Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

He remembered everything.

All of it, clear as a bell, clear as a gunshot echoing off the water. Clearer, really, than it had been to him while it was going on.

Jesus, he’d come awfully close, hadn’t he? The gun to his temple, his finger on the trigger. He hadn’t known there was a bullet in the chamber, but he’d have found out, wouldn’t he? The tiniest bit more pressure on the trigger and—

And it would all have been somebody else’s problem, he thought, because he’d be out of it. Assuming the bullet did the job, and didn’t just leave him in a profound vegetative state, which everybody agreed was a fate worse than death.

But was it? If you didn’t know what was going on, what difference did it make?

Not the right kind of thoughts for a man to be having, not when he had a busy day ahead of him.

When he pulled up within sight of the Stapleton Terrace duplex, both the Hyundai and the minivan stood at the curb. The Lincoln, as he’d expected, was no longer parked in the driveway.

He sat in his car for the better part of an hour. Didn’t she have a yoga class this morning? Hadn’t she mentioned as much somewhere, maybe in an email to C, aka hodehoho?

Maybe the class was within walking distance and she was there now. Or maybe the class was some other day, and she was already midway through the hour of jogging that was on this morning’s agenda.

He could go ring the bell. If she answered, he was a man with a clipboard, looking for Mr. Rupert. Nobody here by that name, she’d say, and he’d say the fellow must have moved out.

He was weighing the pros and cons when the door opened and Ashley emerged, gym bag in hand. She walked briskly to her car, unlocked it with the remote, and drove away.

He gave her five minutes, then let himself into her house.

The first thing he noticed was the fifth of Glenmorangie on the sideboard, the same brand Otterbein kept in his office. It hadn’t been there on his last visit.

No need to stop at the liquor store, not with a bottle already on hand. The seal was broken, and a couple of ounces were gone. One good drink, he thought, or two small ones.

No need to boot up her computer, either. She’d left it on. The screen had gone dark, but it brightened as soon as he touched the mouse.

He checked History, saw that her last activity was in her Hotmail account. He went to it, and read that morning’s email to hodehoho. Some quality time with SD, she’d reported, and then went on to wonder whether aerobics and yoga might tend to cancel each other out.

He copied from his clipboard, amending the text slightly:

OMG, here’s what I forgot to tell you!!! SD had some drinks last nite and then surprised me with an amazing gift — a gun!!! Pretty swirly green handle. Mallokite (sp?) So I won’t worry about prowler, but would I dare use it? I don’t think so!!!

— A~

He read it over, hit Send.

Upstairs, he retrieved the voice-activated mike from the platform bed’s blanket drawer, the receiver from the ceiling crawl space. Leaving them would establish the notion that Otterbein had been suspicious of his mistress, but he couldn’t do that without knowing what the mike might have picked up, and he couldn’t spare the time to play it back now.

He returned to the first floor, frowned at the computer on the dinette table. The only way she’d see the email he’d just sent on her behalf was if she clicked out of her Inbox and into her Sent Mail file, and why should she do that?

Of course there was another way she could see it, and that was if hodehoho read the new message and replied to it. He gave you a gun? Whoa. Sounds pretty but pls don’t get carried away and shoot yourself!!!

Well, he would just have to hope hodehoho didn’t check her email all that compulsively, and took her time replying.

He let himself out, pulled the door shut behind him. On the way to his car he had the sense that he was being watched, but avoided turning around until he reached his car. Then he looked back at the house, just in time to see a curtain drop back in place in the other half of the duplex.

Ashley’s neighbor, taking an interest.

He’d have been just as happy not to have a witness to his departure. But the woman didn’t know him, and had only seen him from the back. And from where she was, she couldn’t have gotten a good look at his car. Or spotted his license number, even if she’d been inclined to write it down.

So what might she conclude? Probably that her bouncy blonde neighbor had more than one boyfriend, and what harm could that do?

Halfway home, he pulled over and took out his cell phone. The regular one, not the Lisa phone.

He called Otterbein’s office, gave his name to the woman who answered. When Otterbein came on the line, he gave the report he figured the man wanted to hear, said he couldn’t find anything unsettling to report.

“Her background appears to be everything you could hope for,” he said. “No one related to her has committed a felony or misdemeanor in the state of Florida. There’s no evidence of mental illness in her family, or any sign of hereditary diseases in her family tree.”

Otterbein said that was good.

“And I didn’t like to snoop,” he went on, “but I had a good look at her computer and her recent emails, and my impression is that she’s very pleased with her present situation. In fact I think—”

“Yes?”

“Well, that she cares for you.” And that pleased the man, too.

“I want to have one more look at her hard drive,” he said, “but I want to pick the right time. You won’t be over there this evening, will you? You will? Good thing I asked, I wouldn’t want to show up at the wrong moment. I’ll wait until tomorrow or the next day.”

Back home, he set up the recorder and played the tape. There were two sequences, and the first and more interesting of the two consisted of an extended monologue of Ashley’s. She was doing all the talking, but seemed to be addressing her remarks to someone else, someone who never appeared to respond. She talked about her day, recalled an incident or two from childhood, and went on for quite a while before the penny dropped.

She was talking to her teddy bear.

That brought him up short, the sweet innocence of it. He stopped the tape and had to sit down. Maybe, he thought, this would be a good time to pull the plug on the whole business. Toss the mike and the recorder where he’d tossed the empty vodka bottle, toss the Baby Browning in after it. Toss the Taurus and the Ruger and the two boxes of shells.

Toss everything, for Christ’s sake. The flash drive, with all Ashley’s files copied onto it. Toss his own computer while he was at it, and his phones, both of them.

And then just get in the car. Get over to I-75 and just drive north for a couple of hundred miles, and then figure out where to go next. Sheriff Radburn would wonder where he’d gone to, but he wouldn’t burst a blood vessel over it. A couple of women would miss him, but not that badly and not for all that long.

As for where he’d wind up, well, it wouldn’t be Florida and it wouldn’t be New York. But that still left a whole lot of country.

He played the rest of the recording. After she was done talking to the teddy bear, he got to hear her with Otterbein, and they’d evidently got most of their talking out of the way before coming upstairs. Much of what he was able to hear consisted of the two of them shifting position on the bed, and then there was a sequence where Otterbein said, “Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” and Ashley said nothing at all, for reasons that weren’t all that difficult to imagine.

Then some more conversation, fading in volume as they dressed and left the bedroom. And then a break, and then a sigh from Ashley, and the words, “Oh, pul- leeze , give me a fucking break ,” addressed probably to God, but possibly to the teddy bear.