Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

When the cab neared my house, I leaned forward. “I’m going somewhere different,” I said. I gave him Jane’s address.

W hen the cab pulled up in front of Jane’s house-correction, it was solely Zac’s house now-I saw the lights were on, and all the drapes in the front closed tight. Two news vans were parked on the street, lights on, but there were no reporters or cameramen outside. The night’s quiet had a temporary feel to it, as if the calm had died down, but everyone knew the storm would erupt again tomorrow.

And then that night came back to me in a flash. I couldn’t walk in that front door again.

“Can you take me around to the other side, please?” I asked the cabbie, remembering the rear entrance that Jane had showed me.

The back of their house faced the alley-familiar territory for a photographer like Zac, who featured such alleys in his work. But for me, the barely lit dark and the eerie silence made me remember another terrifying time-last night, those hands shoving me against the garage.

I asked the cabbie to drive a few houses past Zac’s, then gave him a twenty. “Will you wait for me, please?”

“What do you mean wait for ya?” He was a huge man who looked as if he’d been poured into his cab ten years ago and hadn’t gotten out yet. I doubted whether he could be responsive enough to help me if I needed it.

“Just wait, and call the cops if I don’t come back, okay? I’m going to that house right there.” I pointed.

“I’m not calling the cops.”

I gave him a ten. “You can drive away if you want, but call the cops if I don’t come back in ten minutes. Please.” Ten minutes was enough to confront Zac, to ask him a few questions, to get him to see that I had nothing to do with his wife’s love life, certainly nothing to do with her death.

I hurried down the alley, looking every which way, my heels feeling unstable on the uneven brick. I thought of how I would talk to Zac in a simple way, assuring him I wasn’t involved with Jane. I knew that, as a new widower, he had to be struggling through circles of hell I hadn’t even glimpsed yet.

A gate protected the rear of the house, with a swinging door cut into it. Locked. I looked up at the house. Like the front, all the lights appeared to be on but the drapes and blinds were closed. I looked around for a buzzer. There didn’t seem to be one. I walked down a ways, trying to see into the house from another angle, but again all the curtains were closed. Then the back door of the house opened. I saw Zac and another person. A woman. She was wearing a plaid coat and a white beret. She stepped out of the house first. Zac was behind her, not wearing a coat. He looked up and down the alley. His eyes seemed to miss me in a dark corner of the property. His gaze stopped when he saw the cab up the street, but then the woman in the beret put her arms around him. He hugged her back. Tight. And for a long time. They kissed on the lips once, then again, then once more. Zac closed the door, and she trotted down the stairs. She was pretty in a quirky way. She walked through the gate, and I remembered I’d seen her before at Jane’s funeral, the dark-haired woman looking through the photo book of Jane, dabbing at her eyes.

I stepped back quickly, against the side of a neighboring garage. When I poked my head out, I saw that the woman had spied my cab. She hurried that way, waving at it. And then my thirty-dollar cabbie let her in and drove away.

The loss of my cab was one thing. The fact that Zac had been accusing me of something when he’d clearly had his own secrets pissed me off even more. I marched to the back gate. It had closed but hadn’t locked when the woman left. I was inside and heading up the back stairs in a second.

I pounded on the door. It opened, and Zac poked his head out.

“How long have you had a girlfriend?” I said.

His eyes narrowed. He opened the door farther and gestured at me to come in.

Z ac and I stood in his big kitchen, both of us leaning against the countertops, both of us with our arms crossed tight over our chest. Between us, the granite island, marbled in tan and black, held an assortment of sympathy cards and baked goods.

“Her name is Zoey,” Zac said.

Zac and Zoey. It was actually a cute name for a couple, but now probably wasn’t the time to point that out.

“How long have you been together?” I asked.

“We’re not together. She was helping me move back into my house for the first time since Jane died. It’s been a crime scene until now.”

“From what I saw, she looked like more than a friend.”

“Fuck you,” Zac said. “You have no idea what my life has been like.” He leaned forward, arms squeezed tight around himself, the veins on his neck standing up. “And you have no idea what it was like to be married to Jane. She cheated. You know about her dalliances, right? And she probably also told you that I let her do it. And you know why? Because I loved her. I fucking loved her. So that’s it. Now, what do you want?”

He stopped short and took a breath. His energy and the intensity seemed to drain away then, as if he were a sponge pressed hard, everything seeping out.

I spoke up. “I can’t imagine how tough that would have been. You know, being with Jane, while she was…doing whatever.”

“Doing whomever.”

“So you turned to Zoey. It’s understandable.”

“Look, I don’t have to explain anything to you. But the fact is I’ve got nothing to hide, so I’ll tell you. Zoey and I picked up again just this past weekend.”

The weekend before your wife died, I thought. Kind of an interesting coincidence.

Zac sighed. “We dated years ago. We broke up right before I met Jane, and we stayed friends. And that was all it was. But on Saturday, when Jane wasn’t home, I was about at the end of my rope.” Zac was looking at the floor now, almost as though he was talking to himself. “After that, I just couldn’t stand being in the city. I went to our house in Long Beach. I was trying to sort out what to do. And then Jane found that noose in the house.”

I stayed quiet. Jane had said that Zac could have driven to Chicago from Long Beach and left the scarf in that noose shape when she was at the gym. As her husband, he would certainly have known where she kept it.

He was shaking his head, emotion taking over his face. And then he looked at me, his eyes boring into mine. “Can you see why I loved Jane?”

“Of course,” I answered softly. “She was dynamic. Smart. Beautiful.”

“And sexy,” he added matter-of-factly. “And that was what brought her down.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was beaten and then strangled with her scarf.” He shook his head. “That scarf.”

That scarf. Zac and I just looked at each other.

“This whole thing is so surreal,” he said.

Was it surreal because he had killed his wife? I couldn’t get a read on him.

“But Zoey has helped me,” he continued. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I called her to talk on Sunday, and we met and…”

I wanted to say, And the next day your wife was dead. But Zac appeared to be telling the truth. And he seemed tortured by it.

“Is it wise to be hanging out with her, Zac?” I asked. “While the cops are still investigating?” Why I was willing to help this guy when all he’d been doing was trying to bring me down, I didn’t know. There was something about him that touched me. And if he hadn’t killed his wife, he would be going crazy trying to figure out who did. Just like me.

“I don’t care if the cops see me with her. Don’t you get that? I told you I don’t have anything to hide.”

“I don’t, either, Zac. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”