Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss

“Forget it,” Anatoly and I said in unison.

“I’ll pay you,” she said quickly. “A hundred dollars. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call him.”

“And if he doesn’t answer?” Anatoly asked.

“I’ll pay you two hundred more to go over to the house and find out what’s going on.”

“Excuse me, but I’m about to invest in a million-dollar property. Three hundred dollars isn’t even enough to pay for the sales tax on my upcoming furniture-shopping spree. If you want a decoy you’re going to have to find someone who is a little more desperate.”

“Me for instance,” Anatoly said.

“You?” I squeaked. “But you already have more business than you can handle!”

“This is a one-night job, correct?” Anatoly asked.

“Yes,” Maria said uncertainly. “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

“I’m a P.I.”

“Like Magnum,” she exclaimed.

I rolled my eyes. “You just gave away your age.”

Maria flushed, but kept her focus on Anatoly. “This is perfect,” she continued. “You can call him and if he’s not available then sneak over, break in and—”

“No,” Anatoly said quickly. “I’m not going to break the law for you. But I will find out if he has a guest.”

“You can do that without breaking in?”

“Of course.” Anatoly smiled. “Magnum did it all the time.”

“You shouldn’t have come,” Anatoly mused as we followed Maria through the winding traffic.

Enrico hadn’t answered his phone, not even while Anatoly was leaving a message on his answering machine telling him that he believed someone was in the process of breaking into his restaurant. After that the three of us piled into two cars, Maria into her Mustang and Anatoly and I into my Audi, and we all went over to Enrico’s condo on Telegraph Hill. Since I had been the one doing all the drinking, I had given Anatoly the keys.

“I thought you wanted me to,” I lied. The truth was that I couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting home alone, thinking about the sex I wasn’t having. At least this was distracting. “Besides, it’s not like we’re trying to hunt down the Zodiac Killer,” I noted. “Maria basically hired you to knock on a door and ask if anybody’s home. I don’t see how I could screw that up for you.”

I saw the flash of white teeth as he laughed in the darkness. “You’re underestimating yourself. I’m sure you could screw up anything if you put your mind to it.”

I groaned as he pulled into a spot located only one block away from our destination. “I really hate you, you know that?” I asked lightly.

“I hate you, too,” he whispered. He kissed me and I felt his rough hands gently but firmly pulling my hair back from my face. Anatoly had incredible hands. Watching him knead bread dough was the equivalent of watching a porn flick.

We walked to the condo and found Maria in her car blocking the complex’s garage. She rolled down her window just low enough so she could reach her arm out and shove a set of keys at us. “The silver one’s to the building, the gold one’s to the condo itself. Come down and let me know what he’s up to as soon as you can.”

“No,” Anatoly said simply.

“No?” Maria repeated. “No, what?”

“If you want us to go in there you’re going to have to open the door for us.”

“But that’s preposterous! You yourself suggested that the whole reason Enrico didn’t answer the door earlier is because he didn’t want to see me. If he knows I’m there what’s to keep him from hiding out again?”

“I didn’t say you had to call out to him. But you have to be there. I’m assuming that the reason you have these keys is that this was, until recently, your home. You can argue that you have a legal right to burst into this condo unannounced. Sophie and I can’t make that same claim, not unless we’re there with you, as your guests.”

Maria lowered the window farther and glared up at Anatoly. “No one is that paranoid! What’s the real reason you’re insisting I accompany you?”

“That is a real reason,” he said. A streetlight flickered above us as if struggling to stay awake. “Another real reason,” he went on, “is that I find your motives for hiring me questionable. You’re divorcing Enrico, so why are you so concerned with his well-being? Do you still have feelings for him or did you do something to him and now you want someone else to find him and clean up the mess…or even take the blame?”

“I came to you for help and now you’re accusing me of some kind of crime?” Maria shrieked. “I have never been so insulted! How dare you! You’re completely full of…” Maria shook her head violently, too angry to continue.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is chutzpah,” Anatoly said with a smirk. “Are you coming or should Sophie and I go home and leave you to stew in your Mustang?”

Maria let out something that was between a scoff and a growl before raising her window and thrusting open her door. She didn’t even bother to look at Anatoly or me as she marched to the entrance of the building and unlocked it. She walked in without holding the door open for us.

“What have you gotten us into?” I muttered.

“I got myself into this,” he countered as we followed Maria up three flights of stairs. “I take no responsibility for your decision to come.”

When we reached the top floor of the four-story building, we paused. From the look of it there were only two apartments on this floor, and, as promised, the music of Gabrieli could be heard coming out of one of them. Maria went up to that door and pressed her hand against the wood. “Now what?” she whispered. I started to raise my finger to my lips, but then realized that the volume of the music would allow us to whisper without the fear of being overheard.

“Do you expect me to break through the chain lock for you?” Maria went on.

Instead of answering, Anatoly reached into his pocket and took out a small black object that looked like the kind of magnifying-glass used by jewelers. “What’s that for?” I asked.

“See for yourself.” He gestured for Maria to step aside and then put the object against the peephole. Silently, he invited me to look through it. Upon doing so I discovered that the device reversed the optics of a peephole, making it possible to look into the condo in the same way someone inside would have looked out into the hall. Little gizmos like that always delighted me. It was so very 007.

Anatoly smiled at my obvious pleasure and then took a turn looking through it.

“Well?” Maria asked in the same whispered hiss she had used before. “What do you see?”

“A parrot.”

Maria squeezed her eyes shut in an expression of disgust. “I hate that damn bird. Enrico’s trained it to torment me, you know. He used to instruct it to steal my soy nuts.”

I did a quick double take. “You’re not serious.”

“This would be a good time to open the door,” Anatoly said, locking eyes with Maria.

“I told you, the chain lock is on.”

“It was on,” Anatoly corrected. “There’s no reason to assume that’s still the case, unless you know something you’re not telling us.”

Maria’s glare became a little more venomous. In one swift movement she stuck her key in the lock and pushed the door open…or at least she opened it as much as possible, considering that the chain really was on.

“See?” she said with an I-told-you-so smirk. Anatoly shrugged and reached into the pocket of his jacket again. This time he took out a thin rectangular mirror that was roughly as long as his palm. He leaned against the doorjamb and stuck the mirror through the slit in the door.

“Can you see anything beyond the bird?” I asked.

“Not much—a sofa, the television. I can see the doorway leading to the kitchen and…uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?” Maria and I said at the same time. We were no longer whispering.

Anatoly withdrew the mirror and stood up. “Does Enrico usually take naps on the kitchen floor?”

“Of course not!” Maria replied. “Why do…My God, is he lying on the floor of the kitchen?”

Without waiting for Anatoly to answer she began to pound on the door. “Enrico! Enrico, answer me! This isn’t funny anymore. Open this door!” Then, she pursed her lips and whistled. “Giovanni, sweetie, open door. Open door, Giovanni.”

I looked at Anatoly. “Is she talking to the parrot?”

Anatoly didn’t answer. Instead he pushed Maria out of the way, took three steps back and in a rush of motion broke the chain on his first try.

Maria rushed past him to the kitchen where, from the front door you could see the loafered feet of a man lying on his back. For a split second I hoped that maybe Enrico was just passed out in a drunken stupor, but Maria’s scream put an end to my optimism. Anatoly went to her and when I heard him swear loudly in Russian I knew we had trouble.

Maria let out another penetrating scream and a man from the condo next door stepped out into the hall. “What’s going on?” he asked. A wet mat of gray hair clung to his scalp as he tightened the belt of his terry-cloth robe.

“Nothing good,” I said quietly. I reluctantly stepped in and, passing the impassive parrot, walked into the kitchen. Maria was hysterical and Anatoly was trying to drag her away from what was on the floor.

It was a body, presumably the body of Enrico. There was little question that he was dead. No one could lose that much blood and live. And the way that it caked on his throat, bringing grim attention to the gash that had been made there—it was too sick. And there was the murder weapon, lying beside him caked in the blood it had spilled. Not a knife, but an honest-to-God scythe. The kind that you would expect someone to carry while dressed up like the grim reaper on Halloween, except this blade wasn’t plastic. Above the globs of crusted red blood there was the unmistakable gleam of real steel.

“Maria, we have to call the police,” Anatoly was saying as he struggled not to slip in the pool of body fluids on the floor. “We don’t want to disturb the crime scene any more than we already have.” His hands were around her waist and, considering his significantly bigger size, he should have been able to pull her away easily. But Maria was flailing like a panicked swimmer on the verge of drowning. She was knocking things off the counter, a large bowl of washed arugola, a plate of half-made hors d’oeuvres, it all fell into the blood as she clamored to get free. I stepped around Enrico and grabbed one of her arms just as she reached back in an attempt to claw at Anatoly’s face.

“Let me go!” she cried. “I have to help him!”

“You can’t,” Anatoly breathed as he finally got a firmer hold of her and together we dragged her out of the room. “All you can do is calm down and call the police.”

She tried to claw at him again, but he managed to pin her to the floor. “Call the police, Sophie.”

“I think someone else may have already done that.” I gestured to the staircase and now, in addition to the little man still standing in his bathrobe, there was a small collection of people standing in the stairwell, looking aghast. “Did any of you call the police?” I asked.

It was a moment before anyone spoke, but eventually an elderly woman who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds, stepped forward with her hands on her hips. “Why is your friend assaulting that poor woman?” she asked.

“I’m not assaulting her,” Anatoly yelled back. “I’m trying to keep her from messing up the crime scene. Now, if it hasn’t been done already, call the damn police!” But he clipped the last word short and his head immediately jerked up and he stared across the apartment.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Sophie, when you came in, did you see any open windows?”

“No. My guess is that if there was an open window the bird would have found it long before us.”

“But the bird didn’t find it,” Anatoly muttered. “And the chain lock was on the door.”

Maria wasn’t yelling or struggling anymore, and when Anatoly carefully released her she curled up in a little ball and began to sob.

“Do you think he’s still in there?” I asked.

“Who’s still in there?” screeched the old lady from the stairwell. “Was somebody robbed? We all didn’t haul ourselves out of bed for nothing, we want to know what’s going on!”

“Should we go in and check it out?” I asked. I was praying that the answer was no. I liked investigating crimes, but I didn’t like confronting murderers. It had been my experience that they weren’t very friendly people.

“That depends,” Anatoly said. “Has anyone called the police?”

“I have.” I turned to see a tall, heavyset man with small wire-rimmed glasses push his way past the other people. With effort, he managed to sit on the ground by Maria’s side. “Maria, they should be here soon. Are you all right?”

“Toby?” she croaked.

He let out a gentle laugh. “You lived here for years and never remembered my name. Now you’ve been out of the building for two months and it rolls off your tongue.”

“Can anyone tell me if there’s any other way out of this condo other than this door?” Anatoly called out.

“Just the door,” bathrobe man confirmed.

“Good, and I can see the fire escape from that window so no one can get on it without my noticing.” Anatoly pointed to the window at the other end of the hall. “If the killer’s in there he’s trapped. We’ll wait for the authorities to arrive. They’ll handle it.”

The word killer was echoed in a series of whispers throughout the stairwell.

“They murdered Enrico,” Maria whimpered. She was still in the fetal position and Toby was rubbing her back. “Someone…someone took my beloved amore from me!”

“So that’s it then?” Toby asked, looking up at us, “Enrico’s really dead?”

Anatoly nodded just as we heard the sounds of sirens in the distance. I silently prayed that the murderer was still around, hiding in the dark corners of Enrico’s condo. As creepy as it was to think that someone so violent could be so close, I was also aware of how all this was going to look to the police if they didn’t immediately catch the killer. If the fact that I had discovered two dead bodies in a short period of time bothered me, it was sure to bother the police even more.

“You fucking bitch.”

I jumped and then peered into Enrico’s apartment from where the voice came…not a human voice, but the voice of that seemingly mild-mannered bird now perched on top of the sofa. He stared at me with his sharp avian eyes and repeated, “You fucking bitch.”

The bird went out of focus as did everything else. For a moment all I could see was blurred colors and the vague forms of the things and people around me as I was transported back hours earlier to that phone call. “Anatoly,” I finally managed. “I heard it.”

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