Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  Miranda, poised to move closer, hesitated, hovering, immobile, ready to spring to the other woman’s aid, constrained by an overwhelming instinct to remain motionless, to survive.

  “Please, Miranda. There is nothing you can do.” Their eyes met. “I only get one crack at this. I’d like to do it right.”

  And as she composed her face and posture for maximum dignity, Gloria Simmons looked ethereal. She tilted her head slightly and gazed at Morgan, then she winked and slowly her eyelids drooped and she closed her eyes, accepting her execution with a kind of beatific forbearance. “Come away, death,” she whispered. The words were an invitation, distinct, conspiratorial, quietly triumphant. Her eyelids fluttered. Minutes passed, then, with a convulsive shudder, she slumped and settled back into the chair. A smear of discoloured moisture darkened her lower lip.

  Morgan stared in sustained horror; he had expected rage. He felt sick, suffocated, bewildered. Why embrace death like an act of self-love, of devotion, a caress, speeding it on its way? He felt close to her, angry, intimate, understanding, almost. It was to determine her own moment of dying. Power and grace in the face of the absolute, the utter inevitable inescapable immanence of death.

  She had rendered Ross impotent.

  Or was it Ross, in the shadows, a gracious assassin, who allowed her the illusion of power?

  Morgan could feel Miranda’s anguish. It was never easy to watch someone die, even a self-professed killer like Gloria Simmons. And there was no one like Gloria Simmons, he thought. He began edging toward Miranda with such imperceptible movements it felt like he was creeping inside his shoes.

  As she began turning toward Morgan in ultra slow motion she felt a disconcerting mixture of wary compassion for her partner’s predicament. Poor man, it must be confusing, his survival skills may have saved Gloria Simmons in the Arctic, she resisted murdering him when she could have, and now he was the helpless witness to her death.

  When they touched each other, avoiding skin contact, fabric gently brushing against fabric, they focused single-mindedly on what they were doing. Neither looked at Gloria Simmons and Thomas Ross was irrelevant. Their survival depended on complete concentration; one quick move, sweat, or the slightest abrasion, and either might die or, what would be worse, might kill the other.

  Morgan slowly held his free hand up to eye level and scrutinized his thumb and forefinger for evidence of the poison. Satisfied they were clean he reached over and pulled the neckline of Miranda’s sundress away from her breastbone. When she realized what he was doing, she hunched slightly forward, allowing the weight of her breasts to draw her flesh down to avoid abrasion. Then, awkwardly, without straightening, she reached across and returned the favour, tugging the blood-saturated cotton of his shirt away from the back of his other hand, which was still clutched over his wound, holding it clear of his skin. When he pulled his hand away from his neck he felt a sudden stinging pop, but no blood flowing.

  As they shuffled in their excruciatingly sluggish dance toward the bathroom, silence reinforced the stillness and they moved with a quietude that surprised them. No quips, no commentary. They progressed in unison with such little overt effort that no air stirred. They could hear their clothes rustling. As each moved, the other followed in a shuffling four-foot quadrille until at last they were in position to enter the shower. She had left the light on. Slowly, gently, she opened the glass door.

  Morgan reached cautiously into the stall, which was custom built and extra large, and turned on the water at low pressure.

  When the water was lukewarm they stepped in, fully clothed.

  Like a soft tropical rain, the water washed over their exposed skin and soaked through their clothes until they were drenched. Both began to relax, they seemed in their own small intimate world. As she felt warm water pooling in tepid pockets against her skin, Miranda realized the poisonous blend might have been driven through the fibres. Diluted, still lethal.

  “Careful,” she slurred between clenched teeth, “It’s not over.”

  Morgan had come to the same conclusion. Their sopping clothes were like instruments of medieval torture, hair shirts made from poison fleece. “Did you ever read about the Inquisition?” he asked, jaw rigid, lips unmoving. “Or is that just something you talk about?”

  “Shuddup,” she muttered, then looked up at Morgan without raising her head and risked a small smile as she began to unbutton his shirt, making slow progress because the material was saturated. Item by item, they removed one another’s clothing until they stood face to face, warm water streaming over the contours of their naked flesh, the pile outside the open shower door with twin peaks of baby-blue panties and underwear pants, as Morgan persisted, with endearing conviction, in calling his most personal apparel.

  Miranda knew they were still within a flick of death’s finger, but she was enjoying their prolonged intimacy, the languid pace and sensual movements of their ministrations to the needs of the other. They were so close it would have been equally as awkward to observe his body as her own without craning her neck. And possibly lethal.

  Morgan could sense every pore and nerve and plane and contour of Miranda’s body, which he would have thought was familiar territory; they had worked so closely together for over a decade, had skinny dipped together, had even been lovers in one brief flurry of erotic abandon that they had immediately contained and set off to the side as if it had happened to two other people who were only vaguely recognizable, but now he was intensely aware that neither familiar nor territory were adequate to describe the sensations her nakedness worked on his own body and on his mind, which was also concerned with impending death and strategies for survival.

  Slowly, with caressing motions, they created lather, and gently they soaped one another’s bodies, allowing the lather to slide delicately between hands poised like petals over intimate curves, capturing errant particles that might have stuck to their skin or clothing, and washing them away. They didn’t touch, letting water and gravity slide the poisons away. As they moved so they were almost in profile to each other Morgan caught a stardust shimmer along the upper plane of Miranda’s breast closest to him. He felt a deep thudding in his chest and his breathing constricted. Visible powder had been washed off, but there might be residual poison adhering to glass. When she handed him the soap he worked up a foam that he let slip from his hands over each breast. In the flow of the water over their taut contours, the foam skirted her nipples before sliding down into the shadows on the underside of her breasts.

  Morgan let the soap bar drop on the pile of contaminated clothes and they stood still, lost in the enfolding warmth of the water. He thought she drew him to her and she thought he drew her to him because they moved at the same time. Their arms circled one another and with his head tilted down and hers tilted up, their cheeks touched and their hair formed a drowned medley of auburn and dark brown flecked with grey. Time stopped.

  When it started again, Morgan leaned back and gazed into her eyes. Miranda glanced down.

  “Morgan,” she declared, “That is most inappropriate.”

  “Consider it a compliment.”

  “You know what we used to do when our old stallion did that? Whack it with a flyswatter.”

  “You never had an old stallion.”

  Hearing one another laugh, simultaneously it came to them, the death scene in the other room that they had blocked out in their efforts to concentrate on survival. They suddenly became aware of their nakedness. Wrapping towels around themselves, they walked gingerly into the living room, both of them glowing with a sheen of water. Morgan moved close to Gloria Simmons’s side and Miranda squatted down in front of her and wiped the discoloured moisture from her lips with a bit of tissue, careful not to touch the powder still on her forehead. Morgan remembered her on Baffin, poised between the living and the dead. Miranda touched Morgan, letting her fingers rest against his arm, thinking that sometimes the arc of a life was brief but full, and this woman, whom she reviled and admired,
but did not judge, had lived a full life and taken her leave with class.

  In slow motion, Morgan shifted his focus to scan the room, knowing Thomas Ross would not be among the shadows. He exchanged glances with Miranda. “The valise is gone. He took the Rosetta piece with him,” he said.

  “That’s good.”

  “What do you think?” Morgan looked down at the dead woman. He shuddered and looked away.

  “Gloriasimmons got what she wanted, Morgan. Baffin wins. Your side, Morgan. Sometimes bad people do good things.” She gazed down at the dead woman. “Sometimes good people do very bad things. Because they have to.”

  Morgan tightened the towel around his waist, and, in an instinctive response to his modesty, she tucked the top edge of her towel more firmly in place.

  “Your friends on Easter Island are farther ahead without the junta,” he said. “Fascists aren’t generally sympathetic to splinter groups. If McMan and Ross follow through, maybe within the legal framework of a Chile revitalized by the Baffin investment, the Rapa Nui will get to control their future.”

  “Crimes of the early morning, that’s how Matteo described the new era in his people’s history, the twilight just before dawn. Ross will end up doing the right thing, even if it is for the wrong reasons.” Miranda felt certain of this. “And ultimately, Matteo’s children will come into their own. They will, it’s inevitable.”

  Morgan, who had his doubts about fate and the inevitable, nodded assent. “We’d better call this in. We’ve got a dead person, here. And we’ve got a fugitive on the loose.”

  “Tell me about the sleeping bag, Morgan.”

  Feigning nonchalance, he smiled. “There’s nothing to tell. We were just keeping warm.” To reveal the naked part seemed inappropriate, given the lady was a corpse. “It’s from Shakespeare, you know. Twelfth Night.”

  “What?”

  “What she whispered. Come away, death.”

  “It’s from Twelfth Night.”

  “I just told you that. It’s a lament for lost love.”

  “It’s about consolation, Morgan. We studied it in high school. Not a flower, not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strown. We took it in grade eleven as the absolute zenith of romantic despair.”

  “And for Gloria Simmons, it meant exactly the opposite.”

  “You think? So, you figure her death was, how could we put this, self-inflicted? I mean, Ross was, well no he wasn’t, he …”

  “If you were going to say innocent, he’s anything but!”

  Miranda grimaced. “Not, exactly. Guilty.”

  “Except for assaulting two of Toronto’s finest, kidnapping, aiding and abetting a suicide, fomenting an insurrection, impersonating a lawyer —”

  “Maybe he went to law school.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.” Morgan was concerned by how vulnerable her ambivalance toward Ross made her seem. “You know,” he said, “W.B. Yeats once explained his disdain for Wilfred Owen by saying, ‘There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him.’”

  “His poetry, not the man. Yeats didn’t know the man.”

  “Exactly, and you don’t know Thomas Edward Ross.”

  Miranda gazed down at the dead woman, then back at Morgan. “The kidnapping charge wouldn’t stick. Forcible confinement, maybe. Except after the bonds were removed, she didn’t budge. I mean, this was her home, Morgan.”

  “Was it? You should have seen her on Baffin.”

  “You know what I mean.” She paused. “You should have seen Ross on Rapa Nui. He was even better-looking there — if you like the type. We won’t catch him, you know. He’ll become whoever he needs to be and slip through.”

  “Catch him, no. Find him, yes. Back on Easter Island, sooner or later. But agreed, why bother? I’ve got my killer.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Morgan looked down at Gloria Simmons. Death had leached the lustre from her complexion, the contours of her skull pressed against her face from the inside, through the flesh, in shadow her eye sockets seemed empty beneath the skin, but with her cascade of perfect hair, and the dignity of her expression in final repose, she looked less a cadaver than a wraith, a Valkyrie slain. Morgan felt an odd sense of relief that it was over, and an odd sense of loss. “Know what’s interesting?” he said. “It’s all speculation. It might be hard to convict Ross, but imagine trying to pin anything on Gloria Simmons. I’m in for endless paperwork, or very little at all.”

  “I suspect the latter, although Ross had no problem finding her guilty.”

  “More to the point, she accepted her sentence as just.”

  “And death, inexorable. She embraced it.”

  “Yes, she did.” He ran his hands through tendrils of his own damp hair. “I suppose it is for us all.” She had never heard Morgan sigh, but he exhaled with an audible hiss through his teeth that might have been a stifled sigh. He reached out and touched her cheek with the back of his hand and his dark brown eyes seemed unfathomably deep. “Inexorable,” he said, as if he had just coined the word.

  “Morgan, you’re standing here naked with a beautiful woman— myself — who is also standing here naked. Admittedly, the other beautiful woman on the scene is deceased. But let’s get over the mortality thing.” She reached up, grasped his hand took it away from her cheek, and let it drop to his side. “Let’s cover ourselves up, call this in, and go out for dinner. I want to tell you about a novel I’m thinking of writing.”

  Morgan walked back into the bathroom and in a short time she could hear the dryer whirling. Oh God! She barged in, but their clothes were still in their twin-peaked heap.

  “I didn’t know how to pick them up,” he said. “So I didn’t.”

  “O-kay,” she said slowly, drawing each syllable out with an exaggerated pursing and flexing of her lips. “We’ll have to make do with the towels.”

  “My shirt’s ruined, anyway.”

  “We need it for evidence. We need all our clothes, unwashed, as is, for evidence.”

  “Is that a push-up bra?” he asked, nodding toward the baby-blue swirl of cotton in the clothing pile.

  “Morgan, why don’t you go into the bedroom and see if you can rustle up something for us to wear that’s not laced with residual poison. Make do — I don’t expect that she had many overnight visitors your size. And don’t worry about finding a bra,” she said, arching her back just slightly. “I can do without.”

  When Miranda walked back into the living space, she looked at how graciously Gloria Simmons had settled into death and she reached over with a fresh tissue and dabbed a bit more moisture from her lips. Then Miranda picked up her purse and withdrew her cellphone. As she punched in the number for headquarters, she rummaged around for her semi-automatic. No Glock! The bastard had gone off with her gun. She blanched with outraged embarrassment. Morgan came out, still wrapped in a towel, he glanced over at the kitchen counter. Her Glock was lying beside the breadboard, racked and ready to roll. Ross had just wanted to show them he could.

  * * *

  Miranda’s hazel eyes and auburn hair glistened as they stepped out into the evening sunlight. She was wearing a rumpled pantsuit, the legs and one sleeve were rolled up precariously, the other sleeve had followed the natural inclinations of fabric and design to engulf her fingertips in a flapping tube of smoky green. She wore it with the assurance that an Armani looks good even when it doesn’t fit. Class buys clothes a life of their own. Morgan looked different. His pants were a soft, grey linen and excruciatingly tight, and he moved very awkwardly since the crotch was not cut for a man. He wore a most curious sort of swashbuckling blouse, white silk with cuffs flared below the elbows, and a broad swooping collar that caught the air as he moved; only the buttonholes, off-centred down the front, betrayed its borrowed status not from a dashingly effeminate Caribbean pirate, but from a woman of quite different proportions. They both wore pale blue silk scarves, one sheer and one opaque, flung casually around their necks, and t
hey wore their own shoes, without stockings or socks.

  “Dinner?” she said, taking his arm.

  No one arriving at the crime scene had uttered a word about the green garbage bag full of their sopping clothes on the bathroom floor, nor about them walking off wearing what might have been considered evidence for the Crown, and everyone fastidiously followed instructions to touch nothing, especially the corpse, without thick, protective gloves.

  “Dinner,” he affirmed. “You look lovely tonight.”

  “And you,” she paused, biting her inner lip. “You do as well.”

  They walked slowly down Trafalgar Mews, past an assortment of police cars and a Black Mariah from the city morgue. Despite the gathering coolness of evening, their body warmth pooled between them like an ineffable bond. The moon in the first quarter was a pale crescent against the August sky. Morgan was smiling. He looked at Miranda. She was smiling that radiant inscrutable smile that could mean just about anything. He wondered if she would make him a character in her novel that would never be written. She wondered if he had slept with Ellen Ravenscroft. She shrugged. It was good to be back in Toronto.

  Copyright © John Moss, 2011

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  Editor: Shannon Whibbs

  Design: Jennifer Scott