Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) (4 page)

Tonight, Paine searched for her on his ceiling tapestry. Paine thought about the gun he had once kept in his bedside table. After meeting Rebecca, he had taken the gun out one night and it had felt like a metal bird in his hand. He had looked down at it and then put it to his head and said, "Bang." The bird-gun had said "Click." There had been no bullets in it, at least not that night
_;
it was only much later, when it was too late, that he had understood why his mock self-execution had mirrored Rebecca's real one
_;
how what
she was, the thing that she knew and would not tell him until it was too late, had defined his life from that night onward.

She had been him, Paine's own mirror image, and when she finally told him what he must have known (perhaps he had known it in his dreams—but not on waking, in the tapestry, where it might have done him some good) it was from a short ten miles away on a telephone whose line stretched not ten miles but the opposite way, six thousand miles around the world, because when he had reached her it was too late and she was gone.

"I know that you don't have it in you to do what I'm going to do," she had told him. "You might go to the edge, and peer over, but something will always hold you and keep you from failing. Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on," and she had been right, and he had known himself for the first time.

But Rebecca
was
gone. He had lost his mirror self. And even now, always, he would believe that if he had reached her, or been more aware of himself, he could have kept his mirror sell with him forever He could have looked into his own eyes, into his own mind, and seen that part of him that
did
want to do it, and reach into the mirror, through the looking glass, like Alice, and fix the part in her that wanted self-destruction, truly wanted it, and make it live. He had loved her, and she had known that. But it hadn't been enough.

The telephone line had stretched away from him, all around the world, and he had been too late to find out what would have been enough, beyond love, to save her.

Because Paine was sometimes a romantic fool, he thought of her often when he was using the telescope. She had told him, on that phone before she let the receiver drop and hung herself, "I want you to remember that, Jack. I love you. If there's anywhere after this, I still will." When he used the big white tube to peer into the darkness of space, to find the delicate tendrils of glowing gas, the sparkling pinpoints of colored light called stars, the soft, infinitely distant whirls
of light that were galaxies, he thought of her as between the stars, between the worlds, perhaps looking down at the distant earth, so tiny to her after death, and seeing him. He knew
it
was foolish to search for her in the black cold between stars, but it was a way for him to know that she was still with him.

Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on.
He was foolish and romantic enough, and knew himself well enough now, to do that.

He searched for Rebecca in the ceiling tapestry, in the waking dream that rolled over plaster, as always; but tonight Bob Petty's face appeared to him. And it was not Bobby's face he saw so much as Terry's. He saw them together, and knew that what he saw could not be false. All the years they had been together, the looks of secret life that had passed between them, could not have been manufactured by either. They had fought, and loudly
_;
sometimes they had come to the edge of fissure. But there had been something in their union, some dovetailing, that had always locked them so tightly together, for all the world to see, that what had happened, what seemed to have happened, had to be false. They had worked at their marriage; had realized from the very beginning that love was work, and over the years that Paine had watched them, the work had produced something as tight and true, at the core, as any work of art.

Paine believed in secret lives. He believed it because he knew it to be true. All men keep secrets, especially from themselves, and all unions have secret lives. But the essential self is rarely hidden to those who really look. Most of our lives are spent in self-absorption
_;
our dealings with those others of our species are carried out in the most superficial fashion. The neighbor is always startled on hearing that the "nice, quiet boy" next door has murdered his family
;
that same neighbor would blush with embarrassment on reflection, to realize that for the fifteen years he'd known the nice, quiet boy, he had had no interaction of consequence with him.

All men have secret sins. Paine believed this implicitly. He
could believe in Bobby Petty's infidelity; could believe in any of a number of secret sins: gambling, transsexualism, homosexuality. No revelation, no tiny room exposed when the secret key was turned, would surprise him.

But just as all men have secret lives, so too do they have essential selves, and these they wear like a shroud. No mask can hide it from those who look. Had that neighbor chosen to look to the human being, not the docile mask, of the boy next door, he might have discovered the six-year-old who killed frogs for the pleasure of it, the eight-year-old who torched the curtains in the living room to test the reaction of his distant parents. The essential self leaves clues no man can hide. It transcends the secret self.

Bobby Petty had violated his essential self. Whatever his secret life, he had done something to destroy what he himself was. This was no crime of passion, of secret lust, of suddenly uncontrolled or unbearable passion long hidden. He had deliberately, and coldly, cut the roots from his own soul, and this was what bothered Paine so much.

And Terry knew it, too. It was the source of her unmooring. It was not the fact that her husband had abandoned her—not even the fact that he had taken their money and terribly insulted their children. These were common things in the world, and Terry Petty was a person who could handle such things. What she knew in her gut, and what had frightened her to the core of her own being, was that Bobby had violated not his mask but himself.

And so the tapestry rolled across Paine's ceiling. In his shorts and T-shirt, with his hands locked behind his head, in the hot night with his fan blowing hot air across his sweating face, the fan with the loose part that could never be tightened, which always made a slight ticking noise—with all of this around him, Paine saw the close detail: Petty with his two girls, one on either knee, stealing what he thought to be a private look of undisguised pride, a smile of such warmth, looking at no one but himself, his own mirror; Petty drunk, to the point where some of those little secret
rooms open up, crying, hating himself for crying, telling Paine about his four-month affair, his disgust at his own carnal need, his disgust at his own weakness, the marine training, the Catholic roots of his education, the code of his police office all coming to tell him how weak and human he really was, how unworthy, the tears tracking his rock-hard face, his fist hitting the table and staying there, even as the upset Bud bottles fell to the floor, his fist trying to grind into the wood of the table, become part of it; and then his tear-streaked face had turned to Paine, the tears etching along the rock hardness, and he had looked at Paine and grimaced, a grimace that was almost a smile, and shaken his head and said, "But Jack, I
enjoyed
it! I
wanted
to do it! I've been married to Terry for fifteen years, I've loved her for twenty, I love my family and would die for them on this
spot"—again
he had banged the table, bringing a look from the bartender, who knew them but knew that cops could be violent, even dangerous, especially when very drunk at three o'clock in the morning—"but
Jesus,
Jack, I did it because I wanted to. What the fuck is wrong with me?"

He'd sat up then, and laughed at his own incomprehensibility.

"We all do shit we shouldn't," Paine had said.

Petty's sell-anger flared again. "That doesn't answer it!" He leaned close over the table, as if the empty booth were surrounded with ears. "You know Terry," he said. "You've seen her in a bathing suit. Even after having kids her body drives me crazy. It's not perfect, but it's. . ." He'd shrugged. "It's perfect. You keep telling me how wonderful she is."

"She is, Bobby."

Petty snorted, sat up straight, searched for a still-usable bottle of beer, found a tall-neck Bud hiding near his elbow half full. He drank from it. "She is. And she knows it. That's what I've always loved best about her: She knows she's good at being a wife and a mother, she's strong—" Petty waved his own thoughts away. 'All that shit." He looked at Paine. "Didn't you tell me once you'd grab her in a minute if I was gone?"

Paine smiled. "I was drunk, Bobby."

"You're drunk now. Tell me, wouldn't you grab her in a minute if I wasn't around?"

"Sure I would, Bobby."

"I'm not kidding." Petty was very drunk. He put his beer bottle down, almost tipping its edge, and reached across the small table to grab Paine's arm in a vise grip. "Didn't you have a crush on her when you first met her? She told me you tried to kiss her once at one of the Fourth of July parties down at the club." His eyes were as intense as his grip, which meant that he wanted a straight answer.

"I did, Bobby. But I was drunk then, too. By then I had Ginny."

"Yeah," Petty said. "Sure, Ginny. . .
"

The bartender was making motions with his arms to Paine. Jack focused his eyes toward the bar and saw the man waving his apron like a flag. When he caught Paine's attention he pointed to his wrist and waved at the door.

"Pete wants us to leave," Paine said to Bobby.

Bobby turned and smiled at Pete. "Out in a minute, Petey."

Pete threw up his hands and turned to his paper on the bar, flipping the pages angrily. Bobby found his Bud bottle, drained it, and then suddenly returned his tight eyes to Paine. "You didn't answer my question, Jack."

"Which one?"

Again, tears forced their way out of Bobby's eyes
_;
the tightness in his pupils softened and his granite face flushed red.

"Don't hit the table," Paine said, quickly putting his hand out to stay Petty's fist.

"Dammit, Jack, I want to know! I want to know why I let my dick tell me what to do! Terry's great in bed, she's the best! I felt so guilty. . . ." His face had collapsed into his hands, and he sobbed like a schoolboy. "Jesus, I couldn't wait a couple of months till she got well. I was too fucking weak. I'll never do anything like that again . . .

He sobbed for a half minute
;
then Paine stood and got him up and steered him for the door, past Pete shaking his head
over his paper, stretching to come after them and lock the door, mumbling with a trace of affection, "Fucking cops..."

 
That was Bob Petty. He'd never do it again. He'd been a weak marine. A weak cop. And could barely stand it, the breaking of his code.

That was Bobby Petty, the essential Bobby Petty. There were secret doors, and secret locks into little hidden rooms, no doubt, but that was Bob Petty's soul.

He'd never do it
again.

And now he'd done it again, broken the code, kicked the pieces into the gutter, and Paine couldn't figure why. Petty had unlocked some secret door, and whatever was in it was so deep and horrible that it had made him take his essential self, the soul of Bobby Petty, and strangle it and make it die.

Paine stared at the ceiling, at the parade of his waking dreams. This night, even in waking, none of the images came together and made sense. He stared a long time, in the heat, with his hands cradling the back of his head, and still Bobby Petty's soul stayed in front of him, inviolable, rock hard, refusing to break, and so none of the questions were answered.

Sometime late in the hot night, Paine's eyes closed, and the waking dreams stopped, and the subconscious took over with its own jumbled version of life. Paine dreamed sleeping dreams, bad dreams, too, and in them he searched for Rebecca between the stars, wanting desperately for her to reach out to hold him from a place he could not see, as he looked up into the starry void from a place he would not leave, but still did not want to be.

H
e called Terry early, giving her enough time, and when he got there, the house was straightened and the children were out to school and she wore a face that was presentable to the world. She looked as though she had stopped crying, even when alone. She looked halfway back, which might be as far as she got for a while, but it was enough.

Paine sat at the kitchen table, and she had coffee ready. She wore shorts and a gray gym T-shirt that said Police Academy on it. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and the temperature was already eighty-five degrees. The weather
man had said high nineties, maybe the century mark.

"I want to look through the house, Terry," he said. She was studying his face, and he was sure she already knew what he meant, and understood, but he said it anyway. "Top to bottom. It'll look like it's been burgled when I'm finished. I want to go through his clothes drawers, the junk drawer he kept stuff in, his toolbox, the glove compartment in the car I want to go through the last week's trash, his uniforms. If you want to leave while I'm doing it—"