Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

I followed the bald guy’s slow shuffle onto a freight elevator. We went up two floors, and I followed him some more, through a dimly lit maze of numbered metal overhead doors. We stopped at unit 137, a lovely ten-by-ten affair with walls of corrugated orange plastic and fluorescent lights in a wire cage on the ceiling. He departed; I waited until I heard the freight elevator close, and then I waited some more. The air was cold- about sixty degrees- and it smelled of plaster dust and plastic. In the silence after the elevator, I heard faint music, hip-hop, but I couldn’t tell from where.

I closed unit 137, found the stairway, and walked down one flight. Holly’s unit was number 58, and I wandered for a while before I located it. I passed a few people along the way: a bickering couple hauling boxes in; another, better-humored couple, hauling boxes out; a painter standing in the open doorway of his unit, mixing greens and whites on a palette; a middle-aged woman with tears in her eyes, pushing a dolly. None of them paid me any mind. Unit 58 was at the dead end of a silent corridor, and I was relieved to see no police seals or crime scene tape anywhere nearby. The hasp was set into the floor and there was a medium-sized lock on it. It was more tarnished than the replacement I’d brought in my backpack, but I doubted anyone around here would notice. I put my backpack down and looked up the corridor. No one. I reached inside and pulled out my bolt cutters.

They were hard to maneuver with broken fingers, and I was noisier than I wanted to be, but in five minutes the lock was scrap. I put the pieces in my backpack, along with the cutters, and rolled up the door. I went inside and rolled it shut behind me.

The fluorescents blinked light onto a fifteen-by-ten-foot space, with yellow plastic walls and a bare concrete floor. There was a workbench along one wall, with vises mounted on either end, a rolling stool underneath, and tools stacked neatly on shelves in the back: hammers, handsaws, chisels, planes, clamps, T-squares, bottles of wood glue, small cans of varnish and shellac. A place for everything. There were metal shelves against the back wall, with a router, a sander, and electric drills and drill bits on them; in the far corner, next to a shop-vac, was a small table saw. Opposite the workbench was a large cardboard box full of wood. I took some slow breaths, to drive my heart rate down, and I took a pair of vinyl gloves from my pocket. I worked them carefully over my splints and started with the box.

It was big- the dimensions of a refrigerator lying on its sidebut it held only wood: maple burl, walnut, ebony, and teak boards, in three- and five-foot lengths, and smaller bits and pieces at the bottom. I moved on to the metal shelves, where I found spotless and quite pricey power tools and nothing else. The table saw was well oiled but held no secrets, and the shop vac was ignorant of everything but some wood shavings in the can. There was a layer of dust over things, and nothing seemed to have been disturbed recently. By the time I’d finished with the workbench, I’d concluded only that Holly had had expensive taste in her equipment, and that she’d taken excellent care of it. I pushed the rolling stool back under the workbench and heard a bump. I rolled it out again, knelt down, and looked underneath. I needed my penlight to see them: two cardboard filing boxes, side by side and up against the corrugated plastic wall. I pulled them out and opened one.

It was filled with plastic bags. They were the self-sealing variety, like evidence bags, and in them were souvenirs from Holly’s video encounters- items of the sort I’d seen in her reliquaries, though these were going nowhere now. Used condoms, stockings, soiled underwear- his and hers- neckties, cigar butts, washcloths, a pillowcase, some matchbooks, six inches of rubber tubing: a sordid lost-and-found. Each bag was labeled in black marker with a date and a location, in a firm, precise hand. I read the labels and realized that the items on top must have come from her sessions with David. While it was comforting to know that he’d practiced safe sex, the trophies made me uneasy, and my eyes skidded away. I picked through the box delicately, enough to see that it was bags of mementoes, top to bottom, and nothing more. I closed it. My heart was pounding, and I waited a moment and took a deep breath before I opened the second one.

It held memories of a different sort. There was a zippered black nylon case inside, filled with plastic sleeves. Each sleeve held several DVDs and was labeled in Holly’s neat print: “Interview #1”; “Interview #2”; “Interview #3,” all the way up to 12. Nestled next to the binder were twelve external computer disk drives, each one the size of a thin paperback. Like the DVDs, each was labeled: “January 31 backup”; “February 28 backup,” all the way up to last December 31.

I sat on the stool and looked down at the locker. Mike Metz’s voice sounded in my head: “Just keep the word ‘tampering’ in mind, and be fucking careful.” He was accompanied by Detective Vines: “And God knows what you did to the evidence.” I tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

“Shit,” I whispered.

It was past seven when Clare came in, and I closed the lid on my laptop. She stood in the doorway and took off her coat. Her brow was furrowed for a moment, and then a smile spread on her face as a blush rose on mine.

“The last time I saw anyone move that fast, and look that guilty, was when I walked in on my cousin Roger, in the bathroom. He was fourteen, and I forgot to knock.” She unwound her long scarf. “Keep it up, and you’ll go blind.”

“It’s work,” I said.

“Roger said he was just reading the interview.”

I pointed at the bags she’d brought with her. “Dinner?”

“I’ve got cold sesame noodles, hot-and-sour soup, steamed dumplings, and broccoli with garlic sauce…assuming you can tear yourself away.” I didn’t have much appetite, but I was glad for the break.

Back at Creek Self-Store, I’d stared for several minutes at Holly’s file box, and then I’d said fuck it. I’d returned one box to its place under the workbench, emptied the other one, and snapped the lock that I’d brought with me onto the door of unit 58. I put the empty file box in a Dumpster near the stairs, and took the elevator down. My backpack was considerably bulkier on the way out, but no one at the front desk seemed to notice.

When I got home, I fired up my laptop and connected Holly’s December 31 backup disk to it. I’d been going through files and watching videos ever since, and I’d sat through two painful hours of Holly and my brother when Clare walked in. I’d watched the scene McCue and Vines had shown us, and many others, and they left me covered in a skin of sweat and embarrassment. The only solace to be had was in the fact that David hadn’t hit her. As it turned out, my brother’s appetites seemed to lie in quite the opposite direction.

Which was cold comfort. I imagined the video playing in a court-room- to jurors, to the press, to what family and friends were there. I imagined it playing on television. The humiliation would be crippling, and it wouldn’t take a prosecutor half as bright as Rita Flores to turn that footage into a basis for blackmail and a motive for murder. If the cops had seen what I’d seen, it was no surprise they liked David for Holly’s death.

Clare called me to the kitchen counter and dinner, and she eyed my bruises as we ate. She’d been openmouthed and staring when I’d come back in tatters the night before, and she’d stood unmoving for nearly a minute. Then she’d put on her coat and walked with me to the ER at St. Vincent’s. “Fucking crazy” had been her only comment, and she’d made it two hours later, when we were walking home again. I took it as rhetorical, and kept my mouth shut.