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 13th pair
recently,” I said, recalling that he had made a special request earlier in the
year, “And he requested a 14th 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