Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

An hour later he was in the Mykonos Diner, sitting across the table from Sheriff William Radburn.

“I somehow missed breakfast,” Radburn said, “which is an oversight that needs to be corrected. You sure you won’t have something?”

“Just coffee.”

“Why I called, I been thinking some about our girl.”

“Our girl. That would be—”

“Oh, why mention a name in a public place? We’ll call her the lady who exercised the female prerogative and changed her mind.”

“Okay.”

“And there’s no question she did just that, because I heard her say so loud and clear on the tape you brought in. You know, I played that some more.”

“Oh?”

“I asked myself, Billy, is that a change of heart you’re hearing? And what I decided is it’s not. So I got hold of another man whose name I won’t mention just now, but he’s the one told us about the little lady in the first place. Got the ball rolling, is what he did.”

Richard Gonson.

“Now on the tape, she says she went back to him and tried to call it off, and he said it was out of his hands.”

“I remember. He told her she could just not show up.”

“Which, if you think about it, is what she should have done. Why keep a date with some homicidal Yankee if she was just gonna tell him to forget the whole thing? Only reason I can think of is to keep her options open, give herself a chance to decide at the last minute. Stand to reason?”

“I guess.”

“You have to wonder who it was first came up with the idea of link sausages. I don’t guess they give out Nobel prizes for that sort of thing, but the least you could have is a statue of him somewhere. But back to our friend.”

“The man who started it all.”

“Well, I’d have to say she’s the one started it, but he’s the one brought us into it. I asked him about this last conversation, the one where she asks him to hit the Undo button.”

“It never happened?”

“Nope. Not to say you can take this fellow’s word to the bank, but why would he lie about it?”

“Well, if she did have that conversation with him, and then he didn’t bother to pass the word to us...”

“Point taken. Still, I got the impression this was the absolute first time he was hearing about calling things off.”

“Which would reinforce your idea that she was keeping options open, and didn’t completely change her mind until she got into my car. You think it was the car that queered the deal?”

“ ‘Guy can’t afford a better car than this, how can you trust him to get away with murder?’ Next time maybe we’ll put you in a more suitable vehicle. If you hadn’t helped put a perfectly good automobile dealer in Raiford, I bet he could help us out. You want a refill on the coffee?”

“No, I’m good.”

“What I’m thinking, her calling it off don’t convince me she’s in love with her husband all over again. Who’s to say she doesn’t still want him dead?”

He didn’t much like where this was going. But if the sheriff was thinking along these lines, he was just as glad he got to hear it. “There must be a whole lot of women who’d just as soon be widows,” he said. “And husbands who’d love to be single again without the expense of divorce. What’s the line? ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ ”

“You’re saying there’s a big difference between having an urge and acting on it.”

“Isn’t there? What percentage of people take the action?”

“But she already took it. Shied away at the last minute, but until then she was on board. I’ll grant you there’s a chance she genuinely changed her mind, but there’s at least as good a chance she didn’t.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning maybe she called you off because she found somebody else she was more comfortable working with. Her boyfriend, say.”

“She’s got a boyfriend?”

“That shocks you? ‘By God, it’s not bad enough she wants to kill her husband, but don’t tell me she’d go so far as to cheat on him!’ ”

“Nobody mentioned a boyfriend,” he said. “That’s all. Has she got one?”

“That’s something we ought to know, wouldn’t you say? I was thinking there ought to be a way for you to earn some Gallatin County dollars.”

“You want me to find out if she’s got a boyfriend.”

“Be good to know, Doak. Be good to see what else you can find out about her. Now you’re the one person who can’t sit down and interrogate her, on account of she already knows you as Jersey City Frank. You’re shaking your head.”

“For no good reason,” he admitted. “Jersey City’s in Hudson County, and we’ve been saying Frank’s from—”

“Bergen County, and isn’t that what they call a distinction that’s not a difference? Never mind, I stand corrected. The point is you can’t ask her questions. In fact you’d best keep your distance from the woman.”

“That was my intention.”

“But you can still dig around without getting into her field of vision, can’t you? I don’t want to use one of my men, mainly because I want to keep this on the down-low, but that’s not the only reason. You’ve been in my office. You see a whole lot of bright bulbs in the chandelier?”

“Well...”

“And if there’s no boyfriend in the woodpile, I just can’t shake the feeling that she might just try and do it herself. Mix some rat poison in with his Raisin Bran, or find some miracle ingredient that’ll give him a heart attack. None of which she could possibly get away with, not with her having established herself as a person of interest even before there’s a case to be a person of interest in . That husband of hers dies of anything, any damn thing from galloping diarrhea to a flash flood, she’ll be hearing her Miranda rights before the body gets to room temperature. Which is fine from our point of view, but it doesn’t do a lot for George, does it?”

He’d finally mentioned a name. Not that anybody could have heard him, or made anything of it if they did.

“What keeps eating at me,” Radburn went on, “is I can’t shake the notion that I ought to have a talk with him.”

“The husband.”

“Uh-huh. What stops me is there’s so many ways that can do more harm than good. ‘Thanks for your concern, Sheriff, but I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’ Then he goes home and thinks it over, and loads his gun, and sits up waiting for her to come home from work.”

“Jesus.”

“So maybe she’s the one I ought to be having that talk with. ‘We know what you got in mind, and no matter how slick you are, no matter who actually does the deed, no matter what kind of alibi you’ve got for yourself, anything happens to him and we’re on you like white on rice.’ ”

“And she says she doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“But she does know, and I know she knows, and she knows I know she knows. Believe me, it’s not a conversation I want to have. But how’s it look if he gets killed on my watch? Yes, I’ll close the case, but it’s my fault the man’s dead.”

Should he have seen this coming? Maybe, but what could he have done differently? And at least he was in on things, with a ringside seat.

“Don’t say anything to anybody just yet,” he said. “Let me see what I can find out for you.”

He held off checking his phone until he’d walked the sheriff back to his office, then returned to his car. Once again he’d left the windows all the way up, and he took it out on the highway and ran it at speed with the windows all the way down.

After a couple of miles it was cool enough for the air conditioner to hold its own. By then he was well out of town. He pulled into a rest area, got a Coke from the machine. There were tables and benches, but the county’s site maintenance didn’t extend to cleaning the birdshit off the furniture, so he drank the Coke standing up with his back against a tree.