Boyfriend from Hell (16 page)

“I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you,” which was strictly true; she didn’t know any more than what she had told them.

“If anything else occurs to you—” Santini said.

The detectives sat in their car and went over their notes.

“Too bad the coroner didn’t find semen,” Gomez said, “or I’d take a shot at this: they had sex, he went for asphyxiation ecstasy, it went too far, and she choked him to death. Accidentally.”

“Man, that is reaching.”

“He was a Satan guy, he could’ve been into kinky sex.”

“With her? She thought he was messing up her life.”

“So they didn’t have sex and she’s too small to just walk up to him and strangle him, but there’s the Mariano Rivera factor.”

“Mariano Rivera strangled him?”

“Mariano’s just a wiry guy, not too big,” Gomez said. “No way, if you saw him on the street, would you say he can throw ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastballs and break people’s bats with his splitter. Concealed strength. If she was in a rage enough, she might’ve been able to do it. I mean, she
is
placed there time of death.”

“That’s if the coroner is dead-on accurate and these jerks can be relied on.”

“I wouldn’t dismiss her as a suspect. She seemed really jumpy to me,
and
they’ve got her there time of death.”

“If you had to put all the people we’ve seen so far in a line, she wouldn’t be the one I’d pick.”

“You know what I know? You never know.”

Ronnie called Nancy at work, could they go to a movie that night, do something, she didn’t want to be alone. Nancy and Bob gathered her up and they went to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Nancy and Bob were present the first time she blacked out, but she never told them about the second time, with Cummings. If she told them now and the police at a later date got around to questioning them, it might come out she couldn’t account for her time. The doctor knew and it was in Ronnie’s medical file. The detectives probably wouldn’t know about the doctor, so that area seemed safe. She realized she was making sure her tracks were covered when she couldn’t remember the tracks in the first place. She didn’t think she was failing in any civic or moral duty. She had observed nothing that would be of help to the detectives. If she confessed she blacked out she would walk right into becoming a suspect in the case. Even if she were a dubious suspect, did she really want the police barreling into her life? Then, too, she was mortally embarrassed by her inability to be conscious of all her waking hours. The goal, as she saw it, was to keep the police at a distance so she could concentrate on work, write the book, and this would pass, they would find the person who murdered Cummings.

At dinner Bob brought up Cummings’s murder.

“Here’s the tough question,” Ronnie said. “If I had the choice of his still being alive and my still getting horrible things sent to me, versus his being dead and horrible things not getting sent to me—and they aren’t, they seemed to have stopped—which would I choose?”

“It’s no question,” Bob said.

“It’s beyond a non sequitur,” Nancy added.

“It is a question if you think my writing about him contributed to his death.”

“You mean like, oh, here’s an interesting article. I think I’ll kill this person. Ronnie, for a smart girl, you can be a real dumbbell,” Bob said.

“I love you guys.”

“And we love you. Does Richard Smith? Where is he?” Bob asked.

“Europe.”

“He’s not much good to you traveling, is he?”

“That’s very subversive,” Nancy reprimanded.

“He’s just trying to be helpful,” Ronnie said. “Old wounds—his father traveling so much, his mother patient, and then for her patience, he rewards her by upping and leaving.”

“What did you say? How do you know that?”

“Which? About your father traveling? You told me.”

“I never did.”

“One night at the apartment, you had some wine, and you told me.”

“Never.”

“Maybe you don’t remember, Nancy was in the other room and we were talking, you had some wine, absolutely.”

“I never said a word. Nancy, did you know my folks broke up over my father’s absences, and he suddenly left?”

“I knew they were divorced.”

“But not those particular details. I never told you, Ronnie.”

“Yes. You did.”

They were all uncomfortable and eased into safer conversation, work-related conversation. But Ronnie was positive Bob told her about his father; that he had too much to drink that night, which was why he couldn’t recall.

Richard arrived bearing gray pearl earrings, which triggered an immediate reaction from Ronnie, of caution, I don’t know if I can accept these, they’re beautiful, but too expensive. He had chosen a middle-range Italian restaurant on the East Side, and offered the gift. As she sipped a glass of wine and appraised the handsomest man in the place, she wondered about her priorities. She danced around what was appropriate and not appropriate in a sexual relationship; that’s what it was primarily, certainly not an intimate relationship in a talking-about-intimate-things sense; and yet she was willing to conceal from the police that she was unable to account for an hour and a half on the day when Randall Cummings was murdered. She wasn’t going to tell Richard, By the way I’ve developed a little habit of blacking out and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’ve been.

“I can’t accept these.”

“I knew it. Here’s the receipt.”

“Why do I want the receipt?”

“Look at it.”

“A place in Munich.”

“Sixty-four dollars, American. Sixty-four dollars, Ronnie, that’s less than a dinner in most places. They’re pretty, it was a steal, please accept them.”

She could hear Nancy telling her to lighten up, just accept a gift from the guy, you can accept a gift from someone you’re sleeping with if he travels around the world and decides to pick something up for you.

“They’re beautiful. I’ll accept them on one condition.”

“Which is.”

“We go bowling.”

“Bowling?”

“When you were away, I had this fantasy. That the man I’d be with would be the kind of person who I could do normal things with, like bowling, and we would also have sex in some kind of order.”

“You give new meaning to high maintenance.”

“I know. Aren’t I interesting?”

“Bowling. Sure. The whole time, dealing with these cult people in Germany building primitive altars to Satan, sacrificing farm animals, I thought, when I get out of here, I’m going bowling with Ronnie.”

“Somewhere in there is the point—that it’s so ordinary it’s good.”

She accepted the earrings, they were going to make plans for bowling, she was even going to get to invite her friends to come along, Richard consented to that, a bowling double date.

Back at his apartment, the sex was as she fantasized it, the best sex she ever had, except for the last time with him, that was the best sex she ever had. Afterward she thought holding on with this transient man was the right thing to do, to not bolt because of his inconstant behavior. Being here with him at this place at this time had the power to obliterate, if only for these moments, the disquieting events in her life.

In the morning they went to their breakfast place. He was going to be in New York for a couple of weeks and then he needed to return to Munich. He described the cult, an atavistic group that favored ancient satanic rituals, that somehow was attracting young people from the city. The cult leader was a man in his sixties who wore farmer’s clothes for his mystique, there was always a mystique, he explained, and the dogma was a return to the land and simple pursuits, the cult members joining a working farm, with a nearly medieval worship of Satan. Antoine Burris thought there was a book in it; Richard wasn’t so sure, but he needed to go back. This was clearly the deal, which she fully recognized: Richard was there when he was there, and then he was gone.

“What do you do with all your frequent flyer mileage, get luggage?”

“Maybe I should use it for bowling lessons. Is there such a thing?”

“Richard, there’s something we need to talk about.”

“Still not married, Ronnie. You’ll be the first to know. Maybe not the first.”

“It’s about Cummings. I can’t get rid of the idea that if I just left him in obscurity, he’d be alive today. If I never wrote about him—”

“Wait just a minute. He had over a thousand members. He was rolling along. If you didn’t write about him, somebody else would have, me even. Someone somewhere was going to write a piece on him.”

“But
I
did. And he’s dead.”

“And? Where’s the connection?”

“I put him in the spotlight.”

“You’re a professional journalist and you wrote a professional journalist’s piece. You wrote the piece that needed to be written.”

“It wasn’t a rave review, Richard.”

“Appropriately.”

“His father was on TV. He said Cummings was—creating theater.”

“That was his problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at enough of these—he was a dabbler, Ronnie. He probably
was
creating theater. He wasn’t a true believer like this German guy. It wasn’t well thought out. Be evil, but not
too
evil. You picked it up in your piece.”

“Then he wasn’t that harmful. Makes it even worse.”

“You did a terrific job. Stop. You can’t beat yourself up over it.”

“Still—”

“His death had nothing to do with what you wrote. What you have to do is focus on this book, put every bit of your energy and intelligence into the book, make it as good as it can be. I was watching tennis on television and the announcer said something very interesting. Not all points have the same value. Some you
have to
win. It’s like this book. It doesn’t have the same value as an article. It’s your chance to win, to do something really substantial. All of you should go into it. And you can do it.”

He leaned over, took her hands in his, and kissed them. For all his sexual athleticism, he was not a particularly physically affectionate person, no light touches on the hand or on the waist, and this was as intimate a gesture outside of sex as he had made toward her.

“Thank you, Richard. I hope I hear you.”

Just when she wasn’t expecting much, his latest time in New York turned out to be better than she would have thought. They went to the theater to see
Doubt,
and to a New York Philharmonic Concert in Central Park—bona fide New York activities.

An oddity, but she noticed that when she was at his place the phone never rang. She wondered if he had a telephone system that screened calls, and yet the phone in his bedroom was connected to an ordinary answering machine. He had told her he didn’t have any relatives and that Antoine Burris was his closest friend. Apparently he had no other friends, and when she was there Burris didn’t call, nobody called. This had the effect of making their time together unique, it was just the two of them. However, she found it strange to never hear a phone ring in someone’s apartment because there was no one else in his life to call him, apparently. At the least this did damage to theories about a wife, or other women.

On his last night in New York they went bowling. Ronnie arranged it and booked an alley at Chelsea Piers. Ronnie was not a particularly good bowler. Her idea was people leading regular lives go bowling and that is why they were there. Nancy was a little better than Ronnie, Richard slightly better than both of them. Bob, the runner and athlete and someone who did bowl frequently when he was growing up, was fairly competent.

“I don’t think off this performance we should get club jackets,” Ronnie joked as they were leaving.

The women went to the ladies’ room and Bob excused himself to go off to a hallway so he could make a business call on his cell phone. Richard was left alone at the lane. He looked at the pins set up and with sudden seriousness, picked up a ball and, with perfect form, threw a strike. Bob came back into the area and happened to observe this. Richard hadn’t thrown a single strike while they were playing and had a couple of gutter balls. As Richard walked away from the lane, Bob stepped toward him.

“What was that, you were dumping when you played with us?”

“Nothing to think about. Lucky, that’s all.”

“That was perfect, like you could bowl a perfect game if you wanted to.”

“Bob, really, a lucky toss.”

“You were patronizing us. Why would you? I don’t get it.”

“Nothing to get.”

“And now you’re off again, right, big guy? And Ronnie sits around, seeing nobody, basically waiting for you to show up.”

“Is this really your business? She seems to be happy.”

“I saw an interview with Sting and he said some people have as their song, ‘I’ll Be Watching You,’ which he said was strange since it’s a paranoid statement. Paranoid this may be, but whoever you are, buddy, I’ll be watching you.”

Bob couldn’t get over the image of Richard, after a spotty bowling performance, throwing a perfect strike. At his apartment, before they went to sleep, he described it to Nancy.

“Maybe he was just being social, he’s a good bowler and he didn’t want to outshine us.”

“Customer bowling?”

“That’s the effect it had, we were all sort of on the same level, except maybe for you, and you’re no champion, and we had a good time.”

“Here are the possibilities—”

“Bob, please, let’s go to bed.”

“He was being social, like you say, holding back for the group. Or it’s an indication of something duplicitous about him, he’s not always who he seems. Or, and this is interesting, that the last strike was for
me,
that he wanted
me
to see it, a little dig at me: You thought I was just like you, but I’m not, buddy-boy, I’m so much better than you.”

“So this is really about you, in competition with him.”

“If it is that, he’s still not who he pretends to be and he was still duplicitous with us.”

“I’m saying good night now. Call Oliver Stone.”

“Ms. Delaney, Doctor Lawson here—”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You’re in excellent health. The blood test, the CAT scan, everything is normal.”