The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action

I

All this started one spring when I couldn’t find any women. The weather was so beautiful it just made me crazier. I’d lie on my bed in my little apartment, feeling the moonbreezes and would ache, absolutely effing ache, to be with a woman I cared about. I was in one of those periods when I needed to fall ridiculously in love. It wasn’t just that sex would be better — everything would be better. Fifty times a day I’d spot women who seemed likely candidates — they’d be in supermarkets or video stores or walking along the river or getting into their cars. The first thing I did was inspect them quickly for wedding rings. A good number of them were unburdened. But still, meeting them was impossible. If you just walked up to them and introduced yourself, you’d probably look like a rapist. And if you told them how lonely you were, you might not look like a rapist but you’d sure seem pathetic. I tried all the usual places, the bars and the dance clubs and some of the splashier parties, but I didn’t see it in their eyes. They were looking for quick sex or companionship while they tended broken hearts, or simply a warm body at their dinner tables when too many lonely Saturday nights became intolerable. But they weren’t looking for the same thing I was, some kind of spiritual redemption. Not that I didn’t settle some nights for quick sex and companionship, but next morning, I felt just as lonely and disconsolate. I couldn’t settle very often. I wanted my ideal woman, this notion I’ve had in my mind since I was seven or eight years old, this ethereal Madonna I had longed for down the decades.

So of course the night I met Linda I wasn’t even looking for anybody. I just walked into this little coffee shop over by the public library and there she was, sitting alone at the counter drinking coffee.

I wasn’t sure she could rescue me, and I doubt she was sure I could rescue her, but at least the potential was there, so two nights later we started going to bed. Even though we were sort of awkward with each other, we kept trying till we got it right, and then we became pretty good lovers. The only thing that got me down was she was still pretty hung up on this football coach who’d dumped her recently. She kept telling me how it had only been for sex, and how he was an animal six, seven hours a night, which did not exactly fill me with self-confidence. I wasn’t jealous of the guy but I didn’t necessarily want to attend his testimonial dinner every night, either.

The only other thing that bothered me was her two teenaged daughters. They were usually around the house while Linda and I were making love. Linda always laughed when I got uptight. “Hey, what do you think they do in their bedrooms when they bring their boyfriends over here?”

Linda was one of those modern parents. I’m not. My two kids, daughter and son, were raised pretty much the way I was: what your parents don’t know won’t hurt them. One boozy New Year’s Eve I actually heard this teenage girl talking to her mother about how her tenth-grade boyfriend wasn’t any good at oral sex. Linda wasn’t that far gone but she was a lot more liberal with her daughters than I would’ve been. Even when my wife and I split up, we agreed that our kids would be raised properly, at least as we defined “properly”.

I kept wanting Linda to go to my place to make love, but one night she laughed and said, “But your place is such a pit, Dwyer. I’m afraid I’d have cockroaches walking up my thigh.”

Linda was three years divorced from a very prosperous insurance executive. She’d gotten the big house and the big car and the big monthly cheque. She only had to work part-time at a travel agency to make her monthly nut.

So we made love at her place, and even though we both figured out pretty quickly that we weren’t going to rescue each other, the thing we had was better than nothing. So we kept it up, even though I had the sense that she was vaguely ashamed of herself for liking me. Her previous boyfriends had run to MDs and shrinks and business executives. Security guard was a long way down the ladder.

Then one night I went over and she was late getting home from work. And that was the night it happened, with her sixteen-year-old daughter Susan, I mean.

Started out with an argument in the kitchen between Susan and Molly.

I was sitting in the living room watching a boxing rerun on ESPN. Linda had just called and said she was running late.

First I hear screaming. Then I hear cursing. Then I hear a cup or a glass being smashed against the wall. Then screaming again.

I run out there and find sixteen-year-old Susan slapping fifteen-year-old Molly across the face.

You have to understand, they were both extremely good-looking girls. But Molly was even more than extremely good-looking. She was probably the single most beautiful person I had ever seen, a Madonna with just a hint of the erotic in her dark and brooding eyes. Her sister Susan had always been jealous of her, and now there was special trouble because Susan’s boyfriend had developed this almost creepy fixation on Molly.

I got between them.

“Get the hell out of this kitchen,” Susan said. “You don’t even belong here.”

“You shouldn’t talk to him like that,” Molly said.

“Why? Because our sweet mommy is fucking him?”

Molly shook her head, looked embarrassed, and left the kitchen. In moments, I heard her on the stairs, going up to the second floor.

Susan pushed past me and opened the refrigerator door. She took out a can of Bud, popped the tab and gunned some down.

“I’m sure you’ll tell my mother I was drinking this.” Before I could say anything, she said, “By the way, she’s sleeping with this new guy Brad at the travel agency. That’s why she’s late. She’s going to tell you all about it. But she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She smiled at me. “On the other hand, I don’t mind hurting your feelings at all.”

“So your boyfriend dumped you, huh?” Hell, I was just as petty as she was.

For the first time, I felt sorry for her. The anger and arrogance were suddenly gone from her face. She just looked sad and lost and painfully young. She even lost some of her sexiness in that moment, tiny sad pink barrette turning her into a little girl again. She was all vulnerability now.

She went over to the breakfast nook and sat down in the booth.

“You want a beer, Dwyer?”

“You gonna tell your mom I took one?”

She laughed. “I actually like you.”

“Yeah, I could tell.”

“I’m sorry I told you about Mom’s new boyfriend.”

Women know all the secrets in the world. All the important ones, anyway. Men just know all that bullshit that doesn’t matter in the long run.

“It was bound to happen,” I said.

“You’re not gonna be heartbroken?”

“For maybe a week. Or two. Probably more my pride than anything.”

“He’s sort of an asshole. I mean, I met him a couple of times. Real stuck on himself. But he’s real cute.”

“I’m happy for him. Maybe I’ll take you up on that beer.”

I felt betrayed, stunned, pissed, sad and slightly embarrassed. I was more of an interloper than ever in this house. Very soon now, I’d be back to roaming my apartment and talking to imaginary women again.

I got a beer and sat down.

“You ever been in love?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Really in love?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

“This is the third one.”

“Third one?”

“Yeah, the third boyfriend I’ve had who’s fallen in love with Molly. The first one was in sixth grade. His name was Rick. I loved him so much, I’d get the Neiman-Marcus catalogue down and look at wedding gowns. Then one day I found a note he’d written her. It took me a year to get over it.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ve never gotten over it.”

“So it happened again.”

“Yeah. Paul — you met him — he broke up with me six weeks ago and he’s been calling her ever since. She doesn’t encourage him — I mean, it’s not her fault — but he follows her around all the time. Takes pictures of her, too. He’s the photographer for the high-school paper. Real good with a telephoto lens.” She stared out the window. “He was like part of the family. Mom liked him even. And she doesn’t like many boys.” She looked over at the sheepdog, Clarence, who was treated like the third child. Now he sprawled on the kitchen floor, watching her. “Clarence wouldn’t bark at him or try to eat him or anything.” Reference to Clarence made her smile.

“If it isn’t Molly’s fault, why’d you hit her?”

She shrugged. “Because I hate her. At least a part of me does. If she wasn’t so beautiful—” She looked at me. “She’s even got one of her teachers in love with her.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. One day I was afraid my boyfriend was writing her letters, and so I snuck into her room and started looking around and there was this letter from Mr Meacham, her English teacher. He said he loved her and was willing to leave his wife and daughter for her.”

“Molly ever encourage him?”

She shook her head. “Molly is the most virginal person I know. Sometimes I think she’s retarded. I really do. She’s still a little girl in a lot of ways. She gets these crushes on her teachers. This year it’s Mr Meacham. He’s teaching her the Romantic poets and Molly keeps telling me how much she thinks he looks like Matt Dillon, who’s her favourite movie star. To her, it’s all very innocent. But not to Mr Meacham.” She hesitated. “I even think she’s started seeing him at nights. Last week I was out at Warner Mall and saw them sitting together in the Orange Julius.”

“Does your mother know about this?”

“I haven’t told her. She’s got problems of her own with Molly. Well, with Brad.”

“The guy at the travel agency?”

“Uh-huh. He’s been over here a few times and it’s pretty obvious he’s fallen in love with Molly.”

“You said he was young. How young?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Well, that’s better than Mr Meacham lately.”

“He may be the one stalking her.”

“Someone’s stalking her?”

“Yeah. Grabbed her the other night in the breezeway. But she got away. And been sending her threatening notes.” She sighed. “I want to be pissed off at her but I can’t. She doesn’t understand the effect she has on men. She really doesn’t.” Then: “I feel like shit. God, I can’t believe I slapped her. I’d better go talk to her.”

“Good idea. Tell your mom something came up and I had to go.”

“Sorry I broke the news to you that way. I mean, about Brad.”

“It’s all right.”

“Like Mom says, I can be a bitch on wheels when I want to be.”

We stood up and she gave me a hard little hug and then I went away. For good.

II

So it was back to the streets for me the rest of the summer. I kept thinking about Molly and how beautiful she was and how otherwise sensible men, young and old alike, seemed to take leave of their senses when they were around her. While I wasn’t looking for virginal fifteen-year-olds, I was looking for the same kind of explosive love affair those men were, one that blinds you to all else, the narcotic that no amount of drugs could ever equal. In a few years, I’d be fifty. There weren’t many such love affairs left for me. I’d had three or four of them in my lifetime, and I wanted one more before the darkness. So I went back to the bars, I became infatuated ten times a day in grocery stores and discount houses and even gas stations when I’d see the backside of a fetching lady bent slightly to put gas in her tank. But mostly my reality was my solitary bed and moonshadow, white curtains whipping ghostly in the rain-smelling wind, my lips silent with a thousand vows of undying love. A drinking buddy tried to make me believe that this was simply an advanced case of horniness but I said if it was, it was spiritual horniness and when I said ‘spiritual’ he gave me a queer look, as if I’d told him that I’d started sending a lot of money to TV preachers or something.

The summer ground on. One of the investigators at Allied Security had to have a heart by-pass so they shifted me from security (which I like) to working divorce cases (which I hated). While I’ve committed my share of adultery, I can’t say that it’s ever pleasant to think about. Betrayal is not exactly a tribute to the human spirit. The men seemed to take a strange kind of pride in what they were doing. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about being secretive, anyway. But the cheating women were all a little furtive and frantic and even sad, as if they were doing this against their will. Maybe they were paying back cheating husbands. Four weeks of this stuff before the investigator came back to Allied. My advertising daughter came to town just as August was starting to punish us. My son drove in from med-school in the east. Their mother had married again, third time a charm or so she said, a man with some means, apparently, whom they liked much better than husband number two, a bank vice-president with great country club aspirations. “You’ve got to find yourself a woman,” my daughter said right before she kissed me goodbye at the airport.

One night in late September, beautiful Indian Summer, I came home and found Linda sitting in my living room.

“Your landlady let me in,” she said. Then: “This is really a depressing place, Dwyer. You think we could go somewhere else?”

She didn’t like any of the bars I recommended. Too downscale, presumably. We ended up in a place where businessmen yelled and whooped it up a lot about the Hawkeyes. The way they shouted and strutted around, you’d think they owned copper mines down in Brazil, where they could make people work for twenty-five cents an hour.

“Did you hear what happened to Molly? It was in the news about three weeks ago.”

“I guess not.”

“Somebody cut her up.”

“Cut her up?”

“Slashed her cheeks. Do you remember a New York model that happened to a few years ago?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t ever able to work again.”

Linda’s eyes glistened with tears. “The plastic surgeon said there’s only so much he can do for Molly. She looks terrible.”

“What’re the police saying?”

She shook her head, sleek and sexy in a white linen suit, her dark hair recently cut short. “No leads.”

“Molly didn’t see her assailant?”

“It was dark. She’d parked her car in the garage and was just walking into the house — through the breezeway, you know — and he was waiting there. I guess this happened before — somebody in the breezeway I mean — but neither Molly nor Susan told me about it. Why should they tell me anything? I’m just their mother.”

“She’s sure it was a ‘he’?”

“That’s the assumption everybody’s making. That it was a guy, I mean.”

“She doesn’t have any sense of who it might have been?”

Linda sighed. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She nodded. “I think she knows who it was but won’t say.”

“Why would she protect somebody?”

“I’m not sure.” Pause. “I’ve been having terrible thoughts lately.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking that Susan may have done this.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes.” Pause. “She’s very, very jealous of Molly. Molly — well, a few of Susan’s boyfriends have fallen in love with Molly over the last year or so. About a month ago, Susan made up with this boy, Paul, the one who’d fallen in love with Molly. But then she came home one night and found Paul drunk in the living room putting the moves on Molly.”

“You really think it’s possible that Susan could do something like this?”

“She’s been upstaged by Molly all her life. Even as a baby, Molly sort of unhinged people. I mean, she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And I think I’m being objective about that.”

“Anybody else who might have done it?”

“The police are talking to one of Molly’s teachers, this Mr Meacham. That’s another thing my girls didn’t tell me until after this happened. It seems this Mr Meacham offered to leave his wife and daughter for Molly. He’s forty-three years old. My God.”

“Anybody else you can think of?”

After another drink was set down in front of her, she said, “I have to tell you something. It’s so ridiculous, it pisses me off to even repeat it.”

I just waited for her to say it.

“Last night, my dear sweet daughter Susan accused me of slashing Molly’s face.”

Calmly as I could, I said, “Why would she say something like that?”

“I’m kind of embarrassed telling you the rest.”

“Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

“I trashed Molly’s room.”

“When?”

“Late August, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Brad.”

“The guy from the travel agency?”

“Uh-huh. He’d started phoning her — Molly, I mean — when I wasn’t there. Then one night he came right out and asked me. I mean, I suspected something was wrong. He hadn’t touched me in two weeks. Then this one night he said, ‘Would it really piss you off if I asked Molly out?’ I didn’t want to let him know how pissed I was, so I just said that I didn’t think that was such a great idea. But I said it in this real calm voice. I told him that technically she wouldn’t reach the age of consent until October, and he said he’d wait. Then after he left — I sat in the den and got really drunk and then I went upstairs and started screaming at Molly. Then I started trashing her room.”

She started crying. “My own daughter, and I treated her that way.”

I changed the subject quickly. “You mentioned Susan’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Paul.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Right. He calls Molly four times a day. He says he doesn’t care about her face being cut up. He loves her. His parents have called me, they’re so worried about him. He went from As to Ds last semester. They want him to see a shrink. When Molly won’t come to the phone, he gets furious.”

“And you think Molly might know who did it?”

“I think so. Would you talk to her?”

“It’d probably be easier if you went through the agency. Ask them to assign me to you. I don’t really have much time for any freelance on the side.”

“Fine. I’ll call them tomorrow. I really appreciate this, Jack.” Then: “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“It’s almost ten. I’m supposed to meet somebody at ten-fifteen way across town.” She shrugged. “Met somebody new at the agency. He’s a little older than Brad.”

“Sixteen?”

She smiled. “Wise ass.” Then: “I really am sorry. You know, about Brad and everything.”

“I survived.”

“I’d always be willing to see you again.”

“I never take handouts except at Christmas time.”

What the hell, it never hurts to sound dignified once in a while.

III

The next day, I told her about the breezeway incident. She led me up to the den on the second floor. “She sits in the dark. The blinds are drawn and everything, I mean. You’ll get used to the shadows. She doesn’t want anybody to see her. But I convinced her you only wanted to help her.” Then she went away.

I knocked and a small voice said to come in and I went in and there she sat in a leather recliner by a TV set that was playing a soap opera. Just as I started to sit down in the chair facing her, a commercial came on, the bright colours flashing across the screen illuminating her face.

He’d done a damned good job. If it was a he. Long deep vertical gashes on both checks. The stitches were still on, and that just made her look worse. But even with the stitches gone, her beauty would be forever and profoundly marred.

“Remember me?”

She looked at me with solemn eyes and nodded.

“You think we could turn the TV down a bit?”

She picked up the remote and brought the volume down to a low number.

“Your mom wants me to make sure that you told the police everything, Molly. You understand that?”

Again she nodded. I had the unnerving sense that she’d also been struck mute.

“She told me what Susan said. About hearing somebody run away right after it happened. Is that true?”

Again, she nodded.

“I checked out your breezeway last night, Molly. That’s where it happened, right?”

She said: “I wish I didn’t have to go through this, Jack.”

“I wish you didn’t have to either, sweetheart.”

“I mean your questions.”

“Oh.”

“My mom talked to the principal this morning. I’m going to finish my classes at home this year. So I don’t have to see — anybody. You know, at school.”

“You’re going to sit in this room, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

“With the blinds drawn.”

“I like it when it’s dark. When nobody can see me this way.”

“Can I tell you about the breeze way, Molly?”

“The breezeway?”

“Uh-huh. I came out here last night and checked it out when everybody was asleep. You’ve got an alarm system that kicks on the yard lights whenever anybody approaches the house.”

“I guess so.”

“That means that when the person who did this to you ran off, you had a very good chance to see his face.”

“Oh.”

I waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, I watched her for a moment — she wore an aqua blouse and jeans and white socks — and then I said, “I think you know who did this to you. And I think that you’re trying to protect him.”

“You keep saying ‘him,’ Jack. Maybe it was a woman.”

“Is that what you’re telling me? That it was a woman?”

“No, but—”

“It’ll come out eventually, Molly. One way or the other, the police are going to figure out who did this to you.”

“I just want it to be over with. I’ve accepted it and I just want it to be over with.”

“It was either Paul or Mr Meacham, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t want to talk any more, Jack.”

“Your mother loves you, Molly.”

“I know.”

“And she’s very worried about you.”

“I know that, too.”

“She doesn’t like the idea that whoever did this is still out there running around free.”

“It’s over with, Jack. It happened. And I don’t have any choice but to accept it. People accept things all the time. There was a girl in my class two years ago who lost her legs in a tractor accident. She was staying on her uncle’s farm. She’ll never be able to walk again. People accept things all the time.”

“He should have to pay for doing this, Molly. I don’t know what’s going through your head, but nothing justifies somebody doing this to you. Nothing.”

I stood up.

“Susan is worried about you, too.”

She nodded. “I’d like to watch this show now, if you don’t mind.” But smiled for the first time. Her scars were hideous in the flickering lights of the TV picture tube. “I appreciate you caring about me, Jack. You’re a nice guy. You really are.”

When I got downstairs, I found Susan and Clarence waiting for me. The big sheepdog lay next to the desk where Susan was working on her homework.

As always, the overtrained dog barked as I approached. I was going to get him some Thorazine for Christmas.

“Mom said to say goodbye. She had to run back to work.” Then: “How’d it go with Molly?”

I told her about coming out here last night and testing the yard lights. “She had to’ve gotten a good look at the person who did this.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Tell me one more time. You were sitting in here watching TV—”

“—and I heard her scream and then I ran out to the breezeway and I saw somebody at the edge of the yard running away. He went up over the white fence out there.”

“You said ‘he’. Male?”

“I think so.”

“And Molly was—”

“Molly was in a heap on the breezeway floor. When I flipped on the light, all I could see was the blood. She was in pretty bad shape. Then Clarence came running out and he was barking like crazy.” Then: “I think she knows. Who did it, I mean.”

“So do I.”

“But why would she protect him?”

“That’s what I need to figure out. I’m going over to see our friend Paul.”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind. The way he dumped me for Molly, I mean, I really hate him. But that doesn’t mean he’d do something like this.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” I said. I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Anybody ever tell you what a nice young woman you are?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Paul used to tell me that all the time. Before he fell in love with Molly.”

IV

Paul lived in a large Colonial house on a wide suburban street filled with little kids doing stunts on skateboards.

As soon as his mother learned who I was, her polite smile vanished. “You don’t have any right to ask him any questions.”

I was still outside the front door. “The family has asked me to talk to him.”

“He didn’t do it,” she said. “I’ll admit that he’s been pretty — involved with Molly lately. But he’d never hurt her. Ever. And that’s just what we told the police.”

She was a tall, slender woman in black slacks and a red button-down shirt. There was a kind of casual elegance to her movements, as if she might have long ago studied dance.

Behind her, a voice said: “It’s all right, Mom. I’ll talk to him.”

Paul was taller than his mother but slender in the same graceful way. There was a snub-nosed boyishness to the face that the dark eyes belied. There was age and anger in the eyes, as if he’d lived through a bitter experience lately and was not the better for it.

“You sure?” she said to Paul.

“Finish fixing dinner, Mom. I’ll talk to him.”

He wore a Notre Dame football Jersey and ragged Levi cut-offs. His feet were bare. There was an arrogance about him, a certain dismissiveness in the gaze.

His mother gave me a last enigmatic look and then vanished from the doorway.

“I don’t have much time,” he said.

“I just have two questions.”

“The police had a lot more than two.”

“Can you account for your time the night Molly was cut up?”

“If I have to.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I mostly drove around to the usual places.”

“And ‘the usual places’ would be where exactly?”

“The mall and the parking lot next to the Hardee’s out on First Avenue and then out to the mall again.”

“And you can prove that?”

“Sure,” he said. But for the first time his lie became obvious. His gaze evaded mine.

I said: “I saw her.”

He didn’t ask me who “her” was.

“When?”

“A few hours ago.”

“Was she—”

“I didn’t get a real good look at her. The room was pretty dark.”

He surprised me, then, as human beings constantly do. His eyes got wet with tears. “The poor kid.”

“She’s a nice girl.”

“She’s a lot more than nice.”

“Susan’s nice, too.”

“Yeah, she is. And I treated her like shit and I’m sorry about it.” He cleared tears from his voice. “I couldn’t help — what I feel for Molly. It just kind of happened.”

“Molly’s mother thinks you’re obsessed with her. In the clinical sense, I mean.”

“I love her. If that’s being obsessed.” He sounded a lot older and a lot wearier than he had just a few minutes ago.

“Her mother also thinks you were the one who cut her.”

He smiled bitterly. “That’s funny. I’ve been thinking it was her mother who did it.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “Hell, yes, I’m serious. Her mother’s got a real problem with Molly. She’s very jealous of her. Molly told me how bitter she was when this Brad started coming after her. She pushed Molly down the stairs, bruised her up pretty bad.”

“She show you the bruises?”

“Yeah.”

“She wasn’t exaggerating?”

“Not at all.”

Somewhere inside, a telephone rang, was picked up on the second ring. His mother called: “Telephone, Paul.”

“Maybe I’d better get that.”

“You can prove where you were when Molly was being cut?”

He surprised me again. “No, I can’t, Mr Dwyer. I can’t. I was alone.”

“How about the mall?”

He shrugged. “I just made it up.”

“Then you were doing what?”

“Just driving around.”

Mother: “Honey, somebody’s waiting on the phone.”

“Just driving around?”

“Thinking about her. Molly. I really have to go, Mr Dwyer.”

“Honey!” his mother called again.

V

This was the kind of neighbourhood where college professors always lived in the movies of my youth, a couple blocks of brick Tudors set high up on well-landscaped hills. The cars in the driveways ran to Volvos and Saabs, and the music, when you heard it through the occasional open window, ran to Brahms and Mahler. At night, the professors would sit in front of the fireplace, a blanket across their legs, reading Eliot or Frost. Even if life here wasn’t really like this, it was nice to think that even a small part of our world could still be so enviably civilized.

A knock and the door opened almost at once. A heavy woman in a green sweater and a pair of too-snug jeans stood there watching me with obvious displeasure. She wore too much make-up on her fleshy, bitter face. Women who lived in these houses were supposed to look dignified, not like aging dance club babes. “Yes?” she said. Her mouth was small and bitter. She’d sucked on a lot of lemons, at least figurative ones, in her time.

“I’d like to see Bob Meacham.”

She did something odd, then. She smiled with a kind of nasty pleasure. “Oh, God, you’re another cop, aren’t you?”

“Sort of.”

I showed her my licence.

“Well, come in, Mr Dwyer. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

I couldn’t figure out why she was so happy to see me suddenly. Why would the presence of a private detective bring her such pleasure?

She flung an arm to a leather wingback chair that sat, comfortably, near a fireplace. An identical chair sat just across the way.

“I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t go far. The floor creaked a few times and then she said, “So it’s all over, is it, you bastard? Well, guess who’s here to see you? Another cop. Your little girlfriend must think you were the one who cut her up.”

When he appeared, moments later, he kept looking over his shoulder at his wife, as if he was waiting for her to put a knife in his back.

He came over and said, “I’m Bob Meacham.”

“Jack Dwyer. Nice to meet you.”

We shook hands.

“What can I do for you, Mr Dwyer?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions about Molly.”

“Oh. I see.”

His wife, who stood to the side of him, smirked at me. “When we first got married, Mr Dwyer, I used to worry that my husband was secretly gay. I guess I should be happy he just has this nice heterosexual thing for underage girls.”

Meacham obliged her by blushing.

Seeing that she’d scored a direct hit, she said, “I’ll go back to my woman’s work now, and leave you two to discussing the wages of sin.”

“I know what you must think of her,” Meacham said softly after his wife left. “But it’s my fault. I mean, I’ve made her like this. I’ve... I’ve had a lot of affairs over the years. We should’ve gotten divorced a long time ago but — somehow it’s just never happened.”

He didn’t fit the professorial mould, either. He was a little too beefy and a little too rough in the face. He’d probably played football at some point in his life. Or boxed. His nose and jaw had the look of heavy contact with violence. He wore a chambray shirt and jeans. His balding head didn’t make him look any more professorial, either. It just added to the impression of middle-aged toughness. He didn’t belong in a Tudor house with a Volvo in the drive and T.S. Eliot lying open on his knee.

“You said you’ve had some affairs.”

“Yes.”

“Were they with young girls?”

“Youngish.”

“Meaning?”

“Always of consenting age, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Molly isn’t of age.”

“Molly’s the first. A fluke. Being that young, I mean.”

“You realise that hustling her has opened you up to several legal charges if the cops want to press them.”

“You may not believe this, Mr Dwyer, but I wasn’t hustling her. We haven’t slept together. I don’t plan to sleep with her till we’re married. I know people laugh at me; I mean, I know I’m not much better than a dirty joke these days, but I don’t give a damn about anything or anybody other than Molly.”

He looked at me.

“You’re smiling, Mr Dwyer.”

“Are you seeing a shrink?”

“No.”

“You should be.”

“I’m in love with her.”

“She’s fifteen.”

“She’s also the most spiritually beautiful creature I’ve ever known. That’s why I say I’m not hustling her, Mr Dwyer. That’s why I say we won’t make love till we’re married.”

“Or at least till he gets out of prison,” Mrs Meacham said, walking back into the room.

For the first time, I saw the sorrow Meacham had hinted at. Saw it in the slump of her shoulder, saw it behind the pain and anger in her gaze. She looked old and sad and slightly adrift.

“He’s going to lose his teaching job — the school is already seeing to that — and then the district attorney will charge him with contributing. He brought her over here one day while I was gone and they drank wine together. Isn’t that sweet?”

She hovered at the back of his chair. The smirk was back.

“He said he’s going to leave me everything, when he runs away with her. Probably Tahiti, is what I’m thinking. He’s always been obsessed with Gauguin. He even got sweet Molly interested in him.”

She started wandering around the living room. We watched her with great glum interest.

“He’s going to leave me everything, Mr Dwyer. The mortgage. The car that has nearly 175,000 miles on it. The bank account that never gets above $2,000. And the cancer. I’ve had three cancer surgeries in the past four years, Mr. Dwyer. And I’ll know in a few weeks if I need another one.” This time there was no smirk, just grief in the eyes and mouth. “And you know the worst thing of all, Mr Dwyer? I still love him. God, I’m just as sick as he is but I can’t help it.”

After a moment, Meacham said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? You sound tired.”

She looked at me. “I’m sorry for all this, Mr Dwyer.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s why we don’t have friends any more. Nobody wants to come over here and hear all this terrible bullshit we put each other through.”

Then: “Goodbye, Mr Dwyer.”

After she left, he said, “I suppose you’re getting a bad impression of me.”

I almost laughed. He was pursuing a fifteen-year-old, cheating on a wife with cancer, and thinking of running away and leaving that same wife with all the bills. Gee, why would that give me a bad impression of him?

“My opinion of you doesn’t matter.”

He stared at me a long time. “I’m a romantic, Mr Dwyer. I believe in the ideals of art and beauty. That’s why I was so drawn to Molly. She’s beautiful in an idealistic way — perfectly untouched — a virgin of body and mind. That’s why I want to take her away — to save her so that she doesn’t become corrupted.”

I thought of Brad dumping Linda for Molly; and Paul dumping Susan for Molly, and taking her picture all the time, and following her around obsessively; and I thought of how I’d been all summer, meeting perfectly fine women whom I rejected because they didn’t fit my ideal. A dangerous thing, beauty. It brings out the best and worst in men. The trouble is, sometimes the best and the worst are there at the same time — Meacham here loving her in the pure way of a college boy dumbstruck by the beauty of art; and yet at the same time willing to hurt a wife who was sick and needed him. The best and the worst. Beauty has a way of making us even more selfish than money does.

“She said no.”

“Who said no?”

“Molly.”

“She told you that, Mr Dwyer?”

“In so many words.”

“So you think that because she was taking some time to think it over—”

I sighed. “Meacham, listen to me. She wasn’t thinking it over. There was no way she was ever going to run off with you. Ever. But maybe deep down you really understood that. And maybe deep down that’s why you cut her face.”

“My God, you really think I could do that?”

“I think it’s possible. You’re so obsessive about her that—”

“‘Obsessive.’ That’s a word my wife would use. A clinical word. There’s nothing clinical in my feelings for Molly, believe me. They’re pure passion. And I emphasise pure and passion. There’s no way I could cut her up. She’s the woman I’ve waited for all my life.”

I wondered if I happened to be blushing at this point in the conversation. I thought again of all the women I’d stayed away from because they weren’t my ideal. Good women. There’s nothing like hearing your own sappy words put into the sappy mouth of someone else. Then you realise how inane your beliefs really are.

“Were you here the night it happened?”

“No, Mr Dwyer, I wasn’t. I was walking, actually.”

“The entire night?”

“Most of it. You’re wanting an alibi?”

“That would help.”

“I don’t have one — other than the fact that I’m a creator, Mr Dwyer, not a destroyer. I have created something with Molly that is too beautiful for anybody to destroy. Even I couldn’t destroy it if I wanted to.”

I had to agree with his wife. I don’t know why she stuck it out all these years, either.

“I’ll be going now, Mr Meacham.”

A chill smile. “You don’t like me much, do you, Mr Dwyer?”

“Not much,” I said.

“You’re like her,” he said, and nodded upwards to where his wife lay in her solitary bed. “Very middle-class and judgmental without even understanding what you’re judging.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I doubt it.”

I left.

VI

Clarence started barking at me the minute I pulled into the drive. He was in the breezeway, where he spent a lot of time on these unseasonably warm autumn evenings. Linda came out and calmed him down and then let me in.

“I guess we should be grateful he barks so much, as a watch dog and all, but sometimes he drives me crazy.” Then, apparently out of guilt for saying such a thing, she bent down and patted his head fondly, and said in baby talk, “You drive Mommy crazy, don’t you, Clarence?”

Susan was in the kitchen setting out placemats on the breakfast nook table.

“We’re doing Domino’s tonight,” Susan said. “Are you going to join us, Jack?”

I still couldn’t imagine either of them doing it, cutting her up that way, daughter to one, sister to the other.

“Pepperoni and green pepper,” Linda said.

“You convinced me.”

Susan got beers for her mother and me and a Diet Pepsi for herself. Just as we were sitting down in the nook, Clarence exploded into barks again. The Domino’s man had pulled into the drive.

“Maybe Clarence needs some tranquillizers,” Susan said.

“I put a twenty on the counter there, hon,” Linda said to her.

While Susan was out paying the pizza man, and calming Clarence, Linda said, “Did you talk to them?”

“Yes.”

“Any impressions?”

“They’re both good possibilities,” I said. “Especially Meacham. I’ve been learning some things about him. He’s a real creep. His wife has cancer and he’s still running around on her. He thinks he’s the last of the Romantic poets.”

“Good for him. He’s the one I’d bet on. For doing that to Molly, I mean.”

Susan came back with the pizza and we ate.

Halfway through the feast, Linda said, “Tell him about Mark.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“Go on. Tell him.”

Susan shot me a you-know-how-moms-are smile and said, “Mark Feldman asked me to the Homecoming dance.”

“Great,” I said.

“Honey, Dwyer doesn’t know who Mark Feldman is. Tell him.”

“He’s a football player.”

“Jeeze, honey, you’re not helping Dwyer at all. Mark Feldman just happens to be the best quarterback who ever played in this state. He’s also a very nice looking boy. Much better-looking than that creep Paul. And he’s really got the hots for my cute little daughter here.”

“God, Mom. The ‘hots’. That sounds like something you’d get from a toilet seat.”

We all laughed.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“And she was worried that nobody’d want to ask her out any more, Dwyer. Pretty crazy, huh?”

A knock on the breezeway door.

Susan went out to the breezeway to see who was there. She came back in carrying two pans.

“Bobbi brought your cake pans back, Mom. She said the upside down cake was great and to thank you for the recipe, too.”

“Thank Gold Medal flour,” Linda said. “The recipe was on the back.”

I guess it was the silence from the breezeway I noticed. Clarence tended to bark at strangers when they came up to the door and when they were leaving. But he hadn’t barked at all with Bobbi.

“Why didn’t Clarence bark just now?” I said.

“Oh, you mean with Bobbi?” Linda said.

“Right.”

“He knows her real well. He doesn’t bark with our best friends.”

Then I remembered something that Susan had said to me back when I’d first met her.

I said, “He doesn’t bark when Paul comes up, either, does he?”

“No,” Susan said.

“The other night, when Molly was cut, you said you heard screams from the breezeway. But did you hear barking?”

Susan thought a moment. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Would Clarence have barked if Meacham had come up?”

“Absolutely,” Linda said.

I tried not to make a big thing of it but they could see what I was thinking. I finished my three slices of pizza and my beer and then said I needed to go and do some work.

VII

He wasn’t too hard to find. I spent some time in the parking lot with some burglary tools I use on occasion, and then I went inside the mall looking for him.

He was hanging out with some other boys in front of a music store.

When he saw me, he started looking nervous. He whispered something to one of his friends.

Three good-sized boys stepped in front of him, like a shield, as I started approaching.

They were going to block me as he ran away.

“Molly wants to see you,” I said over the shoulders of the boys.

He had just started to turn, ready to make his run, when he heard me and angled his face back towards mine.

“What?”

“She wants to see you. She sent me to get you.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

I shrugged. “All right. I’ll tell her you didn’t want to come.”

The boy in the middle, who went two-twenty easy, decided to have a little fun with the old man. He stepped right up to me and said, “You want to rumble, Pops?”

The other kids laughed. Nothing kids love more than bad dialogue from fifties movies.

“Like I said, Paul, I’ll tell her you didn’t want to see her.” I looked down at the tough one and said, “If that’s all right with you, Sonny.”

I hadn’t kicked the shit out of anybody for a long time, but the tough one was giving me ideas.

“Fuck that ‘Sonny’ bullshit,” the tough one said.

But Paul had a hand on his shoulder and was turning him back.

“She really wants to see me?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “She does.”

Paul looked at the tough one. “I better go, then, Michael.”

“With this creep?” Michael said.

“Yeah.”

Michael glowered at me. The others did, too, but Michael had done some graduate work in glowering, so he was the most impressive.

“Nice friends,” I said, as we turned back towards one of the exits. I said it loud enough to get Michael all worked up again. “Especially the dumb one with the big mouth.”

We sat in an Orange Julius.

“I thought we were going to Molly’s.”

“We are.”

“When?”

“Soon as you explain this.”

From my pocket, I took a stained paper sack. “Know what this is, Paul?”

“You sonofabitch.”

“There’s a hunting knife in there. A bloody one. I’ll bet the blood is Molly’s.”

“You sonafabitch.”

“You said that already.”

“That’s illegal.”

“What is?”

“Getting into my trunk that way.”

“Wanna go call the cops?”

“You sonofabitch.”

“How about calling me a bastard for a while? Breaks the monotony.”

“It isn’t what you think.”

“No? You ride around with a bloody knife in your trunk and you don’t have an alibi for the other night and it isn’t what I think? You’re telling me you didn’t cut her?”

He started crying then, sitting right there in Orange Julius. He put his face in his hands and wept. People watched us. Son and father, they probably figured, with the father being a prime asshole for making his son cry this way. I took out my clean handkerchief and handed it over to him. I felt sorry for him. I shouldn’t have but I did. Loving somebody can make you crazy. All the fine sane people in the mental health industry tell you that you shouldn’t give into it so hard, but you can’t help it. There was a poet named Charles Bukowski who said that the most dangerous time to know any man is when he’s been spurned in love. And from my years as a cop dealing with domestic abuse cases, Bukowski was absolutely right. So I sat there hating him for what he’d done to poor poor Molly, and feeling sorry for him, too. He’d ended her life, now I was going to make sure that his life was ended, too. He’d be tried as an adult and serve a long, long sentence. The way all men who visit their rages on helpless women should be sentenced.

He started snuffling then and picked up my handkerchief and blew his nose and said, “You still don’t understand, Dwyer.”

“Understand what?”

“What really happened.”

“Then tell me.”

So he told me and I said, “Bullshit. I should beat your face in for even saying that.”

“Let’s go see Molly.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

I walked across to the pay phones, keeping my eye on him all the time. It was preposterous, what he’d said.

When Linda came on, I told her I was bringing Paul over and taking him up to the den to see Molly. I said I couldn’t answer any of her questions. She did not sound happy about that.

Soft silvered shadows played in the darkness of the den. Molly wore a pair of jeans and a white blouse and sat primly in the chair next to the dead TV. There was no question of turning on the lights. Molly had pretty much decided to live her life in darkness.

Paul and I sat on the edge of the narrow leather couch.

“He told me something crazy, Molly,” I said. “I just wanted to give you the chance to tell me he’s lying.”

“I had to tell him, Molly,” Paul said. “I’m sorry.”

I told her what he’d said and she said, “Paul loves me.”

“I guess I don’t know what that means, Molly,” I said gently. I was starting to get goosebumps because it appeared that Paul had told me the truth, after all.

“He loves me. That’s why he did it.”

“Why he cut you up that way?”

“Yes.”

“You wanted him to cut you?”

“I asked him to. He didn’t want to. But I kept after him till he did it. I just couldn’t take the way people acted around me. My face. It’s why I was having all this trouble with my mother and my sister and my friends. I didn’t ask for my face, Mr Dwyer. I’d be much happier if I was plain, because then I wouldn’t have to have all these people after me — like I was some sort of prize or something.” Then to Paul: “I finally made you understand, didn’t I, Paul?”

“Yes,” Paul said.

“And he said he’d love me just as much if I didn’t have my looks. And he does, don’t you, Paul, even though I’ll never be beautiful again?”

Even in moonshadow, his young face looked set and grim. He nodded.

Then she started sobbing and Paul went over to her and knelt next to her and took her in his arms and held her with a tenderness that moved and shook me. This wasn’t puppy love or lust. This was real and simple and profound, the way his young arms held her young body.

At that moment he was father and brother and friend and priest, and only coincidentally, lover. I let myself out of the den and went downstairs.

VIII

“I’m having one, too,” Susan said, when her mother asked her to bring us beers.

She brought three and we sat in the breakfast nook and I told them what had happened.

Linda cried and Susan held her.

“You think we should go up there, Jack?” Susan said as her mother wept in her arms.

“I’d give them a few more minutes.”

“Do you think she’s sane?” Susan said.

I shrugged. “I think she probably needs to see a shrink.”

Linda sat up suddenly. She was angry. “That little prick took advantage of her. That’s why he cut her face that way. He figured if he made her ugly, nobody else would want her. He was just being selfish, that’s why he did it.”

She made a fist and muttered a curse beneath her breath.

“You think that’s true, Jack?” Susan said.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe he did it because he really loves her,” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to this bullshit,” Linda said. “I’m going up there.”

And with that, she forced Susan out of the booth.

“Mother, maybe you’d better stay down here for a little while,” Susan called.

“She’s my goddamned daughter,” Linda said, sounding hysterical. “My goddamned daughter.”

She stormed off to the front of the house and the stairway.

Susan shook her head. “Maybe he really did do it because he loved her. Isn’t that possible, Jack?”

She wanted to believe in love and romance, just the same way I wanted to believe in being redeemed by the right woman. There was a good chance we were foolish people. Maybe very foolish.

Then Linda was screaming and Molly was sobbing and a terrible rage and despair filled the house, like the scent of rain on a sudden chill black wind.

Susan said, “Could I hold your hand for a minute, Jack? For just a minute.”

I did my best to smile but I don’t think it was very good. Not very good at all.

“For just a minute,” I said. “But not much longer.”