23
"I'm serious, Decker. I think I'm pregnant."
"Ah. Pregnant." He paused, and then he narrowed his eyes. "You're kidding me, right?"
She stared at him without blinking for a long, long time and gradually it dawned on him that maybe she wasn't kidding. He leaned closer and hissed, "How can you be pregnant? You're on the pill, aren't you?"
"I had to stop taking it because of my antibiotics. It was only for two weeks. I didn't think that—"
"You didn't think that if you made love without being on the pill that there might be some remote risk of motherhood? Or, even worse, fatherhood? I'm a detective, Mayzie, I'm not a daddy."
Mayzie's eyelashes sparkled with tears. "I'm sorry, Decker. I didn't mean it to happen. But we have to talk."
"What good is talking going to do?"
"I might be having your baby, Decker. It's not going to go away."
Decker took a deep breath. Detective George Rudisill was standing on the opposite side of the lobby, talking to a dithery old woman with her arm in a sling, and he gave Decker a slow, sly smile. Decker thought, Shit, this is all I need.
"All right, Mayzie," he said. "I have to go talk to my chief
suspect right now. But I'll meet you at the Tobacco Company bar at, say—what time is it now? Eight o'clock, okay?" "You'll be there, right? You won't let me down?" "I swear on my mother's hip."
God, thought Decker. To look at, Mayzie was a peach. But whenever they had sex she let out a peculiar piping noise, like a wild goose flying south for the winter, and when they weren't having sex and she wasn't piping she never wanted to talk about anything but soap operas and nail pol‑
24
ish and how she had once appeared in the audience in Oprah! (she had the videotape, if you wanted to see her, fifth row from the back, in the purple spotted dress).
Decker had invited her to Awful Arthur's for a last dinner to say, "Sorry, Mayzie, but I don't think this is really working out." It wasn't working out so much that he had totally forgotten to go.
"Eight o'clock," she insisted, and walked off back toward the traffic department.
Decker stood alone for a moment, slowly massaging the muscles at the back of his neck. Rudisill came up to him and grinned. "Hi, Lieutenant. Everything okay?"
"Sure, why shouldn't it be?"
"Shifflett didn't look too happy."
"Women are always happy, George. Especially when they're miserable."
Jerry Maitland was propped up in bed with the left side of his face and both of his arms thickly bandaged, so that he looked like a snowman. His pupils were dilated and he still smelled of the operating theater. The redheaded nurse said, "Ten minutes and no more, please, Lieutenant."
"You like Mexican food?" Decker asked her.
"I'm married."
"Being married affects your taste buds?"
"Nine minutes," the nurse said and closed the door behind her.
Decker approached the bed. Jerry stiffly turned his head to stare at him. Decker said nothing at first, but went over to the window and parted the slatted blinds with two fingers. Down below he could see the brightly lit sidewalks of Marshall Street, and the intersection with Fourteenth Street. After a while, he turned back and said, "How's tricks, Gerald?"
25
Jerry shook his head, but didn't say anything.
Decker drew up a chair and straddled it backward, shifting Jerry's plasma drip so that he could sit a little closer. "Is it Gerald or can I call you Jerry?"
"Jerry's okay," Jerry mumbled.
"Jerry it is, then. My name's Decker. Don't know what my parents were doing, giving me a goddamn outré name like that. It was something to do with my great-great-grandfather. Fought in the army of northern Virginia, in the Civil War."
Jerry tried to cough, but it obviously strained the stitches in his face, and he had to stifle it.
Decker said, "Hurts, huh?"
Jerry nodded. Decker nodded too, as if in sympathy. "You can have your lawyer present, you know that, don't you?"
"I don't need a lawyer. I haven't done anything."
"You're sure about that? It might be in your own best interest."
Jerry shook his head.
"Okay," Decker said. Then, quite casually, "What did you do with the knife?"
"I was putting up wallpaper and I cut myself. I don't know how. I dropped the knife on the floor."
"No, no. That's not the knife I mean, Jerry. That was a teensy weensy little craft knife. I'm talking about the other knife."
"The other knife?"
"That's right. I'm talking about the great big two-foot long mother that you used to cut off Alison's head."
"You don't seriously believe that I killed her? How can you think—I love her. She's my wife. Why would I want to kill her?"
"Well, that's what I'm trying to find out, Jerry, and it
26
would make it a whole lot less complicated if you told me what you did with the knife."
"There was no knife. Don't you understand? There was no knife."
"So what did you cut her head off with? A pair of nail scissors? Come on, Jerry, there was nobody else in the house but you and Alison, and Alison wasn't just decapitated—she suffered more than seventeen deeply penetrative stab wounds and serious lacerations. I've been listening to her 911 call. The operator asks her what's wrong and she keeps saying, 'My husband."
Jerry's eyes filled up with tears. "She was calling because of me. I got cut first."
"Oh yes, by whom exactly?"
"By whatever it was that killed Alison. I didn't touch her. I love her. We were going to have a baby girl."
Decker was silent for a while. Then he reassuringly patted Jerry's arm. "All right, Jerry. You didn't touch her. But if you can tell me where the knife is, I can have the handle checked for fingerprints, and if it really wasn't you who did it, then we'll know for sure, won't we?"
"There was no knife. My arms got cut and then my face got cut, but I never saw a knife."
"You were alone, though? There was nobody else there except you and Alison? Is that what you're telling me?" Jerry nodded, miserably.
Decker sat in thought for a minute or two, his hand covering his mouth. Then he said, "Okay, supposing that's what happened. How do you explain it?"
"I don't know. There was blood all over the kitchen. I was sure that I was going to die. Then Alison went to answer the door to the paramedics and she suddenly . . ."
"Go on. Take your time."
27
"I wasn't anywhere near her. She just collapsed. She kind of spun around, and—fell onto the floor and—her head—"
He turned his face away, rhythmically beating his bandaged arm against the blankets. All that he was capable of uttering were high, strangulated sobs.
"Okay," Decker said, after a while. "Let's leave it at that for now."
He stood up and placed the chair back against the wall. He had no doubt at all that Jerry had murdered his wife, simply because there was no other rational explanation. But there was little point in trying to question him until he came out of shock. Decker had seen it so many times before: mothers who couldn't admit that they had smothered their babies, husbands who genuinely believed that somebody else had shot their wives, even when they were standing over the body with a discharged revolver in their hand. Disassociation, they called it.
He left the room. A uniformed officer was sitting outside reading the sports pages. He put his paper down and started to stand up but Decker said, "That's okay, Greeley. Got any hot tips for Colonial Downs?"
"Mr. Invisible in the 3:45, twenty-five to one."
"Mr. Invisible, huh?" He glanced back at Jerry Maitland lying bandaged up in bed. There was no knife. There was nobody there.