Those Lacerations on My Hands Are From Cracking Open Crab Legs Last Night

Fiction

“There are some gentlemen downstairs from the Chicago Police Department who want to see you,” is not the call you want to get to start your Saturday morning.

The doorman asks if he should send them up and without taking a second to contemplate what if anything I’ve recently done has been illegal, I impulsively say, “Sure.” He says, “Alright gentlemen, thank you for waiting,” buzzes them to the elevator bank and hangs up.

I’ve never had the cops call on me before but I do watch plenty of procedural dramas and true crime series on the television so figure hesitance to speak with law enforcement will be immediately construed as a suspicious sign. And I’m kind of on autopilot. Any time my doorman calls it’s to ask if he can send a food delivery up, so I have a somewhat Pavlovian response to their calls where I start with some pleasantries then just say, “Yep, send ’em on up, thanks.”

I’m in the middle of my morning journaling routine, which I do immediately after waking, relieving myself, brushing my teeth and chugging some water with my daily meds and thus far mostly unanswered prayers to Saint Dymphna. I like to start my day with a small accomplishment, so I write about my previous day at whatever length it warrants, whether or not I accomplished anything more meaningful than journaling, and then I shower.

Gonna need more than boxer briefs to greet the city’s finest (or do I? No, okay, I definitely do), so I skip into my room to throw on the sweatpants, henley and beanie I discarded on the floor last night before crawling into bed to watch Pop Culture Jeopardy until I fell into a fitful slumber.

On the coffee table there is a disposable foil pan filled with the exoskeletons of various crustaceans and shellfish, a mountain substantial enough it’d be difficult to believe it had been consumed by one human being who was not taking part in a competitive eating contest or otherwise attempting to prove something. It is surrounded by a congealing mixture of butter, garlic and copious amounts of Old Bay.

The kitchen sink is filled with a dirty baking pan and various dishes. Its adjoining counter stacked with all kinds of seasonings, condiments and an opened box containing the gigantic variety selection of Kool-Aid packets I recently purchased from Tik Tok because I know how to party. (I use stevia, not sugar. My wild ways are totally under control.) Also a half-eaten Snickers bar and a barely touched bowl of Honey Bunches of Oat with almonds (looks like the sleep-eating version of me had eyes bigger than his stomach and a little bit of self-control last night). There are several dirty pots strewn about the stovetop.

If I’d had more warning I’d have tidied up. But maybe they want the element of surprise, showing up like this.

The knock isn’t so much a knock as a bang, like they skipped straight to using the battering ram, and I get wanting to come in hot with an illusion of authority but an aggro rapping on a door at 9 a.m. on a Saturday is just simply not called for.

“Mornin’, gentlemen, what can I do ya for?” is a slightly tweaked version of what a terrorist in Die Hard says to the dad from Family Matters and what autopilot for some reason chooses to say to the two uniform-clad cops in my hall.

Unpleasant introductions are exchanged and badges briefly flashed. They ask if they can come in for a few minutes and instead of saying, “Not without a warrant” or “What might this unscheduled visit pertain to?” I step aside and motion for them to proceed.

The officers, whose names I didn’t fully register, survey the spot.

“Sorry the place is such a mess. I was just about to start cleaning. Wasn’t expecting visitors,” I say somewhat apologetically, similar to the tone I take on when my cleaning lady walks into the place and it looks like a bomb has hit it.

“Cleaner than our precinct,” the shorter, bald one says. The other is tall and lanky. They look kinda like Harry and Marv, The Wet Bandits turned The Sticky Bandits.

“Can I ask, um, why you guys are here?” I consider asking if they want some coffee or something (I have no doughnuts with which to get on their good side; some stereotypes exist for a reason), but I have a one-cup Keurig and making two back-to-back is just gonna be awkward and prolong things regarding whatever reason they are in my home.

My mind has been working on overdrive trying to figure out what might warrant two boys in blue darkening my doorstep. It rifles through some blatantly absurd possibilities and some more potentially reasonable if pretty unlikely.

“We’re here to ask you where you were Friday between the hours of 9 p.m. and, oh, 1:30 a.m., Saturday, we’ll say.”

Now I want to know the why behind the why so I ask, “Why?”

“Someone was seen lurking outside a woman’s apartment last night and into the early morning hours, and we’re working to clear some potential suspects,” says Harry.

“A woman?”

“One you’ve had relations with in the past, yes,” says Marv.

This significantly narrows the list of potential stalking victims. Much to my chagrin, I am not exactly a man about town. And I’ve been going through an involuntary (though not entirely so; it’s not like I’ve been putting in virtually any effort) bout of celibacy for longer than I care to admit. It’s kind of a rebuilding season and I’m doing my best to take it in stride. Been eating a lot of garlic, for example. If you’re not gonna be tasting lipstick anytime soon you may as well indulge in the benefits that come with it.

Harry: “When she reported it, she said the man who ran from the hedges where he’d been hiding with binoculars and apparently a White Castle Crave Case sure did bear a resemblance to, well, you.”

I thank whatever gods there may be that there is not a discarded Crave Case in my recycling bin at the moment. It’s a more common occurrence than I’m comfortable copping to.

“Who exactly?” I’m unsure why they’re beating around the bush. Must be some kind of tactic.

Marv, after consulting a notebook, names my most recent ex, who I broke up with 10 months ago and have not spoken with since that day. This is not to be confused with “spoken to,” as I admittedly sent a pretty unhinged (in hindsight) email and a follow-up text about said email when I was going through a bout of the Post-Breakup Madness. But that was probably seven months ago and they were left unanswered and I left worse enough alone. I still think about her all the time but if I’m guilty of any sort of stalking it’s not gone beyond the realm of exclusively digitally based. It’d take an unprecedented amount of yearning to convince me to leave the house in the cold to look through someone’s apartment window.

The fact that this was reported by her and the perpetrator was not me makes some modicum of sense. I’ve seen her current squeeze and images of boyfriends past and it’s definitely not inaccurate to say she’s got something of a type, physically speaking. I sometimes say that when it came to her, I could have been pretty much anybody — that she was looking for someone to fit into a life she envisioned as opposed to building a life with someone and seeing if things might pleasantly deviate from the plan she was hell-bent on living out.

“Is she okay?”

Harry: “Would you be okay if some strange person was spying on your home from the bushes outside?”

I shake my head no, given that a dude with a Crave Case could just play that he was a delivery driver and someone else entering the building would potentially let him in, assuming he’s delivering to some burly guy because beautiful women are honestly more unlikely to order White Castle during the late-night hours, statistically speaking. (I do not have the data to back this up so I guess it’s more a hypothesis gathered from anecdotal evidence.) You show up to the front door of the goddamn Pentagon with a Crave Case and someone’s probably going to let you in before too long.

Could also be that the guy was coming home with said Crave Case and saw something spicy going on in the window and decided to stick around and watch to see what else might happen. My ex is something of an exhibitionist, so this isn’t outside the realm of possibility. But who knows?

“I mean has she been harmed or anything?”

Marv: “You mean more than emotionally?”

Fuck me, with these guys.

“Yes.”

Marv: “No.”

“Good.”

Harry: “We agree. But was it you?”

I’d caused plenty of emotional harm, but not recently and never in a stalker-ish way that I believed she knew about. Obsessively checking an ex’s Instagram page but never engaging with any of the content wasn’t only not illegal, but extremely common. So many don’t have the strength to block and fully move on.

“It was not.”

“Then where were you last night?” asks Marv just as his phone chirps and he walks to the other side of the room to take the call in hushed tones.

“I was here, mostly.”

Harry: “Mostly?”

“I went to Mariano’s just down the street at, I don’t know, probably 9, 9:15. Grabbed a few things then straight back here. Knew exactly what I wanted, so it couldn’t have taken more than like 20 minutes, all told.”

“Were you alone?”

“Regrettably, yes.”

“Anyone see you?”

“My doorman. People at Mariano’s. Cameras in both places, I’m sure, with timestamps.”

“We’ll check into those.

“Great.”

“What’d you do the rest of the night?” Harry asks, his gaze briefly drifting to the mound of what used to be crab legs.

This is going to be somewhat embarrassing if they want to get detailed. But it is my truth.

“Just spent it in.”

“Do anything of note?”

“Well, it was pay day, so I treated myself to a seafood boil bundle from a joint called Seafood Junction that I found for sale on Uber Eats.”

“Sounds decadent.”

“Oh yeah. Snow crab legs, peel n’ eat shrimp, two lobster tails, mussels, some sausage and corn on the cob. The whole nine. It was a journey.”

“That’s a lot for one man.”

“It was listed for two. Guess I took that as a challenge. If you get a hankering, now’s the time to pull the trigger on that kind of thing. They always have solid markdowns around Valentine’s Day.”

“Pull the trigger?”

“Poor phrasing.”

“You ate the whole thing?”

“Sure did.”

“One sitting?”

“Guilty as charged.” God damnit. “There are no leftovers except — wait, yeah, there are some wings in there that came with the order, tacked on free, and I wasn’t about to turn that down.”

“What’d you do while you ate?”

“Caught up on my stories.”

“Meaning?”

“Two episodes of The Bachelor straight through is what I mean.”

“And then after this…Well, whatever you want to call it, you were probably pretty full right?”

“Oh you bet. Consumed enough butter, garlic and Old Bay to really shock the system and maybe do some permanent harm to my arteries.”

“Yet, you chose to go to the grocery store after all of this to get…well, what?”

“I think the seafood boil was a gateway drug because I started looking up videos on how to make one of your own and before you knew it I was hungry again, got a real wild hare going so I checked prices at Mariano’s, found some sales and decided to go grab it all so I could take a shot this afternoon.”

“So you’re making that today?”

“Wild hare couldn’t be ignored so I um, I made it around like midnight.”

“Good lord, man.”

“Gotta live, I guess.”

“That’s a lot of crab to crack. But it does smell like a wharf in here, and due to the detritus, it seems like you’re…well, you’re telling the truth.”

“I can show you the receipt for Uber Eats and Mariano’s if you need them. And I sent a picture of the finished product to my parents just after I steamed up my own tray. I have nothing to hide. Look at my hands. Cuts all over them. Couldn’t find my crab cracker and had to raw-dog the operation.”

Marv hangs up his phone and rejoins the interrogation crew, points out that the cuts look a lot like they could have come from thorn bushes someone was lurking in. Going all gum shoe and shit on me. The man wants to close a case without fully walking the beat. I tell him the god’s honest truth is that they’re looking at the wrong guy, barking up the wrong tree.

“Not that I have been in a tree recently,” I add. “These are crustacean lacerations, and that’s all there is to it.”

“During all this, he still may have had time to get to her place and back, though, don’t you think?” Marv says to Harry as if I am not standing right there.

“There’s no way I could get all the way uptown to hang out in some bushes and then back in the timeline you’re talking about here,” I say. “I’d had to have Ubered, probably, because the train sucks and I hardly ever took it up that way even when we were together. It was a point of contention.”

They look at me simultaneously.

“This was over in Streeterville, just across the river.”

“But she lives uptown.”

“Not anymore, compadre.”

A bit of a shock to the system. I had not known that she had shacked up elsewhere since our abrupt demise. I also didn’t know there was a White Castle probably so close by, which is good information to have. The cops also seem to clock that they have just revealed the area of residence for an ex-girlfriend of mine when really they should not have.

“Don’t use that information for anything untoward,” says Harry.

“Believe me, I will not, and wish I did not even know where she is now.”

“Good. Because she’s weary of you.”

I think he means “wary,” but I do not correct him. I suppose “weary” could accurately apply in this scenario.

“Well, sorry to disturb you. We’ll check the security footage on the way out just to make sure, but, yeah, enjoy your day…whatever it is you’re going to do.”

I choose to return to Mariano’s and have another seafood-laden Debauchery Day. It’s the little things. And the sale is still going.