FALLEN ANGELS

Kemi C. Amusan

CHAPTER 5: BRIAN’S NIGHT

The apartment was all chrome and glass. Rain battered the windows. Brian Bateman stood at the mirror in his tailored suit, tie straight, shirt pressed, and looked at the man he had worked hard to become. His jaw was tight, but he wasn’t in any hurry.

He crossed to the small bar built into the wall, and set a heavy crystal tumbler on the counter. He  took down the bourbon, the bitters, and a squat jar of demerara sugar. One cube went into the glass. Three dashes of bitters. He pressed the cube against the bottom with the back of a bar spoon until it began to dissolve into the dark liquid. From the freezer he took a single large, clear cube of ice, turned it over in his fingers, and dropped it in.

Then the bourbon. Not too much. He watched the level rise and stopped. He added a little more, reconsidered, and stopped again. He stirred, rotating the spoon around the ice instead of knocking it against the glass. Six turns. A pause. Three more.

He cut a strip of orange peel with a paring knife, taking as little of the white pith as he could, and squeezed it over the drink so the oils spread across the surface. He ran it around the rim and dropped it in. Only then did he lift the glass.

The ice clinked. On the television, Constance Hawkeye was mid-sentence.

Constance was the new CEO of Lilith Group, which now owned Crystal Pictures’ film slate. Her face was flushed and it filled the screen.

“This department is rotten to the core!” she shouted. “And that racist pig, Brian Bateman, needs to be suspended, immediately!”

Brian took a drink and watched her. He wasn’t much interested in what she was saying. He liked having a voice in the room, the rise and fall of it filling the silence, and tonight it happened to be hers. She was furious. Really furious. There was something entertaining about it.

His phone lit up on the desk. Headlines scrolled past, one after another.

Brian Bateman. Anti-Black Killer Cop. Hunting Black Men

The feeds refreshed every few seconds. He glanced at them and left the phone where it was.

Beside it, in the clutter, lay a pair of peach silk panties. He picked them up and turned them over. The signature was stitched into the fabric.

With admiration, Selene.

They had arrived that morning by courier, in tissue paper, with no note. A star of her size, sending underwear to a cop the whole country was calling a killer. It still made him want to laugh.

He smiled and folded them, smoothing one corner with his thumb, and opened the drawer. A black lace thong lay inside with no signature on it. He remembered that one. She had been laughing, sitting on the edge of his bed, and he had asked, low and easy, “You don’t mind if I keep this, do you?” She had answered with a kiss. Beside it lay a pair of silk boxers signed across the waistband in marker. He set Selene’s on top and closed the drawer.

He sat down on the leather sofa. Constance kept going behind him.

He picked up his phone and opened a folder of photographs. Media boss women. He liked pictures of powerful women. Women whose names opened doors, who could make people wait outside them, who decided which careers moved and which ones stalled. There were starlets and models in the folder too, and he liked those as well. But the ones with real weight held him longer.

He found Constance Hawkeye and selected the photo. In the editing application he set it beside a model’s photograph and enlarged her face until it filled the screen. The software mapped her features, points appearing around the eyes, the nose, the jaw. One landed too close to her cheek. He moved it.

He told the tool to keep Constance’s face and change everything else: the body, the clothes, the pose, the expression. The image came back. The jaw was wrong. He narrowed it and softened the chin. He changed the lighting so the face belonged to the body under it. He ran it again.

Better. Not right.

He tried Selene’s photograph, then Priya Voss, then Camille Duarte. He typed softer and younger. He typed more approachable. He swiped through the results, Constance’s face on one body after another, and stopped on one. Too severe still. He wanted the anger gone and the face left recognizable.

It usually felt better than this. Tonight, the images just sat there, flat. He put it down to the day.

On the television, Constance had been joined by Chief Homicide Detective Vincent Clay, who was trying to steer the conversation toward the look-alike murders. The investigation was starting to look like a serial case, but Constance kept dragging it back to the Kyrie shooting.

Kyrie. Brian tried to remember what had happened to him afterward.

Had he died?

It surprised him a little that he couldn’t answer straight away. He searched for it. No. He was alive. In a coma, wasn’t he? He was fairly sure.

He finished the Old Fashioned and got up.

Behind the bottles under the minibar was a second bottle of rye, the one he kept for himself and not for guests. He took it out. He filled an old-fashioned glass with ice and set it aside to chill. In a mixing glass he crushed a sugar cube under three dashes of Peychaud’s, added the rye, then ice, and stirred until the glass frosted. He tipped the ice out of the chilled glass, rolled a little Herbsaint around the inside, and poured off the excess. Then he strained the drink in. He twisted a thin strip of lemon peel over it, ran it around the rim, and dropped it in.

He took the Sazerac back to the sofa.

It was stronger than the Old Fashioned. He knew that before the first swallow settled, and drank it anyway, leaning back into the leather as the warmth spread through him. Constance was still angry. If anything, she was getting angrier.

“We have to remember,” Vince said, his voice measured and deliberately reassuring, “that while the Kyrie shooting is a serious matter, we’re also dealing with a much larger situation. These Copycat murders are getting more disturbing. We may be looking at a serial pattern far more organized than anyone first imagined.”

Constance turned to him. “And?”

“And perhaps we should focus on the actual crisis at hand. We have an active predator executing people with distinct signature. That is the priority right now, Constance. looking for a shadow plot against minority folks is just distracting us. Not everything is a conspiracy. And an active serial killer can not be a minor side note to your political agenda.”

“I didn’t say conspiracy.”

“You implied it.” Vince smiled. It was the smile of a man who had learned that looking harmless got him further than looking powerful. He leaned back, hands open. “Alright, alright. My bad. Maybe I went too far. Must be your…. I am sorry. I just tend to be this way around redheads.”

She stared at him as if he had slapped her.

“This is what you all do,” she said. “You charm your way out of everything. You sit there looking harmless and say whatever you want, then pretend it meant nothing.”

“I was complimenting you.”

“You were patronizing me.”

“I assure you that wasn’t my intention.”

“That’s always the answer.”

Brian smiled. He didn’t care whether she was right or whether Vince was working her. What held him was her face, the way it changed as she got more worked up.

Constance leaned toward the camera. “You believe the powerful white patriarch can keep getting away with things by making helpless white women like me complicit.”

Vince’s expression barely moved. “You are anything but helpless. Er, well. I wouldn’t dare.”

Brian laughed quietly and took another drink. The Sazerac was working through him now. His body was getting heavy while his mind stayed awake. He knew the feeling. He could go to bed, lie in the dark with his eyes closed, and stay awake for hours. Sleepy was not the same as sleeping.

He looked at his phone again. The last image was still open, and he swiped it away.

He opened another folder, older photographs, and scrolled past the models and actresses until he found a black-and-white picture from the 1970s. The woman in it was about Constance’s age. She had the kind of face made for a camera, strong features softened by the grain. She looked relaxed, and her body was elegant without trying.

He selected it. Then he went looking for another picture of Constance and found one where she was smiling. It wasn’t the tight professional smile she gave at events. Her whole face had opened. He looked at it for several seconds.

He put both photographs into the application and took his time. He matched the angles. He corrected the light and softened the line of the jaw. He worked on the eyes, then the mouth, moving the expression in tiny steps, trying to keep whatever he had seen in the smiling photograph. He generated the image and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the phone in both hands.

On the television, Constance was in full flight, back on Brian Bateman, the shooting, the department, the people she believed were protecting him. He felt a small flicker of amusement. She couldn’t let him go. Even when she was talking about something else, she found her way back to him. He liked knowing that somewhere inside all that fury, he took up room.

He looked at the phone one last time. Still not right. He wanted her softer. Warmer. Easier to look at.

He stood, and the room shifted slightly, though he stayed steady. He carried the empty glass to the bar.

“We’ll have to work something out, Hawkeye,” he said.

He turned and headed for the bedroom.

The television kept playing. For a few seconds the sofa sat empty. Then the broadcast cut to a new image.

A photograph. Brian Bateman: Anti-Black Killer Cop

His face filled the screen, staring into the empty room, at the sofa he had just left.