Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

“LaMoia?”

She laughed. “That’s exactly who I guessed,” she admitted. “Great minds.”

Boldt had often accused Liz of having the hots for LaMoia, though it had always been teasing.

“Suzie doesn’t know who the mystery man is, only that it’s incredibly hot sex and that Elaine claims to be in one of those self-discovery phases.”

Liz had had her self-discovery a few years earlier, though they never discussed it anymore.

“Jesus. Razor will kill the guy if he finds out. Talk about having a short fuse.”

“Laws of nature, love. Survival of the fittest, and all that. We have no place in this.”

“Can’t you talk to Elaine?”

“Me? I hardly know Elaine. And besides, Suzie promised she wouldn’t tell a soul, so I’d just be getting her in trouble. If Michael says anything about it to you, you had better look surprised, buster.”

“I am surprised.”

“Laws of nature.”

“I can’t hang around for him,” Boldt complained.

“Oh no you don’t. You’re not sticking me with him.” She suggested, “Why don’t you put ‘himself’ to bed. He’s up late as it is.”

Boldt spent the next twenty minutes with his son. He changed the boy’s diapers-knowing they neared the day when they could do without-gave him a quick sponge bath with a warm hand towel, and had another of those limited-vocabulary conversations with him that amounted to listing quite a few nouns and the occasional verb: “Wa” meant both “water” and “wash”; “bunky” meant “bunny”; and “mama” meant that it eventually required Liz alongside to coax him to give sleep a try. They returned to the laundry room, where Liz was still ironing the same skirt. Clearly sensing a comment coming, she said, “I’m not very good with pleats.” And when Boldt offered to give it a try, she kissed him on the cheek and started folding what was just coming out of the dryer.

As he ironed, watching her fold the clothes, he wondered if she felt envious of an Elaine Striker with her young lover, the fawning and attention, and the hot-blooded romance. He felt tempted to ask, but decided against it. There were some things a husband should not know.

They hadn’t talked about her pregnancy in days, so he asked her about it, but she immediately changed subjects, mentioning something about a yoga class she wanted to attend, and he was reminded of his wife’s superstition about pregnancy in the first trimester.

Striker pulled up out front just as Boldt held the freshly ironed skirt at his waist and asked, “What do you think?”

“You’d look better in something brown, and below the knee,” Liz fired back, deadpan.

Striker’s steel claw clicked like a telegraph key, and he circled the small front porch like a dog searching for a spot to lie down. “Awfully late for you,” Boldt observed, trying to initiate some kind of dialogue. Watching a colleague bounce off the railing of his front porch was not great sport. He glanced at his watch, impatient to get downtown. An air force of small black bugs convened around the porch light.

Striker explained, “I didn’t want you to think that I had let you down on this cellular phone thing. All three companies searched their calling logs for a call placed to Adler’s home number, and all came up blank. Since we’re pretty confident about how this went down-Caulfield making the call while up in that tree-I pushed hard for some results, and two of the companies actually tried the search for a second time, but they still came up dry. About an hour ago I talked to a supervisor in data control and she said their lack of record could be explained technically, but I didn’t ask.”

“He burned us,” Boldt summarized.

“It looks like that, yes.”

Striker stared, his eyes dead and distant, his prosthesis chattering like cold teeth.

Boldt asked, “So? You heading downtown?”

Striker’s face contorted into an unforgiving knot.

“Razor?”

“Better than going home,” Striker said.

“Problems?” Boldt asked as innocently as possible.

“She’s never where she says she is, Lou. And she’s smelling a little too good these days when she leaves the house. She’s a little too happy. You know? And worse, her friends are doing a shitty job of covering for her. It’s like everyone knows the secret but me. But eventually you figure it out.”

Striker met eyes with Boldt, who saw the anger and hurt in his friend’s expression and offered what he hoped was good advice. “Forgive her, Razor. In the long run, it’s the only thing that works.”

He said, “You’ve been there, right?”

“Right,” Boldt confirmed. “I feel for you, buddy-I want you to know that. But at the same time, this stuff happens to all of us. And sometimes what we think is happening isn’t happening at all. It’s pretty easy to allow your emotions to give false reports.”

“She’s definitely screwing someone,” he said bluntly, giving in to the anger. Chewing his upper lip, eyes downcast, he repeated, “She’s screwing someone-and in our bed-in my bed, if you can believe that shit!” He turned away. “And I don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

“Have you confronted her?”

Striker looked over with tears in his eyes. He was pale and his nostrils flared as he spoke. “I’ll knock her head off.”

“Razor … You want to think before you do anything. On second thought, maybe it’s better you don’t confront her,” he said, backtracking. “Maybe it’s better if you do some counseling together. Work this thing out with a professional. Hell, I’m no professional.”

“In my own fucking bed!”

No pun intended . “Maybe it’s not like that,” Boldt tested. He wondered if Liz was right about the lover being one of Boldt’s detectives. He hoped not. He also hoped that Striker didn’t know anything about who it was, did not have a name, because where Striker might restrain himself from hitting his own wife, he would go after her lover with a vengeance. Boldt had no doubt about that. “Listen, I need you on this investigation,” Boldt said honestly, selfishly. “You want to watch yourself.”

“You want to talk about watching?” Striker asked, following his own skewed logic. “I can picture her, you know, in the act with him. Enjoying it. Getting off. She used to really get off, you know? Not so much anymore-pretty bored, really. I bet she gets off with him.” He grew paler. His eyes fixed on a stationary object and his lower lip trembled. Boldt could hear the bugs striking the glass bulb around the light. Down the street someone had their television too loud. He felt it weird to have this discussion with a laugh track running faintly in the background.

Striker snapped his head toward Boldt so hard that his neck cracked loudly. “What the hell did you do when you found out Liz … you know?”

Boldt closed his front door and led Striker down the steps, and they stood in the small front yard with insects swirling overhead and the sound of that laugh track even louder. He did not know how, but somehow people had found out about Liz’s affair with a coworker. To Boldt it was ancient history now; he didn’t even think of it as having to do with her. It was something that had gone wrong with them-like a disease they had shared. As far as he knew, only Liz was aware of his one-night adventure with Daphne. But Liz’s distraction had gone on for several months. He said, “What I would do if I were you is start with myself. With you. Because when a relationship goes south, it’s both of you. It’s never-ever-a one-way street.”

“Cliches?” he said, furious. “I show you my dirty laundry and you hand me a bunch of cliches?”

“I’d start with myself is all,” Boldt repeated.