'Not hard, since this is the only road to my house.'
'Shall I let 'em test you? This clever Chip is just sure you've had more than two.'
'Up to you, Marty, but two is what I've had.'
'That'll be the day.'
Marty walked around the front of my car, the headlights throwing his shadow along the asphalt. He opened the passenger door, got in, and closed it. 'I'll escort you home, Russell. These Chippies have your number.'
'I sense an ulterior motive.'
'I'm one big ulterior, Russ. Drive.'
'Long walk back, Marty.'
'I got it covered.'
The officer waved me down a long corridor of pylons that angled into the road. My turnoff was less than a mile out. I stopped at the box, got my mail, then headed up the steep, winding drive that leads to the stilt house. When we made the top and leveled off, I could see the Sheriff's Department car parked outside my home. The idea came to me that it was more than just Marty's ride back to the checkpoint. I swung around it and down into my driveway. A deputy in uniform learn against the car and watched us go by. I wondered whether Marty was about to return the beating I'd given him at the beach on the night of July the Fourth. Overkill, I thought. I parked the garage.
We got out and walked back up the driveway to the departmental car. The deputy was a tall, wide man with short black hair, a strong nose, and high cheekbones. He looked Indian, and his badge said Keyes. Marty introduced us, but he neither spoke nor offered his hand. His eyes were black, small and contained an unmistakable meanness.
'What's the deal?' I asked.
'There really is no deal,' said Marty. 'Not in the sense that you can negotiate anything.'
'Sounds like you've got me cold.'
'Everybody's cold tonight, Russ. Look, we're going to do something kind of unorthodox here, but the alternative is I take you downtown for the murder of Alice Fultz.'
'Who in the hell is that?'
'Keyes,' said Marty. 'Roll em.'
Keyes produced a video camera from the front seat his car, Marty stepped away from me, and then the light went on and the lens aimed into my face.
'Come on, Marty,' I said. 'Get in here.'
'I'll edit out what you fuck up, so never mind.'
'Like the camera, Keyes? Like your job with the Sheriff of Orange County?'
Keyes said nothing, but he looked away from the eyepiece and the light went out.
In the moment of bedazzlement that hits the eye when brightness goes to black, Marty swung a heavy fist into my sternum. I heard my breath heave out into the canyon air, felt the pressure shoot into my head, heard a siren whine shriek into my ears. Doubled over and still waiting for fresh air to get to my lungs, I tried to keep my balance. Marty grabbed my hair and belt and threw me straight down onto my face. The asphalt was warm; the gravel bit into my elbows and cheeks. But my breath came rushing back. I lay there, letting it in.
'This is what you're going to do, Russ. You're going to walk down the driveway to your garage, go in, turn on the light. Then you're going to stand in front of your game freezer and open it. Then we'll cut and I'll tell you what the next scene is. I'm the director; you're the star. Got it?'
'Yup,' I said, but my voice was feeble and soprano-high.
'Repeat,' he said.
I did.
Then he dragged me up by my hair, steadied me, and shoved me toward the garage.
'Action,' he said.
I lumbered on reluctant legs down the steep driveway. The light of the video camera sprayed out on either side of me. I looked for a moment toward town, from which the fog continued to advance like a white blanket pulled by invisible hands. Where the slope of the driveway levels off at the garage, I stumbled and almost fell. My ears were still screaming.
The garage door was up and I went in. The video beam followed me, but I hit the light, as instructed. I turned to the right, away from my car and toward the freezer. I stopped in front of it, looked once at Marty, then reached out and lifted the heavy handle. The door followed, gaskets sucking, then releasing a brief cloud of frost into the air. When the frost cleared upward, I looked down and saw what I had been half-expecting ever since Marty had outlined his screenplay idea.
Twisted, stiff, blue-black and covered with blood, her hair a solid block against the far wall, her face beaten beyond recognition and frozen in a horror that seemed freshly, eternally preserved, lay the body of Alice Fultz. She still had on the blue satin robe. In her hair still lodged the white and pink particulars that had jumped forth from her bursting skull. Her legs had be crammed to fit the freezer, but her arms were still spread they had been on Amber's floor-open, apart, frozen in mid now as if welcoming me: Come down, come down here, my love, take me, embrace me, own me. I am yours.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Keyes came up behind me and to my left, aiming the camera down into the freezer. I turned right, finding Marty, fixing him with a look that must have been half outrage and half revulsion. The idea crossed my mind that my expression could do more to establish my innocence than a thousand words, but by the time I turned to Keyes, his camera was down and he was studying me with his black unforgiving eyes.
'I guess we both know by now that you killed the wrong woman,' said Parish.
'I didn't kill her.'
'Right. Grace killed the wrong woman. It was a mistake even a daughter could make-a dark room, a bed that's usually got someone else in it, all those emotions boiling up inside. The way I've got it figured, Grace probably thought she'd done her mother until you got there later for the transfer and saw the, uh, mix-up. You cleaned it up anyway-that's what the fallback plan called for-but you couldn't dump Amber's body in the freezer because you didn't have Amber's body. So you put Grace's mistake on ice until you could figure out what to do with it. That thing in there used to be Amber's sister, Alice, you haven't figured it out by now.'
I searched Marty's face for a flicker of the madness I knew was in him, but all I saw was a gloomy, bovine conviction that he knew a terrible truth. It disturbed me almost as deeply as the woman lying in my freezer.
'Everything you believe is wrong,' I said.
'Then enlighten me, Monroe.'
'I can't. All I can say for sure is, I didn't kill her and Grace didn't kill her, and I don't know what's going on.'
Marty nodded, a humoring, condescending thing. 'That sure wouldn't play in court, friend, not with a body in your fridge. And it doesn't play with me.'
'I'll take my chances,' I said. I put my hands together front of me-offering them for the cuffs.
'No.'
'No? You're the head homicide dick for the whole county, you pinch me with a body in my garage, and you won't even make an arrest? What's the problem, Martin?'
'The problem is, I love two things that you don't-my wife and my job. If I take you down, both of those go with you. I'll be damned if I'm going to let JoAnn hear you testify that I was in Amber's house those nights. I'll be extra damned if I'm going to make Winters answer for what I did. He'd have to deliver my head on a plate, just to keep his own on. No! You're not worth it. Neither is Alice Fultz-God rest her soul. You surprise me, Monroe, in a weird way. I didn't think you be willing to drag Isabella through all that. Seems like the last thing she needs is you in jail on a murder rap. I guess anybody fucked-up enough to kill a lady for money is fucked-up enough to wreck his own wife, too. Or was trotting Isabella into court in her wheelchair one of your defense licks-if it came to that?'
