Robert Lee Hall is a San Francisco native. He has exhibited his paintings in galleries, he has taught art and English, and he has published several historical mystery novels featuring detectives as varied as Benjamin Franklin, Dr. John Watson, and William Randolph Hearst. Currently he is the drama and dance critic for a Bay Area newspaper.
Ruth Stark hated lies, but it was not a lie that made her tremble as six p.m. drew near.
Truth. She clenched her fists. Let truth finish the bloody thing.
And blind, stupid fury.
First she had to make sure the gun was ready.
She walked down the hall toward the low teak cabinet. The gun was hidden there; Charlie had tucked it in the right-hand top drawer. Ruth was a small woman with soft brown eyes and shingled hair. She had been impetuous once, loving, giving, but eight years of marriage had stifled those feelings, forcing them to retreat to secret spaces deep inside. How she hated denying herself to make Charlie happy! But her husband’s mind always twisted truth into something shameful, dirty.
She sucked a rasping breath. She would give him a truth that would end all that today.
She listened for the sound of the lawn mower. There it was, on time. Good. As its clatter cut the afternoon, she pictured the monotonous green scallops of suburban conformity that made up Valley View. How shocked the town would be when it heard about the murder. But (her fingernails bit her palms) there would be pockets of hope. Behind the curtains of low, ranch-style houses, women would smile in silent glee.
She pictured a particular house, number twenty-three, just across the street, where the mower was cutting the grass: tan stucco, shake shingles, forest green shutters, and in its master bedroom a queen-sized bed where she had cried out in bliss: “My love!”
I’ll spend all the time I want in that bed after today, Ruth thought.
She jerked open the top right-hand drawer of the cabinet. Flatware clattered, and moving cloth napkins, she uncovered the gun, just where her husband had hidden it. A faint, cold smell of steel came off it. There were two others: a Smith & Wesson .44 in Charlie’s nightstand drawer and an old but well-oiled Browning in the kitchen behind the cereal boxes, but this was his Walther .380. The guns were for burglars. “Just let one of those bastards break in my house!” Charlie liked to brag. He practiced at the Green Hill Range every Saturday, waving shredded paper targets in Ruth’s face when he got home. “Just gimme a reason to shoot somebody! Just gimme a reason!”
Ruth’s mouth flattened. I’ll give you a reason, Charlie, dear.
She picked up the gun. She hated it, but though Charlie usually kept all three loaded, she had to make sure, so she checked the magazine. Seven hard, tiny cylinders nestled there. Good. She inserted the magazine, replaced the gun, left the drawer open.
Leaving the hall door open, too, so the cabinet with the gun would be in plain sight, Ruth took the three steps down into the garage.
It was a two-car garage, concrete-floored. Its door was up, letting summer light in from the broad, curving street. The mower clattered louder, and she saw Ben Stillman pushing the machine back and forth over his manicured green grass across the way. So predictable, but predictability was what she counted on. Children yelled in happy play at the Silberts’ next door, while a Volvo station wagon purred by carrying three girls in purple soccer shirts. Alice McKean sat at the wheel of the car, and Ruth felt a pang. Lucky Alice! Ruth had always wanted a baby, but Charlie said no.
But could she have planned murder if she had a child?
August’s heat pulsed in suffocating waves as she leaned against the big white freezer to steady herself. I’m thirty-two, still young. I want love. But she had love; the trick was to keep it, and the memory of tender arms and quickening breath stirred her. For you, dear, as well as me! But could she really kill a man?
She girded herself. I won’t have to; the truth will do it for me.
The mower kept clacking, and she glanced at her watch. Nearly six. In sudden panic, she flung open the freezer and began rearranging icy packages. Charlie was predictable, too, and she wanted to be doing something when her husband got home.
Then he was there. Ruth heard the long white pickup growl up the drive, felt its bulk slide like a dangerously purring animal into the garage behind her. Frantically, she rearranged frozen peas around a leg of lamb. The motor died, and the driver’s door creaked. Then she heard a heavy scrape of boots, and bright flashes seemed to explode behind her eyes as she made herself turn. “Hot today, mmm?” she got out.
Charlie Stark stood by the truck. He made a face. “You figure that out all by yourself?” Dragging his leather tool belt from the seat, he clattered it on the workbench, then slammed the door. Ruth jumped at the sound, but she made her eyes stay on him. She tried to smile.
Charlie was a short, blunt man, five six, with brush-cut hair on a squarish head. Sweat trickled from his sideburns, and he looked pissed off. Why do I get all this shit dumped on me? his bleak eyes whined. That was Charlie for you. Once Ruth had thought she could gentle him, make him happy, when he had courted her, when her Samaritan’s heart had made her say yes to his proposal of marriage. But all the midnight calls he had made before they were married hadn’t meant he loved her; they had meant he suspected her. He’s the opposite of Ben Stillman, Ruth thought. Ben never worries about his wife. Why should he? Who would cheat on Ben Stillman?
Ben’s mower kept whirring while Charlie dragged off his coveralls. He hung them on a hook. A sign on his truck said A-1 Building, and Ruth wanted to laugh. Didn’t he know the name was a joke? Charlie’s business should have gotten bigger—times were good—but it never went anywhere, so year after year he pounded nails, strung electrical wire, plumbed toilets himself. “Goddammit, I’m better than toilets!” he would yell.
His mean look found her. He always blamed her when things went bad, and jamming a hip against the workbench, he folded his beefy arms. “So...what’d you do today?” he demanded.
It was the familiar catechism, and Ruth’s stomach knotted. He opened cans of paint with a forked tool, working its tines around the rims until the lids popped off, and she felt just like one of those cans. For a second she thought she heard a siren, but the police couldn’t be here yet. She pressed against the freezer to keep her knees from buckling. “Well, I talked to the insurance man—” she began.
“Bill Sikorski?” Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “He come to the house?”
“No.”
“Whatta you mean?’’
“I talked to him on the phone, Charlie,” Ruth pleaded.
Charlie’s look said no. It said Bill Sikorski had probably come over and she’d let him screw her. Did you? the look asked. He might even check. He might ask the neighbors what they’d seen—though if he did, he’d find out his wife had told the truth. She always told the truth.
And when you learn the real truth, what will you do? Ruth wondered. Will you kill?
She licked dry lips. “I did some shopping, too.”
“Where?”
“Market Fare.”
“You see anybody?”
“Chloe.” Ben Stillman’s wife. “For coffee.”
Charlie’s face twisted. “That bitch? What a nothing! Her husband’s a piece of shit, too.”
Ruth flinched. Because he’ s a Jew? Charlie was always muttering about Jews, but she knew the real reason he hated Ben Stillman: Ben was handsome, successful. Why shouldn’t he be successful? He was charming, he could make you believe anything, even that he was faithful.
He was quick, too. People on the block had often seen him make a fool of Charlie when Charlie went off on one of his paranoid rants.
Ruth peered past her husband into the summer day. She wished Chloe Stillman were at her kitchen window so she could wave to her, but she had to check on Ben. There he was, mowing his lawn like he did every Thursday, bare-chested in tight-fitting shorts. She watched his lean, brown body crisscross under the sycamores, brutally handsome, with thick black hair above lazy eyes that said he knew what any woman wanted. Just mowing the lawn he appeared sexual, predatory, and her lips compressed.
How many women had he lured into that queen-sized bed when Chloe was off selling real estate?
Ruth recalled when she had first met both of them. It had been at that evening swim party at the Conants a year ago, just after the Stillmans moved in. Frogs had cricked in the dusk while she stood with her gin and tonic in the shadows beside Ben’s wife. She and Chloe had watched Ben in the lights by the pool. He wore skimpy black Speedos, and other women watched, too. He flexed, dove, cut the water, and Ruth had started. “He’s handsome,” she had murmured, standing close to Chloe, so close.
Chloe’s hand had gripped her arm. “Oh, much worse than handsome,” she had replied. “Much, much worse.”
Betrayal, Ruth thought in sudden fury. How good it will be to tell the truth at last!
She blinked. Charlie wasn’t leaning against the workbench anymore. He had seen her watching Ben, but that was just what she wanted, so she was glad to see his I-know-you’re-a-slut expression.
He wiped a hand across his mouth. “Like the way Ben Stillman looks, huh?” he snarled.
You deserve anything you get! Ruth thought as she drew herself up. Now was the time. ‘Tm going to tell you the truth,” she gave him back.
Charlie stared. “Wha-at?” She saw his surprise. Fear, too? Where was the wife who always turned herself inside out to deny everything? Does he know he’s about to be hurt? Ruth wondered, but she hardened herself. He had made her into a whore too many times for pity.
“I’ve been having an affair.” She flung the words across the space between them.
Charlie flinched. He tried to smile, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He turned to stare at the house across the way, turned back. He gaped. “With...with...?” He couldn’t even say the name, so Ruth just nodded.
In a sudden lurch, Charlie made for her.
Darting sideways, she slipped through the door that led into the house. She halted by the cabinet, by the drawer with the gun. She stood there, trembling. This was where it might not work, where he might shoot her instead.
Crashing after her, Charlie stopped so near she could smell him: the sweat, the anguish. Ruth hadn’t known it would be so horrible. He was making strangled sounds in his throat, his hands worked wildly at his sides. He needed something to do with chose hands—but not beating, that wasn’t like Charlie. He had never hit Ruth. She counted on that.
It was for another man, Ben Stillman, to beat a helpless woman.
Then Charlie had the Walther in his hand. He didn’t ask why the drawer was open, he just scooped the gun up. “How...how could you?” he sputtered.
Ruth lifted her chin. “I wanted a good lover! I needed love!”
The whole truth at last.
Charlie’s eyes shimmered. His lips shrank back, and he began co shake. Beyond the garage door, in the dying afternoon, Ben Stillman’s back gleamed with sweat. Charlie still might not do what she wanted, so Ruth fixed her eyes on that powerful back, on the handsome man who owned it. Look, Charlie, look! she willed from the bottom of her heart.
He did. He followed her gaze. “I’ll kill the bastard! “Whirling, he lurched out of the house. A red Ford Taurus barely missed him as he dashed across the street.
Ruth closed her eyes. She heard the mower stop, heard Charlie’s screaming accusations. “You’re crazy!” she heard Ben Stillman yell back before she shut the door. She sank against it. Things were out of her hands; she had done all she could. Now it was up to Charlie. Oh, where was the bang of his gun? She listened, but it did not come. Don’t fail me, Charlie! Shoot the son of a bitch!
She heard a frantic tapping. Opening her eyes, she saw someone outside the sliding glass door of the kitchen just down the hall. Somehow, she got there.
It was Chloe Stillman in a green print dress.
Ruth opened the door, and Chloe slipped in, pale and frightened. “I ran across the street when I heard it start. What’s going on, Ruth? Charlie is yelling crazy things.”
Ruth calmed. Chloe was here. “I told Charlie the truth,” she said.
Fear swam up behind Chloe’s eyes. “The truth?”
Ruth nodded. “About the affair.”
“The...affair?”
“I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.” Through the open kitchen door, Ruth heard Ben Stillman’s patronizing laugh, followed by—at last!—the sharp slam of Charlie’s gun.
How stupid men were.
But Charlie was a good shot; he would not have missed.
Chloe gripped Ruth’s arm. “But, why...why?”
Because one of us had to end it, Ruth thought. Gently, she stroked Chloe’s cheek. The bruise where Ben had punched her last week was fading; with tender hands she would soon soothe Chloe’s less visible wounds. “Listen,” she said as she heard the sirens coming (some neighbor must have called when the shouting began), “when they take Charlie away for murder—”
But screeching tires cut her off. Bullhorn warnings crackled: “Drop the gun!” Then more shots, a rattling fusillade.
Charlie.
Ruth sighed. So he had chosen to have it out with the police. But it was better this way. His misery was over, and though she hadn’t planned it, a dead Charlie would make things considerably simpler; she wouldn’t have to sit through a trial.
Taking Chloe in her arms, she stroked her hair. “It’s out of our hands.” She kissed her lover passionately on the lips. “I couldn’t let the abuse go on. Yours. Mine. But we’re both free now. I didn’t lie. Couldn’t. I had to tell the truth, and I told it today. I told Charlie I was having an affair.” She clasped Chloe near. “I just didn’t tell him who I was having it with.”