A Killer’s Kiss

36

I had plenty of time to think it through later that same night while I sat in the dark in my apartment.

I sat in a chair in a corner of my living room and stewed in a simmering pot of bitterness. She had betrayed me, not just once with the police at Clarence Swift’s urging but repeatedly, overtly, time and again. Terrence Tipton hadn’t let me take him out of that house to treat the disease that was ravaging his body, but he had told me a story, and its clearest message was that at every turn in my tortured relationship with sweet Julia she had betrayed me.

To hear Terry tell it, Julia broke off our engagement because she feared I couldn’t support both her and his drug habit in the manner in which he wanted to be accustomed. She married Wren Denniston because Wren could and was willing to, and look where it got him, the sap. She confessed the details of our old-lovers’ tango to Terry, even as she told me that what was going on between us was ours and ours alone. In my apartment, when she learned of the murder, she collapsed under the weight of her intuitive knowledge that sweet little Terry had shot her husband in the head to allow our tango to reach some heated fruition. And when she rose again, she gathered her senses and did everything she could to protect Terrence Tipton from the just consequences of his brutal act, even if it meant throwing me beneath the train.

I suppose I could have taken this with a certain grain of equanimity in and of itself. Duplicity might simply have been an integral component of Julia’s character, and not the least alluring component at that. Who is ever sexier than a woman on the cusp of a betrayal? But she had betrayed me for a drug-addicted piece of putrefying flesh lost in a haze of posh, romantic, adolescent angst. She had betrayed me for the likes of Terrence Tipton, and that was almost more than I could handle.

Still, amidst all this, I wondered if we had a future. Now who was the sap?

But there was a foundation to my madness. Suddenly it was as if I could peer through Julia’s shields and glimpse her inner life for the first time. She had been twisted around by a twisted love. Something had happened between Julia and Terrence in their desperate youths that had left scars evident in her psyche and upon his flesh. And I now knew what it was. And maybe my love was exactly what she needed to salve the wounds and save herself. The possibilities gleamed. All they required, of course, was to rid ourselves of that murderous piece of human excrement. And right there, sitting on my coffee table, I had the key to his riddance.

“Did you get it?” I said to Derek as soon as we left Terry Tipton’s room.

“Sure thing, bo.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the miniature tape recorder, clicked it off. “I learned my lesson from last time. This time I pressed the damn buttons before we started.”

“Let me have it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” I said.

“You really sure? I mean, how you think she’ll feel about you if you turn that freak in?”

“She’ll never forgive me,” I said.

“So is this tape going to end up in the grip of the police,” he said as he tossed the recorder to me, “or is it going to disappear to keep that girl happy?”

“Don’t know yet,” I said.

And I didn’t, but I intended to find out. So I sat in a dark corner of my living room, staring at the miniature tape recorder glowing dully on the coffee table. I sat there stewing and waiting. Waiting for the knock at the door. Waiting for the ring of truth.

That day I had run from Philly to Washington to Ashland, Virginia, and then back again. I had run around like a fool looking for answers. But I wasn’t running anymore. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen tonight, and it was going to happen here. The players would come to me to figure it all out. How did I know they would come to me? Because I had spent the whole day looking for answers, and now I had them. I knew who had killed Wren Denniston. I knew where the money was. I knew what each player was after, each player but one. All I didn’t know for sure was what my future would bring. But that I would find out with the first knock on the door.

And then it came.

Knock, knock.

“Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”