It wasn’t much of a game. The Giants scored six runs in the bottom of the first and after that it settled into a dull pitchers’ duel. By the sixth inning he was bored and numb from the cold. The wind penetrated coats, sweaters, mittens, the blanket; not even body heat or hot coffee from the big thermos they’d brought kept the cold at bay. Twice he suggested leaving. But she was such a diehard fan she wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t want to miss anything, Jimmy. You never know what might happen.”
In the seventh a gust of fog-laden wind made his teeth chatter loud enough for Doris to hear. She snuggled closer. “Are you really that cold?” she asked.
“Well, my nose quit running ten minutes ago and now I’ve got icicles hanging out of it.”
“I’ll bet I can warm you up.”
“Nothing could right now except a hot shower.”
“I know a better way than that.”
“What way?”
Her hand slid along his thigh, stroked tight into his crotch.
“Hey! What’re you doing?”
“What does it feel like I’m doing?”
“Cut it out, Dorrie.”
“Why? Don’t you like that?”
“You know I like it. But we’re not home.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean this is a public place...”
“And we’re under a blanket and nobody’s near.”
He tried to push her hand away. She resisted. She’d worked her mitten off; he felt her slim fingers tugging, heard the faint rasp of his zipper. The fingers insinuated themselves inside, icy cold, making him jump when they touched bare flesh.
“Mmm, that’s one place you’re warm.”
“Dorrie...”
“How about if I get right down there under the blanket and really make you warm?”
“No.”
“Hand or mouth, big guy, your choice.”
“No!”
Her breathing had quickened; it was warm and feather soft against his ear. In the privacy of their apartment, that would have excited him. In the privacy of their apartment, the touch and manipulation of her hand would have given him an immediate erection. Here, there was not even a stirring in his loins. He felt nothing except nervous embarrassment. He tried again to dislodge her fingers, his gaze jerking up and down, from side to side.
“Dorrie, for God’s sake...”
“What’s the matter?”
He heard himself say, “TV cameras.”
“What?”
“Game’s being televised back in Houston. There’re cameras all over the stadium.”
“So what? They’re focused on the field, not on us.”
“Sometimes they pan around the stands, you know that. One of them might be on us right now... all those people out there watching...”
“Jesus,” she said.
“When we get home... can’t you wait until then?”
She drew away from him, removing her hand at the same time. “I doubt I’ll be in the mood when we get home,” she said. “You just took me right out of it. I was getting pretty horny, too.”
“A public place, a baseball stadium...”
“That’s what made me so horny.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“No, I guess you don’t. Not you, Jimmy.”
“What does that mean?”
She wouldn’t tell him then; she sat stiffly for the rest of the game, staring at the field, not saying a word. It wasn’t until later, in the car on the way across the Bay Bridge, that she told him.
“The trouble with you, Jimmy,” she said, “is that you’re afraid to take risks. Any kind of risk. You want everything to be nice and safe.”
“That’s not true...”
“It’s true, all right. No chances, no risks — not even little ones like tonight, the kind that make life more interesting, give it an edge. A safe life is a dull life, you know? I don’t think people were meant to live that way.”
You want everything to be nice and safe. No chances, no risks — not even little ones. A safe life is a dull life, Jimmy.
He hadn’t understood then, or in all the years afterward. But he understood now, here in this motel room in Beulah, Nevada. What Doris had said to him that night was part of the reason — perhaps the main reason — she’d begun the affair with the prelaw track star and then put an end to their marriage. It was also the reason he was a lonely man. And the reason there was so little substance in his life... his nice, safe, dull, empty life. And at least part of the reason for the compulsion, the rebellion that had taken root and was growing inside him.
The time had come to take risks.
The time had come for his life to have edges, even if he ended up hurting himself on one.
11
He was on his way to the Goldtown Café, walking as he had the previous morning, when the car drifted over alongside. He didn’t hear it at first because of the wind, still blowing in dry, humming gusts; didn’t see it because he had his head ducked down to keep the blown grit out of his eyes. The sound of its horn — a single sharp toot — made him aware of it angling into the curb in front of him. Blue-and-white cruiser with flasher panels on the roof and a sheriff’s emblem on the door.
He stopped, still hunched against the wind. The man who rose up out of the driver’s side was big and bulky in his khaki uniform. He motioned Messenger over to the cruiser, said when he got there, “Mr. Messenger? I’m Sheriff Espinosa, Ben Espinosa. Like to talk to you for a minute.”
“All right.”
“Talk better in the car, out of this wind. Slide in.”
Messenger slid in. The cruiser’s interior smelled of sweat, leather, gun oil, and a sweetish pipe tobacco. The tobacco aroma came off Sheriff Espinosa as well; a blackened pipe bowl was visible under a shirt pocket flap, like a Cyclopean rodent peering out. He was in his mid-thirties, high-cheekboned, flat-eyed. The clipped mustache he wore lay like a black anthracite bar across his upper lip. The flat eyes were steady, measuring. He didn’t offer to shake hands.
Messenger said, “I was planning to pay you a visit later this morning.”
“That right?” There was no particular inflection to the words, but Messenger sensed a hostile undertone just the same. “Why didn’t you pay your visit yesterday?”
“I didn’t see any official urgency, Sheriff.”
Espinosa said, “Maybe you didn’t. But I’d’ve liked to hear about Anna Roebuck’s suicide from you, instead of half a dozen locals.”
“My mistake. But it isn’t as if she was a fugitive.”
“Might as well’ve been, disappearing the way she did. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Why is that?”
“Why do you think? The murders were still under investigation. She was still under investigation.”
“Did you warn her about leaving Beulah?”
“No. Too much time had gone by for that.”
“Then she had every right to leave, didn’t she?”
The flat-eyed stare had a little heat in it now; he met it steadily. “What puts you on her side, Mr. Messenger? From what I hear, you claim you hardly knew her out there in Frisco.”
“I saw her often enough. She was in a lot of pain and I don’t think guilt was the cause.”
“You don’t think. Just a gut feeling, then.”
“Just that.”
“You know about the murders before you came here?”
“No, not until yesterday.”
“Anything at all about her past?”
“No.”
“Why come here then? What do you figure to get out of it?”