Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Tim’s eyes strayed uncomfortably to the single place mat on the dining table, the T-shirt puddled by the box of Kleenex on the floor. He understood more concretely that she’d been touched by death and loss, as had they all.

“I’m afraid you misunderstood me. I can’t…” His hand described an arc of some sort but failed to extract better words. “I’m married.”

“Then why are you here, Rackley?” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack on her nightstand and lit it.

“I need a favor.”

“I offered to give it to you, or hadn’t you noticed?” She winked at him, and he returned her smile. She stubbed out her just-lit cigarette in a candle on the bureau, fell back on the bed, and pulled a blanket across her body neither shyly nor modestly.

“I’d like you to get me the public defender’s notes from the Kindell file. As a good-faith gesture. I know you have access to it. It’s too hard to wait without…something.”

“I can’t break policy. Bring it up at a meeting, we’ll take a vote.”

“We both know Rayner will never let that fly.”

Her eyes never broke from his; for a moment it seemed they were looking straight into each other. He knew that his suffering lay exposed and vulnerable, and there was little he could do to shield it from her gaze. He cleared his throat softly. “Please.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m making no promises.” Reaching over, she clicked the bedside light down a notch. “Come here.”

He walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. She hooked an arm around his waist and tugged him until his back was propped against the curved wooden headboard. She poked him until he shifted slightly left, then raised his arm and adjusted it out of her way. Content, she burrowed into his side, her head at the base of his chest.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

She strung a delicate arm across his stomach, and he was taken by how thin it was at the wrist. “You love her, huh?”

“Deeply.”

“I’ve never loved anyone. Not like that. My shrink says it’s the result of an early loss. My mom, you know. I was fifteen, just entering sexuality. It’s all linked, death and sex. Fear of intimacy, blah, blah, blah. That’s probably why I like being with Rayner. He takes care of me and doesn’t make me feel too much.”

“How was she killed? Your mother?”

“A motel-room murder/rape. There were lots of headlines and prurient speculation. Sort of glamorous, come to think of it. I came home from school, and my dad was sitting there in the kitchen, waiting for me, the smell of formalin coming off his clothes from the ME’s. To this day, I smell formalin…” She shuddered.

Tim stroked her hair, which was even finer and softer than he’d imagined.

“He looked utterly broken, my dad. Just…defeated.”

“What happened with the case?”

“They caught the guy a few weeks later. The jury was, for the most part, white trash, unemployed, and utterly incompetent. They ruled ‘not guilty.’ The evidence was so overwhelming that the Post speculated openly about bribery. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just plain inanity, like most things are.” She shook her head. “Defense attorneys with deep pockets and jury consultants. Not technically a loophole in the law, more like sanctioned corruption.” She made a noise of disgust deep in her throat. “They say it’s better for one hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be put to death. How long does that sententious bullshit bear weight? After the one hundred guilty men commit one hundred more murders? A thousand?”

“No,” Tim said. “It holds weight when the one innocent man is you.”

She grinned faintly. “I know that. I know it-I just don’t always feel it.” Her face felt warm and comforting against his chest. He kept listening, kept stroking her hair. “My dad sold real estate, but he was on a mortar crew in Korea, and some of his old platoonmates had become cops. One night a few of them and my dad rounded the guy up, took him for a drive to a warehouse in Anacostia. I’m fuzzy on details, but I know that when they found the body, they had to print it to make the ID because there wasn’t much left in the way of dentals.”

Tim remembered how Rayner had claimed that her mother’s killer had died in a gang beating, and he wondered if he knew the real story. That depended on how deep the intimacy ran between Rayner and Ananberg.

“I remember when my dad came home that night and told me what he’d done. He sat at the edge of my bed and woke me. He smelled of grass and his knuckles were split and he was shaking. He told me. And I felt nothing. I still feel nothing.” Her voice was quieter now, muffled against Tim’s chest. “Maybe I’m just not wired that way or I’m missing that gene, the conscience gene. Maybe when I get to the gates of heaven or whatever you Christians believe in, they’ll turn me away.”

She shook off a shiver, then turned her face up to him. She pressed her lips together, working up the courage to ask something. Her voice shook a little when she finally did. “Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?”

He nodded, and her face softened with relief. She settled back into him. Soon enough her breathing grew regular, and he sat with the warmth of her face against his chest and stroked her hair. After twenty minutes he slid carefully out from under her and slipped out so silently Boston didn’t even raise his head.

TIM pulled up to Dumone’s apartment a little before 7:00 A.M. A graceless stucco complex that exemplified bad seventies architecture, the building was less than a block off the 10 at Western. Next door, the ampm threw off fumes of gasoline and shitty coffee. The just-risen sun gave out a pale straw light to which Tim felt unfamiliarly attuned. He still had not slept.

His surprise at Dumone’s early-morning cell-phone summons was surpassed only by the fact that Dumone had given him his home address rather than picking a public spot to meet. Had Tim not felt a strong intuitive trust for Dumone, he would have speculated about an ambush.

Tim walked down the concrete walk that threaded along the building. A whistle called out, and there was Dumone, waiting for him behind a dusty screen door. They shook hands, Dumone’s mouth twitching in response to the formality of the greeting, and he stepped aside and allowed Tim to enter.

It was a ground-floor, single-bedroom job that smelled of stale carpet. A budget laminate bookcase and desk housed awards, plaques, and a few guns encased in glass. Dumone swept his arm grandly around the interior. “Get you something? Pellegrino? Mimosa?”

Tim laughed. “Thanks, I’m fine.”

Dumone gestured for Tim to sit on the couch, then sank into a dusty brown La-Z-Boy. His eyes seemed unusually shadowed, his skin stretched tight across his temples.

Tim raised his hands, let them fall back into his lap. “So?”

“I didn’t really call you here for a reason. Just wanted to see you.” Dumone raised a handkerchief and coughed into it, and again Tim noticed faint specks of blood on the cloth.

“You okay? Want me to get you some water?”

Dumone waved him off. “Fine, fine. I’m used to it.” The handkerchief settled in his lap, clutched in a knuckle-thick hand. “Early on, when I was first married, I worked construction some weekends. The job didn’t pay so hot, the wife and I had just gotten hitched. Extra dough, you know? They had me swinging a sledgehammer, knocking down plaster in these old houses in Charlestown. The ceilings-” He coughed again, one finger twirling in the air, indicating the ceiling, holding the strain of the story. “Asbestos. Of course, we didn’t know then.” He shook his head. “Not good. I was invincible anyway, dodging bullets by day.” He smiled, and again his eyes gathered that gleam that said he was astute enough to find amusement in all matters.