He said he’d been busy.
The rib eye was just right, as were the baked potato and creamed spinach, and he ate with good appetite. He’d stuffed himself earlier at Denny’s, but that had been a good many hours ago, and the several days without food had given him some catching up to do.
He drank a bottle of Dutch beer with his meal, and rounded it off with a piece of chess pie and two cups of coffee. When he saw Lisa on her way over, he got out the index card on which he’d printed a few words in large block caps.
She asked if he’d enjoyed his meal. Very much, he said, and positioned the card so she could read it.
She dropped her voice and said, “Tomorrow?”
“Around noon, if that works.”
“I can make it work.”
Her hand settled on his, just for a moment, and he looked up and met her eyes.
So blue . . .
Cindy brought the check. He paid cash, left a decent tip. Outside, he stood alongside his car for a moment and watched a cloud move to cover the moon.
He got in the car, headed for home thinking about blue eyes. Thought about the movie.
Linda Fiorentino’s eyes, he’d noticed, were green.
Well, there you go, he told himself. All the difference in the world.
Before he went to bed, he sat at the kitchen table with both his guns, the .38 registered to him and the 9mm from the show in Quitman. He’d never fired either one of them, but all the same he gave them both a thorough cleaning.
Loaded them when he was done, and put them away.
Thirty-seven
* * *
At the Chiefland Mall the next day, she apologized for keeping him waiting. “My lawyer came over,” she said, “with a stack of papers for me to sign, and it took forever. I’d have called you, but—”
“I wasn’t waiting that long,” he said. “And I had the car radio to keep me company. Waylon Jennings, Dottie West, and your pal Emmy Lou.”
“Country Gold. Close your eyes and you’d think you were back at Kimberley’s Kove.”
“Or half a mile away at Tourist Court.”
“No music, though.”
“Sure there was,” he said. “We made our own.”
Her Lexus was parked alongside his Monte Carlo, and they stood a foot apart between the two vehicles.
She said, “Well, shall we head over to the love nest? I guess you must have paid them for another two weeks.”
He shook his head. “I let it run out. That’s no place for us now, with the musty carpet and the drapes smelling of smoke. I booked us into an oceanfront condo a few miles down the road. It’s somebody’s unsalable time share and they’re more than happy to rent it by the day.”
“It sounds very nice.”
“I haven’t seen it yet. I found it online and booked it over the phone. No, let’s leave my car and take yours.”
The one-bedroom apartment was on the seventh floor of a ten-story building. It had a balcony with an ocean view. The floor was black and white ceramic tile, set in a geometric pattern, with a brace of area rugs in bright primary colors.
The bed was queen size, the bed linen gleaming white.
Lisa walked through the place, getting the feel of it, making it hers. “Quite a step up,” she said. “It doesn’t feel Back Street at all, does it? I kind of liked that aspect of the places we’ve been before, but you’re right, this is better for us now.” She’d been looking out a window, and turned to face him. “I’m scared to death,” she said.
“So am I.”
“I can’t even think, let along make whole sentences. I wish I was in the mood. Are you?”
“In the mood?”
“You’re not. We’re neither of us horny, are we? Doak?” He looked at her. “Fuck me anyway. Okay?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I was so scared.”
“That it wouldn’t work.”
“That it wouldn’t work, that we’d used it all up. That you’d look at me and see ugly where you used to see beautiful.”
“That couldn’t happen.”
“But how could I know that? I was half an hour late today. More than that, closer to forty minutes. You must have been wondering if you were going to get stood up.”
“It crossed my mind.”
“Mine too. The last time we talked, you told me how to disable my phone and get rid of it. I didn’t want to, it was like cutting a lifeline, but I did what you said. I think I told you I was keeping one message of yours.”
“Yes.”
“And you said to delete it, and I did. And after I did it I had the thought that I would probably never hear your voice again.”
He waited.
“And I went to work, and I wondered what was going to happen, and when it was going to happen. And I told myself it wouldn’t be for a few days, if it ever happened at all. And I didn’t know what I wanted, I really didn’t. So I worked my hours, and I smiled and talked nice to people and did my job the way I always did my job.
“And I went home, half expecting him to be there when I walked in the house. But he wasn’t there and his car was gone, and there were no phone messages, and I took a soak in the tub and kept waiting for the phone to ring, but it didn’t.
“And then the maid woke me to tell me the Sheriff was waiting downstairs in the front hall. But that was all she could tell me, because he hadn’t said anything to her. And I got dressed, and I made sure I was wearing something comfortable in case I was going to wind up wearing it in jail.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, I didn’t know what was going on. But I had to go downstairs, and I did, and I got the girl to bring us coffee in the living room, and he told me he had some bad news, and I learned that George murdered a young woman in her apartment, that she shot him while he was strangling her but it didn’t keep him from finishing the job, and that then he went nuts and wrote his confession on the wall. And went and shot himself, and now he was dead.”
She frowned. “And I was waiting for the rest of it, you know? Waiting for the questions, waiting for him to spring the trap. But he didn’t, he was all sympathy and consideration, and did I want a doctor? Did I want someone to give me a sedative?
“And he went away, finally, and then it all went on playing out, with his kids and everybody’s lawyers and a woman from the local weekly who thinks she’s Brenda Fucking Starr, and throughout the next couple of days I just acted numb and dazed and brain-dead, and it wasn’t an act.
“And all the time, where is Doak? Where the fuck is Doak?”
“I couldn’t—”
“Oh, I know that. I knew it then. The one thing you couldn’t possibly do was get in touch with me.” She put a hand on his chest. “But then something strange happened. You disappeared.”
“I disappeared?”
“Uh-huh. From the county, the state. You didn’t live here anymore. You just drove away. That’s what I decided must have happened.”
“After the—”
“After it happened. But then that shifted, too.”
“How?”
“You spoke to me, and you told me to get rid of my phone. And then you got in your car and disappeared.”
“I never went to Stapleton Terrace.”
“That’s right.”
“And what happened there—”
“Happened the way Sheriff Radburn said. They had a fight, he started choking her, she shot him, he finished killing her, he realized what he’d done, and—”
“And so on.”
“Right. And so on.”
He thought about it. “The little gun, the Browning with the malachite grips. You left it in your car for me. How’d Ashley wind up with it?”
“You gave it to her, told her he might get violent and she might need it for protection. Or you just slipped into the house and left it where she could find it.”
“All loaded and ready for use.”
“I guess.”
He let it play through his mind. “W
ell, it could have happened that way. And I can see how it would be emotionally convenient if it did.”
“Because it’s nobody’s fault. Except George’s, and he paid for it.”
“ ‘God forgive me.’ ”
“Huh?”
“On the wall.”
“Oh, yes, of course. For a moment I thought you were—”
“Praying?”
She looked off into the middle distance. “I was alone,” she said, “and he was dead, and it wasn’t my fault.”
“And I was out of the picture.”
“And you were out of the picture, so I didn’t let myself think about you, because what was the point? There was this man I used to know, and for a little while we loved each other, and then he went away.”
“You didn’t really think it.”
“That you had run off? I don’t know what I thought or what I made myself think. I didn’t expect you last night. I must have looked stunned.”
“Well, I could tell you were surprised. But you didn’t show much.”
“The perfect hostess,” she said. “Poised and unflappable. ‘You’ll be dining alone this evening? Right this way, sir.’ ”
“I didn’t know how I’d feel, seeing you.”
“I didn’t know how I felt. And then to have to meet you at the mall. How could I do that? I’m so glad you found this place. If we’d had to go back to that room—”
“No, that was never an option.”
“Although we had some moments there, didn’t we? Telling each other stories. Did you bring me any stories today? No?”
He drew a breath. “After the incident—”
“That’s a good word for it.”
“Afterward, I never left the house until yesterday. I watched old movies and waited for them to arrest me.”
“You thought that would happen?”
“I knew it would. I sat there with a gun in each hand waiting for a knock on the door.”
“Somewhere,” she said, “there’s a Jehovah’s Witness with no idea what he missed. Until yesterday, you said. What changed your mind?”
“Time.”
“The great healer. And until then it was just you and some old movies. No juicy phone calls from Real Estate Girl?”
“That’s over.”
“Really?”
“Really. I spoke to her earlier and managed to scare her off.”
“I won’t ask how. And Pregnant Girl? But you don’t want to talk about Pregnant Girl, do you?”
“Not now.”
“Okay.”
“What I should do now,” he said, “is tell you what happened that night.”
“I guess it didn’t just happen by itself.”
“No.”
“Darling, we can just—”
“Skip it?”
“Oh, I guess we can’t, can we? Lie close to me, and let’s pull the covers up over us. And could you do what you did once before? Could you put your finger inside me while you tell me? I don’t know why that should make me feel safer, I really don’t. But it does.”
Thirty-eight
* * *
He told it straight through, from his arrival at the house on Stapleton Terrace to his return to Osprey Drive. His voice was level and unemotional throughout, his narrative limited to a recital of uninflected facts. I did this and I did that and I did this and I did that . . .
She heard him all the way through without interruption. When he was done she lay still and remained silent. Their bodies were almost touching, and the blanket covered them like a cocoon.
Her eyes were closed, her breathing deep and even. Softly, he said, “Lisa?”
“I’m awake.”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I was there with you just now, you know. Standing at your shoulder watching it all happen. How awful it must have been for you.”
“I think we can safely say it was worse for them.”
“But then it was over, wasn’t it? For them, but not for you.” She reached to touch his face. “What shocked me, when he came and told me—”
“The girl.”
“It never once occurred to me that she would be part of it.”
“There was no way to leave her out,” he said. “Not that I could think of. If George gets killed, even if he drives into a creek or gets sucked into a sinkhole, they’ve got to come looking for you. The only way I could think of that would work was for him to kill himself, and to stage that and make it look right, you had to have another person on the scene. And she had to be the kind of witness who couldn’t contradict you.”
“Because she was dead.”
“And her death made his suicide plausible. It gave him a reason. I don’t know, maybe there was another way to handle it. But this was the only one I could come up with.”
“And it worked. No, don’t take your hand away, I want your fingers in me. Unless your hand is bothering you.”
“No.”
“You could move your fingers if you wanted. Just a little, so they don’t cramp up on you. Oh, that’s just so nice. Darling? When you told me about the man in New York, the one you had to shoot.”
“Yes.”
“You told me how it felt.”
“This was different,” he said. “It wasn’t thrilling.”
“No.” He took a moment to review the memory. “There was no feeling attached to any of it,” he said. “A little revulsion, I suppose, but it was off to the side and out of the way. I was aware of it after the fact, but I didn’t have time to pay any attention to it while it was going on. I had these things I had to do and I was doing them.”
“Checking them off the list.”
“Sort of. Working hard to get them done right.”
He took a breath. You don’t have to say this, he told himself. Took another breath. Yes, you do.
He said, “Before I went over there, I ran it through my imagination.”
“Like a visualization exercise.”
“I suppose so. And I thought it would be exciting. I got hard at the thought of taking hold of her, and doing her.”
“Strangling her.”
“Strangling her. And then it was as I described it. Passionless, robotic. That’s while it was going on. Afterward it was—”
“Awful.”
“Worse than awful.”
“It’s over now, baby.”
“I know.”
“You can let go of it. That’s what we’re doing, we’re letting go of it.”
He nodded. “But first,” he said, “I have to tell you about Roberta Ellison.”
“I don’t know who that is. Oh, wait! Pregnant Girl? Don’t tell me you went back to see her after all? You did! Oh, I want to hear this. Did you get to fuck her?”
He told her the stratagem he’d used, making sure the little boy had gone up for his nap. Told her how he’d noticed perfume on his return, known the opportunity was there for him. Told her how he’d shocked the woman (“Do you suppose he eats her pussy?”) and manipulated her until she led him upstairs.
He lay beside her, facing her, breathing her breath, sharing her body heat beneath the blanket, keeping his fingers tucked snugly inside her. The earlier narrative had been dry and clinical, but he recounted this episode as it had happened, and as he talked she began moving against his hand, moving around his fingers, making little sounds deep in her throat.
When she’d caught her breath she said, “Oh, baby, if she had half as good a time as I did just now, she’s got to be the happiest Milf around.”
“I left something out,” he said.
“That’s okay, darling. That’s a super bedtime story and I won’t mind hearing it again the next time you tell it to me. And just think of all the bedtime stories you’ll get to tell me. Years and years of stories.”
“Think so?”
She propped herself up on an elbow. “Oh, I do,” she said. “Isn’t that what you want? For us to be together?”
“Of course.”
> “I’m still Fantasy Girl, right?”
“Right.”
“Because otherwise what’s the fucking point? You know?”
“I know.”
“We got away with it, and I’m a rich widow. And for a while I’ve got to go on being a rich widow living on Rumsey Road, and you’ve got to be an ex-cop on Osprey Drive. But there’ll come a time when it’s okay for us to meet.”
“We already met.”
“At the Baron? Oh, when I thought you were a hit man. Who knows about that? Just Bill Radburn? Okay, so in a couple of weeks you come to the Baron again, and we’ll flirt a little. And the next day you have a beer with the sheriff and tell him you saw me at the Baron and I didn’t even recognize you from the Winn-Dixie lot, and we sort of hit it off, and you were thinking of asking me out. And you’re a little hesitant, and what does he think, and he tells you to go for it.”
“And we start seeing each other.”
“And it’s a perfectly dignified courtship, because they don’t have to see the part where we’re fucking each other’s brains out in a rented time share somewhere.”
“And we get married,” he said.
“When the time’s right. If you think you’d want to be married to me. If I’m still Fantasy Girl.”
“You’ll always be Fantasy Girl.”
“Then I don’t see a problem. I don’t want to live in that fucking house of his. I’m glad I get to own it, but I’ll be way happier when I get to sell it. If we stay in the area I’d just as soon keep my job, but we don’t have to. We could live anywhere. Do you care where we live?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I’m not rich-rich, but I’ll always have some money, and you’ve got your pension—”
“Whoopee.”
“No, really. We’ve got enough to be comfortable, and that’s plenty.” She stopped, looked at him. “I’m chattering away, all excited, and you’re not. Is something wrong?”