involved romantically.”
He leaned over the side of the chair and placed the guitar on the floor. He released it in such a way that it plonked onto the wooden floor. The
“People say a lot that ain’t true.”
“So you weren’t involved with her?”
“Not like people think,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. I already told all this stuff to the police.”
“Maybe you’re talking to me for the same reason I’m asking so many questions. Rebecca Gibson may have been difficult, but she was still one of the most attractive women I’ve ever seen in my life. She sure as hell didn’t deserve to die that way.”
His jaw locked up and quivered a bit, the sallow skin on his cheeks pale almost to the point of blue.
“No,” he said, a hitch in his voice, “she didn’t.”
I let that hang there for a few seconds, then: “You loved her, didn’t you?”
He stared off into space, unfocused, silent. His eyes watered, and I saw for the first time evidence of what was hidden real deep inside of him. Mac Ford had been wrong. Dwight Parmenter had his passions; it was just that nobody else saw them.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I loved her. And I’d been watching out for her, taking care of her. She needed me. There’s so goddamn many sharks out there. Nobody she could trust.”
“That’s true,” I said. “It’s a lousy business.”
“That ain’t the word for it.”
“Were you her lover?”
He brought his gaze back to my face. “You don’t pull no punches, do you?”
“Sorry, pal. I’m not in the punch-pulling business.”
He chuckled at that. “No, we weren’t sleeping together steady. It’s not from a want of trying, though. Hell, I knew she’d been with a trooptrain full of men. Didn’t make any difference to me. I loved her for what she was, not what she’d been. She used to tell me she loved me.…”
His voice faded to silence. “But not that way,” I said, filling in his blanks.
“She might have one day. I was the only man who ever stuck by her. I’d have never left her. The only way she’d ever gotten rid of me was by running me off.”
Or die by trying, I thought. But for once I had sense enough to engage my brain before putting my mouth in gear.
“Did you take her home that night?”
He shook his head. “No. I wanted to. It was damn near the middle of the night, after all. But she said she’d be fine, that she had to tend to something-and I should quit worrying about her.”
He teared up again, and this time he lost control and covered his face with his hands. “God,” he sobbed, his shoulders shaking, “if I’d just gone with her. If I’d just made her let me take her home. You don’t think she was afraid of me, do you? Was that it?”
He looked back up at me, his face wet.
I shook my head. “I don’t think that was it.”
“If I’d taken her home, none of this would’ve happened. Or maybe it would have happened to me. Yeah, maybe it would’ve been me. I’d have done that, you know. I would have, swear to God.”
I stood up. I’d done about as much damage here as I could, without learning much beyond the fact that I could bet the rent money on Dwight Parmenter being innocent of Rebecca Gibson’s murder. If he killed her, he deserves a freaking Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor Before They Attach the Electrodes.
“If it’d bring her back, I’d die for her right now,” he said. “I’d have died for her in a heartbeat.”
“Yeah, Mr. Parmenter, I believe you would have.”
No matter how much Rebecca Gibson had been the temperamental prima donna from hell, she had one decent man who loved her and mourned her death. Her memorial service had been nothing but a public display of envy, malice, greed, and networking. But here, in a solitary, run-down apartment, one man wept for her alone out of no other motive beyond simple human grief.
Maybe the thought of grieving for a lost woman pushed a few buttons of my own. Or maybe in this sea of lying, treacherous bastards, I found the thought of someone without ulterior motive touching. In any case, I spent the drive over to my office thinking about my short interview with Dwight Parmenter. I’d meant to ask him more details about that last night, about who he thought might have killed her. All that went out the window when I saw how deeply pained he was by talking about her at all. I felt like I hadn’t learned much, outside of the comfort I could take from Thomas Edison’s dictum: I’ve learned lots of things that don’t work.
The downtown rush-hour traffic had thinned more than I expected, until I checked my watch and realized it was almost six o’clock. I made it back to my office without too much agony and found a parking space on one of the lower floors of the garage. I kept replaying my conversation with Parmenter in my head, and wanted to get upstairs to make my notes as quickly as I could. With my degree of mental fragmentation these days, I needed to get everything down on paper.
One thing did bother me, though. Dwight Parmenter said Rebecca didn’t want him to take her home because she had something she had to take care of. What was it, I wondered, that someone could do at four A.M. on a Monday morning? Did she have to put the cat out? Wash her hair? Slap another coat of paint on the living-room wall?
What the hell was it?
The front door was still open, even though it was technically after business hours. I let it squish shut behind me and took the stairs two at a time. Behind me, I heard Mr. Porter open his door a crack and check me out.
“Hi, Mr. Porter,” I said behind me. He grunted and closed the door.
I hit the landing, turned, and headed up the last half flight to my office. Dwight Parmenter’s voice was replaying itself in my head, his sobs echoing between my ears. I felt awful for the guy, I thought as I dug my hand into my jeans pocket to retrieve my keys.
That’s when something shot out of the shadows and slammed into me like a cement sled. There were arms around me: I couldn’t move. There was growling in my right ear and hard, fast breathing.
Then the pressure started, huge arms around my chest, pinning me, squeezing me. I fumbled, trying to fight, but my arms were jammed into my sides. I felt my feet coming up off the floor, and with that, little red- and-black sparkles formed in the corners of my eyes and worked their way toward the center of my vision.
How odd to see my feet in the air in front of me, my knees cocked at right angles. I felt like the wimpy guy in a TV wrestling match you know was just thrown into the ring as fodder.
Whoever my attacker was, he was on me like Nately’s whore. He growled loudly, his hot breath on my neck as he fought to force the last breath out of me. He was concentrating on squeezing my chest, and as he did so I felt my legs dropping back down toward the floor. We were jammed close to the wall. My shoes brushed against the plaster as they came down.
Suddenly I contracted my gut as hard as I could, crunching myself into a tight ball. I wedged my feet between the two of us and the wall, planted them on the plaster, and kicked as hard as I could.
He grunted loudly and fell back, losing his balance in the process, and momentarily easing his grip around my chest. As we fell backward I pulled my head in close to my sternum, then snapped up as hard as I could.
The back of my skull connected with his chin. He barked loudly in pain, then fell back against the opposite wall. My arms dropped free. I held my right hand out in front of me, balled it tightly, then ripped down hard to my right, as fast as I could in the meanest arc I could muster. I connected perfectly and felt the whoosh of air jet out of his lungs as my crumpled fist hit the collection of lumps between his legs.
He dropped. Match over.
I fell on top of him as he went down, my back on his chest. In a blur, I had the stun gun out of my field- jacket pouch pocket and jammed it into his thigh behind me. I hit the button and a thin, watery scream escaped
