LoveMurder

by Saul Black

  Eugene shuddered theatrically.

  “Christ,” Nick said. “What a monster.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? She might as well have stabbed me.”

  Nick shook his head in resignation. Eugene smiled—then stopped smiling suddenly. “Oh shit,” he said quietly. He was looking past Nick toward the bar. Nick turned. A heavily built guy in Adidas whites and a red bandanna was approaching their table. He was deeply tanned, with a bright-white smile and glittery blue eyes: an overall look of deep physical indulgence, of calmly slaked appetites.

  “Mr. Eugene Trent,” he said, beaming.

  Eugene had gotten to his feet. “Mr. Don Lewis.” The two men did the handshake that morphs into a butch handclasp, with a little mutual tugging as if to confirm shared testosterone.

  “Who knew you played here?” Lewis said.

  Eugene had reconstructed his smile, but Nick could see it masked discomfort. He was expecting Eugene to introduce him. Eugene didn’t. Lewis didn’t acknowledge Nick’s existence. Just kept his delighted eyes fixed on Eugene.

  “Yeah, I’m a regular, dude. I didn’t know you—”

  “I don’t. It’s a one-off. We’re still good for Friday, right?”

  “Right,” Eugene said.

  “The numbers are working,” Lewis said.

  “Yeah, but not in my favor, I’m guessing,” Eugene replied, at which both men’s smiles broadened.

  For a peculiar, silent moment, they just stood there, grinning at each other. Then Lewis pulled off his bandanna to reveal a head of lustrous dark hair. “Alrighty,” he said. “I gotta bounce. I’ll see you Friday.”

  “See you Friday,” Eugene said.

  As Lewis walked away Eugene resumed his seat with a visible slump. Nick raised his eyebrows.

  “Fucking Facebook,” Eugene said. “I went to college with him. We do the catch-up bullshit, then it turns out he’s looking for investors in a goddamned nightclub. I shouldn’t have gotten drunk. That’s my trouble. I get drunk, I fill up with love. Friday I’m going to have to break the bad news.”

  “Really?” Nick said. “I can see you as a nightclub owner.”

  “So can I,” Eugene said. “But not with that nut. He’s a total fucking loose cannon.”

  “He doesn’t look like the type to take bad news well.”

  Eugene made a dismissive gesture. “He’ll get over it. I just have to remember not to drink.”

  They walked out to the parking lot together, Nick limping slightly. Beyond all the nonsense, he felt vaguely sorry for Eugene. (Although less sorry for him than for the unfortunate Michelle.) He was lonely, Nick thought. Transparently lonely. The philandering cynicism revealed precisely what it was meant to conceal: an increasing sense that either he would never find someone real, or that if he did, he was too far gone in his character to be able to keep her.

  “You know who really had the thing?” Eugene said.

  “Who?”

  “Katherine Glass.”

  Eugene, like everyone else in the country, had never forgotten the trial, and when he had learned that Nick had been one of the investigators had naturally wanted to hear all about it. As far as the facts of the case went, there wasn’t anything Nick told him that wasn’t already a matter of public record. But of course that wasn’t what Eugene (or anyone else) was really interested in. Eugene (and everyone else) wanted to know what Katherine Glass was really like. Nick had said nothing to him of the current case. No one outside law enforcement knew Katherine was involved. It made him uncomfortable to have her brought up again between them.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d met her,” he said.

  “I know I shouldn’t joke about it, but come on. You said yourself she was a piece of work.”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “If you like sadistic homicidal psychopaths.”

  “It is possible I might not have been able to handle her.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t.”

  “She was so hot, though.”

  “Well, she’s up at Red Ridge prison for the foreseeable future. You could go visit her. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Are you kidding? I’d be scared shitless. But she’s definitely number one in my psycho top five.”

  “Stick with Chanel,” Nick said. “Or quit deluding yourself and admit you’re ready for love.”

  “Well, if it was Chanel…”

  “I’ll check in with you when this stops hurting,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, I don’t want you blaming your next crushing defeat on a weak knee.”

  Nick drove home with his head full of Valerie and Katherine. There had been a point—right at the beginning, when Valerie called him and told him about the note—when he’d missed his opportunity. He should have said: Don’t see her. Get off the case right now. Let the Feds do it on their own. He’d had it right there on the tip of his tongue. But he’d known, even in the moment of almost saying it, that it would have been a waste of time. It would have meant patient, painful argument. And in the end the result would have been exactly the same.

  For the umpteenth time he wished Katherine’s death sentence had been just what it was supposed to be: the end of her.

  But she lived. And thanks to Valerie’s intractable sense of responsibility, thanks to the job only half done, Katherine Glass was back in their lives. She might as well be living with them.

  Nick didn’t believe in God, but it didn’t stop him from mentally uttering the occasional forlorn prayer.

  Please, God, let it be over soon.

  24

  Cassie Hart had a headache. It had been building in sympathy with the morning’s gathering thunderstorm since waking. Now she was at the drop-in center, hunting for Advil in the kitchen. The rain hadn’t come yet. The air was massed and electric. She was sensitive to the weather, unlike her sister, whose relationship to the physical world these days was determined, it seemed to Cassie, exclusively by how it affected her ability to do her job. These days Valerie’s relationship to everything was determined that way. Except, of course, Nick. One night, a couple of months after Valerie had started seeing him again, the two sisters had been out to dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant. They’d been going there since their early twenties, a small place with lots of soft red drapes and tea lights in little blue shot glasses. Valerie had said: I know this is my second chance. And even thinking that makes me feel like I’m daring the gods to take it away. Cassie had let it go, but even at the time she’d thought of her sister as living proof that understanding what was wrong with you was no guarantee that you’d ever be able to change it.

  The painkillers were not under the sink. “Goddamnit,” Cassie said, half to herself, half to Bree, who was loading the dishwasher. “I thought we had Advil in here?”

  “In the third drawer down,” Bree said. “We moved that stuff when the sink leaked—remember?”

  Bree was a floaty woman in her early forties with heavy-lidded eyes and a lot of thick, dyed red hair, invariably held back from her face by a psychedelic head scarf. Twenty-five years ago she’d moved west from Texas to study art history at USC, from which she’d just about graduated (she was a vague student who daydreamed and dawdled through her degree with a gentle resignation to the fact that it wasn’t ever going to amount to more than a hobby for her) and married a young doctor (now a big-bucks cardiologist) not long after leaving college. She’d been a stay-at-home mother until her one son had turned sixteen and now spent her time mildly enjoying museums and galleries, gardening, and having endless cappuccinos with idle friends, salving her not-very-robust social conscience by supporting a few charities and volunteering at the drop-in two days a week. Lately, Cassie had noticed an aesthetic stepping-up in Bree, a little weight loss, fitted clothes, makeup more precisely applied. She assumed Bree had begun having an affair, but they weren’t sufficiently close for her to ask.

  “It’s this goddamned weather,” Bree said, as Cassie found the painkillers and popped a couple. “Even
these guys seem strangely subdued.”

  “These guys” were the drop-in’s patrons. Most of the regulars were there, but there was a pent-up atmosphere in the lounge café. The three card-playing ladies (the “poker posse”) were in their usual spot by the window. Moya, an eccentric fifty-two-year-old who wrote poetry no one could understand (or indeed stand) was at one of the desktop computers looking at—God only knew why—archive footage of whales being flensed. Tommy, the tattooed guy, was at a table alone, going through a file of old telephone and utility bills. He had these occasional fierce fixations, part of his ongoing belief that the world was a conspiracy dedicated to ripping him off. Today his mood was worse than usual because blind John hadn’t shown up. Tommy looked as if he’d been deprived of a curious but desperately needed fix.

  “Honey, why don’t you take off if you’re feeling lousy?” Bree said. “I can handle things here.”

  “Oh, no, it’s fine,” Cassie said. “These babies should kick in soon. I’m just being a wuss.” This was Cassie’s reflex mode, her share in the family trait of not feeling sorry for yourself, overdeveloped in her case thanks to years of nursing, of dealing with people who were really suffering.

  “Well, I wish you’d go see Denise,” Bree said. “I’m telling you: You go once, you’ll want to go every day.” Denise was Bree’s massage therapist. “I haven’t had a headache in ten years,” Bree continued. “It all starts with what’s going on in your trapezoids. Or wait, maybe it’s your mastoids.…”

  Cassie’s shift passed uneventfully, but she was glad when it was over. For all her dismissal of Valerie’s warnings as paranoia, she didn’t feel properly at ease until she was at home with Owen and the kids safely tucked up in bed. Her feelings were the basic you-don’t-give-in-to-terrorism model, but they were hard to sustain if you had kids. There might be first principles worth dying for, but there were no principles—first or otherwise—she was willing to let her sons die for. Since Valerie’s alert, she and Owen had tightened up. There were new security locks at home. The kids were confined to their own backyard. For the last week of school, drop-offs and pick-ups, either she or Owen went inside the building, much to the boys’ mortification.

  “Vincent’s only six,” Jack had protested, “so I get that. But Mom, I am eight and a half.”

  It had delighted her, secretly, that she’d brought them up with a sense of independence and responsibility. She’d wanted to hug Jack when he’d come out with this. But any pride in her sons’ autonomy took a distant second place to keeping them safe. She’d invoked the rarely used maternal right of veto without appeal. “This is one of those times, Jack, where, hard though it might be, you are just going to have to do exactly as I say, with zero argument. Now how often do I say that?”

  “All the time,” Jack had said, without much conviction.

  “Tell the truth. Come on, look me in the eye.”

  Much eight-year-old shifting from foot to foot. “But Mom…”

  “How often, Jack?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me I’m not the most reasonable mother on the planet. I should get some sort of award for how reasonable I am.”

  “You’re not that reasonable.”

  “Spell ‘reasonable.’”

  “What?”

  “Come on.”

  She’d watched him sketching it out in his head. She’d watched him recognize a lost cause. She’d watched him let it go. He didn’t really mind, deep down. Of course his little burgeoning masculinity was affronted, but his wiser child self knew, inarticulately, that the proscription came out of love. She’d watched all this going on in him and been filled for a moment with the richness of her life, its fabulous gifts and priceless treasures, all wrapped up in the plain paper of ordinariness. All that wealth you took completely for granted—until someone exploded it.

  Valerie had wanted her to get a gun, but she’d resisted. There’s no point, unless I’m going to carry the goddamned thing around with me the whole time, and I’m not doing that. One gun-toting woman in the family is enough. I’d probably end up shooting myself in the foot. Besides, the kids already spend half their lives firing Xbox guns at robots. I’m not having them anywhere near the real thing.

  The sky was heavy, and a few thin drops were falling by the time she stepped out of the center into the parking lot, just after two thirty in the afternoon, but the main event still wouldn’t break. The short walk to her car was a wade through molasses. She needed to stop at the supermarket on her way home to pick up stuff for dinner (salmon steaks, she thought, maybe some kale and fixings for a bean salad, though Jack and Vincent would groan; what the hell, she’d make some french fries, too, by way of compensation) and to collect a suede jacket she’d had dry-cleaned. Drop those at home, take a quick shower, then it would be time to go and get the boys from her mom’s, where the presence of one of Valerie’s delegated police officers (there were three of these guys on rotation) had been at first a source of amazement to them, then, in the way that kids had, assimilated, courtesy of Cassie’s explanation that they were Neighborhood Watch officers “in training,” sent there by crazy Aunt Valerie.

  Cassie was looking in her purse for her keys when she heard a strange sound—a sob?—a few feet behind her, and turned.

  “John?” she said.

  “Who’s there?”

  “John, it’s Cassie from the drop-in. What … what’s the matter? Hey…”

  He was leaning against the flank of a brand new pick-up truck parked a couple of spots away. He had his white stick in his hand, but he was shaking, obviously in distress. There was no sign of his Seeing Eye dog.

  “Oh, Cassie,” he said, straightening and putting out his hand. “Thank God it’s you. They took Frankie!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know … I was … They must’ve taken him.”

  “Someone took your dog?”

  For a moment, John just stood there, trying to get himself under control. What she could see of his face (aside from the half-gray beard and dark glasses) was moist. He looked overheated, in fact, in a combat jacket and sweatshirt.

  “I need a … Can you give me a ride to the police station? I mean, do I even go to the police? I don’t know what to do! Frankie’s my eyes, he’s my eyes.”

  Cassie stepped over to him and took his outstretched hand. He was fever hot.

  “Okay,” she said, “take it easy. Take it easy now. Tell me what happened. Just calm down and tell me what happened.”

  “What am I going to do?” John said. “I mean, how am I supposed to get home even?”

  “John, seriously, calm down. Don’t upset yourself. We’ll get you home, don’t worry. Just tell me what happened.”

  “He’s microchipped,” John said. “But that’s only any good if someone hands him in. What if they hurt him? What if they kill him?”

  “John, listen to me. Come with me into the center. Let’s get you—”

  “No, no, I need to sit down for a second. I’m … I need to sit down.”

  “Okay. Listen, my car is right here. Just a few steps. You can sit down and tell me what happened. Come on. Take my arm.”

  Cassie helped him to the Mazda and got him settled in the passenger seat. The first thing she wanted to do was cool him down. It would take a few minutes for the air-conditioning to work its magic, but she had faith in its restorative effects. She started the engine and turned the dial up to max. A sheet of lightning shivered. Followed a few seconds later by loud, brittle thunder. Big droplets began to fall, an urgent calypso on the car’s body.

  “Here,” she said. “I’ve got a brand-new bottle of water in my purse. Have some. You’re a little overheated. Do you want to take your jacket off? It would help.”

  “No, no, I’ll be okay in a minute. Thank you. You’re kind. I’m sorry I’m so upset.”

  “Don’t be silly. Here, drink some water.

  He was still shaking, but his breathing was eas
ier. He took a couple of swallows from the bottle.

  “I waited and waited,” he said. “When the bus came, I thought, you know, if I could get here someone would … someone…”

  “It’s okay, hon,” Cassie said. “We’ll figure it out. I promise we’ll figure it out.”

  “But when I got here I got lost in the parking lot. I’m so used to Frankie knowing the way, you know?”

  “I know. Of course. Of course.”

  “Who would do that?” he said. “I mean, goddamnit, who would do that?”

  She got the story out of him, in bits and pieces. As far as he could tell a girl had spoken to him at the bus stop. She’d made a big fuss of the dog. “I knew she was with someone,” John said. “But when I asked her, she said it was just her. Now I think there might have been a few of them. She sounded young, like a teenager. She said she’d wait with me till the bus came.”

  But she hadn’t. At some point John had felt Frankie’s harness snatched out of his hand.

  “There was a car idling the whole time,” he said. “They must’ve just bundled him in there. You know Frankie. He’s good with people. He probably thought I was going to get in there with him.”

  Cassie was furious. Or rather, depressed because she wasn’t furious. She wasn’t furious because she wasn’t surprised. Kids did cruel things. Small things to them, it seemed, ephemeral transgressions that added a little capital to the idea they needed to have of themselves as heartless. She imagined some of the gang who’d done this would’ve had mixed feelings. But they would’ve been outweighed by the one or two strong, contemptuous personalities in the group, the kind of kids who were moving through the last phase of willed hardness from which it might still be possible to escape. These kids would have a year, maybe months, maybe days before their commitment to killing compassion in themselves would be set in stone. Somewhere in her calculations she understood her kids would never be that way, not terminally. She knew she and Owen had already done enough. Then she thought: maybe these kids’ parents thought the same thing? Could you ever know for sure?