Andrew Klavan - True Crime

I don’t know, Gail. I don’t know if any of this makes sense or means anything to you. There are a lot of smarter people in the world than me, and you already probably know about things that I didn’t even know a person could know. Maybe you’ll be some kind of professor or something or some rocket scientist reading this and there’ll be words I spelled wrong or whatever and you’ll see all this advice and figure you know better than some mechanic guy who’s been dead all these years and was in prison. And you know what-you probably do know better too. It wouldn’t be so hard. But even rocket scientists have bad nights, I bet, and so if all these things I’m saying don’t mean anything then maybe the important thing is just that I touched this piece of paper and I wrote on it for you and now you’re holding it and looking at it and if you can read it, or just touch it, or smell it and know that I was here once loving you so much and wanting so much for you to be all right then maybe if something is hard for you sometime it won’t be so hard when you think about that I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of things there’ll be or who you’ll be. So that’s really my whole message, Gail-whether you’re standing on top of the world or things break wrong sometimes or whatever. I know after today I’m going to be in a place where there’s no pain or hardship and I know that Jesus Christ is waiting for me at the door and I just know for a fact he’s gonna say, Yeah, Frank, okay, a couple of mess-ups in there, man, but yeah, come on in. But the thing that I hope, the thing that I’m asking Him for right now, is that He’ll let me leave just enough of myself back here in this world, in this letter, so you can pick it up whenever you need it and whether the words matter or they don’t matter it’ll be like I’m there with you and I’m saying to you: I’m here, Gail. Your father is here. Your father …

Frank dropped the pen and threw his arms up, crossed, in front of his face. A hoarse growl sounded deep in his throat and his whole body trembled as he fought for control. Benson, at his table, glanced over at him.

But now, Frank lowered his arms again, and sat still in his chair, staring about him wildly.

The city room, as I entered, was not an encouraging sight. I hesitated in the doorway, peered unhappily across the low brown desktops with their outcroppings of off-white monitors. The early workers had trailed in. There were a couple of reporters pecking at their computers, the Trends editor was scrolling copy in her corner carrel. I could hear the snicker of their keyboards and the low murmur of the TVs on the high shelves above them. But to me, just then, the place seemed immense and all but empty, all but silent. Only one feature of the landscape commanded my attention, loomed like a glowering black tor in the distance. That was the figure of Bob Findley. The paper’s city editor, my boss, and my lover’s husband.

He was sitting at the long city desk on the far side of the room. He was pretending to study the papers in his hand. But he was watching the doorway really. He was watching me.

And what did he see? I hated to think about it, but I couldn’t help it. I imagined what I looked like to him. I am not tall, but I am thin-waisted and broad-shouldered and muscular from lifting weights. At thirty-five, I still have the face of a smart-assed undergraduate, youthful and arch with short, curly, blue-black hair, with wicked, sharply angled brows and a wicked, sharply angled smile. My eyes, behind wire-rimmed spectacles, are green. I am told they always seem to be laughing at you, and I believe this to be the case. In short, I look like just the sort of son-of-a-bitch you’d want to keep your wife away from. Bob, I thought, must’ve wanted to put his fist right through the whole collection.

Or maybe that’s unfair to him. Maybe that’s just what I would’ve wanted in his place. All the same, his expression must have altered when he saw me walk in, or the color of his cheeks must have changed, because, a second later, Jane March followed his surreptitious gaze, turned and looked over her shoulder in my direction. Her brows knitted. I could almost hear her wonder what the hell was going on.

I swallowed and let out a low whistle. There’s just no way to keep a secret in a newsroom.

Hands in my pockets, as casually as I could, I came forward, weaving from aisle to aisle, toward the city desk. It seemed a very long way. Bob, pretending to study his papers, never took his eyes off me. His blue eyes. They had the angry depths of dungeons, I thought, though his features never lost their steely composure.

The endless walk ended. I stood before the desk. Bob lifted his face and pinned me with those oubliette eyes. Jane March looked up at me, then back at Bob, then back at me, without saying a word. Though the room was air-conditioned, I felt the sweat spread over the back of my shirt. I felt the dread spread through my center like a stain.

“Morning all,” I said, and then laughed once-“heh!”-idiotically. I cleared my throat.

There was no answer, not for a long time. Bob watched me. Jane March watched him and then me again. She was a small, stoop-shouldered woman in her forties with an anxious, saggy face. She had been at the News for a good many years. She was our living morgue, and an anchor for a staff of younger folks who tended to move on too quickly.

Bob drew a breath, a long breath, before he spoke at last. “You got my message.”

I nodded as remorsefully as I could. “Yeah.”

He tossed his papers down on the desk in front of him. “Michelle Ziegler’s been in a car wreck,” he said.

He said it bluntly like that, cruelly, as if it served me right, as if it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in bed with Patricia. But, at first, it didn’t register. I was so fixed on the other thing between us. And then, for a crazy second, I thought it might be some nasty joke made for spite.

“What? Michelle?”

“She’s in a coma,” Bob went on coldly. “The doctors think she’s going to die.”

“Oh! Oh no!” I felt it now. A weakness in my knees, a chill in my groin. “She’s twenty-three or something. She’s just out of school. She’s … she just got out of school.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, and his voice was sad now, steadfastly decent as he was. “I guess that doesn’t count for much when you go full speed into a wall.”

“Dead Man’s Curve,” said Jane March.

“Aw, no,” I said. “Up by the parkway? That turn up there. Jesus. And they think she’s gonna die?”

“Right now that’s how it looks,” said Bob.

“Man oh man! That dumb broad. That poor kid. Jesus. She just got out of school.”

So, for a moment, the little unpleasantness concerning my dick and Bob’s wife was washed aside by the image of Michelle. I could see her graceful body shattering against the windshield. I could feel the impact in my icy crotch. What the hell had she been doing? I thought. Drinking with her intellectual friends. Laughing with them, satirizing her ignorant colleagues till dawn. Too sure of herself to stay out of her car. Too stubborn to pull off the road. I wanted to shake her for being so stubborn, so sure. I wished I had shaken her the night before. Go home, I should’ve said to her. Stay home, write a better story. Make some calls, get some facts. Write them up so well they have to print it. And she’d have done it too. She’d have listened to me. I don’t know why, but she always did. After she finished cursing me for a fascist and a pig and a this and that, she always came back and listened. I should’ve grabbed her by her stupid blouse front and shaken her till her eyes rattled.

But now, the moment passed. Bob and Jane sat watching me and the whole situation crystallized in my mind. I lifted my glasses with one hand and massaged my brow. I understood the whole ridiculous business, and I felt sick.