Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“You mind?” I asked. Coyle looked at me and shook his head. I picked a glazed one and offered him the box. He shook his head again. I got up and righted the card table, and found the little coffeemaker miraculously intact underneath.

“You have any coffee?” I asked. Coyle pointed to a cabinet over the sink. I found filter papers and Folger’s and some foam cups inside. He watched while I fumbled with the fixings. When the coffee was brewing, I turned around.

“Tell me about Holly,” I said quietly. Coyle’s mouth tightened and his chin trembled, and he stayed silent. The aroma of coffee filled the room, masking for the moment the stink of sweat and cigarettes and wet clothing. Coyle stared nowhere, a faraway, convict gaze, and I thought I’d lost him even before we started. Then he looked at me and decided something. And then- with eyes on the walls, the floor or someplace over my shoulder, and with a voice hoarse and sometimes shaky- he spoke.

They’d met last spring, at the 9:3 °Club, on a night Jamie Coyle had been on the door. Holly and Gene Werner wanted in, and Coyle had given Holly the free pass he gave all beautiful women. But something about Werner had rubbed him the wrong way.

“Fucking Weenie. Maybe it was the way he was looking at himself in the window, or maybe it was how he grabbed her arm. I don’t know, the prick just pissed me off.” Holly had interceded on Werner’s behalf, which made Werner mad. That had pleased Coyle- that, and Holly’s smile.

“Man, she could melt you. I mean, she was a prizewinner- you had to stare- but that smile…It made something bubble in your chest. She was like nobody I ever knew.”

She’d turned into a regular, occasionally with Werner, but most times not.

“She’d come early sometimes, sometimes late. She’d have a drink or two, always bourbon and ginger ale, and maybe she’d dance. Mostly though it was people watching. Guys would try to work her, girls too sometimes, but Holly was always in her own head, and she could give a damn.

“She’d always come by to shoot the shit, though; it didn’t matter if I was on the door or behind the bar or wherever. A lot of times she’d talk about the crowd. She’d make up things about this guy or that girl, whole stories about their lives. Real funny shit sometimes, and sometimes strange stuff- I didn’t always get it all. Other times she’d talk about next to nothing, the weather or whatever, or she’d ask about my job- how I knew who was gonna be a problem, and how big a problem they’d be, how I knew who would back down, and how much pushing it would take, that kind of stuff. And then there were times she’d just hang out, and not say anything at all.”

All he’d known of Holly’s work at that point was some vague talk about movies. “A director or a cameraman or something like that.” In July, she’d approached him about freelancing, and he found out more.

“She said it was security work for her, while she was making her movies- like a bodyguard. Then she gave me the details- the where and when and why- and my fucking jaw hit the floor. I told her no way. The money was fine and all, but the whole setup was fucked, like she was scamming these guys and she wanted muscle. That kind of thing, it goes bad in a heartbeat- a fucking shitstorm waiting to happen. Where I was in my life- where I’d been- no way I wanted any part of that.

“Holly was cool with it. She didn’t push and she didn’t try to work me- she never pulled that kind of bullshit. She just asked me to take a look at one of her movies. So I did.

“I gotta tell you, it fucking blew me away. I never saw anything like it before. She was…amazing. The way she looked, the things she said- it could make your heart explode just watching. And the way she tore that guy apart at the end, the way she got all in his headJesus. I saw one, and then she showed me the rest. Fucking amazing.

“It was weird watching her with those guys- it was fucked up- but Holly wasn’t embarrassed. It was a thing she did to make her movies, she said-‘part of the process,’ like figuring out where to put the cameras, and the lights, and the editing and shit. It was just a role she played, and she was in charge the whole time. That’s what she said.

“I asked her why she did it, why she made those movies when she had enough talent to do whatever. She told me these were the stories she wanted to tell, and these were the questions she wanted to answer. I said, to me it seemed like always the same story. She thought that was funny, and said I was right, and that it was always the same questions too.”

After he’d watched the videos, Holly had offered him the job once more. And because of what he’d seen- the strangeness of her work, its power, her passion for it, and the risks she took to make it- but mostly because he was by then half in love with her, Coyle accepted.

She’d called on him only three times, and while each session had had its tense moments, he’d never had to intervene. He didn’t like the idea of her having sex with other men- it made him sick and crazy when he thought of it, he said, and he tried not to think of it- but he never stood in judgment of her.

“I learned upstate, everybody does their own time, and they do it their own way. I knew a lot of screwed-up people inside- on the street too- and the things they did to manage, to get through the day, were way more funky than anything Holly did. And they had less to show for it. Everybody does their own time.”

Gene Werner was less enlightened. He’d found out about Holly’s videos in late August, and- as Orlando Krug had told me- he’d made her life hell. It was only because Holly had insisted, that Coyle refrained from kicking his ass.

“He was up in her face all the time, and it was making her crazy. A couple of nights at the club, he made big scenes- yelling, breaking glasses, that kind of bullshit. He was a real asshole, and I was about to take him in the alley, but Holly stopped me. She didn’t give a shit what happened to Weenie, she said, she just didn’t want me getting jammed up for smacking him. She put her hand on my chest, and no shit it made me dizzy.”

He did as Holly asked that night, but Werner didn’t let up, and a week or so later, with no word to Holly, Coyle had paid him a visit. “I didn’t lay a finger on the guy. I didn’t even raise my voice. I just said some shit about fucking up his face, and that did the trick.”

That was in September. By October, Holly and Coyle had become lovers. It started one Wednesday, when Holly came into the 9:3 °Club for the first time in a week, and stayed until closing. “She asked me to take her home,” Coyle said. “Then she asked me to stay.” His voice was nearly a whisper.

“Some weeks we’d see each other four, five nights, other weeks once or not at all. Some days she’d call me up two, three times, other days she wouldn’t call. It depended on her work. When she was working, her head was in another place. She needed space and she needed quiet. And she didn’t ever like to be pushed.”

Coyle’s eyes lit with memories of Holly as he spoke, and each time a smile would crease his broad face. But then his sadness would reassert itself: his eyes would empty and his face would go blank. There were no more happy memories when I asked him about the last time he’d heard from Holly, and about the days since.

“It was a Sunday,” he said. I asked him the date and he gave it to me. It was the Sunday before she died: two days after Stephanie had visited her. “She was working on a project and I hadn’t seen her for like two weeks. We were gonna get together that night, but she called in the morning to say no- she didn’t say why. I was pissed- I wanted to see her- but you couldn’t press Holly, and it wasn’t the first time she did something like that.