Stuart Kaminsky - Midnight Pass

“You can trust me. But I’m not sure why you should believe you can.”

“No choice,” she said with a shrug. “I want you to take Sydney and Kenny back to their father.”

Both children said, “no,” but Janice wasn’t listening.

“At three in the morning?” I asked.

She sat the children on the little sofa against the wall and told them she would be back in a second. Kenneth Jr. turned his head into his mother’s shoulder. The little girl looked down and bit her lip. Then Janice motioned for me to follow her into the bedroom, where she closed the door.

“I just killed Andrew Stark,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to the room and call the police. Take my children home. Please. My husband is a good father. I don’t want them involved.”

“Let’s go to your room and have a look before we call the police.”

I slipped my bare feet into my unlaced sneakers and opened the door.

Janice Severtson hugged both her children and told them she would be gone for just a minute. They weren’t crying anymore. They looked as if they were nearly asleep.

“Can we watch television?” Kenny asked.

“Sure,” I said, handing him the remote.

He clicked it on. A voice in Spanish rattled excitedly about a soccer match going between guys in green uniforms and guys in yellow ones.

“They play soccer in Mexico in the middle of the night?” he asked.

“It’s a tape,” I said.

He nodded knowingly, eyes blinking as he changed the station and watched a crocodile slither into a pond of water.

“Be right back,” Janice Severtson said, following me through the door after I checked my pocket to be sure I had my room card.

Even at three in the morning, the atrium wasn’t empty. Five men were seated eight stories down talking softly. A crew of cleaning people was sweeping and scrubbing. Janice Severtson looked down across the open space at the closed door of her room a floor below.

“What happened?” I asked quietly.

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, took a deep breath.

“He tried to rape me,” she said. “He hit me, pulled my hair. He’d gotten up during the night. He was drunk. There was a knife on the table. His knife along with his wallet and keys. I told him to stop. He didn’t. I told him he’d wake the children, that they would see us. I begged him. He grabbed my wrist and laughed. We were standing there, just…I twisted my arm and pulled free and then I brought the knife down. He looked surprised. The children slept through it all. Thank God, the children slept through it. Andrew, he lay there with the knife in his chest. I didn’t know what…You know the rest. I’ll go back and call the police. You take care of my children, please.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?” I asked.

“Yes. I covered his body with the blanket so the children wouldn’t see him when I woke them up.”

“I’ll go take a look. You go back to your kids and give me your room card.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’m asking you,” I said. “I won’t take long. If the phone rings, it’ll be me. Answer it.”

She brushed her hair back with her long fingers and pulled the room card out. I took it and let her back into my room. The television was on. Kenny had switched to an old Dick Van Dyke rerun, the one where Rob goes off to a cabin to write a novel. The episode, as I recalled, was funny. Sydney was asleep and Kenneth Jr. wasn’t laughing.

I went down the fire stairs and made my way to the room on the seventh floor. I opened the door and wiped the door handle clean with my shirt. Then I kicked the door closed. The lights were on. There was a vague body shape under the blanket on the open hide-away bed.

I moved alongside the bed and pulled the blanket back. Andrew Stark lay there, bloody, eyes closed. His T-shirt had a picture of a grinning cartoon turkey on the front. The turkey was covered in blood. A knife was plunged deep into his chest. Stark was naked from the shirt down.

I didn’t touch anything else. I looked around the room and into the bedroom. There was a teddy bear and stuffed elephant lying back on a pink blanket. I went back into the room where Stark was lying, checked my watch, and started for the door.

The moan wasn’t loud, but it was clear and it came from the supposedly dead Andrew Stark. I went back to the body and knelt. Stark’s eyes opened and moved in the general direction of my face. I didn’t bother to tell him not to move.

I could have just called 911, but a few minutes probably wouldn’t make much difference. At least that’s what I told myself.

“You’ll be all right,” I assured him as I examined his wound.

He looked around the room as if he had no idea of where he was. He smelled of alcohol. There was plenty of blood.

“You’ll live,” I lied. “I’m going to try to stop some of this bleeding. Then I’ll call an ambulance.”

His right hand came up suddenly and gripped my wrist. For a dying man, he was damned strong. I tried to pull loose as he croaked, “Why?”

“You want to live?”

“Why?” he asked.

Since it was the same question I’ve asked myself a few thousand times since my wife was killed, I had no good answer for him, but I had the feeling that his “why” didn’t mean the same thing mine did.

His eyes began to roll. A very bad sign.

He whispered something I couldn’t hear, pain in his face…Then he closed his eyes and I leaned over to be sure he was still breathing. He was.

I picked up the phone, not worrying about fingerprints any longer, and dialed my own room. Janice answered before the second ring.

“Yes?” she said with a quivering voice.

“It’s me, Fonesca. Get down to your room fast. Leave the kids there.”

“What…?”

“He’s still alive.”

She didn’t answer and I had no time to talk to her now.

“Fast,” I said.

I hung up, checked my watch, sat on the bed, and said, “Stark, you still with me?”

His groan suggested that he was. I checked my watch. Almost a minute passed. If she didn’t show up fast, I’d have to call 911.

The knock was soft, but it was a knock. I let her in. She was a ghostly pale, beautiful vision of white and blood red. I closed the door and she walked over to Stark, who hadn’t moved.

“Andy?” she asked.

He groaned in response.

She turned to me and, voice and hands shaking, said, “I didn’t kill him.”

“You’ve got to call 911,” I said. “You’ve got to call now. Just tell them a man has tried to kill himself. Tell them where we are. Don’t answer any more questions.”

She shook her head no. I picked up the phone and handed it to her. I hit 9 for an outside line and then 911.

I could hear a voice on the other end because the phone wasn’t close to her ear, but I couldn’t make out the words.

She said exactly what I had told her to say and hung up.

“Good,” I said. “I think we’ve got at least five minutes, maybe more. I’m going to be back in my room with the kids. You understand?”

She nodded again, looking at the half-naked, bloody man on the bed. He made a series of short gasping sounds, managed to reach the handle of the knife with his right hand, and tried to pull it out before I could stop him. Then he stopped struggling and his hands flopped to his sides.

I checked for a pulse in his neck. There wasn’t any.

“You want to tell me what really happened here, or you want me to guess?” I asked. “Faster if you tell me.”

“He didn’t tell you?” she said, clasping her hands together to keep them from shaking.

“He didn’t say anything other than ‘Why?’” I said, determined to be out of there in three minutes. “You said he hit you. There’s not a mark on you. You said he tried to attack you and you fought him, but the kids didn’t wake up. And your robe is bloody and I don’t see a tear in it or a button missing. You stabbed him while you were wearing the robe. You stabbed him while he was lying in the bed. You stabbed him when he was asleep. You got up, put on your robe, and stabbed him.”