Skin Deep

14

“She was reinventing herself.”

Dana’s words hummed across his brain like a plucked wire. The message was loud and clear, and it had little to do with younger women getting the hot sales jobs. That was the cover story. Lanie Fucking Walker who was this side of surgical addiction had planted the idea that maybe it was time to turn over the proverbial new leaf: get a job that paid. Get away from kids who reminded you of the family you don’t have. And while you’re at it, get a new face.

She had hammered Dana with the makeover mentality that was spreading like the Asian flu. Nobody wanted to age naturally. Nobody liked being themselves anymore. Everybody wanted the quick fix: Losing your hair? Get plugs. Look like a dork in glasses? Call a laser clinic. Eyelids a tad thick? Nose too Greek? Crows walking all over your face? See a plastic guy.

But that was Steve’s cover story. And he knew it. Dana’s makeover went beyond her face. She was preparing herself a new life. And he was old skin.

It wasn’t because of Sylvia Nevins. It was the old commitment thing. Dana wanted kids and he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t that he didn’t like kids. Far from it. He feared fatherhood. And it wasn’t because fatherhood meant a loss of freedom, not being able to go out with his buddies or on dream vacations. Nor was it the financial constraints. Nor did he fear losing his identity—no longer being part of a couple, just SteveandDana. On the contrary, whenever they visited Dana’s sister, he saw how much life there was—people cooking, kids running around, the house a noisy mess. The place was alive, humming with people interacting, connecting to one another—and making him feel guilty that his own life was so boringly narcissistic.

He knew what lay beneath the trepidation—a realization that had come to him during his adolescence, something he had hoped to outgrow. But he couldn’t, because he was convinced that he could never dispel the fear that he’d turn out like his parents—people so self-absorbed, so pathologically malcontent that they were incapable of raising him without passing on their own damage. He had met Dana in college and loved her looks from the moment he clapped eyes on her. They began dating immediately, but it took him five years before he could commit to marriage. Then he woke up one morning a married man, thinking that it wasn’t so bad. But he dreaded the next expectation.

And when Dana began to press for children, he froze. In theory he wanted kids, but he never felt that he possessed the ability to secure a useful place in a child’s life, that he could make an irrevocable commitment to a son or daughter. That he could be a good father.

He knew it was unhealthy, but he had never been able to share those fears with Dana. He should have, but he simply could not get himself to open up, even when she had laid down the ultimatum last Thanksgiving. Instead of spewing out the vomit from his soul, he continued to clamp down. Then he became reckless with booze, and at that Christmas party he took up with Sylvia Nevins. Dana was right: part of the reason for the affair was getting back at her. Also a shabby way of deflecting the commitment she sought.

Now it was too late. Dana’s discovery was the deserved shot in the foot. And tonight he sat alone in this hovel, his belly hot with acid and a cabinet full of meds.

But at the moment he had other problems that lay balled-up under all the layers like in “The Princess and the Pea.”

In a box of receipts he had found one from Conor Larkins. June second, the time 5:59. Stapled to the Visa receipt was their order: one grilled chicken sandwich, one glass of Chardonnay, one beer, and two Chivas Regal Scotches. He did not remember having the Chivas. But that was his brand, the way Sam Adams was his beer and Veuve Clicquot was their champagne when he and Dana celebrated. But he did not recall ordering or downing them. Given the time of payment, he must have had those after Terry had left because the time recorded for his call to her was 5:53. Six minutes later he paid the check. Beyond that, he remembered nothing. Not until Reardon’s call roused him out of an Ativan stupor.

On his laptop he found half a dozen pharmaceutical Web sites that said the same thing:

Ativan (Lorazepam) is an antianxiety agent (benzodiazepines, tranquilizers) used for the relief of anxiety, agitation, and irritability, to relieve insomnia, to calm people with mania/schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder….

Normal Dosage: For sedation and anxiety, 2 to 3 mg.

Possible Side Effects: Some patients experience the sedative effects of drowsiness, decreased mental sharpness, slurring of speech,…headaches…These will tend to clear up, especially if you increase the dose gradually. Some people experience low moods, irritability, or agitation. Rarely a patient will experience disinhibition: they lose control of some of their impulses and do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, like increased arguing, driving the car recklessly, or shoplifting. BZs also increase the effects of alcohol. A patient taking a BZ should refrain from drinking alcohol as these effects may be increased….

Adverse Reactions: Ativan (Lorazepam) may cause the following reactions: clumsiness, dizziness, sleepiness, unsteadiness, agitation, disorientation, depression, amnesia…

What kicked his heart into turbo was that the emergency vial of Ativan which he kept in his glove compartment just in case his anxiety level spiked was down to two 1 mg. tabs. Jesus! He had taken them on top of a beer and two Regals. He had no recall of that either. Which meant that sometime during the late afternoon with Terry he had overdosed.

But why?

He had no reason to be anxious. Terry was a casual acquaintance, not someone on whom he had serious designs. It was only casual chitchat over drinks. Unless, while he drove to her place with the sunglasses, his attraction to her had lit hairline roots into that black battery of guilt. And maybe to muffle the static he popped the tabs then blanked out.

“You can walk, you can talk, but you can’t think.”

His doctor’s caveat echoed across his brain. Alcohol and Ativan is a combo looking for trouble. Your cognitive functions go haywire, and memory goes to fog.

Suddenly that pea was a damn golf ball.

What if he had headed over there with other intentions, Sylvia Nevins intentions, using the sunglasses as an invite?

No! Don’t go there.

If his suspicions were correct, his visit to her place would technically make him a witness in the investigation of her murder since he’d be one of the last people to see her alive.

(Maybe the very last.)

The voice rose up from nowhere, but he flicked it away just as fast.

Pursuant to that, he’d have to inform Captain Reardon and the investigatory unit then file a formal report detailing his activities of June second and any others back to day one, whenever that was. The sixty-four-dollar question was how could he justify that when he could neither recall nor convince himself that he had ever visited Terry Farina’s apartment? So far, no evidence had surfaced of his ever having stepped foot in 123 Payson Road.

(Thank you, God!)

Even to preempt possible suspicion, he’d make himself look worse claiming he couldn’t recall anything beyond a beer with her at Conor Larkins.

“Gee, guys, I called her at 5:53 when I found her sunglasses, then woke up the next morning when the captain called.”

“How come no record of the call?”

“Guess I dialed ^*67 without thinking.”

“Why block caller ID?”

“Beats me.”

Not only could he be suspended for incompetence and/or a cover-up, but they’d mount a full-scale investigation of him only to find nothing. But imagine Dana’s delight once the word got out that he had graduated from Sylvia Nevins to a murdered stripper.

SHIT!

No way. Not going to happen, at least not until he could figure out what the hell he had done in that fifteen-hour hole.

Steve took a long hot shower and put on his pajamas and went into the kitchen, where he found a glass and the bottle of scotch. It was about three-quarters full. He could feel it tug at him like a mistress. What he wanted to do was get rip-roaring drunk. Maybe down half the bottle and fill it back up with water to pretend virtuousness. But then he’d wake up feeling like roadkill, and he had to take Dana to her plastic surgeon.

He filled the glass with ice and poured himself a single shot then put the bottle away. He settled at the kitchen table.

The C.S.S. report had detailed all prints found in the victim’s apartment, but none that belonged to anyone on record in their criminal database. Nor his own.

The lab was still out on hair and fiber analysis. As for leads, Farina’s ex-boyfriend’s alibi checked out. On the day of her death, he was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at a handball tournament that was documented on the local cable station. Background checks on other Kingsbury clients so far had turned up nothing. As of yet, they had no person of interest.

“Focus,” he said aloud, and stared into the glass.

Dana had said that she had called him several times to remind him about the air conditioner. That meant sometime after 5:53 he had turned off his PDA, which he never did. And when he got home he neglected to recharge it, which he did nightly. The other possibility was that the battery had run down on its own and his brain was too fried to remember. That would explain why it was dead the next morning, forcing Reardon to call his landline.

“Jesus!” He dumped the drink into the sink, popped a 1 mg. Ativan, and went to bed. For several minutes he tossed around the sheets until drowsiness brought him under.

But he was disturbed by the wildest dream. He was in Terry Farina’s bedroom, where she was trussed up on her bed, her huge blue-black head held up by the stocking on an impossibly stretched neck. Suddenly her head snapped up. “Who did this to me? Who did this to me?” Her mouth was a purple puckered hole opening and closing like that of a fish, but her words were perfectly articulate. He began to speak, trying to explain that he was sorry for what had happened to her, when magically she jumped off the bed and pulled him onto her. The next moment he was having sex with her, an enormous red bush of hair cascading over him like a hood and that hideous blue dead face pressed onto his, that grouper mouth sucking against his own and threatening to suffocate him.

He must have yelped himself awake because he woke up gasping.

The room was black and still, the clock said 2:35, and half the bedding was on the floor. He got up and went to the toilet, telling himself that the dream meant nothing, that there was no hidden message being sent up from the boys down in mission control. That cops had nightmares about victims lots of times. It came with the job. You sucked it up and moved on.

But this dream had left his head feeling toxic. For more than an hour he tossed around in his bed until he broke down and popped two more Lorazepams to settle his mind to sleep, because what gnawed on his brain was the realization that the nightmare woman was Dana.