Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [67]
He would seek medical treatment. He would be identified.
The police would know.
It would be easy to find out: call Margaret Forrester on a ruse about the kidnapping and she would spill it, whatever it was.
Like a bad scene from a bad movie, I picked up the phone and let it drop.
Okay, call someone else over there.
Picked it up and let it drop.
I couldn’t do it. I was too afraid of knowing, although one fact was unavoidable: Andrew had driven off with my gun.
I left the office at six-thirty-five and drove home, aware of nothing until I was suddenly unlocking the front door. Nobody had been inside, which was good luck, as any rookie would have known she was walking into a crime scene.
There were glinting pieces of glass I had missed with the vacuum cleaner. Furniture was still slightly askew, and come to think of it, there were bloodstained clothes in the laundry hamper. If you missed all that, there would be a bullet hole in the white swinging door between the kitchen and the pantry, which might as well have had a huge black arrow pointing to it.
It was hopeless. All the forensics guys had to do was come in here with Luminol and the details of the struggle would fluoresce in the dark like the answer in the window of a magic eight ball. In a fit of despair I moved to the phone to turn myself in and get it over with. All I wanted was for the headache, like screws in an iron mask tightening over the facial bones, to stop.
I walked around the coffee table (more glass granules on the soles of my shoes) and sat down wearily on the couch where Andrew had thrown his weight on top of me and I had pummeled him with my legs. The absence of that struggle made me feel light-headed. But no, it was the sudden absence of him, as if he had been sucked backward out of my life as quickly as he had been rocketing forward, into the future—a home, shared; a partnership taking root. I missed his loud opinionated criticism of the Dodgers; his puppy love for the Lakers; the puffed-up hyperbole about his job (“I know all my geese are not all swans”); the way he would slice a roll the other way and butter each side and put it back together because that’s the way his dad did it; the boasting (“I hitched through Argentina and never had to pay for a hotel room”) mixed with self-deprecation (“You can pick my brain. Not much to pick”); the long, wonderful back rubs; the way he adored my body with his large sensitive hands.
As I hovered, weightless, knowledge came to me that we were too close to go out this way; that stunned awful look he’d thrown as we wrestled for the car door meant to say he was as bewildered as I at how far things had gotten out of hand. I have noticed our destinies are wound around our physical selves: Andrew was built big, big enough to absorb heavy body blows—his, and those of traumatized victims of crime he had comforted during the wearing routine of twenty years of homicide investigation. I sensed that he would take this blow, as well. If he had been sitting across from me in this mess, I know he would have felt just as disoriented, as responsible as I. Neither one of us could have told you what had been true during those scrambled seconds, but we might have said this: We cared for each other. And we shared a code.
Nobody was coming to get me because Detective Andrew Berringer had not turned me in.
I wanted it to be true. It would mean an ending of such happiness.
Lifted by the hope that he was actually protecting me, that we were still in this together, I rose from the couch and settled into the familiar depression in the rattan chair. The laptop sat on the glass table. I believed this was what Andrew was somehow telling me to do, yet logging on to the Bureau website created the most toxic self-loathing of the entire ordeal. I was planning to use classified material on detecting bloodstain evidence to cover up the