I studied Lloyd outside the car—his thick fingernails, chipped and worn and yellow as his teeth. Hadn’t he been one of the people to laugh at my father? “Why are you here?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Lloyd shifted his feet, kicking one of his work boots against the curb. Having this conversation through the narrow opening of the window frustrated him, I could tell. But he didn’t say anything about it, leaning forward instead, putting a hand on the roof of the Beetle. “Back when your grandparents were alive, I was the maintenance person around this building. I hung on to the job even when it became a different sort of place. Now that Howie’s back, I’m still here. So like I said, I’m making you the offer before your reporter friend shows up again. You want me to take you to your uncle or not?”
Some instinct warned me not to trust him, to roll up that window and wave him away as if he really were a vagrant begging for money. Even as those thoughts filled my mind, however, my hand reached for the door handle and pushed it open.
Outside the car, I saw that Lloyd was smaller than I realized, not much taller than me, in fact, with a loose belly and long, monkeyish arms that dangled at his sides. Rather than say anything more, he simply motioned with one of those arms. We walked back across the street, and I thought he might pull a key from his paint-splattered jeans for one of the doors out front. Instead, he went to the alley around the side. Before stepping into the shadows, I glanced down the block to see if I might catch a glimpse of Heekin exiting the bodega, our lunch in his hands. No sight of him, though. Considering that I’d dragged us there on what amounted to a lie, and he’d already been kind enough to forgive me, I knew it was wrong to wander off. But it seemed too late to turn back.
Inside that alley, void of garbage cans or graffiti or anything more than a single enormous Dumpster with a motorcycle parked behind it, we came to a stop at a flight of iron stairs. The stairs looked no different than a fire escape, I thought, and after a moment I realized it was a fire escape.
“See that door?” Lloyd pointed one story up. “It’s unlocked. Just go on up and head down the hall. Third door on the right.”
I stood there, not moving.
“Don’t wait for me, Sylvie. If I take you to him myself, he’s going to be pissed. So do me a favor: just act like you figured it out on your own. I’ll consider this one small way of making something up to your father.” With that, Lloyd turned and walked out of the alley. Gone as quickly as he came.
If I allowed myself to hesitate, I knew Heekin might return and find me there. I put my foot on the first of those steps and began climbing. At the top, the metal door swung open easily, and I found myself in the dimmest of hallways. What little light there was inside flickered as I walked along. Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, All About Eve—posters for those films lined the walls. Whenever the lights blinked brighter, I glimpsed old movie stars smiling at me, like ghosts behind glass frames. “Third door on the right,” I whispered again and again, in an attempt to drown out the shhhh in my ear and the tic-tic-tic of my rabbit heart.
When I reached that door, it was open enough for me to see inside a room not much bigger than my bedroom back on Butter Lane. A wooden desk, littered with papers, filled the small space. A reading lamp on top flickered in the same sporadic rhythm as the other lights in the theater. Behind that desk was a narrow cot, the sort my father used to request in our hotel rooms on lecture trips. I looked past the rumpled blankets on top of the cot at the back wall, where milk crates were stacked floor to ceiling—makeshift shelving, I gathered from the clutter they contained.
I stepped into that office or bedroom or whatever it was and waited. From somewhere in the dark of that building, I heard sounds: a clanging pipe maybe, footsteps maybe too. It was difficult to decipher on account of my ear, which distorted things more than usual. I did my best to study the room without touching anything. On the desk lay more work permits like those on the doors downstairs and a calendar with red X’s slashing the days that had passed, blank spaces in the ones yet to come. Inside those milk crates, I saw boxes of cassettes. The handwritten labels made me think of the tapes from my father’s lectures, only these were marked with names and phone numbers. I went over to the cot, where an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sat atop the pillow. On the floor nearby lay a chaos of newspaper clippings:
INFAMOUS MARYLAND COUPLE MURDERED
DEMONOLOGISTS SLAIN BEFORE ALTAR
DEACON AND WIFE VICTIMS OF BIZARRE CHURCH KILLING
“What are you doing here?”
Startled, I turned to see him in the doorway: Howie. When the lights flickered, he appeared to light up for a moment, same as those movie star ghosts in the hallway. He looked thinner than when I’d last seen him, hair clipped close to his scalp, beard gone, his face less ruddy.