Christopher Smith - Running of the bulls

He rinsed his hands in the sink and left the water running. He took the gold straight razor and went to work, scraping away the hair he hated.

How could he have been born this way? Why had God done this to him? When he was thirteen, he had been taunted in the school showers by the other boys. He was made fun of because of the dense black hair that crawled up his back, covered his forearms and stomach, flourished with the stubborn determination of weeds in the peaks and valleys of his chest. His legs were sheathed with it.

At the time, Wolfhagen’s parents were poor and couldn’t afford a doctor to tell them that their son suffered from an acute imbalance of testosterone. They were uneducated and couldn’t know the psychological scars already carved into their child’s mind. But they were not insensitive. They weren’t blind to the faults of nature. And so in the summer of his fourteenth year, only days before he started a new school year, Wolfhagen’s mother began a ritual that lasted a lifetime-with soap and water, she shaved him.

“It hurts, Mama. Stop!”

“Stand still.”

“But I’m bleeding!”

“It’s either this, or you’ll catch it from those little bastards at school.”

As he matured, his skin toughened along with his soul. While the hair may have vanished, the jeers from his classmates didn’t. They knew he shaved. They could see the stubble on his arms and legs in gym class, could smell it on him as though it were an odor, reeking and awful. They called him a freak to his face. Some spit on him in the halls.

At lunchtime, anonymous arms swung out to strike, while anonymous hands reached out to slap. Through it all, Max learned more than any of them. He learned the darkness of the human heart and just how deeply a person could hate.

His escape became books and literature. He found sanity in the lives of fiction’s characters. He graduated second in his class, earning a four-year scholarship to Yale School of Management, where he redefined himself and became so much more.

He needed to call Carra again. He knew she was having a party tonight and he was going. All it would take was one threat. One potent little threat. Then he could revel in all the shocked faces that greeted him while he humiliated her.

He was slicing away the hair on his chest, maneuvering carefully around the peak of his left nipple, when he heard on the television the news of Gerald Hayes’ death.

Wolfhagen stepped out of the bathroom, his body dripping a mixture of hair and shaving cream onto the Oriental rug. He moved to the center of the bedroom and stared at the television.

Hayes was dead, a possible suicide. There was an eye-witness, Maria Martinez, who was in the opposite building when Hayes fell past her window. The police were questioning Martinez and would make a statement by morning. They were not ruling out murder.

Neither was Wolfhagen.

He reached behind him for a chair and instead caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror on the wall to his right. A thin river of blood was running from his chest down the length of his muscled stomach, stopping to pool in the foam at his groin before dripping from the head of his penis to the carpet.

He looked down at his bare feet and saw that they were speckled with blood and shaving cream. The sight startled him. He usually was so careful. He couldn’t remember a time when he had last cut himself. As he stood there, watching, he felt a sudden, deep rush of shame and embarrassment.

He put his free hand over his slippery, bloody penis and the shame turned to rage.

Spocatti paced.

He walked past the window, walked past Carmen, walked back to the window, paused and looked across at Hayes’ office. In silence, he watched the police rifle through the man’s desk, bag folders, make notes, say little. He saw one of the detectives pick up the marble paperweight on the edge of the desk and wondered again just how carefully Carmen had cleaned it.

He stepped away from the window and looked at her. She was seated cross-legged in the center of the room, his MacBook humming in her lap, her face glowing in the bluish black. She wouldn’t look at him. She knew better. Her fingers raced over keys he couldn’t see.

“What’s the number, Carmen?”

“Almost there.”

“You said that a minute ago.”

“The wireless in this place is shit.”

She typed faster, stopped, leaned toward the screen and read off the number.

Spocatti removed his cell and dialed his contact at the First Precinct. It was late. Chances were she wouldn’t be in.

But the woman answered. “This is Rice,” the detective said.

Spocatti smiled. “Brenda,” he said. “And I thought you’d be home in bed, fast asleep in the arms of your lover.”

Silence.

“You know who this is?”

“Of course.”

“Can you talk?”

“Hold on.”

The sound of a chair sliding back, a door clicking shut. Then her voice, lower than before. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”

“I need a name.”

“A name.”

“And an address.”

“An address.”

“And whatever else you can find out about the woman who saw Gerald Hayes fall from his office window.”

“Right,” she said. “When?”

“Put it this way,” Spocatti said. “You get back to me in twenty minutes with the information I need, and I’ll personally see to it that money won’t be a problem for you or your family ever again.”

It took her fifteen minutes to secure her future.

Spocatti picked up the phone and listened. “Her name is Maria Martinez,” Rice said. “Lives on 145th Street. Has a daughter, five years old. Three priors for drug trafficking, two for prostitution. Had an addiction to heroin and crack. This was six years ago. Now’s she’s off welfare, off drugs and has three jobs, one of them cleaning offices in lower Manhattan for Queen Bee Cleaning. Looks as if she’s turned herself into an upstanding member of the slums.”

Rice paused. “And you’re going to kill her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spocatti said. “I’ve never killed anyone. Tell me what she knows.”

“She didn’t see anything,” Rice said. “Said she was cleaning a window when she looked out and saw Hayes hitting the concrete.”

“She didn’t see anyone in Hayes’ office?”

“No.”

“What does our beloved Chief Grindle think?”

“He thinks she’s lying.”

“So do I. Give me her exact address.”

She gave it to him.

He thanked her, hung up the phone and looked at Carmen, who had moved across the room and now was stuffing her blood-stained clothes into a gray duffel bag. Spocatti watched her change into black pants and a black top. She pulled her hair away from her face, secured it with an elastic and lifted her pant leg. She holstered her gun in the calf strap. “Are you expecting an apology from me?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

“Because I won’t apologize,” she said. “You would have done the same thing had you been there.”

“No, I wouldn’t have.”

“I’ve seen you do worse.”

“I won’t deny that,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have pushed Hayes out that window. It wasn’t necessary. It was juvenile. You’re too proud to admit it and that’s what disappoints me.” He started to walk past her. “But that’s your age and probably your gender, so I can look past it-this time.”

He shot her a sidelong glance, his eyes bright despite the dark room. “It’ll be interesting to see how you handle Maria Martinez.”

The van, a slate-blue Ford Spocatti picked up in Queens, farted little clouds of exhaust as it ribboned through the city.