Tango Key (20 page)

My heartburn. That's how I know.

Hunches don't count, Al,
he would reply.
Evidence counts
.

Evidence. Jesus. The heart knew things the mind could not: that was the only evidence she had. She knew, that was all. She knew. She sensed it in the air in Eve's kitchen. She saw it in the way Eve moved. She heard it in Eve's nervous chatter as she fixed them glasses of iced tea. Eve was acting like Aline was here on a social call.

". . . so I told him to take a hike and not call me again," she said.

She had missed something. "Who?"

"The reporter from that raggy tabloid." She folded a stick of gum into her mouth and straddled the stool across from Aline. "They want my goddamn story, right? Like I'm . . . well, whatever." She cracked her gum and flicked her fingers up the back of her hair, then gazed at Aline. "I suppose you want to know why I didn't tell you about Alan, huh."

Murphy had cued her. Murphy had told her how the omission of her affair with Alan looked from a cop's viewpoint. "Is there something to tell?"

She lit a cigarette. No, that wasn't quite right, Aline thought. Eve Cooper did not just
light
her cigarette. This was obviously something her dead husband had coached her on. Her long, lovely fingers withdrew the cigarette from the pack as though it were a delicate object. The fluid grace of her movements made this ordinary event, this mundane event, seem to be a ritual of impossible beauty, of mystery.

"Well . . . no, not really. I mean, we had a thing going for a while, when I was living in Marathon. But then I met Doug."

"You mean Alan brought you home to meet Dad and then had to go out for a while and you went to bed with Dad here in the house and Alan found you."

Tears stood in her blue eyes. She blew smoke into the air between them. "I knew no one would understand." She spoke softly. "That's why I never said anything."

"All things considered, Eve, there's only one way it can look."

Tears spilled from one eye, then the other, then she swiped at them, angrily, and stabbed out her cigarette. "Doug had a mistress. Did you know that? I didn't know it until six months after we were married. Nice, huh. Yeah, real nice. He wouldn't come home sometimes for a couple of days, and when he did, he smelled of her. You know what that's like, Aline?"

"You didn't tell me about Lucy Meadows, either. And besides, you could've divorced Doug."

She laughed. She slapped her open palm against the counter, and her rings clicked against the slick, inlaid tile. "Oh, sure. I could've divorced him. Except for this little ole contract he had me sign before we got married saying I wouldn't get anything from the marriage if I divorced him within seven years. Nothing." Color bled from her pretty face, her gorgeous face, as she realized how that sounded. "I mean, well, I didn't just marry Doug for money. I didn't. I loved him, but. . ."

"But the money helped."

Her eyes hardened. "You bet your ass it helped. Money always helps. People who say different are the ones who got it and who've always had it. They don't got. . ." She paused, frowning a little, seeking the correct verb, the correct tense. "They don't have any idea what it's like to not know if your old man is gonna come home Friday night loaded on the week's paycheck. They don't know what it's like to live in some shithole of a dust town where your only ticket out is a man who does something other than work at the goddamn prison or bartend. So don't go judging me, Aline. You come from money, so right from the start things was easier for you than for someone like me."

Her syntax, her grammar, worsened in direct proportion to her passion. Her face changed—not just the expression, but the structure, the color, as though Aline were seeing Eve as she might've looked if she'd never escaped her beginnings. "I hate to disappoint you, Eve, but I don't come from money. My parents started Whitman's in Key West in the late forties, and for the next twenty-five years they worked twelve- and fourteen-hour days. The difference between you and me is that you bought the bullshit about a man being your ticket out."

"You weren't there," she snapped. "You don't know what it was like. My people weren't the kinda folks who wake you up for school in the morning. They didn't give a shit whether I went to school or not. My old man died of cirrhosis when I was sixteen, and my ma went six months later of a heart attack. So I didn't have no one footing my bill through a fancy college."

Aline laughed. "Hey, I worked my way through college."

"You're missin' the point," she said, lighting another cigarette. "You're missin' the whole goddamn point. Your folks loved you. Me, shit, I was jus' a Friday-night mistake."

There wasn't much to say to that. Aline finished her ice tea in a gulp and flinched when the wind, which had changed directions, hurled rain against the sliding glass doors to her left. They overlooked a porch where there was an old cooler, potted plants, a bike, several blouses and pairs of shorts draped over the railing, and two lightweight_ beach chairs the wind threatened to snatch away.

"You'd better get that stuff in off the porch."

Eve glanced toward the door and got up. "Shit, just what
 
I don't need. One of those chairs smashed through the window."

She slid open the doors. Rain and wind gusted into the house, snapping the curtains, whistling under the awning. Aline hurried out behind Eve to help her bring in the stuff, and just then the wind whipped off the lid of the old cooler. It pinwheeled into the air, tumbling like a drunken acrobat as Aline and Eve both lunged for it. It sailed out of their reach, over the railing, and Aline turned back to the business of removing the beach chairs, her clothes so drenched now that a little more rain couldn't possibly make much difference.

"I'll get the chairs," Aline called.

But when she glanced around, she saw Eve standing perfectly still in front of the cooler, head bowed as if she were praying, hair plastered to the sides of her face, rain pouring down around her. Suddenly she began to shriek, a high keening sound that slapped against the din of the wind as if competing with it. She leaped away from the cooler so fast her foot struck the edge of it, knocking it on its side. Water with chunks of ice washed out of it, and so did Doug Cooper's head. It bounced across the wooden slats of the deck, the ragged flaps of skin at the throat like white, grotesque fingers, then rolled, a misshapen beach ball, as Eve continued to shriek and Aline just stood there, gaping. It stopped centimeters from the tips of her sandals, the wide, vacuous eyes gazing past her, into the rain.

And then she fainted.

"Passions are vices or virtues in their highest powers."

-JOHANN VON GOETHE

July 5, 7:25 P.M.

H
e has cuffed her left wrist to the armrest of the chair at the table. It's too tight and bites into the bone. But it's better than being tied to the chair in the other room. Almost anything is better than that. And he hasn't blindfolded or gagged her.

He stands at the gas stove, stirring a sauce that smells so good it makes her mouth water. The pot on the other burner has pasta in it. Music thumps from the transistor radio over the sink—a Cyndi Lauper tune. He hums along to the music, a toneless hum like a horde of flies. The lanterns make the room bright enough to see him clearly—and she suddenly wishes for the dark again, the blindfold, sleep, or better yet, some coke. She would like to be buzzed out on coke right now, zipping along the razor edge of some white cloud high.

She sips from the Styrofoam cup of Pepsi he has set in front of her. She hates Pepsi. It's what she drank for years in Arcadia—Pepsi for breakfast with her cereal, Pepsi for lunch, Pepsi in the evening with dinner, Pepsi that rotted her teeth so badly that before she and Doug were married, he insisted that she have most of her teeth capped. Now she has beautiful teeth. Perfect teeth. She chews on the ice in the glass because it tastes better than the Pepsi, and he glances over at her.

"Don't do that, babe. You'll chip your pretty teeth."

"They aren't my teeth."

He laughs. He thinks she's joking. "Right."

"They aren't. My teeth had a bunch off fillings that showed when I smiled, when I talked. Doug hated my teeth because they weren't perfect. Doug didn't like anything that wasn't perfect."

"Doug was an asshole. "He stirs the pasta vigorously. "I don't like assholes."

"May I have some water?"

"Sure." He opens the cooler and lifts out a gallon container of distilled water. He sets it on the table in front of her and watches as she unscrews the lid. "You have nice hands," he says. "But the rings clutter them."

Like he's some sort of expert on goddamn hands, she thinks. "I like the rings. " Instead of pouring water into her glass, she tips the jug to her mouth and drinks from it. Her eyes meet his for just a moment, vacuous eyes, then she looks away and sets the jug back on the table. She flattens her palm against the checkered tablecloth. "This ring," she says, pointing at the lapis lazuli in a silver setting on her index finger, "is for luck. This one "—she wiggles her fourth finger, crowned by an emerald in a nest of gold— "is for health." She lifts her third finger, where a ruby glistens. "And this one is just pretty."

He smiles, evidently fascinated by her litany. "And the other hand?"

She moves it, making the handcuff clatter against the chair, then extends her fingers until they bend back. There are five rings on this hand. All of them were gifts from men,
including the flawless two-carat diamond that is her wedding ring. "These rings are about lies."

He touches her hand, examining the diamond, then works the ring off her finger. "How much is it worth?"

She shrugs.

"C'mon. I know you know."

"Sixty-five hundred."

He touches her other hand now, points at the ruby. "And this one?"

"Forty-two hundred."

She thinks a moment. "Thirty-one hundred."

He laughs. "So you did marry him for money."

She doesn't deny it because, really, what would be the point? It is partially true. "And you killed him because you thought he was an asshole."

"Don't talk like that."

"I've always talked like that."

"Not around me. I don't like it."

She erupts with laughter. It bubbles up from someplace deep inside her, a laughter that is crazy and wild, and racing toward hysteria. He can saw off a man's head, but he doesn't like to hear a woman cuss? She says it out loud and bursts with laughter again, and he stands there until she is finished, until her ribs are aching too fiercely to laugh anymore, and he says, "It isn't the same thing. Not at all," and he slams his hand across her face.

Pain flashes across her cheeks and mouth, a white heat of pain, like her skin has been set on fire. Her ears ring, her vision goes fuzzy, blood thickens across her tongue where she has bitten it. She spits it out, at him, and a wad of pink spittle splats against his cheek and oozes down toward his mouth before he swipes it away with the back of his hand. He moves to strike her again, and she smiles. The smile disarms him.

"C 'mon," she whispers. "Again. C 'mon. You know I get off on it. Just like you do. I know your type, all right. I've seen your type all my fucking life. Pain. Yeah, tell me about it. C 'mon. Your belt. Hit me with your belt."

It isn't what he expected, but even as he steps back, away from her, she knows he is thinking about it. Thinking about pain. The degrees of pain. He is thinking how pain comes in little packages. But then he tricks her. He picks up the knife from the counter, a long slender steak knife, a real knife, not one of the plastic things on the table, but a real knife made of real stainless steel, with real jagged teeth along one side.

He moves toward her. Now he is smiling. She watches the knife in his hand. She hears the water in the big pot of pasta bubbling, hissing, steaming. The tip of the knife glistens. He stops at her right side and touches the tip of the knife to her neck. "An incision right here"—the tip traces the area of her jugular vein — "and you bleed to death. It doesn't even have to be a big incision, that's the nice part. Just a deep nick. It pumps out, the blood does. You start to feel lightheaded. It's kinda like going to sleep, I guess, except that it's your blood, not someone else's, and that's what makes you panic."

She squeezes her eyes closed, tries to shut out his soft, lilting voice.

"Doug panicked when I brought out the saw. It was really kind of funny." Now he is moving the tip of the knife through her hair, toward her ear, lightly.

He's going to slide it into my ear oh God oh please not in my ear or my eye or . . .