77 Shadow Street

11

Apartment 3-F

Mickey Dime left Jerry dead in an armchair in the study. In the kitchen, he washed his hands. He liked the water so hot it stung. The liquid soap made a soothing lather. It smelled like peaches. Peaches were his favorite fruit.

Beyond the window, the sky flashed, flashed. He wished he were outside to feel the air shiver, to enjoy the crisp scent of ozone that lightning left in its wake. Thunder crashed. He felt it in his bones.

He poured a glass of chocolate milk and plated a lemon muffin. The glass was by Baccarat, the plate by Limoges, the fork by Tiffany. He liked the look and feel of them. The muffin was heavily drizzled with icing. He sat at the breakfast table by a window overlooking the courtyard. He ate slowly, savoring the treat.

A lot of sugar made most people hyper, but it calmed Mickey. From the time he was a little kid, his mom said he was different from other people. She wasn’t just bragging. Mickey was different in many ways. For instance, his metabolism was a high-performance machine, like a Ferrari. He could chow down on anything, never gain an ounce.

After the muffin, he enjoyed three Oreos. He pulled the wafers apart and licked off the icing first. His mom had taught him to eat them that way. His mom had taught him so much. He owed everything to her.

Mickey was thirty-five. His mother had died six months earlier. He still missed her.

Even now he could recall the precise chill and the too-soft texture of her cheek when he leaned into the coffin to kiss her. He kissed each of her eyelids, too, and half expected them to flutter open against his lips. But they were stitched shut.

He finished his snack. He rinsed the plate, the glass, the fork. He left them on the drainboard to be washed by the housekeeper, who came twice a week.

For a while he stood at the sink, watching raindrops tap the window. He liked the patterns of rain on glass. He liked the sound.

One of his favorite things was to walk in warm summer rain, in the cold rain of autumn. He owned a getaway cottage in the country, on twelve acres. He liked to sit in the yard, in the fresh-smelling rain, in the nude. He liked to feel a storm washing him with its thousand tongues.

Mickey returned to the study, where Jerry was dead in the armchair. The silencer-equipped .32 pistol had been fired at close range. The bullet pierced the heart. Under the entrance wound, the bloodstain on the white shirt was in the shape of a teardrop, a graceful detail that Mickey appreciated.

Jerry’s suit was beautifully tailored. The pleats in his pants looked as sharp as knife blades. The tight weave of the wool was pleasing when Mickey rubbed a lapel between thumb and forefinger. The shirt and tie appeared to be silk. Mickey liked the smell of silk. But Jerry wore a crisp lime-scented cologne that overwhelmed the subtler fragrance of the fabric.

Since becoming a professional, Mickey never killed a man for free. It was unnatural. Like Picasso giving away a painting. An important part of the sensual experience of murder was counting the money afterward.

The first time he killed, a week after his twentieth birthday, he’d been an amateur. He was fortunate to have gotten away with it. He tried to get a date with this cocktail waitress named Mallory. She turned him down. And she wasn’t nice about it. She humiliated him. He learned everything about her: how she shared a little house with a girlfriend, how her fifteen-year-old sister lived with her. He went in there with a Taser, chemical Mace, and vinyl-strap handcuffs. It was all about sex, and he got plenty. Then he had to kill them, which he discovered was another kind of sex. But it was stupid to kill for sex when you could buy it. Killing for sex instead of just for the pleasure of killing, he was sure to leave DNA behind. Besides, when he was totally hot and in the act, he was out of control and certain to make mistakes, leave clues of other kinds. So even though it had been the best night of his life to that point, he decided never again to kill as an amateur. He was proud of his subsequent self-control.

Mickey also had never before popped a relative. Jerry was his brother. Maybe it should have felt different, but it didn’t. The only difference was not receiving a fat envelope full of cash for the job.

Not once in years of dreaming about murder had Mickey imagined offing someone in this apartment. So inconvenient.

Jerry Dime had forced the moment. He had come here to kill Mickey. But he was an amateur. He telegraphed his intentions.

Come to think of it, Mickey would eventually get a payday for this bit of work. No need now to share their mother’s estate.

From the bedroom closet, he got a spare blanket. It was made of some microfiber, as soft as fur but strong. He rubbed it against his face. It smelled like a camel-hair sport coat, which was one of Mickey’s favorite smells.

Jerry’s wide-open eyes seemed bluer in death than in life. Mickey had russet eyes. Their mother’s eyes had been green. Mickey didn’t know about their fathers’ eyes. Their fathers had been anonymous sperm donors.

After pulling the corpse out of the armchair and onto the blanket, Mickey went through his brother’s pockets. He took Jerry’s wallet, phone, coins. The coins were warm with Jerry’s body heat.

Mickey rolled the dead man in the blanket. He cinched the ends tight with a couple of his neckties.

Stepping out of the study, he pulled the door shut behind him. As he glanced at his watch, the doorbell rang.

His twice-a-month manicurist, Ludmila, had arrived. She was a Russian immigrant, in her mid-fifties, dark-haired and intense.

She spoke English well. But they were agreed that she would not speak except to thank him for payment. Any conversation would detract from the pleasure of the manicure and pedicure.

After his mother’s death, Mickey had expanded the master bath into the guest bedroom. He never had overnight guests.

The huge bathroom had white-marble walls and ceiling, blackgranite countertops, and a checkerboard marble-and-granite floor. It featured a spa chair with water supply, a custom massage table, and a corner sauna lined with cedar.

Mickey reclined in the spa chair. He soaked his bare feet in warm water. The footbath was scented with fragrant salts.

As Ludmila worked on his hands, Mickey closed his eyes. Slowly he ceased to be a man and became only ten fingertips. The whisper of the emery board was a symphony. The fragrance of the clear nail polish intoxicated him. The simplest pleasure could be rapturous if you gave yourself entirely to it.

Sensation was everything. It was the only thing.