“That won’t take but half an hour.”
I made the obligatory laugh, then said, “They don’t really think I did it. They’ve got nobody else.”
“There’s that Kovacs brother, unaccounted for.”
I wasn’t ready yet to tell him why I’d come.
“I thought I was protecting her,” I said.
“You were a kid,” Leo said, raising the bottle to his lips.
“I knew she hadn’t been abducted,” I said.
“You hoped.”
“I knew.”
Always I’d pulled back from the whole of it. I’d never wanted to know how much he had guessed. Now he had to understand all of it.
“Even though my boss at the laundry vouched for my alibi,” I said, “two detectives dragged me over to her apartment, to rub my nose in the scene. They were convinced I knew more than I was saying.”
“Rivertown cops,” Leo said.
“They were right. I did know more than I was saying.”
Leo’s eyebrows went still over the neck of his beer.
“They started me in the kitchen. By then, they’d carted Herman Mays away, but his blood was still all over the table, a big brown puddle, like spilled coffee. They made sure I saw that first.
“After a minute, they walked me through the front room, to Maris’s bedroom. ‘Ever been in here, son?’ the biggest of them, a greasy son of a bitch, asked as he went to her closet. He kept his eyes on me as he started touching her skirts and her blouses with his filthy hands. He had dirt under his fingernails, probably from lunch-the pig-and I kept thinking I wanted to hit him, hit that slug for daring to touch her clothes with his dirty fingernails. He must have seen that on my face, because then he went to her dresser and began opening drawers, slowly, one by one, pulling out her bras and her panties, caressing them with his filthy fingers. Watching me with those fat eyes the whole time. I had to look away, at the wall.”
“Jeez, Dek, don’t tell me this stuff…”
“It was a good thing those were the days before DNA, because they might have found…my…” I stopped to concentrate on the blank television screen, and on taking slow breaths.
“It’s over, Dek.”
“It’s not over.”
“Fittle?” Leo asked, misunderstanding. “He’s just a slap. He’ll go away when the cops learn you don’t have the money.”
“Someone has to pay for Maris.”
“Severs is dead, Dek.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Severs.”
“That surviving Kovacs, then?”
“I still see her bedroom, back in high school. The curtains she’d made, white with a kind of pink piping; a tiny dresser crammed with girl bottles, perfume, a hairbrush, some cream. Not a lot of stuff, but girl stuff. Her stuff. There was a tiny nightstand with a Tinkerbell lamp her mother gave her when she was little. And the bed. Jesus, Leo, that narrow, lumpy, saggy bed with the white bedspread that she’d sewn piping onto to make it match the curtains.” I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest was too tight to let it all the way in. “It was a crummy little bedroom in a crummy little apartment, but she made it speciaclass="underline" white, with a little pink.” I looked at him. “I still smell that bedroom, Leo.”
He leaned forward, worry lined deep on his forehead. “Why are we doing this?”
“That fat cop was wasting his time, trying to unnerve me by touching her things. By then, all I was focusing on was making my face a mask. Because, right off, in the kitchen, I knew she hadn’t been abducted.”
“Come on, Dek-”
“I knew she hadn’t been abducted when I saw the kitchen table.”
Leo’s thick eyebrows touched, confused. “The blood?”
“The typewriter.”
“You knew right away that the typewriter was missing? The cops let you look in her closet?”
“No. She’d taken to leaving the typewriter out, on the kitchen table, all the time. No more hiding it, no more knuckling under to her father. I hadn’t known why, exactly. All she’d say was she’d told him she wasn’t going to be stuck in some factory town her whole life. She was going to go to college and then become a famous novelist, she wasn’t going to end up…”
“Like him?”
“She wanted to rub the bastard’s nose in it, so she left the typewriter out, right there on the kitchen table.”
“M. M.’s future machine.” Leo smiled, the ghost of the memory flitting across his face.
“She was going to be somebody.”
“If not a famous novelist, then a famous reporter, or a well-known playwright, all with that typewriter,” Leo said. “I remember.”
“When that miserable bastard came home at night, stinking of beer and sweat and whores, that typewriter was the last thing he’d see before he passed out at the kitchen table.”
“She must have come a ways since that afternoon when we first brought the typewriter home. Remember how she was afraid Herman would discover it?”
“No more. At the end, she was using it to taunt him. In the middle of the night, when he roused himself awake, when he got up to come…” I took a sip of beer. It had gone warm. “That typewriter was the first thing he’d see,” I finished.
Leo looked at me, not understanding.
“The typewriter wasn’t there, Leo.”
Leo set down his beer. “You said that. And that told you she hadn’t been abducted.”
I watched his eyes saying nothing, letting him work it.
“And from that, Holmes, you deduced, being such a smart young man, that she used the typewriter to smash the head of the miserable Herman as he slept at the kitchen table?”
“Yes.”
“It’s too much of a reach. We know she took the typewriter, because you found it in Rambling, but to think that she used it to murder her father…too big a reach. Where’s the motive?”
“She was pregnant.”
He stared at me, blank-faced. Then he said, “You poor bastard.”
“It’s what we were arguing about on the sidewalk, that last time.”
“Jeez,” he said, “old Herman found out, there was a row, and she killed him.”
“That day on the sidewalk, she’d just gotten it confirmed by the doctor. She hung on to me, sobbing, saying stuff I didn’t understand. But one thing I remember: The doctor said she was well into her second trimester.” I stopped, then went on. “All I could say was we’d get a place.”
“You poor bastard.”
“Damn it, no!”
Leo leaned back in his chair to give me some space.
“You remember my Aunt Lillian?”
“The nice one? She died just before we graduated, right?”
“End of May. Her funeral set me off, made me almost crazy with the fear of death. That was the day Maris and I… The only time,” I finished.
The new thought clouded his face. He’d done the math in a second.
“You’re sure she said second trimester?” His voice was a whisper.
“I didn’t know what that meant. Not for a long time did I think to wonder what that meant.”
“Working backward from August 10, assuming she was at least four months pregnant, brings you to…”
“Early April, at least six weeks before Lillian died.” I looked at him. “If only I’d listened, out there on the sidewalk. If only I’d listened.”
His words came out clipped. “You heard ‘pregnant’ on that sidewalk that day. It’s the loudest word in a young man’s world; it drowns out everything else.”
I went on, in a hurry now to get it all out of my gut. “That last day, she put her hands on the sides of my face and told me I was naive. If only I’d listened, I would have understood, really understood, why she’d taken to leaving that typewriter on the kitchen table. She wanted to make sure Herman saw it when he woke up in the middle of the night…”
“All horned up?” Leo’s eyes raged.
“She wasn’t going to let him break her dream.”