He’s outside, the man with the tattoos. The one who frightens everyone but Kirk. I’m pissed because I’ve been thinking about Ortega and the sight of this jerk cut through my best fantasy like a lightning bolt through a paper kite. What I’m not, though I’m about to leave, is afraid.
I’m wearing a pair of Victoria’s slacks and a pearl-gray sweater with a high neck. Reasonably demure but suitable to the task at hand. I slip into a light jacket, check my shoulder bag for the canister of pepper spray and head out the door. I won’t be a prisoner, not until they put us in handcuffs. And even then, I’m hoping the cops are horny enough to corrupt. One last fling in the back seat of a cruiser before the cell door clangs shut.
Martha was around earlier. She urged me to take matters seriously. She insisted that we’re under siege, threats coming from all directions, doom, doom, and more doom. So what?
I didn’t kill my father. I’m innocent and I know that in America innocence will protect me. Just like it’s always protected me.
So, I’m horny and I’m pissed, at my father, at that sick asshole who calls himself a doctor, at the cops and their bullshit search warrant. And the guy across the street? The guy with the bowling-ball arms and tree-trunk neck? The way I’m thinking, he’s the perfect outlet for the pissed half of the equation. As for the other half, the Ortega part, I’ve decided to put that aside for the present. I’ve got another mission in mind. I intend to visit the Golden Inn Hotel.
I’ve been to the Golden Inn a few times. Not as a hooker but as a matter of convenience. Somehow, the debased ambiance—the gray sheets, the stained floors, the mingled odors of sex and disinfectant—turned me on. My lovers on those occasions were sailors in town for Fleet Week, sailors just off the boat after weeks at sea. One mistook me for a hooker when I hit on him in a local dive. I didn’t take his money, but …
But for once, I’m not out to get laid.
I wasn’t inside the hotel on the night Hank Grand was killed. But if one of the others was, I want to know. There’s another incentive as well. I’m hoping to see the room where that scumbag died. I don’t know who killed him, but I want to believe that one of us did. I want to believe we killed our daddy in cold blood. That way I can imagine him in pain, begging for life, knowing, as he bleeds to death, that his little girl isn’t little anymore.
I’m not really afraid of prison. Our looney-tunes bona fides are proven beyond a reasonable doubt and no sane prosecutor will bring us to trial. Instead, we’ll be shipped off to one or another of New York’s psychiatric hospitals, assigned most likely to a unit for the criminally insane.
With luck, we could be released in as few as ten years.
What do you do if you feel like you’re going insane and you’re already insane? I walk through the door, eager for conflict. The man across the road straightens, then comes right at me. I don’t turn a hair, don’t change expression, the only moving part my thumb, which finds its way to a button at the top of the pepper spray canister.
Angry males? Been there, done that. Often enough to learn the only relevant lesson. Strike first, strike hard, get your ass in the wind.
But it doesn’t happen. He comes to a stop ten feet away, his gaze now suspicious. I’m not running off and I’m not showing fear and I don’t look like Kirk. Not exactly.
“You,” he says. “I know what you did.”
I’m thinking I should cut him off, but I can’t stop myself from wanting to know what he has to say. Given all the circumstances, he can only be talking about Hank Grand’s murder. I hold my ground but remain silent.
“Not talkin’?” He looks at me for a moment before realizing that he’s answered his own question. Finally, almost desperately, he blurts it out. “The cops are tryin’ to put it on me. But you were there. I seen you were there.”
“Then you must’ve been there yourself.”
“So fuckin’ what? Me and your old man were friends. I had no reason—”
I cut him off. “You were there for what exactly, you and my daddy?”
“I don’t have to explain myself.” His eyes narrow and I know he wants to deal with his frustrations by smashing whatever’s in front of him. “Hank told me you was comin’ for a visit.”
“At the Golden Inn?” When he doesn’t reply, I lose it for a moment. “So, tell me, asshole, how was it supposed to be?
Were you gonna share me? Two on one? One at a time? How did you have it figured?”
“It wasn’t that way at all. I was in a different room with a hooker.” He takes a step toward me, then stops. “What your father done ain’t my business, lady. I know you was there.”
“Have I got this right? You were inside a room with a prostitute, but you were also outside and saw me? Cut the crap, man. If the cops suspect you, it’s probably because you killed him. You killed him and now you’re lookin’ for a patsy. Well, I’m not buying, so fuck off.”
He closes his eyes for a second, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. I watch his hands curl into fists, watch the cords on his neck bulge. I know what’s likely to come next and I slide the canister of pepper spray out of my bag. I can hear Victoria now, moaning in despair. Crazy Eleni, destructive Eleni, worthless, useless. I don’t give a damn. I’m about to empty the canister down the asshole’s throat, let him spend the next week in the hospital with his lungs on fire.
But it’s not happening, not today. His shoulders slump as he draws a breath and steps back. “This ain’t over,” he tells me.
I want the last word and I search for a snappy comeback. Too late. He turns and heads back the way he came. I watch him cross the street before I return the pepper spray to my bag. Then I’m on my way, wishing that somewhere along the line I’d learned to whistle.