“The good old days,” Czarcik corroborated.
“I keep getting off track. Where were we?”
“You met in the bookstore.”
“Right. He needed a book. I showed him where it was, we got to talking, and he asked me out for coffee.” She fiddled with her drink. “It’s funny; I’ll never forget the name. Fluid Mechanics and Circuit Analysis. Can you possibly think of anything more boring?”
Smiling. “I can’t.”
“For our one-year anniversary, he gave me a wrapped copy.” She began to cry.
Chloe continued with her story. Her demeanor changed. She became more serious, less wistful. But there was something else, thought Czarcik. He could tell she was now working.
The memories that came easily, the life snapshots that may as well have been recalled from a favorite movie or beloved book, were replaced by careful deliberation. She was trying her best to build a profile of the man she loved with pieces that had not yet crystallized in her consciousness.
Or pieces that needed to be invented. Czarcik wasn’t about to swallow the grieving-widow routine just yet, even if nothing Chloe had told him thus far raised suspicion.
“Daniel was one of those people you would describe, superficially, by saying ‘everybody loved him.’ But if you knew him well, that wasn’t entirely true. Everybody liked him.” She realized how this came out and clarified her statement. “I don’t mean this as a judgment. He was as good a man as there was.”
It wasn’t lost on Czarcik that Chloe had started referring to her husband in the past tense.
“What I mean is that although he had a ton of acquaintances, he didn’t have a lot of close friends. I think some of it was the result of him being an only child with hardly any family. But he wasn’t socially awkward or anything. In fact, he could be extremely charming. But at heart, I think he preferred to be alone.”
“Nothing wrong with valuing one’s privacy. Reminds me of myself.” Czarcik surprised himself by revealing this much unprompted. He chalked it up to the liquor, even though he was only on his second double Cutty.
Or those eyes. Those eyes were doing something to him.
“No, nothing at all,” Chloe agreed. He prompted her to continue. “Well, to make a long story short, after Madison we moved to Chicago. Daniel received an offer from ClearTel that was too good to pass up. Remember them? They had those goofy commercials with the animated wire that was constantly looking for something to connect to. But it can’t, because the world has gone wireless.”
“I do remember those commercials,” Czarcik recalled, “and they were goofy.”
“Phallic too.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “Daniel would tell me the marketing folks would have knock-down, drag-out fights about how large and rounded the pins in the cartoon plugs could be.”
“Now I know why my cell phone bill was so high. Research and development.”
“Cell phones were really taking off during this time. They’d gone from a convenience to a necessity, literally overnight, and the company couldn’t build out its network fast enough. Workers with Daniel’s skills were in high demand.”
“Did you work as well?”
Chloe looked down into her wineglass. “I worked at our local branch of the Chicago Public Library. Wasn’t brain surgery, but it suited me.”
“Most jobs aren’t brain surgery . . . besides brain surgery.”
“There you go,” she said, smiling. “I meant that it wasn’t the most challenging job. But I was surrounded by books, which were my passion. And the truth is, because of Daniel’s job, we didn’t really need the money. I forget if the term yuppie was still used at the time, but it described us perfectly.”
Try as he might, Czarcik couldn’t picture Chloe working in a library. While the literary part fit, the drudgery of the job—filing, stacking, refiling, restacking—seemed a bit stifling. Unlike most people who instinctively tried to sound smarter than they were, Chloe seemed to be the rare type to downplay her pretensions. At that moment he realized why she wasn’t drinking. It wasn’t because she wasn’t a drinker, but because she didn’t enjoy a ten-dollar bottle of shitty chardonnay and didn’t feel the need to pretend to.
Czarcik swirled the ice in his glass, listening to the familiar clink, clink, clink. “Again, my aim isn’t to make you uncomfortable, but I’m sure you can guess my next question.”
She smiled without looking up. “Kids.” His silence was an affirmation. A long pause. “We both wanted them, of course,” she admitted. “Me probably more than him, but nevertheless, it was in our plans. We tried the natural way . . .” She blushed, or was simply flushed from the few sips of wine. Czarcik couldn’t tell which. “When that didn’t work, we saw doctors. Endless doctors. The problem was with me. A congenital defect of the fallopian tube. No need to go into the details, but pregnancy wasn’t unlikely, it was impossible.”
“Adoption?”
“I wanted to, Daniel didn’t.” She looked him right in the eye. “I know what you’re thinking, Detective. You’re a cynic, and a cynic would think this was a convenient out for a man who never wanted to have children in the first place.”
It’s not what Czarcik was thinking, but he didn’t deny the accusation. Her intuition revealed more about herself than it did him. So he just let her continue.
“But that wasn’t it at all.” She took a deep breath. “He didn’t want to adopt a child because he admitted that he could never love it as much as he would love his own. I tried to convince him otherwise. Because for me, I knew it would feel like my own. I explained that adoptive parents were just as devoted as biological ones, often more so.” A tear didn’t fall but took shape in the corner of her eye. “He told me there was a difference between devotion and love and couldn’t live with himself pretending there wasn’t.” She blinked, and the tear was gone. “I wanted kids so badly . . . but I knew he was right.”
“As much as you wanted children, you never considered leaving him? For some couples, that’s a deal breaker.”
Chloe looked at him hard, her blue eyes darkening to near black. She reached across the table affectionately. The contact was electric, and Czarcik pulled back in surprise. “You’ve never been married, Detective. Or even in love.”
It wasn’t a question.
She leaned close to him, almost whispering. “Otherwise, you’d know that you’d do anything for the one you loved.”
Suddenly, those eyes were no longer a window, but a mirror. He didn’t want to look into them anymore. In fact, he didn’t want to be here at all. But since they were far from finished, he drank the remainder of his drink, caught the waitress’s attention, and raised his empty glass.
Neither spoke until the waitress returned with his drink. Czarcik eagerly downed half of it. And just as the burn of the liquor abated, so did the cloud that had momentarily obscured their conversation.
“Where were we?” he asked with renewed focus and interest.
“I mentioned the changes I began to see in Daniel. The . . . darkness. One night, after a particularly bad day, we were lying in bed. He looked up at the ceiling and just said, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ And you know what I said to him? I said, ‘I know.’”
Czarcik finished his drink.
Chloe continued. “The next week—our final one together—was pure bliss. Daniel was a changed man. Full of energy and passion. I didn’t know what was real, what he was faking, and what might be a placebo effect at having embraced the inevitable. And to be honest, I didn’t really care. I just gave in to it. Allowed myself to live in the moment. We made love every day, sometimes for hours. After, we’d read Dickinson, Whitman, and Frost to each other, and not ironically. Especially Frost. He was Daniel’s favorite. He loved the profound simplicity of his poems.
“We bought the most indulgent foods at Moveable Feast—pâté, caviar, foie gras—and made picnics in Lincoln Park near the Peace Garden. We spent lazy afternoons at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institut
e, as well as these weird little galleries in Old Town.
“So at the end of the week, we’re lying in bed. I’m absolutely exhausted. He sees my eyes closing. He takes my face in his hands, kisses my lips softly, and says, ‘I will always love you.’” Chloe allowed the moment to sink in. “When I woke up, he was gone. I knew I’d never see him again.”
She was finished. But for Czarcik, this was the critical part of the story. He couldn’t afford for her to get lost in a tangled memory vortex. “You didn’t contact the police?” he asked.
“It was his choice. What he wanted. I owed him that much.”
“Did you have any idea where he was going?”
Chloe looked at Czarcik as if dumbfounded. He saw the question in her eyes: Could he really have missed the implication of what she had left unspoken? Just as she opened her mouth to add something more, he spoke. “He was going to kill himself.”
Now she did clarify. “He was going to die . . . on his terms.”
“I understand,” Czarcik said quietly. And although he did understand, he pressed on. “You had no idea where he went? Where he was going to end it? What he was going to do with his time left?”
Chloe shook her head. “All I knew was that he withdrew two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from our savings account.”
The amount startled Czarcik. “And that was fine with you? You weren’t afraid? I don’t want to be crass, but all that money going up in smoke had to make you nervous.”
She smiled. “Like I told you, Detective, Daniel did very well. We didn’t live ostentatiously, and we had no children or dependents. Trust me, he wasn’t leaving me destitute.”
“Still . . . you weren’t curious about what he needed that much money for?”
Chloe shook her head. “If he needed it, he needed it.”
Czarcik finished his drink and motioned to the waitress. “Haven’t you had enough?” Her tone was more curious than judgmental or accusatory.
“Is it making you uncomfortable?”
She rolled her eyes. “I just didn’t know cops typically drank this much on duty.”
“Cops don’t.” Paused. “At least not openly.”
The waitress arrived. “Another drink?”
Czarcik glanced playfully at Chloe. “No, thank you. That will be all.”
The waitress gave him a confused look and took his empty glass back to the bar. “Please, go on,” Czarcik encouraged.
Her body visibly relaxed. The hard part was over. The rest was just details, as important as they were. “And then I found the folders,” Chloe said, referencing the pivotal event that led her to this point. “The ones right in front of you.”
Czarcik leafed through them, not really looking at anything inside. “Tell me about that.”
“There’s an unfinished part of our basement. It’s where the washer and dryer used to be. But we moved those upstairs for convenience. We never redid it. No point. Daniel built some wooden shelves that I used for my canning.” Czarcik shook his head, not understanding. “I make preserves in my spare time. Usually just strawberries and blueberries, but I’ve made raspberry and peach in the past. One summer we spent some time up in Michigan, and I brought back some rhubarb to try. But that’s really more of a spring fruit.”
He wanted to tell her that he didn’t give a shit about spring fruit, summer fruit, winter fruit, or any fruit for that matter. He wanted to hear about the folders, but he allowed her to continue at her own pace.
“The other side of the basement Daniel used for a workspace. Not really an office, but a place where he could fool around with his gadgets. He liked to tinker with electronics and things like that. He had dozens of plastic containers filled with microchips, transistors, wires, tiny screws—all those hobbyist things. I knew I was going to have to clean it out eventually. Otherwise they would have been a constant reminder of him. And that wouldn’t be healthy. But at the time, it was just comforting for me to wander around the space. Feeling his presence everywhere. That’s when I saw the folders sticking out of an old cardboard box. At first, I just assumed they were warranties or other papers that should have been filed away in his upstairs office, where he kept the important documents. Or maybe some old issues of Popular Mechanics . . .”
Chloe finally took a sip of wine.
“When I opened the folders, my heart sank. I’m embarrassed to tell you what my first thought was.”
There was no need to tell him. Czarcik was well acquainted with what kinds of unspeakable things were usually recovered from criminals’ private lairs.
“But then I chastised myself,” Chloe continued. “I knew Daniel as well as you can know a person. He wasn’t some pervert. Some sadist. Then I read the articles. They were all stories of horrific abuse or suffering, printed out rather recently. I couldn’t imagine why someone as sensitive as him would want to read them, much less collect them.”
The reason was all too obvious to Czarcik.
“Naturally, my curiosity got the best of me. So I googled all the stories, wanting to see if there were any updates, because some of them were years old. Out of the six cases, the perpetrators in two of them had been violently murdered.” She took another sip of wine, struggling with giving voice to the truth. “Even though one of the cases had a suspect—the Fernandez murders, which is how I knew to contact you—I understood immediately what Daniel had done.”
On the surface, it all made sense. No gaping holes, no flaws in her logic. And if there was one truism more true than even the spouse did it, it was Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one.
Yet something about this story, this confession, bothered him.
He wasn’t sure whether it was the story or Chloe herself. Each was eminently believable. But there was also something about being too perfect. And in many ways, that’s what this was. The story was the perfect tragedy, Chloe the perfect martyr. But real life didn’t usually work like that. It was messy. Messy and confusing.
“Let me play devil’s advocate, Chloe. These were all bad people. Some of them outright criminals with long rap sheets. Surely it isn’t inconceivable that a few of them would meet a violent end?”
“Then why would he have printed the articles? And saved them?”
He nodded. She had a point.
She picked up her purse and placed it on the table. She reached inside, pulled out a receipt, and handed it to Czarcik. “It’s for Thiopental. Do you know what that is?”
“I don’t, but I have no doubt you’re going to tell me.”
“It’s a very fast-acting animal barbiturate. Sometimes given to pets before they’re put down. Well, we didn’t have any pets.”
She waited for Czarcik to fill in the blanks.
“But none of the victims had Thib—whatever it’s called, or anything like that in their systems. I’ve seen the autopsy reports myself.”
“Did you see the one on the chicken?” she asked. “The one that I read was tied around that woman’s neck?”
“We’re not in the habit of doing autopsies on animals,” Czarcik said a little defensively. This wasn’t actually true, and he was slightly embarrassed he hadn’t authorized it.
“Well, if you had, I’m certain you would have found it in the animal’s system. Daniel was so gentle. He wouldn’t have wanted to hurt an animal. But if he had to, he would have made sure to cause it the least amount of discomfort.”
While not exactly a smoking gun, the Thiopental did bolster Chloe’s case. But what she didn’t realize was that Czarcik was already convinced. After all, what was more likely? That this ordinary man just happened to print out articles of random crimes, then grew obsessed with the cases and gathered personal information on the perpetrators, only to have these perpetrators suddenly die in especially grisly ways? Or Occam’s razor?
“You wouldn’t happen to have any pictures of your husband on you, would you?” Czarcik asked.
Chloe looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Of course I d
o. Hundreds.” She handed him her iPhone. “Just flip through them,” she instructed.
Czarcik studied the first photo on the screen: Daniel reclining on a puffy chair, his feet up on the ottoman. In one hand, he held a beverage. His other was draped across Chloe’s body as she slept contentedly with her head on his chest.
Chloe had obviously chosen her favorite photos to store on her phone. But Czarcik wasn’t interested in an impromptu slideshow. He cared about one thing—whether the man with the kind eyes and easy smile could conceivably be Groucho. He flicked his finger right to left a few more times across the screen: the happy couple on the slopes of Vail; hiking in the forests of Appalachia; Daniel behind the wheel of a Chris-Craft motorboat, his glasses spotted with mist, his thick dirty-blond hair damp, looking positively Kennedyesque.
There was no reason that the man in these photos could not have been Groucho.
Nor was there any way for Czarcik to reconcile the happy husband with the masked lunatic who had broken into his home. “Thank you,” he said as he handed the phone back to Chloe.
“Did you recognize him?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.
Czarcik shook his head. She gave him some time to reconsider. “But the two of you look very happy,” he quickly added.
Usually, Czarcik could have polished off a few more double Cuttys with little effect. But exhaustion lowered his tolerance. The adrenaline rush he felt after learning new information about a case had long since dissipated. Chloe, too, had to be growing weary. Her psychic burden was much larger. “Chloe, just one more question.”
She waited, expectant.
“When you found the articles, after your suspicions were confirmed, why did you contact the police?”
She looked at him with a combination of incredulity and pity, as if he were nothing more than a child, forever unable to grasp the simplest of concepts.
Rain Will Come Page 13
