Orchard Grove (26 page)

I might have suggested to her that Miller wouldn’t think highly of her messing with a probable crime scene. But then, forensics had already scoured the place, so their evidence, whether it proved fruitful or not, was already collected, the necessary photos, already snapped. I also recalled Miller stating explicitly that his job was already “done here.”

“Why don’t you go home and get some sleep,” Susan said. “In the morning, everything will seem more optimistic.”

“Optimistic,” I snickered. What I wanted to tell her is I felt like my balls were trapped in a vice that was only getting tighter. No optimism in that.

“Goodnight,” I said, pulling myself up by my crutches.

“Goodnight, Killer,” she said, leaning into me, planting a kiss on my cheek that might have come from my sister if only I had a sister.

But I didn’t leave right away.

When she was gone I stood outside on the deck looking into the dining room and kitchen through the big picture window. I saw something that shocked me, but given everything that had gone down that day and during the previous two days, shouldn’t have shocked me at all. I saw my wife take Lana into her arms and hold her tightly. Lovingly. For a time, Lana just seemed like she needed a shoulder to cry on. Someone strong and understanding. At least, that’s what the once-upon-a-time-dedicated husband in me wanted to believe.

After a few beats, I saw Lana lift her head and open her pouty mouth just a little. She and Susan gravitated toward each other, their mouths connecting. They kissed as passionately as two lovers can possibly kiss, each of them running their hands through one another’s hair, their tongues connecting, playing, exploring. After a time, Lana began to unbutton Susan’s blouse, while Susan lowered both her hands down to Lana’s bear thighs, and then slowly drew them up and into the underside of her short skirt.

I turned away then, hiding myself from the window. My heart was beating fast again, and my throat felt like a rock had lodged itself inside it. What in God’s name was going on here? It was one thing for two girls to make out while their men were present and a loaded gun was involved. Or,
a
man, at least. But it was something else when they decided to enter into the sexual act on their own without the man or men.

Susan… “I’m falling for you.”

Lana… “Go with it.”

In my overheated brain, it meant only one thing: Not only were they falling in love, but they were already in love, and what’s more, they were cutting me out of the equation.

I made my way across the two fence lines, my foot throbbing, pulsing. Entering into the house by way of the back sliding glass doors, I flicked on the overhead lights, navigated the couple of steps up into the dining room, and poured a shot of whiskey. I downed that and poured another and drank that. Then I made my way to the bathroom off the master bedroom. All I wanted to do was wash up, clean my hands and face of John Cattivo’s blood, then get in bed and sleep a dreamless sleep for a thousand nights.

Pulling off my button down shirt without bothering to unbutton it, I stood at the bathroom sink in my white undershirt and stared at myself in the mirror. I stared back at tired, bloodshot eyes, and a scruffy face that had seen better days. The roundness of my face that once upon a time seemed so youthful was now the precise feature that made me appear worn and old. The weight of guilt is said to be unbearable given time. But only a few hours had passed since John blew his brains out…rather, I blew them out for him…and already I felt like I was hefting ten times my own weight on each shoulder. That was the first time it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to give Miller a call and confess the whole damned affair. A confession might put me, Lana, and Susan behind bars for a lot of years, but at least the guilt would be gone.

I turned on the cold water, splashed my face with it. My reflection stared back at me, dripping with water. I was the drowning man. Drowning in my own guilt, greed, and paranoia. Maybe I should have added a little anger to the soup as well. More than a little anger. Anger at Lana and Susan.

At myself.

I’d bitten the apple, and one way or another, I would pay the price. Maybe not in this life, but in the next.

Turning off the water, I pulled the towel from the rack beside the sink, dried my face. Tossing the towel onto the counter, I looked back up into the mirror. It was then I made out the reflection of a second face framed inside the glass.

T
he beam of Maglite shines into the Culvert. But with her eyes closed, she can’t see it, so much as sense the powerful light seeping through the water and through her thin-skinned eyelids. The water is foul, and it seeps into her nostrils. She can’t hold her breath forever. She needs oxygen. She can’t help herself. She begins to gag and choke. No choice but to lift her head from out of the water.

“Help me!” she screams.

Brad the cop is startled to hear the voice and see the female body it belongs to.

“Detective Miller!” he shouts. “You’d better get down here right away!”

F
or a guy with a bum foot, I swung around fast.

He was standing just outside the door to the master bedroom in the dark.

Detective Miller.

“Hope you don’t mind my intrusion,” he said. “Your wife said I’d find you here. I rang the doorbell, called your cell. No answer either way.”

Once my pulse leveled off, I slid my crutches under my arms, hobbled out of the bathroom, my face and hair still damp.

“You gave me a real start,” I said, wondering how he knew he might find Susan next door. Perhaps he simply deduced it. Or maybe he wanted to check out the gunroom one final time.

He smiled that smile again. The one that wasn’t really human.

“You must be pretty jumpy after this evening’s drama,” he said, his hands shoved in his trouser pockets, the grip on his service automatic visible. Then, “Got anything to drink in this place?”

“Thought cops weren’t supposed to drink on duty.”

He looked at me with that cold, gray-eyed stare.

“Wouldn’t you?” he said.

We sat down across from one another at the dining room table. I set a drinking glass in front of him, and one in front of me. Rather than drag myself up and out of my chair every few minutes, I set the bottle of Jack on the table between the typewriter and the bowl of apples, easy access. Sitting myself down clumsily, I grabbed the bottle by its neck, poured the first round, set the bottle back down, hard.

He said, “Must suck having a leg banged up like that, bleeding all the time. How’d it happen?”

“Blame the mileage,” I said. “The football came back to haunt me. So did all that jogging. I split the plate down in the Amazon doing some research for a script. They put four permanent screws in the plate and removed a portion of the index toe. But they tell me I’ll be as good as new when I heal.”

“Try and stay off it,” he said.

“Thanks for the advice. But you ever gonna tell me what this surprise visit is all about?” I said, after a beat. “I just got through talking to you.”

He drank his shot, went to pour another almost immediately, as if the act of emptying your glass and refilling it were not two separate acts but instead, one single fluid motion.

“You mind?” he said, taking hold of the bottle.

“You’re the cops,” I said. “Why should I mind?”

More of that steely smile.

“I like you, Ethan,” he said. “You’ve got spunk. Wish more of my support staff were like you.”

“We’re back to a first name basis. You must want something from me.”

“Course I do. Me and the great Empire State of New York.” He poured a shot, glanced at my glass, saw that it was full, capped the bottle and set it back down in the same exact spot in which it previously rested. “Why else would I be here?”

We were dancing around one another and he knew it. Feeling one another out, waiting for someone to take the first jab. How did the old saying go? Sometimes in life you’re a hammer and other times you’re the nail. I don’t have to tell you what I felt like sitting there across from him.

I drank some whiskey. Half the shot. The booze sank into me, warm, strong, and good. But the man who sat before me didn’t make me feel so good. Considering the circumstances anyway.

“So what can I help you with, Miller?”

“Ethan,” he said, “how well have you and your wife been getting along as of late?”

I could almost feel my eyes go wide. I was sure he noticed them, since he was no doubt trained to notice such reactions. It was exactly the kind of involuntary response I needed to get under control if I was going to weather what was surly going to be a prolonged storm of police questioning over the course of the next few days and nights. That is, until Miller was convinced without an ounce of a doubt that Cattivo’s death from eating his piece had been an unfortunate accident. Or perhaps a fortunate one, depending upon whom you asked.

“You want the truth?” I posed.

“Like you said, I’m the cops. Downtown, on the State Street hill, the fat guys in the black robes locked inside the white marble building with the big pillars out front, those are the judges.”

I sipped a little more Jack, thought about Susan in bed with Lana right this very second.

“Okay, Miller,” I said. “Have it your way. Susan and I have seen better days. Feel better?”

“And why are the better days behind you? She’s an awfully attractive woman, if you don’t mind my saying.”

Miller, dancing, jabbing, provoking…

“Do I have to tell you this stuff? What’s it got to do with Cattivo?”

“Who said it has to have anything to do with it?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here, interrupting what I hoped would be a week-long coma?”

He nodded. “In part. You see… and you might appreciate this as script writer who’s written a few shoot ‘em-ups for the silver screen… but in order to get at a certain truth, a detective needs to more or less skirt around the issue, kind of like the Indians will circle the wagons, hoping to force someone or something out in the open.”

“In this case, a truth or something directly related to the truth.”

He slapped the table, shocking my system. “Exactly. Only in this case, the truth is not established. The truth is still a question. That question being, did John Cattivo really, truly, kill himself? Or was he somehow coerced or set up?”

“I see,” I said, my beating heart inching its way back up into my throat.

He drank the rest of his drink. I drank mine. He poured us two more.

“Now,” he said, “why are you and the wife not getting on so well lately?”

I stared into the golden brown booze, wishing I could drown in it. Since I had no choice but to sit there and take his jabs, I decided to play a little rope-a-dope and give him what he wanted. I’d stretch the truth just a little to maybe get his mind off me and me alone. Maybe if I spread around a little of the suspicion, all eyes wouldn’t be on me. After all, it was Susan who was sleeping with Lana right now. Not me. Not after what I’d done for the blonde beauty. Not after putting my life on the line. I was getting screwed over while Susan and Lana gladly screwed one another.

“Why else do couples start to fight?” I said. “Money, or the lack of it. House in foreclosure. My work in the crapper. Not much to say to each other anymore that doesn’t end up in an argument. The wife screaming at me, hitting me, clawing at me, telling me I’m no good. Can’t even support her. All washed up. Useless. Telling me she’s gonna find someone else to give her multiple orgasms. You know, the usual shit.”

He nodded like I’d gone all TMI on him.

“My wife died on the operating table,” he said. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. Because you’re not, and that’s okay. Why should you be? You didn’t know her. You don’t know me. You had nothing to do with it.”

“Do I want to know you, Detective Miller?”

“Like they say in law school, the question’s moot, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I suppose it’s beside the point anyway.”

“Why so broke?” he asked, grinning through his teeth. “I thought writers who make movies do pretty good. I worked a case not long ago that involved a writer lives not far from here. Crime writer by the name of Reece Johnston. He also happens to be a pyromaniac in remission. Maybe you know him. He seems to do okay.”