by David Ellis
I break free. He grabs for my ankle, but I make it to the bar, reaching over the bottles.
“What—” Dr. Reinardt freezes, his arms slowly rising in surrender. “Wait—listen—”
“Shut up!” Saliva flies from my mouth. The gun is out in front of me, my arm trembling. “Move out of the way, Rachel.” The mention of her name settles me.
She complies, moving from behind her husband toward me. Her husband watches all of this, alternating between terror and confusion. His eyes return to me. “I—know you,” he says.
“You’re not gonna hurt her again.” I raise the gun higher, at the face of Rachel’s husband.
Rachel holds her breath.
Sobs now, audible crying from Dr. Reinardt. His pants colored with urine; his knees buckle. “Don’t,” he pleads. “God, don’t.”
I blink furiously, my body in a tremble. Rachel stands to the side, watching me; her husband barely stands at all, nearly falling to his knees, showing his palms in pathetic surrender.
I steel myself. “It’s over now.” I’ve visualized this moment time and time again, but never quite like this. Dr. Reinardt, soiled and quivering, the shattered door as a backdrop, the cold air whistling into the warm den, my beautiful Rachel to the side, her blouse torn, watching me, waiting for me to save her.
It crashes over me, an avalanche of images. Rachel, lying flat on her bed, writhing in pain as her husband whips her with his belt. Rachel silently screaming as the doctor raises his hand to her. Our life together, a quiet place in the country far from here, Rachel doing her charity work, I’m working out of my home, maybe some consulting. Then I see my nephew, Tommy, in his late teens, developing into a young man, his jaw squaring, his voice dropping to an alto, his hair cut short—visiting me in prison.
I let out a nervous sigh. It will be okay now. I know it with a certainty that has no basis in reason. I have no plan, no guarantee of a life with Rachel. What I do know is that Dr. Reinardt will never again lay a hand on my one and only love. And that is enough.
The gun is at my side now, brushing my thigh. I offer no resistance to Rachel’s hands. She places one on my wrist; with the other she takes the gun away from me and steps aside. I pause a moment, staring at my empty hand as the adrenaline decelerates.
Dr. Reinardt exhales with relief. “Thank God,” he mumbles. “Thank God.”
I look up, not at Rachel, but at the man barely standing across the room. I begin to speak, a warning to the doctor, but my voice is drowned out by the explosion. In my peripheral vision, I see a flash of light from Rachel’s extended arm.
The first bullet hits square in the doctor’s breastbone. He stumbles backward a step, frozen for a beat, before he looks down as if he’s spilled coffee on his tie. The second bullet comes before he can look up; the hole is not discernible from the first, the shots nearly identical in their location.
The blood spreads across his white oxford like a spilled drink on linoleum. Dr. Reinardt limps forward two, three steps, his legs heavy, his hands at the wound, before he falls backward to the carpet.
Rachel turns the gun on herself.
“No!” I cry. I lunge toward her. She wrestles away from me and puts the gun to her temple. Her face contorts with tears.
“Let me do it,” she pleads. “My life is over. I’m going to jail.”
I grab her arm that holds the revolver. Rachel doesn’t resist; she lets me take the gun from her hand before she collapses to the floor. I drop to my knees. “No one’s going to jail,” I say. “He was going to kill you, Rachel.”
“Oh, think about it, Marty!” she cries. She sits up, waving her hand around the room. “Think how this looks!”
I stand and pace, the gun still in my hand. I walk over to the doctor, tiptoeing around his body. I lower myself so that we are face-to-face. The doctor stares vacantly at the ceiling with frozen eyes.
“Give me back the gun,” she says. “Let me end this. You can still have a life.”
I stand. “An intruder broke in,” I say, unzipping my coat. “You couldn’t see who it was.” I point at the splintered glass door. “An intruder. You got that?”
“What—what are you going to do?”
I have already rolled the doctor over, fitting a sleeve of my jacket through one of the doctor’s limp arms. I work quickly to wrap the doctor in the coat. I stuff the gun in my pants and approach Rachel. I squat beside her, cup her face with my hand. “I don’t have a life without you,” I say.
I walk to the glass door, unlock it and slide it open, shards of glass falling with the movement. I return to Rachel’s dead husband, lifting him, propping him up until I get a shoulder under his heavy frame.
“An intruder,” I repeat. “You didn’t see him.” With the doctor over my shoulder, I turn awkwardly, taking tiny steps, until I face the openness of the backyard. Then I break into a slow sprint.
81
JERRY LAZARUS RUNS A HAND THROUGH HIS CURLY hair. He exhales slowly, taking in everything he’s just heard.
“Bet you didn’t figure it that way,” I offer.
He cocks his head. “You’re right about that.”
“You thought I did it.”
Jerry fixes on me. “I thought you had good reason to do it.”
“Saving the abused wife.”
“Well.” Jerry followed the trial, of course. He knows we disputed the abuse. “I guess I didn’t know what to think.”
“Join the club.”
“So he got what was coming to him.”
“Oh, Jerry. The whole thing was set up.”
Laz sits forward, his elbows on his knees. “Explain that.”
“Rachel wants her husband dead.”
“Why’s that? Because of the abuse?”
I let my eyes wander to the hardwood floor. “Because she wanted to be with Rudy.”
Jerry nods solemnly. He can see the tension here. “She can’t just leave him?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “Maybe she was afraid of being left with nothing. I don’t know, maybe she really hated the guy—I mean, he seemed like a class-A jerk to me.”
“Maybe he did abuse her.”
“Nah.” I purse my lips.
“How can you know that?”
“Well, Rachel did show me some scars on her back once.”
Jerry’s face falls. I have conceded something now, something he long suspected but never confirmed.
“But it struck me, even then,” I say.
I brought a trembling hand to her back but didn’t make contact. Three, four, five lacerations, long spindly scars forming a gruesome road map down the center of her back. I remembered then her wincing while we had made love earlier, as I sank my fingers into her back.
Guilt was the first thing that I felt. How had I not noticed these before? How long had this gone on, and I hadn’t noticed?
“We had been together many times,” I say. “And until that time she showed them to me, I had never felt anything like that on her back. If you believe her testimony at trial—and the stories she was telling some of her girlfriends at the foundation, not to mention her shrink—she received weekly beatings on her back, yet I never noticed a thing.”
“So—what are you saying?”
“It was her and Rudy, part of the plan. He put those scars on her back the night before she showed them to me.”
Jerry perks up. “That’s a big leap.”
“It’s no leap at all. Got it from the horse’s mouth.”
“Rachel?”
“Rudy,” I say. “He and I had a little chat.”
“You talked to Rudy?”
“Well, through his attorney. Before his trial, after mine. He needed me. I traded for some information.” I blink and avoid Jerry’s eye contact. The details of my deal with Rudy need not be shared with him. “So,” I continue, “she loaded up on painkillers, he took a belt to her. All to show me the next day.”
Jerry nods slowly. “She wanted you mad enough to kill him.”
“And I was.”
“Wait a minute.” Jerry rises from the couch, wandering over to the mantel by my fireplace. “Dr. Reinardt was abusing her. You witnessed it yourself, that night.”
“Wrong.”
“Then what did you witness?”
My face colors, I can feel it. “Rachel had a thing—she liked being overpowered, I guess. She liked to pretend that she was being sexually assaulted.”
“Rudy told you that, too?”
“Well.” I smile sheepishly. “Rudy confirmed it. I already knew it. Not from personal experience, that was never my thing. But let’s say I have indisputable proof.”
Jerry’s eyes circle. Again, details I will not share. “So what you witnessed, the doctor throwing her down, tearing at her blouse—”
“—was foreplay.”
“Jesus Christ.”
My friend paces the room now, a hand to his mouth, working all the angles. He stops a moment. A finger rises from his cupped hand. “If she staged this whole thing, she had to be pretty sure you’d show up.”
“True.”
“How’d she know that?”
“Well, let’s say it was not unusual for me to appear in her backyard on Thursday nights.”
“Her backyard?”
“She knew I’d be there,” I say. “Let’s leave it at that.”
“Okay.” Jerry holds on that one, eyebrows raised. He won’t inquire, but it sure seems odd to him. He snaps back to attention. “But here’s where it breaks down, I think. She not only had to know you would be there, she also had to know for sure that you’d rescue her—that you’d break through the glass door. I mean, this whole scheme rests on knowing that you would do something incredibly brave, incredibly stupid, really. Was she that sure of what you would do?”
“She didn’t have to be sure.”
“Explain that.”
“Don’t get me wrong—she wanted me to come in. She wanted me to kill him. That was always Plan A.”
Jerry begins to pace again. To some extent he is enjoying the mental game, a lawyer’s game. “Tell me about Plan B.”
“If I didn’t come in.”
“Right, if you didn’t come in.”
“Then she kills the doctor herself. Self-defense.” I reach under the coffee table and remove the piece of paper, the transcript of Rachel’s 911 call to the police. “Read this.”
Jerry comes over and takes the paper. “Right. Okay?”
“Read it again.”
OPERATOR: 911.
CALLER: Please . . . please . . . come quick . . . he’s going to hurt me.
OPERATOR: Ma’am, where are you?
CALLER: He’s going to hurt me.
OPERATOR: Who is going to hurt you? Ma’am, where are you?
CALLER: Please . . . my husband . . . please . . . oh God.
(END OF RECORDING)
“Who’s going to hurt you?” I ask.
Jerry’s eyes slowly rise from the paper. “My husband,” he says.
“Rachel was a smart one, I’ll give her that. That dialogue is vague enough to mean either someone is going to hurt her and her husband, or her husband is going to hurt her.” I raise my hands. “She had both contingencies covered. She could explain it away later, either way.”
Jerry shakes his head. “But she made this call after you left. Why the need for mystery?”
I shake my head, too. “She made the call beforehand.”
I jumped at the sight of her, my one and only, my beautiful Rachel. She must have been in the living room, not upstairs. Or did I miss her coming down the stairs?
The first siren had come much earlier than I expected.
How had they gotten here so fast?
“Remember the testimony of the responding police officer,” I say. “The 911 call came at nine-thirty-eight. He got to the house at nine-forty-nine.” I wag a finger. “And I remember very specifically the timing.”
Still nothing upstairs. Nine-thirty-seven. My anxieties getting the better of me, images running wild in my mind, but the truth is, no one’s home.
I jumped at the sight of her, my one and only, my beautiful Rachel.
“By my watch, nine-thirty-eight is almost exactly when I first saw Rachel. And what happened after I saw her—their little sex game, my grand entrance, the whole thing—took probably a little under ten minutes.” I sit back in the chair. “I heard the sirens when I was in the woods.” I exhale. “She made the call before the doctor was downstairs.”
“Wow.” My best friend stuffs his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “And that’s why she told people about the abuse. The psychiatrist, her friends—”
“Right. If she has to do it herself, then she has a dozen people, including a shrink, testifying that she was a battered spouse. And the story she was telling me—the abuse was escalating, the doctor was talking about killing her—I’ll bet you green money she told the same thing to everyone else. Then she’s got the 911 call, too. ‘I tried to call the police, they were too late, I thought he was going to kill me, I couldn’t wait any longer.’ She would’ve walked away scot-free.”
“Holy shit.”
“But, Jerry—she knew I’d come in.” I shake my head, partly in admiration for her skill. “She worked me for weeks about the abuse. ‘It’s getting worse, he’s talking about killing me.’ She told me that the doctor had even shared with her how he was going to kill her. He was going to rape her first, then kill her.”
Jerry returns to the couch. “So you thought you were witnessing the final act.”
“Right on.”
Jerry’s hand grabs my kneecap. “She played you good, my friend.”
I give a faint smile. “You have no idea how well she played me. I mean, sure, I remove the body and hope everything will go away. But then I discover she’s having this affair with Rudy. And what do I do? Do I lash out? No. I rationalize the whole thing. She was abused and scared. People in those situations do all sorts of things that aren’t in their character. They say some rape victims become promiscuous, hate themselves. I don’t know. So I cut her a break. Then she cuts the deal for immunity, and still I give her the benefit of the doubt. Christ, she implicates me at trial—she I.D.’s me in open court as the guy who came through the door!—and still I rationalize it. I figured they made her say it.”
“I guess love is blind, deaf, and dumb.”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe that was it. You know what it really was—” I hold the thought a moment, shaking my head.
“If it’s the Marty Kalish I know,” says Laz, “then I know what it was. You blamed yourself.”
I hiccup a laugh. “I did,” I say. “I felt guilty about the whole thing. I felt like it was my fault. The way I saw it, I escalated the whole thing. Not only did I break in, I went and got the gun and held it out. Sure, she brought it down for protection, but it’s a whole other thing to actually use it. I could’ve just broken in and confronted the doctor, maybe even knock him around a little. I didn’t have to get the gun. The way I saw it, I practically handed this battered woman a loaded weapon. So even when it looked like Rachel was something less than the person I thought she was—you know, Rudy and the whole thing—I kept coming back to the fact that if it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”
Jerry considers this. “You’re a better man than I,” he says. “So what finally changed your mind?”
“Well, the damn restraining order bullshit.” My hands are on my face, rubbing my forehead. “I mean, she went to that attorney two weeks before the doctor’s death. We were going along great—we had never been closer. There were no threats, no stalking. There was no fucking reason to prepare a court order against me, for chrissake, unless she wanted to show it to someone later. Like after I murdered her husband.” I hurl a pillow across the room, then deflate in embarrassment. Maybe I haven’t put this completely behind me. “After she testified about the restraining order, I revisited everything. The fact that I had never noticed t
he scars before she showed them to me. The timing of her 911 call, the fact that the cops were there when I was barely out the door.”
“Right, right.”
“She wanted me to get caught, right there in her house. She wanted the cops to find me in there, smoking gun in my hand, standing over a dead cardiologist. And her tune would have changed the moment they showed up. ‘Marty’s been stalking me. He’s been threatening me. Wanna see my restraining order?’ Oh, it would have been precious.”
“And if you don’t come in,” says Jerry, “she does it herself and has a great story to sell. Right, right.”
I feel the blood rushing to my face now. Jerry does, too, and feels the need to move me off the self-pity. “Answer me this,” he says. “How’d you figure out Rudy and Rachel were carrying on?”
The change of subject brings some relief. “Oh, that was actually pretty easy. Rudy may be handsome, but he’s not so smart.” I hold out my hand. “I’m getting these calls, right? These anonymous calls, telling me he saw me, I should turn myself in.”
“Yeah.” Laz already knows this much, from Rudy’s trial.
“So I’m wigging out, right? I’m combing through neighborhood directories, racking my memory, trying to figure who could have seen me carrying the doctor out, and who would have recognized me.”
“Right.”
“So then I’m arrested. The papers say I confessed. I don’t hear from the caller. But I need to know. So remember when I called the newspaper and told them I’m innocent?”
Jerry laughs. “Yeah, Paul wasn’t too happy with you.”
I nod. “I was fishing him out, making him think maybe I’d had a change of heart. And it worked. He called me again. And for once in this whole damn mess, I wasn’t the puppet. I was the puppeteer.”
“Tell me.”
“He kept saying, ‘I saw you.’ I pushed him. What did you see? You didn’t see anything. I got him worked up a little. And then he blew it.”
“How?”
“He said, ‘I saw you kill him.’”
Jerry claps his hands together. “And that’s when you knew he was full of shit.”
“Right. Because a real eyewitness would have seen different.”