“Does that reference mean anything to you?”
“Not yet, but I’m only halfway through the notebooks. I doubt that it’s important anyway.”
“Right now, we have no idea what might be important,” she sighed, easing down in the chair beside my desk. “We’re just tugging at strings, hoping to God something will unravel.”
“I’d say you’re the one who’s unraveling, Sergeant. Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s already made.”
“What I really need is to zonk out for twenty minutes,” she said, massaging her eyes with her fingertips. “Haven’t been to bed since this thing happened.”
“You’re welcome to crash on my couch—”
“I appreciate the offer, but I haven’t time,” she said, taking a deep breath, pulling herself together. “The first forty-eight hours are critical. I have to get back on the street. Could you even hazard a guess at who this... Apian, might be?”
“No. I didn’t know he existed until a few hours ago. What does it matter? What difference does it make?”
“Violent crime usually involves one of the Big Three: love, drugs, or money. Nobody made any money on this deal and you don’t strike me as the drug-dealer type. Which leaves passion. Love, hate, jealousy, in one form or another.”
“I’m the wrong guy to ask about love. I clearly know very little about it.”
“We’re all amateurs in that game, Professor. I’ve been married twice. To cops, both times. Disasters, both times.”
“Sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry?”
“Because... you’re right. Love’s a marvelous thing when it works. It just doesn’t seem to work out very often.”
“If it did, we’d be bored out of our skulls and all the blues singers would starve,” Kovacs said wryly. “Let’s hope we both have better luck next time. I’ve gotta go.”
The runaway truck was replaying on her laptop again. I watched the driver dismount, concealing his face behind his forearm...
“That’s the second time you’ve done that,” Kovacs said quietly. “What do you see?”
“Nothing. I just... it’s nothing, Sergeant. I wish I could be of more help.”
“I’m the one who should apologize,” she said, snapping the laptop closed, “for barging in at a bad time. I’m sorry as hell for your loss, Professor Frazier. If you think of anything, or if you just need to blow off some steam, call me, okay? Day or night. I keep odd hours.”
And then she was gone. And I was alone. In my arid, empty Brave New World.
I’d never thought of death as a new beginning, but in a way, that’s exactly what it was.
My love, my old life, and most things I’d believed in were gone. Utterly destroyed. By twenty tons of steel and a few lines of poetry. Yet somehow I would still have to cope. To deal with the details of Linette’s death. Her funeral, her eulogy, a burial plot...
But above all, I needed an explanation. A way to make sense of what had happened to us. Some sort of logic. Cause and effect.
Had I failed her somehow? Caused her to stray? Had her affair brought on this tragedy? It seemed unlikely, but it was a place to start. And I’m a scholar, by nature and profession.
So I poured myself a stiff jolt of brandy and sat back down at my desk with Linette’s workbooks. To begin researching a new field of study. Well, new to me, anyway.
Actually, it’s one of the oldest subjects. The Architecture of Infidelity. 101.
Methodology and Procedures.
I opened the third notebook of verses. In it, Linette described her growing attraction, physical and spiritual, to her Apian. And her sadly reluctant withdrawal from her Lute Player. A reference to me, I suppose. I minored in medieval music at State.
Over the period of months spanned in the sonnets, she described the physical raptures of new love and... sweet Jesus. It was very difficult to focus on this. To remain objective.
As I read on, I kept having flashes of my love, naked and passionate, with another man...
Suddenly I lunged to my feet, gasping, gagging on a surge of acid bile in my throat. Swallowing hard, I managed to force it back down.
And then I forced myself back down, to take my seat in that chair again. And somehow go on. If I didn’t wade through this now, ugly and painful as it was, I knew I never would.
And I desperately needed to know. To understand where we’d gone wrong. How we’d gone wrong. And how much of it was my fault.
So I read on. Sipping brandy against the sting of Linette’s poetry. And gradually, the ache began to ease a bit as the affair ran its course. Her wondrous Apian slowly but surely showed himself to be less perfect than she’d believed in that first glow of infatuation. He was human after all.
And flawed. The self-confidence she’d admired so much proved to be simple arrogance. And his decisiveness left no room for dissent. He was more than strong, he was domineering.
Abruptly, her verses took on a darker tone. She met a Gray Lady. Who soon morphed into the Good Gray Wife.
Surprise, surprise. Linette’s Apian was married.
She must have been aware of it, but in the heat of passion she’d brushed it aside. Until she actually met his Good Gray Wife. And liked her. A lot. And the consequences of her betrayal truly began to register.
Then a second jolt. Her Apian was an even greater rogue than she’d thought. He was not only cheating on his wife, he was cheating on Linette as well, with a new lover. And she felt shattered and betrayed—
Closing the book, I massaged my eyes, feeling a pain in my chest so sharp I thought I might be dying. Aching for all that was lost. For Linette and our lost love. And for her pain. And my own.
It’s so unfair that love has such terrible power over us. To bathe our whole world in shimmering light, or plunge it into darkness. Why can’t things just... work the hell out? Lovers stay together—
Because we’d be bored out of our skulls, and all the blues singers would starve.
The thought jolted me like a slap in the face. I could almost hear Kovacs saying it. Joshing me out of a funk as Linette had done a thousand times before.
Women. Their hearts are terra incognita to me. I’ll never understand them at all. Nor will any other man.
So I took a ragged breath, and shook off my self-pity. I felt like a fighter who’s been decked in the eighth round and still has four to go, but I couldn’t quit now. I was nearing the end.
And so was the affair. As I paced the room, scanning the final verses, I realized that Linette’s infatuation with her Apian lover was finally over. She told him she wanted to break it off—
And he hit her!
Damn it! I remembered a bruise on her jaw only a week ago. She said she’d banged into a door at work and like an idiot I’d believed her — but there was more. After calling him the coward he was, she promised to warn his Good Gray Wife... And that was the final verse. I flipped through the rest of the pages, but they were blank. There were no more verses.
I closed the book slowly. Stunned. When Linette tried to break off the affair, her Apian reacted with violence. And then she’d threatened to tell his wife...
And now she was dead. And a lot of people were injured. All because of an affair that had gone terribly wrong?
I didn’t know that, not for sure. And it didn’t matter anyway because I still had no idea who the man was.
But maybe I could find out. I may not be a man of action, but scholars know how to study. And learn.
I didn’t need the verses now. I only needed to concentrate, to think through the situation clearly and objectively. About a woman I adored making love to another man.
It was even tougher than reading the verses.
Pacing my small office, I mulled through the minutiae of betrayal. Several verses had referred to making love in fading or waning light, so they’d probably met in the late afternoon. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Linette’s library shift ended at three-thirty. Two hours before my last class got out. She usually picked me up after... I swallowed. After whatever happened.