The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

by Lawrence Block

  “But you don’t think it was self-defense.”

  “I think it’s fine they called it that way, and there really wasn’t any other way they could have called it. But no, it wasn’t self-defense, not once he tossed the gun.”

  “You were already set to fire, and it was too late to hold yourself back.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’ve thought about this enough to be able to say for sure. I had time to think about it, just a second or two but that was plenty of time. And I knew not to pull the trigger, and I went ahead and did it anyway.”

  “Three times.”

  “Uh-huh. Bam-bam-bam. One of the hoops they made me jump through was a series of sessions with a department psychiatrist. She didn’t get the story you’re getting, she got the official version. She asked me how I felt about it, and I told her what I figured she wanted to hear. Glad to be alive, sorry I’d had to take a life, sorry I couldn’t have been there in time to prevent the woman’s death. That last line was true, anyway.”

  “And not the others?”

  “Well, it’s true I was glad to be alive. The only problem she had with me is she was concerned by my lack of affect. When I saw the report I read it wrong, I thought she meant I was ineffective, and I didn’t see how it applied. But I think she meant my attitude didn’t match my words, that I didn’t seem to have processed the experience.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Glad he was dead, glad I’d made him that way. I’d have been just as happy not to go through all the crap that came after it, but it was worth it.” He thought for a moment. “How I felt—it didn’t have all that much to do with who he was and what he did. Here’s what you have to know. I liked it.”

  “You liked—”

  “I liked the feeling. I liked pulling the trigger, I liked watching the man die. It was like coming.”

  “Honestly?”

  “I don’t know if I can describe it properly. It was like an orgasm, but it wasn’t sexual. It had nothing to do with my dick, nothing to do with sex, really.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Yeah, really. So if I lacked affect when I talked to the shrink, maybe that had something to do with it. What I did, I wound up putting in for retirement a little earlier than I’d planned. My marriage coming apart was a factor, plus I got caught up in something unrelated, an Internal Affairs investigation of a former partner of mine that got me a little bit tarred with the same brush. But the shooting, which absolutely went into the books as a righteous use of deadly force, it played a role.”

  “How?”

  “Because once they gave me my gun back,” he said, “I figured I’d look for an excuse to use it. Or I’d be afraid I was looking for an excuse, and that would hold me back and keep me from defending myself when I really needed to. If you walk around questioning yourself—”

  “Yes, I can see what that would be like.”

  “So now you know something about me you didn’t know an hour ago. Am I really on board for killing your husband? When the time comes, will I be able to pull the trigger? Hell, yes, I’ll be up to it. I’ll enjoy it.”

  Twenty-four

  * * *

  Murder was easy. The tricky part was getting away with it.

  He spent the next several days trying to work out a way. The problem, of course, was that her willingness to pay to have her husband murdered was already a matter of record.

  The script he’d written, the lines he’d given her, had amended the record so that she’d called off the putative killer and denied that she’d ever been serious about it. And Sheriff Radburn bought the scene he’d staged, or part of it. Yes, she’d called it off, but that hadn’t convinced him that she didn’t actively desire George Otterbein’s death, and wouldn’t eventually try to make it happen.

  And when it did, she was the first person they’d want to talk to. That was basic, you always looked first to the surviving spouse, and with a far more skeptical eye than the NYPD shrink had turned on Doak’s affect, or lack thereof. Did the Widow Otterbein seem unaffected? Did she profess shock, but never shed a single tear? Did the tears flow like an open faucet, but remain somehow unconvincing? Was she too emotional? Was she not emotional enough?

  Was she too quick to call for an attorney? Was she not quick enough, as if overly concerned how it might look to lawyer up before the body was cold?

  Would she consent to a polygraph test? Her lawyer would shoot that down, but suppose they asked her before he got there? It wasn’t evidence, but there were plenty of ways they could hang her with it. They’d make what they wanted out of it, believing the jagged graph when it called her a liar, dismissing it as bad science if it backed her up.

  And maybe you couldn’t point to it in a courtroom, but you could leak the results when it suited your purpose, so that the jury pool wound up awash with men and women who knew she’d taken a lie detector test, and knew too that she’d failed it.

  A call on the Lisa phone: “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Darling, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  “Uh, I suppose you should tell me the bad news first.”

  “It’s the same news.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m being a pain in the ass, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I’m not pregnant.”

  “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? So how is it also bad news?”

  “Think about it, Sherlock.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right. So let’s just postpone our next get-together, because, well, you do get the picture, don’t you?”

  “You know, even if we don’t do anything—”

  “Not to mention that there are other things we could do, and they’re all things I’m very fond of, believe me. But I’m bitchy and blotchy and I’ve got cramps and I’m totally not in the mood. So we’ll have a little five-day vacation, and in the meantime why don’t you call one of your girlfriends?”

  “How did girlfriends get to be plural? There’s just the one.”

  “Real Estate Girl, the one with the oh-so-fabulous stories, except that would make them fables, and fables have to have morals. Which her stories don’t, and neither does she, and neither do we, either one of us, and isn’t that nice? Call her up and get her to tell you a story, and in a few days you can tell it to me. Or you know what? Bring her along and she can entertain us both. You’ve gone quiet. Don’t tell me you’re shocked.”

  “I didn’t know you were into that.”

  “Girls? Not in years, and it was never really what I was about, but women’s bodies are nice, aren’t they?”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  “Well, they just are, and it’s not like I’d forget what to do. When you come right down to it, what’s the difference between eating pussy and riding a bicycle?”

  “Uh—”

  “That’s a rhetorical question, darling. You don’t have to answer it. And if I do forget, I’ll just do her the way you do me. You know who I’d really like to do? Roberta, but I forget her last name. You know who I mean. Pregnant Girl.”

  “You’ve never even seen her.”

  “I haven’t seen Barbie Doll either. You’ve seen her, but you haven’t done anything about it, and I don’t know what you’re waiting for. How long before she has the kid?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of months.”

  “Well, there’s time, but still. I’m sure Real Estate Girl’s great, but I want Pregnant Girl. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have the feeling we could get Barb to do anything, and she’d be up for it.”

  “You could be right.”

  “And Pregnant Girl wouldn’t be up for it, but we could make her do it anyway. And maybe she’d like it and maybe she wouldn’t, and either way we’d have a good time. Now you’re shocked. But you still love me, don’t you?”

  Murder was easy. But how did you get away with it?

  No alibi could save her. She could be at a state dinner
at the White House when her husband was killed, and they’d haul her in just the same, and be sure she’d had a hand in it. And somewhere along the way they’d take a look at him.

  And even if they both held up, and there were no witnesses and zero physical evidence, Radburn and his fellows in law enforcement would know.

  He thought about the movie, Double Indemnity. Thought about Edward G. Robinson, dogged and resourceful. Radburn was a good old country boy, enjoying his meals and his TV, but would he be any less dogged? Any less resourceful?

  No evidence? Nothing that would stand up in court?

  The Otterbein children could still file a wrongful death suit. The standards of proof were very different in civil court, and you didn’t need the unanimous agreement of the jurors. If you had a preponderance of the evidence and the requisite number of jurors, you got your decision.

  And it would keep her from collecting a dime. The insurance company would freeze her claim or deny it outright, and there’d be no inheritance. All she’d wind up with, along with her widow’s weeds, was a reputation that would cling to her like a bad smell for the rest of her life.

  Lisa Yarrow. Her husband was murdered, you know. Oh, they could never prove anything, but she was behind it. I mean, it was common knowledge.

  Moving away wouldn’t help. Not with the 24-hour news cycle, not with CNN and MSNBC, not with Nancy Grace and American Justice and three or four cable channels with round-the-clock true crime shows. Not with the fucking internet.

  “He can run but he can’t hide.” Joe Louis had said that of Billy Conn, and he’d been talking about a boxing ring twenty feet square. Now it was true of the whole world. You could run, but you couldn’t hide.

  So how could you get away with it?

  He remembered a lecture at John Jay, a retired medical examiner talking about his life’s work. “The best way to commit murder and get away with it,” he said, “is to make it look like something other than murder. If it goes in the books as natural or accidental death, nobody’s going to put you in jail for it.

  “So how do you achieve that enviable result? Well, there are two very good ways, and the first is to push the victim from a high window. From a sufficient height, the chances of survival are virtually nil. And, in the absence of witnesses, there’s no way anybody can possibly tell whether the late lamented jumped or fell or was pushed.”

  And the fellow had waited for someone to ask him the other very good way.

  “Oh, that’s simple,” he’d said, when the question came. “Nothing to it, really. Just commit your homicide in Chicago.”

  That got the expected laugh, and made it clear what opinion the ME held of his counterpart in Cook County. And finding a high enough window within fifty miles of Gallatin County was about as feasible as hauling George Otterbein to Chicago and drowning him in Lake Michigan.

  Still, there had to be a way.

  He put in time online, doing all manner of searches, then dutifully clearing his history and deleting cookies. With his police background and his present line of work, he had legitimate reasons to bone up on forensics, but even so he didn’t want to leave a trail.

  His amateur dusting and cleaning would do for now. And when it was all over, assuming it went as he intended for it to go, he might want to take an extra precaution and drop his laptop—or at the very least the hard drive—into the creek behind the house. The brackish water would finish the job.

  Forensics. He’d watched the cop shows, the fictional ones like CSI and Law & Order, and he knew that they drove real-life cops and prosecutors nuts, because it was all so much easier on TV. Most departments didn’t have the resources for that kind of testing, especially in a North Florida backwater.

  But there was still DNA, wherever you were. And there were still tox screens. And if George Otterbein died in a car crash, somebody would give the vehicle the automotive equivalent of an all-out autopsy, which is what George would get if he had a heart attack or stroked out or drowned in the bathtub.

  Okay, nobody said this was going to be easy.

  Twenty-five

  * * *

  He left the house, drove into town, caught Sheriff Radburn in his office. “Nothing,” he reported. “If there’s a boyfriend, he must be living in her attic. I leave her alone most of the time, but whenever I track her there’s nothing doing. She goes shopping, she gets her hair done, she goes to work, she goes home. I’m wasting my time and the county’s money.”

  “But not too much of either, I don’t suppose.”

  “No, and some of it I won’t bill for. I got on her tail the other day and she led me to a mall way the hell south of town. There was a movie house at one end of it, and that’s where she went.”

  “So you turned around and came home?”

  “No, I watched the movie, and I’m not planning to bill the county for my ticket.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  “There’s something else you should know,” he said. “I dropped in on George Otterbein a few days ago. I wanted a look at him, so I turned up at his office with some story about a missing heir with the same name.”

  “Oh?”

  “He poured me a drink and listened to what I had to say, and it didn’t lead anywhere because there was nowhere for it to lead. And then a few days later he called me and hired me.”

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair. “To check on his wife,” he said.

  “No, he never even mentioned her. What he wanted was for me to run some background checks on some of his tenants. I like to call it legwork, but the fingers get more exercise than the legs.”

  “How’s that?”

  He mimed typing. “They do the walking,” he said, “through the internet. The point is, if I’m working for him—”

  “You shouldn’t be investigating his wife.”

  “I’m not sure of the ethics of it,” he said, “but it’s not as though I was getting anywhere.”

  “No, Doak, and I’m beginning to agree with you that there’s nowhere to get. I think she was serious enough when she told Gonson to set her up with a hit man, and I think something scared her off. It’s beginning to look like she’s staying scared.”

  “Or just realized murder’s a bigger step than she’s prepared to take.”

  “Or that,” Radburn said. “Oh, if George turns up with a couple of bullets in him, she’s the first person I’ll want to talk to. Think it’ll happen?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Meantime, at least you got yourself a client.”

  He drove from Radburn’s office to Stapleton Terrace and parked where he could keep an eye on the house. There was a single car parked out in front, a Korean compact that he recognized as Ashley Hannon’s.

  Go and get yourself pregnant, he thought, and Georgie Boy’ll spring for a Lexus.

  He checked his watch. Just past ten-thirty, and maybe she was a lady of leisure, maybe she never rolled out of bed before noon. Or maybe she was out jogging. She was young and fit, and people were crazy enough to do that sort of thing, even in Florida with summer coming on.

  No, there she was, walking out her front door, dressed like those Eastern European girls who’d bored him senseless playing tennis on TV. The same blonde hair, but hers was curly. A short white skirt, a white top. No headband, and no tennis racquet, either, just a canvas tote bag over her shoulder and a set of keys in her hand, and she triggered the remote to unlock the car door, got in it and drove off.

  George had given him a key, but not without getting an explanation first. Two of them, in fact, because the first one Doak floated got shot down.

  “No tapes,” he said. “You think I want to be on any damn tape recording?”

  “It’s the best way to be sure she’s not seeing anyone,” he said, “but I can understand that privacy’s a legitimate concern. I’ll still need access, though. I assume she has a computer.”

  Well, of course she did. Who didn’t nowadays?

  “If she’s
like most people,” he said, “her whole life’ll be on it, just waiting to be downloaded. I’ll be in and out of there in no time at all, and then you can have your key back.”

  Right.

  He gave her time now to remember what she’d forgotten and come back for it. When this didn’t happen, he picked up his clipboard for camouflage and walked to the front door. He rang the bell, because you didn’t want to take anything for granted, and when it went unanswered he used the key and let himself in.

  What furniture there was looked as if it had been ordered all at once from Walmart or Ikea—everything white, everything new, and none of it built to last. The one thing that wasn’t white was her portable massage table, folded and propped against a living-room wall. Her Mac laptop rested on a dinette table in the small kitchen. He booted it up, and the home page supplied her daily horoscope.

  He plugged a flash drive into a port and dumped her hard drive onto it.

  While the life and times of Ashley Hannon were busy reproducing themselves on the Kingston flash drive that lived on his keychain, Doak climbed the stairs to the bedroom. More white furniture—a six-drawer dresser, a queen-size captain’s bed with drawers on both sides.

  She hadn’t made the bed, and one pillow still held the impression of her head. He picked it up, inhaled her scent. For an instant he had the sense that he was being observed, and then his eyes met those of a teddy bear propped on the other pillow. The bear was dressed in striped overalls and a matching railroader’s cap, and looked as though he’d seen it all.