Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

“I don’t think you can actually—”

“Duh. But, you know, symbolically. Swallowing equals acceptance of the seed.”

“You swallowed,” he said. “Were you getting symbolically pregnant?”

“I’m just a greedy little pig who likes her protein. Okay, here’s another question. When you were inside me and you had hold of my belly, did you feel her kicking?”

“I did.”

“Was that nice?”

“It was interesting.”

“I like that you could feel it. And your cum tastes yummy, by the way. Cinnamon.”

“Really? I can’t think — oh, I had a latte, they sprinkled cinnamon on top.”

“I’m gonna have to remember that. I’ll have to feed him some cinnamon, and then I can make this remarkable discovery. ‘Honey, guess what?’ Oh, Jesus, it’s time for you to be on your way. Didn’t you hear that?”

“What?”

“Just now. There. Eli, talking to his animals. I could hear him because I’m his mommy. And in a minute he’ll get louder and they’ll be able to hear him next door. Get dressed, and can you find your own way out? Because I’d just as soon as he doesn’t see you.”

“Sure.”

“And this was fun, and nobody got hurt, and I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. But all the same we’re not going to do it again. Okay? Can we agree on that?”

Back home he plugged the flash drive into a free port and had a look at what he’d dumped from Ashley Hannon’s computer. He worked directly from the flash drive, careful not to move anything onto his own hard drive. He could open all of her files, he could check the emails she’d sent and received, and all without leaving any enduring traces on his own computer.

What he found was mostly what you’d expect to find, given that this was a woman who chose her daily horoscope as a home page. That alone struck him as more than enough to disqualify her from passing her genetic heritage to an Otterbein scion, but he didn’t know that George would see it that way. After all, the man was slipping it to the little darling, and that tended to color a fellow’s judgment.

One email thread was interesting. He couldn’t tell the correspondent’s name, as the email address was no help: hodehoho at hotmail.com. A Cab Calloway fan?

Ashley had two eDresses, AHannon437 at Yahoo, which she used for most of her email, and KurlySadge at Hotmail, her address for hodehoho. And the two of them signed their emails only with initials, when they signed them at all. Ashley’s were signed with an A, hodehoho’s with a C, which probably didn’t stand for either Cab or Calloway.

He decided that C was a woman, and very likely a fellow masseuse. Most of the earlier messages were too brief and cryptic to tell him anything, but lately Ashley’s at least were longer.

He could guess why. She’d moved, she didn’t know anyone in this part of the state, and she needed a girlfriend to confide in. But the confidences were sketchy, with code words and abbreviations he couldn’t puzzle out. For a while he thought either or both of them might be considering a move to San Diego, because “SD” kept popping up in the thread, but gradually he managed to crack at least that much of their code.

SD wasn’t San Diego, or South Dakota, either. It stood for Sugar Daddy.

So Ashley, the Sagittarian with the head of blonde curls (hence KurlySadge), was under no illusions about the nature of her relationship with the Kitchenware King of Gallatin County. He paid her rent and she kept him happy.

Did she have a clue that Otterbein might have bigger plans for her?

If she did, she’d managed to keep it a secret from her computer. Nothing he found suggested she anticipated anything beyond a transient relationship of convenience with her SD. Relieved of the need to work for a living, she could concentrate on mellowing out and getting her head together, whatever exactly those phrases might mean to her. She could work out regularly at the gym in Perry (“tho lame compared to Gold’s in St. Pete, and sauna smells awful!!! Little kids pee on the hot rocks!!!”) and try to get back to eating right. (“Tough to be only wannabe-vegan for miles around!!!”)

It was tiring, sifting through the drivel on the flash drive, and he couldn’t stay interested in the game. Why knock himself out tracking the ruminations of an airhead? He knew all he needed to know about her.

He cracked a beer, turned on the TV.

TCM was all about film noir this week. First The Postman Always Rings Twice , the 1946 version. He missed the first ten minutes of it, and there was a moment when he got this weird sense of déjà vu, as if he were watching Double Indemnity all over again, but with Lana Turner and John Garfield playing the parts of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.

But of course it was a different movie. It had the same basic set-up — two lovers conspiring to kill her husband — and the same writer had written the novel on which it was based.

And, once again, you knew they wouldn’t get away with it.

He watched it all the way through to the end, with Garfield on his way to the gas chamber for the murder of Turner, who in fact had died accidentally. If you managed to get away with one thing, the film seemed to be saying, God would get you for something else.

And, just in case he’d missed the message, the cable channel followed with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in, duh, The Postman Always Rings Twice . The same title, the same basic story, remade in 1981 and not all that different for the passage of thirty-five years.

Well, it was in color, if that made a difference. And after the two of them get away with murder yet again, Nicholson has an affair with Anjelica Huston. But he patches it up with Lange, until she dies in a car accident. When that happened to Lana Turner in 1946, Garfield went to the gas chamber because they thought he’d staged the accident — though how they could have gotten the man indicted, let alone convicted and sentenced to death, was beyond Doak’s comprehension.

Never mind, he thought. In this version, Nicholson didn’t have to worry about the law. His true love was gone forever, after they’d managed to work things out, and the film ended with him in tears over her corpse.

You really couldn’t win, could you? If you were Fred MacMurray, you paid for the murder you committed. If you were John Garfield, you got away with one murder but paid anyway. And if you were Jack Nicholson, you got away with everything and wound up with a broken heart.

He turned off the set and went to bed.

He woke up early, clawing his way out of a dream. All he knew was it had been a bad one.

It was still dark, and he’d been up late. He couldn’t have managed more than a couple of hours of sleep, and felt as though they’d been mostly surface sleep; when he finally did fall deeply asleep, his reward was a nightmare.

And now he was jarringly awake while the rest of the world slept on around him.

He went out and sat on his dock and waited for the sun to come up. The last thing he’d been thinking about, lying in bed and waiting to drift off, was the latest remake of Postman , the one that starred Doak Miller and Lisa Yarrow, the one with George Otterbein cast as the deservedly doomed husband. He knew how to do it, had the solution right there in his mind, but the puzzle pieces wouldn’t quite fit into place. He’d fallen asleep turning them this way and that, trying to make it all work.

And evidently his mind had continued the process while he slept, because now he could see it. How they would make it happen, and get away with it.

He called Lisa. His call went straight to voicemail, and he said “Call me” and rang off.