The Murder Rule(7)
(Note—I’ve never listened to a Nirvana song in my life, and I’ve got the tape of The Bodyguard sound track stuck in my Walkman.) Marta was her usual happy self.
“We’re here to clean,” she said, flatly.
“Real y?” He looked confused. I don’t think he’d been expecting us. But then he shook our hands, so formal y that I wanted to laugh, and introduced himself as Tom Spencer. He showed us in through a big entry hal into the kitchen, then disappeared back into the house.
Which was way nicer than I’d been expecting, by the way. I mean, you could tel that whoever owned the place had lots of money.
Marta did the kitchen and I did the upstairs. Everything was fine until I got to one room that was pretty gross. Empty beer bottles, dirty clothes and dishes al over the floor, and a nasty smel . Like, none of that is new, but the rest of the house was pretty tidy so I wasn’t real y expecting it. My interest in cute Tom in the Nirvana T-shirt diminished quickly. I cleaned everything up, took the dirty stuff downstairs, came back to dust and strip the bed.
The drawer in one of the bedside tables was open. There were two little baggies of coke inside and a smal silver spoon. And the last of my interest in Tom died. (I’m not into coke and everyone I’ve ever met who is is an asshole.)
I stripped the bed and I found some porn magazines under one of the pil ows—a copy of Hustler, and a Playboy featuring Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis. I put the Hustler back under the pil ow (ick), but the Playboy promised an interview with Bil Gates, so I ended up sort of half-sitting, half-kneeling on the floor on the window side of the bed, flicking through the article. It wasn’t as interesting as I’d thought it might be—there was a lot of blah about the information highway and democracy and washing machines— and, look, porn’s REALLY not my thing, but I was kind of curious about the Patti Davis pictures, so I turned the pages and had a look . . . and it was exactly at that moment that I heard footsteps approaching the bedroom. I swear, if I’d been doing anything else I would have reacted differently. But . . . you know what it’s like when you know you’re doing something you shouldn’t and you’re just about to be discovered. You don’t think, you panic. I ducked down behind the bed, sliding my body halfway under. As soon as I did it, I knew I was acting crazy. I almost sat back up, but there was no time.
The footsteps entered the room, the door was slammed closed, and the bedsprings creaked as someone sat down. I heard the sound of a phone handset being picked up and a number being dialed.
I should have stood up then and let him know I was there. I could have shoved the magazine far under the bed, and pretended I was dusting, or something. Instead I shuffled sideways until I was ful y under the bed and just lay there. I breathed as quietly as possible, staring up at the bed slats and the underside of the mattress, and listening to one side of what sounded like a very angry phone conversation. Right away I knew I wasn’t listening to Tom Spencer.
This guy sounded completely different. His voice was higher pitched, and angry. His first word was a barked out “Wel ?” fol owed by a pause and then an angrier “Just tel me.” After that I was distracted, because just above my head, between the mattress and the bed slats, was a gun. It was a handgun, a semiautomatic pistol. It was big and black and nasty and it sat there, just above my eyeline, while the conversation above my head escalated into an argument.
Eventual y I figured out that the guy was talking to his mom—only because he said the word mom, like, five times. But honestly, otherwise I wouldn’t have guessed it. I’m not saying I never fought with my mother (who doesn’t?) but with him there was this tone . If she’d been there in the room and he was talking to her like that, in person, I think he might have hit her. I was freaking out the whole time I was there, sure that at any moment he was going to realize that he wasn’t the only person in the room. That maybe he’d suddenly go looking for his missing Playboy, which I was stil holding (why? why?) clutched in one hand. So I wasn’t real y al that focused on the one-sided conversation going on above me, until he started to get real y angry.
“How could he have been so fucking stupid? I could have told him that guy was a crook. But he never fucking listens to me, does he?”
I couldn’t hear what his mother was saying to him, but whatever it was he got angrier and angrier. He never raised his voice above a loud hiss, but the tone of it got real y vicious.
“No. You tel him to keep his mouth shut, you hear me, Mom? No one is to know about this. No one. I’m working on fixing this goddamn mess. You need to leave it to me. Do you hear me?”
He told her to have his father cal him, immediately. Then he slammed down the phone and let fly with a stream of swear words so ugly that I swear I blushed. He stood up and he kicked the closet door, once . . . then again. The third time he kicked it I heard the door splinter and give way. I heard a muttered fuck, and then another voice, Tom’s voice, coming from outside the room, from somewhere down the corridor— “Mike? You okay?”
There was the smal est, infinitesimal pause, and then I heard my stranger—Mike, obviously—open his bedroom door and say, in a cheery, upbeat, laughing voice that gave absolutely no hint that he’d just screamed at his mom and kicked the shit out of his closet—“I’l be down in a minute.”
He closed the door and stood in absolute silence for a long moment. He gave the closet one last, vicious kick. Then he opened the bedroom door and disappeared down the corridor. As soon as I heard his footsteps on the stairs, I slithered out from under the bed, so fast that I bumped my head and scraped my forehead. I shoved the Playboy under his pil ow, gathered up the dirty sheets, and got out of there. Then I went and stood for a while in one of the empty bedrooms, until I had calmed down and pul ed myself together. It wasn’t the coke or the gun or the argument that scared me.