last call
Caitlyn stirred and squinted at the window. It was morning and Nick was gone. I guess he really did have to get up early, she thought. She lay back in the bed for a minute but the unfamiliar bed was uncomfortable and she was still in her clothes and the sky was cobalt blue swirled with white and was drenching her with vigilant A.M. sunshine so she got up and stretched and trudged to the bathroom. The day was young and there was work to do. She and Gina were supposed to go to the mall and pick up a few things they needed and she had to visit her mom up in Malta to talk since she didn’t anticipate contacting them in a while. Most of their big stuff, like Gina’s desk and drawers and most of Caitlyn’s larger paintings and her dresser were going into storage in Turk’s garage until they got their own place. Turk had the van secured and he was picking them up tomorrow morning to get the bulky shit. He’d drive them down that night with their bags and leave the next morning.
She had thought about calling Nick and was still debating when Nick had called her two nights ago, after maybe a month of neither one of them contacting the other, to tell her that he had finally finished the book. He’d been hung up on an ending for a while but went with his instincts and finished the damn thing. He was in the process of going over the text and fixing errors. He invited her out to celebrate that night, and she accepted, after telling him about her departure for New York City that Sunday. She told him right out that he wasn’t getting sex and he said that was fine, he wouldn’t be thinking about it. He sounded honest and acted it all night. She went back to his place after a nice dinner and a movie in Troy and they ended up making out and cuddling until they both passed out from too much scotch. Nick said he was getting up around nine to go computer shopping before meeting an editor for lunch at noon. His computer had apparently been dying slowly and had finally ceased working entirely on Monday. He only had one disk, one backup in the safe, and one hard copy that he finished on Chuck’s old Royal manual. So she couldn’t see it yet, until he could make her a copy on the new computer. When Caitlyn walked out of the bathroom she saw the disk and contemplated taking it for a second, but decided it wouldn’t be fair as she probably would never see him again after today.
Caitlyn stretched in front of the window, drying her face with her flannel, and looked out. Gina was standing outside the building across the street looking extremely out of place, pinching the butt of a cigarette to her lips. Caitlyn stared at her for a second wondering for what possible reason she would be there. She couldn’t possibly be looking for Caitlyn, as Caitlyn had demonstrated there were nights she just didn’t come home. Besides, she didn’t think that Gina knew she’d been out with Nick. She hadn’t seen Gina since Thursday, on Caitlyn’s last shift. They had spoken on the phone, but there hadn’t been any mention of anything weird.
When Caitlyn saw Gina flick her cigarette and enter three Division she threw her flannel on the windowsill and left the apartment, leaving the door open, and jogged down the stairs. She ran across the street and into the building. There was no sign of Gina. She went back outside and checked the corners quickly, in case she had missed anything but the street was dead. She went back into the building and listened for footsteps anywhere but there was nothing. She walked up the stairs quietly and noticed an open door at the end of the hall. She edged herself towards it.
“Gina?” she whispered. She walked towards the door and saw there was nobody there. She knocked. She heard a gasp from inside and ran towards it. Gina was in the doorway of the bathroom looking at the body of a dead man, sunk in the bathtub. There was water over the floor.
Caitlyn touched Gina’s shoulder and Gina screamed and turned around. It took her a moment to identify Caitlyn but when she did she grabbed her and wailed again.
“Caitlyn!”
“What the fuck is going on?” Caitlyn screamed. “What is this?”
“He’s dead!”
Caitlyn was forcibly holding a shaking Gina. “I can fucking see that, what are you doing here?”
“I got the message, he called, you got it too! What are we going to do?”
Caitlyn tried to stabilize Gina by her shoulders, holding her back a bit. “Wait, what do you mean? I saw you out the window, what message? Who called?”
Gina looked up, stunned. “It’s your brother! He called! I came down here when I woke up! I didn’t get his call! I’m sorry! Oh my god, I came as soon as I heard…” But Caitlyn wasn’t listening. She was over the body, recognizing it, amazed by its age, looking for a face she knew once. She put his chin between her index finger and her thumb and turned it towards her, as if waiting for something.
“Don’t touch him!” Gina screamed. “We’ll get in trouble! You’re not supposed to touch a body! I don’t know what to do!”
Caitlyn dropped Tony’s head and stood up. The body slumped in the water, spilling more out of the tub. Gina let out another piercing sob and covered her mouth with her hands. Caitlyn went over to her calmly and put one hand on her shoulder and cupped the other behind her head.
“Listen to me, Gina,” Caitlyn said. “This obviously is a suicide or a natural death.” She looked at the slim, sickly body suspended in the tub water. “We’re not going to get in trouble.” She pulled Gina out of the bathroom and they sat on a couch in the living room, arms wrapped around each other. Caitlyn, in full knowledge of the fact that they were leaving Albany the next day, resisted the urge to look around the room at her brother’s things by looking out the window. She was talking to Gina, reassuring her, telling her that she needed to go home and finish packing, she had to just go home and wait for her, that she just needed to leave Nick a brief note and then she’d be back there to talk, and they’d go see the guys and they’d air it out. Then she saw the sleeve of her red and brown flannel waving at her in the breeze, and then she saw almost all of Nick’s room, and then she thought that Nick could probably have seen Tony’s room.
~
“So what happened?” Caitlyn asked.
“What do you mean?” Nick was eating sunflower seeds. They were walking along the Plaza, down over South Albany and the highways. Nick was smoking out of the joint. Caitlyn held the pint of Jim Beam secure in her jacket pocket. It was just before midnight.
“With the book, what happened with your book?” Caitlyn had been hoping Nick would bring it up, it being the pretenses under which he’d called her up. She was hoping, at least, that he wouldn’t be difficult about it if asked. “You said you were stuck on the ending.”
“Well,” Nick said. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just figured it out finally. I was really stuck on the ending. And I kind of bailed out a bit. I went for the twist. Do you want to know?”
“Sure, what the hell.”
“At the end, the guy, the one across the street, do you remember? He doesn’t die. All the signs in the book point to it, but he doesn’t. The narrator’s obsession with the woman is his downfall. The guy slips in under his radar. It’s perfect. It makes it more tragic than your average crime novel. It puts the focus back on this K woman.”
“Oh?” Caitlyn asked. She unscrewed the whiskey cap and took a quick hit. “Who’s she? You know, to you?”
“My ex.”
“Which one?” Caitlyn asked. “The big one?”
Nick’s face set. “Yeah,” he said. “All of them, probably. They were all great.”
Caitlyn leaned next to Nick, twining her fingers and stretching her arms out over the edge. She cocked her head at him. “No offense, Nick, but that’s kinda sad. You need to get past that.”
“I know,” Nick said. “Maybe next time.”
~
Caitlyn shushed whatever Gina was saying. “You need to go home right now and pack shit. I will call the police about the body. Anonymously. I will call Turk, then I will call you in a half hour.”
~
Caitlyn could not believe she was hiding behind a curtain. It was a big curtain, but it would never, ever work. Nick came home around three, as she expected. He dawdled around the apartment for a bit, threw his bag down, emptied his pockets. She saw the shadow of him bend down under his desk, what she assumed was his manuscript in his hand, and move to open the safe. When she heard the click and he jacked the handle open, she came out from behind the curtain and tiptoed across the carpet and jabbed him in the back of the skull with the corner of his computer’s keyboard, which he hadn’t noticed was missing. It was a square shot. She hoped she hadn’t killed him. He dropped to the floor. She removed the roll of duct tape from her wrist and went to work. She taped his hands and wrists together, his ankles together, and when she was sure he was still breathing, put a large piece of tape over his mouth and around the back of his head. For good measure, she taped his legs to the legs of the desk. Then she picked up his manuscript and began to read.
~
Gina sat completely paranoid in the eerily downsized apartment listening to the classical station on the radio (she had packed all of her CDs) as night came. Turk eventually showed up, knocking loudly at the door. Gina leapt to answer it.
“I’m supposed to tell you that I’m helping you get everything you need downstairs right now, preferably in a half hour,” Turk said. “Then we’re to pick out everything Caitlyn needs and bring that downstairs, too.”
Gina said nothing, just started at him, waiting for the word.
“You’re leaving tonight,” Turk said. “Chop chop.”
~
Caitlyn saw Nick wake up when she was about twenty pages from the end of the book. She was sitting on his desk, one leg hanging, the other in a triangle, her foot flat against the top of it. It was dusk. She saw him wake up and smiled. He struggled for a bit and muffled a few grunts at her through the duct tape. She put the manuscript down and walked over towards him, reaching for her wallet. Nick recoiled slightly.
“Hey, want to see a picture of him?”
She flashed the picture and held it in front of his face. Nick stared at it. “You know, I’m just re-reading the last fifty pages or so. I finished it a while ago, but wanted you to wake up.” Nick was panting through his nose. His eyes were wide and pleading. “I have some news. He called my house last night, while I was out with you. My roommate got the message and came down here. You guessed wrong, in your book. He’s dead. You missed the cops come and take the body away. You would have liked it. You might have seen someone you knew, you know, from the force. Without having to say hi to them. It would have been perfect.”
Nick grunted a little, as if trying to explain. “You knew,” Caitlyn said. “You recognized the picture that night, didn’t you?”
Nick stayed still for a minute and then nodded. Caitlyn joined him, in rhythm. They both heard a loud car pull up and turned towards the window. “Cait!” they heard.
“Don’t worry, asshole. It’s not a Buick,” Caitlyn said, and then laughed. She picked Nick’s keys off the table and chucked them out the window. Moments later Nick saw a man walked in and thought he was a dead man. The guy walked over to him.
“That him?”
“Yep.” She turned to Nick. “This is my friend Turk. He’s going to be a superstar. It’s just one more name, one more part of this you won’t be able to tell anyone. So remember it all well.” Turk nodded the brim of his baseball cap towards him.
“I’m taking the five thousand dollars you had in your safe,” Caitlyn said. She turned to Turk. “Everything ready?”
“Yep.”
“Gina in the car?”
“Yep.”
“You and Marshall- that’s his brother, who’s also going to be a superstar, by the way, Nick- got the rest of my shit tomorrow?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll give you my and Gina’s keys tomorrow, get the stuff, drop off the keys at the landlords. He’s known we’re going for a while.”
“Sure thing, babe.”
“See,” Caitlyn said to Nick, “Don’t worry. The money will be well spent. I’ll spend it on materials for my painting, and Gina, you remember her, will use it for her computer shit. Or maybe we’ll get a phat pad in Astoria or something. Who knows? But I’m taking it, and you won’t care.”
Caitlyn reached into the safe and took the envelope of cash and the backup disk. “When you finally get out of the duct tape, you’ll realize that your disk is gone. I’m taking your hard copy too. That will be burned to ash before you even get free. Or maybe I’ll tear it up piece by piece and throw it out the car window as we go. And I heard your computer was fried. So sorry to hear that, but just in case I destroyed your hard drive too.” Turk let out a laugh. He twirled Nick’s keys around his finger.
“Did Gina give you the number?” Caitlyn asked Turk. He fished it our of his pocket. Caitlyn went over to the phone and dialed a number. “Hey, is Dawn there? Hey, it’s Caitlyn. What’s up? Fuck yeah, listen, we’ve decided to come down tonight, is that cool with you? If not I probably can- Sweet! Yeah, I’ll explain when we get there, but shit. I know! Look, we gotta go, but I’ll call you from the road. No, nothing’s wrong, everything kicks ass! Okay, see you.”
Caitlyn hung up the receiver and looked at Turk. “All set,” she said cheerfully. Turk gestured to the door. “That was Dawn. Gina’s sister. You can star sixty-nine it and get the number, but you won’t. Because the one thing I won’t destroy is this.” She held up a disk. “I’m keeping one. I know it doesn’t have the ending, but that’s okay. I can keep the last chapter of the hard copy. If you ever even contact any one of us ever again, if you call the police about this, all I will do is take it out of the safe deposit box and give it to them and tell them the story and they won’t help you and your life will really be over. I’m giving you a chance here to live the rest of your life as if this never happened. You’ll take it. You’ll always take it.”
Caitlyn picked her flannel off the windowsill and tossed it on. “My brother,” she told Turk, “ended up being in cahoots with the dudes in the Buick. What a fucking ending! Who would have fucking thought about that shit?” Turk walked over to her and put his arm around her and said something quiet in her ear. “Okay,” she whispered.
She walked over to Nick and reached behind his head. He winced. The sound of the tape ripping was worse than the pain. He didn’t scream. He just looked up at Caitlyn. Her eyes were red and her words came slowly. “So you can chew through it. Or yell for help. Or say something to me. Besides ‘I’m sorry.’”
She gave him about fifteen seconds. “I thought not.” They walked out the door together, Turk with his arm around an exhausted Caitlyn. Nick heard her weeping behind the door, and down the stairs. Turk was saying proud, indecipherable things to her. The sound of the car’s engine, which had run continuously throughout the whole scene, eventually faded away. When it was gone, real gone, he began to chew at the tape around his wrists. About a half hour later he was completely free. He went down to his car, opened his trunk, and brought his brand new computer up the stairs, box by box. He avoided the bar, not wanting Chuck to see him. Chuck was probably pissed. He’d have to show up at some point. It wasn’t that late. He made it up the stairs with the last box, the monitor, lay on his bed, and fell promptly asleep.
~
Caitlyn, Gina, and Dawn went to look at an apartment that Friday just off Bedford Avenue in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. It was the third apartment they had seen that week. This one was the top floor of a two three story house. Eleven hundred a month. Two bedrooms, living room, eat-in-kitchen. The landlady was very friendly but trying to hide the fact that she wanted to rent it quickly. Two girls, graduates, with cash and a good reference was too good, however. Caitlyn and Gina could not hide their glee. They loved it immediately. They were ready to throw two months rent and deposit down right there. But they held out to see the roof. They knew this one was less than two hundred feet from the river and they figured the view would be outrageous. Caitlyn asked as Gina poked around in the corners, looking for dead roaches. The landlady gestured towards the fire escape. Caitlyn crawled out the window and up the ladder. Gina looked up at her, squinting. “What do you see? Is it good?”
Gina heard nothing from Caitlyn. She made small talk with the landlady about her degree and what kind of work she was going to get into down here. The landlady seemed interested but Gina couldn’t tell. Dawn, whose friend Jantzen had pretty much given Gina and Caitlyn all the advice they could ever want on finding an apartment in New York, was still on the second floor, playing with a dog and chatting down and probably conning shots out of the dog’s two cute boyish owners. The doors were left open and it was beautiful outside. Every so often Gina would hear a loud laugh or flirtatious remark and blush.
She saw Caitlyn scrawl down the ladder and back into the room. Her face was tense and serious but vivid. “Go up there,” she told Gina.
Gina eeked her way around the window, opening it a little wider, delicately stepping out, one leg at a time. She sat awkwardly on the windowsill and breathed deep. Had she ever done this? Maybe a few times. Never in Albany, she realized, and could not divine why. Her hands gripped the cool small metal bars of the ladder attached to the side of the house. She climbed one rung at a time. She heard Caitlyn saying, “We’ll take it. If we can have it that is.” A few more steps. Gina saw the World Trade Centers appear as she raised her head above roof-level. The landlady said, “Well, I checked your references yesterday, so if you’re ready we should do this. I don’t really want to keep showing it to people. You seem like nice girls.” Gina lifted herself up two more rungs before climbing to the roof. The entire bulk of lower Manhattan was about a half a mile from her. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the bridges could be seen from the southwest corner of the roof. It was probably the best view of Manhattan she had ever seen from the ground. Better than anything. Live. It left her breathless.
Caitlyn was saying downstairs, “Yeah, we’ve got the cash right here. We’ll take it, we’ll take it. Dawn!”
the end
april 1999- december 14,2001