That Touch of Ink

by Vallere, Diane

  Brad put his elbows on the table and folded his hands in front of him. When he rested his chin on his knuckles, I saw the fine brown hair on his forearms, where his white shirt rode up at his wrists.

  “You still have the watch,” I said absentmindedly.

  He sat up and put a hand on his wrist, then spun his watch around in a circle. The band was black crocodile, setting off a white face with black roman numerals, set in 22 karat gold. It was a classically elegant man’s watch that I’d discovered in a pawn shop in Philadelphia one Saturday afternoon while on a break from a design expo.

  “Of course I still have the watch. Until I found you here in Dallas, it was the only thing I had from you. I wasn’t sure if you were going to be receptive to me showing back up in your life.”

  “How did you find me, Brad? It’s not like I left a forwarding address.”

  “Mr. Pierot told me.” He tipped his head down and smiled, then looked back at me. His face softened as he talked about the man who had trained him. “I went to see him a couple weeks ago. He turned eighty-eight. Turns out he read something in the papers about you. I didn’t know what you’d been through. He gave me the article, and I tracked you down.” He reached a hand across the table and rested it on top of mine. “When I heard about the pillow stalkings, I realized I might really have lost you forever.”

  “Brad, I have a life here. A life I’m used to, a life I like.”

  “Is there room for me in that life?”

  “I don’t think so.” I knew it sounded harsh, but it was the truth. I needed Brad to hear it. “The way you showed up at my apartment, I can’t handle that. Right now I come and go as I please. I’m still getting my business off the ground. I can’t drop it all for you.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I’m here now. I’ll be here until you’re ready for me.”

  “That’s not good enough, Brad. Where have you been? How long are you planning on staying in Dallas? Where are you staying?” My voice rose with every question and when I stopped, I looked around to see if anyone else had heard me. The waiter stood a few feet away getting drinks from the bar. He looked away and carried a tray of wine glasses to a table of college-age girls. “You can’t expect me to not ask questions.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve moved around a lot in the past couple of years, but spent most of my time in Virginia. Right now I’m staying in The Brite House Apartments by White Rock Lake. It’s a short-term lease and a bachelor apartment.” He pulled the black plastic stirrer out of his glass and took a drink. “How long I stay in Dallas has a lot to do with you.” He lifted my hand and I pulled it away.

  Unlike Brad’s sentimentality with the watch, I’d parted with everything he had ever given me. After the lie, I packed the things that I couldn’t replace—mostly vintage items I’d collected from estate sales—filled out a change of address form, and left my life behind.

  I hadn’t been looking for the message from Brad when the police found it in my trunk. If I’d have known it was there, I probably would have thrown it away without watching it, never being the wiser.

  What struck me now about that six minutes of film wasn’t that Brad had bothered to hide it. It was that his confession had been interrupted by someone who never appeared on film. Six minutes in the camera tipped over. There were four gunshots and then the film went black.

  Four gunshots.

  Volunteering at that theater had been one of the highlights of my life after moving to Dallas. After viewing that film strip, I never returned. Like owning my building, establishing Mad for Mod as my mid-century modern decorating business, and swimming every morning at Crestwood pool with the elderly set, being involved with the theater had become part of my routine.

  Brad’s confession had tainted the theater for me. There was no way he would have known I was involved with the newly-renovated classic theater, or known I’d be watching his filmstrip confessional there. That’s the way life had played out.

  Until the moment Brad showed up at my apartment, I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. I’d been going through the motions of my life, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And here he was, sitting across the table from me, telling me his troubles were behind him.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  “Not dead.” His voice was low, intimate.

  “And when I wasn’t thinking you were dead, I thought you might have killed someone.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “How do you know it’s over?”

  “There was only one way out and I did what I had to do.”

  Four gunshots. My new five thousand dollar bill. Tex’s John Doe with the four old gunshot wounds—and one fresh one to his head.

  All of a sudden, I realized that I didn’t know this new Brad. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was capable of shooting someone or coming back from the dead.

  What I did know was this: the one thing Brad Turlington did not seem to need was a watch.

  I became obsessed with the perpetual moving hands on the face of the gold timepiece. The lone crab Rangoon I’d eaten tossed in my stomach, and my face flushed. I pulled my hand away from Brad’s and touched cool fingers to my forehead. I was burning up. I had to get out of there, to process what I thought, acknowledge what I was starting to fear. It couldn’t be, I told myself.

  “Brad, I think it was a mistake to call you. Do you mind if we call it a night?” I asked.

  “You want to leave already?” he asked.

  “I want to go home. Alone.” I stood up. Before he had a chance to follow, I hurried out of the restaurant to my car. My tires squealed against the asphalt as I peeled out of the lot, wondering if the former love of my life was a murderer. I was so lost in my thoughts that I was two miles into my drive before I realized I was being followed.

  FIVE

  The car behind me sped up and swerved across the stripe in the middle of the road. Just my luck to be followed by a drunk driver. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and accelerated, trying to keep a cushion of space between us. I wasn’t successful.

  There were no other cars around, and the drive from the Polynesian restaurant back to my apartment included a couple of relatively familiar surface streets. I turned right on Turtle Creek Boulevard and snaked down the hill, did a practiced dogleg over the creek before approaching Greenville Avenue, and then made another right. When every pair of headlights eventually turned away except for one, I got nervous. The car behind me wasn’t acting like a drunk driver anymore.

  The dark sedan closed the gap between us and rammed my back bumper. My head bounced forward, then back. I tried to brake, but the car behind me pushed me forward. My handbag fell onto the floor and the contents spilled out. My phone slid under the passenger side seat. I looked into the rear view mirror but couldn’t see the driver. The windows were tinted. All I saw was a dark blob behind the wheel. I hit the gas, speeding up again.

  Semi-warm air from the open window, the closest I could get to a fall breeze in Dallas, pushed my hair away from my face and fought against the nervous sweat that had broken out on my forehead. I turned onto a narrow side street, double-backed on the last turn before hitting a cul-de-sac, and returned to Greenville. I slowed and looked in the rearview. The car was a brown sedan.

  I sped up and turned into a neighborhood I knew well. The sedan followed. I turned right, then left, then right, then left, then two rights, then a left, then three rights. My Alfa Romeo swung wide on the turns. I fought to straighten it out when I hit a dark street. I checked the rear view mirror. He was still there. The traffic light ahead of me turned yellow. I was too far away to clear it, but I hit the gas and sped through the intersection after the light turned red, accelerating until I reached my apartment. The assigned parking spaces were in a lot behind the building. I pulled into the entr
ance on the east side of the building, swung the car around and cut the lights, and backed into my space. No other cars pulled in.

  I glanced up at my bedroom windows. I lived in the back unit on the second floor. It overlooked the less-than-glamorous parking lot. Soft light filtered through the floor to ceiling pale pink curtains I’d installed in January. I must have forgotten to turn the light off in my haste to meet with Brad.

  When I opened the car door and slowly stood up, a flash of pain shot through my left knee. I’d been tense through the drive home, and I felt it. I pulled an umbrella from behind the driver’s seat and used it as a cane, distributing my weight off the injured joint while I hurried inside.

  I climbed the back staircase and knocked on the door of Effie’s apartment. I heard Rocky bark on the other side of the door.

  “That was a short dinner,” Effie said when she opened the door. She wore an oversized Batman sweatshirt and bright yellow leggings. Her feet were in fuzzy slippers shaped like bear paws.

  “I wasn’t feeling well and had to leave early. Was Rocky any trouble?”

  “Nope. We spent a couple of hours at White Rock Lake. He made friends with a Chihuahua. We came back here and he played with my bear feet. He’s pretty pooped right now.” She looked over her right shoulder to where Rocky laid on his stomach with his feet thrust out behind him like a frog. He opened his eyes and lifted his head slightly. Effie picked up a leash from a white bookcase and clipped it onto his collar. Rocky stood up and padded over to me. She handed off the leash.

  “Where are you two staying tonight?”

  I felt my face tense. “Who two?”

  “You and Rocky. You’re not going to sleep in your apartment, are you? I don’t think it would be a good idea with the paint fumes.”

  “What fumes? What paint?”

  “You had the apartment painted, right? There was a guy in there earlier. I haven’t noticed any fumes but it’s probably not dry yet.”

  My hand closed tightly around my keys, the sharp, jagged edges cutting into my palm. Rocky pulled me toward the door, winding the leash around my left leg. My hands shook as I reached down the length of the leash to straighten it out.

  “Effie, what did this man look like?”

  “I couldn’t tell. He was wearing a mask.”

  “What kind of mask?”

  “Paint mask,” she answered in the tone of a college student who thinks she’s talking to an idiot. “But he had a black knit hat on, and safety glasses, so I guess I didn’t see very much of him. Why?”

  “When did he leave?”

  “About half an hour ago. He hurried out of here pretty fast too.”

  I didn’t like it. Half an hour ago I’d been at the restaurant with Brad. If someone had been in my apartment, they’d arrived after I left. My early return would have been unexpected. There was only one person who knew I would be out to dinner, the person who had surprised me with an invitation. Things were starting to add up, but I didn’t like the sum.

  “Thanks for watching him.” I said goodnight, picked Rocky up, and walked to the front of the building to check my mail and the status of the rent box. Carlos, a retired mechanic who lived in the unit next to mine, stood in front of the building, smoking. The tip of his cigarette pierced the night like a fat firefly. He nodded when I approached and I nodded back. The rent box was still padlocked shut. I scanned the street in front of the building. Across the street, a car idled next to the curb. The only evidence that the engine was running was the soft cloud of exhaust that floated from behind the car. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the same sedan that had followed me home.

  I turned around, slowly climbed the stairs, and unlocked my unit. The scent of oil paint hit me. I choked back a cough and leaned in. The rug was pulled back from the far corner, exposing half of the unfinished hardwood floor. Paint trays and rollers were scattered around the room, as if the project had been abandoned unexpectedly.

  I descended the back stairs, carrying Rocky under my arm. I ducked out the back door, crossed the parking lot, and let myself out the padlocked gate that served as too little deterrent to keeping our property secure.

  I felt a little like I’d fallen down a rabbit hole. My entire reality had been flipped on its ear, and I didn’t know what end was up. It was a five block walk from my apartment to my studio. Physical therapy had improved the condition of my knee after it had been reinjured, but this would test the limits of the newly-healed joint. Best case scenario, I’d do more damage to an already chronic injury, but would get to my studio undetected. Worst case, I’d be caught while walking down one of the dark residential streets that completed the maze-like path I took to get from here to there. I was willing to take my chances with my knee.

  It was slow going at first. Every couple of steps I looked over my shoulder to see if we were being followed. Rocky pulled me forward. Once we were more than a block into the walk, I cut down a different street. I knew I’d have a variety of sofas on which to sleep and a freezer filled with ice packs for my knee, and right now, that was enough.

  I didn’t allow myself the luxury of mental distractions while I made my way. I coached myself to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. The chant worked. I reached the alley that runs behind my studio and ducked into the opening next to the Dumpster. A stray cat scrambled out and triggered Rocky’s barking. I shushed him and unlocked the door at the back of the building, locking it behind us once we were inside.

  Afraid to turn on any lights, I felt my way along the wall to my office. Light from the street hit the furniture I had staged inside the studio and cast weird images around the walls of the room. I wished the windows had been blacked out, or that I’d installed shades to be drawn during off hours, but I hadn’t, and tonight, I paid the price in privacy.

  Inside my office was a custom desk, a white leather office chair, and a couple of Barcelona chairs for customers. Rocky went directly to his dog bed in the corner and curled into a ball. I wished I could do the same. But for me, it was either sleep on a sofa in the showroom, where anyone passing by could look inside and see me, or sleep on the floor of the office. Despite the guaranteed kink in my neck and promise of pains in various parts of my body, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which was the better plan.

  I found a crocheted blanket draped over the side of a raspberry-colored sofa. I grabbed the blanket and a pillow with an atom embroidered on the center of it and carried them back to the office, assembling a makeshift bed on the floor.

  I spent the next four hours staring at the ceiling.

  Someone had terrorized me on the way home from the restaurant. It could have been Brad. It could have been anyone. But while I was at the restaurant, someone had been in my apartment. It was entirely possible that Brad had orchestrated the opportunity for someone else to get inside while I was out.

  The question was why? Why would someone want to get into my apartment when I wasn’t there? With the exception of a closet filled with vintage dresses from the fifties and sixties, and a modest collection of furniture I’d cherry picked from the Mad for Mod inventory, I had little worth stealing.

  Unless the thief was after the five thousand dollar bill.

  Which made even more sense when I thought about where it had come from.

  I was starting to think Brad’s reasons for seeking me out in Dallas had less to do with the promise of a bright future and more to do with the deep, dark secrets in his past.

  SIX

  Two years ago I would have trusted Brad with my life. Today, he was a stranger. He’d been the genesis of my trust issues, and now I had a hard time getting past them.

  The brass starburst clock that Hudson had rewired for me ticked off the seconds, the minutes, the hours. It wasn’t the first thing Hudson had fixed for me, and I’d started to wonder if I should trust him wit
h fixing more than just inanimate objects. Truth was, Hudson was more than a handyman; he was a friend. He could have been more if I was willing to drop the walls I’d put in place after my breakup with Brad.

  When I left Philadelphia and moved to Dallas, I bought an apartment complex and hung out a shingle for my own mid-century modern interior decorating business. I busied myself with flea markets, estate sales, and other more creative ways to obtain inventory that included obituaries and the recently deceased. I pretended my past didn’t exist. At the time, I thought it was the best way to function. Start over. Start fresh. Take care of myself. Move on.

  I met Hudson six months after moving to Dallas. I was interviewing carpenters who could repair the damaged furniture I’d found in dumpsters and trash piles. He was the one who suggested I adopt a puppy. His artistic temperament and Johnny Cash good looks made a combination that, under normal circumstances, would have caught my interest, but a relationship would have complicated my life in ways I didn’t want. And now, with Brad turning up in Dallas, the complications had complications.

  I closed my eyes. Only an occasional siren, far in the distance, punctured the otherwise silent hours. I readjusted my position somewhere around four thirty. I finally fell into a tortured sleep somewhere after five.

  The rattling of the studio door woke me up. I was disoriented, stiff, scared, and alone. Sometime during the night, Rocky left the comfort of his dog bed and joined me. The knocking woke him,too.

  Sunlight flooded the studio. When I stood, several joints popped like a cheap package of explosives on the Fourth of July. I had slept in my dress, which had ridden up to my waist. I pulled it down, tried, unsuccessfully, to smooth out the creases that had developed overnight, and ran my fingers through my short hair. The knocking on the front door resumed. I peeked my head out of the office. A thin man with Mediterranean features stood in front of the door. He was dressed in a navy and white checked shirt, navy and white v-neck sweater, and navy blue trousers. A skinny navy tie was visible at his collar.