“Well, you got that right, at least.”
“Anyway, I’m not looking for you. Who would be? I wanted to talk with Samantha.”
Ed went on eating his crap and drinking his beer and watching his TV. He didn’t even seem to hear me. Then he said, “Who that?”
“What do you mean, who that? Samantha. The girl. The redhead. Said she was staying down here with you.”
He glanced at me. “You see any redhead girl down here? There’s no redhead girl down here. There was a redhead girl down here, I wouldn’t be talking to you, I’d be doing her.”
I started to laugh as if he were kidding, but I could see he wasn’t kidding so I didn’t laugh. I said, “There’s no one staying down here with you?”
“What am I telling you? Who’d be staying here? There’s no one been here since Livi died but me and my ulcer.”
I took a hit of beer, stalling for time, trying to figure out how to react, what it meant. “Well, do you know a girl named Samantha?”
The old man shrugged. “Know a lot of people.” He actually turned away from the television long enough to give it some thought. “But I don’t believe I do know a Samantha, now I think about it.”
“Beautiful redhead in her thirties.”
“I know I don’t know that Samantha.”
I still didn’t know what to make of it—not in my mind at least. But my gut knew. My gut went sour. My sour gut told me: This is not good. This is bad, in fact. This is something very bad.
Upstairs, I stood just inside the door to my apartment. I surveyed the room. I considered the possibilities.
Why would she lie about staying with Ed? She didn’t look like a girl who would lie about anything. Why that? How had she known to come up here if she hadn’t heard me fussing through the ceiling, like she said? Was she running some sort of game on me? Was she some sort of agent for Internal Affairs? Or for Emory? Or maybe for the Fat Woman? Had she come to get information out of me, to find out how much I knew? I tried to think of what I’d told her. That I’d been on drugs when I killed Emory. What else? Nothing I could remember. But then . . .
I gazed at the plate on the table. The streaks of yolk. The bread crumbs.
I don’t remember.
I didn’t remember eating the eggs. Part of my memory was gone. Maybe I’d told her more than I knew.
I moved from the door to the table. I stared down at the plate from above. Then my eyes shifted and moved over the tabletop. Something was bothering me. Something was making that sour feeling in my gut grow worse.
It took me a second or two to figure it out, but then it came to me.
I remembered lying on the sofa, watching the candle burn. I remembered how the candle wax had dribbled down onto the tabletop and the heat of it had marred the table.
But the burn on the table was gone.
That made no sense. Samantha could have taken the candle away. She could have cleaned off the ring it left on the surface. Thrown out the matches she’d used. Washed off the melted wax. But she couldn’t have made that burn disappear. The burn was permanent. I was going to joke with her about it, years from now, when we were married.
I knelt down next to the table. I went over every inch of it with my fingers and my eyes. There was no heat damage to the surface anywhere. The mark was completely gone.
Slowly, a new idea came to me.
I turned to look across the room—at the wainscoting in the corner.
My secret hiding place.
She had removed a piece of the wainscoting. I remembered now. There had been a hole hidden behind it. She had reached into the hole to get the candle.
I went to the corner. Crouched down. Put my hand on the panel at the bottom of the wall. I pushed it, pulled it, clawed at it. I used that movement Emory had used in his house, placing my palm against the surface of the panel and pushing in and lifting. The wainscoting was solid. There was no way to budge it—not with my bare hand. There was no secret panel there. No hole behind it. There was nowhere she—or anyone—could’ve hidden a candle.
I straightened and moved heavily back across the room. I sank down onto the sofa and sat there staring at . . . at nothing really. At the air between the ceiling and the floor. I guess it took a few more moments before I could admit the truth to myself.
No one could have fixed that burn in the table while I slept. No one could have filled in that hole in the wall or replaced that loose panel. No one outside the job could have known that I was the detective who had killed Martin Emory.
I raised a hand to my face, pinched the bridge of my nose, and shut my eyes. I remembered what Dr. Lee had said about quitting the Zattera.
You’ll see things that look so real that reality will pale by comparison.
Finally, I understood. There had never been a Samantha.
The moment the thought occurred me, I knew it was true. I tried to resist it. I tried to argue myself out of it. Who made the eggs then? I thought. Who cleaned up the apartment?
I don’t remember.
But that was a lie. I did remember. I was starting to remember some of it anyway. Moments were coming back to me in flashes—like those flashes of the moments before I shot Emory. I saw myself in the kitchen, moving like a zombie, frying myself some eggs as the nausea of withdrawal passed and gave way to hunger. I saw myself in the living room, on my knees, cleaning up my own vomit . . .
There was no Samantha. She wasn’t real. How could she have been? She had been the very image of my heart’s desire. So tender, so generous, so feminine. Hardly a woman at all, more like a principle of womanhood. How could she have been anything but the creation of my mind, the last side effect of the drug, the last mirage of my addiction?
I sat on the sofa and stared into space. I pretended I felt nothing. What was there to feel? I had had another hallucination, that’s all, a final hallucination. So what? It wasn’t as if I had fallen in love with her. How could I have fallen in love with her? She wasn’t even real. She didn’t even exist.
I went on sitting there alone in the darkness for a long, long time.
5
The Body in the River
I THOUGHT OF SAMANTHA as I lay in the dark with Bethany soft beside me. Bethany’s cheek against my chest, Bethany’s hair against my cheek, Bethany’s skin against my hand, I thought of Samantha. More than three years had gone by since the Emory case. You would think that was time enough to get over a drug-induced hallucination. You would think so. But I never really had.
It was almost as if, in some bizarre way, I really had fallen in love with her, shadow that she was. I daydreamed about her. I dreamed about what our lives together would have been like. My eyes searched for her sometimes on a street or in a movie theater. I judged other women against her, against her tenderness and generosity. I remembered that feeling I’d had in the few moments she was with me—that feeling of calm and satisfaction, as if I’d finally found the woman I’d been looking for all my life. I yearned to feel that again.
Her image was with me all the time. I couldn’t let her go.
Bethany stirred and breathed and kissed my cheek. I felt the consolation of her breasts against me, her legs around me, her damp center pressed against my thigh. She was a tender girl too, a generous girl who liked a man taking pleasure in her just as she liked watching him eat the food she made. I wanted to love her. I really did.
“What’re you thinking?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” I said.
Bethany shook her head close to me. “You are one strange son of a bitch, you know that?”
I gave a low laugh. “Just what a man likes to hear after making love to a woman.”
“Oh, you know the lovemaking was fine.”
“Just strange, huh?”
“I didn’t say it was strange. I said you were.”
“All right.” I shifted so I could press my lips to her forehead and her dark blonde eyebrows. I tasted her makeup and the heat of her. “What’s so strange about me
?”
She spoke so close I felt her soft words vibrate against my throat. “Well, I listen sometimes when you’re at the table.” She meant the round table by the window in Salvatore’s, the one where the lawmen sat. “And everyone’s telling war stories and everything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you never do.”
“Never do what?”
“Tell war stories. ‘This happened to me way back when.’ ‘I once arrested a guy who did so-and-so.’ You never say anything like that.”
I laughed again. “Oh yeah?” I grabbed at her waist, making her squirm and squeal and giggle. “I’m the strong, silent type, what’s wrong with that?”
“Stop!”
“I don’t know, should I?”
“Dan!”
“One of these days I may show you just how strange I can be.”
I let go of her. She settled back against me. I held her there, kissed her. After a while, she lay quiet, thoughtful, her fingers fiddling with the hair on my chest. A car went by on the street outside. The glow from its headlights passed in an arc over the bedroom’s ceiling and the far wall. The sound of its passage rose and faded. When it was gone, I listened to the little house settle back into quiet and darkness. Bethany’s mom had left her this place. It had a comfortable, purple, musty atmosphere to it, like coming home for a visit. I thought sometimes it was the atmosphere of Bethany’s girlhood. I could imagine her as a child here, playing with dolls in a corner or something, daydreaming about how one day she would have a house and family of her own. Kind of pitiful when you thought about it: the two of us lying in bed together, her with her daydreams, me with mine.
Then she said, “Sometimes with you, I used to think . . . I’d be chattering away, you know, and I used to think, Well, isn’t this nice? Here’s a man who actually knows how to listen to a woman.”
“Yeah? And now?”
“Well, now I wonder: Maybe the only reason he’s always listening is ’cause he’s never talking.”
“Man oh man. ‘Listen to me, don’t listen to me, talk, don’t talk.’ Try to please a woman. I dare you.”
“I know. But you know what I’m saying.”
Well, I suppose I did. And it was true enough: I had my secrets. The reason I had come to Tyler County, for instance—that was one of them.
With a little deadpanned perjury from Dr. Lee, I had managed to keep my drug use out of the grand jury hearing on Emory’s death. But at One Police Plaza, the brass knew. After I was cleared of wrongdoing, I was called into the office of the chief of detectives, Harry Fine. Fine was a fat little man with mild eyes and a mild smile and nothing else really mild about him.
“You did a great job, Champion,” he said, shaking my hand across his desk. He gestured for me to sit in the visitor’s chair. As I lowered myself into it, he added, “And now you’re through.”
I had been half-expecting this. “Am I?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Hell yeah. You kidding me? Five slugs in a suspect while under the influence? That’s ‘Good-bye-nice-to-know-ya,’ in anyone’s book. Be prison too if you ever open your mouth about it.”
I nodded. I was thinking about the Fat Woman. She had been my mission—my obsession—for years. I’d never get the chance now to run her to ground. It was going to be hard to let her go.
“Only question is how you want to handle it,” said the Chief of D’s. “We could send you to Psych Services, put you on ‘limited’ for three months, retire you at half-pay plus benefits. No one could blame you for cracking up after a case like that. It’s not a bad deal.”
It wasn’t, but I waved it off. Hard to get a job in law enforcement after they put you on psych disability.
“Would you back me if I applied to another force?” I asked him.
Chief thought about it. He looked me over, drumming his chubby fingers on the desk. “Should I back you? How crazy are you anyway?”
“I’ll get over it. It was the drug mostly.”
He drummed his fingers some more but finally he dropped a nod. “You go to some rural force. Small town. Bust some teenaged potheads, clean up a meth lab now and then. Guys killing their wives or whatever. You could handle that. I’d back you on something like that, sure. They’d be lucky to have you.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
“It’s plausible too, a plausible story. After a dirty case like this, a guy gets tired of the big city. Wants some fresh air, wants to do some fishing. You like to fish?”
“I do.”
“Well, there you go. It’s a plausible story.” Then he pointed one of those chubby fingers at me. “But you write your memoirs, or go online or come to Jesus where anyone but Jesus can hear you, I will personally react with shock and dismay tempered by sorrow and compassion and then prosecute you till the end of days. Understand that, Detective. If you tell anyone about this, you will go to prison. The NYPD does not perform executions in the field. And we don’t cover them up. It just doesn’t happen. It never happened. Hear me?”
“I hear you.”
He stood up. I stood up. He shook my hand again. “And like I said: good job. I hope you let that evil bastard suffer before you double-tapped him.”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”
“Shame. It’s memories like that that warm the lonely evenings of our golden years. Have a good life, Champion.”
So yeah, Bethany was right. There were things I wouldn’t say—actually couldn’t say—about my past. Maybe that made me wary of story-swapping around the table, especially after a drink or two.
“I mean it’s not just swapping war stories in the bar,” Bethany went on—and it was as if she had read my mind and was speaking directly into my thoughts. She could be a genuine pain in the ass that way. “I mean, I don’t care what perp you had to slap around or how bedbug-crazy some evildoing so-and-so was.”
“You do listen in, don’t you.”
“You and I have been in and out of bed together almost a year.” She was talking low, looking up from my chest, her lips near my jaw. “You know how I feel about you . . .”
“Bethany . . .”
“No, I’m not gonna get off on all that. I’m just saying. I’ve got no complaints about the way you treat me, God knows.”
“Well, after all, I am a stone funky love machine . . . Ow!”
“I’m not just talking about that, thank you,” she said, removing her knuckle from my ribs. “I know you’re the big bad lawman of the world and all that, but I swear I never met a man so naturally sweet-natured behind closed doors.”
“Of course, now that you know that, I’m gonna have to kill you.”
She reached up and touched my lips with her finger, I don’t know whether to shut me up or simply to do it. She said, “It’s just: I don’t know the first thing about you. When I think about it. I don’t know one damn thing.”
“Oh, come on, that’s not true.”
“It is.”
“I’ve told you things.”
“Your resume. ‘Then I went to Afghanistan, then I joined the police . . .’”
“And growing up in foster homes and all that. I don’t discuss that with just anybody.”
“Mm,” she said.
“How come women don’t have to make a logical argument? How come women just get to say, ‘Mm,’ like that?”
“I don’t know. That’s how God made it. You don’t want to mess with God, do you?”
“Well, all right, what is it you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Something personal, something about yourself.”
“Like what?”
“What’s your favorite color?”
“That’s what you want to know?”
“Well?”
“I never thought about it. Chartreuse.”
“Oh, you don’t even know what chartreuse is.”
“Sure I do. It’s purple.”
“It’s green.”
“Oh. Well . . . brown then. I have a b
rown jacket I like. Kind of orange-brown. It’s nice.”
“What kind of things are you afraid of?”
“Conversations like this, for one.”
“Not like guns or dying or something like that. Something stupid. Something you’re embarrassed by.”
“Let’s see. I never liked spiders much.”
“Hate spiders.”
“Ugly little bastards, aren’t they? And they can jump at you, some of them.”
“What’s your earliest memory?”
“Oh, Christ . . . Playing catch in the backyard with one of my foster fathers. He coached Little League, you know. Wanted me on the team. He was shocked I’d never even played catch before so he taught me.”
“Was he a good guy?”
“Yeah, he was.”
“Did you have to leave him?”
“Yes. He got sick or something. I don’t remember.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Oh, man. Does this have to be some kind of sob session about my sad childhood?”
“Oh, no, we wouldn’t want that,” Bethany said. “Big tough fellow like you actually having emotions. Completely unacceptable.”
“I have emotions. Is being annoyed by a lot of questions an emotion?”
“All right, we’ll move on.”
“Or we could stop.”
“What about your first girl? And no, I don’t mean for sex. I don’t want to hear about some Russian hooker.”
“She said she was a Kansas farm girl. She did talk kind of funny now that I think about it.”
“Who was the first girl you had a crush on, the first girl you ever loved?”
“You know what?” I reached down and smacked her backside.
“Ow!”
“I’m tired of this game.” I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, my back to her.
She came up behind me and laid her fingertips against me. “Just tell me something you love, Dan. I just want to know what it’s like.”
I had my hands pressed into the mattress, ready to push up and stand, but I lingered a while, breathing her scent. She had a nice scent. It wasn’t her perfume, either—it was her. She smelled clean and natural; innocent somehow. I always liked that about her.