It was tiring, sifting through the drivel on the flash drive, and he couldn’t stay interested in the game. Why knock himself out tracking the ruminations of an airhead? He knew all he needed to know about her.
He cracked a beer, turned on the TV.
TCM was all about film noir this week. First The Postman Always Rings Twice, the 1946 version. He missed the first ten minutes of it, and there was a moment when he got this weird sense of déjà vu, as if he were watching Double Indemnity all over again, but with Lana Turner and John Garfield playing the parts of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.
But of course it was a different movie. It had the same basic set-up—two lovers conspiring to kill her husband—and the same writer had written the novel on which it was based.
And, once again, you knew they wouldn’t get away with it.
He watched it all the way through to the end, with Garfield on his way to the gas chamber for the murder of Turner, who in fact had died accidentally. If you managed to get away with one thing, the film seemed to be saying, God would get you for something else.
And, just in case he’d missed the message, the cable channel followed with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in, duh, The Postman Always Rings Twice. The same title, the same basic story, remade in 1981 and not all that different for the passage of thirty-five years.
Well, it was in color, if that made a difference. And after the two of them get away with murder yet again, Nicholson has an affair with Anjelica Huston. But he patches it up with Lange, until she dies in a car accident. When that happened to Lana Turner in 1946, Garfield went to the gas chamber because they thought he’d staged the accident—though how they could have gotten the man indicted, let alone convicted and sentenced to death, was beyond Doak’s comprehension.
Never mind, he thought. In this version, Nicholson didn’t have to worry about the law. His true love was gone forever, after they’d managed to work things out, and the film ended with him in tears over her corpse.
You really couldn’t win, could you? If you were Fred MacMurray, you paid for the murder you committed. If you were John Garfield, you got away with one murder but paid anyway. And if you were Jack Nicholson, you got away with everything and wound up with a broken heart.
He turned off the set and went to bed.
He woke up early, clawing his way out of a dream. All he knew was it had been a bad one.
It was still dark, and he’d been up late. He couldn’t have managed more than a couple of hours of sleep, and felt as though they’d been mostly surface sleep; when he finally did fall deeply asleep, his reward was a nightmare.
And now he was jarringly awake while the rest of the world slept on around him.
He went out and sat on his dock and waited for the sun to come up. The last thing he’d been thinking about, lying in bed and waiting to drift off, was the latest remake of Postman, the one that starred Doak Miller and Lisa Yarrow, the one with George Otterbein cast as the deservedly doomed husband. He knew how to do it, had the solution right there in his mind, but the puzzle pieces wouldn’t quite fit into place. He’d fallen asleep turning them this way and that, trying to make it all work.
And evidently his mind had continued the process while he slept, because now he could see it. How they would make it happen, and get away with it.
Twenty-eight
* * *
He called Lisa. His call went straight to voicemail, and he said “Call me” and rang off.
He was working away on the computer when the phone rang. “The little automatic,” he said. “With the green grips.”
“Malachite.”
“Whatever. Is it still in the nightstand?”
“It was the last time I looked. Why?”
“I need it.”
“Jesus, are you planning on starting a war? How many guns do you need?”
“Just that one.”
“I’m kind of tied up today,” she said. “When do you need it?”
“As soon as possible, and you don’t have to drive clear to Chiefland to give it to me. You’ll be working at the restaurant tonight? Bring it with you, park in your usual spot. Tuck the gun on the floor under the driver’s seat, and leave the car unlocked. Can you remember that?”
“I’ll write it on the palm of my hand,” she said, “just in case it slips my mind. Yes, of course I can remember. But what if it’s not in the drawer? I’m not home now, I can’t go check.”
“Call me when you know one way or the other.”
“All right.”
“And just leave a message. ‘It’s there’ or ‘It’s not there.’ ”
“One if by land and two if by sea.”
“If it’s there,” he said, “take it with you when you leave the house.”
“And park in my regular space, and put the gun under the seat.”
“And don’t lock the car.”
“You know, that’ll be the hardest part, because locking it is so automatic. But don’t worry, I’ll remember.”
He hadn’t told her about Roberta Ellison.
He thought about the omission, and thought about the incident at the Ellison home, while little Eli had his nap. Thought about it and shook his head, pushing the memory aside.
Time to tell her later. She’d call to tell him about the pistol, whether or not she’d found it in the drawer, and that would be time enough to tell her.
He was at the computer when the phone rang, the Lisa phone. He picked it up and held it in his hand and it rang again, and rang a third time.
And went to voicemail.
Where he picked up the message a few minutes later: “It was there, and now it’s in my purse.”
He played it through again, then erased it.
He timed his drive to the Cattle Baron so that it was just past sunset when he pulled into the lot. He parked, and waited in his car while a party of four made their way to the restaurant entrance. Two men walking together, talking, with the two women a pace or so behind them. Two husbands and their wives, ready to sit down and eat beef.
The Lexus was where he’d expected to find it, and she’d remembered not to lock the door. He reached beneath the left front seat and his hand found the little gun right away. It was a pretty thing, a Baby Browning, and the swirly green grips made it the perfect lady’s weapon.
But he could admire it later.
He returned to his Monte Carlo and drove out of the restaurant lot, then found his way to Stapleton Terrace.
There were two cars at the curb, Ashley’s Hyundai and the neighbor’s minivan. And, in the driveway, a Lincoln Town Car with vanity plates that read GOGO.
He’d seen the car before, parked in a reserved space in front of a three-story red-brick building on Court House Square. George’s car, tagged with George’s doubled initials.
The lights were on in the bedroom window upstairs. He sat in the Chevy, looked at the car, the house, the upstairs window. He took the little gun out of his pocket and held it in both hands, rubbing the ball of one thumb against the cool green stone.
He put the gun away, drove home.
At the computer, he typed:
OMG, the SD gave me a gun!!! Pretty, too, w/ green stone on the handle. Said it’s mallokite (sp?). In case the prowler comes back, but would I even dare to use it? I don’t think so!!! If I had two of them they could be earrings but maybe too heavy???
He read it over, highlighted the last sentence and hit Delete.
In its place he typed:
All it needs is a pin and I cd wear it as a brooch. Thought about it, changed brooch to broach, changed it back to brooch, and deleted the sentence altogether.
Rewrote the whole thing:
OMG, gift from SD—a gun!!! Pretty swirly green handle. Mallokite (sp?) So I won’t worry about prowler, but would I dare use it? I don’t think so!!!
Two spaces down he wrote:
Miss you!
And on the next line:
~A~
He got up,
used the bathroom, returned to the computer and read it through again. You could overthink this shit, he thought, and what was the point?
Print it out?
No, might as well do it right. He’d done everything right thus far, and this was no time to stop.
He got a sheet from a legal pad, fastened it to his clipboard. Took a ballpoint pen, and was it the same one he’d used to print out his and Lisa’s lines? It might be, one Bic was rather like another. Whether it was the same pen or another like it, it would do.
He copied the email draft. Once again he used block caps, but was less concerned about making it readable. He was the only one who’d have to read it.
Twenty-nine
* * *
He took the Browning out onto the deck, along with the pint of Georgi.
He’d bought the bottle on the way home from the Ellison house, the purchase triggered by the slug of Absolut he’d added to his iced tea. They had all sorts of vodka, Ketel One and Stoli and Grey Goose on the same shelf with the Absolut, but he’d always taken it as a given that vodka was vodka, and any premium you paid was for the label. He’d gone with Georgi, and put it away unopened.
He twisted the cap off now, and took a pull straight from the bottle. He made a face at the taste, but he’d have done the same whatever vodka he was drinking. It tasted, he decided, about the way it was supposed to.
He had another pull, and this time the taste didn’t bother him. He capped the bottle, set it down on the deck, and picked up the Browning. He was familiar with the model, had taken one away from a man who’d planned on using it to kill himself. “You saved my life,” the poor bastard told him, but he’d done no such thing. The guy had saved his own life when he’d decided not to pull the trigger.
That particular Baby Browning had sported checkered metal grips, and the same thumb-slide safety as the one he was holding now.
He sniffed the muzzle and smelled nothing but a faint trace of gun oil, suggesting it hadn’t been fired since its last cleaning. For all he knew it had never been fired, and the last cleaning had taken place when it left the factory.
He removed the six-shot clip, which now held five .25-caliber cartridges. Had Otterbein chambered a round? If so, there was a live cartridge under the hammer, and a trigger pull would discharge it even with the clip removed from the gun.
He’d heard of no end of cases in which someone had been killed with a presumably unloaded weapon, but his instructor at the academy had spoken of two incidents, both in Brooklyn, in which the fatal bullets had been fired by automatic pistols from which the magazines had been removed.
“How can you shoot yourself with an unloaded gun? Answer, it’s still loaded. You can take that clip out and throw it in the Gowanus Canal, but if there’s a round in the chamber, it’s loaded and deadly, and there’s a man who shot himself and another who shot his wife, and they both thought for sure they were just clowning around.”
Lisa had pressed the Browning’s muzzle against her husband’s forehead, had described the little O it left impressed into his skin. He looked at the muzzle of the gun, pressed it forcefully against the palm of his left hand, withdrew it and examined the mark it left.
Tried the same thing on his forehead. Right between the eyes, he thought. Right where the little girl in the nursery rhyme had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.
His finger on the trigger . . .
He replaced the clip, put the gun in his lap. He uncapped the pint of Georgi, took another pull, a long one this time. The vodka, he realized for the first time, had the same name as the man he was going to murder. Well, almost. The vodka ended in an I, the man in an E. Georgi was George in Russian, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the pronunciation. He’d heard people say Georgie, same as the basic nickname for George, but he’d also heard something along the lines of gay-OR-ghee, with both G’s hard. Which was probably how they said it in Russia, but this cheap crap was distilled in the States by your basic American capitalists, so giving it a fancy Russian pronunciation seemed a little precious, didn’t it?
He’d just pointed at the bottle. “Yeah,” he’d agreed, when the clerk took it off the shelf. “That one.”
He took another pull, capped the bottle.
And thought about Pregnant Girl.
She’d led him upstairs, and on the way he ran a hand under her skirt and touched her, and in the bedroom she arranged herself with a pillow under her bottom and her legs wide apart.
He teased her, bringing her right to the edge, then easing off, and she liked the game and went with it, saying Oh, please, please, and when he finally let her come she bunched up the bedsheet and jammed it in her mouth to muffle her cries.
He rolled her onto her side and took her from the rear, feeling her bottom against his stomach, putting his right arm around her, his hand on her belly, his left hand on her shoulder. He was rock-hard and ready to burst, but at the same time there was no great urgency, and instead of thrusting he held himself in check and savored the feeling of her moist warmth around him.
And she began a rolling motion of her own, getting into it, going for it herself. Greedy little pig, he thought, letting her work, and his eyes centered on the back of her neck.
He moved a hand from her shoulder, let it settle on her neck.
His other hand shifted from her belly, that great round mound of belly, and joined the first hand at her throat.
He thought of Ashley’s bedroom, of waiting behind the door for her. And that voice from long ago:
“Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that? Use both hands, put ’em around my throat, and choke me a little. Not too hard. Oh, that’s nice. A little harder, just a little bit. Oh, yeah.” He could choke her a little. Phyllis had liked it enough to ask for it, and she couldn’t be the only woman in the world who liked it. He could choke Roberta a little, just a little—
No.
No, he didn’t want to choke her a little, he wanted to choke her a lot. Once he started, he wouldn’t stop.
So he didn’t let himself begin.
Instead he made himself take each hand from her throat, and he got his arms around her and his hands on her belly, and he held onto her that way, and matched her movements with his own. His hands could feel it when the baby kicked, but in his mind he still had both hands on her throat, choking the life out of her.
And now he remembered the man he’d killed in the third-floor flat on Suffolk Street, remembered how he’d had only a moment to make his decision, but that moment had been all the time in the world. Time to know he didn’t have to pull the trigger, that the man had surrendered, that it was time to cuff him and call it in.
Time to know all that, and time to say the hell with it.
Time to say it not once but three times, bam-bam-bam.
And the feeling it gave him.
We can tell each other everything, Lisa had said. And he’d even been able to tell her about the man he’d shot, about everything connected to it, including the asexual whole-self orgasm it had provided. And she in turn had told him things she’d never told anyone else.
But how could he tell her this?
He went to take a last swallow of the vodka, but the bottle was empty. The last pull had evidently finished it, and how come he hadn’t noticed as much?
Well, he thought reasonably, the vodka must have had something to do with that. Drink enough of it and it kept you from noticing that it was all gone.
He capped it, but a capped bottle wouldn’t sink. It would float at the surface, and that would be fine if there was a message in it, but he didn’t have any messages for anybody, not even for himself.
He took the cap off, heaved the bottle, heard the splash. And could only assume it filled with water and sank, because he couldn’t see anything out there.
Flipped the cap in after it.
Groped around for the gun. Where the hell was it? Oh, there it was.
Thought about the man on Suffolk Street, thought
about Bobbie Jondahl Ellison.
Very different.
Because he’d never regretted the three bullets, bam-bam-bam, grouped so precisely in the center of that bare and nearly hairless chest. The world, he’d thought then and still thought now, was none the worse for no longer having that man in it.
But if his hands had done what they had wanted to do, what they very nearly insisted upon doing, the regret would have been immediate and overpowering. He liked the woman, and had only good feelings for her. A tightass moralist might have been inclined to brand her with a scarlet A for adultery, but only the fucking Taliban would regard that as an offense punishable by death.
His hands hadn’t cared. They’d longed to wring her neck.
Now his hands held the little automatic.
Removed the clip.
Pressed the muzzle to his forehead, where it was very likely making a little O that he couldn’t see, not without a mirror. Awkward, too, holding the gun in that position. Give yourself a sore shoulder if you weren’t careful.
Put it in his mouth, angled up and back. Didn’t care for that, either. Took it out of his mouth, held it to his temple.
Now that felt better. Comfortable, and a whole lot more natural.
So?
Time for a little game of Brooklyn Roulette?
He thought about it. A bunch of voices in his head fought for his attention, and one spoke a little more clearly than the others.
He took the gun from his temple, pointed it out across the water, angled it upward a little.
Bam!
The gunshot didn’t get him sober. That would have been more than you could reasonably ask of any sound, however dramatic. But it did get his attention, and lift him out of that particular drunken reverie.