The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

  At eleven-thirty the following morning he pulled into the Chiefland Mall. The Lexus was already there, at the J. C. Penney side of the lot. He drove them to their motel, and in the car she said she’d been more abrupt than she intended the last time they’d talked. But she’d been rushed, she explained, and an earlier exchange with George had left her short-tempered.

  In their room, with the doughnut on the outside doorknob and the bolt turned, she came into his arms and kissed him, and something relaxed within both of them, some knot of tension dissolved and went away.

  When the embrace ended they stood a few feet apart on the worn carpet and took off all their clothes. His heart filled at the sight of her.

  And not just his heart. “Look at you,” she said, and reached to take hold of him. “Oh, no stories today, no drama, nothing. Just fuck me.”

  Afterward he said, “Story time. I’m afraid it’s not a bedtime story, because I’ve been going to bed alone since the last time we were in this little room. But I saw your husband again.”

  “Was that wise?”

  “Well, it was that or hang up on him. He called me.”

  He told her about the call, and about the meeting forty minutes later in Otterbein’s office. “He gave me a card with a name and address on it,” he said, “and showed me a woman’s picture.”

  “I hope I was wearing more in the picture than I am now.”

  “It wasn’t you,” he said. “George has a girlfriend.”

  Her name, he said, was Ashley Hannon, and she had recently moved into a side-by-side duplex on Stapleton Terrace. She was twenty-seven years old, with a General Studies diploma from a two-year college in Ocala and a certificate from the Broward County Physiotherapy Institute attesting to her competence in Shiatsu, Swedish massage, and Reiki, and there was something else, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Fellatio,” Lisa suggested.

  “That may have come under General Studies. She spent two years in Broward County, mostly in Pompano Beach, and then she moved to the Gulf Coast and took a position in a massage parlor in Clearwater.”

  “A position? Kneeling, would be my guess.”

  It wasn’t a whorehouse, he told her. All of the women had undergone genuine massage training, with certificates similar to Ashley’s. They used professional massage tables and offered a variety of techniques, and all you got for the posted rate was a standard non-sexual massage.

  Anything beyond that was by arrangement with the technician.

  “In other words,” she said, “a Happy Ending. And just how happy it is depends on how much you pay. And then Clearwater must have had an Unhappy Ending for her to come to this backwater garden spot. How’d she wind up here, and how did George find her?”

  “He found her in Clearwater.”

  “And brought her here? I suppose he’s paying her rent.”

  “There’s no rent to pay. He owns the building. The other half’s rented to a black family with a couple of young kids.”

  “And Ashley’s in the other half? Is she black?”

  “White,” he said. “Your basic cheerleader type with a head of blonde curls.”

  “I knew he liked professional talent,” she said. “He never minded saying so, even when things were good between us. He showed me something he wanted me to do.”

  “What?”

  “It’s easier if I show you,” she said. “Two fingers at the rear of your sack, and then like so. I think it has something to do with the prostate.”

  “I can see why he liked it.”

  “Oh? Well, there’s no reason I can’t haul it out of my own personal bag of tricks next time, if you’re not bothered by knowing where it came from. I didn’t ask George where it came from, but he told me anyway. He said very matter-of-factly that a girl in a massage parlor did it to him. I said I hoped he gave her a good tip. But he gave this one more than a tip, he gave her a house. When did she move in?”

  “Six weeks ago.”

  “There would have had to be a whole string of Happy Endings first, wouldn’t you think? When did he first stretch out on her massage table?”

  “He didn’t say, just that he’d met her in Clearwater and taken an interest.”

  “He didn’t say what she was doing there?”

  He shook his head. “You can find out a lot about a person online,” he said. “If you know where to look, and what to look for. Her education and certification are a matter of record, and—”

  “Have you seen her yet?”

  “Just the photo, and no, I don’t have it with me. He gave me a good look at it and then slipped it into a desk drawer. I drove past the house.”

  “You drove past mine, too. I bet hers isn’t as nice.”

  “CBS,” he said, “and that still sounds like the TV network, even though I’ve lived down here long enough to use the expression myself. Concrete block and stucco, two stories with a crawl-space attic. I think I said it’s a side-by-side duplex. The other tenants have a swing-and-slide combo set up on the front lawn.”

  “I think I like our love nest better.”

  “I have the feeling he’s thinking about moving her someplace a little more upscale.”

  “Someplace like Rumsey Road?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He wants a background report on her, and he wants me to focus on her family. Her parents are both dead, and I guess she was a little vague about what they died of.”

  “He can’t think she killed them. Oh, Jesus Christ. He’s thinking about hereditary illnesses.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “He’s checking her out to find out what kind of a brood mare she’ll make.” She sat up, alarm showing on her face. “I wondered how she got him to move her up from Clearwater. I’m sure the girl’s well-schooled, and in more than Shiatsu and Reiki—”

  “Don’t forget Swedish.”

  “—and I’m willing to believe she can suck a tennis ball through a garden hose, but all that would do is get him to drive down to Clearwater when the urge came on him. He wants to get her pregnant.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “If she passes the background check, the next test is can he knock her up. When he got tested they told him there was nothing wrong with his sperm, and they didn’t find anything wrong with me, either, and one doctor told me there seemed to be some way my uterus was rejecting his sperm. I have to say that makes me really proud of my uterus. It’s clearly the most intelligent part of my body.”

  “If he gets her pregnant—”

  “Oh, he will. Love will find a way. And if that happens, he’ll want to marry her. No kid of his is going to grow up sharing a CBS duplex with a passel of pickaninnies.”

  “There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

  “And that may be the first time it ever passed my lips. Darling, this could be good for us.”

  “Well, he’ll pay me a nice fee for running a check on her, but beyond that—”

  “He’ll need a divorce from me before he can marry her.”

  “Unless he moves to Utah.”

  “And he can divorce me, but not without writing out a check for half a million dollars. I told you the terms of the pre-nup, right?”

  “You did.”

  “That sounds like a fortune, half a million dollars. It’s not, not really, not anymore, but it’s a whole lot more than I had in my jeans when I said goodbye to the Twin Cities.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “And it’s not as though I’ve got any say in the matter. If he wants to divorce me that’s what he’ll do. Suppose we invest the money. What kind of income would I get?”

  “I’m not the best person to answer that,” he said, “but I can tell you this much. You’d be better off by a factor of ten if he died before he had a chance to divorce you.”

  “If he died,” she said. “You mean if we killed him.”

  “I mean when we kill him.”

  “God,” she said. She looked down at her folded hands, th
en up at him. “I know you’re serious about it,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to know how serious. I mean, look at me. I was so stupid, making half-assed arrangements with Gonson. What saved me was when you showed up.”

  “With my fancy car.”

  “It did look like something a murderer would drive. But suppose Gonson hadn’t ratted me out, suppose he actually did know somebody and the man I was meeting was ready and willing to do the job. And suppose he went through with it, and got away clean. Who would they look at?”

  “The wife.”

  “And how well would I hold up? I could probably make it through an hour or so of interrogation, and then I could let it dawn on me that I probably ought to have a lawyer, and after that there wouldn’t be any more questions. But if they kept digging—”

  “They’d find something. And of course there’d be the chance they’d find their way to the man you hired, because even if he’s a pro it’s a profession that doesn’t have terribly high standards. And he could drink and run his mouth, or he could give his girlfriend reason to drop a dime on him.”

  “It’s funny how that expression is still around. If you could even find a pay phone, what good would a dime do you?”

  “The point is, he’d give you up in a hot second.”

  “I know that. So I was lucky twice, that a real hit man didn’t show up at the Winn-Dixie, and that the fake hit man decided he’d rather fuck me than score points with the sheriff.”

  “It was a little more complicated than that.”

  “I know that,” she said. “It wasn’t just my pussy. It was my eyes of blue. But you know what I mean, don’t you? I want to do this, Jesus I want to do this, but I don’t know how serious we really are.”

  “I drove to Georgia Sunday.”

  “Why, to get away from this whole business? You got as far as Atlanta before you changed your mind?”

  “I didn’t get anywhere near Atlanta. I went to a town called Quitman.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “I went to the high school, and isn’t that the perfect venue for a gun show? I spent about an hour there, and I came away with two unregistered guns and a box of shells for each of them.”

  “Two unregistered guns.”

  “A pistol and a revolver. The pistol’s a Ruger, the revolver’s a Taurus.”

  “With Gemini rising, I’ll bet. Well, Jesus Christ, Doak. That’s a big step, buying the guns.”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to be a downer, but—”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, could you actually go through with it? I mean there’s a difference between buying a gun and pulling the trigger, isn’t there?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You never actually did it, did you? Kill somebody, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. “Yes as in yes you did, or yes you know what I mean?”

  “I killed a man once,” he said.

  “How did—”

  “With a gun. I shot him and he died.”

  She thought about this. “You were a policeman.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was self-defense,” she said. “It was in the line of duty.”

  “That’s how it went in the books,” he said, “but that’s not how it was. I murdered him.”

  Twenty-three

  * * *

  He’d never told anyone.

  He was working a case, knocking on doors on a mixed block on the Lower East Side, the same tenements housing Wall Street guys and corporate lawyers in four-figure monthly rentals alongside rent-controlled tenants who paid less for rent each month than their yuppie neighbors spent on sushi.

  He could remember when you didn’t walk on that block if you didn’t have to, and now the storefronts were all designer clothes and vegan restaurants.

  He was in a building, going door to door, trying to find someone who might have had eyes on the street three nights earlier when somebody gave a young man named Raisin Little a double-tap with a .22. Raisin had a yellow sheet that ran to drug busts, and it was a fair bet that whoever shot him was in the same line of work. As far as Doak was concerned it was a PSH, a public-service homicide, but you did what you could to clear those, too.

  And gentrification made that a little more possible than it might have been in the old days, because the new people didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to talk to the cops.

  The woman in 3-G was a junior copywriter at a Madison Avenue agency but was thinking of bailing on that because a couple of friends were starting a web-based company and wanted her to go in with them, and it sounded like fun, and there was always the chance it would work and somebody would buy them out for like a billion dollars. I mean it could happen, right?

  And no, she’d heard about the shooting, because how could you not? It had happened right across the street, and she was home and heard the gunfire, or at least she thought now that she must have heard it, but you heard loud noises all the time, and if she even thought about it she thought it was a car backfiring or kids throwing firecrackers, and could someone please tell her what was it anyway with Chinese kids and firecrackers? So if what she heard was in fact the end of Little Raisin (she got the name turned around, but so did one of the tabloids), well, she never looked out the window to see what was going on, and if she had she probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway and—

  A woman screamed.

  Not on TV, not out on the street. It was right there in that apartment, or maybe next door, and—

  “Oh, God,” the copywriter said. “They’re at it again. The fun couple in 3-F, and I know he’s going to kill her one of these days.”

  Another scream, and the sound of something banging into something. Furniture overturned.

  “I keep thinking maybe I should call the police, but I don’t know, I have to live next to them, and—was that a gunshot?”

  It was, and it was followed by another gunshot, and Doak was out in the hall now, his .38 drawn. He tried the knob, and when the door didn’t open he reared back to kick it in.

  It must have been just a snap-lock holding it, because the door burst open, and just as it did there was a gunshot and a bullet sailed past him on the left, about shoulder high.

  He saw a huge man, barefoot, wild-eyed, wearing stained baggy sweat pants and no shirt, with a gun in his hand.

  “Police! Don’t move!”

  That was what you were trained to shout, and he shouted it loud and clear, and the guy heard him and didn’t have to think it over. He swung toward Doak and pointed the gun at him and squeezed the trigger, all before Doak’s brain could tell his hand to point and shoot.

  He thought, I’m dead.

  And heard the hammer click on an empty chamber.

  The guy grinned, he fucking grinned, and tossed the gun aside. “No bullets,” he said, and threw his hands in the air, palms facing forward. “No bullets. Bitch got ’em all.”

  Nodding to his left, where a woman lay slumped against the wall while her blood pooled on the floor around her. You didn’t need to take her pulse to know she was gone.

  And that was the moment, frozen in time. The man with his hands in the air, that grin on his face, mocking his captor with his act of surrender.

  But a good collar, a great collar. Too late to do the woman any good, but there had never been a chance to do anything for her, and at least he could take in the man who’d killed her. Get him to put his hands on the wall, get him to move his feet away from the wall, grab his hands one at a time, cuff them behind his back.

  And call it in.

  That grin, that fucking grin on his face— The .38 bucked in his hand.

  “Three times,” he said. “I pulled the trigger three times, bam-bam-bam, I put three in his chest, grouped them so close together your hand could have covered all three at once. Did I say he didn’t have a shirt on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hardly any hair on his
chest, just maybe a dozen wispy hairs right in the middle. He was such an animal you’d expect him to have a pelt like a bear, but no. His skin was fishbelly white, too, like he never left the house in the daytime.”

  She sat there, letting him tell it.

  He said, “I made a conscious decision. I knew what to do— cuff the fucker, call it in—and instead I went ahead and shot him dead. Bam-bam-bam, and I got him in the heart, and I think he must have been dead before he even knew he’d been shot.

  “I looked around, half-expecting to see the copywriter from next door in the hallway. But she’d had the sense to stay where she was, in fact she’d locked herself in. I was all by myself with a dead man and a dead woman. He’d killed her and I killed him and nobody saw a thing.

  “He’d tossed the gun halfway across the room. I didn’t put it in his hand but I did the next best thing, nudging it with my foot, steering it to where it might have fallen if he’d been holding it when he was shot.

  “Then I called it in and waited for the place to fill up with cops.

  “I probably would have been all right anyway, but I caught a break. It turned out there were two live cartridges in his gun. It was a six-shot revolver, and I don’t know if he spun the cylinder at some point or if he’d only loaded some chambers, but when the gun clicked on a spent cartridge, all he had to do was keep pulling the trigger and he’d have hit a live one.

  “If he’d known that he might have killed me. But he didn’t and he tossed the gun, and when they examined the weapon there was no way to guess what had actually gone down, because the loaded gun fit the story I was telling. Which is that he was shooting at me, and they dug the one round out of the wall in the hallway, and that he’d have kept on firing at me if I hadn’t shot him first.”

  “So you were all right.”

  “Any time you discharge your weapon,” he said, “there’s a lot of shit you go through. They take it away, and you’re in for a stretch of desk duty until the formal inquiry’s completed. As far as the tabloids were concerned I was a hero cop, at least for a couple of days. And I got through the inquiry without any real trouble. Why hadn’t I called for backup? Because I never had a chance. I’d been doing routine canvassing, looking for a witness to the Raisin Little shooting, and my partner was off doing the same thing in a building across the street, because it didn’t take two people to knock on a door when there was no reason to expect anything other than a law-abiding citizen on the other side of it. So yeah, I was all right. I’d justifiably used deadly force in self-defense.”