Lawrence Block: The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

A full-lipped mouth, but not overly so. Visible cheekbones, a pointy chin that just missed being sharp. Big eyes, accented with mascara, and what color were they, anyway? It was a good picture, but you couldn’t tell the color of her eyes.

He could feel the fantasy, hovering out there on the edge of thought.

When had it first come to him? Maybe four, five years into his marriage. By then he’d already let go of his marriage vows, or at least the one about forsaking all others. He didn’t go out chasing other women, but when the opportunity came along and the chemistry was right, he let it happen.

It wasn’t the worst marriage in the world, but it never should have happened in the first place. He’d tried college and when that didn’t work for him he went into the service. It was the peacetime army, and he’d finished his hitch and come home well before Operation Desert Storm and the Gulf War. A buddy was going to take the exam to get on the cops, so he went with him and passed, and went through the academy and came out with a gun and a badge and a stick.

And a uniform, in which he felt terribly self-conscious. But everybody did at first, and everybody got over it.

He met Doreen at a party. She had a cop for a brother, but nobody he knew. They started keeping company, and he was beginning to think it was time to break up with her when she told him she was pregnant. “Look, it’s not the end of the world,” she said. “I mean, we love each other, right? So we’d be getting married sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t we?”

No, he thought, and no. He didn’t love her and they wouldn’t be getting married anyway. But what he said was, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. When you look at it that way.”

And it wasn’t horrible. There were things he liked about being married. And he loved his son when he was born, and the daughter who followed a year and a half later.

Or did he? He figured he must, because you were supposed to.

So he cheated, when something came along, but he didn’t chase, and it seemed to him that the cheating made it easier to stay married. Made life a little more interesting. The job was interesting, and the uniform no longer made him feel self-conscious, and anyway he was on track for a move into plainclothes. If the marriage wasn’t interesting, well, the occasional vacation from it made it more tolerable.

The fantasy: He meets this woman, and their eyes lock, and they connect in a way that neither of them has ever before connected with another human being .

And that’s just it, because they walk out of their separate lives and into a life together. Not a word to anybody, not a wasted moment to pack a bag or quit a job. They look at each other, and they connect, and they’re in a car riding off together, or on a bus or a train or an airplane, and it’s crazy and they know it’s crazy but they don’t care.

Of course it never happened. He met women, and now and then there was a connection, and sometimes it led as far as a bedroom, but it was never the magic mystical connection of the fantasy. Once or twice he thought he might be in love, and maybe he was, for a little while. And then he wasn’t.

There was one woman — Cathy, her name was — and he imagined being married to her instead of Doreen. He could see her in that role, and he thought about it, and then one day he realized that he was able to envision her taking Doreen’s place because she was in fact very like Doreen. And if the two of them wound up together, they’d just recreate the marriage he already had with Doreen. He’d be in the same place, and in short order he’d be cheating on Cathy, too, and the only difference would be the checks he’d be writing every month for alimony and child support.

There was no alimony in the fantasy, no child support either. That was because there was no past in the fantasy, no tin cans tied to the bumper of whatever vehicle whisked them away, him and his fantasy partner, into a wholly desirable if equally unimaginable future.

Well, that was fantasy for you.

Instead, he was stuck with the reality of a marriage that limped along. He was used to it, and he assumed Doreen was used to it, too, and then he went through a rough patch on the job, and that was working itself out, more or less, and Doreen surprised him by filing for divorce.

Nasty divorce, too. The boy was in college and the girl in her last year in high school, and they were young enough to think they had to take sides, and it was no contest, the side they took was their mother’s.

Well, okay.

He could have retired when he had twenty years in, that was what a lot of guys did, but he’d always liked the job more than he’d disliked it, and your pension was better if you hung around for twenty-five. So he’d planned on doing that, and then Doreen did what she did, and all he wanted was to kiss everything goodbye.

It was like the fantasy, sort of, except there was nobody sharing it. Just his own middle-aged self and two mismatched suitcases, getting on a plane at JFK, getting off in Tampa. A night in a chain motel at the airport, then a cab to a used-car lot, where he’d paid cash for the Chevy Monte Carlo he was still driving. It would pass, as they said, everything but a gas station, but he led a low-mileage life and didn’t mind what he spent on gas.

Then he’d pointed the car north. He’d been to Florida a few times over the years, mostly with Doreen. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to be, but Tampa was too far south and the Panhandle was too far north, and when he got as far as Perry, in Taylor County, he thought it felt about right. He had dinner at Mindy’s Barbecue and bedded down at the Ramada, and two nights later he moved to the Gulf Mirage to save a few bucks.

And so on.

A bird settled on a branch a few yards from him, then flew off. You could see a lot of birds from the dock, especially around sunrise and sunset. He couldn’t tell one bird from another, but there were books, if he wanted to pursue the subject. And a pair of binoculars would make it easier to see what he was looking at.

And how long before the binoculars wound up in the garage, next to the fishing tackle?

He settled himself in his chair and let his eyes close, and the next thing he knew the phone was ringing.

“All set,” Bill Radburn told him. “She’ll come by the Winn-Dixie lot at half past eleven tomorrow morning. You’ll be in a royal blue Chevy Monte Carlo parked all by itself at the rear of the lot. At least I think you will. You didn’t cross me up by buying a new car, did you?”

“No, but it’s closer to green than blue. I think it says ‘teal’ on the registration.”

“Well, don’t go run out now and get it painted. She’ll be able to find you. I wondered about the Winn-Dixie, though. I had Susie check what made the papers the last time we did this, just to make sure they never mentioned where the sting went down. We’re clear.”

“Good.”

“I guess. I checked with Motor Vehicles, and she’ll probably be driving a silver-gray Lexus. But if she gets there before you, don’t pull up next to her. Park off by yourself and let her come to you. I don’t have to tell you why, do you?”

“So it’s not entrapment?”

“That’s the reasoning. Must have been worked out by some bright young fellow trained by the Jesuits. I’ll tell you something, Doak. I know this isn’t entrapment but I can’t say it doesn’t feel like it.”

“She’s the one who sat down with Gonson.”

“Oh, she thought it up and brought it up, she’s the one decided she’d rather be a real widow than a grass one. She’s trying to arrange a murder, and we prevent that murder by supplying a fake killer for her to meet with. But if the whole point is to keep a murder from happening, shit, all I’d have to do is polish off another rib eye. When she comes over to the table, what I do is put my cards on it. ‘I know what you’ve got in mind, sweetheart, and don’t bother to deny it. And if anything happens to your husband, I’ll know just who to look at. So you better either divorce him or pray he lives to be a hundred.’ You care to tell me that wouldn’t work?”