“Taking her kids?”
“No, that’s the whole idea, get away alone. If we can work it.”
“What do you need, a sitter?”
“No, her kids’re old enough. It’s the mothers. Sally’s mother asks her who she’s going with, she says me. Alone? Yeah, just the two of us. Her mother’d have a fit.”
“Why?”
“Why?” The large man behind the desk who had been a policeman twenty-nine years seemed self-conscious, vulnerable.
“Because we’re not married. Last winter, trying to get to Florida for a week? The same thing. I tell my mother I’m going with Sally, my mother says, ‘Oh, are you married now?’ Sally’s forty-nine, I’m fifty-four, both of us divorced. Our kids have traveled all over the country with their boyfriend, their girlfriend… see, it’s the grandchildren and they accept that. But if Sally and I tried to do it-”
“You’re kidding,” Raymond said.
“Is your mother still living?” Herzog asked him.
“Yeah, in Daytona.”
“Okay, try it. Tell her you’re coming down with a woman you’re very fond of but you’re not married to, see what she says. ‘You mean the two of you’re traveling alone together?’ Shocked, can’t believe it. I know you’re not as old as I am,” the Inspector of Homicide said, “but I’ll tell you something, we’re in the wrong fucking generation.”
MARY ALICE, Raymond’s former wife, called at 6:20. It was dark outside. He had come home to his apartment in bright fall sunlight, stepped into the shower… and now the sun had vanished from the living room window. He could see his reflection, the white towel wrapped around his middle. Mary Alice told him the roof was leaking again in the family room. She described what the water was doing to the walls and the carpeting, how it was impossible to dry the carpeting completely and take out the stain.
He wanted to say, “Mary Alice, I don’t give a fuck about the carpeting…” But he didn’t. He said, “What do you want me to do about it?” Knowing what she was going to say.
She told him she wanted him to pay to have the roof repaired and the carpeting replaced, speaking to him without using his name. Also, she needed a new clothes dryer.
His first-floor apartment was on the south edge of Palmer Park, across from a heavily wooded area, about three-quarters of a mile from where Adele Simpson’s body was found and a mile from Judge Guy’s residence. He said, “Mary Alice, I don’t think you understand. We’re not married any more. You have the house, I don’t have anything to do with it now.” She started to speak again, using her quiet, almost lifeless tone, and he said, “It hasn’t even rained lately.”
She said he shouldn’t have given her the house in the condition it was in-getting an edge to her tone now. She always had the edge ready for when she needed it. A pouty edge. She could tell him what they were having for dinner and sound defensive, conspired against. She said she would get some estimates-not having heard a word he said-and let him know. Raymond said fine and hung up.
He sliced the leftover New York strip sirloin into thin pieces and fried them in a hot skillet, watching the pieces sizzle and curl, thinking of the girl from the News, picturing her face the way it had appeared, soft, pleasant, before taking on a sheen and her features became sharply defined. He had looked at her as a possibility, a very attractive girl. But with acid-etched opinions that came out and changed her looks. She could be right, though.
You know it? Raymond thought.
And then thought, No, there was no way in the world he could have talked to his wife and told her how he felt. In the first place she didn’t like the idea of being a policeman’s wife. She wanted him to sell the life insurance like her dad and join her dad’s Masonic lodge and go deer hunting with her dad and remodel the back porch into a family room with an acoustical tile ceiling and use some of her mom and dad’s maple furniture. The marriage counselor they visited six times said, “Have you considered having children?” Mary Alice told him she’d had two early miscarriages. She did not tell him she refused to even consider trying again and would begin love-making with reluctance and remain detached while Raymond slowly, gently, tried to involve her to the point of losing herself. (Which had nothing to do with not wanting to have children.) In her detachment, in the automatic, monotonous movement of her hips, she would remain wherever she was, alone.
The marriage counselor asked Raymond if he had always wanted to be a police officer. Raymond said no, he had wanted to be a fireman, but didn’t pass the test. The marriage counselor asked him if he had ever had a homosexual experience. Raymond said, “Well-” The marriage counselor said, “Tell me about it.” Raymond said, “Well, when I was working Vice I’d go into the Men’s room of a gay bar; I’d stand at the urinal and when a guy would come up next to me I’d take out a salt shaker and shake some of it, you know, down like right in front of me. And if the guy rolled his eyes and rubbed his tummy I knew I had a collar.” The marriage counselor stared at him and said, “Are you serious?” Raymond said, “Look, I like girls. I just don’t like her. Don’t you see that?”
He ate the fried steak with sliced tomatoes and onions and a can of Strohs. He wasn’t tired. He hadn’t slept since yesterday morning, but he wasn’t tired. He thought about going out. The prospect still gave him a strange feeling after twelve years of married life. He thought about the girl from the News. He thought about Sandy Stanton and wondered how he might run into her somewhere. He thought of girls he had met at Pipers Alley on St. Antoine, the Friday after-work place, girls who came with toothbrushes in their purses. He thought of girls and saw glimpses of pleasure in strange apartments, chrome lamps turned down, macrame and fringed pillows made of wool, drinking wine, performing the ritual to the girl playing coy or seductive, giving him dreamy eyes, saying undress me and getting down to the patterned bikini panties, wondering why none of these girls wore plain white ones, most of them big girls, bigger than the girls he remembered in college sixteen years ago, the girls acting coy all the way to bed then accepting the decorator-patterned sheets as a release point and turning on with moans like death-throes and dirty words that took some getting used to, though girls in bars said fuck all the time now and when the girl would say do-it-to-me, do-it-to-me, he would think, What do you think I’m doing? Never ever completely caught up in it, but aware and observing, giving it about seventy percent… He remembered the girl from the News saying he was old-fashioned-no, old-timey; but it probably meant the same thing. The girl who knew everything…
The phone rang.
The woman’s voice, quiet, unhurried, said, “Lieutenant, this is Carolyn Wilder. I understand you’re looking for a client of mine, Clement Mansell.”
Raymond saw her in a courtroom, slim in something beige, light-brown hair-and had recognized her voice-the goodlooking lady with the quiet manner who defended criminals. He said, “How about if you bring him in tomorrow morning, eight o’clock.”
“If you don’t have a warrant, why bother?”
“I’d like to talk to him,” Raymond said.
There was a pause, silence.
“All right, you can talk to him in my office, in my presence,” Carolyn Wilder said. “If that doesn’t suit you, get a warrant and I’ll see you at the arraignment.”
He asked her where her office was. She told him the 555 Building in Birmingham and asked him to please come within an hour.
Raymond said, “Wait, where’d you get my number?”
But Carolyn Wilder had hung up.