Anatomy of Fear

34

It was just the two of us, alone now, in the briefing room.

I waited for Terri to say something, but she didn’t, so I said I was sorry.

“I don’t need your apologies.”

“And I don’t need to give them. But I want to.”

“Fine,” she said.

I touched her hand and said I was sorry again, but she shook me off. “The only reason I came to your defense back there was because Perry Denton is an asshole-and because you’re my responsibility.”

“Your what?”

“You heard me.”

“Is that so? Because I thought I was carrying my weight around here just fine. Fact is, I think I’m carrying it better than fine. A whole lot better.”

“You going to turn this into another drama, Rodriguez?”

“Me?” I started to laugh.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the absurdity of the situation.” I wanted to say it was not me being a drama queen, but I knew that would go over like the proverbial lead balloon. Plus, I wanted to make nice because I needed to know where the case was going now that the feds were taking over and, if I admitted it, I wanted to know where I stood with Russo, but no way I was going to say that. “Look, this is stupid. We have a job to do.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about, the job. I thought you were apologizing.”

“I thought you didn’t want apologies.” I sighed. “Look, what do you want me to do, fucking bleed?”

“I don’t want you to do anything, Rodriguez. Nothing, get it?”

“Fine.”

We stood there another minute not speaking, Terri sucking her lip and pushing imaginary hairs out of her face the way people do when they want to hide their expression. Every few seconds our eyes would meet and one of us would turn away. Terri looked really upset, so I finally asked, “Are you okay?”

“No, but it has nothing to do with you. I’m just upset about the case.”

I didn’t think she was being entirely honest, but didn’t think it was a good idea to say it. “So what do we do?”

“We?”

“I’d like to stay connected to whatever goes on-and I think you could use my help.”

I expected another fight, but she directed her anger at the case.

“What do they expect me to do, sit on my hands while the G brings in more BSS and CIU and the rest of the fucking alphabet? I’m not going to roll over and play dead.” She stopped. “Forget it. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“Because I’m your responsibility, remember?” I added a smile, and after a moment something let go in Terri’s face and her muscles relaxed and she smiled too. Then she got serious.

“So, tell me, did you really see a man on fire?”

“Yeah, and it was totally fucking weird. My grandmother would say it was a spirit sending a message.”

“This happen to you a lot, Rodriguez?”

“No. The pictures I’ve seen in my head have always been connected to a drawing I was making with a witness. But this came out of nowhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.” It was true I had a tendency to see things in line and tone, more like drawings than real life, which I chalked up to extensive art training, but this was a whole other dimension. “Maybe I’m starting to see things.”

Terri looked at me like I was a freak.

“Hey, it’s your fault.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Trying to create the unsub’s portrait for you must have triggered a chemical in my brain that just won’t quit.”

“So you’re doing that sketch entirely for me, that it?”

She was right, of course; I was doing it for me as much as for her.

Terri still had that look on her face and I told her to stop, and she told me to stop biting my nails, but in the process we’d gotten past the fight, though we were both a little wary.

I needed to get out of the station to clear my head, and asked if she’d take a break with me.

“Now?”

“Why not? Your big case just went to the G.”

“Thanks so much for reminding me, but I’ve got a deskful of other cases waiting.”

“So let them wait.”

His eyes track them like prey in a rifle’s sight line, and he sees it in his mind’s eye: bullet propelled in slow motion until it reaches its target, then, wham! a direct hit, aorta bursting, blood spurting out of the woman’s heart, white blouse soaked a deep wine red, body thrown back, the look of shock on her face. Then the man, turning to the woman, eyes darting in every direction trying to locate the bullet’s trajectory, and just when he figures it out, just when they make eye contact, it happens: Kaboom! another round fired right into his head!

He blinks and the pictures fade and there they are, the man, sketchbook tucked under his arm, and the woman, crossing the street, getting into a car, no idea they have just been killed.

He waves down a cab. “Follow that car,” he says as he gets in, and forces a laugh. “Sounds like we’re in a movie, huh?”

The driver, head wrapped in a turban, asks, “Where to, sir?”

“I said, follow that car.”

“Whatever you like, sir.”

He stares at loose strands of shiny black hair that have escaped the turban, imagines wrapping a wire around the man’s neck while thinking up the excuse he will give for leaving his desk so suddenly.

With its colonnaded court and Central Park just across the street, El Museo Del Barrio belied any connection to the real barrio only a few blocks east.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” I said.

“Really? This place has been around that long?” Terri grinned.

“It was started by some Puerto Rican educators and activists around 1969, I think, which happens to be before my time.”

I hadn’t been here in a while, but inside it looked the same-large room, lots of tile trim, nothing fancy. It brought me back.

Julio and I used to come here when we were teenagers and had nowhere else to go and didn’t feel like getting into trouble. It was the only museum where Julio said he felt comfortable. A couple of times we’d gone to the Met, but he said the guards would watch him like he was going to steal something. I said they were probably right.

“This place was a sort of haven for me and my best friend, Julio.” I remembered the time we were looking at a show of art from the Caribbean Islands. The tour guide was speaking to a class, in Spanish, about the pots and artifacts that had been made hundreds of years ago, and what Julio had said.

Yo, mira, you hear what she said: hundreds of years ago? I can’t get my head around that. The teachers at Julia de Burgos, they always saying there weren’t no history, no nothing, so like I figured all the Puerto Ricans were like me, un mamao, y’know, worthless.

That day had made a difference to Julio. And when he got out of Spofford we’d come up here to see the exhibitions. Later, after he got the job with the law firm, he became a member and started donating money.

Terri crossed the room to check out the brightly colored portraits that covered a wall of doors, Soul Rebels, painted by the artist Yasmin Hernandez.

I started pointing them out. “That’s Julia de Burgos, a famous Puerto Rican poet; and Piri Thomas, who wrote Down These Mean Streets; and I think that’s Eddie Palmieri.”

“What’d you do, Rodriguez, study up before you brought me here so you could show off?”

I hadn’t, but she was right that I was showing off.

Terri pointed to another portrait. “Bob Marley,” she said, and started to sing, “‘No Woman No Cry.’ You’re not the only one who can show off.”

We headed into the main gallery, an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, spare and austere.

Terri pointed at a stack of papers on the floor maybe two-by-three-feet and six inches thick, an image of sand or waves or clouds on top, it was hard to tell. “What’s this?”

“Pick one up.”

“You want me to set off the alarms and get arrested, that it?”

“No, I’m serious.”

She gave me a look, but did it. “Oh. I hadn’t realized it was a stack of the same picture.”

“Gonzalez-Torres wanted his art to be disposable-democratic, you know, just a stack of photocopies.”

Terri rolled up the print. “Maybe I’ll frame it. Free art, why not?” She moved to a wall of small framed statements, and read one: “Center for disease control 1981 streakers 1974 go-go boots 1965 Barbie doll 1960 hula hoop 1958 Disneyland 1955 3-D movies 1952.” She turned to me. “What’s this about?”

“I’d say it’s about juxtaposing fads and cultural phenomena to create unexpected associations.”

“Wow. You’re either too smart for me, Rodriguez, or really full of shit. Forgive me, but art intimidates me.”

“It intimidates lots of people, but you just have to know the language.”

“You mean like the G, with their BSS and CIU bullshit.”

“Exactly,” I said. “For me, art always came naturally, but put an algebra problem in front of me and I go brain-dead. Gonzalez-Torres is a conceptual artist. He works with ideas as opposed to, say, paint and canvas.”

“Sounds a lot cheaper.”

I laughed, and ushered her into another room, walls covered with papier-mâché masks made in the seventeenth century for the carnivals in Ponce, Puerto Rico.

“Jesus!” Terri gasped.

I looked back and forth between a hideous horned fanged devil mask and Terri’s pretty face.

“Can’t tell us apart, huh?”

“If it weren’t for the horns, no.” I laughed, then squinted at Terri.

“What?”

“It’s gone, but a second ago when you looked at that mask, your anatomy-your facial anatomy, that is-rearranged itself into a classic fear face.”

“How so?”

“Your eyes opened and tensed. Your brows raised, and your forehead wrinkled.”

“Not my forehead, Rodriguez. I’m way too young. Go on.”

“Your lips drew back, then opened, and for a second, just a second, your jaw dropped open and quivered.”

“It did not.”

“’fraid so. Dropped wide open-and it wasn’t pretty.”

Terri whacked my arm.

“Sorry, but the classic elements of fear were written all over your face.”

“You know, I see people lying dead in the street and I barely flinch. But I walk into a room with a papier-mâché mask and I freak out.”

“Facial muscles have a mind of their own. It’s totally involuntary.”

“You really know this stuff, don’t you, Rodriguez?”

“It’s my biz, but I’m still learning. And I spared you the anatomical muscle names because I didn’t want to show off.”

“I think you did a pretty good job-of showing off, I mean.” She looked up at me. “So what’s my face telling you now?”

I cocked my head and studied her. “Aside from your raised lip and the one cocked eyebrow-sure signs of disgust and arrogance-there’s a telltale sign of sadness in the downward slant of your outer eyelids, but I think what your face is saying is, ‘Hey, I’m gorgeous and I don’t always know it because I’m insecure, but I think this guy I’m looking at is way cool.”

“Asshole.” She laughed, and raised a hand to hide her face.

“Right on the money, huh?”

“All but that last part about you being cool.” She kept the hand over her face. “Just don’t look at me, okay, Rodriguez? I can’t have you reading my face all the time.”

“Afraid of what I’ll see?”

“Believe it,” she said and slapped my arm.

“You’re hitting me again.”

“Take it as a good sign.”

We ended up in the museum shop where Terri bought a box of Frida Kahlo stationery and I bought some postcards of tacky Spanish-language movies from the fifties.

Outside, a slate-gray sky was framing the naked winter trees of Central Park.

I looked at Terri, pulled her to me, and kissed her.

“Whoa,” she said, her hand pushing against my chest, but not before our tongues had done a little tango. “You could have asked.”

“I couldn’t take the chance of being turned down.”

She shook her head, but she was smiling.

He feels the bile rising into his throat; the picture of them kissing, vibrating on his optic nerve, sickening.

But what did he expect from her? Maybe she is half Spanish too, like Rodriguez. It was possible, some of them passed.

A school group is heading into the museum and he uses them like a shield to get closer. They are only a few yards apart. He sees them talking and laughing, completely unaware of him. Then the guy raises his arm and the sleeve of his jacket slides back.

He takes a deep breath and ticks off a few more pictures, then pulls the cap lower on his forehead and follows them.

We didn’t make it back to the precinct. We went to my apartment instead. Terri said it was her first day off in a year, but she still felt guilty.

After we fooled around, I pulled myself out of bed and got my pants back on. I wanted to show her my latest drawing.

“It’s still not enough for an identification,” said Terri,

“but there’s something familiar about it. When did you add to it?”

“The other night. I just had a feeling about it.”

She gave me a look, like she was trying to see inside my head.

“Don’t look at me like that.

It makes me feel like a crackpot, the way Denton was looking at me.”

“Oh, Denton just likes to have someone around to torture, and he thinks I’m sleeping with you, so you’ve been elected.”

“How would he know that?”

“He doesn’t. He’s just guessing,” she said, still gazing at the drawing. “What if we got one of the computer nerds to play with this, see what they could come up with?”

“You mean another sketch artist?”

“Oh, don’t look so wounded, Rodriguez, it was just a thought.”

“Well, it’s a sore spot with me. Most of the sketch artists who work on computers have no art training at all. They take a course in moving noses around on a computer screen and they think-”

“Okay, relax. It was just a thought. But do you think you’re going to get more of this face?”

“Maybe,” I said, but had a feeling I would. I thought I might show it to my grandmother too. It didn’t seem so far-fetched these days, particularly with her weird connection to the case.

“And you’ll show it to me if you do.” It was not a question.

It brought up my suspicion or paranoia or whatever you want to call it, that Terri just wanted me around to do my drawings. I don’t know why that annoyed me. I wanted to complete the drawing too.

“What?” Terri asked, looking up at me.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. I’m no face-reading expert, Rodriguez, but I can recognize annoyance when I see it.”

“I’m not annoyed.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

I walked her out and we didn’t say anything until Terri slid into a cab.

“You know, Rodriguez, if something’s bothering you, it’s okay to say it.”

I tried to think of what I wanted to say, but I’d been tamping down my feelings since I was a kid and all I could come up with was “I’m going to Boston tomorrow.”

Terri sighed, pulled the door closed, and I watched the taxi drive away.

Finally.

He has watched them come out of the building, the woman get into a cab, the man stand in the street until the cab turned the corner. The whole time his lids opening and closing like a camera’s shutter, one fragmented picture after another sent to his brain, again…and again…and again.