Death and Taxes (20 page)

I sank onto the sofa beside him. We’d always handled issues circumspectly, lightly, jokingly—trusting that the other would get the point and appreciate the lack of leaden touch. We’d laughed at Quality Time and Serious Talk. But now I wondered if fifteen minutes of serious talk three days ago would have saved the lunacy I’d made of the weekend. I’d turned him into a hostage and myself into my grandmother. I could almost feel the clammy air-conditioned air of that East Coast house and hear the whir of the sawmill outside.

Howard motioned to the pizza. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry. Or almost not. But it wouldn’t do to refuse food—too out of character for me. I picked up a slice and bit into it an instant before Howard said, “Watch out—it’s hot!”

As I swished his beer over the burned roof of my mouth, I steeled myself to keep from racing out, throwing myself into the car, and heading for the freeway to anywhere. I looked over at him. His face was drawn, and the skin on his cheeks hung inward as if it were too tired to stand up. His eyes were half closed, not tired by weighing, pondering, ready to be amused. The fun guy, the guy willing to take a chance—that was how most everyone saw Howard. I’d seen beneath that to the man who took lots of chances on things that didn’t really matter but few on those that counted.

One of those chances had been on me, on showing me that nugget of what he really was. I just hoped I hadn’t yanked it out and trampled it. I pulled back from the thought. It was too painful to think I’d never again see that nugget but only the public Howard.

Howard had fallen in so beautifully with the theme of my sting. I’d almost have thought he was a co-conspirator. Maybe he’d spent too much time in sting mode. He leaned back, his left hand holding the pizza, the right on my thigh. The stereo was playing “City of New Orleans,” traveling music. I wanted to …

But I’d spent my childhood and teenage years watching out, being careful, walking nervously at night when I was alone. I’d heard the tales of girls whose clothes were too tight, short, skimpy, sexy; girls who “got what they deserved.” I’d heard them, I realized, from my grandmother in that prison of a house as we sat on the horsehair sofa by the front window looking out at the normal teenage girls I was terrified I’d never be like. I had blocked that memory all these years. I hadn’t felt really free till I’d joined the force. And even now, I had to admit, the message of those myths was ingrained in my cells. Now I fought against it, purposely didn’t take safe routes, made myself face dangers I could have avoided. But no matter how hard I fought, that ingrained message—“watch out; be careful; don’t get yourself raped”—would never disappear.

I took another bite of pizza, chewed, swallowed, and forced myself to return to the question of the azalea. Surely Howard of all people would agree it would be a pity to waste such a good educational setup as this one. And at the bottom of it all was the fact that the need not to be caged by society, by
him
, was too integral to me to ignore.

I shrugged. In for a flower, in for a bush. “So you figure the plant thief will be back. It’s always more dangerous at night. You don’t think of this as a bad neighborhood. It’s not a place where you’re afraid to walk alone. But”—I let myself sigh—“in times like these there’s no place an azalea is really safe.” It wasn’t quite “A woman always has to be careful to avoid certain areas of town.” But unless the plant grew feet, it was as close as I was going to come. Hoping I wasn’t laying it on too thick, I said, “You could bring them all indoors.”

“They’d die.”

My God! Had he thought of that? He was in a lot deeper than I’d realized. But in one sense it was good. When the sting stung, he’d have little trouble getting the point. God, my grandmother would have been proud. “And you wouldn’t want to put them in front of the windows.” (I wished I could say scantily dressed.) “It could just be too much of a temptation for the thief.”

Howard snatched the beer. The can was empty. He hurled it to the floor and crushed it with his heel. “Just let him try, dammit.”

“If he’s obsessed, you’d be creating such a temptation. I can see his lawyer saying, ‘Detective Howard, you should have known the kind of drives my client has. He’s not a well man. He couldn’t help himself.’”

“What!” Howard stared at me. “What kind of bullshit …”

“Come on, Howard. He’d be saying it’s nearly entrapment. And then, if the lawyer questioned you about your past, if he found out how many stings you’d planned … The promiscuity of it.” I couldn’t keep from laughing.

Howard was not amused. With a snort, he leapt up and strode to the fridge for more beer—with a detour past the front window. Looking at Howard’s short angry steps, his tense jaw, the laugh lines pulled into a scowl, I wondered if I’d delved into a level of him that I didn’t want to know.

But it was too late now. I said, “It really must be frustrating for you to be stuck in here because of someone else’s inability to control their urges.”

“‘Inability’! Jeez, Jill, you sound like a social worker. Inability nothing. No one
has
to steal plants. This guy’s stealing because he figures he can get away with it. The guy’s a thief!”

“The rape of the leaf.”

“Huh?”

I picked up another piece of pizza and waited. But the Popeian penny didn’t drop then. Howard paced to the window and back, snatched a slice of pizza, sat down, sprang up, checked the window. His tension, and mine, filled the room more thickly than that air-conditioned air ever had. I finished my beer and announced I was going to take advantage of the empty house to have a long bath. “Care to join me?”

Howard grinned. For the first time tonight he looked like
Howard
: eyes sparkling, secret grin with just a soupcon of come-hither leer. Then the grin faded. “It’d be too noisy. He could dig up half the yard, and I wouldn’t hear.”

I stood up and kissed the top of his head. “I’ll miss you.”

His hand wandered down my back. “Maybe if we left the door open and …” He let his hand drop. “No. We’d have to be so careful, it’d be ridiculous.”

I gave his hand a squeeze and headed upstairs.

I had barely slid into the water when Howard stuck his head in the room, stood listening, muttered, “Nah,” and left.

“He’s got till midnight,” I said to myself.

Half an hour later, I got out of the tub, pulled on a T-shirt, and headed for bed. Howard was sitting atop the comforter in jeans and the L. L. Bean snap-front sweatshirt I’d gotten him for Arbor Day. The french blue matched his eyes; the cut outlined the angles of his sleekly muscled shoulders. I pulled the top snap free. “Coming to bed?”

“I’ll just be overdressed,” he said, weaving his fingers between mine.

“Jeans and sweats? That
will
limit things. How about mittens?”

“It’ll only be for tonight,” he muttered.

Clearly it wasn’t just clothes that would inhibit us. I slid under the covers. “And if the thief doesn’t come tonight?”

“Well, then tomorrow. We’ll have the morning, Jill. He won’t come in daylight.” He ran his hand under the covers down the side of my breast. “I thought you liked mornings.”

“What if he doesn’t come tomorrow either? Yours aren’t the only azaleas in town. He could be digging up northside tonight and saving yours till the weekend.”

“I’ll worry about that then.” He was massaging my breast as he spoke.

“And even if you catch him,” I forced myself to say, “once there’s a market for stolen plants, there’ll be other thieves. Are you going to sleep in your clothes for the rest of your life, or the azalea’s?”

“Jill—”

“No—”

He stared down at me, his hand still now. “You want me to just let the guy steal my plants—”

“No, I want you to think, really think, how it’d be watching over them all night, every night, night after night, forever, never being able to go out and leave them unguarded, or having to get a guard for them, never being able to leave them out because they might entice some man who’d want to dig them up”—Howard’s eyes widened—“never being too provocative”—his mouth dropped open—“never exciting the lust of—”

“
You?
” He yanked his hand free. His body was quivering as if he were afraid to move, for fear of what he’d do. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry. It was as if time had stopped and then inched forward, and his face flashed between disbelief, hurt, and fury. “The plants are okay? No one is …”

“ … going to rape your plants. No.”

His face was dead white, his voice very soft, as he said, “How could you do this to me?”

I swallowed hard and pushed myself up. The air was icy on my back. “I wanted you to feel what it’s like to be confined—”

“Well, you certainly succeeded.” He jumped up and stood leaning over the bed, squeezing the comforter in the middle of his fists. “Maybe you’d like me to feel what it’s like to have a leg amputated. Or an eye out. Or maybe you’d just like to go straight to being God.”

“Howard, this is how women feel every day of our lives.”

He yanked the comforter off the bed. “You lied to me.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. God, I
was
sorry. “But society lies to women all the time: We love you; we’ll protect you
until
you go where you’re not allowed,
until
you complain about harassment,
until
you pretend you’re equal, or free!”

He stared, but his expression didn’t soften. “How could you?”

I gritted my teeth to keep from yelling. “Do you really want to know?”

Still holding the corner of the quilt, he crossed his arms over his chest. He wasn’t tapping his foot as he waited, but he might as well.

I chose my words carefully. “It is asking a great deal of anyone to know what someone else is going through. But it’s asking even more of someone who is sure he will never have to go through that himself.”

“Well, I’m sorry I’m such a lout. It was magnanimous of you to put up with me all this time.”

“Howard, if you can’t make the effort to understand what it’s like to always be kept in second place, then much as you think you love me, you’ll always be looking down on me.”

Howard walked slowly toward the door. Halfway there he realized he was dragging the quilt and dropped it. “I’ll never be able to trust you again.” He opened the door and walked out.

I got up, grabbed the quilt, and ran to the window to throw it down on him. I couldn’t get the sash up! I stood shaking with anger, and desolation. Howard and I had never had an argument like this. Wrapping the quilt around me, I stood at the window and watched his Land-Rover back out of the driveway; turn, tires squealing; and roar away. Then I recalled the other thing my grandmother had said, not of me but of my father. “Failure,” she’d muttered every time. “The man’ll never amount to anything.” And each time, her dry fingers had tightened on my shoulder. I was too young then to know if my anger and my fear were for him or for me.

Then I would have run after the car all the way to Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Bayside, Queens. Now it was all I could do to restrain myself from grabbing my belongings and slamming out of the house.

But I couldn’t leave. I had to stay here, for Howard and for me.

I pulled the quilt tighter and stared into the dark. I don’t know how long it was before I’d calmed down enough to admit that with the azalea sting I’d chosen the worst vehicle to make my point. I’d been asking Howard to put himself in the one-down position he’d spent his life avoiding, and to be the butt of a sting while he did it. I should apologize …

But women spend their lives apologizing, thinking of others, making nice. I couldn’t do that, not if Howard didn’t speak first. A lifetime of suppressed anger would clench my throat closed.

Howard of all people might excuse the sting. Would he, the Master of Stings, be willing to swear off for life? No way. If he swore off, he’d mourn every situation that cried “sting.” Being the Master of Sting was part of his aura. I couldn’t imagine him giving up that little grin and swagger that went with it. I pulled the blanket tighter around me, but neither it nor all my analysis of this warmed me.

Monday morning, I rose before the alarm. Howard hadn’t come to bed. I was halfway to the bathroom before I realized that it had been Howard’s steps in the hall outside that had woken me. And once in the bathroom, I could hear him walking across the bedroom to his closet.

We didn’t argue well. But we did silence great. From my grandmother I’d learned that the person who holds her breath longest wins. I’d won with a few lovers that way—waited them out while they screamed, looked at them like they were jerks. The game works well when you play with a screamer, but when two strong silents go at it, it’s hell. I picked up my swimbag and headed for the pool.

I’d already done a lap when Howard arrived. I do flip turns, head down, no time to look around at the end of a lap. So I had only a vague sense of Howard standing in the next lane talking to Betty Davis, one of the regulars, talking a long time.

Monday is always rushed with the weekend’s in-custodys. Detectives’ Morning Meeting is always crowded with the weekend’s crimes. Howard didn’t come back to the office afterward. Sometimes he didn’t. Any other time I wouldn’t have noted it. My IN box was full. I had notes from Sunday’s interviews that still needed to be dictated. I had to round up Pereira’s reports and Leonard’s and Heling’s, and I couldn’t do that till I’d dictated my own. No way to avoid an hour in the dictating cubicle.

When I was through, I veered past Pereira’s desk. Howard pushed himself up and headed for the door. I let a moment pass, giving Pereira a chance to fill me in. She stared down at the hot-car report from Evening Watch, even though it would have been read at the Day Watch meeting. What had Howard said to her?

“So, Connie, how’re you coming with the Inspiration books?”

She laughed a little too enthusiastically. “With them, you’re talking an hour or a lifetime. Anything could be hidden in there, but you couldn’t pay me enough to find it. No way to tell whether half the rooms were empty or every inch was filled with carpenters, roofers, and maids.”

I started to ask Pereira if it would have been worth Drem’s while to plow through. But I knew the answer. It would have depended on how badly he’d wanted to get Mason Moon. And only Tori Iversen could tell me that.