When she spoke again, I could hear a tremble in her voice. The mess upstairs had unsettled her, and her neat ideas about the case were no longer looking so neat.
“Who killed her?” she asked softly. It was like she’d decided to try believing me, to see if it felt better than buying Kornfeld’s version.
I almost blurted out: Who didn’t? But it was an ugly remark and I held it back.
When I got into this business, I had the stupid idea that my job was picking the one guilty party out of a cast of innocents. The truth was it was more picking the one or two innocents worth helping out of a cast of villains. I’d failed with Orton Angwine, and now I’d failed with Celeste Stanhunt. It was tough when the way you figured out who to trust was when they turned up hacked in half in a soundproof sex club.
“Phoneblum’s kangaroo was looking for her a couple of hours ago,” I told Catherine. I tried to keep my mind focused on the specifics of the case, and blot out the guilt and outrage that made me want to do crazy things like confess to the murders myself. “For that matter, so was Dr. Testafer,” I went on. “But that didn’t look like the work of a doctor.”
“It looked like the work of a maniac.”
“Maybe Barry Greenleaf killed her,” I said, getting silly. “I told him this afternoon I was pretty sure Celeste was his mother.”
“Were you in love with her?” Her voice was still soft I turned, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“It’s in your file,” she said.
“I thought my file was out of access.”
“I got access.”
I allowed myself a smile. I knew now that the something I felt in the air between us was more than just my wishful thinking. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I had my confirmation.
“The file is a little inaccurate,” I said. “We met twice. The first time I was drunk, and the second time she was lying. I guess I hit her once. That’s about it.”
Catherine murmured, as if she understood why Celeste might need to be hit by someone, or why I might need someone to hit.
“You and Kornfeld?” It wasn’t structurally a question but I put a question mark at the end of it. “Morgenlander called him your boyfriend.”
It was her turn to smile to herself. I guess she was getting the same kind of confirmation I’d gotten. “He wanted it,” she said. “But no.”
“Wanted it?” I said. “He gave up?”
“Wants it,” she said with a sigh.
“Guess that’s part of what’s making my life sp fucking difficult right now, isn’t it?”
“Could be.”
I had to laugh. If Kornfeld understood the current status of my sexuality, he’d be laughing with me. I guess it wasn’t in my file. She sat and listened, and if she wondered what was funny, she kept it to herself.
Eventually I shut up, and when I did, it got quiet in the car, for a long time. We were both looking out the front window, only I was looking at the reflection of Catherine, and when I found her eyes, I could see she was looking at the reflection of me. And then we were holding hands. It was just like that; one minute we weren’t and the next we were. I want to say it made me feel like a schoolboy, but I hadn’t done anything like that as a schoolboy. It made me feel like someone else who had done it as a schoolboy and was being reminded of it now. It made the back of my neck flush. It made me nervous as hell.
We held hands until our palms were sweaty. I realized that maybe it was me who was supposed to make a move. She didn’t know I lacked the nerve endings for what was developing, and I wasn’t about to tell her.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said. “Your place.”
“My place isn’t good,” she said. “Let’s go to yours.”
I looked at her funny. “Isn’t Kornfeld supposed to have somebody watching it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me.”
CHAPTER 27
I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN TO POUR US A COUPLE OF drinks, and while I was there I laid out a line of my blend on the table. After a moment’s hesitation I snorted it up with the tap running to cover the sound. I don’t know where my sudden bashfulness came from, but there it was. When I went back out, she was sitting comfortably right in the middle of the couch, so whichever side I chose to sit on, I’d be close. That was okay. She looked good in my apartment, better than I did. I guess she’d had some practice sitting in it in the past few days.
I handed her the drink.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat down. We were close, all right.
After that I kind of lost track of the time. We just drank and talked, and after a while I got tired of going into the kitchen for drinks and brought the bottle out and put it on the coffee table. It was twelve, and it was one, and it was two, and I didn’t care. We talked about a lot of stupid things, which was nice, and then we talked about a lot of nice things, which was nicer. But we never talked about the case. Not once.
When the conversation finally lagged, I kissed her. It wasn’t like kissing Celeste. It was the first time I’d really kissed a woman in years, because the other night with Celeste didn’t count, didn’t prepare me at all.
We put the drinks aside and spent a while on the couch. I tried to keep us going slow, but it wasn’t easy. When her breast fell into my hand, it was like the first drop of rain hitting a piece of metal so dry and rusted and hot in the sun that the water evaporates and the metal is instantly dry again. I didn’t pay any attention to the pain in my fingers. It had been a long time, and a couple of possibly broken fingers was hardly enough to stop me.
We went in and stretched out on top of my bed. I put out the light. When she took me in her hands, I closed my eyes. The sensations weren’t exactly right, but it didn’t matter, it finally didn’t matter at all. I liked the way it felt, and if I moved my hips a little, I could detect my weight in her hand. We stayed like that for a while, and then I took myself out of her hand and leaned over and put us together. She put her arms around me, and I unfolded my legs and let my body fall slowly on hers.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Maybe it was my imagination, or the seepage of old memories into the present, but I swore I could feel her around me, the way I was supposed to. I fell out a few times, and my hips kept on thrusting before I figured it out—but I wasn’t such a pro that that hadn’t happened before anyway. I had her convinced that I was a man and she was a woman, and once we got into the rhythm of it, I had myself half convinced too.
And then it all came back, and I almost started weeping over her shoulder, into her black hair. Everything hit me at once. I knew suddenly that what I was after wasn’t something lost in the past. I swear it came to me in those exact words.
I knew all at once that I didn’t care about the woman who’d left me like this, that I didn’t want her back and I didn’t want revenge, and I didn’t want Celeste, or anybody else, only the woman moving under me right now. I wanted Catherine, I wanted her with everything I had—except I didn’t have it anymore. What I had to offer, or should have had to offer, was missing, and I’m not talking about my penis. I wanted Catherine, but I wanted to take her with a different self, a self that wasn’t available. The thing I wanted wasn’t lost in the past at all, and it never had been. It was lost in the future. A self I should have been, but wasn’t. A thread I’d let go of in myself, thinking I could live without it, not seeing what it meant.
Then the physical aspect overwhelmed introspection. I held her and I fucked her for all I was worth. My fervor probably resembled anger. Actually it was longing, and fear, in roughly equal measure. When I felt I could, I looked in her eyes, and held her head in place to make sure she looked in mine. The finish took a long time, and I didn’t rush it, and I didn’t let her rush it. We ended crushed in a heap together at the top of the bed, her knees up against my chest, my head in the crook of her neck.