Эд Горман - Blood Moon

We were sitting on the floor, using the coffee table for pizza and beers.

To arm-wrestle, all we had to do was angle our bodies closer to the coffee table and set our elbows down.

“You know something funny?”

“What?” she said.

“I really want to beat you. I really do. I mean, I feel competitive about this.”

“Good. You should. Because I feel competitive, too.”

“But I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What a he-man.”

“No, I’m serious. If I start getting carried away, you just tell me.”

“Sure.”

She gripped my hand. “Ready?”

“Remember now, if I get carried away, you let me know.”

“Right.”

She put my arm down flat against the table.

“I mustn’t have been ready.”

“Oh, right, that must’ve been it. You weren’t ready.”

“You really think you could’ve just flattened my arm like that if I’d been ready?”

“I told you I had three brothers.”

“Well, I had three sisters, so what does that prove?”

“Did you really have three sisters?”

“No. But that wasn’t any dumber than saying that you had three brothers.”

This time I was ready and right away you could see the difference. She didn’t put my arm down flat in ten seconds this time. Nope, on this second outing it took her at least twenty seconds.

I stared down at my arm as if it had betrayed me.

“Tell you what,” she said.

“What?”

“We’ll cut the piece of pizza in half.”

“No; no way. You won fair and square.”

“Aw, God, don’t be noble. My husband was like that, noble noble noble, and he was a real pain.”

“I seem to remind you of your husband an awful lot.”

“You couldn’t possibly be as big a jerk as he was. Nobody could.”

“Boy, there’s a glowing endorsement.”

“Now, c’mon, we’ll split the piece of pizza. And afterward you can try me again.” She leaned over and gave me a chaste little kiss on the cheek. “Maybe I just got lucky.”

“You have a cute big toe,” she said twenty minutes later.

“You only say I have a cute big toe because you want to spare me the embarrassment of pointing out the hole in my sock.”

She smiled. “I noticed you looking around.”

“Nice place.”

“God, Payne, will you stop saying that? It’s a pit.”

Gentlemanly behavior dictated that I once again tell the saving lie and compliment her apartment.

But unfortunately my mind was fixed on the fact that she’d called me Payne. She should have called me Hokanson. That was the name I was using in New Hope.

She’d picked up on it, too. “I think I’m in trouble.”

“I think you are, too.”

“Calling you Payne?”

“Uh-huh. How’d you find out?”

“The day we had coffee, I waited down the street till you left then I rushed back there and lifted your cup. One of the deputies is real good with fingerprints. I checked you out.

Your prints are on several national files. You were in the FBI.”

“I see.”

“So what’re you doing in town, Payne?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“In a couple of minutes, Payne, I’m really going to get mad. My sworn duty is to find out who killed these three people. I believe that you have information that could help me. Ergo, I need you to be honest with me.”

“Ergo?”

“It means consequently.”

“I know what it means. I’ve just never heard a cop use it before.”

“So what’re you doing in New Hope?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“How about if I give you a back rub?”

“Are you serious?”

She was serious.

Dark wind blew silver rain in through the screen and sprinkled drops across my neck and arms. Sweet spring night was on the wind, intoxicating.

I was spread out on her floor in the position that Indians always put John Wayne whenever they wanted to cover him with hundreds of hungry red ants.

She was straddled across my lower back, her hands expertly working the muscles in my neck, shoulder and back. She was deliciously good at it.

“I read up on you, Payne.”

“Oh? Then you know about me winning the Nobel Peace Prize?”

She was charitable enough to laugh. “No, but I know that you did some pretty interesting stuff when you were in the FBI. And I also know your wife died.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll bet she was nice.”

“She was wonderful,” I said.

She redoubled her efforts at massage. I closed my eyes and drifted on the dark cool winds and the dappling drops of chilly rain on my shoulders. This all reminded me of college dates, when you’d end up at a girl’s apartment feeling intimate enough to relax but not intimate enough to know what to do next. Especially since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

“You give great back rubs,” I said. I was going to say more, maybe something craftily romantic, when the phone rang.

“Oh, darn it,” she said.

And grabbed the phone from the end table.

“Chief Avery.” Beat. “When?” Beat. “Does Eve know who did it?” Beat. “I’ll be right there.” She hung up.

“I have to go,” she said.

“What happened?”

She was up already, grabbing a jacket from the closet.

“You think we’ll do this again?” she said.

“I certainly hope so,” I said. “So what happened?”

“Eve McNally.”

“Right. I know who she is.”

“Somebody beat her up pretty badly tonight. She won’t say who, and she won’t let Milner take her to the hospital.”

“Milner?”

“A patrolman.”

“Oh.”

“So I’m going over there. Talk to her myself. She’s the classic battered woman — she’ll never say a word against her husband even though he’s the one who always beats her up.”

“So this has happened before with Eve McNally?”

“Too many times.”

The final thing she did was snag her badge on her turtleneck and wrap her gun and holster around her narrow hips.

I got up off the floor and picked up my jacket and then followed her out the front door, which she paused to lock behind her.

“Sorry if I humiliated you at arm-wrestling, Payne,” she said. And grinned.

“Yeah,” I said, “you sound real sorry, too.”

Then she was gone, moving at a trot now to the official black Ford sedan tucked into the corner of the lot.

I moved slowly to my car, my mind fixed on the question of why Eve McNally might have been beaten up.

Rosamund never did visit him in prison.

When the time came, when the last appeal was turned down and the plan was set in motion, she dispatched a man to visit him, a man whose name she gave as Givens.

Well, two days before Givens’s arrival, there had been some trouble three cells down, a guard getting hit pretty hard on the back of the head, so the warden, being the mean stupid vituperative sonofabitch everybody knew all wardens to be, decided to punish everybody in the block

One of the things he did, the sweet bastard, was suspend the usual visiting privileges.

Usually, the prisoners were led into a long, narrow visiting room where they sat at a long narrow table, on the other side of which sat the visitor, usually a loved one or lawyer.

But the warden decided to make the men of Cellblock D use the booth in which inmates were forced to use the telephone to speak to visitors who were behind the Plexiglas window.

Mr. Givens showed up in an expensive suit and a look of distaste on his handsome face. He looked very anxious to get out of here.

Chitchat was how you’d characterize most of their fifteen-minute conversation.