“Of course,” she repeated. “How silly of me.”
Through the open door he saw Kathy looking in at him as if he were in a hospital room, a room she shrank from entering. He closed his eyes and settled back into the pillow and stayed there until he heard Ellen’s car drive off. Then he began the excruciating process of putting himself back together, showering and shaving, treating a touch of diarrhea, and washing a couple of multivitamins down with a shake of milk and honey and raw eggs.
He dressed hurriedly and drove to work, surprised to see that his hands were no longer trembling. He checked his call-in orders, submitted to the usual raillery from the warehouse workers (“Well, if it ain’t the late Jack Baird!”), and even did a little joshing himself with one of the secretaries, sixty-eight-year-old Emma Bergen, leaning over her desk and breathing in her perfume, observing that if he smelled that good, he’d probably play with himself. Laughing happily, she gave him an elbow in the hip and he limped away, complaining that the good ones always played hard to get.
Then he set out upon his workday, knowing he would get through it only by forcing himself to think about anything and everything except what had happened the night before. With this goal in mind, he was almost grateful that he felt so ill and exhausted, because it was something he had to think about, or at least deal with, minute by minute throughout the day. Several customers commented on his appearance, one even suggesting that he ought to go home and go to bed. But he persevered and in the end even made a good day of it, writing up a couple of large corporate orders and selling a new drive-in chain its first order of printed paper cups, one hundred thousand in all.
When he went for Kathy at four o’clock, he called ahead to tell her that he would pick her up outside, on Clive Street. After they drove away together, she asked him if he wasn’t still worried about Slade.
“Well, of course I am,” he said. “Why else would I pick you up?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess just because you didn’t come inside. And then last night.”
“What about last night?”
“You know—leaving us alone all night.”
“It wasn’t all night.”
She gave him a sad, searching look. “What’s wrong, Daddy? Mother’s really upset. I don’t think she said two words all night.”
“What else is new?”
“Is there anything I ought to know?”
Baird shook his head. “No, there’s no problem, baby. It’s happened before. I just go through periods when I like to stay out after work and have a few drinks with the guys. It’s no big deal.”
As he said this, he kept staring straight ahead, not wanting to see the look in her eyes. It was not something he was used to, lying to his wife and children, or to anyone else, for that matter.
Baird’s final customer of the day was the Mooney Hotel Bar, located in the university district. It was a handsome basement bar, with plush carpeting, a lot of dark wood, brass, and leather as well as a large-screen TV customarily turned to a sports channel, with the sound kept low. Baird had already written up the bartender’s order and was sitting at the bar, drinking a double vodka-tonic and trying to appear casual as he leafed through the evening newspaper. Finally, on the second page of the local news section, he found the item he was looking for, three column inches under the heading, “Dancer Victim in Mystery Assault.”
The story said that twenty-year-old Terri Dean had been assaulted outside her Bothell apartment by two men early that morning as she was returning home from work at the Oolala night club, where she performed as an exotic dancer under the stage name of Satin. Miss Dean had suffered multiple facial and head contusions and had been taken to Kirkland’s Evergreen Hospital for observation. She was unable to describe her assailants other than that one of them was a white man about forty years of age. Miss Dean told the police that she was not able to see the other man, who had seized her from behind and repeatedly battered her about the face and head. The dancer said she had no idea why she had been assaulted. The police reported that she was neither robbed nor raped.
Baird’s hand had started to tremble again as he was holding the paper, so he folded it and pushed it away. Picking up his drink, he tried hard to look relaxed, but he found himself gripping the glass so tightly he was afraid that Sammy, the Asian bartender, would notice. He pivoted on his stool then, gazing at the TV screen at the far end of the room.
It was after five and the local news was on. The two middle-aged anchors—a handsome, balding man and a beaming blond woman—were tossing the ball back and forth, finishing each other’s sentences as if neither of them had enough breath for an entire news item. Then the picture cut away to a reporter standing on the very flagstone walk where Satin had been attacked and Baird had clubbed Slade senseless. In the background was the apartment building, as well as a half-dozen onlookers: a young mother, her two clinging children, and three teenage boys mugging for the camera. The reporter was a black man in his twenties, coatless, with a loosened tie and rolled-up sleeves, obviously a hard worker.
“It was right here that exotic dancer ‘Satin’—Terri Dean in real life—was assaulted at about two o’clock this morning,” he reported as the picture briefly cut away, first to a couple of anonymous topless dancers in a dim strip club, their breasts fuzzed out, then to a still photo of Satin in a string bikini. “Now, this normally wouldn’t be that big a story,” he went on. “Terri Dean, shown here in a publicity photo, wasn’t robbed or raped. But according to police, there are some very strange aspects to the case. Miss Dean described one of the assailants as a good-looking businessman type around forty. And this man, she says, leaned down at the end, while she was still lying on the ground, and said to her, ‘You’ll be all right, honey.’ And finally, as they were leaving, the two men honked their car horn and fired their guns, presumably in the air, as if they wanted to call attention to what they had done.” The reporter smiled wryly. “Weird, huh? Back to you, Barry.”
The male anchor came back on, shrugging philosophically. “Well, a day in the life,” he said. “Thanks, Harvey.”
The female anchor smiled joyously. “Well, maybe Jeff has better news for us. What about it, Jeff? Is this weather going to hold?”
The picture cut to the weatherman, who seemed embarrassed by it all. Baird looked away. He drained his glass and waggled the ice in it, signaling Sammy for a refill. And seemingly without even thinking, he added to his order.
“And a pack of Marlboros,” he said. “No, make it two, Sammy. And a book of matches.”
Sammy served him. “I didn’t know you smoked, Jack.”
Still trying to appear casual, Baird opened one of the packs and lit up. “Off and on,” he said, not bothering to mention that he had been “off” for five years now, ever since his forty-second birthday.
He dragged the smoke into his lungs, trying not to cough. And he wondered what the devil he was doing. Certainly he didn’t expect the nicotine to synergize with the vodka and somehow stem the rising tide of panic in him. At the most, he imagined it was simply that the old habits and restraints—the elements of a sane and sensible life—suddenly did not matter. As far as Jack Baird was concerned, war had broken out, the earth had quaked, his belly was full of cancer. Smiling grimly to himself, he even reduced it all to an epigram: Killers smoke.
Why, he wondered, would TV even cover such a story? Satin had not been raped or robbed. No one had shot her. And the reporter’s explanation, that the story had some unusual aspects, simply didn’t wash. Baird wondered if there had been a dearth of bodies discovered that day. Perhaps no skeletons had been found along the Green River or maybe the Crips had not opened fire on the Bloods or just possibly no sullen young father had beaten his infant son to death. But then Baird knew he was being a bit naive. More than likely, Satin was on TV simply because she was what she was, young and beautiful and a stripper to boot, a victim whose story allowed the news director to squeeze a few seconds of tits-and-ass in between
the sports and the weather. It was probably no more complicated than that.
Yet it unnerved him, seeing not just Satin but the rest of it too, right there on television in daylight: the flagstone walk and the evergreens, the very place where fifteen hours earlier he had altered his life forever. He felt exposed and vulnerable. It struck him as preposterous that he could sit at the bar among the innocent and not be seen for what he was. He kept feeling that Sergeant Lucca and Lee Jeffers were going to come walking through the door at any moment, handcuffs at the ready.
Seconds after putting out his first cigarette, he lit another. And he signaled Sammy for a refill.
“Love that quinine water,” he said.
After leaving the Mooney bar, Baird wanted to go straight to Leo’s, not for more drinks so much as for the comfort of being among friends, the false sense of security he might have found there. But he wasn’t ready to face Leo and Sally and Wyatt Earp any more than he was ready for Ellen. He had the unreasoning fear that if he looked any of them straight in the eye, they would know immediately what he had done, as if the mark of Cain were stamped right on his pupils.
And anyway, he knew that more than anything else, he had to be by himself now. He had to think. He had to go through the whole thing as if it were a filthy closet and sort it all out. He had to get some inkling of where he stood and what might he ahead of him, what he had to do and how he had to change in order to deal with it. And he knew he couldn’t do that at Leo’s any more than he could have done it at home. So he drove south and east through the university’s arboretum until he reached one of the parks along the Lake Washington shore. There he pulled in and parked at the far end of the lot, a good distance from the half-dozen other cars there. In front of him a heavily shaded lawn sloped down to the rocky shore, beyond which the lake stretched two miles across, to a broad green strip dominated by the high-rise buildings in Bellevue and limned by the distant Cascades, still snowcapped, spectral in the light smog. Baird gazed blindly at the scene. It could have changed into a brick wall and he would not have noticed, so intent was he on that spot ten miles to the north, on the other side of the lake: the bluff overlooking Slade’s grave. It was a spot he could not see, however, due to the northern floating bridge, which blocked his view of it.
He inclined his seat and lay back. Despite the three doubles he’d had, he felt clear in his mind. More than anything else, he wanted to get a handle on his feelings, divine just how much was guilt and how much simple fear of being found out. From the moment he’d stopped firing the gun and closed the trunk lid on Slade, he’d accepted it that for the rest of his life he would have to carry a heavy burden of guilt, simply because he had killed another human being, whether rightly or wrongly.
Yet guilt didn’t seem to be what he was feeling now, not yet anyway. He judged that most of all, it was fear he felt, the insistent worry that someone might have seen him during the shooting or as he was getting rid of the body and the car. He kept remembering the force with which the old Impala had struck the water, and in his mind he kept seeing the trunk lid pop open and Slade’s body lift from the wreckage and practically swim back up to the surface in order to point a finger at him.
But Baird was feeling something else too, something that surprised him greatly: a sense of power and exhilaration not unlike that he’d found in the back seat of his father’s car at sixteen, holding a half-naked Sue Ann Johnson in his arms as he ejaculated into her tight little vagina. At first, with Slade, he had thought it was only relief he was feeling, an overwhelming sense of deliverance from the threat old Jimbo had posed to Kathy and himself. By now, though, he was beginning to realize that there was something else going on, a new and different kind of drug singing in his veins.
He got out a cigarette, lit it, dragged. And finally he got around to it, asking himself the hardest question of all: why he had not carried out his original plan and called in the police once Slade had been subdued. As he’d expected, the incident had proved to be intensely chaotic. Since his was the only face the girl saw, it stood to reason that she would point to him as her attacker, not Slade. And Baird was the one carrying a gun, the one who had beaten the other man senseless. So he very easily could have been arrested right along with Slade, no matter what he told the police at the scene.
But then he’d known that all along, had anticipated that it might go that way at first. In the end, though, things would have come out right—he had convinced himself of that too, hadn’t he? He had no police record. He had been a solid citizen all his life. And once he called in Lee Jeffers to back up his story about Slade, certainly the local police would have believed him, would have understood that all he was trying to do was catch Slade in the act, so the state would finally have a solid case against him and be able to put him behind bars, where he belonged.
Yet Baird had not paused a single second once he’d clubbed Slade to the ground. Seemingly without giving the matter any thought at all, he’d simply dragged him to the car and locked him in the trunk and driven straight to the place where he’d then shot him dead. And disposing of the body, the car, and the gun—he wondered if it all wouldn’t seem a trifle too neat, too planned, as if it had been in the back of his mind all along, his true mission, perhaps hidden even from himself until the moment was at hand.
It was a reasonable interpretation. Yet he was certain it was wrong. The truth, he believed, was simply that as Slade had attacked the girl, it was not her Baird had seen but Kathy—lying on her back on the flagstones, her trembling hands raised to protect her already bloody, swelling face.
He wanted desperately to go on thinking about it all. He felt he had to get it straight in his mind before he could get on with his life. But he wasn’t able to keep his eyes open.
It was after ten when he finally woke. He was surprised that he hadn’t been mugged, lounging there in the dark with the windows open. At the moment, though, his main concern was his bladder, which felt as if a stake had been driven into it. As he relieved himself in a nearby clump of bushes, it crossed his mind that if he were arrested at that moment, caught in midstream, so to speak, the newspapers could have a field day. “Murderer Caught Pissing in Park.” Or “Vigilante Suspect in Hosing of Mum Bush.” Then he caught himself, puzzled at his state of mind, at how untroubled he seemed. He felt oddly casual and confident, even reckless, as if all the flak of daily life could no longer reach him, not at the altitude where he was cruising now.
Getting back in the car, he cautioned himself that his mood was undoubtedly temporary, like the high of a five-martini evening. He had little doubt that very soon the real thing would come crashing down upon him, like no hangover in his life. Again he thought of going home or to Leo’s, but he decided that he still wasn’t ready for either of them, not the noisy raillery of the bar any more than one of Ellen’s silent inquisitions, with the lasers bearing in upon him. And anyway, he knew that he was going to have to keep late hours for the next couple of weeks in case Slade’s body was found and the police managed to pinpoint the time of death. It wouldn’t do for him to have been out late, away from home, on that one night alone.
Ravenous by now, he drove downtown to Bramante’s Ristorante, the kind of place where the mob would have hung out, if Seattle had had a mob. Though it was a tomblike place, dark and sinister, the restaurant served delicious Italian beef sandwiches and green salads that stuck to the ribs. Taking one of the candlelit booths, Baird as usual found that he could barely see the menu, let alone the waiter, a wizened old man who bore an eerie resemblance to the old-time comedian, Jimmy Durante.
When Baird ordered a vodka martini, the old man countered, “How bouta tabla red? It’sa reala good.”
Baird was agreeable. “Sure. Why not?”
The carafe of red wine did nothing to lessen Baird’s buoyant mood. A jukebox in the back was softly playing Dean Martin’s version of “That’s Amore,” a record that had begun playing on the radio once when Baird and Ellen were making love, their climax an
d the singer’s “that’s amore!” taking place at precisely the same time. However, it was not sweet nostalgia but lust that Baird felt now, listening to the song. And in his mind it wasn’t Ellen he saw but Satin and her perfect little body, which in turn led him to think of Lee Jeffers and what she might have looked like nude under a pink spotlight or undulating above his and Slade’s couch, moving to that most elemental of rhythms.
Baird was feeling even better by the time he left the restaurant. He walked into the dark parking lot as if he owned it. He squealed the Buick’s tires and drove well over the speed limit as he maneuvered around Lake Union and moved uphill into the Wallingford district. When he reached Lee Jeffers’ street, he again found both sides lined with parked cars, virtually bumper to bumper. Not to be thwarted, he pulled into the detective’s narrow driveway and parked behind her car, blocking most of the sidewalk.
Going up the bungalow’s porch stairs, he heard a Volkswagen Beetle drive slowly past, its tiny motor sounding so much like Ellen’s that he wondered—not very seriously—if he should consider it a sign from on high, a warning to slink back to the marriage bed. The thought amused him sufficiently that he was still grinning when the porch light came on. He thought of pushing his eye tight against the peephole but was too late, as the door opened now, still chained. Through the crack he saw the detective looking out at him, fetching in a blue floor-length robe.
“What’s this?” she asked. “You trying to get arrested?”
“Not that I’m aware of. And I’m not here about Slade either. Haven’t seen the bastard in days.”
“What do you want then? You know it’s almost midnight?”
Baird frowned. “What do I want? Well, let me think. Oh, yes. My life’s falling apart and I was sitting at this bar and I asked myself who would I rather talk with than anyone else on earth. And you came to mind.”
“I’m not a shrink, Mister Baird.”
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