(I)
This is crazy, Father Rollin thought as he stood at the corner of 67th and Columbus, counting the number of hotel rooms facing the street. He counted with his finger, very intently. Several strollers stopped to peer at him. I don’t care if they think I’m out of my mind, he asserted to himself but still felt embarrassed. He looked over his shoulder, to approximate the alignment; then he thought, Hmm. Fourth one from the right side of the building. That looks like it …
He picked up his small suitcase and entered the old brown brick Ketchum Hotel, well known for its Federal-period architecture. A quick trip up to the second floor, trying to maintain his bearing, and then he found the fire-exit map near the elevator. The fourth room from the right appeared as Room 207. Got it. Now let’s just hope I’m not wasting an awful lot of money.
Back downstairs, he approached the check-in counter. The lobby seemed very busy, which wasn’t good. Somebody’s probably already booked the room, his cynicism told him, or perhaps it was a secret hope so that he wouldn’t have to go through with this at all. He actually winced at several women in shining dresses, carrying physiques that he could only describe as…comely.
A lanky, narrow-faced clerk addressed him with a French accent. Rollin had always carried a trifling grudge against the French, for forcing Pope Clement V to move the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309. It was all political! he’d raged with some other priests once, after too much wine. GOD is not political! How can the masses believe that the Church is infallible when everyone from kings to presidents can manipulate the Holy Office? It was a silly argument, but Rollin still didn’t much care for the French.
“It’s a plea sure to receive you at the Ketchum, Father,” said the clerk, whose brow seemed to twitch at Rollin’s presence. “How may I be of assistance?”
“This is probably a fool’s errand,” Rollin began his lie. “I don’t have a reservation, but I was wondering if Room 207 is available. Of course, seeing how busy you are today, I’m sure it isn’t…”
The clerk’s narrow face seemed to tweak at the odd request. A few taps on the keyboard, and, “You’re in luck, Father. We’ve only three rooms unreserved today, and 207 is one of them.”
“I’ll take it for, say, three nights, if possible.”
“Of course, Father.” But then the clerk stiffened with some French-accented chuckling. “The standard rate is $279 per night—”
Rollin wilted, extracting his credit card. God’s work always costs money…damn it, and what is this dupe laughing about?
“It’s regrettable that I won’t be able to give you the convention rate since, I feel certain, you’re not attending the convention.”
Only now did Rollin notice the looks he was getting from the flashy lobby crowd. “Convention? No, no. And the reason I’ve asked for Room 207 is only because I’ve stayed here before and love the room’s view.” Priests shouldn’t be able to lie so easily, he considered. But the man had said something about a convention. “So what’s the big event? Consumer trade show or something?”
Now the clerk was beside himself to stifle his amusement. His smile nearly went up to his eyes. “No, Father, I’m afraid not. It’s the Adult Video Awards Convention.”
Oh my God! Rollin thought. “I’ll just…take the room, please.” He collected his key-card and skirted back to the elevators. Absolutely humiliating …
More cosmetically perfected women smiled at him when he got off the elevator. “Oh, Father, I love your ring,” said a platinum blonde in a body stocking. Rollin trembled when she grabbed his hand to look at it, forcing his eyes away from croquet-ball-sized breasts. “Uh, thank you. Go with God.” He rushed to Room 207 and slipped in as quickly as he could. If somebody I know sees me here… what on earth can I say? But he shoved the trepidation away when he approached the wide windows and parted the drapes. The moment of truth was at hand. He took out his binoculars, stepped six feet back from the gap in the drapes, and zoomed down the alley, which cut up to Dessorio Avenue.
Well at least SOMETHING went right today, he thought when the view showed him that he’d calculated the angle with accuracy. If he stood right against the wall and hunched down, he got an almost dead-on view of the rear windows of the annex house. Rollin fixed himself some coffee, then pulled a chair to the wall to sit. Peeping Tom time again, he thought, amazed at his low-brow tactics. What else can I do? Break into the place? The diocese couldn’t bail me out because they don’t even know!
He tried to sever it all, along with the cosmic disappointment that a lifetime of service to God had led to this. Instead, he teased the focus ring on the glasses.
The top two floors stood drapeless and appeared empty, yet the long windows of the second level possessed raised blinds that revealed a room full of lit computers, book and media shelves, and a slant-angled table that he presumed was a drawing desk. Must be her studio. And below, on a balcony, one narrow window revealed a fairly wide wedge of a very ornate bathroom, complete with a hot tub. A floor lower, he could see the newly installed security bars of the basement windows.
Rollin sighed. Now what? I’m spending $279 per night of my own money—of which I have precious little—all to afford a view of the back of the annex house …
What do I expect to see?
He supposed if he saw nothing, then his prayers would be answered.
Movement flagged him from the studio window—There she is! Rollin could see Cristina Nichols sitting at the large computer screen dressed in a fine robe. At one point, she got up from her work and walked to the window. She seemed to be reveling in the sunlight, which was just beginning to pour in over the top of the higher-leveled condos behind the house.
When he coughed, the binocular’s surreal clarity vibrated like an earthquake; for a second he glimpsed the tops of two heads. Who could that be? He lowered his vantage point and saw a pair of homeless women shuffling down the alley toward Columbus. One with glasses, and one with scabs on her head. They jabbered silently as he watched. Though homeless persons regularly came to the West Side to panhandle, Rollin knew that few actually lived there. Most of the shelters were near the lower streets or up in the Harlem area, yet he’d seen these girls with some frequency.
And Rollin felt certain that it was these women specifically who’d broken into the annex house a number of times when he was its charge.
I’ll have to confront them, he knew, for all the good it’ll do. Or better yet, follow them some time.
Rollin squinted into the eyepieces when he looked back to the studio window. He also gulped.
Cristina Nichols now stood behind the glass with her robe parted, her breasts bared. Rollin could hear his heart thumping. Don’t watch. This is NOT what you’re looking for, and you know it …
God knows it, too.
In that last fraction of a glimpse, Cristina Nichols’s face appeared blank, trancelike, and her hands were slowly caressing her breasts in the sun. The image seemed to pinpoint—on dark, swollen nipples. Then her hands slid downward…
What a place to do THAT—
But Rollin’s heart thumped louder when he brought the binoculars back down. The two homeless girls were approaching the end of the alley. Much closer now, he could discern their unkempt details.
The one with the scabs on her head seemed to be wiping her hands off with a rag.
A white rag that came away red.
(II)
A hot fugue state was the only way she could think of it. For the second time, Cristina caught herself standing before her studio window, touching herself. She nearly shrieked when she grew cognizant of what she was doing, the recognition arriving just short of climax. I’m turning into a nympho! she thought when her senses returned, and she jumped back and resashed the robe.
What brought THAT on?
Her hangover had gone, replaced by this. She didn’t like not knowing the cause of her actions, and after last night’s drunken blackout, an uneasiness began to unsettle her stomach.
The nightmare, magnified this time, the drenching eroticism, the blood.
She went to shower again, to cool herself off and clear her head. What had she been doing? She turned the water from cool to cold, drawing goose bumps. I was in the studio, working out a sketch of the next figure…The Vampirical Vicar …It struck her as odd how the “vampire” bent had seeped its way into the Evil Church line: first the nun, now the vicar. She knew it was all just more influence of the nightmare. And, yes, she remembered working at her drawing table when, without invitation, remnant images had crept into her head: last night’s lesbian-dream frolic, a half a dozen faceless women covering her with hands and tongues while the fanged nun looked on in proximity to the dead man on the stone slab and the queer vase sitting atop it. The unpleasant imagery should’ve left her desires mute yet Cristina found the opposite; she felt charged, misted with sweat, nipples tingling. It’s almost like I was in a trance, she mused. When the dream imagery had faded, it had been replaced by something even more objectionable…
Britt.
Cristina felt ashamed in the recollection. She’d been sitting there suddenly remembering Britt erasing the magic marker from her skin but eventually Cristina’s mind appended the memory. Next, she imagined not Britt’s fingers on her skin but Britt’s lips. Cristina cringed as wet lines were licked and sucked from nipples to navel, all the while Britt’s fingers sliding behind to knead Cristina’s rump and tease the bottom of her sex. Eventually she was urged to the bathroom floor, then Britt straddled her stomach, shouldered out of the scarlet shearling vest, and forced Cristina’s hands to her breasts. Britt sighed, her face upturned. Then she leaned, propped by her arms, to slowly offer her own nipples to Cristina’s mouth, a hot whisper pleading, “Suck them. Hard. Like when—”
Like when …
Cristina did so without reservation, in spite of the awfulness of the reference. Her sex moistened as if on cue, her own nipples suddenly gorged to aching.
“Yes, yes,” Britt breathed through her teeth. “Just like…so long ago…”
The fantasy, however jaded, only stoked Cristina further. Her mouth continued to tend to her foster sister’s areolae while her fingers fumbled frantically at the buttons of the jeans. “Take these off,” she whined in a hot swivet. “Take them off right now and…”
The fantasy snapped and once again Cristina found herself standing open-robed before her sunny studio window—
Masturbating, she finished. Jeez.
After the shower, she sat at her table, ashamed. Should she tell Britt? God, no. I’ve already hassled her enough. Why can’t I be strong, like her? Cristina knew she overreacted to things, perceived her insecurities with far more cruciality than they warranted. This had happened before on rare occasions, and Britt’s therapeutic analyses were always dismissively similar. Erotic latency, the forbidden made enticing by social strictures, she would say. It’s nothing. We’re not even really sisters; it’s just more Goldfarb mental backwash that your mind manipulates into a false fantasy, trying to get rid of it. But sometimes it takes a while. When Cristina reminded herself of that, she felt better.
But just a little.
It seemed that her inability to shed the past was stealing from her. Stealing my joy, my new life here. Again, she knew what Britt would say:
Don’t let it.
Among the demented abuses of her foster parents was the forced couplings. It was the only way Cristina could think of it. While Andre Goldfarb was busy molesting Scott, their foster brother, Helga worked on Cristina and Britt. She drugged them with God knew what and then coerced them into sexual scenarios in which Helga herself would eventually join in. Scott, too, was often forced to participate…
Scott hadn’t fared well in the aftermath, while Cristina and Britt were able to adjust via therapy after the authorities had rescued them. Goddamn the Goldfarbs, she thought all too often. “They’ll probably die in prison,” Britt had said once. “Child molesters are anathema on any cell block. It’s the worst thing to be.”
I hope so …Cristina wasn’t one for ill will but here, certainly, was an understandable exception.
Early evening approached, her studio window growing dim. I’m still a little out of whack from last night’s booze, she reasoned. Just like Britt said. Minor alcohol poisoning and dehydration. She looked back at her latest precursory sketch, and found she liked it even more. The Vampirical Vicar. She smiled at the playful sketch. At first she thought of drawing a modern-day priest—like Father Rollin, perhaps—but drew this instead, a stuffy parson that appeared more English, in pompous red vestments denoting the clergy of hundreds of years ago. Large doll-like eyes were bloodshot, and like much of the line the face was more cherubic than scary. She wasn’t sure if the long, straight mustache worked or not but she found she liked the image. The vicar’s crooked smile showed long thin fangs, just like the Noxious Nun.
I wonder …
An unbeckoned thought caused her to amend the sketch. Where her Noxious Nun bore a three-jeweled bowl of blood, the Vampirical Vicar held a curious decanter—from her dream, of course—which suggested a vessel for Communion wine.
Now she liked the sketch even more.
I can’t wait to show this to Bruno. Enthused, then, Cristina focused at her table, to begin a more refined draft.
(III)
“So we’re here for what reason?” Vernon asked Detective Taylor in the small, computer-filled cubby loudly referred to as the Electronic Evidence Assimilation Unit at Manhattan North Borough Command. Taylor scratched his unkempt mustache and frowned. “It’s what you wanted, and because you didn’t tag a link on the case number from last December, I couldn’t go to the Information Systems Division downtown.”
Vernon’s mind wandered. He was standing behind a civilian employee hunkered over a terminal. “December? Oh, the Christmas tree stand thing.”
“Yeah, that big caper. Ain’t no way it’s not connected to the impalement.”
“I know but it’s hard to push that way.”
“You’re just afraid of being laughed at since making inspector.”
“Tell me about it.” Vernon had to agree. “Christmas tree stands, magic markers, and forty bucks’ worth of whittling knives…”
Taylor smiled wide. “And bum-girls, speaking of which…” The detective pointed to the computer screen.
“There they are,” Vernon said in a hush.
“When I told you the owner of the hardware store couldn’t find the surveillance disk, I was wrong. They never got it back from us. It’s been in the C.E.S. mainframe the whole time. Took this guy here two minutes to pull it up.”
Vernon’s eyes were taken by the screen, which now showed several haggardly dressed females moving in slow-motion down an aisle of the darkened hardware store. The nerdy tech at the desk would freeze the closest image of each perpetrator, hit a key, then slo-mo to the next. A printer below the desk hummed, kicking out four eight-by-ten glossies. The tech handed the photos to Vernon.
“These look great,” Vernon complimented.
The tech smirked like an accountant bothered by something trivial. “You could’ve done it from your precinct house.”
“We don’t have that kind of technology at our house,” Vernon told him.
The tech smirked sharper. “Inspector, it’s ten-year-old technology.”
“Like I said, we don’t have that kind of technology at our house.”
Taylor eyed the slick printouts. “Just like the drugstore.”
Now the tech shook his head. “Where have you guys been? Nobody gets pictures developed at the drugstore anymore. Don’t you have a printer and a digital camera?”
Vernon and Taylor raised their brows. “We’re old-school, but thanks,” Vernon said. Then he took Taylor back out to the parking lot. They studied the printouts more closely, while Taylor verbalized a description of each woman running down the aisle with several boxed Christmas tree stands:
“Ratty-looking blonde with glasses, ratty-looking brunette in pink sweatpants, another ratty-looking brunette in ratty-looking jeans, a ratty-looking redhead, and—”
Vernon completed the summary, “A ratty-looking woman with very short hair and patches of psoriasis—”
“And large breasts…not that I’d want my face between them. She’s probably got boob lice.”
“You sound like Slouch,” Vernon complained.
“No, Slouch would want his face between them. You know Slouch—after a couple beers, anything goes.” Taylor flipped through the photos again. “At least we know what they look like. No way to tell how old they are, but if we spot one on the street we’d probably recognize them.”
“Yeah, but that’s too easy,” Vernon offered cynically. “That’s not the way my luck runs since I turned fifty.”
“Ten-year hard-luck streak, How?”
“That’s Inspector How to you…Patrolman-to-be Taylor.”
Taylor laughed. “I’m just joshin’.”
“Just what I need.” Vernon threw Taylor the keys to the unmarked. “You drive. I’m too old.”
“Yes, sir, Inspector. Where to?”
“Same area you and Slouch cruised with that twenty-five-year-old hooker who looks thirteen.”
“Cinzia. Right.” Taylor pulled off onto 100th, then darted into traffic on Broadway.
Vernon was thinking as he re examined the hard copies. “The redhead was the one we busted in December, right? Where’s she now, or have you been slacking?”
Taylor’s dark mustache trailed down the sides of his mouth like an Italian actor from the seventies. “She’s long gone. I already did the follow-up this morning.”
Vernon glared. “Then how come you didn’t tell me that this morning?”
“Because I was busting my ass trying to run down the fuckin’ surveillance footage from the hardware store like you told me to do,” Taylor emphasized with a raised voice, knuckling the wheel.
“Oh, right. Good job, by the way. So what happened to the redhead?”
“She was clinically fucked-up so she never stood trial.” Vernon turned on the fireball-light on the dash and whooped his siren, to make an illegal turn past Cleopatra’s Needle, run a red light on 92nd, and shoot a right onto Amsterdam. Other drivers leaned on their horns but Taylor didn’t even hear them. “Chronic abulia and apraxia, they told me, what ever that means. And ‘schizoaffective.’ They let her out of the state hospital after a blue paper and ninety days of therapy; her case doctor said she was not capable of mens rea. Then the OT counselor told me she split town, took the first Greyhound out to DeSmet, South Dakota…Like I’ve heard of that. Give me some time and I’ll try to run her down.”
Vernon shuddered when a bus roared by. “Don’t bother. The minute they’re out of a therapeutic environment, they stop taking their meds and are back to square one. She was nuts and homeless here, you can bet she’s nuts and homeless in South Dakota. We’ll just eyeball the streets where the hooker said to. We’ve got nothing else to do except go home.”
Taylor opened his mouth but then closed it again without a word. They passed Tecumseh Playground and Verdi Square. Post–rush hour was still heavy with vehicles. At every corner, however, panhandlers could be seen sitting down with their empty cups or trudging this way and that amid the throng of the upper crust. “Who says there’s no homeless problem on the Upper West Side?” Taylor remarked.
Vernon reflected. “Like the hooker was telling us, if they don’t foot it all the way up here from the shelters every day, they squat in recently closed buildings. It makes sense.”
“Yeah. If your career is bumming change, you’re better off doing it here than the fuckin’ Bronx. Restaurants, bars, stores, they’re going under or getting bought out every day. You shack up in one place for a week or two, then move on to the next. I’ve just never really noticed so many homeless around here in the past.”
“That’s because this is the first time we’ve actually been looking for them. And that Cinzia girl…Didn’t she say something about the hardware store chicks congregating near a vendor at the corner of Dessorio?”
“Right. Slouch and I talked to the guy. He verified what the hooker told us but—”
“Couldn’t give specifics ’cos he probably sees a hundred different homeless people every damn day,” Vernon reasoned.
“Um-hmm.” Taylor slowed the car, pointing. “There’s the guy now. Wanna go talk to him? Now we’ve got pictures he can look at.”
Vernon eyed the short, stocky vendor at the corner. He wore a New York Islanders shirt and a Mets cap, and had a gnawed cigar between his teeth. “Naw. I told you. My luck doesn’t run that way.”
Taylor pursed his lips. “It’s police work, How. You’re the one who said we’ve got nothing better to do. Come on. And you can buy me a hot dog. I don’t make enough on detective’s pay.”
Vernon shrugged. “All right.”
Taylor pulled into a No Parking zone. The instant they both got on the sidewalk, they froze.
“I don’t believe it,” Vernon muttered into the flow of oncoming pedestrians.
Taylor cut a big grin. “And you said your luck never runs this way.”
“Mine doesn’t but evidently yours does.” Vernon threw the photos back in the car and extracted his handcuffs. “Grab her.”
Taylor immediately latched onto the arm of a shabby, large-breasted woman in cutoff military pants. Her very short dark hair was patched with bald spots and scabs.
“Hey!” she whined. “Take your—”
“Police,” Vernon said. “You’re under arrest.”
“You shits! Help me, somebody! These cops are trying to rape me!” she shrieked.
Vernon chuckled. “Christmas tree stands and woodcarving knives? But relax, you don’t have to tell us anything because you have the right to remain silent.”
Taylor pushed her forward against the car and cuffed her.
“You can’t hold me,” the seedy woman proclaimed. “I can fly anything God can make! I’m gonna lock you up in a cave full of milk bottles and soup!”
Vernon rolled his eyes at Taylor. Taylor said, “Rice Krispies.”
“The government put these cameras in my teeth!” She opened her mouth wide. “Now they can see you two shit-cakes!”
“Get her in the car,” Vernon said, unable to refrain from smiling.
“These guys aren’t cops!” she wailed. “They got fake badges that the guys who killed Kennedy gave them!”
“Those are some lines, huh?” But Taylor paused before moving her off. “Hey, How. Check it out.”
Vernon stooped to peer. He was looking at the woman’s very dirty hands cuffed behind her back. All of her fingernails appeared to be lined with dried blood.