We didn’t say anything else. He was kissing me by the time we got to the front door of my building—his lips tasted of curry and beer. I held his head between my hands, the keys pressing into his cheek, thinking it was wonderful to have a man walk me home at night. I was so obliged to him. He didn’t ask why my bedroom had no real furniture, and I was thankful for that too. He just pinned me on my futon mattress in the dark. It was good—friendly and nice, like his face. I knew I wouldn’t see him again.

THE LEROI “HOUSE OF EVIL,” AS THE NEW YORK POST CALLED IT, was down the street from my building. For a while after that night I made a habit of walking past the house, though it required circling the block to head toward the train. I liked to pass it when the morning sun streaked gold across the cream-colored brick. There were blue patio chairs out front, and potted hedges flanking the front door. An American flag hung like a curtain in one of the bay windows on the lower level. It was these everyday details that struck me.

Once a man whistled at me from an upstairs bedroom. “Come here!” he said, and I noticed that he wasn’t yelling, wasn’t even calling, but was talking just loud enough for me to hear. I didn’t stop.

It’s easy to become interested in a story like this. It only requires the same kind of curiosity about evil as watching a horror movie, but why did I continue to visit the house? That month I traced my daily routes around the city in a thick notebook—a project I’d picked up in order to prove my growing intimacy with New York. According to this hand-drawn account I walked past the LeRoi residence almost fifty times that summer, each time on my way to work for Lonnie.

2

SHE WAS YOUNG, YOUNG ENOUGH THAT EVERYONE IN THE CITY, where the rich aged slowly, called her too young. I liked to watch her when she wasn’t looking. The smooth curve of her legs above thin little ankles, flat stomach, pert round breasts. Dark hair and too much of it. “The kind you can’t do anything with!” she whined, because the effects of a flat iron or hot rollers quickly wore off in the city’s humidity, leaving rumpled silken waves instead. Eyebrows thick, manicured, usually drawn in enough to crease the skin between them, that little crease, the very beginnings of her first—her only—faint wrinkle. The nose, upturned, not a ridiculous ski jump, only slightly. Do the rich breed those upturned noses? Her eyes, heavy lidded, green, but not so radiant in color. The kind of eyes you think are plain brown because of all that brown hair, but then find no, those are flecks of jade.