“We’re even, now,” Seymour said.
“Like hell we are. You didn’t do shit for me.”
Seymour watched while the guards wrested the phone from Junior’s hand, hoisted him from his chair and led him away. Before they could get him completely turned around, he lunged back toward Seymour, his mouth still forming words Seymour could no longer hear.
* * * *
Rosalie sat close to him.
“So, he admitted it? Said it was her idea?”
“Right. The baby is fine. And while we were prowling around the hospitals, they took Gomez. That was the whole point.”
“But,” she said, then paused while she looked away, “even for him.”
“Yes,” Seymour said, “even for him.”
* * * *
Rosalie glanced at her watch.
“Don’t you want to see it?” she asked. “Somehow it seems right, that it’s on television. Just like the beginning.” She switched on the set.
Seymour reached over and turned down the volume.
“Tomorrow will be enough,” he said. “If we’re going to watch it let’s do it this way. It’ll make more sense.”
And they watched O’Riley, tweed hat just a little tilted, and pipe at first clenched between his teeth. Seymour noted the practiced timing, the way the pipe moved in and out of the prosecutor’s mouth in counterpoint to his words. The camera shifted to Gomez, his arm in a sling, walking between two detectives. His eyes were as wide and staring as Seymour remembered them on the stairs of his apartment building. Microphones were thrust in his face, and he snapped at them like a dog worried by taunting children. Finally, a well-dressed man intruded and moved his lips in a brief sentence. Then the picture cut to the beaming face of Pedro. Seymour turned the sound up in time to hear a voice-over intone praise for the brave convict who at the risk of his life, reported the confession of the depraved murderer. As the video returned to O’Riley, Rosalie leaned over and turned the television off. Seymour saw tears streaming down her face.
“I wasn’t going to tell you until,” she swiped at the tears, “until, I don’t know, maybe never, but I just can’t stand it any more.”
Seymour suddenly remembered what had been bothering him.
“When you went back into the house, you found something, didn’t you? I was asleep, but I seem to remember something. And you have been on the other side of a very long bridge since then.”
She nodded.
“You know then,” but he could not bring himself to express his thought.
“No, I don’t know, not for sure. But I found this. She reached over to pick up her purse from the end table. She opened it and slid out a belt. “This, I found this outside in the yard, beneath a stone, a hiding place only he and I knew about, since-we were kids. It was there, neatly folded.”
“Almost as if,” he said softly, “he half expected you to find it.”
She shrugged, and he picked up the belt, scraping off the dirt that encrusted it. He saw the holes where the studs used to be.
“I saw him wearing this, that first time, when Lois came for me.”
“And not since?”
“Not recently. You should have told me, you know. Before,” he said, anger rising in him. “That is more important than anything else.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I betrayed our trust. It’s as hard as that. And I did so because I thought I wanted him free. At any cost.”
“And now?”
“Now, I realize that although I cannot tolerate the thought of him in prison, possibly for the rest of his life, I am more terrified that I might lose you. And if you gave me a gun with which to shoot him, and if shooting him would stop you from leaving me, I would pull the trigger.”
He started to reach for her, but let his arm drop to his side.
“It’s too soon,” he said.
“I know. But maybe one day, it won’t be too late.”
* * * *
She spent the night in her own apartment, by unspoken agreement between them. When he awakened, he reached to the other side of the bed expecting to feel the still warm imprint of her body, but the sheet was cold. He waited to hear the water run in the sink but when it didn’t he sank back against the pillow. So many mornings he had enjoyed watching her dress before he himself got out of bed. Even now, he could remember how a tangle would catch in her brush, and she would pause to run her hand through it while his nerve endings joined with hers, so that it was as though he were guiding the thin wrist and long, graceful fingers in a gentle tug that freed the hair before the long sweep of the brush.
“Am I such a show?” she would ask, and turn back to the mirror to run her hand in a nervous gesture over the spot where the tangle had been. He would nod, and now lying in his empty bed he tried to explain this feeling to himself, but the thought resisted words, refusing like the tremulous shape of a cloud that offers the earthbound observer a new face with each gust to settle into a distinct and steady form. He started to rise from the bed, still holding a last image of her as she sat in the chair, her leg crossed over her knee, her skirt tight against the swell of her stomach and the inside of her lean thigh, taut as she pushed her shoe on.
* * * *
He stood next to her on the fringe of the crowd of reporters. They had spoken briefly in the morning when he arranged to pick her up, but they had said little to each other, as if unable to deal with the shock of their sudden estrangement.
O’Riley had called just as Seymour was leaving to ask if he and Rosalie would participate in the news conference. When Seymour had said that they wouldn’t, O’Riley had tried to insist, saying that at least Seymour’s presence was necessary to complete the “symmetry” of the scene. Seymour had let the prosecutor’s smooth voice flow over him while he removed himself from any contact with it.
Even though it was a warm morning for late winter, Lois was bundled in an ermine coat. Her face was carefully made up with decorous strokes of blush and a matronly soft red lipstick, and her thick black hair had been tamed into gentle waves that lapped the collar of her coat. She glowed with a false healthiness that matched the superficial warmth of the air. When she stretched her hand down to her child who tottered between her and Junior on the steps of the courthouse, she uncovered the unadorned flesh of her wrist above her white leather glove, and it had a sickly pallor.
The child’s face beamed up happily at her parents. She held onto Junior’s hand and amused herself by swinging back and forth at arm’s length. She wore a white fur coat to match her mother’s, and Seymour could see a black scuff mark on her freshly polished white shoes. She threw herself into an arc that brought her against Junior’s leg, and she laughed as her father leaned down to pick her up. He, too, had been refurbished for the occasion in a dark blue business suit and a tan raincoat that he held folded over his arm.
Seymour watched Lois. She seemed unsteady, her body rocking almost imperceptibly on her high heels.
“She’s stoned,” Seymour murmured, but Rosalie did not respond. Seymour could not be sure who held her eyes so intensely, but he guessed it was Junior. He scanned the group. The rage he had felt when he had first seen the reunited Constantino family now began to dissipate. He permitted a smile to curl the corner of his lips. The tableau was so ridiculous in every detail: O’Riley’s cap far back on his head while he punctuated every sentence with a stab of his pipe, looking like a bizarre hybrid, part Sherlock Holmes and part Madison Avenue executive; Junior’s pagan energy unnaturally forced into the conservative blue suit, with Lois struggling to retain her balance and dignity, probably wearing, Seymour thought, pink shorts cut to her crotch beneath the ostentatious ermine; and, of course, the centerpiece, the toddler child raised from the dead like Lazarus. All of them, posturing to the assembled press, struck Seymour as too ludicrous to warrant his anger. Not even Goode, hovering behind them in transparently false modesty, occasionally casting a furtive eye at his coat on Lois’ back, could rekindle the rage.
He felt a surge of hilarity rise to his head.
“Gomez will be shipped off to a funny farm,” he said as an irresistible laugh gripped his throat. “O’Riley serves Junior, Lois, and baby to the adoring media, and to all the good citizens who can now sleep more soundly knowing that the bold public servant was right all along.” He struggled to choke the laugh so that he could finish. Rosalie’s frame had started to tremble, but an exorcism, he thought, is an exorcism, however it occurs. “And Goode’s honor is preserved, clothing the whore and addict who is now his surrogate daughter.” The rage boiled up again, suddenly, and convulsed in a hacking fit that prevented him from giving voice to the howl he wanted to hurl at them all.
“He’s guilty,” Rosalie said, her vehemence surprising Seymour.
“We don’t know that,” he began and then recognized the reflex. A cameraman, apparently bored with O’Riley’s performance, turned toward them, and Seymour wheeled them around so that only his back would provide a subject for the lens.
“I know that,” he whispered at last. “But I also know that I love you. The rest of this,” he waved his arm back toward the press conference, “doesn’t matter. I have to go on with my life.”
He was about to progress from “I” to “you” to “we,” but when he looked into her face, he saw that her eyes were closed against it. Instead, he withdrew a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.
“I’m leaving tonight, on this flight,” he said.
She glanced at the paper, folded it up, and slid it into her purse.
* * * *
Sleep swallowed him that afternoon, its offer of oblivion far more inviting than anything consciousness could provide. He awoke in the early evening and looked out of the window of his apartment at the black sky, blank but for one distant star. He reached for the telephone, and held it in his hand until it began to hum loudly. He placed it back on its cradle, then picked it up and dialed the number of a limousine service.
The area next to the boarding gate held a handful of people sitting, it seemed to Seymour, as far away from the next person as they could.
Seymour had bought a newspaper, which he opened to the front page. He scanned a story until he reached the bottom of the page where it requested the reader to find the continuation, and then he laid the paper on the seat next to him. He looked, for the hundredth time, down the corridor that led to the waiting area, and for a moment he thought he saw her hurrying toward him, but the woman turned and disappeared into another corridor.
He saw that an elderly couple across from him was staring at his newspaper. He brought it over to them.
“I’m finished with it,” he said. “Why don’t you read it, if you like.”
The woman looked nervously at her husband.
“Why, thank you,” he said. His smile revealed ill-fitting and yellowed false teeth. “Don’t know when that darned plane’ll get here.”
Seymour looked out the window at the blinking lights and bulky shape of a plane rolling toward the gate. On the ground it looked, he thought, as graceless as a pterodactyl.
He heard the loud speaker crackle and a shuffling movement began among the passengers. As he reached into his coat pocket for his ticket, he felt a hand squeeze his arm, and the pressure sent a surge of warmth into his belly. He turned and saw her smile.
“I hear the surf is up in Malibou,” she said,
“So it is,” he said. “And it damn well better stay up until we get there.”
They walked together through the tunnel. Seymour stopped her for a moment before the door to the plane. The night was bright with moon and stars, and Seymour imagined he could hear the ocean, only a few miles away, crash its powerful rhythms against the shadowy sand. He waited a moment longer, as though the words he wanted to say to her would form from the foam of the surf, in the ancient echo, or perhaps they would emerge in the dark sky where he envisioned the circles of the gulls whose harsh cries he could almost hear as a tremulous counterpoint to the waves.
“I feel,” he said slowly, hearing his voice swallowed by the roar of the engine, “that ft is right for us to be here. Together.”
“And?” Rosalie whispered into his ear.
“And that we have a chance.”
He saw the starlight catch the white of her smile.
“That,” she said, “is all that we can ask for.”
TO CAROLYN
for her loving support and more, her intelligent criticism
Copyright © 1990 by Stephen Lewis
Originally published by Walker Mystery; electronically
published by Belgrave House in 2010
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.