“That was the size of the hole it would make if I pulled the trigger.
“I’d say I thought about it, but I don’t remember any thoughts.
“I went upstairs. I put the gun back in the drawer. I stripped the bed and made it up with fresh sheets and pillowcases.
“In the morning I went to my hairdresser and told him he had to fit me in. When I let him know what I wanted he kept asking me if I was sure. ‘Lisa, girlfriend, don’t you want to think this over?’ He was afraid to do it, but I told him if he didn’t cut it I’d cut it myself. Well, he couldn’t let that happen, so he cut it, and I kept saying, ‘No, shorter,’ and he cut it the way it is today. I’ve kept it like this ever since.
“I drove straight from the beauty parlor to the Cattle Baron, and when I left there I had my old job back. I lucked out, the hostess had given notice and he needed to find somebody to replace her, but I think I’d have gotten the job anyway, even if he had to fire somebody. He always liked me.
“I went home. The maid gaped when she saw my hair. George was out, and it was dark out by the time he came home. He’d been drinking but he wasn’t drunk. He looked at me and his face didn’t change expression.
“I told him I’d be going to work, that I had my old job back. He just nodded.
“We never said anything about the previous evening. He never brought anybody home again. And about a month later we were in bed, and he started touching me. I didn’t stop him. And then he got on top of me, and I went along with it.
“The little gun’s still in the nightstand drawer. Sometimes I open the drawer and look at it, but I never pick it up, or even touch it.”
He went out, drove around, bought pizza and brought it back to the room. They ate the pizza and drank Cokes from the machine and she apologized for ruining the mood. He told her not to be ridiculous.
She said, “Your stories get us hot. Then I tell a story and turn us off completely. I never told that story before. Maybe I should have taken it to the grave.”
“I’m glad you told me.”
“And I’m glad I told you, but look at the mood it’s put us in. Here we are in our love nest, and it’s wasted on us. You’re shaking your head.”
“Because it’s not wasted. What did you just call it?”
“Call what? This place? I called it our love nest, but that’s how you’ve been referring to it since you paid the rent.”
“Because that’s what it is.”
“I don’t—”
“Not our fuck nest,” he said. “Our love nest.”
“Oh.”
“And I love you.”
She was holding a slice of pizza, and now she looked at it as if couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do with it. She put it down and turned her blue eyes to him.
She said, “We’ve never said that, have we? I’ve been calling you darling, which is fairly extreme all by itself, but we’ve stayed away from the L word.”
“It’s been in my mind.”
“And mine.”
“I tell you everything else. I ought to be able to tell you I love you.”
“And I love you.”
“And your story got us here, so stop apologizing for it.”
“All right.”
“I love your hair this way. It shows off your face, it makes your blue eyes big enough to drown in.”
“I was wondering if you might like me better with long hair.”
“No, keep it this way.”
“I will.”
“And your story serves a practical purpose, too.”
“Oh?”
“It’ll make it a whole lot easier,” he said, “when the time comes to kill him.”
Twenty-one
He dropped her at the Chiefland Mall. She headed north in the Lexus, on her way to work, and he thought about a movie, but the four films on offer were aimed at a much younger audience. The films he liked were to be found on cable channels.
He drove home, checked his email, had a shower, drank a beer, watched a couple of Eastern European women play tennis. They were both blonde, they were both wearing white, and neither one had a name he could pronounce, so he found them essentially indistinguishable. He watched without really paying attention, hit the Mute button to shut up the announcers, then found he missed the sound of the bouncing ball. He took it off Mute and just ignored what they were saying.
And after the sun was down he found himself watching a movie, Double Indemnity on TCM. He’d recalled it a few days ago, while he was doing the job for Newhouser, and when channel-surfing brought it to his attention, he could hardly pass it up.
Barbara Stanwyck and — for God’s sake — Fred MacMurray, acting in what had to be the only dark role of his career, and playing the hell out of it. He was an insurance agent and she was married to a policy holder and they hatched a plot to kill her husband for the insurance. And there was Edward G. Robinson, on the side of the angels for a change, playing the tough claims investigator who wouldn’t let them get away with it.
All in black and white, which suited the film’s classic noir mood, and TCM showed it without commercials, and he started out appreciating it and wound up caught up entirely in the story. He had to go to the bathroom, his bladder was stretched to capacity, but he waited until the final credits had rolled before he got up from his chair.
The subject matter, of course, may have had something to do with it.
They were going to have to kill George Otterbein.
No way around it, really. The pre-nuptial agreement he’d had her sign had been drawn by one of the state’s foremost matrimonial lawyers. It defined her participation in her husband’s estate, specifying just how much and how little he could leave her. If he were to divorce her, it set the terms of the divorce settlement in advance. She’d get something along the lines of a half million dollars. That was certainly a substantial sum, but far less than she might otherwise have expected to receive.
On the other hand, if she were the one to institute divorce proceedings, or if she physically ceased cohabitation with him, she’d be cut off with fifty thousand dollars.
That was more money than she’d brought to the marriage, when her net worth had consisted of the clothes in her closet and her equity in the eight-year-old car she was driving. But it was roughly a tenth of what he’d have to pay her if he was the one who wanted the divorce, and the difference was enough to explain why he was comfortable sharing his bed and board with a woman who’d come to despise him. And it pretty much guaranteed that life with George was not going to get better for her, because he had every reason — well, every reason with a dollar sign in front of it — to make her unhappy enough to walk out.
Fifty thousand dollars. You could see all the options just by moving the decimal point around. Half a million if George got the divorce. Something in the neighborhood of five million if he died.
Sunday he spent most of the morning online. Around noon he got in the car, stopped at an ATM, then drove for a little over an hour to Quitman, Georgia. He filled the tank at a BP station and got directions to the local high school, where they were holding a gun and knife show. It seemed an unfortunate venue, with school shootings so frequently in the news, but maybe the local school board missed the memo.
He parked in the high school lot, where his Monte Carlo looked at home among a good batch of clunkers, and followed the signs to the school gymnasium. Some two dozen dealers had their wares displayed on folding aluminum tables, and at least that many prospective customers were looking at what was on offer.
He found the edged weapons more interesting than the guns. Most of the tables showed at least a few of them, and they were a specialty of one dealer, whose stock included everything from a Civil War cavalry saber and Nazi daggers to army surplus combat knives and bench-made hunters and folders.