The Glass Lies

I.

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. I looked at it, as I had every morning for 37 years. It was the image of a kind man - the sort who gave five dollars to panhandlers and smiled at baristas. The face was unlined and ageless. It was an arresting face. Not pretty-boy handsome, but well-chiseled and distinguished. Trustworthy, my customers called it.

It was the tired face of someone who had worked late getting things done.

The mirror was mine, gifted to me by my mother, now dead. Her grandfather had picked it up in the 1890s at an estate sale in Grosvenor Square, London. It was perhaps three feet by two, ormolu, exuberantly detailed and lovingly crafted. Despite its age, it showed no sign of wear. It could have been carved yesterday if the artisans of that time were still alive.

"Dad, Mom says breakfast is ready," yelled my 15-year-old, Victoria. She was my older child. The smart one of the family, we all agreed. She got it from my wife, Julia - 'Wholia' as she was a Chilango. A proud citizen of Mexico City washed up on a Brooklyn beach.

I had married young. We had to. Because back then, if the unexpected happened, you wed to pretend you had intended it. Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter and have never regretted marrying her mother. It was the lack of control that I minded. I like to be in charge.

I was a thrifty man. With the money I made as a commercial realtor, I bought a run-down brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I worked nights, tending bar. That money I put into the market. My timing was right. America had just elected its first Black President and the economy was in disarray. But no depression lasts. And I was minting money.

“You had better come, Dad. Mom’s muttering.” Talking to herself in Spanish was how Julia conveyed irritation.

“Lo siento, carina,” I said to Julia as I entered the kitchen. “Something smells good.”

Julia laded my plate. I poured some coffee. And sat at the table and opened my iPad. The news was the usual. Some politician was lying about something. A corpse had been found in a Soho alley. A rare tornado had struck Los Angeles. The earlier-than-expected heat would continue in New York as the April showers stayed a rumor. And still no word on why some 19-year-old had shot up a school, killing 14. Same old, same old.

“Can you take the girls to school today, Basil?”

“Sure. What do you have going on?”

“I have to receive a delivery.”

Julia was an interior designer. It was an accidental career. When we were first married, she had used her esthetic eye to make our home distinctly ours. She had taken the ill-kept brownstone with peeling plaster and sagging moldings, and room-by-room created art. I was her grunt. I rewired and replumbed in my few spare hours. People noticed.

They came to her for advice. Someone said she should start a business. The word got out. And now she was doing three or four projects a year. Her current client was a Colombian couple looking to perfect their high-rise aerie in Brooklyn Heights.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll get the dishes."

Which I did, as Victoria and her younger sister Consuela - Vicky and Connie - packed their backpacks. We left the house. Got into the car. And I drove them the 12 blocks to school at Bishop Loughlin.

From there I drove to my office near City Hall in downtown Manhattan. I still work in commercial real estate. However, I no longer negotiate leases for mom-and-pop businesses in storefronts in Brooklyn. Now I helped companies - mostly financial - expand and downsize their office needs as the times dictate.

I had ambition. When my business had become big enough, I would leave the grit to the three assistants I had worked up to. and walked around the Financial District and points north. My hero was the self-made, real estate goddess, Barbara Corcoran, and my bible her book, “If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails.”

I read everything I could. Talked to every real estate person who spared the time. I doubt many know the alleys and side streets of downtown as well as I do.

Today, I was meeting Savannah Jones. Sam represented some Emiratis who were looking to expand their footprint. We did business over lunch. I liked Savanah. She was a straight shooter - not looking to work the angles. She was thankfully realistic about what her clients wanted and what they could get. And you could trust her.

Too often you get the good-time cowboys, full of bravado and bullshit. Too many movies portray the financial world as a place where egos fueled by coke, make big deals on a lie and a prayer. But the reality is different. The world is run by mathematicians and algorithms. A good line may open the door, but the real players were data-driven pirates.

We came to a handshake agreement. Now it was the turn of the lawyers, who would justify their million-dollar fees with stacks of paper that no one would ever read. Have you ever closed on a house? Multiply that by the highest number you imagine - now you’re close.

Business done, I walked. It was how a stayed in the game. With the internet, you could find the same things everybody else found. The secret to staying ahead was to learn the stuff other people didn’t know.

I stopped at Frank’s place. You had to be a member. It was where the finance crowd hung out. Not the CEOs and SVPs. The next rung down, where the winners of the analyst wars drank. The money business hires for attrition. And these were hard players who had grabbed the brass ring. And where there was money there was sex.

Financial companies make noise about diversity, equality, and inclusion, but it is still a man’s world. And Frank’s was full of modelesque young women looking for whatever it is they were searching for. Many were regulars. I said hello to those I knew and nodded at some of the others.

Time passed and then I was home. It had been a long day - not as long as some - and I felt a sense of accomplishment. Julia was used to my variable hours. Most days I was home by seven. Others could end at eleven or later.

Something hot and spicy was in a pot. I made a wrap and savored the heat of the Mexican food. Something this Brooklyn boy with Scottish roots thought was to die for.

The next day was similar. My life was like a salad bar. It was the same every day, yet the combinations were infinite. The day after that the same. This went on for a couple of weeks. And then I had one of those uphill days where every task fought back.

I was frustrated. I felt that there was something I was missing. Superficially, everything appeared tickety-boo. Underneath I felt empty. Like I was out of gas. My battery was running low and I needed charging. So I walked. I didn’t pay much mind to where I was going and eventually, the feeling wore off.

It was a late night. Julia was already in bed. So I slept in the spare room after showering the grime off. The mind is a rum place. That afternoon I had felt incomplete. Now I was satisfied. I’ll take it.

The next morning it was raining. A welcome relief. It was Saturday and the girls were squabbling. I had taken the day off and told them we would go to the movies so their mother could have time to herself.

Breakfast was leisurely. My iPad told me that the temperatures were reverting to the norm for April. A gunman had gunned down worshipers at a Shabbat service in a Chicago synagogue. The stock market had a good week. Someone had been murdered in Little Italy. And the ex-President had threatened some prosecutors. Same old, same old.

2.

The police had found the body in an abandoned lot. The development company that owned the weedy expanse had planned to build an apartment block. Then they went belly up. Creditors were snarling at each other in court as they picked over the corpse. One day a building would go up. But for now, the place was surrounded by a dilapidated plywood barrier, the padlock on the gate long gone.

Detective Janelle Williams estimated the corpse belonged to a woman in her mid-twenties. She was lying on her back. Her arms were folded across her chest as she gazed upward, without purpose. From her torso down, she was surrounded by drying blood. Presumably her own. The medical examiner would confirm that.

The victim's clothing was stylish, but mall-bought, not Madison Avenue. She didn’t read like a working girl. Her hair and nails pointed to the bridge and tunnel crowd who poured into the City from the Outer Boroughs and New Jersey for Friday evening pursuits.

“What do we got, Jan?” The detective turned to see her boss, Seargent Andy Paklov standing back gazing at the body, his hands jammed into the pockets of a non-descript raincoat.

“First glance, it’s gotta be another one,” she replied. “Same MO. Same victim type.”

“Did CSU find anything?”

“Only if we’re lucky. Everybody and their aunt have pissed and puked here. The ground is as firm as rock. Maybe they’ll find something on her clothes.”

As they talked the medical examiner took charge of the body. It was bagged and loaded into a discretely marked, windowless van. And driven off. The examiner promised a preliminary report later in the morning. Friday nights were well-staffed by the city because crime loves weekends.

They had caught a break. The body had been found shortly after death by two drunk lovers as they fumbled for happiness in each other’s clothing. The romance had died when the secretary, who had encouraged her lover’s advances by stepping back toward the deeper shadow, had tripped over the body.

They stood, sobered up and unhappy, under the glare of the crime scene lights. Not that they had much to offer. They were unlikely suspects. After they left their contact info, the detective dismissed them. She promised the man, who she saw in the glare was older than his date, she would not involve his wife unless she had to.

At 11 that morning, Williams got an email with the ME’s report attached. The victim had been drugged. Her death was the result of a deliberate slash of the femoral artery on the inside of her upper thigh. Otherwise, the body was uninjured. She hadn’t had sex, forced or otherwise.

The only discordant note was that she was a broken cross in her hand. Which was likely not hers as her name was Esther Bernstein. She was from Bayside and worked for a furniture store near City Hall.

She had lived with her now distraught parents who confirmed that Essy was a fun-loving girl who often stayed late in the city at the end of the work week to hang with her girlfriends.

Her parents were wrong this time. Esther’s friends said that she had not been with them. That she rarely was. Her Friday nights had become a mystery to them. No one she knew had seen her after she left her office at 5:30 Friday evening.

There was no doubt now they were pursuing a serial killer. It could be no coincidence that three women were drugged and killed, each two weeks apart, by a surgical cut to a major artery. All three had been arranged to stare sightlessly upwards, arms folded and holding a broken cross.

3.

The movie was a superhero film. The girls knew the back story of every character and they had followed the plot lines as religiously as a fan of professional wrestling. The format was the usual. Good people with inhuman strength and other talents would battle bad people with the same attributes. Good always won, eventually - or at least until the next installment. It made them happy, which made me happy. And blessedly it only took around two hours.

Dinner was pizza and soda at Luigi’s Original Italian Pizza. Luigi was long gone and the establishment was owned by Albanians who hired Mexicans to work the oven. Nobody cared because that’s how life is.

Movies are made by computer. Pizza is made by Chicanos. The line between fact and reality, tradition and fad blurred by art and expediency. Forgive my dime-store philosophy. That’s the sort of garbled thinking that clouds my mind. Most of the time I'm on the ball. Other times I can disappear for hours without knowing where I am.

4.

Months passed and the body count mounted. The New York Post’s editors prayed every day that this week would produce another young lovely sliced down too early, and discarded in the city’s fetid wastelands. New York’s population buzzed with a frisson of fear not experienced since 1977 gave the world Saturday Night Fever and the Son of Sam.

The NYPD threw everything they had at finding the elusive killer. But months passed with no results. Then they got their break. Near the last body, a security camera outside a deli recorded footage of the victim with a man.

She had her armed linked through his. She appeared to need his strength to support her. She was laughing and happy. He seemed equally at ease. They were two people enjoying the late night together, admiring the bodacious splendor and bright colors of the hothouse flower display. It was how New York does nature. Big and bold and impermanent.

The brass at One Police Plaza agonized over the question of publicity. Would publishing his picture spark a murderous rage? Or would the likely killer be soon identified and caught? The Commissioner offered her advice. It is better to do something and be wrong than not do something and permit wrong.

The die was cast. The picture was published.

5.

I woke up and did what I did every morning. I showered and dressed, and checked my appearance in the mirror. The stranger was gone and I saw myself. I felt the weight of the world slough off and walked downstairs with vim.

Julia noticed. “You look like the cat that caught the mouse,” she said.

“Not just one,” I replied. “Maybe ten or more.”

I got breakfast and coffee and sat down with my tablet. There I found the Post’s blaring headline “PICTURE OF A KILLER???” above a grainy photograph of a couple looking at a sidewalk flower display. I recognized him. He was the man who had been in my mirror.

I stared at the picture for a long time. It was odd because I recognized her. I can remember the evening I spent with her. Her name was Vivian. She was a graduate student at Barnard who liked to hang out at Frank’s.

We had talked. She was as smart as a whip and as beautiful as a nun. I thought about our time together. We laughed and walked. We went further west than I normally go. Then she got tired and I suggested she lie down.

We were at the Irish Hunger Memorial over by the Hudson River. The breeze off the water is cool even in July. Viv didn’t mind. She lay back on the Irish grass, symbolizing the soil of the old country. A dismal island the starving had deserted for opportunities in the New World. Not that she was paying history much mind.

I looked at her with fondness. Love, actually. We had only just met but I felt that we were destined for intimacy. As she lay there peacefully, her breath shallow, I gently lifted her dress, only as high as I needed to. I didn’t want to rush things or take liberties. My feelings for her were too tender.

The moment ripened and I unsheathed my scalpel. I pressed the blade against the soft flesh. And falling free as you might from a plane before your parachute opened, I consummate our relationship.

I lay there in the afterglow enjoying the closeness of our bodies. But nothing good lasts forever. I rose and carefully folded the small tarp I used for protection. You can never be too careful, especially with people you have only just met. I stripped off the long black latex gloves and rolled them up with the other items.

Fondly, and with gratitude that this angel had decided to share herself with me, I made sure she was comfortable. I straightened her legs and restored her modesty. I crossed her hands on her chest and pressed the broken cross on her. I left her thinking of a poem from Oliver Goldsmith

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can sooth her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom—is to die.

After breakfast, I went back upstairs. In the mirror, I saw myself - my true self - not the imposter that had occupied the frame for so long.

In the reflection was a picture of monstrous horror. Every sickness man has suffered scared the face and deformed the body. Flesh sagged with dissipation, green in its fecundity, black in its evil. Eyes burned back at me with millennia of war and pestilence in the icy heat of their stare.

It was revolting. The image of a pestilence that only Satan could sire. I felt the power of my immorality, the freedom of my sin.

I heard the sirens. They had come for me but I was no longer there. My journey continued. They were too late.

Cops came running up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door open. Guns unholstered they crashed into the room. There they found a corpse, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage, lying on the floor surrounded by shards of glass from a broken mirror, with a knife in his heart. And only by his clothes could they tell who it was.

Several crossed themselves and muttered imprecations. To no avail. There was no human agency that could wash this sin away.

Afterword.

Julia moved back to Mexico with the children and buried the past. But unknown to her, Vicky had kept a photograph of me. She framed it and kept it stashed at the back of the top shelf of her closet. Occasionally she would take it down and stare at it - and smile, waiting her turn.