I was a part of the scenery by then. I’d used the phone, so it was no surprise to see me taking the elevator. I got out on the eighth floor and knocked on the door numbered 829.
Star certainly was not expecting me. She would have closed the door in my face but I pushed past her.
Her room was what they call a junior suite. Bigger than a regular room, it had enough space for a small settee with a stuffed chair at its side. I sat in the chair and put up my hands, indicating that I just wanted to talk.
“That detective from Diablerie is coming,” she said, trying to move me out with words. “He wants to turn you over to the Colorado authorities.”
“You mean Winston Meeks?” I said.
That stopped Star with her mouth open.
“And Harvard just left your room,” I added. “I doubt if he’ll be back anytime soon.”
“What do you want, Ben?”
“You say my name like you’ve known it your whole life,” I said, “and here I don’t even recognize you.”
“How can that be, Ben? You and I were together when you killed a man.”
I felt a coolness run through my chest like the breeze out of an open tomb.
“I don’t remember anything about anything like that,” I said, almost absolutely certain of my ignorance.
“Then why did you come to my readings?”
“The Diablerie dinner was because my wife made me go,” I said. “The college was to get you to tell me why you’re doing this to me.”
“I’m only protecting myself,” she said. “The first time in my life that I do something right and you come out of the woodwork to threaten me with more trouble.”
“Miss Knowland,” I said. “You have to understand me. I don’t want anything from you.”
“Not now,” she said. “Not now that I’ve told the authorities all that I know. Now if there’s a trial, you’ll be the one in the docket. You’ll be the one to go to prison. I’m not going to pay for what you did.”
As she spoke, Barbara Knowland’s face distorted into a kind of malleable rage, like that of an infant who does not comprehend her own emotion. She had worried for years about someone like me coming out of the shadows.
“But I don’t remember,” I said.
“How can I believe that?”
“Why would I kill anyone?” I asked. “What reason would I have?”
“Blind, drunken rage,” she said. “We went up to his house together. I just wanted you to help me move my things. It was you who went crazy. He told you to get off of his property and let his guard down. That’s when you hit him with your crowbar or whatever.”
“If I was such a demon, then why didn’t you turn me in to the cops?”
“You know we didn’t do things like that back then,” she said again, like an old friend. “Things happened and we just moved on.”
It was true as far as it went. Drug dealers and burglars, car thieves and gangs were all a part of my social landscape back in my drinking days. I could remember many crimes and criminals that I would have never even considered reporting.
But I had never been with anybody who’d committed murder. At least I didn’t remember being there.
Squat and middle-aged, Barbara “Star” Knowland peered into my eyes. She was nervous, scared of me, of what I might do. I raised my hand to scratch my eyelid and she flinched. This fearful gesture was more damning than her verbal accusation. She was actually afraid of me. Maybe she really had seen my rage before.
I thought about Svetlana sprawled on the floor where I had thrown her.
“Why don’t you sit down, Star?”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“What did you tell Meeks?” I asked her.
“I told him about Messier,” she said, screwing up her courage. “I told him what happened.”
“What happened?”
“I, I don’t think I should be talking to you about it. If there’s a trial, you could use it.”
The meanings behind the words that my accuser spoke went through me like waves of electricity. She had seen me, remembered me, called my wife’s magazine, called the Denver prosecutor. Because of her I might soon be in prison clothes standing trial for a crime I had no inkling of.
I stood up, feeling the strength in my thighs. I reached out to take Barbara by the arm. She opened her mouth and I said, “Do not yell,” and she remained silent as I pulled her toward me.
I witnessed all these events unfolding as if they were the actions of another man.
“What happened that night?” I asked her.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Listen, bitch,” I said. “You came up to me when I didn’t know you. You blindsided me and then you turned me over to the cops. You are the only one who knows about this, as far as I can see. And so tell me what you know right now.”
There was a threat wrapped up in my words to her. I wondered if I meant it.
“We met in a bar outside of Boulder,” she said. “You had been drinking already, and Sean Messier had kicked me out of his house—”
“You were his girlfriend?”
“I was fucking him and he was feeding me. But I got pregnant and he didn’t want to pay for an abortion. He drove me down to the highway and put me out on the side of the road. It was two days after that that I met you. We started messing around and I told you about what he’d done. I was hoping that maybe you’d help me with some cash but you said that we should go up to his house and steal enough for the abortion.
“I, I didn’t want to rip Sean off, but he did have my things in a trunk, so I said we could go. I knew his flight schedule and so we drove up there after he was gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘his flight schedule’?”
“He was a small-plane pilot who worked doing deliveries for a farm-supply company.”
“Were we drinking?” I asked.
“You had a couple of quarts of whiskey in the trunk. We drank one of the bottles on the way up to his place. You broke through his big picture window in the living room and then I went upstairs to get my trunk and, and the money he kept in a cigar box in his bathroom. It was you who said that we should fuck in the living room. If you hadn’t started that shit, we would have been out of there before he got back. If we weren’t doin’ it, we would have heard him before he dragged you off me and took you outside.”
“I thought you said he was working?” I said, squeezing her arm tighter.
“He was supposed to be but he came back. It was raining that day... I don’t know.”
“What happened then?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“You guys went outside. I was afraid to go. I knew how mad Sean could get. You guys went out there and then, maybe five minutes later, you came back and told me that you took care of him.”
“I told you that I killed him?”
“You said that you took care of him,” she said with real fear in her voice. “I didn’t know what to do. You told me that we had to get out of there, but I was afraid to be with you. You told me that you didn’t care about me anyway. You put on your clothes, took the money, and left.
“After you drove off, I went to see if I could help, help Sean. But he was dead. The side of his forehead was crushed. So I took his car and drove it to Berkeley, where my sister lived. I told her what had happened and we had the car junked.
“You’re hurting me, Ben.”
I was gripping her upper arm as hard as I could. I released my hold, thinking of what she had said. I didn’t remember any of it — not the woman, not the pilot, not the murder, not anything.
Barbara had fallen into the chair, holding her hurt biceps with her good hand.
“I don’t know you,” I said.
“How could you forget?” she asked. “You killed him.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, floundering. “You didn’t see me do it.”