Night Film by Marisha Pessl
“What’d you do that for?”
“I told you. I love you. And not as a friend or a boss, but real love. I’ve known it for twenty-four hours.”
“Sounds like a stomach bug that will pass.”
“I’m serious.” She scrambled on top of me, sitting Indian-style on my shins, and before I could stop her, the girl leaned in and planted another kiss on me, her hands clasping the sides of my head. I was almost too tired to do anything about it, but managed to grab her shoulders and pull her away.
“You need to go back to bed.”
“You don’t think I’m pretty?”
“You’re gorgeous.”
She was inches from my face, really squinting, as if it were a section of a globe she’d never closely inspected before, an ocean filled with strings of unnamed islands.
“So what’s the matter?”
“To my knowledge, Woodward and Bernstein never took it this far. I’d prefer we didn’t, either.”
“You’re making a joke?”
“You have your life in front of you. You’re young, and I’m … an old bicycle.” I had no idea where that unfortunate metaphor came from—maybe I was half asleep—but I suddenly had a very unpleasant vision of myself as a rusty junkyard ten-speed, no front wheel, stuffing bulging out of the torn seat.
“You’re not. You’re amazing.”
“You’re amazing.”
“Well, two people who feel that way should be together right now this second and not think.” She scrambled eagerly right alongside me, as if we were together in a compact camping tent. She felt bony and light, and as she rolled over me, her hair and a smell of soap fell around my head, a waterfall I was drenched inside.
“Nora. Please. Go to bed.” I shoved her back, a little more forcefully this time. “I love you, too,” I went on. “You know I do—but, not like that.”
I was aware of how shoddily stitched together the words were—suddenly I was a kid in the hall standing outside my locker about to head to Math. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. That’s when all the real things were said.
“Why are you treating me like I don’t know my own feelings?”
“Experience. I’m forty-three. Maybe even forty-four.”
“In olden days people only lived to thirty, so I’d be ancient.”
“And I’d be dead.”
“Why do you have to joke? Why can’t you just be?”
I didn’t answer, only held out my hand, waiting for her to take it.
“You know I’ll always be on the sidelines,” I said, “cheering you on. You’re a powerful woman. And you’re going to go on being powerful, for miles. For years. I’d only slow you down.”
“Maybe I want to be slow. Why do people have to keep moving away from each other all the time?” She was on the verge of tears again. She wrenched her hand away. “Hopper’s right. You’re not attached to anyone. You love only yourself.”
She waited for me to disagree, but I didn’t. Maybe it was the effect of the last three days. I was spent, had no more will to exert on my own life. I could only keep watching it now, in all its gory glory, as it twisted and bucked in front of me.
“You’re going to ruin everything. Like Hopper said. You don’t care about me. Or Ashley. She means nothing to you. Even now. All you care about is the hunt.”
She struggled off the bed, white comet shooting through the room.
“Nora,” I called out.
But she was gone.
99
My alarm went off at seven. By seven-thirty, I was out the door.
I took the 1 train up the West Side to Barney Greengrass—the famed hundred-year-old Jewish deli—arriving when it opened, and then, bags of bagels and fresh lox in hand, I rode the M train to its very last stop, Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens. If I was going to pay an unannounced visit to Sharon Falcone on a Sunday morning, I could only come bearing gifts, and Sharon had a weak spot for poppy-seed bagels, Nova Scotia salmon, and a Yiddish delicacy called schmaltz herring, a cured whitefish that to me tasted like leather encrusted in salt. To Sharon, it was heaven.
She lived in a mug shot of a house: redbrick, sobered, bleary-eyed, square. More than a decade ago, I’d once dropped her off at home when we were working late on the same case—her father had just died, leaving her the house—and I’d quietly made note of her address, in the off chance I ever needed to find her.
There was no answer when I rang the bell, so I sat down on the leaf-strewn steps to wait, wondering if she’d already headed into the city to the station or if she’d moved. But then I noticed the empty dog’s water dish and the bald tennis ball in the yard under the single bush, and within fifteen minutes I spotted Sharon speed-walking down the sidewalk. She was wearing her maroon North Face jacket and carrying two large deli coffees. In true Falcone fashion, she wasn’t surprised to see me.
“If you’re selling Bibles, I got twelve already,” she said, skipping past me up the stairs.
“I’m peddling another powerful religion. Barney Greengrass.”
Thankfully, her gaze couldn’t help but dart curiously down to the plastic bag in my hands. But she said nothing and then, nimbly balancing one coffee cup atop the other, opened the screen, unlocked her door, and, fast as a burrowing mole, darted inside. She was furious I’d shown up, that was clear, but she also didn’t slam the door and bolt it.
“Some girl left me a voicemail the other day, claiming you were in mortal danger.” She was shrugging off her jacket, hanging it on a hook.
“That’d be my assistant, Nora. She can be dramatic—”
“I don’t know why she thought that’d be anything other than wonderful news.”
“I’m sorry,” I said through the screen, Sharon quickly disappearing down a hallway. “I’m sorry I’m here. But I need your advice, and if I didn’t think that you would absolutely care, I wouldn’t bother you. Just hear me out. Then throw me out. And as far as we’re concerned, we never met.”
This must have had its satisfying prospects, because not a minute later, she was escorting me into her dining room, or perhaps her living room. Whatever it was, it was empty, apart from a yellow carpet, a wobbly folding table, two chairs, and a pillow bed in the corner covered in dog hair.
I unzipped my pockets and pulled out two plastic bags, one containing the child’s blood-soaked shirt, the other the bones. Obviously I didn’t volunteer where I’d stumbled upon them, though based on Sharon’s silently fuming face, she had her suspicions. But the moment she saw the shirt on the table, her demeanor changed. And I knew then that I wasn’t off-base or crazy, because if that shirt could take Sharon Falcone by surprise, even if it was simply a prop, it was a realistic one. Without taking her eyes off it, she set aside her two coffees—it was clear now both were hers—examining the shirt through the plastic. She zeroed in on it like a microscope, squarely considering it, going very still.
“Is it blood?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If it is, it’s an old stain. Ten years at least. Must have been kept somewhere dry or the cotton fibers would have degraded. Or there’s an inorganic blend in the shirt. It acts like blood, though, because of the stiffness. Another substance wouldn’t cause such rigidity.”
“What about the bones?”
She removed them from the plastic bag, testing the weight in her hands.
“No idea. I’d have to have an anthropologist take a look.”
“Could it be part of a child’s foot?”
“The human foot is long and narrow, weight largely borne on the heel. A nonhuman foot is broader, weight borne on the toes. But it gets more confusing the younger the bones, as they’re not fully developed. Infant ribs can look like a small creature’s even at a macrostructural level. Cranial bones of children often resemble turtle shells.”
Saying nothing more, she set aside the bag and, grabbing one of her coffees, took a sip, watching me closel
“Some heads are rolling, by the way, over that suicide you’re so interested in.”
She meant Ashley. “Whose head?”
“You remember a lawyer was lobbying against an autopsy, the Jewish faith against desecration of the body and so on. The ME can overrule it. And he was planning to. Only her body disappeared in the middle of the night. It’s also why those pictures were missing. Someone was paid off.”
“Pictures?” I repeated, not following her.
“I told you. Some body shots were missing from her file. They never appeared on record. There’s a departmental witch hunt going on, trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing. It’s a mess. And I’m sure they’ll come up empty-handed. Those types of tracks tend to dissolve before they’re even laid. The girl’s family’s got power.”
I remembered, then, Sharon mentioning the missing pictures in the file, Ashley’s front and back torso.
“Our phone call the other day,” I said, after a moment, “about the child services case. It wasn’t the best connection—”
“There was no certificate of occupancy for the building. No sign of anyone living there.”
“Any idea who owns the building?”
“It was registered to an LLC. Something Chinese. I have it in my notes. I’ll call you with it. And I will quietly look into this”—she picked up the plastic bags off the table, shooting me a penetrating look—“even though I should have you booked for being a royal pain in my ass. It’ll take a month to process, at least. Lab’s backed up. Don’t ever show up here again. You look like crap, by the way.”
She slipped out of the room with the bags.
“Thank you,” I called after her.
“You need to get that right hand checked out,” she shouted from the depths of her house. “You got something lodged in there, and it’s about to turn into staph.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, until I stared down at my hand. She was absolutely right. The swelling and redness had gotten worse. What I’d thought to be encrusted dirt in the palm appeared to be a splinter embedded deep in the skin under my thumb. Seeing it gave me a sudden stab of paranoia. Had those people in black cloaks marked me? Put another curse on me? Was it a dart steeped in poison? A rusted, tetanus-yielding nail?
I had to get home. “How can I repay you?” I called out after a minute, when I realized Sharon, preoccupied with something else now, wasn’t ever returning to the living room. “Can I get you another German shepherd, a yacht, an island in the South Pacific?”
“You can get out of my house,” she called from somewhere.
100
Back in Manhattan, I stopped at the emergency care clinic on Thirteenth Street. The waiting room was crowded and it took nearly three hours for a doctor to see me. I explained I’d just come back from a camping trip.
“I can see that,” he stated cheerfully, pulling the curtain closed. He was a chipper, quick-talking young man with overcaffeinated energy and Scotch tape accidentally stuck to the back of his white coat. “You have contact dermatitis. You did a fair amount of hiking through heavy foliage? Looks like you came into contact with something you’re allergic to.”
I was about to clarify that I’d been in the Adirondacks—when I realized, stupidly, that that was hardly the case. What about the swimming pool? An animal might have been decomposing in that water for months. And the Reinhart family greenhouse?
“What type of plants in the greenhouse?” the doctor asked after I sketchily explained some of this.
“One was called Mad Seeds. I can’t remember the others.”
“Mad Seeds,” the doctor repeated, tilting his head. And that didn’t make you want to run screaming out of there? he seemed to be thinking.
“I’ve also gotten stuck with something, a bad splinter.”
I showed him. Within minutes, a nurse was cleaning my hand with water and a topical antiseptic and the doctor, wielding a scalpel and a long pair of tweezers, was slicing into the palm, whitened pus oozing out as he took hold of something embedded inside and pulled it out. When I saw what it was, I was too stricken to speak, though the doctor chucked it on the stainless-steel table beside us.
“Looks like you had quite a camping trip,” he said, smiling. “Maybe next time try the beach.”
It was a black thorn off some type of plant, though my first thought was that it was a sharp twisted fingernail, crooked and two inches long.
101
By the time I made it back to Perry Street, it was after four.
I was looking forward to seeing Nora, filling her in about Sharon, showing her the blackened spike I’d just had extracted from my hand. And we could get back to work. But the moment I entered my apartment, I heard an odd banging upstairs.
Racing into Sam’s room, it looked as if Moe Gulazar’s closet—maybe Moe himself—had exploded all over the carpet. Sequined gold leggings, a mink stole (suffering from mange), silk blouses, and striped neckties were draped everywhere. Nora, in a pair of black jodhpurs and a tuxedo shirt, sleeves rolled up, was packing up the clothes. I noticed Jesus and Judy Garland were no longer taped to the wall.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She glanced at me over her shoulder and then turned away, folding a pair of purple hot pants and shoving them into one of the Duane Reade bags.
“I’m moving out.”
“What?”
“I’m moving out. I found an amazing sublet.”
“When?”
“Just now. I’m finished with the case.”
“Okay. First of all, you don’t find amazing sublets just now in New York City. It takes months. Years, sometimes.”
“Not for me.”
“And where did this amazing sublet come from? Angel Gabriel?”
“Craigslist.”
“Okay. Let me explain something. People who use Craigslist tend to be hookers, homicidal maniacs, and massage therapists who give happy endings.”
“I already checked it out.”
“When?”
“This morning. It’s a huge room in the side of a townhouse in the East Village with a bay window. Tons of light. All I have to pay is five hundred a month and share a bathroom with this really cool old hippie.”
I took a deep breath. “Let me tell you about cool old hippies in the East Village. They’re nuts. They study tarot cards and eat soy. Sometimes they eat tarot cards and study soy. Most haven’t left this island since Nixon was president and have identifiable plant life growing under their toenails. Trust me on this one.”
“We just had lunch. She’s super-nice.”
“Super-nice?”
She nodded. “She grows organic tomatoes.”
“Fertilized with the carcasses of her thirty cats.”
“She was a photographer’s assistant for Avedon for years.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“She had an affair with Axl Rose. He wrote a song about her.”
“It was probably ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ ”
“I don’t know why you’re freaking out. It’ll be cool.”
It’ll be cool. I felt as if a rug were being yanked out from under me when I’d been standing on hardwood floors in bare feet.
“This is because of last night,” I said.
She only raised her chin, grabbing her Harmony High School yearbook, frowning dramatically as she paged through it.
“You’re angry because I was a gentleman? Respected the boundaries of our working relationship?”
She snapped the book closed, sticking it inside the bag. “No.”
“No?”
“No, it’s because of Hamlette auditions at the Flea Theater.”
“Hamlette auditions at the Flea Theater.”
She nodded triumphantly. “They’re reversing the genders of all the roles, so there are finally good parts for females. I’m going to try for Hamlette, so I have to practice my monologues night and day. It’d drive you crazy because you hate my ac
“That’s not true. I’ve grown quite fond of your acting.”
She was folding an old gray cardigan with a sequin flying bird pin on the shoulder and a massive gaping hole in the left elbow that resembled a silently screaming mouth.
“You yourself said last night that I have to go hurling forward into space and you’ll be my cheerleader on the sidelines. So that’s what I’m doing.”
“Why would you take my advice?”
“I said it was temporary. That it was until we found out about Ashley. And we did. And I have money now.”
I’d paid Nora before we’d gone to The Peak, including a very sizable bonus that I was now sort of regretting.
“Plus, you’re going to be busy publicizing everything and making money off of Ashley for your own benefit, just like Hopper said.”
I let that remark sail past me like a grenade blowing up inches from my face. She wouldn’t stop zipping around the room like some insect with ten thousand eyes, folding, tucking, packing it all away.
“The investigation is not over,” I said. “You’re quitting in the end zone, fourth quarter, five seconds left, three downs.”
She glared at me. “You still don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get? I’d be fascinated to find out.”
“You don’t see that if Cordova had ever done something that’d hurt anyone, Ashley wouldn’t have allowed it. I trust her. And so does Hopper. You obviously don’t trust anyone. Here’s your coat back.” She’d brutally yanked Cynthia’s black coat off a closet hanger and chucked it over the bed. It sagged onto the floor. I’d given it to her weeks ago, so she’d have something without feathers to wear to Olivia Endicott’s. She’d loved it, announcing with unabashed joy that it made her feel like a French person, whatever that meant.
“I gave it to you,” I said.
She put on the coat, stepped in front of Sam’s Big Bird mirror, and took a very long time fixing a bright green scarf around her neck. She then grabbed a black fedora off the bedpost, setting it delicately atop her head like a lost queen crowning herself. I followed her downstairs in a sort of daze. She set down her bags, heading into my office. She’d picked up Septimus from the kennel. She crouched beside his cage.