Authors: Colin Harrison
The bell rang, startling him, and he opened the front door an inch, feeling the air.
“I’m here!”
Cassandra, cloaked in an immense black mink, swept in, her heels clicking on the floors, and before he could shut the door, she gave him a long kiss on the mouth. He smelled perfume. Cold fur touched his skin.
“Hi,” she whispered. “Your private banker arrives.”
He pulled back into the warmth of the house. Cassandra’s lips were strangely red. She had probably changed from work; her dress was cut deep and tight. Tightly circling her waist was something made of brass and bone.
“I really appreciate this,” he apologized, already erasing the ashy taste of Cassandra’s tongue from inside of his mouth. “I happen to need cash for tomorrow and I don’t have it—”
“No need to explain, Peter.” Cassandra looked appreciatively at him. “I think we’re finished with these explanations, don’t you?”
She handed him her fur to hang up; it was thick and exceptionally heavy. How Janice would love such a coat, despite her protestations that she didn’t want one, didn’t believe in killing animals for warmth.
“Well—I
do
appreciate it. Were you able to draw on your account at work?”
“I keep a small safe at home.”
“Ahh,” he said, wishing he knew why.
During dinner he told her about the Carothers case and took satisfaction in her pleasure in hearing the inside account. Despite his eager audience, he remained careful, however, to omit any suggestion that he was circumventing Hoskins.
Then Cassandra presented dessert. “This is a complicated recipe,” she announced. “Each step is simple, but you have to do everything in the right order.”
Yes, he thought, half listening to her, he needed to complete a sequence of events from Carothers’s arrival at his apartment to the moment he was arrested. Compare the police events minute by minute with the Carothers version, find the holes.
“Hey,” he said as Cassandra spooned out some heated concoction of pudding and pie, “that looks good. But I should tell you that I need, in not too long, to get some work done.”
“You’re forgetting one thing.” Cassandra smiled, brandishing the pie knife. It flashed in the light. She possessed a crumbling beauty. “You’re forgetting why I’m here.”
Her presence in his kitchen seemed absurd.
“No-oh, I’m not. You came over to lend me some money. Which reminds me, I’ll pay you back, with interest, of course. I’m selling some stock, and—”
She lit a cigarette. “You don’t have to pay me back.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
The room was quiet. Cassandra’s presence pushed at him, drove him toward another mood.
“But you do need to do something for me.”
The pie was on the plates, nobody looking at it.
“Name it,” he said. “You’re doing me a hell of a favor.”
“Take me to bed tonight.”
“Ha—come on.”
She said nothing, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe.
“You’re paying me ten thousand dollars to take you bed?”
She looked at him. He laughed too loudly. “Cassandra, there are ten thousand
guys
in this town getting drunk in bars
now
who would happily pay you.”
She shook her head ever so subtly. He sensed an unnatural determination in her, a potent, controlled rage. “I scare most men, Peter. That should be clear.”
The tendrils of smoke curled from her nose, lifting, spinning, weaving, above her head.
“Yes or no, Peter.”
“I need the money, but—Jesus, what does that say about me?”
This seemed of little consequence to Cassandra. She shrugged. “You’re the one who needs the money. Loans must be repaid. Here’s a chance to pay off your debt immediately.”
He pictured Vinnie’s fat, expectant paw open before him.
“I’ve gotten very big, “
Vinnie had said.
“Why are you doing this? You don’t
need
to do this. Cassandra, I’d rather—assuming you’re not playing some joke on me—I’d rather we
just forgot it. I can get the money some other way. I—” He stared at her. “You’re kidding. This is ridiculous. You’re pissed at me—”
“What is it that makes you resist me, anyway?” she asked bitterly. “I want to test that.”
“Why? Why be angry at me? Jesus, I’m just some guy with a lot of problems…”
She shook her head, unwilling to listen to his filibuster.
“Peter, I deal with men all day long. I know how they think. I saw right away that you’re a good man. I’m not so good a woman, not really. I’d like to be happy for a night.” Her voice remained abstracted, smoke around her head. “This is a nice house, you’re a good man. I find you very attractive, the kind of man who doesn’t want the kind of woman I am, understand?” Her voice held a zombie precision. “I know men like you—you live by a certain code and expect to be rewarded. You
expect
that your wife will be happy with you, because she’s the kind of woman who you want to be with. But there’s something else.” She exposed again a savage smile that glinted dental work. “I know there’s something about me, something that attracts you to me—otherwise we never would have met. There’s something in me you want. You don’t want the softness.” She was right. “It’s not sex, exactly, because I’m sure you had
nice
sex with your wife. It’s something else.”
“What?” he said, half knowing what she meant.
She smiled and tapped her purse. “Ten thousand dollars is nothing, Peter,
nothing
.” She bit on this word as she said it, for that nothingness had cost her a great deal. He could stand up and give her one swat and she would be out the door. Maybe she saw this in his face, for she sat down, stubbed out her cigarette, and put her cool hand against his cheek.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I like it when I’m in bed with you. You’re a big man, you make me feel good.” She put her arms around his neck. He felt revulsion at his own desire, but this time he knew what he was doing was beyond stupid, palpably wrong. Yet if he could stall Vinnie off long enough to finish the case and get back with Janice, then he could blow town if he had to. Vinnie’s potential blackmail was a lot more powerful as long as he was in office. And he wanted the information on John Apple. He needed to figure out who he was dealing with, competing
against. Essentially, he could fuck Cassandra while being fucked by Vinnie—he wished he could just slip out and let them do it to each other, especially since the money transfer was exactly the same. Yet trying to sort out these questions—trying to get an idea if it really was
worth
it—was difficult. Cassandra was pulling at him, cooing in his ear, suggesting they move upstairs to the bedroom. And he had been lonely lately. She pulled a fat white envelope from her purse and laid it softly on the kitchen table. They left the dishes. In the upstairs bathroom, looking into the same mirror where he and Janice had held each other, he brushed his teeth. Cassandra removed from her purse a pill that looked like an oversized aspirin and swallowed it.
“What is that?” he asked tightly.
“A pill.”
“No kidding.” He imagined punching her.
“I call them fun pills. Everything slows down, feels better, deeper.”
“Well, I’m tired, so don’t expect too much.”
She turned off the bedroom lights, whispered to herself.
“What?” he said irritably. “What did you say?”
Then, long minutes later, in the dark, Cassandra pulled him toward her, forcing him close to her.
“C’mon,” Cassandra demanded. “Do it.”
He turned toward the window. Impossibly, the snow was still falling. They all would be buried soon. He turned back. She moved beneath the covers and had him in her mouth. Her hand pushed his chest down and he hated his own lust, saw it for what it was, small and distracting. But what she was doing was very expert—all the nerves were attended to, around and down, and flickered over and stroked. He clutched the bedposts with both hands. This is what men over the centuries craved and were stupid for. He shut his eyes. Then Cassandra came up from the covers, keeping him in her hand, tightly.
“Let me see your ring,” she said.
“Why?”
“Let me see it.” She squeezed him. “You can trust me.”
He pulled it off with a humoring sigh and held it up. She snatched it with her other hand and put the gold circle against her mouth and
slipped the red tip of her tongue through it. She knelt over his groin and pushed the tip of him against the ring.
“Give it back now,” he called uneasily.
Cassandra smiled. He lunged for the ring. She put it in her mouth, and with a quick, forceful nod of her head, swallowed it.
He grabbed her mouth, jammed his fingers in. She bit them, laughing. Instantly, he understood her game: He was supposed to be filled with hate for her and in doing so give her the fucking of a lifetime. Well, maybe that would happen, maybe it just would. He pulled her out of bed violently and lifted her upside down by the legs into the air, his waist against her head. His body was suddenly sweaty, shaking, and he had forgotten he was this strong. She laughed more and took the opportunity to lick his penis mockingly.
“Throw it up!” he demanded. “Throw up that fucking ring.” He tossed her back on the bed, pinning her with one arm.
“C’mon, Peter, come here,” Cassandra sang archly. Her gaunt face leered up at him, teeth large. He did hate her now and, with the pressed lips of someone who must complete some wretched task—the removal of a long-dead animal, perhaps—he pressed his hand against her neck.
“C’mon,” she growled wildly, using her last breath. She grabbed his head and pulled him forward and their teeth cracked painfully. He hovered above her, silently, still erect, his hand heavily at her neck. She didn’t struggle, and instead pulled him into her, keeping her hand on him, grinding him around. He removed his hand from her neck and started to move with her. It neither hurt nor felt good, and his eyes moved toward the window.
The snow fell gently, begged at the windowpanes. The plow trucks would be out, traffic snarled. And in this he remembered the words he had heard earlier that day, somewhere lost to him hours before. Carothers had driven to the apartment house. How frustrating it must have been to try to park with a delivery truck blocking the entry to the parking lot. Cassandra was scratching his back with her left hand, urging him to moan, shiver, or otherwise display awareness of her, but the image of a delivery truck parked outside the apartment house intrigued him infinitely more. A truck, a driver, somebody who knew the streets. Cassandra tilted her pelvis forward and lifted her knees up around his
ribs and was sucking and licking at his chest, and he knew instinctively that he was driving very deep into her. The truck had probably been on a routine stop. Why hadn’t it been mentioned in the police report? The neighborhood patrol cars would know every delivery truck in their sector. The police always asked questions of delivery men, gas-meter readers, mail carriers—anybody who routinely passed through a scene could notice something different. Now Cassandra rolled them over, her on top. Should the truck have been there? If yes, perhaps the driver remembered something. Or perhaps the truck itself was related to the homicide. The truck was there, Carothers parked, and found the body still warm, he’d said. The absence of a report indicated either oversight or purposeful omission. Peter wished he remembered if there was a back staircase. Carothers might have been coming up while the killer of Johnetta was going down the back of the building. A man in a truck might tell him who was coming or going in the minutes before Carothers arrived.
He glanced at the clock: nearly two. Carothers had seen the truck before three. There was enough time to dress and drive across town. Like a seven-foot center going for a jam to the hoop while harassed by a pesky guard, he flicked Cassandra away from him, stood, and yanked on some clothes.
“Hey!” Cassandra yelled. She saw he was leaving. “Goddamn you!”
Downstairs, he found his coat and hat and car keys. In the kitchen he paused and thought about taking the money just to be sure. He ripped open the unmarked envelope. Inside was a stack of grocery store coupons—breakfast cereal, cookies, dish soap, nothing more. He tossed them into the air and the colored paper fluttered to the kitchen floor. He considered going back upstairs and doing something unmentionable to Cassandra. It seemed only just. But he couldn’t waste the time.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER,
Peter stood outside the apartment house, checking his watch, staring at the windows on the fourth floor, and enjoying the dead calm. The windows above him were dark, indicated nothing more than their existence. He had prosecuted cases where bodies had been found in burned-out warehouses in the Northeast, in the
rail yards of West Philly, in the elevator of a parking garage, in the backseat of a trolley, in the washroom of the national headquarters of an insurance firm. But those were the exceptions; most murdered people lost their lives in their homes or in the street. It was the intimate spaces that were most vulnerable to moments of rage or greed or jealousy: hallways in apartment buildings, bedrooms, stairwells, front stoops, places people knew, places so intimate people forgot themselves. The window above led not only into the bedroom but into a set of lives that now included his. That he had told no one of all he had discovered made him feel like an accomplice, part of a chain of guilt, and this compelled him; something more—he knew not what—lay at the end of it.
The cold air burned the inside of his nostrils. He spewed great shadows of steam and watched the occasional car pass, worrying he’d made a mistake, but convinced, somehow, that he hadn’t. He thought again of Janice and the heater. She seemed always to get cold easily and she would love the radiating warmth, the bright hiss of the flame. He moved his feet, paced.
Then headlights turned the corner—a delivery truck, slowing as it neared him. He slipped out of the lights. The truck slowed, then stopped before the neighborhood grocery next to the apartment building. The driver parked, keeping his engine on, and disappeared for a moment within the truck. He emerged carrying two large flat pallets of what could only be bread, given that they were light enough that the man held them with one arm. He wore baggy pants and a thick jacket, and carried the pallets around the back of the building, probably, Peter thought, to drop them off inside a delivery door to which he had a key. The truck was red, green, and white—Italian bread.