A Killer's Kiss (22 page)

I had plenty of time to think it through later that same night while I sat in the dark in my apartment.

I sat in a chair in a corner of my living room and stewed in a simmering pot of bitterness. She had betrayed me, not just once with the police at Clarence Swift’s urging but repeatedly, overtly, time and again. Terrence Tipton hadn’t let me take him out of that house to treat the disease that was ravaging his body, but he had told me a story, and its clearest message was that at every turn in my tortured relationship with sweet Julia she had betrayed me.

To hear Terry tell it, Julia broke off our engagement because she feared I couldn’t support both her and his drug habit in the manner in which he wanted to be accustomed. She married Wren Denniston because Wren could and was willing to, and look where it got him, the sap. She confessed the details of our old-lovers’ tango to Terry, even as she told me that what was going on
between us was ours and ours alone. In my apartment, when she learned of the murder, she collapsed under the weight of her intuitive knowledge that sweet little Terry had shot her husband in the head to allow our tango to reach some heated fruition. And when she rose again, she gathered her senses and did everything she could to protect Terrence Tipton from the just consequences of his brutal act, even if it meant throwing me beneath the train.

I suppose I could have taken this with a certain grain of equanimity in and of itself. Duplicity might simply have been an integral component of Julia’s character, and not the least alluring component at that. Who is ever sexier than a woman on the cusp of a betrayal? But she had betrayed me for a drug-addicted piece of putrefying flesh lost in a haze of posh, romantic, adolescent angst. She had betrayed me for the likes of Terrence Tipton, and that was almost more than I could handle.

Still, amidst all this, I wondered if we had a future. Now who was the sap?

But there was a foundation to my madness. Suddenly it was as if I could peer through Julia’s shields and glimpse her inner life for the first time. She had been twisted around by a twisted love. Something had happened between Julia and Terrence in their desperate youths that had left scars evident in her psyche and upon his flesh. And I now knew what it was. And maybe my love was exactly what she needed to salve the wounds and save herself. The possibilities gleamed. All they required, of course, was to rid ourselves of that murderous piece of human excrement. And right there, sitting on my coffee table, I had the key to his riddance.

“Did you get it?” I said to Derek as soon as we left Terry Tipton’s room.

“Sure thing, bo.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the miniature tape recorder, clicked it off. “I learned my lesson from last time. This time I pressed the damn buttons before we started.”

“Let me have it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” I said.

“You really sure? I mean, how you think she’ll feel about you if you turn that freak in?”

“She’ll never forgive me,” I said.

“So is this tape going to end up in the grip of the police,” he said as he tossed the recorder to me, “or is it going to disappear to keep that girl happy?”

“Don’t know yet,” I said.

And I didn’t, but I intended to find out. So I sat in a dark corner of my living room, staring at the miniature tape recorder glowing dully on the coffee table. I sat there stewing and waiting. Waiting for the knock at the door. Waiting for the ring of truth.

That day I had run from Philly to Washington to Ashland, Virginia, and then back again. I had run around like a fool looking for answers. But I wasn’t running anymore. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen tonight, and it was going to happen here. The players would come to me to figure it all out. How did I know they would come to me? Because I had spent the whole day looking for answers, and now I had them. I knew who had killed Wren Denniston. I knew where the money was. I knew what each player was after, each player but one. All I didn’t know for sure was what my future would bring. But that I would find out with the first knock on the door.

And then it came.

Knock, knock.

“Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”

“Victor?” said Julia, peering into the glum darkness. “Is that you?”

“It’s me, all right,” I said.

“I’m so relieved,” she said, stepping into the apartment. “Where have you been all day? I was so worried. I wanted to explain.”

“I bet you did.”

“Victor?”

“I’ve been waiting,” I said. “Waiting for your explanation.”

She must have caught something in my voice because she hesitated at that instant, turned her head to see if someone else was hiding in the apartment, which told me all I needed to know about whose room she had come from.

“I didn’t mean to get you into trouble,” she said. “I just told the truth to the police, that’s all. About us. Just like you did the night of the murder.”

“That’s not what I wanted explained,” I said. “I want to know the truth about why you left me. The truth of why you married Wren. The truth, for once, about us.”

“I told you that already. You were pulling away, Wren stepped in, I was feeling vulnerable.”

“But you left out one last player.”

She stepped forward and tried to stare into my eyes through the darkness. Discouraged, she dropped onto the couch, one leg crossed beneath her.

“I knew you’d find him eventually,” she said, her voice carefully calm. “He said he told you a story to get you to leave him alone, a story full of lies.”

“He told me a story, all right, but it wasn’t full of lies. And there it is, right on the coffee table. His story.”

“You taped him?”

“You bet I did.”

She leaned forward, picked up the recorder, pressed play. For an instant, Terry Tipton’s slurry voice filled the room.
“—had been sending me money since before their wedding. That was his agreement with Julia, the way he got her—”
She clicked him quiet.

“He’s sick,” she said. “He’s not in his right mind. He’s an addict, addicted to lies as much as to the drugs. And you taped him without his knowing?”

“I taped him without his knowing.”

“That was so unfair.”

“Unfair is the way I play it when my neck is on the line.”

She clutched the tape to her chest, leaned back, let her head loll on the sofa. “Let’s just go away, let’s just go someplace else. Let’s get on a plane and get the hell out of here and start over. Just you and me.”

“And the tape.”

“Stop it.”

“And Terry, too, when he decides to show up again and infect your life.”

“He won’t. I’ll make him promise. That will be the price for leaving him out of it.”

“There’s no leaving him out of it, and there’s no running away. They’ll grab us as soon as we hit the airport. Our attempted escape will be Exhibit One at our trial and add years to our sentences. We have to stay and fight. And the tape is all we have to fight with.”

“We can stonewall.”

“That’s what they want us to do. So they can pile accusations on our heads, one after another, while we sit quietly and take it. Pretty soon the pile will be too high to shovel our way out of.”

“We can find someone else to blame. What about that Miles Cave? I thought we agreed. Why didn’t you tell the police about him? Why can’t he be the one?”

“Because he doesn’t exist.”

“All the better.”

“Except that your lawyer has set up a frame of his own so it looks like I’m Miles Cave.”

“Why would Clarence do that?”

“To get me out of the way. Because he loves you.”

“Oh,” she said, not at all surprised.

“I’d set up Clarence, and enjoy doing it, but he has an alibi. At the moment Wren was killed, he was at an ATM, getting cash to pay off Terry.”

“We have to do something, Victor.”

“Yes, we do. We have to give the tape to the police. On it Terry admits to coming to the house, to demanding money, to being shown the open and empty safe by Wren. He admits to taking the gun and shooting Wren in the head and then dropping the gun on the floor and fleeing. And you know why he did it?”

“Stop this.”

“For you. Because he loves you and he wanted for you to be happy. With me.”

“He’s insane.”

“Yes, he is. And it’s all here, all his insanity, on the tape. You have to give the tape to the police.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t even understand it myself. I loved him so much. With a pure adolescent love that never leaves, that remains like a jagged diamond in the heart. Shakespeare’s poetry seemed to come as naturally to us as our breaths. I would hold him, and he would kiss me, and the words just appeared. ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’ Just to think of him then can still draw out tears. You don’t know what it’s like.”

I didn’t say anything to that, I just stared at my own jagged diamond in the heart.

“He was so sweet, so sensitive. The part of myself that loved him was the best part of me,” she said. She wasn’t really talking to me anymore, she was talking to herself, her younger self, trying to justify all that she had given up. “When I hear the word ‘love,’ it’s his face that comes to mind.”

“Then why aren’t you together forever and always?” I said, interrupting her reverie.

“You sound so bitter.”

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “I’ve heard the violins.”

“If only you knew the truth, you wouldn’t feel that way. You wouldn’t act so threatened. He’s not like other men.”

“He showed me.”

“What?”

“I asked him what was keeping you two apart. Why you didn’t just be with him. I asked him if he was gay, and he laughed, and then he asked me if I wanted to see.”

“So you know.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“To him it is. And it was to me, then. And the way I reacted.”

“You were sixteen.”

“And so was he. Imagine what it did to him. What I did to him. When he wouldn’t do anything, no matter how forward I was, I did something terrible. To push him to action, to make him jealous.”

“You screwed Sherman, the quarterback,” I said, my voice flat with the matter-of-factness of it all, “and Terry found you backstage before rehearsal.”

“I wanted him to find me. And he did. But I didn’t know about his condition then. You should have seen his face, Victor, cracked in pain. I can’t forget it. Ever. I can’t stop imagining it. Our love was real and impossible at the same time. I suppose that’s what made it so perfect.”

“Worth lying for? Worth betraying me for?”

“Worth everything,” she said. “Still. I have no choice but to save him.”

“You can’t.”

“But I can’t stop trying either, don’t you see?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. Listen, Julia. That tape is our last hope. I don’t know if we could ever make each other happy, but that tape is the only way to find out. Since you’ve come back into my life, we’ve been bouncing like Ping-Pong balls from emotion to emotion. Bitterness to lust to suspicion to fear to paranoia. But now there’s hope, it resides in the truth, the truth on that tape.”

She tossed the tape player back onto the table. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“If I turn it in, you’ll hate me forever. If you turn it in, our future opens wide.”

“Don’t make me.”

“I could never make you do anything. But I can make you choose.”

A slight sneer stained her lips. “Between you and him?”

“Between truth and nothing. From the moment you stepped
in this door, you’ve been lying. You’re pretending to care about us, but it’s an act. All you care about is saving him.”

“That’s not true.”

“Another lie.” I stopped for a moment, thought about that strange room in which Terrence Tipton now lay, that tomblike room concocted solely out of Julia’s fantasies. “In fact,” I said, slowly, as revelation dawned, “everything we ever had was a lie, because the biggest truth, your love for Terry, was always hidden. But now there’s a line. On one side is the end of lies. On the other side is the end of hope, any hope you might have for something, anything, that’s worthwhile in your future. Because if you can’t face the truth now, that hope is dead.”

“It died fifteen years ago.”

“Stop it. You and he are both blathering idiots. So he’s got no cock. Find a surgeon, for God’s sake. You screwed the quarterback to get him jealous. It happens every day—why do you think high school quarterbacks are always smiling? And the tragic dénouement was a stupid high school play, nothing more. Shakespeare being mangled by high school kids is bad theater, but it’s not a tragedy. Get off the damn balcony and move on.”

She looked at me with something implacable warping her features. Then she stood up and grabbed her bag. “I need to use your bathroom.”

I waited for her to desperately snatch the tape recorder from off the table. I expected that she would take it to the bathroom, pull out the cassette, yank the tape free, and flush it down the toilet. She eyed me for an instant as if she were calculating the odds of her actually getting her hands back on the tape before I grabbed it. But if she wanted to destroy the tape, I wasn’t going to stop her. All I really wanted was an answer, finally, and her grabbing the tape like that would ring as clear as I could hope for. But she didn’t grab the tape. Instead she glanced at it, glanced at me, and then went off through the
bedroom door, leaving me both confused and just the slightest bit optimistic, which in my experience has always proved to be fatal.

It took her a long time to return. She was thinking it through. I sat in the darkness and thought it through myself. I wondered if possibilities still existed. I wondered if we had a future. I wondered if that’s what I really wanted. As the minutes ticked by, my neck tensed, my heart beat a little faster. What had I gotten myself into? I had been fighting all this time to keep something alive, and suddenly, with the tape still on the table and the possibility for survival rising all the while, I began to think it would have been better to let it die, long ago. Better had it shriveled like a leech covered in salt and suffered an excruciating death than to let it attach back onto my heart.

I’m not much good at romance, I’m afraid, but I am the master of ambivalence.

“Okay,” she said, back now, her face clean, her brow strangely untroubled. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Take the tape player,” I said. “Go to the Roundhouse. Ask for Detective McDeiss. He’ll probably be at home, but they’ll find him for you. Give him the tape, along with the address in Kensington where Terry can be found.”

“McDeiss?”

“That’s right. He’ll make sure the arrest is done clean, by the book and without any shooting.”

“And what happens to Terrence?”

“I’ll find him a lawyer. He’ll make a deal and will have a chance to clean himself up in prison.”

“You make it sound like I’ll be doing him a favor.”

“Buying drugs for him, shooting him up when you visited, letting him live like a tick sucking off Wren’s wealth, enabling his self-destruction, and protecting him every step of the way, that was no favor. There is an infection in his body that is
chewing him to pieces, and he’s doing nothing about it. He’s killing himself. Prison might be his only chance.”

She looked at me for a moment, a harsh emotion rolled across her features like a rough ocean wave, and then she smiled wanly. “You’re a bastard.”

“Yes, I am.”

She stared down at the tape player on the table, as if she were staring at betrayal itself, and then she picked it up, dropped it into her bag, whirled around.

“Call me when it’s done,” I said to her back.

“One step at a time,” she said, and then she was out the door.

I gave her a minute, in case she quickly changed her mind and came back in, and then I rushed over to the window and watched her leave as I took out my cell phone and made a call.

“I see her, bo,” said Derek from the other end.

“Don’t lose her. She’ll be in a dark blue BMW.”

“She got the tape?”

“Yes.”

“What she going to do with it?”

“Call me when she gets to the Roundhouse.”

“And what if she goes the other way?”

“Then keep following.”

“Just so you know,” said Derek, “I think you got some visitors.”

“Who?”

“Two men. They was waiting for her to leave before they popped in.”

“Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I was expecting them anyway.”

And I was. Sims and Hanratty, I figured. I had dropped their tail, I had slipped out of town, I had pissed them off. At least I was being consistent. Now they were coming for answers, which worked out just fine, because answers were what I had for them.

I again took to my chair and waited in the darkness for the knock at the door. And then it came.

Knock, knock.

“Come on in,” I called out cheerfully. “The door’s open.”

And in they came. Not Sims and Hanratty.

Damn.