Big Boned

21

“Just give me the keys,” I say, holding out my hand.

For a minute Pam just looks at me with a very surprised expression on her face. Then she throws back her head and laughs.

“Oh… you!” she says, reaching out to give me a little push. “Owen always said you were a kidder. In fact, he said you spent so much time kidding around, sometimes he worried about you getting the job done.”

Now that—as opposed to the typing thing—I believe Owen actually said.

“I’m not kidding,” I say. “And you know it. Give me the keys, Pam. I’m not letting you get away with this. And you know the cops aren’t going to, either. You can’t just pack up a murder victim’s stuff and drive away with it. I’m sure there’s some kind of protocol that has to be followed—”

Pam stops laughing. But she’s still smiling. There’s something a little stiff about the smile—like she’s turned into a jack-o’-lantern.

Or Muffy Fowler.

“Protocol,” she repeats, with a humorless little chuckle. “Now you’re starting to sound just like Owen.”

“Look, Pam,” I say. I can’t believe it took me so long to notice, but this lady is nuttier than a slice of Fischer Hall coffee cake.

I know I’m going to need to tread carefully here. But I’m not particularly worried, because I know where the murder weapon is—in an evidence locker in the DA’s office downtown. I’m safe. There’s nothing she can do to me. I suppose she can try to take a swing at me, but I’m at least ten years younger, and twenty pounds lighter. I could easily take her in a fight, if it comes to that. I’m actually longing for her to take a swing at me.

It’s true I didn’t like Owen all that much.

But I liked walking into my office and finding his dead body even less. And nothing would give me more pleasure than punching the person who is responsible for making me go through all that.

“Don’t play with me,” I say. “I know you killed him. I know you didn’t get in today, like you pretended. I know you were actually here yesterday. You were spotted in the chess circle across the street, you know.”

Pam stares at me, her lips slightly parted. She’s still smiling, though. “That… that’s just baloney,” she says.

Seriously. Baloney. That’s what she said. Not bullshit. Baloney. Priceless.

“I know you planted that gun on Sebastian Blumenthal,” I go on. “Just like I know you and Owen were fighting over your wedding china. Owen told me all about it. He wanted it. God knows why. Probably because you did, and he wanted to punish you for divorcing him, and because he was completely lacking in imagination, it was the only way he could think to get back at you. I don’t know when you got to town, but I can’t imagine it will be too hard for the police to figure it out. What did you do, rent the truck and drive here? Then bide your time until you found Owen alone, then blew his head off? Is that how it went?”

Pam is shaking her head slowly, her graying mom haircut still so carefully styled from the memorial service that it doesn’t move an inch.

“You,” she says, still smiling, “are a very creative person. It must be your background in show business.”

“That’s called premeditation, you know, Pam,” I inform her. “And it’s probably going to get you life in prison. And the part where you planted the murder weapon on an innocent person? That’s going to get you life without parole.”

Pam is still shaking her head. But when I get to the part about how she planted the gun on Sebastian, she stops shaking her head, and just stares at me. The weird part is, she’s still smiling.

But the smile doesn’t go all the way up to her eyes. It’s like her lips are just frozen that way.

“I can’t believe,” she says, through that cold, creepy smile, “you’re on his side.”

I stare at her. “Whose side?”

“You know whose,” she says. “Owen’s. You worked with him. Every day—in the same office! You saw what he was like. Like a robot, with his agendas and itineraries and appointment calendars. The man was inhuman!”

I blink at her. The smile is finally gone. The bright spots of color on either of her cheeks have spread, and now her whole face is red. Her eyes—once a soft hazel—are beginning to glitter with a sort of manic intensity I’m not sure I like. She doesn’t look like a gentle potter anymore. She looks a little psycho, if you ask me.

I take a step backward. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“Uh,” I say. “You’re the one who married him.”

“Yes, I married him,” Pam spits. “I met him in college, back when I was an art major, a real wild child, into drugs and partying and sexual experimentation, and he was my resident assistant, and straight as an arrow, and I felt like I needed a little of that to calm me down. What I didn’t need, however, was to be smothered! To be creatively stifled for twenty years! Except that that’s what happened… until I finally got the guts to leave him. And, yes, you’re right—he did insist on taking the china—my beautiful china. Not because he cared about it. But because he knew I loved it. To punish me for leaving him! Well, I got it in the end, didn’t I?”

But I’m already shaking my head.

“No,” I say. “No, you won’t. Because it’s wrong, and you know it, Pam. I’m not letting you take it. Give me the keys.”

She’s weeping openly now, tears spilling out of those hazel eyes, and dropping down onto the fabric aprons the rag dolls are wearing.

“I… I… ” is all she seems able to say.

I hold out my hand. “Come on, Pam,” I say, in my most soothing tone. “Give me the keys. I’m sure we can work something out with the DA. Battered wife syndrome, or something. Maybe they can send you to the same place they sent Martha Stewart. She got to do a lot of crafts in there. You could still do your pottery.”

Pam lets out a sigh, and turns toward a chest of drawers.

“That’s it,” I say encouragingly, speaking to her in the same gentle but firm tone I use with the anorexics we get periodically down in the office, and whom I have to urge to eat the special, highly caloric muffins the nutritionists send over to fatten them up enough for what we’re saying to make some sort of sense to their vitamin-deprived little brains. “You’re doing the right thing—”

But when Pam turns around, I see to my dismay that it’s not a set of keys she’s holding in her hand.

It’s a handgun.

And she’s pointing it right at me.

“You didn’t really think,” she says—and I see, with a lurch of my entrails, that the smile is back—“that I only had the one gun, did you, Heather? I’m a country girl, you know. I grew up around guns. I know how to use them—even if I think they’re entirely too easy to procure for most people.”

I can’t believe this. What a phony she is! Her sweatshirt is totally lying! She doesn’t believe in interracial harmony at all!

Well, okay, maybe she does.

But she doesn’t seem to have a problem with killing people. Including completely innocent assistant residence hall directors.

“Pam,” I say, holding up both my hands. “You do not want to do this.”

“Actually,” Pam says, taking a step toward me. “I really do. Because by the time anyone finds your body, I’ll be long gone. So killing you really isn’t a problem for me.”

I take an instinctive step back. But for every step I take away from her, Pam takes another one forward. I’m looking around, wondering frantically what on earth I’m going to do. Owen kept his apartment as fastidiously neat as he kept his office. Unlike my own place, there are no stray objects lying randomly around that I can pick up and try to throw at my would-be assassin—no whimsical lamp shaped like a mermaid, purchased at the local flea market for a song, that would make a handy missile. No terrariums filled with sea-shells that I can heave in her direction…

Not that I’d be likely to hit her. But it’s better than nothing.

The worst thing is, no one even knows I’m here, except for the moron with the toothpick at the desk downstairs. And he doesn’t even work for the college. He works for Rosetti, and is about as likely to notice the sound of a gunshot upstairs as he is likely to notice that his multiple gold neck chains clashed with his many bracelets.

I’m basically a dead woman.

And for what? For Owen.

And I didn’t even like him!

Still, I have to try.

“This isn’t Iowa, Pam,” I inform her. “Someone’s going to hear a gun go off, and call the cops.”

“I’m from Illinois,” Pam says. “And already thought of that.”

And she reaches down, picks up the phone that’s sitting next to the couch I’ve bumped into (I’ve backed up as far as I can go), and dials 911.

“Hello, operator?” she says, in a breathless, panicky voice quite unlike her own, when someone on the other end picks up. “Send the police right away! I’m calling from apartment six—J at twenty-one Washington Square West. Former teen pop sensation Heather Wells has gone crazy and broken into my apartment and is trying to kill me! She’s got a gun! Ah!”

Then she hangs up.

I stare at her in total astonishment.

“That,” I say, “was a big mistake.”

Pam shrugs. “This is New York City,” she says. “Do you know how long it’s going to take them to get here? By the time they do, I’ll be long gone. And you’ll have bled to death.”

Pam obviously doesn’t realize what’s happening in the park approximately a hundred yards from the entrance to her ex-husband’s apartment building.

And how many cops are out there as a consequence.

On the other hand, it won’t matter if two dozen cops storm apartment 6–J in the next twenty seconds if she manages to put a bullet in my brain the way she did Owen’s.

Which is exactly what I realize she’s about to do when she raises the pistol she’s holding and points it at my head.

“Good-bye, Heather,” she says. “Owen was right about you, you know. You really aren’t that good of an administrator.”

Owen said that? Geez! Talk about ungrateful! And I was really helpful when he first started, showing him the ropes and the best place to get a bagel (outside of the café, of course), and everything. And he said I wasn’t a good administrator? What was he even talking about? Has he seen the binders I created at the reception desk, making the kids responsible for keeping their own time sheets, so I don’t have to bother with it? And what about my innovative way of getting the student workers to pay attention to what’s going on in and around the building, the Fischer Hall Newsletter? Was Owen completely unaware of the fact that Simon Hague, over in Wasser Hall, stole my idea, and invented his own student worker newsletter, and even had the nerve to call it the Wasser Hall Newsletter?

Well?Was he?

But I don’t have a chance to process how I feel about this betrayal, because I’m busy ducking the bullet Owen’s ex-wife has just fired at me. Ducking and, I’d like to add, diving over the side of the couch and grabbing the one thing in the apartment I think might actually give me half a chance to survive the next two minutes until the boys (and girls) in blue can get up here and save my cellulite-ridden butt.

And that’s Garfield.

Who isn’t too happy about being snatched from his resting place on the sofa cushion, by the way.

But then, the sound of a handgun going off at close proximity hadn’t made him particularly happy, either.

Snarling and snapping, the great big orange tabby is doing his best to get away from me. But I have him by the scruff of his neck with one hand, his sizable belly with the other. His unsheathed and flailing claws are, fortunately, facing away from me. So there’s virtually no way he can escape.

But no one’s told him that. He’s twenty-five pounds or so of pure enraged muscle. And he’s taking it out on me. All I can taste and smell for a few seconds is fur and gunpowder, especially when I practically land on him.

But I’m alive.

I’m alive.

I’m alive.

Pam is staring confusedly at the spot in which I’d been standing. Blinking, she turns, and stares at the place to which I’ve leaped over the couch.

When she sees what I’m holding, her eyes widen.

“That’s right,” I say. My voice sounds oddly muted. That’s because the crack of the pistol had been so loud, everything in relation now sounds completely muffled, including the protests from the creature I’m holding, like the city after a record snowfall. “I’ve got Garfield. Come any closer, Pam, and I swear, the cat gets it.”

The smile that had been playing across Pam’s face freezes. Her upper lip begins to twitch.

“You’re… you’re bl-bluffing,” she stammers.

“Try me,” I say. The stupid cat still won’t quit struggling. But over my dead body am I letting go of him. Literally. “Pull that trigger again, and yeah, you might hit me. But I’ll still have time to snap his neck before I go. I swear I’ll do it. I love animals—but not this one.”

And I do mean that. Especially as Owen’s cat’s fangs sink into my wrist. Ow! Stupid cat! Wasn’t I the one who brought Pam over here to make sure he got his stupid pills? Talk about ungrateful! Like pet, like owner.

Pam’s face twists in pain—even though I’m the one who’s bleeding.

“Garfield!” she cries, in anguish. “No! Let him go, you witch!”

Witch. Not bitch.

Priceless.

I’m not sure, given my state of semi-deafness. But I think I hear voices in the hallway. Suddenly there’s pounding on the door to the apartment.

“Put the gun down, Pam,” I say, stalling for time. “Put the gun down, and no one—including Garfield—will get hurt. It’s not too late to give yourself up.”

“You—you meanie!” Pam’s eyes are bright with tears. “All I wanted was what I deserved! All I wanted was to make a clean start! Why can’t you just let the cat go, and we’ll call it even? I’ll go—I’ll take Garfield, and go. Just give me a head start.”

“I can’t do that, Pam,” I say. “You already called the cops, remember? In fact—I think they’re here.”

Pam spins around just as something that sounds like a small explosion goes off in the hallway. A second later, four or five of New York’s Finest, their guns drawn, burst into the living room.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone before in my life. I’d have rushed over and kissed them if I hadn’t been so busy concentrating on not getting my hands gnawed off.

“Ma’am!” the first cop cries, the mouth of his piece pointed at Pam’s chest. “Drop the gun, lay down on the floor, and place your hands upon your head, or I will be forced to fire.”

I’m busy thinking it’s all over. I’m busy thinking,Swell, okay, she’s going to put the gun down, and I can put this stupid cat down, and then I can go home, and this will be all over, and I can go back to my boring little life, for which I will never again be ungrateful. I love my boring little life. I love it. Thank God this is finally over.

Except it isn’t. Not by a long shot. No pun intended.

“You don’t understand,” Pam wails, waving her gun at me. “She has Garfield! She won’t let go of Garfield!”

Oh God. No. Please, no.

“Ma’am,” the officer says again. “I’m asking you again to drop the gun, or I will be forced to fire.”

Drop the gun, Pam. Pam, please. Just drop the gun.

“But I called you,” Pam insists, still waving the gun around. “She’s the one who threatened me!”

The next thing I know, another shot’s been fired. I have no idea whose gun it’s come from, or whether or not it strikes home, because I’ve hit the floor, clutching Garfield to me and curling into as small a ball as I possibly can, with the thought of trying to make myself into the tiniest target possible. The cat, for his part, has stopped trying to bite me, and is now clinging to me as tightly as I’m clinging to him. If his ears are ringing anywhere near as loud as mine are, I figure he has as little idea what’s going on as I do.

All I know is, it’s just me and Garfield, all alone in this world. Just me and him. All we have is each other. I’m never letting go of him. And I’m pretty sure he’s never letting go of me.

It isn’t until someone lays a hand on my shoulder and shouts, “Miss! It’s all right to get up now!” (apparently, he had to shout in order for me to hear him, since my hearing was so blown on account of the gunfire) that I uncurl myself and look around to see that Pam’s gun has been wrestled away from her—primarily because some excellent marksman has shot it out from her fingers. She’s cradling her now useless and bloody fingers in her uninjured hand, and blubbering out a confession to my old friend, Detective Canavan, who looks at me tiredly above the semi-hysterical woman’s head.

Wedding china?he mouths.

I am in so much shock, I can’t even shrug. The truth is, I don’t get it, either. But then again, there’s a lot I don’t seem to get. Like why, even though the police officers and EMTs keep offering to take Garfield from me, I still can’t let him go. In my defense,he won’t let go of me, either. It’s like we’re the only two stable beings in a world turned suddenly topsy-turvy.

I’m still holding on to him—and he to me—half an hour later when Detective Canavan finally escorts me into the elevator and then out into the lobby. Flashing red lights from all the cop cars parked outside Owen’s building reflect against the marble and brass—but that isn’t the only difference between now and when I’d gone upstairs a few hours earlier. Something else has changed as well. It takes me a minute to register what it is, and that’s because my hearing still hasn’t quite recovered from the gunfire.

Then it hits me.

There’s screaming from the park.

Not chanting. Not cheering.Screaming.

I freeze with Detective Canavan’s hand on my back just as he’s about to escort me outside. My statement done—I’d given it upstairs—he’d been about to walk me home.

But now I’m reluctant to step out the door. Not into that. No way.

“It’s okay, Heather,” he says encouragingly. “It’s just those kids who were rallying earlier. They’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating,” I echo. “Celebrating what?”

“The president’s office apparently sent over a memo a little while ago. They settled their differences.”

I blink. “They… settled?”

“That’s right,” Detective Canavan says. “The kids won. The president’s office conceded on all points. Decided he’d had enough bad press lately. Either that, or he didn’t like having a big rat sitting outside his office door. He’s never been over to the West Side, obviously.”

I blink with astonishment. “President Allington settled? The GSC won?”

“That’s what I hear,” Detective Canavan says. “We’ve got the whole precinct on hats and bats, dealing with crowd control. We expect ’em to start tipping cars over any minute. Helluva night you picked to get shot at. Ah, there’s the boyfriend. Right on time.”

And with that, Detective Canavan steers me out the door…

… and into the waiting arms of Cooper Cartwright.