Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

They burst together upon the summit of completion with a throaty chorus of groans and cries that could spring only from the thing they were doing. They rolled across the pinnacle and down the other side, losing momentum slowly until they were finally still, the man clearly exhausted, Angel still draped across him like a tablecloth.

She was the first to move. Rolling back up to a sitting position, she dropped her head back. The way her hair swept across the bare skin of her back reminded me of the backless evening gown she had worn that first night when I had taken her picture in Pittsburgh, when she had turned in my direction, and I had seen in her face that look of a predator’s pure bloodlust.

On the screen, she reached one of her long arms down to the side of the bed and pulled a pillow from the floor to tuck under her partner’s head. She dismounted, turned full on toward the camera and, with her partner’s face revealed, smiled at me.

His favorite pie was custard. He liked green apples but not red. He was allergic to cats. The large bone in his right forearm was softly curved from the time he pitched off his skateboard and broke it.

These were some of the things I knew about my brother. I knew in the way we always know things about our families. Some of them are hardwired into our genes. Some are absorbed over the years of living under the same roof, folding each other’s underwear, and eating from the same ice cream carton. There were enough details to let me believe I knew him, when in fact what I knew about him, the things I remembered, made up an infinitesimal slice of whatever it was that made him who he was.

One of the things that fell squarely on the side of stuff I didn’t know about my brother was how he could be in bed with a prostitute.

JAMIE HAD GONE INTO THE DEN TO WATCH TV, only he’d never turned it on. He sat stiffly on the couch, staring at a blank screen. When he noticed me in the doorway, it must have been in my face, because he knew. His face looked the same as it had the day I’d showed up at his school unexpectedly.

He had known that day, too.

“She passed.” That’s what the counselors and teachers had whispered to each other about my mother that day, as if she’d been a car in the next lane or a horse coming up on the backstretch. Passed what? Passed go? Passed counterfeit bills? To this day, I hated that gutless euphemism. She died. She’d been dying for a long time, her breath rattling around in her chest, sounding as if she were trying to breathe underwater. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not, but always dying. Jamie was eight, but he knew that, and he knew there was only one reason I would show up at his school in the middle of the morning, and when he walked into the room and took in the scene, he immediately erupted, crying hard and heavy just from the sheer terror of what I might say. He cried so hard it scared me. The counselor tried to move in, but I shoved her aside and put my arms around him. We sank into a pile on the floor, and it smelled like bananas in that room, because some kid had left one in his desk, and the rain outside poured as it often does in Seattle in March, as if it were falling from tipped buckets, and I said it in his ear so they wouldn’t all hear.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”

Bananas and rain and Jamie crying with so much anguish I would have done anything to make the thing that was hurting him stop.

But we weren’t in a classroom. We were in his house in Westchester, and it seemed to me he knew now, just as he had known then, that his world was about to crash down, and I was the one wielding the ax.

“I need you to see something.”

I could barely make myself move, but I turned and went back down to his office. When he showed up, I closed the door. I walked over and clicked the start button, and the show began. Jamie watched, blinking a lot, looking as if he’d awakened from a deep sleep and opened his eyes into the glare of a bright light.

His face turned ashen. His lips parted just enough to let all the air exit his body. When he tried to grab the mouse, he knocked it off the desk. It swung by its cord until he captured it with both hands and returned it to its pad. By then, his motor control was so far off he couldn’t manipulate the cursor. He tried and tried, but he couldn’t get it, and his fumbling failure was like a key that opened a door inside me. My eyes filled, and I tried to stop the tears with the heels of my hands, but they slipped out anyway and ran down my face. I took the mouse away from him and stopped the video.

He lowered himself into his desk chair as a man recovering from malaria might do it. There was another chair in the room, but the wheels on it scared me. I stood. I waited. Eventually, Jamie, staring at the frozen image, squeezed out a thought. “She taped it. Why would she tape it?” That thought led him to his next. His perspective seemed to widen from the screen to include the computer, the room, and ultimately me. “How did you get this?”

“Can we get the larger issues out of the way first, like since when did you start patronizing hookers?”

“Hookers?”

“Yes.”

He gestured weakly at the screen with his palm up. “Alex, why do you have this?”

“Angel sent it to me. Will you answer my question?” I needed to know. I really needed to know if he was one of those cocks with wallets Angel had talked about or if this was a onetime thing. Please let it be that.

“Who is Angel?” He answered my question with his own, and I felt what Monica must have felt in her moment of crisis: boiling rage.

“She’s the woman you are screwing in this video for all the world to see, and if we don’t get our shit together right now, all the world will see it.”

He went from stunned to bewildered to defeated in record time, all of it showing right on his face. Then he closed his eyes. His shoulders gave up. With wrists together, his hands dropped into his lap. Then he did the last thing I expected.

He laughed.

“Is this funny?” I was stunned, and I was angry. “I’m thinking of Gina and Sean and Maddie, and I’m thinking this is not quite so hilarious as you seem to find it.”

He slouched down into the seat, let his head roll back, covered his eyes with his hands, and laughed some more. He sounded almost loony. “Thisis hilarious. Fucking hysterical. Don’t you find it hysterical?” He looked at me from under the visor of his hand. “You’re right. It’s not funny. It’s…ironic. That’s a better word.Ironic.”

“What is ironic about this?”

He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. “I haven’t seen you or talked to you in almost a year. I run into you completely by chance. Then I do something so goddamned stupid I want to kill myself, and before I can even turn around, you’re on it. You areon it. I mean…what…how-”

“You’re upset that I found out your secret? That’s what is bothering you?”

“Don’t play high and mighty with me.” He got up from his chair but once on his feet didn’t seem to know where to put himself. That seemed to get him more and more wound up, and when he got near a wall, he punched it with his fist. Then he turned on me with his jaw tight and his finger jabbing the air in front of my face. “This is my house. What gives you the right to come intomy house, drag me in here, and start making accusations about things that are not even close to being any of your business?”

“So, you’re telling me there is some innocent explanation for this?” I pointed to the monitor. “That somehow I got the wrong impression from watching you screw this woman? Why don’t you set me straight, Jamie? Let’s hear it.”

“What do you want to hear? That I fucked up? I did. I fucked up. Does that make you happy?”