George Higgins - A change of gravity

When she exhaled she made the kind of rhythmic, low, rumbling, happy growling sound that came from the television, harmonizing with the large tired golden retriever, first seen playing hard with children on a sunny day, now contented lying down after a nutritious dish of choice cuts of meat and meat by-products in real gravy combined in the dog food advertised in one of the brief announcements from the ABC local-affiliate station in Springfield.

Merrion picked up the VCR remote keypad and punched it twice with no result. Then he picked up the other one and shut the television off.

"Good," he said. Janet exhaled, making a low whistling sound. Her hair was mussed around her left temple. Her face was flushed and shiny with sweat.

"You aren't gonna wake her up, are you?" Brody said in a soft voice, as though he had been caring for a sick person whose recovery depended on plenty of rest.

Merrion snorted but he kept the noise down too. "Sooner or later, I'm gonna, yeah," he said, glancing down at her as he put the remote pad down and then hitched up his pants. "Before I leave here she's gonna have to wake up and tell me some things I want to know, bet your sweet life on that. But first I wanna find out if Chappelle's in here someplace. Like I told you the guy makes me nervous. He's in here someplace with us, I want to know about it. So the first thing I am gonna do is take a look around here."

Brody remained standing at the door and Merrion crossed the room to the interior hallway. "Maybe the bedroom," he said, talking to reassure himself. "Sleeping it off inna bedroom? Got just as good and drunk as she did last night, but had the sense to go to bed." Brody did not say anything.

Merrion went through the door and paused at the second door, opening into the bathroom. He pushed it open further and looked in. To his left there was a blue plastic shower curtain drawn around the tub enclosure. Beyond that he could see the front of the flush. All the light came from a high narrow window directly ahead of him. To his right there was a long fluorescent fixture mounted above a large vanity-mirror and a sink enclosed in a countered cabinet below it.

There was a long white extension cord plugged into a socket at the bottom of the fluorescent fixture; it dropped down from the fixture to the floor beside the cabinet and led across the blue bath mat up to the edge of the tub, where it disappeared behind the shower curtain.

Merrion stepped back from the bathroom door and went down the hall into the bedroom. The door was ajar. He pushed it open slowly and silently and looked into yellowish window-shaded dimness onto an empty, unmade double bed, a pale-green top sheet and two woolen blankets, one white and one tan, mounded up on a wrinkled and stained pale-green bottom sheet; there were two pillows in pale-green slip cases jumbled together at the head of the bed. There was a small table next to the far side with a clear glass lamp and a small alarm clock on it. There was a four-drawer pine chest of drawers in the far corner of the room. There was a small yellow upholstered chair in the corner to his right; it was filled with a pile of soiled clothing. The room smelled stale and loamy.

Merrion had no desire to go in. He turned around and started back toward the living room. "Any sign of him?" Brody called softly and hesitantly from the doorway.

"Nothin'," Merrion said. "Janet isn't what you'd call a great housekeeper, though. "S pretty rank in here."

"Because see, I was just thinkin'," Brody said, clearing his throat, 'that unless you really hadda, you know, wake her up and ask her things, maybe what we could do here, we could then just go back out, and close the door behind us?"

"And then she wouldn't ever know that we were in here; you're tryin' to say that to me, Steve? Nobody else'd know that I made you invade this unit this morning?" Merrion was at the bathroom door again. He paused, smiling, and waited for Brody's reply. He could hear Janet snoring peacefully in the next room. Brody did not answer.

"Steve?" Merrion said. "You still out there? Haven't gone into a panic here, run out on me here, have you? Certainly hope not. You're my witness here, you know, everything I did was kosher, absolutely by the book, from the minute I stepped in. Can't afford to have you leave me in here now, all by myself."

"Well," Brody said, drawing it out, 'no, I didn't do that. I was just thinking here was that if there wasn't any need, you know, to wake her up, well, it does seem as though she's sleeping pretty sound. Doesn't look like she's gonna wake up by herself."

"Not unless somebody shows up here with a howitzer and shoots it off in the kitchen, no, I don't think she will," Merrion said. "But I'm still gonna wake her up, Steve, no matter what you say here, and you might as well deal with it it's gonna happen." He pushed the bathroom door all the way open, flipping the light switch outside as he went in. The light did not come on and he hesitated in mid-stride, flipping the switch again. The light did not come on. "Because this bozo she's been hangin' out with's got a pretty vivid history of being dangerous.

"And therefore what I'm doing here today," he said, using his left hand to pull the shower curtain back, 'is first seeing if I can find out… oh oh. Uh oh.

"Yeah," he said, looking down at the two brown knobby knees protruding from the grey-cloudy soapy water in the middle of the tub, and under the handles and the faucet and the drain shutoff, the white hair-dryer tethered by its own white cord to the white extension cord, half-submerged between the two feet underneath the faucet at the front of the tub. He could make out the shins and calves of the lower legs buckled up behind the ugly feet, and beyond the knees the black-haired swarthy head with brown staring eyes in the gaping face above the milky surface at the back.

"What?" Brody said from the other room. "What's going on in there?

Everything all right?"

"Yeah, oh yeah," Merrion said, making a brief dismissive brushing gesture with his right hand against his pantsleg. "Yeah, everything's fine here. Well, everything's all right for me, I mean, in here, and probably for you." He heard Brody come into the bathroom behind him.

"But I don't think it is for him. And if what I'm seein's what I think it is I'm seeing, and I'm damned sure that it is, I don't think it's gonna be all right much longer for our friend Miss Janet out there. Not for some time at least. She's probably in for some excitement, and then a nice long rest. Although maybe not; her lawyer'll be glad to see those bruises. This naked gentleman in front of us I suspect is Lowell Chappelle, and also that he's somewhat dead."

He yanked the curtain back all the way and stood looking down at the shiny-black-haired dark-skinned man in the tub, his eyes staring and mouth frozen open in the head that looked as though it had been impaled on the rigid neck sticking out of the surface of the grey water covering the shoulders and the torso of the submerged body. "Yes, now I'm sure of it," he said. "No longer any question in my mind he's completely fuckin' dead. My guess is that in this very bathtub, Steve, the late Lowell Chappelle, former well-known desperado, learned last night after a few drinks that his electrifying girlfriend didn't like it when he hit her. Just before he became truly, fuckin', dead."

He turned aside to let Brody step up to the tub beside him. "You wanna take a look here, Steve? See you recognize him? After all, you know the guy, seen him around, when he was breathin' and so forth. Before this terrible shock. I'd turn the light on for you but I think the fuse's blown."

Merrion paused expectantly but Brody did not respond. He continued to stare down into the tub. "He kind of stinks, a little," he said. "I would have to say." He stepped back and looked up at Merrion. "You think we should get someone, see if they can, you know, get him out of here maybe, and then maybe do something with him? Undertaker, something? Can't just leave him like this, I don't think, can we? It wouldn't be right to do that. At least not for me, the building and all. We should do something, I think."