lemony smell.
As I plucked it from her drawer, the mirror on the dressing table gave me a startling look of myself. The thick blond hair, spiky and dishevelled. The forehead shiny with perspiration. The grey eyes, ordinarily amused, wide open and red rimmed. One side of the mouth turned down in a smirk. The hint of a stubble on my cheeks. As for the rest of me, not much left of the slender carriage – I was all slumped shoulders and fidgety hands.
The buzzer rang again.
Come on, you fool, I muttered under my breath. Run!
Which is what I did. I rushed to the back of the house and attempted to lift the guest room window that let onto the fire escape. Damn! Stuck so badly only a ghost could pass through it. Now what? A hammer. A rock. Anything.
I found a boot and banged the frame to force the window open. It did, giving me the feel of summer air. I took a deep breath and jumped out for the long run to… Where? Onward, obviously. As far as I can get. The boundless lands of New Zealand, maybe. To what use? To move on, to leave no traces. Why? To preserve whatever part of me is salvageable. If any.
TWO
June 19, 2005
The phone in the library rang over and over and still I hesitated to answer, knowing it was the sound of Dante’s angry panic.
“Damn it, Trev,” his voice exploded in my ear when at last I picked up. “Get down here. Now! You’ve got to see me through this.”
So I said I would. And that’s why I found myself in this appalling building, groping for keys and coins before I passed through the metal detector, then rode a joltingly slow lift to a third-floor chamber marked CONSULTATION ROOM, as if anyone could possibly doubt that this garishly lit, funereal vault could be anything but a Custody Area.
Unless you have been charged in a crime, it is not easy to comprehend the rituals of incarceration. So I assumed an air of aplomb and approached an officer with an inquisitive glare.
“Danilo Terranova,” I said.
He scanned his computer and enquired if the person in custody might call himself Dante.
“That’s him,” I said.
“Are you a solicitor?”
“Yes,” I lied.
The stern eyes speculated about how best to use his own scraps of authority. “Wait,” he ordered.
While he punched buttons and studied the numbers on his screen, I was left sitting on a metal chair. Too late, as usual, I attempted to block the image of two boys, Dante and me, growing up together in a middle-class neighbourhood of West Palm Beach, Florida, on the crossroads of Tangerine Road and South Dixie. We both lived in white stucco houses in the shadow of a luxury apartment building draped in bougainvillea and surrounded by giant Australian pines that thrust their spindly tops at the brilliant blue sky.
We each had a parent. Mine was a disgruntled father who consumed a quart of Jack Daniel’s every night in order to blunt his frustrations as an abandoned husband, single parent and flood-insurance salesman. Dante’s, in contrast, was a sexy, youthful mother, with pin-curled bleached hair, lacquered lips and nails, an hourglass figure and slinky necklaces draped over her décolletage.
I had been dumbfounded to hear the neighbours say that her splashy “affluence” owed nothing to inheritance but, rather, to her brazen bluffs in high-stakes poker games (a subject I chose never to discuss with Dante since it was neither useful nor gallant to blurt out unsavoury bits about his mother).
Not surprisingly, in the end, it was my father who drove off the edge of a cliff in his old maroon Chevrolet Silverado. And it was Dante’s mother who married a successful art dealer and moved to England.
But not before the “incident” which now resisted my efforts to forget: The “Cromley Incident”, as Dante’s mother referred to it forever after. Quite simply, I stole a Cromley and Finch silk necktie from the men’s department at Bloomingdale’s. Flamingo pink with yellow stripes. Awful to look at, but irresistibly goading me from the rack. Reach out. Pull it down. Walk away with it. But, before I could reach the exit, I saw the security guard approaching. So I stuffed the tie in Dante’s pocket and left him to face the consequences. Not looking back. Except to push it away whenever the memory returned, as it just did, rejected, but not quite locked-up.
“Come with me, please,” a voice thundered from the officer’s desk, sparing me further memories.
As I walked over to the desk, another officer motioned me to follow him to the Custody Suite, making me feel that the seconds were already ticking, that time was being spent.
Two men, Dante and I, seated across the table from each other in a windowless interview room where souls were pushed one step further into hell. I was shocked by the prison uniform he was wearing: drab white and ill fitting. His handsome Mediterranean features were drawn, his thick black hair dishevelled and unwashed. The eyes, brown like the soil of his ancestors, heavy-lidded from lack of sleep. The lips, clues to his phenomenal appetite for women, tightly closed, as if pushing laughter out of his life. As for the muscular body (no taller than mine but broader, stronger), it seemed only a semblance of his former self.
“Not feeding you much, are they?” I said, hoping for a smile as we faced each other.
No smile. Not even that naughty one he used when he felt himself backed into a corner.
“Hey, Trev,” he said. “What the bloody hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Dante. I assume it’s related to the fact that Antonia is still missing.”
“Of course it is. But in what way? What am I doing here? Why me?”
I leaned forward in the glaring neon and wiped the sweat off my upper lip, though the interview room was unnaturally cold.
“Look, Dante,” I said. “Antonia has been missing –”
“Five days.”
“Exactly.”
“The police are looking for someone.”
“And that someone is me?”
“I don’t know, Dante,” I mumbled, for the question had disturbed me, deeply, while stirring a sense of relief that it was him, not me, who was in custody.
“You don’t know,” he retorted. “But I’m the one in the clink. How come?”
“They’ve got the wrong man, obviously.”
“Obviously. But someone’s got to tell them it wasn’t me. I’m not a heartless beast. I could never have done this.”
“I believe you,” I said, though my eyes were a little hasty in looking away.
“You bloody listen to me, Trev,” he shouted and clutched my arm with trembling hands. “The police have got to catch the culprit and you’ve got to help them. The motherfucker who did this is out there somewhere and –”
“I will do all I can to find him.”
I
