Parker moved his lips as he read.
He read the whole thing twice, the name of the drug store and the address and the phone number and his dead wife’s name and the name of the doctor and the number and the message. Then he dropped the pill bottle into the half-full wastebasket beside the nightstand, and turned to look at the corpse again.
He moved as though to touch her wrist, to feel for a pulse, but then he checked the motion. A corpse is a corpse; there can be no mistake. The skin is too waxlike, the chest too still, the lips too dry, the eyes too sunken behind the closed lids.
He had to get rid of her. He had three days to stay here, and she couldn’t be here with him. In all his rages, six months on the prison farm, he had never planned to kill her. To beat her, yes, to mutilate her, to give her pain and scars, but not to see her dead.
In the closet, he found a dress with a zipper all the way down the back. He put it on her, forcing her stiffening arms through the sleeves, then rolled her over and zipped it closed and rolled her back again. He forced shoes onto her feet. They were too small. Either the feet had started to swell or she had gone in for shoes more flattering than comfortable.
Dressed, she looked less dead. Not asleep, though. Unconscious. As though she’d been clipped. He closed her mouth, and it stayed closed.
At the doorway, he looked at her for a long minute. Then he said, “You were always dumb. You never changed.”
He shut the door.
There was a television set in the living room. He found a bottle of blended whiskey in a kitchen cupboard, broke the seal, and w.iiched cartoons on television. Then he watched situation comedy reruns and children’s shows.
The living room drapes were closed, but he could tell by the i lock over the television set when the sun was going down. He w.iiched dinner-hour news broadcasts, and they didn’t mention liim. They wouldn’t. The break was three weeks ago. A continent ago. A dead guard and a runaway vag don’t make the news it i ontinent away.
It should never have happened. Another result of her dumbness. Sixty days as a vag,. and now they had his prints on file, the m.irks of his fingers. The name that went with the marks was Ronald Casper, but it didn’t matter. He could call himself any-(lung, even his true name, and the marks of his fingers would never change. Sixty days they gave him. Twenty days, and he liiught a guard, and they added six more months. Eight months nut of his life, weeding on the prison farm. He lasted six and Iniind his break, and took it — and left behind a stupid guard with his head half twisted from his shoulders.
She had caused that, just one of the things she’d done to him. < rossed him and cuckolded him and jailed him and put his 1’iinrs on file in Washington, D.C. Given him a continent to i kiss. She had done it.
No other woman could have. There had never been a woman .inywhere in the world to trouble him, till her. There never would be again.
And now she had left him a body to dispose of. He couldn’t leave her here, he had a messenger to meet. He couldn’t keep her here, he wouldn’t be able to stand that. He couldn’t call for the law to come take her away, like a solid citizen, because one hard look would tell them he wasn’t a solid citizen.
He hated her. He hated her and he loved her, and he’d never felt either emotion for anyone before. Never love, never hate, never for anyone. Mal, now. Mal he would kill, but that wasn’t hate. There was a score to settle; there were accounts to balance. That was rage, that was fury and pride, but it wasn’t hate.
The level lowered in the whiskey bottle, and the prime-time panel shows and westerns came on the television set. He sat and watched, the blue-white light gleaming on his face, outlining the ridges of his cheekbones. Prime time went by, and the old movies started, and he watched them. The movies finished, and a minister said a prayer, and a choir sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” while a flag fluttered on the screen, and then the station went off the air. The speaker emitted only a heavy hissing; the screen was full of a trembling of black and white spots.
He roused himself, switched the set off, turned on lights. The bottle was empty. He felt a little high, and that was bad. That was something else she’d done, made him drink himself a little high when he shouldn’t.
He went out to the kitchen and made a sandwich, and washed it down with half a quart of milk. He was tired then, so he made coffee and drank three cups black, and doused his face at the kitchen sink.
The bedroom was dark. Light spilled in from the living room, across her shod feet. He switched on the ceiling light, and she had moved. Her arms and legs had twisted in toward her torso; her head was back, her eyes were open and staring at the closed drapes.
He pushed down the eyelids, and they stayed down. Her limbs resisted when he straightened them out. He picked her up, like a groom about to carry his bride across the threshold, and bore her out of the bedroom, across the living room to the front door.
The hall was empty. He pushed the button and the elevator came up from the first floor. He took it down to the basement, carrying her, and found the back way out of the building.
An alley took him to the street a block from the front of her building. He turned right and walked down the half-block to Fifth Avenue and Central Park. On the way, a man passed him, hurrying by, giving him scarcely a look. At the corner, a cruising cab sidled close, the driver leaning over to call out, “You want a cab, mister?”
“We live just down the block.”
The cabby grinned. “Got a load on, huh?”
“She isn’t used to vodka,” he said.
The cab cruised on. There were no pedestrians. He waited for ii Jaguar sedan to pass, going uptown, and the couple in it ^hmced at him and grinned and looked away. He crossed the m rret and stepped over the low stone wall into the park.
In a blackness of shrubbery, he laid her down. Working by (eel, unable to see what he was doing, he stripped off the dress ii ik I the shoes again. He took out his pen knife. Holding her jaw in his left hand to guide him in the darkness, he stroked the kmfr across her face. Otherwise, the law would try to have her identified by running a photo in the papers. Mal would read the papers.
There was no blood on his hands, very little on the knife. A corpse doesn’t bleed much. He wiped the knife on
