Bill Pronzini - The Crimes of Jordan Wise

". . . What?"

"On the left side of your neck there, that mark."

She clapped her hand to the spot. A flush crawled up into her cheeks. She dragged a pocket mirror out of her purse, held it up, and tilted her head so she could see her neck.

"Oh, that," she said. "That's just a scrape. The door to the stall in the ladies' room stuck, and when I jerked it open the edge of it cought me."

"Doesn't look like a scrape to me."

"Well, that's what it is."

"More like a hickey."

"For God's sake, Richard! Would you like it better if I told you I was bitten by a vampire?"

"You've got the look, too," I said.

"What look?"

"The well-screwed look."

Her gaze flicked away from mine, just for an instant. "You think I was with a man, is that it? Some other man?"

"Were you?"

"No! I wish I had been well screwed today, but I wasn't, and haven't been in so long I've forgotten what it's like. Why are you so suspicious? I told you how I got the scrape and that's the truth."

No, it wasn't.

She'd been with a man, all right.

Bone and I went on our sail, a five-day trip up through the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. When we got back, Annalise pretended to be glad to see me. But it was obvious what she'd been doing while I was gone. No more love bites—she must have read the riot act to her lover about marking her—but she still wore that look of smug sexual satisfaction that few men or women can quite hide. And she didn't come near me in bed that night.

That was the final straw.

My estimate of how long it would take for Annalise to blow her last chance had been six months. I was too generous. It took her exactly five months to reach my breaking point.

You remember what I said earlier about love? That it's an individual experience and you don't really have any idea of what it is or what its effect will be until it happens to you? Well, the same is true of hate.

Hate isn't just the flip side of love, or a crossing of that thin Une everybody keeps yapping about. It's more, much more.

Hate is dry ice held close to raw nerve ends, so that you never stop feeling its burning cold.

Hate is a succubus that whispers and moans in your sleep.

Hate is a disease that burrows through the dark side, like a slow-moving, flesh-eating bacterium.

Hate is another word for death.

I think I knew all along that Annalise would have to die.

It was never a conscious consideration, yet it must have been there in my subconscious all along. Bone was wrong. You can't run away from a poisonous viper that has bitten you twice before; sooner or later you have to kill it before it sinks its poisonous fangs into you again. If you don't, then you'll be the one to die. As simple, as elemental as that.

What I had to do is murder in the eyes of the law, yes, but not in my eyes. To me it was not even an act of aggression. It was justifiable self-defense, the same as Coder's death; the only difference is that with Annalise it was necessarily premeditated. There was no real malice involved. The decision, the final act were as cold as the hate. A cold equation, but not a cold-blooded one. The distinction is important.

I am not a murderer.

The blame for Annalise's death was entirely hers. You can see that, can't you? There was no hate in me until she put it there. If she had stayed with me from the beginning, stayed faithful to me, she would still be alive today. If she hadn't betrayed me to Cotler and helped him try to blackmail me, she'd be alive today. If she'd remained on Long Island instead of crawling back to St. Thomas, she'd be alive today. If she'd kept her promises after I gave her her one last chance, it would've amounted to the viper emptying its own poison sac and my hate would have lain dormant and I'd have gone on living with her. And she'd be alive today.

I didn't kill her, when you look at it in that perspective. I didn't kill Cotler, either. I was merely the instrument, like a gun or knife or cut-glass decanter, by which they died.

Fred Cotler killed himself.

And so did Annalise.

It's one thing to devise a boldly audacious scheme to steal a large sum of money and then carry it out with systematic precision. It's another to destroy a person in a moment of irresistible impulse and blind rage, and then to improvise a method of covering up the mess. And it's a third thing entirely, so much more than just problem-solving, to carefully plot someone's death. You can't design a method strictly by using the principles of mathematics, as an intellectual exercise; you can't approach it with emotional detachment, or hurry up and put it into action. There's a hell of a difference between executing an abstract equation and executing a human viper.

The best way to approach the problem, I decided, was as if I were one of Amthor Associates' engineers embarking on a construction project. The building of a wall, a perfect wall, from scratch. First there were the basics to be worked out, then blueprints to be drawn. That much was pure mathematics. Then the materials had to be gathered, the foundation laid, and finally the wall itself could be erected. The actual construction required skill, determination, courage, total commitment. No, not courage. Fortitude. I had plenty of that. I was nothing if not tenacious.

Simplicity was the keynote. The more elaborate you tried to make a wall, the greater the chance for a flaw that would cause it to collapse. After deliberation, I decided the first of the concepts I considered was the best. Annalise had disppeared once suddenly and without a trace, she had to disappear again the same way.

I shaped the plan and drew the blueprints off of that. Her death had to be bloodless—I couldn't bear a repeat of the kind of clean-up I'd had to do after Cotler—and it had to be tempered with a quality of mercy. I didn't want her to suffer. Cold equation, start to finish. So I couldn't do the obvious thing of taking her out to sea in Windrunner and throwing her overboard. Death by drowning was cruel; letting the sharks have her alive was barbarous. Besides, if anyone knew or suspected she'd gone out with me and then didn't return, there would be an investigation. I didn't dare report an accidental death for the same reason. I discarded several other methods before I settled on one that was bloodless, humane, and relatively easy to accomplish.

But there was a sticking point, the same one I'd had with Cotler: disposal of the remains. I liked the irony of putting her where I'd put him, but I couldn't do it that way. Too risky. I'd been fortunate to get away with a cemetery burial once; trying it twice was a fool's gambit. The safest choice? Burial at sea. That could be done easily enough, but how to manage it without risk? If she disappeared on the same day I happened to go out alone on Windrunner, somebody might conceivably put two and two together. Whatever I did, it had to be free of the remotest possibility of an investigation.

At first I rejected the only workable answer. It meant involving a third party, and that third party would have to be Bone. He wouldn't know it—he'd be an unwitting accomplice, an innocent witness—but I didn't like the idea of using him that way. There was the y factor, too; you increase the possibility of hidden dangers when you bring an outsider into an equation like this. I toyed with other solutions. None fit the fundamental plan nearly as well. So then I considered other methods of building the wall, using different types of bricks and mortar. None was as basic, as easy to work with, as certain to guarantee solidity.

Like it or not, using Bone was the only way to do it as it needed to be done.

Preparations.

The first thing I did was to see Bone and have a talk with him. I said he'd been right about Annalise, I'd been having problems with her just as he'd predicted and I felt like six kinds of fool for taking her back. It was typical of him that he didn't give me any I-told-you-so's. All he said was, "You got no exclusive on being a fool, mon."