Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (4 page)

The taxi didn’t come for her until a quarter past two, by which time we had gone over it, and gone over it again, and gone over it yet another time. When the driver honked his horn outside, she went to the front door, opened it, waved to him, and then kissed me. On the cheek. I watched her as she ran up the front walk. I watched the flash of her long legs as she hiked up her gown to slide in onto the back seat. I watched the taxi as it pulled away from the curb. Dale did not look back. I listened to the sound of the taxi’s engine until it faded on the sodden night.

I went back into the living room then and mixed myself a very strong, very dry martini. I did not put an olive in it. I mixed another one the moment I’d finished the first. I sat drinking in my empty living room, watching the lighted pool outside, replaying in my mind everything she’d said and everything I’d said. First she’d told me she’d met someone else. When I asked her how she
possibly
could have met someone else when we’d been seeing each other virtually every night of the week, she’d said, “But not
every
night, Matthew.” I asked her where she’d met this
person
. I couldn’t bring myself to call him a man. He was still a faceless
person
, someone she’d met, someone she’d been seeing on the nights she wasn’t seeing me. She said she’d met him at her office, Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield, and Pollock, repeating the name of the law firm as if she were a receptionist answering the phone. She said he was a client. She said she was handling a collection case for him. She said he was forty-two years old, a recent widower. She said he’d asked her to marry him. She said she was going to marry him.

I asked her how long this had been going on. I felt stupid as hell asking the question. I felt like a husband whose wife had been
cheating on him. She told me she’d met him a month ago. I made some snide remark about him being a fast worker, or something equally inane, I still didn’t know the guy’s
name
, she hadn’t told me his
name
—“What’s his name?” I asked. She said that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she loved him and wanted to marry him, and that she felt cheap and shoddy being with me when she felt so committed to him. I think I was beginning to get angry by then, and I said something cruel, which I apologized for a moment later, I said I could certainly understand how shuttling back and forth between two beds
might
make a woman feel cheap and shoddy, and then I immediately told her I was sorry, and she kept watching me with those glade-green eyes looking a trifle sad and she said something like, “So that’s it, Matthew,” and I told her we couldn’t just
end
something that had been going on for such a long time, if all she wanted to do was get
married
, why hadn’t she
said
so? I’d marry her in a minute if that was what she wanted. She said, “Yes, that’s what I want,” and then she said something as cruel as what I’d said only a few moments earlier, she said, “But it’s not
you
I want to marry.”

So we sat in silence for what seemed a very long time, and then I asked her to please tell me what I had done
wrong
. I suppose I was still thinking of my ineffectualness with the two goons at Captain Blood’s, was thinking that if only I had behaved in a more manly fashion, this might not be happening now, I would not now be sitting in an air-conditioned living room listening to a woman telling me she no longer wanted or needed me while outside the pool rippled a sparkling blue under a starless night. She told me I hadn’t done anything wrong, it was just that she’d fallen in love, and I interrupted immediately to say, “I thought you loved me,” and she said, quietly and calmly, “I never told you that, Matthew,” which was the truth; we had never exchanged the words “I love you.”

This seemed in retrospect a serious oversight, so I told her at once that she
knew
I loved her, and that I
thought
she loved me, otherwise what had it all been
about
these past seventeen months, eighteen months, however the hell long it had been? She said it had all been about sex. I denied that. She repeated it. “
Sex
, Matthew.” And then she went into a sort of rhapsodic reverie about this new man she’d found, whose name I still didn’t know, and possibly didn’t
want
to know, telling me about all his virtues and even his faults, of which she was well aware, but they didn’t matter, the faults. She was in love with him, and he’d asked her to marry him, and she’d accepted, and that was that.

I fell back on the cheap male strategy of trying to work her into bed, figuring that if I could get her in bed just one more time, hold her in my arms, kiss her, make love to her, she would realize what an important relationship she was throwing away. I reminded her of all the good times we’d shared, and of how passionate our lovemaking had been—didn’t she remember that first time at her house on Whisper Key, didn’t she remember all the other times, didn’t she remember Mexico and the few ecstatic days we’d spent down there, didn’t
any
of it mean anything at
all
to her? She was very quiet for a very long time, and then she said, “It meant a lot to me, Matthew. I’ll never forget it. But I’m marrying Jim.”

And with his name out in the open, with his name falling leadenly into my own air-conditioned living room, it all became a reality, and I knew that indeed she had done what she had planned to do from the very start of the night, she had effectively and irrevocably ended it. When the taxi driver honked his horn outside, I was thinking about her taking off that sequined slipper and coming to my defense earlier, when all we had to worry about was assault and battery. She said, “There’s my taxi,” or something like that, and she just shook her head sadly, and went to the door and opened it, and waved out at the driver, and I followed her to
the door, and she touched my bruised cheek with her hand and said, “Good-bye, Matthew,” and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’m sorry,” and then turned swiftly and went running up the walk to the waiting taxi, and I didn’t know whether she’d meant she was sorry I’d been beaten up or sorry she was ending it this way.

I sat there drinking. I guess I fell asleep right where I was sitting. I feel certain I didn’t pass out, I simply fell asleep.

The phone woke me up.

I blinked at the sunlight outside the sliding glass door. It was Tuesday morning, the ninth day of August. I looked at the clock on the wall over the stereo equipment. A few minutes past seven. The phone kept ringing.
Dale!
I thought.
She’s changed her mind!

I stood up abruptly and felt a sharp pain at the base of my skull. For an instant I didn’t move. The room swam dizzily and then came into sharp focus again. The phone was still ringing insistently. I went into the kitchen and yanked the receiver from the wall hook.

“Hello?” I said.

“Matthew?” A man’s voice. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Who’s this?” I said.

“Morrie Bloom.”

Detective Morris Bloom of the Calusa Police Department. I figured he had come into work early this morning and seen the uniformed cop’s report, and seen my name on it, and was calling now to find out how I was.

“How are you?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I did not feel okay.

“I’m sorry to be calling you so early,” he said, “but I’ve been working on this all night, and I waited till what I thought was a respectable hour.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Seven a.m. did not seem like a respectable hour.

“Matthew, we caught a homicide at a little past ten o’clock last night,” he said. “Condo out on Stone Crab, multiple stab wounds, kid named Jack McKinney, does the name ring a bell?”

“Yes,” I said. “A
homicide
, did you say?”

“Yeah. Reason I’m calling, we found your business card in his wallet. Was he a client, Matthew?”

“Yes, he was.”

“What were you handling for him?”

“A real-estate transaction.”

“Here in Calusa?”

“Yes.”

“Matthew, I know this is an imposition, but I wonder if you could come down here and fill me in on the details? We want to get a fast start on this one, maybe get a few steps ahead of whoever did it.”

“I just woke up,” I said.

“How long will it take you to wash and dress?” Bloom asked.

“Morrie, I’m not feeling too hot this morning—”

“Jack McKinney feels even worse,” Bloom said. “Can you do me the favor, Matthew?”

“Give me an hour or so,” I said.

“I’ll see you,” Bloom said, and hung up.

His eyes opened wide the moment he saw my face.

My own eyes had opened just as wide when I’d seen myself in the shaving mirror forty minutes earlier. Or at least as wide as I
could
open them, considering that they were puffed and discolored and looked a lot like the poisonous men-of-war that sometimes washed up on Calusa’s beaches.

“What the hell happened to
you
?” he said.

I told him all about Charlie and Jeff.

“Did you report it?” he said. He meant to the police. Since he
was
the police, it hadn’t been necessary for him to elaborate.

I told him I’d reported it.

“What was the responding officer’s name?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t remember.

“I’ll check the Activity Report spindle,” he said, “make sure it’s followed up.”

I thanked him.

“Fucking Wild West down here, huh?” he said, and shook his head.

I hadn’t seen him since November, when our separate professions had thrown us together on a case he still referred to as “the Beauty and the Beast mess,” but which I always thought of as “the George Harper tragedy.” He seemed to have lost a great deal of weight. Bloom was six feet three inches tall, a heavyset man with the oversize knuckles of a street fighter and a fox face with a nose that had been broken more than once. He had shaggy black eyebrows and dark brown eyes that almost always seemed on the imminent edge of tears—a bad failing for a cop. But the last time I’d seen him, he had to have weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds, and he didn’t look anywhere near that now.

“So how are you?” he said. “Otherwise.”

“Fine,” I said. “Otherwise. And you?”

“Much better now,” he said.

“Now?”

“I got hepatitis just before Passover,” he said. “Jews aren’t supposed to eat shellfish, am I right? It’s in the dietary laws. So what does the good Jew, Morris Bloom, do? He eats shellfish. Clams on the half-shell, to be exact. I been eating them all my life, don’t tell my rabbi. Only this time, bingo—hepatitis. Type A. I was sick as a dog. I wanted to die. Fever every goddamn day for a full month.
I lost
thirty pounds
, can you believe it? I’m thinking of writing a book called
The Hepatitis Diet
, you think it might sell? How do I look? I look better, don’t I? I weigh an even two hundred now, I could be a fashion model. Who makes more money, fashion models or guys who write diet books?
Cops
sure don’t,” he said, and grinned. “It’s good to see you, Matthew. I’m sorry I called so early—”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“I wouldn’ta called at
all
if I’d known about your trouble last night. I’ll have all the blues looking for those punks, we’ll find them, don’t worry. Charlie and Jeff, huh? Sounds like a pair of vaudeville comics. Some comics. They did a nice job on you, Matthew. I’ll have to teach you to fight dirty.”

“I’d love to learn,” I said.

“Are you serious? Come down the gym one night, I’ll kick you in the balls a few times. Are you serious?”

“I’m very serious.”

“Good, we’ll make a date. About McKinney,” he said. “I just got a call from the coroner’s office, they’ll be sending the written report up later. McKinney was stabbed or slashed fourteen times, somebody did a very nice job on him, I can tell you that. What do you know about him, Matthew? I’d appreciate anything you can tell me. When did you last see him? Because in police work, when we catch a homicide, there’s a rule we follow, we call it the twenty-four P-and-P—does this sort of stuff interest you?”

“It does.”

“’Cause some people it doesn’t,” Bloom said. “What it is, P-and-P stands for past and present. The first thing we try to do is track down the past twenty-four hours in the victim’s life, because that way we can work up a timetable on where he went and who he saw and what he did and maybe get a lead that way. That’s the twenty-four
past
. At the same time, we try to work as fast
as we can in the twenty-four hours
following
the murder—that’s the twenty-four
present
—because that’s the only time we’ve got a slight edge. The killer hasn’t had time to cover too many tracks, he doesn’t know how much we already know, or even if we’ve found the
body
yet. Like that. Very important time, those first twenty-four hours. After that, it can get mighty cold mighty fast, Matthew, even down here where you can melt like a snowman. The Twenty-four P-and-P, live and learn, am I right? Did you see McKinney anytime during the past twenty-four hours?”