She let him lead her into the apartment as he led her in the dance. She let him undress her, and she felt, for the first time, a sense of rightness. This was the way she had always wanted things to be. Later, when it was over, she lay in Paul’s bed for a few minutes, then sat up, walked into his living room, putting on her clothes as she found them on the floor. On the way back, they talked as they had before, about the songs they loved and the dance class.
The next Tuesday, the same thing happened, and Sylvie realized that it hadn’t been an isolated event, a mutual lapse that they would each silently wonder about forever. That had been the lie she had told herself. Soon she was lying to Darren about the exercise sessions she missed at the gym and about her partners in the dance class. Sometimes she would describe for him men who really were in the class, and sometimes, because there were more women than men, she would say that she had danced only with women that day.
After a few weeks, she told Paul that she was married. He said, “I saw the mark on your finger where you took off your ring.”
Two months later, Paul said, “We should be married. It’s time to get your divorce.”
She told him about the prenuptial agreement she had signed. “If I divorce him, I won’t have much money— only what I could save before I got married.”
“Does he have a lot of money?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s made a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s only left you one way to get your share of it.”
Sylvie let the moment pass. She never asked, “What do you mean?” She said nothing. For two more months, she thought about what Paul had said. She knew he had meant it at least a little, because he had said it the way some men made jokes—the kind that really weren’t jokes, but questions. She detected certain feelings in herself that she should not be having. She resented Darren for having caught her at a weak moment and holding out marriage as the alternative to a bad part of her life. She began to wish that Darren were dead.
But Paul took care of Darren by himself. He waited for Darren to go out on one of his tours with a couple of women who had used the names Ray-Lee and Kay-Lee in their last few films. All actresses in adult cinema liked to do girl-on-girl scenes because they were so much easier, less dangerous and strenuous than regular sex. These two had temporarily captured the imaginations of the segment of the audience who liked to watch that sort of thing.
Paul flew to New York, drove to Philadelphia, and waited for Darren and the women to reach town. He took a room in the hotel where they would be staying, then waited until a morning when the women left the room beside Darren’s to go to the hotel’s spa. He stood outside Darren’s door holding a grocery bag and knocked. When Darren opened the door, he pushed his way in and closed the door. Paul’s bag held a .32 revolver with a plastic one-quart water bottle taped over the barrel to suppress the sound. Paul fired once into Darren’s chest, then stood over him and fired into his head. He walked out with the gun still inside the bag, and closed the door. If anyone heard the noises, they did not interpret them as shots. The women found Darren two hours later, when Paul was already in the airport waiting for his plane home.
Sylvie was awakened abruptly that morning by a ringing doorbell, and opened the door to a pair of police officers. Since this was only four hours after Darren had been killed, the visit ended forever any suspicion that she’d had any direct role in his death: No flight from the East Coast could have brought her home that quickly.
Even so, when Paul paid his respects before the funeral, he told her that they must not call, write letters, or meet each other again for three months because police often kept family members of murder victims under surveillance. Ninety-one days later, they met, apparently by chance, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago. They returned to Los Angeles on different days, Sylvie started going to the dance class again, and Sylvie and Paul had a period of simulated courtship.
Sylvie watched Paul driving the streets of Las Vegas, and felt a light-headed tingle of excitement about him. There was nothing in the world as erotic as being with a man who had killed her husband to take her. The breathless feeling was still there after fifteen years. But as she watched, she could see his face was changing, taking on a new expression. “What is it?”
“Look.”
She looked ahead. As she did, the big red-striped shape of a Southwest Airlines jet glided over them and onto a distant runway. “Is he at the airport?”
“His car is at the airport. I think he turned it in.”
“Then how are we going to find out where he went?”
PAUL WALKED CAREFULLY along the side of Ann Delatorre’s house in the darkness, keeping his shoes from making any noise. There were no security-company signs on the lawn, no stickers, and no keypads visible through the windows, and he wasn’t surprised. People on the run didn’t want any conversations with the police officers who responded to false alarms, or even minor burglaries. They wanted everything quiet and undisturbed. He liked that. What he didn’t like was that many of them made up for it by arming themselves.
Paul peered around the corner of the house and saw Sylvie waiting outside the back door. In the darkness behind the house he could just see that her right hand was down at the side of her body, and he knew she was holding the pistol beside her thigh, where it would not be seen if a light came on. She had screwed the silencers on the threaded muzzles of the two .38 revolvers. Paul liked to use the lower-caliber, low-velocity cartridges for jobs like this. If Ann Delatorre could be intimidated by a gun, a .38 with a silencer on it would scare her as much as a .44 magnum, and if she couldn’t, then it would be big enough to kill her.
Sylvie gave Paul a silent wave, and Paul moved back toward the front of the house. He was searching for the room where Ann Delatorre slept. He had looked in at two dark bedrooms, and seen only the smooth, tight bedspreads and undented pillows on the beds. At last he found what he had been looking for. The third bedroom had its blinds closed, but he was able to put his eye to the corner and make out the shape of a sleeping person on the bed.
He stood still for a few seconds and listened. The night was quiet out here in the suburbs. He knew that Route 215 swung through Henderson, but it was too distant for him to hear the cars. He went around the house to a spare bedroom where the door was closed. Any incidental sounds he made getting in would be less likely to reach Ann Delatorre’s ears from there.
Paul used a glass cutter to etch a small half-circle in the windowpane just at the latch. He ran a strip of duct tape across the semicircle, then put on his leather gloves and pounded it once with his hand. There was only a dull thump and a click as the semicircle of glass was punched inward and held by the tape. He peeled back the tape carefully and brought the small piece of glass with it, then reached inside, unlocked the latch, and slid the window open six inches.
He put his head to the opening and listened. When he heard nothing but the hum of the air conditioner, he lifted the window all the way, and climbed inside. Then he crouched on the floor for a few seconds, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. Paul had killed several people at night while they were asleep in their beds, and he had come to enjoy it. He moved quietly to the door, stood still for a few seconds, then turned the knob and pulled the door inward.
The sudden bang made him jump in alarm, and the muzzle-flash blinded him. He had leaped to the side instinctively, so he was behind the wall again, and he squatted there. He heard footsteps dash out of the bedroom across the hall, already past him and around the corner before he was able to get his gun out of his jacket.
Paul leaned around the doorway and fired, but he knew that the shot was at least a whole second late. It was just a way to fight his paralysis and do something. He ran down the hallway, knowing that if she were waiting to shoot him, the place she would aim was at the corner. He ran past it into another doorway and aimed up the next hall. All he saw was an open door, and the night beyond.
She had made it outside. He dashed to the back door and heard Sylvie’s voice rasp, “Drop it at your feet. Now turn around and go back inside.”
The woman’s shape appeared in the doorway, and then Paul could see Sylvie’s taller silhouette. She stepped in and closed the door, and Paul turned on the light.
