“You play chess?” Frank asked from behind.
She turned to face him. He was juggling a chessman one-handed. The other hand held a shotgun. His eyes were bleary from drink and yet there was something else about them, too.
“My God,” she said. “You’re here.”
“True enough,” Frank replied. He gathered up the chessman in a knuckleball hold and hurled it across the kitchen at her. She ducked the missile and called out from behind her arm, “What’s wrong with you?”
“A wee bit surprised to see me?”
He crossed the distance in two long steps and gripped her throat with his free hand. With the shotgun he forced her head down onto the table.
“Thought I’d be gone for good, right? Dead maybe? Not enough to tell Felix: Do it, kill him. Had to make sure. Just in case the Akers boys fucked up. Play both ends. ’Cuz you had a whole new set of plans tonight.”
She squirmed in his hold but could not break free. Her arms flailed without connecting.
“They found you, right? The twins’ family, they made you an offer and you grabbed it. Was that before or after you fixed it with Felix?”
With his tongue protruding through his teeth he drove the gun butt hard into her kidneys. Her knees gave way and she slid to the floor. Her bladder broke. The gun butt came down hard again, this time on her neck.
“Frank,” she shouted, “you gotta listen, this woman- ”
“I know all about the woman,” he said.
He kneed her in the back, a vertebrae cracked. Grabbing a shank of hair, he dragged her kicking across the floor.
“What I ever do to you?” he said.
He pulled something from under his shirt. It had been hidden there, tucked in his belt. She saw what it was when he raised it over his head. A hammer. Shel screamed his name.
Chapter 13
Abatangelo stood pinning up prints in the back room of his North Beach flat, drinking a beer and listening to a cassette of Maria Callas performing excerpts from
He turned around to recue the tape each time his favorite aria ended: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.” Now in my hour of sorrow, Maria Callas sang, I stand alone. Callas’s was not normally a voice he preferred, but in this particular rendition, this aria, she gave him the chills. He’d read somewhere that the aria was often called “Tosca’s Prayer.” A misnomer, he thought. She isn’t praying. She’s braving her fate. Which brought Shel to mind and returned him to the matter at hand.
Despite the repartee, a hint of the old spark, even a kiss, Shel had left him standing there. A perfectly good reason existed for that, of course. Frank could be the biggest skank on earth, it wouldn’t change a thing. There was a child in the picture. And the boy got waxed. God only knew what the whole story was. Regardless, he knew Shel well enough to know she’d never in a thousand lifetimes turn her back on a thing like that.
And what about you, he thought. All you ever want to do is help, right? Like some heartsick freelance Boy Scout. All you want to do is say, Tell me how far to go. I’ll lie, cheat and steal for you, baby. Better yet, just like Tosca- I’ll kill for you, if you suffer for me.
He dropped into a chair near the wall and wiped his hands on a dish towel. The damp prints dripped on the floor, dangling from a plastic clothesline hung wall-to-wall by eyehooks. This was the darkroom. With sheets of black plastic he’d sealed off the kitchen in his flat. Upon a card table he’d stationed rubber bins filled with developer, stop bath, fixer. He worked by infrared lamp and an egg timer.
The photographs were those he’d shot from the hilltop overlooking Shel’s house. They seemed very much beside the point now. Even if he passed them along to Jill Rosemond the PI, what would it net him? Frank and Shel were most likely already on the run somewhere, far away and for good, leaving behind lonesome Danny and his pointless schemes.
He did not hear the rapping at his door until his next recue of the tape player. He remained still a moment, ear cocked, wondering if he hadn’t imagined the sound. It came again, more like a scratching than a knock. He tread toward the sound in his socks across the tile floor.
It was not quite dawn. The Bible peddlers wouldn’t be making their rounds as yet. Drunks might sleep in the stairwell, but they wouldn’t come up knocking. Jimmy Shu, his landlord, avoided most encounters requiring English, and his probation officer called first now, they were pals.
At the door he called out, “Who is it?” pressing his head to the doorjamb to listen. A snuffling, fleshy murmur answered back. He couldn’t tell if it said, “It’s me,” or, “Come see.” He cracked the door.
Her eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, small and unreal. One eye flared red, beyond bloodshot. Swelling puffed her jaw. A long scab flecked her lower lip.
“I had that long, hard talk with Frank,” she murmured.
Taking her hand he led her inside and locked the door. Shel deferred to his touch without remark. He studied her briefly, surmising what had happened and what, to his mind, should be done about it.
He told her to wait and disappeared to the back of the flat. When he returned he was carrying his camera and arming the flash. He positioned her against the white wall and told her to lift her hair. She obeyed, revealing bloody scratches and a bruised knot on her neck.
It’s time, she thought, time to listen to him. It may well have been time all along.
Abatangelo shot five frames, told her to turn front, shot a close-up of her scabbed mouth, her ballooning cheek, her crimped eye. He used Plus-X in addition to a filter, to give the reds a disturbing saturation. She displayed her arms, bruised black where Frank had held her or come down with the gun butt. At Abatangelo’s urging she turned to face the wall again, naked from the waist up, exhibiting the purple-yellow welts across her back. She explained in time that, right before he’d tried to crush her skull with a hammer, she’d managed to groin him, coldcock him with his own gun and scramble to her truck.
“I don’t want to get even,” she said as he disarmed the flash. “There’s no point.”
“This isn’t getting even,” he told her, removing the roll of film and pocketing it. “This is insurance.” He took a blanket from the couch, shook it free of cracker crumbs and wrapped it around her. Setting her down in his only armchair, he tucked the blanket about her knees and told her to stay put.
In the bathroom, he turned the space heater on high and threw open the hot water spigot, filling the tub, tossing in every towel he found except a few he’d need for drying. Moving to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and dug from behind bagged peas and carrots a fifth of Stolichnaya embedded in hoarfrost.
Carrying two glasses and the icy vodka bottle, he returned to Shel. Guiding her up from her chair, he led her down the hall and set her on the edge of the tub. Steam purled about the room, coating the mirror. Moisture frothed Abatangelo’s skin, he opened his shirt and wiped his face with his wrist. He drew Shel’s blanket away, undid her coat, and as he continued to undress her she stared at him with weary bafflement.
“Now that there’s a record on film of what he did to you,” he explained, “we can concentrate on getting the bruises down.”
He poured her a full glass of vodka and told her to drink it. She did. He poured her another. Her body sagged dreamily and she regarded him with sweet, tired eyes. He took her in his arms and knelt beside the steaming water, saying, “This is going to hurt.”
Submerged, her body convulsed. She struggled, whimpering. He refused to let her out, even as the water scalded them both. He gathered the steaming towels from around her, wrapped them tight across her back, her throat, her face. He wrung or pressed them against her skin until she screamed from pain, the sound echoing against the tile. He reassured her with jokes, constantly moving. He sang the few funny songs he knew, gleaned from opera buffa and cartoons. “You’re looking better,” he said, over and over.
In time he slowed his rhythm, letting the towels sit on her body longer. Where it wasn’t puffed or discolored, her skin had the same smoothness he remembered from years before. The hair of her muff rose up softly in the water. Her nipples flared red in the heat.
“I realize,” he began, “that this is a sensitive issue, and you don’t have to answer, but I was wondering if he- ”
