“Yeah, but that’s exactly the point. I’m not really that person anymore.”
“Well, we’re different,” Karen said. “You want to sell magazines, and I want to maintain my identity. Karen Hill. Don’t you think it sounds better?”
“It’s a nice name,” Tina Noor said, “but no one knows who Karen Hill is.”
“I do.”
“I mean everyone’s familiar with Karen DiCilia. You were in the papers again when Ed Grossi was killed. People are interested in what you think about… what it’s like to be associated with those people and live a normal life.”
“A normal life,” Karen said.
She moved to the umbrella table, reached into a straw beachbag and brought out a pack of cigarettes. Tina’s eyes remained on the bag, lying on its side, open now. She looked at Karen lighting the cigarette, Karen sitting down in one of the deck chairs. Tina’s eyes returned to the straw bag.
She said, “Is that a gun in there? In the bag?”
Karen nodded.
“Can I ask why you have it?”
“Why does anyone have a gun?” Karen said.
“I mean, of course for protection; but do you feel for some reason your life might be in danger?”
“I’m Karen Hill, I was born in Detroit, Grosse Pointe. I’m forty-four. I was married to Frank DiCilia five and a half years. I never asked him what he did. I never asked him why he had a gun. That particular gun, as a matter of fact.” Karen paused. “But now I know.”
“Would you tell me?”
Karen drew on the cigarette, the smoke dissolving in the afternoon glare. Karen seemed unaffected by the heat, though she was perspiring beneath the caftan, and when the writer left she’d go in the pool… come out, shower, it would be time for cocktails. Wait for someone to come.
She said, “Until Ed Grossi’s death, I hadn’t had a cigarette in sixteen years.”
Tina waited. “You feel the need?”
“It’s something to do.”
“Are you… in good health?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, I just wondered. You seem a little tired.”
“Or bored,” Karen said. “In a way, bored. In another way-well, that’s something else.”
“What is?”
“Why don’t you ask what my hobbies are?”
“What’re your hobbies?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Well, what do you do all day?”
“Nothing.”
“You have friends-”
“Are you asking?”
“Yeah, don’t you have friends?”
Karen drew on the cigarette, looked at it and let it drop to the brick surface.
“Not really.”
“Well, why don’t you go out more, do things? Travel maybe.”
“There are reasons,” Karen said.
“What reasons?”
“I told you you weren’t going to get much of a story. I don’t know why you insisted.”
“Because something’s going on,” Tina said, “and I think if you had just a little more confidence in me you might tell what it is.”
“It has nothing to do with confidence.”
“All right, trust. I promise I won’t write anything you don’t want revealed.”
“Revealed,” Karen said. “That’s exactly the kind of word I don’t want to see. Karen DiCilia’s Secret Revealed.”
“I don’t know why I used it,” Tina said, sitting forward in her chair, feeling close to something and forgetting her casual-reporter pose. “It’s a written word, but it’s really not the kind I use. I’m interested in your point of view, how you feel about things, rather than your effect on me. If you know what I mean.”
“Which is what? How do you see me?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I mean I haven’t made any judgments. Right away I think of those words again. Karen DiCilia’s Secret Not Revealed. A very smashing looking woman who keeps to herself, has a gun-”
“Don’t mention that.”
“Isn’t exactly hiding but seems watchful, guarded, quietly aware of something going on she won’t talk about. You must realize you’ve got everybody wondering about you.”
Karen didn’t say anything. She sat with her legs crossed, one slender hand touching the side of her sunglasses.
“All right, if I do a Karen Hill rather than a Karen DiCilia,” Tina said, “do you have any early pictures of yourself?”
“I may have,” Karen said. “I’d have to look.”
A woman by the name of Epifania Cruz, forty-two, had given her daughter and son-in-law a wooden chair that was over two hundred years old and originally from Andalucia. The chair and baby Alicia, her daughter, were brought to Miami from Cuba the night of April 27, 1961, following the defeat at the Bay of Pigs.
It was a low straight chair, more like a three-legged stool with a back support. Epifania gave it to Alicia and her son-in-law with apprehension because he was one of those who dressed like a disco dancer and spent his time at the Centro Español even though he never had a job. Epifania was in Abbey Hospital because of a problem with her colon, when she learned Alicia and her son-in-law, the pimp, had moved away quickly, getting out before they were taken to court, and had left much of what they owned in their rented home on Monegro Avenue.
Nearly a month had passed; but maybe the chair was still in the house. Epifania was told no one else had moved into it. Maybe she’d be lucky.
She went there at night. If she found the chair and carried it away, she didn’t want people to see her even though she considered the chair her own property. She brought with her a large kitchen knife to use to pry open the door, but found she didn’t have to. The door was unlocked.
With the street light shining in the window, Epifania could see well enough. The chair wasn’t in the living room. It wasn’t in the kitchen. She opened the door to the bedroom and stood in the opening. It was too dark back there to see anything. She raised her hand holding the kitchen knife, reaching for the light switch. There was an explosion and Epifania was blown back into the hall, almost to the kitchen.
Roland came out of the bedroom with the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun under his arm, reached into the kitchen to turn on the light and looked down at the woman.
He said, “Shit. You ain’t Vivian.”
MAGUIRE SAID TO LESLEY, “Just tell him I’m whacked out, probably coming down with something.”
“I don’t wonder,” Lesley said. “The three of you get it on at one time, or you and the guy take turns? Hey, is he Andre?”
“Yeah, it’s Andre,” Maguire said, “and his wife. We haven’t seen each other in awhile, so I want to take the day off, spend some time with ’em.”
“He just loaned you his car a week ago, didn’t he?”
“Hey, Lesley,” Maguire said, “you’re gonna be late for work. Tell him, okay?”
“Brad’s pissed at you anyway for not coming back yesterday. He’s gonna want to know where you went.”
Maguire reached the end right there. He said, “Tell him whatever you want. I don’t give a shit.”
“Ca-al!”
She never called him Cal. Did she? What difference did it make? He went into his apartment, leaving Lesley standing by her yellow Honda. (The Mercedes was parked two blocks away.)
Jesus, hunched in front of the television set, adjusting the picture, said, “Look, the house on Monegro.” A covered human form on an ambulance stretcher was being carried down the front steps as the voice-over newscaster described the mysterious shooting, the murder of a woman named Epifania Cruz. The newscaster said the police were now looking for the woman’s daughter and son-in-law, the last tenants of the house.
Vivian Arzola, holding a coffeepot, watched from the stove. She said, “You know what it’s like?” Neither Maguire nor Jesus looked at her, watching the woman’s body being lifted into the van now. “Like in a movie, the people run out of the house, they reach safety just in time and the house blows up.”
They were looking at a commercial now. When Maguire realized it he turned off the television set. Next thing they’d be watching Dinah Shore and Merv Griffin. He said, “We got to do it tonight. Figure out how and set it up-”