Zipper Fall (38 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, my reaction automatic. “You two were close, I take it.”

“She was the only woman who’d ever truly fascinated me.”

I swirled more pasta onto the fork and kept eating, plotting my next move. What would I have picked up at the gym, being new like I was supposed to be?

“That bald guy at the gym said her death was your fault,” I said, my voice quiet and hesitant. I eyed him over my wine glass.

“Yeah. He’s right. Of course it was my fault. If you’re belaying someone and they fall and die, there’s only one fuckin’ person to blame.”

I looked at him, my eyes hopeful. “Maybe it was an accident.”

He gulped some wine. “You’re new at this. You don’t get it yet. Have you ever belayed anyone?”

“No,” I lied.

“Okay. You’ll find that when you stand there, anchored to a tree or to a bolt in the rock, and the other end of someone’s line is in your hand, they entrust you with their life. It’s… it’s very special, and we did that a lot for one another, she and I. And I failed her.” His wine was gone, and he topped his glass off, his eyebrows quirking up at me. I shook my head; I’d had barely half a glass and I was still good.

“Did you meet in the gym? Or in college?”

His expression changed from pain to a calculating gaze. “Don’t tell me you don’t know she was Jack Azurri’s sister. Maybe it’s because she went to school in England.”

I let my glass slip out of my fingers, hit the cheap area rug, and spill. I sat there motionless, slack-jawed, goggle-eyed. “You… you dated his sister?” He kept staring at me, and I kept looking shocked, only letting my eyes drift to my still hand much later, now devoid of its wine glass. I looked down, knowing what I’d find. “Shit! Shit I’m so sorry. It didn’t break, though. But I made a mess.” I ran my hand through my loose hair as though to cover my embarrassment, and began standing up to get a paper towel.

“Sit.” Risby was up before I was and refilled my glass and dropped a folded paper towel on the wet spot and stepped on it. “I have a dark carpet for a reason.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry.” And I was sorry. This man, this well-read, clever, surprisingly charming man had murdered Celia, and I was sorry because, had he not done that, I would have wanted to be his friend.

T
HREE
hours later I was out of that dingy apartment building and getting back into Jack’s car, a bottle of cheap wine replaced by a book I now had to read.

“That was interesting,” Chico said. They all heard the recording. We traveled down to the Loose Rock, where detective Jubal Lupine planned to meet us and listen to the conversation.

Jack was silent, his eyes on the road. I didn’t feel like talking, either. Risby’s admission of guilt had been genuine and unexpected—but a simple, fatal mistake while belaying his girlfriend would hardly hold up in court.

Which is what Jubal Lupine said, too.

“You did a good job, letting him talk like that, but it doesn’t get us anything. He feels guilty, as well he should. The thing is, so what? He screwed up and she fell and died. So far, with the thin, dyed rope being inadmissible as evidence, it’s still only a tragic accident with no foul play involved. Legally speaking, anyway.”

I hung my head. Risby’s sad expression was hard to erase. It had seemed so genuine—but then again, my surprise and spilled wine had been calculated to seem genuine as well. “I’d like to go home,” I said, leaning against Jack’s side. “I’m so tired.”

We drove to Jack’s apartment in Shadyside and only when he was about to park in the lot three blocks away from where he lived did he break his silence. “Your place or mine?”

“Yours.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

Once we stepped into his foyer, he hung his jacket, kicked off his shoes, and strode into the kitchen. I was still untying my infernal combat boots when I heard the first plate crash against the wall.

And another, and then a few more.

I edged my way through the living room and the dining room into the modest, functional space. The wall next to the refrigerator was his anvil, and he was the hammer. I watched him heft another plate in his hand and fling it, full force, against that little wall. It was like watching a pitcher warm up before a baseball game.

A large serving platter decorated with a floral pattern was balanced on his fingertips now, and he glanced at it, freezing in place. Pink roses winked from their garlands, gold accents glimmered in the dim light of the faraway hallway light.

He set it down with precious care, and I saw a tremor run up his spine.

Like a flash I was behind him, embracing him from behind. “Jack.” My face was buried into his hunched, quivering back. “Jack.” I wrapped my arm around him and picked up the oval serving platter. It looked antique. I liked it. When I turned it over, the maker’s mark said “Limoges, France.”

“Why not break this one, Jack?” My question was calm, factual. I needed data.

He turned slowly, pulling me in, taking the plate out of my hands only to set it down with the greatest of care. “It was Celia’s.”

I
ROLLED
off Jack, my breath still heavy. Both of us were sticky with the evidence of our love. Twice in one day we had shared one another’s bodies, one another’s souls, but the spirit of that sharing couldn’t have been more different. Earlier in the gym, hanging off the climbing rope, had been a mutual exploration into the world of kink. It had been happy, loving, adventurous. What we had just shared was my effort to comfort him by impaling myself on his flesh while kissing his pain away.

I showered quickly, cleaning up just enough before I let the bathtub fill with hot water. Then I pulled on Jack’s arm and coaxed him in. “Come on. You’ll feel better.”

His eyes were empty, much as Risby’s had been for just a flash of a moment, and I noted the similarity and filed it away. I cajoled Jack into the tub, put on water for tea, stripped his old sheets, and changed the bed. I made sure clean, soft towels were laid out for us when I brought two cups of Sleepytime tea with honey into the bathroom.

“Here, drink this.”

“I don’t want whiskey,” Jack said, his eyes closed.

“It’s tea. Chamomile, mostly.”

He took it from my hands and hissed at its heat. We both had a sip and set our cups on the bathroom floor to cool. “Join me?”

“Yeah.” I stepped into the tub and settled between Jack’s bent legs. We barely fit, and the water was now raised almost to the rim. I could hear the overflow drain do its job, letting the excess run away. His arms hugged my chest; I leaned my still-moist head against his shoulders, getting my hair wet all over again. “We don’t have to do this, Jack. I thought it would make you feel better, but… I don’t know. I hate seeing you like this.”

We both knew what “it” was—the belated investigation of Celia’s death.

I felt his arms squeeze. We stayed that way for a while, sipping our tea and sharing our distress until the water cooled enough to be uncomfortable. Then we did the same in the fresh, clean bed, with Jack spooning me from behind and holding me tight, his nose nuzzled into the crook of my neck.

“I love you, Wyatt.”

I turned in his arms to face him. He was barely visible in the dusky corner of his bed; only the neon lights reflected off the white bedding made his face visible. “I know.” I slipped my arms and legs around him, maximizing our area of contact. “I love you too.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, suddenly gruff. His large hand was rubbing circles into my back. “As long as you’re fine, I’ll be fine.”

I smiled in the dark. “I’ll be fine. And tomorrow I’ll go buy you some new dishes.”

O
NLY
a week later I walked into the North Face, my regular gear on and Celia’s old GriGri belay device in my hand. Risby was thirty feet up the wall, defying both gravity and gym regulations. He wore no harness; nobody stood by to arrest his fall. I leaned back against the opposite wall and watched his long limbs execute their graceful dance of impending doom. He climbed down using a different path, feeling his way. When he was only six feet up from the ground, I raised my voice.

“Yo, Risby!”

He tried to look down, missed his foothold, and slipped; only his strong fingers grasped the handholds. He smeared the ball of his foot against the wall itself in search of something to step on and, realizing how close to the ground he was, he cursed and jumped. “Don’t ever do that, Wyatt. Not when someone’s free-climbing.”

“When I walked in, you were almost all the way up,” I said. “What, you have a death wish or something?”

He didn’t reply; he just leaned down from his considerable height and kissed my neck.

“Hey!”

“Looked tasty.” He shrugged.

“You’re as bad as Jack.” Oops, that just slipped out.

“You two together?” His eyebrows went all the way up as he shot me an assessing look.

“None of your business.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe if you two are together, I don’t want to poach. Considering I killed his sister, stealing his boyfriend would be just rubbing salt into the wound.”

Now it was my turn to just stand there, not knowing what to say. “I started reading the book,” I said instead.

He walked off to the wall and got his water bottle and drank some. “You liked it?” he asked once he wiped his wide lips with the back of his hand.

I shrugged. “History has never been my thing, but this writer is interesting. It must have taken a lot of research to pretend you’re an old emperor and write about all those tribes.”

The dark gloom lifted off Risby’s face. “The emperor actually wrote it himself.”

I took a minute to wrap my little thieving mind around that. “No shit?”

“No shit. Gaius Julius Caesar was
the
Caesar. He was the first-ever emperor of a decaying republic, which is why he got killed….”

“I know who he was from Shakespeare.”

“Okay. Shakespeare must have read his writings, and writings about him, to get all that history right for the play. Shakespeare is derivative. The book I gave you is a translation of the original, from the horse’s mouth.”

“Oh.” Words failed me, so I turned to action instead. My cover was blown; Risby figured Jack and I were together, and the romance of Mata Hari was a thing of the past. I looked at that wall and walked up to it. I climbed up to the blue line that told us not to go any higher without a harness. Then I went a bit higher, and a bit higher still. I felt comfortable. It wasn’t any harder than climbing while being belayed, but there was a serious adrenaline rush knowing you could just fall and get badly hurt.

Not die. Not here. The floors were padded. Maybe a few weeks in the hospital….

“Wyatt.” Risby’s voice was calm as I approached the ledge. The same ledge I had pretended not to be able to climb last time. “Wyatt. You’re doing great, but I need you to start climbing back down.”

I kept going up; my belly was sucked to the wall as I grabbed a handhold and swung my right leg over the ledge, gripping a stub of fake rock with my toe. One, two… then I was over on the flat wall again and found a good foothold and two handholds where I could stop and rest.

“Wyatt, I want you to climb to the right, past the ledge. Don’t do the ledge on the way down.” There was panic in Risby’s voice.

I climbed four feet higher, touching the wide, red pipe by the ceiling as I always had when I made it up. The sweet symmetry of what I did to Risby struck me as ironic. He pretended to be the beginner for Celia, and I pretended to be the beginner for Risby only one week ago. The deceit might have unfolded on the very same wall, too.

“To the right, Wyatt.”

I did as he said as I glanced to the side, picking the best place to begin my descent.

Going down was five times harder than going up. My focus was so total, so unwavering and complete, that I had to forget about my mission, about Jack and Celia and Risby, and finally, all there was left was the wall and me. I’d climbed down before, but never without a harness. I probably did the best, most intricate climbing of my life that day, using every technique, every trick up my sleeve. My feet hit the floor and I turned around, breathing a bit harder than usual.

Everyone was there. Craggs and his punk daughter Rosalie with her wild hair, Chico and Carlos, Reyna, Jack….

Wait. Why was Jack here?

Before my exhilarated mind even had the chance to come up with the answer to that question, Risby stalked to me and shook me by my shoulders. He was tall and thin, and there was that empty look in his eyes again. His voice was a cold hiss laced with panic. “I told you to get the fuck down. You wanna get killed? You wanna learn from me, you have to listen!” The pain and fear in his eyes was only thinly veiled with anger.

I wanted to take him seriously—except I’ve developed something of a reaction to people yelling at me of late. “Oh, fuck off, Risby.” My retort was automatic; so was his, apparently.

His fist cuffed my cheek so hard I saw stars before I fell to the ground.

W
HEN
I came to, I saw the uneven face of Craggs, who bent over me, frowning while wiping my forehead with a cool cloth. I didn’t know him well and found him a bit scary up close, with his weathered furrows lining his forehead and those feral eyes just drilling me into the rubber floor, making me stay put by his sheer will alone. “Here, drink this.”

I took the water bottle from his hand and sat up. My head hurt, but nothing was broken. “What happened?” I croaked.

“World War III happened. Risby hit you, Jack jumped Risby, and they had it out while you were out.”

“Is he okay?”

“Who?” Craggs grinned.

“Jack.”

“Yeah. A broken nose… could’ve been worse. He gave Risby a concussion, and now they’re being babied by all those friends of yours.”

I sat up and, testing my balance, I stood. My head hurt, and a cut on the inside of my lip left a metallic tang in my mouth, and now the small wound was hot and swollen. I padded over to a group of guys hovering over Jack. He sat holding an ice pack over his face; cotton balls kept blood from flowing out of his nose.