BREAKDOWN
—Chapter XI—
"Hai perso la ragione?! The deli got robbed and you went after a chick?" Maurizio scolded me.
"We weren't robbed" I said and looked around. The Deli was already cleaned and the police had left. I had instructed Maurizio to call Pietro and the police came early that morning. He handled them well and he made all the arrangements with the insurance company. Actually, nothing was missing except my black leather jacket. I thanked God I let Mauritzio convince me to get insured. "It was just a window and it's not like the first time it happened."
I tried to show myself calm but my head was in turmoil. The tormenting thoughts of Betty and Matt Hartley's engagement, her handwriting on Beth's threatening notes kept me in a chaotic mood. On top of that, last night was the first time I'd been in a situation like that and it still gave me chills just to imagine someone broke in the Deli while I was sleeping.
Beth also collected her strength and insisted in working that Saturday. I had left Beth at Meade Publishing. She was probably better with the sharks and backstabbing bitches at Mode than alone at my place. I told her to call me when it was time to pick her up. I had already given her the keys to my apartment but I didn't want her to take the metro on her own. She showed herself as a strong woman in front of everyone else but I've seen her fragile side. Then I couldn't help but care for her. I guess that's just my nature.
"Dio santo!" said Mauritzio, "if you're going to grow your beard at least do it with style, Come io. Look at me."
Mauritzio always managed to look impeccable at all times. Charming the ladies was his favorite hobbie and it would be wise to take his advice but I wasn't up for his ramblings.
"Stai zitto. Oggi mi sento una merda."
I scratched the stubble on my face. I knew I had taken an old pair of jeans, the first tshirt I found, I've neglected my shaving and my combing. It was as if I've become another person.
I heard some quick steps at my back.
"Gio. Thank God, you're all right" I heard a high pitched voice and the image of Betty appeared in front of my eyes.
There was something different in her. She had her braces removed and her smile looked as white as the exquisite pearl bracelet she now flaunted on her wrist. Those must have been gifts from the battle I had lost. I could have never been Matt Hartley. I could have never given her that kind of life.
I gathered my pride.
"I'm okay" I said. "You don't have to worry. Maybe it was some crazy drunkard."
"You're probably right" she said and then we had very little else to tell one another.
Then I remembered the threatening messages, the notes written by her. I took the moment to confront her. I showed them to her and explained how someone had left them at Beth's apartment. The envelopes had no stamps but the reception desk said they were found in her mailbox later that evening so they slip it under her door.
"Of course I didn't write this. How could you say that? I don't know for what reason but this must be someone could be pretending to be me. Even Daniel has faked my writing before" she returned the notes to me. "You don't think I would write such horrible things. What's happening with you?"
I apologized.
"You trust this Beth so much."
"I don't" I admitted. "But this looked like your writing. What did you want me to think?"
"You should know me better. And this Beth —she's so mysterious and secretive and she's been hanging around you an awfully lot lately" She looked at me in the eye. "Who is she to you now?"
"Just a friend" I say.
"Just a friend?" she said, her bangs almost covering her eyes but I could still feel the weight of her stare, "Just a friend like me? Like I was to you?"
I didn't answer that. It was not her business. She was already engaged to Hartley. She had no right. The ring on her fingers gave me the last shot of reality to my heart. How did I manage to fool myself again?
"Betty, you're engaged" the words came out against my will and there was a long moment of silence between us.
"I don't know why I didn't tell you. Maybe I didn't want to hurt you."
I saw the look Beth had feared, the shine of pity inside Betty's pretty brown eyes.
I tried to gather myself and pretended I wasn't wounded. I tried to breathe and think. Betty was out of reach. She had always been. When was I going to understand that?
"Friends don't have secrets. I need to trust you, Betty."
"I just don't trust her. She didn't even go to the engagement party. All her family was there. I feel like she's hiding something. Did she tell you what she'd been doing until she found that message? Don't you find it strange she didn't found the letter under her door until pass midnight?"
"She said she went to a bar."
"And you believed that."
To tell the truth I remember I smelled alcohol around her when I picked her up.
Betty spoke again. "I can't help it. I don't believe her one bit."
I chuckled.
"What?" she said. "Why you're laughing?"
"She said the same thing about you."
She smiled with me.
"I know. I'm sorry. This is not like me. It's probably her hair. She reminds me too much of Charlie."
I remembered Charlie, the woman that took away all hopes of happiness with her first love, Henry Grubstick. She also distrusted redheads —just like me.
"I want all this to end" Betty spoke again. "Mrs. Hartley, she's in the hospital. They say something about food poisoning but nobody tells us anything. Nobody wants me near her. They don't even let me visit her this morning. When am I going to be part of the family?"
"Mrs Hartley?" I was taken aback by the news. "Wasn't your gala at her place?"
"It wasn't a gala and yes, she arranged everything at her house and she was fine —behaving in her usual self, that is" I guessed Mrs. Hartley didn't stop tormenting Betty in public even at her own engagement party. "Matt even stayed with her. I took a taxi back home around midnight. And this morning Matt called me. This is all so awful. When am I going to be finally happy again?"
Poor Betty, I thought. It wasn't her fault that I got heartbroken again. I was the one that had imagined false hopes with her. I shouldn't hurt her because of me and my silly dreams.
I opened my arms and invited her to me. She hugged me back and I held her tightly. I knew she'd suffered enough and my heart thought it was okay that she found a little happiness even if it was with another man and not me.
Amanda and Marc found us arm in arm. Marc pulled his cellphone to take a picture but Betty was faster and jumped at him.
"Not this time. You're not going to send that to everyone at Mode."
"Spoilsport" Marc said and looked at the broken window. "Oh, I see you're redecorating… nice but that's not why we're here. We came to inform you we believe Mrs. Hartley was poisoned last night."
"That is crazy!" Betty said, covering her lips with her hands.
"And that Beth spent the night at your place" said Amanda, "but I guess you already knew that."
"What?" Betty was confused.
"Wait, where you got that from?" I frowned.
"I know everything" said Marc.
"Oh yeah? How about you tell us who the killer is, eh? Now, really, who told you about Beth?"
Amanda pointed at Mauritzio. He flinched and raised both hands.
"Hey! Non ci posso far niente, cugi! She's a good kisser."
At least I had had to acknowledge that Amanda was a professional at sucking information out of men.
"You better watch out, pickle boy" said Marc. "You don't know if she's the killer. She fills the profile perfectly: always acting high-and-mighty, almost schizophrenic. I could see her killing with no remorse and now that we know what we know, there's a motive."
"We don't know it, we suspect it." I said.
"Suspect what?" Betty was getting desperate.
"It's nothing" I glared at Marc but Amanda jumped right in.
"Beth could be Mrs. Meade and Mr. Hartley love child. We heard some talk about it."
Betty's eyes opened wide.
"But— but that would mean that she and Matt are half-siblings."
"These are just rumors" I told her. "She doesn't know anything about it. She shouldn't and neither should Matt. I know I can trust you, Betty."
"Of course" she said, still visibly confused.
"Come on, guys. We've spent too much time biting each other's tails. We are losing the focus."
"The killer is probably neither one of us and we're missing the big picture" said Amanda.
Those were the wisest words I've heard all morning.
Marc had promised to collaborate with the team and we had to take his word for it. I wasn't convinced but there wasn't much we could do by our own so we needed as much help as we could, even if that meant leaking information to Wilhelmina Slater.
He handled the list. He had double checked exact location of most suspects at the exact time of the murder and narrowed it down to those people whose alibi couldn't be confirmed by more than two people.
"I added the horoscope and the size of their shoes" said Amanda.
I rolled my eyes at her comment and proceeded to read the names of the remaining suspects: The Hartleys, the Meades, Wilhelmina and all of us were still there. Not even I could be crossed out. Mauritzio came to the deli around 8:30 that morning and only I could prove I had been sleeping the hour before.
My phone rang in my pocket and the voice of Pietro Vitelli sounded across the line.
"Can you tell me how the hell your plate number ended up in my desk this morning?"
I explained him what happened yesterday and how we found out Averaimo at Wilhelmina's office. I also thanked him for his help with the Deli.
"I had to do wonders to cover your tracks with Averaimo. The good thing is, he forgets things easily. I know for a fact he's been doing some side investigation on lady Meade's past life. He's probably doing it for that woman, Slater. Doing it all by himself. Just telling you in case you wanted to know.
"Also, the weapon ballistic was done. I know Averaimo halted the process but the technician is a good friend of mine, you know. She has the largest pair of breasts I've ever—"
"Pietro, the weapon. Focus!" I urged him.
"It's a rare and unique model, probably a collector's item, a custom made weapon made to resemble a Russian old spy model. Really fancy, palm size, silenced ammunition, special alloy that cracks detectors, must've cost a fortune to make. That's all the specs we could get. I checked the registry. Now, don't fall from your chair. It was ordered for a Calvin Hartley and registered —let me see— on March 17 of 1996."
I wrote it all down on a paper. We were still on a dead end at least we know he was killed with a weapon he made for himself thirteen years ago.
"How about about the death of the girl on Thursday. Anything on that?"
"Our desk is not the one working with that murder or the rest of the girls. Everyone is saying they are unrelated. Different situations"
"I don't recognize the last one but the previous two, I remember their faces, they used to come to Gio's Deli so they must work nearby."
"We already knew that. They were all found around the area. Some were stabbed some were hit by a blunt object, some were strangled with a rope. It was on the news. They all worked in publishing houses but there's nothing else that would imply they were murdered by the same person."
I thanked Pietro and explained to the rest of the guys what he told me. Amanda's face lightened up.
"That's just a few days before Matt's birthday. Look!" her well polished nail pointed at Mathew Hartley's name. "March 25."
We all looked at each other.
1996. His sixteenth birthday.
"We need to have a serious conversation with that man right now" I said.
"You don't think—This is impossible. He isn't even here today" Betty said.
Lucky bastard.
"I guess we'll have to deal with him later, then" I said.
—0—
The rest of the Saturday passed uneventfully. I spent it supervising the details on the installation of the new window and, later on the evening, I picked up Beth from work.
I had dinner ready by the time Beth came out of the bathroom, her hair perfectly straight again, all long and reddish and very unlike the Meades.
"Why are you called Leigh and not Hartley?" I asked her.
"It's my father's name"
"I thought you've never met your—"
"I never did. I've met part of his family" she said. "Yes. I'm still 'The Bastard Hartley'. Mother and Father never married and I heard he died a few years after I was born. I lived as Beth Hartley most my life but when I was sent to Seattle" she paused and quickly added "—to study, I insisted in changing my name. I hated so much to be a Hartley."
I kept at eating my dinner in silence.
"Aren't you going to ask why I chose to have the name of the guy that abandoned me instead of the one of my own family?"
"Hey. You must have your reason. I am nobody to judge what you did with your own life."
It was her turn to be silent.
"So, you're from Seattle. That's quite far, wouldn't have guessed."
"My father's family is from there. So yes I've been living there for quite some time. Until I came here."
We finished dinner and she offered to clean the dishes.
It was my turn to use the bathroom and it seemed like it had been suddenly conquered by her. Her toiletries were all over the place, invading my space. I touched a pair of hair straighteners. I took the flat iron in my hand and eyed it with curiosity. 'So that's the thing that kills those pretty curls. What a shame'. My mind drifted to the memory of her long hair ablaze in lively spiral waves falling all over her lean shoulders—
"What the hell am I thinking?" I punched myself and resumed my shower.
I made a mental note to try to wake up early and bathe before her. I smelled her all over the small room, her perfume stenciled on the walls. It was affecting me more than I wanted. Maybe I've been alone for too long.
I came out of the room wearing my boxers and undershirt and was going to prepare the sofa to sleep when I noticed she was going through my things in a far away corner of the living room.
She touched one clipping held in a delicate glass frame and read it with curiosity. I knew every word of that article by heart. 'Young at any age' said the title in lively colors. She put it back into place and kneeled down to check a pile of old newspapers resting carelessly on the floor. She gave a little gasp: they were all the same newspaper dated the same day two months ago, the same article she saw me destroy at the deli. On top of them was another framed note.
"Oh my God, Gio" She yelped. I'd made my presence known with a cough.
"You scared me" she continued and bolted up. She held a crystal frame in her hands. The frame carried a little note written in the same penmanship of her threatening messages. It was one of my little treasures, that little letter Betty wrote to me when she was crazy poisoned in perfume almost two years ago.
"Why you didn't tell me you recognized it?"
"I'm sorry you had to see that" I just managed to say and took the frame from her hands. I sat on the couch and placed the cup of tea in the table. I was too calm I even scared myself. Everything was a cloud in my head when I saw those pictures.
I informed her of my little exchange with Betty. She didn't seem to pay attention and asked me to forget it and not to talk with anyone else about it. She informed me she was going to start looking for an apartment next Monday and she'll try to be as little of a nuisance as possible. I sensed some anxiety on the tone of her voice.
"Gio… you must get help" she picked one of the many newspapers, the same picture of Betty and Matt, smiling devilishly at me, mocking me— but this time foul words in bold red ink, terrible markings and doodles disfigured the picture. She grabbed another article and it had been poked with a pencil; another one and the picture had been shredded into pieces with something sharp. Of course I already knew it. I had done it myself with a kitchen knife.
"You must get help" she repeated, looking at me with her transparent eyes. She was killing me. I didn't want her to find out about my obsession. It made me feel weak to have my secret revealed in that way. I could only imagine what she must have been thinking. My head started spinning.
"I'm not crazy!" I said with indignation and it almost sounded as if I was trying to convince myself. "I am not crazy."
"But this is not normal" she said and grabbed another article. It had the words 'I love you' 'I hate you' written all over it.
"None of your business, Beth" I managed to say as calmly as I could.
"You must get help. You can't… live like this." She said and touched my knee.
"Who are you to tell me what to do?" I slapped her hand in a sudden reaction. "You don't have a fucking idea, do you?"
She sensed my anger. She stood up and eyed me with determination.
"You must get professional help. This was my mother's doctor" she placed a card on the table. "I've known her better than most of my family. She's okay."
"I'm not going to see any shrink."
"Just think about it" she said. "Please."
She went straight to my room.
"I think I will stay in your room tonight and will lock the door" she said. "Good night, Gio."
—0—
I considered going back to my Mother's home but I scratched the idea. I didn't have the van and it was easier to get the metro lines to the deli.
I just didn't want to face Beth and any more of her judgmental comments on my life. I turned my phone to silent and, while I was on my way to my favorite bar in Manhattan, I passed near the Meade building. I turned back as I heard some steps but there was nobody behind me. I felt uneasy. I could almost swear someone was following me.
I blamed my imagination, the damned nightmares and my fears. I hurried my walk and entered the bar. I wanted to drawn them all in alcohol.
I drank my heart away. I wanted to forget about the article and the faces of Betty and her fiance, Matt. I wanted to cast away their stupid expression of happiness printed in that paper and my mind.
Even worse, I couldn't erase it from my head or the idea that was roaming my brain as of late… the fact that all the murders started happening exactly two months ago.
I ordered another round of whisky. It was a horrible coincidence the realization that something always seemed to happen those nights I had the nightmares.
I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid something tragic would happen if I closed my eyes.
I heard some giggles and I could barely look at the corner of the bar. I was totally wasted. I couldn't recognize the faces but I think there were some party girls. I didn't even try to make my moves on them. Not only I wasn't in the mood—or the condition—but I had someone living in my apartment and I wasn't even sleeping with her. Talk about leading a shitty life.
The rest of my memories were fuzzy from then on. All I was certain is that there was a scream. That woman's cry of horror was still ringing in my ears.
To be continued... later
Notes:
"Hai perso la ragione?" = (it.) Are you out of your mind?
"Dio santo!" = (it.) My God!
"Come io" = (it.) Like me.
"Stai zitto. Oggi mi sento una merda" = (it.) Be quiet. I feel like shit, today.
"Non ci posso far niente" = (it.) I couldn't help it.
Edited: Fixed several mistakes. Betty and Beth's name are similar and I keep confusing them. :D Thanks, Maria.
