April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“Mother of God!” she gasped. “You scared me.”

“Can I walk with you? Pretend I’m a homeless person.”

“Don’t make me feel guilty.”

“For what?”

“Not calling you.” She squinted against the sun. “I’m sorry. With a new baby your life isn’t your own.”

“Hey.”

We avoided each other’s eyes.

“Outstanding job on the serial rapist,” she said finally.

“Thank you. Deirdre good?”

Barbara’s face lit up. “Almost walking. Cruising on the furniture, you know …” Then her voice dropped, as if I wouldn’t know. “So where are you off to?”

“Jail.”

She laughed. “Oh, come on!”

“No joke. Mark Rauch is arguing to revoke bail as we speak.”

“Why on earth—?”

“Violation of the agreement. Because I went after Brennan.”

“What a crock.”

People kept padding by. Overweight men wearing windbreakers and carrying briefcases. Tiny Asian grandmothers in black. Suddenly I knew I could never ask her to take me into her home.

“Well … I just wanted to say hi. See your smiling face.”

She saw the hurt and put her arms around me. “I feel so bad for not calling.”

“Don’t,” I sniffled. “You’re not the only one.”

“Tell me. Quickly. How are they going to argue? I have to interview another new baby-sitter, or else I’d—”

“It’s okay. Another time.”

“No! I don’t care, she’ll quit in a month when her boyfriend gets back from Tibet.”

“Tibet?”

She blocked my way. “I want to hear.”

“It’s over for me, Barbara. I’m looking at hard time, for real.”

She insisted on that zany Catholic optimism. “What is Devon County doing for you, right now ?”

“Background checks on witnesses.”

“So he’s just getting started!”

I snorted. “It’s great bedtime reading. The dirt on the dirtbags. Remember that Margaret Forrester, the dame Andrew slept with — one of many — at the Santa Monica police? I told you about her.”

“Kind of.”

“She’s the one who ratted me out.”

“Jealous?”

“A nutcase. Turns out she’s making a ton of money selling seashell jewelry to yuppie stores …”

“Aside from the police job?”

“She was awarded $52,674 when her husband died in the line of duty, although apparently—”

Barbara pushed the blowing hair out of her eyes. “When was this?”

“A year and a half ago. Why?”

She had that Barbara look.

“It’s a funny number, that’s all.”

“How funny?”

The Human Computer is never wrong about numbers. Never wrong about anything that has happened during a bank robbery, if it is in our files, in the last five years.

“That’s the same take as the Mission Impossible caper.”

“The exact amount the suspect took from the bank?”

Barbara nodded, brows furrowed with concentration.

“There was more in the safe deposit boxes, but he didn’t find it or he didn’t have time …”

The details of the robbery would have continued to spit out like runaway ticker tape if I had not stopped them by suddenly gripping her arms.

“Oh, Barbara,” I whispered.

Barbara ditched the baby-sitter and came with me to the apartment in the Marina because, she said, it would not be a good idea to go back there for the first time alone.

The key turned happily, as always, in the brass faceplate that was worn yellow in the spot where the rest of the keys had hit every day for the past ten years. These are the marks we leave on the world.

“They wouldn’t trash it,” Barbara kept promising during the drive, but still I pictured desolation and ruin left by the crime scene techs. When we got there I hesitated with the key, giggling foolishly, because I was afraid that once we opened the door the loss would be overwhelming.

All that was missing was a piece of carpet, a neat surgical square out of the center of the living room where there must have been bloodstains, but there were black fingerprint powder smudges left on the walls, and the furniture had been moved and put back in a haphazard way. It looked as if they had been messing around in the garbage disposal. Like Juliana overcome by brutal flashbacks, I was hit with spiking memories of the destruction that had happened here, as if nameless obliteration were still shaking the floor, as if Andrew and I had been citizens caught in some mistaken blitz: What in the name of God did we do to each other?

“Don’t cry,” said Barbara briskly. She dropped her purse on the glass dining table and strode to the windows and yanked the curtains back. “Let’s get some air in here.”

When the light swept in, and the white-hot view of the brilliant boats and the sharp smell of kelp and gasoline, I saw the place was still mine — the bamboo furniture I had chosen, the TV with its trusty remote — but were I ever to live there again, room would have to be made now for a smoky melancholy. I could not even look in the direction of the coffee table and the couch.

“Where do you keep your plastic bags?”

I pulled out the drawer for Barbara, who was brave enough to open the refrigerator. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this. You do what you have to do,” she instructed, holding out the Baggies.

I stared at the box with the certainty that we had reached the end, the place in the river so treacherous it could not be crossed.

“I can’t do this to him.”

“Do you want your home back? How about your freedom? He’s more than ready to take your freedom away from you. ”

In the bathroom, the bars of soap were shriveled and dry and the towels were gone, taken for evidence. I had to hold on to the wall as the image came of Andrew and me playing in the shower before work, teasing who would get to rinse their hair first, bending to lather his strong long toes and legs, working my way up, warm water pulsing on my back.

As I stared into the mirror it seemed to fog up with that very steam, and then, as if I had wiped that steam away, I saw in an arc of clarity, Andrew and me. Our hair was wet, cheeks ruddy, his big naked shoulders inches higher than mine; we were ritually washed for the workday, but no longer playful — rather, patient and solemn, as we had never really been. I steadied myself and the impression faded. Two toothbrushes still hung in the holder. One green and one blue. His and hers.

Andrew had bought the green one, fastidious Andrew, who kept a change of clothes in the car, whose tools were always clean and hung in rows. Solitary Andrew, whose mind worked like a clock, with ruthless omission of whatever it is that must be left out.

Ruthless?

I removed the green toothbrush and slipped it into the plastic bag, allowing myself to hear only the part of my mind that was quickly calibrating which route would be fastest to the forensic lab in Fullerton this time of day.

The azaleas in front of Andrew’s house were trimmed as usual into perfect ovals of red, white and pink, like mounds of psychedelic candy brightly pulsating along the path to the door. The path was newly wet and fragrant with cedar chips still moist in the shade of a mimosa tree, whose featherlike leaflets trailed languorously in light ocean airs. Everything would be in working order — the tight screen door, the chiming bell — and it would take several more seconds for him to unsnap all the locks and chains. In those seconds we could still turn back.

But then he was standing there, with nothing between us, vivid and three-dimensional in the immediate plane: greasy day-off hair, old sweats with cutoff sleeves, as if popped there whole. Behind him I could sense dark wood and cool rooms, and the poignant scent of gardenias was blowing across the interior through open patio doors.