Dallas stared at the television, numb. I picked up the remote. “Want me to turn it off?”
“It’s okay.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “That wouldn’t make it go away. Let’s see what we’re up against.”
So we watched. All twelve rollicking minutes of it. I don’t know about Dallas, but it passed over me like a dream, watching it unfold, seeing the two of us as the world would see us and judge us. By the time it was over, we’d used up 80 percent of our allotted fifteen minutes of Warhol’s infamous fame in one short evening, and I had the feeling we were going to get a whole lot more than our fair share by the time all was said and done.
Wendell Sjorgen’s stabbing death in an alley behind a Wells Avenue bar twenty years ago was once again a hot topic. Jonnie’s dad had received forty-six knife wounds, all in the torso, and his wallet was found on his body, containing over three hundred dollars. No suspects had ever been picked up, no motive put forth, no murder weapon found.
I turned it off when a bit came on about the latest gang shooting on Neil Road. News that wasn’t news. Half the crime in Reno could be ended by cordoning off Neil Road one night and plowing it under, then waking up to a bright new day.
Dallas said, “How did he…it…get in there?”
I knew what she meant. Jonnie’s head. And I knew she wasn’t up to par yet because the “how” was obvious. Only the who, when, where and why were unknown. She probably hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but I didn’t blame her for that. You don’t dwell on the details of a day like the one we’d just been through.
“Jonnie had a set of keys to your car, didn’t he?” I said.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Now someone else does, Dal.”
Which meant if she kept the car she’d have to have the locks changed, but knowing Dallas she’d get rid of it and buy another. What’s a measly hundred ten thou, minus a $70,000 trade-in—maybe more since the car was now world famous. A thought I kept to myself.
“A key to your house, too?” I added, because that might not have occurred to her. I made it a question. I didn’t know if Jonnie had had access to her place—which she’d kept and used only infrequently—but it seemed likely.
She nodded yes.
And that was that. No more talk of heads or bodies or trunks. Dallas told me she’d got another letter from Nicole, who was off in the French Pyrenees with Edward Kiehl, same boyfriend as last year, so this one was looking serious. At twenty, Nikki was doing what she wanted now with no interference from mom and pop, which both pleased me and scared the hell out of me. She was a bright girl but a bit on the giddy, innocent, overly trusting side, and the world was full of human vampires and other hellish critters, like Bundy and Dahmer and others to be named later.
I took a cool shower, scrubbed off the day, and at midnight Dallas turned on the TV to a late-night movie—Father Goose, with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron.
She turned the sound low as I crawled into the other bed—the suite came with two king-size beds. I lay awake for a while amid the soothing burble and flicker of the television as the day unreeled: K unconscious in my bed, Dale and Gregory, Skulstad’s bean counters and his voluptuous secretary, Rachel Cabrera. And Jonnie in the trunk of Dallas’s car, hair mussed in his usual boyish way—but, now that the day had slowed to this contemplative crawl, I saw the deep slash mark on his left cheek an inch below his eye, and a thin ring of dried blood encircling his scalp above his forehead, barely visible through his dark Mediterranean curls.
* * *
I awoke from a tangled knot of dreams when Dallas slid into bed beside me. It was one of those razor-edged moments you play by ear. I made no assumptions, didn’t reach for her. I just lay there and, like a good gumshoe, awaited clues.
First, I discovered she wasn’t wearing a thing. But Dallas has always slept in the nude, summer, winter, and every season in between, so that was less a clue than an ordinary, garden-variety fact. Not an unpleasant one, however.
Second, she snuggled up to me. But I more or less anticipated that as well. It’s hard to give comfort across the acreage of a king-size bed, and I figured that comfort was what she was after, nothing else.
Third, she said, “Hold me, Mort.”
When a woman says she wants to be held, you have a whole slew of ways to make either a fool or a swine of yourself. She probably does want to be held, but a naked woman, unless she’s an idiot, has to know that her presence can have a certain predictable effect on a man’s physiology—unless that man is possessed of iron control, and few women want to be found resistible enough to witness that iron control. But then, some do. A few say what they mean, and then mean it, which can be very confusing. You could go crazy sifting through it all, trying to puzzle it out, especially right there on the spot, in real time. She’d said, “Hold me, Mort.” So, what else?…I held her. And I liked holding her. I always have. Given the quagmire of motive and counter-motive that fills our lives, you can only do what you do, be who you are, play as few games as possible—so I pulled her into my arms and held her and felt her tears on my chest. They landed hot, then turned cool on my skin.
After maybe ten minutes she said, in a whispery voice, “We were going to be married. Next May. We weren’t going to say anything until the first of the year.”
“I’m…sorry, Dal.” Okay,