The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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I get into my car and begin to drive the silvery blue convertible, the one that my husband gave me for my last birthday, that I now think of as a guilt present, and hear the bass-voiced DJ mention him on the radio. It’s nothing more than they’ve been saying for the past month: crimes committed, neighbors interviewed, victims’ mothers crying, but somehow, it seems like it means something. Perhaps there are no coincidences, and, when our fat Elvis married us, after he asked, “Is there anyone to object to these two getting hitched?” and the Priscilla look-alike in a white minidress and tall black beehive who was taking pictures at the ceremony fainted, it meant something. I put my foot on the accelerator and drive faster toward the county jail, tell them who I am, submit to their weapons check, and find myself sitting across a scarred wooden table from my husband.
His hair looks darker than it has before, smoothed tightly against his skull, and his dry lips are riddled with cracks. “Darlene,” he says, then falls silent.
We stare at the table. My nail polish has chipped, and I can’t seem to move my eyes away from the jagged red. I blink, and, with my eyes closed, say, “Did you do it? To those girls? When I was at home, sleeping, did you?”
He says my name again, softer.
“I need to know.” I open my eyes, but I still can’t look at him.
“Are you leaving me?” His voice breaks.
“I’m trying.” I look up now at his face, the lines that have deepened, that I did not even notice when staring at him across our dining room table. “What, I mean, did I...”
He cuts me off, his voice stronger now. “Do you remember that last fight that we had? When I told you that you pushed me to elope? I was glad you pushed me, I am glad. If you leave, I understand, but I’m glad. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had this dream...”
“You’ve been sleeping?”
“Listen, I’ve had this dream,” he continues. He sounds so certain, more certain than I’ve ever heard him before. He looks so weak, but his voice, his conviction, seems so solid. I can’t quite find my soft-spoken husband in this Henry. “In it, you were cutting out my patient’s wisdom teeth, and then you handed things over to me to finish up.”
“Oral surgery?” I mumble. “I was performing oral surgery?”
He continues. “That dream.” He takes a deep breath. “The good stuff, Darlene, that was because of you.”
He is only saying this, I think, to get me to stay. I can’t only be responsible for the good parts, and imagine I had nothing to do with the rest. I wonder how many times I let him lie to me in the past several years. “Is this what you prayed about?” I ask.
“No, that was about us.”
I shake my head at him. I don’t believe him.
“Darlene, it’ll be all right,” he whispers, as though my name means something to him, as though it will mean something to me to hear it on his dry lips, and I recognize the man that I lived with, the way he chanted the same words again and again, until the words became a soothing white noise like the sounds of a heavy rain, when we waited together for the results of my lumpectomy.
“I’ll plead, if that’s what you want me to do. I’ll plead any way you’d like. We can still settle.”
“Stop. Please,” I shake my head. I do not want to know these details.
Then, he looks down at his hands, and I follow his glance. His hands look stiff, and weak, no longer the strong, smooth hands that had wrapped around my shoulders, and I suddenly know for certain, in a way that I had not known until now, that he did it, and that I loved him, all of him, while he did it. My chest heaves. Hadn’t I loved his strength, his ability to move all the furniture into our first apartment without help, and tried to make him stronger, to make him more forceful? Hadn’t that been how he did it, force, muscles?
These are the same hands that touched me, caressed my belly and breasts with shaky, unsure strokes and left those bruises, heavy welts, swollen eyes, and split lips on those girls, wrapped ropes around their wrists, shook them and tore them and held them down in their own beds. My lungs tighten and seem to quiver within me, then I close my eyes, stand up, and walk out of the room. He calls after me, but I do not answer. I’m afraid of what I’ll push him to, what lies I’ll let myself believe, if I stay. I always wanted a more aggressive lover, someone to grab me and dispense with the foreplay, someone who I would not have to seduce. That was what our arguments were always about — he was not strong enough, not man enough. Not to me, at least. It is horrible, what happened to those girls, but my shame is that I feel worse that it was not enough for him to do those things to me. If he had truly wanted me, with an overpowering desire that obliterates all thoughts, wouldn’t he have done those things to me? My hair would have been ripped from my skull, welts left on my neck from his grip, nose bloodied when he shoved me into the headboard, bite marks left on my breasts. Isn’t this what I dreamed about, the love of a strong man, a man who, in the middle of the night, stormed into my room and threw me down on the bed, twisted my arms behind me swiftly, tore off my nightgown and, with it, bits of my flesh, and left me covered with his sweat and semen and my own blood, forever changed by him? Had he truly loved me, it would have been me, and not them, and I have to leave him. This is the truly unspeakable, I think, as I look down at my own thin hands, their bony frailness, desperately in need of a manicure.
Scott Turow
Loyalty
From Playboy
this happened, the first part, four or five years before everything else. In those days I was still sweeping a lot of stuff under the rug with Clarissa, and we didn’t see the Elstners often, because my wife, given the history, was never really at ease around Paul and Ann. Instead, every few months, Paul Elstner and I would take in a game on our own — basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer — meeting first for an early dinner usually at Gil’s, near the University Field House, formerly Gil’s Men’s Bar and still a bastion of a lost world, with its walls wainscoted in sleek oak.
And so we were there, feeling timeless, telling tales about our cases and our kids, when this character came to a halt near our table. I could feel Elstner start at the sight of him. The man had a generation on us, putting him near seventy at this point. He was in a longhair cashmere topcoat, with a heavy cuff link winking on his sleeve and his sparse hair puffed up in a fifty-dollar do. But he was the kind you couldn’t really dress up. Fie was working a toothpick in his mouth, and on his meaty face there was a harsh look of ingrained self-importance. He was a tough mug, you could see it, the kind whose father had come over on the boat and who had grown up hard himself.
“Christ,” Elstner whispered. He’d raised his menu to surround his face. “Christ, don’t look at him. Oh, Christ.” Elstner has always run a little over the margins. Never mind the dumb stuff twenty years before when we were law school roommates. But even now, a married grownup with two daughters, Paul would ride around in the dead of winter with his car windows open so he wouldn’t kill himself with his own cigar smoke, a pair of yellow headphones mounted over his earmuffs so he could rock with the Rolling Stones despite the onrushing wind. Looking at him with the two sides of the menu pushed against his ears, even though he was twice the size of the guy he was hiding from, I figured, It’s Elstner.
“Maurie Moleva,” Paul said when the old guy at last had moved on. “I just didn’t want him remembering I’m still alive.” Elstner swallowed hard on the hunk of schnitzel he’d stopped chewing when Moleva appeared.
I asked what it was Paul had done to Maurie.