Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  It wasn’t as if Geof couldn’t have said no to the ugly house or the ugly bed. Or the wife. I wished he had. Said no to marrying her, that is. Then maybe I wouldn’t get these occasional sinking feelings that I was standing in a line at the edge of a cliff over which two wives had already jumped. Or been pushed by his job? I don’t like lines. I’m not crazy about heights. What was I getting into? But how could marriage to him be different from living with him? But if it wasn’t any different, why do it?

  “Oh, shut up.”

  By way of punctuating the thought, I switched off the light.

  I pulled up the covers and closed my eyes.

  They opened again and stared into the chilly darkness of the bedroom. Finally, the nightmare thoughts that I had been holding back crept into my brain, down my spine, into my bowels: Somebody died tonight, somebody else became a killer. It was all my imagination needed to start wondering who, how, why. Something lost and evil was loose in the world again, and nobody would be safe until it was tamed, or caged, or killed. I wasn’t afraid for Geof so much as for all the innocent, sleeping people in the world. He, at least, was armed, trained, ready for it. The rest of us were not. By the time I had that thought, every creak of the furnace had become a stealthy footstep and every shadow held a stranger with a knife.

  Damn Gail Henderson and her wide eyes full of fear!

  I didn’t know I had slept until Geof woke me by gently massaging my shoulders. His chin whiskers brushed my earlobe as he kissed my left temple and then murmured the last part of our good-luck formula: “Still here, m’dear.”

  “Never doubted it.” I rolled over gladly into his embrace. Over his bare shoulders I saw the clock: two-thirty. My lips were gummed together with sleep. I licked them before asking, “What happened?”

  He was silent for so long I began to fear he had seen something so gruesome he didn’t want to tell me about it. Then he sighed. It was a ragged sound dragged up from deep in his abdomen.

  “Full moon.”

  “A domestic disturbance, you mean?”

  “To say the least. One dead husband.”

  “Oh, Lord. It wasn’t anybody I know, was it?”

  “Dick Hanks?”

  “No.” I felt relieved, and shamed by it. “Self-defense?”

  “I guess.”

  I kneaded my knuckles strongly into his back, along his spine. He groaned. He was faintly damp and smelled of Safeguard soap. After a night homicide call he always took a shower, brushed his teeth, cleaned and pared his nails. Sometimes he rinsed his eyes, as if he could wash away the bloody sights they’d seen. In the morning, if I looked, I would find his clothes rolled up at the bottom of the dirty-clothes hamper. He was not a fastidious man except when it came to clearing other people’s violence from his system before coming to bed with me.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not now. I’m too tired.” But then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he said, “He beat her, and she couldn’t take it anymore, and she killed him. Shot him. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. He was forty years old, but one of those perennial students, you know? I don’t think he’d ever had a real job, just part-time jobs while he kept piling up the degrees. This time, he was a security guard at the college. Five fucking degrees. What’s a man need five degrees for, anyway? Three kids. Two of them were out tonight, but the baby was there. Shit. Two years old. Jesus. The wife’s the one who worked, but not at anything that paid worth a damn, just at a barbecue joint. She was supposed to be playing bridge at a girlfriend’s house. Eleanor. Dick and Eleanor Hanks. I’ve called on them before, Jenny. Twice. And there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to save either one of them. It’s sick. It makes me feel sick.”

  I continued kneading his spine until he fell asleep, at which point I could have used somebody to massage my own tense muscles. As it was, I stayed awake a long time, imagining a woman driving her car into a garage. . . .

  3

  SEVEN-THIRTY, SATURDAY MORNING. ACROSS THE bedroom, Geof was already up and dressed in a white shirt and dark gray trousers. His hair, brown and thick, looked as if he’d combed it with his fingers; I sniffed, inhaled spicy aftershave. He was gorgeously appetizing, but I sensed that my nose was pressed up against a bakery window and I was lusting for cookies that were only on tantalizing display, but not for sale this morning. With considerable regret, I watched him zip his pants and fasten his belt. He snapped his watch into place. I sighed. He looked up and said, “Hi.” This was the day we were going to pick up our airline tickets and visit a minister. We had been looking forward to it all week, planned on brunch at our favorite café and then maybe a walk along the harbor, where we’d seduce ourselves with talk of honeymoon beaches in Puerto Rico.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny.” He threaded the tie under his collar, then looped one end over the other. His tone was the tight, brisk one that tired people use to camouflage their exhaustion. “I . . .”

  “. . . have to go to work,” I mumbled. My eyes drooped shut, and I burrowed back down into my pillow. “S’right.” Our bed was a warm lake in which I was floating, and sleep was a rock tied to my foot; I was sinking beneath the surface of the water when his words revived me.

  “I wish you’d get dressed and come with me.”

  “With you?” I struggled up onto both elbows. “Why?”

  “Are you ready for this?” He pulled back the drapes at the window and raised the blinds, letting in a clatter of bright, thin November sunshine that hurt my eyes. I wasn’t ready for that, or for the shock of his next words. “I want you to understand why I’m thinking of quitting the force.”

  “Quit?” I squinted at him through the pain in my eyes. “What?”

  He transferred his wallet from the top of the dresser to his right back pocket and spoke to me as if he were continuing a conversation with himself. “It’s not as if I have to work, I never had to work, you don’t have to work. Hell, we could play Charles and Di on the combined incomes from our trust funds.

  “No, thank you.” I struggled to sit up.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night, Jenny, and I paced around downstairs, thinking about it.” He began to maneuver himself into a brown leather shoulder holster. “And I thought, what’s a wealthy family for anyway, if not to support you in your disillusioned middle age? Hell, if I really wanted to work, I could join the family hardware business, sell frigging wrenches like my brothers, I don’t need this damned cop work.”

  “You always wanted to be a cop.”

  He raised one shoulder, then the other, trying to shrug the holster into a position that would cause him the least discomfort. “It ain’t what it’s supposed to be, Jenny.”

  “What is?”

  “You.” He stared at me while he crooked his hands back and tugged down on the leather strap that crossed his back. “Please, come with me this morning. I want you to understand, so you won’t think I’m crazy. Or maybe so you’ll know what’s made me crazy, hell, I don’t know.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “First, we’ll talk to Eleanor Hanks.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who killed her husband last night.”

  I recoiled against the headboard. “Geof, I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s not in jail,” he said, misinterpreting my fear. “She’s not even under arrest yet, but it won’t be long. After we get in the lab reports and the interviews, it’ll close pretty quickly. And in the meantime, she’s not going anywhere—no money, no relatives in town, three kids to take care of, she’ll be there when we’re ready for her.” He picked up his gun from the dresser, checked it out, placed it in the holster. “I’ll clear it for you to talk to her.”

  That was a lie: he wouldn’t clear it, he’d just do it.

  “I don’t want to meet a woman who killed her husband.”

  He put his suit coat on, looked at me. “She’s nice. You’ll like her.”

  “She’s nice? I’ll like her
?”

  “I’m asking you. Please.”

  There wasn’t really any choice, not if he was serious about wanting to quit the police force. I pushed back the covers, swung my feet over the bed and placed them on the carpet.

  He patted the gun beneath his armpit and said, either to it or to me, “I do love you, lady.” He walked out of the room then, only to reappear shortly afterward with fresh, hot coffee to prove the strength of his declaration. I was too upset to drink it—almost. This wasn’t turning out to be any way I wanted to spend any Saturday morning in my life.

  Eleanor Hanks had gathered her children the night before and gone to stay at Sunrise House, our local shelter for battered women. It wasn’t actually a house, but rather a converted mom-and-pop grocery store in a neighborhood where the homeowners didn’t have much more to lose in the way of property values. In the old days, the grocery was on the first floor, and the family who owned it lived upstairs. Now the second floor was a dorm for women and children, while the first floor had been divided by pasteboard wall partitions into kitchen, dining room, living room, and office. The Port Frederick Civic Foundation was a funder, so I was familiar with Sunrise House.

  On the drive over, Geof didn’t seem to want to talk except to briefly tell me a few more facts about the case. I kept myself from worrying about our future by working them into the morbid fantasy that I’d begun to weave in bed the night before. By the time we parked in front of the shelter, I’d played out the murder of Dick Hanks several times and several ways in my imagination, and some of it was beginning to settle in like truth, or memory.

  Willie Henderson was waiting for us, leaning against the closed door of a clean brown sedan, working on his incisors with a toothpick. He, too, wore a suit (shiny green that caught the sun like algae on a pond), shirt (pale green), and a green-and-black-striped tie. Most Port Frederick cops, when they didn’t wear uniforms, were given to conservative blues and browns.

  Geof raised a hand to acknowledge Willie.

  “You notice those black leather pants last night? He wore this green number his first day. Now some of them call him Liz. For Lizard.”

  “You think Willie crawled out from under a rock?”

  “It’s just the clothes, that’s all.”

  Willie nodded back, then uncoiled himself, stuck the toothpick in his coat pocket, and strolled toward us. He had an odd gait, loose but stiff, like a runner who’s warmed up and waiting for the gun. You had the feeling Willie could do wind sprints from a standing start.

  “The Lizard was all right last night.” Geof sounded grudging, but I decided it might only be weariness eating at the edges of his voice. “He doesn’t talk much. He just kind of stands there and waits for his moment—like a lizard on a rock waiting for a fly to come by. Zap. Gotcha. He may work out all right, I don’t know. It’s a long way down from Boston to Port Frederick, though. We’ll see if the fall bruised him.”

  I hoped I detected a future tense in that speech.

  “I thought he jumped of his own free will,” I said.

  “He may have felt pushed by his wife’s health. Either way, it’s a long drop. It could be a hell of a blow to his wallet, not to mention his ego.”

  “Which seems, however, to be intact.”

  Geof was looking at me quizzically as Willie opened the door on my side.

  I stepped out. “Thanks. Hello, Willie.”

  He looked across at Geof.

  “She knows these people,” Geof said, as if that explained my presence.

  Willie nodded, apparently accepting the explanation.

  I led the two men up the cracked cement walk to the door of the former grocery store.

  “How ’bout you do the talkin’?” Willie suggested.

  “This time,” Geof agreed, making my heart lift with hope that he intended a next time. He was a good cop. He loved being a cop. Didn’t he? This was all a mistake, a brief burnout. Wasn’t it? How would I manage with an unemployed, depressed bridegroom?

  I rang the doorbell, then stepped aside for the cops.

  Soon, a female voice was raised on the other side of the door. “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Police,” Gedf called back to her.

  “Which ones?”

  “Detectives Bushfield and Henderson, and Jenny Cain’s here.”

  “Wait a minute, please.” I knew that on the other side of that locked door a volunteer was running to get a staff member to get permission to open the door to us. Nobody, particularly men, ever got into Sunrise House without being checked out first—partly to protect the women’s anonymity, partly to guard against the potential for violence from their abusive mates.

  It was Smithy Leigh, the director, who opened the door to us.

  “This wouldn’t happen, Bushfield,” she said at once, staring aggressively at Geof, “if you’d throw, the bastards in jail for a year the first time you got called out on them.

  “We only serve the law,” he replied, smiling a little. “Smithy, this is Detective Willie Henderson. Willie, this is Smithy Leigh, the director of Sunrise House. She hates men, which she’ll tell you is the natural result of accumulated evidence, but what the hell? Maybe you’ll get a dispensation for being a member of an oppressed minority.”

  “Charming company you keep, Cain,” she said to me.

  “It’s a dirty job,” I agreed, eyeing Geof’s profile, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

  “I know you’re here to see that poor Hanks woman,” Smithy said, as if it were a dirty secret she had uncovered about us. “But I won’t let you talk to her alone, get that? She doesn’t have a lawyer yet, the poor silly twit doesn’t seem to realize the situation she’s in, and I won’t have you badgering her unless I’m in the room.”

  I’d always kind of liked Smithy-or at least admired her—because she was as tough and fearless as a Rhodesian Ridgeback bitch in her protection of the wounded lambs of this world, but to my knowledge she’d never returned the compliment. At twenty-seven, she had a body like a rasp and a personality to match. Her pale, flat-featured face was surrounded by a mane of curly light brown hair that she never, on principle, combed. She had told me once that it was not on her agenda to attract the sexual attention of the enemy: men.

  “Fine,” Geof said, still smiling. “We’ll only badger her when you’re present.”

  She tightened her thin lips before saying in the grudging tones of a surrendering general, “She’s upstairs with the kids. I’ll bring her down. You three wait for me in the dining room.”

  We three had to open the door for ourselves, since she allowed it to slam in our faces.

  4

  WE LET OURSELVES INTO THE SHELTER.

  In the hall, a homely, chubby baby crawled across our path. He paused to gaze up in blue-eyed wonder at our great heights, and to drool a small pool of saliva onto the carpet.

  “Shawnie, honey?”

  From the adjoining living room, a teenager called out to the baby in the kind of high, sweet voice that no child ever obeys. The girl looked unformed, as if the sculptor had started the job by working the pale clay until it softened, and then left for lunch. She had a full-moon face, big breasts, spreading buttocks, and colorless hair that hung to her waist like unraveled rope. I remembered the room as the produce section of the old grocery store; she would have been sitting on the potatoes. In a pleading voice she crooned, “Come to Mommy, honey!”

  The baby continued to stare up at the three strangers.

  I felt the foolish grin that babies inspire spread across my face. When I looked at Geof, I saw it mirrored on him.

  Willie leaned down and gave the little bottom a sharp swat.

  “Git to your mama,” he growled.

  The child probably didn’t even feel it through his diapers, but, looking scared, he scuttled back across the hall. There were three other small children in the living room and a fat black woman who had turned her face away from us when we came in.

  Geof said to her, “Hello, Mrs
. Gleason.”

  The black woman busied herself with one of the babies as she muttered, “ ’Lo.” We didn’t move on, as Geof seemed to be waiting for something. Finally, Mrs. Gleason looked up, exposing a black and swollen left eye and a stitched gash at her temple; several of her front teeth were missing, so that when she spoke she sounded like an old woman. I bit my lower lip to keep my dismay to myself. She directed her words half defiantly, half apologetically at Geof: “He don’t mean to do it, Officer Bushfield, he just gets drunk, you know him, that’s all, and he ain’t himself that way, but he don’t never really mean to do it.”

  “It hurts you all the same.”

  She raised a hand to her wounded face but didn’t touch it.

  “It don’t hurt,” Mrs. Gleason said.

  “Shit,” Willie said under his breath.

  The house and the people in it were making my stomach clench on the coffee I’d had for breakfast; there was such a palpable atmosphere of real and remembered pain, of anger, shame, and an edginess that was expressed in darting glances, pinched mouths, sharp tones. I knew it wasn’t always like this, I knew sometimes the house rang with laughter, and the faces shone with hope, real or imagined. But not this morning. And this was where they felt safe! The pity I felt for the children made me turn brusque.

  “This way.” I led the cops to the dining room.

  They took chairs at the far end of a long wooden dining table that held dirty coffee cups and a baby’s warming dish containing something that looked like crusted oatmeal. From the direction of the kitchen came the henhouse sound of women fixing breakfast together: chatter, scrabble, laughter, chatter. There was an aluminum coffeepot on a counter in the dining room, and some mugs that appeared clean, so I poured for us, and then I passed powdered cream and sugar to the men. I rummaged through the drawers until I came up with a single spoon, which I wiped off with my fingers, and held up to a light to examine.

  “Cleanliness is not, contrary to popular opinion, a sex-linked trait,” I remarked.