Too Easy

by Bruce Deitrick Price

  “You ready to talk to me?” Gillson says. “Read him his rights,” the detective says to the cop by the door.

  “Sure, do that,” Robert says vaguely. “But no, I can’t talk now, if you don’t mind. I’m going to be numb for a while.”

  He drifts back to Anne. She takes his arm and they stand facing the cops and medics.

  “Okay, boys, move out,” Gillson tells his people. The medics go to lift Kathy’s stretcher. “We’ll pick it up later, Mr. and Mrs. Saunders. I’m not sure what we got here. Probably just straight self-defense. Never mind. We have to go through the process. Just be patient. I’m sorry, Mrs. Saunders, you have to come along now. Talk today, Mr. Saunders? Tomorrow?”

  Anne says, “Whatever you say. Give me a few more minutes.”

  “Whatever,” Robert says vaguely. “How about first thing in the morning?”

  “Fine, fine,” Gillson says, turning to go out the door.

  They watch the last cop file out of their home. Robert wants to ask what really happened. “Anne, please . . .” he says quietly. “I’m lost. Can you tell me what . . . went on here?”

  “The detective has a very full statement, Robert. You could read that when you’re ready. Basically, I confessed.”

  Robert stares at her, confused by her strange detachment. “Confessed . . . ?”

  “You probably ought to see your lawyer now,” she says, “get ready for tomorrow. I’ll be all right at the station. I’m not sure about bail. Robert, call Gillson in an hour or two.” She smiles briefly. “I don’t want to spend the night in a jail.”

  “No, of course not.”

  He watches her intently. There, they’re planning together, working things out.

  “And, Robert . . . I don’t want you to stay here tonight.”

  Robert forgets his questions. He stares in surprise. “Anne . . . please. Like you said, I had no idea . . . it would come to this.”

  Anne laughs in a dry, sorrowful way. “I suppose not. Anyway, part of the deal is that you leave. Our lawyers will work out the details. I expect you not to quibble.”

  “Anne. What are you saying? . . . I love you, Anne. No matter what you think, I do.” He confronts her. “Don’t you love me?”

  “I do, Robert. Probably I always will. But I cannot live with you.” Her face is cold and sad. “You have to leave.”

  “Anne, this isn’t . . .”

  “Think what you did, Robert. . . .”

  Robert thinks his head will vibrate into pieces. “Please, Anne. I need you. I’m just so sorry. . . . I need a second chance.”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention at all? I just gave you one.”

  Robert settles down on the nearest chair. Head in his hands. He thinks he’ll cry. Then he realizes there’s nothing left.

  Anne realizes she feels sorry for him. She almost reaches out to touch his hair but stops herself. She thought she was going to be enraged, screaming at Robert, insulting him. Now she actually feels sorry for him. What a thing. And that woman in the ambulance. Yes, sorry for her, too.

  But, Anne thinks, not so sorry I’d take it all back. I’m supposed to be dead now, I should be happy. I wish I felt something. And here I am, a little sorry, nothing else. Sorry for Robert and me and that woman.

  “Please, Anne, think about it,” Robert suddenly says.

  Anne sighs. “I can’t imagine not thinking about it.”

  He looks away from her intent face, toward the rug where Kathy was lying under the sheet. “You actually killed her?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yes!”

  Robert stares at her again. There’s something stern in her face. He doesn’t remember seeing this before.

  “How could you do it?”

  “The truth? I guess I didn’t like the idea of being pushed around.”

  His eyes widen. “I didn’t mean . . . why. Oh, God, pushed around? . . . I mean how.”

  Anne shrugs. “My lucky day, I guess.”

  Robert cannot bear the blank look in her face, the flat tone of her voice. “And you want me to leave?”

  “Yes.”

  Something cold and implacable. My sweet wife Anne. . . .

  “Anne, please. . . . Lucky day? No, it’s horrible. It’s not real. It’s too much to deal with. Alright, I’ll go. And we’ll talk . . . again.”

  “I’m sure we will. Well, Robert, I have to go now. I’m being booked, I think it is. This will be in the papers, you know. . . . You might want to think about that when you talk to your lawyer.”

  “Meaning . . . what?”

  “Making sure your story sounds right, Robert. You know how they bore away at these things.”

  Robert just stares at her. In the papers? She means us, me. . . . Robert sees his name in a headline . . . their photos . . . Kathy’s pretty face. He lurches to his feet. “How, Anne? How in God’s name? . . . You actually killed her?”

  Anne walks to the foyer to get her coat.

  Chapter

  39

  • Stan touches his fingers, stares across his desk at Anne. His face twitching now and then. “Are you really sure you want me to handle this? I mean, I just don’t know. . . .”

  Anne smiles faintly, sitting back in the big stuffed chair. It amuses her that Stan’s so nervous. “I’ve told you once, Stan. That should be sufficient. I thought you liked this kind of case.”

  “What kind?”

  “Somebody breaks in somebody’s house.”

  “I believe you let her in.”

  “Of course. Well, then. Somebody comes into somebody else’s house in order to commit a crime. Or you only like to represent the bad guy?”

  Stan fidgets some more. “No, not at all. It’s just that . . .”

  “Stan, really, what is the problem? You think I’m the bad guy?”

  “Anne . . . this is a very serious matter. What do you find so amusing about it?”

  Anne figures it’s really because of Stan and the other lawyers, telling those stories in the cafeteria, that Kathy’s dead now. It’s his baby. And she thinks he should have it to the end.

  “I don’t think I can tell you that. I’m sorry, Stan. I’ll try to be more serious. So what’s the gossip around here?” She pauses before asking: “Will I . . . do time?”

  “Now, there,” Stan snaps at her. “Don’t talk like that. It doesn’t sound as if you care.”

  “I’m all out of caring about very much, Stan.” She shrugs, sitting there in her dark suit, her hair combed back more than it used to be, looking quite sophisticated. “Anyway, I want you on the case. I want you to do a first-rate job. The police have a statement on tape and another on video. I cooperated fully. Contact Gillson and get copies.”

  “You didn’t have a lawyer present,” Stan says. “That testimony could all be challenged.”

  “No, we won’t be doing any challenging around here. But I’ll say this. The whole thing was fast, violent, and terrifying. I can’t vouch for the exact sequence of events. I expect your only job will be to keep them from building a case based on small discrepancies. I was home, as you know, because I was sick.”

  Stan keeps staring at her, a nervous disbelief on his face. He thought she didn’t like him. He also thought she was much more high strung than she seems to be now—after something that should make anyone high strung. He certainly never imagined she could kill anyone. The whole thing feels odd. There might be layers he doesn’t know about. He’s heard, oh, about six theories already on what really happened.

  “What is it, Stan? Office gossip getting to you? Afraid of getting your name in the papers?”

  “None of that bothers you?”

  Curious, she thinks. No, it doesn’t. I don’t seem to care so much what other people think. Now I understand Edd better. People assume he’s boring or there’s not much to him. He simply doesn’t care enough to try to impress anyone.

  “Oh,” she says. “I was thinking about your question. No
, not that much, Stan. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can be part of the gossip. You’re on my side now.”

  “Very well, Anne, if you’re sure you want me to represent you.”

  “Very sure, Stan. It just feels right.”

  Stan shakes his head, not at all comfortable with anything mystical, psychic, or astrological. He’s starting to suspect that Anne is operating in there somewhere.

  Anne stands to leave. “Call me when you need me, Stan.”

  Stan stands, too, and reaches over to shake her hand. “Very well, Anne.”

  “By the way, Stan. I passed Estelle in the hall. I happened to mention a certain promotion I might be willing to litigate over. Of course, I’d want you to handle that.”

  “Anne! Sue my own firm?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that. . . . I sense she’s looking at me in a new way now.”

  Stan sits down, his face aghast.

  Anne winks at him, and then walks into the hall and back toward the elevator to return to her floor. People look up when she passes. There she goes, a bona fide killer. Is that the saddest thing in the world, Anne wonders, or the funniest? She can’t decide.

  She stops by Edd’s office, sits on the corner of his desk. “Well, Edd, how’s tricks?”

  He leans back, smiling at her. “You’re handling all this very well.”

  “The worst is over. I think anyway. Well, Edd, does this mean I should learn to play bridge?”

  “Absolutely not. Bridge ruins a lot of marriages, you know. When you say this . . . ?”

  “Oh, you remember. You said if you could ever be of help.”

  “Just name it.”

  “We’ll have dinner, I suppose.”

  They stare at each other for a long time in silence. Anne thinking about that little favor he did for her, getting that case dropped. Very touching, she always thought that. But she couldn’t let herself be touched then. Now she can.

  Chapter

  40

  • Tuesday, after a three-drink lunch, Robert goes out to Newark for the funeral. He wears dark glasses, the ones Kathy gave him, and tries not to look at anyone. He keeps his head down, hoping he’ll be lost in the crowd. More than two hundred people show up; only a few knew her, the rest read her story in the papers and want to see the end of it. Robert is sweaty and nervous. He can’t glance at the coffin without seeing Kathy naked, crawling over the bed toward him, her breasts swinging, grinning at him in that way of hers, doing something he never thought of before. That or he starts blaming himself again, knowing he put her in the ground.

  He can finally think it. Yes, I did it. I killed her. . . .

  But two people come up and say almost the same thing, “We understand, man, it wasn’t really your fault. She went too far.”

  They look at him as if he’s a hero for having this flashy girlfriend. How could he know she’d get nuts and go running up to Westchester to kill his wife? The crazy broad. Show some class.

  He’s afraid to acknowledge this attitude or say anything for fear it’ll vanish. He just nods grimly.

  The same slant is in a lot of the coverage. He thought everyone would be against him. It’s only four days since it happened, but people are mostly sympathetic. Some of the ones at work sort of joking with him: Now we know why you were so crazy. . . . Hardly anyone thinks he’s part of it, because then there would have been two against the wife, and she wouldn’t have made it. But the crazy girlfriend, by herself, hell, she’s bound to make a mess of it.

  At the end of the service a woman comes up to him. “We have a lot in common,” she says.

  “Really? What?”

  “She was my best friend. Yours, too, I gather. My name’s Louise.”

  “Your best friend? She never said much about her friends.”

  “Yeahhhh,” Louise says. “She was ready to move on.” The woman looks at him with a crooked grin. Squaring her shoulders some, making him notice her build. He looks at it, then shakes his head. Jesus, Robert thinks, it’s weird. Like we’re supposed to jump on the ground and screw in memory of Kathy.

  “Listen,” Robert says nervously, “that guy there with the police? At least I think they’re police.” Robert points to the edge of the crowd, a tough-looking black-haired man standing between two men in gray suits. “He keeps looking at me. You know him?”

  Louise snickers. “That’d be Keith.”

  “Keith?”

  “Her ex, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Didn’t mention Keith either, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t. Not by name.”

  “She was ready to move on, like I said. You were her ticket. Seriously.” She leans closer, grinning, letting him smell her perfume, maybe look down between her breasts. “How’d you make such a mess of it?”

  Robert stares at her with a horror he can’t conceal. He can’t get out a word, finally turns and jogs away from her. Louise looks after him with a certain disgust on her face.

  Chapter

  41

  • Robert’s lawyer goes out of the room to find some papers. Anne and Robert are in big leather chairs a few feet apart. Robert whispers loudly at her, “Anne, don’t you see, it was all a mirage. It wasn’t real. None of it. I love you. Please. We shouldn’t be divorced. What if we just had a trial separation?”

  “No. I can’t live with you.”

  He hates the cool way she’s watching him. “It was like a disease. A fever.” Robert leans closer to her, his face animated and intense. “The fever’s over now. I’m myself again.”

  Anne ignores what he said. “You know, Robert, you shouldn’t have started the affair. But you did. So you had to be able to finish it. Seems to me—and I’m putting this the way I think she would—you screwed up coming and going. Have I got this right?”

  Robert stares at her in shock. She’s so cold. “That’s looking back at it,” he insists. “I’m telling you the whole thing was like a hallucination.”

  “So which are you most sorry about?” Anne says. “I think I can handle this now.”

  “What?”

  “That you started or that you couldn’t finish? Which do you regret the most? Tell me!”

  “Anne, stop this. That’s all hindsight. It was madness, pure and simple.”

  “Robert—tell me what you’re most sorry about. You started the whole thing? Or you couldn’t finish it off?” She smiles at him and whispers, “Finish me off, that is.”

  I can’t believe this, Robert thinks. We’re married all these years and now she’s looking at me with this supercilious expression. I’ve created a monster. Doesn’t she understand? I’ve lost the most here . . . the two best women I’ve had in my life.

  “Anne, what’s happened to you?”

  “I survived. What’s happened to you, Robert?”

  Look, he thinks, she’s toying with me. This is horrible. “Anne, please . . . can’t you forgive me?”

  “No, Robert. I cannot. . . . Don’t feel too bad, I’m not sure I can forgive me either.”

  “Why, Anne? Why?! Why’s it have to be . . . like this?”

  He’s very near her now. She stares quietly into his frantic eyes, studies the big face. Maybe for the last time, she thinks. Look, Robert, it’s like this. I defended myself and my home—well, that’s part of what happened.

  She frowns for an instant, thinking through to the end of it. And I guess I defended myself from the thought, every day for the rest of my life, that you’d be making love to another woman. . . . One you loved more than me. . . .

  He blinks before her calm gaze. “I couldn’t help myself, Anne. Don’t you understand that? I was powerless. I’m only human.”

  Robert springs from the chair and paces the side of the room. Looking back at her with imploring grimaces. She watches his big, restless figure.

  “Make some allowance,” he tells her.

  That was the oddest part, she thinks. All the time he was with that other woman, preparing to kill
me, really, the marriage was very good. Sex was getting better all the time. It’s so weird.

  Robert points at her. “I don’t accept this, Anne. One mistake? That’s all I ever made.” He’s shouting now. “Do I have to pay for it forever?”

  “I guess we all do.”

  “I want you to be my wife. We belong together.”

  Anne wonders if she could want Robert back. Is she taking some sick pleasure in rejecting him? Maybe. Probably. How could anyone be sure? It’s not just that she can’t forgive him or can’t understand him; maybe she could do both. But there’s the feeling that she has grown in some other direction, where he can’t follow her. And she wants to make this definite.

  “Tell me this, Robert.”

  “What? What! Anything!”

  “How was the sex?”

  “What?!”

  “The sex, Robert—with Kathy?”

  “Anne! Don’t talk like that—”

  Robert’s lawyer comes back, almost running into the room. “Hey, hold it down. People are listening to—”

  “Anne! . . . God, please stop that. What a terrible thing to say.”

  The lawyer holds Robert’s elbow. “Come on, take it easy. These things are always rough.”

  “Anne, please . . . forgive me.” He’s trying to push past the lawyer.

  She stares across the room, hardly hearing him now.

  • BRUCE DEITRICK PRICE grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and decided at age seventeen to become a novelist. He graduated from Princeton, served two years in the army, and then settled in New York to pursue a career as a writer. He published a nonfiction book about explorers, and then his first novel, Ralph. He worked at a variety of part-time jobs before he started his own business, Word-Wise Advertising, which designs brochures and logos. His second novel, American Dreams, was published in 1984. In addition to fiction, he writes poetry and essays on language and eduction. He is also a painter who has had several shows.

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