Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005
- Автор: Dean David, Dempsey Timothy F.
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
Anne lost track of whole pages listening to those noises, straining to ignore them. But right now, Anne guessed, the two of them were probably spooning on the bed watching TV, Richard clutching a White Russian highball. His fingers always stained with grease, and his blue shirt stitched with Richey on the breast pocket because he worked down at the Northside Auto Garage. The woozy stench of motor oil on his body. One of Rich’s eyes, the left one, was sliced up from a knife fight a few years ago. The pupil of that eye looked as if it had exploded through the iris like a dark star gone supernova.
They were not calm in there for long. The fight started with Gloria’s ragged whispers about how Richard had worked an hour late at the garage. But he couldn’t reason with Gloria, couldn’t calm her. Then came the thud against the wall and Gloria bellowing, “I’m calling the cops on you!” She came screeching from her bedroom. And there was Richard close behind, grabbing at her with his clawed hands. Their two bodies flung together across the apartment and rumbled everything so that it seemed the house might implode. Gloria swiped up the kitchen phone, dialed nine and one but not the last one before Richard wrenched it away chanting, “sweetie, sweetie,” while she slapped at him. Her neck was already sprouting red welts in the shape of Richard’s fingers.
Nine and one was enough. The dispatcher called back and when no one answered the police came. Their red flashing lights whipped through the windows as they swerved up the driveway. The lights draped across the living-room walls like a sudden coat of paint. Anne sat on the couch, waiting. She knew she had only to wait, because she lived with the sense that human anger surged and always passed like bad weather.
“Did he do that to you?” the police asked Gloria, sitting with her at the kitchen table. She covered her neck with her own hands. By then, Richard was outside sucking cigarettes and pleading with another officer.
“It was an accident,” Gloria said. Her lipstick had dwindled into the cracks of her lips, and tears cut streams through her makeup. She had dressed for clubbing in candy-striped nylons and hoop earrings and hairspray, but now she was a party whose guests never showed. The officer watched stone-faced as Gloria recited the same crap excuses he’d probably learned verbatim from other women.
“Would you like to have him arrested, ma’am?”
“No. No,” Gloria said. “I shouldn’t have called you. I didn’t, even — just the first two numbers, but I guess that was enough because you called back. I was afraid to answer. I’m sorry you had to come all the way—”
“Where were you when this happened?” The cop glared at Anne where she stood in the kitchen archway. He was asking her. Now Anne was implicated, almost accused.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Anne said, and the cop lowered his head, nodding slightly, inking her words forever onto a notepad.
The kitchen phone rang. Richard answered gruffly, as if something other than silence had been interrupted. “No, she’s not here,” he said. “I’m waiting for her. This is Richard — who’s this?... Richard, her boyfriend... She’s not here, either. Tell me who you are... Neither of them. No one else is here right now.”
He hung up the phone. Anne heard his gasping breath just outside the bathroom. His shadow’s gray smear leaked through the kitchen light coming under the door. She smelled oil again, stained onto his hands. The blood of engines, and he’d left a black streak of it on her wrist.
Anne couldn’t bear the image of herself in the mirror anymore, so she clicked off the night-light with her shivering thumb. Now there was only the light shaft under the door. She peeled both her socks away — the blood on the left heel already drying. She stepped backwards onto the cold porcelain bottom of the tub. Never had she navigated that tiny bathroom in full darkness. She reached for surfaces that seemed to evade her touch.
“Anne? What are you doing in there?” Richard said. His boots shifted and his shadow grew.
Anne remembered the barber’s scissors stored in the medicine cabinet, but she couldn’t imagine piercing them through his skin and the tough red muscle beneath, forcing her arm to stab and stab until he collapsed. Her own flesh clenched with the notion.
“Please bring me some clothes?” she said.
“No. We’re just waiting for Gloria. Like I said.”
“I’m cold. And I’m scared. If you just bring me some pants, or a shirt. They’re in my closet.”
“I ain’t going back in there. I messed up bad in there. I don’t want to see that again — you know? I had too much to drink before — all this vodka.”
“Please bring me a blanket — something.”
“Shut up!” He kicked the door and the hinges crackled where they were bolted into the wooden frame. “I did it already. I can do it again to you, so shut up!”
Anne’s legs gave way, bringing her down to her knees near the drain coated with mildew and soap scum. Scented like fruity shampoo. She pulled the shower curtain shut — another flimsy, useless barrier. Each second she confronted the miracle of her brain still working.
“Just calm down in there.” Richard spoke carefully, word by word. “It’s going to be over soon.”
“Don’t,” Anne said.
“Nobody needs to freak out, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know. Don’t screw with me. You know.”
When she ran the hot water it came out rippling. At first her cupped hands stopped the water from slapping the tub bottom, but then it overflowed. It kept flowing and rising, hugging around her knees, channeling between her toes. Anne pressed her face under the surface of the water. Her ears filled and sang with the surge of the faucet. She was alive, but just yards away Daniel was dead and growing colder. She thought of his parents, all his relatives, who’d raised him for so long. She had taken him away from his family who had nurtured him and then she let him die. She hadn’t done anything to stop it.
They met Richard in a bar. Anne perched on a barstool bolted to the floor. Around her, spotlights dragged bright colors past silhouettes on the dance floor. Limbs flailed, blurred and artless. She tugged downward at her skirt hem that kept rising up her thighs. Gloria had been there, too, seated near Anne at the table, until she excused herself for the bathroom, only for a few minutes. They’d just become roommates and were celebrating here at Club Helium, where hovering balloons were anchored by ribbons, glowing like oriental lamps in the background studio lighting.
Gloria’s whiskey sour billowed in its glass while Anne waited for her to come back. She raised her head and scanned wide-eyed through the crowd for Gloria’s face. Someone watching, a stranger, might’ve mistaken Anne’s impatient glances for another kind of desperation. A guy like the one who approached her then, with his polyester shirt untucked and unbuttoned, tank top beneath, and his prickled hair moussed wet against his scalp. Rising from his pinched fingers was a ribbon tied to a balloon that was white and weightless as a pure human soul might be.
He leaned toward her, straining over the music, “You sitting this one out? You look pretty relaxed. I thought this balloon would be your color, you know?”
He tried to pass the ribbon, but Anne missed. The balloon swooped silently off toward the rafters. She could only face him for an instant — enough to notice the brilliant fractal defect in his left eye, a pupil spilling its blackness everywhere.
“I’m Rich, if you want to know,” he said.