Base Notes, page 30
Besides, I was a little curious to see how the flow of information might have changed—what did Beau tell her these days, about me or anything? And what did she tell him? What would eventually make its way to me?
A petty game of small powers, but perhaps not inconsequential; it was always good to know who would tell you what, and what they would tell others.
I wondered what she had told him about her last visit with me.
The tape measure traced the inside of my thigh, kissed my knee, and ended just inside the arch of my foot, where his thumb pressed its metal tip to the floor. He stood and made a mark in the little notebook pressed flat on his worktable. “Arms up.”
I lifted them, and he stepped in slightly too close—I couldn’t tell if it was an average Beau mannerism, a necessity of the trade, or something he would only try with his intimates.
“So . . . you and Jane worked things out?” He threaded his arms beneath mine and drew the tape measure around my chest so it crossed from nipple to nipple, kissing the tip of each shoulder blade behind.
“Did she tell you that, or are you just inferring from the commission?” I enjoyed when people played my games.
“Gotta do your neck,” he said, and his hands didn’t even shake, though I saw him swallow and lick his lips. Trauma, of course, but maybe arousal too. I have a very beautiful neck, five inches long and narrow as a stem: tempting to people who go in for that kind of thing. Though as far as I knew, he far preferred to be strangled. I wondered if that had changed.
“You need a haircut,” said Beau, unwinding the measuring tape from my neck. “It’s getting a little shaggy in the back.”
Not the turn I had expected this would take. “Where do you go?”
He grinned, rakish. “Jane cuts my hair.” Then, more soberly: “Giovanni won’t see you?”
“Not until I die and we meet in hell. And maybe not even then.”
“That blows.” Beau marked the final measurement in his notebook, not quite meeting my eyes when he looked up. “What happened with his building? Didn’t it get bought?”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “I heard they’re going to let him keep the space.”
Pausing with his pen raised above the page of numbers that described my form, Beau gathered himself. Unlike Jane, there was no guile in him. Did she find that sweet or tiresome? I could see as he prepared himself to broach an uncomfortable topic, and I settled back onto my heels to receive it. This was not the intelligence I had hoped for, but it would perhaps prove of more practical use.
“Man,” said Beau, and shook his head. Tried to start again. Set the uncapped pen flat against the page. A fine spray of ink from the nib left a spatter of lilac over my measurements. “This is . . . I don’t even know how to ask this. But Giovanni said you got the building sold. Like, to . . . what, to bribe him? Blackmail? To hold it over him, he said.”
“I’d call it leverage,” I said. “More accurate, less loaded.”
“But like . . .” He did a quick recalculation—he had not been expecting me to admit it. “How?”
I was trying to figure out where he was taking this. Whether it was something Jane knew or cared about. When Giovanni had told him, and why. “I told my client I needed his company to sell the building. He did.”
“Like that?”
“He really, really wanted this perfume.” I shrugged, a little flirty. “Rich people are weird.”
But he was already shaking his head. “I mean, isn’t that kind of fucked up, though? I thought we were all in this together.”
Did Jane think we had been in this together? She had always been in it for herself. But she and Beau already differed on so many things, somehow this misinterpretation did not surprise me.
“So did I.” Earnest, tragic. Even off balance, I knew what tone to strike with Beau. “But I guess Giovanni didn’t think so.”
He wavered. I saw him waver. But then he said, “I mean. It was kind of a big deal.” Dropping his voice, he added, “Murder isn’t like . . . easy.”
“No,” I said, thinking of that frozen night with Pippin Miles in the back of my car, the bone-deep exhaustion of hauling corpses in the cold. “It isn’t. But if you and Jane were steeled to it, why not him?”
Something had shut across his face, though: like Jane’s steel grate but softer, sadder. A curtain furling across a stage. The sway of a sign just turned from OPEN to CLOSED.
“When did he tell you all of this?” Then playfully: “Beau, did you have brunch without me?”
It struck the wrong note; he winced. “No. We just grabbed drinks a couple of nights ago.”
“What night?” I was done cajoling. This was a demand.
“Earlier this week. Tuesday.”
After I left Giovanni and took his grappa, that bastard had texted Beau and talked shit about me, tried to drive a wedge in. What did he hope to accomplish? Did he think that because Beau did all of Jane’s flirting for her, he could handle her breakups as well? That wasn’t how this kind of thing worked.
Beau was still talking. “He’s really upset, Vic. I’m kind of worried about him.” He considered his tangled tape measure for a moment. “I mean, I’m fucked up about it, I won’t lie, but he’s . . . Giovanni follows the rules, Vic. When shit goes down, he calls the cops.”
My bowels turned to liquid. “Did he say he was going to call the cops? Beau?”
“He wouldn’t,” said Beau. “No way. What about me? What about Jane?”
“Did he say anything?”
“No,” said Beau. “No. He didn’t. He just said—”
Fuck. “What?”
“He just said he thought it wasn’t fair. Getting away with it. That it wasn’t right.”
“You shouldn’t go bankrupt running a successful business either,” I said. I was livid. And not only at the state of American socioeconomics.
Giovanni had lied to me. He had cared very much what happened after he left my basement. I was a chump for taking him at his word. But I had wanted so badly to believe in his apathy, because anything else would necessitate action on my part. I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had. This realization caught me almost by surprise: I didn’t want to hurt any of them. But it was far too late for that.
“Your goddamned life shouldn’t be ruined by medical debt,” I said, a paltry expression of this sudden, wrenching sentiment. “You shouldn’t have to give up everything you love just to pay your rent. That isn’t fair either.” Like Barry said: bread and roses.
“I know,” he said. “I know. But—”
“But fucking nothing.”
“But,” he insisted, “your friends shouldn’t fuck you over. There’s nothing fair about that.”
Service does for service. I wondered if Giovanni had told him about that too.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked. “For the deposit?”
He gave me a number. It wasn’t small, and he didn’t offer the friends and family discount. Jane would have approved.
As I came out of the elevator on the ground floor of Beau’s building, my phone chirped. My first instinct was to reach for it—a newish habit. I hadn’t had any reason to check my texts so fast, before all this. It would have been Barry, who was paid to wait, or a client, who could afford to. But these days—or the days that had preceded them, before murder made everything so difficult—there were people I wanted to talk to.
But murder had made everything difficult—an outcome I had not foreseen or cared about at the outset of this project. This text might be Beau, with some brittle logistical follow-up. A sad contrast to his salacious missives of mere months ago. It might be Giovanni’s last words before flinging himself into the crushing arms of Justice. Or it might be Jane. She hadn’t texted me since she left my apartment, and I didn’t know if I wanted her to or not.
So I paused with my hand hovering over my back pocket. If it was Barry, I would lecture him about independent decision-making and ownership of his projects, which would make me sound very supervisory. If it was a client, I was free to refuse any pleas, offers, or persuasions that came my way. Except from Eisner, who still lurked in my peripheral as a problem that needed to be dealt with. I had given myself a vacation of some months, but eventually that loose end would need to be knotted, ends snipped neatly flush.
As I hesitated, my phone buzzed again. A second text, or the automatic reminder? If I knew, it might help me decipher the sender.
I should just look at it. Instead, I stepped into the street. As I walked to the subway I waited. Would it buzz again? Three in a row would mean Barry, maybe Beau. But I only got silence. It wasn’t until I was safely out of signal, deep under Union Square and waiting for the L rendered unreliable by construction, that I finally pulled out my phone to check.
I’m not sure who I expected, or who I wanted it to be. All right, that’s a lie: I did want a text from Jane. I wanted two texts in a row. But it was Eisner, one text, the second vibration a nagging reminder that he refused to be ignored.
Call me, it said. That was it.
On the one hand, he was a self-centered sack of shit who firmly believed that his desires were sacred. This could be one of those I need yous that ended in sinister inanity, like Sunset Boulevard. On the other hand, Gillis did end up dead, and Eisner had enough leverage to see me, if not a corpse, then at least pretty thoroughly fucked.
I would have to wait twenty minutes to swipe in again, the downside of my new unlimited MetroCard. Still, I trekked back aboveground and collapsed on a bench to call him.
“Vic,” he said when he picked up, and I knew immediately that something was very, very wrong.
“You texted me. I called.”
“Ye-es.” I heard a phone begin to vibrate in the background of the call. Faint voices. He was in the office, maybe. But then I thought of the quiet C-suite, the trickling fountain and soundproof glass. Not his office, but someone else’s.
“Why?”
“Well,” he said. “I’ve just left the lawyer’s office. The corporate lawyer.”
That didn’t bode well.
“It’s just . . . well, it seems there are some discrepancies between the version of events you and I agree on and the legal realities of my current position.”
“Interesting,” I said, and wished I were still midwestern enough to imbue the word with as many shades of ire as I felt. Jane could have, I was sure. Jane could have handled Eisner so deftly he wouldn’t realize she had done it, and left him with a faint whiff of shame he didn’t exactly understand.
“Perhaps you’d care to explain?” he asked.
I would not. But I couldn’t hang up. What did Eisner want to hear? Catering to his fantasies had gotten me this far—maybe it would get me a little farther. Just far enough.
“You trust your GC?” I asked. “You didn’t trust Pearson or the Yateses.”
Silence on the other end of the line. Encouraging.
“All I’m saying is: I made you a single meeting. How much do you think you really know about this deal your colleagues were doing? About who else might be in on it?”
“Well, I thought I knew enough,” he said. And then his frustration began to seep outward: sibilant, slow, corrosive. “But after all, I suppose this was an experiment, this perfume. If you’ve fucked up . . . Do you realize what this will cost me? Do you know what kind of shit I’m in right now?”
Not nearly the kind of shit I was about to be in, if he was this angry. This man knew everything bad there was to know about me. Or, almost. And that was plenty.
“Everything I have worked for was riding on this,” he said. “On stopping this. And now I’m months too late, and on top of this investigation, there’s . . . the other issue. I can’t afford any scrutiny right now, and if you’re wrong, and the lawyer’s right? It’s going to hit me like a fucking searchlight.”
My heart bled. “Take a few deep breaths. You can afford good counsel. You told me so yourself.”
“What the fuck do you know about it?” In that, I heard a familiar kind of despair. The same kind that I felt whenever I was faced with someone—like Eisner—who simply couldn’t comprehend what it was like to live so close to the edge. Who wondered why I didn’t just budget better, eat out less, cancel my gym membership. (What gym membership?) It was too vast a gulf to bridge.
Lucky for him, he would never have to try.
My order of priorities had just been reshuffled. Tonight was no longer a quiet night in. I resented that Eisner had called while I was already downtown—now I was faced with a trip up to Harlem for supplies and a change of clothes, and another trip down later. Then again, even well supplied I would have had several hours of lurking until full dark, and more after that, waiting for the neighbors to fall asleep. New York is a wonderful city for many reasons; ease and speed of travel is not one of them. To prepare yourself for an entire day in the city took foresight and planning and an enormous tote bag. Never mind preparing for the perfect murder.
Iolanda caught me on the way in. “How’s business?” she asked, and I smiled and told her the truth, two things that hadn’t gone hand in hand until recently.
“How’s that friend of yours?” she asked. “That pretty girl I’ve seen coming and going?”
So she had noticed Jane. For a moment, I felt warm: not embarrassed, but suffused with a sort of ridiculous pride. I thought that they might get along; I wanted, absurdly, to introduce them.
Then I paused to wonder if Iolanda heard more through her floor than I had previously believed. Alarming, if so. Not so much because it afforded the chance to eavesdrop on my sex life; rather because there were other things I wanted to keep quiet. But she didn’t place any particular emphasis on “pretty” or “coming”—it was a statement of fact, not an innuendo. I wondered if she was much more conservative than I had expected and didn’t realize what was going on, or far more open-minded than I gave her credit for.
Whichever, it made me uneasy that she paid such close attention. She hadn’t struck me as a mother hen, or a gossip. Maybe it was all that laundry; there was such a thing as too much good will. How could I put her off? Just enough to chill this burgeoning interest.
At any rate, I would have to go out the basement door later, to avoid any more small talk. Maybe if she didn’t see me again, she would even think I had been home all night. Though if she had seen Jane out the windows, there was no telling how long she sat watching in a given day, and what she noticed. An unnerving thought. But she had left me alone so far; I would have to rely on her a little longer at least.
Downstairs, I gathered a new length of clothesline from the roll on the workbench and curled it into a loop that fit in the back pocket of a pair of tight black jeans. Less for aesthetics—though I can lean into heroin chic when I want—and more to keep track of where my clothes were at any given time. Loose fabric was asking for an untoward spatter or stain.
As dusk moved ponderously across the sky, I ate dinner. Over a bowl of reheated barbacoa I asked myself how I was feeling. Ready to jump back in? The sense of panic and overwhelming exhaustion that had dogged my footsteps throughout January and February was absent. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the task—I was more looking forward to its completion. But I felt rested, refreshed, and prepared to tackle it head-on. Or from the side. Or whatever angle I could get, as quickly as I could get it.
He never should have given me his address.
At night, Eisner’s windows were lit gold, and looking into them felt like peering into the period rooms at the Met—much better illuminated than the dingy, dark little alcoves at the Brooklyn Museum, with bad glare on the glass and children’s greasy handprints blurring the view.
If anyone ever reconstructs my apartment from that time, I’m sure that’s how it will measure up to Eisner’s place.
The indoors was unobscured by window treatments. After dark in this neighborhood, you left your shades up and your curtains open so that less fortunate people could look in on your splendor like the Little Match Girl and appreciate your comfort and good taste.
The less fortunate do not appreciate the view, nor your having offered it. They feel acquisitive, angry, at the very best merely aspirational.
The night was mild, so as I stood looking into Eisner’s windows I didn’t feel the insult of cold as well as that of exclusivity. If I hadn’t known whose house it was, and hadn’t been on a particular type of errand that didn’t allow for conspicuous loitering, I might have stopped on the sidewalk to assess the crown molding, evaluate the choice of light fixture hanging from an original medallion. But I was, so I did not.
Despite the difference in architectural styles, his elegant old Federal-style row house had the same convenient service entrance under the front steps as Iolanda’s brownstone. The servants’ entrance, a hundred years ago. I hoped this one led to Eisner’s basement and not a converted apartment on which he made a little extra each month. What the hell would he need it for? No, far more likely it was where he kept his Peloton.
I had circled the block a few times trying to find parking for my Zipcar and settled for something a few blocks away. I could always double-park when it came to the pivotal moment. There was little traffic here to disrupt.
I had already put a few dozen miles on the odometer, running interference all over Manhattan and even taking a trip into the Bronx over the Willis Avenue Bridge. It wasn’t the cleanest alibi, but it might confuse the situation somewhat if anyone started looking.
They wouldn’t. I was good at my job.
I climbed the steps, flexing my hands inside gloves that were almost unseasonable now. But better sweaty palms than stray fingerprints. I wore a beanie as well, to keep any loose hairs in check.
The street was so quiet that I could hear his doorbell—resonant, a proper ring. Iolanda’s bell was an awful buzzer, and my apartment didn’t even have one. Not that anyone ever stopped by uninvited or unchaperoned.
