Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“I’m Mariela,” she said. “Jen’ll be with me for a little.”

“Good.”

She opened her eyes wider.

“I’m from the agency. Carl Stagg. We just need—”

She backed up into the apartment and he passed through the doorway.

Jen was sitting up now, with her sling resting on an oversize sofa arm, and her figure-eight brace coaxing uncommonly good posture from her. The sight of her face, now largely healed except for the bloody eye, seemed to transform into the disfigured one he’d seen under the truck. This was an inversion of that night, when her true face, one he could now see he had correctly imagined, even in the finer details, had seemed to surface from behind the blows and cuts, the froth of blood along the mouth and chin. He wished he could leave the other face behind. But it remained as a kind of spectral superimposition. He couldn’t hold her eyes.

Mariela leaned on the sofa arm farthest from Jen. Stagg raised his eyes to hers, but the throat reaming came back to him. He turned away from her too.

“Okay, I’ll be back in an hour, maybe two?” Mariela said. “Enough time I hope.”

Looking only at the peach floor, he nodded with a delicacy of significance lost on the Latina. The door was noisy, the hinges on the jamb squeaking, the metal of the loose knob rattling and clicking as Mariela twisted it and pulled the door closed twice to get it to shut.

From an inner pocket Stagg pulled a spiral pad of unlined paper, pale green. He scrawled the date on the first blank page. “You wouldn’t mind,” he said, moving toward a tall halogen tower near where Mariela had stood.

“It’s dark,” Jen said, nodding at the tower. These were the first words she’d spoken to him, now or at the crime scene. He twisted on the light and followed her gaze out the slatted blinds, still open, a second geometry overlying the gridded glass. Dusk was passing. The apartments were mostly lit.

Stagg sat down in a cavernous chair the color of cognac and faced Jen across the coffee table.

“You know the man that did this?” Stagg asked.

“No. Or only by reputation.” A pained half-smile flitted across her face.

“And this issue, the violence, it’s well known.”

“To the girls?”

“Right.”

“You couldn’t not know, really. I don’t see how you could. Well, you , I can’t say. But us.”

“I’d still have to start somewhere, whatever I know.”

“There’s been no chance to forget either,” she continued. “Two months go by, then this,” she said, with a look at her braced collarbones. “And the start?”

“Yes?”

“That must go back a long time.”

“The first woman you heard about like this.”

“Oh, that’s simpler. Nine months, I think. Mariela will know better. She’s been around longer.”

“And you?”

“Yes?”

“You started when? The workers involved, who might have information, the department’s not going to bother them.”

“The workers.”

“The sex workers.”

She brushed away a long dark curl of hair that fell from behind her ear across her mouth. “Not long ago, at least around here. Three months maybe. Three and a half months.”

“You started working the neighborhood where you were found.”

“I’m not a walker.”

“Okay.”

There was a tightening in the exchange. Stagg could smell his shoes lost to the deluge, the rot. He wondered if she could too.

“He took me there,” she said. “I was working out of a club. No dancing, just escorting. Most of the dancers do it. The club’s mainly a brothel. The dancing is for show.”

“It has rooms.”

“The usual private dance ones. But not that many, and not the kind a lot of johns want, real bedrooms. The girls will go with them then. The hotel we use is down a few blocks. Someone had called and scheduled with me, asked for me, from the club. The hotel knows what we use it for, so it’s safe for us, in a way, because of that. So they sent me off to meet him, in the lobby. But he was waiting for me at the intersection, outside the hotel.”

“In a car.”

“He was standing outside it with the door open. And he called me by my name, my work name. Lisa.”

The ordinariness of the name struck him hard.

“You knew it was him?”

“I thought I recognized his face. But not really. I hesitated near the car. He said we could just do things there, down the road, no need for a room. Normally you don’t do that, it exposes you, like the girls in the street. But this was arranged through the club. Anyway I couldn’t really deal with a cancellation that night. I couldn’t. And he was clean cut, a pressed suit, seemed like a businessman or a lawyer taking care of himself for the night. Handsome too. The tip was going to be good. So I got in, this sedan, a Lexus, I think.”

“And the color?”

“Green, but like it was black. It took lights to see what it was, and — I’m not sure how to put it — it had this depth to it. Then inside it was all white leather. He started the engine, I asked him what he needed. He said he was thinking about it, had to see the girl before he knew, and maybe we should drive, find the right place first. That didn’t sound so strange, from a man looking like he did. So he took me out past the tenements, the cash-check shops, all the dust and dirt, toward the freeway. The luxe hotels were just across the way, two or three exits. Maybe he only wanted something nice.

“But just as it looked like we were going to get on the freeway, he pulled up under the overpass. I looked at him, a little surprised. But not really, he hadn’t said we were going anywhere in particular.

“He said he’d figured it out, what he needed. ‘From what,’ I asked with a light little laugh. ‘You haven’t looked at me since we got in.’ He said just from breathing me in. The air, that was all it took, most of the time. ‘What, then?’ I said. He said he needed to talk to me. ‘That’s all?’ He said he wasn’t sure, that ‘the air doesn’t settle everything.’ Which was a pretty thing to say, I thought.

“Finally he turned to me. He hadn’t looked at me once yet in the car. His eyes were calm. There was even a warmth in them, on and off. He started asking me how long I’d been working, doing this, the reasons, how long I intended to carry on. You know, up until the questions, I hadn’t really been concerned, but I started to think—”

“He spoke with the other women at length too,” Stagg said, thinking aloud more than talking to her. “That’s what they’ve said.”

“But that wasn’t it, some pattern. Even if nothing at all had happened, the questions, the extent, it would have still stuck out as… unnecessary. From a john. They do want to talk sometimes, even just talk, that’s not that strange. But there was no charge, no tinge of sex in his voice. There wasn’t any pain in it either. He wasn’t looking for a listener, confiding in strangers — that happens too. He just seemed interested, intellectually, I guess, in my… history. And that doesn’t really happen. So I started to feel a problem coming, whether it was actually him, or just someone like him.

“You’re already all nerves if you’re sleeping with people for money. That’s what the drugs are for, the ones to sleep, the ones to get out of bed. And now, what’s happened to ten girls, your nerves, they’re just searching for a trigger.”

She coughed and put her hand to her eye. “But I was right. And it was too late.”

Stagg stirred. He looked at his pad and a bear stared back. He’d been doodling, apparently, though only now, scanning the immediate past, at the margins of memory, could he recover any experience, and even then it was faint, of laying down the lines of the animal’s face, its wide tongue, its teeth drawn tiny.