“Someone special?” I say.
She narrows her eyes. “Luther and me are divorced.”
“Where were you last night?”
“At work. I'm a manager at a clothes store at the mall. We stay open till ten, it takes till ten-thirty for everybody to cash out, I'm home by eleven. You can check the time cards if you doubt it. Did Luther tell you I set the fire in his stupid store? That son of a bitch.”
I look at her.
“Please don't put me swearing on TV,” she adds.
“Does your ex-husband have a lot of enemies? Who would benefit from this?”
“He doesn't have any enemies I know about,” she says. “But on the other hand, he doesn't have a lot of friends, either.”
“How's his business doing, do you think?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Do you know anybody who sleeps on a water bed?”
“Not personally.”
“My point exactly. For years I told him, Luther, you gotta go high end, and get into ergonomics, those fancy mattresses from Sweden you see advertised in the back of magazines. Did he listen to me? Never.”
After we're done, she walks me and Mario to the door. “I'll definitely be on tonight, right?” she says. “I wanna tell my mom to watch.”
As we leave, a man gets out of a car across the street and starts for Shannon Hodges's door. He's younger than Luther, and taller, so I can figure why Luther would try to pin the fire on his ex-wife. There are simple explanations for most things.
Heading back to the station, I consider calling Jeff to see how he's doing, just to hear his voice. But when I get there, Luther Hodges is waiting for me.
“Mr. Hodges.”
“I told you to call me Luther.”
“What do you want, Mr. Hodges?”
“I got something to show you.”
I check my messages. I thought there might be one from Jeff, but there isn't. Instead there's one from a contact of mine, confirming that Luther Hodges does indeed carry massive amounts of fire insurance. I'm not following any other major story at the moment, and don't have to tape anything for tonight, so I agree to go with him. I'm curious about what he might want to show me. We take my car — I feel trapped if someone else is driving — and he directs me back to the scene of the crime. The water used to fight the fire has frozen into massive, sturdy, ghost-white icicles. Folds of ice droop thickly over the building, and beneath them you can just make out the bones of the charred wreck itself, the contours dark and shadowed. The whole thing is kind of gorgeous, as fragile and decorative and pale as an enormous wedding cake. It could all break apart at any second, is what I'm thinking, looking at it. There's police tape everywhere, but we ignore it. Luther leads me around back, to a cracked window that isn't fully iced over. We peek inside, and I can see the husks of the water beds laid out in the dark like crypts. The icicles creak in the wind, an anxious, spooky sound.
“See that?” Luther says, but I have no idea what he's pointing at. “That's the Queen Elizabeth,” he says, “the cruise ship of water beds. The ultimate deluxe model. I bought two for display purposes. They cost thousands of dollars. If I sold just one I'd be back on track. It was an investment, don't you see? So why would I burn it down?”
Suddenly he's sobbing, this fat little man. Not tearing up, but serious sobs that steal his breath. I take his arm and lead him back to the car. Sitting in the passenger seat, slumped and soft-fleshed, his doughy cheeks aflame with cold, he makes me feel a little teary myself. I pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. Without saying anything, I pull out of the parking lot and drive to the nearest bar I can find. Luther follows me inside, as obedient as a child. We drink one shot and then another. It's a neighborhood place, and the locals eye us in an unfriendly manner. We do our best to ignore them. I can't tell whether I'm being recognized and I don't care. Several drinks later I announce to Luther that I'm driving him home. He starts to cry again, and I sigh.
“You do believe I'm innocent, don't you? It's important to me.”
“Of course I do,” I tell him, although I don't. I think he's sobbing out of regret for his own dumb behavior, not over being wrongfully accused. I think it's only a matter of time before he gets arrested. Which makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing here, exactly, in this bar, with this man, investigating this half-interesting story. What if this is going to be my life from now on? What if, because I haven't chosen marriage and kids with Jeff, this is what I get? It doesn't seem fair.
Just because a person has an insurance policy that covers fire, it doesn't mean she wants her entire life to go up in smoke.
I drive Luther to an apartment building that hasn't seen better days and probably never will. When I pull up in front, he asks if I want to come in. With three or four drinks in me, I decide it might not be a bad idea to wait a while before driving home. But once we get inside he offers me another drink, and I say yes. He pours me a Scotch, neat, in a small glass.
His apartment looks like a motel room, with a bed and a TV in the living room and not much else. There are some dog-eared Reader's Digest books stacked in the corner, which look like church-basement giveaways. In the kitchenette is a small counter with two stools in front of it, and I sit down on one and sip. The Scotch is gone almost before I know it. Luther keeps puttering around the apartment, picking socks up off the floor, putting dishes in the sink, pulling lint off the sleeve of his sweater. And talking the whole time about how the fire's ruined him, how his wife left him once the water bed business started to go downhill, how he kept telling her that water beds would come back in style but how she didn't believe him, how she had no faith and wouldn't take the leap, how she wanted security, for everything to be pinned down.
“Let me ask you a question,” he says while pouring me more Scotch. “Do you think we're living in a classical or a romantic age? I think it's classical. I think there's no big emotions left, no passion. Everyone's concerned with self-preservation. It's about money, it's about safety. You know what I mean?”
I look at the Reader's Digest books. “Where do you get this stuff?”
“I read things,” he says.
“Is that a water bed you've got there?”
He shoots me a look.
“I've never actually been on one,” I say.
He holds out his arm in a gesture of welcome, the bottle of Scotch still in his hand. I lie down on my back, expecting it to swish and sway. Instead it feels basically solid, like any other mattress. Unfortunately I'm encountering other problems: the spins, for example. The water bed and I seem to lift up off the ground together, hurtling through space on a mission to some faraway planet. My palms feel very cold. I keep losing my grip on my glass. Luther Hodges is lying next to me, talking about back muscles and the even distribution of weight. The bed spins and flies, part water, part solid. I'm leaving earth and I'm all alone — no Jeff, no Mario, no camera — and it almost makes me cry, the agony and confusion of it, and I grab Luther by his grimy collar and pull him down closer to me, so that on this mission at least I'll have a warm body along for the ride.
I wake up regretful.
A few hours later I wake again and find I'm still in the apartment. In my dream I'd showered, dressed, and left Luther behind — but apparently never got around to doing it for real. A middle-aged man is lying next to me, smelling of middle-aged sweat. I think I've just violated a bunch of journalistic ethics. I remember what one of my journalism professors used to say: “When you find you're starting to break all the rules I've taught you, you'll know you're finally working in news.”
I get dressed slowly, my stomach several steps behind me. Luther's snoring is soft and buzzing and regular, like a small appliance. He doesn't budge as I leave the place, stepping out into the cold morning. The temperature's the same as it has been, but today the cold doesn't feel bitter. It just feels numb, inevitable. I'm not even surprised when Jeff and Aurora pull up to the curb. Why wouldn't they be here? It's their case.