“You want to do it here? On the pool table?”
He thought of the dead girl as he looked into Shelly’s eyes, and he had to laugh at the misplaced fear that he’d felt just a few moments before. “Yeah.” His fingers smoothed the cool green felt that surrounded the eight ball, never quite touching the ball itself. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
“I don’t know…” Shelly was looking over his shoulder now, not looking at him at all.
He sensed someone behind him, watching. In an instant the fear was back with him. There were plenty of self-righteous cops in the world and there were plenty of people in his business who were much more dangerous than any self-righteous cop.
He turned quickly, confronting nothing more dangerous than an old hand-tinted wedding photo of his father and mother that hung on the wall.
Marvis smiled. So this was the source of Shelly’s unease. He had always thought the photo told the truth. His father’s skin so black, his mother’s so white. In the wedding photo, Marvis’s mother was almost as white as her dress. In reality, his mother’s skin had been the color of a honeycomb still slick with sweetness. Marvis was nearly that light, though his hair was darker than his mother’s.
“It’s like they’re watching us,” Shelly whispered. “And your father looks so angry.”
“Of course he looks angry,” Marvis said flatly. “He was a cop. Cops always look angry, especially when they’re off duty.”
“Oh, Jesus.” She giggled. “You’re kidding, right?”
Marvis shook his head.
“Did he know? I mean, did he know what you do? How you make your money?”
“He died when I was in college. A junkie slit his throat three months before he was due to retire. My mother’s heart gave out a few weeks later. All they knew was that I wanted to open a camera shop.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Marvis knew that she wanted to say more, so he didn’t say anything. “That must make it so hard for you. Knowing what they’d think.” She stared at the picture, trying to find something of Marvis in his father’s face. “If he knew that someone like me was in his house…I mean, he’d hate me.”
Marvis stroked her pale breasts, inhaled her perfume. God, she even smelled white. “No, he wouldn’t hate you.” The conclusion was simple, logical. “Not my father.”
Marvis turned the photograph to the wall, but Shelly couldn’t bring herself to look away. “Maybe we could use a little something to take the edge off,” she suggested.
Marvis nodded. Shelly slipped from the table and started toward the hallway, but he stopped her with a single glance.
“I know where it is,” she said. “Remember? You showed me-the very first time, when we did it in the bedroom.”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
His girls were waiting for him in the bedroom.
Marvis winked at them. “I guess I haven’t lost my touch,” he said, and his voice held genuine surprise rather than the hollow ring of braggadocio.
Marvis always felt like a teenage boy when he entered his bedroom. It didn’t really seem like an adult’s room at all, not with his girls there. It would forever belong to a nervous teenager that everyone had known as Shutterbug.
Marvis stared at his girls, trying to see them as he once had, with Shutterbug eyes. To his younger eye they had been perfection. Now he could see their flaws. A nose that was just a little too large. Teenage breasts that would never swell to desired dimensions. A smile that would be eternally crooked, because orthodontia wasn’t covered on blue-collar health plans.
And here they were, eighteen years later, still locked in his bedroom. Each one of them trapped in an eight-by-ten inch frame, sealed behind a slab of clear glass. Untouched and untouchable.
Their smiles glowed. Girls were different back in the seventies. At least these girls were different. A little more innocent. Not much, but just enough. They weren’t like the knowing nineties girls with caked-on vampire makeup who visited Marvis’s camera shop to pose for their senior portraits. And they weren’t at all like Shelly Desmond, who dressed like an MTV exec’s idea of a bad girl. When she wore any clothes at all, that is. No, Shutterbug’s girls would have died of shame in Shelly Desmond’s skin. They were daddy’s princesses, and they behaved as such. In Shutterbug’s photographs they wore princess smiles untouched by the cold hand of life.
At eighteen, Marvis had believed that his camera was the only thing that could get him close to that kind of girl. His tongue was more tin than silver, and he certainly wasn’t a jock. His father despised athletics, believing that too many promising black youths crippled themselves playing stupid games that didn’t mean anything. Chess club was as exciting as it got for Marvis.
But the kid everyone called Shutterbug could make wonderful pictures. He told his girls that he was going to grow up to be a fashion photographer. And they believed him, just as they believed that they were going to find careers as models or actresses. Marvis snapped some of them so often that he memorized their entire wardrobes, learning which blouses went with which skirts, which sweaters or T-shirts were acceptable with bell-bottomed Levi’s. Even now he could remember their shoes-mostly those awful cork platform things that girls had worn in the days of disco-though recalling the range of a girl’s footwear after all this time seemed a little sick, even to Marvis.
But he was never Marvis to those girls. He was Shutterbug. It was a whitebread name he could hide behind, a nickname that would have fit a friend of Marcia or Jan on The Brady Bunch, a name that got him past the vigilant mother or father who answered the kitchen phone, securing passage to the ear of the girl who lay on her bed with a pink Princess extension balanced on her flat white stomach.
Even now, eighteen years later, he had to smile at his ingenuity. A whitebread princess’s parents would have been naturally suspicious if their daughter had received a call from someone named Marvis. The kid everyone called Shutterbug couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t recognized that simple fact. The old man had certainly considered Marvis’s voice and diction, because he had taken the time to beat the neighborhood street talk out of his only son. But he’d missed the name- Marvis – a real tip-off to any bigot.
Marvis grinned at the very idea of his father making a mistake. Maybe the old man had been human after all.
Marvis still used his voice to make business contacts on the telephone, just as he still used his camera to make social connections.
The camera had brought Shelly here tonight.
No, it wasn’t the camera. The money brought her here.
Marvis laughed. “Shut up, Shutterbug.”
He opened the bedroom closet. Two shoeboxes were shoved toward the back of the middle shelf. He opened the box on the right, razored a couple of lines onto a cosmetic mirror for Shelly, then did a few discreet toots of his own with a gold coke spoon that he kept in the box.
The rush caught him and his eyelids fluttered. He was nowhere for a brief instant, and then he was staring down at a bent photo jammed in a box of high school junk. It was a shot of the cheerleading squad that he’d snapped in his senior year. Five beauties in the foreground, in the background-barely visible through a biology lab window made nearly opaque by hard afternoon sunlight-a young man’s silhouette. Faceless, but anyone who looked closely enough to see the solitary figure knew instinctively what the young man was watching.
Voyeurism. Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were. Or more simply put, Marvis thought, it takes one to know one.
Not that anyone would notice the young man’s silhouette now. The photo had been ruined long ago at the direction of the editor of the 1976 yearbook, a real ice princess named Amelia Peyton. Well, the order had come from the vice principal himself, but Amy Peyton had obviously enjoyed passing it on. Shutterbug had been forced to excise-that was the vice principal’s word-the face of the cheerleader who’d been kicked off the squad. He had backed the hole with some black mounting paper, and once that was done the viewer’s attention was invariably drawn to the stark nothingness of the black pit.
Minutes ago, in the living room, Shutterbug’s eyes had been drawn to the ebony eight ball and the pocket of
