John Hart - The King Of Lies

The door swung up on silent hinges, opened to darkness; and then I blinked.

The first thing I saw was cash, lots of it, banded together in stacks of ten thousand. I removed all of it. The money was solid in my hand, a brick of currency that I could smell over the mustiness. At a glance, it looked like almost $200,000. I put it on the floor beside me, but it was difficult to look away. I’d never seen so much hard currency. But I wasn’t here for money, so I returned to the gaping hole.

There were pictures of his family. Not his wife and children. Not that family. But the one that raised him, the impoverished one. There was a faded picture of Ezra and his father. Another of his father and his mother. One of several dirty, blank-eyed children who may have been siblings. I’d never seen these before, and I doubted that Jean had, either. The people looked used up, even the children, and in one group shot I saw what had made Ezra different. It was something in his eyes, like in the photo on his desk at home. There was strength in them, as if, even as a child, he could move worlds. His brothers and sisters may have sensed this, for in the photographs they seemed to hover around him.

But they were all strangers to me. I’d never met a single one of them. Not once.

I put the photos next to the money and returned to the safe. In a large velvet box I found some of my mother’s jewelry-not what she was wearing when she died, but the really expensive stuff, which Ezra once referred to as “fuck-you baubles,” and only brought out when he wanted to impress a man or make the guy’s wife look cheap. Mother hated to wear them, and she once told me that they made her feel like the devil’s concubine. Not that they weren’t beautiful; they were. But they, too, were tools, and never intended as anything else. I put the box aside, planning to give it to Jean. Maybe she could sell them.

The videotapes were on the bottom, three of them, unmarked. I held them as I would a snake, and wondered briefly if I’d been wrong-that maybe there were things about a father that a son should never know.

Why would he keep videotapes in a safe?

A VCR and a television sat in the corner. I picked a tape at random and put it in the player. I turned on the television and pushed the play button.

At first, there was static, then a sofa. Soft lights. Voices. I looked at the long leather couch behind me, then back at the screen. They were the same.

“I don’t know, Ezra.” A woman’s voice, somehow familiar.

“Humor me.” That was Ezra.

I heard the sound of a gentle smack, a burst of girlish laughter.

A woman’s legs, long and tan. She ran past the camera, flung herself onto the couch. She was naked, laughing, and for an instant I saw a flash of white teeth, and equally pale breasts. Then Ezra heaved into view, filling the screen. He shrank as he moved to the couch, but I heard him mumble something. Then her voice: “Well, come on, then.” Her arms above her head, face obscured. Her legs opened, the left finding the back of the curved leather couch, the right circling his waist, guiding him down.

He collapsed onto her, buried her under his massive body; but I saw her legs, and she had the strength to rise up beneath him. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Like that. Fuck me like that.” And he did, slamming her, driving her down and into the yielding leather. Narrow arms escaped from beneath him, found his back, and dragged claw marks into his skin.

Watching, I felt sick, but I could not look away. Because some part of me knew. It was the voice. The way her legs joined. That brief, horrible flash of teeth.

I knew, and in bleak disbelief I watched my father nail my wife to the couch.

The images were hammer blows. He used her, manhandled her, and her eyes, when I saw them, glowed like an animal’s. There was no office, no world; it was gone, obliterated, and I could not feel the floor that rushed up to meet my knees. My stomach clenched, and my mouth may have filled with bile, but if it did, I never tasted it. Every sense was overwhelmed by the one that I could forever do without. Sights no man should see swelled and burst like rotten fruit. My wife, on her back, then on her hands and knees. My father, hairy as any farm animal, grunting over her as if she, too, were mindless flesh, and not the wife of his only son.

How long? The thought found me. How long had this gone on? And then, quick on its heels: How could I have missed it?

And just when I could take no more, the screen went dead. I sagged into myself and waited for a collapse that never came. I was numb, staggered by what I’d seen and by what the sight implied. Her voice, when she spoke-it shocked the hell out of me.

“You nailed the boards down.”

I turned and saw her. She stood by Ezra’s desk. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs and so had no idea how long she’d been there. She lowered the remote control to the desk. I climbed to my feet. She looked calm, but her eyes were glazed and her lips were damp.

“Do you know how many times I’ve tried to open that damn safe?” She sat on the edge of the desk and looked at me; her face remained pale, and her voice was equally colorless. “Late at night, usually, while you slept. It was the best thing about being married to a drunk. You were always a heavy sleeper. I knew about the tapes, of course. I shouldn’t have let him do that, but he insisted. I didn’t know he kept them in the safe until it was too late.”

Her eyes were lightless, and when she blinked, her body seemed to tilt. She looked drugged, and may well have been. I didn’t know her. I never had.

“Too late for what?” I asked, but she ignored me. She pulled at her ear with one hand and kept the other hand behind her back. I knew then that I’d been wrong about a great many things.

“It was you that night,” I said. “You pushed the chair down the stairs.”

I looked around the office. There was only one way out.

“Yes,” Barbara said. “I’m sorry about that. But I guess it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I’ve been up here so many times.” She shrugged, and the gun appeared. It was in her left hand, and she acted as if it weren’t there. I froze at the sight of it. It was small and silver, an automatic of some kind. She used the barrel to scratch at her cheek.

“What’s the gun for, Barbara?” I tried to make my voice as nonthreatening as possible. She shrugged again and looked at the gun. She tilted it this way and that, as if fascinated by the play of light along its glittering edge. Her face was slack. She was clearly not herself, and I thought she had to be stoned or mentally adrift.

“Something I’ve had for awhile,” she said. “This town is getting so dangerous these days, especially for a woman alone at night.”

I knew that I was in danger, but I didn’t care.

“Why did you kill him, Barbara?”

Suddenly, she was on her feet, jabbing the gun in my direction, and the vacuous calm of her eyes disappeared, replaced by something entirely different. I flinched, expecting the bullet.

“I did that for you!” she screamed. “For you! How dare you question me? I did it all for you, you ungrateful bastard.”

I held up my hands. “I’m sorry. Try to calm down.”

“You calm down!” She took three uneven steps toward me, holding the gun as if she meant to use it. When she stopped, she didn’t lower the gun. “That son of a bitch was going to change the will. I fucked him for six months before he agreed to do it right in the first place.” She laughed, the sound like fingers on a chalkboard. “That’s what it took, but I did it, and I did it for us. I made that happen. But he was going to undo all of that, put it back the way it was. I couldn’t allow that. So don’t you pretend that I never did anything for you.”