“The downstairs door was open,” she explained.
He invited her into the room. She smelled like lilac. He figured her pearls for fake, though she wore them as if she didn’t care. Strawberry blond hair brushed her shoulders and her purple pullover sweater. The reporter introduced herself, said she wanted to talk about the shooting.
“What do you want me to say?” Dudek said, hoping she’d hear how willing he was to say anything. The reporter didn’t bite.
“Tell me what you saw,” she said, “what you heard.” Her voice reminded him of hot fudge pouring over mounds of vanilla. He said the first thing that came to mind.
“He came out with a cop on each arm. I tried to see his face. I mean, how does a guy look after he shoots his wife? I’ll tell you. He was grinning. Like everything was blue sky and bird songs. He was in such a good mood, I thought of yelling at him, ‘Hey, Mr. Tucker! You mind if I’m late on the rent this month?’ Don’t write that. It’s a joke.”
She grinned and watched him while scribbling on her notepad, her hard mahogany eyes unafraid to meet his. One hundred percent flirt. No question. Dudek could lock on a flirty smile through thirty feet of dark, smoky bar even when his heart pumped tequila instead of blood. In his own apartment, having downed only one can of beer, he felt as certain of the reporter’s intentions as he did his own.
He got a rag from the bathroom to wipe up the spilled beer. He’d seen reporters on TV, always yak yak yakking — but not this one. Mostly she listened, frowning in sympathy, pooching her lower lip. “Ask me something,” he wanted to say, but instead he turned the blinds and looked out on the grimy April afternoon. He thought she’d like that picture: the loner in a T-shirt and ratty trousers, staring out the window at a world gone to hell. On Dudek’s street, that world was low-riders and rust-eaten pickups, and the house across the road where kids had hung a cheap nylon banner for the holiday. On it, a pink bunny gathered painted eggs and grinned, ignorant and idiotic, at the house where Dudek lived, where until about half past six that morning, Mrs. Tucker had lived, too.
“It kicks my ass that he picked Easter Sunday,” Dudek said. “For Christ’s sake, wait until Monday. You know what I’m saying?”
“For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, chuckling, so he laughed, too. He liked her freckles, sprinkled around her cheekbones like fairy dust.
Dudek made a show of sweeping crumbs off the couch, even beating a pillow with an open palm. “Have a seat,” he told her while on his way to the kitchen. “Can I make you some coffee? Pop you a beer? Murder on Easter rates at least a six-pack.”
“Sounds tempting, but I’m on duty,” she said.
In the kitchen, he fished a can from the fridge, glad the reporter had turned down his offer when he noticed that can was the last one.
“You read our paper?” she asked as he sat near her on the couch. The newspaper lay slapdash over the coffee table he had scavenged from a neighbor’s junk pile.
“It’s the Tuckers’.” He sipped his beer, folded the paper. He had read about two wars, a flood in China, and about people who wanted a state beach declared nude for one week a year. He was rooting for the nudies.
“So, when did you hear the shots?”
“I was making breakfast,” he said, “boiling eggs, you know, because it’s Easter. It was dark outside. Quiet. I can’t sleep late. My old man was the same way, but he could blame smoker’s cough. Me, I don’t know. Anyway, the Tuckers. I’m hearing nothing from downstairs, which is strange, because I always hear them when they’re at each other’s throats. I mean, I used to hear them. Before. You’d think this morning they’d have been at it, too.”
“What would they fight about?” she asked.
“Stupid things,” he said. “Sad things. She called him fatso, though she was fatter. He hated that she didn’t work. Some nights, I’d wake to him shouting, ‘You ignorant witch!’ or her yelling about how he was lousy with his hands.” Dudek grimaced. “Stuff I didn’t need to know. Some nights it sounded like they had fun hating each other that much.”
Dudek swigged a mouthful, let it tingle his gums. Mornings after those fights, Dudek would listen carefully before leaving for work, waiting until he could hear either Mr. or Mrs. step out of their apartment. Then he would hurry down the stairwell that landed at their apartment door, wanting to see in their faces how they’d got through the night, how they’d changed from the day before, if something moved in or moved out. He didn’t tell that part to the reporter.
She scribbled something and crossed her legs, her black pantyhose shimmering from the glare of the bulb on his ceiling. She had small feet, the reporter. And she wore black heels that came to a point like a knife. The heels were low, but he could imagine her in higher ones. He drained his beer and set the can between his feet next to the earlier empty, thinking she’d like it if he said something generous about the Tuckers.
“They loved the dogs. Two boxers. Purebreds. Frazier and Foreman. Cocky things. Big chests. God, they barked like maniacs.”
“This morning?”
“All the time, but this morning... I’d never heard them bark like that before. Strangled. Half a howl, almost. You’ll think I’m crazy” — he paused for effect — “but it was like they were begging.”
He noticed her fingers as she wrote: mid-length nails, shiny with clear polish; no ring on the important finger. “When did the dogs start?” she asked.
“After the first shot. Like I said, I was at the stove.” He told her how he’d stood there, the eggs knocking together, rattling the pot. The first bang. Jesus. He ran downstairs like an idiot. In his underwear, halfway down, he’d heard two more, the sound slamming through the walls to his spine. He turned back. One shot might be an accident. Three means something awful.
“Then?” she asked.
Silence. No barking. No nothing. He locked the door. Called the cops. “They were here in a few minutes,” he said, though it had seemed longer as he waited, wondering if Tucker would come upstairs next. Dudek had sat in his living room, gripping the aluminum baseball bat he hid beneath his bed in case of trouble, trying not to throw up. Nothing Ms. Lilac-and-Fake-Pearls needed to know.
“When they brought her out she was on a stretcher,” he said, “covered by a sheet. One of the wheels caught in a crack in the walk and they nearly tipped her. The dogs they brought out in garbage bags.”
The reporter uncrossed her legs, but kept her knees tight together. She leaned toward him, and then placed the tip of her pen between her teeth, lips apart.
Jesus H. Christ, Dudek thought, and he laughed at his good luck.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing. What else do you want to know?”
She thought a moment. “Why didn’t he kill himself, too?”
“Seems dumb doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because when you hear about these things it’s always murder-suicide. But Tucker walked out with that big grin. Maybe it’s like a car alarm loud as hell in the middle of the night. You know how you want to shoot those things. You just want to shut it up. Nothing else matters.”
“So, Mrs. Tucker was like a car alarm.”
Dudek shrugged. “I’m no head shrinker. Just a neighbor.”
“Did the Tuckers have friends or children?”
“None I ever saw.”
“You didn’t know them too well, then?”
“It’s not like we bar-hopped together, but you live above people, you get to know something about them. They were nice enough, I guess. She read those true-life crime books. In summers she’d read on the porch, fall asleep in one of those scratchy lawn chairs, and snore. He watched the fights. As far as landlords go, he couldn’t tell a wrench from pliers, you know? Cheap, too. You can tell he didn’t like to spend money on the place.”