Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  She did mind, of course, but being more experienced in courtesy than in honesty, she was incapable of telling him so. After a few moments when no inspiration came to her, she said, “If you like,” and turned to resume her slow pace. “I must tell you, however, that I’m not very good company right now.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  They walked for a while in a silence that was, he judged optimistically, not wholly uncomfortable. He had come this far, and was pleased, but he had yet to win a smile from her. He realized that he had an insane desire to make her laugh. Not as any sort of credit to himself; he wanted only to break open the shell of misery around her and let her out into the free air.

  “My name’s Mike,” he ventured. “Mike Slattery.”

  They walked a few steps in silence, then she started to say something at the same time that he said, “It’s O.K. You don’t have to tell me.”

  She shook her head slightly. “I don’t mind. Carolyn Stanley.”

  He stopped and held out his hand. “Glad to meet you, Carolyn.”

  She took his hand, gathered courage from somewhere, and said, “Thank you, Mike.”

  For a moment she looked directly at him, and the naked despair in her eyes struck him like a physical blow, so that he gave a little gasp.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  His facade broke. “Ca—Carolyn,” he stammered, “please don’t be angry. I know it’s none of my business, and you don’t have to tell me, you don’t have to tell me anything”—he had gathered her hand in both of his and held it firmly—“but whatever it is, I want to help. Please let me help, don’t say I can’t. Please—”

  It was the kindness that undid her. She had held herself together, had she but known it, buttressed by the indifference of the strangers around her. Instantly her defenses crumbled, her breath caught in her throat, and she began to sob, great, racking sobs that shook her whole body.

  When he held out his arms to her, it was an instinctive reaction. No thought of seduction entered his head: He wanted only to soothe her grief, to take the hurt away.

  She, too, moved as if by instinct; seeing his open arms, she stepped into them, laid her head upon his shoulder, and wept uncontrollably.

  He held her close, patting her as one would a crying child, wondering what to say. Some deep wisdom told him that “Don’t cry” would be an asinine thing to say to anyone in such pain. So he said, “Cry all you want to. All you need to. It’s O.K.”

  Finally, the sobs abated, and she stood quiet in his arms for a few moments. Then she lifted her head from his shoulder and said unromantically, “I’m afraid I need a tissue.”

  “Oh. I don’t think I—”

  “It’s all right, I think I have some in my bag.” She stepped back and opened her handbag.

  He let her go, without regret. He had not been holding her for his own pleasure but for her comfort, and if she no longer wanted or needed to be held, then that must mean she was feeling a little better. Or stronger.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she was saying in obvious embarrassment, as she dabbed at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief and then blew her nose in it. “I don’t normally burst into tears all over total strangers.”

  “But we’re not strangers. We’ve been introduced.”

  “So we have.”

  She began walking again, slower even than before. In order to have time to get acquainted? You dreamer, he thought. Still, there was a chance. After a while he offered, “I’m from Cleveland. Here for a convention on computers in insurance.”

  They walked on in silence.

  “Was that the wrong thing to say?” he asked finally.

  She was thinking. Perhaps he really could help. The necessity of making conversation would occupy her mind. But it had to be conversation that didn’t carry her back to what she had run away from. She laid a hand on his sleeve and they stopped. “Could we—could we make an agreement? Let’s not—” She searched for a way to say it. “Let’s not do all that information people always do, the same old stuff about where are you from, and what do you do, and all that. Let’s make a deal to just—” Again she searched for the right words. “To just do trivia.”

  “Trivia?”

  “Yes, I mean things like, oh, who’s your favorite singer, that kind of thing.”

  “O.K.,” he said agreeably. “I think I can handle that. Pavarotti. Who’s yours?”

  “I like opera, too.” She sniffed, recovering from the tears, but determined not to lapse back into them. “But I think I’d have to say that Domingo is my favorite. He’s a much better actor.” This being a commonplace observation among music lovers, she produced it without the effort of self-examination. But to continue the conversation along these lines would be unwise. A topic like opera could all too easily get into emotions. So she said, “Next question. Your turn.”

  “O.K. Hmmm, let’s see. What’s the best movie you— No, what’s the worst movie, the very worst movie you ever suffered through?”

  The corners of her mouth tightened in the veriest ghost of a smile, and he felt a disproportionate surge of triumph.

  “That’s a good one,” she acknowledged. “Let’s see, what was that awful thing with Dudley Moore and Liza—oh, I know, Arthur 2. Never trust a sequel.”

  “Yeah, Arthur 2 was a real dog. But I think the worst I’ve ever suffered through—” He paused a moment, and then continued: “Come to think of it, when I think of movies I’ve suffered through, I think of the good ones.”

  “You suffer through good ones?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. I suffered like mad all the way through The Godfather. I kept thinking, this is a brilliant movie and I can’t wait for it to be over.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll probably think I’m a real wimp, but I couldn’t stand the violence. Since when is it supposed to be entertaining to see some guy get shot in the eye? Carolyn?” For she had come to an abrupt halt.

  Not realizing she was doing it, she held a trembling hand out to him. He took it and held it in both of his. She started to walk again. He kept her hand, tucking it into the crook of his arm, and she didn’t seem to mind. She said as evenly as she could, “I agree with you. Absolutely. I can’t even stand violence that’s supposed to be funny.”

  “When I was a kid, all my friends loved the Three Stooges. But I got really tired of watching those guys hitting each other.”

  “Oh, yes. I have never understood why people hitting each other was funny. I couldn’t stand Laurel and Hardy, either.”

  “The fat one was always bullying the skinny one.”

  He was doing nothing but telling the truth, but it was working, he knew, better than any line he could have invented. She was beginning to become just the slightest bit animated. Almost as if she were beginning to enjoy herself, at least just a little. It might work. He might be able to break through the grief after all. He pursued his advantage. “I guess I didn’t like that because I was skinny myself when I was a kid.”

  At some point in the ensuing discussion of cruelty in comedy, they turned their steps back toward the hotel. She could have said “Let’s go back,” or “I’m getting chilly” or a dozen other things, but there was no need. He could have said “Would you like to come up to my room for a nightcap?” but again, there was no need. The talk about the unattractiveness of violence got them through the lobby and onto the elevator without either of them having to say anything about where they were going or what they were going to do next.

  In the elevator the conversation died, but that was all right because there were other people there. At his floor he gestured as if to say Ladies first, and she stepped out of the elevator without any visible hesitation. He led her a short way down the hall, stopped by a door, opened it with his key, and again gestured for her to precede him, all without either of them saying a word or meeting the other’s eye.

  He was holding his breath. Once in the room, surely he would have to say something? No, even the
n the magic held. He helped her out of her coat and dropped it over a chair. She immediately turned and came right into his arms, just as she had done out on the street, only this time she was not crying.

  Even as he kissed her, however, his conscience stirred. She was so vulnerable; he was taking advantage of her. He pulled gently away from her kiss, took her face in both his hands, and whispered, “Are you sure you’re not going to regret this?”

  She looked at him. “No,” she answered quietly. “I couldn’t possibly regret anything more than I’m already— Never mind. Anyway, I haven’t got any regret left, I’ve used it all up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  It was almost with a trace of impatience that she said, “You don’t want to, do you?”

  “Not want to? Oh, God!” He gave a shaky laugh. “Oh, God, yes, I want to!” And then, striving for a lighter tone: “But will you still respect me in the morning?”

  She laughed. She actually laughed.

  He was exultant. He had done it, he had made her laugh. It was what he had wanted all along, but he could not have told her that. She wouldn’t have believed him, she would have thought it a line, a ploy to get her—

  Where he had her now. In his arms, pressing against his growing hardness. Allowing him to stroke the silk of her blouse over her breasts. Lifting her hands to pull the pins from her dusky hair. Coming to him, giving herself to him, an unlooked-for miracle. It was the reward for his good intentions. He had wanted more than anything else to lighten her sorrow, to take it from her, and he had; and now he took from her the silken blouse, and released the lace brassiere, and touched a softness finer than the silk. It was not just desire, no, not just desire, but breathless gratitude that filled him, that swelled in him as he lost himself in her, as his senses swam in her fragrance, in the glorious perfume of her.

  And she also, feeling the body’s urgency, lost herself in it, and for the first time since her world had ended in blood on a white tile floor, forgot the blood, forgot the body of the woman who had been her friend, forgot the dreadful sight of him standing in the doorway, forgot everything that had followed her relentlessly across the miles, forgot the fearful images in her mind, forgot, forgot.

  iv

  It was the deep of the night. It should have been completely tranquil. The noises, the furtive movements, fell like stains on the serenity and ruined it. One sleeper, pulled from her bed by the sweat of a breaking fever, heard and watched. She took in every terrible moment of it, until at last it was finished, and the noises pulled slowly away into the dark.

  Julia Robinson was sleeping soundly. Then gradually, she became aware of small, icy hands shaking her shoulder, and an unintelligible babbling that became, as she struggled up from sleep, the voice of her ten-year-old daughter, demanding that she call the police.

  v

  She lay quietly in his arms, and he was content. She murmured something.

  “Hmmm?” he asked.

  “I said, I just remembered.”

  “Remembered what?”

  “The lighter, that little gold lighter you tried to give me. You forgot to turn it in at the desk.”

  “Oh, yes, the lighter.”

  “Some woman is going to be frantic.”

  He chuckled. “No, I told her I’d give it back to her tomorrow.”

  Thinking she had not heard him correctly, she turned her head to look at him and asked, “What?”

  He kissed her on her perfect nose. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I borrowed it from a friend of mine in the bar. I had to have some excuse to start talking to you.” He was so sure she would laugh, share the joke with him, that when he got no response from her he assumed she had not understood him. “I saw you in the bar, down at the end by yourself. I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.” He could have added and the saddest, but he was afraid that if he mentioned the sadness, it would come flooding back. “So I said to myself, How can I meet that gorgeous woman?” He did not add and take away her pain.

  “I see,” she said neutrally, and turned her face away.

  He had blundered. “I’m sorry,” he said softly into her hair. “I thought you would think it was funny.”

  She did not say anything.

  “Carolyn? Are you angry at me?”

  After a pause she said, “No, I’m not angry at you.”

  It was true. Her anger was at herself. She had been a pickup, a common, vulgar pickup. She had thought—God, how could she have been so stupid?—she had thought he was a gift from heaven, a little miracle from a God who was not, after all, her tormentor, but who knew how bitterly she felt her guilt, and had given her a way to purge herself of the man who was in fact her tormentor. What better way to erase a man from your body and your soul than to let another man take his place? A charming man who disliked violence even on a movie screen. An honest man, making an honest mistake, trying to return an expensive toy to its proper owner. But there had been no miracle, and no mistake. Wrong! Her mistake.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  She turned her face back to him long enough to plant a swift kiss on the corner of his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she said, snuggling deeper into the sheets and making no move to free herself from his embrace. “I think I’m just tired. My body clock thinks it’s three a.m., you know. I’ll probably think it’s funny in the morning.”

  And so they slept.

  But in the morning she was gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Twenty-two hours. Grace Kimbrough had been gone for twenty-two hours, they had been on it for about nine hours, and they were nowhere. She was dead. She had to be. It was stupid to waste time hoping she wasn’t.

  Tom Holder had wished, the previous afternoon, for an interesting crime; the recollection of that wish now filled him with a guilt he knew to be unreasonable. No desire of his, expressed or unexpressed, had caused her death. So why did he feel so bad about it?

  Because of Kathryn, answered a voice in his head. He was not immediately sure what that meant. Then suddenly he saw what a fool he’d been. For the better part of a year he had actually allowed himself to believe that his attraction to Kathryn was light and insignificant, that all he ever wanted was the satisfaction of knowing she returned just a fraction of his interest. He didn’t want her for a lover, after all. Surely his reaction to her was normal and permissible, thwarted only by Louise’s unreasonable jealousy.

  But now he saw clearly for the first time how far over the line into his fantasy life his feelings had strayed. She didn’t fit the profile for his regular make-believe lovers, so he had been able to pretend to himself that he didn’t seriously want her. But he did. Oh, shit, he did. And that was where his guilt was coming from.

  He escaped from this unhappy revelation by dragging his mind back to the matter at hand. Grace Kimbrough. She was dead and it was his job to do something about it.

  He thought he had a pretty good idea of who killed her, but he had not one bit of evidence. Worse: He could not even establish that there had been a murder. They needed to find the body, obviously, and until they did, he was more or less stuck.

  There was a faint possibility that a forensic search of the Kimbroughs’ house might yield something useful, but George Kimbrough’s response to a mild suggestion that the police “take a look around” had been uncivil bordering on violent. His compliance could be forced only with a search warrant and there was no evidence to persuade a judge to issue one. Besides, Holder didn’t believe that Grace could have been violently done to death in that over-decorated residence without George’s noticing something out of order when he got home. The removal of her body would have left one of the gold tassels crooked, or something.

  With a sigh, Tom shuffled through the unhelpful results that were coming in from the routine inquiries. Although he was personally convinced that he wasn’t dealing with a runaway—runaways generally take suitcases—he was still obliged to check out the possibility that Grace had
left the neighborhood under her own steam. As her husband had said, she hadn’t driven away in her own car; Reilly’s Garage had verified that Mrs. Kimbrough’s green Volvo had been on their premises all day Monday—and was, in fact, still there. Nor had she taken a local taxi. Both the local cab companies had had pickups within a few blocks of the Kimbrough house on Monday, but they had all been checked out and none of them was Grace Kimbrough.

  Checking the buses would be harder, of course, as you had to count on the memory of drivers who had dealt with hundreds of people that day. That was a bush that Holder didn’t want to spend a lot of time beating; bus service was scanty through Canterbury Park, and he could not picture the wealthy—all right, moderately wealthy—Mrs. Kimbrough leaving home by walking half a mile to the bus stop, with or without a suitcase. He had dispatched a couple of underlings to make inquiries at the terminal, but he knew they wouldn’t get anywhere.

  What he needed was something, anything, that would get him a search warrant for the Stanley house. It wasn’t enough that the guy fainted on sight of the police. Correction: It was enough for Holder, who had been there and seen it, but it wouldn’t be enough for a judge.

  So where was he? He had the victim at the scene, thanks to Glamorous Gloria. The next step was to get the suspect there.

  By his own admission, Bill Stanley had come home from work early, though he had steadfastly refused to remember the time he had done so. Clearly, then, what came next was to check out the place where he worked.

  At this point Tom had a little talk with himself. He was running on four hours of sleep and he was seriously tired. If someone else drove him, he would have ten or fifteen minutes to concentrate on unclenching all the muscles that had been gradually tightening since the moment when he had seen Grace’s luggage the previous night. On the other hand, if he drove himself, he would have ten or fifteen minutes on his own.