Chapter 3 - The Body at the Bottom o fthe Bottle

CHAPTER 3

Luckily, George followed me out of Marlowe's without too much convincing, once I lied and told him a very grumpy Len was downstairs. I lit a cigarette and started walking – I couldn't call in a dead body at Marlowe's in front of the very guy trying to find an excuse to close the place down.

I rudely blew smoke in his direction.

“What are you doing here? And what about the restraining order?” I was shaking but kept walking, hoping to dissuade him from following me. The cell phone was still in my hand, my thumb hovering over the call button.

He started to answer, but I thought it best to cut the conversation short.

“You know what, I don't care. Get away from me and stay away from Marlowe's.” I started down the block.

My mood dropped two more notches: one when I caught sight of my watch and saw how little time was left before my Harding meeting, and another when George started following me, jogging easily until he’d caught up, reminding me of the kind of high school jock I had always hated.

I reached the corner of Flatbush Avenue and threw my arm up to hail a livery cab. I could call 911 from the taxi.

“I have a very important meeting. I’m very eager to get to it.” I’ve always been a natural liar. “And I am certainly not going to make myself late by talking to the man trying to take over a whole neighborhood for his company.”

A yellow cab – a rare sight in Brooklyn – spotted my hail from a block away.

“Forget about that!” George spoke with urgency, raising his voice over the traffic. “I need to talk to you, but not about the TST project – well not entirely. I need to warn you!”

He reached out and grabbed my wrist, spinning me towards him. I tend not to take kindly to strange men placing hands on me, so I instinctively snatched my hand back, sending my cell phone flying. I took two steps back, planting me a yard and a half into the street – and right in front of the cab that had only been trying to give me a ride.

The driver leaned on the horn and, luckily, on the brakes, as George grabbed my arm for the second time in a minute. But this time he yanked me into the gutter. The cab screeched to a stop next to me – but its front wheel crunched over my cell phone, turning it into plastic splinters. The taxi was so close that its front bumper was barely a foot in front of me.

If I’d still been in the street, I would have been as dead as the body in the wall.

How would I call the cops with my cell phone all over Flatbush Avenue?

“You have to listen to me!” George exclaimed. “I just saved your life,” he added.

I jerked away again, “After almost getting me killed!”

“That’s what we need to talk about – I think you’re in danger! If Len asked you to come down here, you could be next!”

“I could be next for what?”

The cabbie, finally recovered from almost flattening me. He lowered his window. “You guys going somewhere?”

“I am,” I said, getting in the backseat.

As I tried to close the door behind me, George caught it and climbed in behind me, forcing me to scoot further into the cab. “I’ll come with you. I just need to talk to you. It won’t take long.”

I quickly slid out on the other door – almost getting hit by yet another car. I made apologetic hand gestures in response to the driver’s profane ones and hurried behind the cab to the safety of the curb, where I collapsed on my haunches.

George was out of the taxi and slammed the door, knocking the hood like an anachronistic gent. He said to the cabbie, “We’ll catch the next one, thanks.” The cabbie drove off, cursing us both.

He crouched down next to me. In my near-accident and dead-body dual shock I suddenly noticed how he must be dirtying his nice gray suit, and how weird it was that this professional lawyer was trying to warn me of danger while almost getting me killed. Twice.

“You can’t trust him,” he said.

“You already said that!” I yelled, “But I have no idea what you’re talking about, or why you’re talking to me at all!”

“I tried to warn him and he didn’t listen and look what happened to him!” George said.

“Him who? What are you talking about?”

He looked me in the eyes. “Peter. He told me what he was going to do and I warned him that Len was dangerous, but he refused to listen to me and then he went missing.”

I stood up real fast. My brain swirled inside my head, and I had to rest a hand on a parked car to keep my balance.

“I don’t need to explain anything to you,” I said, “You have no idea what you're talking about. You don’t know Len, because if you did, you’d know he’s harmless, and I can’t believe Pete ever trusted you enough to confide anything in you. So just leave me alone and maybe I won’t go to the press with this whole insane debacle!”

I stormed off down the street. I didn’t know how I’d get to my meeting in time at this point, but anyhow I should go back to Marlowe's and use Len's phone to call the cops instead. First things first. Dead bodies took priority over meetings I didn't want to go to.

But I didn’t know what was wrong with me – I was dizzy with every step and my stomach felt like hot lava. I prayed I'd make make it to the bar and phone around the corner without putting myself in mortal danger.

George called out after me. “In time, you’ll see I’m right.” He turned and walked off, but turned back, arms out, backing away. “Do you think I'd risk my life and my job for a complete stranger if I didn’t think you were in real danger?” He shook his head, and rounded the corner.

His words stuck with me. Why would a prominent, politically connected lawyer risk his reputation when I could so easily tarnish his image by exposing his paranoid delusions?

And just as I realized that he must truly believe what he’d said, I vomited all over the sidewalk in front of me.

My knees gave out and I sat down hard on the cold stone. I was thinking how I probably shouldn’t have drank that half-beer with Len on an empty stomach, but how that shouldn’t have made me throw up, when my mind spun again and I passed out. The last thing I felt was the back of my head hitting the sun-warmed cement. Then I was out cold.

*

My first thought as I came to was thanking the drum in my head for waking me up.

I opened my eyes, surroundings coming into focus slowly, though I didn’t recognize them at all. Dusky sunlight barely flickered through heavy curtains. The ceiling was wood-beamed but painted over with a very unfortunate, now-peeling lime green. The matching wall paint looked as old as I was and as dirty as I felt.

I was drenched in cold sweat and my muscles ached as if I’d been in the same position for hours without a twitch. I was on a lumpy, scratchily-upholstered wood-frame couch. I reached behind my head and pulled out a throw pillow so gross I absently tossed it aside. It was nice someone had given me a pillow, though. Which made me wonder who’d set me up on the couch. And where the couch was.

The room spun when I moved my head to look around. It could have been a huge room, or a small room. A sheet was hung wall-to-wall, creating a small section with just two walls, the sheet, one window, the couch and a coffee table. Two glasses of water – one half empty, one clean and full – sat on the table next to an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes.

With a lot of mental – and physical – effort I propped myself up. And promptly threw up – mostly bile at this point as I was almost running on empty. Into a conveniently placed wastebasket.

“I thought that might come in handy,” said a familiar voice, behind me. “Claire Zakarian. Imagine seeing you here.”

I looked up to find Peter sitting in a matching wood-frame chair. He was giving me that kind smile he'd given me so many times before. The main difference was the gun in his hand.

It was a banged-up semi-automatic handgun with a bullet glistening in the chamber and the safety off, an archaic monster of a gun that looked ridiculously heavy in his thin hand.

The Pete I'd known and fallen in love with knew how to handle a gun. His favorite uncle, Jeff, an NYPD detective who had taken on the paternal role when his father walked out, had taken him to the shooting range as a kid.

As young as nine years old, Pete had only been allowed to watch the cops' target practice and training sessions, until he reached the legal age of eighteen. He'd told me how nine years of watching probies and old hats fire off rounds had in no way prepared him for the power and shock of his first trigger pull. But he'd gotten over it and become quite the marksman.

His heart had first been broken by this favorite uncle when Pete refused to join the Police Academy as Jeff had hoped – the real point of all the time they'd spent together.

They fell out of touch then – when a nineteen-year-old Pete needed him the most – until one night years later when Jeff showed up at Pete's previous bartending gig. The now-retired detective had too much to drink and admitted that he'd been glad his sister's husband had turned out to be a deadbeat, because it had given him, a childless single man married to the job, the chance to raise a protegé. Until Pete had thrown it all away by shunning Jeff's plans for his whole life.

That was the night Pete lost that bartending job, after he lost his cool. Pete yelled and Pete cried and begged to know why Jeff had stopped loving him – how he could stop loving him – just because he didn't want to become a cop.

Jeff had left without giving answers, and died a few weeks later of a massive coronary. Pete had confided in me that he expected to spend the rest of his life looking for those unfindable answers.

The only thing he'd been left by his Uncle Jeff was his off-duty gun, an unofficial legacy Jeff's partner had slyly bequeathed to young Pete, unaware of their recent argument. The very gun he was now pointing at me.

Pete was dirtier than I’d ever seen him, which is saying a lot. Like so many guys his age, he’d never been a model of cleanliness, but he was presently wearing a faded and stained plain t-shirt that hung off his tall frame like it was two sizes too big, or he’d recently lost ten pounds. Ten pounds he’d never had to spare. His hair was a shaggy greasy mess and perhaps to make up for the heatless chill in the room, he'd traded in his trademark fingerless gloves for a full-finger black leather pair that looked incongruous with his short-sleeved tee. Or maybe he didn't want to leave prints on the gun. Which made my stomach sink.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and turned around, lying back on the couch so I was facing him. I felt fuzzy. My head felt as fuzzy as my tongue.

“Hi,” was what I finally decided to open with.

“You look good,” he replied, like any boyfriend seeing an ex after a long period of time. Not like someone holding his ex at gun point.

I didn't insult him by lying and saying he did too. He had always looked good but something was off today.

I went a different direction. “I got that email you sent me.”

“I sent that weeks ago,” he complained.

“I know,” I said petulantly.

“What took you so long?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?”

He was getting impatient. “What took you so long to go to Marlowe's?” he demanded.

“What makes you think I did go see you?” The nerve on this guy.

“I saw you last night,” he said like it was obvious.

I looked at him quizzically. Could I have not noticed him? No.

“You weren't at Marlowe's last night,” I said.

“I wasn't. But I still saw you.”

“Have you been following me?” I demanded, furious.

He ignored the question, pulling aside the decrepit curtain and looking out the window. The sun was setting.

I changed tack. “If it was so important that I go to Marlowe's, why didn't you come into the bar?” I asked.

Gun or no gun, I was getting angry. He had no right to speak to me like that. He had no right to be mad at me to begin with. “You're lucky I came by to see you at all!”

My head lurched as I sat up, but not as badly as before. My throat felt raw and I instinctively reached for the glass of water he'd laid out for me.

Taking a sip, I wondered why I'd been sick three times that day.

Had I really had that much to drink the night before? Mixed too much beer with too much liquor? I probably shouldn't have had that shot of 30Keds at the end of the night.

I was parched and drank the water down in three loud gulps. “So you were following me. I mean, how else could you know I was at the bar last night?”

He sat down on the edge of the coffee table, and placed the gun on his lap. I probably could have reached it, but what would have been the point? He looked around, focused on my empty glass.

“Can I have another glass of water?” I decided to distract him, redirect his energy.

He looked relieved. “Sure,” and he went behind the curtain. He'd tucked the gun in his belt when he stood, and I felt the tide changing in my favor again.

“So why are you kidnapping me?” I knew there was a chance this would set him off again, but I didn't know what else to do but keep talking.

Through the curtain, he asked, “Kidnapping? Who says anything about kidnapping?” It was more a lamentation than a question. “You should be thanking me, in fact.” He always felt unappreciated.

“Really? Why's that?”

He came back with the water and held it out to me. He watched as I drank it down.

“I saved your life,” he said proudly.

I couldn't help but sigh. “You are not the first man today to lay claim to saving my life – after putting me in danger to begin with.”

He tensed up. “You can't trust him. You just can't.” Now he and George even sounded like each other.

“Him who?”

“The lawyer. George. You can't believe a word he says, you hear me?”

“So you have been following me.”

Like talking to a dolt, “Of course I was following you. How else do you think you got here. You should be grateful – you could have been lying on that sidewalk for hours before anyone found you. Not a lot of foot traffic in the middle of the day. Not since the TST closed all those businesses down.”

“So if you're not kidnapping me, but you're following me, why didn't you show up when I was at Marlowe's?” I sat up straighter on the couch. My hands flew up to steady myself – to my head and out to the side to balance. I was swimming again. Worse than before.

“It's not safe there. It's not safe for me, and now I know it's not safe for you.”

Now I was getting worried. Maybe I was a latecomer to that ballgame, but suddenly I wasn't sure I was safe. With Pete.

I tried to stand. My legs gave out. “Did you – ”

“I didn't do anything.”

I didn't believe him. He had spoken too quickly. I looked at my empty water glass. I looked at Pete.

“Did. You. Poison. Me?” I spoke slowly and deliberately, but not just because I was so angry at him – because I could barely speak, I was so tired.

“Okay, yes.”

“What?” I couldn't believe him. I didn't know this man. He came over towards me. “Get away!”

He stopped immediately, but he was only a few feet away. “I'm not going to do anything!” he said.

For the life of me I couldn't figure out what his game plan was. I knew he was not a violent threat. Okay, yeah, he still had the gun in his belt. That's not what I meant. I knew this man. I knew him at his sweetest and I knew him at his worst, his most irrational. Didn't I? And yet...

“You just said you poisoned me!”

“But not like you think!”

He crouched on the floor and lifted up a loose floorboard. Looking closer, I could see very obvious tool marks where he'd previously forced the board free. Never one for the details, Pete.

He reached inside the void and took hold of something. He looked up as I spoke.

“Are you the reason I threw up three times today? The reason I passed out on the street? What did you give me?” I could barely keep my eyes open.

My mind raced but slowed at the same time. The slowing was winning. I thought back to my three instances of gastric pyrotechnics today.

His eyes were fixed on mine. “You don't understand. Look.” He pulled out the object from the floorboard hollow.

It was a severed hand.

I passed out cold.