by Jack Bunker
Her lips quiver, and her eyes tear. She takes a sip to compose herself then continues. “But he didn’t. He tried to grab me, and the gun just went off.”
SIXTY-NINE
I hear a knock and wake up to find that my bedside light is still on. The clock reads two a.m.
“Yeah?”
The door opens to the visage of an angel. Sophia’s wearing one of my old baseball jerseys for a nightshirt. Slinky polyester that comes halfway down her thighs. If she has on anything underneath, it’s not apparent. Luckily, the team was too cheap to print their name on the shirts. I don’t know that I would have kept mine if it were emblazoned with the words “Master Batters.”
“Sorry,” Sophia says. “I saw your light and thought you were awake.”
“Come on in.”
“I couldn’t stand being alone.”
I scooch over to give her room to sit on the edge of the bed.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about Karl,” she says. She grabs her shoulders and shivers. “Do you mind?” She lifts the edge of the blanket, seeking permission to climb under it.
“Help yourself.”
She crawls under the covers and nestles in on her side so that we’re face to face. We’re not touching, but I feel her warmth and wish we were. I think about baseball but only because of her silhouette in my jersey.
“What he did to me in therapy was awful, but he tried to make up for it. I truly believe he loved me, I really do.”
I don’t quite know what to say, or what she wants me to say, so I play it safe. “I think I understand.”
She smiles. “Are you trying to play therapist now?”
“I’m trying to keep my negative opinions to myself.”
“I know you didn’t think much of Karl, but you didn’t know him. He wasn’t some sort of monster; he just lost it. I know what it’s like to be overwhelmed by paranoid fantasies, and I think that’s what happened to him.”
“Just an innocent victim of emotional problems? Driven by his inner demons to kill Ginger and try to kill you? Poor Karl.”
She laughs and pulls the sheet up under her chin as if she’s cold. It makes her look like she’s huddled in a sleeping bag, like we’re kids having a sleepover.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t his fault,” she says. “I’m just saying I understand how you can love someone and try to kill them at the same time.”
I wonder how this understanding affects her stages of grief. For that matter, I wonder how they’re affected by the fact that she pulled the trigger.
“Do you think he loved you when he put drugs in your coffee?”
“Haven’t you ever loved and hated someone at the same time?”
I think of Holly. “I take the Fifth.”
I roll onto my back with my hands clasped behind my head. She snuggles up tight against me, her head on my arm. She swings her leg across mine. It’s confirmed: she’s wearing nothing beneath the jersey. I feel her pubic warmth on my thigh. If she moves another inch, she’ll feel my reaction.
“When I first moved in with Karl we went for STD tests and when we both passed, I went on the pill. We opened our last box of condoms for one last Trojan fling to celebrate our commitment to monogamy. Cut to seven months later. He was shaving in the bathroom, and I happened to notice the condom box in his bedside drawer. A dozen came in the box and we’d only used that one so there should have been eleven left. I got this sudden urge to count them. Talk about paranoid.”
“It’s not paranoid if it’s true,” I extend my arm around to hug her to me. I feel her warmth against my side through the soft jersey. She kisses my chest, and I feel it in my groin.
“I never found out for sure. He walked out of the bathroom just as I dumped the box on the bed, and he flew into a rage. He couldn’t believe I’d stoop so low. He accused me of sabotaging myself and all the work I’d done in therapy. He started ranting about me trivializing his love and trashing our relationship and how without trust we’ve got nothing and I was terrified that I’d destroyed everything and it was over. I just wanted to melt in his arms and have it all go away. But at the same time I felt like his tantrum was just a big cover-up. Why make such a big deal of it unless it was true, unless he was cheating on me.”
“I can’t imagine cheating on the woman I love.”
“I can tell.” She snuggles closer and her knee brushes my family jewels. I shudder and she feels it. She lifts her head and looks at me with those autumn eyes. “Why didn’t we make love the other night?”
“I thought you might regret it in the morning.”
She traces my lips with her finger. “Maybe I regretted the missed opportunity.” She retraces my lips but with her tongue this time. I can barely breath between the sexual promise and moral haze.
“I didn’t want to take advantage,” I say. “I’m not sure that’s changed.”
She straddles me and can feel my arousal overruling my concern.
“I’m a big girl,” she says and slips out of the jersey. She’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.
SEVENTY
“Is she as good a fuck as me?”
“As I,” I correct her, “and she sleeps in the guest room.”
The end of my deck and the wall of my house look like the raw face of a strip mine as Gloria and I sit with our backs to the ruins having coffee and cold pizza. I feel like I’m in a war zone. The to-do list is growing: fix the toilet, get a new couch, rebuild the deck, repair the deck chair, pay off the ex-wife, replace the smashed bottle of Scotch, and solve the two murders.
The morning is mild for a change, midseventies with a few scattered powder puffs of clouds in a clear blue sky. LA has some of the worst air in the country, but we’ve cut pollution by two-thirds since 1955, which is nothing short of a miracle. When I was a kid, we had days that were so smoggy they’d have to close the schools. That doesn’t happen anymore. Today is a poster child for environmental progress.
Runt whines. Gloria tosses him an arc of stale pizza crust. He snatches it in the air. Runt is not one to let food fly by. He keeps his snout skyward so the crust won’t fall out of his mouth as he chews.
“I wasn’t asking how she sleeps, I was asking how she fucks.”
“Give it a rest, Gloria. This routine is getting old.”
She smirks. “Listen to Mr. Sensitivity over here. I just want to know where I stand. I know you’re a monogamous kind of guy, so is your dick available these days or not?”
I glance nervously toward the house. I’d hate for Sophia to overhear this conversation. But I’m pretty sure she’s still asleep. We had a long night, not that I’m complaining.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Why should I be jealous? You in love?”
“Of course not.” I feel like I’m lying, and I don’t know why.
“I know. Because you’re still hung up on Holly.” The accusation stings, like I was a college swim coach accused of staring at camel toes.
“Besides,” she says, “Sophia just killed her last lover. You don’t want to be next. She’s a basket case. She’s numb, she’s susceptible, she’s breakable, she’s damaged, she’s an emotional depth charge. I know that you’re dumb enough to make a move on a woman like that at a time like this. I just wonder if you’re crass enough.”
From any other woman this would be an insult, but I know Gloria well enough to hear it as an expression of her love. She’s worried about me. I have an urge to let her know I appreciate it, but she’s sparring, and I don’t want to give her an opening.
“She’s spent a lifetime getting fucked over by men she trusts,” I say. “Do you think I want to join the list?”
“Very chivalrous of you. But if her last relationship is any indication, she can edit her own list.”
“It was self-defense, Gloria.”
Gloria gives me the eye. “Did Sophia tell you how she happened to shoot him?”
“They fought for the gun. It just went off.”
“What are the odds of an unintentional gunshot putting four bullets in a guy?”
Something clenches in my gut and migrates to my face.
Gloria reads me like a neon sign. “I guess your girlfriend forgot to mention that little detail,” she says.
“How did she explain it?”
“She said it was reflex. Not like a muscle twitch, but mental. Like some kind of survival instinct thing.”
“I can see it. Fight or flight. She was cornered. He closed in, fear took over, she pulled the trigger. And kept pulling it until he fell.”
Gloria’s abdomen lurches in a silent guffaw.
“You don’t buy it?”
“Got no way to disprove it,” she says. “Besides, it’s not up to me, it’s up to the DA. But I’ve yet to see a case where multiple gunshots didn’t spell out intent.”
SEVENTY-ONE
Karl’s house looks the same, except there’s a remnant of yellow crime-scene tape knotted around the mailbox post. Sophia unlocks the front door then stands back.
“You go first,” she says.
I can actually see a rapid pulse beating in her carotid artery, but despite this her face is pale. The memory of Karl’s death is a fresh wound that she’s afraid of reopening. I step ahead of her into the house.
I was here just after the shooting, but I never set foot inside. I expect to see some blood on the living room carpet, maybe an overturned chair, but I’m not prepared for the chaos. The room looks like it was decorated by a grenade launcher. There’s debris everywhere from a huge overturned display case of glass art. Sheet glass, blown glass, etched glass, stained glass, fused glass, leaded glass, molded glass, in thousands of shattered shards of every imaginable color. Chairs are strewn about, an antique red-lacquered Chinese desk is overturned, lamps lie on the floor, and over everything is a patina of fingerprint powder. The powder, too, is multicolored, though all in the gray scale, each selected to contrast with the shade of the underlying surface or object.
Sophia follows me in, and I hear a little gasp. I’m guessing the last time she was here, her nerves were overloaded, and her eyes were so fixed on Karl that she tuned out the collateral damage. It won’t take much to persuade a jury that this was a life-or-death battle, if it comes to that. She’s going to need a shovel to clean this place up.
I notice a clear spot on the carpet, heavily stained with blood where his struggle ended. Sophia sees it, too, and rushes past. I follow her up the stairs.
The bedroom is large and painted eggshell white. The bed is a low platform with built-in nightstands and lights. Two walk-in closets obviate the need for dressers. A flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall. And through the open bathroom door I see a built-in vanity cluttered with makeup. No need for much furniture. Aside from the bed, there is only a blond leather lounge chair with a Memphis-style side table.
“Make yourself comfortable,” says Sophia. She pulls a large suitcase from her closet and opens it on the lounge chair. She heads back into the closet to start selecting clothes to pack. I sit on the bed, presumably on Karl’s side, judging by the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry on the nightstand. I look across the bed and see a pile of paperback mysteries on Sophia’s side, a Chelsea Cain on top.
She walks in with an armload of folded sweaters and puts them in the bottom of the suitcase.
“Can I help?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” She disappears back into the closet.
I look out the window and feel calmed by the scenery. The neighborhood is tranquil, wooded. Across the street a teenage boy practices free throws through a hoop mounted on his garage. The familiar bounce of the basketball is a comforting sound. An old woman wrapped in a stylish wool coat walks a miniature schnauzer on a retractable leash. Even the dog appears placid.
Sophia looks like a Stepford wife packing for a long vacation; her domesticity seems unnatural in this house of lingering death. I indulge a fleeting fantasy of what it might be like to live here with her. Let Holly have my house. Let Jerry deal with replacing the deck and repairing the office window. I’ll just move uptown with Sophia and help her forget.
She walks out of the closet, holding a stunning pair of high heels covered in what looks like emerald-green Thai silk. She wraps them carefully in T-shirts before packing them.
My eyes wander to Karl’s bedside drawer. A square box of Kleenex, too tall for the drawer, wedges it six inches open. I peer in, and the famous box of condoms stares up at me like a movie prop.
“Count them,” Sophia says. I look up to see her watching with a strained expression, a jewelry box in her hands.
“Does it matter anymore?”
“I want to know.”
Karl is dead, but she’s still jealous. I wonder if she’d feel better knowing they’re all accounted for or if it would assuage her guilt to know he cheated.
I grab the box and dump the contents on the bed. There are eleven. Her expression relaxes, even though it proves nothing and changes nothing. She goes into the closet and comes out with a stack of panties. She drops them on the chair and starts rolling them into cylinders to pack.
My eye falls on a dust pattern inside Karl’s bedside drawer. Highlighted by the oblique angle of the sun through the window, it looks like a key ring except it’s got a crescent bisecting the center. A trigger guard. Karl had kept a gun in the drawer. The thickness of the dust made it clear that the gun had been left untouched in that drawer for a very long time. And the crispness of the pattern revealed that it had been removed only recently.
He went for the Chinese desk, and I panicked. That’s where he always kept his gun.
SEVENTY-TWO
It’s about three o’clock in the morning. I can see that Sophia is having nightmares from the way she grimaces, the way she twitches, the way she kicks off the sheets. It’s been a hot night. The moon streams through the window and falls across her at an acute angle, making sharp planes of the shadows, a cubist painting across her breasts and up her neck.
Why do any of us do what we do? Why did my father? He had a life. Maybe he was in financial trouble, maybe even facing a few years of jail. But he had a wife who loved him, three kids he was proud of, plenty of friends, marketable skills, and a mean hook shot. What made him decide to take a flier off that cliff?
I had a woman who loved me, who I loved, who I would have died for, killed for. I had a job I was proud of, where I could do some good for the world and still earn a pension. What made me sabotage all that? I didn’t have to quit. I could have fought, yet I didn’t feel like I had a choice. You don’t rat out the guys who cover your back in the field. I was protecting a twisted code of honor, a false god, but that realization came too late. Never again.
I gently kiss the top of Sophia’s head and the musky scent of her hair warms me like the smell of fresh-baked bread. I wonder about my attraction to a woman who shot the last man she loved. While he was unarmed. Four times. And probably lied about how she got the gun.
He may have been a sociopathic opportunist, an emotional saboteur, a chainsaw slayer of trust and self-esteem, but his guilt should have been judged by a jury, not by a jealous lover.
On the other hand, Sophia’s psychological ingredient list was top-heavy with mitigating circumstances.
I watch her head bob gently on my chest as I breathe. She looks so peaceful, so angelic. It had to be self-defense. Maybe she didn’t lie. Lynch could have had two guns, one in the bedroom and one in the living room. That’s certainly possible.
Sophia’s eyes flutter half-open and look into mine. She smiles contentedly. She feels safe with me. I want to kiss her but don’t want to fully wake her. She needs a rest from reality. Her eyes close and she falls back to sleep. A barely conscious moment devoid of guile. I’m warmed by the kind of feeling that could be mistaken for love. Unless it is. The thought isn’t soothing.
I can’t stop thinking about those four shots. After all that Sophia has been through, Ginger’s death could have ea
sily pushed her over the edge. Sophia could have been temporarily insane. I try to reenact the murder in my head, but there’s a problem with the script. If she was packing her clothes, what was she doing in the living room?
“Sophia, wake up.”
“Wuz wrong?” she mumbles, eyes at half-mast.
“How many guns did Karl have?”
“What?”
I sit up abruptly, pushing her off my chest onto her back. “Did he have more than one gun?”
“What are you talking about?”
I grab her by the shoulders, pinning her to the bed. “Just tell me!”
“You’re scaring me.”
I back off. She snatches the sheet to shield her nakedness, eyes open wide.
“Tell me about the second gun.”
“What second gun?”
The disappointment on my face must have spoken volumes.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is you brought the gun downstairs before Karl got home and waited to shoot him as soon as he walked in. You killed him in cold blood, and you’ve been lying all along.”
She slaps me hard on the same side Petya hit. It hurts like hell, and I feel a headache start to bloom. At least she’s finally awake.
“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” I say. “What’s the point of feigning outrage when you know I’m right? I saw a dust impression of the gun in Karl’s bedside drawer. He didn’t keep it in the living room, but you lied about that because you’d have a hard time arguing self-defense if the police knew it was all premeditated.”
“You bastard! I trusted you!”
She takes another swing at me, but I catch her hand. “Stop playing the shocked little innocent. It doesn’t wash. You never trusted me. You lied to me from the first day we met, and you’re lying to me now!”
“He was going to kill me!” Sophia bursts into tears. “He was afraid I’d tell the police that he went to Ginger’s the night she died.”