Night Film(170)

“You need to get that right hand checked out,” she shouted from the depths of her house. “You got something lodged in there, and it’s about to turn into staph.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, until I stared down at my hand. She was absolutely right. The swelling and redness had gotten worse. What I’d thought to be encrusted dirt in the palm appeared to be a splinter embedded deep in the skin under my thumb. Seeing it gave me a sudden stab of paranoia. Had those people in black cloaks marked me? Put another curse on me? Was it a dart steeped in poison? A rusted, tetanus-yielding nail?

I had to get home. “How can I repay you?” I called out after a minute, when I realized Sharon, preoccupied with something else now, wasn’t ever returning to the living room. “Can I get you another German shepherd, a yacht, an island in the South Pacific?”

“You can get out of my house,” she called from somewhere.





100


Back in Manhattan, I stopped at the emergency care clinic on Thirteenth Street. The waiting room was crowded and it took nearly three hours for a doctor to see me. I explained I’d just come back from a camping trip.

“I can see that,” he stated cheerfully, pulling the curtain closed. He was a chipper, quick-talking young man with overcaffeinated energy and Scotch tape accidentally stuck to the back of his white coat. “You have contact dermatitis. You did a fair amount of hiking through heavy foliage? Looks like you came into contact with something you’re allergic to.”

I was about to clarify that I’d been in the Adirondacks—when I realized, stupidly, that that was hardly the case. What about the swimming pool? An animal might have been decomposing in that water for months. And the Reinhart family greenhouse?

“What type of plants in the greenhouse?” the doctor asked after I sketchily explained some of this.

“One was called Mad Seeds. I can’t remember the others.”

“Mad Seeds,” the doctor repeated, tilting his head. And that didn’t make you want to run screaming out of there? he seemed to be thinking.

“I’ve also gotten stuck with something, a bad splinter.”

I showed him. Within minutes, a nurse was cleaning my hand with water and a topical antiseptic and the doctor, wielding a scalpel and a long pair of tweezers, was slicing into the palm, whitened pus oozing out as he took hold of something embedded inside and pulled it out. When I saw what it was, I was too stricken to speak, though the doctor chucked it on the stainless-steel table beside us.

“Looks like you had quite a camping trip,” he said, smiling. “Maybe next time try the beach.”

It was a black thorn off some type of plant, though my first thought was that it was a sharp twisted fingernail, crooked and two inches long.





101


By the time I made it back to Perry Street, it was after four.

I was looking forward to seeing Nora, filling her in about Sharon, showing her the blackened spike I’d just had extracted from my hand. And we could get back to work. But the moment I entered my apartment, I heard an odd banging upstairs.

Racing into Sam’s room, it looked as if Moe Gulazar’s closet—maybe Moe himself—had exploded all over the carpet. Sequined gold leggings, a mink stole (suffering from mange), silk blouses, and striped neckties were draped everywhere. Nora, in a pair of black jodhpurs and a tuxedo shirt, sleeves rolled up, was packing up the clothes. I noticed Jesus and Judy Garland were no longer taped to the wall.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She glanced at me over her shoulder and then turned away, folding a pair of purple hot pants and shoving them into one of the Duane Reade bags.

“I’m moving out.”

“What?”

“I’m moving out. I found an amazing sublet.”

“When?”

“Just now. I’m finished with the case.”

“Okay. First of all, you don’t find amazing sublets just now in New York City. It takes months. Years, sometimes.”

“Not for me.”

“And where did this amazing sublet come from? Angel Gabriel?”

“Craigslist.”

“Okay. Let me explain something. People who use Craigslist tend to be hookers, homicidal maniacs, and massage therapists who give happy endings.”

“I already checked it out.”

“When?”

“This morning. It’s a huge room in the side of a townhouse in the East Village with a bay window. Tons of light. All I have to pay is five hundred a month and share a bathroom with this really cool old hippie.”

I took a deep breath. “Let me tell you about cool old hippies in the East Village. They’re nuts. They study tarot cards and eat soy. Sometimes they eat tarot cards and study soy. Most haven’t left this island since Nixon was president and have identifiable plant life growing under their toenails. Trust me on this one.”

“We just had lunch. She’s super-nice.”

“Super-nice?”

She nodded. “She grows organic tomatoes.”

“Fertilized with the carcasses of her thirty cats.”

“She was a photographer’s assistant for Avedon for years.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“She had an affair with Axl Rose. He wrote a song about her.”