“I didn’t go to the doctor, though. Norman brought home a big bottle of antibiotic tablets. I took them and got better. He knows all sorts of people he can get things from. He calls people like that “daddy’s little helpers.” That’s sort of funny when you think of it, isn’t it?” She was still talking mostly to her hands, which were clasped in her lap, but she finally dared a quick look up at him, to gauge his reaction to the things she had been saying. What she saw stunned her.
“What?” he asked hoarsely.
“What, Rosie?”
“You’re crying,” she said, and now her own voice wavered. Bill looked surprised.
“No, I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am.” She reached out with one finger, drew a gentle semicircle below his eye with it, and then held the tip up for him to see. He examined it closely, biting his lower lip.
“You didn’t eat much, either.” Half of his dog was still on his plate, with mustardy sauerkraut spilling out of the bun. Bill pitched the paper plate into the trash barrel beside the bench, then looked back at her, absently wiping at the wetness on his cheeks. Rosie felt a bleak certainty steal over her. Now he would ask why she had stayed with Norman and while she wouldn’t get up off the park bench and leave (any more than she had ever left the house on Westmoreland Street until April), it would put the first barrier between them, because it was a question she couldn’t answer. She didn’t know why she had stayed with him, any more than she knew why, in the end, it had taken just a single drop of blood to transform her entire life. She only knew that the shower had been the best place in the house, dark and wet and full of steam, and that sometimes half an hour in Pooh’s Chair felt like five minutes, and that why wasn’t a question that had any meaning when you were living in hell. Hell was motiveless. The women in Therapy Circle had understood that; no one had asked her why she stayed. They knew. From their own experiences, they knew. She had an idea that some of them might even know about the tennis racket… or things even worse than the tennis racket. But when Bill finally asked a question, it was so different from the one she had expected that for a moment she could only flounder.
“What are the chances he might have killed the woman who was making all the trouble for him back in
“85? That Wendy Yarrow?” She was shocked, but it wasn’t the kind of shock one feels when asked an unthinkable question; she was shocked in the manner of one who sees a known face in some fabulously unlikely locale. The question he had spoken aloud was one which had circled, unarticulated and thus not quite formed, at the back of her mind for years.
“Rosie? I asked you what you thought the chances were-”
“I think they might have been… well, pretty good, actually.”
“It was convenient for him when she died like that, wasn’t it? Saved him from watching the whole thing get hung out in civil court.”
“Yes.”
“If she had been bitten, do you think the newspapers would have printed it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.” She looked at her watch and got quickly to her feet.
“Oh, boy, I have to go, and right now. Rhoda wanted to start in again at twelve-fifteen and it’s ten past already.” They started back side by side. She found herself wishing he would put his arm around her again, and just as part of her mind was telling her not to be greedy and another part (Practical-Sensible) was telling her not to ask for trouble, he did just that. I think I’m falling in love with him. It was the lack of amazement in that thought which prompted the next one: No, Rosie, I think that’s actually yesterday’s headline. I think it’s already happened.
“What did Anna say about the police?” he asked her. “does she want you to go someplace and make a report?” She stiffened within the circle of his arm, her throat drying out as adrenaline tipped into her system. All it took was that single word. The p-word. Cops are brothers. Norman had told her this over and over. Law enforcement is a family and cops are brothers. Rosie didn’t know how true it was, how far they would go to stick up for each other-or cover up for each other-but she knew that the cops Norman brought home from time to time seemed eerily like Norman himself, and she knew he had never said a word against any of them, even his first partner on detectives, a crafty, grafty old pig named Gordon Satterwaite, whom Norman had loathed. And of course there was Harley Bissington, whose hobby-at least when in attendance at Casa Daniels-had been undressing Rosie with his eyes. Harley had gotten some kind of skin-cancer and taken early retirement three years ago, but he had been Norman’s partner back in 1985, when the Richie Bender/Wendy Yarrow thing had gone down. And if it had gone down the way Rosie suspected it had, then Harley had stuck up for Norman. Stuck up for him big-time. And not just because he’d been in on it himself, either. He’d done it because law enforcement was a family and cops were brothers. Cops saw the world in a different way from the nine-to-fivers ('the Kmart shoppers,” in Normanspeak); cops saw it with its skin off and its nerves sizzling. It made all of them different, it made some of them a lot different-and then there was Norman.
“I’m not going anywhere near the police,” Rosie said, speaking rapidly.
“Anna said I don’t have to and nobody can make me. The police are his friends. His brothers. They stick up for each other, they-”
“Take it easy,” he said, sounding a little alarmed.
“It’s okay, just take it easy.”
“I can’t take it easy! I mean, you don’t know. That’s really why I called you and said I couldn’t see you, because you don’t know how it is… how he is… and how it works between him and all the rest of them. If I went to the police here, they’d check with the police there. And if one of them… someone who works with him, who’s been on stakeouts with him at three in the morning, who’s trusted his life to him…” It was Harley she was thinking of, Harley who couldn’t stop looking at her breasts and always had to check on where the hem of her skirt finished up when she sat down.
“Rosie, you don’t have to-”
“Yes I do!” she said with a fierceness that was entirely unlike her.
“If a cop like that knew how to get in touch with Norman, he would. He’d say I’d been talking about him. If I gave them my address-and they make you do that when you file a complaint-he’d give him that, too.”
“I’m sure that no cop would-”
“Have you ever had them in your house, playing poker or watching Debbie Does Dallas?
“Well… no. No, but…”
“I have. I’ve heard what they talk about, and I know how they look at the rest of the world. They see it that way, as the rest of the world. Even the best of them do. There’s them… and there’s the Kmart shoppers. That’s all.” He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure what, then closed it again. The idea that Norman might find out the address of her room on Trenton Street as the result of some cops” jungle telegraph had a sort of persuasiveness to it, but this was not the main reason he kept quiet. The look on her face-the look of a woman who has made a hateful and unwilling regression back to an unhappier time-suggested that he could say nothing which would convince her, anyway. She was scared of the cops, that was all, and he was old enough to know that not all bogies can be slain by mere logic.
“Besides, Anna said I didn’t have to. Anna said if it was Norman, they’d be seeing him first, not me.” Bill thought it over and decided it made sense.
“What will she do about it?” “she’s already started. She faxed a women’s group back home-where I came from, anyway-and told them what might be happening here. She asked them if they could send her any information about Norman, and they faxed back a whole bunch of stuff just an hour later, including a picture.” Bill raised his eyebrows.
“Fast work, especially after business hours.”
“My husband is now a hero back home,” she said dully.
“Probably hasn’t had to pay for a drink in a month. He was in charge of the team that broke up a big drug-ring. His picture was on the front page of the paper two or three days running.” Bill whistled. Maybe she wasn’t so paranoid, after all.