Malory, his love, is visible to him, draped across the sofa, a hip and one leg askew. Tangled in her own clothes she looks deformed. She’s a bloody mess. A dark stream crossed the warped wood floorboards and pooled close to the professor’s shoes where he stands by the door. Dry now. More blood lies splattered across the wall and upon an abstract painting of a sunny meadow.
He despised that painting.
Phil Toomey stands frozen in place. Wretched. Displaced.
In shock.
He’s spotted the bullet hole in her head. First he saw the gaping wound that nearly separates her left shoulder from an arm, while other injuries, slices and stabs, mar her torso. He hunts for any special alarm or panic on her face, which is tilted toward him, seeing only that she is dead. Her mouth agape. Nothing to interpret in her gaze, nothing to seize upon as a final communication.
Professor Toomey is suddenly compelled by his own need to breathe, and gulps air. He snaps at the waist. His breath accelerates. He tries to measure each inhale and exhale, calm his heart rate before he hyperventilates.
He needs to believe that the appalling scene before him is real.
He needs to breathe and react. Do something.
She’s clothed. At least, the thought strikes him, it wasn’t that.
That solitary coherent notion severs his shock and his brain starts clicking again and suddenly he’s returned to himself. Not calm but capable of functioning.
In the old days, Toomey was never required to commit an overt act of aggression, let alone a murder. Nor did he ever plan such a thing or cause an event like this to happen on his watch, nor had he been part of any discussion in which any similar deed was contemplated or devised. He never witnessed what people in his office liked to call extreme prejudice. Twice, however, the task of cleaning up a room—once with a corpse still in it—had been assigned to him. He had accomplished his chores with equanimity and dispatch. Even, he had to admit, with vague excitement. The first time, he understood why he’d been asked, he was the only agent handy in a remote theater of operations. The second request made no sense. When, eventually, he was able to confront his bosses, their response was both surprising and an object lesson. One that he committed to memory. From then on, he was careful about which tasks he performed exceptionally well. If given an unsavory chore he’d rather not repeat, he learned to botch it the first time.
Walk no closer. Instinctively, he knows this. He thinks he can make it to her but he mustn’t risk blood on his shoes to either trace his steps or identify the pattern on his soles. Suddenly, his body rebels against him, he’s on the verge of a scream. He fights to repress the reflex as his nerves recoil and rebound. Gasping, he dry heaves repeatedly and all seems lost.
He needs to grasp control of himself once again, then hang on. He’s worked in the shadows but the darkest work was left to others. He passes through another moment when the whole of his being wants only to call out her name, to summon her back among the living, to rock her in his arms again, to be smothered by her embrace. He has to forcibly restrain himself, pin himself to reality, face this, and see exactly what’s before him.
See her, but he must not touch her.
Blood’s everywhere. Soaked into the floor. This has been atrocious.
From outside, Toomey hears car doors slam shut.
What to do?
Careful to step only on clear spots, he works his way to his right and a window there. He glances outside at the edge of a lace curtain. He almost expects to see this, too. Cops. Guesses that they’re cops, anyway. Detectives. They’re in no hurry. Should he receive them, with Malory savaged? Allow himself to be found on the scene? Proof of his innocence is indicated by his white spiffy shirt, blood-free, and his clean, pressed pants. No one could possible think that he was involved in the carnage. Not the spiffy professor. On the other hand, the cops are showing up within a minute of his arrival and, as an academic, what is he doing here? Did he need to see her—in her home—about having his desk dusted? Toomey has been a witness to how things work. If he’s being set up, cops can easily orchestrate his personal defamation—cause him to appear bloody and bruised in a moment. As it is, his fingerprints and DNA are indelible throughout this apartment. His DNA from a day ago sleeps inside her, if that still counts, he doesn’t know, and dried secretions undoubtedly are on the bedsheets and on her clothing and panties and mopped up by Kleenex and tossed in wastebaskets in the bathroom and bedroom and who knows where else.
They’ve ransacked each other all over this apartment, leaving evidence behind.
Run! The message had warned him to run.
If this is a setup—the early arrival of the cops, if they’re cops, suggests that it might be—then he’s toast. Even if it’s not, he’s still easy to frame, a lazy cop’s wet dream. What jury in America, white, black, mixed, biased, or fair would sympathize with the rich white professor having it on with a poor black cleaner lady, who is now violated, savaged, and dead?
No one in court will mention how secretly smart she was or think it mattered. What mention can he make of a latent Eros without sounding the fool, or degrading the good opinion of himself that others might hold?
He does not want to leave poor Malory to the devices of the authorities. Not like this. He even has the thought that if she has family he wants to grieve with them. Properly. Publicly. Out of the shadows. And yet, if this is as it seems, a brutal crime of passion and the killer is a former lover or a new jealous one, or if it is a random homicidal-madman incident, a vegetative subset of a subset intrusion, then to stand there and implicate himself will only muddy the investigation and be helpful to no one. Least of all to himself. His fingerprints and DNA are on file, just not in any data bank local police can access. Still, who knows where this will lead, or where it began, or how, or if, he’s been implicated. He’s free to run and escape scot-free. He’s also free to stay and suffer the ignominy of all that.
There’s a third option, and how he hates third options. The additional alternative maintains that he’s imperiled and caught in a trap. He can neither surrender nor flee without either option being construed differently. He has a note in his pocket that contains a dictum. Pure warning. Which he failed to heed.
Breached
Run!
He didn’t follow the advice granted to him and now he’s trapped. Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t surrender, don’t run, figure it out over the long haul.
He hates third options.
Such is the urgency of the moment that his full deliberations take no more than a hurried second. An eye blink. The police aren’t bothering to ring the outside bell. They’ve opened the door. Maybe they’re not cops. Killers? They’re mounting the stairs. Phil Toomey steps carefully over the blood and approaches his lover. He still drips rainwater from his clothes. He desires to kiss her, hold her, bring her back to life. Those times that he performed well cleaning up a scene that involved extreme prejudice, he impressed his bosses by merely following his instincts. He does that now. He loves her. Lust is gone, vanished. At the end he understands what defeated him at the beginning. He loves her. He does not recognize what he takes from her. He’s never seen it before. As he had removed intimate identifiers previously, in other theaters of operation—rings, a watch, a medical bracelet—he now takes the necklace from around her neck. Change what is. Skew the comprehension of a scene. Cause the exceptional to look mundane, gift the ordinary with intrigue. He removes a shoe of hers as well, and will drop it on his way through the kitchen. A blood-soaked cushion he’ll drag down the hall. Hoist a sharp knife from the dripping tray by the sink and stab it into the floor. Figure that one out, coppers. He knows to do this but his motives are also more complex. He wants anything of hers and has no time to look around. The necklace. He hears the slow mounting of stairs. He had a key. They must have picked the lock. What cop does that? Who are they? He will not ever be back here. He removes his key to this apartment from his pocket, rips off a sheet of paper towel, wipes his prints off the key and places it on the radiator. Holding the towel, he takes two plastic apples from the kitchen table’s decorative setting. Behind him, the steps have turned on a landing, are almost at the upper door. He strides quickly, silently, to the back exit, lifts the locking latch. He leaves, and while closing the door gently slips the plastic apples back inside, where they would have been knocked aside had anyone gone out that way. He departs by the exterior staircase down to the backyard and the shelter of the pouring rain.
In the time it takes to draw a breath, he’s thinking, I’m out of here. I’m gone.
Yet he needs to go somewhere. He needs to weep until his lungs ache and his heart submits to being shattered. He also needs to know: Did he cause this to happen? Is there anything about him, mired in his past or a thing unknown, a breach, a failure to run, that precipitated his beloved’s death? If it comes down to that and he has to forgive himself for a personal failing, Professor Phil Toomey has already sworn that he will not.
He runs in a straight line, no deceptive circles this time.