William Bayer - Blind Side

"I was so furious about what they did to Adam, I guess I got carried away." She stood back. Droplets clung to her body. Her hair looked great, wet and tangled. She looked so good I wanted to screw her then and there.

She pushed her mouth against my shirt, spoke against my chest.

"Early this morning I torched Mrs. Z's building. Firebombed it. When I left, it was in flames. The whole rotten place was burning up." She looked up at my face again.

"God, how I wish you'd been there, Geoffrey! to see the flames! to see them dance!"

Here's something I have to tell you, Geoffrey. Wanted to tell you in the car . . . but I was afraid."

It was I:00 A.M. We were lying naked in a huge double bed in the Seek And Ye Shall Find Motel in Santa Fe. It had been thirty-six hours since we left New York. We'd spent most of the evening in the room eating carryout food and watching TV. I'd just turned off the set. I was bone-weary, about to close my eyes, when Kim announced she had something to say.

"Mrs. Z was in the building when I burned it. There wasn't any way to get her out." And then, when I didn't react: "Don't you hear me, Geof? She got burned up."

She spoke in a monotone, tired and subdued, as if recounting some ordinary little fact.

"Poor Mrs. Z-she's just cinders now," she added wistfully.

"Sounds like a very bad dream," I said, all my denial mechanisms running flat out.

"Prettier to think so, isn't it?" She settled back, stared at the ceiling.

"She double-crossed me. I had to see her. I had to protect myself. Then … things got out of hand." She paused again.

"Starting that fire-I thought it would be difficult. But it wasn't. It wasn't hard at all."

I couldn't think of anything to say to that, so I stayed silent. Then, to make the time pass, I looked around the room. It had the sorrowful quality of most motel roomsschmaltzy framed prints on the walls, ruffled lampshades and other mawkish touches meant to make it seem like home, but which, because they spoke of the anonymity of the person who had chosen them, made me long for my Manhattan loft.

She turned to me.

"Don't you want to know why, eoffrey?"

"Sure. Tell me why," I said quietly.

She started to speak, then caught her breath; perhaps she feared the effect of what she was about to say. When she finally spoke it was in a rapid stream, as if blurting it out, like removing a bandage fast, would somehow hurt me less.

"I lied to you in Key West. Rakoubian told the truth. The blackmail was my idea. Except it wasn't. He just thought it was. I brought it to him-that much was true. But the original idea came from Mrs. Z."

The room started to feel cold.

"She came to me after Sonya was killed, said we could backmail Darling and make a fortune. That all we needed were some photographs and for that we could use Rakoubian. She told me to propose the idea to him without telling him she was part of it. I did. I even helped him set up his camera in the changing room. Mrs. Z gave me the keys. Now the poor creep's dead and he never knew she was behind it all."

"And the 'cover photographer-who was behind that?" I asked, suddenly on a knife's edge between fury and helplessness.

"Oh, Geof, believe me: Rakoubian thought that up on his own. I swear to you, Geoffrey, I didn't know. I . had absolutely nothing to do with that."

I got out of bed, went to the bathroom, knelt on the tiles in front of the toilet and began to heave. I wanted to throw up. When nothing came, I moved to the sink and splashed cold water on my face.

Later I stood against the bathroom door and studied her. Our sheet covered her to her waist; she was bare above. Her hands were linked behind her head, her hair splayed on the pillow. The spaces beneath her arms were dark. I couldn't see her eyes.

"You do believe me, don't you, Geoffrey?"

I shook my head.

"I swear!"

"You swore to me before."

She looked up at the ceiling.

"That was in Key West."

For a moment I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I thought I did.

"Oh, I get it. Everything you said down there was false. But that doesn't matter because Key West is-what? A liar's paradise? Is that what you want to say?"

She didn't answer, just continued staring at the ceiling. I watched her awhile longer, waiting for her to speak. When she didn't, I broke the silence.

"I take pictures of you. We talk, sleep together, make love. But for all of that, after all these weeks, I have no idea who you are."

She shrugged.

"I'm just a girl you met who got you shooting people again."

"Yeah. An ordinary girl."

"Go ahead, mock me. But I want you to know-"

"What?"

"Know me, Geoffrey."

Ilaughed.

"What's the matter?"

"Everything," I said.

We'd left New York the day she burned down the building, traveling under assumed names. I'd flown to Dallas on one airline, she to St. Louis on another. We'd each spent the night in our respective city of transit, then continued to Albuquerque, where we'd met that morning at the airport. We'd rented a car, eaten lunch at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory, then had driven up to Santa Fe.

Frank had been adamant: the three of us must not be seen together. So Kim and I had cruised Cerrillos Road looking for a suitable motel. We chose the Seek And Ye Shall Find because of its pink-and-white facade, and because the name appealed to Kim-it was, she said, pretty much the story of her life.

What was that life? What had she been seeking? And what had she managed to find? What was she seeking now from me? That's what I wanted to know.

She'd told me so many different stories I couldn't keep them straight. At least one of them, I figured, had to be true. But then, I thought, that might not necessarily be the case. Perhaps all of them were lies,

I was thinking about that, and what I was going to do about her, when finally she began to speak, in a strange emphatic way I'd never heard her use before.

"She thought up the whole thing, brought me into it. Then, when the crunch came, she chickened out. Maybe she thought Darling would find out she was the blackmailer. Maybe he accused her, so she had to give him proof that he was wrong. Whatever the reason, she switched sides. Didn't say anything, just switched. One day I was her dear accomplice, next I was good as dead. She sold me out to save her ass. Only reason she let me get away was she knew I'd tell Darling the whole rotten scheme was hers."

"Yeah, Kim. But the bottom line is she didn't kill you, did she?"

She shook her head furiously.

"She would have! She lured Shadow to be killed. That was the night I ran to you. And you were there for me, Geoffrey! You were the only one I could trust. Now, isn't it funny? You don't trust me at all. Even now, now, while I'm telling you the real truth, you don't believe a word I say. Not a solitary word."

"Is there a difference?" I asked. She stared at me confused. "Between the truth and the 'real truth'-is that a distinction I should know about?"

"All you do is mock me, Geoffrey."

"Want me to feel sorry for you?"

"That's not what I want!"

"What do you want?" "I want you to believe me! I want you to love me!" I retreated back into the bathroom, sat down on the edge of the tub. Oh, Christ, I thought. Jesus Christ!

Later, sitting in the motel-room easy chair, feet stretched out on the matching ottoman, I tried to get her story straight. Kim faced me, attentive, straight-backed and cross-legged on the bed, her perfect bared breasts thrust forward, harbingers that she would speak the naked truth.

"Now, let's see if I've got this right," I said.

"First, Mrs. Z doublecrossed Darling." She nodded. ,,Then the two of you set up Rakoubian."

She nodded again.