I close out the noise and in my mind I see her on top, naked, riding him cowgirl. Kicking off her Jimmys, stepping out of her tiny black skirt, Eleanor must have been a rocket on the Fourth of July.Īs I move through the crush of people-unknown to any of them, a stranger with an expensive jacket slung over his shoulder and a lot of freight in his past-I stop at the bed. On the street one of its names is Easy Lay. But GHB also comes with its own side effects-a loss of inhibitions and a more intense sexual experience. Most music venues are flooded with it: clubbers slug a tiny cap to cut tina, taking the edge off of its paranoia. It’s getting a lot of play now in the dark corners of the web: in large doses it is replacing rohypnol as the date-rape drug of choice. Unmarked, it contains a clear liquid-GHB, I figure. Next to the two empty foils of tina is what looks like one of those tiny shampoo bottles you get in hotel bathrooms. Under its influence the only coherent thought most people can marshal is to find a partner and bang their back out. It makes you so damn horny, so euphoric as it hits your brain that any sense of foreboding would have been impossible. Tina-crystal meth-would have taken care of that. However she died, those that look for blessings may find one here-she wouldn’t have realized what was happening, not until the last moment anyway. The really sick ones figure he cut her throat while he was still inside her. The crime-scene team still have work to do, but there isn’t a person in the place who doesn’t think Eleanor was killed during sex: the mattress half off the base, the tangled sheets, a brown spray of decaying arterial blood on a bedside table. In my head I start calling the victim Eleanor. The idea of a young woman without a face made me think of a Lennon/McCartney groove from long ago-it’s about Eleanor Rigby, a woman who wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. In places like this, where you get a feeling evil still clings to the walls, your mind can veer into strange territory. Unless the forensic guys at the NYPD get lucky with a dental match, they’ll have a helluva time putting a name to this one. The acid has dissolved not only her fingerprints but almost the entire metacarpal structure underneath. That was the plan I guess-whoever killed her had also weighed down her hands with telephone books. The young woman in the bath is unrecognizable-the three days she has spent in the acid have destroyed all her features. Even if a victim doesn’t know anyone in the world, it seems like there’s always someone sobbing at a scene like this. The place is in chaos, the noise deafening-police radios blaring, coroner’s assistants yelling for support, a Hispanic woman sobbing. I’ve always said it’s hard not to admire good planning. They’ve all got their price tags still attached and I see that, in order to avoid suspicion, whoever killed her bought them at twenty different stores. She is naked in the bathroom-her throat cut, floating facedown in a bathtub full of sulfuric acid, the active ingredient in a drain cleaner available at any supermarket.ĭozens of empty bottles of the cleaner-Drain Bomb, it’s called-lie scattered on the floor. Like their owner, they don’t belong here. Lying next to the bed are a handbag, black panties the size of dental floss, and a pair of six-inch Jimmy Choos. There are places I’ll remember all my life-Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother’s bedroom on the wrong side of Eight Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theater of Death.īut nothing is burned deeper in my memory than a walk-up in New York-threadbare curtains, cheap furniture, a table loaded with tina and other party drugs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |