All his training, all his experience, everything he knew had taught him never to trust anything a defense lawyer said. His head snapped up and an ominous look came into his eyes. “Look,”
he warned, “if you think I’m going to-”
“Lie? I don’t want you to lie,” I insisted, as I bent forward and grabbed his arm. “I want you to tell the truth. You know: the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.”
“All right,” he said, mollified, “but what difference does it make if it’s me or one of the other people who headed up the investigation?”
I let go of his arm and sank against the wooden back of the booth. “All the difference in the world,” I said after I took another drink from the brown beer bottle. “The question is: Can you arrange it so you’re the one the prosecution calls?”
He thought about it for a moment, his head moving from side to side. “Yeah,” he said finally. “There were three of us. I’ll make sure I’m the only one available.” He looked down at his hands, and then looked up at me. “Just so long as you understand: I’ll answer any question they ask and I’ll answer every one of them as truthfully as I know how.”
“And I expect you to answer the questions I ask exactly the same way.”
I took one more drink and then held the bottle in front of me, examining the label, before I put it down. “I’d love to stay here and drink great liquor and chase beautiful women,” I said, nodding toward the woman at the bar with the red lipstick smeared across her mouth. “But I have to get home.”
As I slid out of the booth, Flynn glanced at Stewart. “I didn’t think it would ever happen, but Antonelli got himself engaged to be married.”
I knew him scarcely better than I knew Cassandra Loescher, but just like her, he seemed genuinely pleased. “That’s wonderful,” he said as he stood up and shook my hand. “Congratulations.”
I left them alone to finish their coffee and continue that long conversation, made up mainly of a companionable silence, by which they every night gave each other the encouragement to get through just one more day without a drink.
The wind that had lashed my face had stopped, and the rain, still heavy, fell straight down, surrounding the senses with a dull endless roar. The drunk on the sidewalk had fallen on his side, an empty pint of whiskey protruding from his coat pocket. I hesitated, then reached down and dragged him by the collar into the doorway under the neon sign. His eyes opened, and he looked at me, and then his head swung down onto his chest, and with water dripping off his cap and onto his face he started to snore.
I drove along the deserted streets and across the Morrison Street Bridge, wondering who was living under it tonight and where they went when they left, moving from one place to another, searching, I suppose, like the rest of us for something a little better, and finding, more often than not, something worse. A sense of the futility of it all started to close in on me. I picked up the car phone and called home, but when Jennifer did not answer by the third ring, I hung up, certain she had fallen asleep.
I was out of the city, driving along the tree-lined shore of the river, a few lights twinkling through the darkness. The rain began to let up, replaced by a murky gray drizzle. The headlights of a car appeared out of nowhere and a wave of water crashed against the windshield as it sped by. Then, as I left the river behind and followed the narrow lane that twisted through the hills and tun-neled under the trees, everything was covered with the still, black solitude of a starless night.
I came around the corner, anxious to get home, and thought at first I was having the first real hallucination of my life. At the top of the knoll, at the end of the gated drive, the house looked like it had been set on fire. Every light in every room, upstairs, downstairs, must have been turned on. Then, as I tried to convince myself I was seeing things, I heard it, sweeping down across the dancing shadows on the rolling green grass lawn, the hard-beating, pulse-pounding music of a jazz piano player, his fingers flying, crashing, on the keys. When I reached the door, the music was deafening, and when I got inside I had to hold my hands over my ears.
Barefoot, wearing only a pink nightgown, Jennifer was pushing the vacuum cleaner across the living room rug, her head bobbing up and down in time with the music. I dashed to the CD
player and turned it off. The noise of the vacuum cleaner filled the room and at first Jennifer did not seem to notice the difference. Then, she pulled up straight and looked around. A huge smile flashed on her face when she saw me standing there watching her. She switched off the vacuum cleaner.
“I thought I’d do a little housework while you were gone,” she explained, holding the black cord in her hand as if she meant to continue. “I cleaned the bathroom; I cleaned the kitchen; and after I vacuum in here…” she said, looking past me toward the dining room.
“It’s a little late to be doing this, isn’t it?” I asked as gently as I could. I took the cord out of her hand and hung it over the handle. “Why don’t we go to bed now.”
Her eyes were wild with a kind of eager excitement, as if there was something she could not wait to tell me. She put her hand on the side of my face and then reached around my neck and rose up on her toes. “I’m so happy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m so glad we found each other again. I’ve never felt this good in my life.” She let go of my neck and took hold of my hand. “Come on,” she said, as she led me toward the stairs. “Let’s go to bed.
“Carry me,” she said as we got to the top of the stairs. “Make love to me,” she said when we got to the bedroom door.
We tumbled down on the bed together, pulling and tearing at each other’s clothes, and lost all separate sense of ourselves in the white-hot act of love. At the end, when there was nothing left of me, I collapsed in her warm, smooth arms and staring into the darkness drifted into a wordless dream that had neither a beginning nor an end.
I woke up with a start and thought I had overslept, but it was still dark. Pulling the covers over my shoulder, I turned on my side and reached out to put my arm around Jennifer. She was too far away, and I moved closer and reached again. My hand fell across her pillow and then down across the sheet. She was not there.
I found her downstairs in the library, her legs tucked under her, curled up at the same end of the sofa, reading the same paperback novel she had been reading before. As soon as she heard me, she jumped to her feet.
“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
She was wide awake. “A little after three. I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? I tried to be quiet.”
I cinched tighter the terry cloth robe and squinted at the clock on the fireplace mantel to see if it was really the middle of the night.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said as she took my hand in both of hers.
For some reason, it struck me funny. “You couldn’t sleep? After what we did? I slept like a dead man. When I woke up and it was all dark I thought at first I must have slept straight through the day.”
We sat down next to each other on the sofa. An empty cup with a damp tea bag on the saucer was on the coffee table.
“Did you sleep at all?”
She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, wearing a blue silk robe, her hands in her lap. Her eyes darted around the room, staring first at one thing, then another. Her mouth twitched nervously at the corners and she started to rub her hands, stroking each finger in turn, over and over again.