said, “looking for the right guy.”
“Maybe you’re in luck,” he said.
“Maybe I am.”
She tilted her head back a little and lowered her eyelids and gave him an appraising look.
“You must be single,” he said.
“I had something like you at home, I wouldn’t let you out.”
“Divorced,” she said.
“Because?”
“Because my husband was a jerk.”
“He’s still a jerk,” she said,
“but he ain’t my husband anymore.”
“Kids?”
“Two. My mother’s got them until tomorrow afternoon.”
He nodded as if that answered the final question. He was wearing a dark blue polo shirt and white pants and boat shoes with no socks. Everything fitted tightly over his obvious musculature, and when he raised his glass to drink, his bicep swelled as if it would burst the short sleeve.
The disk jockey said something into the microphone which nobody could hear, and played a record. She couldn’t hear it but she knew it was slow because the few people on the floor were touch-dancing.
“Dance?” he said.
She slid off the barstool.
“Sure,” she said.
There were two big speakers at opposite corners of the small dance floor and when they got onto the floor they could hear the music.
It was slow. Pressed against him, she felt the tension building in her.
She could feel the thick slabs of his muscles. Muscles where she didn’t know people had muscles. They danced two numbers, his huge hand low on her back, pressing her steadily in against him.
“You’re free until tomorrow
afternoon,” he said as the second record stopped playing, and the DJ began his chatter while he cued a new record.
“As a bird,” she said.
“You wanna go someplace?” he said.
“And do what?” she said, looking upward at him as seductively as she knew how. She had practiced that in the mirror at home.
“We could get naked,” he said.
She giggled and thought about seeing that body without
· clothes on. It was a little frightening and a little enticing and she was interested in a way she didn’t understand but which was not merely sexual. She giggled again.
“Yes,” she said.
“Let’s go someplace and get naked.”
before. He d seen a couple of people killed in car accidents, and he’d even done mouth-to-mouth on a guy who was having a heart attack and died while DeAngelo was working on him. But the naked woman in the junior high school parking lot was his first murder victim. There were bruises on her face, and her head was turned at an awkward angle.
Someone had written SLUT in what looked like lipstick across her stomach. DeAngelo tried to look at her calmly as he called in on his radio. He didn’t want the kids being herded past the scene by teachers to think he was frightened by it. But he was. This wasn’t accidental death. This stiffening corpse lying naked in the dull mist, on the damp asphalt in the early morning, had died violently during the night at the hands of a terrible person. He didn’t know exactly what he should do, standing there talking into his radio. He wanted to cover the poor woman ,but he didn’t think he ought to disturb the crime scene. Rain wasn’t heavy. Probably didn’t bother her anyway. He wished Jesse
4kc’t:‘se would hurry up and get there. In the school the kids were crowded at the windows despite the best efforts of the teachers. The school bus driver who had spotted the body first was standing beside DeAngelo’s cruiser. She looked for people to talk to, to tell about what she had seen and how she was the first to see it, and oh God, the poor woman! But DeAngelo was still on the radio and the junior high school staff was fruitlessly busy trying to protect the kids from seeing the corpse. He felt better when Jesse pulled up in the unmarked black Ford with the buggy whip antenna on the back bumper swaying in decreasing arcs as the car stopped and Jesse got out.
“Anthony,” Jesse said.
He walked over and looked down at the body.
“‘Slut,’” he said.
“Yeah. Like the car. Like the cat,”
DeAngelo said.
Jesse nodded, still looking at her.
“Clothes?” he said.
