He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. He removes one with his lips, starts to put them away, then holds them out to me as if to show he isn’t such a bad guy after all. I shake my head. I don’t tell him that those things will kill him. He shrugs, as if not accepting one of his cigarettes is undeniable proof I must be crazy. He lights it and sucks deeply, then breathes a mouthful of smoke into the damp air. It hovers above his head, but doesn’t drift.
“You cut off Kathy’s breast and took it home.”
“What?”
“What? You didn’t think I looked in the box?”
“I had no idea. I just assumed it was a head.”
Landry shakes his head. “You just don’t stop trying, do you?”
I feel sick. “It still doesn’t add up. You think one of them waited in the car while I killed the other?”
“You attacked one of them quickly and knocked her unconscious, then subdued the other. You probably left her tied up in the car.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
Kathy’s ghost has gone and Luciana’s arrives. She looks at me from where Kathy stood earlier, only she has no drink to hold. Instead she’s holding a towel to dry her wet, ghostly hair.
“She tried to call the police, but you had to stop her, didn’t you?” Landry says.
“What happened?” Luciana asks.
“I broke the phone.”
“I know,” they both say, but only Luciana carries on. “It was too late anyway, Charlie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you kill Jo?”
“What? No,” I say. “How do you even know about her?”
“But you abducted her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I shake my head. “No, it’s not what you’re thinking. I was trying to help her.”
“You were helping her by abducting her.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.”
“No, I don’t think you know just how crazy it really sounds. Where is she?”
“She was helping me find Cyris.”
“Let me get this straight. You abduct her, and she agrees to help you.”
“Like I said, I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true.”
“You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that during my career,” Landry says. “People think if they lead into a conversation by saying they know how crazy it sounds, that somehow it will make what they say more believable. But it doesn’t. It only makes them sound more guilty.”
“Well, she was helping me.”
“Bullshit.”
“She was in the car,” I tell him, and suddenly I realize what that means. “She saw you! She will have seen you, and she’ll be able to identify you to the police. You should take me back. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”
“You’re lying.”
I shake my head. “I’m not lying. Look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying.”
He looks into my eyes. “You’re lying,” he says.
It’s been a few hours since I tied Jo up. In that time she will have managed to work herself free, or in that time somebody will have walked past the car. If she worked herself free, she will have gone into a neighbor’s house to call for help. She couldn’t have driven anywhere because I have the keys-unless Jo has spent time over the last six months learning how to hotwire a car. Right now the police will be looking for me. She will have told them. The only problem is she won’t have told them where. And she won’t be able to have told them who took me. But it’s something. Knowing Landry may be found guilty of killing me isn’t much comfort, but it’s something.
“Tell me about Luciana,” he says, and as if on cue, Luciana reappears.
She slowly shakes her head at me exactly as she did on Monday morning. She finished drying her hair and offered me fresh clothes to replace the bloody ones I was wearing. She shook her head when I told her mine weren’t that bad and called me a typical male. She left me alone in the lounge to think, alone to drink my beer, and the beer had my head buzzing. Kathy was trying to call her husband. The next thing I knew darkness was my friend and in the darkness I thought about the offer Cyris had made me. I had fallen asleep. I woke to find Luciana crouching in front of me and my beer seeping into her carpet.
“She told me not to worry about it,” I say.
“About what?”
“She said, ‘It’s perfectly okay for the man who saved our lives to stain my carpet.’ She handed me a flannel and a towel and a change of clothes, then gave me directions to the bathroom.”
“You showered in her bathroom,” Landry says. “You showered before you killed her.”
“Yeah, I showered. I wasn’t going to. I wanted to show up the way I was, but. . I don’t know, there was something just too creepy about sitting around with another man’s blood on me. Anyway, I figured I’d still have my clothes, and that would be enough. Kathy was still trying to get hold of her husband. She said she’d stay in the clothes she was in.”
“You were a mess,” Luciana says, then smiles at me, the tense of her sentence suggests she’s thinking back to the past, that she’s not still there living it.
I walked down her hallway and walking into the steam of her bathroom filled me with excitement. It was full of typical womanly scents-soaps and subtle perfumes that made you think of meadows and flowers. For the first time I thought of Jo. Up until that moment I hadn’t given Jo, or my parents or any of my friends or my job, a moment of thought. I was in a house with two beautiful women and they were in my debt. Anything could have come from it and, as it turns out, something did.
I dropped my own clothes in a heap. I had no idea how bad I was until I looked in the mirror. I was smeared in blood and dirt; patches of my hair had been welded together with blood. The only clean parts were where my clothes and watch had been. There were clumps of dirt in my ears and my forehead had the lump it still has now. I was smiling-smiling to be alive, smiling as I thought what my students would say the next time they saw me walk into the classroom looking like I’d been hit by a car. And, truth be told, I was smiling at the thought of Kathy and Luciana joining me in the shower. Of course I was. What guy wouldn’t?
The hot water hit my damaged body and stung like hell. I was in the bathroom Luciana would soon die in. I was dancing from one foot to the other, washing green shampoo through my hair, creating a red lather. Red water ran down my body, moving over sore muscles and torn skin in long stripes. It was blood and I liked the fact that most of it wasn’t mine. When I returned to the lounge Kathy and Luciana were talking on the couch.
“You certainly looked uncomfortable in those clothes,” Luciana says to me.
“I didn’t have any underwear on.”
My headache, as it is now, was thumping along nicely.
“I’m trying to be serious here, Feldman,” Landry says, “and all you can tell me is you weren’t wearing underwear in the shower? Why the hell would you?”
“Ignore him, Charlie,” Luciana tells me. “We should have gone to the police. That’s what you wanted to do. We sat down and talked about it. You wanted to go. I wasn’t sure. But Kathy wanted to get hold of her husband. She said her husband used to tell her all the time where people messed up was by not having a lawyer. She said the common mistake innocent people made was to assume the police would think that innocent people were innocent. You wanted to go and she wanted to stay, and I sided with my friend. Of course I did. If I’d agreed with you. .” she says, and doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
“Cyris was dead,” I say, to both Luciana and Landry. “So we decided to wait until we could get hold of Kathy’s husband. We would then go in together. We were all too upset and exhausted, and that was a recipe for saying the wrong thing during questioning. We planned to go first thing.”
“Why did you shower?”
“I told you already. I was a mess,” I tell him. “I was covered with Cyris’s blood and I know it’s dumb, but I kept feeling like it was going to seep into the pores of my skin and make me sick.”