This one’s about as erotic as my stuff gets. I was asked to participate in an anthology called Flesh & Blood: Erotic Tales of Crime and Passion, and almost begged off because I prefer subtlety to graphic sex, but when it was explained the editors were looking for something along the lines of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity—two excellent novellas that emphasize suspense over the tiresome bedtime details—I decided to accept the challenge. Also it gave me a chance to plug a terrific pop song that never got its due.
• • •
No, I’m not prejudiced. Well, not any more than the majority of the population. I’m an organic creature, subject to conditioning and environment, and as such I’m entitled to my own personal set of preconceptions. No, I’m not disappointed; relieved is the word. If you’d shown up with cauliflower ears or swastikas tattooed on your biceps, the interview would have been over right then. So let’s sit down and jabber. What do you drink? Excuse me? Jack and Coke? Don’t get defensive; you’re young, you’ll grow out of it. You grew out of your formula. Miss, my friend will have a Jack and Coke, and you can pour me another Chivas over rocks and don’t let it sit too long on the bar this time. Scotch-flavored Kool-Aid is not my drink.
What’s that? No, I’m not afraid she’ll spit in my glass. She’s got miles on her, no wedding ring, she needs this job. People will put up with what they have to, up to a point.
Which is the point where my job begins. Or began. See, I’m not sure I’m still employed. It isn’t like I go to the office every day and can see if my name’s still on the door. I’m talking too much; that’s my third Scotch the barmaid’s spitting in. You don’t mind that I’m a motormouth? I forgot, you’re one of the new breed. You want to know why. I’m down with that. Thank you, miss. Just keep the tab going.
Let’s see. You ever watch the news, read a paper? Don’t bother, that question’s out of date. You can’t avoid the news. The wise man on the mountain in Tibet picks up CNN in his fillings. But that’s network; it’s the local reports I’m talking about, the police beat. I know what you’re thinking. Crime’s the last thing I should be interested in when I get home. Truth is, I can’t relate to wars in eastern Europe, not since I got too old for the draft, but give me a carjacking two streets over from where I live and you can’t pry me away from the screen. Past forty you get selective about what you take in. I’m not just talking about your stomach.
Anyway, have you noticed, once or twice a month there’s a story about some schnook getting busted trying to hire a hit man? Some woman meets a guy in a bar and offers him like a thousand bucks to knock off her husband or boyfriend or her husband’s girlfriend or the mother of the girl who’s beating out her daughter for captain of the cheerleading squad? Okay, it’s not always a woman, but let’s face it, they’re still the designated child-bearers, it’s unnatural for them to take life. So they engage a surrogate. The reason they get caught is the surrogate turns out to be an undercover cop. I mean, it happens so often you wonder if there aren’t more cops out there posing as hit men than there are hit men. Which may be true, I don’t know. Assassins don’t answer the census.
That’s how it seems, and the department’s just as happy to let people think that. Actually there’s very little happenstance involved. The woman’s so pissed she tells her plans to everyone she knows and a few she doesn’t, gets a couple of margaritas in her and tells the bartender. Working up her courage, see, or maybe just talking about it makes her feel better, as if she went ahead and did it. So in a week or so twenty people are in on the secret. Odds are pretty good one of them’s a cop. I don’t know a bookie who’d bet against at least one of them telling a cop. So the next Saturday night she’s sitting in a booth getting blasted and a character in a Harley jacket with Pennzoil in his hair slides in, buys her a zombie and a beer for himself, and says I understand you’re looking for someone to take care of a little problem. Hey, nothing’s subtle in a bar. People want their mechanics to be German and their decorators gay, and when they decide to have someone iced they aren’t going to hire someone who looks like Hugh Grant.
You’ll be happy to hear, if you’re concerned about where civilization is headed, that many of these women, once they realize what’s going on, are horrified. Or better yet, they laugh in the guy’s face. These are the ones that are just acting out. The only blood they intend to draw will be in the courtroom, if it ever gets that far; a lot of couples who considered murder go on to celebrate their golden anniversaries. A good cop, or I should say a good person who is a cop, will draw away when he realizes it’s a dry hole. It’s entrapment if he pushes it, and anyway what’s the point of removing someone from society who wasn’t a threat to begin with? It just takes time away from investigations that might do some good. Plus he knows the next woman he invites himself to will probably take him up on it.
Hell yes, he’s wearing a wire, and I’m here to tell you Sir Laurence Olivier’s got nothing on an undercover stiff who manages to appear natural knowing he can’t squirm around or even lift his glass at the wrong time because the rustle of his clothing might drown out the one response he needs to make his case. I was kidding about the Harley jacket; leather creaks like a bitch, on tape it sounds like a stand of giant sequoias making love, and you don’t want to hear about corduroy or too much starch in a cotton shirt. Even when you wear what’s right and take care, you need to find a way to ask the same question two or three times and get the same answer, just for insurance. Try and pull that off without tipping your mitt. I mean, everyone’s seen NYPD Blue. So you begin to see, as often as these arrests make news, the opportunity comes up oftener yet. You can blame Hollywood if you like, or maybe violent video games. I’m old enough to remember when it was comic books. My old man had a minister when he was ten who preached that Satan spoke through Gang Busters on the radio. My opinion? We’ve been killers since the grave.
Lest you think I draw my munificent paycheck hanging around gin mills hitting on Lizzie Borden, I should tell you life undercover most of the time is about as exciting as watching your car rust. When the lieutenant told me to meet this Rockover woman I’d been six weeks raking leaves in the front yard of a drug lord in Roseville, posing as a gardener. I never saw the man; he’s in his bedroom the whole time, flushing out his kidneys and playing euchre. He’s got maybe a year to live, so assuming I do gather enough for an indictment, he’ll be in hell trumping Tupac’s hand by the time they seat the jury. I don’t complain when I’m pulled off. Friend, I’d work Stationary Traffic, handing out parking tickets, if it meant getting out of those goddamn overalls.
The briefing’s a no-brainer. This Nola Rockover has had it with her boss. He’s a lawyer and a sexual harasser besides, it’s a wonder the Democrats haven’t tapped him for the nomination. It’s her word against his, and he’s a partner in the firm, so you know who’s going to come out on the short end if she reports him. Her career’s involved. Admit it, you’d take a crack at him yourself. That’s how you know it’s worth investigating. The odd thing, one of the odd things about getting a conviction, is the motive has to make sense. Some part of you has to agree with the defendant in order to hang him. It’s a funny system.
Getting ready for a sting you’ve got to fight being your own worst enemy. You can’t ham it up. I’ve seen cops punk their hair and pierce their noses—Christ, their tongues and bellybuttons too—and get themselves tossed by a nervous bouncer before they even make contact, which is okay because nine times out of ten the suspect will take one look at them and run for the exit. I know what I said about bars and subtlety, but they’re no place for a cartoon either. So what I do is leave my hair shaggy from the gardening job, pile on a little too much mousse, go without shaving one day, put on clean chinos and combat boots and a Dead T-shirt—a little humor there, it puts people at ease—and mostly for my own benefit I clip a teeny gold ring onto my left earlobe. You have to look close to see it doesn’t go all the way through. I’ve spent every day since the academy trying to keep holes out of me and I’m not about to give up for one case. Now I look like an almost-over-the-hill Deadhead who likes to hip it up on weekends; a turtleneck and a sportcoat on Casual Friday is as daring as he gets during the week. Point is not so much to look like a hit man as to not look like someone who isn’t. Approachability’s important.
The tech guy shaves a little path from my belt to my solar plexus, tapes the mike and wire flat, the transmitter to my back just above the butt-crack. The T’s loose and made of soft cotton, washed plenty of times. Only competition I have to worry about is the bar noise. Fortunately, the Rockover woman’s Saturday night hangout is a family-type place: you know, where a kid can drink a Coke and munch chips from a little bag while his parents visit with friends over highballs. Loud drunks are rare, there’s a juke but no band. The finger’s a co-worker in the legal firm. I meet him at the bar, he points her out, I thank him and tell him to blow. First I have to reassure him I’m not going to throw her on the floor and kneel on her back and cuff her like on Cops; he’s more worried she’ll get herself in too deep than about what she might do to the boss. I go along with this bullshit and he leaves. Chances are he’s got his eye on her job, but he hasn’t got the spine not to feel guilty about it.
The place is crowded and getting noisy, the customers are starting to unwind. I order a Scotch and soda, heavy on the fizz, wait for a stool, and watch her for a while in the mirror. She’s sitting at the bar booth facing another woman near the shuffleboard table, smoking a cigarette as long as a Bic pen and nursing a clear drink in a tall glass, vodka and tonic probably. I’m hoping I’ll catch her alone sometime during the evening, maybe when the friend goes to the can, which means I don’t count on getting any evidence on tape until I convince her to ditch the friend. So I wait and watch.
Which in this case is not unpleasant.
Nola Rockover’s a fox. Not, I hasten to add, one of those pneumatically enhanced bimbos you see on TV, just another flavor-of-the-month, but the dark, smoldering kind you hardly ever see except in black-and-white movies and old reruns. She’s a brunette, slender—not thin, I’ve had it with those anorexic bonepiles that make you want to abduct them and tie them down and force-feed them mashed potatoes until they at least cast a decent shadow—I’m talking lithe and sinuous, like a dancer, with big dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. She had a pantherish quality I’d come to know better, and how.
She wore this dark sleeveless top and some kind of skirt, no cleavage or jewelry except for a thin gold necklace that called attention to the long smooth line of her throat, and she had a way of holding her chin high, almost aloof but not quite, more like she hadn’t forgotten what her mother had told her about the importance of good posture. She’s not talking, except maybe to respond to something the other woman is saying, encourage her to go on, except I’m thinking she’s not really that interested, just being polite. In any case it’s her friend who’s flapping her chin and waving her hands around like she’s swatting hornets. Probably describing her love life.
Yes, miss, another Chivas, and how’s yours? Sure? Now you’re making me look like a lush.
Nola’s friend? Okay, so I’m a chauvinist pig. Maybe she’s talking about the Red Wings. She’s got on this ugly business suit with a floppy bow tie, like she hasn’t been to see a movie since Working Girl. I’m thinking Nola tolerates her company to avoid drinking alone in public. Maybe she already suspects she’s said too much in that condition in the past. You can see I’m kindly disposed to her before I even make contact. There’s no rule says you can’t like ’em and cuff ’em.
I watch twenty minutes, my drink’s all melted ice, and I’m starting to think this other woman’s got a bladder the size of Toledo when she finally gets up and goes to wee-wee. I give it a minute so as not to look like a shark swimming in, then I wander on over. Nola’s getting out another cigarette and I’m wishing, not for the first time, I hadn’t given up the weed, or I could offer to light her up from the Zippo I no longer carried. Sure, it’s corny, but it works. That’s how some things stay around long enough to get corny. But it’s out, so I do the next best thing and say, “I hear the surgeon general frowns on those.”
She looks up slowly like she knows I’ve been standing there the whole time, and you’ll like what she says.
“I don’t follow generals’ orders any more. I got my discharge.”
And she smiles, this cool impersonal number that make the soles of my feet tingle. She’s got nice teeth—not perfect, one incisor’s slightly crooked, but she keeps them white, which is not easy when you smoke. Her eyes don’t smile, though. Even if I didn’t know her recent history I’d guess this was someone for whom life has not come with greased wheels.
I’m scraping my skull for what to say next when she throws me a life preserver. “You like the Dead?”
Now, that’s a conversation starter. It takes me a second to remember what’s on my T-shirt.
Not, “You’re a Deadhead?” Which is a term they know in Bowling Green by now, it’s hip no more, but most people are afraid not to use it for fear of appearing unhip. The way she doesn’t say it, though, tells me she’s so hip she doesn’t even bother to think about it. I admit that’s a lot to get out of four words, but that was Nola, a living tip-of-the-iceberg. Thanks, honey; I like my Scotch good and orange.
I lost the thread. Oh, right, the Dead. I take a chance. Remember, everything hangs on how I broach the subject, and the conventional wisdom is never, ever jump the gun. If opening it up standing in front of her table with her friend about to come back from the can any second is not jumping it, I don’t know what is.
“Yeah, I like the dead.”
Lowercase, no cap. Which you may argue makes no difference when you’re talking, but if you do, good day to you, because you’re not the person for what I have in mind. No comment? There’s hope for you. Then you’ll appreciate her reaction.
Her face went blank. No expression, it might have been enameled metal with the eyes painted on. She’d heard that small d, caught on right away, and quick as a switch she’d shut down the system. She wasn’t giving me anything. Wherever this went, it was up to me to take it from there.
“I know about your problem,” I said. “I can help.”
She didn’t say, “What problem?” That would have disappointed me. Her eyes flick past my shoulder, and I know without looking her friend’s coming. “Have you got a card?”
This time I smile. “You mean like ‘Have gun, will travel’?”
She doesn’t smile back. “I’m known here. I’ll be at the Hangar in an hour.” And then she turns her head and I’m not there.
I join the boys in the van, who take off their earphones long enough to agree the Hangar is Smilin’ Jack’s Hangar, a roadhouse up in Oakland County that’s been around since there was a comic-strip character of that name, a trendy spot once that now survives as a place where the laws of marriage don’t apply. Every community needs a place to mess around.
So forty minutes later wearing fresh batteries I’m groping through the whiskey-sodden dark of a building that was once an actual hangar for a small air service, my feet not touching the floor because the bass is so deep from the juke it suspends everything on vibration alone. When I find a booth not currently being used for foreplay and order the house Scotch, I’m hoping Nola is part bat, because the teeny electric lamp on the table is no beacon.
At the end of ten minutes, right on time, I catch a whiff of scent and then she rustles into the facing seat. She’s freshened her make-up, and with that long dark hair in an underflip and the light coming up from below leaving all the shadows where they belong, she looks like someone I wish I had a wife to cheat on with. The perfume is some kind of moon-flowering blossom, dusky. Don’t look for it, it wouldn’t smell the same on anyone else.
“Who are you?” She doesn’t even wait for drinks.
“Call me Ted.”
“No good. If you know my situation you know both my names.”
I grin. “Ted Hazlett.” Which is a name I use sometimes. It’s close to “hazard,” but not so close they won’t buy it.
“And what do you do, Ted Hazlett?”
“This and that.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here and there. We can do this all night if you like.”
My Scotch comes by slow freight. She orders vodka tonic, and when the waiter’s gone she settles back and lights up one of those long cigarettes.
“We’re just two people talking,” she says. “No law against that.”
“Not according to the ACLU.”
“‘This and that.’ Which one is you kill people?”
I think this over carefully. “‘That.’”
She nods, like it’s the right answer.
She tells her story then, and there’s nothing incriminating in the way she tells it, at least not against her. She’s a paralegal with a downtown firm whose name I know, having been cross-examined by some of its personnel in the past. Attends law school nights, plans someday to practice family law, except this walking set of genitalia she’s assigned to, partner in the firm, is planning even harder to get into her pants.
You know the drill: whispered obscenities in her ear when they’re alone in the office, anonymous gifts of crotchless panties and front-loading bras mailed to her apartment, midnight phone calls when she’s too groggy to cut him off in the middle of the first heavy breath. At first she’s too scared to file a complaint, knowing there’s no evidence that can be traced to him. Then comes the day he tells her she better go down on him if she wants a job evaluation that won’t get her fired.
The firm’s as old as habeas; no employee recommendation means no employment with any other firm. To top it off, this scrotum, this partner, sits on the board of the school she attends and is in a position to expel her and wipe out three years of credits. Any way you look at it he’s got her by the smalls.
Well, what’s a girl to do? She’s no Shirley Temple; lived with a guy for two years, object matrimony, until she caught him in the shower with a neighbor and threw his clothes out a window—I mean every stitch, he had to go out in a towel to fetch them. The senior partners are conservative about cohabitation outside marriage and domestic disturbance.
So she does the deed on the partner, thinking to hand in her two weeks’ notice the next day and take her good references to a firm where oral examinations are not required.
Except she’s so good at it the slob threatens to withhold references if she refuses to assign herself to him permanently, so to speak.
After stewing it over, she decides to take it up with the head of the outfit, file a complaint. But the senior to the seniors won’t sully himself, and fobs her off on an assistant, who by the time she finishes her story has pegged her as an immoral bitch who’s gone to blackmail when she found out she couldn’t advance herself on her knees; she can see it in his face when he tells her the incident will be taken into advisement.
Next day she’s reassigned to computer filing; the dead end of dead ends and leverage to hound her into resigning.
It doesn’t stop there. She tries to finance a new car but her credit’s bad. Pulls out her card to buy a blouse at Hudson’s, the clerk makes a call, then cuts up the card in front of her. Some more shit like that happens, then late one night she gets another phone call. It’s the walking genitalia, telling her he’s got friends all over and if she isn’t nice to him he’ll phony up her employment record, get her fired, evict her, frame her for soliciting, whatever; it’s him or a cell at County, followed by accommodations in a refrigerator carton on Woodward Avenue; choice is yours, baby. He’s psycho, no question, but he’s a psycho with connections.
What the partner hasn’t figured on is a basic law of nature: Corner an animal, and it’s got only one way out.
There’s no way I can tell you all this the way Nola told it. She lays it out flat, just the facts, without a choke or a sob. The only hint she’s stinging at all is when she breaks a sentence in half to sip her drink, like a runner taking a hint of oxygen before he can go on. But I know every word’s true. I can see this puffed-up bastard in his Armani, ripping up some poor schmoe in court for stepping out on his wife, then rushing back to the office for his daily hummer from the good-looking paralegal. And while I’m seeing this—I can’t say even now if I knew I was aware of it—I sneak a hand up under my shirt and disconnect the wire.
Nola won’t talk business in a bar. She suggests we meet at her place the next night and gives me an address on East Jefferson. I stand up when she does, pay for the drinks—there’s no discussion on that, it’s an assumption we both make—and I go to the can, mainly to give her a chance to make some distance before I meet with the crew in the van. Only when I leave the roadhouse, I know she’s somewhere out there in the dark, watching me.
I walk right past the van and get into my car and pull out. I don’t even give the earlobe-tug that tells them I’m being watched, because I know Nola would recognize it for what it was. And I spent an extra fifteen minutes crazying up the way home, just in case she’s following me. You know, they say some prey has a way of turning things around on the hunter; that’s Nola Rockover in a nutshell.
My telephone’s ringing when I get in, and I’m not surprised it’s Carpenter, from the van.
“What’s the deal, something go wrong with the transmitter, you forgot we’re out there freezing our nuts off? You get drunk or what?”
“Sorry, I’m wiped out. Wire must’ve come loose. Not to worry, Phil. She’s no killer, just a broad looking for a sympathetic ear. She couldn’t kill her drink, much less her piece-of-shit boss.”
“So why give us the brush off?”
But I was ready for that, too. “Bartender was giving me the fisheye. He saw me climbing in and out of a van I might blow his Tuesday night poker game in the back room. We need places like that, if just for seed.”
I don’t know if he believed me about Nola, but the part about the bartender was true enough based on what we knew about the dive, so he let it go. Carpenter’s not what you call Supercop, would just as soon duck the graveyard shift for whatever reason. It wasn’t for fear of his disapproval I stayed awake most of that night wishing I still smoked. I could still smell her cigarettes and that dusky scent on my clothes.
Most of the next day was paperwork pertaining to the nonexistent Rockover case. I logged out in time to go home and freshen up and put on a sport shirt and slacks, no sense working on the image now that the hook’s in.
Understand, I had no intention of whacking the son of a bitch who was bringing her grief. In twelve years with the department I’d never even fired my piece except to qualify. I’m sympathetic to her case, maybe I can help her figure a way out—brace the creep and apply a little strong-arm if necessary, see will he pick on someone his own size and gender.
Okay, and maybe wrangle myself some pussy while I’m at it. Hey, we’re both single, and it’s been a stretch for me, what with everyone so scared of AIDS and GHB; I’m telling you, the alphabet’s played hell with the mating game. I figure I’m still leagues above the prick in the thousand-dollar suit.
She’s on the second floor of one of those converted warehouses in what is now called Rivertown, with a view of the water through a plate-glass window the size of a garage door in her living room. Décor’s sleek, all chrome and glass and black leather and a spatter of paint in a steel frame on one wall, an Impressionist piece that when you stand back turns out to be of a nude woman reclining, who looks just enough like Nola I’m afraid to ask if she posed for it. I can tell it’s good, but the colors are all wrong: bilious green and violent purple and a kind of rusty brown that I can only describe as dried blood, not a natural flesh tone in the batch. It puts me in mind less of a beautiful naked woman than a jungle snake coiled around a tree limb. Artists, they see things most of the rest of us miss.
It takes me a while to take all this in, because it’s Nola who opens the door for me. She’s wearing a dark turtleneck top over skin-tight stirrup pants with the straps under her bare feet, which are long and narrow, with high arches and clear polish on the toenails. Those perfect feet are just about the only skin she’s showing, but I’m telling you, I was glad I brought a bottle of wine to hold in front of myself. It’s like high school, with the hormones kicking in.
She takes the bottle with thanks, her eyes flicker down for a split second, and the corners of her lips turn up the barest bit, but she says nothing. I step inside and she closes the door, locking it with a crisp little snick.
Charlie Parker’s playing low on a sound system I never did get to see. She has me open the wine using a wicked-looking corkscrew in the tiny kitchen, and we go to the living room and drink from stemware and munch on crackers she’s set out on a tray on the glass coffee table, crumbly things that dissolve into butter on the tongue. I’m sitting on the black sofa, legs crossed, her beside me with her legs curled under her, as supple as the snake-woman in the picture, giving off that scent.
Small talk, music, wine. Then she lifts her glass to her lips and asks me if I approve of the police department’s retirement package.
I managed not to choke on my wine. I uncross my legs, lean forward, set my glass on the table, sit back. I could try to bluff it out, but just from my exposure to her I know it’d be a waste of breath. I asked her how she doped it out.
“You forget I’m a file clerk now. I ran that name you gave me through the computer. You shouldn’t have used one you’d used before. Are you getting all this on tape?”
“I’m not wearing a wire.”
“Am I supposed to believe that?”
“Oh, I was wearing one before, but I yanked it. I want to help.”
She watches me, unblinking as a snake.
“Lady,” I said, “if it’s a lie, you’d be in custody right now.”
She watches me a beat more, then sets down her glass, and before I know it she’s unbuttoning my shirt.
Long after it’s obvious there’s nothing under it but me, she goes on groping; and in a little while I know there’s nothing but Nola under the sweater and pants. It’s like wrestling that snake, only a warm-blooded one with a quicker tongue that tastes like wine when it’s in my mouth and burns like fire when it’s working its way down my chest, and down and down while I’m digging holes in the leather upholstery with my fingers, trying to hang on.
I don’t want to give you the impression I’m one of those jerks that tries to puff himself up by giving the play-by-play; I just want you to see how a fairly good cop brain melted down before Nola’s heat. I’ve been married, and I’ve had my hot-and-heavies, but I’ve never even read about some of the things we did that night. We’re on the sofa, we’re off the sofa, the table tips over and we’re heaving away in spilled wine and bits of broken crystal; I can show you a hundred healed-over cuts on my back even now and you’d think I got tangled in barbed wire. In a little while we’re both slick with wine and sweat and various other bodily fluids, panting like a pair of wolves, and we’re still going at it. I’m not sure they’d chance showing it on the Playboy Channel.
Miss? Oh, miss? Ice water, please. I’m burning up.
That’s better. Whew! When I think about that night—hell, whenever I think about Nola—this song keeps running through my head. It isn’t what Bird Parker was playing on the CD, he died years before it came out. It wasn’t a hit, although it should have been, it was haunting. I don’t even know who recorded it. “Evil Grows,” I think it was called, and it was all about this poor schnook realizing his girl’s evil and how every time he looks at her, evil grows in him. Whoever wrote it might have known Nola. Because by the time I crawled out of that apartment just before dawn, feeling like I’d been through a grain combine, I’d made up my mind to kill her boss for her.
His name’s Ethan Hollis, and he’s living beyond his means in Grosse Pointe, but if they outlaw that they’ll have to throw a prison wall around that place. I don’t need to park more than two minutes in front of the big Georgian he shares with his wife to know it won’t happen in there, inside a spiked fence with the name of his alarm company on a tin sign on the gate.
Anyway, since I’m not the only one who’s heard Nola’s threats, we’ve agreed that apparent accidental death is best; I’m just taking stock. The few seconds I get to see him through binoculars, coming out on the porch to tell the gardener he isn’t clipping the hedge with his little finger extended properly—is enough to make me hate him, having worked that very job under cover for a drug lord in Roseville. He’s chubbier than I had pictured, a regular teddy bear with curly dark hair on his head and a Rolex on his fat wrist, with a polo shirt, yet. He deserves to die for no other reason than his lack of fashion sense.
I know his routine thanks to Nola, but I follow him for a week, just to look. I’ve taken personal time, of which I’ve built up about a year. The guy logs four hours total in the office. The rest of the time he’s lunching with clients, golfing with the senior partner, putting on deck shoes and dorky white shorts and pushing a speedboat up and down the river, that sort of bullshit. Drowning would be nice, except I’d join him, because I can’t swim and am no good on the water.
These are my days. Nights I’m with Nola, working our way through the Kama Sutra and adding footnotes of our own.
The only time I can expect Hollis to be alone without a boat involved is when he takes his Jaguar for a spin. It’s his toy, he doesn’t share it. Trouble is not even Nola knows when he’ll get the urge. So every day when he’s home I park around the corner and trot back to his north fence, watching for that green convertible. It’s a blind spot to the neighbors, too, and for the benefit of passersby I’m wearing a jogging suit; just another fatcat following the surgeon general’s advice.
Four days in, nothing comes through that gate but Hollis’s black Mercedes, either with his wife on the passenger’s side or just him taking a crowded route through heavy traffic to work or the country club.
I’m losing confidence. I figure I can get away with the jogging gag maybe another half a day before someone gets nervous and calls the cops. I’m racking my brain for some other cover when out comes the Jag, spitting chunks of limestone off the inside curves of the driveway. I hustle back to my car.
Hollis must need unwinding, because he’s ten miles over the limit and almost out of sight when I turn out of the side street.
North is the choice today. In a little while we’re up past the lake, with the subdivisions thinning out along a two-lane blacktop. It’s a workday—Nola’s in the office, good alibi—and for miles we’re almost the only two cars, so I’m hanging back, but I can tell he’s not paying attention to his rearview or he’d open it up and leave me in the dust. The arrogant son of a bitch thought he was invulnerable.
You see how I’m taking every opportunity to work up a good hate? I’ve had time to lose my sense of commitment, start to think when I get him alone I’ll work him over, whisper in his ear what’s in store if he doesn’t lay off diddling the help. He’s such a soft-looking slob I know he’ll cave in if I just knock out a tooth.
After ninety minutes we’ve left the blacktop and are towing twin streamers of dust down a dirt road with farms on both sides and here and there a copse of trees left for windbreaks. Now it’s time to open the ball.
I’ve got police lights installed inside the radiator grille, and as I press down the accelerator I flip them on. Now he finds his mirror, gooses the pedal, then thinks better of it and begins to slow down. But we’re short of the next copse of trees, so I close in and encourage him forward, then as we enter the shade I signal him to pull over.
I’ve been wearing my old uniform under the jogging suit all this time, and have shucked off the outer shell while driving. I put on my cap and get out and approach the Jag with my hand resting on my sidearm. The driver’s window purrs down, he flashes his pearlies nervously. “Was I speeding, Officer?”
“Step out of the car, please.”
He’s got his wallet out. “I have my license and registration.”
I tell him again to step out of the car.
He looks surprised, but he puts the wallet away and grasps the door handle. His jaw’s set. I can see he thinks it’s a case of mistaken identity and he may have a lucrative harassment suit if he can make himself disagreeable enough. I’ve been around enough lawyers to know how they think; meth cookers are better company.
Then his face changes again. He’s staring at the uniform.
“You’re pretty far out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? This area is patrolled by the county sheriff.”
“Get out of the fucking car.” I draw my sidearm.
“Fuck you, fake cop.” He floors it.
But it’s a gravel road, and the tires spin for a second, spraying pebbles, which strike my legs and sting like hornets, which gives me the mad to make that lunge and grab the window post with my free hand. Just then the tread bites and the Jag spurs ahead and I know I’m going to be dragged if I don’t let go or stop him.
I don’t let go. I stick the muzzle of my piece through the window, cocking the hammer.
Who knows but it might have worked, if my fingers didn’t slip off the window post. As I fall away from the car I strike my other wrist against the post and a round punches a hole through the windshield.
Hollis screams. He thinks he’s hit, takes his hands off the wheel, and that’s the last I see of him until after the Jag plunges into a tree by the side of the road. The bang’s so loud if you even heard my piece go off you’d forget about it because the second report sounds like a cannon, and across a whole field of wheat at that.
I get up off the ground and spring to the car, still holding the gun. The hood’s folded like a road map, the radiator pouring steam, windshield gone. I look up and down the road and across the field opposite the stand of trees. Not a soul in sight, if you don’t count a cow looking our way.
Just as I’m starting to appreciate my lucky break, I hear moaning.
Lawyers are notoriously hard to kill.
He lifts his head from the wheel. The forehead’s split, the face a sheet of blood. It looks bad enough to finish him even if it wasn’t instantaneous, but I’m no doctor.
I guess you could say I panicked. I reached through the window and hit him with the butt of the gun, how many times I don’t know, six or seven or maybe a dozen. The bone of his forehead started to make squishing sounds like ice cracking under your feet, squirting water up through the fissures. Only in this case it wasn’t water, and I know I’m going to have to burn the uniform because my gun arm is soaked to the elbow with blood and gray ooze. Finally I stop swinging the gun and feel for a pulse in his carotid.
He wasn’t using it any more. I holstered the weapon, took his head in both hands, and rested his squishy brow against the steering wheel where it had struck the first time.
I take a last look around to make sure I didn’t drop anything, get into my car, and leave, making sure first to drag the jogging suit back on over my gory uniform. I wink at the cow on my way past.
For the next few days I stay clear of Nola. I don’t even call, knowing she’ll hear about it on the news; I can’t afford anyone seeing us together. I guess I was being overcautious. Hollis’s death was investigated as an accident, and at the end of a week the sheriff tells the press the driver lost control on loose gravel. I guess the cow didn’t want to get involved.
I was feeling good about myself. I didn’t see any need to wrestle with my conscience over the death of a sexual predator, and a high-price lawyer to boot. As is the way of human nature I patted my own back for a set of fortunate circumstances I’d had no control over. I was starting to think God was on my side.
But Nola isn’t.
When I finally visited, after the cops had paid their routine call and gone away satisfied her beef with her employer was unconnected with an accident upstate, she gave me hell for staying away, accused me of cowardly leaving her to face the police alone. I settled her down finally, but I could see my explanation didn’t satisfy. As I’m taking off my coat to get comfortable she tells me she has an early morning, everyone at the office is working harder in Hollis’s absence and she needs her sleep. This is crap, because Hollis was absent almost as often when he was alive, but I leave.
She doesn’t answer her phone for two days after that. When I go to the apartment her bell doesn’t answer and her car isn’t in the port. I come back another night, same thing. I lean against the building groping in my pockets, forgetting I don’t smoke anymore, then Nola’s old yellow Camaro swings in off Jefferson and I step back into the shadows, because there are two people in the front seat. I watch as the lights go off and they get out.
“If you’re that afraid of him, why don’t you call the police?” A young male voice, belonging to a slender figure in a green tank top and torn jeans.
“Because he is the police. Oh, Chris, I’m terrified. He won’t stop hounding me this side of the grave.” And saying this Nola huddles next to him and hands him her keys to open the front door, which he does one-handed, his other arm being curled around her waist.
They go inside, and the latch clicking behind them sounds like the coffin lid shutting in my face. She’s got a new shark in her school. I’m the chum she’s feeding him. And I know without having to think about it that I’ve killed this schnook Ethan Hollis for the same reason Chris is going to kill me; I’ve run out of uses. So for Chris, now I’m the sexual predator.
Until I got a good look at her in the security light, I wasn’t sure it was even her. She hadn’t pulled that helpless-female routine with me. To hear her now, she hadn’t a sardonic bone in her body. See, I’d been wrong to connect her with just one variety of reptile. She’s at least half chameleon, changing her colors to suit the sap of the moment.
I was out of my league.
That’s why we’re talking now. It’s Nola or me, and I need to be somewhere else when she has her accident. I’ve got a feeling I’m not in the clear over Hollis. Call it cop’s intuition, but I’ve been part of the community so long I know when I’ve been excluded. Even Phil Carpenter won’t look me in the eye when we’re talking about the Pistons. I’ve been tagged.
Except you’re not going to kill Nola, sweetie. No, not because you’re a woman; you girls have moved into every other profession, why not this? You’re not going to do it because you’re a cop.
Forget how I know. Say a shitter knows a shitter and leave it there. What? Sure, I noticed when you reached up under your blouse. I thought at the time you were adjusting your bra, but—well, that was before I said I’d decided to kill Hollis, wasn’t it? I hope your crew buys it, two wires coming loose in the same cop’s presence within a couple of weeks. I’ll leave first so you can go out to the van and tell them the bad news. I live over on Howard. Well, you know the address. You bring the wine—no Jack and Coke, mind—I’ll cook the steaks. I think I can finish convincing you about Nola.
Like killing a snake.