In the front room of the home in which I have lived for better than eight years there is complete disorder. Open boxes, half packed, are everywhere, the items removed from shelves and drawers are strewn in all directions. The furniture is gone. I never cared much for the sofa or the love seat, and Barbara wanted them for her condo outside Detroit. I'll move January 2 to an apartment in the city. Not a bad place. The realtor said I was lucky to get it. The house is up for rent. I've decided that each step should be slow.
Now that Nat has left, the job of packing seems to take forever. I move from room to room. Every item reminds me of something. Each corner seems to contain its quotient of pain and melancholy. When I reach my limit, I start working somewhere else. I think often of my father and that scene I recalled for Marty Polhemus, in which I found my old man, the week after my mother's death, packing up the apartment he had abandoned a few years before. He worked in a sleeveless undervest, and he had a brazen manner as he pitched the remains of his adult life into crates and boxes. He kicked the cartons from his path as he moved about the rooms.
I heard from Marty just last week. He sent a Christmas card. "Glad to hear everything worked out for you." I laughed aloud when I read his message. Lord, that kid really has the knack. I threw the card away. But the toll of loneliness is greater than I imagined. A couple of hours ago, I went rummaging through the boxes of trash in the living room, looking for the envelope. I need the address to write him back.
I never wrote my father after he left for Arizona, I did not see him again. I called on occasion, but only because Barbara dialed the number and put the receiver in my hand. He was so deliberately uncommunicative, so chary with the details of his life, that it was never worth the effort. I knew he was living with a woman by then, that he worked three days a week in a local bakery. He found Arizona hot.
The woman, Wanda, called to tell me he was dead. That was more than eight years ago now, but the shock of it, in a way, is with me every day. He was strong and fit; I had taken it for granted that he would live to be a hundred, that there would always be this far-off target for my bitterness. He had already been cremated. Wanda only found my number as she was cleaning out the trailer and she insisted I come West to settle the rest of his affairs. Barbara was eight months pregnant then and we both regarded this trip West as my father's final imposition. Wanda, it turned out, was from New York City, in her late fifties, tall, not bad-looking. She did not hesitate to speak ill of the dead. Actually, she told me when I arrived, she had moved out on him six months before. They called her from the bakery, where he collapsed with the coronary, because they knew no one else. 'I don't know why I do these things. Really, I have to tell you,' she said, after a couple of drinks, 'he was mostly a prick.'
She did not think it was funny when I suggested her phrase was what should be carved on the stone.
She left me alone to pick through the trailer. On his bed were red socks. In the chiffon robe, I found another six or seven dozen pairs of men's hose. Red and yellow. Striped. Dotted. Argyles. In his last years, my father had finally found an indulgence.
The doorbell rings. I feel the faintest surge of anticipation. I look forward to a moment's conversation with the postal carrier or the man from UPS.
"Lip," I say through the storm door. He enters and stomps the snow off his feet.
"Nice and homey," Lip says, surveying the disaster in the living room. As he stands on the doormat he hands me a small package, not much wider than the satin bow on top.
"Christmas present," he says.
"That's awfully nice," I say. We've never done this before.
"I figured you could use a pick-me-up. Nat get off okay?"
I nod. I took him to the airport yesterday. They allowed him to be seated first. I wanted to go with him onto the plane, but Nat would not permit it. From the doorway, I watched him go down the jetway in his dark blue NFL parka, alone and already lost in dreams. He is his father's, son. He did not turn to wave. I want, I thought quite distinctly, I want the life I had.
Lip and I spend a moment looking at each other. I still have not taken his coat. God, it is awkward, and it is like this with everyone, people on the street or people I know well. So much has happened to me that I never counted on. And how are people to respond? Somehow it does not fit into any recognized conversational pattern to say, It's tough about your wife, but at least they didn't get you for that murder.
I finally offer him a beer.
"If you're drinkin," he answers, and follows me to the kitchen. Here, too, half the housewares are in boxes.
As I'm taking a glass out of the cabinet, Lipranzer points to the package he brought, which I've set down on the table.
"I wanna see you open that. I been savin it a while."
He has done a careful job with the paper.
"I never saw a gift wrapped before," I say, "with hospital corners."
Crumpled inside a small white box is a manila envelope ribboned with red-and-white evidence tape. I cut through that and find the glass that turned up missing during the trial, the tumbler from Carolyn's bar. I put it all down on the table and take a step away. This is one guess where I would never have been close.
Lip fishes in his pocket and comes out with his lighter. He holds a corner of the evidence envelope in the flame until he's sure it's burning, then flips it into the sink. The glass he hands to me. The blue ninhydrin powder is still all over it, the three partial prints etched there, a kind of surrealistic delft. I hold the glass up to the window light for a moment, trying for reasons I cannot discern to figure which of the tiny networks of lines are the marks of my right thumb and my third right middle finger, the former telltale signs. I am still looking at the glass when I start talking to Lipranzer.
"There's a genuine question here, whether I should be touched," I say, and now finally catch his eye, "or real pissed off."
"How that?"
"It's a felony in this state to secrete evidence of a crime. You hung your ass out a good long way on this one, Lippen"
"No one around who'll ever know." Lip pours the beer that I've just opened.
"Besides, I didn't do a goddamn thing. It was them that fucked up. Remember they got Schmidt to come grab all the evidence? The glass wasn't there. I'd took the thing down to Dickerman. Next day I get a call from the lab, the test is done, I can come pick up my glass. When I get down there somebody's signed the receipt 'Returned to Evidence.' You know, the idea is that I'll put it back in. Only I don't got any way to put it anywhere, since it's not my goddamn case anymore. So I tossed it in a drawer. Figured sooner or later somebody's gotta ask me. Nobody did. In the meantime. Molto's like every other half-ass deputy. Signs off on all the receipts without matchin em against the evidence. Three months later he's got himself in a bucket of shit. But that's his problem." Lip lifts his glass and drains most of it. "None of them ever had the most screwed-up idea where the thing went. They tell stories about the way Nico tore his office apart. He had them pick up the tacked-down carpet, I hear."
We laugh, both of us, knowing Nico. When he gets very excited you can see his scalp redden where the hair has thinned. His freckles seem to stand out more as well. After the laughter is done, we wait through a little hollow moment of silence.
"You know why I'm pissed, don't you?" I finally ask.
Lip shrugs and raises his beer.
"You thought I killed her," I say.
He's prepared for this and does not even flinch. He belches before he answers.
"Lady was bad news."
"Which makes it okay if I killed her?"
"Did you?" asks Lip.
That, of course, is what he's come to find out. If he just wanted to be a soul brother, he'd have taken the glass with him the last time he went fishing and dropped it in the Crown Falls, which rages so magnificently up there near Skageon. But it must be eating at him. That's why he's offered the glass, so I know that we're in it together.
"You think I did, don't you?"
He drinks his beer.
"It's possible."
"Screw off. You're gonna stick your neck out like that cause it's just a little possibility, like life on Mars?"
Lip looks straight at me, his eyes clear and gray.
"I'm not wearin a wire, you know."
"I wouldn't care if you were. I've been tried and acquitted. Double-jeopardy clause says that's all she wrote. I could publish my confession in the Trib tomorrow and nobody could try me again for murder. Only we both know, Lip-I take a slug of the beer I've opened for myself-"they never do admit it, do they?"
Lip looks across the kitchen toward something that isn't there.
"Forget it," he says.
"I'm not going to forget it. Just tell me what you think, okay? You think I cooled her. That's not just for the sporting life that a fifteen-year copper hikes the evidence in the biggest case in town. Right?"
"Right. It ain't just sportin life." My friend Dan Lipranzer looks at me.
"I think you killed her."
"How? I mean, you must have worked it out in your head."
He does not hesitate as long as I would have thought.
"I figure you cracked her in anger. The rest was just to make it look good. There wouldn't be much point in sayin you were sorry once she was dead."
"And why was I so pissed off?"
"I don't know. Who knows? She dumped you, right? For Raymond. That's enough to be pissed about."
Slowly, I remove the beer glass from Lipranzer's hand. I can see his apprehension when I do that. He is prepared for me to fling it. Instead, I put it on the kitchen table next to the one he brought, the one they found on Carolyn's bar, the one with my prints. They are identical. Then I go to the cabinet and take down the rest of the set, until there are a dozen glasses standing there in two rows, one sudsed with beer foam at the head on the left, one dusted with blue powder at the front of the line next to it. It is a rare moment, in which Lipranzer wears none of his hipped-up wise-guy look.
I run the water in the sink, washing down the ashes, then fill the basin with suds. I start talking while I do that.
"Imagine a woman, Lip, a strange woman, with a very precise mathematical mind. Very internal. To herself. Angry and depressed. Most of the time she is volcanically pissed. With life. With her husband. With the miserable, sad affair he had in which he gave away everything she wanted. She wanted to be his obsession and instead he's hung up on this manipulative slut, who anyone but he could see regarded him as sport. This woman, Lip, the wife, is sick in spirit and in the heart, and maybe in the head, if we're going to be laying all the cards out on the table.
"She's mixed up. She is seriously on the fence about this marriage. Some days she's sure she's going to leave him. Some days she wants to stay. Either way she has to do something. The whole thing's eating at her, destroying her. And either way, she has a wish, a wild secret hope that the woman he was sleeping with could end up dead. When the wife's rage is at a peak, she's ready to abandon her husband, head for open spaces. But there would be no satisfaction in that if the other woman is alive, because the husband, helpless slob that he is, will just go crawling back to her and end up with what his wife thinks he wants. The wife can get even only if the other woman is gone."
"But, of course, you always hurt the one you love. And in her down moods, she longs for everything they had, to find some way to bring them back to old times. But even in these moods, it seems that life would be better if the other woman were dead. With no choice, he will finally give up his obsession. Maybe then they can recycle things, build on the wreckage."
The sink by now is full of suds. The ninhydrin comes off the glass easily, although there is a sulfurous stink when it hits the water. Then I take down a towel and wipe the glass clean. When I am finished, I get a box and begin wrapping up the set. Lip helps. He separates the sheets of newsprint that the movers have provided, he is not talking yet.
"And so the idea is there. Day after day. All the wife thinks about is killing the other woman. Whether she is in the peak of rage or the dungeons of self-pity, there is that thrilling notion.
"And, of course, As the idea takes hold, there is another twist. The husband must know. When she is raging, when she's on the way out the door, it is a kind of delicious vengeance to think of him bereft and knowing just who left him in that condition. And in her softer moods, when the thought is of somehow saving this marriage, she wants him to appreciate this monumental act of commitment and devotion, her effort at finding the miracle cure. It will have no meaning to him if he thinks it's just an accident.
"So that becomes part of the compulsion. To kill. And to let him know that she has done it. How is that to be accomplished? It is a magnificent puzzle to a woman capable of the most intricate levels of complex thought.
Obviously she can't just tell him. For one thing, half the time she's planning to be gone. And, of course, on the basic level, there is a risk that-to put it mildly-her husband might not approve. He may go tattling. She has to take that option from him. And how best to do that? Fortunately, it is predictable that the husband will investigate this crime. The head of the Homicide Section has taken a powder. The acting head is a person no one trusts. And the husband is the P.A.'s favorite son. He will be the one collecting evidence, him and his pal, the all-star homicide dick Lipranzer. And as the husband proceeds, detail by detail, he will discover that the culprit for all the world appears to be him. He'll know of course that it was not. And he'll know who it was, because there is only one person in the world who has access to this glass, or to his seed. But he'll never convince anybody else of that. He will suffer in lonely silence when she leaves him. Or kiss her bloody hand with new devotion when she stays. In the act itself, there will be purification and discovery. With the other woman gone, she will be able to find just what it is she wants to do.
"But it must be a crime that the rest of the world can reasonably regard as unsolved, when hubby declares that to be the case. It must be a crime in which he alone will realize what has occurred. That's why she decides to make it look like a rape. And so the plan proceeds. Something that must be utilized is one of these glasses."
I show the tumbler I am wrapping to Lip. He is seated on one of the kitchen chairs now, listening with an open look that mediates between rough horror and a kind of wonder.
"It was a glass just like this one that her husband picked up and wept over, the night he told her of his affair. The self-centered sap sat there and devastated her with the truth and cried because their glasses were just like the other woman's. That will be the perfect calling card, the perfect way to tell him, You know who. He drinks a beer one night while he watches the ball game. She hides the glass away. Now she has his fingerprints.
"And then on a few mornings she saves the gooey mess that comes, out when she removes her diaphragm. Puts it in a plastic bag, I figure, which probably sat a while in the basement freezer.
"And that's how it's done. April first. Ha ha. That's to help him get it. She makes a phone call from the residence an hour before the event. Hubby is at home, babysitting, but, as Nico would have argued if Stern had ever pointed out that Barbara might have been here when I made that call, you can use the phone in Barbara's study without being heard downstairs."
Lip's chair makes a sudden screech at it jerks back across the floor.
"Whoa," he says. "Run that by again. Who called? Really. Not what Delay was thinkin. Her?"
"Her," I say. "That time."
"That time?"
"That time. Not before."
"You before?"
"Me before."
"Hmm," says Lip, and his eyes down as he reflects, no doubt, on that day in April when I asked him for what surely seemed a harmless favor, a trivial indiscretion, to skip retrieving my home tolls. "Hmm," he says again, and actually laughs out loud. I do not understand at first, but when I see his somewhat cheerful look I realize he is satisfied. We can only be who we can be. Detective Lipranzer is pleased to know that he was not completely wrong to judge me guilty of some margin of bad faith. "So she called that night?"
"Right."
"Knowin you'd done it before?"
"I'm not sure of that. She couldn't have overheard me, because there was nothing to hear. But if you want a guess, I think she knew. That was my sense. I probably left the phone directory from the P.A.'s office open to the page one time when I called Carolyn. That's the kind of thing Barbara would notice. You now how fixated she is with details, especially around the house. That may even have been what kicked her over the edge. But I don't know for sure. It could have been a coincidence. She had to get in touch with Carolyn somehow. She couldn't just show up."
"What'd she tell her on the phone?"
"Who knows? Something. Bullshit. She asked to drop by."
"And killed her dead," says Lip.
"And killed her dead," say I. "But not without a stop first at the-U. She logged into the computer. Nobody ever checked, but I'll bet she loaded on some brain busting program. I'd guarantee that machine was churning out paper for two hours. Every clever killer needs an alibi, and Barbara, you might say, had considered a detail or two. Then she drives over to Carolyn's, who by now is waiting for her to arrive. Carolyn lets her in. And when she turns her head, Barbara serenely bashes it in with a little item called a Whatchamacallit, which is just small enough to fit inside a lady's purse. Then she gets out the cord she's brought along and does some tying. Leaves the calling-card glass on the bar. And then takes a syringe and the knowledge gained from her readings in artificial insemination and injects the contents of her little Ziploc bag, full of male fluid. She unlocks the doors and windows before she leaves.
"Of course, criminal detection is a little more complicated than Barbara knew. There are entire fields of inquiry unknown to her. Like fiber analysis. She leaves traces she never counted on. The fibers from the carpets in her home, which are clinging to the hem of her skirt. Or a few hairs of her own. Remember how Hair and Fiber didn't bother with the female hair they picked up at the scene? I'm sure she never figured anybody was going to do so detailed an analysis of the sperm specimen. And I would bet that Barbara had no idea about MUD records, and was astonished when it turned out that her call was traced back to our phone. She drew more of an arrow toward herself than she intended. Same thing with that third fingerprint on the glass-probably a moment of carelessness. And of course none of us ever figured that Carolyn had tied her tubes.
"There's the rub, of course. Life, it seems, does not follow the invariable rules of mathematics. Things do not turn out as she had planned. Molto is shadowing the investigation. He picked up on everything she never meant to leave behind, and items like the fingerprints that she had probably figured I could shove under the rug. Things turn very dark for hubby. The world falls in around him. He seems completely fuddled. Maybe he doesn't even know who set him up. And now she finds herself in the one place she never counted on being: she feels sorry for him. He has suffered in ways she never intended, and in the cold light of reality, she is full of shame. She nurses him through his ordeal. She is ready at any moment to save him with the truth, until it fortunately proves unnecessary. But of course there are no happy endings. This story is a tragedy. Things are better now between the husband and wife. Passion and feeling have been rediscovered. But now The Act stands between them. There are things he cannot say to her. Things she cannot say to him. And worst of all, she cannot stand her own guilt-or the recollection of her insanity."
When I am done, I look at Lip. And Lip looks at me. I ask him if he wants another beer.
"No, sir," he says. "I need whiskey." He stands up to wash his glass. Then he puts it in the box with the other eleven. He holds the box closed while I apply the tape.
I pour him his shot and he stands, drinking.
"When'd you figure all this out?" he asks.
"The big picture? I think I pick up pieces of it every day. There have been days, Lip, while Nat was at school when I've done nothing but sit in the dark and work over the details. Again and again."
"I mean, when did you know what happened?"
"When did I know she did Carolyn? It crossed my mind when I heard there was a phone call from here the night she was murdered. But I thought Tommy must have diddled the phone records. I didn't really know until I saw the glasses again in Carolyn's apartment and realized all of hers were there."
Lip makes a noise, a little too ironic to be called a groan.
"How'd that one make you feel?"
"Weird." I shake my head. "You know, I'd look at her. Here she is-cooking dinner for me. For Nat. Touching me, for Chrissake. Then, you know, it would all come clear to me: I was out of my fucking mind. I wouldn't believe it at all. For days, I wouldn't believe it. Sometimes I was positive that Tommy set me up. Making me think it was Barbara was part of his scam. I thought that a lot. I would have loved to hear Leon lay it all on Molto. But, you know, at the end, when I knew what it was, I wasn't surprised at all."
"Don't you wanna see her burn?"
I pout my lip. Slowly, I shake my head.
"I couldn't do it, Lip. I couldn't do it to Nat. We've all had more than enough. I couldn't take it. I don't owe anybody that much."
"And you don't worry about the kid? With her?"
"No," I say. "Not that. That's one thing I don't worry about. She's in better shape with him. It pulls her back. Barbara needs someone around who really cares about her. And Nat does. I always knew I couldn't split them up-it would be the worst thing I could do to either one of them."
"Least I don't gotta wonder why you threw her out." Lip makes that noise again. "Whew," he says.
I've sat down now in the kitchen chair Lip formerly occupied. I am thus in the middle of the room alone as I speak.
"I'll tell you something that will blow your mind: she's the one who took the powder. I didn't ask her to leave. I suppose six months from now I could have woken up and strangled her in her sleep. But I was willing to try it. I really wanted to try. Crazy as she is, wild and nuts, no matter how many times you turn it upside down, you still have to say she did it because of me. Certainly not out of love. But for it. I wouldn't call it even, but we'd have both had our share to make up for."
Lip laughs at that.
"Boy," he says. "You really got a way with the ladies."
"You think I'd have been out of my mind to stay with her?"
"You askin my opinion?"
"I seem to be."
"You're better off without her. You're givin her way too much credit. You're believin in a whole lot of accidents."
"How's that?"
"The way you're lookin at this whole thing."
"For instance?"
"Your prints. They're on the glass, right?"
"Right."
"And only you would know? You can't make an I.D. yourself. Gotta get the lab to do it. That means somebody else comes up with your name."
"Yeah, but I'm a big dummy. I was supposed to recognize the glass-not ask for prints."
"In a major murder case you ain't gonna ask for prints?"
I take a moment. "Maybe she didn't know they could make a laser match. My prints are there just to keep me from dropping a dime on her."
"Sure," says Lip. "And in the meantime the lab is lookin at the gism, figurin things out. And they got your carpet fibers."
"Nobody ties those things to me."
"What about your phone records, if somebody should think to look? You said yourself she probably knew you'd been usin this phone to call Carolyn. Why's she dial from here, while you're around the house? Why take that chance instead of goin to a pay phone? You don't think that lady knows from MUDs? Or fibers? Or whose prints are on file? After twelve years of listenin to your stories?" Lip chucks down the rest of his whiskey. "Champ, you don't got this figured right."
"No? What do you figure?"
"I figure she wanted Carolyn dead and you in the slammer for doin it. I'd say the only thing that happened that she never counted on was that you beat it. Maybe two things."
Lipranzer grabs one of the kitchen chairs and sits down astride it. We are now face to face.
"I bet she was world-class pissed when you ended up with this case. She'd have never guessed that on the front end. You're the chief deputy. You don't horse around these days with homicides. You don't have the time. You got a frickin office to run while Horgan's tryin to save his butt. The only thing she'd know is Raymond would be tear ass-he'd want to keep this thing in-house, right under his thumb. Anybody'd know Raymond would make damn certain the police assignment was Special Command. I think she figured that some smart homicide dick was gonna nail you. Somebody who'd look at too many doors and windows open, who'd get a report about what was in the wad and see it was all a setup-somebody who'd go lookin for a real bright guy who'd know just how to do it. That's what she was countin on-somebody who knows you real good. Somebody who goes with you to the Red Cross drive and knows your blood type. Maybe even knows you well enough to think you were keepin company with a certain dead lady. Knows what color carpet you got at home." Lip suddenly, and inappropriately, yawns as he looks out to the living room. "Yeah," he says, "when I come for you with the cuffs, that'd put the knife in pretty deep. That's what I figure."
Lipranzer eyes me sagely. Then he nods, convincing himself.
"That's possible," I say, after a moment. "I've thought of that. But she said things didn't go the way she'd expected."
"Meanin what?" he asks. "They didn't fry your ass? I mean, what else you gonna hear but hearts, and flowers: Honey, I'da saved you if I had to. What would you do? Say, Go head and turn me in?"
"I don't know, Lip." I look at him, then I slug him softly in the shoulder.
"Fifteen minutes ago you thought I was the one who killed her."
In response he makes his sound.
"I don't know," I say again. "I believe two things. She did it. And she was sorry. I'll always believe she was sorry." I straighten up. "And anyway, it never would have done me any good to tell."
"Speakin of tellin, did you let your lawyers know, at least?"
"Nope. Neither one. Right at the end I had this idea Sandy might have figured it out. He talked to me one night about putting Barbara on the stand-and I got a clear feeling he didn't have the slightest interest in really doing it. And the kid, Kemp, had some notion, too. He knew something was out of whack with the phone records. But I'd never have put either one of them in that position, having to choose between my wife and me. I didn't want to be defended that way. Like I said, I couldn't see taking his mother from my son. And besides, it would never wash. If Barbara really figured all this out, Lip, then she knew that, too. Nico had a beautiful argument if I got up there and accused her. He would have said this was the perfect crime. An unhappy marriage. A prosecutor who knows the system inside out. A guy who's become a misogynist. He despises Carolyn. He hates his wife. But he loves the boy. If he and his wife split, he'll never get custody. He'd have said I planned it this way. Made it look like her set-up. Right down to gettin her fingerprint on the glass or injecting the spermicide. Maybe he'd say I was using Barbara as a fail-safe, the person I'd like to see nabbed in case the whole house of cards fell in on me. There are plenty of juries that might buy that."
"But it isn't true," says Lip.
I look at him. I can tell that I have left him out there again, floating uneasily in the nether regions of disbelief.
"No," I tell him, "that isn't true."
But there is that flicker there, the brief light of an idle doubt. What is harder? Knowing the truth or finding it, telling it or being believed?