“You know, Arch, subtract a couple of inches and add a few pounds, and Vanna White would be a dead ringer for Katrina Bates.”
The name had come up recently—on my caller ID. For a single horrible, irrational second, I thought it would be her voice on the other end. Of course it wasn’t.
“We’re getting back together,” Tom Bates had said.
“You and Kinsey?”
“No, me and Katrina. Come on, Ruzak. Why do you do that?”
“That’s a question I often ask myself,” I said. “Why I lack that internal editing function most people take for granted.”
“Well, you’re not fooling me. What’s puzzling is most of us want others to think we’re smarter than we really are.”
“Maybe it’s a strategy to lower expectations because as an only child I had undue burdens placed upon me.”
He laughed. “I can picture you as a child.”
What the hell did that mean? I said, “Well, that’s terrific. She’s a nice girl.”
“She distrusted my motives,” he said without a hint of irony. “She thought I only asked her to marry me because she was pregnant. She thought I viewed her as a baby-delivery system, not a person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.”
“Sort of like Katrina,” I said.
“See? This proves my point about you.”
“Evidence,” I said. “Not proof.”
“That’s not the reason for my call,” he said.
“You want to thank me for saving your life.”
“See? You are capable of it.”
“Maybe your life wouldn’t have needed saving if you had been faithful to your wife.”
“I know where this is going.”
“Well, if anybody would …”
“It’s my fault. If not for my little adventures, Katrina would still be alive.”
“ ‘Little adventures.’ I like that, Tom. Like skydiving or snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.”
“The problem with that kind of thinking, Ted, is that you never reach the end of it, like the value of pi.”
“That’s a poor analogy,” I said. “It’s more like the butterfly effect.”
“Oh.” He laughed. “You’re going to lecture me about chaos theory.”
“Tom, I wouldn’t dream of lecturing a brick wall, much less a brainiac like you. I’m just the thick sap who nabbed your wife’s killer.”
“Maybe it’s Alistair’s fault for fucking the baby-sitter thirty years ago.”
“Violin tutor.”
“What ever. You know what I mean.”
“We’ve drifted a far piece from ‘thank you.’ ”
“Something else,” he said. “We’re holding a memorial ser vice for Kat this Sunday on Tybee. At sunset. Wanted you to know.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now I know.”
Sun fading in a violet sky (Walter Hinton was an idiot), I sat on my sofa, silent cell phone in one hand, television remote in the other, both delivery systems of things I had no stomach for at that moment. I had important stuff to do. Walk Archie. Feed him. Feed me. Put him to bed. Put myself to bed. Animal Cops came on at nine. I was fairly certain there would be no segment featuring a Border collie’s plot to frame its owners for murder. Animals are like us, only better. Maybe not better, just luckier, less burdened by memory and guilt.
There was some leftover pizza in the fridge—spinach deep-dish, my favorite—and some lettuce I should eat before it went bad. What the heck is foie gras? I wondered. Isn’t that like duck guts or something? Her lips had tasted salty from the crackers, sweet from the wine, and when she laughed, her mouth didn’t open too wide like a lot of women’s, but her tongue felt fat as a sausage in my mouth and the texture was like fine sandpaper or the roughness of a cat’s. I tried to remember what her hair had smelled like. Felicia’s had a fruity smell, like peaches, and her legs were better; I had never seen better legs in real life, nicely toned from years working as a waitress. And then there were those knees.
“Not you. Not you,” I’d said to Melody after my boorish pass. Felicia had said the same to me during another man’s boorish pass: “Not you.” And Meredith, that very day: “It’s not you.” It could have been the leitmotiv of the entire affair, from the moment Katrina Bates brought the curtain up on this absurd little morality play. Not you, not you. If she or Tom or even her dad back when she was a twelve-year-old little girl, walking in on something no little girl should ever walk in on, had said “Yes, you” none of it would have happened. The one person who did say “Yes, you”—a big homely girl with a big ugly crush on a poor man’s George Clooney—made it possible. I had told Alistair Lynch it revolved around connection; actually, it was connection’s opposite, the failure to connect, the longing to fill something that perhaps, ultimately, tragically, could not be filled. It wasn’t about sex, she’d told me on our first meeting. Sitting on my sofa, remote in one hand, cell phone in the other, I realized it wasn’t about revenge, either. It was about those damn monkeys. The need to be needed, the desire to be desired, and the absurd lengths we are willing to go to fill that hole, not to feel so damn empty and alone, to feel important to someone or something, to be connected. Not you. Not you.
I struggled to maintain a grip on myself, and lost. There are some cognitive paths you simply should not traverse, and I had wandered off, once again, into the thickets; I had stripped off my clothes, once again, and dived naked into the crashing surf, where all sorts of hidden, alien creatures resided, the most benign of which might sting me, and where the most malignant might eat me. My chest heaved. I fought for breath. Katrina went down with arms outstretched reaching for her killer. Not you, says Dresden Falks. Not you.
Caught in a riptide, I struggled to reach the surface as the waves roiled around my flailing limbs. I cried for help, but sea-water filled my mouth as I reached, as I reached, reached, but no one was above me to grab my outstretched hand.
I don’t know how long I sat there, drowning on my sofa, being pulled slowly, inexorably down, every muscle and sinew taut as piano wire, before I felt his warmth on my thigh, the warmth that’s born of another living thing. I didn’t hear the clickety-click of his nails on the hardwood or the pant of his breath. I wasn’t aware he had come to me until I looked down and saw his head resting on my leg, saw his soft, sad brown eyes through the watery prism of my own. The remote slipped from my fingers and I placed my empty hand upon him. His eyes never left my face and, out of my peripheral vision, I saw the tip of his tail give the slightest of twitches.
Yes, you.
CURTAIN SLOWLY FALLS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all the good people at Thomas Dunne Books, particularly my editor, Marcia Markland, and Diana Szu.
Special thanks to my good friend and agent, Brian DeFiore, possessor of the best laugh I have ever heard.
Thanks to Elbert Reed for all his help over the years. And thanks to Josh for Celtic.
And Sandy, from whom I have learned so much, to whom I owe so much, and with whom I have shared so much, thank you. Yes, you.
The Highly Effective Detective Plays the Fool Page 21