“I feel a reminiscence coming on,” Lenhardt said. “Wife number one or two?”
“Two.”
“Didn’t you cheat on Two?” Nancy asked, knowing he had.
“Yeah, but I felt bad about it. You know, adultery isn’t what kills a marriage, it’s just-”
“A symptom,” Nancy said, winning a big laugh from Lenhardt, which made her feel good. Infante’s marital history and the accompanying litany of excuses were well known to them.
“Fuck you,” he said, but without bite. This, too, was part of the litany, the beginning of Infante’s marital beatitudes. “Yes, I slipped up, and she caught me, but I wanted to get back with her so bad, I was willing to do anything. Only she didn’t want me anymore. She wanted my house and my furniture, though. And all our money, not that there was so much of it, but her lawyer told her to drain every penny out of our joint accounts. The one thing she didn’t get from me was my key.”
“Really?” Nancy had been working on raising one eyebrow-she thought it was an expression that might have its uses in interrogations-and she tried it now. She caught a glimpse of her face in the metal napkin holder and the effect was far from what she intended. Even allowing for the distortion of the napkin holder, she looked silly, like a cartoon character trying to be menacing. “Calculating as she was, and she didn’t get the key from you, or change the locks?”
“Well”-Infante’s grin belied the hangdog dip of his head-“maybe I had a copy made one day, for emergencies, and she forgot about that. At any rate, one night when she was out, I let myself in.”
“To what purpose?” Lenhardt asked.
“That was the funny thing. I didn’t really have a plan when I went in. It was one A.M.-”
“Was this an alcohol-related crime, Mr. Infante?” Lenhardt pulled out his pad, pretended to take notes.
Again, his grin confessed all. “So I’m there, in my old living room, and I can already see how she’s, like, eliminating me from our life. I had this picture of a boat, kind of a painting, and I just really liked it. It’s not over the mantel, so she’s put it away somewhere. She doesn’t want it, but she won’t let me have it. That’s what she was like. The cat comes in and sniffs at my ankles and my feet, and I start thinking about what she loved most in the world-”
“Not the cat.” Nancy was remembering a famous bit of Baltimore lore about a lobbyist who had put his ex’s cat in the microwave.
“No. What kind of pervert do you think I am? But I look at the cat, twisting around my feet, and when I look at my feet, I see my shoes and I remember- Lorraine loved shoes. So I find a hacksaw in the basement-my hacksaw, by the way, from my toolbox-and I go upstairs and saw the heel off every right shoe in her closet.”
“Why every right heel?” The detail fascinated Nancy, an insight into Infante, maybe into all men.
“Because you don’t have to take both to ruin the shoes, you know? And she has, like, ten, twenty pairs of shoes. Half of ’em black, by the way. So when I’m done there’s just like this little pile of-” He gestured, incapable of defining what he had created.
“Dismembered shoes,” Lenhardt supplied.
“Yeah. I just left ’em in the middle of the rug.”
“She ever say anything?” Lenhardt again, the consummate cop, intent on getting the facts while the suspect was feeling voluble and expansive. Nancy was too dumbfounded to comment.
“Naw. I kept checking the precinct, too, but she never filed a report. So she knew it was me.”
Nancy finally thought of what she wanted to ask, the question she wanted to ask every mutt, but seldom got a chance. “Did it feel good, sitting on the floor of your old bedroom, sawing shoes?”
“Yeah. Well, actually, I cut my hand up a little, but I enjoyed every bit of it, absolutely.”
“You left trace evidence,” Lenhardt said, only half joking. “You could have fucked up your career over something like that.”
“Naw. I had a key, my name was still on the deed. And I bought those fuckin’ shoes, so I was just taking my half.”
“I wonder,” Nancy said, “what she did with all those leftover shoes. You think there’s a charity that specializes in giving shoes to one-legged women? Like, you might see a woman come hopping at you one day, and she’ll be wearing a pump from your ex-wife’s closet?”
“I tell you what,” Infante said. “That is the day I take a one-legged woman dancing.”
Their main courses arrived-cream-rich pasta dishes for the men, penne arrabbiata for Nancy, who had signed up for an online diet service that helped to track one’s daily calorie intake. It had a whole list of what you were supposed to eat in different kinds of restaurants, and it swore by penne arrabbiata in Italian places. She watched wistfully as the waiter grated fresh Parmesan on the others’ dishes, but shook him off with a noble little nod.
“There are about a million calories in that green stuff,” she said wistfully of the tapenade. Lenhardt and Infante, used to such non sequiturs from her, dug into their food, their chins hanging low enough to catch the steam from the hot bowls of pasta.
“What about you, Nancy?” Lenhardt asked. “You ever gotten back at anyone?”
“No one’s ever done anything to me. I mean, not like that.”
“Really?” For a moment, she thought Lenhardt knew she was lying. He was a good homicide police and being a good police meant knowing how to listen to everything, how to keep secrets and retain them for years, in the hopes they might be useful some day.
No, she told herself, trying to remember to chew her food with the careful “savoring” bites recommended by her e-Diet program, she was giving her sergeant too much credit. He didn’t know everything. The knowledge felt blasphemous, but good. It was not unlike the way she felt when she realized the priest at her cousin’s wedding was drunk, or that Father Mike couldn’t know if you didn’t tell him absolutely everything at confession. Even her computer wouldn’t know if she was lying, at day’s end, when she dutifully logged her meals. There was only one God and only He-she couldn’t help herself, she still thought of him as He in raised gilt letters-only He really knew what He wanted. Everybody else was just making it up as they went along.
Friday, June 26
10.
It was at the Catonsville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library that someone finally thought to call the police. The always busy branch was particularly antic on the third Friday in June, with children selling band candy and a community group gathering signatures on a petition for plantings along the Frederick Road median strip. Inside, the talk-loud, insistent talk, not at all library-like-was about the Fourth of July celebration, and whether there would be fireworks, given last year’s unfortunate incident. (A small fire, no injuries, but still it raised the question of whether the local Elks Lodge should be entrusted with this task again.)