The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Thirteen

It was still full dark during the drive home, but the sky was starting to lighten up by the time he pulled into his driveway. He needed a shower, he’d driven all the way home smelling himself and smelling her on him, but when he got his clothes off he stretched out on the bed, just for a minute, and when he finally opened his eyes it was past noon.

He spent a long time in the shower, decided he didn’t need to shave, but looked at himself in the mirror for a long moment. A little more gray at the temples, and he didn’t mind it there, but knew it was the thin edge of the wedge. There’d be more gray coming.

He checked his phone. There was a call he had to return, from an insurance office in Perry that used him now and again for background checks. It didn’t pay all that much, but he could generally get the job done without leaving his house, just noodling around a little on his computer.

Funny how computers had scared the crap out of him when they first started showing up at the station house. He’d thought of himself as an old-school cop, getting out in the city streets and knocking on doors, burning rubber, wearing out shoe leather. But the fear went away over time, and it turned out he had a natural affinity for the machine. The department would pay if you wanted to take a course on your own time, so he went to a third-floor room at John Jay three nights a week and let a young woman with a nose ring and a Hello Kitty tattoo turn him into an expert, though he didn’t kid himself. He knew he was still nowhere near the proficiency level of the average twelve-year-old.

He returned the call, and the agent agreed to email him the applicant’s name and vitals. The agent, Bob Newhouser, had played sports at Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, and now spent as much time as he could on the golf course. He liked golf jokes as much as he liked golf, and had a new one this morning, and Doak didn’t have to force his laugh.

He booted up his computer, checked his email, deleted most of it. He stood up, realized he was hungry, and remembered emptying the milk carton over the last of the cereal. Was there anything in the refrigerator? Nothing but beer, and that wasn’t how the day ought to start.

He checked his other phone. The new one.

Nothing.

He went out for breakfast.

They’d taken both cars from Kimberley’s to the motel. She led in the Lexus and he followed her along the stretch of empty road, parked in the back near the cabin she’d rented.

And when it was time to go he’d stood in the cabin’s doorway and watched her taillights disappear in the distance.

First, though, he’d given her a cell phone. He’d bought two of them for $39.99 apiece in a 7-Eleven on 41, paying cash and waving away the receipt. He’d tossed the packaging and instructions and programmed each with the phone number of the other. And in the little Tourist Court cabin he’d given her one of them and showed her how it worked. “It’s prepaid,” he said, “with more message units than we’re likely to use. You use it only to call me, and only on the number that it’s already set to dial. Never call me on any other phone, and never call any other number from this phone, and—”

“I get it. It’ll be in my purse, and I won’t leave home without it. But I think I’ll keep it turned off and just check it from time to time.”

“That’s what I intend to do.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it? I like your fantasy better. We just get in the car and disappear. But it wouldn’t work, would it?”

“For days, maybe weeks. Even as a fantasy that was about as much mileage as I could get out of it. You know the first thing you said to me at Kimberley’s?”

“I forget what it was.”

“ ‘Now what?’ ”

“Was that what I said? Yes, I guess it was.”

“A couple of days, a couple of weeks at the outside, and that’s the question we’d both be asking, and neither one of us would be able to come up with an answer.”

“You did make it sound good, though.”

“Riding off into the sunset.”

“I was about ready to do it. Not even go back to pack a bag.”

“That’s an important part of it, not wasting a minute. The clothes on our backs and nothing else.”

“Not bad. How many years did you run that tape?”

“Maybe twenty. Maybe more. You’re the only person who ever got to hear it.”

“I think I knew that. And now—”

“Now it’s gone,” he said.

“Did I do something to spoil it?”

He shook his head. “What killed it was hearing myself say the words. See, it’s a fantasy about running, about a new start in a new place. The partner’s just a reason to run and start over.”

“In other words, a geographical solution.”

“Which is how the West was won, you know. A whole swarm of malcontents telling themselves that the next place would be better.”

“Makes me think of my mama and the losers she kept hooking up with. And me, for Christ’s sake, playing hopscotch with a map of America.”

“I came to Florida for a new start. And found it, fair enough, but I took myself along.”

“Hard not to, isn’t it? I make that little mistake every time. Doak, if your fantasy’s dead, where do we go from here?”

“ ‘Now what.’ ”

“Yeah, that’s still the question, isn’t it? More than ever.” She tilted her head, showed him the blue of her eyes. “I guess we’ll have to look for the answer.”

He drove to the Denny’s on the motel strip outside of Perry, because they served breakfast around the clock, but when he looked at the menu he decided what he really wanted was a patty melt and an order of onion rings.

There was a 7-Eleven next door, but it was the one where he’d paid cash for the two cell phones. There’d be a different clerk at this hour, and nobody would bother to look at him twice, but it was just as easy to drive to the next convenience store on the strip for a box of cereal and a quart of milk and the couple of other things he’d run low on. He found enough items to get over the store’s credit card minimum, and used his Visa, because another thing he was running low on was cash.

Back at his computer, he spent an hour checking out Raymond Fred Gartner, who’d been persuaded to insure his life for half a million dollars, with the benefit doubled in the event of accidental death.

Double indemnity, in other words, and that made him think of the movie, and that made him think of Lisa.

He finished his work on Gartner, and if there was any reason to turn down his application, he couldn’t see what it might be. As far as he could tell, the most interesting thing about the man was his middle name, which was in fact Fred and not Frederick or Alfred or some other more formal equivalent.

He could have written up his report on the spot, he had all the data he needed, but a certain boots-on-the-ground presence made a good impression. So he got in the car and drove to the address he had for Raymond Fred.

Why not either Raymond Frederick or Ray Fred? Full names all the way or get all good-old-boy and pair the nicknames cracker-style, as in Joe Bob and Billy Ray...

He managed to find Gartner’s address and circled the block, fair-sized ranch houses on landscaped lots, a suburban neighborhood in keeping with the sense of Gartner his computer had furnished. It wouldn’t surprise him to know that the average homeowner carried a policy along the lines of what Newhouser had sold Gartner.

Of course, Bob Newhouser already knew all this, and had very likely been inside of Gartner’s house instead of merely assessing its curb appeal in passing. So he could have skipped this part altogether, or stayed home and let Google Earth do the heavy lifting.

But knocking on doors, that was something you had to do in person.

And so he pulled up in front of the house to the immediate left of Gartner’s and went to the front door, carrying the clipboard that always went with him on such excursions. Not because he was much at jotting things down, but because nothing equaled a clipboard for establishing one as being a legitimate man of purpose.

There was a yellow pad under the clip, the one he’d used to write out that little one-act radio play starring Doak and Lisa. The sheets he’d covered with block capitals had all been shredded, along with the several blank sheets at the top of the pad, where the pressure of the ballpoint might have left a lasting impression.

Because you couldn’t be too careful.

Once he’d knocked on a door on the top floor of a Brownsville tenement, and something made him step aside just seconds before a bullet came through it. From that time on he always stood to the side of the door when he knocked, and of course he never saw another bullet.

Another time, a woman answered the door wearing bunny slippers and nothing else. She had a drink in her hand and, he suspected, quite a few others inside her. He had a partner with him, a kid named Birch who’d just made the move to plainclothes, and it was interesting to watch him work at keeping his composure. He’d heard squad room stories of similar situations, and in some of the stories the responding officers did the right thing, feeding the poor dear a couple of aspirin and tucking her into her solitary bed. And in other stories the officers responded in a more assertive fashion, treating their hostess to a two-on-one.

Either ending was plausible, he supposed. He and Birch had taken a middle course, just turning around and getting the hell out of there. Years later he’d run into Birch, who asked if he remembered the naked lady with the bunny slippers (he could hardly have forgotten her) and wondering what had ever become of her. He had no idea.

“She had a shaved bush,” Birch said. “Never saw one of those before.”

Had she? He couldn’t remember that part.

“Now it’s all the rage, I guess. You know, man, we could of taken her in the bedroom and done anything we fuckin’ wanted to her.”

“I guess.”

“Say we do it. You think she’s gonna mind? Probably wants it, or at least half of her wants it.”

“The top half or the bottom half?”

“The shaved half. I mean, who comes to the fucking door like that? And what’s the odds she’s even gonna remember it the next day? ‘Oh, goodness, my pussy’s sore. I must have fucked a couple of cops.’ What’s the matter, Doak?”

“Nothing,” he’d said, “but you were what, twenty-two when I knew you? Twenty-three?”

“So?”

“So you’ve changed some since then.”

“Well, this fucking job,” Birch said. “And anyway, who’s the same person he was at twenty-three? Who in his right mind would want to be?”

Since then, just as no one had fired through a door at him, neither had anyone shown up in bunny slippers. But, even as he stood to the side of the door (even here in this placid suburb, where people didn’t shoot through doors) so too did he allow himself the wistful thought that the door might open onto an adventure, a brief encounter.

What did he need, or even want, with the kind of adventure that might wait behind a closed door? He was in the middle of an adventure with, literally, the girl of his dreams, and he had another very adventurous lady as a Friend with Benefits. Was he turning out to be just like the mopes on Let’s Make a Deal, jumping up and down because they’d just won the prize of a lifetime, then ready to throw it away for whatever might turn out to be behind Door Number Three?

He had time to think this over, because nobody came to the door at first, and if he hadn’t seen the squareback Honda in the driveway, he’d have tried his luck next door. But he gave it another minute, and heard footsteps and muted conversation, and then the door was opened by a woman in a pastel print housedress. She had a toddler clinging to her hand, a little boy with white-blond hair, and her shape suggested that he could expect a brother or sister in two or three months.

He gave her his name, told her the man next door had applied for an insurance policy and he needed to confirm a couple of points. In the living room, he asked her half a dozen innocuous questions to which he already knew the answers, then moved on to get a more personal perspective. What kind of neighbor was Ray Gartner? His lawn and yard looked good today, but was that generally the case? What was her impression of the Gartners’ marriage? Did they entertain a lot? Keep late hours? Have loud arguments?

He barely paid attention to her answers, which were everything both Gartner and his prospective insurers could have hoped for. Instead he found himself increasingly aware of the woman’s body. Her son sat beside her, turning the pages of a picture book about dinosaurs, while his mommy testified to the laudable ordinariness of the family next door.

A Milf, that was the term for her. An acronym of the texting generation, for a Mother I’d Like to Fuck. Make that an eMilf, he thought, with the E for Expectant.

How long since he’d had a pregnant woman? Ages, he realized, because he’d never had one aside from Doreen, not that he was ever aware of. And if any of their couplings during either of her pregnancies had been notable, they were so no longer. He couldn’t remember them. He knew they’d had sex while she was pregnant, though not terribly often, but had there been anything different about it?

What would it be like with this one?

Her name was Roberta Ellison, he’d had to write it down for his report. Roberta, I think pregnancy is making your breasts swell up, because your maternity housedress is getting too tight on top. Roberta, I bet your husband’s too gentle with you these days, I bet he’s afraid he’ll hurt either you or the baby. Roberta, I won’t make that mistake, because I don’t care if it hurts you, I don’t care if it fucking kills your baby.

Did she have any idea what he was thinking?

She was probably thirty or close to it, but she wasn’t wearing any makeup and her face was an oval with small regular features, and she looked younger than her years.

He said, “Well, I think that’ll do it. You’ve been very helpful, and I don’t think your neighbor has anything to worry about. Thanks very much for your time, Mrs. Ellison.”