My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  “Be careful, Vitus,” Lionel said. “You father would never forgive me if anything happened to you. One small detail could unravel the entire thing.”

  I hid behind the coffee and kept my eye on Elvedina through the curtain. Again, I thought of her secret kiss with Megan. I wondered if the same hands that held her face were hands that pulled triggers and assassinated with cold ease. What had Megan seen, in all her time with Jamie? What battle stories did she have to tell? A silent witness to his crimes?

  I jerked upright. Coffee sloshed over my chin and down my shirt with the coordination worthy of my old zombie skill set. I wiped burning coffee off my face. Everything was on fire, and behind my eyes, my brain generating smoke.

  The wife, of course. The wife.

  Highsmith’s wife.

  *

  Polly Highsmith.

  When you think “serial killer,” you conjure a series of composite images manufactured by Hollywood. An intelligence tempered with animal ruthlessness and cultivated as roses with thorns twice as sharp. Killing machines become breathtaking and beautiful in their violence, like gladiators of old, their circuses become private arenas. Even the violence takes on sexual undertones, as though killing someone is tantamount to sexual conquest. The line blurs and you’re not sure anymore if being the focus of a serial killer’s wrath is to be flattered and desired, or feared and terrified.

  Glamour shots on the cover of a magazine of the serial killer’s face, isolated and lonely. You forget that most of the real ones, not the Hollywood-crafted villains, have wives. They have parents. They have siblings. They have children. Swallowed up by the shadow of their husband’s infamy, the wives of serial killers occupy the background as victims by proxy. How could they have known, seen the path of destruction unfolding before them?

  This, in turn, led me down into memories of my own, my long lost wife and child. They never had a choice in what the fates decided for us. I signed up for the military experiment my brother helmed, the infusion of Virus X, the experiment that turned me from human to monster when it should have made me a better, more able soldier and cemented my rise through the ranks. My family hadn’t signed on for madness and mayhem, just as Polly had never conceded to a life such as this. Like my wife and son, Polly was forced to stand witness to the casualties of her husband’s choices. Unlike my wife and son, she lived still.

  I had no preconception of who Polly Highsmith would be. Would she be the female version of Blake Highsmith? Part of me expected the door to open and that I’d be confronted with a gorgeous widowmaker, desperate to wrap me in her silk and suck me dry. Ruthless and cold, maybe even colder than Elvedina.

  But Polly Highsmith was small. So diminished, she seemed to shrink beneath my gaze as the door opened. From the corner of my eye, even Elvedina looked flummoxed as she stared straight ahead into empty space before realizing our host was two feet shorter. I anticipated well-appointed high-end clothing to suit the part of the wife of a powerful man, and what I got was Wal-Mart sweatpants and a scrubbed-raw face with mouse-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Who was I, indeed? I stumbled and nearly said Vitus, but that wouldn’t do anymore, would it? In private, I could be known for who I really was, but if I so much as applied for a library card or social security, I wasn’t Vitus anymore, was I? Vitus was lost, buried deep in the body of my nephew.

  “My name is Amos Adamson,” I said and gestured to Elvedina, “this is my assistant. I’m a private investigator, and ma’am, I know—”

  But Polly Highsmith was already retreating into the interior with her faded mouth peeling down into a scowl. I talked faster into the disappearing gap of the door.

  “—I know this is difficult but I have reason to believe your husband is innocent and we’re just trying to ascertain how to help you both.”

  The door slammed shut in my face then bounced back open. Polly’s eyes glittered, but her mouth was still grim-set, adding twenty years to her age. Her petite frame buried in the layers of dingy-colored sweatpants and a shirt that looked like it worked overtime as a table cloth.

  She invited me in. The rest of the palatial house was sterile and cold: vaulted ceilings and massive entry foyers so the wind revolved in an endless polar vortex. Marble countertops stolen from Scarface’s movie set. Wall-to-wall Berber carpeting a celestial white, spun out of cotton candy. Elvedina followed me in and we were led to a room with a coffee table and a gas fireplace with fake logs resting in the center, a world where everything is reduced to cartoon status. Even fire, fabricated.

  “Nice home,” I said. It wasn’t. It felt like a science lab.

  “I’m trying to keep everything maintained for when Blake comes back.”

  She set out several glasses and turned away to unearth a liquor bottle from the cabinet.

  Comes back? I mouthed. Didn’t she know her husband had been sentenced for life?

  Elvedina arched one eyebrow and said nothing.

  Polly returned. We sat like children in a church pew on our best behavior. In the next second, clinking glasses and the slosh of liquor. She did not meet our eyes. Everything about her shuffled through each moment in a half-daze. Medicated, I concluded.

  Had I been like this in those months after I had become a zombie? Tethered in a straightjacket and mewling like an incomprehensible beast? And afterward, when I discovered what my wife had become, the horror and the outrage had been far too large to absorb.

  “They asked me everything already.”

  She sat on the couch across from us. Her hands fidgeting in her lap. One knuckle over the other, wringing them. She turned her wedding band ’round and ’round.

  “I don’t think they asked you the right questions.”

  “You said your name was Adamson?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “As in, Jamie Adamson?”

  A power surge worked up my spine and lit up my brain. The connection between Atroxipine and Highsmith. There are times working cases when nothing fits or makes sense or amounts to anything. Chasing shadows to no avail. Other times, the synchronicity comes on hot and thick as syrup, and I licked my lips with anticipation.

  “I’m his son,” I said. “He’s been recently deceased.”

  “I saw the obituary. Naturally, I imagine they weren’t about to publicize his death in great detail. The government knows how to shelter their own.”

  “They want me to take a closer look at his projects. And I know, Mrs. Highsmith, that he often conducted business with your husband.”

  “I really can’t talk about it,” she said.

  Oh, but she could. I looked over at the blank television screen and noted the picture of her husband, his arm flung back along the couch while she rested her head on his shoulder. I reclined, letting my body stretch and become expansive in imitation of the missing husband. Giving her a gentle psychological comfort, to ease her into familiarity with me that I had not earned.

  A ticking clock. The fridge hum filled the emptiness with a depressing soundtrack of desolation. All of us ensconced in silence like a tomb until every word echoed back to us with ten-fold sound.

  “I don’t want to reopen old wounds. I know you met my father. He spoke well of you and Blake. You can be safe in the knowledge that, as Jamie’s son, whatever secrecy he held with you and your husband, I am bound to as well. No court can steal it away, you know. If he ever put you under such a restriction.”

  Some people are taciturn; others wait to be unlocked with the right combination of looks and words, gestures and touches. The road to Polly’s heart required me to play a compassionate husband to replace the one she lost—and it wasn’t hard to do, to fill that ache if only for a fraction of a second. But unlike Polly, I could lie to myself only so much. When the time came, all my gestures of compassion were nothing but weaponry to get what I really wanted from her.

  I sat forward to put my hand on hers. I steadied her fingers with a touch a
nd she stared at the bottom of her glass and did not move. Her lower lip trembled.

  “You build a life together,” she whispered. “People get married for love all the time, but I wasn’t like that. I think that’s naive. I wanted more. I wanted a foundation. Blake understood that. We wanted to have our careers but go on to bigger things. We wanted to be a force. Husband and wife. We wanted to be a business. We wanted to change the world together. Do you know what it’s like, Mr. Adamson, to build a foundation for the future, and watch it be dismantled right in front of your eyes? One strip at a time?”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  She put the glass down. I followed her as she poured herself another glass and I masked my surprise. The glass went straight to her lips with a hefty swallow.

  “Everyone asked. They said I had to have known. Had to have been involved. How could I suffer evil in my own home and never know it wore the face of my husband? And it’s just not that simple. And I couldn’t make it simple enough for them to understand.”

  I squeezed her hand and took both of them in my own over the coffee table. The grasp didn’t last long. If I was hoping to gain a foothold into her private thoughts, this would not be it. Instead, she topped off her glass. Again. Liquor, apparently, was the path to this woman’s confidence.

  Elvedina leaned back and watched us in her typical silence.

  “You don’t have to make it simple, Polly,” I assured her, watching her drink down her third glass. “Give it to me complicated. I’ll put it together. That’s what I do.”

  “He changed, after he got his promotion. He was gone all the time. Do you know that? Hour upon hour. Night after night. I used to think it was an affair. Some other woman. I kept sniffing his collar for a mistress’s perfume and looking for lipstick stains and there was nothing. I followed him, too.”

  She laughed, and the laughter came out thin. Her voice wavered, her words slurring at the edges.

  “He was always at work. In some ways, that was worse. Another woman, I would have understood. But he didn’t have another woman. He really loved me, and only me. But then there was his work, his career. And I could suffer that. I could sacrifice our time to that because I was banking on a future. A future that never arrived.”

  “Do you think he killed those people?”

  She looked away. She closed her eyes and seconds dragged out upon seconds. Her head tilted downward, her chin flirting with her collar until she came awake, suddenly, her eyes widening to keep herself aware.

  “I don’t know. The law says he did. They destroyed us, in that court. We laughed it off at first, because it was just so silly. I mean, who gets taken to court with such little evidence? Our lawyer promised us the case would be dismissed before we even got that far.”

  “But you did go to court.”

  “Rumor is one of the victims had a relative working out of the county prosecution. They wouldn’t let up. Kept pushing and pushing. So even though there was barely a case against my husband, they pushed it through. You know how it is in New Jersey.”

  I nodded. It’s who you know that makes and unmakes laws in this state. That answered one thing, at least.

  “We didn’t take it seriously. I know now, we should have. But because we didn’t, we didn’t get our defense down. We had people left and right assuring us it would never come to pass because it was ridiculous and then… right before my eyes, the world turned upside down overnight. One day, the sky is blue. The next, I can’t be certain of what color it is anymore. And I lost him. Just like that.”

  “Did he ever give you any reason to believe he’d killed anyone?”

  “He wasn’t always nice. I mean, to most people. He was nice to me. He never said a mean thing to me in my life. Never raised a hand to me. Reporters were all over me trying to get me to admit to some kind of transgression in our home life. Like he would come back from killing people and take it out on me. There wasn’t anything like that. He ran his mouth sometimes. He was under tremendous pressure at work, constantly under deadlines. There were people in life he had to please, who expected results. If he failed to deliver, there was a lot at stake. He could lose everything. Naturally he’d say incredibly stupid things, like, ‘I wish Dietrich was dead, I could kill him.’ All bluff, like no one ever says that kind of thing when they’re angry, and then forgets about it later?”

  “I spoke to your husband,” I said. “He says he killed Dietrich.”

  Polly put her head in her hands and stayed there for long minutes. The clock ticked and ticked.

  “Doesn’t he care? Doesn’t he love me at all?”

  She scrubbed and raked at her face with her hands. Her wedding ring was a cool, pale gold disc. She leaned against the couch with a sigh, closing her eyes.

  I waited to see if she would speak again.

  “Polly?” I said.

  Elvedina sat where she was without commentary, oblivious to us both. I ignored her in turn, leaning forward to tap Polly on the knee. Polly’s leg moved with the force of my tap, but she did not stir. In between the ambient sounds of the ticking clock and the refrigerator hum, she let out a whistle through her lips, sucked in breath. Her eyes searched from beneath the lids. Polly had nodded off.

  I informed Elvedina. She stared at the sleeping woman as though she had never seen such a thing before.

  I stood and took quick inventory of my surroundings. I shook off the taste of the whiskey and inhaled all the scents of this empty home. Mentally, I mapped out a rough draft of its layout. I looked up the stairs and saw doors ajar. Up there would be a master bedroom where Blake Highsmith slept beside his wife. I gauged the value of the second floor against the eroding seconds. Polly could wake up at any time. I turned away from the stairs and, instead, chose the long hall that arrowed away from the heart of the house and into spaces unknown.

  I passed a bathroom, shelves affixed to the wall like slashes, adorned with vases and fake flowers. In another time, this must have been an attractive place, a place one wanted to come home to. Now the silence and the emptiness clamored with despair, gave voice to a throbbing sorrow.

  I forged on. I opened a closed door and saw it led to a basement. Several steps down the narrow wooden stairs, a concrete floor loomed up and I made out the shapes of a washer and dryer, an old industrial sink. Empty and unwelcoming. I left it, closing the door behind me.

  At the same time, the door seemed to slam shut an instant too soon, nearly catching my finger. Subsidence, I consoled myself, but the sense of the house willing to shut me out, conspiring with some ancient damage, persisted. Some places take on the stain of past crimes, but I’m not one to bother with ghosts and such nonsense.

  And yet, my collar formed a tight noose around my neck and I reached up, loosening it. I wanted to get out of here—this place where the doors shut in on you too quickly and the lady of the house drinks herself into oblivion and her husband thinks he kills people with mind bullets.

  I found a guest bedroom, a storage closet, and then faced the last door tacked onto the end of the hallway, like an afterthought. I stepped up to the brass knob and twisted, throwing it open.

  Cool air flowed over me, chilly at the bottom against the concrete slab. Darkness pervaded beyond my gaze, and I could not penetrate, but I knew the atmosphere of a room like this. An attached garage.

  I couldn’t see into the room, but a burning in my nostrils, the smell of spilled gasoline and paint fumes—and more than that. The stitch of goosebumps up my arm filled me with anticipation.

  No murders occurred in this house; all the victims died in their own residences or hospitals. All the same, I intuited latent malice within the molecules of the disturbed air, confirming for me what I already knew: something had transpired here. The room, heavy and overfilled with presence as I reached around the jamb to flick the lightswitch.

  The light switched on—and then blew out, extinguishing into darkness.

  In the brief illumination, I had expected to see a car. An expensiv
e model would have suited the likes of Highsmith. I pictured a Nissan Z, or a Mercedes, BMW. Empty concrete greeted me, stained and with tread marks from cars past, and then the darkness cut off my sight and left me blind.

  I fumbled for my car keys and found the key chain flash light, lifting it to shed a cone of light on the floor. I thought of horror movies past and waited for the light to flicker, burn out and die, signaling my fate. Perhaps I’d be chopped into little bits by an ax murderer. I’d scream good enough to be one of the B-Movie queens, and Lionel and Lafferty would shake their heads in disappointment that I was had so easily. Elvedina, well, she’d say nothing.

  None of those things happened. Instead, I brought light to the square of concrete before me and I drew the light forward, over marks and ridges. A dark pattern etched in the stone.

  I frowned.

  Squares. Big squares, in a line, formed against the wall and kept going beyond where my little light could reach. A shape darted along the wall, and I snared it in a circle of light. It reared up on hind legs, a white rat, nose twitching to regard me with beady eyes, and then dismissed me to scamper into the corner.

  I flicked off the light. The square marks embedded in the concrete stayed with me. I conjured mental images, fitting objects into the shape. One after the other, a time clock ticking in the back of my head. When would Polly awake?

  “Cages,” I said. “Kennel cages.”

  And since when were houses infested with white rats?

  *

  Elvedina and I packed into the Ford Crown Vic. We sat in the car together; I felt uneasy and sick.

  A rational person might wonder why I’m sitting shotgun with a woman who may or may not kill people for fun and profit. Real life is not so simple. Since Lionel established her purpose as my shadow and prison warden, weaseling out of her care was going to take more political finesse than I had the power to wield. Like a kid hiding beneath the covers, the only certain death is letting the monster know you’re on to him. Or in this case, her.