At the door the hooker removes a rabbit’s foot key ring from her purse and opens the lock. The stale smell of shag carpet hits Sigrid and gives her pause before she steps in.
“Where’s my suitcase?” she asks.
“What suitcase?”
“Black. Cheap. Broken wheel.”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Has anyone else been here?” Sigrid asks.
“Wait a second. You left your suitcase on the steps. Here?”
“Shit.”
“Earth, huh?”
The Defining Characteristics of Gum
Despite being on a tight schedule, the woman in the midmorning sequins wants to talk to Sigrid. “What do you want in here, anyway?”
“Do you know where Marcus is?”
“I told you. He’s gone.”
“I understand that, but do you know where he went?”
“I figured he went home.”
Sigrid does not reply.
“To your home,” the woman clarifies. “Norway.”
“I checked there.”
Sigrid resists the impulse to take off her shoes because she doesn’t want to prompt a new round of intercultural conversation, but she is careful about where she places her feet. Taking her smartphone from the scuffed Italian purse, she snaps pictures.
“You a cop or something?” the woman says.
“I’m on vacation,” Sigrid says, clicking away liberally.
“You act like a cop.”
“I’m trying to find him. I don’t know all the right questions to ask yet. I’m collecting information broadly so that later, when I do build an investigative strategy, I’ll have material to consider, informed by a framework.”
“That doesn’t sound like what they do on TV,” says the woman.
“It’s not.”
In the course of her career as a beat cop and later an investigator, Sigrid has been inside many homes. Most adults are invited into the homes of friends and neighbors and family, but that is a limited social and economic range of homes, and the frequency curve on new locations flattens out the older people get. The simple fact is that most adults seldom enter new spaces on a regular basis. Cops, though, are in new places all the time. Domestic disturbances, abuse, murder, missing children . . . they are all invitations to the wider world.
The house does not look like the typical bachelor homes she often saw in Norway during her time as a beat cop. Then, she used to visit drunks or occasionally drop them off at home. One apartment after another was filled with IKEA furniture bought from the discounted corner near the cashier for being damaged or having pieces missing; the disposable income spent on a TV too big for the room and placed like a god in its center; video game consoles with white and black cords intermingling like interracial robots; Grandiosa frozen pizzas in ordered stacks in the freezer; boxes of wine sorted like ammunition in the pantry.
Marcus’s living room does not look like this. He has placed two brown three-seater sofas across from each other and a large wooden coffee table between them as though for a summit of some kind. The crumbs and detritus under the cushions, however, prove that he always sat alone and in the same spot; a spot that does not face a television. Instead, and nearby, is a teetering stack of books piled with the spines facing in all directions.
“Was Marcus depressed?” Sigrid asks, running a finger across the windows and wiping the dirt on the upholstery of the sofa.
“He was sad.”
“I don’t know if that’s different,” Sigrid says.
“Me either,” the woman whispers.
Upstairs the woman guides Sigrid through the two bedrooms. In the master, she explains how she’d put everything of Marcus’s that looked valuable or useful into the same boxes she’d used for the move. Sigrid decides not to ask where she moved from because it seems tangential. The number of boxes tells Sigrid that she has taken the move seriously and is intending to stay for a long time; the same length of time she expects Marcus to be gone.
Her name is Juliet McKenna; it is printed in capital letters on every box in purple marker.
“They got my name on ’em,” she explains unnecessarily. “That’s why the cops didn’t touch ’em.”
“What cops?”
“The ones who came here with a warrant and looked around. Didn’t we talk about this already? No. Well . . . Irving. Irving the cop. And that little sidekick who follows him around? I forget her name. They were trying to find Marcus. I didn’t tell them anything, though. I told them not to touch my shit unless my name’s on the warrant. And it wasn’t. That backed them off.”
“The police were here looking for Marcus?”
“I can’t tell if you’re summing up or trying to catch on.”
“When and why?”
“A week ago. Listen, you can’t just pump me for information without . . .”
“Are you telling me that Marcus was seeing a fancy woman, that the woman died, Marcus disappeared, and that the cops came here with a warrant looking for him, and went through his stuff?”
“You’re repeating shit again.”
“Who’s Irving?” Sigrid asks.
“Irving Wylie,” she says. “Irv.”
“OK.”
“The sheriff.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“About what?”
“Sheriff Irving Wylie? You have sheriffs here?”
“Police station. Center of town. Can’t miss it.” She looks at her watch and says, “Oh shit, I’ve got a date. Don’t fuck up anything while I’m gone.”
Juliet leaves Sigrid in peace, and she takes the opportunity to not only see her surroundings but try to feel them. The bedroom is furnished in earth tones and shadows, with the single window facing the busy off-ramp of cars. The kinetic energy of the world outside underscores the static space of the room, and the absence of whatever life has previously been experienced here.
Juliet has already removed most of Marcus’s clothes from the closet and stuffed them in her JULIET MCKENNA boxes. Sigrid sees how unceremonious her efforts had been once she opens them with the Buck lock-blade knife she finds on the dresser and decides to keep, as it must have been Marcus’s.
The contents are mostly balled-up casual clothes, though she does find a good blue suit and leather shoes tossed in with the rest.
In
