Lawrence Block - After the First Death

I lit us each a cigarette.

“Cause once the cops get you, you’re dead.”

“I know it”

“I wish I could say that I saw something, like somebody following you and Robin to the Maxfield. But I didn’t even see you pick her up. I was with somebody.”

“You told me.”

“Well, at the time I would of told you that anyway. Not to get involved, you understand?” She sipped her coffee. “Do you have any idea who did it? Any suspects?”

“Nothing much.”

“Tell me.”

So I did. I gave her the unabridged edition this time, all of it, front to back. She was the first person to hear the whole thing, and it did me good to tell it. She was just the right kind of sounding board. She stayed with every word, nodding to show that she was following me, interrupting now and then when she wanted a point cleared up. Linda disgusted her, MacEwan appalled her, and the problem of finding out who did what appeared to intrigue her.

She didn’t think much of my idea of picking up a girl and asking her questions. “No one would tell you anything,” she said. “They’d just run.”

“You didn’t run.”

“Well, I told you I was crazy.” She considered that. “What happened was I decided to trust you.”

“I trust you, too.”

“What’s to trust? What could I do to you?”

“Call the police.”

“Me?” She laughed. “The police and I”-holding up two fingers pressed together-“are not exactly like this.”

“Even so.”

“I hate to tell you this, I’m not proud of it, but I’ve been arrested. I’ve been in jail. Not just once. A few times.”

“That must be rough.”

“Rough! You know the House of Detention? In the Village?”

“I know where it is.”

She turned her eyes away. “I shouldn’t mention it. You can’t think much of me.”

“I was inside just once, but for a lot longer than you.”

“It’s different.”

“Maybe in some ways. I think I understand you better than you think, Jackie. You don’t have to worry about what you say to me.”

Long silence. Then, “There’s worse.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you probably know it already. One of the reasons I couldn’t stay at the hotel forever, I had to come back here.”

During the past few minutes her eyes had been running, and she had been sniffing nervously. I knew what was coming.

“You saw my arms.”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, you know.”

“Sure. You use stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

A longer silence this time. Then, “I have to fix now. I don’t want you to see me. It would make you sick.”

“No, it wouldn’t”

“I don’t mean sick, I mean you wouldn’t like me, seeing it. I want to go in the other room.”

“All right.”

“Alex?”

“What?”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“All right.”

“You’ll stay here? You won’t leave? Because I think maybe I can help you. I mean finding out who did it. You won’t go?”

“Where would I go?”

“I don’t know. Away, I guess.”

“I won’t go anywhere.”

“Good.” She was rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. She got to her feet and walked quickly out of the room. “I’ll be right back, Alex. I won’t be more than a minute, I’ll be right back.”

THE CHANGE WAS INSTANTLY VISIBLE WHEN SHE RETURNED, IT was much more than a matter of pupil dilation. Her face, nervous and animated before she fixed, was now profoundly relaxed. She walked slowly, as if with cushioned feet, and her shoulders drooped. She sat on the couch, her feet out in front of her, and said, “Too bright, too bright,” and I went around turning off lights.

After awhile she said, “I was off for a whole year. I wasn’t working. There was this man. He lived in Scarsdale. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes.”

“I was never there. Is it nice?”

“Yes.”

“He was married. He paid for my apartment and gave me money, and I didn’t see anybody else. I saw him during the day, or sometimes he would stay over.” She closed her eyes. Her cigarette burned down, and I took it from between her fingers and put it out. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I was in love with him,” she said.

Her voice was very soft and she spoke slowly, levelly. Only her lips moved. Before she had talked with her hands, but now they remained still in her lap.

“An hour here, an hour there. And during the summer he always took his wife to Europe for two months. He would send the children to a camp in New England and take his wife to Europe, every summer. So this one summer, when we were seeing each other, he was going to give me a trip. He would let me buy a new wardrobe and he would arrange a trip for me to Puerto Rico. He would take care of the hotel and the airplane ticket and everything, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I was very excited about this. Are you from New York, Alex?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“Ohio.”

“Is it nice there?”

“Not especially.”

“Oh. But I’m from New York, see, and I was never anyplace. Always here in New York. So I was very excited about the trip, and I started shopping for clothes, and then this man explained to me that his business was bad and he couldn’t afford to pay for the trip. He could give me some money, but not enough for the trip.” The eyes closed again. I smoked half a cigarette, and then, eyes still shut, she said, “He could still send his kids to that camp and take his wife to Europe, but he couldn’t afford the trip for me. See?”

“I see.”

“So I was very hurt, Alex, and when he came back from Europe I didn’t live there any more. I started working again, tricking, and I started using stuff again, and I stopped being in love with him, and when he came back I didn’t live there any more.”

She fell silent again. I looked at her and wanted to touch her face.

She said, “Everybody needs a crutch, that’s all Everybody has his own hang-up.” She opened her eyes. “Here I’m telling you things I don’t ever tell anybody. Alex? How come you picked me up?”

“I wanted to find out if-”

“No no no. I saw you on the street, you know, back and forth, back and forth. There were a lot of girls out tonight What made you pick me?”

“You were the prettiest.”

She opened her eyes very wide and turned a little toward me. Truth is perhaps contagious; I had not meant to tell her that had tried to avoid telling it to myself, but it had come out. She studied my eyes very closely.

“You’re a very nice person, Alex.”

I looked at her and didn’t know what to do.

“Yes,” she said, very softly, to the question I had not asked. “I would like it very much, Alex.”

So I kissed her.

She kissed greedily, eagerly, like a yearning schoolgirl in a parked car. She kissed warm and wet and tightened her arms around my neck. She kissed sweet and soft, and I rubbed the back of her neck and stroked her like a frightened kitten.

We walked drunkenly to her little bedroom and stopped to kiss in the doorway. She sighed, and murmured my name. We entered the bedroom and left the lights out. We undressed. She drew down the bedclothing and we lay down on the bed together.

“Well, it took awhile, but here we are. Who would of guessed?”

“Shhhh.”

“Alex-”

We kissed, and she clung to me, and I felt the awesome softness of her. Every bit of her was soft and smooth. I could not stop touching her. I touched her breasts, her belly, her back, her bottom, her legs. I loved the way she felt.

She lay quite still, eyes closed, body at peace, in the sweet inertia of heroin, while I wrote song lyrics on all the delights of her flesh. I stroked her and kissed her, and at length her body began to make sweet abbreviated movements, and her breathing matched these movements in rhythm. She made small noises, sweet dim sounds. I ceased to think, I lost myself utterly in the smell taste touch of her. And at length she said, suddenly urgent, “Now, darling, now.”