It wasn’t a park, really, just a strip of grass running along the river. In the summer it was a place for lovers, what with its picnic table and benches. Now, in November, with a steady, bitter wind slamming the gray water below into a jagged rock wall, it was home only for a few pigeons and stray dogs. Which was why the lovely blond woman in the tailored trench coat looked so out of place leaning against the rail above the river.
She showed no sign of recognition as I moved toward her, and I knew how bad a sign this was. Jane Branigan was almost neurotic about greeting you with deft little jokes and tiny, heartbreaking smiles. I should know. I lived with her for slightly longer than a year.
By the time I reached her, the noontime fog dampening my face, the chill deadening my fingers and knuckles, I saw that she held something in her left hand, something dangling just out of sight behind her coat. I shifted my steps slightly to the right to get a better look at what she was holding.
Jane Branigan held a .45 in her hand. Not the sort of thing you expected a woman who worked is a commercial artist, and who was the daughter of a prosperous trial lawyer, to have in her hand.
She didn’t become aware of me until I was within three feet of her. Then she looked up and said, simply, “He’s dead, Jack. He’s dead.”
From my years on the force it was easy enough to recognize that she was in shock. The patrician features, the almost eerie ice blue of the eyes were masklike. I was surprised that she even knew who I was.
“You’d better sit down,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be better for you.”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The way he looked –”
My impression was that she was going to cry, which would have been better for her, but all she said was “Dead.”
The .45 slipped from her fingers to the ground. I helped her to the park bench, sat her on the fog-slick surface. She was a statue, sitting there, poised, numbingly beautiful, as dead in her way as the man she mourned.
“Jane, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Jane, I have to ask you a few questions.”
Nothing.
“Jane, where did you call me from?”
For now, anyway, it was no use.
I sat a moment longer staring at her, at her beauty that had turned my bed bitter and lonely, at her predicament, which rendered my old grudges selfish and embarrassing.
I sat there in silence, trying to think of what to say, what to do. Finally I had an idea. I touched her shoulder and said, “You remember the little puppy we almost bought that Christmas?”
Our first holiday together, shortly after we moved into our joint apartment, each of us in flight from terrible first marriages. We’d gone to the city pound and nearly taken a small collie home with us. Then we’d decided, sensibly enough, that because both of us had careers, and because we lived in an apartment, such confinement would not be fair to the dog. Still, from time to time, I remembered the pup’s face, his wet black nose and the pink open mouth as we wiggled our fingers at him.
Apparently Jane had a reasonably clear memory of the dog too. She didn’t smile or say anything specific, but something like a response shaped in her eyes as she stared at me. I took her lifeless hand, held it, saw in the slight tightening of her mouth and the tiny wrinkles around her eyes the stamp of late-thirties on her otherwise flawless face. I felt a little sorry for both of us. Our lives had not been exemplary and we’d hurt many people needlessly along the way. It had taken her hurting me before I understood that.
Then I got up and went over to the .45. I bent down, took out my handkerchief, and lifted the piece as carefully as possible. It was unremarkable, the sort of weapon sporting goods stores sell as nothing more than a way to get you to come back and buy ammunition. I looked at it in my hand and imagined a prosecutor pointing to it dramatically in the course of a trial.
Then I went up to the phone booth on the edge of the hill and called 911. It didn’t take them long to arrive. It never does.