John Woman, page 4
Herman was innocent. It was not his weakness that struck down Lorraine. Cornelius was the killer and he alone.
A few days later there was an article in the New York Post about Filo Manetti. He was named on a federal warrant. The government had an informant in the mob who had linked Lucia’s boyfriend to a conspiracy to commit murder. The gangster fled before the police could move in.
Fled, Cornelius thought, with my mother.
At the end of the first week the police came to the Arbuckle. When asked his name Cornelius told the police he was Herman Jones. They wanted to know if he had seen Chapman Lorraine.
“Not for months, officers,” Cornelius said.
Even though he was in the theater office on the lower floor Cornelius thought he caught a whiff of glue from the bookcase-door.
“When was the last time you saw him?” asked the senior detective, Colette Margolis.
“He didn’t like the place very much, ma’am,” Cornelius said. “He couldn’t sell it because it was a landmark building so, you know, he was kinda sour.”
“Did he have problems with anyone?” the detective asked.
“I didn’t really know him,” Cornelius replied.
“What about you?” she asked France Bickman.
“I haven’t seen Chapman in four months. The checks come in the mail and he don’t like the place too much like Herman here says. I really wish I could help you but we hardly know the man.”
The detective had amber eyes. Their beauty struck the teenage killer. Maybe he was staring a little too hard.
“You’re a little young aren’t you?” she asked and Cornelius wondered what she meant. The question must have shown on his face.
“To be working as a projectionist,” she explained.
“Oh. It’s after school and I can do my homework right here. You know all I have to do is change reels. It’s easy.”
She had brown skin like his. Her hair was a wavy brown.
The policewoman smiled. Her partner, a tall Hispanic man, nodded at Cornelius and then touched her shoulder.
“I guess we better be going,” she said. “We might come back if there are any other questions.”
“Come see one of our movies, Detective,” Cornelius offered. “When you watch them it’s like you’re living a hundred years ago.”
“Maybe I will,” she said.
Cornelius wished that the woman would return, but without a badge.
“The thesis is a police investigation,” Herman said when Cornelius told him about the detectives.
“The antithesis is animal attraction.”
Cornelius had decided to tell his father what was going on without telling him about the murder. He worried about the impact this knowledge would have.
“She’s a lot older than I am, dad, but I found myself wanting her to come back,” the boy said.
“But not in her role as a policewoman,” Herman added. “The only question is—what will be the synthesis of the heart’s investigation?”
That discussion was a rare moment of lucidity for Herman at that time.
Often Cornelius would come home to find his father in a confused state; the elder Jones sometimes didn’t know where he was. Cornelius would try to tell him that he was at home in his bed but that wasn’t enough. Herman would have to reenact the journey of his life up to the moment he was there in the room with the young man who called himself his son.
This pilgrimage took many different paths. Herman would, for instance, tell the story of a long and convoluted bus ride from his home in Columbus, Mississippi, through a life of deprivation and joy until the final stop in Brooklyn where he met Kendra Brooks, who later had an operation and became the seductress—Lucia, who made Herman into her man. The wordplay would bring a smile to the old man’s lips. He’d look up and recognize Cornelius sitting there beside him.
Cornelius continued to read to his father. When he was awake Herman loved the stories but rarely gave incisive interpretations of the uses of history. Late at night he’d wake up yelling for the conductor to stop the train.
“Why do you do it?” Herman asked one morning before Cornelius was off to school.
“What, dad?”
“Why do you make me come back to this?”
“You seem lost,” Cornelius explained, “scared.”
“But out there I’m having adventure. I got my legs and a big dick. The girls all like it fine.”
“You don’t want me to remind you that you’re here with me, dad?”
“Just be my friend, France. That’s all I need. Remember that we have to make sure my son has a pot to piss in when the curtain comes down.”
6
DETECTIVE MARGOLIS RETURNED to the Arbuckle on a Saturday evening three months after the disappearance of Chapman Lorraine. She came to watch movies. Between films she climbed the slender staircase and knocked on the projector room door.
“Hello, Detective,” Cornelius said.
“You remember me?”
“Detective Margolis. You gave France your card.”
“You can call me Colette,” she said. “I’m not on duty.”
She wore jeans and a short-short-sleeve pink blouse. Her thick hair was tied back. Deftly applied makeup made her amber eyes seem enormous. She was a few inches shorter than Cornelius but well-formed and strong.
“You were right about the movies,” Colette said. “It’s weird how everything in your life seems so far away. You really feel for the characters.”
She wasn’t forty, maybe not much past thirty, but he could see the hardness in her face when she stood close to him.
“You want to watch the next film from up here with me?” He wondered how the question managed to get out around the lump in his throat.
“That’d be great,” she said.
He opened the viewing panel and unfolded a chair for her to sit in. He perched on a stool behind her as she watched The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino.
The cop leaned forward, lost in long-ago passion. Cornelius’s fervor was right there in front of him; there in the room where his mother seduced his father, where he’d squandered his seed turning the pages of Dirty Nymphs, where he murdered Chapman Lorraine, where the dead man lay entombed not six feet from them.
After half an hour he put his hands on Colette’s shoulders and squeezed as his mother had him do when she had a headache. He contemplated that move from the moment she sat down. When Colette leaned back he took in a breath so deep that it got stuck. His fingers dug deeper because he couldn’t exhale. Colette hugged the fingers of his right hand by pressing against them with her jawbone. He let out a loud sigh then. This embarrassed him but he kept on kneading the strong flesh.
When the movie was over Cornelius walked Colette out of the projection room. She held out her hand and said, “Thanks.”
After the handclasp she said, “Well … I better be going.”
Four steps down and Cornelius said, “Can we have coffee sometime?” She took three more steps, stopped and turned. Her face was very serious.
“Come down here,” she said.
Something about the command thrilled CC.
He stopped at her stair. She went a step higher, enabling herself to look him in the eye.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Ju-just that I’d, I would like to see you again. Maybe talk about the films.” There appeared a hint of a smile on Colette’s pursed lips. Cornelius noticed that she had small scar on her right cheek. There was another along the right side of her lower lip.
“Just coffee?”
“Yeah.”
A smirk came into Colette’s scarred lips, then a smile. “You want my number?”
“If that’s okay.”
“You know I work very hard,” she said. “It took me months just to find time to come here.”
“Anytime would be fine,” Cornelius said.
“What about school? And what would your parents say about you seeing some woman for coffee who was almost twice your age?”
Almost, Cornelius thought.
“My mother is gone,” he said. “My dad is bedridden. I work here to pay our bills. I can do what I want.”
Colette took a white card from her red handbag. Cornelius caught a glimpse of the pistol nestled therein. She scribbled a number on the back.
“The printed side is my work number and the backside is my home,” she said. “Call me and we’ll see.”
The next day he called the home number. When a man’s voice answered he hung up. He redialed and the man, now angry, answered again. Cornelius hung up.
For a week the boy fretted.
The man is probably her boyfriend, he thought. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. Maybe it’s her brother or her roommate. Lots of mom’s relatives sometimes stay with each other.
He called, the man answered. Cornelius hung up.
The next day he got an answering machine.
“We’re not in but you can leave a message,” Colette said. “Either Harry or Colette will get back to you later.”
Cornelius hung up without a word.
We’re not in. The agitated teenager wrote these words down. He thought about her tone of voice and the permanence of the phrase. He called four more times to make sure he heard the message right.
That night he developed a fever. Violet Breen moved in for a few days to care for both father and son.
At night Cornelius could hear the buxom Irishwoman reading Yeats to Herman. He’d drift from the poems into nightmares about the decomposing corpse behind the wall.
France Bickman agreed to do double duty and show the films while the boy recuperated. Cornelius worried that France might remember the secret door and wrench it open with a crowbar. He imagined Chapman’s flesh turning to liquid and leaking out from under the door, then Colette coming in her pink blouse to arrest him. He’d start awake with a gasp hearing “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” rendered in Violet’s gentle brogue.
On Thursday morning the fever broke and Cornelius went to school. He sat quietly in classes, almost as if he wasn’t there. He had no friends among the students and avoided teachers, counselors and coaches with their helping inquiries. He did homework and took exams but Cornelius wasn’t interested in school. He knew there was no future; Herman’s history lessons had taught him that much.
“We all fade into the tapestry of the past,” Herman often said, “becoming like so many tiny knots in the weave of fine Chinese silk. There is nothing to distinguish you, me or even who we might think is a great man. Time passes and we all diminish until the fabric of our age renders unto dust.”
School was just another connective knot of thread, a passing moment.
That evening he went to work. It was the week of the annual Charlie Chaplin festival so the theater was crowded. Cornelius opened the viewing panel and watched, while imagining his fingers kneading Colette’s strong shoulders.
At the beginning of the second reel he ran down to the corner pay phone and entered the number printed on her card.
“Missing persons,” she answered.
“Colette?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, um, Herman.”
“Oh. Hi. I was wondering if you were ever going to call me.”
“Yeah,” Cornelius said. There was a siren wailing down the street.
“Where are you?”
“On the street. I got a twenty-minute reel playing.”
“Did you call my house?”
“No.”
“Really? Because somebody’s been calling. My boyfriend thinks I have something going on.”
Boyfriend.
“I got sick,” the boy said. “I had a fever or something.”
“Oh. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Well I guess I better be going.”
“Why’d you call if you’re just gonna get right off?” There was humor in her tone.
“I just wanted to say hi I guess.”
“What about that coffee?”
“Um, wouldn’t your boyfriend be mad?”
“You’re just a kid, Herman. Why would he be mad?”
“No reason I guess. There’s a place I go to on Second. It’s called Uno.”
“I know it.”
“What about four tomorrow?”
Colette was waiting for him, sitting across from the booth where Cornelius and his mother usually sat. She had on a rose-colored summer dress with quarter-inch straps and a zigzag stitch pattern across the bodice.
Her light brown skin reminded him of the coffee frosting on his father’s favorite doughnuts.
“Hi,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t order for you because I didn’t know what you drink.”
“Mocha cappuccino,” the boy said.
The waiter, Gino, came to the booth.
“Hey, CC,” he greeted. “Long time no see. How’s your mother?”
“She moved to Alaska,” the boy said, feeling like he was under a light as bright as the sun.
“Hello,” Gino greeted Colette.
“Hi,” she replied holding out a hand to the mustachioed elder gentleman. “I’m Colette.”
When Gino went away to order Cornelius’s sweet coffee Colette asked, “Why’d he call you CC?”
“My name isn’t Herman,” the boy confessed. “That’s my father’s name. He’s been sick so I’ve been doing his job. It started before I was sixteen and I kept his name so we wouldn’t lose the paycheck.”
“You work every day?”
“Please don’t tell anybody. If I lose that job we’d be broke.”
“What about Lorraine?” she asked and Cornelius’s fingers went stiff.
“Huh?”
“Won’t he get into trouble if he has an underage boy working there?”
“He knows all about it,” Cornelius said making sure to use the present tense. “And I’m sixteen now. This way he has somebody in there who he doesn’t have to give a raise for at least two years.”
“How many days a week?” the policewoman asked.
“Every day.”
“You never have a day off?”
“Uh-uh.”
“That would put Lorraine in even more trouble.”
“Why?”
“He broke the law having you there before you turned sixteen and then he has you on the job every day.”
“Please don’t tell,” Cornelius begged. “I need the job.”
“Don’t worry.” She sat back in her chair and grinned. “I do missing persons not child abuse.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I know.”
They talked about films after that. Cornelius had become an expert in silent films since taking his father’s job. He talked to her about great Russian films like Father Sergius and Song About the Merchant Kalashnikov. They also discussed little-known Asian works such as The Goddess and The Big Road. From there he started telling her how Europeans always had a better hold on culture because they spoke so many languages and their histories intertwined.
“Americans are so far removed from the actual events in their past,” the teenager said. “They don’t even know the basic lies that make up our history.”
“You sure you’re in high school?” Colette asked him.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You sound like you’re goin’ out for a master’s degree in about two or three subjects.”
“I read a lot.”
“Don’t you go dancing or play football or something?”
“Between school and work and my dad I don’t have very much time,” Cornelius explained.
“But what do you do for fun?”
“Having coffee with you is nice.”
Colette was the first friend Cornelius had since taking his father’s job. When they got together he would talk for almost the whole two hours before they each went off to work. They went to Uno three times before Colette suggested meeting somewhere else. She’d made up her mind not to tell her boyfriend about their friendship because Harry was the jealous type and might try to stop them from meeting. “… And I like seeing you,” she said.
They met on a Thursday in Alphabet City, at the corner of Avenue D and 2nd Street. Colette was carrying a picnic basket.
She led him past a dark green door, up a winding staircase to the fourth floor.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Right here,” she said as she worked a key in the lock.
The room smelled musty. There was only a short sofa and an end table. The wood floor was bare except for a small rope rug. A low-watt lamp tilted on the small table. Colette switched the light on after making sure the chain on the door was secure.
“Is this your place?” Cornelius asked.
“No … well, kind of … It’s the precinct’s apartment. Anybody can come here if they want to get away.”
She reached into the basket and brought out two paper cups of coffee.
“Just like the coffee shop but at half the price,” she said. “Sit down.”
Cornelius did as she told him. She sat with her back to him and pushed her thick hair aside.
“I’ve been wanting you to massage my shoulders again ever since that night at the Arbuckle,” she said.
Cornelius went right to work.
“Oh yeah,” she crooned. “That’s what I’ve been needing. Harry tries but he only does it for a minute and he doesn’t know how to grab the muscles like you do.”
Cornelius’s erection was almost instantaneous.
“Have you heard anything about Mr. Lorraine?” she asked.
Now he was fearful and excited at the same time. This brought back the night of the murder in full force.
“N-no.”
“What’s wrong, baby? You nervous?”
“Just concentrating on the massage.”
Colette leaned back against him and said, “Harder.”
He increased the pressure.
“Harder,” she said again.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Cornelius replied. He was already doing the best he could.
“Do you think that you can hurt me?” she asked.
“Well, I, um.”
“Come on,” she dared, rising to her feet. “See if you can throw me.”
“Uh-uh.”
“No really. Try.”
“I don’t want to.”
A few days later there was an article in the New York Post about Filo Manetti. He was named on a federal warrant. The government had an informant in the mob who had linked Lucia’s boyfriend to a conspiracy to commit murder. The gangster fled before the police could move in.
Fled, Cornelius thought, with my mother.
At the end of the first week the police came to the Arbuckle. When asked his name Cornelius told the police he was Herman Jones. They wanted to know if he had seen Chapman Lorraine.
“Not for months, officers,” Cornelius said.
Even though he was in the theater office on the lower floor Cornelius thought he caught a whiff of glue from the bookcase-door.
“When was the last time you saw him?” asked the senior detective, Colette Margolis.
“He didn’t like the place very much, ma’am,” Cornelius said. “He couldn’t sell it because it was a landmark building so, you know, he was kinda sour.”
“Did he have problems with anyone?” the detective asked.
“I didn’t really know him,” Cornelius replied.
“What about you?” she asked France Bickman.
“I haven’t seen Chapman in four months. The checks come in the mail and he don’t like the place too much like Herman here says. I really wish I could help you but we hardly know the man.”
The detective had amber eyes. Their beauty struck the teenage killer. Maybe he was staring a little too hard.
“You’re a little young aren’t you?” she asked and Cornelius wondered what she meant. The question must have shown on his face.
“To be working as a projectionist,” she explained.
“Oh. It’s after school and I can do my homework right here. You know all I have to do is change reels. It’s easy.”
She had brown skin like his. Her hair was a wavy brown.
The policewoman smiled. Her partner, a tall Hispanic man, nodded at Cornelius and then touched her shoulder.
“I guess we better be going,” she said. “We might come back if there are any other questions.”
“Come see one of our movies, Detective,” Cornelius offered. “When you watch them it’s like you’re living a hundred years ago.”
“Maybe I will,” she said.
Cornelius wished that the woman would return, but without a badge.
“The thesis is a police investigation,” Herman said when Cornelius told him about the detectives.
“The antithesis is animal attraction.”
Cornelius had decided to tell his father what was going on without telling him about the murder. He worried about the impact this knowledge would have.
“She’s a lot older than I am, dad, but I found myself wanting her to come back,” the boy said.
“But not in her role as a policewoman,” Herman added. “The only question is—what will be the synthesis of the heart’s investigation?”
That discussion was a rare moment of lucidity for Herman at that time.
Often Cornelius would come home to find his father in a confused state; the elder Jones sometimes didn’t know where he was. Cornelius would try to tell him that he was at home in his bed but that wasn’t enough. Herman would have to reenact the journey of his life up to the moment he was there in the room with the young man who called himself his son.
This pilgrimage took many different paths. Herman would, for instance, tell the story of a long and convoluted bus ride from his home in Columbus, Mississippi, through a life of deprivation and joy until the final stop in Brooklyn where he met Kendra Brooks, who later had an operation and became the seductress—Lucia, who made Herman into her man. The wordplay would bring a smile to the old man’s lips. He’d look up and recognize Cornelius sitting there beside him.
Cornelius continued to read to his father. When he was awake Herman loved the stories but rarely gave incisive interpretations of the uses of history. Late at night he’d wake up yelling for the conductor to stop the train.
“Why do you do it?” Herman asked one morning before Cornelius was off to school.
“What, dad?”
“Why do you make me come back to this?”
“You seem lost,” Cornelius explained, “scared.”
“But out there I’m having adventure. I got my legs and a big dick. The girls all like it fine.”
“You don’t want me to remind you that you’re here with me, dad?”
“Just be my friend, France. That’s all I need. Remember that we have to make sure my son has a pot to piss in when the curtain comes down.”
6
DETECTIVE MARGOLIS RETURNED to the Arbuckle on a Saturday evening three months after the disappearance of Chapman Lorraine. She came to watch movies. Between films she climbed the slender staircase and knocked on the projector room door.
“Hello, Detective,” Cornelius said.
“You remember me?”
“Detective Margolis. You gave France your card.”
“You can call me Colette,” she said. “I’m not on duty.”
She wore jeans and a short-short-sleeve pink blouse. Her thick hair was tied back. Deftly applied makeup made her amber eyes seem enormous. She was a few inches shorter than Cornelius but well-formed and strong.
“You were right about the movies,” Colette said. “It’s weird how everything in your life seems so far away. You really feel for the characters.”
She wasn’t forty, maybe not much past thirty, but he could see the hardness in her face when she stood close to him.
“You want to watch the next film from up here with me?” He wondered how the question managed to get out around the lump in his throat.
“That’d be great,” she said.
He opened the viewing panel and unfolded a chair for her to sit in. He perched on a stool behind her as she watched The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino.
The cop leaned forward, lost in long-ago passion. Cornelius’s fervor was right there in front of him; there in the room where his mother seduced his father, where he’d squandered his seed turning the pages of Dirty Nymphs, where he murdered Chapman Lorraine, where the dead man lay entombed not six feet from them.
After half an hour he put his hands on Colette’s shoulders and squeezed as his mother had him do when she had a headache. He contemplated that move from the moment she sat down. When Colette leaned back he took in a breath so deep that it got stuck. His fingers dug deeper because he couldn’t exhale. Colette hugged the fingers of his right hand by pressing against them with her jawbone. He let out a loud sigh then. This embarrassed him but he kept on kneading the strong flesh.
When the movie was over Cornelius walked Colette out of the projection room. She held out her hand and said, “Thanks.”
After the handclasp she said, “Well … I better be going.”
Four steps down and Cornelius said, “Can we have coffee sometime?” She took three more steps, stopped and turned. Her face was very serious.
“Come down here,” she said.
Something about the command thrilled CC.
He stopped at her stair. She went a step higher, enabling herself to look him in the eye.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Ju-just that I’d, I would like to see you again. Maybe talk about the films.” There appeared a hint of a smile on Colette’s pursed lips. Cornelius noticed that she had small scar on her right cheek. There was another along the right side of her lower lip.
“Just coffee?”
“Yeah.”
A smirk came into Colette’s scarred lips, then a smile. “You want my number?”
“If that’s okay.”
“You know I work very hard,” she said. “It took me months just to find time to come here.”
“Anytime would be fine,” Cornelius said.
“What about school? And what would your parents say about you seeing some woman for coffee who was almost twice your age?”
Almost, Cornelius thought.
“My mother is gone,” he said. “My dad is bedridden. I work here to pay our bills. I can do what I want.”
Colette took a white card from her red handbag. Cornelius caught a glimpse of the pistol nestled therein. She scribbled a number on the back.
“The printed side is my work number and the backside is my home,” she said. “Call me and we’ll see.”
The next day he called the home number. When a man’s voice answered he hung up. He redialed and the man, now angry, answered again. Cornelius hung up.
For a week the boy fretted.
The man is probably her boyfriend, he thought. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. Maybe it’s her brother or her roommate. Lots of mom’s relatives sometimes stay with each other.
He called, the man answered. Cornelius hung up.
The next day he got an answering machine.
“We’re not in but you can leave a message,” Colette said. “Either Harry or Colette will get back to you later.”
Cornelius hung up without a word.
We’re not in. The agitated teenager wrote these words down. He thought about her tone of voice and the permanence of the phrase. He called four more times to make sure he heard the message right.
That night he developed a fever. Violet Breen moved in for a few days to care for both father and son.
At night Cornelius could hear the buxom Irishwoman reading Yeats to Herman. He’d drift from the poems into nightmares about the decomposing corpse behind the wall.
France Bickman agreed to do double duty and show the films while the boy recuperated. Cornelius worried that France might remember the secret door and wrench it open with a crowbar. He imagined Chapman’s flesh turning to liquid and leaking out from under the door, then Colette coming in her pink blouse to arrest him. He’d start awake with a gasp hearing “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” rendered in Violet’s gentle brogue.
On Thursday morning the fever broke and Cornelius went to school. He sat quietly in classes, almost as if he wasn’t there. He had no friends among the students and avoided teachers, counselors and coaches with their helping inquiries. He did homework and took exams but Cornelius wasn’t interested in school. He knew there was no future; Herman’s history lessons had taught him that much.
“We all fade into the tapestry of the past,” Herman often said, “becoming like so many tiny knots in the weave of fine Chinese silk. There is nothing to distinguish you, me or even who we might think is a great man. Time passes and we all diminish until the fabric of our age renders unto dust.”
School was just another connective knot of thread, a passing moment.
That evening he went to work. It was the week of the annual Charlie Chaplin festival so the theater was crowded. Cornelius opened the viewing panel and watched, while imagining his fingers kneading Colette’s strong shoulders.
At the beginning of the second reel he ran down to the corner pay phone and entered the number printed on her card.
“Missing persons,” she answered.
“Colette?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, um, Herman.”
“Oh. Hi. I was wondering if you were ever going to call me.”
“Yeah,” Cornelius said. There was a siren wailing down the street.
“Where are you?”
“On the street. I got a twenty-minute reel playing.”
“Did you call my house?”
“No.”
“Really? Because somebody’s been calling. My boyfriend thinks I have something going on.”
Boyfriend.
“I got sick,” the boy said. “I had a fever or something.”
“Oh. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Well I guess I better be going.”
“Why’d you call if you’re just gonna get right off?” There was humor in her tone.
“I just wanted to say hi I guess.”
“What about that coffee?”
“Um, wouldn’t your boyfriend be mad?”
“You’re just a kid, Herman. Why would he be mad?”
“No reason I guess. There’s a place I go to on Second. It’s called Uno.”
“I know it.”
“What about four tomorrow?”
Colette was waiting for him, sitting across from the booth where Cornelius and his mother usually sat. She had on a rose-colored summer dress with quarter-inch straps and a zigzag stitch pattern across the bodice.
Her light brown skin reminded him of the coffee frosting on his father’s favorite doughnuts.
“Hi,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t order for you because I didn’t know what you drink.”
“Mocha cappuccino,” the boy said.
The waiter, Gino, came to the booth.
“Hey, CC,” he greeted. “Long time no see. How’s your mother?”
“She moved to Alaska,” the boy said, feeling like he was under a light as bright as the sun.
“Hello,” Gino greeted Colette.
“Hi,” she replied holding out a hand to the mustachioed elder gentleman. “I’m Colette.”
When Gino went away to order Cornelius’s sweet coffee Colette asked, “Why’d he call you CC?”
“My name isn’t Herman,” the boy confessed. “That’s my father’s name. He’s been sick so I’ve been doing his job. It started before I was sixteen and I kept his name so we wouldn’t lose the paycheck.”
“You work every day?”
“Please don’t tell anybody. If I lose that job we’d be broke.”
“What about Lorraine?” she asked and Cornelius’s fingers went stiff.
“Huh?”
“Won’t he get into trouble if he has an underage boy working there?”
“He knows all about it,” Cornelius said making sure to use the present tense. “And I’m sixteen now. This way he has somebody in there who he doesn’t have to give a raise for at least two years.”
“How many days a week?” the policewoman asked.
“Every day.”
“You never have a day off?”
“Uh-uh.”
“That would put Lorraine in even more trouble.”
“Why?”
“He broke the law having you there before you turned sixteen and then he has you on the job every day.”
“Please don’t tell,” Cornelius begged. “I need the job.”
“Don’t worry.” She sat back in her chair and grinned. “I do missing persons not child abuse.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I know.”
They talked about films after that. Cornelius had become an expert in silent films since taking his father’s job. He talked to her about great Russian films like Father Sergius and Song About the Merchant Kalashnikov. They also discussed little-known Asian works such as The Goddess and The Big Road. From there he started telling her how Europeans always had a better hold on culture because they spoke so many languages and their histories intertwined.
“Americans are so far removed from the actual events in their past,” the teenager said. “They don’t even know the basic lies that make up our history.”
“You sure you’re in high school?” Colette asked him.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You sound like you’re goin’ out for a master’s degree in about two or three subjects.”
“I read a lot.”
“Don’t you go dancing or play football or something?”
“Between school and work and my dad I don’t have very much time,” Cornelius explained.
“But what do you do for fun?”
“Having coffee with you is nice.”
Colette was the first friend Cornelius had since taking his father’s job. When they got together he would talk for almost the whole two hours before they each went off to work. They went to Uno three times before Colette suggested meeting somewhere else. She’d made up her mind not to tell her boyfriend about their friendship because Harry was the jealous type and might try to stop them from meeting. “… And I like seeing you,” she said.
They met on a Thursday in Alphabet City, at the corner of Avenue D and 2nd Street. Colette was carrying a picnic basket.
She led him past a dark green door, up a winding staircase to the fourth floor.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Right here,” she said as she worked a key in the lock.
The room smelled musty. There was only a short sofa and an end table. The wood floor was bare except for a small rope rug. A low-watt lamp tilted on the small table. Colette switched the light on after making sure the chain on the door was secure.
“Is this your place?” Cornelius asked.
“No … well, kind of … It’s the precinct’s apartment. Anybody can come here if they want to get away.”
She reached into the basket and brought out two paper cups of coffee.
“Just like the coffee shop but at half the price,” she said. “Sit down.”
Cornelius did as she told him. She sat with her back to him and pushed her thick hair aside.
“I’ve been wanting you to massage my shoulders again ever since that night at the Arbuckle,” she said.
Cornelius went right to work.
“Oh yeah,” she crooned. “That’s what I’ve been needing. Harry tries but he only does it for a minute and he doesn’t know how to grab the muscles like you do.”
Cornelius’s erection was almost instantaneous.
“Have you heard anything about Mr. Lorraine?” she asked.
Now he was fearful and excited at the same time. This brought back the night of the murder in full force.
“N-no.”
“What’s wrong, baby? You nervous?”
“Just concentrating on the massage.”
Colette leaned back against him and said, “Harder.”
He increased the pressure.
“Harder,” she said again.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Cornelius replied. He was already doing the best he could.
“Do you think that you can hurt me?” she asked.
“Well, I, um.”
“Come on,” she dared, rising to her feet. “See if you can throw me.”
“Uh-uh.”
“No really. Try.”
“I don’t want to.”
