Night Film(17)

I staggered over to him. To my surprise, he was too wasted to stand. He reeked of booze and cigarettes, and he was just a punk—mid-twenties, shaggy hair, dirty white Converse sneakers, a faded green T-shirt that read HAS-BEEN. His eyes were watery and bloodshot, seemingly unable to focus as they stared up at me.

“My turn,” I said. “Who the f*ck are you?”

He closed his eyes and appeared to pass out cold.

My first impulse was to strangle the kid. Touching the spot where he’d cracked me on the head, I could feel blood. He wasn’t a cop, so that left random derelict or a Cordovite. Or, he knew Ashley.

I pulled his gray tweed coat out from under him, checking his pockets. There was a pack of Marlboros, three cigarettes left, a lighter, a set of apartment keys. I put them back. In the other, I pulled out an iPhone, the screen cracked, locked with a security code, the background a snapshot of a half-naked blonde.

I checked the inside pocket. It was empty. Yet, I felt something else and realized there was another compartment sewn into the ripped lining.

I reached inside, pulling out two tiny Ziploc bags. Both contained pills, one set yellow, the other green, letters and numbers stamped on the sides—OC 40 and 80. OxyContin.

So, he was a drug dealer—and pretty small-time, given the fact that he was snoozing through a body search. I returned the pills to the pocket and stood up.

“Can you hear me, Scarface?”

He didn’t answer.

“Hands in the air. FBI raid!” I shouted.

Nothing.

As gently as I could—though I don’t know why I bothered; he’d siesta through an apocalypse—I rolled him onto his side, removing his wallet from his back pocket. No driver’s license, no credit cards, only cash—seven hundred and forty bucks, mostly twenties.

I put the money and wallet back, but zipped his iPhone into my own pocket. Then I stepped around him to inspect the elevator.

There was nothing there but the dark pools of dried blood, a few tendrils spreading into the cracks of the concrete.

I took a few shots and then moved back to the kid, checking his breathing. He appeared to be only drunk—not on anything else. I pushed him deeper onto his side, so he wouldn’t suffocate if he got sick, and headed back to the window and climbed out, darting through the alley and back onto Mott Street.

I assumed I’d learn nothing more about him until tomorrow, when he discovered his phone missing. Yet during the cab ride home and even hours later, after I’d taken a shower, downed two Tylenol (given the immense pain from Beckman’s vodka and getting cracked in the side of the head, I should have swiped an OxyContin)—the kid’s phone was bombarded with texts.



That was Chloe. She wrote again six minutes later.



Then it was Reinking (I couldn’t help but visualize her: Nordic, legs like ice picks):



Two minutes later:



Twelve minutes later:



Then she appeared to sext a picture, which I couldn’t open. It was followed with:



Then a text from Arden:



Interspersed with all of this, a highly obsessive girl named Jessica called eleven times. I let her go to voicemail.

Then Arden again:



It had to be his name. Hopper.

Small-time drug dealer in a faded coat, crouched in the corner of that freight elevator—he’d have something to tell me about Ashley, whoever he was.





11


“Hello?” I answered. I heard plates clattering on the other end.

“Hey. You found my phone.”

“So I did.” I took a sip of my coffee.

“Cool. Where?”

“Backseat of a taxi. I’m in the West Village. You want to come pick it up?”

Twenty minutes later, my buzzer rang. I pulled aside the living-room curtains, the window affording a clear view of the front stoop. There he was, Hopper: wearing the same coat from last night, the same faded jeans and Converse sneakers. He was smoking a cigarette, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

When I opened the door for him, I realized in the stark light of day, even with the greasy hair, the brown eyes hollowed out from booze, women—who knew what else—he was a good-looking kid. I didn’t know how I’d missed it before. It was as glaring as a silver silo piercing a cornfield horizon. He was about 510, a few inches shorter than me, slight, with a mangy scruff of beard and the raw, beautiful features of some brooding actor from the fifties, the ones who cry when drunk and die young.

“Hey.” He smiled. “I’m here for my phone.”

He clearly had no recollection of the previous night; he was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“Right.” I stepped aside to let him enter, and after sizing me up and apparently deciding I wasn’t going to jump him, he shoved his hands in his coat pockets and came in. I closed the door, heading into the living room, indicating his phone on the coffee table.

“Thanks, man.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, what were you doing at that warehouse?”

He was startled.

“In Chinatown. Your name’s Hopper, right?”

He opened his mouth to speak—but stopped himself, his eyes flitting past me to the door.

“I’m a reporter, looking into Ashley’s death.” I gestured toward the bookcase. “Some of my old cases are there, if you want to take a look.”