Body Language

by James W. Hall

  She went over to the bed, took him by the arm, and tried to tug him to his feet, but he made himself heavy and wouldn’t budge. He smiled at her as he continued to pet the large black cat.

  When he fell into these mulish moods, there was no wrenching him back. She could see in his eyes, lightless and opaque, that he was so mired in the bog of his delusion, not even the wedding march would stir him now.

  Alex stooped down beside him and made a show of lifting the dust ruffles and peering under the bed.

  “Well, nothing there,” she announced.

  Then she hustled into the small bath, opened the cabinet, gave the crowded shelves a perfunctory look, and shut the door quickly. Her heart knotted and went cold. From a quick glance, Alexandra knew with perfect clarity the woman who lived in this place. Jennifer McDougal, with her collection of froufrou perfumes and trendy hues of lipstick and nail polish, was the kind of girl who religiously pored over the monthly tips on man-catching from those slick and empty single-girl magazines, a girl with sufficient time and expendable income to indulge herself in every costly ointment and elixir that might help her spin her magic web.

  With eyes blurred, Alexandra marched back into the bedroom.

  “All right, Dad, I’ve seen enough. Now let’s go.”

  As he scratched the cat’s neck, her father squinted at her and shook his head.

  “Is that the way they taught you to investigate a crime scene, Alexandra? That kind of cursory effort? Department standards must have slipped.”

  “Dad, come on, damn it. I’m serious. Get on your feet.”

  “I want you to turn around and go back in there and peek and peer, dig under the cushions on the couch. Open every door, sniff and poke until there’s not a square inch you haven’t touched. There must be a thousand hidey-holes around a place like this, crevices you haven’t even considered.”

  Alexandra stamped her running shoe on the hardwood floor.

  “Dad!” she shouted, loudly enough to wake a sleeper from the death throes of a nightmare. But Lawton just smiled at the air.

  “Now go on, young lady, do a decent job this time. And be thorough, or you’re going to have to do it all over again.”

  Her pulse was misfiring, stealing blood from the muscles of her legs. Lawton Collins bounced lightly on the bed, the cat riding with him like an old friend who’d been down this bumpy road before, bright sunlight straining through the dirty windows, and somewhere nearby the combative libretto of a mockingbird staking out the perimeters of his territory, while in the living room the dolphin mobile clattered in the moving air.

  In a nervous daze, she made a circuit of the house and stared at every item, knowing that without intending it, she was storing everything she saw in these long-term banks of memory she’d never be able to expunge. The sink was cluttered with dishes, crusted with half a dozen dinners, and high atop the sugar canister a roach waved its antennae, sensing Alex’s shadow sweeping across the counter. There was the funky scent of garbage left too long beneath the sink, onions rotting in some drawer, a sinuous trail of sugar ants that made four S curves across the stove to a lake of Alfredo sauce.

  Clearly, Jennifer McDougal was no hausfrau. A girl who didn’t sully her hand with dishrag or Brillo pad. Whose skin was baby soft, lightly scented, a delicate girl who had spun out her fine coquettish net of perfumes and body oils and blushes and lip gloss and had trapped a helter-skelter, buzzing husband.

  Alex wanted to break everything she saw, then pick up the fragments and break them into smaller pieces.

  She turned from the sink and wrenched open the door of the Kenmore and peered into its frosty depths. Tecate beer, Stan’s favorite, a packet of hot dogs, jar of mustard, a Tupperware container full of white rice, a skim milk carton, and a box of Frosted Flakes that she must have kept there to save it from the bugs. Every item on those shelves was so squarely in the mainstream of Stan’s diet that they alone could indict him in Alexandra’s court of law. But it was the cheese that rocked her back. A wedge of Brie stripped of its cellophane, left to harden on the egg shelf, its pointy end bitten off, the grooves of a man’s teeth marking the blunt edge of the soft white cheese. It was one of Stan’s crude habits, which had once seemed a charming, boyish idiosyncrasy. But now as she stared at the cannibalized wedge, it was as damning as bloody footprints tracked across a murder scene.

  She could stand no more and slammed the door and headed back to the bedroom.

  The black cat had taken command of one of the pillows, but her father was gone. As she whirled back to the living room, she heard the voices of men somewhere outside. Halting, she hissed her father’s name, but there was no reply. With her heart knotted, Alexandra marched to the bamboo screen that covered the double front windows and peered through the slats.

  In the middle of Leafy Way, a buffalo of a man in pale blue pants, yellow sports coat, and a gray shirt was talking to Lawton Collins. Watching from a few feet away, a blond girl with a mocha complexion leaned over the tailgate of a blue pickup truck and was digging around under a blue tarp.

  Stiffly, her father stood a yard in front of the man, and in her father’s hand was a brown leather duffel. From forty feet away, Alex could clearly make out the image printed on the side of the bag—a white cobra outlined in orange, rising up from its coiled base. It was the dreadful mascot of South Miami High, with its logo: GO COBRAS, GO. And when her father shifted the bag in his hand, the sunlight lit up the solitary white scuff mark that several months ago, unsuccessfully, Stan Rafferty had tried to stain back to its original brown.

  The room was suddenly as cool and transparent as an aquarium, and as Alexandra swept to the door and walked onto the porch and down the steps, it was as though she were streaming through the bright unreal obstacles of some glassed-in undersea world.

  Without a glance at the big man standing in front of her father, she strode around the rear of the car, took Lawton by the crook of the arm, pulled him toward the passenger door of her Toyota and settled him in his seat. Then, with a quick nod at the large man and a glance at the girl, who was hurrying over, some kind of shotgun in her hands, Alex raced to her door, jerked it open, got in, and turned the key.

  The girl yelled out, “Hey!” then again, “Hey!” And the big man tried to block their path, but he was ponderously slow. Alex burned the tires, veered hard to the left, then swung the car straight, and the man pranced out of the way like a frightened horse.

  Lawton Collins, with Stan’s duffel on his lap, gave a courteous wave to the huge man and the girl, but they couldn’t see him, for they were scrambling back toward the blue pool truck.

  She turned onto Main Highway, lurched in front of a UPS van, switched lanes at the last second, and ran the light, going straight onto Douglas, north, then a quick left at Crawford, another left over to Poinciana, right and left again, then continuing south through the serpentine streets of the west Grove, running stop signs at a full tilt, putting as much crazy distance as she could between them and the blue pool truck, them and Leafy Way. At Cocoplum Circle, she cruised around twice before deciding which exit to take. Out Sunset Drive, down the shady tunnel of banyans, heart racing, eyes on the rearview mirror, then swinging right through a maze of Gables streets, straying vaguely north toward US 1, where she might lose herself in the endless flood of cars.

  “What’d he say, Dad? That man, what’d he say to you?”

  “Not much,” her father said. “He asked about the duffel.”

  “The duffel.”

  “Yeah, he wanted to know what was in it. I told him it was none of his goddamn business.”

  Alexandra was on Alhambra, waiting for the light, or a break in the traffic, so she could turn right onto Dixie Highway.

  “While you were poking around in the kitchen, I searched the bedroom closet, and that’s where I found it.” He patted the brown duffel. “If I’m not mistaken, this belongs to your husband. Mr. MVP in the football regionals.”

  Alex looked over at him
.

  “By the way,” he said, “the girl Stan’s shacked up with, she’s a size six. Little thing. I looked at her dresses, her shoes. She likes to go out dancing. She has a lot of those kinds of dresses. Shiny, low-cut, red or black, a couple of them made out of vinyl. Red appears to be her favorite color. And she wears very high heels—spikes. I looked for a riding crop, but I didn’t find one. A little vixen, that’s who Stan’s mixed up with.”

  “Stop it, Dad. That’s enough.”

  The light changed to green and Alex floored the Toyota, lurching north toward the city.

  “Well, now we know,” Lawton said, shifting the duffel. “Now we know the story behind the headlines.”

  “What?”

  “The story you won’t find anywhere else. Late-breaking news, exclusive footage at eleven.”

  “What’re you talking about, Dad?”

  “This,” he said. And he reached inside the duffel’s main compartment and drew out a green brick of cash. “A mess of cash is what I’m talking about.”

  THIRTEEN

  At Jackson Memorial Hospital, Alexandra parked the car in the underground lot, not far from where she’d seen Jennifer McDougal pull out the night before. She sat for a moment, the car idling, while her father worried over a loose thread he’d found on the sleeve of his jumpsuit.

  Then she switched off the engine and sat listening to the concrete echoes of the parking garage. Her body felt emptier than seemed possible for someone still alive. She sat for several moments listening to the hollow thunk of her pulse.

  The morning’s rage had burned itself out and left nothing but char where her heart had been. Her exhaustion was compounded by a sleepless night, lying in their dark bedroom at that unaccustomed hour, listening to the saw and flutter of her father’s snore through the wall.

  “We going to sit here all day or what? Not that I mind. One place is as good as another.”

  She heaved the door open and plodded around the car to free her dad.

  “What about this?” He patted the duffel.

  “Leave it.”

  “Leave it in a parked car in a public parking lot in Miami? A million buckaroos?”

  “Somebody steals it, fine. More power to them.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you, Dad. No.”

  “Have I done something I should be ashamed of? I mean, yes, I know there was the breaking-and-entering incident. And I suppose I’ve tampered with evidence now. Removed items from a crime scene. Some smart young lawyer could make something of that.”

  “It’s okay, Dad. You’ve been good. You’re not in any danger.”

  “I don’t know about those leaves, either. Leaving them in piles like that. Some kid could come along, little tyke who doesn’t know better, and hide inside one of those piles, and who knows what could happen? I could be liable.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” she said. “We’ve got it under control, Dad.”

  “I told you, didn’t I? The minute I saw it on the news, I knew it was Stan’s work. I’ve got a nose for crime.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  In his attack of fidgetiness, Lawton had unzipped his jumpsuit down to the brim of his small potbelly, leaving the coarse white hair on his chest exposed. She helped him zip it up and then led him over to the elevator and they rode silently to Stan’s floor.

  Her fingers felt numb, the prickly insensate feeling of frostbite. Her toes were going, too. Everything below her neck seemed to be sliding into shutdown.

  But her mind was sharp, every synapse clicking clean and hot. This man whose sophomoric pranks had once been the talk of the high school hallways had graduated to the national news. This man with sea blue eyes and a bullish determination to prolong his boyhood as long as possible. This was her husband, adulterer, thief, and perhaps even a killer.

  “Should I wait here?” her father asked just outside Stan’s room.

  “No, come in. We need to stay together.”

  When she eased open the door, Stan was dialing the last two digits of someone’s phone number. Then he leaned back against his pillows, his chin tucked down, eyes intent on the noise in his ear. His expression was smooth, joyless, flattened by the drug perhaps, robbed of its coarse vitality. She had a moment to study him in this unguarded repose, to witness the bland and bestial muscularity of his face. With a grim objectivity she’d never exercised, she noted how his forehead broadened near the hairline as if he had battered his head once too often against a skull more unyielding than his own. And she saw the piggishly narrow set of his eyes, their implacable flatness. His neck was too short, too wide. His ears tilted out a few obscene degrees too many, as if he were perpetually eavesdropping on the secret affairs of his neighbors. This was the man who had hauled her out of high school obscurity, crowned her with his spurious status, promoted her to the upper ranks of adolescent aristocracy. It had meant nothing then and now it meant even less. That the lingering love she’d felt for this man could have ended so abruptly and completely did not shock her as much as the idea that she had ever loved him at all.

  When he looked up and saw them standing in the doorway, his wooden composure barely altered. Without a word, he reached out and set the phone aside.

  “Pretty clever, aren’t you?” her father said, jabbing a finger at Stan as if he were a delinquent Lawton had nabbed. “Had it all figured out. Cause a big ruckus, get yourself injured, and no one would ever suspect. Pretty damn clever. Except you didn’t put us in the picture, Mr. Smart Guy. Me and Alex here. That was your mistake.”

  “Get that old fool out of here.”

  “He stays.”

  Stan shifted against his pillow. His IV bag wobbled on its stand.

  “Where’ve you been? Why haven’t you come to see me until now?”

  She stepped up to the foot rail of his bed.

  “Who were you calling, Stan?”

  “I was calling you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What’s going on, Alex? What the hell’s with you?”

  “Tell me, Stan; I think I deserve to know. Why did you do it? It wasn’t for us, was it? We didn’t need the money. We were doing all right. Not rich, but all right.”

  He was shaking his head, eyes straying to the wall.

  “Did she put you up to it, your size-six Jennifer? Was this your nest egg? You were going to run off and start over with her?”

  He clicked his eyes to hers and his lips turned ugly.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” But his voice was no longer into the lie.

  “Don’t bother, Stan. We’ve been over at the driving range. The Leafy Way Golf and Country Club.”

  Lawton chuckled.

  Stan’s eyes were working, little flicks of thought happening back there. A cornered weasel trying to remember his escape routes.

  Alexandra brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. A tall woman with smooth white skin. None of it showing in her face, the bombs that for the last few hours had been detonating in her gut.

  “You know, Stan,” she said, holding his slippery gaze, “what fooled me was Margie. How caring you were. You loved her so much, it radiated all around you. You were there to protect her, catch her if she started to fall. It was incredible to see. A high school kid with that much love for his sister. That’s the man I fell in love with. That’s the man I thought you were. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You used it all up on Margie, didn’t you? You just had a little bit inside you and you spent it all on her; then it was gone.”

  “You fucking bitch. You have no right to talk about her. No right at all.”

  Alexandra stepped back from the bed, a dizzy elation taking her.

  “We have your duffel down in the car, Stan. It’s all over, your little caper.”

  Stan opened his mouth to speak, but there was wild static in his eyes, everything crossing out everything else.

  “Don’t tax
yourself, Stan. There’s nothing to say. Nothing at all.”

  “Give him hell, Alex.”

  “I’ll turn you over to the police, you whore,” said Stan.

  “What?”

  “I’ll give them you and the old man.”

  “Are you crazy, Stan? You can’t dump this off on me. You’re a son of a bitch, and you’re going to jail for a long, long time.”

  “No, Alex. No, I’m not.”

  With a lazy snort of scorn, Stan turned his eyes away from her, drank in the bare wall for a moment, then turned his gaze back. A triumphant light burned in his eyes.

  “Take the money home, Alex. That’s what you’re going to do.”

  “You’re confused, Stan. You’re not calling the shots.”

  “Listen to me. Jennifer will come by and pick up the money later on this afternoon. She’ll ask you for the duffel, you’ll hand it over to her. That’s how it’ll work. Then everything’ll be okay. When I get out of the hospital, we’ll stay married for a while, keep up appearances; then when the time is right, I’ll divorce you and go away.”

  “Bullshit, Stan. Wake up! You’re deluded. You’re not going anywhere but jail.”

  She reached out for Lawton and took him by the arm. He was humming a song to himself, worrying over a thread on his sleeve.

  “I know about Darnel Flint,” Stan said.

  Her mouth went dry. She dropped Lawton’s arm.

  Stan said, “I know about all of it. All the gory details. You’re a murderer, Alex. If I take a fall, you do, too. And the old man goes down with us.”

  There was a tightening in her inner ear, a pang of pressure, as if she were on an elevator whose cables had snapped, the floor dropping beneath her.

  “Lawton told me the whole thing a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t you, you old fool? Babbling away, he told me how the kid molested you, killed your dog, so you walked next door and shot him in the face. He told me about the cover-up, the drugs on the floor. He even saved the gun you used on the kid. The murder weapon, Alex. He showed it to me, and I took it away from him. I got it put away nice and safe. The pistol you used to murder that kid. I hid it, in case I might need it someday. A day just like this.