A Tap on the Window

Forty-one

“You fucking broke my toes, man!”

I knelt down and had a look. “Try to wiggle them.”

Roman Ravelson wiggled his toes.

“I don’t think they’re broken,” I said. “But then again, I don’t hold a medical degree.”

I offered my hand to help him get up, but instead he crawled two feet over to the stairs and used them to pull himself to a standing position. His skin was milky white, like he’d spent the last few years in a cave. Maybe he only came out at night. There was a little roll of fat over the elastic of his boxers, and sheet creases in his pudgy cheeks.

“Did I get you up?” I asked.

“I was out late,” he said. “You should leave. If you don’t leave, I’m gonna call my mom.”

I got out my cell. “Want to use my phone? You can tell her how you practically knocked me out last night.”

“That Sean— Jesus— I was trying to help him and he gives me up just like that. My mom told me you said to say hi. You wanted to fuck with my head, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “Your dad home?” I recalled Annette saying Kent Ravelson was out of town.

Roman blinked a couple of times, like he was kick-starting his eyes. “He’s — my dad’s away or something.”

“When’s he coming back?”

The young man shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t keep track of him.”

“You want to put on a shirt or anything? I’ve got a few questions.”

Roman sighed. “Fuck. Follow me.”

He started trudging upstairs. I followed him to the second floor, down the hall, and into his bedroom. Bumping his toes with the door appeared not to have crippled him for life.

His room was decorated hurricane-style. Bed unmade, clothes all over the floor. Magazines, video games, everything arranged helter-skelter. The walls were plastered with movie posters. 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dance of the Dead, Zombieland, Dawn of the Dead.

I was definitely picking up a theme here.

On the floor next to the bed, atop a pile of clothes, was an open laptop. Roman picked it up, looking for something to wear. The motion made the screen, which had been asleep, come to life. I caught a glimpse of text, arranged in what looked like play format.

A script.

He tossed the laptop on the bed, found a black T-shirt he liked, and pulled it on. It was a couple of sizes too small and just barely covered his stomach. Across the front it read.

I pointed to it. “I don’t know that place. It’s not from around here.”

He gave me a “duh” look. “It’s the pub where they’re trapped in Shaun of the Dead. You’ve seen it, right? It’s only one of the best zombie movies ever made. It’s scary, but it’s also funny as fuck.”

“Sorry,” I said. Now I pointed to the laptop. “You writing a zombie movie?”

“Maybe,” Roman said.

“What’s it about? Haven’t zombies been, forgive me, kind of done to death?”

“You just have to find a new angle. I’ve got one.”

I waited.

Roman took a breath. “Okay, most zombies, it happens because of a plague or an experiment or something like that. But what if people were turned into zombies by aliens? A mash up of two different genres. My hero is this guy named Tim who knows what the aliens are doing and tries to stop them.”

I nodded. It sounded dumb to me, but when had dumbness ever kept an idea from being turned into a movie?

“You might have something there,” I conceded. “You got a regular job, Roman?”

“This is my job. I’m a screenwriter.”

“So, then, how much do you make, I don’t know, on a weekly basis, writing your scripts?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “It’s not like some job stocking shelves in a fucking grocery store where you get some stupid paycheck at the end of the week. You write a script, and then you shop it around and sell it. So you don’t make money for a long time, but then you could get, you know, a few hundred thousand or a million or something.”

I nodded. “Oh, okay. I don’t understand how Hollywood works. So how many scripts have you sold?”

“I’ve had some nibbles,” Roman said. “I had an e-mail the other day from Steven Spielberg’s office.”

“No shit?” I said. “When’s your meeting?”

“Okay, the e-mail wasn’t exactly — it was more like thanks for your inquiry, but— Did you just come here to bust my balls?” he asked. Wouldn’t have been hard, given what he was wearing. “’Cause if you’re here about who gave shit to Scott, I swear to you, it wasn’t me.”

“I’m not here about that,” I said. “You’re more into beverages. That’s what supports you while you write your scripts.”

He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, busted. I buy beer and drive around and sell it. Big deal. I’m a fuckin’ terrorist.”

“You had Sean and Hanna doing the deliveries for you, didn’t you? Is that why you were out last night, because they weren’t exactly available?”

“I didn’t know anything about that. I called Hanna earlier and got no answer, and when I called Sean he didn’t pick up, either. Fuck, I didn’t know she was dead or anything.”

“Did you know they’ve arrested Sean for it?”

His mouth dropped open. He plopped down on the side of the bed. Quietly, he said, “No way. Sean’s my friend. There’s no way he’d do that.” Roman shook his head in disbelief. “Sean was really into Hanna. Really loved her. Son of a bitch.”

“If Sean didn’t do it, who do you think did?”

He shrugged. “I can’t think of anybody who’d do something like that. That’s just — that’s fucked-up, man.”

I moved some rumpled jeans off a computer chair over by the desk and sat down. I noticed a phone sitting on the desk.

“Did you like Hanna?”

“Oh yeah, sure, she was nice. I mean, she kind of pissed me off sometimes. She was late with money she owed me. But, you know, it was no big deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’d buy, like, two dozen cases of beer, load it into Sean’s Ranger, right? And they’d go around delivering. Sean drives, Hanna looks after the money. And there’s a markup, right? So at the end of an evening, or a weekend, Hanna’s got enough to pay me back everything they owe me, and still have money left over. We’d usually meet up the next day.”

“But sometimes she didn’t have it?”

Roman rolled his eyes. “If she passed the mall on the way to see me, sometimes she’d get distracted. Buy herself something. And a couple times, people tried to pay her in something other than cash. I am strictly a cash operation, you know?”

“What do you mean? You’re not telling me some kids want to write you a check.”

Another eye roll. If he did it again they might get stuck looking at his brain.

“No, no, like, if someone didn’t have enough cash, they’d hand over some weed or something to Hanna. I had to lay down the law on that one. I don’t want that stuff.”

“Hanna ever owe other people money besides you?”

“Beats me. Not that I know of. I don’t know why you’re asking me so many questions about how I make a few bucks. Nobody cares about that, and it’s got nothin’ to do with what happened to Hanna.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, like maybe he was trying to stop himself from crying. “I’m tellin’ ya, there’s no way Sean woulda done that to her.”

“That’s why I have to find Claire,” I said. “She may know what really happened. But you weren’t exactly helpful to her father on the phone last night.”

He blinked. “What — how do you—”

“We talked this morning. You said, quote, you didn’t fuckin’ know and didn’t fuckin’ care, unquote, where she was.”

“Okay, you have to know a coupla things. One, my mom did not tell me Hanna was dead before she made me call him. And two, that guy Sanders never liked me. He never thought I was good enough for Claire.”

Point, Sanders.

“How long did you and Claire go out?” I ran my finger along the edge of the cell phone sitting on the desk.

“Like, four months or so, till, like, July.” His lips compressed. “Till she met Dennis.”

Now we’d reached the main reason for my visit. “Tell me about Dennis.”

“Well, his last name is Mullavey, and he’s a black guy, and he’s from someplace like Syracuse or Schenectady.”

“Those are very different places.”

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. He was supersmooth, you know. Thought he was real cool.”

I picked up the phone.

“Leave that alone,” Roman said.

“You take pictures with this?” I asked.

“Every phone takes pictures. How old are you?”

“This the one you used to take the picture of your cock you sent to Claire?”

“What did you say?”

“Is this the photo app here?”

He shot forward and grabbed the phone from my hand. I didn’t make any effort to hang on to it.

“Is that what makes you cool, Roman? Texting hard-on pics?”

Roman stood before me, almost shaking.

“Claire and I would goof around sometimes, that’s all. Just having some fun.”

“She send you naked pictures of herself?”

“Claire’s a little more uptight about that kind of thing. But she thought it was funny.”

“Even after she’d broken things off with you?” I asked. “Did she think it was funny to get a reminder of what she was missing? Did Dennis find out about that picture? Did he come after you for it? Did something happen between you two that made him leave town in a hurry?”

“No!” Roman said. “Nothing like that happened. This is bullshit, bringing up this stuff. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Okay,” I said understandingly. “Just tell me what did happen. Tell me about Dennis.”

“I hardly ever even met the guy. I know he had a stupid job cutting grass for the summer.”

“With Hooper’s?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Driving around in one of those orange trucks.”

“So what happened?”

“She started seeing him, while she was still seeing me, right? But I could tell something was wrong, because she was getting all cool, you know? And then she gives me the whole it’s-not-you-it’s-me thing, and next thing I know she’s seeing Mullavey. I wanted to fucking bash his brains in, you know, but Sean, he talked me out of doing anything stupid like that, and I never would have anyway. You think these kinds of things, but you never actually do them.”

“But then Claire and Dennis broke up all of a sudden.”

“Yeah,” Roman said. “Like, from what Sean told me, one day he just quits his job and goes back home. Like, maybe one day he realized cutting grass was boring. He breaks it off with Claire. At the time, I thought it kind of looked good on her. Like now she’d know how it feels.”

“You try to get back with her? With anything more tempting than your dick shot?”

Roman hesitated. “I, you know, I called her a few times. I admit that.”

“You do anything more?”

“Like, what do you mean?”

“Did you start following her around? Stalking her?”

Another shrug. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“But you followed her?”

“I just wanted to talk to her, that’s all. Because I think we had a good thing going on. She wouldn’t answer my calls, so what was I supposed to do?”

“That your Mustang out front?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Your parents bought that for you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“What’s your dad drive?”

“What the hell? Why are you asking?”

“Just tell me.”

“He’s got a BMW. Him and my mom both got ’em.”

BMW didn’t make a pickup truck. But I was betting Ravelson Furniture had one or two for deliveries. Roman could have borrowed one.

“Do you know why Dennis broke things off with Claire?”

“Man, I don’t even think Claire knew the reason, from what I hear. My guess is, he was just a total douche.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that would explain it. Roman, you know Claire, you went out with her. Where would she go? If she was scared, or just wanted to get away from everybody, where would she hide out? Aside from her mom’s place in Toronto.”

He thought, then said, “I got nuthin’.”

I got out of the computer chair. “Good luck with your meeting with Steven.”