Carmen and I left Holly’s house before I had a chance to meet Artie. That disappointed me.
We were out the door and all the way down the porch steps when I thought of something else, told Carmen to go ahead and get in the car, and returned to the screen door. Zach was playing with a pile of those oversized fat Legos in the living room, making something that looked like Frankenstein’s dog.
“Holly,” I said, calling her back to the door. “I’m sorry, one more thing.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You’re not frightened of him? Of Sterling?”
“No, I’m not.”
“The other women he’s suspected of murdering? They don’t-”
“I’m not convinced. Far from it.”
Her expression changed just enough that I guessed that whatever came next was going to be at a different level of intimacy than what had come before. I found myself struggling to tune my antennae.
“Listen,” she told me, “I e-mailed him again a couple of weeks ago. I asked him if he was interested in going to church with me again sometime. That’s how not-frightened of him I am.”
“You would see him again?”
“Before this week and all the news in the papers? Before you and Detective Loves-Kids-Lacks-Social-Graces started trying to scare the bejesus out of me? I would have seen him, yes. We had a great time together.”
Sometimes people ask me why I’m a cop. I don’t usually answer with the public service/public welfare refrain. I answer with the truth: People are endlessly interesting.
Holly Malone was a damn good example.
“Did Sterling respond to your e-mail?”
She shook her head convincingly. Even a little ruefully, I thought.
“I gave you my cell phone number, right? Just in case? You’ll call if you see him around here, or even if you get a feeling?”
“Yes, Detective. You did. And I will.”
I reached into my pocket and handed Holly the crappy photo of Brian Miles. “Him too. Keep it. Call if you see him.”
“You’re not going to tell me who he is, are you?”
“His name is Brian Miles. He’s somebody you should avoid.”
She held the picture loosely in her hand. “I told you, I’m careful. No matter what you think about my lifestyle, I don’t take chances with my safety. You haven’t convinced me that Sterling’s a killer, but you’ve convinced me that seeing him might involve taking an unnecessary risk.”
“Might?”
She smiled at me in a way that seemed full of understanding and wisdom. The wisdom was bearded with just the slightest tease. I found it all quite disarming. Me and women? What a frigging mess.
With my thumb and index finger I spread my mustache away from the center of my lip. Holly was watching me carefully, waiting to see where I was heading next; I thought she knew that I hadn’t come back to her door to ask her about Sterling and Brian Miles and to make sure she had my phone number.
Holly probably knew things about men that I wouldn’t know for the rest of my life.
In the grand scheme that was probably an okay thing.
I said, “You and your husband, you and Mark? Did your, what did you call it before, your ‘imaginative’ sex life-that’s right? I got that? Did it include, you know, other people, other couples? Sexually, I mean. I don’t know if I’m asking that exactly right. But what I’m wanting to know is… well…”
My voice disappeared like stormwater down an open manhole.Swooosh.
“Is this a professional inquiry?”
“Actually, no, no, it’s not. It’s, um,… it’s personal. It’s something I’m struggling with… myself.”
I watched muscles change in her face. Her mouth softened, and the tendons along her jaw slackened. Fine lines erupted alongside her eyes. She said, “Yes, it did. It included other people sometimes. We were active swingers long before we were married.”
“And it didn’t…” Some questions are harder to ask than others. Those seemed to be the only kind I was asking. Or trying to ask. I wasn’t doing a bang-up job.
“Didn’t what?”
“Cause problems? For the two of you? In your marriage? Fidelity, and trust, you know? Feelings weren’t hurt?”
She shook her head. “Far from it. This may sound funny, but it was all about trust for us. Mark knew every man I was involved with sexually, and vice versa. We each had total veto power over the other’s partners. What we did enriched us.” She glanced back to make sure Zach was still engaged with his Legos. “This is a hard thing to explain. Sex with other people brought us closer.”
“It did?”
“Yes.”
“It helped with trust?”
“No. We had trust going in. Honesty. Respect. That never wavered.”
I was perplexed the way I’m perplexed by Stephen Hawking. The words he uses are English, but after one or two paragraphs I feel like I’m reading Armenian. Same thing right then with Holly. The arithmetic of the coupling was simple enough. Two plus two equals four. I shouldn’t have been so mystified by the equation. But I was.
“Trust?” I said again, and then I sighed away some of my exasperation. “I wish I understood it better. I really do. It seems that… with you being… and him… I just don’t quite get it. I’ll think about it some more, though. I will.”
“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you try to understand. Some people don’t. Most people don’t.”
“Artie?” I said.
She laughed. “Artie, indeed. Have a happy Thanksgiving, Detective. I’d invite you to join us for supper, but under the circumstances…”
“Of course, of course. Artie wouldn’t be happy I was there. You, too, Holly, you have a good holiday, too. Don’t let Artie ruin it for everybody.”
I pivoted to leave but stopped and looked over my shoulder. She was still at the door.
“Would Mark have been okay with Sterling? As a sexual partner for you? Just curious.”
The face she made was rueful. “No. No, he wouldn’t. Sterling is… firmly on the wrong side of the Brad Pitt line. That’s where Mark’s comfort level stopped. At the Brad Pitt line.”
She leaned out the door, took a step toward me, and touched her lips to my cheek. That was good-bye.
Carmen waited for me to get settled, pull my seat belt on, and start the engine before she said, “Holly seems like a nice girl. I’m sorry I got off on the wrong foot with her.”
I smiled at the irony. “She is a nice girl. My mother maybe wouldn’t think so, but she is. She’s nice.”
Carmen didn’t want anything to do with my comment about my mother. Wise on her part. “Did you get what we needed?” she asked.
“To decide if Holly’s in danger? I don’t know. How about we’ll decide that together? Let’s go someplace, and I’ll tell you what she said, and we’ll put our heads together and decide if we should spend Thanksgiving hanging around South Bend waiting for Sterling or whether we should spend it doing something else.”
“Do you want to go back to the Days Inn? We can talk there. There’s some kind of coffee shop on the corner.”
“Nah. I don’t think so. Where’s the campus from here? I’d like to see that. That way you can tell your dad you’ve been there, and… anyway, I’ve heard some interesting things about the basilica.”