The tension of faking my way through the phone call with Sykes dissipated as soon as I hung up, and in its place was a wave of fatigue that threatened to engulf and pull me under. I had to get home and lie down, even if sleep wouldn’t come. I could turn the air-conditioning up and pull the shades and peel off these clothes and be still for a moment Try to quiet the storms for a little while.
Ten minutes after leaving Lonnie’s, I pulled into my driveway, only to find my path to the garage blocked by the Reverend Hawkins’s big Lincoln.
“Blast,” I muttered. “Just what I need.”
I backed out and parked on the curb, then walked up the driveway, resisting the urge to carve my initials on his car door with my keys, and turned the corner.
Hawkins and his wife were standing on the back stoop, the wooden screen door open, twisting the knob and rattling the door. He was bent over, with her huddled behind him, frantically trying to get the door open.
I padded up undetected, then cleared my throat with a deep rumble that caused them both to jump and shake.
“You scared us to death!” she hissed.
“Can I help you?”
“We’re trying to get into my mother’s house,” he blustered. “And the door’s stuck.”
“The door’s not stuck, you moron,” I said. “I had the locks rekeyed.”
He turned bright red and it was like this huge bubble was inside him, trying to get out, and it was too big to come out either end so was just resounding within him, causing him great distress.
“How dare you!” the Ice Queen spat when she realized her fat husband had been rendered inarticulate by the shock.
“Look, lady, I’ve had a very long couple of days—”
“Open this door immediately!” she demanded.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”
This time she turned red as well. I tried to keep from laughing, but I swear the two of them looked like some kind of mutant radioactive overgrown radishes wearing clothes, and tacky ones at that.
“How dare you,” she sputtered again. “You have gone too far this time!”
“No, you two are the ones that have gone too far. How could you dig up that woman and subject her to an autopsy just to get your grubby, greedy little paws on something she didn’t even want you to have?”
The Ice Queen backed off, frightened, her breath coming in short gasps. The reverend fell back, a gagging sound erupting from his throat.
“And when they slice open your mother like a field-dressed deer,” I continued, pointing at him, “and lay her guts out on a steel table to examine them and they discover the truth, which is that she died quickly and peacefully from old age and I had nothing to do with it, then the two of you are going to be exposed as the small-minded, venal little shits that you are!”
They looked numb, almost in shock. I didn’t expect any of what I’d said to change anything or make any difference to them, but it felt good to say it.
“Now if you’ll move,” I said, turning to the Reverend Hawkins, “I’ll open the door to my house so you can get your stuff out. And I’d appreciate it if you’d make arrangements to take care of this as quickly as possible, because frankly, the sight of the two of you makes me want to barf.”
His bulbous, bloodshot eyes twitched in their sockets, but he stepped out of the way and he kept his mouth shut. I drew from this the conclusion that at least he wasn’t stupid. I unlocked the door, then turned my back on the two of them and started up the stairs. Behind me, the Reverend Hawkins did the only thing he could do under the circumstances; he started spouting Scripture at me. Religion, like politics, is one of the last refuges of the scoundrel.
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye shall serve—”
I sighed. Like I really need this crap.
“—but as for me and my house!” he yelled up the stairs. “We will serve the Lord!”
“Oh, shut up,” I muttered. “It’s not your house.”
Somehow sleep came, and when it did I fell into that black pit that had become sleep for me over the past few months. I can remember dreams, can remember a time when sleep brought rest and I woke up renewed. Now it was like weight on me, more like coma than slumber. And then, hours later, when I began to drift up toward the surface, a dream came to me that was so vivid it was like a knife in the belly. In the dream, I relived the first time I ever made love with Marsha. It was a dream beyond the erotic. Sex dreams always seem to concentrate on a certain specific and somewhat narrow focus, a vision that converges on body parts and visual movement. This was different. In the dream, I smelled her, felt her, heard her, tasted her, saw her. In the dream every sense came alive in ways that I seldom experienced while awake. I remembered so vividly the sounds she made as I touched her, the way her lips pouched out and her eyes narrowed when she was aroused. The kittenish, almost mewling sounds that erupted from her throat as she came; sounds of pleasure and surrender.
At least I thought then that her sounds were of surrender, but knew now that Marsha never surrendered. There was a part of her inside, a core place that never surrendered no matter how intense the assault, how powerful the desire, how desperate the yearning. There was a part of her that was hidden and would remain forever hidden, and in the end she turned me away, perhaps because I had threatened that place inside her in ways that no one ever had before.
I awoke in pain, partially from my own pressured arousal and engorgement, and partially from the end of the dream wherein I realized for the first time that she was gone, that I had lost her. Marsha was somewhere else now, and I was no longer part of her world. I was her history.
The world had realigned itself and I hadn’t even realized it. Nothing was the same. She had been part of the structure of my life and now that structure had collapsed. I would have to start again, somehow, and adjust to a new world.
Shift happens.
It was midafternoon when I woke up and I had to see her; not to hold on, not to beg in desperation, but to close out the accounts and say goodbye. I picked up the phone, still half asleep, then decided that wasn’t the way to do it.
I ran hot water and plastered a steaming washcloth across my face. The heat soaked in to the bone and I rubbed until my skin felt raw. Outside, the reverend and his awful wife were gone. I checked the doors to the house to make sure they were locked, then started around the front to the car.
The tiny plastic strip of a miniblind moved in Crazy Gladys’s window next door as I passed. I turned and faced the window as I walked by and gave her a slight smile. The blinds jerked as she pulled away from the window.
Forty minutes later I knocked on Marsha’s door. With the Porsche gone, there was no way to tell if she was home. I stood there for a few moments after knocking, then started to leave. The door opened behind me as I stepped off the porch.
“Oh, hi,” I said, turning. “Didn’t know if you were home or not.”
She wore a pair of denim maternity jeans with some kind of billowy top over them. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore no makeup. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead and a gray smudge on her cheek. And the seemingly permanent circles under her eyes were particularly vivid today.
And yet she was beautiful. I tried not to look at her.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “C’mon in.”
“Look, if it’s a bad time …”
“No, c’mon.” She stood aside and held the door open for me. I stepped into the hallway of her condo and stopped, startled.
There were moving boxes everywhere, piled in the hall, stacked in the foyer.
I turned to her. “Looks like you’ve been busy.”
“Been a crazy couple of days,” she said. “C’mon back.”
Marsha closed the door and threaded her way between the boxes down the hall to the living room. I followed her, stepping around the boxes as well. The built-in bookcases in her living room were empty, little dust lines the only evidence of the books that once filled the shelves.
She turned, faced me. “I meant to call you,” she said.
“Did you? I tried to call you but couldn’t get through.”
“The phone’s been tied up.”
“And when it’s not,” I said, perhaps more coldly than I intended, “you aren’t picking up.”
She tucked her chin, looked away from me. “I’m sorry, Harry.”
“So where you going?”
She sighed. “I’m leaving town. I can’t stay here. Not now.”
“You could have another job with a phone call,” I said.
She looked up at me. “And spend the rest of my life here with everyone knowing what’s happened? This is a small town. I won’t have people whispering behind my back at cocktail parties. I have some pride left. Not much, but some.”
“Oh, lack of pride’s not your problem, babe. Not at all.”
I crossed my arms and leaned against the door frame. “So where you going?”
“I’m going to live with my aunt Marty,” she said. “At least until the baby’s born.”
“That was her that called when I was here, right?”
“We were working out the last of the details,” Marsha said. “I knew two weeks ago I’d be moving. I knew it was all going to end at the office.”
I stared at her and shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, me, too. So where’s Aunt Marty? Where are you moving?”
“She’s well off. Real well off. She lives in L.A. most of the time, but she has a nice place outside Reno. She’s going to let me stay there. The movers come tomorrow morning and this place goes up for sale.”
My mouth went slack. “Reno?” I asked, aghast. “You’re moving to Reno-fucking-Nevada?”
“Yes, Harry,” she said coldly. “I’m moving to Reno-fucking-Nevada.”
“Well, I mean, were you going to tell me about it? Or was I just going to get the goddamn change-of-address card? Were you at least going to send me a birth announcement?”
“God,” she said. “I knew you were going to do this!”
“Do what?”
“Make it harder,” she said.
“Oh, should I have made it easy, Marsha? Is that what you want? Well, let me make it easy for you now, okay? I love you and I thought we had something special and I thought the two of us having a kid together was going to be a miracle, but I guess I was wrong. So you pack your stuff up and pay the movers and you run like hell just as far away from me and this city and the terrible drivers and the bozo politicians and the rest of your problems as you can!”
Her lip trembled.
“You want out, Marsha? You’re out. Officially. End of story, okay? Now if you’ll excuse the hell out of me, I have an appointment with the guy who murdered the guy everybody thinks I murdered.”
I turned, started for the hallway.
“Wait,” she said behind me.
“What?” I asked, without facing her.
“I was going to call you. I was going to say goodbye, Harry. I just wanted to do it in my own way and in my own time.”
I turned and looked at her. “Doesn’t really matter much now, does it?”
“It does to me,” she said. “I never wanted to do it this way.”
“What way did you want to do it?”
“Harry, I’m just doing what I have to do. I hope you’ll understand that one day.”
“I hope I understand a lot of things someday.”
“I have something for you,” she said.
Confused, I looked at her. She seemed a stranger now. “What?” I asked.
She walked over to a pile of boxes, dug around in one, and pulled out a padded envelope.
“I was going to mail it to you after we said goodbye and I left. I wanted you to have it, but I didn’t know if I could give it to you face-to-face. But I can, Harry. I can do this and I want you to have it.”
She stepped over and held out the envelope to me. I took it and unfolded the end, then reached inside.
It was a license plate, her vanity plate from the Porsche she’d just sold.
DED FLKS, it read.
“I’ll give you this much,” I said. “You got a hell of a sense of humor.”
“I know how much you enjoyed that car. How much fun we had in it. I hope it’s okay to do this.”
I stared at it for a moment, held the cold, sharp-edged metal in my hand.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Yeah, it’s okay.”
“Take care of yourself,” she said.
“Yeah, bye.”
Then I turned into the hallway, walked out her door and into a world without her.