Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

Her hair was disarranged; a strand had fallen damply across her eyes. “There was a little girl,” Lyssy began, pushing it back gently, “who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.” He kissed her on the forehead, then again, softly, on each eye. “And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was-”

“Lilith,” she broke in. “When she was bad, she was Lilith.” She kissed him again, more lasciviously, her mouth open, her lips soft and sloppy, her tongue expertly insistent, then broke it off. “Well,” she said, panting for breath.

“Well, what?” He was breathing pretty hard himself.

“Who am I? Lily or Lilith?”

“Does…does it really matter?”

“Hell no,” she replied, grabbing his head in both her hands and pulling it down to her breast.

You’re not breaking and entering, Pender reminded himself as he circled Irene Cogan’s house, looking for a way in. You’re just-what was it they used to say when they needed a warrant? — effectuating a surreptitious entry.

He discovered an old wooden ladder lying on its side, next to a tarpaulin-covered stack of firewood by the side of the garage. It was in dubious condition, the mildew-splotched wood of the rails soft enough to dig his thumbnail into, but the rungs were dowels an inch in diameter, and appeared to be sturdy enough for the job at hand.

Pender carried the ladder around the side of the house and leaned it against the overhang of the flat, tar-papered roof above the office extension in back. He already knew the trick to hauling two hundred and eighty pounds up an old ladder: distribute your weight among all four limbs so that no single rung has to bear even half the load. Fortunately, the preponderance of Pender’s avoirdupois had always been concentrated above the waist. His belly was the tipping point-once he dragged that over the eaves, the rest followed easily enough.

From the flat roof above the office, Pender boosted himself another four feet to the roof below Irene’s rear bedroom window, which was closed. Balanced with difficulty on the slanting roof apron, he managed to get the merest fingertip purchase on the crossbar of the window sash, then let loose a prayer and leveraged upward with all the strength in his fingertips.

The window flew open, causing Pender to lose his hold on the sash, and with it his balance. Toppling backward, arms flailing, he managed to grab the windowsill; behind him, his Pebble Beach golf cap fluttered to the ground like a powder-blue autumn leaf.

Pender now found himself stretched out full-length on the sloping roof, hanging on to the windowsill with both hands, his Hush Puppied feet dangling in space. Kicking, grunting, he finally got his feet under him again, then duckwalked up the slope until he was at eye level with the windowsill, breathing hard and sweating harder. As he squatted there, trying to catch his breath, he felt an unaccustomed breeze from behind, and realized that with his shorts dragged down and his jacket rucked up, he was showing more crack than an inner-city coke dealer.

After a hasty sartorial adjustment, and a quick peek to make sure the bedroom was empty, Pender climbed through the window feet first, then took the Colt out of his pocket again and flicked off the safety-no way Maxwell would be getting the drop on him again.

Irene’s queen-size bed appeared slept in and unmade, but there were no bloodstains, no sign of a struggle. Pender flattened himself against the door jamb with the Colt held sideways against his chest, then peered into the hallway. Empty. With the gun in two-handed firing position he made his way down the hallway to the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. Aside from a rumpled bedspread with a few coins strewn around it, the little room was in apple-pie order.

He started down the stairs, keeping to the wall side of the carpeted treads to avoid any potential creaking. The paintings lining the staircase-landscapes, still lifes, and a portrait of Irene Cogan in her midtwenties, looking a little like the young Greta Garbo-all bore the signature of Irene’s late husband, Frank.

The stairway opened out onto the white-carpeted living room. No sign of trouble there, but in the tiny downstairs bathroom, the rectangular screen lay on the tiled floor beneath the open window, and the state of the kitchen suggested either a break-in or a hasty departure-the cabinet doors were ajar, the counters littered with cans and cartons, and the usually tidy pantry appeared to have been ransacked.

As he looked around, Pender caught a glimpse of himself in the glass front of Irene’s china cabinet. Hatless, dark circles under his eyes after his nearly sleepless night, his shoulders slumped and his once-snappy madras jacket practically in rags, Lily’s Uncle Pen was now a ringer for Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

Satisfied? Pender asked the poor dejected SOB, as he dropped the gun back into his pocket. Are you good and satisfied now? Maxwell’s gone, he’s taken Lily and Irene with him, and however much of a head start he had, it’s now half an hour longer thanks to you.

Pender turned away, hitched up his shorts, and crossed the kitchen. His intention-to call the police from Irene’s wall phone-was a measure of his turmoil: he had the phone to his ear and his finger poised to call 911 before he caught himself on the verge of a classic rookie cop error. Not even rookie-trainee: calling in the crime on the crime scene phone, thereby destroying not just potential fingerprints or saliva for DNA (not all that relevant in the current case, which wasn’t exactly a whodunnit), but also the ability to call *69 and instantly recover the last number accessed.

He patted through his pockets, took out his cell phone, realized he’d left it with the ringtone on. Another worse-than-rookie mistake: you’re sneaking around looking for a perp who’s sneaking around looking for you, somebody gives you a friendly ring-a-ding-ding on the old cell, next thing you know you’re so full of holes they could read a newspaper through you.

He pulled the cell phone’s antenna out as far as it would go, then pressed the green Call button. But as he raised the phone to his ear to make sure he had a dial tone, he became aware of another sound, faint, sputtery, and intermittent, that he must have been picking up on subconsciously for at least a few seconds.

It was the sound of somebody snoring, and it seemed to be coming from Irene’s office-the only room he hadn’t searched, Pender reminded himself. Swapping the phone for the Colt, and borrowing a clean drinking glass from the cabinet, he hustled out of the kitchen and down the hallway, and pressed the rim of the glass to the office door, listening between snores until he was reasonably sure there was nobody in there but the snorer.

Pender set the glass down carefully on the hallway carpet, then turned the doorknob slowly with his left hand, while holding the unfamiliar Colt in his right with the safety off and a round up the spout. Probably should have dry-fired the thing earlier to accustom himself to the pull, thought Pender-but it was too late now. Just one more fuckup to add to the list, he told himself as he inched the door open.

The sated lovers lay entwined atop a patchwork quilt worn silky with age, their naked bodies rosy in the soft glow of twilight. Everything in the one-room cabin was invested with a reddish glow from the setting sun; even Lily’s dark, shoulder-length hair reflected auburn highlights.

“The first thing I remember noticing about you was your hair,” Lyssy murmured sleepily, burying his face against her neck-he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Tuesday. “Like moonlight on a midnight lake, I told myself-I don’t know whether that’s from a poem or a song, or if I just made it up, but that is what I was thinking.”