The Middle of Nowhere Read online

  THE

  MIDDLE

  OF

  NOWHERE

  THE MIDDLE

  OF

  NOWHERE

  A Lenny Bliss Mystery

  Bob Sloan

  Copyright © 2003 by Bob Sloan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sloan, Bob.

  The middle of nowhere : a Lenny Bliss mystery / by Bob Sloan.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4738-8

  1. Bliss, Lenny (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—New York (State)—New

  York—Fiction. 3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.L5M53 2003

  813′.54—dc21 2002033014

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Alice Jarcho and Tom Gallagher

  FRIDAY

  Bliss sat on the wooden floor of the yoga studio, his legs splayed indecorously in front of him while the rest of the class sublimely assumed Lotus position. Bliss was not in Lotus position. He was not anywhere near Lotus position, or half-Lotus, or an infinitesimal speck of Lotus. He couldn’t imagine anyone being any more un-Lotus. He’d taken a wrong turn, missed his exit, and was miles away from Lotus, standing in a phone booth in the rain at a gas station reeking of beer and piss, holding a receiver without a dial tone. That’s how far from Lotus he was.

  As a present for his forty-third birthday, Rachel and the kids had given him a series of yoga classes. That was almost a year ago. He’d been putting it off, making excuses, citing his being busy at work, too many murders to attend to. But the coupon was about to expire. He didn’t want to disappoint his kids. C’mon, Dad. It was a present. You have to go. So now here he was in the Serenity Loft, knee-deep in a squalid mess o’yoga.

  Bliss pulled harder on his ankle, seeing if he could bully it closer toward Lotus, but it was as if there were an equally strong Lenny keeping his leg exactly where it was. Isn’t this how saints were put to death in the Middle Ages? Burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, having their legs forced into Lotus. He was sure he’d seen a fresco of it in some church somewhere.

  Suddenly, his hamstring cramped. He shot his leg out to relieve the pain and wound up kicking the back of an older woman in front of him. She didn’t turn, didn’t flinch, just stayed completely Lotus, the gentle swing of her long gray braid the only evidence of the collision. His muscle relaxed, but he didn’t dare bend it yet. He left it out, to de-Lotus. Maybe someone would have pity on him.

  Fucking yoga.

  His family wanted him to go. The Girls—Rachel, Julia, and Cori. They wanted husband/dad Bliss to find more peace, to feel less stress, to be more at one with the universe. So he might be happier. More Om at home.

  “It’ll be good for you,” Julia, his oldest, said. “I take yoga in school. It actually gives you more energy.”

  More energy for Bliss to pursue the depraved denizens of Gotham, the meanies who lurked in the shadows, who left the messes and spills he and his partner Ward were constantly cleaning up.

  But he couldn’t let the coupon expire. It was his birthday present. And, though it was probably the least yoga-esque reason for going, he went.

  He had presented his coupon to a pretty, tattooed girl at the Serenity Loft front desk. She smiled and stamped it with some Japanese character that probably represented “balance” or “harmony” or “let’s have fun watching the lumbering cop make a fool of himself.”

  He walked into the studio in his old, stained sweatpants and his Police Athletic League T-shirt and for a solid half-hour he tried gamely to be a yoga player. He tried Cobra position, the Cat pose, he tried Downward-Facing Dog until he could downward-face the dog no more.

  The instructor, a woman about his own age, came over to him. Bliss tried not to notice the way her nipples poked through her leotard, sensing this might not be in the true yoga spirit.

  She bent over him, her hand placed delicately, lovingly on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” she said, her voice soothing. “Beginnings are always hard.”

  “I had a coupon,” Bliss said.

  “You need to stay with it.”

  “My kids gave it to me.”

  “Keep breathing.”

  “My present.”

  “Yes. Stay in the present.”

  “It was about to expire. I had to come.”

  “The next time will be easier,” she said.

  The next time, Bliss thought. That was what his first partner said—about the sight of death leaking from the hole in the neck of a livery cab driver hunched in the front seat of his cab, coffee and a donut in a little cardboard box next to him, the donut covered with blood, like cherry icing. It’ll get easier. But he’d never been sure if easier was better.

  “It’s there,” the instructor said with the gentle insistence of a Jehovah’s Witness offering him a copy of The Watchtower. “It’s inside you. You just have to find it.”

  But she didn’t understand that Bliss expended most of his sentience trying not to find what was inside him.

  He suddenly had an image of his father, Monty, walking in wearing his full dress blues (what he wore to police funerals), his shield festooned with the badges he’d earned in his twenty-two years of service in the Yonkers Police Department, staring in disbelief at his only son sitting on the floor as he did in kindergarten. And then Bliss imagined his father kicking him in the butt.

  Let’s get you out of here, son, before you get a rash.

  Bliss grabbed his ankle in defiance and pulled it toward him, harder than he had before.

  “Good,” the instructor said. “Look at that.”

  He felt his father kick him again.

  Let’s get away from these nut jobs, Lenny. Queers. Lesbos.

  He pulled his leg harder.

  “Breathe into the stretch,” the instructor urged him.

  Bliss let out a groan.

  He felt his father’s foot, harder now. Relentless.

  C’mon, son! This is no place for you.

  It felt like his knee was going to snap. Almost forty-four years old and he was still trying to show up his father.

  Lenny! Let’s get the fuck out of here!

  He gave one last protean effort and suddenly it was there, his left foot, resting atop his right leg.

  “Yes!” Bliss said.

  “Wow!” the instructor said.

  He’d done it. Half-Lotus. He’d never get his other foot up, but he’d gotten one. He raised his arms in victory, making so much commotion that everyone’s yoga-ness was shattered and they all turned to look at him, just in time to see Homicide Detective Bliss lose his balance, start to teeter, and then slowly, but inexorably, tip over until he lay on his back, one leg still crossed and the other sticking up in the air. Bliss heard stifled snickering from the class, until one woman could no longer restrain herself and, in a less than yogalike display, snorted and laughed heartily at the sight of Bliss lying helplessly on his back like a turtle.

  You should have left when I told you, Lenny. You should have liste
ned to your father.

  Then his father turned his back on him and walked away. And his father was laughing, too.

  * * *

  Chantal ran into one of the stalls in the boys’ bathroom, locked the door, knelt down and puked.

  “Shit,” said a voice. “You okay, man?”

  She grunted as low as she could.

  “Jesus, that stinks.”

  The boy flushed and left. Chantal flushed, too, then closed the top of the toilet, sat down, and took out the pregnancy tester and got the test started. The irony that she could be pregnant without having intercourse was not lost on her. Her own immaculate conception. She should just let Owen do it already, she thought. It would be tidier.

  She followed the instructions on the package. She smiled, thinking how she was doing her pregnancy test in the boys’ bathroom—Mecca of unwanted sperm.

  She stared at the tester and prayed. Please God, help me. No green. Please God. Don’t let it turn green.

  In the commercials for the pregnancy tester, the woman waits with her husband in their cozy living room, staring at the strip together, both of them wanting her to be pregnant, wanting desperately for there to be a baby growing inside her. They had probably made love the night before by candlelight, moving together slowly like dancers, like people under water, the woman welcoming him inside her, wanting him inside her, completing each other. Not groaning and grunting like Owen did while he lay on Chantal’s back, his weight pressing her face against his bedroom rug, leaving mottled marks on her skin, one of the ways he had of doing it without really doing it.

  Chantal didn’t think the tester company would be calling her any time soon for an endorsement: Close-up of girl in boy’s bathroom stall. Wearing a shirt stained with tears, she holds the tester in her trembling hands, dread etched on her face, worried that her boyfriend’s sperm had found its way from her thigh into her uterus, sneaking around where it wasn’t wanted, trespassing. In the background, boys pee, a toilet flushes. It sounded more like a public service announcement from the Catholic church—see what happens when you have sex?

  But the tester came up negative. She wasn’t pregnant.

  On the door of the stall someone had gouged a crude drawing of a penis and testicles. It had been painted over, but the outline was still there. If this had been in a novel they were discussing in English, she would have raised her hand and said that the author was trying to symbolize that even if you tried, you couldn’t cover up the crude ugliness in the world, that it would find a way to show through. She was getting better at that kind of stuff. Finding the metaphors, the hidden meanings in the books.

  She dropped the tester in the toilet and flushed, but it wouldn’t go down. Another metaphor, she thought. She reached into the toilet bowl and pulled out the tester. The water was cold. She had never felt toilet water before. She wrapped the tester up in toilet paper as she did with her Tampax at school. That was kind of symbolic, too. Her period and her pregnancy both wraped up like a cocoon. Another metaphor. Metaphors, metaphors everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

  Chantal discreetly deposited the tester in the trash basket in the hallway and went back to class.

  She wasn’t pregnant. She should be happy. But Chantal wasn’t happy. She still felt nauseated and clammy. Maybe it was the flu. Or maybe it was just her, the way she was, the things she kept trapped inside her, the guilt, the shame, the secrets, churning inside her and making her sick.

  She wondered if they made a test for that.

  SATURDAY

  They were in the kitchen. Together. Just the two of them. Their fifteen-year-old, Julia, was somewhere in the Village, hopefully not getting a tattoo or a piercing. Cori, their eleven-year-old, was at a friend’s house, hopefully not getting a tattoo or a piercing. It was just Bliss and Rachel, husband and wife, sipping coffee, the way they’d started out almost twenty years before.

  “You don’t think I can take it, do you?” Rachel said.

  “It isn’t that,” Bliss said.

  “Then what?”

  “It’s just …” He trailed off.

  A week earlier Rachel had announced she was finished with stand-up comedy. Three years doing the clubs had left her weary. She couldn’t deal with any more vodka-hazed hecklers trying to impress their dates; or the dentists in town for their conventions, hitting on her, inviting her for drinks at their hotel, offering her drug samples, a free cleaning; or, most painful of all, the young comics mistaking her for a waitress, asking Rachel to get them drinks between sets. Clint Eastwood was still interested in the development deal about her life—stand-up comic wife of a homicide detective—but she just couldn’t face the clubs anymore.

  So Rachel proclaimed herself a writer of novels. Like the buffalo, his wife’s creative impulses needed vast areas for grazing.

  “What kind of novel?” Bliss had asked, as if he didn’t know.

  “About a homicide detective,” she said.

  And now, here she was again pressuring Bliss to take her with him on a case, to let her ride in the car with him and his partner Ward, to stand next to the victim, get some blood on her hands.

  “Let’s wait for ‘Take Your Wives to Work Day,’” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Authenticity. That’s what I’m after. Details. The details are the most important part of a novel.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “Details.”

  “Yeah. Next case, I’m in the backseat.”

  Bliss wanted to tell her that certain details are not worth knowing, like looking at a girl’s body on the floor of an abandoned building, her shirt bunched around her neck, her panties down at her ankles, her bare torso scarred, and suddenly your daughter’s face replaces the dead girl’s. Details like that can do permanent damage. He could attest to it.

  “Sometimes the eyes on a corpse are black,” Bliss said. “And not from too much mascara. It’s the eyeballs themselves. Like a kid colored them in with crayons. Eight-ball eyes. It happens when someone gets shot in the back of the head.”

  Instead of making her wary, she seemed emboldened.

  “Eight-ball eyes,” she said, her voice giddy.

  “Sometimes there is a mother by the body,” he continued, remembering this scene all too well. “A mother, just like you. And she’s begging me to make it go away—her son’s death. She grabs me by the arm, her fingers digging into my skin. Do something, she says. Please. It’s the ‘please’ that kills me. And I stand there helpless, trying to figure out why I can’t do it. Get the bullet out of the skull of her son and back inside the gun. Such a simple thing, and her agony will go away. I can make it go away. I’d be her hero. My photo will be by her bed. A place at Easter dinner forever saved for me. But I can’t do it.” He did his best Stanislavsky now, trying to get her to taste the fear. [quavering voice] “Please, the mother says, tears streaming down her cheeks [using his fingers to illustrate]. And I so much want to do it, [clenching fists] to put an end to her suffering [dramatic pause], but [opening hand, showing emptiness as symbol of failure] I can’t.”

  He ended, waited for her to respond.

  “I have to get my notebook,” she said. “I so need to write this down.”

  He’d put his heart and soul into it, but it wasn’t enough.

  Then the phone rang.

  “If it’s Ward, I’m going with you,” she said.

  It was Ward.

  “Floater,” Ward said, his deep voice exuding its usual luxuriant calm.

  Ward directed him to the bank of the East River, under the access ramp to the Harlem River Drive, near 128th Street.

  “Be there soon, partner,” Bliss said, then hung up.

  “So?” Rachel’s eyes were wide. There was no stopping her. In eighteen years of marriage, he’d never once succeeded. Why did he deal with homicides more easily than the needs of his wife? He wondered if the other detectives had the same problem. He’d bring it up at the next meetin
g of the Homicide Husbands Support Group. After the communal hug.

  “Floater,” he said. “Usually they’re short a few facial features. Their stomachs are tidal pools, eels live in their lungs.”

  Rachel reflected, going to that mysterious place where women go to make the big decisions. When she came back, her face was perky, alert, like a kid about to get on the ferris wheel.

  “What shoes should I wear?” she said. “I mean, to a crime scene—flats or pumps?”

  Clara arranged the towels in the guest bathroom, folding them lengthwise in thirds so the monograms faced out the way the Missus liked them. All the women Clara had cleaned for had their own idea of tidy—towels folded just so, china stacked just so, clothes arranged in drawers just so. Some wanted the socks tucked together in balls and some wanted only the tops folded over, the rest of the sock hanging down like a dog’s tongue on a hot day. We like the socks folded just so, Clara, the Missus said. Our children are used to it. And Clara had no doubt that if she didn’t fold the socks just so, she would lose her job.

  Because God forbid the children’s socks should be folded differently than they were used to.

  The Gelmans were the third family she’d worked for since coming to New York. She’d been with them for two months. She worked twelve-hour days, cleaning, shopping, making dinner. The Missus ate only minute portions of fresh fruit, steamed vegetables, and brown rice, as close to not eating as she could get. Sometimes she just had carrots. Still, Clara was the one who had to peel them and set the carrots on the gold-rimmed china. She wondered if someday the Missus would ask her to chew up her food like mother birds do, to reduce the strain on her delicate white teeth.

  Clara filled the porcelain dish shaped like a large clam with tiny guest-bathroom soaps in the shape of seashells in the same pastel colors as the towels. Clara seriously doubted whether Mister Owen’s friends at the party that night would care how the towels were folded in the guest bathroom or if there were enough seashell soaps. She just hoped they got the toilet lid open in time before they vomited. They didn’t the last time Owen had a party. Not by a long shot.