She had stopped writing. She looked bored. Dudek chewed his lower lip.
“Our apartments have the same layout,” he said. “My bedroom sits over theirs. The cops told me that’s where he killed her, if you want to...” He pointed out of the living room, his face so dumb with faked innocence that she smiled.
Dudek had left his bed unmade, and dirty clothes shaped a hill in the room’s far corner. “Maid’s sick,” he said, kicking underpants and T-shirts under his bed. Then he pointed at the floor. “Down there.”
The reporter stepped around Dudek’s dresser and his bed, her high heels clicking on the worn wood floor, and Dudek realized how eerie the room had become, how he’d avoided it all day. Suddenly, he couldn’t help imagining Tucker, a few feet below, squeezing soft on the trigger, the jolt in his hand, the noise. Tucker must have blinked. When he opened his eyes... and what about Mrs. Tucker? Had he nudged her shoulder to wake her? Did he turn on the light? Tucker would have needed light. Unless he stood close enough to touch metal to scalp.
Dudek stopped rubbing his temples; he couldn’t remember having started. “Blows my mind,” he said. “Killing the wife and dogs on Easter. It’s got a kind of poetry though, you know what I’m saying? Everybody’s looking forward to a nice time. And bam! That’s it. Tucker’s waving his gun around shouting, ‘Hey everybody, look at me! I’m in the shits big time! Forget spring. Forget that rising from the grave stuff. Let me give you a big wad of death.”’
“Why would he do that?” she asked.
“That’s the big question, huh? Why would he put it in God’s face that way, say ‘Screw you, God!’ ” Dudek waved his middle finger at the ceiling. “Something must have made him that crazy...”
She wanted to know. She really did, he could tell — from her insistent voice, from her pale throat now flushed red — she wanted to brush against the ugliness and danger of that morning, feel the electric jolt that he’d stumbled into. She shouldered against the wall of his bedroom, hair tucked behind an ear to lay bare her smooth neck and delicate lobe pierced by a tiny, crystal stud.
“Well, I could’ve predicted it,” Dudek said. He sat on the corner of his mattress, which sagged a few inches. “Early, before I even started breakfast, I heard the outside door of the house banging around, like someone wanted in. I went down, keeping quiet in case it was some thief. Brought my baseball bat just in case.” He pulled it out from under the bed to show her. “I found Mr. Tucker at the landing, fully dressed.”
She waited.
“It wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night out,” Dudek said. “ ‘Happy Easter,’ I said to him. He’d bent down to pick up the key they keep under the mat. I said, ‘Happy Easter.’ ”
“ ‘Happy Easter, Henry,’ he said, and looked at the baseball bat. ‘Watch out for the slider,’ he said. Lots of laughs, that Mr. Tucker. He unlocked their door, then put the key back in its place. I could smell his breath.”
When Dudek looked at the reporter, she stared back, writing without looking at her notepad. She tilted her head and asked the question with her eyes.
“Booze hound,” he whispered. “Her, too.”
She stopped writing. She looked as if she had heard that story before.
“They just weren’t hobby drinkers,” he insisted. “This was a career. You should see the liquor boxes stacked out back. Mr. Tucker used to miss work. And the dogs roamed loose everywhere. Come Tuesday, if he managed to get out their garbage, the bags of empties made Mount Everest on the sidewalk. Sometimes, they’d forget I owed rent. Fine with me, but you know...”
“And this is why he killed her?”
“Yeah. What? Murder on Easter Sunday, fighting, alcohol, that’s not enough?”
“No,” she said and scribbled something. “I mean, yes, of course it’s enough. It is what it is. Well.”
She handed him a business card, smiled, and asked him to call if he had anything else to say, and he nodded like it wasn’t any big deal as she stepped out of his apartment and down the stairs in those pointy-heeled shoes. From the window, he watched her walk through the dusk to her car — a little Honda. She looked once more at the Tuckers’ apartment and then slid into the driver’s seat. Headlights on, zoom, she was gone.
In and out. That was Dudek’s plan. He knew they’d have beer or some liquor, and they owed him. Mr. Tucker did at least, for raining murder down on the holiday. The man owed the whole block drinks.
The police had blocked the Tuckers’ apartment, twisting yellow tape around a couple of rusty nails hammered into either side of the door frame. Dudek unwrapped the yellow tape, then found the key where Tucker had left it under the doormat. He rolled the deadbolt back into the door.
From where he stood he could see almost nothing, and the only light came from a low-watt bulb high above the stairway behind him. He waited for something to move or to make a sound, not surprised at how scared he was, but not having expected it either. A moment later, his eyes adjusted and he stepped inside. The room smelled sweet and coppery like a fresh pack of cigarettes, and he could hear the Tuckers’ fridge humming from the kitchen. A clock ticked the time. From the darkness came a steady pulse of blue light, the display on a VCR. He knew there was a couch near the door; he’d seen it from the stairwell when passing their apartment as Mr. or Mrs. was on the way in or out, and he recalled that he’d never seen them together, never on the porch or walking the dogs; always he met them one without the other.
He felt the wall near the door for the light switch that would be in the same place as the one in his apartment, but then he worried maybe some neighbor would notice and call the cops. Burglars made a living like this, didn’t they, raiding the homes of the recently dead? But that’s not what he was doing, not really. Besides: quick in, quick out. The apartment would be dark again before anyone noticed.
When the lights flashed on, he expected to see a home wrecked by the violence of three murders, but it wasn’t that way at all. He saw the couch, over-stuffed, with balding corduroy upholstery, and a coffee table with a wood laminate surface; on its top, an open TV guide from the newspaper, a coffee mug with coffee in it, a pen, and a few scraps of paper on which someone had written to-do lists: renew the termite policy, brake job, talk to Dudek about parking... He suspected that had pissed them off: parking behind them in that skinny driveway so they couldn’t get their car out. In two of the room’s corners were plaid doggie beds for Frazier and Foreman, their names embroidered on the pillows. On the eggshell-colored walls, framed prints — one of a barn in a wheat field and the other of toddling girls holding fistfuls of dandelions. A television and that VCR he’d noticed. A shelf with a few of Mrs. Tucker’s books, but mostly a place for framed eight-by-tens of some kids in cowboy hats, posing and faking smiles in front of a photographer’s background drape. In another photo, a thirtyish guy — who shared Mr. Tucker’s pointed nose and pear-shaped ass — shook hands with Tommy Lasorda. So the kids lived in L.A. and that explained why Dudek had never seen them. Maybe they’d be flying in now to take care of things. Dudek supposed the police would have called them.
In the kitchen, he grabbed three beers, then changed his mind and took the whole six-pack in its paperboard carton. What difference did it make? Would Tucker junior take inventory? So what if he did? When Dudek shut the refrigerator door, magnets fell and along with them a Chinese menu and some photographs. He picked them up, started to put them back when he noticed — right at eye level — lottery tickets stuck to the fridge by a rubber magnet of Florida.