Ragged breath, and then the rest of it in the past tense, without qualifiers, her eyes squeezed shut and her voice congealed: “Afterward he went into the bathroom and I crawled off the bed and managed to put on my clothes, and his gun was lying there on the table, and I picked it up, and he came out of the bathroom wearing his robe and smiled at me as if nothing terrible had happened, as if it was perfectly normal, and said ‘I love you, Janice,’ just like that, and went over and picked up his cigarettes from the nightstand and lighted one, and I walked around in front of him and I... he looked at me and saw the gun and he said, ‘Oh Christ, Janice, not this again’ and I... the gun... his head just seemed to... I couldn’t look at him lying on the floor, all the blood... outside there were voices and somebody pounding on the door... I couldn’t think, I ran into the bathroom...”
She sagged a little as the last of it dribbled out. Gail Kendall caught her arm, held her with a kind of fierce protectiveness.
Dry-mouthed, I asked, “If you were so distraught, why did you close the window after you were out? Make sure the catch was fastened?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember anything about that. I was in the bathroom and then I was outside and then I was in Gail’s car driving away. It’s all... fragmented. Unreal, as if it were happening to somebody else.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Kendall said, “You don’t believe her, do you?”
“Why should I? The story’s convincing, she’s convincing, but so was Erskine the day he poured out his lies to me. I swallowed that sob story, but I’m not swallowing any more without corroboration.”
“Corroboration,” Sondra Nelson said in a dull voice. “All right, if that’s what you want.”
She pushed away from the older woman, unzippered her windbreaker. And then in a series of swift movements she opened her skirt and let it fall, caught the waistband of a pair of white briefs and yanked them partway down, and with her other hand lifted the blouse to her breasts — exposing the entire middle of her body.
Healing scrapes and welts, bruises still purple-black and piss-yellow at the edges. From sternum to crotch, a madman’s abstract design hammered out on human flesh.
“Well?” Kendall said savagely. “Now do you believe her?”
I’d seen and heard enough, too much. All of a sudden there were too many conflicting emotions swirling around inside me. I turned away from the two of them. Walked toward my car, not fast and not slow. I could feel the .38 inside my belt, the barrel digging into my hipbone, the grip tight against the pad of fat above. It felt like a dirty hand — Ira Erskine’s hand.
Hard steps behind me, hurrying to catch up. Hard fingers gripping my arm to halt me before I reached the car. Gail Kendall in my face again. “Are you going to see Battle now?”
“...No. Not now.”
“But eventually. You’ll still turn us in.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’d never be convicted, you know we wouldn’t. No jury would ever convict two battered women in a case like this. I don’t care about myself, but Sandy... you’d be putting her through more hell for nothing. Nothing!”
I shook my head. It had a loose feel on the stem of my neck.
“Hasn’t she suffered enough? You heard her, she’s sick about what he made her do. She’ll never get over it. Isn’t that punishment enough?”
“She killed a man,” I said, only this time it sounded hollow — a meaningless phrase in a legal brief, words blowing in the wind.
“Not a man,” Kendall said, “a rabid dog like the one I lived with for ten years. She killed a rabid dog to save her life, the same as the county SWAT team killed one to save mine.”
“You’ll hear from me. I won’t do anything without letting one of you know first.” I started moving again.
“When?” she said behind me. “When?”
I had no answer for her; I had no answer for myself. All I could do at this point, all I did, was to get into the car and drive the hell away from there.
20
“I thought I had it all figured when I went out there,” I said to Kerry. “Cut-and-dried, and no matter what Sondra Nelson said it wouldn’t make any difference. But when I heard and saw what he’d done to her, those bruises... it did something to me. Now it doesn’t seem half as simple as it did before.”
“He must’ve been a monster. Erskine.”
“Yeah. But I already knew that... Oh, hell, I don’t know. I just feel bad for both of them. Smug and self-righteous, Kendall called me, and she was right. I paid lip service to having compassion, but I didn’t take enough of it out there with me.”
“Are you saying you’re sorry you found out the truth?”
“Christ, no. I’d feel twice as bad if I’d heard it later, after I dumped my version on Battle.”
The water in the tub was cooling; I turned the hot water tap on full blast again. Steam rose in thick floating layers that gave Kerry, seated on the clothes hamper across the bathroom, an ethereal quality, as if I were talking to an ectoplasmic representation rather than a real person.
She said, “You are going to tell him, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know yet. I still haven’t made up my mind.”
“You will,” she said.
“Will I? What makes you so sure?”
“Because you know they won’t confess of their own volition and Battle probably won’t find out without your help. There’s nobody else to see that justice is done.”
“Honorable, dutiful, Mr. Do-the-Right-Thing.”
“That’s you. You couldn’t let two people get away with murder.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Compromise your principles, jeopardize your career, for a pair of strangers—?”
“A pair of badly used human beings.” My principles aren’t exactly what they used to be, either, I thought, but I kept that to myself. “Kerry, what would you have done in Sondra Nelson’s place?”
“Come on, that’s not a relevant question.”
“It’s relevant to me. Suppose that screwball ex of yours was stalking you—”
“Ray? He may be crazy, but he was never abusive.”
“All right, but suppose he was and he’d been stalking you ever since you left him. And he found you and threatened your life in front of witnesses and you knew he meant it. Would you throw away the new life you’d built, a man you loved and who loved you, and start running and living in fear again? Or would you take desperate action?”
“I can’t answer that,” Kerry said. “No woman can, really, unless she’s living in such a situation.”
“Right. Exactly. You get pushed to the limits and then you find out. So it is possible you’d’ve done just what Sondra Nelson did. You don’t rule it out.”
“I doubt I could kill anyone.”
“Not even if you were beaten and raped? Not even to save your own life?”
“In self-defense, yes. I came close to doing just that not so long ago, don’t forget.”
“I’ll never forget that night in Cazadero.”