He turned from the closet and sat on the bed for a moment, his hands heavy on his knees. Then he moved one hand to the small table beside the bed. There was a long drawer, and he slid it open, pulling it all the way out until the weight of what was in it started to push the drawer down and threatened to pull it out of the table.
There was only one thing in the drawer. He took the gun out and let it sit in his hand. It had the weight of a dead bird. It was cold and blue, the blue of metal. He closed his eyes and it still felt like a bird in his hand.
He remembered a time when he was drunk, before he had given up drinking. He had been at it all night, had started after getting off duty. This night it had done nothing but sharpen what was in his head. He had taken in so much Scotch that it meant nothing to his body. The one part of his mind that he wanted the liquor to kill had become sharp and bright as lightning. Bobby Petty had driven him home and then left. He knew that Petty hadn't been drunk because Petty never got drunk, and because he had started to get on him for drinking so much.
After Petty left, he sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the lightning in his head to go away. It stayed bright. He sat there for a long time. Then he looked down and his gun was in his hand. There were bullets scattered over the kitchen table. He had taken the bullets out of the gun, but there was still one in it.
It was then that he closed the cylinder and spun it, and put the gun to his temple. He felt nothing. Suddenly the lightning in his head flashed out and all he could feel was his finger on the trigger of the gun. No other part of him was alive. He felt the pressure on his finger, nothing else. His finger was alive, filled with electricity; the rest of him was dead storm. He felt the pressure against the finger grow. The finger was living for him, a lightning bolt, doing everything for him. No other part of him had to think, or eat, or breathe.
Then something (his finger?) made him look up. Ginny was standing in the doorway to the kitchen in her bathrobe. Her eyes were not wide because he had caught her at the exact moment when her eyes first made contact with him. None of the things that should be were in her eyes, the disbelief, the screams, the pleading for him to stop. Nothing was there but her first pure reaction, which was-get it over with. There was relief in her eyes in that unadulterated, frozen moment-relief that it would happen now and not some other night, or day, not while he was on duty or in a bar or by himself in a hotel room with a razor in front of a fogged mirror, with only silver and white the colors of the world, the white and silver of the bathroom and the white of his undershirt and underwear, staring at his own face while the silver razor did the job, and she would have to go somewhere to look at his body with all that blood on it. They wouldn't clean the blood off, and his undershirt would be caked with it, and his face would have the lusterless pallor of a stranger. Let it happen now, her eyes said. Get it over with.
In that moment he knew he didn't love her, if ever he had. There was no possibility of loving her because she did not love him.
Then suddenly his finger gave up its life to him. The storm ended. He felt everything again.
She walked to him and put her hand on the gun and pressed it to the kitchen table. She held it against the Formica. "I'll get you a cup of coffee," she said.
She made coffee, and he drank some, and while she was putting the cups in the sink he opened the cylinder of the.38 and saw the single bullet stare up at him from the chamber that would have fired.
He sat on the bed in the gray afternoon and looked at the gun in his hand now. There was no more alcohol and no more Ginny. But the same numbness was there that was always there, without the alcohol or with it. It had never gone away. That was what had put the gun in his hand, not the beer or scotch, or the fact that his wife didn't love him, or that his father had killed himself. There was still the fact that it was his own choice. When his finger was doing the job that night, the finger was him. His mind could produce all the metaphors it wanted, confuse them, change them around, but it would still be him. He knew that. But it made no difference because the numbness was still there.
He felt the weight of the gun in his hand. He slipped his fingers around the butt in a smooth motion and put his finger onto the trigger, feeling where it should go. Then he put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.
"Bang," he said.
The gun said click.
He took the barrel away from his head and turned the gun over and put it slowly back into the drawer, more carefully than he had handled the water glass in the kitchen, and he closed the drawer, and then he changed his shirt and jacket and went out into the gray world of sun.
TWELVE
In the gray jail cell, Mary Wagner looked shorter than she had standing with Les Paterna outside Bravura Enterprises. That was because Les Paterna had probably been shorter than he had looked behind his desk. Another businessman with deceptive interior decorating.
He would have to ask Barker if there was a listing in the Yellow Pages for magic furniture that turned creeps into big shots.
"How did you get in?" Mary Wagner asked him. She had been crying. Her mascara was smeared all around her eyes, giving them a haunted look. Up close, her hair coloring was apparent, the soft red locks giving way to mousy brown at the roots. Altogether, she didn't look as New York professional as he had thought. Trick lighting, no doubt.
"I told them I was your lawyer. The guard barely looked at me. He was arguing with his wife on the phone."
She looked at him and didn't even pretend to smile.
"Do you have a lawyer?" he asked her.
"I've got one," she said. "He's the Bravura Enterprises lawyer, Henry Kopiak." She was making nervous motions with the fingers of her right hand; the nicotine-stained place between her middle and forefinger was empty and she was obviously not used to that.
"Sorry, I don't have a cigarette," he said.
Abruptly, she began to cry.
"I had a fight with him," she sobbed, the way people do when they wish they had done one little thing differently which would have saved them from a big hole they had fallen into. "That was all. He was a pain in the ass sometimes, and last night he just got on my nerves. He picked me up at nine, we had a couple of drinks, then we went back to my apartment. He started to bother me, so I kicked him out." She wiped her hand across one eye, showing Paine the technique she had used to smear her mascara.
"Did you call him later?"
She gave him a look as if he really was a lawyer.
Paine waited.
"Yes," she said.
"What time?"
She hesitated. "I'm pretty sure it was around one-thirty."
"Pretty sure?"
"I kicked him out around midnight. I gave him time to get home, and a little more time to steam. I called him because I didn't want him mad at me."
"Because he was your boss?"
She looked at him, and a sob came.
"Do you think he killed himself?" Paine asked.
Again she smeared her mascara. "Oh, God, I don't know. I don't think so. He never talked that way. But I didn't know him all that well. He didn't tell me everything. ."
"Did he tell you anything about the Grumbachs?"
"Only the business things. He never talked about much of anything."
"Did he ever talk about what he did before Bravura Enterprises?"
"He used to talk about it sometimes. But I got the impression he didn't like to. Like it was something to forget."
Paine took the two envelopes of photos from his pocket. He took the photographs out and handed them to her. She stopped at one of the three Dolores Grumbach had left for him, of a thin-faced man in his mid-forties with receding hair and long sideburns.