Delusion

by Peter Abrahams

  “Looked like me how?”

  She flinched again, not as much this time, less fun for him. He began to decide he didn’t like her. Hey! How funny was that? Because of course he hated her guts. Correction: would have hated her guts, if he hadn’t come to peace with life.

  “It was the shape of the face,” Nell said. “And mostly the eyes.”

  “The eyes?” He turned his head so just the patch was visible from where she sat.

  Her voice fell, real quiet now. “They were pale blue,” she said. “Like yours.”

  “Like mine?” Pirate said. He raised the patch, gave her a real good look.

  Silence.

  And then came a voice, an angry, heavenly voice that spoke through him. “My power lives in this secret place.” The voice of God, no question. Pirate felt like a giant.

  He lowered the patch, turned so he could see her. She was crying—silent crying, but with tears rolling right down her face in two silvery tracks. He watched. For a few moments he felt pretty good, but then it wore off. He rose, got the Kahlúa bottle, topped her up, offered the glass.

  “Enough of that,” he said. “Drink up.”

  She took the drink, this time knocking back a real grown-up snout-ful. What else could he get her to do? But that was a nasty thought, not him at all. He clinked her glass again, again said, “Peace.”

  She nodded, found some tissue in her pocket, wiped her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, squaring her shoulders, pulling herself together. “This is unforgivable.”

  Sending an innocent man up to Central State for twenty years? Is that what she meant by unforgivable? Or something else? All at once Pirate was tempted by three magic words: I forgive you. Wow. The power of words; maybe they were wasted most of the time, but now this, a chance to wield them like…like God. The catbird seat! Pirate came close to saying the magic words, if for no other reason than to feel like God. Then, at the last second, he remembered from Job what God was really like, not the kind of guy for making nice right from the get-go, more the kind of guy for drawing things out. For example, if God knew about the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, would He be spilling the beans, tidying up everybody’s lives? No way. So Pirate kept the magic words to himself, just sat back and watched her get herself all groomed and composed, the way she’d been before this visit. She came pretty close, but still looked a little different. Would it be cool if she never got all the way back? This—thinking like God—was giving him a nice rush. He refilled his glass.

  “Funny about the hurricane,” he said.

  She sat with her hands in her lap, folded around the tissue. “What do you mean?”

  “You know.” Another God-like line: he was getting good.

  “The way it did so much damage but also helped you?” she said.

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself.” Although actually he could have: The great rain of his strength.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Pirate was surprised.

  She met his gaze. For a moment, he was sure that the waterworks were starting up again, but they did not. “The way something good managed to come out of the storm,” she said.

  “Something good?” he said. “Me getting out?”

  She nodded, and as she did, seemed to notice his feet. Pirate realized he was still in bare feet; he had really big ones. And he’d picked up a case of nail fungus, thick and yellow, like all the lifers. She squared her shoulders again.

  “Yes, you getting out. That was good. You’re innocent.”

  Was there just a trace of question mark at the end of that sentence? If so, he let it hang there. Did he need to prove anything to anybody? Four hundred and thirty-two grand did all the talking necessary.

  She rose, walked over to the window, looked out. It was nice watching her move. “What I’m trying to do now,” she said, “is figure out how it happened.”

  Pirate knew the answer to that, had it on good authority, straight from the mouth of that potbellied cop: frame job. But more fun to let her work it out for herself. Unless…unless she already knew, was in fact in on the frame job, a key player, and all this chitchat was part of some game. Pirate thought of the tiny weapon. “And?” he said. “What you got figured out so far?”

  “Not much.” She turned to him. “Were all of these people strangers to you before the murder?”

  “What people?”

  “The ones involved—Bobby Rice, Johnny Blanton, my husband.”

  “Which one doesn’t belong?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Murder victim’s on your list,” Pirate said. “Asking me if I knew him makes me wonder where you’re going with that.”

  “I’m just trying to see how the investigation went wrong.”

  “Like maybe they thought I had some grudge?” Pirate said. “A motive?”

  “Exactly.”

  Pirate took another drink. “Blind alley,” he said. “Complete strangers, all three of them. Next question?”

  “But you had a—you’d had legal problems before,” she said.

  “So?”

  “Maybe those legal problems brought you into contact with my…with the detectives.”

  “Nope,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah you. Any chance of you being acquainted with a detective or two, back in the day?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Motive works both ways.” He was cookin’, simply on fire. In case she’d missed anything, he hammered it home. “What goes around comes around.”

  “Are you suggesting it wasn’t a mistake?” she said, her voice rising in a way that grated on him. “That I did it deliberately?”

  “In cahoots,” said Pirate. In the beginning was the word, right? So God always had the right ones at the hand.

  “But I just told you,” she said, her eyes filling up again in a gratifying way. “There was nothing deliberate. I made a mistake, the worst mistake of my life. You’ve got to understand that.”

  Oh? He was on the receiving end of some order? Weren’t twenty years of that enough? When was it his turn to dish it out? All at once the expression on her face changed and she stepped back, as though frightened. Had some look shown on his face? He gave her a smile, a real big one, and said, “Mind excusin’ me for a second?”

  Pirate went through his bedroom, into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face; a face, as he saw in the mirror, not particularly scary, more like a kindly buccaneer. So her reaction pissed him off even more. And at that moment, pissed off even more, he remembered one of the most important bits of God’s wisdom in the whole Bible, maybe the king of them all: An eye for an eye.

  How perfect was that? His heart started pounding. He shook with the force of the idea, his image blurring in the mirror. Pirate lowered his head, drank from the tap, calmed himself. Then he returned to the sitting room, pausing by his bed for just a moment to retrieve the tiny weapon from under the mattress and drop it in his pocket.

  She was sitting on the sofa again, hands folded, composed—mine enemy. God had delivered her into his hands.

  “Hey,” he said, “how’s it goin’?”

  She blinked.

  “Hungry?” he said. “I’ve got Twizzlers.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Jujubes?”

  “I’m really not hungry.” She rose, approached him, stopped within arm’s reach. “I’ve realized something today,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Up until coming here, I didn’t want to find out who the killer was,” she said, “wanted to leave it all behind. Now I know we’ll never have peace that way.”

  “Who’s we?” said Pirate. “I’m at peace.”

  “You are?” she said, gazing up at him.

  “Hundred percent,” said Pirate, focusing on her right eye, a light brown eye with tiny gold flecks, almost like a gem. He felt some shaking coming on, went to the window.
Down below, the Indian woman with the tits was waiting at the bus stop again. All kinds of thoughts swirled through his head, fighting for attention. If she couldn’t pick up his heartbeat now, there was something wrong with her hearing.

  But maybe there was something wrong with his, because he didn’t hear her approaching from behind until it was too late. She laid a soft hand on his shoulder, just a touch, light and gone. Pirate jumped, spun around, reaching into his pocket. How had that happened? His hearing, since that long-ago run-in with Esteban Malvi, had been amazing, practically superhuman. Was he losing his edge, here on the outside?

  “Sorry,” she said, backing away. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But if you’re really at peace, I’m grateful, that’s all.”

  “You doubt my word?” he said, getting a grip on the tiny weapon.

  “No, no, not at all,” she said. “It would just be so…so rare for anyone to feel like that.”

  Rare? Interesting.

  “That’s all I have to say,” she said. “I won’t take any more of your time.”

  “Getting on back to hubby and kids?” he said, but not with total concentration, his mind still stuck on the rarity idea.

  “I don’t have any kids,” she said.

  “Say what?”

  She said it again.

  Wow. Things were not what they seemed. Of course she had a kid, his new pal, Norah. On one hand, there was justice, an eye for an eye. On the other hand was mystery. Did he care about getting to the bottom of things, about the truth? Kind of. Besides, justice had to be meted out in the right way, a way that let him hold on to freedom and the four three two. And then there was the example from above: drag things out, especially ordeals.

  “But you’ve got a husband.”

  “You know that.”

  “I surely do.” And then came yet one more great idea, out of the blue. “I’d like you to be at peace, too,” he said, trying to imitate that reverend’s wimpy voice, Proctor, or whatever the hell his name was.

  It worked. He could see it on her face: she was moved by his goodness, his turning the other cheek, or maybe not quite that, but something Jesus-like.

  “And I’m with you on one thing,” he said, setting it up so well: “You won’t be at peace until you get to the bottom of things.”

  She was watching, concentrating so hard he could almost feel her mind.

  “So maybe there’s something you should know.” He went to the window, glanced out, just to get the timing right. The Indian woman was gone.

  “What should I know?”

  She couldn’t hold back; he was getting good at the dragging-it-out thing. Pirate turned to her. “First, I better make sure of the facts,” he said. “Your husband was the white detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said, then took a deep breath, like a guy struggling with something. “Only saw him the one time, down in the cell. Just the two of us. He said, ‘Last chance to confess.’ ‘Why’d I want to do that?’ I said. He said, ‘Because this witness is going to sink you, my man.’ ’Course I didn’t confess, but on the way out he said one last thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “‘And when you’re locked up I hope she’ll be grateful. She’s one hot babe.’”

  Nell went white. It wasn’t just an expression. The power of words: and not just words but all this speechifying, out of nowhere, so real-sounding. Losing his edge? No way. He was smokin’.

  From his side window, Pirate watched her walking across the parking lot. Her tits didn’t stick out like the Indian woman’s, but they weren’t bad. He thought of another use for the tiny weapon, and got a little mixed up.

  CHAPTER 23

  Was it possible?

  Nell crossed the parking lot at the Ambassador Suites.

  She felt sick—hot and nauseated, as though coming down with something, a one-two punch. Punch number one: the brown-eyed vision at Dr. Pastore’s office, eyes of the murderer. Punch number two: I hope she’ll be grateful. Only hearsay, that long-ago wish, she reminded and reminded herself, and maybe not even hearsay, maybe simply an outright lie. But why would DuPree invent something like that? Was he even capable of it, clever enough? DuPree didn’t seem especially clever, was in fact a little plodding, moving from one cliché to another, if that wasn’t too harsh. Did that mean she should trust him? No. Despite her guilt—like a clamp around her heart—despite his suffering, Nell still recognized that there was something scary about him. The way he’d raised his eye patch—that was scary, and so were his feet. Where was the fairness in that? What could he do about his feet or his missing eye? But just as the image of those huge feet with the diseased nails rose in her mind, she stepped between the Ambassador Suites and its garage, and a hot breeze caught her full face, the first hot breeze of the year, and heavy with Bernardine stink. It combined with the already curdling Kahlúa inside her, and the next moment Nell was bent double, vomiting on the pavement. Her insides emptied out, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Nell straightened, hurried to her car, flung open the door. Breathless, out of air: she could have been back on the reef at Little Parrot Cay, trapped this time not under the collapsed coral shelf, but under a rubble of possibilities. Was it possible that Clay had killed Johnny? And more, was it possible that she herself was the motive? Had she ever seen Clay before the night of the murder? Had he seen her? Was her whole marriage a delusion? Nell stood in the parking lot, paralyzed. But how crazy, this motive, she told herself. She was no great beauty, no great anything, couldn’t be the object of an obsession with such destructive power, the power to sink a knife through flesh and bone. But much more important, she knew her own husb—

  “Mrs. Jarreau?”

  Nell swung around, saw a skinny uniformed cop coming toward her, a cup of coffee in his hand; his face was young, familiar. “Timmy?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looked worried, a single horizontal line appearing on his smooth forehead. “Everything all right?”

  Oh, God—had he witnessed her little episode? “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Just on my break,” he said, gesturing toward his cruiser, a few cars away. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, awkward. “We get breaks,” he said. “It’s a real good job, ma’am.” More rocking back and forth. “That little Miata get fixed up okay?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “And, um, your daughter?”

  “She’s fine. Thanks for all your help.”

  “Oh, I didn’t do nothin’, only…” Timmy looked down. “Just glad no charges—just glad it all ended good.”

  Nell got in her car. Timmy closed the door for her, tapped the roof. She drove home.

  The phone was ringing as she walked in. Things were speeding up, and downtime, time she badly needed for thinking, for sorting things out, was shrinking, the events of her life bumping up against one another. Johnny had once talked about that, maybe in the context of Einstein. Could use you now, Johnny. She picked up the phone.

  “Hi,” said Lee Ann. “Quick question. How—”

  Nell interrupted. “I’m not answering any more questions.”

  “Why not?” And then quickly: “Has something happened?”

  “Lee Ann, you missed the point. I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  A moment of silence, and then Lee Ann said, “This one isn’t even about you.”

  Despite everything, Nell almost laughed; Lee Ann was irresistible. “Go on,” she said.

  “How well do you know Velma Rice?”

  “How is that not about me?” Nell said. “And her name’s not Velma.”

  Nell heard the rustle of paper, Lee Ann searching through her notes. “Bobby’s widow’s not Velma?” she said.

  “Veronica,” said Nell.

  “Christ,” said Lee Ann, “my editor’s such a moron. Why is he incapable of the simplest—” She cut herself off. “The problem is Veronica Rice doesn’t seem to be returning my cal
ls.”

  “So?”

  “So I was hoping maybe a word from you might encourage her.”

  “I haven’t seen Veronica since Bobby’s funeral,” Nell said. “And I never really knew her that well.”

  “How’s that possible?” said Lee Ann. “He and Clay were partners.”

  True, but the men had grown apart after Clay started getting promoted. Was any of that Lee Ann’s business? “I’m just telling you I didn’t know her well,” Nell said. “Believe what you want.”

  “Sorry,” Lee Ann said. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me.” Silence. And in the silence, Nell thought of the obvious question. “Why do you want to talk to her in the first place?”

  “The tape was found in Bobby’s locker,” Lee Ann said. “How did it get there? Did he ever speak to Veronica about it? What does she think happened? And a thousand other questions I’m sure you could come up with on your—hang on a sec; got to take this call.”

  Nell clicked off. She heard a sound somewhere above, as though a small animal was running across the roof.

  “Norah?”

  Nell went upstairs, looked in Norah’s room. No Norah. The stuffed monkeys swung gently on their trapeze.

  Downstairs, Nell found Ines’s number on her phone and dialed it.

  “Hey, this is Ines. Leave a message, I’ll get back.” The recording had captured what sounded like a party going on in the background. Nell even thought she heard Norah’s laugh. She was dialing the number again, just to be sure, when the front door burst open.

  Clay strode in, saw her; he stopped, almost swaying forward from the force of his momentum.

  “Clay,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. She could see the vein throbbing in the side of his neck, like an agitated blue worm. “Why would anything be wrong?”

  Nell stood there in the front hall, everything around her so familiar, except the expression on Clay’s face, and the tone of his voice.

  “Answer me,” he said. “Why the hell would anything be wrong?”