Duplicate Keys (38 page)

It was Alice’s turn to sit as still as possible, hoping that her face didn’t give away the turmoil and pain of her feelings. It was all too easy to see herself from Susan’s point of view, hovering, enfolding, suffocating, smiling. She closed her eyes. Susan went on. “You were going to act normal forever, pretending that I hadn’t done anything, pretending that nothing bound us except simple friendship. Denny was like that. Most of the time he pretended that Craig and I really liked each other, but we hated each other! And Noah, and Rya, and Ray! Everybody was always pretending something!”

“But we did like each other. We made compromises, that’s all. That’s life! You can’t get to be thirty without disapproving of your friends sometimes, or being hurt or offended by their bad taste and bad judgment. We all knew pretty much where we stood with each other. That was the pleasure in it!”

“Was it?”

Honey looked at his watch. Susan sat up, and Honey said, “Mrs. Ellis will get you some clothes from the bedroom. I would rather you sat here with me.”

Alice stood up and Susan leaned forward, reaching under the couch. In a second the gun was in her hand and she was pointing it at Honey. Alice inhaled sharply. Susan said, “Were you afraid I would get this?”

Honey smiled, but Alice could tell he was nonplussed. After a moment, he said, “You may not be aware that there is a mandatory death sentence in this state for shooting an officer of the law.”

Alice gripped the cushion of her chair as Susan squeezed the trigger. There was a click. “Not loaded;” said Susan with a smile. “The bullets are in the bedroom.” She turned the gun in her hand and gave it to the detective. Honey said, “You are a remarkably calm woman, Miss Gabriel.”

“Only on the surface, Detective Honey.”

“Mrs. Ellis,” said Honey, “would you get Miss Gabriel some clothing, please.” Alice stood up, her knees knocking, and went into the bedroom. When she came out, the clothes she was carrying were her own, lent to Susan at various times over the past months. Susan smiled as she put them on. As they were leaving the apartment, Alice said, trying to make her voice as casual as possible, “Say, can I have your keys to my place? I’m locked out.”

“Take them all,” said Susan, thumping the heavy bunch into her hand. Honey fitted her wrists with handcuffs, although Alice didn’t see that this was necessary. Susan watched for a moment, then looked at Alice. Finally, she said, “You thought too well of me. It was galling.”

R
YA
, who had shown up close to midnight Wednesday night and gone to bed at once in Alice’s spare room, was not inclined to rise, even though Alice had told her that Noah was to be set free that day, and that it was she, Rya, who ought to go out and get him. “Come on!” exclaimed Alice. “Honey said he might be out by ten, and it’s going to take you a while to get there!” Rya rolled over so that her face was to the wall, and groaned. Alice, who hadn’t yet put on her shoes, kicked the other woman on the derriere with her stockinged foot and went on, “Get up! I have to go to work today, and it’s nearly time for me to leave.”

Rya sat up. “I thought you were going with me! Shit, I’m beat.”

“I can’t go with you. I missed all those days, and yesterday I was way behind. But you’ve got to go!”

Even dishevelled from inadequate sleep on a hot night, Rya was pretty, almost elegant. Her twenty-six-year-old face was rosy
and smooth, and the fluid hair was too heavy to have tangled in the night. “But he doesn’t even expect me! He probably doesn’t even want me to come! Oh, shit!” She lifted her legs and rolled backward onto the bed.

“What is the matter with you? Don’t you want to see him?” A picture of Noah making his solitary and unwelcomed way back from Riker’s Island seemed not to have even occurred to Rya, or at least not to have affected her. “Don’t go back to sleep!”

“Please go with me! Can’t you take another day off? They won’t mind.”

“I can’t and I won’t. I have too much to do. I’m going to bring you a cup of coffee. Don’t go back to sleep.”

She was enraged when she returned and found Rya prone with her nose in the pillow. She put down the hot cup she was holding, grabbed the other woman’s shoulders, and yanked her up. “Ow!” cried Rya.

“Sit up! You’ve got to get up! Don’t you want to see him? I want to see him, and he’s
your
husband!”

Rya reached for the coffee. “So your relationship isn’t as complicated as mine is. No, I don’t know that I want to see him. I don’t know anything! Don’t you understand that? Three nights ago, you told me that he had killed Craig and Denny because of me. Last night, when I was falling asleep on my feet, you told me that no, it was Susan who killed them for some reason that I still don’t understand, and that we had to go out and get him this morning.”

“You had to.”

“That’s worse, anyway. What if I’m not ready to see him? What if the whole prospect of starting up our marriage again scares me to death? Don’t you realize that we haven’t spoken to each other, or at least he hasn’t spoken to me, in six months? You’ve got this good wife trip that you’re laying on me, and I can’t stand it.”

Alice walked out of the room.

A minute later she walked back in. “Look,” she said. “I don’t care what happens between you and Noah. In my opinion, you
don’t deserve for anything good to happen because you’ve made such a terrible mess of everything. In my opinion, you’ve both been so stupid that it boggles the mind. But I also think that what is happening to Noah today has nothing to do with your relationship. A man who has been accused of a crime, and who is pretty confused himself, is getting out of jail. He deserves to have his wife, and not just some girl he knows, meet him, and take him home. You can pick up where you left off or you can get a divorce after you get home, but this event of leaving jail is a public thing, like getting married or buried. You have to meet him because it’s the human thing to do.”

With her finger, Rya pushed her hair behind her ear. “Then you come with me. That’s the human thing to do, too.”

“I won’t!” Alice was vehement. “Why don’t you be brave for once! Why don’t you rise all the way to the occasion this time!”

“Please?”

“I’ve got to go to work!” Alice grabbed the now empty coffee cup from Rya’s hand and turned on her heel and went down the long hallway. She was determined not to accompany Rya to Riker’s Island, determined not to get anywhere within Susan’s orbit. The attack of Sunday night, like a narrowly averted accident, had become far more real to her in retrospect than it had been at the time. Her thoughts swung between the dark mystery of seeing Susan step out onto the fire escape and the sunlit bitterness of having everything spelled out the following afternoon. Everything was fresh again. She did not seem to have accepted the murders, Susan’s planning of them, Ray’s injuries, the attack on herself, or Susan’s opinion of her at all. Whatever composure she remembered having attained over the weekend was false, and had vanished anyway. Even the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, where you caught the bus for Riker’s Island, seemed dangerous ground. She rinsed Rya’s cup and set it in the drainer. Rya herself appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I can’t go!” she wailed. “I can’t go! He’s just going to have to take a cab by himself. He won’t mind. He’d be embarrassed to have me out there, I’m sure.”

Alice screamed, “Why are you such a bitch! Such a selfish bitch! Think of somebody else for once! How he’s managed to put up with you for six years, I’ll never know!”

“If you went with me, it would be all right!”

“I won’t go with you! I just won’t. Don’t nag me!”

Rya thrust out her chin. “It’s because Susan’s out there, isn’t it? I bet Susan’s out there. Otherwise, you’d go. You were willing to try and see him, but you’re not willing to do this. I know it’s because Susan’s out there.”

“I want to keep my job!” But Rya was already down the hall, disappearing into the second bedroom. Alice looked at the telephone and looked away. It was impossible. She picked it up. After all, it was rather easy. She said, “Howard. I’ve got to miss work again today. I’m not sick. I’ve been involved in a murder.”

“Jesus!” said Howard.

“Just peripherally, and actually, it’s been going on for a couple of weeks, but there are some things I have to do.”

“Take the rest of the week, Alice.”

“I couldn’t stand it. Today is enough. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She heard Howard put down the phone and imagined the entire library lighting up instantly like a neon sign with the news. Rya entered the kitchen, her hair pinned up. “What should I wear?” she said meekly. “Do you think a dress is appropriate? Do I have to take the subway? God, I hate taking the subway alone. But I guess I’ll have to.”

Alice put down the receiver. “I think anything Noah likes is appropriate. And we take a bus over to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Honey gave me the information. I’ll go with you.”

“Thank God! But listen. Sometime, you will tell him I was ready to go alone?”

Alice nodded, feeling doomed.

T
HE
trip was briefer than Alice expected, into Queens, then Astoria. The neighborhood was middle class, nearly up to the
bridge. With the recent weather, Alice was reminded forcibly of the beach. The robin’s egg sky and the sapphire water made the perfect Cape Cod contrast. Yes, they had heard of Noah, which somehow surprised Alice, as if they had come to retrieve him from a trashbin instead of a modern, automated prison facility, and he would be ready in about an hour and a half. They were instructed to wait with the other visitors in the army tent behind the parking lot. Alice craned her neck, but the white-trimmed group of buildings on the island looked only like a college.

The temptation to ask after Susan was almost irresistible, only to ask how she was, not to see her, but even that Alice feared and hated to do. Rya said, “Is Susan here? You ought to go see her.”

Alice snapped, “Forget it!” and it was Rya’s turn to smile. Alice cleared her throat angrily and sat in her seat with great determination, but it didn’t matter. Soon enough she had crossed the parking lot again, asking after a recent arrival, “Susan Lynn Gabriel.”

The uniformed guard dialed some numbers and repeated Susan’s name into the phone, then he turned to Alice. “Was she brought in last night?”

“Yes, but—”

“That’s the one. Can she have visitors? I’ll send her over.” “I don’t—I’m not—”

He hung up. “Just get on that bus, and ask the driver to take you to the women’s area.”

“I don’t want to go to the women’s area! I just wanted to find out how she was!”

“Well, ask her yourself.”

Rya was watching her. Alice decided to get on the bus and go over the bridge, and maybe even get out at the women’s area, but then, even though she wasn’t going to see Susan, she began to perspire and get frightened, as if she were. The bus rolled over the beautiful blue of the bay, turned left, stopped here and there. People got off much too quickly. “Well?” said the driver, and he seemed so weary and irritable that she got off. She stood immobile
for a few minutes, then went in. She was not going to speak, but an authoritative black woman asked who she was, and she did it, named herself and asked to see Susan Gabriel, who was a new arrival. Alice was told to check her purse. Then, too committed to turn back, she was led to a room and invited to sit down. Everyone was polite, but this was not a place where you waffled or changed your mind or acted bizarre in any way. She dreaded the sight of Susan as much as, on the ledge outside her building, she had dreaded the appearance of some monster face around the sash of the window. In the midst of her dread, Susan was brought in, looking much as usual.

She smiled knowingly when she saw Alice, rendering Alice unable to speak. After a minute or so, the wardress prompted them. They had ten minutes. Susan said, “How did you get here? But you’re magic. You always turn up.”

“Not necessarily. Anyway, there are regular buses. You go through Queens. The bus doesn’t penetrate a time warp or anything.”

“You should use the car.”

“It’s impounded.”

“Oh. I guess it would be. How about the apartment?”

“They went over it yesterday. Starting today I can go in and out again.”

“It’s all very practical, isn’t it? Like moving to Europe.”

“Except that they do a lot of it for you.”

“I suppose.”

The tone of their voices was familiar to Alice, and after a second she realized that Jim and she had spoken just this way, with affectionate but distant politeness, after the divorce. She also had the same desire to proclaim one last consummate accusation, to make her position known forever, and the same inability to do it. She said, “We came out to get Noah, actually. He’s in the men’s part. Honey reduced his charge to a misdemeanor. Rya got back last night.”

“I can just see Rya at a prison.”

“She’s okay.”

There was another long pause. Susan looked at her with the old amused directness and said, “Do you hate me?”

Alice thought about the word “hate” and compared it to her feelings of the past two days. She looked up. “Yes.” After a moment, she said, “For now.”

“How’s Ray?”

“Feeling better. Honey dropped around his place the night he got out of the hospital and said that he should go back to Minnesota and gave him a good talking to about lifestyle and companionship. I guess Ray’s going to do it.”

“Five minutes,” said the wardress, halting all conversation once again. Alice coughed.

Susan said, “Can I say something? Don’t be so dependent. You don’t have to be.”

Alice opened then closed her mouth, then chuckled.

Susan said, “What?”

“I was just about to say, How will I know what to do without you telling me?”

“You will. You knew what to do the other night. I would never have thought of that.”

“True.” And here was another thing like the divorce, the harsh habit of being in love that inflamed every exchange. Alice looked directly at Susan for a moment. Susan didn’t feel it. That was clear. She was merely being kind. Alice stood up. “It’s almost time. Can you get packages? Can I send you anything?”