“Boy,” she said afterward. “Boy.”
“I take it it was better that time.”
“You just want a compliment,” she said and then promptly fell asleep without giving me one.
I was on the bottom of an ocean, chained to a rock the size of a house. I was being called urgently to the surface but I couldn’t escape, hard as I tried.
I woke up realizing that the phone was ringing. It was on my side of her bed. She had her arms flung wide and was snoring. She was the only woman I’d ever known who could snore cute. I got the phone.
There was a long pause on the other end, a heavy-breather pause. I wondered if it might be a twist-o, or her ex-husband, the very wonderful (just ask him) Chad. But it wasn’t.
He was very drunk and he had to say it twice before I could understand what the hell he was saying.
“ ’s big trull. ’s big big trull.”
Big big trouble.
I remembered my police training. When you talk to somebody drunk or desperate, stay calm.
“Where are you?”
“ ’s one piece ’a trull I won’t get outta.”
“Stephen, where are you?”
Another long pause. I heard a match being struck. In the receiver it sounded like a bomb going off.
“Where are you?” I repeated.
The cigarette had apparently helped a bit. At least I could understand him on the first sentence now.
“I’m at his apartment.”
“Whose apartment?”
“Reeves’s.”
“Reeves’s? Stephen, what the hell are you doing there?”
By now Donna was awake, whispering, “Is he all right?” She had a daughterly affection for Wade. At moments such as these it would translate into terror.
“Came over to ’pologize,” he said.
“So what happened?”
There was a long sigh and then a silence and then a sigh again. “Fucker’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Another sigh. When he spoke again, he sounded miserable and lost. He sounded on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what happened over here, Dwyer. Please come over right away. Please.”
With that, he hung up the phone.
3
The closer we got to Reeves’s apartment, the more Pizza Huts and Hardee’s and Long-John Silver’s we saw. In the rain all the neon had a certain beauty.
Reeves lived in a neighborhood on the edge of what had once been the Czech section of the city. Now some of the Czechs had moved out (literally), looking down on the houses they’d left behind — houses today occupied by people with NRA and country-and-western radio station stickers on their bumpers. It had become a lower-class white bastion. Blacks knew better than to move in. Reeves’s place was just on the dividing line. White upper-class couples had recently started refurbishing some of the rambling old houses into mock-Victorian apartment houses. We found Reeves’s building.
The run through the rain, from the driveway to the porch, got us soaked. In the vestibule we looked for his name along the row of ten mailboxes, and then we went up the curving staircase. The place smelled of fresh paint.
Reeves’s apartment was in the rear. A silver number 11 identified it. If you looked closely, you could see that the door was ajar.
“Boy,” Donna whispered, taking my hand and placing it over her breast. “Feel my heart.”
It was racing, pounding, and I didn’t blame it a damn bit.
I eased the door open. It squeaked so loudly I could imagine lights going on all over this side of town.
“Maybe we should just call the police,” she whispered again.
“Don’t you want to help Wade?”
I knew that would get her. She looked instantly guilty. She liked and, more importantly, felt sorry for Wade. She made a grim little expression with her mouth and nodded for me to proceed.
The first thing I noticed inside was the aquarium. It surprised me only because Reeves spent so much time playing the cool theatrical wizard. What the fuck would a cool theatrical wizard be doing with a tank full of fishies?
Light from the big fish tank was the only illumination in the front room. The rest of the place ran more to my expectations. The walls were decorated with posters from plays he’d directed as well as photographs of himself and the semi-famous actors he’d worked with at the Bridges Theater. Bookcases made of bricks and boards ran the length of the rear wall and were crammed with plays and quality paperbacks by writers as varied as Aristophanes and Neil Simon. That was the only time Simon would ever keep company with Aristophanes.
The furniture reminded me of my own stuff. A green couch that didn’t at all match the green overstuffed chair that clashed with the dark blue drapes. In other words, a salute to Goodwill stores everywhere.
Three halls led off from the living room. One went to the kitchen, which was empty and smelled of dishes left in the sink for days. Another went to a screened-in porch at the back that smelled of new spring grass and rain. The third hall led to his bedroom and that’s where we found him, sprawled across the bed. A butcher knife stuck out from between his shoulder blades, and a dark puddle of blood had seeped from the wound.
As Donna and I moved closer she started saying “Boy” and then “God,” and then alternating the expressions back and forth the closer we got.
The bedroom was sparsely decorated — a few more play posters, a few more photos of himself with the famous. A clothes hamper stood open. Apparently he washed his clothes about as often as he did his dishes. I angled away from the smell.
“That’s how I found him,” a rough voice said from behind us.
Stephen Wade, dressed in a dark turtleneck sweater, a hound’s-tooth Stanley Blacker sport coat, and a pair of dark pleated slacks, stepped from the walk-in closet looking dapper and very theatrical, as if he was playing a role in a British crime drama. To complete the image, he waved a .45 at us.
“God, Stephen,” Donna said, “what’s the gun for?”
I turned on a table lamp. He was sobering up fast, but a kind of madness, founded on fear I suppose, was setting in. His gaze was narrow and furtive. I wanted to say something to help — to calm him; to get that goddamn look out of his eyes — but nothing came to mind.
Donna started over to him. Maybe it was because her father had never been home when she was a child and as a consequence she secretly felt she’d never really had a father. Maybe it was because, with his large, handsome, silver-haired head, Wade looked like the ultimate TV-commercial father — or grandfather. Or maybe I was full of beans and she just plain old had a crush him. Whatever it was, being around Wade sort of unglued Donna, and she got real maternal. Now, as she moved toward him, she held out her hand for him to give her the gun.
He took her in his arms and they hugged. I heard her sob, and for a moment I saw him close his eyes in a kind of surrender to her presence, but then he gently pushed her away and said, “I don’t think I killed him, but I’m not sure.”
“Oh, Stephen,” she said, “you couldn’t have killed him. You just couldn’t.” She turned back to me. “Tell him, Dwyer. Tell him he couldn’t have killed him.”
“I appreciate your confidence,” Wade said. “I just wish I could share it.”
I looked at the body and then at Wade. His eyes seemed worse by the minute. The soberer he got, the more shock set in.
“Why don’t we go out into the living room?” I said.
“I’ll make some coffee,” Donna said. Then she remembered. “Boy, I wouldn’t want to drink any coffee made in that kitchen. How about if I walk down to that Pizza Hut and get some coffee?”
“Great idea,” I said.
While Donna left, I led Wade into the living room. For a long minute he said nothing. He just stared at the fish — gold and red and blue and green — slapping their wispy little tails through the water. At the moment they seemed to have it knocked. All they had to do all day was swim around and eat food that looked like crunched up communion wafers. They didn’t have to worry about murders or being a drunk or has-been actor or a security cop who couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to help out a friend.