I said, “You’re a religious man, aren’t you, Brad?”
He nodded.
“You had a strict upbringing. Your parents were very devout in their faith, raised you the same. And that caused problems for you when you and Ginnie were going together. Didn’t it?”
He nodded again.
“She was a wild girl,” I said, “Ginnie Mullens. And you were a teenage boy with the normal teenage urges.”
He put his hand over his face, elbow leaned against the dash.
“She was, even then, a hippie. Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I bet that drove your parents crazy.”
“It drove me crazy,” he said. “God forgive us both.”
“I was a close friend of Ginnie’s,” I said. “I didn’t know about her and you, but I knew about many, many private things in Ginnie’s life.”
He looked at me sharply; his hand had smeared the tears, so that his whole face seemed damp now, like somebody who’d been caught in the rain.
Remembering those nights out under the stars, when Ginnie and I shared secrets, I said, “I know about the abortion she had her junior year.”
He swallowed.
“You were the father,” I said, “weren’t you?”
Another tear trailed down the mask.
I went on. “Ginnie, in that patented, tactless, sometimes cruel manner of hers, brought it up, that long-ago abortion, and rubbed it in your face at the reunion. That’s why you fought. That’s why you...” I didn’t finish it: cried when you stormed out of the Sports Page.
He stared ahead.
“With the recent loss of your son,” I said, carefully, trying to avoid speaking in a tactless, cruel manner myself, “what she said hurt you. Hurt you deep.”
He said nothing.
“My question is how deep? She may have been murdered, Brad. I believe Ginnie was murdered.”
That stunned him; he looked at me with wide, red eyes, and a mouth hanging open to where I could count the silver fillings. Seven.
He said, “Murdered?”
“I’m almost sure of it. Where were you the night she died?”
“Alone,” he said.
Some alibi.
“But I would never take a life.” He winced, possibly thinking of his son. “Knowingly,” he amended.
“Did you hate Ginnie Mullens?”
He didn’t answer.
I tried again: “Did you hate her?”
He whipped around and grabbed me by the shirt. “Yes!” His eyes were red and fierce and his teeth were clenched and his breath smelled of Listerine; the pores in his nose were large.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, scared shitless.
It must’ve been the right thing to say, because then he let go of me.
“Hated her, yes...” Leaning against the side door, getting as far away from me as he could without getting out of the car, he said, “But not enough to... kill her.”
“Somebody hated her that much.”
“Not me. Only... only that night... when she told me.”
“Told you what?”
He looked at me with eyes so haunted I saw them in my sleep for months after.
He said, “That she had aborted our child. Sixteen years ago. That I’d had another child, sixteen years ago... and lost him, too.”
“She... she never told you?”
Fists in his lap, shaking. “Not in high school, she didn’t. Not until the reunion, last month. In that restaurant.”
“My God.”
“God. She’s in His hands now. Most likely she knows eternal damnation, for what she did. But I don’t wish it on her.”
“Eternal damnation, you mean.”
“Right,” he said. And without a trace of sarcasm he said, “Believe me, hell on earth is bad enough.”
And he got out of my car and, a figure in a ghost white smock, disappeared into the hardware store.
12
I was in bed with Jill Forest.
I hadn’t planned it that way, I swear to you. Not that I’m apologizing, and I’m certainly not complaining. But just because I’d asked her to come to my place for supper — rather than take her out to a restaurant — didn’t mean I had any underlying intentions. Or is that underlaying?
Well, here we were, both embarrassed about it; sitting up in my bed, a pale blond art deco piece circa 1933 that I bought at a yard sale, both not knowing quite what to say to each other. We didn’t know each other well enough for this to have happened. We’d dated those two times in high school, so you could say we’d known each other for twenty years, but there was the little matter of fifteen years since we’d last seen one another.
She was smoking, which at least gave her something to do with her hands. I just sat with a pillow propped behind me, sneaking looks at her, a beautiful dark-skinned woman with short punky black hair and cornflower blue eyes given a dreamy unreality by the half-light of the scented candle glowing atop the pale blond matching chest of drawers at my left. She was on my right. Smoking. Or did I say that?
“I’m very embarrassed,” I said. Admitting it.
She smiled a little. “Me, too.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
She cocked her head, curiously, the smile fading just a bit. “Are you sorry?”
“No! No. It was terrific.”
And it had been terrific. She’d dropped by for a late supper around nine, after a city council meeting at which she’d announced a projected rate hike for the cable system, looking a little weary from the battle that followed, but sultry, alluring, in a clingy blue dress the color of her eyes and a lot of makeup and no hose. I’d cooked pasta for her, dazzled her with my homemade sauce, wooed her with red wine, garlic bread (not much garlic, though, mostly bread) and spumoni ice cream. (This is one of three dinners I taught myself to prepare for company, preferably female; otherwise, as a chef, I know everything there is to know about frozen food and a microwave.)
I’d showed her around my little house. She’d been amused by my eccentricities — the Seeburg 200 jukebox stocked mostly with Bobby Darin records, the Bally pinball machine with its garish lit-up illustrations of Chicago gangsters and their bosomy molls — both machines out in the entryway area near my fireplace; the living room where a stereo, its speakers, a TV, and several video recorders were dwarfed by a wall of books — Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane; the tiny green lights on several walls, indicating that key windows and doors in the house were closed, the remnants of a burglar alarm system the former owners had installed, a service I’d let lapse as far as having the alarms tied by phone line to the police was concerned (I explained to her) ever since I’d set them off accidentally three times and was charged fifty bucks per visit by the city; my small cluttered office where my word processor sat on a desk, printer and typewriter on a table, and manuscripts in progress scattered everywhere, the original cover painting for Roscoe Kane’s Murder Me Again, Doll hanging on the wall facing my work seat.
“You must like those fifties babes,” she said wryly, nodding toward the vintage paperback cover painting. Her smile, like the girl in the painting, reminded me of somebody else.
“I guess. But I seem to be living in the eighties.”
“Nobody in Port City’s living in the eighties.”
“Stuck in a time warp, are we?”
“Rod Serling meets you at the city limits,” she said, and I led her out of my office, back into the living room, to a sofa that faced the TV/stereo area.
She lit a filtered cigarette, crossed her dark, sleek, unnyloned legs. “Coming back to the Midwest after five years out east was a shock to my system.”