by Unknown
“I can’t believe how much money you’ve spent over the years on books that were considered trash back when they came out in the thirties!” she’d said once.
He said quietly, “The fifties, most of them. The fifties.”
“Whatever.”
Eric once had tried to read her one of his favorite pulp novels, The Grifters by Jim Thompson, but she wouldn’t have it.
“I don’t want to hear that trashy crap,” she said. “It’s hateful and sexist. I’ve seen those awful covers. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
He tried to explain to her how boring his life was at work. He was an accountant for Macy’s at the mall. It was a deadly dull job. As he worked, he looked forward to going home and losing himself in an exciting novel about ruthless crooks, sleazy private eyes, seductive femmes fatales, crooked cops, nervy psychos. The books were vividly-written pieces of escape fiction, that was all.
But of course, she only used it to insult him, saying that of course his favorite “escape” would be to a sexist world of the past when women were nothing but sex objects.
They had been married for fourteen years. Eric was thirty-six years old, Alma thirty-four. It had been such a wonderful marriage at first. She had been such a loving woman, so affectionate. She’d wanted so much to be a mother, and he knew she would be a great one. They’d tried those first two years. They’d tried hard. The doctor said it was his fault. He was sadly lacking in those little swimmers so necessary to the baby-making process. He was treated for it, and they kept trying, but with no result. So they gave that up and went straight to adoption. The wait for a baby was endless. But if they were willing to take an older child, it might be possible to match them up with one very quickly.
They brought Andrew home when he was four years old. He was an adorable child, angelic—wisps of golden hair all around his head, enormous bright blue eyes that absorbed everything, and that amazingly complex smirk that came shortly before a big smile. Eric found him mesmerizing.
Back then, Alma used to tease Eric about not being able to do anything without her. He would wash the dishes for her, then put the dishes away—in all the wrong places. She would come in and have to do it all over again, putting them where they belonged. She’d poke him in the ribs and say, “What would you do without me, huh?” And he would laugh, then embrace her and kiss her. It didn’t bother him because it was so clearly done with love and affection. There was no meanness, no bitterness. No contempt.
When Andrew was six, Alma left him with Eric for one hot summer weekend while she went to see Pam, her best friend from school days. Pam lived in Eureka—sometimes Alma went to see her, sometimes she came to see Alma. They took turns. It was Alma’s turn to visit Pam. And of course, she joked before she left about him being helpless without her. And he laughed before giving her a big, long kiss.
That Saturday afternoon, Eric fired up the barbecue in the front yard and started grilling hamburgers and hot dogs. It wasn’t long before neighbors began to wander over, as he’d known they would. Somebody brought beer, somebody else brought chips. Before long, they had a party. Kids were playing on the lawn. Somebody brought over a boom box and turned on the oldies station.
The squeal of brakes seemed so out of place there, with all the laughter and chatter, and the good music, the sounds of playing children—the shrieking brakes did not belong there at all.
The sound cut through the gathering like a scalpel through flesh, and everyone fell silent, leaving the music the only sound in the yard.
Then the scream, some woman near the street.
Eric saw his adopted son under the front wheel of a silver Chrysler. Eric went insane then, just lost his mind and went completely crazy, screaming at the driver to back up, please back up, and when the driver did, Eric bent down over the boy who lay clearly broken and torn open on the bloody pavement. He screamed for help, pleaded with someone to call an ambulance. Someone assured him that an ambulance had been called, and kept assuring him, but it did no good, he did not hear the assurances. He heard nothing. His ears were ringing, and his head throbbed, as if there had been some kind of deafening explosion, even though there had not. The explosions had been inside Eric. They had begun when he first saw Andrew lying beneath that tire. They had not stopped yet. They kept going off inside him, in his chest, in his gut, deep inside his head.
Andrew was clearly dead. His eyes were open, and his face had been splashed with blood when it had exploded from his mouth. Eric picked Andrew up in his arms, and the boy’s head flopped lifelessly to one side.
Eric heard an awful sound, a high, wailing sound that quavered as it dragged on and on, and after awhile, he realized the sound was coming from him, because it only stopped when he had to breathe.
When Alma came home, she would not speak to him at first. He had no idea why, and it made him furious. He shouted at her, but that did not work. She remained silent, clearly suffering by the look of pain on her face. He wanted to suffer with her, together. But she would not let him.
Then she blew. As dusk was passing and the windows looking outdoors became completely dark. He was following her down the hall to the bedroom, trying to talk to her, and suddenly, she spun around with a look of such wide-open hatred on her face that Eric stumbled backward as if he’d been struck.
“Are you really so helpless?” she cried. As she spoke, her voice grew louder and louder, until she was screaming. “I couldn’t leave you with him for a weekend? One lousy weekend? You’re so helpless that you couldn’t even keep our son alive for a weekend? You’re useless!” Then she’d gone into the bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it against him.
Things had never been the same since then. Alma had never been the same. She hated him, and she made no attempt to hide her feelings. He suggested divorce, but she said she’d never divorce him, that they were going to be together forever, just like they had vowed at the altar. Alma was a devout Catholic and had been all her life. There had never been a divorce in her family—and Eric had never seen a more miserable, unhappy group of people because of it. Of course, he did not need her permission to get a divorce, but he put it off. He kept putting it off, and time passed.
Alma’s father had opened a donut shop when she was a little girl, and by the time she was in high school, he’d turned it into a chain from Eureka to Sacramento, a very popular chain because Alma’s father poured on the icing, double what other donut-makers used. By the time she graduated from college, he’d sold the chain to a big conglomerate for an enormous sum of money, which was to be split between Alma and her sister Marianne once their parents were gone. By the time Alma’s family got rich, she and Eric were engaged. They’d fallen in love long before all the big money came in, so they all knew he was not after her money.
Not then.
But things changed.
He met Jill.
They’d agreed to meet at a Denny’s in Hope Valley. It was a safe, public place. Eric felt like he already knew Jill—they had exchanged pictures of each other online. He already knew she was an ivory-skinned, raven-haired beauty. Her hair was shiny-black and fell straight down her back, so thick that as soon as he saw it in the picture, he wanted to touch it.
They met in front of Denny’s, out by all the newspaper vending machines, and he touched her hair. She reached up and touched his face. Next thing he knew, they were kissing, and their hands were moving all over their bodies, their tongues going wild inside each other’s mouths.
There was a Best Western Inn right next to Denny’s, and that was where they went before even entering the restaurant.
It had been a long time since Eric and Alma had had sex. And the last few times, so long ago, had been very uncomfortable. She’d been so stiff, lying there like a corpse with her arms down at her sides, her face all screwed up, as if she were determined not to enjoy it, or even participate in it.
Alma’s parents had died in the first decade of their marriage, first her father of a brain embolism, then her
mother of breast cancer. All that money was Alma’s and Marianne’s after that. They did not change the way they lived. Alma refused to spend it. She did not want to lay a finger on any of it. So they didn’t.
For a while, it was all Eric thought about, that money. He dreamed about it at night when he slept, and he daydreamed about it during his work at Macy’s. All that money, more than any one person could spend in a lifetime, no doubt. An obscene amount of money. All locked up because she didn’t want to touch it. But it was hers to do with as she saw fit. And the only thing that would change that, of course, would be Alma’s death.
After that first time in the Best Western, Eric and Jill lay with arms and legs intertwined, their naked bodies shimmering with sweat as they panted like worn-out dogs, the sheet and blanket and spread all humped up at the foot of the bed. They kissed as they panted and ran their hands through each other’s hair, and he bent forward and buried his face between her voluptuous, upturned breasts and laughed like a little boy getting away with something. Her skin was like satin, her lips tasted vaguely of strawberries. She made things unravel inside him that hadn’t unraveled for a long, long time. She made him feel like himself again, the way he used to feel back when he had friends and he and Alma would go to the pub two or three times a week. Jill brought him back to life, and she did it in one coupling, one exchange of energy. She had reinvigorated Eric.
Finally, they both fell still, propped up on elbows facing one another, and stared into each other’s eyes, faces just an inch or so apart.
“You’ve changed me,” he said, breathing the words. “From just this one time, you’ve changed me already. I haven’t felt this good in years, Jill.” She bowed her head a moment, sniffled, then lifted her head again. The light caught one of the moist trails down her cheek. When Eric saw her tears, his eyes widened and he said, “What’s wrong? I’m sorry, what did I—”
“You didn’t do anything,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I mean, you didn’t do anything wrong. You definitely did something. I’m not sure what yet, but… something.”
“How… how are we going to handle this?”
“I’m not sure yet. I guess it’s really up to you. You’re the married one.”
“Yeah, I guess I am, huh?” He lightly dragged his fingertips down the edge of her body, from the side of her breast, down over her ribs, to the luscious curve of her hip, then down her thigh to her knee. “I’ll have to start lying to my wife, for one thing.”
“Is that going to bother you?”
“You have no idea how my wife treats me. It’s not going to bother me at all.”
“But we can’t keep that up very long.”
Eric’s eyebrows rose high over his eyes. “We can’t?”
“No, of course not. You’ll have to tell her the truth. And soon. So we can be together all the time.”
Eric ran his fingertips back up the edge of her body, but said nothing.
“Look, Eric, I don’t want to be involved in some long-term deception, okay?” Jill said. “Do you understand? Either the plan is to tell your wife at the right time, or there’s no plan at all. Because if you don’t tell her, Eric, I will.”
Now there would be an interesting scene, Eric thought.
Jill’s declaration worried him a little. He was not sure how he could tell Alma. And why would he tell Alma? It would most likely get between him and her money. But he had to tell Jill something for now, something to satisfy her, to get her off the subject.
He leaned over and brushed her hair back with his fingers and put his lips to her ear. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he breathed into her ear. “Don’t worry.”
Eric had managed to keep the relationship going without any big revelations to Alma for seven months, but Jill was getting impatient and even a little angry.
That was when Eric began to think about other solutions to his problem. No more waiting around.
The heater in the car made the cab too hot, and Eric turned it down. It started to rain, and he turned on the windshield wipers.
The whole thing passed through his mind now, how he got where he was at that moment. After Jill came along, he came to see Alma as a problem that needed to be solved. He’d thought long and hard about it.
Eric had a lawyer friend in Newbury, Max Randible, a shady kind of guy, a criminal defense attorney with questionable connections, who would bend over backward for Eric—they’d known each other since high school. They had lunch once a month. On his next lunch date with Max, at an Italian restaurant called Angelo’s, he’d said, “I’ve decided to try my hand at writing a novel.”
“You’re shitting me,” Max said as he ate spaghetti. He had floppy, shaggy dark hair and always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow. His face was jowly, with a nose that hung low over his thin-lipped mouth, like the face of a friendly dog. “A novel? You?”
“Yeah. You know how I love pulp fiction. Well, I’m going to write one of my own.”
Max laughed a hearty, encouraging laugh. “Hell, good for you, man, that’s fantastic! What’s Alma have to say about it?”
“She doesn’t know. She’d laugh. Look, I’ve got a question for my novel. I’ve got this guy who needs to get hold of a hit man. See, his wife has been murdered, and he thinks he knows who did it, and he wants revenge, but he knows he can’t do it himself, so he needs to hire someone to kill this guy. How does a regular guy go about doing something like that? My character, he’s a construction guy, you know, a contractor. How would a construction contractor find a hit man?”
As Eric spoke, the smile on Max’s face slowly disappeared. He stared at Eric for a long time, unsmiling, his head tilted slightly forward and to one side, locks of his shaggy hair falling on his creased, frowning forehead. “A hit man,” he finally said, flatly, with no expression.
Eric nodded. He was pulling all of this out of nowhere. He fought to keep up with it, tried not to trip himself up with anything too complex. “Yeah. You know, to kill this guy who killed his wife.”
Max slowly nodded his head. Then he reached into a pocket, produced a cell phone, and flipped it open. From his shirt pocket, he produced one of his business cards and a pen. He punched in a number, hunched forward, head low, and spoke in a very low tone. He wrote something on the card, then flipped his cell phone closed and put it back in his pocket. He wrote something else on the card, then put the pen back in his pocket. He picked up the card and handed it across the table to Eric.
On the back of the card was the name Judas, and below that, a telephone number.
“You did not get that from me,” Max said, leaning forward over the table. He scooped in a mouthful of spaghetti, sucked up the strings of pasta dangling from his mouth, and chewed for a while, then, with the food making his cheek bulge, he said, “If you ever said you did, I’d deny it up and down. And I’d never speak to you again. You say you need a…” He lowered his voice to a whisper for the words: “… hit man? Well, there he is. The rest is up to you, you’re on your own from now on. I don’t want to know anything” He continued to chew, then swallowed. He mopped up some spaghetti sauce with a slice of garlic bread, then took a bite.
“Look, Max,” Eric said, but Max did not let him continue.
“I’m not asking,” Max said, “because I don’t want to know, okay? I’m going to forget we had this little exchange, and we’ll just go on from there. Understood?”
“But Max—”
“You don’t have to explain, you don’t have to say a word.”
Eric wanted to continue the lie and insist that he really was writing a crime novel, that was all, but Max would not let him.
“I’m happy to be able to help, Eric,” he said. “You say you need that, well, I’m glad I could provide it, for whatever reason it is you need it. But like I said, we’ll forget all about it from this moment on. Okay?”
“Well… okay. If you insist.”
“I insist.”
Eric had called the number that very day, and
for the first time, he’d heard the raspy, damaged voice of the hit man who called himself Judas, because he thought the Lord’s betrayer was a pretty cool guy.
Eric got on the freeway and pressed the speed limit of seventy until he got to the first Hope Valley exit and he took the cutoff. He got to Sycamore Arms, her apartment complex, at 8:13.
He parked on the street and got out, hurried across the courtyard and up the stairs to the second level. He hurried along the outdoor walkway that passed all the apartment doors. He stopped at 209 and knocked hard, his knuckles crack-crack-cracking on the door. He heard no movement inside, no sound at all.
Eric took his keys from his pocket as his breath plumed before him, chose the right key, and slipped it into the doorknob of door number 209. He turned the key and pushed through into the apartment.
“Jill?” he called. He closed the door behind him and locked it again. “Jill, it’s me!”
Nothing. No response, no movement. The apartment was dead silent. The shower wasn’t running. The television and radio were off.
The apartment was empty.
He went down the short hallway, then turned left into the living room. A note was taped to the television screen. Frowning, he crossed the room, snatched the note off the screen, and read it.
Dearest Eric,
By the time you read this, I will probably be sitting down with Alma, telling her the truth about our relationship. It needs to be done, Eric. You know that as well as I do, and you’re not doing it. So I’m going to stop waiting and do it myself. This will finally bring everything to a head. Finally, you and I will be able to live in the open. I’m doing this for both of us, Eric.
I love you,
J.
Eric cried out, a sound of agonizing pain. He dropped the note to the floor and ran back through the apartment, looking for the phone, which was not on its base in the living room. He found it in the kitchen on the counter by the microwave. He picked it up and punched in his own phone number. He missed a number, severed the connection, then tried again, and missed the same number. He swore out loud as he tried a third time, and finally got it right.