“I couldn’t sleep. The drug was the only way I could get any sleep.”
“Of course. But you had to see it through. It had to be done.”
I nodded. I was relieved she understood. It made me feel better. “There was a little girl . . .”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the house . . . There was a child. He had her tied up in there. Do you understand? He was going to . . .”
“Oh, yes, of course, yes. I understand. Of course. That’s why you had to do it.”
“That’s it.” I was so relieved she understood.
“That’s why you do what you do.”
“Right. Right,” I said. “Not just for her but . . . all the others . . .”
“And there would’ve been still more too, if you hadn’t stopped him.”
I nodded eagerly. After so much horror, her simple sympathy and understanding moved me—powerfully, deeply. The emotions made my eyes fill.
Samantha turned her head away as if something across the room had caught her attention. She was giving me time to get control of myself, see. She knew a guy like me wouldn’t want a woman to see him lose it. It was such a kind gesture. Delicate. Womanly. It moved me even more.
She gave me more time. She didn’t turn back to me, but instead stood up and walked across the room. I wiped my eyes dry with my hand while she wasn’t looking.
When she reached the corner of the far wall, she settled gently on her haunches. The room was dark. The curtains were still drawn though there was daylight at the edges of them. I had to squint to see her through the shadows . . . the flash of her knee, her skirt like drapery. I saw her fiddle with the wainscoting at the bottom of the wall. She pulled a small section of the wooden panel away, revealing a hole in the wall behind it.
“My secret hiding place,” she said, still without looking back at me. “Even Ed doesn’t know about it.”
I watched her through the dark as she reached into the gap in the wall.
“What is it?” I asked her, my voice rough.
She stood. She came back to me, back to the sofa, cradling something in her hand. She sat down beside me again and laid the thing on the table. It was a candle—what was left of a candle. She had a pack of matches too. She set the candle upright on the coffee table and lit it. The flame rose, bright in the darkness. I watched her by its wavering light. I watched her set the matches down. I watched her slender, graceful fingers. I checked to see if she was wearing a wedding ring or an engagement ring. She wasn’t. I was glad.
She turned back to me and I think she caught my glance, maybe even read my mind. She smiled. “Could you manage to eat something?”
“Maybe. Maybe some eggs. I think I bought a dozen before I came home.”
“I’ll make some for you. Meanwhile, try to get some rest.”
She started to move away through the flame-lit shadows.
“Samantha,” I said.
She stopped and looked back at me. I had had some idea of asking her why she was here, why she was staying downstairs, what she was doing with Ed. But now, I just gazed at her. I realized I had only wanted to say her name out loud and see her face again. She seemed to understand. She smiled and went out of sight, into the kitchen.
I lay on the sofa and listened to the jangle of silverware, the clank of pots and pans. I heard the eggshells crack and heard the eggs sizzle as they landed on the hot skillet. Then I smelled them and I smelled bread toasting. I started to feel hungry.
I lay and watched the interplay of candle-glow and shadow on the ceiling and listened to the noises from the kitchen and smelled the smells. I turned my head toward the candle and watched the flame. I watched a line of wax roll down the shaft to the tabletop. As the wax touched the surface, the heat of it made a little section of the table’s cheap plastic coating whiten and curdle and crack. Later—years from now—I would tease Samantha about how she ruined my table the day we first met. The thought made me smile.
I felt calm now, wonderfully calm for the first time in weeks, for the first time I could remember. I felt a sense of deep satisfaction, a sense that a great journey had come to an end, that it had ended the moment I saw Samantha. It wasn’t that I loved her already. How could I? She had just walked through the door. But I already knew I was going to love her. More than that. I knew I had been waiting to love her all my life. It was as if I had always known that she was out there somewhere and now I had found her and recognized her on sight. I didn’t know stuff like that really happened. But apparently it did.
I smiled into the candle-glow again. Then I let my eyes sink shut and fell back to sleep.
I woke in the dark. After a few seconds, I became aware that something was different. Better. Then I realized what it was. I felt clean inside. The sickness had passed. I had survived the withdrawal. I had kicked the drug.
I sat up on the edge of the sofa, my elbows on my knees, my face in my hands. Something else came to me as well. I remembered that something good had happened. What was it? Oh yes. It came back to me: Samantha. I recalled that sense of calm and satisfaction. It was still there. The woman I had been waiting for my whole life had shown up. At my lowest moment. Just like that. And everything was going to be all right now. I knew it. It was a great feeling.
But the apartment was quiet.
I called out to her, “Hello?”
There was no answer. The place was empty. Samantha must’ve gone out. I was sorry about that. I missed her already.
I looked down at the coffee table. Even in the dark, I could make out the plate there. A knife and fork lying on it. Hardened streaks of egg yolk. Bread crumbs.
I don’t remember
.
I guessed I must’ve woken up at some point. Samantha must’ve brought the eggs to me and I must have eaten. But when I tried to bring the memory of it back, there was a kind of barrier in my mind, a resistance I couldn’t overcome.
I let it go. I tried to stand up. The room tilted and my legs went weak under me. I sank back down. After a few deep breaths, everything steadied. I tried again. Made it this time. Shuffled like an old man across the room. Found the light switch. Flipped it up. The light came on. It was a deeply unpleasant experience: the visual equivalent of having some guy clash a pair of cymbals together with my head in between them. I debated whether to claw out my eyes to make it stop but decided that would be an overreaction. Instead, I went into the kitchen and started some coffee brewing.
I went into the bathroom. I pissed and showered and shaved and brushed my teeth. I went dripping naked into the bedroom. Put on new jeans and a new sweatshirt. These were all major plot points in the story of my returning humanity.
I walked from room to room. I saw that Samantha had cleaned the place. She had cleaned up the vomit on the carpet. Rubbed the stains out. She had taken away the candle and removed the melted wax from the surface of the coffee table. She had turned off the demon-possessed television and pushed it into a corner.
Take that, you TV demons
. In the kitchen, she had washed out the skillet and left it in the drainer.
Imagine,
I thought.
Imagine someone doing that. Cleaning up like that for a perfect stranger. Cleaning a stranger’s vomit off the carpet, cleaning the stains out
. Again, it struck me as such a generous and womanly thing to do. I was moved, really moved, deep down.
I poured myself a mug of coffee and went back to the living room. I went to the window. Opened the curtains. It was early evening. The end of a clear blue day. The people on the sidewalk were hurrying home in their winter overcoats and woolen caps. Their breath was visible in the darkening air.
I sipped my coffee and watched the scene like it was Christmas morning. I felt good, really good. The Emory case was over and the poison was out of me and now there was Samantha.
Samantha.
I went downstairs to Ed Morris’s place. Ed was one of those old guys you see sometimes who seem to be deflating in slow motion. Getting smaller, softer, more slouched and shapeless, bit by bit, day by day. He was a black guy with iron hair and rheumy eyes. Grumpy was his good mood. When he was in a bad mood, he got silent or whiskied up.
“Don’t tell me I gotta clean your shit up there.” That’s what he said when he opened his door and saw me on the front step. That was his version of hello. “I don’t wanna hear it.”
“Be thankful you don’t have to dispose of my body, you nasty old son of a bitch.”
“Sounded like I was gonna. Way you was carrying on. Smell the upchuck all the way down here.” By then he had turned his back on me and gone shambling back into his apartment. “Only reason I didn’t call the cops on you is you
are
the cops, I know they would’ve sided with you, rousted my ass.” I followed him in. Followed his hunched figure down an unlit corridor toward the bright kitchen.
“They would’ve, too,” I told the back of his flannel shirt. “They’d’ve dug up every evil deed you ever did.”
“Oh, I know it. Don’t think I don’t.”
“So quit bitching. You got off easy. Plus I’ve lived to overpay you for another month. What else do you want?”
“Overpay me!” He was in the kitchen now. He opened the refrigerator. I leaned against the doorway. “I see on TV your boys been doing good work, though,” he said. “Sending that evil motherfucker to hell. That’s a good day’s work right there. You tell them I said good job.”
“I’ll pass it on.”
“Whoever done it. TV say he’s undercover. You tell ’em: He’s a good man. Good job.”
He handed me a bottle of beer. I tipped it to him. “Will do.”
“Hope he did it slow too. Put one in his goulies. Man doesn’t know how to use ’em shouldn’t be allowed to keep ’em.”
“True that. There oughta be a law.”
By now, I was already thinking this was strange. Samantha said Ed had told her I was the detective who killed Emory, but now he didn’t seem to know. The department had shielded my identity, kept my cover. That was standard procedure. So how
would
he know? Maybe he had guessed. Maybe he was just being discreet or . . . or something. It was strange.
Ed made it across the room and settled into a wooden chair at the kitchen table—really, just like he was deflating. He already had a beer bottle open there and a plate of some mess he’d been eating. Had a small television set up right in front of him, playing the local news at low volume. He started eating again. Watching the TV as if I weren’t there.
“Didn’t mean to disturb your dinner,” I told him.
“What’d you think you’d do coming down here around this time of night?”
“That crap you’re eating—I did you a favor.”
“Well, you got that right, at least.”
“Anyway, I’m not looking for you. Who would be? I wanted to talk with Samantha.”
Ed went on eating his crap and drinking his beer and watching his TV. He didn’t even seem to hear me. Then he said, “Who that?”
“What do you mean,
who that?
Samantha. The girl. The redhead. Said she was staying down here with you.”
He glanced at me. “You see any redhead girl down here? There’s no redhead girl down here. There was a redhead girl down here, I wouldn’t be talking to you, I’d be doing her.”
I started to laugh as if he were kidding, but I could see he wasn’t kidding so I didn’t laugh. I said, “There’s no one staying down here with you?”
“What am I telling you? Who’d be staying here? There’s no one been here since Livi died but me and my ulcer.”
I took a hit of beer, stalling for time, trying to figure out how to react, what it meant. “Well, do you know a girl named Samantha?”
The old man shrugged. “Know a lot of people.” He actually turned away from the television long enough to give it some thought. “But I don’t believe I
do
know a Samantha, now I think about it.”
“Beautiful redhead in her thirties.”
“I
know
I don’t know
that
Samantha.”
I still didn’t know what to make of it—not in my mind at least. But my gut knew. My gut went sour. My sour gut told me:
This is not good. This is bad, in fact. This is something very bad.
Upstairs, I stood just inside the door to my apartment. I surveyed the room. I considered the possibilities.
Why would she lie about staying with Ed? She didn’t look like a girl who would lie about anything. Why that? How had she known to come up here if she hadn’t heard me fussing through the ceiling, like she said? Was she running some sort of game on me? Was she some sort of agent for Internal Affairs? Or for Emory? Or maybe for the Fat Woman? Had she come to get information out of me, to find out how much I knew? I tried to think of what I’d told her. That I’d been on drugs when I killed Emory. What else? Nothing I could remember. But then . . .
I gazed at the plate on the table. The streaks of yolk. The bread crumbs.
I don’t remember
.
I didn’t remember eating the eggs. Part of my memory was gone. Maybe I’d told her more than I knew.