He already knew he didn’t want to go to jail—didn’t deserve it. She’d started the fight, had struck out at him. He’d not even swung the bottle, not really. He’d tried to block another blow, he thought, and the bottle sort of bumped her.
Deep in his heart, though, he knew he’d killed her.
He stood there and thought about it, turned, looking around the room, noticed the blond wooden railing of the stairway coming down from the second floor.
She’d tripped and fallen, he decided.
He swallowed back his nausea, pulled her body over to the bottom of the stairs, spent a moment arranging it. When he’d hit her, he’d literally knocked her out of her high heels. He picked them up—stylish tan pumps—carried one halfway up the stairs, left it on a step, put the other one halfway back on one of her feet.
Got close enough to notice that she still smelled good. Hestarted to cry, tears running helplessly and hopelessly down his cheeks. He brushed them off with the sleeve of the green sweater, but, gasping with grief and fear and loathing, thought,What else?
Nothing else. Nothing more he could do. Wait: fingerprints on the back door...
—
Two minutes later, he was out the back door again, having carefully wiped the doorknob with a paper towel from the kitchen. He walked out to the van, settled into the seat, ran his hand through his hair... and it came away sticky with blood.
She’d cut him when she hit him, raked him with her fingernails. He still had the paper towel in his hand and he used it to wipe his hair. More blood, but drying. He again ran his fingers through his hair, found the cuts, two of them, a quarter inch apart. Raw and stinging now, but not bleeding much.
Because of his jobs, he kept a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the door pocket. He squirted some of it on the paper towel and used it to clean up his hair as best he could. When he was done, he touched the cuts again and came back with faint specks of red on his fingertips. Done bleeding, he thought.
A car went by, and he turned his face away from the headlights.
In another minute, he was driving out Maple, his mind churning. David knew hisCSIshows: if the cops brought in somebody to check for DNA, they’d find his all over the place. And why not? He’d been at the meeting. He’d hugged Gina when he arrived. Well, he hadn’t, actually, but others had, and nobody would have noticed that he hadn’t. He was cool on the DNA.
At the intersection of Maple and Main, he stopped and lookedboth ways. To the south he saw the glittery lights of Club Gold. He almost froze at that point; almost fled home, to bury his... what? Angst?
He didn’t do that. He touched his hair again and this time his fingertips came back clean. After a moment, he drove down to Club Gold, parked in back, and walked over to the back door. The men’s room was there, and he went inside. He looked at his hair in the mirror. The cuts were invisible. He peed, zipped up, turned on the sink water, and waited.
None of it was thought out. He was acting purely on instinct. And from information gleaned from theCSIshows.
He waited some more and, after two or three minutes, heard cowboy boots coming down the hall. Here came a witness. He punched the soap dispenser and began washing his hands. Five seconds later, a guy named Cary Lowe bumped through the door, said, “Hey, Big Dave, how they hangin’?” and eased up to the urinal.
“Free and easy,” Birkmann said, as he rinsed his hands and dried them beneath the hot-air blower.
As Lowe continued to pee, he asked, over the roar of the blower, “You singin’ tonight?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“Good luck, then,” Lowe said. “You do have the voice, my man.”
Karaoke every Thursday and Saturday night at Club Gold. Karaoke and a gold-plated alibi.
Birkmann finished drying his hands, pushed out into the hallway, hung his parka on a coat peg, and ambled out to the main room. He got a beer, signed up to sing. Twenty minutes later, Bob Hart said, “You’ve seen him before, you’ve heard him before, you’ve loved him before. You know what’s coming up now, folks.Here’s Big D—Daveareeno, Daveissimo, the Bug Boy—with Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman.’”
David did a decent “Pretty Woman” and got a respectable round of applause from the... witnesses... and when he got off the stage went and had another beer or two. And he talked to lots of people. Becauseeverybodyknew Bug Boy.
He went home, sobbing against the steering wheel of his van. And at one o’clock in the morning, with a storm coming in, he sat in the living room armchair and drank a last beer of the night, staring at the blank screen of the television.
Right into those dead gray eyes.
Dead. Gray. Eyes.
TWOBen Potter was an old guy, unshaven half the time, smelling of fried eggs and something fishy—sardines? He occasionally walked around with his fly unzipped, mumbling to himself. His eyes were too pale, wandering and watery, half buried in the flesh of his eyelids. He was always heavily bundled up against the winter cold, a tanker cap askew on his head, fleece earflaps hanging loose. He’d inherited the cap from his older brother, now dead, who’d gotten it the ugly way, in Korea, during the war.
Potter was pushing eighty but got around all right on his two artificial hips. People paid no attention to him, except to say, “Hey, Ben,” or, “Mr. Potter, how’s things?”
Nobody really wanted to hear how things were.
