Pointing with his phone, Foster had shouted, “That man is a kidnapper! He runs an international ring for kiddy porn!”
Bleary-eyed and bushy-haired, the accused had uttered only, “Harsh, dude.”
When the little girl had started to cry, that seemed to confirm the charge. Potential heroes had unclicked their seat belts and stood, launching themselves and tackling, then dog-piling the caveman lowlife whose muffled protests now nobody could hear. Everyone had been shouting at once, and those people not restraining the burnout had held their phones aloft to shoot video.
Foster had knelt in the airplane aisle and crawled toward the weeping girl, saying, “Take my hand!”
She’d lost hold of the burnout’s grip and watched him disappear beneath layers of bodies. Wailing in tears, she’d cried, “Daddy!”
“He’s not your daddy,” Foster had crooned. “Don’t you remember? He kidnapped you from Arlington, Texas.” Foster had known the details of the case by heart. “He’s not going to hurt you anymore.” He’d reached until his large hand had closed over her tiny one.
The girl had shrieked a wordless scream of pain and terror. The press of struggling passengers had held the caveman helplessly buried.
Foster had pulled the little girl into a hug, shushing her and petting her hair as he’d kept repeating, “You’re safe. You’re safe, now.”
At the blurred edge of his vision he’d been aware of passengers holding their phones to record him: this man, some distraught man wearing a navy-blue suit, an ordinary no one, he’d sunk to his knees in the center aisle of the plane grabbing after a little girl in a flowered dress.
An overhead announcement repeated, “This is the pilot speaking. TSA security is en route. Would all passengers please remain in their seats.”
The girl had been crying, maybe because Foster was crying. She’d stretched her free hand toward a patch of scruffy pervert hair barely visible under the tumble of bodies.
Foster had taken her tear-stained face between his two hands and brought her innocent brown eyes to meet his. Saying, “You don’t have to be his sex slave. Not anymore.”
For an instant, everyone had basked in the warm glow of their mutual heroism. In real time, it was all over the internet. Then, on a couple hundred YouTube clips, an air marshal had grabbed Foster in a headlock.
Framed between his hands, the girl’s eyes had glazed with a curious, steely resolve.
Choking, he’d assured her, “And you don’t have to thank me, Sally.”
“My name,” the girl had said, “is Cashmere.” And she’d turned her tiny head just enough to sink her teeth into the meat of his thumb.
The paramedics had a special name for it. The ones who came to collect the body. They called it “the Fontaine Method,” after the high-rise that offered tenants nothing to tie a rope to. A tower of steel-reinforced concrete, with high ceilings broken only by recessed pot lights, what some people called “can” lights. A few units had track lighting.
Stylish, but nothing that would support a person’s weight.
A trip to the recycling bins in the building’s basement explained a lot. The bin for clear glass was piled full of Patrón bottles and Smirnoff bottles. Her neighbors weren’t poor. No one living at the Fontaine ate cat food, except the cats, of course.
Visitors visited rarely. With the exception of the paramedics.
Even now, an ambulance idled at the curb. No lights. No siren. Mitzi watched from the seventeenth floor, from the mattress Jimmy had dragged to the windows. Two men in uniforms bumped a gurney down the building’s broad steps and left it sitting on the sidewalk while they opened the rear doors of the ambulance and sat on the tailgate to smoke cigarettes.
The figure on the gurney, covered completely and strapped down, it looked small. A woman, Mitzi guessed. Not a child, because the condo bylaws didn’t allow them. More likely an advanced decomp. A few weeks in the California heat could do that, even with the central air-conditioning on high. It could cook a person down like that. Like mummification. Desiccation. The other residents would know who. And whether it was a maid or a strong odor that had summoned the police.
It was the housekeeper, Mitzi knew, who’d found Sharon Tate butchered. It was the housekeeper who’d found Marilyn Monroe cold and naked. It occurred to Mitzi that stumbling across your pregnant boss stabbed to death must be among the worst ways to find yourself out of a job.
Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering. It takes as little as one jab or slash to trigger the screaming and bleeding. But so many more are required to make them stop.
Across the street, level with her, a single man sat in his office. A dad-shaped nobody he looked to be, peering into a computer screen she couldn’t see. He wore eyeglasses at his desk, in the only office in the building with the lights on.
She’d tried it once, Mitzi had, the Fontaine Method. A simple trick taught by rumor to each new resident. A person simply opened a door. As a metaphor it was poetically sweet. Because there was nowhere else to tie a rope, a person tied it to a doorknob. The soft belt of a terry cloth bathrobe worked well. With one end tied to the knob a person tossed the rest of the belt over the top of the door and fashioned it into a noose. You stood on a chair, kicked the chair aside, and performed your gibbet dance against the door’s smooth, painted surface.
In olden times, Mitzi knew, no one wanted to curse a tree. So when a hanging took place, people leaned a ladder against a wall and tied a rope to the highest rung. The condemned would stand atop a chair or sit astride a horse. As the chair toppled or the horse bolted, a noose hanging in the area below the ladder did the trick. That gave birth to the fear of walking beneath ladders. Because a person never knew. The spirit or spirits of highwaymen or cutthroats might still haunt the space where they’d been executed.
Spirits of the evil crowded the Earth to avoid their destiny in Hell. The dead suffered no hangovers, she hoped.
As she watched the paramedics, she took an Ativan and chased it with an Ambien. She had a headache. She often had a headache, but maybe she’d forget this was her head. Ambien could do that. Enough Ambien.
In light of the circumstances, someone ought to offer a prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven,” she began, but the Ambien was already erasing her thoughts. She started and stopped, at a loss for the right words. “Forget us our trespasses,” she said, “as we forget those who’ve trespassed against us…”
Seventeen floors below her window, the paramedics had loaded their passenger and were slamming the doors. In the building across the way the single light winked out.
In its place, replacing the dad-shaped man, Mitzi saw only her own reflected outline. She waved an arm and watched her mirrored self waving back.
Her phone chimed. The ambulance was gone.
Alone, alone and beyond her reach, her mirrored self lifted an arm and put her mirrored phone to her ear. With her free hand, the reflection in the window waved. As if she were waving good-bye to the paramedics or to the dead person or just waving farewell to her real self.