She suddenly frowned like a child expecting to be reprimanded. “I shouldn’t speak that way of the dead, I suppose.” She looked in the bag. “What do we have here?”
“Linguine, salad.”
“Good,” Liz said without enthusiasm.
“You’re not happy?”
“I don’t know. I was feeling a little bit like Thai. But this is fine. I can eat this.”
“Are you really gonna bust my balls about dinner today?”
Liz rubbed his shoulder and forced a pout. “Big man have bad day?”
“Yeah, I had a bad day. And it’s not over. Blackmore’s freaking out because Georgina hasn’t come home, and the most important disc is the one I can’t find.”
Liz got down plates, opened up the take-out containers, and divvied up the pasta and salad. “I’ll get some Parm,” she said, and brought out a container of cheese from the refrigerator door.
“Are you hearing me?” he said.
“No matter how bad things are,” she said, “we still have to eat.”
They did so, standing at the counter. The kitchen table was littered with newspapers, bills, boxes of paperwork that appeared to have taken up permanent residence there. They twirled pasta onto their forks, speared salad leaves.
“So, what do you mean, you can’t find it?” Liz asked.
“Like I said. You know how Georgina’s been lately. Like she wants out. I started to wonder whether it was her that took it from Adam’s place. Tore her — well, her and Peter’s — place apart, but it wasn’t there.”
“Shit,” she said. “I wish you’d find it.” She smiled. “I’d like to watch it.”
“Jesus, Liz, the second I find it, I’m breaking it into a hundred pieces.”
“She was a foxy little thing, that Olivia.”
Clive shook his head, not wanting to talk about it.
“What?” Liz said. “That was a fun session. It was too bad what happened to her. She might have liked to come back for more. We didn’t even have to spike her wine like any of the others. She was coming on to Adam in the kitchen. She didn’t even know what we were all into. She just wanted to fuck a washed-up writer.”
“We should have,” he said.
“Should have what?”
“Spiked her wine like the others. It was a huge risk, bringing her into the mix and letting her remember what actually happened.”
“She never told a soul,” Liz said. “I mean, the girl was engaged, for God’s sake. Who was she going to tell? Her fiancé? I think she wanted one last wild experience before she tied the knot.” A grin. “You know, in the marriage sense. I seem to recall a bit of knot-tying that night.”
“Honestly, Liz, dial it down for Christ’s sake. This is no joke.”
“Okay, okay. You’re just so serious all the time.”
“I’m going to go through all the discs again tonight, at Peter’s. Maybe I missed her. I fast-forwarded through all of them once I got them out of Adam’s house. I didn’t see her. But maybe she was there, and I just went too fast.”
“It must have looked funny.”
“What looked funny?”
“All that fast-motion fucking. All those asses going up and down at a hundred miles an hour.”
Duncomb opened the fridge, took out a beer, uncapped it. “A cop came out to the campus today,” he said.
“Why?”
“About the Mason Helt thing. They’re still asking questions about that. I didn’t do anything wrong there.”
“Of course you didn’t,” she said, almost purring.
“I saw Peter run after him when he left. I think he was asking about Georgina, whether to file a missing persons report. I told him I’d look after this, but he doesn’t listen.”
Liz touched a finger to Duncomb’s chest, worked it between the buttons of his shirt, and made tiny circles on his chest. “I like Peter.”
“You like his tongue — that’s what you like.”
She withdrew the finger. “Maybe. But I feel terrible about Adam. There was a man who had it all.”
Duncomb didn’t respond.
“Don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t even mean sexually, necessarily. You know I love you, Clive. More than anyone else. I’m just saying he was an interesting man. And I can’t get over the irony of it. Here was a guy who loved the movies, and he dies when a movie screen falls on him. It’s like some sort of cosmic joke, you know? Like that jogger guy, years ago? You know, who wrote the book about it? And how does he die? He has a heart attack while out for a run. It’s like that.”
“I guess,” Duncomb said.
“You sound hurt. You can’t be jealous of a dead man.”
“I’m not.”
“And you have to be missing Miriam.” She smiled. “Be honest. She was very creative. I’d never seen anyone with that kind of imagination who wasn’t in the business.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Of course you do. That’s the way it’s always been. We love each other, and make love with others. But Miriam was very special. And totally bi. The rest of us basically swapped partners, but Miriam had as much fun with me or Georgina as she did with you or Peter.”
“It feels kind of strange, talking about Adam and Miriam like this. Now.”
“But, you see, what’ll help us through this is, we’ve always been good at separating the physical from the emotional. Otherwise, right now, we’d be devastated. Losing Adam and Miriam would, under different circumstances, be very hard for us. But I’m okay. Aren’t you?”
Duncomb hesitated. “Sure.”
“And you never had any reason to be jealous of Adam. The fact is, you were much alike. You’ve done things you don’t like to talk about, and so had he. Back to his days when he was in that gang. Those weren’t weekend bikers he hung out with. Those were bad, bad people. Some of them were never heard from again after Adam left that life behind.”
“I know.”
“I’ve always had this theory that he must have ripped them off before he left. I don’t think he ever made enough writing books to have a nice house like that, or that antique Jag. I think he did okay for himself. He talked about it some with me. He managed girls — I managed girls. We had that in common. But there were drugs, too. I think that’s where he got his money.”
“Maybe,” Duncomb said. “I’ve been thinking, with what’s happened, it’s time to put a stop to this kind of stuff.”
“Just because Adam’s playroom’s no longer available doesn’t mean things have to be over.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore with Peter and Georgina. He’s getting too skittish about things, and her, I don’t know how to read her anymore. I don’t trust her.”
“I get that. You get tired of people. We’ll find new friends.”
She stopped eating and slipped her finger into his shirt again, started to unbutton it. She pushed Duncomb up against the counter and pressed herself into him, felt his hardness grow against her. She wrapped her arms around herself, gripped the bottom of the tank top, and slipped it off over her head. She was wearing nothing underneath.
“Touch me,” she said.
Clive Duncomb did as he was instructed.
Liz, moving herself slowly against him, said, “Tell me again... starting from the beginning... and tell me very, very slowly... about when you shot that kid in the head.”
Thirty-one
When it got to be dusk, George Lydecker was itching to do it again. Actually, he’d been itching to do it all day, but daylight break-ins were not the smartest thing in the world.
He wanted to break into another garage. In a weird way, he needed to do it to calm his nerves. George hadn’t been to sleep in a day and a half.
He’d been pretty freaked-out the night before when he and his friends Derek and Canton and Tyler had tried to sneak into the Constellation, only to see the whole goddamn thing come crashing down. They were about to get busted by the manager for trying to smuggle Derek in by hiding him in the trunk of the car. George had even gotten out to try to argue that the guy didn’t have the constitutional right to search the vehicle.