Foot Daddy

They found him lying on the street, his saxophone case beside him, and a small, pink ballerina shoe lying a foot away.

A screaming woman alerted the neighbors of the body. Ms. Shoemaker had gone jogging early in the morning, right after drinking freshly-pressed orange juice, and was listening to the hypnotic beats of an electro tune as she hurriedly traced circular paths over the cobblestone street. The air smelled of sweet banana bread and spice, and of pistachio cupcakes, and of freshly- made baguettes, and all the smells spilled over the minty, crisp breeze of an English morning. When she was passing in front of the local bakery, always flanked by two pots of purple flowers, she found the body. Shocked, she stood there, frozen in time, immobile and screaming. Screaming at the top of her lungs, screaming louder than when she delivered her baby five months prior, huffing and puffing to push her baby between her legs.

The screams woke up Mr. Bloomingbutton, who coincidentally worked for the local forensics office. Mr. Bloomingbutton woke up annoyed and looked over to his sleeping wife to check if she just had another of her horrifying nightmares, but she slept peacefully by his side. Then he heard the screaming woman again and his annoyance was soon replaced by sheer curiosity, always well cultivated by the nature of his job, and he quickly bolted towards his bedroom window to poke his head out. Then he saw it. The musician and the ballerina, dancing a still dance on top of the cobblestone street. And the screaming prima donna standing next to them, her face white with horror. All three of them surrounded by a thick curtain of English fog.

****

Fog clouded the mirror. I had been taking a warm shower for more than thirty minutes, taking my long, sweet time washing my hair, and scrubbing every inch of my body. I then proceeded to shave my legs and apply a blueberry facemask while the bathtub was filled with warm water and bubbles. Once the bathtub was full of water, and the bubbles shimmered under the golden light of my bathroom, I slipped out of my pink silk robe, and into the lushness of the bath. I grabbed the sleek cup of cold red wine sitting in a corner, and fell into a relaxing stupor, glad to have some time to myself.

Then my phone rang.

I decided to ignore it and call back whoever was calling me later. But then the phone rang again, insistently; I let it go straight to my voicemail. When the phone rang for the fourth time, I had had enough of its noise, and I decided to answer the call, furious that someone had perturbed my peace.

“Hello?” I asked with a hint of annoyance, wrapping my naked body between layers of pink silk, and tying the laces of my robe around my waist.

“Is this Miss Anna Cohen?” a deep, raspy voice, probably belonging to an old man, asked on the other side of the line.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Well, Miss Cohen. We need you to speak with the Libertyville Police Department at your earliest convenience. The FBI is looking for you.”

“The FBI?!” I asked, both surprised and concerned.

“Yes. Your name has been linked to a murder in England and they need to speak to you as soon as possible.”

“A murder? In England? I have never even laid a foot in England!” I paused for a second, gathered my thoughts and added, “Is this a joke? If this is some sort of sick joke, Edmund?! I will let mom know!” I replied, thinking back on the time when my youngest brother had called me in the middle of the night telling me he needed money because he had been in a car accident and couldn’t afford his hospital bill. I believed him and hurriedly asked him how much money he needed to borrow, only to receive his shattering laughter from the other side of the line. I was sick of Edmund’s jokes.

“Miss Cohen, I’m sorry but this is not Edmund and this is not a joke. I am Officer Moudrianakis from the Libertyville Police Department and I need you to come to the station to make a statement. Otherwise, we will assume that you are not complying and… you would not want to do that” his voice was deep and stern. It sounded like it belonged to a man with a receding hairline. He couldn’t be Edmund and by the tone he was using, he couldn’t be lying. Though deep down, I wished he was lying because all of this sounded like a joke.

“Ok Officer Moudrianakis, there has to be some sort of mistake. I have never been to England; I haven’t left South Carolina for years. So, there is no way I could be linked to a murder that took place over there,” I replied, my voice shaking a bit due to the impression.

“If there is some sort of mistake, the investigation will clear that up. For now, we need you to come to our offices and provide us with all the information you know.”

I sighed in resignation and agreed to go to the police station later that afternoon, around 4 pm. I was going to waste one of my few precious days of vacation answering questions related to a murder I was sure I was not involved with.

I drained my bathtub, put away my wine, and cleaned my bathroom, trying to remove the remnants of bad energies that that horrible conversation had left clinging to the walls. I then took a shower and dressed in a pair of jeans with a white shirt and a black blazer. I arranged my hair in a tall ponytail, applied some light makeup, and slipped into a pair of blue ballerina flats that I had been wearing every day for the past two months. I downed some sparkling water with a quick turkey sandwich and left my home, which was now all clean. I had cleaned all the counters, straightened my bed, arranged all the tabletops, washed all the dishes, and folded my clean laundry. I clean whenever I’m anxious. And I was nervous because I didn’t know what lay ahead.

***

Officer Moudrianakis wasn’t fond of his job. Nonetheless, he was a workaholic. Though it wasn’t passion that drove him, it was the desire to ignore the recklessness of his life in shambles after his divorce that pushed him to work long hours. If he worked long hours, he figured, he wouldn’t notice the emptiness of his house and might stop craving the legs of his now ex-wife and stop missing the warm embrace of his children. His wife had left him once she realized that he was never going to be able to buy the house she wanted due to his crippling student debt. She had found herself a handsome hedge fund broker who was willing to help raise her children. Every morning, Officer Moudrianakis would commute to work, squeezing his way through the thousands of neurotic early risers, go to Dunkin Donuts and pick up his black coffee. He enjoyed the bitterness and staleness of the dark concoction, which matched the bitterness and staleness of his life.

He was quietly drinking his third coffee of the day, going over his files, when the intercom woke up.

“Officer Moudrianakis, there is a woman here asking to see you. Her name is Anna Cohen. Should I let her go up and see you?” the receptionist was talking with a high-pitched jingle in her voice. She must have gotten laid last night, he thought. She was usually very boring and rude.

“Yes, tell her to come upstairs. Tell her to take the elevator to the fifth floor and come to my office,” he said while looking for the files that he had received from the Interpol.

The receptionist, a black woman in her thirties with dyed blonde hair, relayed the message “Officer Moudrianakis is waiting for you at his office. You need to take the fed elevator to the fifth floor, take a left, and go to Office 523. He’ll be waiting for you there” She smiled a polite smile to Anna and then resumed swiping through pictures of men in her phone, completely uninterested in Anna’s reaction.

Anna did as she was instructed. She found the red elevators, which had their doors painted in red, true to their name, and pressed number 5. Her heart was racing.

****

If you stab a knife on a human body, the blade must go through 6 layers of tissue: it first goes through the epidermis, then through the dermis, followed by the Scamper fascia, then through the Camper’s fascia, then through muscle, and then it finally must cut through the peritoneum.

Mr. Bloomingbutton had learned all these things in a human anatomy class ages ago. He checked that the bullet had gone through all the layers when it perforated the cavities of the musician. He grabbed a scalpel and made an incision near the hole where the bullet had entered. The scalpel was cold, as was the room where he was standing. The morgue was cold and blue; the synthetic lights accentuated the ominous atmosphere that surrounded the many metal cabinets, filled with corpses, all neatly tagged with names and numbers.

One of the advantages of practicing medicine on corpses is that you can never accidentally kill anybody. Each decision you make could only better the lives of those mourning the dead, your patients. Practicing medicine on corpses equated justice, which was all Mr. Bloomingbutton lived for, especially after his daughter had been kidnapped when she was only six years old. The police had yet to find her, but that only meant the police force needed more men to join them to continue their tireless effort to protect society. So, Mr. Bloomingbutton had shifted his career to work at the morgue. Someday, he was going to find his daughter, alive or dead, and someday his wife would resume sleeping gently in his embrace at night, without screaming and without nightmares, just like in the old days, when the days were brighter.

The man lying in front of him now was just shy of 36 years old. He had honey-colored hair, plastered with a sticky gel that shackled his golden curls back and prevented them from falling onto his face. He wore a thick, brown jacket, with some holes and tears near the lapel, and a checkerboard-pattern shirt underneath. Mr. Bloomingbutton found a stack of business cards in the front pocket of his jacket. “John Livingston, musician. Saxophonist” read the card. John Livingstone now laid in a morgue bed, with his hands and his lips and the nails on his toes almost blue, probably due to the many hours he had been laying out in the cold, in front of a bakery. Interestingly, he smelled sweet, perhaps because some of the smells of the bakery had impregnated his clothes. John Livingston now slept a sweet death, a long interlude of silent jazz.

Mr. Bloomingbutton’s autopsy confirmed what the police officers had speculated earlier in the day. The musician, John Livingstone, had died due to a shot to the chest and his time of death had been around 7 am. The workers at the local bakery heard a shot, but nobody saw the killer. They had called the police some minutes later before Ms. Shoemaker had found the body during her daily morning jog; she also had not seen the killer. There was no clue clearly pointing toward the reason for the murder, except for a small ballerina flat that had been found in the crime scene. The shoe, size 5, pink, and heavily worn. The sole had holes and the ankle area underneath had tears caused by continuous use. Curiously enough, only the left shoe had been left at the crime scene; the right shoe was missing. The Crime Scene Investigation team had taken the shoe in for analysis, hoping that any material found inside could help clarify why a jazz musician’s notes had been silenced.

****

John Livingstone started playing the saxophone when he was 8 years old. He heard a tune in an elevator and fell in love with the smoothness of the notes, how they resonated inside the metal cage. His obsession then morphed into collecting lots of old jazz records until his mother decided to sign him up for music lessons. He picked up the saxophone, naturally, and began playing in his school’s band. After high school, John went on to study music at the London Conservatory.

There, he outshined his peers and he met Lucy, a viola player. Lucy was short and pale and delicate, with large, blue eyes that sucked the light out of the room and shone it back in a technicolor of possibilities. She was optimistic and bent over her viola in a frenzy that hypnotized whoever heard her play. Professors adored her, her peers loved her, and there was always a line of gushing fans that sprouted from everywhere to see her perform. From the moment he met her, John was enthralled with her, obsessed with her presence, with the way she curled her feet when she was performing a crescendo and with the way her spiced-apple-colored hair fell in waves on top of her shoulders. He marveled how the light shone on her whenever it was her turn to play a sorrowful soliloquy, and with how her face contorted in a beautiful ecstasy as her hands vibrated in unison with the notes that emanated from her instrument. John loved Lucy from the moment he laid eyes on her.

One day, a bright yellow afternoon in January, after finishing his classes, John saw small footsteps in the snow. Small, tiny footsteps, as if made by a snow fairy. They traced a path across the garden enclosed in the inside of the conservatory and pointed towards the practice rooms. The size of the prints and how they looked dainty on top of the snow, like musical notes in a rhythmic hurry waiting to be heard, enticed John to follow them across the garden and at the end of the path, he found Lucy, alone in a practice room. That first meeting catalyzed many more and started the cascade of lust and love and passion and mania that marked the 10 years that John and Lucy had loved each other.

Lucy loved John because he smelled of watermelons. And of oranges. Of all things sweet. He smelled of safety. Of security. And of a peacefully predictable simple life. A simple pattern, a rosary of wooden good mornings and goodbyes that she learned to cherish and tuck in between the love she had for her viola. Lucy loved John because of his faint smile and his kisses and his warmth when he rose early in the mornings. Because of how he would turn around after hearing his alarm clock and hug her, pressing her head hard against his chest and under his chin, pulling at her waist gently before planting a kiss on her forehead. The way he kissed her goodbye, deep, wet kisses, before going to work, to play at some charity event where the rich popped bottles and drank champagne to forget their sorrows. Because of the way he wrapped his hands around her waist to pull her on top of him to force her to sleep because she was afraid of having nightmares. Lucy loved John because of their sex, because of how he planted tender kisses in her lower belly before sinking his head between her legs. Because of how they both became the same lust-driven beast, riding the horizons of pleasure, how he would make her writhe and moan and scream in pleasure in the middle of the night, both their bodies shining under the moonlight.

John loved Lucy’s feet. Those tiny feet, that curled up when Lucy arched her back in pleasure, whenever they were having sex, or when she experienced the ecstasy of playing with her instrument. Or when John played with her, his fingers making Lucy sing like her viola never could, both intonating the same deep notes of an ancient rhythm, with her feet always propped on both sides of his neck. Those tiny feet that had made marks in the snow and guided him onto the muse of his life, those feet that were the pedestal on top of which the love of his life stood proudly. Those feet that balanced Lucy’s fragile body after she was diagnosed with a fatal inflammation disorder and her viola stopped vibrating in front of the big crowds. Those feet that made slow, faint noises as Lucy became weaker with the passing months and could barely walk after days of painful IV immunosuppressants and painful hours stuck to a dialysis machine. Those feet that John massaged dutifully to make her forget the aches of her tired muscles and bones and those feet that were the only body parts that remained untouched after the disease had started eating away the youthfulness of Lucy’s once beautiful and lush body. John loved Lucy’s feet, from the day he met her, until the day she died.

When the doctors told Lucy her death was imminent, John and her decided to live their last days together to the fullest. They played together in frenzy. They drank champagne in the art museum they loved. They cried and kissed. And cried and kissed and made love. Lucy pressed the warmth of her body against him, both scared of their imminent farewell. Both trying to frantically wash away their hurt by losing themselves in the madness of lust. When Lucy was up, climbing the sinuous heights of his being, deeply tied to John, and feeling waves of pleasure through her body, she looked down, as always. To lock her eyes with his. To unite her soul with his. And she saw his sorrow. She saw his fear. She saw how it mirrored her horror and her sorrow and her fears. They were both scared of the little time they had left together. They were both scared and horrified that the person who meant everything to the other was suddenly leaving. And they were there, frozen in time, loving the communion of their bodies, but weeping for the lack of company in the future. Weeping because they knew they had their days of happiness together counted.

After Lucy’s death, John never loved again. At least, not other women, not physically. He didn’t find comfort in other bodies. How would he ever find somebody like Lucy? John knew he would never find somebody like her. There are never two souls alike. How would he ever dare to lock his eyes so deeply with someone else? He couldn’t. Lucy had stared deep down into him; he let her see him bare, and naked, and raw. Scared. And vulnerable. How could he find someone else? How could he find someone else who fitted him so perfectly, who made him want to desperately fuse his life with hers? How could he find someone else that would make the long hours of dizzying days wonderful? He couldn’t. He couldn’t and he refused to do so.

After Lucy’s death, John fell back onto his obsession of collecting things. Collecting old jazz records and shoes. All ballerina flats of size 5. Shoes that would keep company all the pairs of ballerina flats that Lucy left behind. Lucy always wore ballerina flats on warm days in the summer and also wore them on top of colorful tights in the short days of the fall. John’s memories of Lucy always portrayed her as a beautiful fairy, wearing small ballerina shoes wherever she went, always carrying her viola, ready to unleash the miracle of her music. So after Lucy’s death, John became a collector of worn women’s shoes.

****

When I left the elevator, I looked for room 523 and pushed the door open. Inside, a man in his forties was sipping a cup of coffee. He had a head full of hair, unlike what I magined, and he was looking over some files.

“Officer Moudrianakis?” I asked.

The man lifted his head, made eye contact with me, and nodded.

“Miss Anna Cohen, I assume?”

It was my turn to nod.

“Please follow me into the interrogation room,” he said, standing up, grabbing his file and his cup of coffee, and walking towards the door. He opened the door and signaled me to step out first.

We then walked down a long hall, with tall white, naked walls, dimly lit by hanging lights. He opened the door to a dark room where many more officers waited and some were looking through transparent glass that allowed them to watch the interrogation room. A police agent wearing a dark navy suit approached me, followed by an agent in a business jacket. Officer Moudrianakis opened the second door and the police agent wearing the navy suit led me into a smaller room. The interrogation room was better-lit and had an empty table and two chairs in the middle. I sat down on the left end and the two agents remained standing. Officer Moudrianakis stayed outside. The two agents left the room shortly afterward and I was left alone, sitting in the chair, looking at the grey wall ahead of me with a blank expression. Unlike before, I couldn’t see through the big window; it allowed officers to look in, to watch me, observe me and prod me, but I couldn’t look outside.

Minutes later, the door opened and Officer Moudrianakis stepped into the room, accompanied by an agent wearing an FBI badge, who was carrying a third chair. They sat at the opposite end of the table, facing me.

“I’m agent Moudrianakis, the investigator assigned to this case. The man with me is Agent Stevenson. He is our representative for the FBI today” Agent Moudrianakis then proceeded to open the folder he had brought with him “And you are…Anna Cohen. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

He then proceeded to lay out an array of pictures in front of me.

“Have you ever seen this man?”

I looked down and blood left my face. In front of me laid the pictures of the corpse of a man in his thirties, wearing a brown jacket. He had his dirty blonde hair combed back with gel, and his lips were blue and were closed tightly. I didn’t recognize his face.

“No. I have never seen this man in my life,” I replied, truthfully.

“This was John Livingstone, a jazz musician from Liverpool. He was found dead on Thursday morning. The autopsy revealed he was shot dead at around 7 am. Did you ever have any contact, be it physical or digital, with John Livingstone?”

I hesitated. I had had electronic conversations with many men online. Perhaps some of them didn’t use their real names. It was a possibility.

“His name doesn’t ring a bell,” I answered after some minutes of carefully weighing my answer.

“Perhaps you knew him by his pseudonym, ‘Saxxyjazzlover’? He was a foot fetishist. He collected ‘well worn’ ballerina flats. Size 5. Does that ring a bell now?”

My heart dropped. Saxxyjazzlover had been my most loyal customer for years. He loved my feet. He said they reminded him of the feet of his dead wife. He always sent me nail polish for me to paint my toenails and send pictures of my feet to him. He paid me $11 per picture; I only had to take pictures flexing my feet. Every three months, Saxxyjazzlover would buy my old shoes, only ballerina flats and pay me nearly a hundred dollars for a pair of shoes that had barely cost me $12. I met him on an online selling platform after I made a post trying to sell my old shoes to other women. Saxxyjazzlover contacted me instead, complimenting my feet, offering to pay me nearly five times the price I had originally asked. I had never seen him in person. I had never even seen his face. He had never seen mine either. We both didn’t have pictures on our online profiles, yet I sent shoes to him for nearly three years. I would make a post on the selling site asking for a price and all the interested buyers would make offers that were greater than what I had asked for. Saxxyjazzlover would always win the auctions. He always won my shoes. They had an emotional significance for him, after all. After a while, my friends started calling him ‘Foot daddy’. They knew that I had started selling my shoes to foot fetishists to supplement my income; I always had trouble making ends meet in college. And Saxxyjazzlover helped me. He paid me well for my shoes and for my pictures. We started talking after he won my first three successful sales. He would tell me about his wife, how much he loved her, and how much my feet looked like hers. I found that detail creepy at first, but I kept communicating with him because he paid me well and because I later found out he was a kind-hearted guy. Yes, he was obsessed with feet, but he was a good man. He loved a woman and he chose to honor her in a weird way, yet he was honoring her.

I remained silent for some minutes, processing the news. Finally, I took a deep breath and talked.

“Yes, I knew Saxxyjazzlover. He… he bought some things from me,” I replied hesitantly.

“You mean…shoes?” Officer Moudrianakis asked, lowering his gaze to look at me judgingly.

“Yes, that is correct. I sold shoes to him. Ballerina flats to be precise. I once may have sold him used underwear”

“How many shoes did you sell him?” the FBI asked, joining the conversation.

“I sold him a pair of flats every three months for nearly three years.”

“That’s four pairs of shoes every year. Twelve pairs then?” asked the agent.

“No, he bought a 13^th pair recently,” I said, recalling that he had made a special request earlier in the year, “And he requested a 14^th one for the end of this month,” I said, looking at the blue shoes I had been wearing constantly to wear them down.

“Were you planning on selling this pair to him?” asked Officer Moudrianakis, joining the conversation once again.

“Yes. I’ve been wearing them every day to wear them out’, I said, then added, “…and to tear the soles, as he liked them. Many foot fetishists seem to like that. They like their shoes well worn. It…it increases their price,” I added.

Officer Moudrianakis slid a different picture in front of me. It was the photo of a pink ballerina flat laying on top of cobblestone. I recognized the shoe. I had sold it to Saxxyjazzlover earlier in the year.

“Is this yours?” asked the Interpol officer.

“Yes, that shoe was mine,” I replied with a sad voice.

“We found this shoe at the crime scene. Forensics identified some genetic material on the inside and a search on a DNA database showed you were a match, he said as he showed me a summary of a lab test. He also showed me my file from the DNA database.

“Why was my name on a database? I have never been accused of any crime,” I asked worriedly.

“Maybe you got your DNA analyzed to learn more about your ancestry? Those companies are required to post the DNA sequences of their clients on our databases. People need to start being careful about the services they buy,”  added the FBI agent, his lip twitching into a broken line. “Now, let’s talk about something more useful. Another man shot John Livingstone. Forensics uncovered the footprint of a man wearing construction boots. We think the killer was also a foot fetishist, perhaps another of your customers. Could you provide us with a list of your regulars?”

I nodded. “Yes, I think I can. The online site keeps records of all the users that have made bids for my shoes. I think I can pull a list from that. I could give you access to my account if that helps.”

“Yes, that would be helpful. It would help reduce your time in jail, by collaborating with the police,” added Officer Moudrianakis.

My heart dropped again. I could feel my face pale as blood rushed out of me.

“Time in jail?! But…but why? I…I didn’t kill him. I have never been to England. And I have offered you all this information,” I said with my voice trembling.

“No, you didn’t kill him. But you sold him your shoes, among other things.”

Officer Moudrianakis shot me a grim look and added, “Miss Cohen, we’re aware that you sell other… used things. You told us so yourself. And you should be aware that in South Carolina, federal law prohibits mailing indecent things.”

“But it was just my shoes!”

“You sold him shoes knowing that he was a foot fetishist. You admitted so yourself. It’s like selling your used knickers, which you actually did. It can amount to sex work,” explained Officer Moudrianakis.

“But…but I sold them to him because I was a student and I was trying to reduce my student debt,” I said with tears rolling down my face. I was in shock. “Do you know what it feels to have a ton of student debt chipping away at your life,” I said, looking pleadingly at Officer Moudrianakis in the eye.

Officer Moudrianakis looked away. His heart ached, though I didn’t have any way of knowing that. How would I know that I had brought up a very sensitive topic for him?

He sighed. “I know very well the ways that student debt can destroy a life, Miss Cohen. Believe me, I know,” said Officer Moudrianakis in a grim voice, while he gathered the pictures laid on the table and tucked them back into the folder, “Maybe you can convince the jury to go easy on you. Otherwise, you could be facing 5 years in prison,” he then stood up, followed by the FBI agent and left the room.

I remained some minutes sitting in the room again, alone. Staring at the wall blankly. Thinking. Nobody cried for the body of John Livingstone, though somewhere, encircled by English fog, he may have finally reunited with Lucy. Nobody cried for them, but now they had each other, playing a silent soliloquy under the moon together, somewhere. Meanwhile, in America, in the depths of the Libertyville Police Department, nobody played a silent soliloquy for me. I just wept quietly, alone