Same Difference, page 15
When I finally took a breath Eliza seized on the opportunity. ‘How come you can lift a guy over your head and throw him at a bunch of cops?’
‘I work out a lot.’
She took her eyes off her every step and gave me a withering glance. ‘Come on,’ she said.
‘Fair enough. I’m not really like other people,’ I said. I knew that wouldn’t suffice, but I thought the implicit message ‘Not now’ might land.
It did not. ‘No kidding,’ Eliza said. ‘I work out but I can’t do that. How come you can, and you can carry people down the side of an apartment building?’
Subtlety was not my top priority on East 21st Street. We still had a way to go and I was definitely not in the mood to unburden myself like I had to Mank, especially given how well that had worked out. ‘Not here and not now,’ I said.
Eliza gave me an interesting look that blended a certain loose familiarity with something like understanding. ‘You’re not out yet,’ she said.
That would be how she’d see it, and she wasn’t wrong. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘And I might never be.’
She looked sympathetic. ‘It really frees you up,’ she suggested.
‘It’s not the same thing. You know that.’
We shut up and kept walking until we got near our new digs. I checked in my bag for my wallet and found all of four dollars in cash. ‘I guess we’re not buying groceries,’ I said. ‘We’ll figure out food.’
Eliza reached into her jeans for her thin wallet. ‘I can go to an ATM.’
‘No. You can’t. They’ll find us in about four minutes.’
She looked like something smelled bad. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said.
When we got to the building on East 62nd we walked to the southeast corner as Ken had instructed in his note. Sure enough there was a mailbox there, one of the old blue ones that the Post Office put up for collection that virtually nobody uses anymore. I followed the note’s instructions and opened the hinged slot at the top. You used to be able to open the box and put in something larger than a number-10 envelope, but people being what they are put all sorts of disgusting things in mailboxes and the USPS installed narrow slots in the boxes and made you go to the post office for everything else. People.
A testament to how often these boxes are used now was the small white envelope Ken had taped to the inside of the hinge on the slot cover. I pulled the envelope out and walked toward the building, which was fully constructed for the first eight floors but clearly not yet completely habitable. There were fences around it and many of the upper floors were still boarded up. I reached into the envelope and found a key card and another note.
This will get you in. I’ll see about getting you food later. And keep in mind the electricity and the bathrooms don’t work yet. Swell.
Thank goodness it wasn’t February, because I was willing to bet the heating units weren’t up to speed yet, either.
We went to what was clearly the construction entrance and found no one guarding it. There’s security and then there’s a building my brother knows about. The apartment he’d secured for Eliza and me was on the third floor, which appeared to be about halfway up the part of the interior construction that had been completed so far. I hadn’t wanted to be on the ground floor, which was mostly lobby, anyway, just so we would have a view of the street if anyone discovered where we were hiding.
The key card got us in through the front door and then, strikingly, the apartment door was unlocked, because the same key card was apparently going to be used for the locks, and there was not yet any electrical power to the apartments. I guess they figured nobody was going to break in to steal the nothing.
It was a valid point; Eliza and I walked into what I’m sure was becoming a very expensive luxury apartment and found walls and a ceiling. The place was clean enough, given that it was a construction site, but there was no furniture, no rugs, no light fixtures. We had to figure out how to get some cash soon or it would be pitch black in this place within a couple of hours. And we’d be sleeping on the floor.
Still, it was not open to the elements and I could pretty much bet the few dollars I had left to me that the NYPD or whoever was after us would not think to look here. I was here and I wouldn’t think to look here.
‘Home sweet home,’ I said to Eliza once I had done the one and only thing I could do, which was sit on the floor. Eliza, being more resourceful than me, hiked herself up on the kitchen countertop and sat in a cobbler’s pose there, looking not nearly as serene as her online yoga instructor might hope. (I was guessing.)
‘Yeah,’ she said. I was lamenting the lack of a bottle of wine until I remembered that I don’t drink and buying Eliza any alcohol would be illegal for another two years. ‘Now tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’ Was she wondering what my plan for a next move would be? Because I definitely didn’t have one I liked yet.
Eliza’s voice was measured and calm. ‘Tell me why you can pick up a great big guy like Julio and carry him out to the street so you can throw him at the cops.’
It was a fair question and not a surprising one. But I’d spent decades not telling anyone the answer, and I wasn’t the least bit comfortable giving my most closely held secret to a nineteen-year-old I’d met that day.
‘I’m bigger than most people,’ I said. ‘You can see that. It’s genetic. Ken is bigger and stronger than almost anyone else, too. The luck of the draw, I guess.’
Eliza raised an eyebrow in an expression that was not, to be honest, very accepting. ‘It’s more than that and you know it,’ she said.
I lay down on the floor because the day had been more than enough and I hadn’t charged up as much as I’d wanted to. In this place without electrical service that was going to be something of an issue. And I didn’t want to answer Eliza. ‘I’m gonna take a nap,’ I said.
‘Coward.’
I can’t tell you why, but that got to me. I sat up. ‘Coward? I carry you down the side of an apartment building, keep you away from the cops even though I think you should turn yourself in, toss a guy into a crowd to keep him away from you, and find you shelter for the night, and you think I’m a coward?’
A lot of people would have been intimidated by someone who looks like me yelling at them. Eliza was not a lot of people. Her tone remained even and unperturbed. ‘I had to tell everyone I knew about who I really was after I’d spent my whole life pretending to be who they wanted me to be. I didn’t know how any of them would react. Some of them accepted me right away. Some of them took their time and then sort of accepted me. There are more than a few I never heard from again. So you tell me about being brave, OK? I lost people that I thought loved me.’
For reasons I can’t begin to identify or explain, that made me think of Mank. I deflected. ‘Did you tell anyone on the day you met them?’ I asked.
That got to her; she blinked and looked away, despite there being remarkably little to look at. ‘Not when I didn’t have to. My only ID has my deadname. Anyone who sees it is someone I just met and came out to at the same time. I don’t always get the choice.’
‘OK. My bad. I get that. So I’ll prove I trust you but you have to trust me, too. How about that? I’ll tell you as much as I possibly can without putting you in more danger, but you have to tell me everything you know about Damien’s little side hustle and what happened to him in that basement by Yankee Stadium. How’s that?’
She really didn’t want to go that way; I could see it in her face, in the way she refused to look in my direction. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but the windows were already losing the direct sunlight they’d had when we’d arrived less than an hour before. I hoped Ken was at the supermarket because I was getting hungry. And I needed to find a place with working electricity to charge my battery. I couldn’t dare turn on my phone to push my brother. This was all coming down to trust. I needed Eliza to trust me.
She was thinking about what I’d said and the only indication she’d reached a decision was that she came down off the counter and sat on the floor across from me. ‘OK,’ she said.
I waited. ‘OK, what?’
‘OK, you tell me what you can and I’ll tell you what I can about Damien. I figure they’re chasing us because of that and so you need to know.’
‘Good.’ I waited some more. ‘So?’
‘So, you go first.’
I should have seen that one coming. But she needed the gesture and I had offered it; there was no way of backing out now. ‘OK. Ken and I were changed by our parents, even before we were born, to be bigger and stronger than other people. Our parents were geneticists and they wanted to protect us from the harder parts of life. They felt that making us strong and unusually agile would do that.’
Eliza sat and stared at me for a very long moment, making me worry that perhaps I’d said too much and she now saw me as a freak. If she didn’t trust me, that was going to make a very difficult situation even harder to navigate. She seemed to take a moment to collect herself, or at least that was my impression, and then she said, ‘And?’
‘And, what?’
‘Well, aside from the idea that your parents seemed to dabble in eugenics and that really needs to be addressed, you’re obviously holding something back from me. I can see you’re big and strong, but that’s not something you have to hide from the rest of society. I had to come out as trans. You don’t have to come out as big and strong.’
I hated it when she was logical.
I especially cringed at the use of the word eugenics. Was that what Mom and Dad had done? Ken and I joke about being superbeings, but we’re really not. We’re essentially the same as everyone else but with … differences our parents gave us. Were they actually contemplating creating a race of champions? There was no evidence they ever ‘made’ anyone other than Ken and me, and Aunt Margie always insisted they went to the lab for us because they couldn’t conceive and had problems with adoption. That last bit might have had something to do with my father’s four arrests protesting apartheid when he was a college student (in Ohio, not Johannesburg).
‘That’s true,’ I acknowledged, because what choice did I have? ‘Although I think “eugenics” is a little overstated. But see, they didn’t manipulate us in the womb or try to change our DNA.’ How far could I go without going too far? ‘They developed some parts of us organically because they couldn’t conceive children of their own.’ I’d never said it that way before, but it was technically true without being graphic.
Eliza looked at me as if I were a new breed of dog she hadn’t encountered before and she couldn’t decide whether to pet my head or back away before I bit her. ‘They never heard of adoption?’ she asked.
‘They had issues.’ That wasn’t any of her business. ‘Now how about you? When do I get to hear what you know about Damien?’
It was starting to get dark and that was a worry. We couldn’t turn on our phones to use the flashlight apps and pretty soon the only light we’d have would be from the construction team’s overnight facility. It was something, but it wasn’t enough and it was going to be coming from only one direction, below us.
But none of that made a difference to Eliza. She was being backed into a corner and clearly wasn’t happy about it. So few are. ‘What do you need to know?’ she asked carefully.
‘Everything. I can’t help solve this crime and get you out of a boatload of trouble if I don’t know what I’m dealing with. So, spill.’ I looked at as much as I could see of her in the shadows and tried to use my most penetrating gaze to get her to talk.
She stood up, which I wasn’t expecting. Some people like to pace when they’re in uncomfortable conversations. I didn’t know if that was the case with Eliza, but she walked over to the window and looked out, which blocked more of the light coming through.
‘I wasn’t in love with Damien,’ she said. ‘I think Laura was, but I wasn’t. He wasn’t my type and I’m not dating anybody right now. So I was just around for some of the stuff.’
‘Then just tell me what you know,’ I said, because she had stopped talking for a bit.
I didn’t so much see Eliza nod as I noted that the light from the construction klieg brightened for a moment and then dimmed. It was getting very difficult to see in here. ‘Damien was kind of sketchy right from the beginning,’ she said. ‘I met him in my first semester, when I was still pretending. He thought I was a dude and I let him think it because I didn’t care what he thought at first.’
Aha! Perhaps a breakthrough! ‘At first?’
‘Damien was funny,’ she said, still staring out the window, probably to avoid looking at me. Not that she would have been able to see me that well. ‘He didn’t tell jokes or anything, but he made you laugh. Somebody, you know, just in a crazy conversation, asked him once who decided that thing you serve gravy in should be called a boat, and he said, “The gravy navy.” That cracked me up.’ She chuckled just thinking about it, and had a hard time saying the words without laughing.
‘So you got to be friends.’ If I didn’t move this along we’d be discussing the gravy navy all night.
‘Yeah. And Laura was always around, too.’ Her voice sounded sour and displeased.
‘I thought you were friends with Laura,’ I said. ‘You were into Mary Shelley.’
She actually turned to face me so I could see the contempt on her face, except that I couldn’t because she was backlit. ‘For class,’ she said. ‘We didn’t hang outside of class until she was involved with Damien and his pill thing, and all of a sudden he was like a hundred percent into that. After a while he stopped going to class.’ Eliza walked back over toward me but did not sit down. She stood there and stared in the direction of the door.
‘It would be a really bad idea to bolt,’ I said quietly.
Eliza’s head swiveled quickly and she stared at me. ‘I wasn’t going to … You know, you don’t know me nearly as well as you think.’
‘You’re right, I don’t,’ I told her. I didn’t have time for a deep character study because someone was dead and other people were coming after Eliza and me. ‘So how did Damien get involved with Julio? Did you believe Jules when he said he didn’t kill Damien?’
‘Jules,’ she said with an edge. ‘Now he thinks his name is Jules.’
‘Now? That’s a new thing?’
‘I dunno. He’s always been a pain about his name. I think it’s really Eric.’ She sat down. ‘What are we going to do about food?’
Because I apparently live in a movie, there was a sudden knock at the door, and both of us started as if we’d heard a gunshot. By the time I’d managed to get to my feet, the knocking had stopped. Had Jules found us? It seemed unlikely that knocking would be his style. He was more a kick-down-the-door kind of guy, which would be a shame because it was a nice new door. But it was a door without a peephole, largely because there was a security monitor already installed over the top of the door, which would have been very handy if there were electrical power in the building.
Feeling a little drained and wondering if I could lift Jules into the air again, I very carefully turned the knob and opened the door, suddenly remembering it had never been locked and anybody could have walked right in on us.
Maybe tomorrow we’d have to find a new place to crash.
I pulled the door open quickly, thinking I might be able to startle the person/people in the hallway and get the drop on them. But I needn’t have worried.
There was no one standing in front of our door. On the floor outside the apartment there were three reusable tote bags full of groceries. And on top was a box indicating it held a battery-operated electrical charger.
My brother had come through for us again.
TWENTY-THREE
Things are so much easier once you’ve eaten.
Eliza and I sat on the floor of the bare apartment with two candles Ken had left for us (to be completely accurate, I was certain he would have stayed away and gotten someone else to deliver the groceries, possibly Igavda, maybe his real-estate friend, who would have had a key card), sitting in plastic cups and effectively lighting our small part of the room. I’d just as soon not have tons of light in here to alert anyone who looked up that there were people in the building under construction.
I felt like we’d relaxed a bit once Eliza had eaten a veggie sub and I’d had one of the turkey variety, to complete a turkey-centric day. So I propped myself up on one elbow and said, ‘Did you always know—’
She cut me off and her face bordered on angry. ‘There’s nothing to know. I was always this, even when I was three and trying to play by their rules. I’m Eliza. This is me. There was no change that took place; I didn’t used to be who my father thought and then become who I am. This is my true identity.’
‘I was going to ask if you’d always known Damien was dealing pills,’ I said.
Eliza looked sheepish and then grinned a little. ‘Sorry.’
I waved a hand. ‘You spent enough time being sorry about who people thought you were. That’s over now. But we need to know who killed Damien. Was he selling on campus when you first met him?’
‘No,’ Eliza said after a sip of the spring water she had been supplied. I was trying to be careful about the fluids because Ken had said the bathrooms weren’t working and he had not provided any in the grocery bags. ‘That just started maybe a month ago. I tried to talk him out of it but he wanted to pay the rent on his apartment himself and not take money from his mother.’
‘He couldn’t wait tables like everybody else?’ I said.
Eliza closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at me. ‘I don’t know who, but somebody must have approached him with this idea. Julio used to say he was Damien’s supplier, but someone was supplying Julio. He wasn’t smart enough or connected enough to do it himself, and one time Damien had to wait a couple of days for pills because Julio had run out.’
