“That’s the thing,” she said. “That’s the thing I hate.”
“What?”
“Just seeing him go off, not even talking, and then…”- she swallowed -“now he’s gone.”
The thing Hardy hated, he told himself, was being in this position, the inquisitor. After a minute he told her as much.
“That’s okay,” she said. “At least you believe me.”
“Who didn’t believe you?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I got the impression the police had a hard time with it I mean, me not knowing why Eddie had gone out, or where.”
“Maybe he just wanted…” Hardy began, then rephrased it. “Maybe he needed to think about being a father.”
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced.
“Except what?”
“Except he’d been going out a few times lately. I think it had to do with his business.”
Uh-oh, Hardy thought. But he said, “Didn’t you talk, you and Ed?”
“We talked all the time, about everything. You know that!”
“But not this?”
She shook her head, then punched her little fist into her other palm. “It made me so mad, I could’ve killed him.” The hand went up to her mouth. “Oh, I mean, I didn’t mean that. But we always shared everything, and this was like he was protecting me or something, like I couldn’t handle what he was doing.”
Okay, that was possible, Hardy thought. “So this night, Monday, after you told him about being pregnant, did you have a fight?”
“Not a real fight. More a disagreement. I wanted to snuggle, have him tell me it was all right, that he wanted to have it.” She sighed. “But he said he had to go out.” Again, Frannie shook her head back and forth. Her knuckles were white, clamped on her lap.
Hardy watched the beer she’d spilled spread slowly over the hardwood.
“See?” she continued. “His job was almost over anyway. I thought it was stupid.”
“His job?”
She bit her lip, thinking. “I mean his concern with trying to save the business. I think he got tired of arguing with me about it, and just went ahead on his own, not wanting to bother me or fight anymore about it.”
Hardy drank some beer. “I’m afraid you’re losing me.”
“I’d better get a towel.”
She brought another beer back for both of them. “God, it’s hot,” she said. “Eddie always loved hot days, all two a year.”
She sat this time in the deep chair in front of the window. More composed now, getting used to it, she started talking on her own.
“You know we were going down… He’d gotten into the MBA program at Stanford and we were going down there in September. His job was so… arbitrary. It wasn’t a career. He just wanted to actually work a couple years so grad school wouldn’t all be book learning, you know? So he got this job after college with Mr. Polk over at Army, because he wanted to get into distribution eventually.” She looked out the window. “This seems so stupid now. Why am I talking about this?”
“Talk about anything,” Hardy said.
“Then last Thanksgiving or sometime there, Mr. Polk got married and at the same time they heard they might lose the La Hora account.”
“ La Hora? That’s Cruz Publishing.”
Frannie nodded again. “I know, that’s where he…” She tightened her lips and continued. “Anyway, the police said they’d check that. If there was a connection.”
“If? There’s gotta be.”
“It sounded crazy to me, but one of the policemen said it could have been like a protest, Eddie maybe killing himself in the parking lot as a protest against Polk, like a Buddhist burning himself or something. I don’t know if he was serious.”
Hardy swore at that, shook his head.
“I know,” she said, “but at least it does put him there-”
“So would a meeting with someone who wanted to kill him.”
She didn’t answer. Hardy felt a wisp of a breeze, and Frannie sat back in the deep chair. She turned her head to the window, away from him. He saw her wipe her face with the back of her hand, as a small child would.
“Oh, damn,” she said.
“Frannie,” he began, and she twisted to face him.
“I didn’t want him to go,” she said. “I didn’t even know he owned a gun.”
Now she sobbed, and Hardy got up, walking to the window, his back to her. The street fell away sharply outside. In the distance, the air shimmered over the rooftops.
“Did you tell the police about being pregnant?” he asked finally, turning around.
“No.” She sniffed, rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I didn’t see what difference it would make. I don’t want anybody to know until I know what I’m going to do. You won’t tell Moses, will you?”
“Not if you don’t want.”
“Because he wouldn’t understand. I mean, I might not have it now. I might…”
“Frannie…”
“But Eddie would not have killed himself over that.” She pounded a small fist against her leg. “He wouldn’t have. He would have been happy as soon as he got used to the idea. He was happy. He was!”
In the next fifteen minutes, Hardy found out that the scar on Ed’s leg was from trying to hop a train when he was a kid. His guitar playing, Hardy should have remembered, explained the finger calluses, and also made him right-handed, which Frannie verified. Sometimes at work he got little bruises from moving and lifting things, but Frannie noticed no new ones the last few days. He’d never had a fight she knew of, and he drank, she said, “way, way less than Moses, just a beer or two when he got home.”
Finally Hardy lost his heart for going into details. He looked at her for a long minute. “You really, deep down, can’t think of any reason for it? I know it’s a hard question, Frannie, but could there have been anything?”
Frannie walked over to the open window. She stood there for what seemed a very long time, occasionally brushing the hair away from her face. When she turned around, she shrugged. “He just didn’t. What can I tell you? He didn’t do it. The rest I don’t understand, I don’t…”
She hung her head and turned around to face the window again.
Hardy stood up. “I won’t tell Moses,” he said to her back. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t do anything too soon, about the pregnancy, about anything, okay? Let things settle a little.”
She turned around. “I think I know now how you got the way you are.”
At the door, she managed a last half-smile. Hardy thought of something. Awkwardly, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket and looked through it. “I know this might seem a little weird, but…”
Good. He still had a couple of cards he’d had made up for his dart playing-he thought they gave him a little psychological advantage when he passed them out at tournaments. Like, Wo! This guy’s serious.
He gave one of them to Frannie. They were pale blue embossed with a gold dart. “If you need anything at all, even just to talk, call me, okay? And if you remember anything else, the smallest thing…”
“Okay.”
He wanted to hug her again, somehow ease things, but it would be useless. Nothing was going to ease things for Frannie for a very long time.
He left her standing on the sidewalk, the sun behind her, staring down at the shimmering city.
Down the block, some kids were playing on the street. It seemed odd to Hardy that anybody could be laughing in the whole world, but they were. Laughing and laughing. Life was a ball.
Well, there were a lot of motives, he thought. Enough to keep him thinking for a couple of days. Eddie wouldn’t have been the first man to be driven to despair by the thought of fatherhood, especially as he was preparing for three years of poverty and intellectual struggle. The business he ran was going bust-maybe he took that pretty seriously, too. It was possible, though Hardy hated to admit it, that he was having a love affair that had gone bad. Hardy guessed the police would be checking into that, as well as Frannie’s whereabouts that night.