She was on the bed, her head dangling off the near side, her arms splayed out, legs flung toward the far edge. A spray of blood flecked with gray painted the ceiling, and more of it streamed down the bed covering, puddling thick and black on the lush carpet under my feet. My stomach gave a quick flip and I swallowed hard, afraid I was going to lose the fish tacos I had bought for dinner down in Pacific Beach.
“Sharon?” I said, sobbing the word.
But it wasn’t her, and I knew it almost at once. This woman had a hole in the middle of her forehead, just between the eyebrows. But she also had gray streaks in auburn hair and wide green eyes staring at me, and she was at least fifteen years older than Sharon. Attractive, or she had been before the bullet, and relatively fit, but thicker and less voluptuous.
I stared at her, uncomprehending, just as stupid as I had been while in Sharon’s bed, in her arms, clutched between her thighs. I was still standing there, unable to move, my gullet spasming, when the door creaked behind me.
“I see you’ve met Sharon,” Terry Paulson said.
I spun around, shined the light at him. She stood behind him, glorious as ever. “But … if that’s Sharon …”
“It is,” Terry said. “Meet Lacie.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That, my friend, is self-evident. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen and talk this over, shall we?”
I let them lead me back downstairs. Lights were on now and the house felt more like it usually did, except there was a dead woman upstairs and I was utterly lost.
We sat at their big rustic wooden dining table, and Terry filled me in. Sharon—no, Lacie—sat close to him, occasionally stroking his arm, smoothing his hair. She made no effort to touch me, and I was too afraid to try reaching out to her.
“Here’s the deal,” Terry said. “I have this big house, this terrific life, right? Or I did, until I lost a bundle in the meltdown. Since then, things have been getting tight. We were in serious debt—another month or two or five, and we would have lost all this. Sharon wouldn’t have wanted that. She has never been particularly healthy, and worse these last couple of years, sick all the time. We had major insurance policies on each other, of course, and I kept thinking I’d be able to collect on hers in time to save everything. But although she was close to dying, she wouldn’t actually die. She was in pain, absolutely miserable, really, but she kept hanging on. Lacie and I, well … we couldn’t wait.”
“So you killed her?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? You killed her.”
“What the fuck do you mean by that?” I slammed my palm against the table, making it jump.
“You’ve been having an affair with her for months. There’s plenty of documentation of that. Phone records, saved texts, surveillance video showing you coming to the house at all hours. I bet if we subpoenaed the GPS records of your company car, they’d back that up.”
“But … not with her. Not the real Sharon.”
“Phone records and texts don’t divulge that kind of detail. So you’ve been having an affair with a married woman. Tonight, she called you. You came over. I guess you fought or something, and … well, you just snapped.”
“But that’s not what happened!” I said.
He smiled, and the jam I had put myself in started to become clear.
“It doesn’t have to be what happened,” he continued. “But it might have been, and we can prove that version if we have to. There’s video of you coming in here tonight. There’s her phone call—her last phone call, to your cell. That’s your company car outside.”
I stared at them, my gaze shifting from one impassive face to the other. “What kind of sap do you think I am?”
“How many kinds do there have to be?” Lacie asked, throwing me the kind of smile that a day ago would have caused a stirring at my groin instead of nausea in my gut. “We only needed one. It was down to you or the pool service guy, and I liked you better.”
Terry picked up where he had left off. “Or it could go this way. Lacie has an apartment, down by the Cove. We were all there tonight, the three of us. A kinky little threesome. Some man-on-man action, along with both of us on Lacie.”
“I don’t—”
“I don’t either,” Terry said. “That’s why it’s beautiful. A man in my position, with my reputation, would never make up something like that just for an alibi. It’s too embarrassing. So everybody will believe it. I’m still important enough in this town to keep it quiet, but the people who need a story—a few detectives, a prosecutor or two—we’ll give them a story they’d never imagine was a lie.”
“You killed her.” I was slow, but I wasn’t impenetrable after all. “You fucking killed her for the insurance money!”
“I guess you weren’t with him for his brains,” Terry said.
“Not hardly,” Lacie agreed. “To be fair, that wasn’t what he saw in me, either.” She squeezed her arms together, popping her breasts out. “It’s all about the jugs, isn’t it, Mike?”
I scraped my chair back, stood up fast enough to knock it over with a loud crash. I picked it up, then realized I had put my fingerprints on it. They were all over the house. I’d never be able to wipe them all. “You make me sick!” I said. “Both of you!”
“We’re not particularly interested in your opinion of us, Mike,” Terry said. “You were meant to serve a purpose. You’ve served it. Now, you either go to prison for Sharon’s murder, or you alibi us and we alibi you. Sharon goes into the unsolved files, and everybody’s happy.”
“Not everybody. Not me. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“You stay out of jail. We’ll help you out financially, of course. Say, fifty thousand when the insurance check clears. Another fifty in three years, if you’ve kept up your end of the bargain. Not life-changing money, but a pretty nice little bonus.”
I buried my face in my hands, paced the kitchen, scratched my head, my arms. Everything itched. How could I have been so stupid? I wondered. Then I looked at Lacie, and remembered.
She had been straight with me in the beginning. She’d told me she did what she needed to do to get money. What made me think that fucking me was any different from fucking Terry?
And that face I’d seen in the window one day, behind a sheer curtain. That had been Sharon, who had known, even then, that something was happening around her. She could have called out, could have told somebody. Was she a willing accomplice in all this? Knowing she wouldn’t die but couldn’t really live, wanting to let Terry get the big paycheck?
That was what I told myself when I finally agreed to Terry’s plan. I kept telling myself that through the investigation, the hours and hours of interrogation. When it was over, when it didn’t look like I was being fired because of suspicion, charges never leveled against me, Gold Shield cut me loose. The fifty grand came in handy then, and I was barely able to stretch it for the three years until the next fifty.
When he brought me that second fifty, a surprisingly small bundle in a reusable Ralph’s grocery bag, Terry looked worn out. His face was blotchy and lined, his hair unkempt. Dark half-moons drooped from his eyes like a crying woman’s mascara. We had become something resembling friends over the past three years, meeting at bars every now and then, or at the Cove, watching the seals play, talking about our lives. Mostly me talking, him listening; many of my friends had drifted away after the murder, losing my job. I didn’t have people I could talk to who really understood what I’d been through, except him.
But not this time.
He sat in my living room, on a Goodwill couch, slouched forward with his arms on his knees, doing almost all the talking. “I never should have married her,” he said. “That’s when it all started to go wrong.”