Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

“Somewhere,” she said, “there’s a Jehovah’s Witness with no idea what he missed. Until yesterday, you said. What changed your mind?”

“Time.”

“The great healer. And until then it was just you and some old movies. No juicy phone calls from Real Estate Girl?”

“That’s over.”

“Really?”

“Really. I spoke to her earlier and managed to scare her off.”

“I won’t ask how. And Pregnant Girl? But you don’t want to talk about Pregnant Girl, do you?”

“Not now.”

“Okay.”

“What I should do now,” he said, “is tell you what happened that night.”

“I guess it didn’t just happen by itself.”

“No.”

“Darling, we can just—”

“Skip it?”

“Oh, I guess we can’t, can we? Lie close to me, and let’s pull the covers up over us. And could you do what you did once before? Could you put your finger inside me while you tell me? I don’t know why that should make me feel safer, I really don’t. But it does.”

He told it straight through, from his arrival at the house on Stapleton Terrace to his return to Osprey Drive. His voice was level and unemotional throughout, his narrative limited to a recital of uninflected facts. I did this and I did that and I did this and I did that...

She heard him all the way through without interruption. When he was done she lay still and remained silent. Their bodies were almost touching, and the blanket covered them like a cocoon.

Her eyes were closed, her breathing deep and even. Softly, he said, “Lisa?”

“I’m awake.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I was there with you just now, you know. Standing at your shoulder watching it all happen. How awful it must have been for you.”

“I think we can safely say it was worse for them.”

“But then it was over, wasn’t it? For them, but not for you.” She reached to touch his face. “What shocked me, when he came and told me—”

“The girl.”

“It never once occurred to me that she would be part of it.”

“There was no way to leave her out,” he said. “Not that I could think of. If George gets killed, even if he drives into a creek or gets sucked into a sinkhole, they’ve got to come looking for you. The only way I could think of that would work was for him to kill himself, and to stage that and make it look right, you had to have another person on the scene. And she had to be the kind of witness who couldn’t contradict you.”

“Because she was dead.”

“And her death made his suicide plausible. It gave him a reason. I don’t know, maybe there was another way to handle it. But this was the only one I could come up with.”

“And it worked. No, don’t take your hand away, I want your fingers in me. Unless your hand is bothering you.”

“No.”

“You could move your fingers if you wanted. Just a little, so they don’t cramp up on you. Oh, that’s just so nice. Darling? When you told me about the man in New York, the one you had to shoot.”

“Yes.”

“You told me how it felt.”

“This was different,” he said. “It wasn’t thrilling.”

“No.” He took a moment to review the memory. “There was no feeling attached to any of it,” he said. “A little revulsion, I suppose, but it was off to the side and out of the way. I was aware of it after the fact, but I didn’t have time to pay any attention to it while it was going on. I had these things I had to do and I was doing them.”

“Checking them off the list.”

“Sort of. Working hard to get them done right.”

He took a breath. You don’t have to say this , he told himself. Took another breath. Yes, you do.

He said, “Before I went over there, I ran it through my imagination.”

“Like a visualization exercise.”

“I suppose so. And I thought it would be exciting. I got hard at the thought of taking hold of her, and doing her.”

“Strangling her.”

“Strangling her. And then it was as I described it. Passionless, robotic. That’s while it was going on. Afterward it was—”

“Awful.”

“Worse than awful.”

“It’s over now, baby.”

“I know.”

“You can let go of it. That’s what we’re doing, we’re letting go of it.”

He nodded. “But first,” he said, “I have to tell you about Roberta Ellison.”

“I don’t know who that is. Oh, wait! Pregnant Girl? Don’t tell me you went back to see her after all? You did! Oh, I want to hear this. Did you get to fuck her?”

He told her the stratagem he’d used, making sure the little boy had gone up for his nap. Told her how he’d noticed perfume on his return, known the opportunity was there for him. Told her how he’d shocked the woman ( “Do you suppose he eats her pussy?” ) and manipulated her until she led him upstairs.

He lay beside her, facing her, breathing her breath, sharing her body heat beneath the blanket, keeping his fingers tucked snugly inside her. The earlier narrative had been dry and clinical, but he recounted this episode as it had happened, and as he talked she began moving against his hand, moving around his fingers, making little sounds deep in her throat.

When she’d caught her breath she said, “Oh, baby, if she had half as good a time as I did just now, she’s got to be the happiest Milf around.”

“I left something out,” he said.

“That’s okay, darling. That’s a super bedtime story and I won’t mind hearing it again the next time you tell it to me. And just think of all the bedtime stories you’ll get to tell me. Years and years of stories.”

“Think so?”

She propped herself up on an elbow. “Oh, I do,” she said. “Isn’t that what you want? For us to be together?”

“Of course.”

“I’m still Fantasy Girl, right?”

“Right.”

“Because otherwise what’s the fucking point? You know?”

“I know.”

“We got away with it, and I’m a rich widow. And for a while I’ve got to go on being a rich widow living on Rumsey Road, and you’ve got to be an ex-cop on Osprey Drive. But there’ll come a time when it’s okay for us to meet.”

“We already met.”

“At the Baron? Oh, when I thought you were a hit man. Who knows about that? Just Bill Radburn? Okay, so in a couple of weeks you come to the Baron again, and we’ll flirt a little. And the next day you have a beer with the sheriff and tell him you saw me at the Baron and I didn’t even recognize you from the Winn-Dixie lot, and we sort of hit it off, and you were thinking of asking me out. And you’re a little hesitant, and what does he think, and he tells you to go for it.”

“And we start seeing each other.”

“And it’s a perfectly dignified courtship, because they don’t have to see the part where we’re fucking each other’s brains out in a rented time share somewhere.”

“And we get married,” he said.

“When the time’s right. If you think you’d want to be married to me. If I’m still Fantasy Girl.”

“You’ll always be Fantasy Girl.”

“Then I don’t see a problem. I don’t want to live in that fucking house of his. I’m glad I get to own it, but I’ll be way happier when I get to sell it. If we stay in the area I’d just as soon keep my job, but we don’t have to. We could live anywhere. Do you care where we live?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I’m not rich-rich, but I’ll always have some money, and you’ve got your pension—”

“Whoopee.”

“No, really. We’ve got enough to be comfortable, and that’s plenty.” She stopped, looked at him. “I’m chattering away, all excited, and you’re not. Is something wrong?”