Chapter 7
My parents, having spent a second night, are camped out in my kitchen. My mother is on the phone with her friend, Adele Adelman, to whom she is giving as many juicy details as she can either recall or invent.
“I’m going to run up to Oyster Bay to pick up a lamp I bought on Craig’s List,” I tell my father. “I’ll be back before the kids–”
“Whose house are you going to?” my father asks, like I’m eleven and having a play date after school.
I shrug. “A guy named Martin. Or maybe Marvin. He’s got a mid-century teak floor lamp that would be perfect for a client of mine’s den. She’s got a boomerang table that was her mother-in-law’s and this lamp is perfect.” In my father’s general direction, I wave the photo I’ve printed off the net of the lamp in its natural habitat surrounded by plants. “He claims it’s really special, one of a kind and guaranteed to produce a high. I assume he means beam.”
“Marvin who?” my father asks. “What’s his last name?”
I know I’m safe if I say Steinberg or Goldstein, because in my father’s eyes, Jews can’t be murderers. I glance down at the email exchange I’ve printed out. His name is Smithson. If that isn’t bad enough, he uses his middle name, John. All mass murderers, assassins and kidnappers use three names, if you haven’t noticed.
“It’ll be fine, Dad,” I say, but he isn’t having any of it. He announces that my mother will stay home and wait for the kids and he will accompany me.
“Safety in numbers,” he says, while my mother pulls out her pack of Newports and makes it clear that the minute I’m out of the house she’s lighting up.
“Smoke detector,” I say, pointing at the ceiling. When she appears unmoved I remind her that the call will go to the police and Guess Who is likely to show up.
“You’re going to protect her?” my mother says when my father pushes off against the table to get up and lets out an old man sort of groan. “Or be a liability? Sit down. She’d be better off on her own.”
My father insists that I am not going alone. My mother says she’d go with me, but that would leave my father alone and she won’t leave him alone with my computer. “With what your father does on the computer, yours wouldn’t just get a virus. It would get an STD.”
“What?” my mother asks defensively when my father and I stare at her. “You think I don’t know what goes on?”
I look at my watch. I’ve got to get to my serial killer’s house to get that lamp before three or he’s leaving. I open the front door and there is still blood on my front step and I consider taking my father with me. Or not even going. The guy actually offered to deliver it, but that could be worse.
I see a cop scouring the sidewalk and I signal him. “Find anything?” I ask.
The cop is non-committal.
I take that to mean he surely did.
“Another figurine?” I ask.
He pretends he didn’t hear me.
“Blood?”
He looks up quickly and looks away.
So then. They found more blood. . .
