Just Right (Part 13)
Wolfe: Mirror, Mirror
The bathroom mirror was broken.
Either that or both my eyes were. It was hard to tell because I was sure my head had been crushed by a boulder or cracked open with an ax or the ceiling had fallen in on me. There was no telling how many Tylenol it would take to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but for the moment I was claiming a moral victory. I was standing. Only I wished I was lying down, or even dead. Maybe not a victory at all.
My watch lied. Nothing about what the window said, even with the shades drawn, seemed real, like a waking dream. The room told its own lie, the overturned furniture, the shards of bathroom mirror staring up at me full of blame, some in the sink, some on the floor near my toes, threatening. I’d been there for longer than I could figure, wondering what had happened and when, and why I still had an erection. Those were all the clues I had, and none of them led me back to what had happened the night before. Well, nothing except for the red cape mixed in with the bed clothes, which had led me inexorably to a rather discomforting position before the toilet, crouching in sickening submission, a familiar place, an angry place. I’d barked into the porcelain echo chamber and flushed again and again, tasting the bile that was rotting my guts, eviscerating my liver, and probably leading me to a shortened lifespan. Maybe I was doing myself a favor.
If the mirror hadn’t been broken already, I’d have broken it then. I reached up and touched the broken glass where it was splintered as if by a hammer’s blow.
That was when I realized my right hand was bandaged with loose, blood-stained gauze, the kind (sans blood) that I kept in the medicine cabinet above the cheap, off-white toilet in my cheap, off-white bathroom within my cheap, off-white Bronx box of a flat, which I filled with cheap shit, cheap booze, and cheap cigarettes. I stared at myself, a pixelated, pathetic pariah, outcast even amongst my own. Open and shut case, Doc. I stretched my arms out for the straight jacket, yanked my fingers away when I felt the prick from the vengeful mirror.
I sucked on the wound, took a deep breath, inhaled the lingering scent of the weed. It permeated the room like her blood soaking into the back alley concrete, a permanent stain on my lungs, my heart.
The red cape was in my other hand. I didn’t remember picking it up, but it was folded neatly and I was holding it steady above the sink like a singular bauble, like a valuable trinket, something to find its way to her shrine, something to drape over her casket when the funeral was set. Red in one hand; red on the other. It was a lousy metaphor for something, and I dropped my head, no longer able to look at the accusing spiderweb. What was there left for me if all I could do is hurt everyone?
My gun was still there, the Beretta 92, sitting in its holster, hanging from the back of the chair near the bed. This was my chance, once and for all. Just drape the red cape over my shoulders, pull the hood up onto my head, sit back in my chair, my cock struggling for attention like an old geezer on the blue pills, and open my mouth to swallow my darkness. I pulled it from its nest and felt the old grip nestling into my palm, my fingers flexing familiar around the specialized grip. It felt so right, so intimate, like the molding of a lover’s body against mine, like it belonged there.
Let them find me on a Sunday morning, the sun streaming in and catching the dust motes settling on my corpse.
A lover rolls over, a smooth, tanned leg drapes over mine, an arm across my chest, warm breath with the sweet stink of morning sex, soft and cozy. Her arm shifts, fingers searching, finding, coaxing, pulling, stroking. Her whole body shifts, and all I see is red — she loves to wear the hooded cape when we fuck — and then her tongue finds me, coupling with her fingers, her lips, and then the smooth, wet stroke of her mouth as I come and go and come again. Eyes closed, feeling the first hints of…of.
When I opened my eyes, the Beretta was in my mouth, the barrel full bore until I gagged on it. I stared at it, at my thumb resting and ready to click off the safety, and it all came flooding back.
The cape, the hood, the long, flowing hair, screaming so good when I blew her house down, my hands around her throat, squeezing. She kicked and she thrashed, and scratched my arms as she clutched at me, going over the edge again and again until I couldn’t keep up. Then more and more, she wanted more, and she wanted it harder and dirtier and uglier and meaner.
I slid the barrel of the pistol out of my mouth and dropped it on the bed. I knew where it had been.
She sucked it like she sucked cock, my hands in her hair as she took it deeper and deeper down her throat, moaning around the chrome-lined barrel, her hands halfway up to stop me, to say “No”, and yet unable or unwilling to complete the act.
I could see the fear in her eyes, the tears streaming as she sucked my steel cock, until I let her go, pushed her back and crammed the barrel inside her cunt. “Do it!” she screamed, bucking against the unyielding metal until I watched her whole body quaking, her fingers and toes curling, her eyes locked on mine, mouth open in a silent whimper of pleasure, and then she was still and hushed and limp, like a dead thing, like her soul has passed on or was quieted, as if something had passed out of her.
I pulled the Beretta out of her and set it beside her on the bed, flicking the safety back on out of habit. Not tonight. Not today. I watched her, and she watched me, and when I laid down beside her, my head aching, sweat dripping into my eyes, I waited for her to slide over, to swing her leg over, to cozy up to me, but she only got up with a sudden deep breath and pulled on her dress, found her shoes and let herself out, her golden hair matted to her face, a look in her eyes like she’d passed through death and come out the other side into life again. She closed the door, and she was gone.
Goldi.
For a moment she’d been Red, more than Red, something familiar and yet something wholly different. I’d wanted to pull the trigger. She’d wanted it, too. Hadn’t she?
I closed my eyes and the room faded away.
I stood in the shower, finishing the last of the Ultra, and checked the cut on my knuckles again. The hot water had made pulling off the gauze that much easier, but it still stung. Not deep enough to require stitches, I decided, but I did have a few butterfly Band-Aids that would come in handy here. I stepped over the glass on the floor and moved into the bedroom to find my pants, my shoes, my jacket. A quick comb through my growing mane as I eased down the stairs, and I found myself at the front door pulling on my jacket.
A downpour greeted me, heavy gray clouds refracting the bright city lights. I grumbled and tucked the paper sack under my arm and ran out to the corner as a checkered cab approached. The driver glared at me when I climbed in and mumbled something about the weather and his seats. I watched the words flit by like so much bullshit and tossed him both my destination and an extra hundred from the bag.
“Morris Park as fast as this bucket will get us there.” New York cabbies had attitudes, but they were all the right ones if you had the green.
He was a basket of sunshine after that, and we arrived at our destination in record time.
As I swept down the stairs to the main floor to catch the №6 Train, my mind kept going back to what I’d left behind in the apartment. It wasn’t the scene of a crime so much as it was the scene of some universe-unforeseen accident. Call it a twist of fate. Call it chance. Call it “why was that bitch in my house and what had she seen when she was there?”
What had happened was not only out of the ordinary, it was downright insane.
First of all, I knew that Goldi hated me; that had been apparent since the day we’d met, when Red had introduced us. Second of all, I knew that Goldi hated me, which meant coming home with me, even after what happened and throwing in whatever psycho-babble grieving process bullshit one would pay big money for, was a no-go, a no-no, a hell no. Which left me with what was behind door number three: something was up. But what was the game, and why hadn’t I figured it out yet? And that’s what had me out the door the moment I’d woken up, seeing it was so late and I’d been passed out in that chair for hours while a bag filled with hundred dollar bills sat vulnerably and precariously on the dining room table.
No way she’d missed that, and I knew the bitch was as quizzical as any woman I’d ever seen. And “quizzical” was being polite. I had to get that money out of the house, someplace safe, and then it was high time I put my detective hat on. There was something amiss, and I was missing it. Or was I? I looked down at the bag again, at the stacks of hundreds that I was removing from it — walking around money, someone once said — and I closed the little door and turned the key. Then tucking the bills into the inside pocket of my jacket, right near the dangling and newly-shined Beretta, I moved across the expansive marble floor of Union Station to grab a cup of coffee and clear my head.
There was more here than met the eye, and it was high time I stopped staring in the fucking mirror and feeling sorry for myself. It was high time I find out just what the fuck was going on. And as I got in line behind a woman I was sure modeled lingerie for a living, I realized exactly what I needed to do.
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