don’t make me say it.”
A stab of nausea pitchforked her belly, her intestines boiling dangerously upwards. She clutched at her stomach and sank to the floor.
She wanted to run to the bathroom, but knew she couldn’t stand. Cool sweat sprang from every pore. Say it, say it, say it, say it.
“You killed them?” she screamed.
“Of course I did.”
She spent a long time crouched at the base of the toilet in the half-bath, hurling up yellowish bile. After dry heaving spasmodically for several minutes, she rinsed her mouth and splashed her face, pulling harshly on the skin under her eyes.
Shaking like she had malaria, she inched her way on rubbery legs out of the bathroom, over the floor tipping out from underneath her, and sat full on the wobbly tile, clinging to her pepper spray.
“You lunatic,” she choked out, her voice, along with her body, trembling. “You’re not human.”
“I wasn’t human. I was sick in the head.” His voice rose. “Sick in the head! But you have your tense wrong. I was one.” His head swiveled for a moment, and she worried he would go to sleep. But he rapidly rubbed his mouth with his free hand, stimulating himself back to alertness. “From the time I was a child, I had uncontrollable thoughts and impulses. Miss Brock knew about them, she had to deal with me as a child. One time, she caught me trying to torture our little dog. I was six years old, I think. Sharon saw some of it. She used to love me, but all I did was lie to her, cheat on her. So she gave up and married someone else. After the aneurysm, it all stopped.”
Casey weakly held up one hand, beads of moisture popping from her temples like measles, wanting to tell him not to speak anymore, to spare her the rest. Then she remembered the recorder, its bars jiggering, waiting. “I need to hear what you did to them,” she said.
“I told you. All those people I’ve been trying to help. It was me.”
A blanket of numbness settled on her, and she didn’t want to hear anymore. Nothing. But she knew she needed it recorded.
“Why these people?” she asked.
“I picked them out. They were in the news for their heroism. I knew their deaths would cause a furor, get—get in the news.” Wiping dismally at his mouth again, he continued, “Who could do that? Special people like them, heroes. Preying on prostitutes, drug addicts, children—not my thing. That’s bottom feeding.”
“Oh, do you get points for that? The big, brave killer who went after adults?” She was weak, as if she’d taken the sleeping pills too. Why was her body betraying her? She needed strength.
She’d read about cognitive dissonance, how the brain could shut down if it receives opposing realities and can’t conjoin them. Her brain was splitting, her opposing realities clashing. How could she reconcile the man she’d known and loved with this thing? She prayed the recorder was getting everything, because she had the odd feeling she might block it all from her mind.
“Why would you put anyone on this project? You knew I’d find the police sketch.”
He looked surprised, squinting and opening his eyes wide, then squinting again. “Police sketch?”
“When you attacked Natalie Marshall.”
“I didn’t know there was a police sketch. I left for Greece after I botched the job and had the aneurysm a few months later. Is it like?”
“Like enough.” Her voice was rough, sand papery. “You saved her for last. You saved her for last in case I saw it. If I did, it wouldn’t matter, because the rest were done, and you were out of the country. You were going to let me find that thing.”
He shook his head, sadly, as if he couldn’t believe how little she thought of him. “Not at all. If I’d known there was any chance of you finding a sketch, I never would have assigned her to you. I saved her for last because she was alive. She could start digging around, asking questions about this foundation no one had ever heard of before. But I couldn’t let it go. Then it was too late to continue the plan to kill myself. I was in Geneva, trying to live. Wanting to start over. With you.” His bottom lip protruded, as if he’d been asked a pop quiz question for which he had no answer. “You see? No one knew there was a serial killer. Different types of victims, different weapons, different locales, different modi operandis.”
“Does that make you clever or something?” she yelled. “So you took the belt, the rings, as trophies.”
“Trophies? I took them to make it look like a robbery and kept them as a precaution.”
He twisted his wrist around, as if the handcuff was pinching him. Her weakness fled, adrenaline ignited. She went on high alert, aiming the pepper spray at him.
“Casey, I’m not going to hurt you. Look, let me show you something.” He curled his finger with his free hand and pointed. “You used cuffs with an emergency safety latch. If I press this lever, I’m out.”
Her body disappeared. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. She forgot she had pepper spray in her hand. If he’d come at her right then, she would have been a goner. Goddamn sex-shop staffer had neglected the part about the safety latch.
“But I’ll stay in this thing so you feel comfortable,” he said. “I don’t hurt people anymore and the thought of hurting you of all people…”
What he didn’t know was she had an eight-inch chef’s knife angled on a nearby table, hidden from view by two empty vases. She’d thought she could grab it anytime, but hadn’t counted on her spurts of paralysis.
Suddenly, liquid dynamite gushed through her and she bounded up and grabbed the knife. “I’ll use it!” she hissed. “I should save the taxpayers the cost of a trial.”
Far from making her feel better, the threat repulsed her.
“If that’s what you want to do, then do it,” he sighed. “I’d rather you be the one to kill me than anyone else. But I wouldn’t want that to be a thing you see. You’re not the kind of person who could unsee it.”
