Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“Good,” Infante said.

“But the victim’s mother might not want it,” Nancy said. She was remembering the woman she had met back in April, a woman whose life had tested her faith yet never weakened it. The walls of the woman’s rowhouse had featured a riotous competition between God’s only son and her only son, with Jesus edging out Franklin Morris. “She’s Christian.”

“So?” Infante said. “Aren’t we all?”

“I mean a real one. Very devout. And you know the state’s attorney won’t go for the death penalty if the relatives don’t want it.”

“Christian?” Lenhardt pretended to be indignant. “Well, eye for an eye is the oldest Christian rule of all.”

“I guess she’s more New Testament, turn the other cheek, like.”

“The New Testament,” Lenhardt said, wagging his breadstick, “is the New Coke of religion. They need to throw that sucker out and go back to the original recipe.”

Nancy gasped so hard, trying not to laugh, that she almost swallowed a cherry tomato from her salad. She was no more religious than the average lapsed Catholic, but it was not a subject about which she could joke. She felt too guilty, being AWOL from St. Casimir’s all these years.

“Anyway, you let that nice Christian lady sit through a little testimony, see a few crime scene photos, and she’ll be ready to give those guys the injection her own self.”

Infante nodded sagely. It was one of his few moves that got under Nancy ’s skin, that wise nod, as if there were things that only he and Lenhardt could understand.

Lenhardt was on a roll, the topic of religion having struck his fancy for some reason. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. And that’s the New Testament, by the way.”

Nancy didn’t know the Bible that well, but she was determined to argue the point: “Is mine . His, not ours. So isn’t God saying we’re not supposed to be in the vengeance business?”

“He’s saying we do it for him, so we better do it right.” But Lenhardt was guessing at the meaning, too. Not a one of them at the table-two Catholics and a Lutheran-at least she thought Lenhardt was a Lutheran-had the credentials to play even half-assed theologians.

“I’ll tell you what I know about revenge,” Infante piped up. He pronounced the word REE-venge, as if it were an act of repetition, not reaction. “It feels good . That’s why God wants it for himself. He knows how much fun it is.”

“I feel a reminiscence coming on,” Lenhardt said. “Wife number one or two?”

“Two.”

“Didn’t you cheat on Two?” Nancy asked, knowing he had.

“Yeah, but I felt bad about it. You know, adultery isn’t what kills a marriage, it’s just-”

“A symptom,” Nancy said, winning a big laugh from Lenhardt, which made her feel good. Infante’s marital history and the accompanying litany of excuses were well known to them.

“Fuck you,” he said, but without bite. This, too, was part of the litany, the beginning of Infante’s marital beatitudes. “Yes, I slipped up, and she caught me, but I wanted to get back with her so bad, I was willing to do anything. Only she didn’t want me anymore. She wanted my house and my furniture, though. And all our money, not that there was so much of it, but her lawyer told her to drain every penny out of our joint accounts. The one thing she didn’t get from me was my key.”

“Really?” Nancy had been working on raising one eyebrow-she thought it was an expression that might have its uses in interrogations-and she tried it now. She caught a glimpse of her face in the metal napkin holder and the effect was far from what she intended. Even allowing for the distortion of the napkin holder, she looked silly, like a cartoon character trying to be menacing. “Calculating as she was, and she didn’t get the key from you, or change the locks?”

“Well”-Infante’s grin belied the hangdog dip of his head-“maybe I had a copy made one day, for emergencies, and she forgot about that. At any rate, one night when she was out, I let myself in.”

“To what purpose?” Lenhardt asked.

“That was the funny thing. I didn’t really have a plan when I went in. It was one A.M.-”

“Was this an alcohol-related crime, Mr. Infante?” Lenhardt pulled out his pad, pretended to take notes.

Again, his grin confessed all. “So I’m there, in my old living room, and I can already see how she’s, like, eliminating me from our life. I had this picture of a boat, kind of a painting, and I just really liked it. It’s not over the mantel, so she’s put it away somewhere. She doesn’t want it, but she won’t let me have it. That’s what she was like. The cat comes in and sniffs at my ankles and my feet, and I start thinking about what she loved most in the world-”

“ Not the cat.” Nancy was remembering a famous bit of Baltimore lore about a lobbyist who had put his ex’s cat in the microwave.

“No. What kind of pervert do you think I am? But I look at the cat, twisting around my feet, and when I look at my feet, I see my shoes and I remember- Lorraine loved shoes. So I find a hacksaw in the basement- my hacksaw, by the way, from my toolbox-and I go upstairs and saw the heel off every right shoe in her closet.”

“Why every right heel?” The detail fascinated Nancy, an insight into Infante, maybe into all men.

“Because you don’t have to take both to ruin the shoes, you know? And she has, like, ten, twenty pairs of shoes. Half of ’em black, by the way. So when I’m done there’s just like this little pile of-” He gestured, incapable of defining what he had created.

“Dismembered shoes,” Lenhardt supplied.

“Yeah. I just left ’em in the middle of the rug.”

“She ever say anything?” Lenhardt again, the consummate cop, intent on getting the facts while the suspect was feeling voluble and expansive. Nancy was too dumbfounded to comment.

“Naw. I kept checking the precinct, too, but she never filed a report. So she knew it was me.”

Nancy finally thought of what she wanted to ask, the question she wanted to ask every mutt, but seldom got a chance. “Did it feel good, sitting on the floor of your old bedroom, sawing shoes?”

“Yeah. Well, actually, I cut my hand up a little, but I enjoyed every bit of it, absolutely.”

“You left trace evidence,” Lenhardt said, only half joking. “You could have fucked up your career over something like that.”

“Naw. I had a key, my name was still on the deed. And I bought those fuckin’ shoes, so I was just taking my half.”

“I wonder,” Nancy said, “what she did with all those leftover shoes. You think there’s a charity that specializes in giving shoes to one-legged women? Like, you might see a woman come hopping at you one day, and she’ll be wearing a pump from your ex-wife’s closet?”

“I tell you what,” Infante said. “That is the day I take a one-legged woman dancing.”

Their main courses arrived-cream-rich pasta dishes for the men, penne arrabbiata for Nancy, who had signed up for an online diet service that helped to track one’s daily calorie intake. It had a whole list of what you were supposed to eat in different kinds of restaurants, and it swore by penne arrabbiata in Italian places. She watched wistfully as the waiter grated fresh Parmesan on the others’ dishes, but shook him off with a noble little nod.

“There are about a million calories in that green stuff,” she said wistfully of the tapenade. Lenhardt and Infante, used to such non sequiturs from her, dug into their food, their chins hanging low enough to catch the steam from the hot bowls of pasta.

“What about you, Nancy?” Lenhardt asked. “You ever gotten back at anyone?”