Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Mr. Harper,” Bloom said gently, “you say you were in Miami on Sunday morning, and then you went up to Pompano and Vero Beach, and then came back down to Miami later in the day, is that right?”

“Yessir.” His head was still lowered, he seemed intent on studying his high-topped workman’s shoes.

“Did anyone see you while you were in any of those places?”

“Lots of people seen me.”

“Anyone who might be able to say with certainty that you were actually where you were when you say you were?”

“Juss Lloyd’s wife, an’ the lady lives nex’ door to my mama.”

“But that was on Sunday morning.”

“Yessir.”

“How about Sunday night?”

“No, I dinn see nobody I know Sunday night.”

“Or Monday?”

“Nobody.”

“No one at all?”

“Nossir.”

“Mr. Harper, are you sure you weren’t here in Calusa on Sunday night? Are you sure you didn’t drive back here to—”

“I’ll have to object to that, Morrie. You’ve got his answer to that already. He was in Miami on Sunday night, he’s already told you that.”

“Then how do you account for the complaint his wife filed on Monday morning?”

“Are you questioning me, too, Morrie? If so, you’d better read me my rights.”

Bloom sighed.

“Mr. Harper,” he said, “did you kill your wife Michelle Benois Harper?”

“Nossir, I did not,” Harper said.

“Okay, thank you very much. Is there anything you’d like to add?”

“I dinn kill her,” Harper said directly into the microphone.

Dale and I have never exchanged the words I love you.

I know that Dale was once passionately in love with an artist she’d met in San Francisco when she was practicing law out there. I also know that she lived with him for two years, and that the parting was painful for her because it came as the result of a sudden recognition that seemed to negate everything they had previously shared. Last January, when we were first getting to know each other, she used to talk about him a lot. She never talks about him now. But neither has she ever told me she loves me.

For my part, I have used those words often and with varying degrees of sincerity. I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I was growing up in Chicago, I had none of the sexual advantages today’s young people enjoy. I was seventeen when the sixties were just starting; I missed out on the permissiveness that followed. A goodly amount of my adolescent energy was spent feverishly scheming on how to plunder the treasures inside a laden blouse, each button the equivalent of a Vietcong division guarding the road to Hanoi, how to slide a wily and preferably unsuspected hand along the inside of a thigh and onto those cherished nylon panties beneath a fortress skirt, how to hide from the eyes of a shocked citizenry the erections that bulged the front of my trousers whenever any girl of reasonably modest good looks (and, quite frankly, even some very ugly ones) sashayed into view. I loved legs, I loved breasts, I loved thighs, I loved asses, I loved girls with a passion that was all-pervasive and overwhelming. And on that perilous road to hopeful consummation, I discovered that the words I love you sometimes worked wonders: “I love you, Harriet, I love you, Jean, I love you, Helene, I love you, Melissa,” my fingers frantically working those maliciously obstinate buttons and those diabolical brassiere clasps invented by a madwoman scientist, “I love you, Joyce, I love you, Louise, I love you, Alice, I love you, Roxanne!” Those were the days of garter belts and nylon stockings, soon to give way to panty hose (invented by that same madwoman in her boiling laboratory), and God , the delirium of actually touching those secret mysterious undergarments, the windows of my father’s Olds fogged with the exhalations of singular male intent and determined female resistance, “I love you, Angela, I love you, Shirley, I love you, Ming Toy, I love you, Anybody !”

I used the words as cheap currency in a market without buyers.

I later learned, when I met and fell truly in love with Susan — the woman who would later become my wife — that the words I had until then considered the three cheapest words in the English language were indeed the three most expensive in any language. I’m not referring now to the alimony payments I still make to Susan each and every month, $24,000 a year with a built-in cost-of-living increase — but who’s counting? I’m referring only to the pain of total exposure, the loss of a private entity to a partnership. We were good partners for a good many years; many divorced men and women tend to discount the happiness they once shared, remembering only the bad times. But perhaps that was the trouble; we became partners and stopped being lovers. And yet, as partners, we made it work for fourteen years, and we did, after all, produce together the light of my life, my darling daughter Joanna, long legged and beautiful and mightily resembling her mother — Joanna whom I love to death but whom I only get to see every other weekend and for half the duration of her school vacations.

When a wife becomes a partner and nothing more than that, and when another woman suddenly materializes as an apparition from a bygone time of hand-in-hand moonlit walks along Lake Shore Drive, reviving memories of all that steamy adolescent sex in the front and back seats of automobiles, when “love” once again enters a man’s life with all the heart-lurching suddenness of a lightning flash at midnight, well then, the partnership goes down the drain, the tweed and corduroy you’ve been cutting for that Seventh Avenue manufacturer surrenders to the silken secret of whispered liaisons, and the marriage dissolves, the marriage ends — “I love you, Aggie,” for such was her name, Agatha Hemmings, now herself divorced and living in Tampa, so much for that ozone-stinking lightning bolt that left behind it nothing but a withered landscape.

So our wariness — Dale’s and my own — with the words I love you is perhaps understandable. Or perhaps we have no need for saying them out loud. If what we share together isn’t “love” (whatever the hell that may be), it is at least a reasonable facsimile. We are enormously glad to see each other. We chatter like magpies when we’re together, not only about the profession we happen to share, but about everything under the sun — and there is a lot of sun in Calusa, Florida. Moreover, I find it more and more difficult to keep my hands off her. I want to touch her all the time. I find it almost impossible to be anywhere with her — a public place and most certainly a private one — without longing for some sort of physical contact. I will sometimes reach across a restaurant table to brush a strand of auburn hair away from her cheek. I will touch her fingernails, I will touch her arm, I will cop a covert feel as I am helping her into her coat, I seem to absorb from her flesh the very essence of her, and the simple knowledge that she is still and simply there . My partner Frank says that the world is divided into Touchers and Tap dancers; Frank tends to make sweeping generalizations about everything. I know only that never in my life (discounting those delirious adolescent forays when I would have touched even an iguana if the contact served to still the longings of that raging tumescent creature in my pants) had I been a particularly demonstrative person. My need to touch Dale remains bewildering to me.

Dale insists it’s because of the sunrise-sunset coloration of her hair; the hair on her head is a lovely burnished shade of red, the hair between her legs is blonde. Since I am privy to her secret, she says, since I know that her “golden snatch,” as she sometimes calls it, had in her own tumultuous adolescence inflamed more than one energetic swain to heights of unprecedented passion by its very contradictory and surprising existence — why naturally, then, I burn with desire to touch not the passive flesh of cheek or elbow but rather the responsive slit buried behind those gilded portals, the touching here and there above serving as a sort of out-of-town tryout for a Broadway opening below , so to speak. Dale is thirty-two years old, a true child of the sixties, and is often more candid about matters sexual than the Tap dancers of the world are. (Frank defines a Tap dancer as anyone who glides and clicks away from true contact with another person.)