forearms. He was wearing blue jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses that were too small for his face, so they looked like the useless little masks across the eyes in drawings of comic-book superheroes. Duane stepped back and stood uncomfortably outside the doorway. “Hi, I’m Duane. Is Mae ready?”
“Just about,” Varney said. “Come in and sit down.” He set a chair in the center of the tarp.
“I’ll wait out here,” Duane said.
“Come in,” Varney repeated, his dark expression telling Duane he meant it. Duane looked at the tarp, pan, and roller. Varney said, “I don’t want people hanging around the hallway, spooking the neighbors.” Duane stepped in.
“I see you’re doing some painting,” said Duane, as he obediently sat in the kitchen chair.
Varney said, “Yeah,” as he went to the refrigerator and reached into the freezer. He could see that the sound of the freezer made Duane feel less awkward and worried. His shoulder muscles relaxed, and he reached up to take off his sunglasses. Before Duane’s hand could touch the frame of the glasses, Varney pulled the knife out of the freezer, turned, and shoved it up into the space below Duane’s ribs into the vicinity of his heart. Duane looked down, as though to see what the source of his sudden discomfort might be. He saw the darkening spot at the top of his paunch, gripped it with both hands, and lunged forward, his mouth open in a silent circle.
Varney’s knee came up quickly and snapped the sunglasses neatly at the bridge of Duane’s nose, so that the glasses came apart, dangling from Duane’s ears. Varney gripped Duane’s hair with his left hand, brought the knife across Duane’s throat, and shoved him down so that his face hit the pan on the tarp.
Duane’s heart was still pumping, but only half the blood seemed to be spurting into the pan. Varney judged that the rest of it was leaking into Duane’s chest cavity or out onto his shirt. Varney raised his knife to the side, spun it in his fist, and exerted his right arm muscles hard to drive the blade through the thin wall of bone into Duane’s temple. Duane’s body jerked once more and went limp.
Varney stood and looked around him. There were no blood spatters on the floor or walls. He heard no sound of footsteps. It had been unusually quiet. Varney moved the kitchen chair off the tarp, waited a few minutes, then checked Duane’s carotid artery. He had no pulse, and his skin was already beginning to feel cooler to Varney than it had at first. He dragged the head back, and saw that the blood that was dripping now was just running down from Duane’s chin. The roller pan held only about two quarts, and the overflow had pooled under and around Duane, soaking his clothes.
It took Varney a few minutes to clean the knife, return the paint cans and roller to the closet, pour the pan out into the sink drain without getting much on the porcelain, and wash it too. He used a few week-old newspapers to soak up the pools of blood on the tarp.
He took Duane’s wallet, removed $620 from it, and then found his car keys in his pocket. Varney went downstairs, moved Duane’s car to the back of the building beside the door, and lined its trunk with plastic trash bags.
When Varney returned, he was pleased to see that most of the blood had soaked into the clothes or the old newspapers or thickened and begun to dry a bit. He rolled Duane up in the tarp, tied it securely with twine, and then ran duct tape around the ends to hold it. It occurred to him that Duane looked like a big blue sausage, and he laughed. He put a trash bag over Duane’s top, and another over the bottom, tugged them until they met, and secured them with more duct tape.
Varney moved all of the furniture back into the kitchen, took a last look around to be sure there was nothing he had forgotten to clean, then knelt and used his legs to raise Duane to his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
He staggered getting Duane up, then steadied himself and stepped out the door. He could feel the strain of the extra weight on his back and knees as he went down the stairs, but he breathed deeply, kept his shoulders flexed and his back straight. When he bent his knees to shift Duane into the trunk of the car, then straightened, he felt as though he were rising into the air. He was proud of himself: there weren’t many men his size who were strong enough or in good enough shape to do that. He was sweating a bit, but he wasn’t strained or winded.
Varney drove to the south for an hour before he saw the right kind of wooded area. He used the knife to loosen the top layer of leaves and dirt, then dug a bit more with a spare hubcap he found in the trunk. He worked hard, dug two feet down before he went back to get Duane. He unrolled the tarp so that only Duane and his glasses went in, then gathered the tarp, knife, and newspapers into one of the trash bags and tied it shut. He filled in the hole, covered it with leaves again, and took the trash bag with him to the car.
Varney drove back to Cincinnati, stuffed the bag into the bottom of a dumpster, then parked the car on the street five miles from his apartment. He searched it for any paper that might tell the police anything, but found none. He wiped the prints off the door handles, steering wheel, and trunk, walked the first two miles, then jogged the rest of the way home. He was back at one, but he could see that Mae had not returned from the mall. He took his clothes off, put them into the washing machine and started the load, then got into the shower.
When he got out, he heard Mae laboring up the stairs. When she was outside the door, he heard a rustle, then a heavy clank as she set the weights on the floor and put her key into the door. It swung open, and he saw her raise her hand to push a strand of black hair out of her eyes. She looked beautiful to him, and he discovered he was not angry at her anymore.
It was five days later that he had to go into the office and pay Tracy for the next two weeks. He walked into the building, climbed the steps to the second floor, and stepped into the big wholesale office.
Tracy was busy staring at a column of figures on a piece of paper. He had to wait until the sharp pencil point had put a dot beside each line and come to the bottom. Then the sharp fingernails released the pencil and let it fall on the desk.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. She was not smiling.
“I brought you some money,” said Varney.
She raised the pencil again, holding it before her, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “You’re not going to say anything?”
“Like what?”
“ ‘I’m sorry, Tracy,’ or ‘Forgive me, Tracy, I didn’t mean it.’ ”
He stared at her, and he could see she knew. “I’m sorry.” Then he said, “Why am I sorry?”
“Because you have risked my life, my sons’ lives, the very people who took you in when you needed it. You showed no regard for our safety, or even your own. You killed a man who worked for me. Do you have no feelings?”
“What are you talking about?”
She raised her voice almost to a shriek. “They warned me. Everybody warned me. You can’t keep a killer around and expect he’s not going to do something. That’s why I never did it before. You fooled me, with your baby face and your ‘Yes, Tracy, no, Tracy.’ I should have cut out my tongue before I said yes to you.”
“He called the apartment. You should have kept him away from Mae,” said Varney. “I was paying you for that.”
“He never asked me, or I would have.”
“His mistake.”
“No, yours.”
“How’s that?”
“You think I’m the only one who knows? He had a family. They know you did it. He called you from home!”
“Give me their address, and I’ll take care of it.”
The suggestion seemed to further enrage her. “He was a hillbilly. You can’t kill them all. There are brothers, sisters, cousins all over Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. They want money. They wanted a hundred thousand to keep quiet, but I beat them down to seventy. If you don’t think that’s a good deal, here’s the phone book. Kill everybody in it named Perkins. Then you can start on the sisters under married names, and the cousins and aunts and uncles.”
“You got them to agree to one payment to shut up and forget he’s dead?”
“I told you, they’re trash. They know it’s either seventy grand, or they get to talk and have the pleasure of seeing you go to jail, which is worth nothing.”
“Have you paid them?”
“No, I haven’t paid them,” she shouted. “I didn’t kill him. And where am I going to get seventy thousand
