Not anyone’s car he knew.
He’d spotted the car three blocks after he’d left the Sea Shanty. Stopped to buy himself some cigarettes at the Seven-Eleven on 41, noticed the car pulling in behind him. Still there when he came out with the cigarettes. Car was a black Toronado with red racing stripes and tinted windows, couldn’t make out the driver through the almost-black glass. Pulled out almost the minute he did, though, the guy had to be an amateur. Or somebody just didn’t give a shit.
Otto himself was driving a faded blue Buick Century. The whole thing in surveillance work, you wanted the car to blend in with the surroundings. You drove something showy, they made you in a minute. If automobile dealers sold pre-faded cars, he’d buy a dozen of them. This one had faded by itself over the years and was perfect for making itself disappear.
It wasn’t doing too hot a job of that tonight, though, because the guy in the black Toronado was still on his tail.
It was a black-tie party. Muriel and Harold Langerman’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. All the men were in white dinner jackets, the women in slinky gowns. The band’s drummer had gone up the beach to disperse the kids playing guitars, and then had come back to join the piano player and the bass player on the patio below the deck. They were now playing “It Happened in Monterey.” The moon was full. The Gulf of Mexico glittered beneath it like shattered glass.
“What are you thinking?” Susan asked.
“I’d get arrested,” he said, smiling.
“That bad?”
“That good.”
“...a long time ago,” the lyrics said.
“You look beautiful tonight.”
A shy smile.
“You look handsome.”
“Thank you.”
He was an even six feet tall (though his sister Gloria insisted he had once given his height as six-two, to impress an adolescent girl), and he weighed a hundred and seventy pounds, and he had dark hair and brown eyes and what his partner Frank called a “fox face.” He did not consider this handsome. This was adequate. In a world of spectacularly handsome men in designer jeans, Matthew Hope thought of himself as simply and only okay.
“...lips as red as wine,” the lyrics said.
He wanted to kiss her.
“But then, Matthew, you always did look marvelous in a dinner jacket.”
She had called him Matthew from the very beginning.
Back then, people were calling him Matt or Matty. In fact, his sister Gloria used to call him Matlock, God only knew why. But Susan had called him Matthew, which he preferred. Nowadays, hardly anyone called him Matt. He guessed he could thank Susan for that. In fact, he guessed he had a lot of things he could thank her for.
He was staring at her again.
“Something?” she said.
“Yes, let’s get out of here,” he said in a rush.
The black Toronado was closer now.
Fifteen feet behind him maybe.
And then, all at once — like the scene in Close Encounters where the headlights in the rearview mirror are almost on the guy, whatever his name was, the guy who was also in Jaws; and they swerve up and away and you know it’s a spaceship behind him — just like that scene except that the lights in Otto’s mirror swerved to the left; and all at once the Toronado was alongside him, and the smoked window on the right-hand side of the car glided down and Otto looked over at a gun.
He thought Oh, shit, and that was the last thing he thought because the gun went off once, and then another time, but he didn’t hear or feel the second shot because the first one took him clean in the left temple and his hands flew off the steering wheel like a pair of startled birds and the Buick swung out of control onto a sidewalk outside a television repair store and went through the plate-glass window of the store and smashed into a dozen or more television sets and the Toronado continued driving south on 41, the smoked window on the right-hand side gliding up again.
He could not believe later that he was in bed with Susan when he first heard the news about Otto Samalson.
His daughter would have thought they were both crazy.
Maybe they were.
The bed was a brierpatch of memories.
The radio was playing softly in his bedroom. Music of the fifties. Their music.
Memories of her.
Susan as he’d first seen her, sitting on a Styrofoam ice cooler, the lake behind her, singing along with a boy playing a mandolin, her legs widespread, skirt tucked between them, long brown hair blowing in the wind off the lake, dark eyes flashing as Matthew approached.
The pool lights were on outside. He could see her naked body in the reflected light.
A tangle of memories.
Susan as virgin queen, radiant in white, billowy white skirt and white sandals, white carnation in her hair, gleaming white teeth, face flushed as she rushed to him, hand outstretched, reaching for him, reaching...
She whispered that she liked his house.
He whispered that he was renting it.
Memories.
Susan as wanton hooker standing in their bedroom door, black garter belt and panties, seamed black nylons and high-heeled black shoes, dark hair hanging over one eye, Come fuck me, Matthew...
She asked him if he enjoyed living alone.
He told her he didn’t.
So many years together, you learned the hollows and curves, you learned the spaces, you molded yourselves to remembered nooks...
“In Calusa tonight—”
The news.
He looked at the bedside clock: 11:03 P.M.
He kissed her.
“—killing the driver. The car swerved off the highway and into the front window of a television repair—”
Her mouth the way he remembered it when she was young.
Breasts still firm.
Legs...
“—identified as Otto Samalson, a private investigator with offices on Highgate and—”
“What?” Matthew said.
Susan gasped, startled.
“Did you hear that?”
“No. What? Hear what? What?” she asked, frightened, and sat up, clutching the sheet to her naked breasts.
“Shhh,” he said.
“In Sarasota, the county commissioners have outlined a plan to open—”
“Did he say Otto Samalson? Did you hear...?”
“No,” Susan said. “Who?”
“Jesus,” he said, and got out of bed.
“Matthew, what...?”
“I have to... I’d better call... Susan, if it was Otto... look, you’d better... listen, I have to make a call, excuse me.”
He went into the room he’d set up as an at-home office, and called the Public Safety Building, and asked for Detective Morris Bloom. A detective named Kenyon told Matthew that Bloom was on vacation, but yes, the man who’d been shot and killed on US 41 was indeed a private investigator named Otto Samalson.
Matthew thanked him and hung up.
When he came back into the bedroom, Susan was already dressed.
“I just remembered why we got divorced,” she said, and walked out.
It was nightmare time.
A nightmare of flashbacks.
Invading Matthew’s bed, invading his sleep.
I just remembered why we got divorced.
Susan’s words. Opening a floodgate of memories that triggered the first of the nightmare flashbacks: Matthew coming home at a quarter to one, the lights on in the study, Susan sitting naked behind the desk in the house they used to share. “I just had a phone call,” she says, “from a man named Gerald Hemmings,” and Matthew’s throat goes suddenly dry.
He and Aggie have rehearsed this scene a thousand times. They are lovers, Aggie and he, and therefore liars of necessity. They are lovers, he and Aggie, and therefore killers by trade, strangling their separate marriages. They are lovers, Aggie and he, he and Aggie, and therefore conspirators in that they are sworn to secrecy and know exactly what to say in the event of a trap.