after he held her and stroked her hair and said he did love her.
“You should be getting back to work,” he said at last, hoping to find any excuse to stop holding her.
She shook her head. “My position was eliminated two weeks ago. I’m out of work.”
“Is that why you’re so desperate to get married?”
She wailed like a banshee, not that he really knew what a banshee sounded like. Something scary and shrill. “No. I love you, Charlie. I want to be your wife for that reason alone. But the last month, with all this going on, I haven’t been at my best, and they had a bad quarter, so I was a sitting duck. In a sense, I’ve lost my job because of you, Charlie. I’m unemployed and I’m alone. I’ve hit rock bottom.”
“You could always come back to the company. You left on good terms and I’d give you a strong reference.”
“But then we couldn’t be together.”
“Yes.” He was not so clever that he had thought of this in advance, but now he saw it would solve everything.
“And that’s the one thing I could never bear.”
Charlie, his hand on her hair, looked out the window. It was such a beautiful day, a little cooler than usual, but still sunny. If he left now-but, no, he would have to go back to the office. He wouldn’t get to play golf at all today.
“Who is she, Charlie?”
“Who?”
“The other woman.”
“There is no other woman.”
“Stop lying, or I really will go to Marla. I’ll drive over there right now, while you’re at work. After all, I don’t have a job to go to.”
She was crazy, she was bluffing. She was so crazy that even if she wasn’t bluffing, he could probably persuade Marla that she was a lunatic. After all, what proof did she have? He had never allowed the use of any camera, digital or video, although Sylvia had suggested it from time to time. There were no e-mails. He never called her. And he was careful to leave his DNA, as he thought of it, only in the appropriate places, although this included some places that Marla believed inappropriate. He had learned much from the former president and the various television shows on crime scene investigations.
“Look, if it’s money you need-”
“I don’t want money! I want you!”
And so it began all over again, the crying and the wailing, only this time there was no calming her. She was obsessed with the identity of his new mistress, adamant that he tell her everything, enraged by his insistence that he really did play golf in his spare time. Finally, he thought to take her down to the garage beneath her apartment and show her the clubs in the trunk of his car.
“So what?” she said. “You always carried your clubs.”
“But I know what they are now,” he said, removing a driver. “See this one, it’s-”
“I know what’s going on and I’m done, I tell you. The minute you leave here, I’m going to go upstairs and call Marla. It’s her or me. Stop fucking with me, Charlie.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t use that word, Sylvia. It’s coarse.”
“Oh, you don’t like hearing it, but you sure like doing it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking!”
She stood in front of him, hands on her hips. Over the course of their two-year affair she had not become particularly more attractive, although she had learned to use a depilatory on her upper lip. What would happen if she went to Marla? She would probably stay with him, but it would be dreary, with counseling and recriminations. And they really were happier than ever, united by their love of golf, comfortable in their routines. He couldn’t bear to see it end.
“I can’t have that, Sylvia. I just can’t.”
“Then choose.”
“I already have.”
No, he didn’t hit her with the driver. He wouldn’t have risked it for one thing, having learned that it was rare to have a club that felt so right in one’s grip and also having absorbed a little superstition about the game. Also, there would have been blood, and it was impossible to clean every trace of blood from one’s trunk, according to those television shows. Instead, he pushed her, gently but firmly, and she fell back into the trunk, which he closed and latched. He then drove back to the office, parking in a remote place where Sylvia’s thumping, which was growing fainter, would not draw any attention. At home that night, he ate dinner with Marla, marveling over the Greg Norman shiraz that she served with the salmon. “Do you hear something out in the garage?” she asked at one point. “A knocking noise?”
“No,” he said.
It was Marla’s book club night and after she left, he went out to the garage and circled his car for a few minutes, thinking. Ultimately, he figured out how to attach a garden hose from the exhaust through a cracked window and into the backseat, where he pressed it into the crevice of the seat, which could be released to create a larger carrying space, like a hatchback, but only from within the car proper. Sylvia’s voice was weaker, but still edged with fury. He ignored her. Marla was always gone for at least three hours on book club night and he figured that would be long enough.
IT WOULD BE SEVERAL WEEKS before Sylvia Nichols’s body was found in a patch of wilderness near a state park. While clearly a murder, it was considered a baffling case from the beginning. How had a woman been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, then dumped at so remote a site? Why had she been killed? Homicide police, noting the large volume of calls from her home phone to Charlie’s work number, questioned him, of course, but he was able to say with complete sincerity that she was a former employee who was keen to get a job back since being let go, and he hadn’t been able to help her despite her increasing hysteria. DNA evidence indicated she had not had sex of any sort in the hours before her death. Credit card slips bore out the fact that Charlie was a regular at the local country club, and his other hours were accounted for. Even Marla laughed at the idea of her husband having an affair, saying he was far too busy with golf to have time for another woman.
“Although I’m the one who broke ninety first,” she said. “Which is funny, given that Charlie has a two-year head start on me.”
“It’s a terrible mistress, golf,” Charlie said.
“I don’t play, but they say it’s the worst you can have,” the homicide detective said.
“Just about,” Charlie said.
PART III. MY BABY WALKS THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE
EASY AS A-B-C
Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef, or carve master bath suites in the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate-boom. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.
