“Your wife made the complaint.”
“Nossir, she couldn’ta done that. Nossir.”
“Mr. Harper, when did you leave Miami?”
“This mornin.”
“What time this morning?”
“’Bout ten o’clock, musta been.”
“And you came directly here to the police station when you got back to Calusa, is that right?”
“Directly.”
“Why didn’t you come back home yesterday? Your business partner was away...”
“Lloyd ain’t my partner. He’s juss an ole army buddy I does business with, thass all.”
“But he was away.”
“Thass right.”
“And so was your mother.”
“Thass right.”
“So why’d you stay in Miami? Why didn’t you just turn around and come back yesterday morning?”
“I thought Lloyd might come back.”
“Did he come back?”
“Nossir.”
“So why’d you stay there?”
“Thought he might.”
“Uh-huh. How long have you been married, Mr. Harper?”
“Woulda been two years come nex’ June.”
“Your wife was a foreigner...”
“Yessir.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“In Bonn, Germany. I was stationed with the military police in Bonn.”
“When was this?”
“When I met her, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Two years ago this month. Met her in November, married her the followin June.”
“Were you married in Germany?”
“Nossir, right here in Calusa.”
“What kind of a marriage would you say it was?” Bloom asked.
“I loved her t’death,” Harper said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands and began crying. In the stillness of the office, the only sound was the whirr of the tape as it relentlessly recorded Harper’s grief. He sat in a hard-backed chair, dwarfing it, his wide shoulders shaking, the sobs coming up out of his barrel chest, his huge hands covering his pockmarked face, sobbing uncontrollably. Bloom waited. It seemed that Harper would never stop crying. His sobs reverberated through that empty room like the moans of a wounded animal deep in a secret jungle glade where nothing else might hurt it and only the moon bore witness. And then, at last, the sobbing stopped, and he reached into his back pocket and took out a soiled handkerchief and dried his eyes, and then blew his nose and sat very still in the chair, sniffing, his shoulders slumped, all life and spirit seemingly drained from that enormous body.
“Mr. Harper,” Bloom said gently, “you say you were in Miami on Sunday morning, and then you went up to Pompano and Vero Beach, and then came back down to Miami later in the day, is that right?”
“Yessir.” His head was still lowered, he seemed intent on studying his high-topped workman’s shoes.
“Did anyone see you while you were in any of those places?”
“Lots of people seen me.”
“Anyone who might be able to say with certainty that you were actually where you were when you say you were?”
“Juss Lloyd’s wife, an’ the lady lives nex’ door to my mama.”
“But that was on Sunday morning.”
“Yessir.”
“How about Sunday night?”
“No, I dinn see nobody I know Sunday night.”
“Or Monday?”
“Nobody.”
“No one at all?”
“Nossir.”
“Mr. Harper, are you sure you weren’t here in Calusa on Sunday night? Are you sure you didn’t drive back here to—”
“I’ll have to object to that, Morrie. You’ve got his answer to that already. He was in Miami on Sunday night, he’s already told you that.”
“Then how do you account for the complaint his wife filed on Monday morning?”
“Are you questioning me, too, Morrie? If so, you’d better read me my rights.”
Bloom sighed.
“Mr. Harper,” he said, “did you kill your wife Michelle Benois Harper?”
“Nossir, I did not,” Harper said.
“Okay, thank you very much. Is there anything you’d like to add?”
“I dinn kill her,” Harper said directly into the microphone.
Dale and I have never exchanged the words I love you.
I know that Dale was once passionately in love with an artist she’d met in San Francisco when she was practicing law out there. I also know that she lived with him for two years, and that the parting was painful for her because it came as the result of a sudden recognition that seemed to negate everything they had previously shared. Last January, when we were first getting to know each other, she used to talk about him a lot. She never talks about him now. But neither has she ever told me she loves me.
For my part, I have used those words often and with varying degrees of sincerity. I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I was growing up in Chicago, I had none of the sexual advantages today’s young people enjoy. I was seventeen when the sixties were just starting; I missed out on the permissiveness that followed. A goodly amount of my adolescent energy was spent feverishly scheming on how to plunder the treasures inside a laden blouse, each button the equivalent of a Vietcong division guarding the road to Hanoi, how to slide a wily and preferably unsuspected hand along the inside of a thigh and onto those cherished nylon panties beneath a fortress skirt, how to hide from the eyes of a shocked citizenry the erections that bulged the front of my trousers whenever any girl of reasonably modest good looks (and, quite frankly, even some very ugly ones) sashayed into view. I loved legs, I loved breasts, I loved thighs, I loved asses, I loved girls with a passion that was all-pervasive and overwhelming. And on that perilous road to hopeful consummation, I discovered that the words I love you sometimes worked wonders: “I love you, Harriet, I love you, Jean, I love you, Helene, I love you, Melissa,” my fingers frantically working those maliciously obstinate buttons and those diabolical brassiere clasps invented by a madwoman scientist, “I love you, Joyce, I love you, Louise, I love you, Alice, I love you, Roxanne!” Those were the days of garter belts and nylon stockings, soon to give way to panty hose (invented by that same madwoman in her boiling laboratory), and God, the delirium of actually touching those secret mysterious undergarments, the windows of my father’s Olds fogged with the exhalations of singular male intent and determined female resistance, “I love you, Angela, I love you, Shirley, I love you, Ming Toy, I love you, Anybody!”
I used the words as cheap currency in a market without buyers.
I later learned, when I met and fell truly in love with Susan — the woman who would later become my wife — that the words I had until then considered the three cheapest words in the English language were indeed the three most expensive in any language. I’m not referring now to the alimony payments I still make to Susan each and every month, $24,000 a year with a built-in cost-of-living increase — but who’s counting? I’m referring only to the pain of total exposure, the loss of a private entity to a partnership. We were good partners for a good many years; many divorced men and women tend to discount the happiness they once shared, remembering only the bad times. But perhaps that was the trouble; we became partners and stopped being lovers. And yet, as partners, we made it work for fourteen years, and we did, after all, produce together the light of my life, my darling daughter Joanna, long legged and beautiful and mightily resembling her mother — Joanna whom I love to death but whom I only get to see every other weekend and for half the duration of her school vacations.
When a wife becomes a partner and nothing more than that, and when another woman suddenly materializes as an apparition from a bygone time of hand-in-hand moonlit walks along Lake Shore Drive, reviving memories of all that steamy adolescent sex in the front and back seats of automobiles, when “love” once again enters a man’s life with all the heart-lurching suddenness of a lightning flash at midnight, well then, the partnership goes down the drain, the tweed and corduroy you’ve been cutting for that Seventh Avenue manufacturer surrenders to the silken secret of whispered liaisons, and the marriage dissolves, the marriage ends — “I love you, Aggie,” for such was her name, Agatha Hemmings, now herself divorced and living in Tampa, so much for that ozone-stinking lightning bolt that left behind it nothing but a withered landscape.