WIDOW

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  She paused in dressing, deep in thought. Might this affair cure her from the madness of murder? Might it really? Could he take away her compulsion to poison the low-lifes? She hadn't felt the need to look for a victim in some time . . .

  She did not know that Mom paused in her tidying and turned from the mirror to watch her curiously. She also did not hear her say, softly, as if to the walls of the room, “He gonna be a fine man for you, I predict. Lord knows, he better.”

  Thirty

  “She's not here.” Mitchell looked through into the kitchen, stepped into the hall, and checked out the spare bedroom. “She must be on the street.”

  Shadow stood in the center of the living room rubbing Pavlov's big square head. Mitchell looked like a man who would own a dog like this. “Should she be out this time of night? That's a little dangerous, isn't it?”

  “No, she shouldn't, but at least I've got her staying here part of the time. I can't chain her to a chair. She's about the most obstinate person I've ever known. Her old habits are going to die hard, if they die at all. You might call this an experiment that just might turn into my worst nightmare.”

  “Why do you call her Big Mac?”

  “She practically lives at McDonald's. She'd rather eat a Big Mac than T-bone steak.” He pulled Pavlov away by the collar and locked him in the spare room. When he returned, he said, “You want a drink?”

  Shadow shook her head. Pouring drinks made her think of the decanter on her dressing table in the Shoreville mansion. Sometimes at the Blue Boa when she lifted a glass to her mouth, she imagined she could smell the poisoned whiskey, and she couldn't drink a drop. “I don't want anything, thanks.”

  He didn't seem to know what to do next. He brushed his hands together, looked around the room as if inspecting it with her opinion of it in mind. “Well . . . I guess I'll get a glass of water. I'm a little thirsty.”

  Shadow sat on the sofa. She patted the cushions. She wished she hadn't come.

  As she turned her head, feeling someone nearby, she found Mitchell down on his knees next to her, his face inches from her own. She flinched. “I thought . . .” She thought he was getting water, but he had changed his mind, he had come to her, and in his eyes she saw the longing. She lifted her hands to his face and looked into his eyes. “What are we doing, Mitchell? What's happening to us?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  He put his arms under her legs and behind her back, lifted her from the sofa, and stood there in the living room, holding her weight, breathing slow and easy.

  She almost asked him to kiss her but, before she could, he was kissing her. She locked her hands around his neck. He moved his lips over her cheek to her ear, and down to her throat. She lay her head back and sighed. She wanted this, needed this. She loved it. Loved how he made her feel, loved the heat he created.

  In the bedroom he put her gently onto the unmade bed and sat down beside her. She reached out to unbutton his shirt. In minutes they had their clothes discarded on the floor, and Mitchell lay beside her, clutching her tightly to him. She ran her nails down his back and felt his muscles tighten and his pelvis push closer to her.

  “I don't know what I'm doing,” she whispered. “I shouldn't . . .”

  “Shhh.”

  He made love to her slowly, in total silence. The room was dark and smelled of damp towels and dog. Shadow thought she would not climax, that she would not be able to lose herself, that she would think of where she was and what she was doing, that her mind would be a million miles away. But his hands caressed her so, his body brought her into rhythm with him, his lips sought her breasts in the darkness, and soon all she could think of were the sensations of her body collapsing into his, buckling up to his. And she moved with him, beneath him, and there in the strange, odor-filled dark room she reached for release, with all her might, and came with a shudder that shook them both.

  He lay beside her, kissing her face, murmuring love talk while her breathing slowed and her skin cooled from sweat evaporating.

  “Now we know what we're doing,” he said.

  “And we do it so well,” she said.

  They lay a while side by side, luxuriating in the peace, holding hands. Then he led her to the bathroom saying, “Come with me.” They showered together, soaping one another, and again grew aroused so that they had to make love even more passionately than before. He had her against the shower wall with the water trumpeting on his shoulders and streaming down over her breasts to run between them in a soapy river.

  He finally had her wishing she never had to leave. As she toweled dry he said from behind her, “Why don't you move in with me?”

  Her hands froze.

  “I didn't mean to leave you speechless. I know it's too soon, and a bathroom isn't the most romantic place in the world to propose a living arrangement, and I can't explain this, but I do know I'm in love with you.”

  She covered her face with the towel to buy time.

  “You don't have to answer now. Maybe you need to think about it . . .”

  “Mitchell . . . I . . .”

  “All right, I know it's nuts. I know I surprised you, but I wish you'd do it. Move in with me.”

  “You don't know me.” She turned to him, lowering the towel so she could see his face. He could never really know her, not the person she had become.

  “I know what I need to know.”

  She was almost in tears. He meant it, she could see that in his eyes. He loved her, he wanted to live with her, one day he'd probably ask her to marry him. And it was the craziest thing she had ever heard of. Maybe crazier than her, a murderer, sleeping with a homicide cop. Doing what he asked would be the ultimate joke on the criminal justice system.

  She couldn't do that. “I can't do that,” she said, voicing the thoughts that spilled willy-nilly through her brain.

  “Can't or won't?”

  “I . . . just can't.”

  “You could bring Charlene, I don't care. This is a big house, there's enough room for everyone.” He moved to her and took her into his arms. He was so tall compared to her, that her head barely reached the top of his shoulder.

  She lay her cheek against his damp soapy-smelling skin and fought back tears. It really wasn't fair, was it? Things never worked out as they should. She would have been better off never having met him.

  “Think it over, will you? Just think about it.”

  She thought about it. Could think of nothing else. When she was at the mansion again with Charlene tagging behind her as she nervously paced through the house, the thought dominated her mind.

  “He asked me to live with him,” she said to Charlene.

  “The cop?”

  “Yeah, the cop.”

  The silence lasted and began to gnaw at Shadow. She stopped pacing and faced her friend. “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe it would be a good thing.”

  “Oh, hell!” Shadow turned from the ballroom's floor-length windows and crossed the room for the hall. She heard Charlene behind her, pittypatting in her loose house slippers.

  “Did he want me to move in too?” Charlene asked. “I don't want to go back to Austin.”

  “Yes, he invited you too. He already has a bag lady living there. I feel like one more stray animal he's taking in.”

  “Oh, don't say that.”

  “You're right, I shouldn't say that. That's not the way it is. He feels sorry for the bag lady. He says he loves me. I suppose there's a difference.”

  “I'd say.”

  Shadow wrestled with the idea until she felt herself going in circles. Finally she said she had to dress for work.

  “Aren't you off tonight?”

  “I'm on because I choose to be on. Maybe it'll take my mind off this other business.”

  Charlene was standing outside the bedroom door when Shadow appeared with her gear and the car keys in her hand.

  “He's a nice man,” Charlene said, taking up the dropped conversation as if there had been no
interruption of time. “This . . . this thing could stop if we move in with him. Maybe the voices would stop then.”

  “I don't want to talk about it anymore. I have to leave or I'll be late.”

  “Shadow?”

  “What?”

  “This may be God's way of saving us.”

  Shadow began to laugh sarcastically and then she stopped abruptly. Charlene needed something from her, something from life she had never found. If there wasn't enough there—and there wasn't!—then she needed God, and so be it. “Maybe,” she mumbled, moving into the hall, and for the front stairs.

  “Won't you think about it?” Charlene called after her.

  And what do you think I've been doing, Shadow wanted to say. I am, I am, she wanted to shout. Why is everyone pressuring me, she wanted to scream. But she said nothing and pulled the door closed softly behind her as she left the house.

  ~*~

  Son watched from a distance. He was there, parked on the street, when she came to work. He was there hours later when she came from the Blue Boa's exit door at the back of the building and walked to her car.

  His belly tightened and he sat straighter in the driver's seat. His buttocks were numb and he was terminally bored from sitting, waiting. But now that his sacrifices might pay off, he didn't care.

  She drove a few blocks away and turned into a Kroger parking lot. He drove past, then around the block and, cruising by again, he saw she had parked. There was a man at her driver's side window. He was bent over at the waist, talking to her.

  Son saw a dark house with a gravel driveway next to the grocery store parking area. He pulled into it and killed the headlights. He could see Shadow's car from where he sat. He brought his thumb to his mouth and gnawed at a hangnail. What did this mean, her meeting someone again at a place away from the club? This time he'd tail her. He'd find out for sure if she were the killer or if it was the crazy woman she lived with or someone else she worked with as a team player.

  Maybe it was where she made arrangements for prostitution. He wouldn't be surprised. Most of the dancers in those clubs were for sale when the price was right. But he suspected this was something else, he could feel it in his bones.

  He saw the man circle Shadow's car and get in the passenger's side. He reached over and placed his fingers on the ignition key. Shadow backed from the parking spot, drove around the lot and out the exit. When she reached the stoplight at the corner, Son started his car and followed her.

  ~*~

  “Hotel California” by the Eagles was playing on the radio. Shadow listened to the lyrics rather than the inane babblings from her passenger. In the Hotel California you could check out any time you wanted, but you could never leave. Hadn't she created a Hotel Texas in the Shoreville mansion?

  Her passenger would never leave.

  He had come to her table around one a.m., an hour before closing. He was overweight and sweating. He kept mopping his doughy, red face with a white-linen handkerchief. She saw the tattoos that ended just before the cuffs of his long-sleeved, white shirt. She reached out and took his wrist. She said, "These are interesting. How far up do they go?”

  “They're all over my body.”

  “Didn't that hurt?”

  “Not too bad.”

  She inclined her head to peer closer. It appeared the tail of a snake was woven around his wrist. Then, turning his hand a little, she saw a swastika tattooed between his thumb and forefinger. “What's this? You a Nazi?”

  She had said it as a joke, but his eyes changed to a troubled gray. “No,” he said.

  “Then what does this mean?” She rubbed her thumb over the swastika.

  “I'm a white supremacist. I don't like anyone who isn't white. You don't have any nigger blood in you, do you?”

  She felt her heart grow leaden. It was a sudden sensation that was suffocating, as if an elephant had sat on her chest. She thought of Mom in the dressing room and what this man might do to her if he caught her alone in an alley. “No,” she said, “I'm mostly German.”

  That pleased him, as she had calculated it would. He began shoveling money into her palm. The more he gave her, the more she hated him. She wanted to tell him that he wasn't white, who was? He was filthy, muddy, no-true-color and his blood was a gray-water pollution; his ancestors were fucking apes who didn't have the sense to come down from the trees. His kind made her want to gnash nails between her teeth and spit them out crumpled as foil paper.

  “Are you in the local KKK?” She asked this just to wheedle at his self-image.

  “I don't talk about things like that,” he said.

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I run a landscape service company.”

  She knew he employed only whites—trashy uneducated whites who cut grass for him and raked leaves. Whites who hated colored skin as much as he did.

  “You're awful dark or maybe it's these lights in here,” he said. “Germans are blond. You sure you don't have some spic or wop in you? With that black hair and all . . .”

  Shadow shrugged. “I can leave if you want me to.” She made to stand from the table. He grabbed her wrist.

  “No, wait,” he said. “You're the best-looking gal in here. You say you're German, that's all right with me. Even the Führer had dark hair.”

  She sat again. She listened to his hate-mongering babble. She weaseled admissions of violence against other men out of him he might not have made had she not threatened to leave him alone at the table. He came from a long line of white supremacists. He had lived most of his life in Vidor, Texas where they had kept blacks completely out of the town until only recently when, by court order, a housing development had had to abide by the law. His grandfather had formed the first KKK branch in the area. His great-grandfather had owned slaves and died fighting the Yankee carpetbaggers who not only took his landholdings, but courted away his wife and daughters too.

  He had killed his first nigger when he was seventeen, he said, not bragging, but stated as a simple fact. At nineteen he beat a Mexican-American to within an inch of his life and left him crippled and wheelchair-bound.

  Had he ever had relations with someone other than a white woman? she asked of him.

  “Not once! I wouldn't dirty my hands. I'd vomit if I tried to do something like that,” he said vehemently. “But I've cut enough of the bitches so they won't be making anymore of those fucking nappy-headed brats. I've done that, by God.”

  He told her all these things in a low, conspiratorial voice. He truly thought he had found in her a sympathizer. He so easily bought her lie that she was of German ancestry. Which just went to show how much intelligence he had at his disposal.

  He was stupid—though racists, in her book, could be nothing other than stupid.

  And this man was more.

  He was incredibly, utterly evil and, although he had no suspicion, he was not long meant for this world.

  ~*~

  Son parked where he had the last time he'd followed Shadow to the mansion. He left the car and sneaked up to the house until he was on the wide front porch watching through the windows. He couldn't see anyone—not Shadow, not the man she had brought home, nor the crazy woman who had met him at the door asking about her cat.

  He sat down with his back to the wall and waited. Again. He let his mind wander and entertained himself by trying to roll a quarter over his knuckles without dropping it into his lap.

  It might have been an hour later—it could not have been longer because he had not managed to get the quarter to roll smoothly over two of his knuckles—when he heard voices, and turned to peek through the window. He saw the two women trying to carry . . .

  a body

  . . . something big and heavy, wrapped in a sheet and plastic liner. Shadow was cursing and the crazy woman was weeping. They both kept dropping the end of . . .

  the body

  . . . the burdensome cargo. He pressed closer to the glass to be able to hear the conversation inside. He clutched th
e quarter tightly in the palm of his hand. Dizzy excitement caused him to breathe rapidly, shallowly.

  “You said this wouldn't happen again . . .” That was the crazy woman and she sounded heartbroken. He could see her face was wet with tears and splotched red from crying. She looked as insane as the woman in that old movie, what was it? Snake Pit! Was that Rita Hayworth? Or maybe it was . . .

  Shadow shouted, “Lift his feet! I'm going to drop the son of a bitch right here if you don't try to help me.”

  “We could have moved out of here if you hadn't . . .”

  “I'm never gonna get this bastard out of the house.”

  “I think we need to call the doctor for you, not me. You have to stop . . .”

  “He's a fucking monster!” Shadow screamed.

  “I hear him and he says he is not a monster. He never did nothing . . .”

  “He did too! You didn't hear him, Charlene, you don't know. And you don't hear him now.”

  “But I do hear him . . .”

  “Shut up and lift him, goddamnit, lift his feet. Damn!”

  Son saw them make the corner on the landing and move through an opening into darkness. He immediately stood and raced down the stairs to the yard. He moved around the right side of the house. He fought his way through chest-high weeds to the green glass that rose two stories to a curving glass roof.