“She tried to reach your beeper,” Barbara said.
“Mm,” I said. I had forgotten to take it out of the glove compartment after I left the prison.
“She was crying. She wanted you to know that it was over. And that she was sorry Bob was going to force you out.”
I laughed. “Good of her to leave a message.”
She looked down on me from her moral height. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”
Well, yeah, actually, I’d thought I had her fooled completely. But I decided not to say so. “That crazy Patricia,” I murmured.
“I told her not to worry about it,” Barbara said then. “I told her this is just what you do. It’s just the thing you do.”
“Right. Sure.”
“Though, for the life of me, you don’t seem to get much pleasure out of it.”
I lifted one shoulder. Pleasure was a serious business to Barbara too.
After another moment of silence, I reached across the table and took up the ring. I held it between finger and thumb, turned it this way and that, watching the light from the small chandelier above us glint on it. There was an inscription on the inner curve. Just her name: Barbara Everett. It had been her new name at the time and seemed very romantic.
I closed my fist around the ring. “… hard on the kid,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Won’t this be kind of hard on the kid?”
Her eyebrows arched. “Good time to think of it, Ev.” I tried to answer her, but that stone, my heart-some laborer in the inner hell kept rolling it up into my throat and letting it sink down, bang, into my chest again. Poor Davy, I thought miserably. Poor little guy. With Barbara over him every moment, loving, grim and good. Who was going to teach him how to fool around? How to disobey? How to fart in silence and get everyone to blame the kid sitting next to him? Who would tell him that the best way to deal with a bully was to understand his insecurities and then bring your elbow real fast across the bridge of his ugly nose? Or how to nod at women when they told you what was right so you could get in their pants without too much palaver? How would he learn to shrug off the underdog sometimes and when to laugh up his sleeve at human suffering? The poor little nubbin. Barbara, with her great instincts for compassion and morality, with her big soul-Christ, without me, she would bury him in there.
“Look,” I said, my voice shaky. “Is it just the girls? Is it just the women you mind so much?”
She looked at me, wondering.
“I mean, look, we don’t have to have a marriage like other people. You could have guys sometimes,” I said. “I’d kill them, sure, but you could have them before that. I mean, what the hell, it’s two thousand years since Jesus died, we can make our own rules now.”
A fatuous proposition, made to her. “Maybe that’s your idea of marriage, Ev,” she said, as I might have guessed she would. “But it isn’t mine.”
“Why the hell not?” I answered desperately. “It’s not as if you loved me.”
That look of wonder was fixed on her face, but her eyes had gone glassy, her lips were trembling again.
“God, you’re stupid,” she said softly. “You don’t know anything about anybody else. You make people up in your head, and you decide what they’re thinking, and whatever they do, you just stuff it into the pattern of what you’ve decided about them. And you don’t know anything.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Now get out of here. Please.”
But I sat there all the same awhile longer. Unclasping my hand, bouncing the ring on my palm for a bit. I pressed my own lips together to keep them still.
Then finally I slipped the ring into my shirt pocket and stood up to go.
2
It was about twenty past nine, I guess, when I left my apartment. Later, Mark Donaldson told me that that was exactly when he had called. I figure the phone must have rung as I was clomping gloomily down the stairs, but I didn’t hear it, or if I did, I didn’t pay it any mind. Barbara didn’t answer it either.
Eventually, Donaldson hung up. He had already tried my beeper, but it was still in the glove compartment of my car. He sat back in his chair and sighed.
By then, he had put in a full day at the paper-and he still had a story to write up. The story was about an enraged wife who tried to set her husband’s comic book collection on fire and was killed in the blaze that followed. Donaldson was in a hurry to get the story done so he could get home for some sex with his own wife before she went to sleep. He was in no mood to chase me down, and he wondered, anyway, if it was even worth the trouble.
The reason he was calling was this: He had been sitting at his desk, hammering out the lead to the comic book story when a call was transferred to him from the city desk. Bob had already gone home and Anna Lee Daniels was there, the night city editor.
“Mark,” she sang, across the big room, “some drunken moron on three.”
“Thanks,” said Donaldson. He picked up.
A guttural voice belched out his name. “Zis Donaldson?”
“Yeah?”
“Zabout ti one of you azzoles got wise bout de nigger.”
Donaldson tucked the receiver comfortably between cheek and shoulder and returned to tapping out his story on the keyboard. He liked it when crazy people called him; it made for some funny stories.
“Well, thank you for sharing that thought with me,” he said. “What exactly are we talking about?”
“Aren you de one culled Benny bout de-uuuuuhhhhh-Beachum caze?” said the guy on the phone.
Donaldson stopped typing. He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “So who are you?”
“Me? Me? I’m Arsley. Who de fug dya think?”
“Arsleywho?”
“Lieutenan Arsley. I uz in charge of de investi-thing. Ingation. I’m retired.” This last came out “ritahed,” and was followed by a seizure of phlegmy coughing.
“Ardsley,” Donaldson said. “In Florida?”
The man on the phone wheezed a few times and then said, “Sarasota, yeah. So you figured out it uz de nigger, huh. Too you bazzards long enough.”
Donaldson reached for his pad and pen. He was developing that heavy-lidded expression he got when he was annoyed. He didn’t think he was going to get much of a funny story out of this call. In which case, he was inclined to feel this nasty creep could more or less go to hell.
“We’re talking about the Beachum case,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, nigger punk, druggie peeza shit. Warn Ruzzel. Heezawon.”
“What?”
“Heezawon!” Ardsley shouted. “Whattayou deaf?”
Heezawon, Donaldson repeated to himself. “He’s the one?”
“Yeah, whydaya think I’m callin’ here? Fuckin health? Warn Russel.”
“Warn who?”
“Russel. Warn. Thuzis name. Nigger druggie shit.”
“You’re telling me that he’s the one who shot-what’s her name-that woman in the store?”
“Eah, yeah, yeah. Shot her. Sure, he shot her. Whodaya think? I knew the minneh he came in. But the CA, she already made a big fuss, see, cause she go’ thiz whi guy gotta show she doin juztiz. Too many niggers gettin the needle. Fuckin Supreme Court azzoles say so. Ga do juztiz now. Sh’already talked to the-uuuuuuhhhhh-papers. Press. Big speech at the courthouse. Dred Scott.” Ardsley favored Donaldson with his impression of a whining woman. “ ‘Gonna get de death penalty. I’m so tough. Gah get juztiz. Yah, yah, yah.’ Then iz Russel come in, I say, ‘Heeza gah! Heeza gah!’ She says, ‘Whattaya talkin?’ I say, ‘Heeza gah!’ She says, ‘Wherza proof?’ ‘Proof?’ I say. ‘Lookim! Nigger peeza shit. Druggie peeza shit.’ I mean, I’m no bigot or nothin he jus di it. Thazzall. She say, ‘Bushit.’ She say, ‘No place peep lak you on de fuckin force.’ Bitch. I say, ‘Fahn!’ I say, ‘Fuck you, bitch. Kill de wrong guy. S’your funeral.’ Pfffftt.” This noise was apparently a laugh of some sort and was followed by another round of gurgling coughs. Then, suddenly, the ex-cop’s tone of voice changed. He became more serious. In fact, he sounded worried. “I ga go.”