Across the street Holly Malone killed the TV, and the light in the dormer died along with it.
Carmen noticed the change in scenery the same second I did. She said, “I guess we have a decision to make.”
“Coming here was your idea, Carmen. It was a good idea, or I wouldn’t be here with you. I think whether we ruin Holly’s holiday tonight or tomorrow morning is up to you. I’ll back you up either way you want to go.”
She gave the puzzle fifteen, twenty seconds of thought. “We passed a motel a few blocks back. I vote that you and I go get some sleep, and we talk to her tomorrow morning when she’s chopping celery and onions to stuff into her turkey.”
“Okay, that’s what we’ll do.” I started the car. “Tell me something, Carmen. Are you a Raiders fan?”
“What?”
I pulled a U-turn in the intersection before I switched on the headlights.
“Football? You a Raiders fan?”
“As I matter of fact, I am. How did you know?”
“Intuition. Did you have tickets when you lived up north?” What was I guessing? I was guessing that she had season tickets and that she owned a good-sized wardrobe of Silver and Black.
“Yes, I did.”
“Thought you might.”
“What else do you know about me?”
You like disco and the Oakland Raiders. That’s about it. Don’t necessarily like what I know, but I don’t know as much as I’d like.That’s what I was thinking.
I decided to circle Holly Malone’s block one more time, slowly, searching for any sign of Sterling Storey. Why? Criminals almost always end up proving themselves to be a lot smarter or a lot dumber than people give them credit for. I was still hoping that Sterling was a lot dumber. That was why.
Halfway around the block I finally responded to Carmen’s question. “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know anything else about you. You have kids?”
“One. She’s a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. She’s spending Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s family.”
I did the math, figured Carmen was maybe a little older than me. “I have one, too. He’s a sophomore in grammar school. He’s spending Thanksgiving with his grandparents.”
She laughed before she said, “I know.”
She knew.
“You married?” I asked. I didn’t think about asking, I just asked. I don’t like it when my mouth gets ahead of my brain. It doesn’t happen often. Usually my mouth is pretty slow, my brain a little faster.
“No,” she said, without explanation.
She didn’t ask me if I was married.
She knew.
Or did she?
I sucked in my gut, knowing damn well the act did nothing to disguise my man-boobs.
What did I spend the next few blocks wondering? I spent the next few blocks wondering what it would be like to get one room at the Days Inn instead of two.
FIFTY-ONE
We got two.
I hoped I hadn’t been obvious when the woman at the desk had asked, “One room or two?” I’d hesitated a beat too long-I knew I had. I was waiting for Carmen to say “two,” but she didn’t. Or hoping she’d say “one” or something. It might have been my imagination, but I thought she was waiting to hear what I was going to say.
After that beat-too-long passed, we both blurted, “Two.”
My room had littleNO SMOKINGsigns just about everywhere I looked, but it had recently been occupied by a smoker, no doubt about it. The fetid air caught in the back of my throat with each slow breath I took.
I took a minute to call Alan on my cell to let him know that Carmen, and therefore the Boulder Police Department, knew about the woman in South Bend and that they seemed to have a conduit that ran straight into his office by way of the Crime Stoppers program.
He sounded dismayed at the news. I felt bad for him. The guy’s plate was pretty full.
Carmen and I had been assigned rooms right next to each other; they even had a pair of those odd connecting doors between them, as though the desk clerk thought it might be fun to tempt me with trespassing all night long.
She sang soulful songs as she prepared to sleep. Except for my shoes I was still fully dressed, and I lay on the bed as motionless as I could so that the bed wouldn’t squeal and I wouldn’t miss a muted note. I was almost certain that I’d never heard any of the songs she was singing before in my life.
That, I thought, was fitting. It seemed that all the melodies I’d heard since she sat down opposite me in the Marriott were composed of fresh notes.
Except for the disco.
She sang three songs, paused, I guessed, to brush her teeth, and then sang one more tune, something so full of lament that it brought tears to my eyes about Simon and Sherry and the holidays and my heart. I thought of Lauren and the fears that enveloped her, and even of Gibbs and what her life was going to be like when the dust settled, and I shed a tear for her as well.
I fell asleep right like that with my clothes on and woke at one-thirty, stripped in the dark, brushed my teeth, and fell back into bed. I listened for a while to the silence, pretended I could hear the soft percussion of Carmen’s breathing through the walls, and replayed the songs I’d heard only once a short while before, and they worked for me once again like lullabies. I was back to sleep before two and stayed that way until she pounded on my door at a quarter to eight.
When Carmen busted me awake, she’d torn me from a dream about the Wolf sisters and their mostly cooked turducken. The details of the dream evaporated instantly, but I woke thinking that if I inhaled deeply enough, I would be able to smell the intertwined birds roasting in an Ochlockonee, Georgia, oven. A deep breath and a quick look around the room brought me back to the reality that all I was smelling was the stale smoke of some inconsiderate fool’s Marlboros.
I chided myself for my juvenile romantic fantasies all through breakfast. What had I been thinking?
Whatever intimacies I had imagined the night before had disappeared with the darkness. If we’d been flirting at midnight, we weren’t flirting anymore. Carmen played nothing but business at breakfast, and I ran along next to her, trying hard just to keep up. I returned to the buffet line in the motel’s little breakfast room a couple of times, not just to get more food, but also to get a break from her intensity. The meal wasn’t bad; I ate yogurt and fruit and Cheerios with nonfat milk. After two cups of decaf I switched to regular coffee. If the morning was any indication what our day was going to be like, I was going to need some rocket fuel to match her pace.
My cardiologist would just have to understand.
“What do you know about Sterling and Holly? Their relationship?” Carmen asked me when I indicated I was done eating by pushing the plastic cereal bowl and the plastic spoon away from me. I thought that her saying “Sterling and Holly” was particularly ironic; it managed to make the two of them sound like they were the cute couple that’d been crowned king and queen at the Homecoming Dance.
But Carmen’s question caused me take a sharp breath, too. Or maybe it wasn’t the question; it was the answer I was about to give. “They were having an affair,” I said. Which was exactly what I’d been thinking about doing the night before. I tasted hypocrisy with my next sip of coffee.
I don’t like hypocrisy in others. I hate it in myself. Hate it.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough. When I talked to her yesterday, she was obviously upset that I knew about her and Sterling. If all the two of them did was mess around a couple of times, why would she be so upset? She’s not married, so what did she do that was so wrong, other than show some bad judgment by sleeping with a married guy? That particular sin is committed about a million times a day in this country.”
It couldn’t have been clearer if she’d been shouting at me. Carmen was announcing to me that she’d almost made the exact same mistake eight hours or so before and that she wasn’t feeling particularly good about how close she’d come to yielding to the temptation.