I stared up at the brick three-flat looking for signs of occupancy. Brynn had tracked down a last-known address for Levi Vinson, but standing here in front of the building, I had my doubts. It had been decades since anyone had put money or attention into this property. Peeling paint, wood rot, a roof missing a third of its shingles—from where I stood, the building looked like it needed to be condemned. Junk mail was piled up on the porch, torn and disintegrating in the weather, and others had been tossed into the scrawny shrubbery by the wind. I saw no signs of Levi’s name on the front buzzer near the door, nor did I see the apartment number Brynn had indicated. Perhaps it was a basement unit or had back access. Slimy landlords could always find someone to occupy the most unappealing space, if the rent was low enough.
I walked around the side of the building. Finding weeds had been trampled into the dirt, so I continued to the back. There a stairwell descended six steps into a concrete pit. Apartment B1 was scribbled on a piece of cardboard and duct-taped onto the basement door. Dead leaves and standing water littered the foundation. I imagined there was a drain somewhere under the debris that was probably perpetually blocked with garbage and plant material. Apparently the building owner preferred a crumbling foundation and smelly biology experiments.
Oh well, the shoes I’d slipped on this morning were uncomfortable anyway. I looked down into the dark space, took a deep breath, and stepped into the muck.
I knocked hard on the wood and listened for any sign of an occupant but heard nothing. However, a faint light was visible in the glass block window on my left, so I knocked again, harder and longer.
After a few moments, I heard a muffled shout, but the words were unintelligible, so I knocked again. I could hear footsteps now and seconds later the door opened a few inches. An irritated Levi Vinson stood on the other side of the door, blinking hard to refocus his vision.
He was shirtless, clothed only in a pair of ill-fitting gym shorts. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and then down over his beard.
“What the hell do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about Zoe.”
“Jesus Christ! She’s dead, all right? What the hell is there to talk about? And why the fuck would I talk to you?” He pinched the bridge of his nose and ran his hand through his hair, trying to shake off sleep before looking more closely at me. “You’re that woman from the funeral,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t you people just leave me alone?”
“She’s dead, Levi, so, no, you are not going to be left alone. Karl Janek isn’t about to leave you alone. And it doesn’t appear Zoe’s mother is going to sit back quietly, either after burying her daughter. They just want to know what happened to her,” I said, softening my tone. “They want to know why she died. Why she died alone in a basement in an abandoned house.”
He clenched his jaw and stared at me, anger in his face. Or was it defiance? Perhaps that was a more accurate assessment. Regardless, it wasn’t the emotion I’d seen the other day at the funeral. I couldn’t quite get a handle on Levi. His love for Zoe was clear, but there was something else complicating his behavior that I hadn’t figured out. Nor was I certain that he could be absolved of guilt.
“Here’s what I believe,” I said. “I believe that you loved her.” He dropped his head, staring at the floor as if the thought were too much to bear. “I also believe you may have been the last person to see her alive.” I was thinking about his outburst at the treatment center. The vague accusation he’d made and what it might have meant. Levi had been too upset at the time to notice anyone else in the room, let alone me. He blamed Wykell for something. But it wasn’t quite time to make him aware that I had seen the exchange.
“We’re just trying to figure out what happened to her. Don’t you want to know that too? Or do you already know?” My voice was firm. I let the accusation sit there, hoping that his love for Zoe would take precedence over whatever battles were going on inside him.
He cleared his throat and opened the door the rest of the way “Come on in.” I followed him in to a concrete room where the scent of mildew and stale cigarettes hit me immediately. A single bare bulb hung over a folding card table. On top of a stash of plastic milk crates, a microwave and electric hot pot filled in as a makeshift kitchen. The floor held a single twin mattress with a stained pillow and threadbare blanket. T-shirts and jeans were piled on a stack of boxes.
He plopped into a folding chair at the card table, and I sat across from him feeling the squish of stagnant water in my shoes and repressing visions of flesh-eating bacteria.
“So, am I right? Did you see Zoe while she stayed at the home on Pierce?”
He chewed on his lip and stared at the floor, debating, his internal monologue playing out.
“Look, you either saw Zoe or you didn’t. Can you just tell me the last time you saw her?”
“It was the end of last year. Thanksgiving. We didn’t have anybody to spend the day with. It’s not like our families are inviting us over for their festivities. Easier to pretend we don’t exist.” His tone was full of resentment. He sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Yeah, I knew she’d been staying over at that house, so I scrounged up a meal and we had our own little celebration. It’s not like we had a lot to be thankful for, but there was something about it that made us feel a little more normal. Just some grocery store sandwiches and beer from the Jewel, but that’s what we did.”
“And she’d been living in the house for a while at that point?”
He nodded but didn’t lift his head, seemingly fixated on a hangnail he kept picking at. It was hard to look at him and not wonder about how his life had taken a downward turn, what it would have been or could be without the damage drugs had done. But so far he was doing little to build my trust.
As I waited for his response, a clear plastic tub tucked into a corner on the floor caught my eye. Baggies of brown powder, a scale, a metal scoop. Looked like the kid was still in business but given the quality of his accommodations, he couldn’t be moving much product or was using his own supply. I quickly looked away. He’d never talk if he thought I had caught him in the lie.
“She’d been there a few months, I think,” he said. “It’s not like she had anyplace else to go. She crashed with me, here, for a while before that, but after we broke up, she found that place.”
“And did the two of you get high together on Thanksgiving?”
His head shot up. “No, hell no! We were both clean. It wasn’t easy, but we were clean.”
His vehemence seemed authentic but that didn’t mean he knew the details of Zoe’s habit after they’d separated. Or that he’d stopped dealing. Although there had been no opioids in Zoe’s system at the time of her death, we had no real idea of her sobriety.
“How do you know Dr. Wykell?” I asked, deciding to probe for links between them.
He drew back, his eyes getting a little wider. I could see I’d caught him off guard. He checked himself and slouched back into the chair.
“Why do you think I know him?”
“Because I was at the center a few days ago. The afternoon you came into the meeting.” He stared back at me, his eyes shaded, trying to read me. Assessing whether I was telling the truth and how much had I heard. Given his agitation at that moment, he might not even remember exactly what he had said.
“What was all that about? You seemed really angry with him. Were you a patient? Was Zoe?”
He stayed silent, his attention back on his nails. I let him sit, let the silence and his own conscious weigh on him.
“We were both patients,” he said, his voice cracking. “At least we both started the program. I don’t think either one of us lasted more than a week and a half.”
“Why was that?”
“Things just got weird. They control everything. When you woke up, when you ate, talk sessions, rules for everything you did, IV treatments every day. It was like being in jail.”
“That doesn’t sound all that weird to me, under the circumstances. At least it doesn’t sound all that different than any other rehab center.”
Patients walked out of treatment all the time, fabricating excuses for why it was just too hard to comply with rules they found onerous. It was common and a sign of not being ready to face the work versus anything inherently wrong with the treatment protocol.
“I got spooked, okay? It was my roommate. He came back from a treatment session, something where they had him in the coach house locked up for two days. When he came out, something wasn’t right with him. It was like he’d changed. His whole personality had changed. I thought about that Stepford wife thing, where the women move in and have some weird operation that their husband's secretly set up. Afterward, they’re all docile and have big boobs. You know that movie?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, but the guy changed. There was just something different about him that I couldn’t deal with. It was him, but not him. He was empty inside, like his mind was altered. I kept looking at his head for scars to see if they’d drilled holes in him or something. The staff was so proud of him, thrilled to see how he was afterward. It scared the fuck out of me. I sure as hell didn’t want to be turned into some zombie. So I split.”
“What do you think they did to him?”
The IVs and padded rooms came back into my mind. Levi was making it sound like a chemical lobotomy. It might also explain his accusation.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see any scars. You can’t exactly hide a lobotomy, but somehow they messed with his mind. How do you do that? Drugs? Electric shock? I wasn’t going to let somebody put electrodes on my head and turn me into a eunuch. So I got the hell out. There’d been rumors about some experimental drug they’re using. Something that might not be legal, but what do I know? Those are just rumors.”
“Patients aren’t told what the treatment will involve?”
My mind was running through options and watching Levi. His account of the coach house jived with what I’d seen, but the IV treatments could just have easily been nutritional. Every major city had walk-in IV hydration facilities where two hundred dollars could get you a Myers Cocktail and B12 infusion, not exactly sketchy science. Perhaps Levi simply didn’t know what his roommate’s personality was like without mind altering chemicals.
“They keep you in the dark intentionally,” he said. “You wake up in the morning and they don’t tell you what they’re going to do till they’re just about to do it. As if that’s supposed to make you feel more comfortable.” He shrugged again. “They kept talking about the need for secrecy, that there were some bigger plans, that they had an investor who was going make the place a big deal. I thought it was all bluff. A way to keep us from freaking out.”
“And did Zoe leave the center when you did?”
“Not long after. She wasn’t as freaked out by what happened to my roommate, but she didn’t see him either. I think she just didn’t want to stay there alone.”
“Do you remember when this was?”
“A year ago, maybe even a little more. That’s when I got serious about getting myself clean. Didn’t want to go back to a treatment center, and if I didn’t start taking charge of my problems, I was going to be dead or chained to a bed in jail or running from my suppliers. Figured those were all bad choices. I stopped all the shit and got a job at this club down on Halstead, Rocket Lounge, kind of a dive but they pay cash.”
Levi appeared to be sincere about having gotten clean, although the stash in the corner, suggested his selling days weren’t over. However, all addicts, at moments along way, convinced themselves and loved ones that this time they were serious. I didn’t know the odds, but promises made were not the same as promises kept.
“And how did you pay for this, the treatment center, I mean. Excuse the assumption, but it doesn’t appear that you are in a financial position to be able to afford in-patient care. I know it’s a very personal question, but Zoe wasn’t in a position to pay for it either, and I know her mother didn’t pay, so I’m curious about the financial arrangement.”
“No, I’m not offended. I wouldn’t be living in this shit hole if I had another choice. The center has a special program for people who aren’t rich. You don’t pay anything until you get through the first month. After that, they have some kind of scholarship, I don’t remember exactly what he called it. They work some bookkeeping magic to make it all happen. You have to sign some papers that you won’t sue them, but it seemed like a good deal to me. They told me not to worry about it, that I’d get treatment even if I didn’t have the coin to cover it.”
“That’s a very unusual financial model,” I said. Wykell didn’t seem to be in the charity business, and without insurance or government agencies to foot the bill, that left a huge question to be answered. And the threat of lawsuits seemed to be the least of it.
“On the one hand, it kinda makes sense, if you think about it,” Levi said. “Pretty hard to have a conversation about your addiction when your head is all fucked up. Takes a while for shit to get cleaned out of your system. But I didn’t get through the month, so I don’t know what kind of quid pro quo they’re looking for. Maybe you gotta scrub toilets with a toothbrush for the next twenty years?”
“And how did Zoe stay clean?”
“I guess you have to define the word stay. She struggled, like we all do. We were both clean when we left the center, but for Zoe, it didn’t last. She relapsed, and when I saw her for our Thanksgiving, she was going to give Dr. Wykell another try. That was the last time I talked to her, because she stopped taking my calls. Like I told you at the funeral, I left a bunch of messages and texts, but she never responded. Then her mom cut off her phone. I went over to the house a couple of times after, but she wouldn’t answer. It didn’t look like anybody was living there, so I thought maybe she left, moved in someplace else.” He blinked back tears then looked away.
“Do you remember when you were last at the house?”
“January, I think. It’s all kind of a blur. I guess she was just down in that basement dying, while I pounded on the door like a schmuck.”