WIDOW

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  When the hour was over, he put out his hand for her to shake. “It's been real nice talking with you,” he said. “You wouldn't mind if I came back and did it again sometime?”

  She said she wouldn't mind at all, and told him he was a gentleman. Then she watched him leave and sighed after him. If only that kind of man would come into the clubs more often, she wouldn't mind her work so much. She had begun to think the only sort of men left in the world were those on the make, or whose agendas were so deceptive and cruel she had to take them home and administer the drink of poison whiskey. It was a real surprise that a nice man had found his way into a club such as this and was willing to pay to talk with a dancer.

  Of course, she didn't really know him. For all she knew he was another pervert who was just better than others at wearing a mask. But for some reason she thought not. He couldn't be that accomplished an actor, she didn't think. How many people were? Then again, who would ever guess the truth behind her mask?

  She smiled, thinking how his name, Frank, seemed to fit his demeanor. And how “Shadow” fit her own.

  She was just about ready to head for home when she saw the cop. He came through the door, his gaze fastened on her, and before she could move to leave, he was sitting across from her in the same chair Frank had just vacated.

  “I want to apologize for waiting out back that night for you,” he said. “It was a stupid move. I had no right to do that.”

  She had tensed, seeing him. Now she tried to relax. Maybe she could get some things straight with this guy. “It costs to sit at my table,” she said.

  He dug in his shirt pocket and put a fifty-dollar bill on the table. She waved over the waitress, then tucked the fifty away.

  “Irish coffee,” he said.

  “Why don't you tell me what you're up to hanging out in the clubs?” She decided she'd needle him.

  He leaned back in the chair, looking her over. “It's sort of a hobby of mine, a stress reliever, if you like. I enjoy watching the girls dance.”

  “Ever try the ballet?”

  He laughed. Maybe she was in a mellow mood or maybe talking with Frank had eased her feelings toward men, but she caught herself smiling in return, pleased she had caused that reaction. She was so serious most of the time that humor seemed hardly to play a part in her life. She couldn't remember making anyone laugh except Charlene.

  “I don't care for the tights,” he said. “Or the music.” She nodded. The waitress brought the coffee and left. “What do you want with me?”

  “Nothing really . . .”

  “You want something. You keep following me around and coming to my sets. What's the deal?” Best to get the shit into the fan right away, let it fly.

  He took a swallow of the coffee. “If I answer that I'll just be saying what a dozen men have probably already told you.”

  “Like what? I'd like to hear your explanation.”

  He looked into her eyes and she saw the truth residing there, waiting for it to issue from his lips. If he lied to her, she'd recognize it. “No, really,” she prompted. “I'd like to know what it is with you.”

  “You're beautiful.” His voice had changed, dropping into a lower register, and his eyes remained steady on her face. “You mesmerize me. I don't talk with the girls, ask around. Until now I only came in to watch. With you, it was different from the first time I saw you. I wanted . . . to get to know you a little.”

  When she opened her eyes wider to indicate he might be entering the territory of the lie now, he said, “I mean it. I don't expect . . . well . . . hey, I'm just wasting time, it's nothing to get alarmed about. I'm not going to stalk you or anything. I'm not one of those fucking freaks you get in these places. That's why I'm apologizing for waiting out by your car that night.”

  “Then you aren't interested in arresting me.” Maybe she could tease, rather than needle him. He didn't seem a bad sort, but his adulation made her uncomfortable. Who needed a cop fan? Jesus.

  “Not tonight,” he said, surprising her.

  “But I guess you want to know what a nice girl like me blah-blah-blah?”

  “Actually,” he said. “I don't need that question answered. I pretty much know all the reasons women dance in the clubs.”

  “We're exhibitionists.”

  “If you say so.” He looked at her solemnly over the rim of the coffee cup as he drank. “Is that why you never get friendly with the customers? The whole dance thing is to show off, get attention?”

  “I didn't know you were a psychiatrist too.” She tried to change the direction of the conversation. “So if you're not Vice, what kind of cop are you?”

  “Homicide.”

  She remembered now one of the girls telling her that. “Solve any good murder cases lately?”

  “One or two.”

  “Any I might have heard about on the news?” This was easy money. Get them talking about themselves and their jobs. Easy way to make the time pass. She figured she owed him another thirty minutes or so. If she felt like it. And he didn't threaten her.

  “You know about the gay banker who was killed down here a few months ago? Found in an alley with his head bashed in?”

  She faintly recalled the word on the street about it. Montrose was a haven for the gay population. The killing had caused the gay caucus leader to demand the police do something and do something now. “I heard of it,” she said.

  “I picked up the kids who did it.”

  “I thought people were considered innocent until trial by jury.”

  “That's the way the law states it. I know these kids did it, though. I have an eyewitness saw it go down. They're guilty all right.”

  “Kids? Like teenagers?”

  “Privileged little pricks out for a joyride.”

  Shadow sipped at her Coke. She heard the steel enter his voice and it gave her pause. This cop wasn't as easy to talk to as she thought he might be. Nevertheless, it gave her a secret little thrill to know she was talking to a homicide detective about murder without him knowing she had committed more crimes than his joyriding little pricks. Of course there was a world of difference between what she and the teens had done. They killed an innocent man for nothing. She killed for better reasons—not that the cop would agree with her on that score. “Will they go to jail?”

  “For a while. Unless mommy and daddy bring in F. Lee Bailey or old Racehorse Haynes to get them off. Which wouldn't surprise me in the goddamn least.”

  “Ever read about a guy called Travis McGee?” she asked. “I think he was a kind of detective.”

  “The novel series? John D. MacDonald? Yeah, I've read them. Travis wasn't a cop, though. He was a ‘salvage consultant.’ People came to him to get something back that belonged to them. One time a guy came to him to get back his lost reputation. They made it into a movie, but it didn't work. Travis doesn't translate well to film. Have you read them?”

  She shook her head. “Someone else told me. I hardly ever have time to read.”

  “Yeah, well, when I'm not on the job or in these places, time's all I've got.” He didn't appear happy to admit it.

  “You married?” She knew it was the next question in the queue expected of her.

  “I was once. No more. Cop's life, old story, nothing new, blah-blah-blah.” He smiled winningly and she liked that smile. “You?”

  Now it was her turn to laugh at the absurdity of a question. “No,” she said.

  “Divorced?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Widow,” she said. “My husband killed himself.” It had simply popped out. She felt like biting her tongue in half.

  “Hell, that's a damn shame.”

  “I think it was exactly what he should have done.” She sounded colder than a block of ice. She might as well stick to the truth as long as it never really told him anything specific about her past or her life now.

  “Oh? Was he an asshole? Beat you, that sort of thing?”

  She searched her brain for yet another subject to aim him towar
d and came up blank. Finally she said, “I don't want to talk about him. He'd dead. He's good and dead.”

  The cop drank his coffee and sat watching her a while. She let him, unconcerned with his scrutiny. He ordered another drink. She asked for coffee too, straight, black.

  “Any kids?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  She frowned at him. “Look, you don't pay me to divulge my personal life history here. We can talk about books or dancing or the hole in the ozone layer, but not about my life. I'm afraid I have to leave now.”

  She stood up, leaving the coffee, and went to gather her things from the locker in the dressing room. She hadn't looked back at him. She didn't care what he thought of her. She should have known a cop was going to pry, ask questions she didn't want to answer. That was the job they did. Next time he came to her table, she'd leave right away. So what if he was good-looking, with soft brown eyes, and a football quarterback's kind of body? So what if he had a crush on her?

  She had no time for romantic involvements. She hadn't wanted a man for a long time. The bottom had dropped out of her sex drive. If her ovaries were still producing hormones, they just weren't moving through her bloodstream in enough quantity to make a damn bit of difference. She might as well be a nun as far as sex was concerned. And it wasn't that she was moving toward any lesbian relationship with Charlene either. Charlene was like a sister. She loved her, wished to protect her and keep her on track, but she sure as hell didn't want to get into bed with her.

  Why was she making all these excuses to herself anyway? Why had she thought the cop's eyes were nice?

  Christ. Maybe her hormones were working. Edging her toward the first tantalizing steps that would lead to normal sexual activity again.

  Now wouldn't that be something? Goddamnit. But not with a cop! Especially one who asked so many piercing and potentially dangerous questions.

  When she saw a drunken fool wending his way down the sidewalk and turning toward the parking lot where she was unlocking the driver's side door of her Toyota, she was suddenly very tired. So tired she wanted to just curl up on the backseat of the Toyota, cover her head, and go to sleep.

  She wondered if Charlene was still up waiting for her and if she had made anything good to eat. She needed to tell her she had a fondness for lemon-meringue pie. She was positively lusting for any kind of lemony pie, all of a sudden. She could almost taste the lemon bite on her tongue. Pie and sleep. That's all she wanted. Nothing more. Except some peace from men—men, goddamn boring-ass men . . .

  "Scuse me, baby, you goin' somewhere?” The drunk had her by the upper arm.

  She wrenched away. “Get lost.”

  She had shut and locked the car door before she heard what he replied. She knew all the curses. They did not bother her in the least. Fuck him and his need for her. That's what it was, too, need. Except for Frank . . . and maybe the cop . . . the men she had run into in the clubs were just eaten up with the need for a woman, any make or model of woman. A woman to bed down with, not just to talk to. It was as if all males over the age of fifteen had been stranded on a dry desert island for twenty years without female companionship. Or locked up in the penitentiary. Which is where most of them belonged.

  Either there or the deep-blue sea.

  Twenty-Two

  While Charlene worked she thought about Shadow. It had been a rough night. Every creak in the mansion set her blood pressure soaring. She had developed a headache that no amount of aspirin could touch.

  She bent over to wring out the mop in the bucket of Clorox and Pine Sol. She had put off cleaning the ballroom for too long. Now it must be done. She kept the lights blazing the whole time so there would be no shadowy corners calling to her overactive imagination. She took a portable radio with her and turned on 102.9FM—the easy-listening station—so as to drown out the voices in her head. With Bette Midler, Streisand, Michael Bolton, and an occasional Doris Day and Frank Sinatra singing at her back, she handily completed the chore, stood at the entrance door to the ballroom when she was finished, and beamed at how the floor shone clean and spacious. A sea of white marble.

  Though the music kept the voices overpowered, they still talked to her as she worked, therefore the headache. It was like listening to FM with static bleeding through.

  “Go away,” she whispered wearily, standing in the ballroom doorway holding the bucket of wash water in one hand, the mop in the other. “Please leave me alone.”

  She remembered as a child chanting this same plea in her head all the time. At school, home, out shopping, on the bus, at the park, watching television, doing homework. Go away. Please leave me alone!

  The voices had increased in both volume and frequency ever since she discovered Shadow was killing the men she brought home. Murder was something she never would have thought her friend capable of. But after stabbing the rapist, it appeared murder was the one thing Shadow did exceptionally well. Not only was she capable, she was expert at it.

  The voices that dogged Charlene throughout the day and night now were new to her. They belonged to the three men Shadow had dropped into the bay. They said things to her that drove her crazy.

  Why did you let her kill us, they said.

  What did we do so horrible, we should die?

  It's cold here, in the waters, in the deep waters. It's lonely here and cold.

  Shadow is insane, they said, surely you know that. Surely you can stop her. You're not so crazy yourself that you can't stop her.

  Watch her, they said. She'll kill you next. She'll poison you the way she poisoned us. Do you want to bleed to death? Internally? Do you know what that's like, to die that way?

  She's evil, they said. She's monstrous.

  Charlene sometimes argued back with the voices. She's not evil. She is my friend. She can't help it. She thinks she's doing right. And anyway, you were all horrible people. Shadow was right about that . . .

  Not so horrible, they chorused. Not so horrible as you think.

  But they were. Charlene came to know just how horrible they were the more they tromped around inside her head, giving her no peace and quiet. They invaded her sleep and created nightmares, forcing her to live through them until she woke screaming into her pillow. They badgered her endlessly to do something.

  But what could she do? She loved Shadow and she loved living in the mansion even if sometimes, when she was alone here, she feared the big open spaces and the dark rooms and the many barred windows.

  She didn't want to go back to the state hospital. She didn't want to go back there ever. Nor did she want Shadow to have to return. This time either or both of them could die there, never to be free again.

  The price of freedom might just be learning to live with the new voices. If she couldn't persuade Shadow to stop.

  She saw the car lights turn into the long drive before she heard the engine noise. She glanced at her wristwatch. Three-thirty-five a.m. Please, God, she begged silently. Don't let her bring anyone home tonight.

  She sat on the top step just above the entrance, waiting. She could still smell the Clorox and pine scent on her hands, though she'd washed them with a bar of soap. She brought her hands down from where she'd had them propping up her chin and lay them in her lap. She straightened her aching back.

  She wondered if there was anything stronger in the medicine cabinet than aspirin for the raging headache.

  Shadow glanced up at her as she unlocked the front door and came into the foyer. “Hi there. What's the matter?”

  “I have a headache.”

  “You look terrible. Have you taken anything for it?”

  Charlene watched her climb the staircase, put down the gym bag at her feet, and take a seat on a lower step so that she was looking up at her.

  “I took aspirin. Hasn't helped.”

  “Oh, poor baby. Want me to massage the back of your neck?”

  Charlene shook her head and it made the headache shift from over her right eye to her left. She winced and held her head stif
fly. “It'll go away soon. I wanted to talk.”

  “Shoot. But first, tell me. Do we have any lemon pie filling or lemon pudding in the kitchen?”

  “No. Butterscotch. Chocolate. No lemon.”

  “Damn.”

  “We have fresh lemons. I could make a glass of lemonade, if you want it.”

  Shadow shook her head now, her silky black hair lifting from her neck and moving back and forth before lying still again. “I had a craving for lemon pie. Lemonade just doesn't sound the same.” She smiled.

  “I'll make one tomorrow. I make pretty good pies.”

  “So what did you want to talk about? Aren't you sleepy? I'm pretty beat, myself.”

  “I won't keep you long. I just wanted to tell you . . .” She touched her temple where the headache throbbed, lowered her hand again. “It's the voices,” she blurted. “They want me to turn against you.”

  Shadow went perfectly still. “Turn against me how?”

  “I don't know how, exactly. They yammer at me all the time, hon. They tell me it's . . . cold in the water. They say it's . . . lonely.”

  Shadow blinked and then some sense of understanding glowed in her eyes. “The men I dumped in the bay. They talk to you.”