“Maybe I didn’t bring it,” he said. “It’s probably home on my bedroom table.”
“I hope,” I said.
“I’d leave my elbow laying around,” Bob said, “if it weren’t attached to my arm.”
I smiled and raised my glass to him.
“Soon,” I said.
He nodded and went out. I sat and sipped my wine.
30
After Bob had been gone for half an hour, Spike walked to the front door of the restaurant and went out to get some air. When he came back in, he walked to my table.
“No sign of him,” Spike said. “How’d you get here.”
“I walked over,” I said.
“I’ll take you home.”
“I can go home alone, Spike.”
“No.”
“I have a gun in my purse, and some mace.”
“I’ll take you home,” Spike said.
“He can shoot you from ambush just as easily as he could shoot me,” I said.
“Easier,” Spike said. “I’m a bigger target.”
“I’ll be fine on my own, Spike, really.”
“I’ll take you home,” he said.
I knew he would, unless I ran for it. Which seemed undignified.
“Thank you,” I said.
Spike was wearing a navy guayabera shirt. He went behind the bar and took something from under the bar and put it in his right hip pocket under the shirt.
When he came back to the table, I said, “Packing, are we?”
“No reason not to,” Spike said.
Spike’s black Escalade was parked in an alley behind the restaurant. Both of us paid a lot of attention to our surroundings as we went to the car. We were in the middle of the city, but it was late now, and there was very little sound in the alley. No one shot at us.
Once in the car, with the doors locked, we pulled out of the alley.
“He’s not going to kill me,” I said. “At least not yet. He’s enjoying the relationship too much.”
“I was watching him from the bar,” Spike said. “He was posing for you like a peacock. First time I ever saw somebody strut sitting down.”
“He was sexually aroused,” I said. “I know it when I see it. I’ve seen it before in men.”
Spike grinned.
“Me too,” he said.
He parked the Escalade on the corner near my loft by a sign that said TOW ZONE: NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER.
“You can just drop me,” I said.
“No.”
“You’re in a tow zone,” I said.
“Find a tow truck at this time of night,” Spike said.
We walked watchfully to the door of my building.
I said, “Thank you, Spike.”
“I’m coming up,” Spike said. “I want to see Rosie.”
I nodded. Spike wasn’t looking at me. He was surveying the street. My building door was locked. I unlocked it. I went in with Spike so close behind me that I could feel him. The big old freight elevator came down when I pressed the call button, and the doors opened. It was empty. Spike and I got in and went to the fourth floor. I could hear Rosie snuffling a little behind my loft door. I opened it. She scooted out and capered. I scooched down to pat her and Spike went past me into the loft. I always left lights on for Rosie.
When Rosie and I came into the loft, Spike had surveyed it and was content.
“Clear,” he said.
“Oh, God,” I said. “You’ve been watching those cop shows again.”
Spike went to my kitchen and poured us two citron vodkas on the rocks, and brought them into my living-room area. He put them on the coffee table, took his gun from his hip pocket and put it on the coffee table beside the vodka, and sat on my couch. I sat beside him. Rosie wiggled herself into a comfortable position between us. Spike patted her absently.
“You’re convinced this is the guy,” Spike said.
“Yes.”
“Okay, I don’t have to prove anything in court. I’ll assume you’re right.”
“Thank you.”
“In which case,” Spike said, “you are fucking around with a serial killer.”
“I like to think of it as investigating,” I said.
“And,” Spike said as if I hadn’t spoken, “he’s almost certainly going to try to kill you sooner or later.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
“No, but it would seem stupid to work on a different assumption,” Spike said.
“Yes,” I said.
Spike’s gun on the coffee table was a Browning nine-millimeter semiautomatic.
“Didn’t you used to have a big old Army-issue Colt .45?” I said.
“Still do,” Spike said. “But it’s kind of heavy to carry.”
I nodded. We both sipped our vodka.
“You’re going to stay with this guy, aren’t you?” Spike said.
“Yes.”
“You think you keep flirting with him, he’ll get so horned up that he’ll confess?”
“Or do something that gives him away,” I said.
“Like try to kill you,” Spike said.
“I hope to prevent him,” I said.
Spike put his feet up on the coffee table.
“He kills you, it won’t make your father happy,” Spike said.
“As I say, I hope to avoid that.”
“It wouldn’t make him happy if he knew you were taking the chance,” Spike said.
“I can’t worry about that,” I said.
“The hell you can’t,” Spike said. “That’s why you’re doing it. You want to solve it for your father.”
“I want to solve it,” I said, “because it needs to be solved.”
“It’s been your father’s albatross for twenty years,” Spike said. “You’re going to be the best daughter in the world. You’re going to solve it for him.”
“I…”
“You know this is the guy,” Spike said.
“Yes.”
“You want to roll him up, stop the killing.”
“Yes.”
“So you go to Richie’s Uncle Felix, you tell him the situation, and you go home. In a day or two, Bob Johnson’s in a landfill someplace, case closed.”
“I can’t do it that way,” I said.
“Because?”
“It’s not…it’s wrong, Spike.”
Spike smiled.
“You think?” he said.
“We don’t need to get metaphysical about it,” I said. “How about, it’s illegal?”
“Lot of people have died waiting for the law to work. You sure it would be so immoral to have him killed?”
“I can’t do it that way,” I said.
“Because your daddy would never solve the case, might not even know that you ended it.”
I sipped some vodka.
“How can you weigh more than the state of Montana,” I said, “and be as smart as you are.”
“It’s a gay thing,” Spike said. “Richie know about this?”
“No.”
“You ever see him?”
“We’re seeing each other again,” I said.
Spike raised his eyebrows.
“What about the wife?” he said.
“Richie’s moved out of the house.”
“And I’m the fucking last to know?” Spike said.
“It’s all been pretty sudden,” I said. “And mixed in with this Spare Change thing…”
“And now is probably not the right time to talk about it,” Spike said.
“No.”
“Okay. But I got a little speech to give. I don’t want you to die so you can b
e Daddy’s favorite. Your father doesn’t, either. And Richie doesn’t, and neither does Rosie.”
I nodded.
“But if it happens, I will see to it that Johnson dies shortly thereafter,” Spike said. “If your father doesn’t beat me to it.”
“That would destroy Daddy’s life,” I said.
“Keep it in mind,” Spike said.
“You’d kill him?”
“Maybe, or maybe I’d mention it to Richie and he’d kill him, or maybe he’d mention it to Felix. You die,” Spike said, “one way or another, Johnson’s gone in a New York minute.”
“That’s comforting,” I said.
“Hell,” Spike said, “Tony Marcus would probably do it.”
“I’m hoping maybe to live,” I said.
“I’d like to stick with you while you’re doing this,” Spike said. “But you’re not going to let me.”
“No,” I said. “I do this for a living. How can I do this for a living if I have to be surrounded by a covey of protective thugs.”
“Thugs?”
“However adorable,” I said.
“I know,” Spike said.
“You may be right, down the line,” I said. “He may turn. No way to know. Since we don’t know why he killed before, there’s no sense trying to make any guesses about why he will again. I may not be what he kills. But if I am, he won’t do it soon. Right now I am a rich masturbatory fantasy for him.”
“He’s probably home right now,” Spike said, “snapping the carrot.”
“‘Snapping the carrot’?”
“You know,” Spike said. “Sanding the bishop.”
“God, Spike,” I said. “You are such a smooth talker.”
31
Richie,” I said.
Dr. Silverman nodded and looked interested. I wondered if she really was. How could she be? Clients coming in all day, talking endlessly about themselves, often boring, often saying things that she knows are evasive, failing to see the obvious, failing to understand what she probably knew about them the first day they were there but had to lead them to.
“We need to talk about Richie,” I said.
She nodded as if she wanted to hear. I supposed that if she weren’t interested, she couldn’t do this. It was probably a little like me. I, too, liked to find out about people.
“He’s left his wife,” I said.
She nodded.
“He wants us to try again.”
She nodded.
“I’ve told him I probably can’t get married. He says he doesn’t care. I’ve told him I can’t live with anybody. He says that’s okay. He said he loved me. He asked if I loved him.”
She shifted her head slightly. It meant “Tell me more.”
“I said I did.”
She waited.
“He said it was a place to start.”
“How do you feel about that?” Dr. Silverman said.
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” I said.
She smiled and didn’t speak. Had she ever had problems? Had she struggled with love and sex and things like that? It was hard to imagine.
“It’s what he didn’t do,” I said. “He didn’t ask me why I couldn’t get married or live with somebody. He didn’t say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”
“Do you want to be with him?”
“I think so,” I said.
“With conditions?” she said.
“Yes.”
She nodded. She seemed relaxed and focused. Her makeup was understated and flawless. Her hair was in place without any hint of hairspray. Her clothes fit her perfectly. They were expensive and subtle, suitable for psychotherapy. Appropriate. Like her. Always appropriate. Did she ever get a stomachache? Was she ever scared? Did she always know what was what?
“What is wrong with me?” I said.
“I’m not sure wrong is the appropriate word,” she said.
“Whatever,” I said. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” she said.
“Why can’t I live with someone? Marry someone?” I said.
“How do you feel when you think about it?”
“Small,” I said.
Dr. Silverman seemed absorbed by my answer.
“Talk about that a little,” she said.
“I feel like, yes he loves me, but I…”
She waited. No hurry. She knew I’d get there.
“I feel childish,” I said. “He’s the adult, I’m the child. He loves me and takes care of me, but who and what I am doesn’t matter.”
She nodded slowly, calmly, just as if that weren’t a silly way to feel.
“When you say he, are you talking about Richie?” she said.
“Any he,” I said. “Anyone I committed to exclusively. Any he that I lived with.”
“Is Richie like that?” she said.
“Richie?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not so much what he does,” I said.
“What is it, then?” she said.
“It’s more how I feel.”
“And what does he do to cause the feeling?” she said.
She was being positively directive. I must be on to something. I took a minute and thought about Richie.
“He’s very self-sufficient,” I said. “Very interior.”
She nodded.
“He doesn’t need to be taken care of much,” I said. “He’s a very capable man.”
“So why does he need you?” Dr. Silverman said.
I looked at her for a moment. My mind felt blank.
“Need me?”
“Yes.”
“To love, I guess.”
She nodded. I was quiet. She was quiet. Somewhere I could hear the white sound of a central air conditioner.
“You know,” I said, “when you asked me what he did, I told you what he was.”
She smiled and nodded.
“He doesn’t do anything, really, to make me feel that way,” I said.
She continued to nod…pleasantly. She understood. She always understood. Even when I didn’t. Did she ever misunderstand? Was she ever confused? Did she ever fuck up?
“It’s not him,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Yes,” Dr. Silverman said.
“I suppose that’s a good thing,” I said.
She nodded again…neutrally.
“I’ve learned enough in here to know that I can’t change other people. But I can change myself.”
“If you wish,” Dr. Silverman said.
“I’m not sure right now what I wish,” I said.
“There’s time,” Dr. Silverman said. “We’ll get there.”
32
Taft University was the big school in the area. Its basketball teams went to the NCAA tournaments. Its football teams played in bowl games. Its campus was bigger than some towns. It had begun life as a lovely rural campus with a lot of red brick Georgian architecture and a green, open campus. After World War II, veterans financed by the GI Bill began to fill the campus, and when they graduated they stayed, and Walford, where the university was located, began to expand. The result was, sixty years later, that the town was now a small city, and the university was a hodgepodge. Some of the buildings looked like they’d been there since the eighteenth century. Some of them looked like vocational school projects. There was very little green remaining on the campus.
I drove out the fifteen miles from Boston on a fine Wednesday morning and parked in a faculty-only space beside the new library, which looked somewhat like a beached aircraft carrier. Inside the library, with the help of an alert librarian, I found a collection of college yearbooks dating back to 1911. I sat at a table, put the picture from Bob Jo
hnson’s bureau on the table beside me, and began to look at the yearbooks. If Bob Johnson was forty now, and all was normal, he would have graduated around nineteen years ago. I started there. Things had apparently been normal. Because he was there, with the rest of his graduating class. He had more hair then, but he was pretty similar otherwise.
He’d been on the yearbook staff, a member of an organization called the Social Committee, the chess club, and something called the International Relations Club. They all sounded to me like résumé filler. There were scraps of meaningless, to me, phrases beside the pictures of the graduating seniors. For Johnson they were “…last of the great ones…yes, we’re related…farewell to Ike.”
That was all there was, four years of college. A degree in accounting. I went through the yearbook page by page. There was a picture of the chess club, but no sign of Bob. There were pictures of the Social Committee, and the International Relations Club. Again, no Bob. In fact in the whole yearbook, though I couldn’t make out everybody in all the pictures, I could find no other sign of Bob. In the faculty section was a picture of Bob’s father, Robert B. Johnson III, professor of Business Administration. He was a pleasant, rather good-looking guy. Bob resembled him.
I kept at it. I went back four years, looking for Bob. I could find him nowhere in any of the yearbooks. He’d changed enough so that among the several montage pages of uncaptioned snapshots, he might have been there and escaped my eye. Nonetheless, it seemed as if he had been preparing even then to be a man of mystery.
When I got through, I sat up straight and arched my back a little and looked around. There were undergraduates of all genders in the library; some were studying, many were socializing. Many of the girls wore T-shirts and jeans. Which is what I was wearing. They weren’t that much younger than I was. People probably thought I was one of them, Sunny Coed.
I went back to Bob’s graduating yearbook and started looking for the woman. There was no special reason she should be in his college past. But there was no special reason that she shouldn’t, either. It would have saved time and effort if I had looked for both at the same time. But when I’m really focused, I have room for only one item in the circle of my attention.
In the picture I had, she looked to be in her twenties, so she might not look so different than she would have looked in college. If she had gone to college. If she had gone here. If she had done so within the compass of Bob Johnson’s tour. I went through the four years’ worth of yearbooks page by page. It was slow and painstaking and boring. But it didn’t pay off. She wasn’t anywhere in any of the books.
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