They moved toward the hall, and ahead of them a male voice sounded, high and terrified: “Muriel! Oh, my God, it’s Muriel!”
Then a female voice, more angry than frightened: “Henry? What are you talking about?”
Just entering the hall, Parker stopped and gestured to the other two. Everybody wait. It would be useful to listen to this.
The man’s voice went on, with a broken sound. He was crying. “It’s the detectives, I knew we’d never get away with it, you couldn’t be alone tonight, not after— How could I have been so stupid, she called Jerome, she knows I’m here, all those lies—”
“Henry, stop! Muriel doesn’t know anything because Muriel doesn’t want to know anything! What was that crash?”
“Private detectives, I knew she’d—”
“Henry, get up and see what that was!”
Now the three moved again, down the hall and into the bedroom, where the couple, both naked, sat up in the bed, he babbling and sobbing, she enraged. They both stopped short when Parker and Mackey and Williams walked in and stood like their worst dream at the foot of the bed.
Parker said, “Henry, do we look like private detectives?”
The woman slumped back against the headboard, color drained from her face. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Henry, not knowing what was going on if this was some nightmare other than the nightmare he’d been expecting, picked fretfully at the blanket over his knees as though trying to gather lint. “What do you—” he started, and ran out of air, and tried again: “What do you want?”
Parker looked at the woman. “You recognize us, don’t you?”
“On the news,” she whispered, still staring, still too pale, but recovering. “You” — and her eyes slid toward Williams — “and you.”
Now Henry caught up: “Oh, you’re them,” he cried, and for a second didn’t seem as scared as before. But then he realized he still had reasons to be scared, and shrank back next to the woman. “What are you going to do?”
This was Mackey’s game; Parker said to him, “Tell Henry what we’re going to do.”
“We’re going to have a conversation,” Mackey told them. “We’re going to talk about poor little innocent Brenda Fawcett, pining away in a jail cell while you two roll around in your — adulterous, isn’t it? — adulterous bed.”
5
“I knew she was part of the gang!” the woman cried, forgetting her own fear as she pointed at Mackey in triumph.
“But she wasn’t,” Mackey said. He was being very gentle, very calm, in a way that told the two on the bed he was holding some beast down inside himself that they wouldn’t want him to let go.
The woman blinked. “Of course she was,” she said. “She was casing the place.”
“Casing the dance studio?” Mackey grinned at her, in a way that seemed all teeth. “Come on, Darlene,” he said. “You know why she was there.”
“She’s with you people.”
“She’s with me,” Mackey said. “Not doing anything, not working, you see what I mean? Just along for the ride.” He gestured at Henry seated there now with mouth sagging open, like somebody really caught up in an exciting movie. “Probably like Muriel,” Mackey explained, and Henry’s mouth snapped shut, and Mackey said to him, “Right, Henry? Muriel’s just along for the ride, not part of what you’re doing, am I right?”
Henry shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then you’re just not thinking, Henry,” Mackey told him. In creating this dialogue, rolling it out, taking his time, Parker knew, Mackey was both easing their fears and keeping the pressure on. They were all in a civilized conversation now, so their survival seemed to them more likely, so they would gradually find it easier to go along with the program, and eventually to do what Mackey wanted them to do.
Rolling it out, Mackey said, “You’re part of the bunch fixed up the Armory, right?”
Henry looked frightened again, as though this were a trick question. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.
“You got your father in there with his jewelry business.”
Henry’s lips curved down. “Yes, you’d know about that,” he said.
Parker said, “We know about everything, Henry.”
“You put Darlene here in the dance studio,” Mackey went on, “and every once in a while you come around and dance. So there you are, captain of industry, putting together deals, making it happen. Muriel around for much of that, Henry?”
“What do you mean, around?” Henry’s incomprehension was making him desperate. “I’m married to her.”
“Sure, but was she at the meetings? When you and the guys were putting together the Armory deal, when you made the deal with your father, when you made the deal with Darlene here. Muriel in on any of that, Henry?”
“No, of course not,” he said.
Mackey spread his hands: case proved. To Darlene, he said, “You get my point? I’m here, I’m working, my friend’s along. She isn’t working, she’s just along, like Muriel. She gets bored, she takes a few classes over at your place. She can’t give you real information about herself, because maybe something might go wrong with what I’m doing here, but she’s paying you in cash, so it doesn’t matter what she says. But then you decide, ‘Hey, this woman is lying to me, I can’t have that, I can’t have some woman come into my dance studio and lie to me, I’m gonna find out what she’s up to, and if I can make some trouble for her, I’ll make some trouble for her.’ Just like Muriel might get a little pissed off at you, Darlene, and if she could make some trouble for you, and I bet she could, what do you think? You think you can run a dance studio and have an alienation of affection suit going on at the same time, all in public, all over the cheap crap the press has turned itself into? And no help from Henry, you know, Muriel would be keeping him occupied, too.”
“Oh, God,” Henry said, and covered his eyes with one hand, head bowed.
There was a chair against the side wall, with some of Henry’s clothing on it. Saying, “This is gonna take a while, these people are slow,” Williams walked over to the chair, dumped the clothing off it, and sat on it.
Henry lowered his hand to gape at his clothes on the floor. Darlene said, “Even if—”
Mackey looked at her with polite interest. “Yeah?”
“Even if you’re telling the truth,” Darlene said, “even if she wasn’t a part of it, she was here with you, she’s still an accomplice.”
Mackey said, “Is Muriel an accomplice? They still have those old blue laws on the books in this state, did you know that? Who knows how many different felonies you two already committed in that bed there, but the point is, is Muriel your accomplice?”
“That’s absurd,” she said.
“You’re right,” Mackey agreed. “And Brenda’s my accomplice the same way.”
She frowned, trying to find some way around this comparison, then impatiently shrugged and said, “It isn’t up to me, it’s up to the police. If whatever-her-name-is was more than just ‘being around,’ they’ll find out.”
“Oh, but that’s the problem, Darlene,” Mackey said. “It isn’t the police that make trouble for Brenda, it’s you.”
“It’s up to them now,” she insisted. “If she wasn’t doing anything wrong, they’ll let her go.”
“But they don’t want to let her go, do they, Darlene?” Mackey asked her. “They told you themselves, they don’t have a single thing to hold her on, but they don’t want to let her go because they’re suspicious of her because they can’t find out who she is, so that’s why they want you to go back tomorrow morning and sign a complaint against her.”