“So, you’re saying you didn’t know that Rick Luna returned to the bar later that night.” Her half-smile was sly and the hazel in her eyes hardened into green as she pinned me. “You mean, you didn’t hang around yourself? I thought you looked kind of interested in some Annie action too.”
“Sally, I went straight home. Took the train uptown and dropped into bed before midnight. I was excess baggage at that point, and I knew it. You and Gerry and Rick were part of Anniesha’s current life. I was just a sorry memory from her past.”
Sally’s eyes went soft. “No regrets?”
“Lots of regrets. Sure. But none I was in a position to correct.” I shifted on the plastic seat and stared through the window to the deepening dusk.
Nostalgia. Or chagrin. Or regret. Whatever you chose to call it, the sentiment was dangerous. I knew war-seasoned soldiers who’d died when they let vague and bittersweet emotions replace hard calculation. Keeping your head in the here and now was essential to completing your assignment, solving the puzzle, staying alive. I knew what my regrets were; I wasn’t fool enough to share them. But what regrets might Sally Anastos be keeping?
I’d let the silence linger for so long she charged into the void. “You loved her, didn’t you?” A sigh, something akin to sympathy, sweetened her voice.
Pining was for fools. I knew, but I admitted to it anyway. I looked straight at Sally. “Yes.”
“Still.”
“Yes.”
The syllable hung in the space between us, bare and mournful as a church bell. To muffle the sound, Sally offered a platitude. “Love’s a funny old thing, isn’t it?”
I didn’t think it was all that funny, but I got her point. “You don’t get to pick who your heart wants, that’s for sure.”
“No, you don’t. You just love and love. No matter what.” She hesitated, then added, “I’m sorry.”
That whisper seemed like a non-sequitur, so I asked the obvious. “Why?”
“Just, oh…For nothing.”
Hollowed out as we were, neither of us had much to say after that. The remains of the burgers lay in gray heaps among the wilted lettuce on our plates. We gulped the last of our drinks and rose to leave.
I dropped two twenties on the table next to the pile of demolished napkins. Doubling the bill would erase my waiter’s disappointment that he hadn’t been able to engineer a love connection.
As wind whipped the first chill blasts of fall, Sally raised her sweatshirt hood and tugged it close around her face. I stepped forward and we shook hands at the curb.
I pulled her to my chest, forcing my words by the gusts. “Maybe I’ll see you at the Blackistone announcement Friday afternoon. Annie ought to be represented. So maybe I’ll show.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll look for you Friday.” Her promise blew away on the wind. “I need to get up there anyway to check on my brother. Make sure he’s doing alright. George is a freshman at Alexander”
Darkness screened Sally’s eyes. The lamplight’s shimmer cast a sickly glow over her trembling chin. As she stepped from my arms, she stumbled over a crack in the pavement.
I clamped both hands at her waist to stop the fall. The blunt nose of a gun bumped my fingers. I pulled it from the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. She gasped as I weighed it in my palm. The pistol was warm from her body and slick with the sweat of her hands.
I slipped it inside again. “You carry a weapon?”
“Obviously.” Sally stuffed her fists next to the pistol, holding it snug against her stomach. “You really are a detective, aren’t you?”
I’d earned the sneer, so I let it pass. “Why, Sally?”
“It’s my dad’s. He kept it next to the cash register in our restaurant in Bridgeport. When I moved to the city, he kept nagging me to take it. For protection, he said. But I always said no.” She crammed space between each word, breaths chugging as she pressed her chin to her chest. “Then, in the last eight months, there were two break-ins, three muggings, and a rape on my block. I changed my mind. Now I carry it.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Of course. My dad’s unsophisticated and uneducated. But he isn’t stupid. He wouldn’t let me have his gun without lessons. He dragged me to a firing range every other morning for two weeks before he let me take it.”
She thrust her head up. Shadows slanted across her brow. I couldn’t see her eyes. Her lips tightened above the cinched knot holding her hood in place.
I wanted to keep her talking. “You haven’t had to use it, have you?”
“No. So far, so good.” She lifted the gun until its outline bulged against the thick fabric of her sweatshirt. “But I’m ready if I ever need to.” I thought her voice wavered, or maybe it was the force of the gusts swirling around us. She said, “If I stay lucky, I never will.”
Sally had minimal skills but enough knowledge to use the gun at close range. Did she have the guts to shoot when it counted? I wasn’t sure.
When she raised an empty hand to me, I took it and leaned over her. “Then stay lucky, Sally.”
“See you, Rook.”
She drew her fingers from mine and pulled the sweatshirt cuffs until her balled hands disappeared inside the sleeves. As we separated, wind rattled the restaurant awning. Annie had been dead for twelve days.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
The morning after my hamburger with Sally Anastos, I returned to Alexander University. Her cult leader, Gerry Keith, was in my sights. Again.
Back to the eyesore Barstall Building. Dregs of early rain dripped from the red and purple ducts strangling the cement structure. But rain couldn’t wash the ugly from the dreary facade. The university grounds crew had been at work. Whiffs of new-turned soil, fertilizer, and clipped grass met me as I walked the incline to the front door. The anthropology department office still bristled with weapons stolen from around the world. At her desk in the reception area, my second-favorite admin assistant, Johnetta Ames, wore a purple-and-gold checked wrapper on her head. A matching cloth draped over her shoulder. Maybe she had a skirt in the same material, but she was sitting, so I couldn’t tell. She looked like a queen. Nothing lost by telling her so: “You look like a queen, Ms. Ames.”
“Call me Johnetta, honey.” The giggle bubbled through gold-plated fingernails. “What can I do for you today. You name it, you got it.”
I unpacked flirtation skills I hadn’t used since high school. Eyelash, lip tug, eyelash, smile. The heavy lifting produced details of her boss’s location. “You hurry, you can catch the end of his lecture. Basement of this building, Bowl 3. Turn left when you get off the elevator. You can’t miss it.” Johnetta’s grin widened. “You see all that sparkly light glowing through the classroom door, that’s the sun shining out his majesty’s ass.”
Bowl 3 was a deep arena entered from the top. I slipped through the door and leaned against a padded wall at the rear. Fifteen half-rings of countertops curved around the windowless room. Students squeezed into purple swivel chairs fixed to the red desks. The stadium was full, maybe 150 undergrads tapping laptops with furious vigor. I counted four Black students in the crowd. The class was equally divided between the sexes, but males hung in the upper rows, eager women had seized the first seven rings of the bowl.
The focus of their energy was Gerry Keith. He circled the well of the arena, prancing behind a wooden podium which held his laptop. Three giant white screens framed his figure. The green shirt and black jacket and jeans set off his flame hair and beard. The room was still, the crowd riveted. At first, Keith seemed distant, as untouchable as the cold moon. I scanned the tense young faces below me, looking for cracks in the wall of attention. Nothing. But as the lecture continued, change took me. Keith seemed to expand, puffing warm breath against my face, filling me with his words. He was near me, around me; pictures in my head danced at his command.
Then a sigh rippled across the classroom. I exhaled too and looked around again. Keith’s lecture was over. Without a glance at the stunned audience, Keith unplugged his laptop and slid it in a leather satchel. He pulled a purple cardboard box from the podium and ruffled through a pile of exam books stacked inside. Around me, students shut their laptops, hitched backpacks on their shoulders. They laughed and shoved as they clambered up the steps. I pressed against the wall. The crowd jostled past me through the door.
I watched a knife-thin white girl in a flowered dress and leather clogs speak to Keith. Her hair was gathered into a knot of brown strings and she shouldered a stuffed backpack. He shoved the box of exams into her arms. She climbed the stairs, the clomp of her shoes echoing in the empty bowl. Keith followed her, his steps silent like a cat’s. At the top, he made no attempt to help her through the door. When I did, he glared at me. Her heavy backpack bumped my chest as she squeezed by.
In the hall, the girl turned toward the staircase. She toed the first step when Keith called out: “Devin, after you finish grading them, just leave them on Johnetta’s desk. I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”
“No problem.” Her squeak echoed in the stairwell as she vanished.
Keith shook his head. “They all talk like gum-chewing cows in some squalid dive, don’t they? ‘No problem!’ Of course, it’s no problem. She’s my grad assistant, for fuck’s sake. It’s her job in this feudal system.” He shot a crooked grin at me, then hiked his shoulders to invite me into the joke. “Peasants. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t thrash ‘em.”
“Good to see you again, Gerry.” I pushed from the wall, closing the distance between us. He backed a step.
“Glad you could catch the end of my lecture, Rook.” He smelled of tobacco and menthol cough drops. “I saw you sneak in. You know, if you spend any more time on campus, the bursar will send you a tuition bill. This year, the charge is three hundred dollars per credit hour. A bargain at twice the price, don’t you think?”
“Nice to catch your act.”
He narrowed his eyes. The olive shirt made them greener than I remembered. Like blades of grass. Or pond algae. Mouth tight, he ditched the good humor: “Come on.”
The students of Bowl 3 had disappeared, leaving the corridor empty. Keith and I walked beside a display of stark landscape photos. Utah, or maybe Dakota badlands. Past the elevators, Keith dropped into a chair made of foam blocks covered in purple suede. Aluminum pipes clamped the blocks together. He tilted his head toward the matching seat to his right. I took it. A square red steel table separated us. Keith parked his leather satchel on the table and rummaged inside it. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, stuck one in his mouth, and fired a sleek Ronson lighter. No offer to me. Which made sense as we were sitting under a red-lettered sign: “No Smoking Please.”
Two drags in silence. One silky stream spewed in front, the other jetted above our heads. My visit made me the aggressor, but I let the quiet eat at Keith. He bit after two more puffs. “This is stalking, Rook. I could call the police. A restraining order would be the next step.”
“Feel free, Gerry.”
“What do you want.” Flat, with no upward lilt at the end of the sentence. “This stalking gets you nothing.”
“If it gets me answers, I’m good.”
“I doubt that. But go ahead.”
“How did you come to be at the conference?” He knew the one I meant, the one where Annie died.
He crushed the back cushion, eyes fixed on the ceiling as thoughts jumped. “You know, I’m not sure. I believe Anniesha suggested my name to the conference organizers. I supposed she was eager to promote my new book. At any rate, I was invited to speak and I accepted.” He leveled his gaze to meet mine and took a long pull on the cigarette. “I was thrilled to catch up with Anniesha again. She seemed as fresh and alluring then as when we first met in Miami.” He curled his tongue over “alluring,” as if it was a foreign term.
“You spoke with Annie the day before she died?” I knew the reports of Pearl Byrne and the hotel manager Brock Stevens. But I wanted the first-hand story.
“Sure. She phoned me in my room, said she’d be in the hotel gift shop. Of course, I came down to the lobby right away. No one ever says no to Anniesha. No one in his right mind.” Lines softened around his beard. The wistful smile erased a decade from Keith’s face.
“What did she want?”
Keith pulled the cellophane wrapping from the cigarette packet. He tipped ash into the tiny container. “To talk, she said. To reconnect. She suggested we have dinner. But I’d already made plans to meet Sally Anastos. Anniesha pouted in that imperial style she had when things didn’t go her way.”
He thrust his pink lower lip to imitate the expression. “A brief dark cloud flew across her face. Then she brightened, bubbling with a new idea. She invited Sally and me to join her for drinks in the hotel bar. She said we would let our dinner plans ‘evolve’ as the night rolled on. That’s how Anniesha put it, evolve. Like something magical could happen for us if we relaxed into the flow.”
“Magical,” I echoed. But he didn’t seem to hear.
“We might have said more. We would have, certainly. But that bitch, Pearl Byrne, barged in like a desiccated spinster determined to block everyone’s fun.” Keith snapped the insult through a jet of smoke. “Always nagging, always prying. That nasty woman pushed Anniesha to uncover things she never should have known.”
“Pearl broke up your talk with Annie.”
“Yes, we parted soon after that wretched hag arrived. Anniesha mentioned you would be joining us for drinks. Her ex. A private detective, of all things. She said we’d make a fun party of it. Fitting together all the pieces of her past. That’s how she put it: a party for the past. Crazy lit, she said it would be. Exciting.”
I wondered if Annie had been using me, hoping I’d be a shield. A form of security in the uncertain meeting with her academic friends. Or maybe she had intended for me to be a sword, a useful threat for an attack she planned to launch. Smoke curled before the sign over our heads, the gray plumes pinkening in the gloom. I dug elbows into my knees and studied a photo on the wall opposite. A harsh canyon draped with silver shadows.
I let the seconds creep. Ten. Twenty. “Who was she, Gerry?”
Keith tapped the packet and removed a new cigarette with his lips. “Whom do you mean?”
“The one you’re so fucking angry with. Who the hell was she?”
He puffed his cheeks, then glanced along the edges of his eyes at me. He took the cigarette from his mouth. “You know, I was married once too. A long time ago.” No more braying, this softer voice spooked me.
He sighed into the release. “Shawn and I married our second year of grad school at the University of Chicago. We met in a seminar on matrilineal systems in West Africa. We started dating October 5th, passed our doctoral qualifying exams May 13th, and married May 22nd.”
“You remember the dates?”
“Yes, all of them. This was the brief, golden period when she was faithful.”
“I see.” I didn’t, but debate would kill the story. He was whispering, so I did too. “But you got married anyway?”
“I didn’t know about the cheating, not at first. And I thought I wanted it. Marriage, I mean. We were the golden couple. We were dazzling together. Beautiful geniuses. Everybody said it. The whole world was promised to us. So, we meshed our doctoral research agendas, planned our field work together, applied for grants together, lived seven months in that squalid hut together, hacking dust and wiping calamine lotion over our mosquito bites. We even contracted malaria the same week.”
He lit the cigarette and inhaled. The ghost of a smile flicked across his mouth. “I wanted to preserve the golden moment we shared. The time when I had a loyal partner, a faithful wife. I truly did want it.” Keith coughed, then licked his lips. “But I wasn’t that lucky. S
he wasn’t the woman I thought she was.”
“How did you find out?”
“She told me. We’d planned to stay fifteen months in the field. After six, Shawn told me she wanted to go home. She wanted a different life. Not the one we were driving toward.”
“So, you called it quits and both came home?”
“No. Shawn returned. I stayed and completed my field research. Alone.” Keith sniffed; a deep drag on the cigarette covered the sound. “But she was right to move on. Absolutely. She was miserable and she would have made me miserable too. We divorced three months after I defended my dissertation.”
“Not a complete wreck then.” I kept eyes front on that silvery canyon. I could see Keith without shifting my gaze.
He fingered the lighter, stroking its slick curves. He set it on the table then tipped his head. He scoured my face, maybe looking for pity or even triumph. “Neither one of us crashed. We were pros, Rook. Meticulous, decent, even collegial. We launched our academic careers with great verve. Separate but equal, you might say. I had something to prove, so I pulled myself together and dived in.” He expanded his chest and sighed little eddies into the smoke. “Winning is fine. But the best revenge is revenge. Always has been. Always will be.”
That was his mission statement. I let it ride on the silence for a moment. “And where’s your ex now?”
“Shawn died of ovarian cancer twenty-two years ago. I was only thirty-four years old.” His voice was faint and clipped, all its public vigor sucked dry. He tapped the inch of ash into the cellophane.
At the far end of the corridor, someone opened a door to the outside. The rushing air sounded like an ocean swell. The figure disappeared into the sunlight. I raised my chin so Keith couldn’t see wet glittering along my lids. “That’s a tough one, Gerry.”
“Yeah, her death hit me hard. Until that, I still hoped we had a chance. When Shawn died, I dug into my writing. I finished my third book and published two journal articles that year. I won tenure based on that work.”
Murder My Past Page 24