The Last Precinct

Chapter 7

IT IS ALMOST MIDNIGHT. I SIT BEFORE THE FIRE IN the hand-carved rocker that is the only hint of rusticity in Anna's house. She has set her chair at a deliberate angle so she can look at me but I don't have to look at her if I find myself in sensitive discovery of my own psychological evidence. I have learned of late that I never know what I might find during my conversations with Anna, as if I am a crime scene I am searching for the first time. The lights are switched off in the living room, the fire in its agonal stages of going out. Incandescence spreads along smoldering coals that breathe shades of orange as I tell Anna about a Sunday night in November a little over a year ago, when Benton got uncharacteristically hateful toward me.

"When you say uncharacteristically, you mean what?" Anna asks in her strong, quiet tone.

"He was accustomed to my peregrinations late at night when I couldn't settle down, when I would stay up late and work. On the night in question he fell asleep while reading in bed, Not unusual, and it was my cue that I could have my own time now. I crave the silence, the absolute aloneness when the rest of the world is unconscious and not needing something from me."

"You always have felt this need?"

"Always," I tell her. "It's when I come alive. I come into myself when I'm absolutely alone. I need the time. I must have it."

"What happened on the night you mention?" she asks.

"I got up and took the book out of his lap, turned out the light," I reply.

"What was he reading?"

Her question catches me by surprise. I have to think. I don't remember clearly, but I seem to recall Benton was reading about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America that is less than an hour's drive east of Richmond. He was very interested in history and had double-majored in it and psychology in college, and then his curiosity about Jamestown was ignited when archaeologists began excavating out there and discovered the original fort. It slowly comes back to me: The book Benton was reading in bed was a collection of narratives, many of them written by John Smith. I don't recall the title, I tell Anna. I suppose the book is still in my house somewhere, and the idea of happening upon it one of these days pains me. I go on with my story.

"I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office," I say. "As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it's made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It's funny, but my normal activities seem mundane and beyond question until they are inspected by others. That's when I realize I don't live like other people."

"Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?" Anna asks.

"Because they wanted to know about everything." I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo's fire before lightning strikes.

Can't sleep! he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn't sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn 't need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.

At this point, Anna interrupts me. "Nothing else might have preceded this? No forewarning whatsoever?" She knew Benton, too. This wasn't Benton. This was an alien who had invaded Benton's body.

"Nothing," I answer her. "No warning." I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. "The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI's star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn't was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, Anna, we had respect. We always treated each other with respect."

"And did he tell you what was wrong?" She presses me on this.

I smile bitterly. "When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me." Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it Is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an aban- doned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.

"When you did have sex, who usually initiated it?" Anna asks.

"Eventually, just him. More out of desperation than desire. Maybe even frustration. Yes, frustration," I decide.

Anna watches me, her face in shadows that deepen as the fire dies. Her elbow is propped on the armrest, her chin resting on her index finger in what has become the pose I associate with our intense time together these past few nights. Her living room has become a dark confessional booth where I can be emotionally newborn and naked and feel no shame. I don't see our sessions as therapy, but rather as a priesthood of friendship that is sacred and safe. I have begun to tell another human being what it is like to be me.

"Let's go back to the night he got so angry," Anna navigates. "Can you remember when this was, exactly?"

"Just weeks before his murder." I talk calmly, mesmerized by coals that look like glowing alligator skin. "Benton knew my space needs. Even on nights when we made love, it wasn't unusual for me to wait until he fell asleep and get up with the stealth of an adulterer to slip inside my office down the hall. He was understanding about my infidelities." I feel Anna smile in the dark. "He rarely complained when he reached for me and felt an empty space on my side of the bed," I explain. "He accepted my need to be alone, or seemed to. I never knew how much my nocturnal habits hurt him until that night when he came into my office."

"Was it really your nocturnal habits?" Anna inquires. "Or your aloofness?"

"I don't think of myself as aloof."

"Do you think of yourself as someone who connects with others?"

I analyze, searching everywhere inside me for a truth I have always feared.

"Did you connect with Benton?" Anna goes on. "Let's start with him. He was your most significant relationship. Certainly, he was the longest."

"Did I connect with him?" I hold up the question like a ball I am about to serve, not sure of the angle or spin or how hard. "Yes and no. Benton was one of the finest, kindest men I've ever known. Sensitive. Deep and intelligent. I could talk to him about anything."

"But did you? I get the impression you didn't." Anna, of course, is on to me.

I sigh. "I'm not sure I've ever talked to anybody about absolutely anything."

"Perhaps Benton was safe," she suggests.

"Perhaps," I reply. "I do know there were deep places in me he never reached. I also never wanted him to, didn't want to get that intense, that close. I suppose starting out as we did may be part of the explanation. He was married. He always went home to his wife, to Connie. It went on for years. We were on opposite sides of a wall, separated, only touching when we could sneak. God, I would never do that again with anybody, I don't care who."

"Guilt?"

"Of course," I answer. "Every good Catholic feels guilt. In the beginning, I felt terribly guilty. I've never been the type to break rules. I'm not like Lucy, or should I say she's not like me. If rules are mindless and ignorant, she breaks them right and left. Hell, I don't even get speeding tickets, Anna."

It is here that she leans forward and holds up a hand. This is her signal. I have said something important. "Rules," she says. "What are rules?"

"A definition? You want a definition of rules?"

"What are rules to you? Your definition, yes."

"Right and wrong," I reply. "What is legal versus illegal. Moral versus immoral. Humane versus inhumane."

"Sleeping with a married person is immoral, wrong, inhumane?"

"If nothing else, it's stupid. But yes, it's wrong. Not a fatal error or unforgivable sin or illegal, but dishonest. Yes, definitely dishonest. A broken rule, yes."

"Then you admit you are capable of dishonesty."

"I admit I'm capable of being stupid."

"But dishonest?" She won't let me evade the question.

"Everyone is capable of anything. My affair with Benton was dishonest. I indirectly lied because I hid what I was doing. I presented a front to others, including Connie, that was false. Simply false. So am I capable of deception, of lying? Clearly I am." The confession depresses me deeply.

"What about homicide? What is the rule about homicide? Wrong? Immoral? Is it always wrong to kill? You have killed," Anna says.

"In self-defense." On this point I feel strong and certain. "Only when I had no choice because the person was going to kill me or someone else."

"Did you commit a sin? Thou shall not kill''

"Absolutely not." Now I am getting frustrated. "It's easy to make judgments about matters one looks at from the distant vantage point of morality and idealism. It's different when you're confronted by a killer who's holding a knife to another person's throat or reaching for a pistol to shoot you. The sin would be to do nothing, to allow an innocent person to die, to allow yourself to die. I feel no remorse," I tell Anna.

"What do you feel?"

I close my eyes for a moment, firelight moving across my lids. "Sick. I can't think about those deaths without feeling sick. What I did wasn't wrong. I had no choice. But I wouldn't call it right, either, if you understand the difference. When Temple Gault was hemorrhaging to death in front of me and begging me to help, there are really no words for how that felt and how it feels now to remember it."

"This was in the subway tunnel in New York. Four or five years ago?" she asks, and I answer with a nod. "Carrie Grethen's former partner in crime. Gault was her mentor, in a sense. Isn't that right?" Again, I nod. "Interesting," she says. "You killed Carrie's partner and then she killed yours. A connection, perhaps?"

"I have no idea. I have never looked at it like that." I am jolted by the thought. It has never occurred to me and seems so obvious now.

"Did Gault deserve to die, in your opinion?" Anna then asks.

"Some people would say he forfeited his right to be in this world and we're all better off now that he's gone. But my God, I wouldn't have chosen to be the one who carried out the sentence, Anna. Never, never. Blood was spurting through his fingers. I saw fear in his eyes, terror, panic, the evil in him gone. He was just a human being dying. And I'd caused it. And he was crying and begging me to make his bleeding stop." I have stopped rocking. I feel Anna's full attention on me. "Yes," I finally say. "Yes, it was awful. Just awful. Sometimes I dream about him. Because I killed him, he will forever be part of me. That's the price I pay."

"And Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?"

"I don't want to hurt anybody anymore." I stare at the dying fire.

"At least he is alive?"

"I take no comfort in that. How can I? People like him don't stop hurting others, even after they're locked up. The evil lives on. That is my conundrum. I don't want them killed, but I know the damage they do while they're alive. Lose-lose, any way you look at it," I tell Anna.

Anna says nothing. It is her method to offer silences more than opinions. Grief throbs in my chest and my heart beats in a staccato of fear. "I suppose I'd be punished if I'd killed Chandonne," I add. "Without question I'll be punished because I didn't."

"You could not save Benton's life." Anna's voice fills the space between us. I shake my head as tears fill my eyes. "Do you feel you should have been able to defend him, too?" she asks. I swallow and spasms of that agonizing loss rob me of my ability to speak. "Did you fail him, Kay? And now it is your penance to eradicate other monsters, perhaps? To do it for Benton, because you let monsters murder him? You did not save him?"

My helplessness, my outrage boil over. "He didn't save himself, goddamn it. Benton wandered into his murder like a dog or cat wandering off to die, because it was time. Jesus!" I am out with it. "Jesus. Benton was always complaining about wrinkles and sagging and aches and pains, even during the early years of our relationship. As you know, he was older than I. Maybe aging threatened him more for that reason. I don't know. But when he reached his mid-forties, he couldn't look in the mirror without shaking his head and griping. 'I don't want to get old, Kay.' That's what he would say.

"I remember late one afternoon we were taking a bath together and he was complaining about his body. 'Nobody wants to get old,' I finally said to him. 'But Ireally don't_ don't to the point that I don't think I can survive it,' was his reply. 'We have to survive it. It's selfish not to, Benton,' I said. 'And besides, we survived being young, didn't we?' Ha! He thought I was being ironic. I wasn't. I asked him how many days of your youth were spent waiting for tomorrow? Because somehow tomorrow is going to be better? He thought about mis for a moment as he pulled me closer in the tub, touching and fondling me beneath the steamy cover of hot water scented with lavender. He knew exactly how to play me back in those days when our cells came alive instantly on contact. Back then, when it was good. 'Yeah,' he considered, 'it's true. I've always waited for tomorrow, thinking tomorrow's going to be better. That's survival, Kay. If you don't think tomorrow or next year or the year after that will be better, why bother?' "

I stop for a moment, rocking. I tell Anna, "Well, he stopped bothering. Benton died because he no longer believed what was ahead was better than what was past. It doesn't matter that it was another person who took his life. Benton was the one who decided." My tears have dried and I feel hollow inside, defeated and furious. Feeble light touches my face as I stare into the afterglow of fire. "Fuck you, Benton," I mutter to smoking coals. "Fuck you for giving up."

"Is that why you had sex with Jay Talley?" Anna asks. "To fuck Benton? To pay him back for leaving you, for dying?"

"If so, it wasn't conscious."

"What do you feel?"

I try to feel. "Dead. After Benton was murdered…?" I consider this. "Dead," I decide. "I felt dead. I couldn't feel anything. I think I had sex with Jay…"

"Not what you think. What you feel," she gently reminds me.

"Yes. That was the whole thing. Wanting to feel, desperate to feel something, anything," I tell her.

"Did making love with Jay help you feel something, anything?"

"I think it made me feel cheap," I reply.

"Not what you think," she reminds me again.

"I felt hunger, lust, anger, ego, freedom. Oh yes, freedom."

"Freedom from Benton's death, or perhaps from Benton? He was somewhat repressed, wasn't he? He was safe. He had a very powerful superego. Benton Wesley was a man who did things properly. What was sex like with him? Was it proper?" Anna wants to know.

"Thoughtful," I say. "Gentle and sensitive."

"Ah. Thoughtful. Well, there is something to be said for that," Anna says with a hint of irony that draws attention to what I have just revealed.

"It was never hungry enough, never purely erotic." I am more open about it. "I have to admit that many times I was thinking while we were having sex. It's bad enough to think while talking to you, Anna, but one shouldn't think while making love. There should be no thoughts, just unbearable pleasure."

"Do you like sex?"

I laugh in surprise. No one has ever asked me such a thing. "Oh yes, but it varies. I've had very good sex, good sex, okay sex, boring sex, bad sex. Sex is a strange creature. I'm not even sure what I think of sex. But I hope I've not had the premier grand cm of sex." I allude to superior Bordeaux. Sex is very much like wine, and if the truth be told, my encounters with lovers usually end up in the village section of the vineyard: low on the slope, fairly common and modestly priced_ nothing special, really. "I don't believe I've had my best sex yet, my deepest, most erotic sexual harmony with another person. I haven't, not yet, not at all." I am rambling, speaking in stops and starts as I try to figure it out and argue with myself about whether I even want to figure it out. "I don't know. Well, I guess I wonder how important it should be, how important it is."

"Considering what you do for a living, Kay, you should know how important sex is. It is power. It is life and death," Anna states. "Of course, in what you see, mainly we are talking about power that has been terribly abused. Chandonne is a good example. He gets sexual gratification from overpowering, from causing suffering, from playing God and deciding who lives and who dies and how."

"Of course."

"Power sexually excites him. It does most people," Anna says.

"The greatest aphrodisiac," I agree. "If people are honest about it."

"Diane Bray is another example. A beautiful, provocative woman who used her sex appeal to overpower, to control others. At least this is the impression I have," Anna says.

"It's the impression she gave," I reply.

"Do you think she was sexually attracted to you?" Anna asks me.

I evaluate this clinically. Uncomfortable with the idea, I hold it away from me and study it like an organ I am dissecting. "That never entered my mind," I decide. "So it probably wasn't there or I would have picked up the signals." Anna doesn't answer me. "Possibly," I equivocate.

Anna isn't buying it. "Didn't you tell me she had tried to use Marino to get to know you?" she reminds me. "That she wanted to have lunch with you, socialize, get to know you, and tried to arrange this through him?"

"That's what Marino told me," I reply.

"Because she was sexually attracted to you, possibly? That would have been the ultimate overpowering of you, wouldn't it? If she not only ruined your career, but helped herself to your body in the process and therefore appropriated every aspect of your existence? Isn't that what Chandonne and others of his type do? They must feel attraction, too. It is simply that they act it out differently from the rest of us. And we know what you did to him when he tried to act out his attraction to you. His big mistake, no? He looked at you with lust and you blinded him. At least temporarily." She pauses, her chin resting on her finger, her eyes steady on me.

I am looking directly at her now. I have that feeling again. I would almost describe it as a warning. I just can't put a name toil.

"What might you have done had Diane Bray tried to act out her sexual attraction to you, saying it was there? If she had hit on you?"Anna keeps digging.

"I have ways of deflecting unwanted advances," I reply.

"From women, too?"

"From anyone."

"Then women have made advances."

"Now and then, over the years." It is an obvious question with an obvious answer. I don't live in a cave. "Yes, I've certainly been around women who show interest I can't reciprocate," I say.

"Can't or won't?"

"Either."

"And how does it make you feel when it is a woman who desires you? Any different than if it is a man?"

"Are you trying to find out if I'm homophobic, Anna?"

"Are you?"

I consider this. I reach as deep as I can to see if I am uncomfortable with homosexuality. I have always been quick to assure Lucy that I have no problem with same-sex relationships beyond the hardships they bring. "I'm okay with it," I answer Anna. "Really and truly. It simply isn't my preference. It's not my choice."

"People choose?"

"In a sense." Of this I am certain. "And I say so because I believe people feel many attractions that aren't what they would be most comfortable with, and so they don't act on them. I can understand Lucy. I have seen her with her lovers and in a way envy their closeness, because although they have the difficulty of going against the majority, they also have the advantage of the special friendships women are capable of having with each other. It's harder for men and women to be soul mates, deep friends. I'll admit that much. But I think the significant difference between Lucy and me is I don't expect to be a man's soul mate, and men make her feel overpowered. And true intimacy can't occur without a balance of power between the individuals. So because I don't feel overpowered by men, I choose them physically." Anna says nothing. "That's probably as much as I'll ever figure it out," I add. "Not everything can be explained. Lucy and her attractions and needs can't be completely explained. Nor can mine."

"You really don't think you can be a man's soul mate? Then maybe your expectations are too low? Possible?"

"Very possible." I almost laugh. "If anyone has low expectations, I deserve to after all of the relationships I've fucked up," I add.

"Have you ever felt attracted to a woman?" Anna finally gets to this. I figured she would.

"I have found some women very compelling," I admit. "I remember getting crushes on teachers when I was growing up."

"By crushes, you mean sexual feelings."

"Crushes include sexual feelings. Innocent and naive as they may be. A lot of girls get crushes on their female teachers, especially if you're in a parochial school and are taught exclusively by women."

"Nuns."

I smile. "Yes, imagine getting a crush on a nun."

"I imagine some of those nuns got crushes on each other, too," Anna remarks.

A spreading dark cloud of uncertainty and uneasiness encroaches on me and a warning taps at the back of my awareness. I don't know why Anna is so focused on sex, particularly homosexual sex, and I entertain the possibility that she is a lesbian and this is why she never married, or maybe she is testing me to see how I might react if she finally, after all these years, tells me the truth about herself. It hurts to think she might have, out of fear, withheld such an important detail from me.

"You told me you moved to Richmond for love." It is my turn to probe. "And the person proved a waste of time. Why didn't you go back to Germany? Why did you stay in Richmond, Anna?"

"I went to medical school in Vienna and am from Austria, not Germany," she tells me. "I grew up in a Schloss, a castle, that had been in the family for hundreds of years, near Linz on the Danube River, and during the war the Nazis lived in the house with us. My mother, my father, two older sisters and my younger brother. And from the windows I could see the smoke from the crematorium some ten miles away, at Mauthausen, a very notorious concentration camp, a huge quarry where prisoners were forced to mine the granite, carrying huge blocks of it up hundreds of steps, and if they faltered, they were beaten or pushed into the abyss. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.

"Day in and day out, dark clouds of death stained the horizon, and I would catch my father staring off and sighing when he thought no one was looking. I could feel his deep pain and shame. Because we could do nothing about what was happening, it was easy to slip into denial. Most Austrians were into denial about what was happening in our beautiful little country. This was unforgivable to me but could not be helped. My father had much wealth and influence, but to go against the Nazis was to end up in a camp or to be shot on the spot. I can still hear laughter and the clink of glasses in my house, as if those monsters were our best friends. One of them started coming into my bedroom at night. I was seventeen. This went on for two years. I never said a word because I knew my father Could do nothing, and I suspect he was aware of what was going on. Oh yes, I am sure of it. I worried the same thing was happening to my sisters, and am quite certain it was. After the war, I finished my education and met an American music stu- dent in Vienna. He was a very fine violinist, very dashing and witty, and I came back to the States with him. Mainly, because I could not live in Austria anymore. I could not live with what my family had averted its conscience from, and even now, when I see the countryside of my homeland, the image is stained with that dark, ominous smoke. I see it in my mind always. Always."

Anna's living room is chilled, and fire-scattered embers look like dozens of irregular eyes glowing in the dark. "What happened with the American musician?" I ask her.

"I suppose reality introduced itself." Her voice is touched by sadness. "It was one thing for him to fall in love with a young female Austrian psychiatrist in one of the most beautiful, romantic cities in the world. Quite another to bring her back to Virginia, to the former capital of the Confederacy where people still have Confederate flags all over the place. I began my residency at MCV, and James played with the Richmond symphony for several years. Then he moved to Washington and we parted. I am grateful we never married. At least I did not have that complication, mat or children."

"And your family?" I ask.

"My sisters are dead. I have a brother in Vienna. Like my father, he is involved in banking. We should get some sleep," Anna says.

I shiver when I first slide beneath the covers, and I draw up my legs and tuck a pillow beneath my broken arm. Talking to Anna has begun to unsettle me around the edges, like the earth about to cave in. I feel phantom pains in parts of me that are past, gone, and my spirit is heavy from the added burden of the story she has told about her own life. Of course, she would not volunteer her past to most people. A Nazi association is a terrible stigma, even now, and to consider that fact causes me to paint her demeanor and her privileged lifestyle on a very different canvas. It doesn't matter that Anna no more had a Choice about who stayed in her family home than she had a say about whom she had sex with when she was seventeen. She would not be forgiven if others knew. "My God," I mutter, staring up at the ceiling in Anna's dark guest room. "Dear God."

I get back up and make my way down the dark hallway, passing through the living room again and into the east wing of the house. The master bedroom is at the end of the hallway, and Anna's door is open, thin moonlight seeping through windows and softly outlining her shape beneath the covers. "Anna?" I speak quietly. "Are you awake?"

She stirs, then sits up. I can barely make out her face as I come closer. Her white hair is down around her shoulders. She looks a hundred years old. "Is everything all right?" she asks groggily and with a trace of alarm.

"I'm sorry," I tell her. "I can't tell you enough how sorry I am. Anna, I've been a terrible friend."

"You have been my most trusted friend." She reaches for my hand and squeezes it, and her bones feel small and fragile beneath soft, loose skin, as if she has suddenly become ancient and vulnerable, not the titan I have always envisioned. Perhaps it is because I now know her story.

"You've suffered so much, carried so much all alone," I whisper. "I'm sorry I've not been there for you. I'm just so sorry," I tell her again. I bend over and hug her awkwardly, cast and all, and kiss her cheek.