by Jaye Maiman
“Dahling, it’s me. How do the two of you survive without me there?”
She laughed good-naturedly. “Funny, but our food lasts a little longer, the block’s a little quieter, and we all feel a little safer. But it is more interesting when you’re around. So are you in trouble yet?”
Beth knew me too well.
I yawned for effect. “Just the usual. A little murder, a little romance, a missing wife or two.”
“Well, be patient. Things will heat up any day now.” She broke off as the hospital paging system kicked on. “I had a feeling you weren’t just feeling homesick.”
“I need a little medical debriefing.” I summarized what I knew about Noreen’s death.
“Interesting,” she said, her tone reflexively dropping into a more professional cadence. “Typically, cardiomyopathy’s a chronic disorder of the heart muscles. Usually involves hypertrophy and obstructive damage.”
Now she sounded like Flynn. I responded sarcastically, “Want to try English on me?”
“That is English. But I’ll simplify. Cardiomyopathy’s a progressive weakness and enlargement of the heart.”
“And it’s related to alcohol abuse?”
“It can be. Hold on, I want to look something up.” She put down the phone, flooding my ear with urgent buzzes and beeps. I started feeling ill, as I usually do thinking about hospitals.
“Okay, I’m back. Let’s see . . . almost one-third of cases of congestive cardiomyopathy are related to alcoholism. But the condition can also be caused by rheumatic fever, a vitamin B deficiency, viruses, autoimmune diseases, toxic agents—”
I interrupted. “Toxic, as in poison?”
“Sure. But I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions,” she cautioned me. “How advanced was her condition?”
Without an autopsy report or a full medical story, I was working blind. “I have no idea.”
“Do you know her age?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“What about her health condition over the past year? Had she experienced fatigue, chest pains, palpitations? Loss of sex drive? Anything like that?”
I answered in the negative.
“Without all the facts, I really can’t help you much. Think of it as just another type of investigation, Rob. A good physician has to trace disease as surely as you trace clues in a criminal investigation.
The comparison didn’t exactly have me jumping for joy. Beth had no idea how much of my job was sheer guesswork. Or maybe she did. The possibility further unnerved me. “That’s fine,” I muttered, feeling anything but fine. “But given what you do know, would you draw the same conclusion as Marks and Flynn?”
She paused. “I get the sense you want me to say no. I can’t. If this woman really had a history of alcoholic cardiomyopathy and she continued drinking, sudden cardiac arrest is not unexpected. I doubt any physician would react differently than they did. To tell you the truth, given the circumstances, I’d have to say an autopsy wasn’t warranted.”
“Thanks anyway.” I scratched at an unruly cuticle, wondering if I was inventing a mystery where there wasn’t any, and shifted gears resignedly. “By the way, how did the social worker’s visit go?” Her hesitation made me uneasy. I rushed to fill the silence. “I’m sure you wowed her.”
“Oh, we wowed her all right.” The bitter edge was atypical of Beth. “Dinah and I made a few tactical errors. We thought honesty was the best policy. What morons we were.”
She was fighting back tears. Unexpectedly, so was I. I hadn’t realized till now how much I wanted the adoption to go through for them. “What happened?”
“The bitch strolled into the house and in less than five seconds zeroed in on our portrait gallery.” She was referring to the framed photographs lining the hallway on the parlor floor. Images popped into my head. Dinah and Beth dressed in silver-blue dresses, exchanging vows in Prospect Park’s picnic house. A group of us attempting to mount a giraffe raft at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown. The three of us standing entwined in front of the Washington Monument during the morning rally of the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington. Off to our right, if you looked real close, you could see two shaved-head lesbians signing each other’s boobs.
I closed my eyes tight. “Shit.”
“The ironic thing was, we talked about taking down the photographs. But we decided that it was unscrupulous. And God knows, we have to have our scruples.”
I hated hearing the stony self-ridicule. The few arguments I’ve had with Beth and Dinah have been over principles. My work often necessitates a little ethics-bending, and the two of them have judiciously tracked every reported indiscretion. The strange thing was, I realized with a start, their criticism helped me keep peace with myself.
Bolting for the high ground, I blurted, “Don’t talk like that. You did the right thing—”
“The right thing,” she said, cutting my lecture short. “Robin, she didn’t even pretend to take us seriously. She told us right off, ‘You ladies are not qualified for adoption.’”
I stood up and winced. A line of fire was running along my thigh and into my spine. I headed into the bathroom for an aspirin and said, “We’ll get a lawyer—”
“Wait. You haven’t heard the best part yet. Dinah went on a rampage, citing cases and spewing legal terms like Perry Mason. The woman just sat there nodding impassively. When Dinah was done, she smiled and said she was sure we could adopt an AIDS baby or, and I quote, ‘another undesirable.’ But the ‘normal’ babies were reserved for ‘normal’ couples.” She was crying now. “You know how I feel. It’s not that I don’t care about those other children...”
She didn’t have to explain to me. Beth used to work in pediatrics. After six years of pediatric intensive care, she had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the strain contributing to the dissolution of a three-year-old relationship. Soon after, she moved into a studio apartment with a view of a brick wall, totaled her car, and started dosing up on valium. Trapped in a downward spiral, she was lucky or healthy enough to enroll in a special workshop for health professionals that Dinah was leading at the clinic. The subject was coping with death.
Dinah recognized the seriousness of Beth’s depression and urged her to get into therapy. Six months later, Beth transferred to triage and moved in with Dinah. I was adamantly against the arrangement, warning Dinah that she was on the verge of becoming another “U-Haul lesbian.” The past five years of domestic bliss have happily proven me dead wrong.
I took a deep breath and asked, “So what happens now?”
Her laugh was abrupt. “Who knows?” In the distance a deep voice bellowed her name. She grunted into the phone. “Duty calls.” She hung up before I could say another word.
I was still staring at the phone when K.T. came back to the cabin. The sound of my name springing from that honied tongue made me scoot out of the den like a child running for an ice cream truck. Her hair, the color of Sedona mountains at dusk, was windblown, the curls clinging to her neck and forehead like ivy. The weathered denim shirt she wore drove me crazy. Somehow, perhaps from her lugging the groceries from the car, the shirt had lost a middle button. Her cleavage was a magnificent tease, a delicate curve plunging into a tantalizing shadow.
She lowered the bags onto the kitchen table as in slow motion. Through the gap I saw a portion of her foam-green bra, a hard pink nipple pressing against the lace. I started to pulse and twitch. But it was the eyes that did me in, the leaf-green glow, the intent gaze. The communication between us was silent and indisputable.
I don’t remember crossing the room, just the way our mouths met and danced together, a ballet of tongues and lips, slow and yet rousing. My fingers lifted her shirt, traced the deep indentation that culminated in the small of her back. I was shivering. Lips to ears, small cooing sounds, the sweetest music. I grasped her hand and started to lead her upstairs. She protested briefly, pointing to the groceries, whining about pork chops and fried green tomatoes.
I reache
d around her, lifted the phone off the receiver and flipped the power off. “I have my own tomato to fry,” I said with a racy twitch of my brows. She chuckled, but her hips gyrated against me with purpose. An eyebrow winked back at me and then we kissed again, this time longer, the urgency building. Our bodies began rubbing together in a now-familiar rhythm. A river over rocks. My juices rushed.
I walked us out into the hall and started up the stairs backwards, our lips locked, knees banging together. I tripped over the last two steps, landing hard on my butt. A sharp pain shot down my leg, but I was too busy to pay it much attention. K.T. fell on me, giggling. The weight of her body lit me like a match to kerosene. I rolled her over and covered her laughing lips with my hungry mouth. She responded instantly, one arm wrapping around my neck, pulling me closer. Her legs trapped my thigh against her groin, begging me to pump. Using the top of the step to brace myself, I pressed myself into her, feeling her hip bone against my own groin, the friction almost too much too soon.
I lifted myself on one elbow, opened her shirt, and struggled awkwardly, anxious to undo her bra. Impatiently, she pulled it up over her breasts. Groaning, I took a nipple into my mouth, sucking harder than I had before, knowing instinctively that we both needed this contact, this intense taking. With the other hand, I stroked her, from her belly to her other breast. Finding the bud hard and waiting, I kneaded it with my fingers then, greedy, sought it with my mouth. I oscillated between her breasts like a pendulum, while my thigh kept time between her legs, pumping steadily.
All at once, words filled the air like the scent of our aching bodies. She urged me to suck harder and I responded gratefully, my own body tightening and straining toward her in answer to her groans and heated directions. Without realizing it, I had gone over the edge, rubbing my still-clothed body over her full thigh till I came in a shuddering explosion. I stripped K.T.’s jeans and underwear, the waves of orgasm pitching me forward with fierce need. What I wanted was K.T.’s shiver against me. I backed down the stairs and knelt before her, opening her with cold, trembling fingers.
“You’re so beautiful,” I said, the words surprising me, but not as much as the tears and choked-back sob.
K.T.’s hand found the top of my head, her fingers catching in my hair like fire. Her touch seared me. “Oh, take me, baby. I want you inside. I want you.” Her voice was hoarse with need. I pressed my mouth against her, slowly entering her with my fingers, sucking her fervidly. I loved hearing her voice as I explored her, carried her from crest to crest. She began saying my name over and over, and I punctuated her cry with my tongue. Painfully, purposefully, I tried to slow myself down, to intensify her sensations, but her thighs tightened and she bolted toward me.
“No, no. Don’t stop. Now. Please.”
She blossomed on my mouth, twitching against tongue like the wings of a butterfly.
“Oh, God, Robin, I love you.”
Suddenly stone cold and mute, I rested my head against her as she throbbed.
Neither of us acknowledged my stillness. We retreated to the bedroom, where K.T. promptly made love to me, as if to cover her declaration with the blanket of passion. I couldn’t come. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, in a room so hushed the silence shrieked like wind through a ruin.
When I awoke, K.T. was gone and the air smelled like hot apples. I was at once relieved and famished. I dressed quickly, feeling strangely shy, and started downstairs. The first step ignited a nerve in my right leg. The second sent an electric shock up my spine. I cursed my way into the living room. No question about it, I moaned to myself. The sciatica was back.
I stopped in the bathroom for two Motrin, then headed into the kitchen. K.T. was cooking with a vengeance. Every cupboard was open, pots simmered on the stove or soaked in the sink, and the microwave was counting down like a mad scientist.
“Whew. Did you leave anything untouched?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, barely noting my comment as she beat a bowl of creamy orange batter.
I crossed to the pine table and fleeced a slice of apple, then opened the fridge and downed a Yoo-Hoo. We all choose our own medicine.
“You’ll ruin your appetite,” K.T. said in an offhanded way that reminded me of someone’s relative. She was right, but it wasn’t the Yoo-Hoo that was killing my hunger.
“What smells so delicious?”
She finally made eye contact, then immediately looked away. In that one glance she conveyed so much emotion—pride, fear, affection, confusion—that I wondered how she was able to stand.
“Hope your cholesterol is good.” She tried to adopt a lighthearted tone.
Maybe if we both pretended...
“If it is, I have a feeling it won’t be after this meal.”
“Good guess. I’m making fried green tomatoes which, despite rumors to the contrary, were made famous by my mother and not by Fannie Flagg. That appetizer of haute grease will be followed by pan-fried pork chops with apple jelly, spiced mustard greens, and my own specialty, sweet potato hush puppies.”
“What, no dessert?”
She laughed. The effect was like rubbing Noxzema on a sunburn. “No self-respecting Southern woman would commit such a travesty. I made a cherry cobbler. And if you think finding all these ingredients in this neck of the woods was easy—” She planted one hand on her hip and with the other pointed at me playfully. I kissed the tip of her index finger and winked.
“Why, ma’am, I am honored to be your guest tonight.”
“You should be,” she said with mock sternness.
I smiled. We were back on solid ground.
While K.T. was finishing dinner preparations, I holed up in the den to review my notes. When she finally called me to dinner with a light kiss on my neck, I was fully immersed in the case. I wolfed down the fried green tomatoes, which were served with some sort of goat cheese and spicy sauce, and made a lame attempt at conversation. K.T. caught on quick. She spooned the apple jelly onto the pork chops and said, “Okay, detective, why don’t you spill the beans?”
She didn’t have to ask twice.
What troubled me most was the contradictory information I had gathered about Noreen’s alcohol consumption on the night she died. Helen had insisted that Noreen was already bombed when they were fighting at Robert and Allan’s place. Yet when we had talked on the deck, I could have sworn she was dry as overdone turkey. That was around ten o’clock. Then there was Manny’s testimony. According to her, Noreen didn’t start drinking until after she left the party. By midnight, she was supposedly stinking of booze. But if she started drinking after the party, why weren’t there empty bottles in the house?
“Maybe she stopped off at a pub, or a friend’s house,” K.T. offered.
The nearest bar was a good half-hour away and populated by rednecks who’d be more likely to smash a bottle over a bulldyke’s head than share a counter with one. I should know. An urgent call from nature once forced me and my friend Leslie into the bar. Three men with pool sticks started approaching us before we made it to the bathroom. We’d ended up peeing in the bushes.
The second option wasn’t much better. All of Noreen’s friends were at the party. Then it struck me.
Maggie.
Had Noreen stopped at Maggie’s? Both women had drinking problems and from what Dean told me, Maggie had good reason to be teetering in her resolve.
“I have another theory,” K.T. mused. “What if the two of them were more than friends? Maybe Dean came home and caught them in some compromising position. He could have followed Noreen home—”
“And did what? Pour alcohol down her throat till heart gave out? Maybe this job’s made me overly suspicious,” I said, spearing another slice of pork. Maybe her death is just an unfortunate tragedy.”
K.T. tilted her head and stared at me with doubt. “You don’t believe that.”
She was right.
The night before she died, an unusually lucid Noreen had expressed an interest in hiring me. I had assumed that Helen
was right and all Noreen wanted from me was assistance in searching for her siblings. But there was another possibility — that Noreen had been in some kind of trouble and needed my help. Rational or not, I felt obligated to fulfill that impromptu commitment. Besides, the inconsistencies taunted me. So did Maggie’s disappearance.
My former lover Mary once said that one of the stupidest things in the world anyone could do was piss off a Scorpio like me. She was right on. My venom was surging. And I was aching to sting.
We made love again after dinner, this time playfully, both of us so full from dinner that energetic lovemaking was out of the question. Instead we giggled and groaned our way into sleep. My insomnia in abeyance, I awoke shortly before dawn, rested and incredibly grateful for the weight of K.T.’s leg over mine. I kissed her moist arm and eased out from under her.
During the night, the fire had died. Even so, the house was chillier than it had been the previous week. One look outside told me why. A light snow was falling. Bending over, I could feel the pain in my lower back flare up. The cost for energetic lovemaking, I thought. I arranged logs on the grating and watched the flames pop over the bark, blue smoke rushing up the flue. I wanted desperately to feel content, but my mind was already racing.
With every minute, the trail leading to the truth was getting muddier. Instinctively, I knew I had to move fast. But what the hell could I accomplish at five in the morning? The answer dawned on me, bright as a Kansas morning. I showered, directing the head so that hot water pounded the base of my spine and upper thighs. I dressed, scribbled a note to K.T., and grabbed my notebook.
My running sneakers crunched through the thin layer of frost lining the driveway. The nip in the air warned of a long, hard winter. I envisioned the soot-blackened ice that marks winter in Manhattan and sighed. As I started the car, I imagined buying the cabin as a retreat for K.T. and me. The thought made my teeth chatter and I slid the temperature control lever to high.