by J. D. Mason
Women were brilliant creatures. They put men to shame in the brains department, and as smart as Ed Price believed himself to be, as cunning, and as secretive, Plato knew from personal experience that a woman could crack the code on a man’s cell phone faster than any hacker, if she so desired. She could interpret cryptic conversations better than any intelligence specialist or linguist. And if indeed she did discover that there was another in your heart, then God bless you. Tag team? Enemies? He wasn’t sure. But if Lucy Price did bring her ass to Blink, then he’d soon find out.
Can’t Buy a Thrill
LUCY SAT IN THE LIVING room of Marlowe’s small bungalow, numbed by the experience of finally seeing this woman in person. Marlowe Price had been larger than life since Lucy had first seen her on the news, but nothing could’ve prepared her for actually meeting her face-to-face and seeing the very literal contrasts between herself and the other woman her husband had married.
Marlowe was a curvy woman, slightly bigger on the bottom than on top, with a waist so narrow it hardly seemed sufficient enough to support both halves of her. She had a youthful face, round and smooth, with an explosion of hair that overwhelmed absolutely every other part of her except those hips. And all that was compacted into a body that couldn’t have been more than five four on a good day. Lucy stood five eight.
The tension in the room was stifling, and for the first five, maybe ten minutes, all the two of them could do was stare at each other. Roman’s voice broke through the fog and snapped them out of this trance they’d fallen into at the sight of each other.
“Mind if I ask how you met Ed Price, Marlowe?”
Without looking away from Lucy, Marlowe responded, “Cancun. I was supposed to go with my sister, but she passed away, and I decided to go alone after we buried her.”
Lucy made note of the cadence in which Marlowe spoke, slow, steady, and even. Not a twang, but a drawl. Most Texans she’d met didn’t even have noticeable accents. But there were twangs. And there were drawls. And there was a difference. Why this mattered, Lucy couldn’t say. But with Marlowe, everything mattered.
“How long ago?” Roman asked.
“A year ago.” Lucy responded with the answer because she’d remembered Ed going away for a week to an investors’ conference in Mexico. She remembered because the two of them hadn’t been married but a few months, and she was disappointed that he was going out of town without her. He’d started seeing this woman three months after he’d married Lucy.
“He came on to you?” Lucy asked, breaking the rules of the deal she’d made with Roman before they’d come here.
“Let me ask the questions, Lucy. If you ask them, things could get heated,” he’d warned her. “Follow my lead, or we won’t do this.”
“Lucy.” He said her name with warning.
“Did he?” Lucy asked again, ignoring him.
“I was sitting on the beach, and he came over and offered me a drink. I declined because I don’t date white men,” she explained bluntly, “and then he asked me to dinner.”
“So you don’t date white men or accept drinks from them, but you have dinner with them?” Lucy asked callously.
Everything about Marlowe Price was insulting to Lucy. Everything from her smug demeanor to her big hair to her unapologetic attitude that she purposefully seemed to be directing at Lucy.
“Marlowe,” Roman interjected. “After the two of you started seeing each other, how did Ed explain his absences? He had to have been gone for weeks at a time. Where did he tell you he was going?”
“Where’d he tell her he was going?” she asked, looking at Roman but jutting her chin in Lucy’s direction. “Eddie was gone a lot, but he was home enough. Enough to where I didn’t suspect that he was married to somebody else.” She looked back at Lucy. “What’d he tell you?”
It felt strange to be angry at this woman, to feel jealousy over the fact that she’d slept with the man that Lucy had loved and married, but ultimately with the man that Lucy hardly knew. Those kinds of emotions were misplaced here, and in that part of Lucy’s mind that was logical, she knew it. Ed was a lying, cheating, murderous bastard who’d soiled everyone he’d come in contact with. It was the irrational side that rose to the surface.
“He told me that he was away on businesses, at conferences, visiting clients,” Lucy said defensively. “He didn’t tell me that he was in Texas fucking you.”
“Lucy!” Roman said sternly. “Don’t do this!”
“I guess he didn’t want to feed your insecurities,” Marlowe retorted. “I didn’t ask him to marry me. He asked me. He chased me like I was the only woman left in the world, and he did it knowing full well that he had you at home waiting for him, so don’t sit here and try and make me the villain.”
“No, Ed’s the villain,” Roman stated. “You both need to remember that. Neither one of you would be here now if it weren’t for him.”
“This bitch is acting as if I’m the one who’s done something wrong, Roman.”
“No, this bitch resents you coming into my damn house, staring down your nose at me like I’m so fucking desperate that I’d have married a man who I knew was already married. I’m not that gotdamned needy.”
“Aren’t you? You barely knew him, Marlowe. You don’t marry a man that you know for three months. If he wants to marry you after three months, I guarantee that something’s wrong with him, something’s wrong with you if you say yes, and in fucking Vegas of all places? Really?”
Roman stood up. “Let’s go, Lucy,” he demanded, glaring at her.
“You’d better listen to him, Lucy,” Marlowe said threateningly. She stood up, too.
“Did you kill my husband?” Lucy blurted out.
Mixed emotions came so hard and so fast that Lucy couldn’t make sense of any of them. Ed was a monster. He’d threatened to come after Lucy if she ever told the police her suspicions about Chuck Harris. Marlowe was a monster, too, in her own way. And after meeting her here, Lucy wouldn’t be surprised at all if Marlowe had admitted it.
“What the hell makes you think I’d tell you if I did?” Marlowe shouted.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Lucy spat. “The police will find out soon enough and arrest you, Marlowe.”
Marlowe’s steely gaze bored into Lucy. “What’d you really come here for? To find Eddie or to see what it is about me that made him lose his damn mind?”
Tears stung Lucy’s eyes. “Is he dead, Marlowe?” she asked, standing up.
“I don’t know, Lucy,” Marlowe shot back. “Is he?”
“Lucy,” Roman grumbled under his breath, grabbing her by the elbow. “Let’s go.”
He tugged on her firmly, leading her to the front door, making it clear that the two of them were leaving together.
They climbed into the car and sat parked in front of the house for several minutes. “That was a catastrophe and a monumental waste of time,” he said irritably. “Is that what this was about, Lucy?” he asked, turning to her. “Is that why you wanted me to arrange this meeting, so that you could go head-to-head against this woman over a man who has unofficially fucked up just about every life he’s ever come in contact with?”
Lucy was reeling, but more at her own behavior than that woman’s. “No,” she snapped. “I couldn’t … I don’t know, Roman. I just got so angry at her.”
“Why? What’s she done to you?”
“She married my husband.”
“What the hell, Lucy?” he said, exasperated. “Do you hear yourself? We’re talking about Ed Price, the man who threatened to come back and kill you. The gotdamned killer, according to you. And you give a fuck about who else he married?”
God! He was right. This wasn’t about Marlowe Brown or Price or whatever she called herself.
Lucy shook her head, disappointed. “I thought that if I saw her, if I met her, I would look back at a woman who was as wounded and disillusioned as I was.”
“You didn’t give her a chance to show you if she was w
ounded, and I guarantee you, she is. The woman’s under siege, Lucy, and not just from you or me, but from the police, the media. Hell, if he threatened you, who the hell knows what he did to her?”
Roman started the engine and slowly pulled out of the driveway. Lucy stared out the window at the trees and open fields. She was no closer to knowing if Ed was alive or dead than she’d been before she’d made this trip. Was she crazy for even thinking that she could find out? Marlowe wasn’t going to volunteer a confession of killing a man to Lucy and Roman. And if she didn’t kill him, she’d have told the police where to find him if he were alive to save her own ass if nothing else. Lucy wanted him to be dead. Ed felt real down here. He felt a long way from dead.
Belly of the Whale
MARLOWE USED TO LIKE the Internet. It had been great for her business, but since all this had happened, she’d come to loathe it simply because it gave every dim-witted asshole a platform to offer up an opinion and other dim-witted assholes the opportunity to “like” or to “follow” or to “share” bullshit that had made her public enemy number one.
Quentin Parker headed up the police department in Blink, Texas, and he was the one leading this investigation on the homicide that had everyone in the town, and most of the country, watching.
Marlowe had known Quentin all her life. After Marlowe and Marjorie’s mother abandoned them, Quentin was the one who’d picked the twin girls up from their temporary foster home and drove them to their aunt Shou Shou’s.
“You girls be good.” She remembered him kneeling on one knee in front of the two of them on Shou Shou’s porch. It had taken an awful lot to convince the state that a blind woman was perfectly capable of taking care of twin girls, but somehow, he’d done it. “If you need anything, anything at all, you call me.”
He’d been a handsome young officer with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes. Quentin had to be at least sixty now. Most of that blond hair was gone, but he held on to what he had left with conviction. He’d put on some weight, but those eyes were still as blue as cornflowers.
“You need some water or anything?” he asked Marlowe, who had been sitting in that room for ten minutes, waiting on him to come in and finally question her about Eddie.
Marlowe had been dreading this day, but she knew that it was coming. Quentin would come to the house every now and then and ask her some things, but this time was different. This time was “official.”
“No,” she said tersely.
Quentin Parker wasn’t her friend. He was her interrogator. Of course she was guarded and defensive. In this capacity, Quentin was the enemy.
“Do you believe that I killed my husband, Quentin?” Marlowe couldn’t help asking him “officially.”
He wouldn’t even look at her, just wrote on that yellow legal pad of his like she wasn’t even there.
“You know me. You know my whole family. How could I have done something like this?”
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, Marlowe,” he said, sounding more like a father than a detective. “It’s not about what I believe. It’s about getting to the truth.”
“I’ve told you the truth,” she said, resting her elbows on the table and leaning in his direction. “I ain’t never lied to you, Quentin. Never had a reason to, and I don’t have one now.”
It wasn’t until someone from the media wrote up an article published online about a missing man named Edward Price that Quentin had connected Marlowe Brown to him by a marriage license discovered in Vegas. Quentin was the one who told Marlowe about that article, and that was how she found out about Lucy. Less than a week later, the police had come across a body, and as soon as reporters put the whole story together, Marlowe Brown-Price was suddenly suspected of murdering her bigamist husband in a jealous rage.
“Forensics is trying to see if Ed’s dental records match the victim’s,” he told her. He leaned back and sighed. “When was the last time you saw your husband alive, Marlowe?”
The knot she already had in her stomach grew even tighter. Quentin had asked her this question before, not long after they’d found that body, and that was the one and only time that Marlowe had lied to him. He was asking that question again, because he probably suspected that she hadn’t been truthful.
“Marlowe?” he said, staring at her like she was his own daughter caught in a fib.
Before, she’d told him that the last time she’d seen Eddie was when he’d left the house at four in the morning to drive to the airport in Dallas. Quentin had her. She could tell by the look on his face that he knew it.
He waited for her to start.
“I was at Shou Shou’s with my cousin,” she reluctantly began. “We stayed there until about midnight, and then she drove me home.”
All of a sudden, Quentin looked disappointed, like he was hoping that his assumption about her had been wrong.
“It was Shou Shou’s birthday,” she continued hesitantly.
“When was this?”
Eddie had told her that he’d be home on Saturday. “Wednesday.”
“The Wednesday before the body had been discovered?”
Reluctantly, she nodded.
Quentin tossed his pencil down on that pad of paper, leaned back, and sighed.
“I didn’t know he’d be home,” she added, like a schoolgirl trying to justify why she’d ditched class. “He told me that he wouldn’t be home until the weekend.”
He picked up his pen again and starting writing something on that pad of paper. “You say your cousin drove.”
“Yes,” she said, so softly that she barely even heard herself. “Belle.”
“Why didn’t you drive yourself to Shou Shou’s?” he asked suspiciously.
“Belle offered to drive,” she said simply, meeting and holding his accusatory gaze. “Since she had to pass my house, anyway, to get to Shou’s, it made sense.”
He had handed her the rope. Marlowe had turned it into a noose and put it around her own neck.
“So Belle pulled up in front of your house at midnight?”
“Give or take a few minutes,” she murmured, “yes.”
“And you saw Price’s car when you pulled up.”
“Yes.”
“Where was he?”
She shrugged. “I assumed that he was in the house.”
“Were the lights on in the house?”
She had to stop and think about it. “No.”
“You assumed that he had gone into the house and hadn’t turned on any lights?”
When he put it that way, of course it sounded silly. “I didn’t think about it. I just saw his car, and since he wasn’t in it, I figured he was inside.” Marlowe thought about it. “And it was late. Late enough for him to have been in bed.”
“Your husband traveled quite a bit for business?”
Again, she nodded. “His company was headquartered in Denver. That was where he worked most of the time.”
“And the rest of the time?”
She shrugged. “He was either at home with me, or he said he was traveling to conventions or to see clients. Eddie had some rich clients, and he said that it helped the business relationship with those clients if, from to time, he met with them in person to review their portfolios.”
“You believed him?”
Knowing what she knew now, Marlowe felt like an idiot for believing him. “I did believe him,” she replied simply.
“So you went inside the house?”
“I did.”
“What’d you do?”
“I went into the kitchen to put away food that I had brought home from Shou Shou’s party.”
“Did you turn on any lights?”
Why the hell did he care so much about lights? She shrugged. “I’m sure I did. I don’t know. You’ve been to my house. It’s small. I just wanted to put that food in the refrigerator before going upstairs to Eddie.”
“How’d you know he was upstairs?” he challenged.
“I just figured he was. Like I said, i
t was late. And if he’d just flown in from Dallas and then drove another two hours to Blink, then he’d be tired.”
Quentin was trying to make her second-guess herself about that night. But Marlowe hadn’t done anything wrong. She just hadn’t told him about what really happened until now, and he looked like he wasn’t too anxious to know why.
“Did you go upstairs?”
Marlowe just looked at him.
He sighed. “Was Price upstairs like you assumed he’d be?”
“I never went upstairs,” she admitted reluctantly. “I was about to put the food in the refrigerator when I heard something out back.”
Her backyard was directly off the kitchen, which had a door leading out into it.
“What’d you hear?”
“It sounded like fighting.”
Quentin tilted his head curiously toward her. “Fighting?”
“Grunts and…” How do you describe the sounds of fighting? “It didn’t sound good, but I didn’t know what it was for sure.”
Marlowe’s memory traced back to that night and to her creeping cautiously toward the window over the kitchen sink. “I moved the curtain just enough to see outside, but I stayed low, because I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if somebody was trying to break in or if they were just fighting.”
“What’d you see?”
She’d never told this to anybody, and Marlowe both dreaded and welcomed this release. “I saw Eddie.” Heated tears filled her eyes. “Eddie and another man fighting.”
Marlowe recalled flashes of those two men, swinging fists at each other. The other man hit Eddie so hard that Eddie fell back on the ground. The other man pulled out a gun, but Eddie kicked him in the knee. The other man screamed, dropped to the ground, and dropped the gun next to him.
“Eddie climbed on top of him and just started hitting him with his fists, over and over again in his face.” She grimaced. “Until the man stopped moving.”
She’d never seen anyone beat on another person like that in real life. It was brutal and evil and terrifying. And the fact that Eddie had been the one to do it left her even more shaken. She’d had no idea that he was capable of that kind of rage.
