by Susan Isaacs
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“And her pubic hair. She only has that little stripe.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why don’t you want to believe me?” I picked up the photograph and examined it again. “Look, she even has the same long, polished toenails.” Her right foot, resting on Prince’s haunches, was turned toward the camera; her first two toenails were visible.
Sharpe leaned over and gazed at the picture. “You’re positive?”
“Yes,” I said wearily.
“Okay. Then where does that get us? You said she’s short?”
“Yes. No more than five three.”
“Well, unless she took a flying leap at Fleckstein, she couldn’t have done it.”
“She’s not the flying-leap type. She’s very studied, trying to be graceful, stately. She wants to be a WASP.”
“Then she should have fucked an English sheepdog,” he remarked. “Okay, where does all this leave us?”
“I don’t know.” I slumped in the chair, head in my hands.
“Maybe it gets us nowhere,” Sharpe mused. “Maybe she was just another one of his broads.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Just be quiet for a minute.” He sat, an inch from me, watching me think, which of course made thinking impossible. “Nelson, maybe you should leave now. I can’t concentrate. I’ll call you if I come up with anything.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Don’t you have any police work to do?”
“I’m doing it,” he insisted. “Look, let’s get out for a while. I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I can’t. My son’s coming home from school.”
“Can’t he make his own lunch?”
“Nelson, he’s four years old.”
“No kidding. I didn’t realize you had such a little one. What’s his name?”
“Joseph. Joey.”
“Do you have any others?”
“Katherine. She’s six. Do you know what’s really odd?”
“What?”
“The fact that we’re calmly considering sleeping together and we don’t even know the most basic details of each other’s lives. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“No. Judith, we’re in tune with each other. Does that happen with every guy you meet?”
“No. Only with about sixty percent of them. And out of sixty percent, I only have time to sleep with half of them.”
“Look,” he said, “we’re adults. We’ve been around long enough to develop a sense of what other people are all about. Does it make any substantive difference if you know what my middle name is?”
“No, but it would make you more real. What is it anyway?”
“Lawrence. Does that make me more of a person to you?”
“Mine’s Eve.”
“Great. Now I know all I need to know about you. All right, Judith Eve, can I take you out to lunch?”
“No. I told you, my son’s coming home any minute.”
“Can’t he go somewhere? Play with a friend?”
“I should abandon my child so you can seduce me?”
“Judith. I have a key to a friend’s apartment. Ten minutes from here. I’ll tell you my mother’s maiden name on the way over.”
“I thought you were so angry with me when you came in. How come you have the key?”
“I was hoping we could work it out.”
“But we’re working on a case. What about Brenda Dunck?”
“She doesn’t do a thing for me. You do.”
“Please. Let’s finish the business at hand,” I said. “I need time to go over all the information we have.”
“You can think at the apartment. It’s very peaceful there. I’ll try not to disturb you.”
“Nelson,” I said, and the doorbell rang. It was Joey.
“Mommy, you weren’t at the bus stop, so I came here by myself. Remember you told me if you weren’t there to come and ring the bell? So I did.”
“Good boy,” I said, taking his hand. “This is Lieutenant Sharpe, Joey. A policeman.”
“Hi, Joey,” said Sharpe.
“You got a gun?” Joey asked.
“Here,” Sharpe indicated, opening his jacket to show his holster, clipped on his belt. He also had an erection.
“Can I see it?” Joey demanded.
“No. Look at it where it is. Guns are dangerous.”
“Lieutenant Sharpe is just going, Joey. What would you like for lunch?”
“Peanut butter and jelly. Cut in squares.”
“What would you like for lunch?” Sharpe asked me softly.
“Goodbye, Lieutenant,” I said forcefully.
“Goodbye, Joey,” he said. “Nice meeting you.” Joey ignored him. Sharpe looked at me and murmured: “I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
“No.”
“Forty-five minutes.” He waved to Joey and left.
“So,” I said to Joey, struggling to open a new jar of grape jelly and calm down at the same time, “what did you do in school today?”
“Why do we have so many cops?”
“Police. They’re just checking things out to make sure everybody’s nice and safe and obeying the law. That’s their job.”
I prepared the sandwich, meticulously cutting it into precise, clean-edged squares. “Here,” I presented it to him. He ate slowly, taking minuscule bites and rolling them around his mouth. “You’re eating very slowly,” I observed tartly.
“You said I shouldn’t eat fast. You want me to get a tummy ache and throw up?”
“No.” I replaced the lid on the peanut butter jar. “What do you want to do this afternoon?” I asked. “Want to play with North?”
“No. He farts.”
“Joey, come on. That’s so silly. Let me call Mrs. Hughes.”
“No.”
I stood by the sink, waiting for my maternal instincts to overpower my desire for Sharpe. “How about Jenny? Can I call her mother?”
“No.”
“I heard she has some wonderful new toy.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Want to go over and see?”
“Oh, okay.” Before he could change his mind, I called boring little Jenny’s tedious mother.
Forty minutes later I was sitting in Sharpe’s Dodge Dart, waiting for a traffic light to change. No one can force me to go through with this, I thought. I can just tell him that I find adultery morally abhorrent. Or simply say that I need time to resolve things—one way or another—with Bob. I twisted the fastener on my shoulder bag open and shut, open and shut. Look, Nelson, I could say, can’t we just be good friends?
“What if,” I began, my voice hoarse and distant, “I decided to change my mind?”
The light changed. He pulled over to the curb. “Do you want to change your mind?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know. What would happen if I did?”
“I’d make a U-turn and take you home.”
“Just like that? No recriminations? I can’t believe that.”
“What would you expect me to do? Beat you over the head and zap it to you while you’re unconscious?”
“Would you still talk to me?” I demanded.
“Yes. I don’t know. I guess I’d be upset or hurt or something, but I’d still talk to you. Although I’d probably want to sulk for a couple of days.” He paused and lifted my hands between his; his palms were damp. “Judith, I like you. And I want to go to bed with you. But if it’s more than you can handle, I’m not going to push. I don’t want that on my record. It has to be your decision.”
“It’s all up to me?”
“I’ve already made up my mind. I have no problems with it.”
I ran my hand along the dashboard. “What if I’m lousy? What if you think I’m the most boring lay in the world?”
“I’ll roll over and fall asleep. Just give me a poke when you want to go home. Judith, calm down. What if you
think I’m lousy? What would you do?”
“Oh,” I responded, feeling enormously relieved. I would pat him on the head and tell him these things happen, especially if a man is nervous. And I would smile, not mockingly, but with great compassion. But if that was the case, why was I going?
“Well?”
“Drive,” I said. “I have to be home in two hours.”
His friend’s apartment house was in a town about five miles due south of Shorehaven, a red brick six-story building flanked on the left by a butcher shop and on the right by a beauty salon. The address, a large Two Twenty-Five, was written in gilt script on the building’s glass door; under it was the apartment’s name.
“The Versailles?” I asked. “It’s actually called The Versailles?”
“Well, it has mirrors in the lobby.”
We parked the car in a space in the back of the building and walked in through the back entrance.
“You’ve been here before?” I inquired.
“Sure. This friend of mine took the apartment right after his divorce, so he could be near his kids.”
“And you’ve visited him here?”
“No. He just gave me the key so that every day when he’s at work I can take a new woman to the apartment and get laid. Judith, he’s my friend, a guy I went to high school with. Of course, I’ve visited him here. He’s been pretty broken up since his divorce.”
“Why did he get a divorce?”
“His wife was screwing around.” He pushed the elevator button and the door opened immediately. “After you,” he said. We rode in silence to the fourth floor. I thought: his friend’s wife still has custody of the kids.
Still not speaking, we walked down the blue-carpeted hall to apartment 4E. Under the bell, his friend’s name was printed in neat white capital letters on a black plastic tab: Greenberg. At least, I pondered, peering at Sharpe’s small nose, he’s probably not a latent anti-Semite. He unlocked the door and held it open for me.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “when I called the office after I left you this morning, they had gotten the lab report on the awl.”
“Tell me.” I sat in a small green chair that exactly matched the green couch in Greenberg’s living room, a muddy, brown-tinged green common to motels and budget-decorated offices, the kind of green used for a furnished apartment that will not show dirt, that will survive from tenant to tenant.
“It’s almost definitely the murder weapon,” said Sharpe, still standing. “There wasn’t enough blood for a test, but the length of the bloodstain exactly matched the depth of the wound.”
“That’s interesting.” We smiled at each other. Then I cleared my throat; we became very sober. We remembered why we were in Greenberg’s apartment. Sharpe took my hand and helped me from the chair. For a moment we stood in uncomfortable silence.
“Judith,” he finally whispered, as he began to kiss me, “who did it?”
“I’m not sure. Is that why you brought me here? To sweet-talk me and get me to tell you everything?”
“No. Because,” he said slowly, “you’re lovely.”
“You’re lovely too,” I whispered later, lying beside him in Greenberg’s bed and running my hand over his stomach. The hair on his head was completely gray, but the hair on his chest merely brown and gray, and traveling still lower, brown and dark and curly, as though his mind had matured and mellowed years ahead of his genitals. “I can’t begin to tell you,” I began.
“I know,” he answered softly, and kissed the tips of my fingers.
“But I want to tell you. I thought it was going to be terrible.”
“You did? Why?”
“I’m not really sure. I thought I’d panic and become completely stiff or something.”
“Or something?”
“I thought that under that charming facade, you were a quivering, insecure wreck of a human being and that you wouldn’t be able to get it up.” He laughed loudly, the sound echoing off Greenberg’s dresser, with its bottle of Brut and plexiglassed snapshots of his two daughters. “I was going to tell you how it didn’t matter.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“And I thought you wouldn’t be circumcised and I might not like it. Or I’d like it too much.”
“Well, they snipped it off before I was old enough to file a complaint. I’m not very exotic, am I?”
“Everything about you is exactly the way it should be.”
“You know something?” he asked, pulling me tight against him. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years. Do you know that?” I rested my head on his shoulder, hoping that that would suffice as an acknowledgment. “Judith, talk to me.”
“You were wonderful,” I responded.
“So were you. Jesus, you’ve got some great moves. But talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“What I’m thinking?”
“Yes.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I’m too overwhelmed to think. I mean, it was so different from what I’d expected.”
“Tell me what you thought it would be like,” he urged, cupping my behind in his hands and rubbing it gently.
“I assumed it would be fast and neat and that it would clear my sinuses.”
“At the beginning, you seemed to be in a rush.”
“I know. And then, when I slowed down, I was surprised that we were so aware of each other as it was happening. In a way, I guess I hoped the sex would be divorced from everything I was feeling, so it would be easier to cope with. Sex, pure and simple.” I pulled away slightly so I could look at his face. “Nelson, in a way I was doing exactly what I kept accusing you of wanting to do—just grabbing a quick lay. But it didn’t happen that way and I’m glad it didn’t. But I don’t want to talk about it any more, okay?”
“Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I said.
“Shit.”
We dressed slowly, watching each other, helping each other with zippers and buttons, squirreling away our visions of each other for the long, cold weekend.
“Are you working tomorrow?” I asked as we drove home.
“Probably in the morning. I promised my kids I’d take them ice-skating in the afternoon.”
“You ice-skate?”
“Sure. Do you?”
“I used to,” I said.
He dropped me off with about five minutes to spare before Kate’s school bus pulled up to the corner. As she and I drove to pick up Joey, she interrogated me. Why was Daddy mad? Was I mad at Daddy? I coughed and some of Nelson’s semen dripped onto my underpants. Would Daddy and I get a divorce? She was frightened, her voice quavering despite her attempt to sound casual. I reassured her; people can get very angry with each other even though they’re in love.
“Don’t you ever get angry at me, Kate? I mean, really angry?”
“I guess so. But this is different. Daddy wouldn’t even talk to you. The other night when we went to the restaurant, he hardly even looked at you. I know, Mommy. I saw it.”
“I know you did, Kate. But try to understand that when two grown-ups live together for years and years, they sometimes get on each other’s nerves. And if I want to do something, something I’m really interested in, and if Daddy doesn’t want me to do it, who wins? Who’s the boss?”
“You’re both the boss,” she responded. I had trained her well.
“That’s right. So there can be problems if we disagree.”
“I know that. But it was weird. Daddy didn’t yell at you.”
“I know. But everything will be all right. Don’t worry, honey.”
Kate stared out the car window. “Do you still love each other?”
“Of course, we love each other. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t care about each other and then we couldn’t get mad. Could we?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
The beginning of the evening must have been a relief for her. Bob came home and talked
.
“Hello, Judith.” He gave me a light kiss that didn’t quite touch my cheek. “How was your day today?” Not bad, I told him, managing to speak and hold the salad bowl at the same time. “Guess who died yesterday?” he asked cheerfully. “Sam Brown.” His accountant had taken his last deduction. “The funeral was at eleven, but I had a meeting. I’ll send a donation.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I mean, that he died.” I served dinner.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he said later, sipping coffee.
I contemplated a kissy-kissy response, going over, sitting on his lap and kittenishly rubbing his nose with mine. “There’s a new wrinkle in the Fleckstein case. I’m trying to figure it out.”
He slammed both fists down on the table. “Kids,” he said, his voice tight with control, “why don’t you run outside and play.”
“It’s dark, Daddy,” Kate informed him.
“And cold,” added Joey.
“Oh. Then go downstairs and watch some TV. Now. Hurry up.” They trod out of the dining room sullenly, casting suspicious glances at us as they turned the corner into the hallway.
“Now what’s this?” Bob demanded. “I thought all that was over.”
“All what was over?” I asked. “The Fleckstein case? How could it be over?”
“I thought it was clear that you had severed your connection with it.”
“Are you serious? Where did you get that idea?”
“Well, you hadn’t said anything for a couple of days, so I assumed...”
“Let me tell you something,” I said carefully. “For the last couple of days, if you can stretch your mind back that far, you have not been home. Excuse me, you have been home for short spurts of time, but all you’ve been is a physical presence. You don’t talk. You won’t listen to what I have to say. And then you drift away to your office where the only contact I have with you is through your half-assed secretary who gives me messages and tells me you’re in meetings while you’re probably hovering over her with your ear smack against the receiver listening to how I take the news of your vital, successful business career. So don’t tell me...” My voice faded. My anger at Bob became a pale mist and blew away. I had it! The Fleckstein case. It made sense.
“If you think I have nothing better to do than listen in on your conversations with my secretary, who, by the way, happens to be a very nice person, you’re crazy.”