“I really hadn’t thought about it-”
“Drop the pose. She explained how you acted on the beach. I had to tell her it was only her imagination. I still wasn’t certain about this-any of this. Now I am.”
The gun trembled. Jack could almost feel Steve’s trigger finger slowly drawing down.
“You would have killed her,” Steve breathed, “if I hadn’t come along. Wouldn’t you?”
A truthful answer might prove fatal, but instinctively Jack knew there was more certain danger in a lie.
“Yes,” he said, and tensed himself for the crack of the pistol’s report.
Nothing.
The gun didn’t fire, the world didn’t go away.
Steve merely nodded and went on nodding, as if in confirmation not only of Jack’s words but of every evil he had ever known.
“You would have left her floating in the shallows,” he said, voice hushed. “Facedown like Meredith. You bastard.” He glanced at the knife. “Was this what you were going to use?”
“Yes.”
“Cut her throat?”
“Yes.”
“You motherfucker. You piece of shit.”
Jack sat motionless, untouched by the insults. Bullets could wound, kill. Words left no mark.
“Is that how you murdered your other victims? With the knife?”
“No. A needle. An injection.”
“Meredith, too?”
“That was different. Cruder. I was only a kid then.”
“Yeah, sure, you were just the boy next door.” Steve frowned, the disgust on his face deepening, becoming open revulsion. “Literally, in fact. You did live next door to the Turners.”
“Yeah.”
“But you didn’t kill Meredith at home. You went to the bathing pavilion. Why?”
“I wanted it to look like an accident. I knew she always stayed late after locking up. She would practice her breaststroke, execute some dives. She took that lifeguard job seriously, I guess. Anyway, I hid in the bathroom till the other bathers were gone, then crept up from behind while she was swimming laps. Slammed her head against the side of the pool. Held her under till she drowned. Easy.”
“You sound real remorseful.”
“I don’t pretend to be. That bitch deserved it.”
“Why?”
“There’s a reason.”
“You always hated her. Never made any secret of it. But you wouldn’t say why.”
“It’s not important.”
“It was important enough to kill her for.” Jack said nothing. “Did she turn you down? Is that it? Was she immune to the patented Dance charm?”
“No-shit-nothing like that, Stevie.” Jack sighed. “Just drop it, okay? It doesn’t matter now.”
“Maybe it doesn’t. But it sure did matter back then. That must have been why the cops got interested in you-because everybody knew how much you’d hated her, how you’d always referred to her as a bitch, a cunt, every ugly word you could think of.”
“All of them entirely appropriate.”
“You think you’re so goddamn smart. So fucking superior. But if you are, how come you never anticipated that you’d become the most obvious suspect? How come you didn’t prepare an alibi in advance?”
Irrationally, Jack bristled, his criminal competence challenged. “I assumed the coroner would say she’d struck her head on the bottom of the pool after a dive. Which is what he did say-eventually.” His shoulders moved in a shrug. “I didn’t mess up so bad. In the end, things worked out exactly the way I’d planned.”
“Oh, sure. Everything worked out great, just great-thanks to your quick thinking. Did you come up with that story of yours on the spur of the moment?”
“More or less. I worked it out on my way over to your place. It sounded plausible. You knew Lisa and I had a little thing going.”
“That part was true, I suppose.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, mildly surprised to taste the bittersweet flavor of nostalgia in the words. “It was true.”
Lisa Giovanni had been a married woman of thirty-three, recently separated from her husband. She’d liked sharing her bed with an eighteen-year-old lover, tanned, muscular, virile; and Jack in turn had enjoyed her small, firm breasts and slender legs and silky dark hair, her finely chiseled Italian features, the perfume that wound around her like a flower’s fragrance.
Their trysts had been secret, of course. A scandal if the relationship should come out. Only Steve had known.
So it had been easy enough to formulate the lie and sell it.
“The cops are going to want to know where I was the night Meredith drowned,” Jack had said, pacing Steve’s bedroom on that humid August evening, while Steve listened, first puzzled, then concerned, then afraid. “They’re desperate for somebody to pin it on. Here’s the thing: I’ve got an alibi, but I can’t use it. ’Cause I was with Lisa. She gave me the world tour, as usual. But if I mention her name, it’ll be all over town in two days.”
“What can I do about it?”
“Tell the cops we were together that night. Doing something-I don’t know-maybe we took a drive. A long drive, say, down to Asbury and back. We’ve done that before.”
“Lying to the police-”
“It’s not a real lie. I’ve got an alibi. Just can’t use it, that’s all. Come on, Stevie, you don’t want this thing between Lisa and me to come out, do you? My folks’ll fucking kill me.”
It had taken some time and some talk, but Steve had agreed to go along. No other suspects had emerged, and finally the coroner had been persuaded to close the case. End of story, or so Jack had supposed.
“You already admitted you believed me at the time,” Jack said now. The wind kicked up; the boat rode gentle swells. “What changed your mind?”
“A rumor I heard around town a few weeks later. Story was that Mrs. Giovanni had been trying to get back with her husband. They’d spent a weekend together in Cape May-the same weekend Meredith died.”
“Oh, Christ. You mean the little guinea bitch was two-timing me?”
“Apparently. Of course, it was only gossip. Might not have been true. Or maybe whoever started the rumor got the details wrong. Even so, I started to think I’d better go to the police. But if I did, it would look really bad for you-and I still didn’t believe you could have killed Meredith.”
“So you went off to college,” Jack said slowly, as faint hope stirred in him, revived by the beginning of an idea, “and forgot about it.”
“Tried to.”
“Never said a word-for all these years.”
“All these years.”
Jack smiled then. Smiled like a jackal on a flyblown mound.
“We are friends,” he said with rising confidence. “We really are. Better friends than I knew.”
“No.”
“You kept my secret.”
“Wrong. I kept… my secret.”
Jack understood. And suddenly he knew he could master this situation. He could turn things to his advantage. He could take control.
“Yes, Stevie,” he said softly. “That’s right. It was your secret, as much as mine. You lied to the police in a homicide investigation. You were an accomplice after the fact.”
“In a sense.”
“Not in a sense. That’s the way it was.”
“You could say so.”
