Method 15/33 Page 22

  Second, my company. I am the Owner, President, CEO, Supreme Empress, and Ruler of my very own forensics consulting company. We hold contracts with law firms, police departments, corporations, wealthy barons and billionaires, and a handful of federal agencies I am not at liberty to divulge. One such agency inherited “Lola” from the FBI, and this is how I get the good cases. As Liu has mentioned, given Lola’s unconventional tactics, her obvious conflict of interest in contracting with me, and her constant status as “underground and dark,” we need to keep her identity masked in this tale. Sometimes she brings suspects in off the grid and holds them in the basement here for questioning. I usually turn the green mixer in the company kitchen up high so as not to listen to her interrogations. I then deliver her batches of her favorite cookie, the cinnamon-and-sugar-laced snickerdoodle, and watch her swallow each cookie in one bite. One after the other.

  I study crime scenes, analyze blood samples, dabble in metallurgy, defy chemical compounds, research, solve, and, as I am doing today, compare fingerprints if my lab tech calls in sick. I’ve testified as an expert witness for countless parties in countless trials. My building is filled with flat panel iMacs, the big ones. I recruit from MIT and Berkeley, the summa cum laudes only, and steal the top scientists from megacorps and governmental bodies by tempting them with high salaries and a lower-priced real estate market. I hired a very good consultant on staff as well, a former FBI agent, Roger Liu. He’s about twenty-five years my senior and, besides my husband, he’s my best friend in the world. His wife Sandra keeps us sane by reading us the sitcom scripts she writes in the office she shares with Roger.

  I own instruments so advanced, NASA might believe my suppliers are aliens, and I develop even better ones, for which I hold several patents, on which I exact unconscionable licensing fees from those very same megacorps from whom I steal established scientists. I own my building, which I purchased with trust fund money Nana set up for me when I was born and which fully vested when I turned twenty-one. By that point, at age twenty-one, I had set my sights on this particular building for a good long five years. I had asked Mother to intervene with the banks and the state and the federal government, all of whom wanted to lay claim to this winged structure with rolling fields and an apple orchard. Quarry too. Mother did a fine job convincing my competitor buyers to hold their bloody horses.

  I renovated and retrofit from the remaining shell of this former boarding school, one that presides over a field smelling of cows, and used to have a kitchen with long steel tables and a black oven. In Indiana. Yes, the very one. There are a couple of rooms on the third floors of Wings 1 and 2, which I converted into twin terrariums, at no small cost I might add. In these terrariums, I breed exotic, poisonous plants, tanked pit vipers, African tree frogs, and anything else I come across in nature that might “leave a mark.” I’ve labeled all of these assets “Dorothy” and dedicated both rooms to “Dorothy M. Salucci.”

  Poisonous assets might be necessary someday, you never know. You know, if I’m ever asked to solve a crime involving their venom or such. Or, maybe if someone other than The Doctor helped to kill three girls and two unborn babies and thrown them in a quarry. Who knows…

  The Dorothy M. Salucci Terrariums are powerful and lively, exotic, and dangerous, and only a fool would enter unprepared.

  The quarry has long been dredged and drained. A team of landscapers filled the empty cavern with rocks and the top eight feet with vitamin-rich planting soil. For years, I’ve curated an amazing rose garden in the middle of the forest. There are lots of thorns among the tempting reds, sun-kissed yellows, blushing pinks, and special strain of blacks.

  If you were to walk outside my no longer white building—now painted blue—you’d see my company sign just below a triangular window. It says, “15/33, Inc.”

  And this is exactly what I’m doing right now as Vanty hauls his Audi down the dirt road far too fast for my taste. I’ve never switched off my Love switch for Vanty for even one millisecond, and because of this I am perennially traumatized by just about everything he does. When he plays basketball, will he suffer a concussion from all the fouling? When his best friend moved to another school, would Vanty make new friends? When he goes out with anyone other than me, if he were to eat a hot dog or a grape or a fistful of popcorn or any other lethal food, will anyone know how to perform the Heimlich—which is a recurring required course in our household, run by a paramedic I hire to come once a quarter. Can’t practice this too much.

  Vanty is getting out of his car, grabbing his backpack, and doing a pressed, closed-mouth smile to me, looking like a ten-year-old in my eyes, even though he is every minute of seventeen. All I want to do is kiss his creamy cheeks so as to feel once again the peachiness of his infancy, which no matter the years, no matter the lines on his face, will never fade to the feel of my mother’s lips.

  “Ah, Vanty, you sweet boy,” I say.

  “Ma, I’m seventeen.”

  “Whatever,” I say, returning to my regular, clinical self so he’ll stop his forward movement away from me. “Listen, Hal called in sick and we’ve got a big pile of fingerprints to clear. I’m going to need you to prep those slides for the university case. I’m not going to get to those until late tonight.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he says, patting my shoulder and pecking my cheek, as if my scientific analysis of major crimes is the most insignificant task in his easy-breezy-beautiful-cover-boy life.

  If any other human in my employ so nonchalantly considered dirt samples from a murder happening on the campus of a major Ivy League university—hint, starts with an H and is in Cambridge, Massachusetts—I’d probably stare them into a trembling apology. But Vanty. Vanty has this unique quality, an asset of his own. And it’s not just me, not just because I’m his forever heartbroken mother. It’s with everyone he meets. He snakes you in like a charismatic megalomaniac. This one time, his little friend Franky went grocery shopping with us. They were about ten. Franky pocketed a 3 Musketeers, unbeknownst to me or Vanty. When the alarms sounded and a rent-a-guard stopped us in the parking lot, it was Vanty, not me, who controlled the situation. After much yelling by the guard and crying by Franky, the Musketeers having fallen on the tar, Vanty stepped to the scene, picked up the bar, handed it to the guard, and without a stitch of youthful sweetness and without a stitch of condescension, spoke to the cop as if he were his equal, assuming in his tone a matched intellect. The guard’s nametag said, “Todd X.”

  “Todd, I’m really sorry about this. Franky here, he’s my friend, and my mom and I are just trying to cheer him up. His grandma died last night and I think, Franky right, I think 3 Musketeers were her favorite? Right, Franky? What were you going to do, put this in her casket?”

  Any other pre-pre teen who’d delivered these same lines would have sounded like a total puke. But Vanty, and this is hard to illustrate, his delivery was as if he’d very simply known Todd his entire life and Todd was just another respected person in his life, just as respected as himself. Equality is what I think Vanty conveys and what he’s taught me, because I study his techniques constantly. The perception of equality neutralizes and then entraps people. My theory is that this act plays to people’s egos, and once played, they’re sucked into Vanty’s physical appearance, further satisfying their ego that someone so beautiful would take the time to talk to them.

  Todd ended up paying for the candy bar.

  I never could have pulled it off like Vanty—he’s like melted chocolate on top of a Bundt cake, a perfect-fitting, sugary cover.

  Was I mad that he lied? No. There are problems. And there are solutions. Problems and solutions. If Lenny were there, our moral compass may have been forced another way. But since he wasn’t, we went with Vanty’s solution. All in.

  Is Vanty devious? I don’t think so, but I do watch. And I worry. I think he’s actually quite loving, but I want to be sure.

  Vanty and I have two long-term inside jokes. And millions more short-term inside jokes. W
e laugh a lot, Vanty and I. Ever since he was a baby, I’ve sat in his room and either read to or talked with him before he coils in to his own sleep routine. I can tell Lenny listens in to our serious talks or tittering laughter by leaning his ear against the wall dividing our room from Vanty’s room. Knowing this comforts Lenny, comforts me. Again, an angel with a hand on my head.

  One of our long-running inside jokes is that before reading for the night, I pick an arbitrary time limit on how long I’ll read and then set a vibrating timer that goes off in my pocket. “I’ll read for 21.5 minutes,” for example. When the timer goes off, I stop, playing a joke about being literal, then I close the book, which inevitably leaves a scene completely uncompleted or a thought undeveloped, or a sentence half-read, and thus, Lenny hanging. When I very first did this when Vanty was five, he cried because he was so enchanted with what was happening in the book, and he thought I was going to make him wait until the next night. And though I was only kidding about finishing my reading for the night, I was immensely relieved that my little boy felt so strongly for a story so as to cry real tears. Which meant he wasn’t like me. He wouldn’t be separate from the world, like me. The next time I stopped a story short because my arbitrary timer went off, he laughed at my lame joke about being literal, which is something I am often truly accused of, and so Vanty understood I was really teasing at my own expense. So he laughed. And I laughed. And we laugh every single time. I hope we still have this very personal joke going when I’m sixty and he visits with my grandchildren.

  Our other long-standing inside joke is that we speak fake French when we’re in public. But with Vanty, because of his disarming charisma, people actually believe he is speaking real French. Even a French woman once asked him, in broken English, what province he was from! While I do enjoy playing this con with Vanty, just for our own personal amusement and to fortify our insular life together, I have begun to worry about Vanty’s heightened social abilities and whether they actually make him a man apart, separate from the world like me, but in a different way. I’m not really sure how far he can carry this skill or what it means or whether it’s good or bad. With respect to Vanty, I try hard not to fall prey to my typical mode of categorizing everything and everyone in neat black and white boxes; rather, I work hard at allowing him organic growth. But now I wonder if certain aspects of him should be tamed or refined or reined in. Is it right that he reads body language like he breathes air? Is it normal that he commands a group to silence just by walking by and looking in? Did the principal just tell me last night that her “advisory board” is made up of the PTO President, the Superintendent, and Vanty?

  Despite Vanty’s exceptional people skills, it is still Lenny in this trifecta of ours who remembers the family birthdays and the right Christmas presents to buy for grandparents and friends. Vanty doesn’t go to people, they come to him. And I’m beginning to worry that this is somehow a scary, although useful, quality. Or maybe I’m just obsessing over every possible thing that might harm my precious boy someday and really, he’s just perfectly fine. Will I ever be settled and calm, easy in and out of his presence? Here he is before me, giving me that mock annoyed and loving eye roll again.

  “Get your ass inside and get my dirt slides together. And if you have any homework, you better get it done now, Mr. Smartypants. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Oh, we’re having homemade burritos for dinner—Dad’s making them. So I guess you got your way again because I told him if he made those damn footballs one more time I was going to starve myself.” Vanty starts to walk away, but I stop him, not ready to release him from standing before me. “Oh oh, and Grand Nana is coming in from Savannah tomorrow, so make sure your pit trap of a bedroom is clean,” I say, shooing him inside. “And if you want to talk about One Hundred Years of Solitude tonight, let’s do that. I’ll read you my favorite passage for exactly 1.2 minutes.”

  “Jun-a se in qua a twie,” he says in a very convincing fake French.

  “Yeah, yeah, I love you too. Now go.”

  I watch my beautiful, untroubled—although possibly frightening—boy glide inside 15/33 Headquarters. I begin to dead head the purple wave petunias in the blue pots by the entrance so as to force away the sad tremble in my chin. He’ll be gone to college next year, I remind myself.

  To love someone so much you are heartbroken just to look at them. This, is to have a child.

  I said there were three things to mention. Lenny. My company. And now, the last, and surely the least, Brad.

  Vanty, Lenny, and Nana are the only ones for whom I keep the Love switch on all the time, without any moment of “off.” For others, I’ll switch on sometimes. And for others, Love is never on, only vast, unending hate and even, a distinct emotion of homicide. If it weren’t for Lenny’s angel touch on my head, several more people on this planet would be no more.

  It’s a new day at 15/33. After polishing this manuscript one last time, I lock it away, only to be opened and shared upon my death, just as Liu rolls up to our building. Liu’s wife, Sandra, jumps out of the passenger side of their Ford F-150, the only vehicle Liu will drive anymore. I think he’s on his fourth since I met him. Sandra is making ridiculous faces at him, asking him what best demonstrates a man’s reaction to eating a “shit burger.” As is a daily occurrence, she’s working on some new sketch.

  Personally, I think a man chewing a shit burger would look like a cat does when dry-heaving a hairball, so as Sandra reaches the red kitchen door of 15/33, I show her my best impersonation of a cat hacking up a hairball. My own cat, Stewie Poe, meows disapproval at my theatrics. He’s stretched in all his flabby stomach glory and reaching a lazy paw in an annoyed way because I’ve disturbed his first of thirty naps of the day. His gray fur sprawls from his resting body, and he looks like a ruling Pharoah in the way he lounges on the turquoise rug in front of the ocean-blue hutch—as close as he can be to his cat dish. Stewie is a real pain in my ass, jumping on my face when I sleep, loudly demanding chopped filet and white tuna fish instead of regular cat food. I’ve got no one to blame but me. I’ve always had real awe for how expertly cats expose their distaste of almost everything, how nonchalant they are in dismissing even the hand that feeds them. So, I pretty much cater to whatever Stewie wants. But I make him wear pink bells on his purple collar as my revenge.

  “Hey there, girl, you ready?” Liu asks me, standing by his still-running truck.

  “Yeah, yeah, I like it. Do it again,” Sandra says to me, as she passes through the kitchen doorway, approving of my shit-burger face.

  “Liu, hang on, let me grab my coat,” I say, and I grab my white safari-style jacket, hanging on the red pegs by the door. As I do, I again demonstrate my hopefully comic face to Sandra.

  “Perfect. That’s how I’ll write it then for this script. You guys don’t be too cruel today,” she says as she pours herself a mug of coffee from the pot I brewed just for her. She heads into her writer’s office after crouching with her mug to stroke Stewie’s fat chin.

  I walk backwards out the door, watching Sandra, continuing my contorting face-act for her, and hop into Liu’s truck.

  “She said not to be too cruel today,” I say.

  Liu bounces his nose up as he swallows back a smile.

  We’re pretty much going to be as cruel as we can be today.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

  Liu’s in his late fifties now. He’s got a thick head of gray hair. He still works out like he’s got some federal mission that requires him to chase kings of kidnapping through forests, so his body remains compact; his forearm muscles flex as he turns the wheel of the truck.

  I know what he’s thinking about, and I’m thinking it too. It was the bed of a truck, just like this truck, seventeen years ago, in which Brad slid down his scarf gag by aggressively using his tongue and teeth and tried to avoid our punishments by sucking gasoline from the tube of a spare gasoline can, down on his knees and with his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs tied to a hook. It was Lola w
ho smelled the opened gas on the air, and Liu who ran and slapped Brad’s face so hard we thought he broke his jaw. We’d been sketching out the capture of The Doctor and The Obvious Couple, standing in a circle by the hood of the truck, when, fortunately, the heavy odor rode the cold air like water down a steel slide—easy and fast. If Brad had succeeded in exiting the world, I would have had to wait until my death to trudge into hell to torture him. Thankfully, I don’t have to wait.

  Liu and I have made this particular trip two times in seventeen years. This is our third. We have to make this trip whenever Brad attempts to plead for clemency, beg for a shot at the parole board. Sometimes Brad needs to be reminded of what awaits him outside and how very lucky he is being tortured on the inside. Liu and I have friends in the Indiana State Prison system and also some informant-lifers for whom we may or may not have done a few favors. So we know everything. Literally everything.

  We made a deal with Brad back in that truck: he allows himself to live, and we wouldn’t seek death. Instead, we’d hand him over to the state for life, but under our unofficial supervision. Back then, in the heat of his capture, Brad was most distraught about the prospect of not death, but death row, a sentence he surely would have suffered: recall, all the young bodies in the quarry. When we presented the deal to Brad, a little glimmer awoke in him, a kernel of hope, just enough to make him want to live, which is exactly what we wanted. You could say Brad took a very special kind of plea deal, one Liu and I gave, and, as such, the special Indiana prison where Brad now stews was converted to my very own.

  Liu doesn’t take much convincing in aiding me in my enduring commitment to taunt Brad. He’s been hardened ever since his brother Mozi failed at his third suicide five years ago. Sometimes I worry about Liu, and how he’ll work all night on any of the cases we’re hired to consult on—but then I switch off any worry emotion when I walk into his and Sandra’s office and see her draping her body beside him, drawing him cartoons of his wrinkled brow. Some people accept their lot in life, go with it, persevere, and some of these people are rewarded with a good partner who props them up to climb every tree they need to climb in order to hunt and weed out every demon they seek to find.