Andrew Klavan - True Crime

I grinned like an idiot. Dear Christ , I thought. Dear Christ . “Where else would I be, ya goon?” I said, forcing a laugh.

He considered that too, and then let my arm go. “I will go to sleep now,” he said. He rolled over and closed his eyes.

“Wise move,” I told him. I nearly choked on the words.

At the door, I stood a moment and watched him lying there. He turned his head on the mattress and peeked at me. The fact that I was still there made him smile.

“Go to sleep, ya monster,” I said.

I switched off the lights.

In the corridor outside, I paused again. Stone-hearted, black-gutted, heavy-headed, beat. I stood with my head bowed. I massaged my temples with my hand. What had I done? What had I wrought? I could see it all so clearly now.

It was scary stuff: to have been so deluded all day. Not to be deluded anymore. Scary; empty; scary stuff. To have the Beachum story gone, resolved into a dew. The mission of the hour vaporized, the heroic effort a bagatelle, the grail a mirage-and the job kaput . The job and the marriage sure to be kaput . And nothing left but the glowing memory of chasing around all day trying to prove that a rack of potato chips made a guilty man innocent at the hour of his death. Ah, the human mind: what a kidder.

I took a breath and headed down the hall.

My wife was sitting at the dining room table, an oval table. She had cleared the dinner dishes, Davy’s and hers, and was sitting at the oval’s head, sitting over an empty cup of coffee, rubbing the fingers of her left hand with her right.

I clumped to the table and sat down opposite her. I drummed my fingers on the wood. Badump-badump-badump. Sorry about the zoo? I thought. Sorry about the day? Sorry about our life together, such as it was? Badump-badump-badump went my fingertips on the oakwood. Sorry, sorry, sorry . Badump-badump-badump.

Barbara didn’t look at me. Her stately features were set and sad. She twisted her left hand back and forth on the fingers of her right. Slowly, that way, she worked her wedding ring over her knuckle and took it off.

She set the gold band on the tabletop-reached out to place it as far from her as she could, as close to me. Then she sat back. She raised the empty cup to her mouth so I wouldn’t see her lips trembling. Then she set it down unsteadily, making the saucer chatter.

She nodded at the ring. “If that were a bullet, you’d be dead,” she said. I believe it was the only spontaneous joke I ever heard her make.

I sat awhile, without a word, my eyes stinging. Watching the golden band go in and out of focus, watching the reflected light extend from it in rays and then subside. Is that all? I thought, my drumming fingers falling still. Is that what I was so afraid of all this livelong day? Merely losing her. Whom I didn’t love. And moving away from Davy, whom I rarely saw. Was that the whole impetus behind the Beachum fantasy? That long hallucinatory delaying tactic: had it all been in the service of avoiding merely this?

We both stared at the ring awhile, Barbara too. When I shifted my gaze to her, she was still staring at it. Her back straight, her head rearing, her features set in their haughtiest, most aristocratic expression. It was something she took very seriously, that ring, taking off that ring. But then, she took just about everything seriously. She always had.

“Right,” I said finally. My hand lay motionless on the edge of the table. “So I guess-what? — Bob called you?”

She snorted softly. “What’s the difference who called me?”

I shook my head.

“She called me, if you really want to know. Your Patricia.”

“Right,” I said. “Right, right, right.” Like Beachum’s confession, this made sense to me on the instant. It would be Patricia who called. She had wanted me to make her suffer, and now she was paying me back for doing what she asked. And I deserved it too, which was probably the strangest thing of all.

“She tried to reach your beeper,” Barbara said.

“Mm,” I said. I had forgotten to take it out of the glove compartment after I left the prison.

“She was crying. She wanted you to know that it was over. And that she was sorry Bob was going to force you out.”

I laughed. “Good of her to leave a message.”

She looked down on me from her moral height. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”

Well, yeah, actually, I’d thought I had her fooled completely. But I decided not to say so. “That crazy Patricia,” I murmured.

“I told her not to worry about it,” Barbara said then. “I told her this is just what you do. It’s just the thing you do.”

“Right. Sure.”

“Though, for the life of me, you don’t seem to get much pleasure out of it.”

I lifted one shoulder. Pleasure was a serious business to Barbara too.

After another moment of silence, I reached across the table and took up the ring. I held it between finger and thumb, turned it this way and that, watching the light from the small chandelier above us glint on it. There was an inscription on the inner curve. Just her name: Barbara Everett . It had been her new name at the time and seemed very romantic.

I closed my fist around the ring. “… hard on the kid,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Won’t this be kind of hard on the kid?”

Her eyebrows arched. “Good time to think of it, Ev.” I tried to answer her, but that stone, my heart-some laborer in the inner hell kept rolling it up into my throat and letting it sink down, bang, into my chest again. Poor Davy, I thought miserably. Poor little guy. With Barbara over him every moment, loving, grim and good. Who was going to teach him how to fool around? How to disobey? How to fart in silence and get everyone to blame the kid sitting next to him? Who would tell him that the best way to deal with a bully was to understand his insecurities and then bring your elbow real fast across the bridge of his ugly nose? Or how to nod at women when they told you what was right so you could get in their pants without too much palaver? How would he learn to shrug off the underdog sometimes and when to laugh up his sleeve at human suffering? The poor little nubbin. Barbara, with her great instincts for compassion and morality, with her big soul-Christ, without me, she would bury him in there.

“Look,” I said, my voice shaky. “Is it just the girls? Is it just the women you mind so much?”

She looked at me, wondering.

“I mean, look, we don’t have to have a marriage like other people. You could have guys sometimes,” I said. “I’d kill them, sure, but you could have them before that. I mean, what the hell, it’s two thousand years since Jesus died, we can make our own rules now.”

A fatuous proposition, made to her. “Maybe that’s your idea of marriage, Ev,” she said, as I might have guessed she would. “But it isn’t mine.”

“Why the hell not?” I answered desperately. “It’s not as if you loved me.”

That look of wonder was fixed on her face, but her eyes had gone glassy, her lips were trembling again.

“God, you’re stupid,” she said softly. “You don’t know anything about anybody else. You make people up in your head, and you decide what they’re thinking, and whatever they do, you just stuff it into the pattern of what you’ve decided about them. And you don’t know anything.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Now get out of here. Please.”

But I sat there all the same awhile longer. Unclasping my hand, bouncing the ring on my palm for a bit. I pressed my own lips together to keep them still.

Then finally I slipped the ring into my shirt pocket and stood up to go.

It was about twenty past nine, I guess, when I left my apartment. Later, Mark Donaldson told me that that was exactly when he had called. I figure the phone must have rung as I was clomping gloomily down the stairs, but I didn’t hear it, or if I did, I didn’t pay it any mind. Barbara didn’t answer it either.