She was lying quietly on the floor, hands over her face, towels strewn about her naked body. Her jaw was shaking, her breasts were rising with each shallow breath. I stared at her for a moment and wondered what I was seeing. A devastated woman who had just lost her beloved husband? No, surely not that, or why would I be seeing her at all? A cold-blooded killer trying to use me as an alibi or, worse, a fall guy? At first take it added up just like that. But she was so lovely I couldn’t stop myself from hoping that she was something in between, and that hope itself was enough to allay for a moment the brutal doubts that had bound tight my emotions.
I bent down, put one arm behind her neck, snaked the other arm beneath her legs, lifted. She was lighter than a woman her size had any right to be. I smelled the shampoo in her hair and felt the silky heat of her skin as I carried her to the couch. I placed her gently on the cushions so she was sitting up. From the bedroom I fetched her a blanket, with which I covered her modestly. From the kitchen I fetched her a beer, which I placed into her hand. She sipped from the bottle once and then ignored it while her dazed eyes darted to and fro. I sat close and petted her still-wet hair.
“Do they know who killed him?”
“No.”
“Do they know why?”
“Not yet.”
“Was it a robbery?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do I do now?”
“You need to get dressed,” I said.
“Okay.”
“The cops are outside. They’re looking for you, and they’re outside.”
“Why are they looking for me?”
“To ask you questions. They want you to help them find out who killed your husband. And they’ll also want to know where you were tonight.”
“Do they know I’m here?”
“Not for sure, but they suspect.”
“They shouldn’t know. This was just about us, not about them. I don’t want them goose-stepping into our lives.”
“It’s too late for that. Either they’re waiting outside, hoping to catch you leave, or they’re waiting for a warrant to be approved by a judge so they can come back and search my apartment. Either way, you need to get dressed.”
“I’ll go out the back.”
“My guess is it’s also being watched.”
“Where will I go?”
“It doesn’t really matter. Once the police spot you, they’ll pick you up and take you to the Roundhouse for questioning.”
“Police headquarters?”
“That’s right.”
“They think I did it.”
“They’ll just want to ask you some questions. And they’ll want to know where you were all night.”
“Here,” she said.
“Before you came here.”
She stared out for a moment as something washed through her. Then her eyes went slack and the blanket fell to her waist, exposing her breasts, and she did nothing about it. It was strange to see Julia at such a loss, as if when she heard the news the secret that seemed always to sustain her had slipped away along with the blanket. When she spoke, finally, her eyes still were distant, as if focused on some far shore, and there was a soft, girlish note in her voice.
“Remember when you spoke about regrets,” she said. “In the hotel bar. You were thinking of me, which was so sweet it almost made me cry. I was thinking of myself at sixteen, living in Ashland. Ashland, Virginia. ‘The Center of the Universe.’ That’s the town motto.”
“I can’t imagine you at sixteen.”
“I was in the drama club at John Paul Jones High School. Romeo and Juliet. I played the lead.”
“Forsooth.”
“It was a disaster, and yet it was the highlight of my life. Is that sad, Victor, playing Juliet in a silly high-school production being the highlight of your life?”
“Who was Romeo?”
“Nobody. Somebody. A sweet boy. Terrence.”
“That name must have made for some unpleasant afternoons on the schoolyard.”
“Terry. You should have seen him then, Victor. He was Romeo in his bones.”
“I’m getting jealous.”
She licked her lips. A worm of emotion stirred in my gut. In all our time together, she had never before rambled on like this about her past, never before let her voice be twisted by remembrance and sentiment. It was as if she were a different woman entirely, open and unguarded, sweetly innocent, the woman I had imagined her to be when first I spied her behind the counter of that coffee joint. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned forward and kissed her.
She raised a hand, touched my cheek. “‘Thou mayst think my ’havior light,’” she said: “‘But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange.’”
“Is that Juliet?”
“On the balcony. But it proved to be a lie, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
Was I a fool to think it was my misplaced trust and my betrayed hopes that had been plaguing her all these years?
“It’s time to go home,” she said.
Was I a fool to wonder if my heart was the home for which she yearned?
“I’m here,” I said.
“I know, but I want to go home.”
Yes, I was that fool. I stood, straightened my spine to a lawyer’s posture. “You can’t go back to your house,” I said. “It’s now a crime scene. The coroner would have already picked up the body, but there will be yellow tape across the front door, there will be technicians taking prints and searching for evidence. There will be blood.”
At the word blood, her eyes focused, as if some red and sodden image had snapped her back to the present and its prickly predicament. She pulled the blanket up to her neck. She noticed the beer in her hand and took a long drink.
“I’ll just stay here,” she said.
“The cops are going to find you, Julia. It’s better for you if you find them first.”
“What do I tell them?”
“Either you tell them the whole truth or you tell them nothing. Those are your choices.”
“Which should I do?”
“Do you have an attorney?”
“I suppose. Wren did, at least. Clarence, Clarence Swift.”
“Then you should call this Clarence Swift and ask his advice.”
“But what about you? Why don’t you be my lawyer?”
“I can’t represent you. I’m a witness to your whereabouts. If I try to represent you, they’ll have me disqualified immediately, and it will gum up everything. But as a friend, I would advise you for the time being to tell them nothing before you talk to your lawyer.”
“I didn’t do anything, Victor.”
“It doesn’t matter. They can twist things. And I don’t trust the guys they assigned to the case.”
“Do they think I killed him?”
“The spouse is always a suspect until she’s cleared.”
“What do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“But you just kissed me. Would you kiss me if you thought I was a killer?”
“Go get dressed,” I said.
She took another long drink of the beer, nodded a couple of times, and then stood. As she turned away from me and walked into my bedroom, the blanket still clutched to her front, I caught a view of the length of her naked body, from the back of her head to her thin heels.
Lovely neck, I thought. A sweet arch in her spine. Nice legs. To answer her question, even if my worst suspicions had been right, I’d still kiss her. And more. See, I never believed that part about Sam Spade. Sure he would have turned in Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but only after. That’s the way we’re wired.
When she came out of the bedroom, she was fully dressed, with makeup in place and lipstick bright, her red handbag like a shield at her side. She looked like a woman who had made a decision. I turned to the window again, peered out at the street. The car was still there, Hanratty and Sims were still there.
“They’re waiting for you.”
“I’m ready,” she said, her voice firm.
“I’ll take you down, introduce you, stay with you as long as they let me. Do you remember what I said?”
“To say nothing.”
“Good. If they press, tell them you want to see your lawyer.”
“Okay.”
I walked toward her, took hold of her right arm to lead her to the door, but she didn’t follow. Instead she pivoted forward into my chest. The top of her head tickled my nose. We stood there for a while. And then she tilted her face up and stood on tiptoe and kissed me. And I let her. She kissed me, and her body eased and sagged into mine, and we fit together, like we fit together before, like we were made one for the other, and I kissed her back. I liked it more than I should have liked it, considering the dead man and the questions that remained. But I didn’t like it as much as I did before the knock on my door. It still had the past, present, and future in it, but the idealized sheen was gone, and I could see them now for what they truly were: soiled, paranoid, dead.
“You seem to have recovered from the trauma,” I said when I pulled away.
“You want to know the truth, Victor?”
“Not really.”
“I’m not broken up that he’s dead. The truth is, the last few months I couldn’t stand the sight of him.”
“Let’s try not to tell the cops that. As soon as they can, they’re going to separate us. They’re going to try to turn us against each other. That’s what they do.”
“Are you going to turn against me?”
“I’ll do what I can for you.”
“Even after what I did?”
“It was both our faults, isn’t that what we decided? The best way to play it right now is for both of us to say nothing. Can you manage?”
“I’m good at saying nothing. You can trust me.”
“We’ll trust each other,” I said.
“We’re in it together.”
“Sure,” I said, still holding on to her arm as I walked her to the door. “In it together.”
I stopped at the entrance to the kitchen, grabbed a dish towel from the counter, and wiped her lipstick off my lips.
“Now let’s go meet the cops,” I said. “Their names are Sims and Hanratty. Hanratty is the big one. Watch out for Sims.”
4
They put me in a small green room in the Roundhouse. The table was cheap, the chairs hard, the place smelled like sweat and vinegar and dead mice. But you had no excuse not to look snazzy, because the room had a great mirror on one of the walls in which you could straighten your collar and check your teeth.
Julia was in an identical room somewhere in that same ugly building. I assumed they were giving her the business. Sims was whispering sweet nothings into her ear; Hanratty was banging on the table. But no matter how tough it got, I figured she was holding up just fine.
Julia always had a place deep within the recesses of her emotions where she could retreat, a sanctuary from which even those who loved her the most were barred. It exists in all of us, that last place that others never reach, but in Julia it was a cavernous castle, with a fearsome moat and chains on the doors and evil dwarfs as guards. Even Gollum couldn’t have slipped inside. If Sims had chased her into her sanctuary, it didn’t matter how hard Hanratty banged on the table or knocked on the door, they weren’t getting in.
When we came out together from the door of my apartment in the middle of the night, the two cops climbed out of the car as if they had been expecting us all along. Sims was kind and courteous, uttering solicitous words to the grieving widow, holding the rear door open as he offered us both a ride. Hanratty glared at me with a brutal little smile on his granite face. I was getting a pretty good idea of the range of Hanratty’s facial expressions. And the drive east, toward the river and the Roundhouse, had been almost jolly. Sims had talked about his planned retirement, how big would be the trout, how clear would be the air.
“You ever fish in Montana, Hanratty?” said Sims.
“I don’t fish,” said Hanratty.
“Fly-fishing, I’m talking about.”
“I don’t fish.”
“Neither do I,” said Sims. “And I’ve never been to Montana. But I’m going as soon as I get my twenty-five. The land’s cheap and the trout are jumpy. I’ve been reading up. A River Runs Through It.”
“Runs through what?” said Hanratty.
“Montana,” said Sims.
“What river?”
“I don’t know. The Mississippi, maybe.”
“The Mississippi doesn’t run through Montana.”
“Where does it run?”
“Iowa.”
“Who the hell goes to Iowa to fish flies?”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t fish.”
“Well, let me tell you, Hanratty, you don’t retire to fish flies in Iowa. Montana is it.”
“What river?”
“Who the hell knows the name of a river in Montana?” said Sims. “Any ideas, Victor?”
“Take up knitting,” I said.
It was quite an act—if vaudeville were still alive, they could have taken it on the road—but it wasn’t putting me at ease, like they intended. At the Roundhouse they were pleasant as could be, gallantly opening doors, offering up cups of cop coffee, tepid, bitter, and thick.
“Can you wait in here a moment, Victor?” said Sims, gesturing toward the small green room.
I went in and sat down. Sims closed the door, leaving me in there alone. I checked myself in the mirror. No jacket, no tie, haggard and unshaven and sallow. In a green room, under fluorescent lights, even a cherub looks like an ax murderer.
I tried to fathom the depths of the trouble into which I had fallen, and I failed. Things were happening above and below, all around. I could sense their shapes and movement, but the purposes remained mere shadows. Still, I knew the taste of trouble and this was it, oily and electric, with too much salt and a bitter pinch of cumin. Oh, yes, I was neck deep. Sims seemed ready to help me out, for reasons that left me feeling squirrelly, but Hanratty had a hard-on for me, I could tell. Is that a baton in your pocket, Officer, or do you just want to smash my face against the wall?
A knock on the door. It swung open, and a young uniform poked his head inside. “Detective Sims thanks you for your patience and says he’ll be with you in just a moment.”
“That’s what he said an hour ago.”
“I’m sure it won’t be too long.”
“I’m glad you’re sure,” I said as he closed the door behind him.
I drummed my fingers on the table. I stared at my watch. I tried to think it through.
How to handle the next few hours, the next few days as the cops investigated the murder of Dr. Wren Denniston and found themselves someone to pin it on, was the question plaguing me. And the answer, I knew, hinged on Julia. Was she the love of my life, a savior who had returned to rescue me from an increasingly dismal existence? If so, then I needed to do all I could to protect her. What false story wouldn’t we concoct for true love? What crime wouldn’t we commit? And hadn’t the two of us agreed, in my apartment, to trust one another, not to turn each on the other, and, at least for the moment, to keep our mouths shut?
On the other hand, if Julia had opened our rapprochement for the sole purpose of using me as a lifeline out of a brutal crime she planned to commit, then she was nothing but a manipulative psychopath set on endangering both my physical and emotional well-being. Of course, what else could one expect from an old girlfriend, and about par for the course in my relationships, but something to avoid nonetheless. And the easiest way to avoid it was to sing like a rock star and wash my hands of the whole foul mess.
The problem was, I couldn’t figure out who she was, which I suppose was a clue right there. I mean, what kind of relationship was possible if I was unsure of the basic psychological makeup of the object of my affection? She could be just a messed-up girl or a dark-hearted murdere
ss? Either way I was in for trouble.
And I couldn’t help but wonder why she had finally come back to me, and why now? I thought about the letters Julia had shown me. “SLUT. WHORE. WITCH’S CUNT. FAT SLOB. SLAGHEAP. BANGSTER. YOU GREEDY BITCH.” Something about the letters seemed to be the clue to everything. It was the letters, she said, that had caused her to call. If she had written them herself, she couldn’t have found a sweeter opening. And who says she didn’t? Write the notes, stuff them in plain envelopes, drop them into the mailing slot to set up the old lover to take her fall. Even finding her fingerprints on the letters would tell us nothing. Mine were now on them, too. If she had sent the letters herself, then she had been setting me up from the start. But then again, if someone else had sent the letters, maybe the sender should be the prime suspect.
I tried to think it through, but the night had already been too long, and I was too tired, and I failed.
I checked that the door was unlocked. It was, which made me feel strangely vulnerable. I slipped out of the room, swiveled my head like a leopard escaping from his cage, and then explored just enough to find a bathroom.
It hurt when I peed. My testicles felt heavy and bruised. At least I wouldn’t have to lie about that. When I stepped outside the bathroom, with the intent to traipse up and down the hall looking for Julia, the same young uniform was waiting in the hallway to kindly lead me back to the green room. I thought I heard a click after the door closed. I tried the knob again. This time it was locked.
I sat and sighed. I twiddled my thumbs. I leaned back, kicked my legs out, watched my beard grow in the mirror. My head lolled on the top rail of the chair, and I fell asleep.
It was at that very moment, of course, that the door burst open and Sims and Hanratty marched into the room.
5
Hanratty closed the door and leaned on it, barring any attempt to flee. Sims sat down across from me and smiled like a kindly uncle, you know, the kindly uncle who feels your muscles through your sweatshirt to tell you how strong you are and asks you down to the basement to take some pictures.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Victor,” said Sims.
A Killer's Kiss Page 3
