Topping From Below (37 page)

My realization leaves me in a turmoil. I change the subject.

“Did you kill Franny?” I ask. I’m unable to keep the despair out of my voice. Long ago, I gave up any pretense of being M.’s equal. I am no match for him. All I want now is the truth. “I need to know. I
have
to know. Even if you did, there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s no evidence, no proof. It’ll be your word against mine. You’ll never see the inside of a jail. But I need to know if you killed her, and how and why you killed her. Just tell me the truth. Please … tell me.”

M. reaches over and strokes my hand. “Oh, Nora,” he says softly, almost sadly. “When are you going to open your eyes? I have no proof, but Ian seems the most likely suspect.”

I shake my head. “He hadn’t seen her for six months before she died. And he had no reason to kill her.”

“Sometimes a reason isn’t necessary. Besides, he lied to you, didn’t he? He never would’ve mentioned Franny if I hadn’t told you they knew each other. So maybe he lied about other things as well. How do you know he hadn’t seen her for six months?”

“He told me.” “And you believed him?” I hear the cynicism in his voice.

“Yes.”

“I see,” he says. Then adds, “Do you think you’re capable of being objective about Ian? You dismiss every fact that makes him appear suspicious. He fucked Franny, he lied to you about knowing her, immediately after she was killed he latches on to you, and soon after he realizes you suspect him—after you asked him his whereabouts on the day Franny was murdered—he pulls away from you. Don’t you think Detective Harris would be interested in knowing this? Tell the police. Let them ascertain his innocence.”

“He didn’t kill Franny.” I get up and pace the room. “And if you’re positive he’s the killer, why didn’t you tell me sooner? You say you care for me, that you’re falling in love—weren’t you afraid he’d kill me as well?”

M. watches me pace. Calmly, he says, “No. Your life was never in danger. Ian isn’t a killer—not by nature. He doesn’t have it in him. I think it was an accident, a mistake.”

“She was bound with duct tape. Are you telling me that was an accident? A mistake?”

“I don’t have all the answers, Nora. I may not have any of the answers. I just think that he lost control. He’s not a cold-blooded person. I don’t think he meant to kill her.”

I sit on the far end of the sofa. Leaning forward, I place my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. His words reverberate in my mind:
he
lost control.
I remember the night Ian lost control, when he fucked me out of anger, roughly, without my consent.

“If you really believed he killed her, why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t you tell the police when they questioned you?”

“I only made the connection recently—when Ian confessed to his new friend Philip Ellis that he had slept with Franny. Nora, if I had told you, would you have believed me? You still don’t want to. And the police? Why would they believe any accusation of mine, the man they prefer to believe is guilty?”

I don’t say anything, at a loss for an answer. What he says makes sense, but I no longer trust my judgment.

He leaves the room, then returns a few minutes later, carrying a small cardboard box. “I brought this home today,” he says. Then he smiles apologetically. “I kept it at my office so you wouldn’t find it.” He sits next to me and opens the flaps on the box. “I thought you’d like to have these—some things Franny left behind.”

He reaches in the box and pulls out a blue silk scarf. I don’t know if it belonged to her or not, but then he places a pair of jade earrings in my palm. I had given these earrings to Franny on her birthday two years ago. I close my hand, and the earrings become warm in my palm. Sensations: I want to feel sensations, her presence in the earrings, a psychic connection that spans both worlds.
Talk to me
,
Franny
. But nothing comes. Only silence, without significance. Tears form in my eyes, and I squeeze them tightly so M. will not see me cry. I chide myself for my sentimentality. What did I expect? Some sort of signal?

“Here,” M. says, and I open my eyes. He hands me a pair of tinted glasses.

“Franny didn’t wear glasses,” I say, and start to give them back.

“Reading glasses,” he says. “She got them a week before we split up.” Then he hands me a Jean Auel book,
The Clan of the Cave Bear
, and two nursing magazines. He pulls a brown sweater out of the box and hands that to me, also. Last of all, he reaches in and takes out a miniature wood carving, a snake hatching from an egg. As if it was a foreboding, my skin prickles when I see it. I think of the one Ian carved for me over six months ago, still on my coffee table.

I am confused and cannot stay here with M. today. I put everything back in the box—the blue scarf and jade earrings and tinted glasses and magazines and brown sweater and the Jean Auel book and the wood carving—and get up and leave without saying a word. I know he will make me suffer later for walking out on him, but I don’t care.

I go home and call a man named Peter Byatt who works the police beat at the Bee. Although I’ve known him for over ten years, we’ve never socialized outside of work. He’s an older man, competent, who’s helped me out on several stories in the past. I wait while the call is transferred to his desk. The phone rings repeatedly before a man answers, his voice flat and bored, saying simply, “Byatt here.”

“Pete, this is Nora Tibbs.”

There is a moment of silence as my name registers, then recognition. “Nora! How’re you doing? When you coming back to work?”

“Soon,” I say. “I need a favor.”

He pauses briefly, then says, “What can I do for you?”

“Do you remember the Mansfield murder?”

“The woman on Channel Three? McCarthy’s girlfriend? Sure.”

“Tell me about it. About the guy who killed her.”

I hear a chair squeaking, and I picture him leaning back, using one of the filing-cabinet drawers as a footrest, a position I’ve seen him in many times. “Mark Kim,” he says. “A real wacko. An ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t let her go, kept harassing her. A genuine nut case. She got a restraining order to keep him away, but obviously it didn’t work. He kept up the harassment; she filed charges. He finally pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of stalking, and was put on probation, two years, I think, maybe three, and ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling. It didn’t do much good—he stabbed her in the parking lot at the station, eight, nine times, something like that.”

“How did he harass her?”

“It’s been several years,” he says, thinking. He hesitates for a minute, then says, “He used to call her repeatedly, if I remember correctly, professing his undying love and devotion. She finally had to change her number. And he’d follow her around town, showing up wherever she was covering a story, in general making an ass out of himself. He’d take her picture, hundreds of them, and send them to her. When she ignored him, he started mailing threatening letters. He even broke into her house a few times, or so she claimed. He denied everything. He maintains his innocence up to this day. Says he was framed, claimed it was a different boyfriend who killed her, that it was Ian. The two of them got in a fistfight one time, when Kirn was following them to a restaurant. The police checked it out, but they never seriously suspected Ian. The evidence was pretty conclusive against Kirn. No one actually saw him kill her, but his fingerprints were all over the knife. And there was a witness who ID’ed him at the parking lot just a few minutes after the murder.”

As he was speaking, I felt a vague uneasiness spread through me. Ian never told me the man claimed to be innocent; he never told me they had got in a fight. “Thanks, Pete,” I say, and I hang up before he asks any questions.

My car is in the garage, but I decide, even in the hot weather, to walk downtown to clear my head. It’ll take me about an hour of brisk walking to reach Second Street, and that will give me just enough time to get to the Paragon by five-thirty, when I’m supposed to meet Joe Harris.

Ian. I think of Ian.

I walk through the underpass that goes beneath the train tracks, and then into the downtown area.

Joe is waiting for me when I reach the Paragon. I’m sweaty from my long walk, and go directly into the bathroom to wash my face. I’m still charged up from the vigorous walk across town, feeling a little agitated. I think again of Ian.

I sit down, then suddenly start pouring out everything that’s happened the past several days, talking so fast that I realize I’m making no sense.

“Slow down, Nora. Slow down. What’re you talking about?”

I stare at Joe, flustered. I don’t know. I have no idea what I’m talking about.

“The person who killed Franny,” I finally say. “It could be anyone. Anyone.” And then I realize the cause of my agitation. I’m about to betray Ian.

“I’ve been telling you that all along,” Joe says cautiously. He’s wearing a green polyester shirt, short-sleeved, and it stretches snugly across his chest. He takes a sip of beer, eyeing me over the rim of his glass. Setting it down, he says, “So you changed your mind finally? You don’t think he killed her?”

It’s odd the way neither of us says M.’s name out loud to the other, as if the utterance would validate his existence, make him more human.

“No,” I say, then quickly add, “Yes. Maybe.” I pause to collect my thoughts. “I don’t know. There’s someone else.”

Joe raises his bushy eyebrows but is quiet.

I take a deep breath and say, “You mentioned you were investigating someone else. It’s Ian, isn’t it?”

There is a sudden burst of laughter, then a cough as Joe chokes on his beer. He’s smirking, as if I told a joke. “Your boyfriend? Jesus, Nora. You can’t be serious.”

Now I’m surprised. I thought for sure that Ian was the other suspect. “I know it sounds a little crazy, but—”

“More than a little.”

“But hear me out.” And I tell him about Ian’s encounter with Franny and how he withheld the information, his sudden interest in me upon her death, his skill with knives, the wood carving he gave her before she died. I take a breath, and then ask him if he remembers the Cheryl Mansfield murder. When he says, “Vaguely,” I tell him she had been Ian’s girlfriend. “What about the photos and letter I’ve received?” I say. “Just like the ones she got. They could be from Ian.”

Joe says nothing, gazing thoughtfully at the table, playing absently with the beer glass.

“He broke up with me as soon as I suspected he was the murderer,” I say.

He still remains quiet.

“And when I asked him where he was the day she was killed, he didn’t answer.” Listening to myself, accusing Ian, I shake my head slowly and back off. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“No,” Joe says finally, looking up, his gray eyes deep in thought. “You’re not crazy. It’s worth checking into.”

I don’t go back to M.’s house tonight. My mind is confused, and I need to be alone. Did I do the right thing by telling Joe my suspicions of Ian? I showed him the wood carving of the snake hatching from an egg. It was whittled from holly, the same wood Ian used in the carving he made last February. It was on my coffee table all this time. When Joe drove me home this evening, he took both wood carvings with him.

I go to bed, exhausted from everything that happened today, and fall asleep almost immediately. My dreams are filled with anxiety, and sometime during the night I wake up. Something is wrong, but I’m not sure what. I sit up, looking around, feeling disoriented. My alarm clock, an electronic one with red digitals, is off, the face black, and there is no light from the streetlamps filtering through the curtains. The electricity in the neighborhood went off—that is what woke me, the silence. No humming refrigerator, no sound of my neighbor’s air conditioner, which he leaves on all night. The room is black, no moon tonight. A car must’ve hit an electrical pole, knocking out the electricity.

I lie back down, and am almost asleep, in that halfway, hypnagogic state between drowsiness and unconsciousness, when the phone rings—a jarring, loud sound in the middle of the night, piercing the blackness of the room. I jerk in response. I grab for it, before it rings again, but I miss. The shrill ring resonates, rude and brazen. Grabbing for the phone again, 1 accidentally knock it over. I fumble in the darkness, then bring the receiver to my ear. Nothing. Then I hear the breathing. I should’ve let the answering machine pick up the call, but I didn’t think when I heard the jarring ring. I hold the receiver to my ear, listening. I don’t say anything. Neither does he. The breathing is deep and regular, just to let me know he’s there. Is it Ian or M.? I think it’s Ian, but how can I be sure? I sit up, listening, unable to utter a word. I should hang up, but I can’t. A morbid curiosity—or maybe it’s fear, yes, that’s it, fear of the unknown—keeps me on the phone. My two weeks are almost up. As I listen to his rhythmic breathing, my chest tightens. The room is so dark. I think I hear noises in my home, but I know that’s only my imagination. The house is settling; a cat is crawling on the roof. It’s not Ian in my house. It’s not M. But one of them is here, on the phone, at the other end of the line. One of them sent me the note. The breathing continues. I squeeze my eyes shut and listen, my own breathing shallow, filled with nervous apprehensions. I hang up the phone, finally, and stay awake the rest of the night.

Every evening after that, I take the phone off the hook before I go to bed.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX

I no longer see Ian, so I spend most of my evenings at M.’s house. Already, we have established routines. He wakes up before I do, makes coffee, and brings a cup into the bedroom while I’m still sleeping, setting it on the nightstand beside the bed. My life is much simpler without Ian. There’s no more lying and no more deception. I no longer have to cover my tracks, and it comes as a great relief. I am sleeping better and the dark smudges under my eyes have disappeared.

I’m sitting up when M. walks into the room, a blue towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still damp from a shower. He walks over to the bed and drinks out of the coffee mug, then hands it to me—he knows I won’t touch it otherwise. He slides under the covers.