“It probably would.”
“Damn right it would. She’d miss out on a few years in an orange jumpsuit and George would be spared knowing that his wife wanted him dead. And I’d be shirking my duty.”
“Which is to lock up the bad guys.”
“And girls, right. And if she’ll go so far as to hire a killer, who’s to say society is better off with her on the loose? I might be able to frighten her out of having George Otterbein killed, but would that scare some moral fiber into her?” A sigh. “So we’ll play this by the book. Eleven-thirty in the Winn-Dixie lot. She’ll be bringing a thousand dollars as earnest money, and it’d be best if you could get her to hand it to you.”
“Understood.”
“And you won’t forget to wear a wire, will you?”
“What an idea.”
“And remember you’re a Jersey boy. You wouldn’t want to slip and say something like, ‘Bergen County, maybe y’all have heard of it.’ ”
He watched the local news, the national news. Five minutes of Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, five minutes of Jeopardy. Took a shower, decided he could get by without a shave, then changed his mind and shaved anyway.
Couldn’t decide which shirt to wear. Crazy, he thought, and stupid in the bargain. He didn’t have that many shirts, and nobody was going to notice what he was wearing, and it’s not as though he was looking to make an impression.
Been a while since he’d had a good steak. No need to read more than that into it.
Five
And it was a good steak, no question about it, well-marbled and tender. The cliché about doughnuts notwithstanding, cops learned to eat well in New York, and at one time or another he’d had steak dinners at Keen’s, Smith & Wollensky, and Peter Luger. If the Cattle Baron’s rib eye wasn’t the best he’d ever had, it was certainly in the top ten.
He ordered it black and blue, not sure if they’d know what that meant, and he wasn’t reassured by the faint look of puzzlement on the face of the dishwater-blonde waitress. But she evidently passed the order on to a chef who knew what he had in mind, and his steak showed up charred on the outside and blood-rare within. It was a generous serving, accompanied by a baked potato and a side of creamed spinach, and it was almost enough to take his mind off Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.
Almost.
The fantasy, brought up to date:
He sits over a cup of coffee, watching her. She can’t see him, but his gaze is strong enough for her to feel it, even though she doesn’t know exactly what it is that she feels.
She approaches his table, asks him if everything is all right.
He says it is.
But none of their words matter. Their eyes have locked together, and something passes between them, a current as impossible to identify as it is to deny.
She says her name: “Lisa. Lisa Yarrow.”
“Doak Miller.”
“We close at eleven. That’s when I get off.”
“But we don’t have to wait until then, do we?”
“No, of course not. I’m through here. As soon as you finish your coffee—”
He puts money on the table. “I’m done with my coffee,” he says.
He gets to his feet. She takes his arm. They walk through the dining room and out of the restaurant.
She points to her car.
“We’ll take mine,” he says.
“Good,” she says. “His money bought it. I don’t want it anymore.”
He holds the door for her, walks around the car, gets behind the wheel. The car starts up right away, and he pulls out of the lot and heads north on Camp Road.
They drive for twenty minutes in silence. Eventually she asks him where they are going.
“Do you care?”
She thinks about it. “No,” she says at length. “No, not at all.”
The reality:
She comes to his table without being summoned, or even stared at. She asks him if everything was all right. He says it was.
Their eyes never meet.
The blonde waitress brings the check. He takes a credit card from his wallet, thinks better of it, puts it back. And, as in the fantasy, puts bills on the table.
Back home, he booted up his computer, checked his email, dropped in at a couple of websites. Found something to Google, and let one thing lead to another.
Running it all through his mind.
He thought about — and Googled — Karla Faye Tucker. Killed some people with a pickax during a 1983 robbery in Texas, got herself convicted and sentenced to death the following year, and executed by lethal injection in 1999. She found God in prison, which is where He evidently spends a lot of free time, and the campaign for a commutation of her sentence made much of this conversion. She was an entirely different person now, her advocates stressed; kill her and you’d be killing someone other than the woman who’d committed the murders.
The other side pointed out that, even if the conversion was genuine, it had only come about because Karla Faye had a date with the needle. Yes, she’d earned herself a place in Heaven. No, she couldn’t postpone the trip. Your bus is waitin’, Karla Faye!
What brought the case to Doak’s mind had nothing to do with arguments for and against capital punishment, an issue on which his views tended to shift anyway. But he remembered something someone had said right around the time that 60 Minutes was airing the woman’s story, and George W. Bush, still in the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, was turning down her appeaclass="underline"
“If she wasn’t pretty, nobody’d give a damn.”
Well, somebody would. The die-hard opponents of capital punishment would be on board no matter who she was or what she looked like. But if she’d had a face like a pizza, there’d have been fewer signatures on those petitions, fewer feet marching, and a lot less face time on network television.
But she was a pretty woman, maybe even beautiful. That got her more attention, got her special treatment.
So he was thinking about the woman he was going to meet tomorrow. Lisa Yarrow Otterbein, who was better looking than Karla Faye Tucker, and who, as far as he knew, had never even laid hands on a pickax.
The Wikipedia page showed a photo of Karla Faye Tucker, and he pulled up Lisa’s photo on his phone and held it alongside of Karla Faye’s for comparison.
No comparison, really.
Radburn’s photo was a good one, he noted. Except that it was static, a single moment frozen in time, and she had one of those faces that kept changing, looking slightly different from every different angle, changing too as whatever was going through her mind played itself out on her face.
A man could spend a lifetime looking at a face like that.
Jesus, he thought.
He opened MS Word, clicked to open a new document. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, and then he changed his mind, just as he’d changed his mind about the credit card. He closed Word, then shut down his computer altogether.
Found a tablet. The old-fashioned kind, a yellow legal pad, ruled sheets of paper 8–1/2 by 11 inches. Uncapped a Bic ballpoint, began printing in block capitals.