The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Twenty-two

In the morning he checked for a message from Lisa, called her when he didn’t find one. His call went straight to voicemail, and it was several hours before she got back to him.

“Today’s a mess,” she said. “Can we meet tomorrow?” And, after they’d set a time, “Gotta go. Bye.”

He set the phone down with a sense that something was wrong. The brevity of the conversation, her hurry to be done with it—

The phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Can you talk now?” but it went on ringing, and he realized it was the other phone.

Caller ID showed a number he recognized but couldn’t place. He took the call, said “Miller.”

A woman said, “Mr. Miller? Will you hold for Mr. Otterbein?”

Really?

He said he would, and a moment later Otterbein was on the line. “Miller,” he said. “You find any more of my long-lost relatives?”

“I’m afraid I’ve stopped looking,” he said. “Unless you’ve remembered something you think might prove useful.”

“I haven’t, and as much as I’d like to embrace Cousin Elmer — did I get that right? Elmer?”

“Elmer Otterbein.”

“Nice to know I can remember his name, even if I can’t come up with a way for us to be blood kin. You swamped with work, Miller?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You got a deskful of missing heirs and such? Because you’ve been on my mind ever since you walked into my office.”

“Oh?”

“So why don’t you walk into it a second time,” he said, “and we’ll talk. You found your way here the once so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it again. Say half an hour?”

At eleven-thirty the following morning he pulled into the Chiefland Mall. The Lexus was already there, at the J. C. Penney side of the lot. He drove them to their motel, and in the car she said she’d been more abrupt than she intended the last time they’d talked. But she’d been rushed, she explained, and an earlier exchange with George had left her short-tempered.

In their room, with the doughnut on the outside doorknob and the bolt turned, she came into his arms and kissed him, and something relaxed within both of them, some knot of tension dissolved and went away.

When the embrace ended they stood a few feet apart on the worn carpet and took off all their clothes. His heart filled at the sight of her.

And not just his heart. “Look at you,” she said, and reached to take hold of him. “Oh, no stories today, no drama, nothing. Just fuck me.”

Afterward he said, “Story time. I’m afraid it’s not a bedtime story, because I’ve been going to bed alone since the last time we were in this little room. But I saw your husband again.”

“Was that wise?”

“Well, it was that or hang up on him. He called me.”

He told her about the call, and about the meeting forty minutes later in Otterbein’s office. “He gave me a card with a name and address on it,” he said, “and showed me a woman’s picture.”

“I hope I was wearing more in the picture than I am now.”

“It wasn’t you,” he said. “George has a girlfriend.”

Her name, he said, was Ashley Hannon, and she had recently moved into a side-by-side duplex on Stapleton Terrace. She was twenty-seven years old, with a General Studies diploma from a two-year college in Ocala and a certificate from the Broward County Physiotherapy Institute attesting to her competence in Shiatsu, Swedish massage, and Reiki, and there was something else, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

“Fellatio,” Lisa suggested.

“That may have come under General Studies. She spent two years in Broward County, mostly in Pompano Beach, and then she moved to the Gulf Coast and took a position in a massage parlor in Clearwater.”

“A position? Kneeling, would be my guess.”

It wasn’t a whorehouse, he told her. All of the women had undergone genuine massage training, with certificates similar to Ashley’s. They used professional massage tables and offered a variety of techniques, and all you got for the posted rate was a standard non-sexual massage.

Anything beyond that was by arrangement with the technician.

“In other words,” she said, “a Happy Ending. And just how happy it is depends on how much you pay. And then Clearwater must have had an Unhappy Ending for her to come to this backwater garden spot. How’d she wind up here, and how did George find her?”

“He found her in Clearwater.”

“And brought her here? I suppose he’s paying her rent.”

“There’s no rent to pay. He owns the building. The other half’s rented to a black family with a couple of young kids.”

“And Ashley’s in the other half? Is she black?”

“White,” he said. “Your basic cheerleader type with a head of blonde curls.”

“I knew he liked professional talent,” she said. “He never minded saying so, even when things were good between us. He showed me something he wanted me to do.”

“What?”

“It’s easier if I show you,” she said. “Two fingers at the rear of your sack, and then like so. I think it has something to do with the prostate.”

“I can see why he liked it.”

“Oh? Well, there’s no reason I can’t haul it out of my own personal bag of tricks next time, if you’re not bothered by knowing where it came from. I didn’t ask George where it came from, but he told me anyway. He said very matter-of-factly that a girl in a massage parlor did it to him. I said I hoped he gave her a good tip. But he gave this one more than a tip, he gave her a house. When did she move in?”

“Six weeks ago.”

“There would have had to be a whole string of Happy Endings first, wouldn’t you think? When did he first stretch out on her massage table?”

“He didn’t say, just that he’d met her in Clearwater and taken an interest.”

“He didn’t say what she was doing there?”

He shook his head. “You can find out a lot about a person online,” he said. “If you know where to look, and what to look for. Her education and certification are a matter of record, and—”

“Have you seen her yet?”

“Just the photo, and no, I don’t have it with me. He gave me a good look at it and then slipped it into a desk drawer. I drove past the house.”

“You drove past mine, too. I bet hers isn’t as nice.”

“CBS,” he said, “and that still sounds like the TV network, even though I’ve lived down here long enough to use the expression myself. Concrete block and stucco, two stories with a crawl-space attic. I think I said it’s a side-by-side duplex. The other tenants have a swing-and-slide combo set up on the front lawn.”

“I think I like our love nest better.”

“I have the feeling he’s thinking about moving her someplace a little more upscale.”

“Someplace like Rumsey Road?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He wants a background report on her, and he wants me to focus on her family. Her parents are both dead, and I guess she was a little vague about what they died of.”

“He can’t think she killed them. Oh, Jesus Christ. He’s thinking about hereditary illnesses.”

“That would be my guess.”

“He’s checking her out to find out what kind of a brood mare she’ll make.” She sat up, alarm showing on her face. “I wondered how she got him to move her up from Clearwater. I’m sure the girl’s well-schooled, and in more than Shiatsu and Reiki—”

“Don’t forget Swedish.”

“—and I’m willing to believe she can suck a tennis ball through a garden hose, but all that would do is get him to drive down to Clearwater when the urge came on him. He wants to get her pregnant.”

“It sounds like it.”

“If she passes the background check, the next test is can he knock her up. When he got tested they told him there was nothing wrong with his sperm, and they didn’t find anything wrong with me, either, and one doctor told me there seemed to be some way my uterus was rejecting his sperm. I have to say that makes me really proud of my uterus. It’s clearly the most intelligent part of my body.”

“If he gets her pregnant—”

“Oh, he will. Love will find a way. And if that happens, he’ll want to marry her. No kid of his is going to grow up sharing a CBS duplex with a passel of pickaninnies.”

“There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

“And that may be the first time it ever passed my lips. Darling, this could be good for us.”

“Well, he’ll pay me a nice fee for running a check on her, but beyond that—”

“He’ll need a divorce from me before he can marry her.”

“Unless he moves to Utah.”

“And he can divorce me, but not without writing out a check for half a million dollars. I told you the terms of the pre-nup, right?”

“You did.”

“That sounds like a fortune, half a million dollars. It’s not, not really, not anymore, but it’s a whole lot more than I had in my jeans when I said goodbye to the Twin Cities.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “And it’s not as though I’ve got any say in the matter. If he wants to divorce me that’s what he’ll do. Suppose we invest the money. What kind of income would I get?”

“I’m not the best person to answer that,” he said, “but I can tell you this much. You’d be better off by a factor of ten if he died before he had a chance to divorce you.”

“If he died,” she said. “You mean if we killed him.”

“I mean when we kill him.”

“God,” she said. She looked down at her folded hands, then up at him. “I know you’re serious about it,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to know how serious. I mean, look at me. I was so stupid, making half-assed arrangements with Gonson. What saved me was when you showed up.”

“With my fancy car.”

“It did look like something a murderer would drive. But suppose Gonson hadn’t ratted me out, suppose he actually did know somebody and the man I was meeting was ready and willing to do the job. And suppose he went through with it, and got away clean. Who would they look at?”

“The wife.”

“And how well would I hold up? I could probably make it through an hour or so of interrogation, and then I could let it dawn on me that I probably ought to have a lawyer, and after that there wouldn’t be any more questions. But if they kept digging—”

“They’d find something. And of course there’d be the chance they’d find their way to the man you hired, because even if he’s a pro it’s a profession that doesn’t have terribly high standards. And he could drink and run his mouth, or he could give his girlfriend reason to drop a dime on him.”

“It’s funny how that expression is still around. If you could even find a pay phone, what good would a dime do you?”

“The point is, he’d give you up in a hot second.”

“I know that. So I was lucky twice, that a real hit man didn’t show up at the Winn-Dixie, and that the fake hit man decided he’d rather fuck me than score points with the sheriff.”

“It was a little more complicated than that.”

“I know that,” she said. “It wasn’t just my pussy. It was my eyes of blue. But you know what I mean, don’t you? I want to do this, Jesus I want to do this, but I don’t know how serious we really are.”

“I drove to Georgia Sunday.”

“Why, to get away from this whole business? You got as far as Atlanta before you changed your mind?”

“I didn’t get anywhere near Atlanta. I went to a town called Quitman.”

“I never heard of it.”

“I went to the high school, and isn’t that the perfect venue for a gun show? I spent about an hour there, and I came away with two unregistered guns and a box of shells for each of them.”

“Two unregistered guns.”

“A pistol and a revolver. The pistol’s a Ruger, the revolver’s a Taurus.”

“With Gemini rising, I’ll bet. Well, Jesus Christ, Doak. That’s a big step, buying the guns.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to be a downer, but—”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, could you actually go through with it? I mean there’s a difference between buying a gun and pulling the trigger, isn’t there?”

“Absolutely.”

“You never actually did it, did you? Kill somebody, I mean.”

“Yes.”

A pause. “Yes as in yes you did, or yes you know what I mean?”

“I killed a man once,” he said.

“How did—”

“With a gun. I shot him and he died.”

She thought about this. “You were a policeman.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was self-defense,” she said. “It was in the line of duty.”

“That’s how it went in the books,” he said, “but that’s not how it was. I murdered him.”