The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Thirty-six

He got up, showered, shaved. He went to the computer and backspaced through I did it, erasing the words. His version of Word automatically backed up every document, but not until after you’d saved it once. He checked anyway, and while he was at it he cleared the browser’s history for the past week.

They weren’t coming for him. It had taken days for him to entertain the thought, but he’d somehow awakened at last with it all clear in his mind. His efforts on Stapleton Terrace, his over-elaborate staging of the scene, had actually worked to make two deaths go in the books as a murder and suicide. George Otterbein had killed his much younger paramour, Ashley Hannon, sustaining a profound but non-fatal wound in the process. And then, overcome with remorse, he’d taken his own life.

Case closed.

His every action at the murder scene had been undertaken with great care and foresight, keeping him too busy getting it right to let other thoughts intrude. And yet all along he’d carried the unvoiced conviction that he was doomed, that his role would be instantly apparent, that they’d come for him before the bodies were cold.

And so he’d arrived home and promptly fallen apart. From the moment he cleared his own threshold he was waiting to be arrested, and all evidence to the contrary, starting with Sheriff Radburn’s words on the phone, failed to change his mind.

He’d be caught, he knew it. Forensics would find his skin cells mixed with Otterbein’s blood on the wall. A neighbor who’d helpfully written down his plate number would call it in. Someone who’d caught a glimpse of him would remember an older and whiter face than you usually saw framed by a hoodie, and would pick his picture out of the six-pack they showed him. The mood that came down on him was paralyzing, and all he’d been able to do was outlast it — and, with a little more pressure on the two triggers, he wouldn’t have done so. But he was alive, and in his right mind, or as close to it as he could reasonably expect to get.

And now he had work to do.

The clothes he’d bought at J. C. Penney and worn to Stapleton Terrace, the black pants and hoodie and sneakers, were on the floor of his closet, stuffed into the shopping bag they’d come in. There was blood on them, and gunshot residue, and all manner of DNA — his, of course, and that of his victims as well.

Just sitting on his closet floor, waiting for someone to find them.

He carried the bag to his car and headed for the dump, stopping along the way for a bag of charcoal and a pint can of lighter fluid. The clerk who took his cash and rang him up volunteered that her husband had bought them a propane grill, and she’d never go back to charcoal.

“Well, y’all are modern,” he said. “Myself, I’m too darn old to change.”

There were piles of smoldering trash at the dump. He dumped the bag of clothes on one of them, and tongues of flame greeted the fresh offering. He added squirts of lighter fluid and watched everything burn.

Opened the sack of charcoal, emptied it in another part of the dump. Wiped the can and tossed it. Brought back the empty sack, added it to the fire.

Driving back, he thought, Jesus, they had their chance. Three days in his closet, a bagful of hanging evidence, right there for anybody to see.

And nobody did. So fuck ’em.

His stomach had been trying to get his attention all morning, and on his way back from the dump he was able to pay attention and grasp the nature of its complaint. He hadn’t really eaten in days.

He filled a shopping cart at the Winn-Dixie. When he got home he put everything away, looked over his purchases, and went out to Denny’s. He ordered the Hungry Man’s Breakfast and ate everything they put in front of him. Eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, pancakes, hash browns — a mountain of food, and he cleaned his plate.

Back home, he turned the radio to a local station and let it play while he sat at the computer, checking news accounts.

Nothing, not really. Some of the national media had picked up the story, and if they’d gotten anything juicy they might have run with it. If, say, a B-list star had hopped onto her massage table back in Clearwater, or if she’d at least been arrested a couple of times. But she hadn’t, and the man who killed her was a fairly colorless local businessman who’d never done anything newsworthy until the last day of his life. So they’d covered the story in a paragraph and let it die.

Nothing.

He stepped away from the computer, turned off the radio, sat down on the couch.

And, for the first time in days, he let himself think about Lisa.

There’d been no point, really, in giving her space in his head for the past several days. He couldn’t call her. His phone was gone, smashed and trashed before he’d paid his last visit to the duplex.

He thought about her now.

Thought about his first sight of her, on Radburn’s phone. And then on his own phone, after the sheriff had emailed the picture to him.

Had he ever deleted it?

He reached for his phone, opened up Camera Roll. There she was, and he sat for a moment looking at her picture and remembering. Remembering the first real physical glimpse of her, at the Cattle Baron. And then in his car, watching all the changes of expression on her face and in her eyes as she came to realize what was going on.

Other places, other times.

He thought about the fantasy, and how it had begun to fade as soon as he’d brought it fully into focus. There she was, Fantasy Girl, all he’d ever envisioned and more, and all they had to do was get in the car, his car or her car, and point it away from Gallatin County, and drive.

Not a chance.

So another fantasy had taken its place, this one to grow out of a simple act of murder. It had been a sufficiently powerful dream to make killers out of John Garfield and Fred MacMurray.

And look how well it had worked out for those two.

He went back to the computer, found what he was looking for. Picked up his phone, made a call, talked for a few minutes.

Rang off.

The 4pm feature on TCM was The Last Seduction, a 1994 film starring Linda Fiorentino. He’d never seen her before, not that he remembered, and he didn’t see how he could have forgotten her.

If you were going to cast Fantasy Girl, well, she’d sail through the auditions.

It was a terrific movie, classic film noir given a more contemporary slant, and Fiorentino was almost too convincing in the role of a homicidal sociopath who uses her sexual skills to turn men into killers. At the end she tricks one of them into confessing to a murder she herself committed, and winds up in the clear with all of the cash.

He watched the entire credit roll before he turned it off. Not the best picture to be watching, he thought, given his present circumstances.

Maybe it was a sign to call that number again: “Listen, I changed my mind since I spoke to you two hours ago. I’m going to cancel.”

No, he thought. The cards were dealt. Play the hand.

It was just past 7:30 when he pulled into the lot at the Cattle Baron. He didn’t see her car, and wondered if she’d returned to work yet. She might have felt it necessary to spend a little more time playing the grieving widow, might simply want to give the scandal a few more days to die down before making herself available to the public.

Or she might have quit the job. She certainly didn’t need it, neither for the money it paid nor for the excuse it provided to get out of the house. She was a rich widow, she lived by herself, and she could do as she pleased and go where she wanted.

He took another turn through the lot, looking for a Lincoln this time. They’d have returned George’s car to Rumsey Road, after forensics had found nothing in it but whatever prints and trace evidence George had left there, and maybe she’d want a change from the Lexus.

But no, there was the Lexus, parked where she always parked it, in the very spot where she’d left it unlocked, with the Baby Browning waiting for him beneath the front seat.

How had he missed it the first time? Maybe it was a message from his guardian angel, the same one who’d tried to use Linda Fiorentino to get him to change his mind and cancel. Maybe—

He parked the Chevy and went into the restaurant.

She was seating a party of six when he reached the hostess stand. He watched her moving smoothly among them, making small talk, smiling. Then she straightened up, steered a waitress to their table, and headed back to her post. She had almost reached it when she registered who was waiting for her.

And if he hadn’t been looking at her face, watching her eyes, he might have missed her reaction. It didn’t show in her body language, only on her face. He fancied he could see her thoughts written on her forehead, and they all ended with question marks. But when she was within a few feet of him she flashed her hostess smile and asked him if he’d be dining alone. Or would someone be joining him?

“I’m by myself,” he said.

“Right this way,” she said, smoothly, professionally, and led him to a table off to the left. It was set for two, and she scooped up the napkin and silverware opposite him. As she straightened up, the tip of one finger traced a two-inch line across the back of his hand.

No one watching could have seen a thing.

“Your waitress will be right with you,” she said, and walked out of his field of vision.

He chose the same meal he’d had last time, unable to think of any way to improve on it, and ordered it from the same dishwater blonde. He remembered her name — Cindy — but she didn’t recognize him until he specified that he wanted his steak cooked black and blue. Her eyes widened at the phrase, and she looked at him and said, “Oh, hi! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

He said he’d been busy.

The rib eye was just right, as were the baked potato and creamed spinach, and he ate with good appetite. He’d stuffed himself earlier at Denny’s, but that had been a good many hours ago, and the several days without food had given him some catching up to do.

He drank a bottle of Dutch beer with his meal, and rounded it off with a piece of chess pie and two cups of coffee. When he saw Lisa on her way over, he got out the index card on which he’d printed a few words in large block caps.

She asked if he’d enjoyed his meal. Very much, he said, and positioned the card so she could read it.

She dropped her voice and said, “Tomorrow?”

“Around noon, if that works.”

“I can make it work.”

Her hand settled on his, just for a moment, and he looked up and met her eyes.

So blue...

Cindy brought the check. He paid cash, left a decent tip. Outside, he stood alongside his car for a moment and watched a cloud move to cover the moon.

He got in the car, headed for home thinking about blue eyes. Thought about the movie.

Linda Fiorentino’s eyes, he’d noticed, were green.

Well, there you go, he told himself. All the difference in the world.

Before he went to bed, he sat at the kitchen table with both his guns, the .38 registered to him and the 9mm from the show in Quitman. He’d never fired either one of them, but all the same he gave them both a thorough cleaning.

Loaded them when he was done, and put them away.