What a homicide had to do with this woman's broken nose in a single glance, he was able to make this diagnosis the red-headed resident couldn't possibly imagine. But the look on the detective's face said that the matter was extremely urgent, the matter was in fact positively critical, and there would be hell to pay if this woman's broken nose resulted in a bungled homicide investigation.
So the resident ignored all the other people clamoring for attention in that Saturday night purgatory and immediately tended to the blonde Woman's needs, determining (as he'd known at anyway) that the nose was in fact broken, and giving her an immediate shot for the pain, and then setting the nose, and dressing it with plaster (such a beautiful face, too) and writing a prescription for a pain-killer should she have difficulty getting through the night. Only then did he ask her how this had happened, and Marilyn told him unhesitatingly that she'd tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs.
This was when Willis fully realized something he had only partially known from the moment he'd found her in the kitchen with the ice pack to her nose.
Marilyn was lying.
"But why did you lie to them?" Sally Farnes asked.
This was eight-thirty P.M. The two of them sitting on the little balcony outside their living room looking out at the lights of the Saturday night and the splendor of the sky overhead. Sunset stained the western horizon an hour and a half They had eaten an early dinner and then had their coffee out here onto the balcony, the brilliant show of color that had beer/their treat these past several weeks. Tonight's had not been at all disappointing, a kale display of reds and oranges and purples and blues culminating in a dazzle of stars across an intensely black sky.
"I didn't lie," he said.
"I would say that allowing them to think you the priest had settled all your differences...”
"Which we did," Farnes said.
Sally rolled her eyes heavenward.
She was a big woman with brown hair, full-breasted and wide across the hips, a woman who had ironically chosen to remain childless while equipped with a body seemingly designed for childbearing. In a nation where being thin and staying young were the twin aspirations of every woman past the age of puberty, Sally Farnes at the age of forty-three thumbed her nose at all the models in Vogue and called herself voluptuous, even though she was really twenty pounds overweight according to all the charts.
She had always been a trifle overweight, even when she was a teenager, but she'd never looked fat, she'd merely looked zafiig .- a term she understood even then to mean voluptuous because a Jewish boy who later became class valedictorian told her so while he was feeling her up in the back seat of his father's Oldsmobile. Actually, the boy had been thinking of the word wollfistig, which indeed did mean voluptuous, whereas zaftig merely meant juicy. In any case, Sally had looked both voluptuous and juicy, and pleasantly plump besides, with a glint in her blue eyes that promised a sexiness wanton enough to arouse the desires of a great many pimply-faced young men.
She still looked supremely desirable. Even sitting alone here in the dark on her own balcony with her Own husband, her legs were crossed in a provocative manner, and the three top buttons of her blouse were undone.
There was a thin sheen of perspiration over her upper lip. She was wondering if her husband had killed Father Michael.
"You know you had a fight with him," she said.
"No, no," he said.
"Yes, yes. You went there on Easter Sunday...”
"Yes, and we shook hands and made up.”
"Arthur, that is not what you told me. You told e... '' "Never mind what I told you," Farnes said. "We shook hands and made up is what I'm telling you now.”
“Why are you lying?" she asked.
"Let me explain something to you," he said.
"Those detectives...”
"You shouldn't have lied to them. You shouldn't be lying to me now.”
"If you don't mind," he said, "you asked me question.”
"All right," she said.
"Do you want an answer, or do you want to interrupting?”
“I said all right.”
"Those detectives came to see me because a was killed, do you understand that? A priest. Do know who runs the police department in this city?”
"Who?”
"The Catholic Church. And if the church tells cops to find whoever killed that priest, the cops are going to find him.”
"That still doesn't...”
“That's right, interrupt again," Farnes said.
In the light spilling onto the balcony from the living room inside, his eyes met hers. There was something fierce and unyielding in those eyes.
She could remember the last time she'd challenged him.
She wondered again if he'd killed Father Michael.
"Catching the real killer isn't important to them," he said. "The only thing that matters is catching a killer, any killer. They came to the store trying to make a big deal out of my differences with Father Michael. Was I supposed to tell them we'd had an argument on Easter Sunday? No way. We shook hands and made up.”
"But that's not what you did.”
"That is what we did. Period.”
From the street far below, the sounds of traffic filtered up. Distant, unreal somehow, the honking horns and ambulance sirens sounding like canned background sweetening for a daytime soap. They sat listening to the murmur of the city. The wingtip lights of an airplane blinked across the sky. She wondered if she should push this further. She did not want him to lose his temper. She knew what could happen if he lost his temper.
"You see," she said, as gently as she could, "I just think it was stupid to lie about something so insignificant.”
"You must stop saying that, Sally. That I lied.”
"Because certainly," she said, still gently, still calmly, "the police weren't about to think that a silly argument...”
"But that's exactly what they were thinking.
That's exactly why they came to the store. Waving that damn letter I'd written! Finding something threatening in every paragraph! So what was I supposed to say? What did you want me to say, Sally? That the letter was only the beginning? That we had a violent argument shortly after I'd written it? Is that what you wanted me to say?”
"All I know is that policemen can tell when someone is lying.”
"Nonsense.”
"It's true. They have a sixth sense. And if think you were lying about Father Michael...”
let the sentence trail.
"Yes?" he said.
"Nothing.”
"No, tell me. If they think I was lying Father Michael, then what?”
"Then they may start looking for other things.”
"What other things?”
"You know what things," she said.
Hawes was learning a few things about Krissie He learned, to begin with, that she'd come to this from a little town in Minnesota...
"I love it here," she said. "Do you love it here?”
"Sometimes.”
"Have you ever been to Minnesota?”
“Never," he said.
"Cold," she said.
I'll bet.”
"Everybody runs inside during the winter. You can freeze to death out there in the snow and ice, you know. So they all run to the bunkers and lock up behind them and wait till springtime before they show their faces again. It's a sort of siege mentality.”
It seemed odd to be talking about the dead of winter when everywhere around them springtime was very much in evidence. They had come out of the restaurant at a little after ten, and it was now almost ten-thirty and they were walking idly up Hall Avenue toward the Tower Building on Midway. On nights like tonight, it was impossible to believe that anyone ever got mugged in this city. Men and women strolled together hand in hand, glancing into brightly lighted store windows, buying pretzels or hot dogs or ice cream or yogurt or souvlaki or sausages from the bazaar of peddlers' carts on almost every corner, browsing the several bookstores that would be open till midnight, checking out the sidewalk wares of the nighttime street merchants, stopping to listen to a black tenor saxophonist playing a soulful rendition of Birth of the Blues, the fat mellow notes floating out of the bell of his golden horn and soaring upward on the balmy air. It was a night for lovers.