Evan Hunter - Romance

And then I found the earring.

Josie’s earring.

Do you believe in fate?

I absolutely believe in fate.

I found it on the sink counter in the ladies’ room. At the theater. I almost gave it back to her. I knew it was hers, of course, I’d seen her wearing them before. Almost gave it back. Almost missed the clear signal that earring was sending me. That earring was telling me what I had to do next, you see. It was telling me how to get the part I should have had to begin with, and it was also telling me how I could quit worrying about Chuck maybe cracking and involving me in a murder that was his idea, after all, he was the one who first suggested it, you can believe that or not, I don’t care.

I figured if I could…

If I could make it look like someone had committed suicide, you see…

Well, make it look as if Chuck had committed suicide, actually…

Leave a suicide note and all.

Type up a suicide note.

Make it seem as if he was remorseful for having killed Michelle, but then…

And this was the good part.

Make it look as if the suicide had been faked, the suicide was really a murder, do you see? Someone had killed him and tried to make it look like a suicide, I’m sure you see a lot of that, I’ve been in a dozen plays where that happened. In fact, I was counting on your looking for something like that, a fake suicide. I was counting on you finding the earring I left under the bed, Josie’s earring. I was counting on you figuring she was the one who’d been there, she was the one who’d made love to him.

We made such good love that night.

I surprised him there.

Knocked on the door. Hi, Chuck.

He looked so handsome.

We made such good love.

I’d like a drink, I told him afterwards. No, don’t get up, I’ll make them. I mixed them in the kitchen, dropped two Dalmanes into his. Here’s to us, darling, here’s to our future. He was out like a light ten minutes later. I rolled him off the bed and dragged him to the bedroom window, but the damn thing was sealed shut around the air conditioner, so I had to drag him all the way into the living room, he was so big, so heavy. I left him on the floor under the window while I did what I had to do. I was still naked. I left the glasses where they were. A woman there, right? Put away the bottle of Scotch. Typed up the note. Still naked. Tried not to make it too specific because I wanted you to figure out some things for yourself. If it looked too phony, you’d begin to think it was supposed to look phony, that someone was trying to make it look phony. I wiped off everything I’d touched, even the earring. I was going to leave the earring in plain sight, but then I thought that might seem too obvious, too, so I put it under the bed. Not too far under it. I wanted it to be found. I wanted you to think she’d dropped it on the floor, Josie, and it had just rolled under the bed, and there it was. While I was getting dressed, I couldn’t find my panties, he’d tossed them across the room someplace. I almost panicked. I found them hanging on one of the dresser knobs. I’d been searching all over the floor, and there they were hanging on this knob. Can you imagine the hundred to-one shot that was? Chuck throwing them across the room and them landing on a knob? The things that happen.

Getting him out the window was the hard part.

He was so heavy. Such a big man.

I propped him up and sort of draped his arms over the sill, and then I tried hoisting him up over it. I was already dressed and beginning to sweat, struggling to lift him. I wanted to leave the apartment the minute I got him out the window, run down the back stairs, get away from the building in what I hoped would be a lot of confusion outside. But I was beginning to panic again because I wasn’t sure I could manage it, it was taking all my strength just to get his chest up onto the sill. And then all at once I… I don’t know what it was… I suddenly seemed so much stronger, maybe it was an adrenaline rush or something, I don’t know, but all at once I was lifting him and… and he was suddenly weightless… falling away from my hands… out and… and gone. Just gone.

All the way home, I kept praying you’d find the earring and think Josie was the one who’d killed him.

Because then you’d go get her.

And I’d get the part.

You didn’t see any palm trees growing in this city except in the tropical-bird buildings of the Grover Park and Riverhead zoos, and in several of the indoor buildings at the Calm’s Point Botanical Gardens. This city was no garden spot. But on Palm Sunday, you’d think the plant was indigenous to the area.

Half the Christians who carried leaves of the stuff to church that Sunday didn’t know that the day celebrated Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. All they knew was that the priest would bless the frond and then they would carry it home and fashion it into a little cross which could be pinned to a lapel or a collar. Some of the palm crosses were quite elegant with fancy little serrated tips on the post and transverse pieces.

Mark Carella wanted to know why his father hadn’t made a little cross for him, the way all the other kids’ fathers had made for their sons. Carella explained that he was no longer a practicing Catholic. April, overhearing the conversation Carella was having with her twin brother, announced that she wanted to become a rabbi when she grew up. Carella said that was fine with him.

Mark wanted to know why they had to go to Grandma’s house two weeks in a row. They were going there next Sunday for Easter, so why’d they have to go today, too?

“Grandma’s always so gloomy nowadays,” he said.

This was a true observation.

Carella took him aside and told him he had to be a little more patient with Grandma until she was able to adjust to Grandpa being dead. Mark wanted to know when that would be. Mark was ten years old. How did you explain to a ten-year-old that it took time for a woman to adjust to the traumatic death of her husband?

“I miss the way Grandma used to be,” Mark said.

Which was another true observation.

Carella suddenly wondered if the man who’d shot and killed his father realized that he’d effectively killed his mother, too.

“Why don’t you tell her?” he said. “That you miss her?”

“She’ll cry,” Mark said.

“Maybe not.”

“She always cries now.”

“I cry, too, honey,” Carella said.

Mark looked at him.

“I do,” Carella said.

“Why’d that son of a bitch have to kill him?” Mark said.

When Rosa Lee Cooke was coming along in Alabama, there weren’t any white restaurants colored folk could go eat in. The restaurant Sharyn took her to today was thronged with white people. Crane her neck hard as she could, Rosa Lee could see only one other black family there. Black man and his lighter-colored wife, three children all dressed in their Palm Sunday best. Rosa Lee herself was wearing a tailored suit the color of her own walnut complexion; Sharyn had taken her shopping for it as a birthday gift. She was also wearing a bonnet she’d bought for herself, trimmed with tiny yellow flowers. Wouldn’t be Easter till next Sunday, but she couldn’t resist previewing it today.

She wasn’t a drinking woman, a little sip of sweet wine every now and again. But today was the day Jesus had marched into Jerusalem with his head held high, and she felt a little drink in celebration might not be remiss. So when Sharyn asked if she’d like a cocktail before lunch, she said she wouldn’t mind a Bloody Mary.

Rosa Lee had been thirteen when Sharyn was born, and now — at the age of fifty-three — the women truly looked more like sisters than they did mother and daughter, a compliment both had heard so often they were now sick to death of it. Same color eyes, same color skin, same smooth complexion, but Sharyn’s hair was trimmed close to her head whereas her mother’s was shiny with tight little curls springing from below the brim of her fancy hat.