A quarter of an hour later, the door at the rear of the building swung open. A woman stood there in the yellow light, peering out, slowly scanning the row of vehicles. DeMarco could not see her face because she was backlit, but she was wearing loose slacks and a short-sleeved, collared shirt—not a dancer’s outfit. DeMarco opened his car door, leaned out, and said, “Over here,” blinked his flashlight once, then pulled his door shut.
Now Bonnie came toward him without hesitation, long, angry strides. Whispers’s door banged closed behind her, and in the sudden darkness, he lost her for half a minute, then found her again as she neared the front of his car. He leaned across the seat and popped open the passenger door.
She put both hands on the roof, bent down to look in at him. “All right, so what’s this about?”
“We’re having a conversation,” he told her. “Get in.”
She blinked twice, and now he saw the anger in her eyes for what it was, a mask for something else. When she spoke, there was no heat in her voice, only the chill of fear. “I have a business to run, you know.”
“Not if you don’t get in,” he said.
She drew back then, straightened up, looked toward Whispers. “This is bullshit,” she said. DeMarco said nothing. He was feeling better now, less jittery.
She climbed in and slammed the door and sat there glaring at him. He shut off the radio. Then he turned to her and smiled.
“This is harassment,” she said.
His smile did not waver. “Where were you two Thursday nights ago?” he asked.
He felt the flinch more than saw it, knew that even with the dome light on, he would not have seen it on her face but he had felt the negative energy of it, sudden and brief and then gone. “Where do you think I was?” she said. “Same place I always am. I was here. Working. Tending to my business.”
“If you’re going to start this conversation with a lie, Bonnie, we can have this conversation somewhere else. Someplace where the seats aren’t as comfortable.”
“Someplace I can have my lawyer present,” she said.
“That’s fine with me. I can hold you for questioning for seventy-two hours. You and me and your lawyer can have several conversations in seventy-two hours.”
She stared out the windshield.
DeMarco said, “I know you were with Thomas Huston that night. The Thursday night he missed coming here.”
“Yeah, right, I went to a literary reading. Probably my favorite thing to do.”
“Last time we talked you had no idea where Huston was that night.”
She was sitting hunched forward now, silent and still. Half a minute passed. She said, “I swear to God I didn’t do anything.”
“I know you didn’t. Why would you? You liked Thomas Huston; he liked you. You spent a lot of time together talking, didn’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
“So where did the two of you go on that Thursday?” he asked. “I know you were together. I know you spent the night together and it wasn’t at a literary event in Cincinnati. So you can either tell me where you were, or within twenty-four hours, I’ll find out for myself and be back here to arrest you and shut you down.”
“This is illegal, what you’re doing.”
“I’m questioning a witness, Bonnie. There’s nothing illegal about that. So far I have no reason to arrest you. But if I know that you’re withholding evidence, I do. And I will. So the choice is yours.”
He allowed her a few seconds to mull things over, then added, “Bear in mind that this is a homicide investigation. Not a trivial matter. Four people are dead. Three of them children.”
With every minute in the car, she had leaned slightly more forward in the seat, and now sat with her forehead nearly touching the dashboard, fists pressed tight to her stomach. He waited for her to sort out her options. A full minute passed. The thump of music from Whispers no longer bothered him. He was feeling calmer now.
“He took me to get an abortion,” she said.
Now it was DeMarco’s turn to flinch. “Thomas Huston did?”
“That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Took you where?”
“Cleveland. I had it done Thursday afternoon. We spent the night at the Super 8 out by the interstate. Then came home in the morning.”
“You know I can check all this out,” he told her.
“Do it,” she said. “It was the Cleveland Women’s Center on Water Street. I gave my name as Bonnie Jean Burns. He came up with the name. Apparently it’s from some old poem by somebody.”
“Why Huston?” DeMarco asked. “Why was he the one to take you there?”
Now she turned her head his way, looked at him through the darkness. “Why do you think?”
“You’re telling me that it was his baby?”
She sounded exhausted when she answered. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“He was cheating on his wife with you?”
“Do you find that so hard to believe? Or you just don’t want to believe it?”
He had no answer, none he wanted to give. “Did the two of you ever talk about being together? Permanently, I mean.”
“Christ no,” she said.
“You never talked about what might happen if maybe his wife and family weren’t in the picture?”
“It was a fucking fling, DeMarco, okay? He knew it and so did I. I sucked his dick three times and fucked him twice. You want to know what positions we used? Is that relevant to your investigation too?”
“Neither one of you was smart enough to use protection?”
“I wear a diaphragm. Apparently they aren’t foolproof.”
DeMarco leaned back in his seat and stared at the steering wheel. The exhaustion he heard in Bonnie’s voice seemed to have spread to him now. The calmness was gone, replaced suddenly by a heaviness in his body, a dull numbness of the limbs. For the first time in a long time, he felt that if he closed his eyes, he would almost certainly fall asleep.
The light that flared abruptly from Whispers startled him. In the rectangle of yellow light, a large man stood, broad, bald, heavily muscled. In his right hand he held a baseball bat. He shoved the door open the whole way so that the spring hinge locked, then he came forward a few steps, paused, and squinted at the vehicles. Within seconds, he spotted the silhouettes in DeMarco’s car and strode toward them.
DeMarco threw open his car door. “You need to go back inside, pardner.”
But instead of halting, the bouncer increased his pace. Now DeMarco climbed out, turned on his flashlight, and aimed it at the man’s eyes. “This is state police business. And I am telling you to go back inside. Now.”
The big man stood in place for a moment. Then he took a step and a half backward, then turned and retreated into the building and pulled the door shut behind him. DeMarco slid back behind the steering wheel and eased his door shut.
“Tell me about Tex,” he said.
“His name is Tex,” she answered.
“Anything else?”
“He’s the bouncer.”
“Last name?”
“I think he said it was Doyle.”
“You think?”
“What did I already say about names in this place? And now I suppose you want to arrest me for giving a guy a job without clearing him through Homeland Security.”
“Why is he so interested in you being out here?”
“Because that’s what I pay him for: to watch over the girls and me.”
“He’s new?”
“Yeah, a couple of months or so.”
“Who was your bouncer before he came along?”
“My brother, Moby. You’ve seen him. So you know why I needed a new one.”
“Where’s Tex from?”
“Probably Texas, you think?”
<
br /> “From what I hear, the two of you have a thing for each other.”
“Right,” she said. “I don’t even know his last name for sure, don’t know a damn thing about him, but I’m fucking him anyway. Hell, I guess I’m fucking everybody in the place. I’ll fuck you if you want me to. I run a club where girls shake their tits and pussies at men, so obviously I’m a fucking whore myself, right? I’m a fucking nymphomaniac, right? So whip out your dick for me, DeMarco, and let’s have at it.”
DeMarco allowed a few moments to pass. Then he asked, “Which of these vehicles is his?”
“How would I know?”
“You don’t know what car he drives?”
“I’m inside when he gets here. I’m inside when he leaves. For all I know he gets dropped off by a flying saucer.”
“So you’re going to force me to run down every license plate in this parking lot. Just to find out who your bouncer is.”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. Besides, what difference does it make who he is? He’s got nothing to do with any of this.”
“Maybe I just don’t like guys who come at me with a baseball bat.”
“That’s your problem, not mine.”
He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. The thump of music was grating on his nerves again. He felt the vibration in his eyeballs.
“So are you going to whip it out or not?” she said. “What’s the matter? Afraid to show me what you’ve got?”
He did not open his eyes. They sat in silence for another minute. Finally he asked her, “How can you work in such a sad business as this?”
“Haven’t you noticed?” she said. “It’s a sad fucking world.”
Another minute passed. DeMarco sat up, buckled his seat belt, put a hand on the ignition key. “I’ll let you know if I have any other questions.”
“I can hardly wait,” she said.
The slamming of the door jarred his bones. He started the car and the headlights flared on. He watched as she crossed the gravel lot. Her stride on the return trip had none of its previous adamancy. Now her gait was halting and weary. She had thrown her shoulders back and lifted her chin in an attempt to show that he had had no effect on her, but the trudge in her gait betrayed her. At times she almost appeared to falter and list to one side. He leaned forward to watch her more closely, but then she was at Whispers’s door. She yanked it open, stepped into the yellow light, and then was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He turned in his seat, reached for his briefcase, laid it open on the passenger seat. He turned on the dome light, then found Huston’s journal among the papers and paged through it until he located the passage he wanted.
There is some quality of furtiveness about her, some pale aura of shame. She looks like a dancer trying to hide a limp, but there is nothing wrong with her legs; her legs are fine. Better than fine. No, her limp is elsewhere, somewhere in her mind or in her heart, in the shuffle and drag of her soul.
And there was another passage too, something about the mouth. It didn’t take him long to find it.
She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Her mouth is sensuous but sad, limbs long and elegant, every movement languid. Even her smile is slow with sorrow.
The passages, he realized, applied more to Bonnie than to Danni. In fact, they fit Bonnie perfectly. He looked up at Whispers, the closed door, the dim, naked bulb. “She’s Annabel,” he said. He did not yet know what it meant, but he was nonetheless certain. “They’re both Annabel.”
Forty-Three
On the drive home, DeMarco thought three times about calling Nathan Briessen. After the third time, he placed the call.
“I hope you don’t mind my calling again. But I guess you’ve become my go-to guy for all things literary.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Nathan said, although to DeMarco’s ears his voice sounded sleepy. “Not that I’m any kind of authority.”
“Well, you’re in training to be a writer. So you know how writers work. How Thomas works. I’ve read lots of novels, sure, but that doesn’t give me any insight into what goes on in a writer’s mind.”
“I think you’re giving me too much credit, but I’ll help if I can. What do you want to know?”
“Is it reasonable that Thomas could have based his Annabel character on two women? One young and the other one older?”
Nathan took a long time before answering. DeMarco did not hurry him.
“A composite character,” the young man finally said. “I mean…I don’t see why not. Maybe he used one as the younger version of Annabel and one as the older. Or maybe he took qualities from each of them to build the character. The one thing he always preached to us was the need for complex characters. It’s the contradictions in a personality that make for conflict, he said. And that’s what a story is all about. Do you know the Faulkner quote from his Nobel speech? He said that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
“The heart in conflict with itself,” DeMarco said.
“Right. So…” Then Nathan went silent.
“Is there something else?” DeMarco asked.
“Sorry, I was thinking about something he said about building characters. That we—as writers, I mean—have to really take our time getting to know them. To not just jump into a novel until we have a full sense of who our main characters are as people. That we have to let them build bit by bit.”
“I’m not sure what that means, Nathan.”
“In terms of his Annabel. He was still building her. Figuring out exactly who she was as a character. And probably using various people, not just one or two. The way this one looks, the way that one talks, bits of history from somebody else.”
“You’re saying that his Annabel wasn’t based wholly on one real person.”
“It’s unlikely that she was. After all, he was starting with Nabokov’s and Poe’s Annabels. And building his own from there.”
DeMarco suppressed a sigh that would have emerged as a groan. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. I appreciate this. I apologize for disturbing you.”
“Not a problem,” Nathan said.
Afterward, in the reclining chair that, most nights, served as his bed, DeMarco tried to ignore the recognition that something had fallen in him, some inarticulable thing that left him feeling heavier than he was before, as if his center of gravity had dropped to his knees. Not only had Huston’s Annabel become more amorphous than ever, but the notion that Huston had cheated on his wife was even more troubling. DeMarco had wanted Huston to be better than that, someone he could admire. But now the equation was changed. It was a kind of Occam’s razor for law enforcement that adultery explained nearly everything. Infidelity. Lust. Stupidity and weakness.
It did and it did not. To be attracted to the kind of life Bonnie represented, to be drawn to that hedonism and self-indulgence when one’s own life is otherwise so structured and controlled, this much DeMarco could understand. But to lay a knife across the throat of a woman you apparently adored, to take the life of your own son and daughter and baby boy, this was incomprehensible. Mere lust, sexual attraction, the desires of the flesh—how could any of it account for such madness?
In the darkness and silence of his living room, with a cool glass of melting ice and whiskey in his hand, DeMarco wondered if he was trying to apply reason to a situation where reason did not exist. To a casual observer, Huston’s life would have appeared blessed. But this was the illusion Huston had created and maintained. A man patient and generous with his students, a picture-perfect wife and family, shirts and chinos always neatly pressed, fame and financial success; a man respected, envied; a man with a life each of his students longed for. Was it all a construction meant to conceal in himself the same dark urges that drove Huston’s characters? His life had seemed a sunlit lagoon, but what
currents made the blue water shimmer? A lifetime of struggle and ambition. Parents taken away by violence. Professional jealousies. The stresses of fame, the loss of anonymity. The pressure to live up to the hype, to always be better, brighter, more successful, more worthy of praise.
Was it as simple as that? The facade, as thin and brittle as all facades are, had shattered? Huston had snapped?
DeMarco sipped his drink and wondered how it must feel to let everything go. Was Huston now deliriously happy in his insanity? Completely weightless and free? No shame, no remorse, no obligations, no sin?
DeMarco could not imagine such a state of being. Not in this world or any other.
Forty-Four
At first light, after three hours of restless sleep, he returned to Huston’s journal. He told himself that he was looking for the madness that would explain everything and solve the equation. He read each entry aloud, hoping to hear some vague insinuation he had missed on previous readings.
DeMarco now understood that much of a novelist’s life can show up in his fiction, thinly disguised as somebody else’s life. Portions of the journal were total fiction, but others were not. Discerning the difference would be the hard part.
If Annabel was a composite character, part Danni and part Bonnie, probably even part Claire, maybe Huston’s nameless narrator was a composite too. More than likely, some of that composite was Huston. Were that character’s desires actually Huston’s desires brought to the surface?
It wasn’t long before certain entries seemed to leap out at DeMarco as they had not during earlier readings. He had wanted it to happen while studying the names on the whiteboard, but it had failed him then. Now it happened in Huston’s journal. Not once, but three times.
Earlier, DeMarco had read the entries while assuming they were statements made by Huston’s protagonist. But if viewed as expressions more accurately ascribed to the author… The hairs on DeMarco’s arms bristled as he read them again:
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