“No!” I exclaim.
“It’s the case. I really can’t tell you. I should have just driven on back home.”
She wipes sweat from her upper lip, reminding me of Class wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“Class has confessed to you, hasn’t he?”
she guesses. She knew I was going to see him.
I know I have been talking too much to her.
Angela has pumped me for details on a regular basis.
“Let’s talk about something else,” I say, unable to look at her. She has always been able to read me like a book.
Angela reaches over and grips my arm.
“He’s not trying to say that Paul is involved, is he?”
I stand up abruptly and pour my tea out on the ground. This was a terrible idea.
“I can’t talk about it. I need to get home.” “Paul didn’t do it,” she says.
“I know he didn’t!”
Angela is practically shouting at me. I look around to see who is listening.
“How could you possibly know for sure?”
She shakes her head, and begins to cry.
“Let’s go inside. I can’t talk out here.”
She runs into the house, and I follow, now prepared for her to tell me she doesn’t want to see me anymore. She sits down at the kitchen table and motions for me to do the same. When I do, she wipes her eyes with a tissue and says, “Gideon, I’m absolutely certain that Paul didn’t kill Willie I haven’t told you this, but Paul said to me the day after Willie
died, and this is an exact quote: “If somebody hadn’t killed the old son of a bitch, I might have done it myself.””
“Are you serious?” I say, leaning across the table toward her. I am dumbfounded that she hasn’t told me this before now.
Angela nods.
“But don’t you see? He was joking!
I know it makes him look bad, but it proves he didn’t kill him. When I told him how horrible he sounded, he said he wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head.”
“Why didn’t you say something before now?” I demand.
“That doesn’t prove he didn’t have Willie murdered. He was giving himself a cover in case something backfired down the line.
Something must have scared him, and he started constructing an escape hatch.”
Angela shakes her head furiously.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard you say! That’s not what he meant at all!”
“Listen to me,” I say, excitedly.
“I’ve got to call you as a witness. A jury has to hear this. Where were
you? Had he taken you out to lunch?” “No,” she says, her voice now frigid.
“We were in bed at the Peabody Hotel. Paul and I had been lovers for over a year.”
I collapse against the back of my chair, my face tingling as if she has just slapped me. Damn it, why didn’t I figure this out? She has talked about him nonstop for three months.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I gasp. I’m suddenly lightheaded, as if the blood in my brain has thinned into water.
She puts both hands to her face and begins to cry.
“I didn’t want to lose you! But Gideon, I know Paul. He would never have somebody killed. You’ve got to believe that.”
I clench my fists, which have become the color of mayonnaise.
“You couldn’t wait,” I cry, “until your husband died to crawl into bed with him?”
At the time Willie was murdered, Dwight had just two months to live.
Angela begins to sob, but I don’t give a damn.
I fight back a wave of nausea before yelling, “Why did you do it? Is Paul that great in the sack?”
Angela stares at a spot to the right of my head and forces out the words, “I got involved with him originally so we’d get our loan. But it became more than that.”
More than that. I look at this woman. Thirty years ago she was the most idealistic person I’d ever known. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“Was Dwight in on this little plan?” I ask sarcastically, opening my hands and watching blood rushing into my fingers. I feel my face go beet-red as the shock of what she has told me transforms into rage.
Angela puts her head down on her arms as her body is racked by spasms.
I am tempted to grab her by the hair and shake her. Why has she done this to me?
“Though he would have, Dwight didn’t actually die from the cancer,” she says in a tiny voice.
“Cecil suspected I was involved with Paul and told him. After Dwight confronted me, and I admitted Paul and I were lovers, he took an overdose of pills that night and never woke up.”
“Oh, shit!” I gasp, feeling my breath coming in short bursts. The guilt she must feel! Despite my own rapidly growing feeling that Angela is like an old-fashioned grifter and I am the gullible dupe in some ancient con game, I can’t help but have some sympathy for her. I force myself to take a calming breath and wonder if this is for real or part of an act that involves Paul. If she would betray her husband of thirty years, surely she would betray me.
When she can speak again, she says, “Cecil knows how Dwight died, but I begged him not to tell the boys. They’d never forgive me.”
I feel a numbness creeping up my chest, my body unable to keep up with all I am hearing.
“Cecil’s blackmailing you, isn’t he? He’s forcing you to sell him the land.”
Angela clears her throat and sighs heavily.
“Yes.”
Now I comprehend why we rode out to Cecil’s and screwed in his bed.
“You hate him, don’t you?”
She nods but doesn’t speak. If I make her testify, everything will come out, including my own conduct. My mind races as I review my options.
Damn it! I feel like some wild animal caught in a trap that can’t escape unless it gnaws off a leg. It is too late to try to withdraw.
Johnson wouldn’t let me.
“When did it end with Paul,” I ask, my own voice tight.
“Or has it ended?”
“We were never together again after Paul said that,” she says, her eyes searching mine.
“Dwight was getting sicker, and I felt terrible. It’s only been since I met you again that I’ve begun to admit to myself how deprived I felt all those years. I’ve finally admitted to myself what a sham of a marriage I had.”
I stare at her in amazement.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, incredulously.
“You said Dwight was as close to a saint as any man you ever knew.”
Angela stares past me at the diplomas on my wall.
“A plastic one,” she says, her voice bitter.
“Dwight never let himself entertain a real doubt in his life. He had this image of the way our lives were supposed to go, and no matter how ridiculous the reality, nothing interfered with it. Yet, by most standards, he was considered a wonderful man. He worked hard, went to church, loved his children, and kept every emotion he’d ever had bottled inside twenty-four hours a day. I think now that he was scared to death of life the whole time we were married, but his defense mechanisms were so strong he never admitted it. When I finally got through my head you weren’t going to propose, instead of going back east, I went after Dwight because he seemed to be the nicest guy around. I probably did it to spite you. I didn’t know I’d never get closer to him than I am to my cat. True enough, Paul is a womanizing son of a bitch, but I found out
he was wonderfully human, and I was starving for somebody real. It wasn’t until after I got involved with him that I even had an inkling of how much I had allowed myself to miss in life.”
My emotions begin to whirl around me like a dust storm. Put side by side with Paul, Dwight, to ninety-five percent of the population, sounds like a bargain, but something in me is stirred by Angela’s story. Her confession makes me realize how I, too, have always tried to idealize women, making them either Madonnas or whores. I should be repulsed by what Angela has told me, but I’m not sure what I feel.
“It sounds to me like you’re still in love with Paul.”
Angela brushes her hair back from her face and gives me a grim smile.
“I know this sounds terribly callous, but he was just a wake-up call. I can do much better than Paul Taylor. I love you, Gideon.”