More people drifted in, and I watched them go through the same process of recognition and shock. The Passenger was clearly enjoying things, but to be perfectly truthful, I was beginning to think that the whole affair was wearing a little thin. I could not really get into the spirit of the event and feel any sense of fun from the audience’s suffering. After all, where was the point? Okay, Jennifer cut off pieces of her leg. So what? Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you? What did it prove? What happened next?
Still, Rita seemed determined to make herself as uncomfortable as possible, moving relentlessly from one video loop to the next. And I could think of nothing else to do but follow along in her wake, nobly enduring as she repeated “Oh God. Oh my God” at each new horror.
At the far end of the room, the largest clump of people stood looking at something on the wall that was angled away so we could only see the metal edge of the frame. It was clear from their faces that this was a real doozy, the climax of the show, and I was a little impatient to get to it and get things over with, but Rita insisted on seeing every clip along the way first. Each one showed the woman doing more dreadful things to her leg, until finally, in the last one, a slightly longer clip that showed her sitting still and staring down at her leg, there was nothing left but smooth white bone between her knee and her ankle. The flesh on the foot was left intact, and looked very odd at the end of the pale length of bone.
Even odder was the expression on Jennifer’s face, a look of exhausted and triumphant pain that said she had clearly proved something. I glanced again at the program, but I found nothing to say what that something was.
Rita had no apparent insight, either. She had fallen into a numb silence, and simply stared at the final clip, watching it three times before shaking her head a last time and moving on as if hypnotized to where the larger group of people stood clustered around the Something in the metal frame at the far end of the room.
It proved to be by far the most interesting piece in the exhibit, the real clincher as far as I was concerned, and I could hear the Passenger chuckling agreement. Rita, for the first time, was unable even to muster another repeat of “Oh my God.”
Mounted on a square of raw plywood and set in a steel frame was Jennifer’s leg bone. The whole thing this time, including everything from the knee down.
“Well,” I said. “At least we know for sure it isn’t trick photography.”
“It’s a fake,” Rita said, but I don’t think she believed it.
Somewhere outside in the bright lights of the world’s most glamorous city, the church bells were striking the hour. But inside the little gallery there was very little glamour, and the bells sounded unusually loud—almost loud enough to cover another sound, the sibilance of a small familiar voice letting me know that things were about to get even more interesting, and because I have learned that this voice is almost always right, I turned around to look.
Sure enough, the plot was thickening even as I glanced at the front of the room. Because as I watched, the door swung open, and with a rustle of spangles, Jennifer herself came in.
I had thought the room was quiet before, but it had been Mardi Gras compared to the silence that followed her as she clumped down the length of the room on crutches. She was pale and gaunt. Her stripper’s costume hung loosely from her body, and she walked slowly and carefully, as if she was not yet used to the crutches. A clean white bandage covered the stump of her newly missing leg.
As Jennifer approached us where we stood in front of the mounted leg bone, I could feel Rita shrink back, away from any possible contact with the one-legged woman. I glanced at her; she was nearly as pale as Jennifer, and she had apparently given up breathing.
I looked back up. Just like Rita had done, the rest of the crowd, with their unblinking eyes fixed on Jennifer, edged away from her path, and she finally came to a halt only a foot in front of her leg. She stared at it for a long moment, apparently unaware that she was depriving an entire roomful of people of oxygen. Then she raised one hand off the crutches, leaned forward, and touched the leg bone.
“Sexy,” she said.
I turned to Rita, thinking I might whisper “ars longa,” or words to that effect. But it was no use.
Rita had fainted.
THREE
WE ARRIVED HOME IN MIAMI ON A FRIDAY EVENING, two days later, and the mean-spirited surge of the crowd in the airport as they cursed and shoved one another around the baggage carousel nearly brought a tear to my eye. Someone tried to walk off with Rita’s suitcase, and then snarled at me when I took it away, and this was all the welcome I needed. It was good to be home.
And if any further sentimental greeting was necessary, I got it bright and early on Monday morning, my first day back at work. I stepped off the elevator and bumped into Vince Masuoka. “Dexter,” he said, in what I am sure was a very emotional tone of voice, “did you bring doughnuts?” It was truly heartwarming to realize that I had been missed, and if only I had a heart, I am sure it would have been warmed.
“I no longer eat doughnuts,” I told him. “I only eat croissants.”
Vince blinked. “How come?” he said.
“Je suis Parisien,” I said.
He shook his head. “Well, you should have brought doughnuts,” he said. “We got a really weird one out on South Beach this morning, and there’s no place out there to get doughnuts.”
“Quel tragique,” I said.
“Are you gonna stay like this all day?” he said. “’Cause this could be a really long one.”
It was, in fact, a long one, made longer by the mad crush of reporters and other gawkers who already stood three deep at the yellow crime-scene tape strung up around a chunk of beach not too far from the southernmost tip of South Beach. I was already sweating when I worked my way through the crowd and onto the sand, over to where I saw Angel Batista-No-Relation already down on his hands and knees about twenty feet from the bodies, examining something that no one else could see.
“What’s weird?” I asked him.
He didn’t even look up. “Tits on a fr
og,” he said.