“No, I did not,” I said. Was there a tug somewhere along my spine at that? Some twinge that comes from telling a lie? No, couldn’t be.
“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re offended. Sorry you feel betrayed.”
“I don’t feel betrayed, I feel stupid. I’ll give you this heads-up, though: I’m going to track down whatever police agency is investigating Cantrell’s death and tell them about your request.”
“You think I was involved?” He still had his head down, and now, standing above him, I could see another scar, long and ugly, across the back of his skull and neck.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but you’ve killed before, and you seem awfully fascinated with this couple, one of whom happens to be dead. I think the right cops ought to be told about that.”
“It’s my past that bothers you. That’s why you refuse to give me any credibility.”
“Yeah, Harrison, that does bother me. Just a touch. Sorry.”
“Let me ask you one question,” he said, keeping his back to me.
I was silent.
“Can a good man commit a horrible act?” he said.
I stood there at the door, looking at his bowed head, and then I said, “Harrison, get out.”
He nodded and got to his feet. “Okay, Mr. Perry. Goodbye.”
It was the first time he hadn’t called me Lincoln.
I stood at the door while he went through it, and then I crossed to the window and looked down as he walked out of the building and into a hard, driving rain.
6
__________
Amy was in my apartment when I got home, and she was cooking, some sort of Italian dish that had filled the rooms with a thick scent of tomatoes and garlic and made the place feel more welcoming than at any time I could remember.
“Did anyone give you permission to touch my valuable implements?” I said, lifting a cheese grater off the counter. Amy had never cooked a meal in my apartment before.
“You want to be the only one to touch your implements, I can make that happen.” She shifted a pan on the stove and adjusted the heat.
“Seriously, to what do I owe this?”
“You sounded a little rough on the phone. Like it hadn’t been the best day.”
I listened to that, and watched her move around the kitchen, and I was grateful to see her there. She was right; it hadn’t been the best day—but those were the sort of days that could stack up on you easily, and it was a new and welcome thing for me to end them with Amy. It beat the hell out of ending it alone, with a bottle of beer and the mindless noise of some TV show.
“Thank you,” I said. “Really.”
“I wouldn’t say that till you taste this.”
“What is it?”
“I call it Mafia lasagna. In honor of the Sanabria family.”
“Weak humor, Amy. Very weak.”
She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face me. “If you’re interested, I’ve got a bunch of printouts discussing Joshua Cantrell—or at least the discovery of his body—over on the table. As for Alexandra, there’s not much out there. She’s the quiet one of the Sanabria family, I suppose.”
I walked over to the table and looked at the stack of papers there. Lots of articles. The discovery of Cantrell’s body had made plenty of news.
“I can’t believe the name didn’t register with me,” I said, flipping through the articles.
Amy turned to look at me over her shoulder, a few strands of hair glued to her cheek from the steam rising off the stove. After months of fighting to straighten her naturally curly blond hair, she’d finally given up again, and I was glad to see it. She’d looked too corporate with the straightened hair—an observation that had gotten a pen thrown at me once.
“You’ve been pretty removed from the news lately.” She pulled the oven open and bent to look inside, leaving her voice muffled as she continued to speak. “Can’t say the last time I’ve seen you with the paper.”
It was a good point. Ordinarily I would’ve read about the discovery of Cantrell’s body, and probably remembered the name when Harrison said it, but I’d stopped reading the papers and watching TV news shows back in the fall, when I was making all-too-frequent appearances in them. I hadn’t gone back to them yet, but now I was thinking maybe I should. It’s dangerous to be uninformed, as today had demonstrated.
“That’s just good taste,” I said. “You know the sort of crap they write in the newspaper these days. It’s a wonder they still refer to those people as journalists.”
She closed the oven and stood up. “I am close to knives, you know. Large, sharp knives.”
“Good reminder.” I moved the stack of articles out of the way. They could wait, or maybe I’d never read them at all. There was no need to. I’d taken a silly nibble today, but now I saw the lure and its hooks and knew better than to hang around. The Cantrell case didn’t need my attention, and I needed even less the attention of the Sanabria family.
“Food is almost done,” Amy said, “and you better realize the only reason I’m feeding you is because I want to hear the story. Not some half-assed version of it, either. The real story, with all the details.”
“You’ll get it,” I said, “but let me pour some wine first.”
It was a nice evening that turned into a nice night, and she stayed with me and we slept comfortably and deeply in my bed while another round of storms blew in off the lake and hammered rain into the walls that sheltered us. Amy rose early and slipped out of the house sometime before seven to return to her own apartment before starting the day. We’d been together a while now, but still we both clung to own routines and our own space, and I wondered at times if maybe that wasn’t the way it would and should always be, if maybe we were the sort of people who simply didn’t cohabit well. At other times, I’d come home and sit alone in the apartment and wonder why in the hell I hadn’t proposed.
She’d been gone for almost an hour, and I’d fallen back into a surface layer of sleep, not quite awake but never far from it, either, when the tapping began. A gentle series of taps, five or six at a time, then a pause followed by another sequence. I don’t know how many sequences had passed before they finally carved into my brain and I sat up in bed and realized that someone was knocking on my door. Knocking, it seemed, with extraordinary consistency and patience. Never loud, never urgent, but never stopping, either. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
I got out of bed and tugged on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, made it to the top of the stairs as another calm sequence of knocks began, reached the bottom just as it came to an end. Then I had the door open and was squinting out into the harsh daylight and the face of a small, dark-haired man with a raised fist. There was a ring on his finger that seemed brighter than the sunlight behind him, some hideous collection of gold and diamonds so heavy that I hoped he wore one on the other hand to keep from becoming lopsided. He was getting ready to bring it back down on the door, continue the knocking, but when he saw me he just held the pose for a second and then slowly lowered the hand to his side.
“Good morning, Mr. Perry.”
I was barefoot and he was in shoes, but still I had a good four inches on him, and I’m not particularly tall. He was thin across the chest and shoulders, with small hands and weak wrists, and seemed like the kind of guy who would need his wife to open the pickle jar for him. Until you looked him in the eye. There, in that steady and unflinching gaze, was a quality I’d typically seen in much larger men, stronger men. Men who felt invincible.
“Did I wake you?” he said when I didn’t respond to the greeting. “I apologize. I’m an early riser, though. Always have been.”
He put out the hand with the ring and waited until I shook it, until my palm was firmly held in his, to say, “My name is Dominic Sanabria.”
