“Who was that?” she asked.
“It was work,” he said nonchalantly, and walked in his shorts to the Mr. Coffee.
“Bullshit.”
Tom turned, frowning. “What?”
“It wasn’t work calling, Tom. Who was it?”
Tom’s eyes rolled in their sockets. “Aw, come on, Helen. Give it a rest, huh? I just got up.”
“You’re lying to me. Who was it?”
Tom leaned against the wall, arms crossed in exasperation. “It was Joycelyn.”
Helen gaped. “
“Joycelyn, the new pathology intern. She just got a shipment of formalin concentrate at the morgue and she didn’t know if it needed to be refrigerated or not. So she paged me for instructions.”
“‘I’ll light you up real good’?” Helen quoted. “I heard what you said, Tom. You weren’t talking about any goddamn formalin.”
Tom’s expression drooped. “Helen, you were tossing and turning all night, you were having nightmares. Whatever is was you think you heard me say, it wasn’t real. It was from the dream.”
“Bullshit,” she repeated. “You’re sleeping with someone else.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Helen, please don’t start this crap again—”
Helen’s hand raised, as if to emphasize an immediate point. “So you’re trying to tell me it was the hospital that paged you just now?”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit,” she said yet again. It was becoming an important word in her index of lexicon. “The hospital prefix is 266, the prefix on your pager is 224.”
The span of time with which Tom paused at this statement was impossible to calculate. But any pause, even a fraction of a second, was all this aspect of Helen Closs’ psyche needed to be convinced.
“Just get out,” she said
“Helen, it was the annex—”
“Bullshit, bullshit!”
“—where the supply contractor drops off their deliveries!”
Her face, in an instant, turned red. “Get out of my apartment! You’re a lying son of a bitch!”
Tom brushed by her, snatched up his pager, and went to the bedroom. Snippets of self-muttering could be heard: “—you’re absolutely ridiculous—” “—can’t hack this anymore—” “—don’t need the headache—”
Helen tremored from her stance in the kitchen. “If I give you a headache, then take a goddamn aspirin and get the hell out!”
“Don’t worry, I’m going,” his voice griped back from the bedroom.
“No wonder you never want to fuck me!” she bellowed. “You’re too busy fucking some other woman!”
The apartment door slammed so hard the walls shook.
Helen remained where she stood for a full ten minutes. The more she tried to let herself cool down, the hotter she felt. Like meat on a turning spit. Like a sucker goose cooking. Paralyzed—that’s how she felt. Her fists clenched and her teeth grinding. Her temples throbbing till she thought her head might burst.
««—»»
“I— I need to talk.”
“All right.” Dr. Sallee’s voice sounded taut and nasally over the phone. Helen could never put the man’s face to that voice. “You missed your appointment, by the way. Did you get my message?”
“Yes, I did. I’m—I’m sorry I missed it. I was working nighters and when I work nighters I sometimes lose track of—”
“Fine, I understand. But what seems to be the problem now, Helen?”
“Is it Tom?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “I think he’s cheating on me.”
“Helen, you’ve always suspected that every man you’ve ever been involved with has been cheating on you. It’s becoming a paranoic compulsion.”
“I caught him this time. Well, I mean, I think I did. The phone number on the pager, the city prefix, the —”
“Helen, I’m not following you, you’re talking too fast. I’m with a patient right now, but I want you to come and see me tomorrow, okay?”
“Yes, yes,” she blurted.
“The usual time, okay?”
“Yes.”
“
“I— I won’t.”
She hung up. She felt absurd, standing there with tears dried on her cheeks, her head pounding.
She dialed the info number at the hospital, a 266 prefix. “My name is Helen Closs, I’m a Captain with the Wisconsin State Police.”
“Yes, ma’am? How can I help you?”
“Are there any 224 phone prefixes for the hospital?”
The question seemed to take the receptionist aback. “No ma’am. All hospital prefixes are 266.”
“Including the annex?”
“The…what?”
“The annex,” Helen repeated. Her temples throbbed.
Time ticked as the question was weighed. “I’m sorry, Captain Closs. There’s no annex on my directory index.”
Helen hung up again. All she could see in her mind were the most lewd images: Tom with another woman, Tom
««—»»
Work was her only salvation, the only thing to turn her mind away from her calamities, or so she thought. She walked into HQ in a daze, a shroud of fuzz draped about her head. It was probably a mistake coming here—she hadn’t had a real case in weeks. She wasn’t even scheduled to work today. But she needed…something…to put her in a safer mode.
She prowled the lower level, passed Fleet Maintenance, the property vault, Requisitions. Halfway down the main hall toward the locker rooms, she heard:
“Yeah, man, fucking two-pack shaker.”
“No, no, man, it’s Tu Pac Shah-
Excitedly: “And they shot the son of a bitch
The name, in a moment, rang a bell to Helen. Some famous rap star had been shot by muggers in New York a few nights ago. It was the first bit of news that seemed to ebb the Dahmer tide in the press. Helen only half- listened as two unseen cops continued their rant.
“The piece of shit. Shoots those two off-duty cops in Atlanta, and got charges dropped, for Christ’s sake. Goddamn judges. Bet the judge was black.”
“You can count on that. What kinda muggers they got in New York anyway? Shoot a guy five times and he
