“No, not again,” she said, and pushed the hand away. It lingered like a predator only temporarily discouraged. “Not so soon.”
“Aw, it’s not soon at all.”
“It is, Jake. Listen to me, please? Will you?”
“Shit!” The voice of a disappointed boy denied a toy.
“Jake…”
“Okay, I’m sorry, Mary. I missed you, is all. Hey, you oughta be glad I want you so much.” Deliberately rustling the sheets, he settled down noisily on his side of the bed, not touching her. “Maybe when we’re old and gray it won’t be like that, and you’ll be sorry.”
“No way I’ll get old and gray if you kill me first.”
He laughed, his vanity tickled. Mary could manipulate a little herself. No way to live with Jake and not learn something about it.
She said, “I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow so I can call into work and tell them I won’t be there till afternoon.”
“I’ll drive you down to the hospital to get Angie.”
“I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”
“Yeah, guess you’re right. I gotta say your mother’s not crazy about me.”
“She doesn’t have to be,” Mary said, and rolled over and kissed Jake on the mouth. What if Angie stayed uncaring and distant from everyone, including Mary? Not like the old Angie? A lifetime of alcohol could do that; Mary had seen it happen. She scrunched closer to Jake and clung desperately to him.
“Hey,” he said, “I thought you were the gal that wanted to sleep.”
“Changed my mind.”
His hand slid between her thighs again and closed possessively on what he sought. Fingers began to massage. She wished he’d move them higher, and he did. Then he pressed his mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I own you, babe, you know that?”
She said she knew.
When Mary stumbled into the kitchen the next morning to put Mr. Coffee to work, the first thing she saw was the line of gin bottles on the table. Five of them, all taken from Angie’s apartment. Three less than half full, two unopened. They drew the morning light and recast it as a rainbow of color over the table, reality bent and filtered through a prism and made beautiful. Temporarily.
Mary sometimes wondered how she’d escaped the compulsion to drink. The illness that was so often hereditary. Angie was-let’s face it-an alcoholic. And Duke had probably been one. Mary told herself she could take or leave alcohol, yet she seldom drank anything stronger than wine. Maybe that was because she’d seen what hard liquor could do. What it had already done to her life, even though she hadn’t been the one who’d drunk it. She tapped one of the opened bottles lightly with her fingernail. The clear tone it emitted was bell-like and beautiful.
Angie had been ingenious in hiding her stash of booze. One half-full bottle had been in the kitchen cabinet, like a decoy. It had turned out to contain water instead of gin. The other bottles had been buried in a flour canister, submerged in the toilet tank, stuck inside the bottom of the sofa through a rip in the upholstery. And of course there was the bottle behind the vacuum sweeper in the closet, the one Angie had told Mary about. Only it had actually been tucked inside the sweeper’s zippered bag, lying there like something waiting to be born.
Mary and Jake had searched the apartment for over an hour; she was reasonably sure Angie would return to an alcohol-free home. Of course, nothing was stopping her from phoning out and having a bottle delivered from the corner liquor store, but at least there wouldn’t be alcohol already in the apartment, tempting her.
Mr. Coffee had begun gurgling. Mary padded barefoot back into the bedroom.
Jake was still asleep, lying on his stomach with one arm draped over the side of the bed so his hand lay palm up on the floor. Mary looked at the clock. Quarter to eight. She’d be able to call someone at Summers Realty soon.
She didn’t feel like going back to bed, so she decided to take a shower and get dressed. After calling the office, she’d phone Saint Sebastian Hospital and find out what time she should pick up Angie. She thought that past ten o’clock or thereabouts, and Angie’d be charged for another day in the room. Blue Cross might bitch about that. Nobody wanted trouble with Blue Cross.
Mary went into the bathroom and douched, then turned on the shower. She let her nightgown puddle to the floor and stepped out of it, naked and cool.
When the water was warm enough, she climbed into the shower and washed away some of what Jake had done to her, soaping her genitals and rubbing gently, feeling some of last night happening to her again.
Jackie Foxx, one of the more aggressive salespeople at Summers Realty, answered on the second ring. Mary explained that her mother was ill and had to be checked out of the hospital, and she wouldn’t be able to get to work until that afternoon. She’d go directly to the title company for the scheduled closing on a piece of commercial property out in Chesterfield. Jackie Foxx asked if there was anything anyone could do to help, but Mary assured her everything was under control. “Everybody’s mother gets sick sooner or later,” Jackie said in a sympathetic voice, then hung up and left Mary trying not to think about where that line of logic ultimately led.
Mary called Saint Sebastian and was told her mother would be ready to leave anytime between nine and ten o’clock. Past ten, and the room rate for that day kicked in. Like a motel, Mary thought glumly, only there were two ways to check out.
She didn’t have to leave for at least half an hour, so she used the remote and switched on the TV. She tuned in “Good Morning America” at low volume, so it wouldn’t wake Jake, then sat back and sipped her coffee.
When her cup was half empty, there was a TV journalist standing in front of the Verlane house in New Orleans again. Network news shows had now fallen in love with this case. And why not? It had everything: murder, anger, mystery, the victim’s husband at odds with the authorities.
Mary’s thumb eased down on the remote’s volume button. “… perhaps a new development,” the bland-featured journalist was saying. Wind was gusting in New Orleans, riffling his hair and causing a strand of it to keep getting stuck in the corner of his earnest eye.
A tape of Rene Verlane was shown again, this time soundlessly, while the journalist talked about how police were now speculating that the murder of a woman a month ago in Seattle, Washington, might somehow be linked to Danielle Verlane’s death. The similarities of the two murders were more than what the police called obvious modus operandi. Though both women’s throats had been slit, there apparently was something more, a mysterious and grotesque something the police were keeping to themselves, that connected the two homicides. The journalist also said that for the first time Rene Verlane himself might be considered a suspect in the eyes of the police.
Fade to an interior shot of the handsome Verlane seated on his white sofa with his legs crossed. He was wearing a cream-colored suit with a white shirt and flowered tie. Behind him the pale sheer drapes undulated in the breeze like the gowns of dancing angels; at least that was how Mary saw them.
Verlane was explaining that he, too, thought his wife and the woman in Seattle were probably murdered by the same person. The Seattle woman, Martha Roundner, had been a dark-haired, 35-year-old aerobics instructor who’d also been taking ballroom dancing lessons. The police, it seemed, were making light of that correlation and concentrating instead on whatever pertinent fact they were keeping secret.
As Verlane talked, Mary studied his face, searching for some flicker of guilt, but there was none. She hadn’t considered before that she might be looking at the killer of a woman, or women, who’d borne a superficial resemblance to her, who’d been “her type” and who’d danced. There was about Verlane a smooth kind of brutality that strangely intrigued her. Merely watching the man on television, Mary could feel his magnetism.
“It isn’t fair,” he was saying in his syrupy accent, “that the New Orleans police, and now the Seattle police, are keeping some key piece of evidence from the husband of one of the victims. Sure, I understand they want a trump card to play on the suspected killer-if the investigation ever reaches the point where they have a suspect-but a husband has the right to know everything possible about his wife’s death.”