Richard stood in his driveway, his arms folded across his chest, and gazed at the police cars and the mobile crime scene van. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour and he was cold. He hadn’t bothered to get a jacket when they had all left for the police station a while back. His younger brother was on his way back to Brooklyn by now; all of the guests were straggling home.
He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. Not yet. He needed a moment. But he was curious as to what awaited him, and so he went to a window, crunching the pine nuggets beneath his shoes and pushing aside branches from the dwarf hydrangea. From there he peered into the living room. He presumed the corpses were long gone, and, indeed, he didn’t see the bodyguard who had been killed there. His blood, however, was everywhere. The couch, upholstered with a beige brocade patterned with dark blue shadows of flowers, looked as if it had been sitting on a slaughterhouse kill floor. In the sepulchral, hungover darkness of his mind, Richard saw a cow on a stalled conveyor belt bleeding out above it and wondered briefly where he had ever seen such a thing. Then he remembered. PBS. A documentary. He recalled the thug at the moment of his death and why so much of the blood had wound up on the couch: the man, a Russian with an almost comically bad Boris Badenov accent, had been leaning over its back, reaching for something that had fallen onto one of the cushions. A cigarette lighter, Richard thought—the first of two glimmering flashes, one silver and the other steel. They’d been getting ready to leave, Richard presumed, the four of them. The bodyguards and the girls. He’d just brought…Alexandra…downstairs. And then the blond one—so tiny, so very, very small, her weight gossamer when she had been straddling him on the couch, pressing her breasts into his face, her nipples erect—had appeared out of nowhere, a raptor, throwing herself onto the Russian’s back and plunging a knife deep into the right side of his neck. The fellow had reared up like a horse and tried throwing her off of him, but already he was gagging, his eyes wide. Richard had watched (they all had watched, studies in suburban male impotence) as his blood had sprayed like the paint on one of those pinwheel paint machines for little kids at community carnivals, soaking primarily the couch but also splattering the spines of the novels on the white built-in bookshelves on the nearby wall and—when the bodyguard lashed out one last time before collapsing onto the rug—the Hudson River School landscape by a minor but still immensely talented painter from the nineteenth century. A wannabe Bierstadt. The girl had reached into the dead man’s jacket, grabbing his wallet, his pistol from his holster—dear God, Richard recalled thinking, the guy was actually wearing a holster with a gun—and the wads of twenties and fifties and (yes) hundreds she and her partner had earned. Then she looked at the rest of the men briefly (in hindsight, Richard couldn’t decide whether that glance was dismissive or regretful) and rushed into the front hallway. Her arms were tattooed with the pimp’s blood. There was some on her neck and her cheek. It was like she was a five-year-old who had been finger-painting. A moment later, all of the men at the party, stupefied by the way the hooker had gone banshee, some afraid that they would be next, had heard the gunshots—two pops, a few seconds between them, the noises not deafening but still horrifying because it was the middle of the night and because everyone knew what the sounds were. What they meant. It was then that Richard saw the girl (like her partner, so petite) with the black hair, a gun in one hand and a key ring in the other. He had no idea if it was the same gun the blonde had taken from the dude she had just stabbed, or a second weapon. She, too, surveyed the room before climbing back into her clothes—some of them, anyway, because through the window Richard could see the white blouse in which she’d arrived, draped on one of the living room chairs—and disappearing with the blonde into the night. None of the men thought to stop them. Richard guessed that all of them were, like him, utterly dazed. And, without question, terrified. It was only when they heard the car’s engine roar to life in the driveway that any of them stopped cowering. Because, in fact, they had been cowering. They had.
It was his brother, Philip, who spoke first, murmuring, “What the fuck. Seriously, what the fuck just happened?”
But he knew. They all did.