Page 21

21

Murderers at Work

Jake

When Dodi steps into the lobby she’s wearing a dress like widow’s weeds—a lacy knee-length black sheath. Her tattoos glimmer dimly through the netting of the sleeves, and her lips are the color of sudden, painful death.

“There’s been an accident,” I tell her when she’s close, jerking my head in the direction of the crowd outside.

“That’s too bad,” she says disinterestedly, like it’s too bad it’s just an accident and not something a little more premeditated, and we walk in the opposite direction across the lobby and out into the night.

We traipse along the sensory hellscape that is the Strip, the street crawling with life like a log was rolled away to reveal the wriggling insect city underneath. The sky is already black and bottomless, but everything around us glows, flickers, and gleams, sometimes in gaudy Christmas colors. On all sides, signs compete for our attention and our money, and all around us are idiots who think this is fun. Groups of young people, old people, friends taking selfies, couples holding hands. Dodi studies everything around us like an anthropologist observing a strange cultural phenomenon, and I study her.

Would Dodi snarl in disgust if I reached out and took her hand? Or would she squeeze tight, digging her sharp nails into my skin?

Dodi spots the bill for Murderers at Work first. She presses ahead, and I follow, showing the tickets to the doorman.

Inside, the stage rises on one side and on the floor are tables. At table sixteen Dodi slings her purse onto a chair and it clunks, but she acts like nothing’s amiss, like it’s normal to tote bricks around. She orders us cocktails, but she’s twitchy all the while, glancing around this way and that, like she expects to see someone she knows. Or be seen by someone she knows.

And then it seems like exactly that happens. A thin, sharp-faced woman at the table just diagonal to us turns and looks directly in Dodi’s eyes. Her face flickers in recognition, then slackens into a studied neutral expression. She swivels back around, and next to me, Dodi freezes.

That’s when the lights dim. I want to ask her who the woman is, but a clip of familiar music plays, the xylophone jingle at the start of every Murderers at Work podcast, and two figures appear onstage in matching shirts that say Dead in Las Vegas . The room erupts, and one makes a production of casually sipping her cocktail while the other curtseys and smiles bashfully. I don’t recognize them until I hear their voices.

“All right, Murderheads,” Aya says, and it takes several minutes for the cheering and clapping to die down.

“As you know from reading the giant freaking sign at the door, we’re recording tonight, because we’re celebrating five hundred episodes …”

Cheering erupts.

“…and to kick off, we’re going to play Name that Killer!”

The room loses it.

Bex continues. “If you’ve listened to our live event recordings, you know the drill! Each table will send up one representative when called. Send us your best, your funniest, your most dramatic. Act, mime, monologue—whatever you want—and the rest of us…will guess the murderer! We can’t stop you from using your phones to look up the name, but we hope your sense of self-preservation will compel you to keep that shit in your pocket. After all, we all know about five hundred ways to deal with you if you don’t!”

“And,” Aya shouts, “look lively! We’re going to see how many we can get through in thirty minutes!” She cups her hands around her mouth and hollers, “Table one, GO!”

A woman from table one sprints across the floor toward the stage, and when I glance over, the sharp-faced woman at the table diagonal to us is watching me over her shoulder.

“Who is she?” I ask Dodi. “The woman at that table?”

“No one,” Dodi says irritably, and quaffs half her cocktail. I know her well enough to know there’s no point in persisting.

“Will you do the Paper Pusher when they call us?” I ask.

Dodi’s eyes dart over to the sharp-faced woman, who’s no longer watching us. “I can’t. They haven’t done an episode on her yet.”

“?‘Her’?”

She gives me a look. “It’s definitely a woman.”

I guess we won’t be making jokes about me being the Paper Pusher anymore. But she has no reason to be so certain. The thing is, I know a little more than most about the Paper Pusher urban legend.

A small woman steps up to the mic and the room falls quiet. She pulls glasses out of her pocket, places them low on the tip of her nose, and says into the mic in a deep, manly voice, “Careful playing Texas Hold’em with me, because my card shark abilities will have you in a chokehold —”

“Ed Scully, the Poker Choker!”

The room erupts in cheers and hoots.

“You don’t know it’s a woman,” I tell Dodi.

“I do know it’s a woman,” she says impatiently.

I’ve been looking forward to revealing that Aunt Laura tidied up four of his “victims,” that I temped at three of the offices where the “murders” happened. Her curiosity in me has always been my only angle, and I’ve been keeping this tidbit in my back pocket to bring out when I needed to.

I lean in to tell her, but she’s not paying attention to me. She twitches and huffs, then she pivots, looking at the faces around us, a captivating thought occurring to her. “I wonder how many murderers are in the audience tonight?”

“What?”

“Active ones. Ones that haven’t been found out. Ones that got off. Ones that have done their time. They’re not all locked up in prison, you know.”

“You want to catch one?”

She gives me a disgusted look. “I don’t have hero fantasies. I just want to meet one.”

“Why?”

“They wouldn’t be in a position to pass judgment, would they?” Pass judgment on what? She swivels around, as if looking for one now. “Where else would you go for a bit of appreciation if you were a killer? This podcast glorifies killers, and these people here—they’re fans. Wannabes. I could get up there and prove it to you.”

There’s no need. A man from table two runs up onto the stage and mimes being trapped in a glass box, to the room’s hooting. These are the people who would have cheered at a hanging two hundred years ago.

“Jonathan Litsz, the Down-to-Clown Drowner!”

The room bursts into laughter. They’re all in on about ten years’ worth of inside jokes. Dodi doesn’t laugh.

“Don’t you glorify murderers?” I ask. “You marinate your brain in true crime.”

She frowns and drags her elegant fingers down the stem of her glass, thinking. “Murder is a very difficult thing to do. Especially when it’s the right thing to do. It’s easier for people who are doing it for the wrong reasons.”

It’s chillingly philosophical in a room full of hooting deviants. Before I can ask her what she means, another man appears onstage. He brandishes an imaginary bag and rings a doorbell, and instantly, someone yells, “Scott Leipke, the Door Dash Slasher!”

“What made you think to bring me here?” she asks, voice low.

“This was the reason you wanted to come to Las Vegas.”

Dodi shakes her head, slowly. “I told you the reason why I needed to come to Las Vegas.” She looks me in the eye, like she’s willing me to recall her reason so she doesn’t have to repeat herself.

“Right. You need to dispose of a body.”

She tips her head to one side, sinuously, exposing her neck in that Dodi way. I search for a retort, but there’s nothing to work with. She’s far too serious.

“You promised you would help me out, if I ever needed.”

I wait for a sharp-toothed little smile, but it doesn’t come.

“Whose body?” I ask, probing for the other half of her joke. She’s silent, and it doesn’t make any sense, but—there’s no way she’s just making a joke. She licks her lips and presses them together. She jerks her chin at the room in general.

“My husband would have found this hysterical. He was completely morbid, too. Like you.”

I shrink, retract, and freeze at that word: “husband.”

“Your…husband.”

“You’ve never asked how he died. I wanted to tell you myself, in my own words, but I know you’ve already figured it out if you brought me here.”

I stare at her. I wonder if my face is as expressionless as hers.

“Tell me in your own words,” I say. I’m a hand puppet using someone else’s voice. “Tell me how he died.”

Is that gratitude in her eyes?

“It wasn’t natural causes,” she says quietly.

The hair on the back of my neck rises.

“Wasn’t an accident, either. His death was deliberate. Calculated. Premeditated.” Her face is savage as she says this. This is a woman who was wronged. This is a woman who had something stolen from her.

She’s a puzzle I’ve been assembling upside down, feeling pieces out, mashing them together, but now I’ve flipped one over and finally noticed a picture on the other side that puts them all together.

“Your husband was murdered.”

She stares at me with eyes harder than diamonds. “Yes.”

In my head a hand reaches out and twists a piece of string around a thumbtack under a photo of a man with blurry, indistinct features.

“And the killer?”

Again, she licks her lips. She’s tense. She’s a coil wound tight. Beyond her, the narrow-faced woman at the other table glances over again, her gaze sharp and probing.

“Prosecution couldn’t pull together a case against her.”

The string is pulled taut and the other end is tacked to a Post-it Note— The killer is a “she”—

I get a flash of a body falling off a balcony, here, in Las Vegas. The Paper Pusher is a “she.” It’s something Dodi knows . I make eye contact with the strange woman, and she turns away from me.

Dodi continues. “And now she’s in Las Vegas, living her best life, in the audience of a true crime podcast live event. What a twisted bitch, right?”

They’re not all locked up in prison, you know. Some of them are here tonight, to gloat. The hand scrawls Paper Pusher on the Post-it.

Other scraps of paper materialize on the idea board. The bill to the Murderers at Work event. The hotel’s packed conference calendar, with attendees from all over the continent. We’re in Las Vegas to dispose of a body. We’re here to take care of the woman who killed Dodi’s husband.

“Is the woman at the other table still staring at me?” Dodi asks.

“No.”

Dodi lets out a breath.

There are so many questions, but the one that comes out is, “You’re capable of murder?”

Relief washes over her face, relief that I’ve understood her, relief that I made that leap on my own.

“Yes. We all are, Jake. You’re capable of murder. You just need a big enough reason.”

She holds my gaze. I’m in Las Vegas with Dolores dela Cruz at a Murderers at Work event, drinking cocktails, while she asks me to be an accomplice in murder.

“What’s a reason big enough for murder?”

Her voice is low, and throaty, and raw. Brittle, and savage, and tender. Her voice is a lot of things. “Love.”

The word takes a second to curl up in my ear. It takes a second longer to realize she’s called me out. She’s seen a shadow inside me that I hadn’t even noticed yet, something dark and scary, that twitches from slumber and stretches its limbs and reveals itself to be several times bigger than I thought. She stares at me, and I stare back, and in this noisy, chaotic space, all I see is her. Her face is rimmed with cool light from the stage, ice blue flecks sparkling in her eyes and on her shiny painted lips. She doesn’t blink.

I would do anything for her, and she knows it.

“I understand,” I say. I understand everything. This twisted flirtation of ours, right from the start—it’s been a job interview while she sizes me up, tests my waters, checks to see if I know what I’m doing, and if I can be properly motivated. I’m a body disposal expert, and I’ve done the job for far lesser reasons. She’s wanted something from me all along, and I don’t mind. I really don’t. She doesn’t love me back, and I don’t even want her to. I just want her to look at me the way she did when I gave her the doll, when I staged our serial killer playdate, when I made plane tickets to Las Vegas magically appear. I want her to look at me like the boring temp identity is just a disguise, like there’s something more to me, something she and I have in common. A secret between the two of us.

“I understand,” I repeat.

She sags with relief when I say it. “I thought you would.” Her hand materializes over mine under the table, and she squeezes it fiercely, like she’s going to wring the blood from it.

“Meeting you was so unexpected, Jake. You knew exactly how to get through to me. You knew I needed to see you’re just as strange and twisted as I am. And I still don’t know what to make of you. Sometimes I still don’t feel ready—you’ve seen that. And I think I panic or something, and I get so angry. It feels disloyal to him, to move on, and to live my life. But…”

She swallows. Painfully, it seems.

“I’m ready now. It took me a long time to get to this point.” She presses her lips together. “You made this trip finally happen for me. You snapped your fingers and made it happen. It’s time. I’m ready for closure, Jake.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

I shiver and nod. “Where?”

“I need some help with that part.”

“I’ll take care of it for you.” I want to say I’ll take care of you.

“It’s something I need to do myself,” she says. “But…I want you to help me.”

“No. You can’t. You can’t do it,” I tell her, and she stares at me, bewildered. “I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if I do it.”

And then I say it to her. I tell her the secret that’s been scratching with splintered claws at the underside of my floorboards. I tell her the secret I haven’t told anyone.

“I’m going to be dead soon, anyway.”

The room erupts into cheers when I say it, and I startle, but Dodi doesn’t even register the noise.

“You’re dying,” she says. “You’re dying .”

“Yes.”

She pulls her hand back from mine like she’s touched fire.

“How long do you have?”

“Table sixteen!” a voice calls out from the stage.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be around long enough to take care of your husband’s murderer.”

“?‘It doesn’t matter,’?” she echoes. She shakes her head, slowly, stunned. “You’re dying , and you think…you think I want you to kill my husband’s murderer.”

“TABLE SIXTEEN!” the voice calls again.

Dodi pushes back from the table, and I make to stand, too, but she stops me and slips away in the dark. The woman at the other table watches all this, then leans in and whispers something to her tablemates.

I regret letting her go a second later. I can’t see which direction she went in. I don’t know if she’s coming back. I stand up again, and someone behind me huffs and leans dramatically to one side to let me know I’m an asshole.

“Dodi!” I hiss, and a man shushes me, and—

There she is. Dodi.

I watch her step out of the lip of blue shadow and into the spotlight onstage. She doesn’t blink away the light. She scowls into it, clutching her big, heavy purse to her stomach. The woman at the other table goes deathly still.

“Name this killer,” Dodi breathes into the mic.

The room descends into awed silence. There’s something different about this speaker, and everyone feels it in their bones. Faces swivel to her, and in the darkened room, the whites of strangers’ eyes glint eerily in the blue light from the stage, like the reflective eyes of night creatures.

“I’m a newlywed, halfway through my MBA, married to a statistician who can count cards. He loves Las Vegas, although I always refuse to go with him for his tournaments. I like to have a few stubborn hills to die on. That’s my prerogative. He and I are looking at houses, and thinking about getting a dog, and starting a family, maybe, and life is fucking perfect. There’s just one problem: his back hurts.”

The people who came before Dodi were comedic, all in, working for their Golden Globe nomination. Dodi on the other hand is a terrible actress, and the room is uncomfortably quiet. No one is standing and pointing. No one is calling out names. It’s just Dodi, reciting her piece without inflection. When she stands up there, she’s just herself: irritable, bored, vicious. Cruelly beautiful.

“Lung cancer, stage four. We’re stubbornly hopeful for a year, even though he’s a statistician and he should know better—but then they find brain mets. He feels differently about that. It’s different when it’s your brain. Your brain is you . He gets headaches. He’s confused. He can’t do numbers anymore. He can’t play cards. One day I watch him make a bowl of cereal. He pours the milk first, and then the cereal. I never could get him to pour his cereal first. Weird, right? But no, the really weird part is that he got the bowl down from the shelf last, after pouring the milk and cereal onto the countertop.

“He looks at me and tells me, ‘I’m done.’ There’s going to be too much pain. Too much loss of dignity. Too much loss of control. Too much for me, his wife, who is visibly cracking. He and I are becoming different people. He’s turning into a stranger as his brain gets sicker and sicker, and I’m turning into whoever I need to be to get through this. The problem is, he’s too weak to do it himself. So he turns to me.”

The entire room is holding its breath. It’s so quiet I feel like everyone around me must be able to hear my heart knocking in my chest.

“You Murderheads really suck tonight,” Dodi breathes into the mic. “Episode sixty-three?”

It’s not that no one recognizes the killer from her monologue. It’s that they all recognize her. The thin-faced woman at the table diagonal to ours stands, and everyone turns to watch as she raises her arm to point at Dodi, specter-like.

She takes a deep breath, and the bottom falls out of my stomach when she says, “Dolores dela Cruz, the Blackjack Widow!”