Flesh Wounds, page 14
“Ask him why her car’s still out front!”
“Aw, come on, Hannah, are you off your medicine again?”
Her response to that was to puff up like an African bull frog.
“That’ll be enough of that,” interjected Thompson, sensing he was losing control, “both of you.”
“My wife’s sister was here for a visit last week, Officer,” I explained. “My wife drove back to Mississippi with her four days ago.”
“And when will she be returning?”
“Well, the honest truth is I don’t know. See, we had a bit of a fight and she... well, she left me.”
“I see.”
“Look, I don’t see that my personal affairs are really the business of the Oklahoma City Police Department, but if you really must know the whole story...”
Thompson poised a ballpoint over the notebook. “That would be most helpful, Mr Cooper.”
“My wife’s sister is going through a nasty divorce and... well, the two of them got to comparing notes—commiserating, if you will. Something of an all-men-are-pigs session. Know what I mean?”
Thompson cocked an eye at Hannah and knew he couldn’t acknowledge he knew what I was talking about. But he wanted to. “Go on,” he said.
“Well there’s not much more to tell. She accused me of being insensitive and left with her sister. If you check with her family in Mississippi, I’m sure you’ll be able to assuage Mrs. Kingsington’s fears.”
“Do you have those numbers?”
“I’ll get them for you,” I said, closing the door in his face. I came back with them a moment later on a slip of paper. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve really got to get back to work.”
“Certainly,” replied the officer, “but if you don’t mind, we’d like you to stay in town until we clear this up.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Told you already, I’m working against a deadline. I won’t be far from my computer.”
“Thank you,” he said, and the two of them led Hannah back across the yard.
“I’m telling you,” Hannah insisted, “he did something to her. He murdered her just like in that story about the roller coaster.”
“Gaffed,” I volunteered just before the door closed.
I spotted them through the window in my den the next day poking around in the yard, Hannah pointing to likely spots behind the tool shed, in the flower beds, under the pool deck. When they’d satisfied their curiosity or exhausted the possible places where a body might be hidden, Thompson came around to the front door and rang the bell. The second officer managed to keep Hannah back in the yard.
“Mr Cooper, we seem to be having a bit of difficulty reaching anyone at the numbers you provided,” reported Officer Thompson.
“Really? I spoke with my wife just last night.”
“Is that so? Did she say when she might be coming home?”
“Between you and me, Officer, I’m not so sure she’s ever coming home.”
Thompson frowned. “Meaning...?”
“Meaning that she’s considering divorce. Now if you don’t mind, I really think that my private affairs are none of your business. Besides which, I’m very busy. I assume you and Mrs. Kingsington have finished searching the premises and you’ve failed to find any fresh graves or bloody gloves. So if you don’t mind—”
“We’d like to check inside the house.”
“Do you have warrant?”
“I can get one within the hour.”
He was starting to piss me off. “I’ll go you one better, Officer. I will call my wife, and within the hour she will call you. Since I don’t think even AT&T has lines into the hereafter, you can rest assured that she has not become the victim of foul play. Good enough?”
He really wanted to search the place. I could tell. It might have been nothing more than the air conditioning wafting out the front door, cooling the sweat on his brow, or it might have been the chance to see how a famous writer lives, but he really wanted in.
“We’ll see, Mr Cooper. We’ll see.”
He had his hat in his hands this time.
“Officer Thompson, what a pleasant surprise,” I greeted him sarcastically. “My wife assured me that she’d call. Didn’t she?”
“Well, yes, she did, Mr Cooper.”
“Then what can I help you with? I thought surely yesterday would be our last encounter. Maybe I should take down the name of your superior...”
He made a grimace. “It’s not about your wife this time, Mr Cooper.”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s about Mrs. Kingsington. Seems that no one’s seen her since late yesterday. We’ve searched her house, but no luck. We were wondering if you might have seen her out and about.”
Somehow I kept the smile off my face. “Sorry, Officer, I’ve been busy researching my latest story.” A shrug. “Wish I could help.” And I closed the door on them.
Pieces
Exactly one week after his wife ran away with someone she’d met on the Internet, Glen Matthews found the Xeroxed image of a woman’s hand in his in-basket. He thought it might be a mistake, that one of the ladies in the secretarial pool had accidentally photocopied her hand while making copies for him, but he hadn’t asked for any copies. Besides, the toner-etched sheet of bond had been folded in thirds and placed in an envelope that bore his name printed neatly in black ink. This was no accident.
Perplexed, Glen peeked over the walls of his Dilbert-style cubicle. Surely the prankster would want to watch as the mysterious photocopy was examined. To his surprise, everyone else in the programming department was hard at work, hidden behind their own fabric walls. Instead of the anticipated sniggering, all Glen could hear was the skeletal rattle of computer keys punctuated by the occasional curse.
He examined the envelope. He didn’t recognize the handwriting. Other than his name, there was no other marking, no stamp, no indication of where it might have originated. The envelope bore the trace of a woman’s perfume, but it was not a brand he recognized. The flap of the envelope hadn’t been licked, just tucked inside. It seemed a feminine thing to do. Men, he reasoned, always lick the envelope and seal it.
Frowning, he examined the document itself. Here, the acrid smell of toner had replaced any hint of perfume. The Xeroxed hand was unadorned, not a watch or bracelet or a single solitary ring. There were no scars, no moles, no identifying marks of any kind. The fingers were long and slender. The nails were precisely manicured and carefully painted a dark color—whether red or jet black was beyond the communicative properties of the color-ambivalent copy machine. But it was most definitely a woman’s hand.
“Or a fag’s,” Jeremy pointed out at lunch. “A fag could have a hand like that.”
Glen scanned the nearby cafeteria tables. “You want to keep your voice down, Jere?” Just last month one of the senior programmers had been reprimanded for making jokes about Ramadan to one of the Iranians. The Iranian had gone along with the jokes quietly enough, but afterward he’d promptly gone to Employee Relations and filed charges. Within a few weeks, the programmer with the great jokes but a poor grasp on human relations had been demoted, and the entire programming department was made to suffer through sensitivity training. Touchy-feely training, they all called it. How to be politically correct in an ethnically diverse office environment.
“I’m just saying that you don’t know it’s a woman’s hand.” Jeremy tossed the Xerox on the table where it began to soak up spilled Coca Cola.
Glen briefly debated saving the document, deciding he really didn’t care if it was ruined. He shook his head at Jeremy. “No way that’s a man’s hand, even a man who gets his nails done at the beauty parlor. Look at the fingers. Look at the knuckles, the lack of hair, the fine bone structure. It’s definitely a woman’s hand.”
“You’d be surprised,” Jeremy countered. “I was at this bar once in Fort Lauderdale where they had a legs contest.” He gestured elaborately with a French fry. “You know the kind of contest I’m talking about, the one where all the women are behind this partition that starts just below the crotch. You can’t see anything but their legs.” He swallowed the fry and plowed another through the puddle of catsup on his tray. “Anyway, there were two men behind that partition and no one knew about it until later. One of those pretty boys took second place!” He made a face. “Enough to make you sick, thinking just seconds ago you were admiring those legs, thinking how nice it would be to slip between them.”
Glen scanned the nearby tables again. There were at least two women eyeing them, eyebrows raised at Jeremy’s crude comments. The entire programming department had been subjected to sexual harassment training also. None of the cautions seemed to have stuck with Jeremy.
“Why would someone send this?” Glen mused in an attempt to redirect the conversation.
“Better question is who sent it.”
“I wish I knew. There’s no postmark, so it must have been delivered with the interoffice mail.” That narrowed it down to the thousand or so employees at Promart Enterprises. Maybe less than half that, if he made the assumption that a woman had sent it.
“Well,” Jeremy shrugged, “I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. I mean, it’s only a hand. Not exactly something I’d call threatening. Count yourself lucky one of the guys didn’t send you a Xerox of his hairy ass!” They both laughed, after which they concentrated on lunch for several minutes. “Heard from Peg?” Jeremy asked.
Glen frowned. “No.” He’d actually heard from her just the night before. She’d discovered that he’d pulled all the money out of their joint account. She wanted him to put half of it back. Bad enough she had maxed out their credit cards on this Internet bum, Glen had no intention of sitting idly by while she spent their life savings.
“You want my opinion, you’re better rid of the bitch. What kind of woman runs off with someone she never met anyway?” Jeremy delivered a playful punch to his friend’s shoulder. “Tell you what, tomorrow night we’re going to hit some bars. You need me to show you what you’ve been missing all these years.”
Glen smiled weakly. “Sure, Jere.”
The squeal of the modem as it connected was unnerving. The titles of the chat rooms were as confusing as the procedure to reach them. Very few of the titles seemed to have anything to do with the room’s actual subject matter. The occupants spoke in unfamiliar acronyms and introduced themselves with statistics he had no way to verify.
F/34/OKC, typed someone with the blatant pseudonym of Sex_Kitten.
Hi, he typed back.
A/S/L? Sex_Kitten responded.
Sorry, he typed. I don’t know what you mean.
LOL, Sex_Kitten replied. New at this, aren’t you?
Yes. It’s my wife’s computer.
sure it’s not your mom’s? asked someone named Nappy.
Sex_Kitten: LOL
gmatthews: What?
Buffalo_Bob: ROFL
*** Candy falls out of her seat laughing.
Candy: Good one, Nap!
Nappy: damn juvies always go straight to the adult chats when their mommies aren’t looking!
Glen switched off the computer and sat there, staring at the blank screen. Peg had spent hours in front of this damn thing, while he’d watched ball games, or read science fiction, or worked on some behind schedule coding project on the other computer in the den.
What had she seen in it?
Setting aside his Budweiser, Jeremy unfolded the sheet of paper. “Looks like a foot,” he smirked. The strobes from the dance floor lent his face a macabre glow. The man had more teeth than was natural.
“It is a foot,” Glen replied. “A woman’s foot. It showed up in this afternoon’s mail.” He’d chased after the mail carrier and asked her where it had come from, but she was unable to help him. She just delivered the mail, she said. All the interoffice correspondence went through the mail room, where it was sorted and sent back out. There was no way to tell where it had originated in the vast caverns of Promart.
“Creepy,” Jeremy remarked, sliding the sheet of paper back across the table. “She’s got nice ankles, though. And cute little popcorn toes.”
Glen studied the foot, but didn’t see anything special about it. To hear Jeremy talk, the foot possessed some erotic qualities. For a second, Glen’s mind flashed on the image of all those teeth snapping at the dainty toes in the Xerox. He shuddered. It amazed him that Jeremy actually did well with the ladies—provided, that is, that the stories Jeremy told around the office were true. Still, though he tried, Glen found he couldn’t summon a spark of jealousy for whatever success Jeremy had at scoring in bars like this. What was the point?
“You’ve got a secret admirer,” Jeremy proclaimed, gesturing with his beer bottle as if he were placing an exclamation mark at the end of his sentence.
“What?” Glen started, thinking his friend meant someone in the bar.
“At Promart,” Jeremy explained. “It’s one of the secretaries or maybe even that blonde in accounting—you know, the one with the big tits. Someone’s taken a liking to you, but they’re a bit shy. So, this is her way of introducing herself, a little bit at a time.” Jeremy winked. “Frankly, I can’t wait to see how far she’ll go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a practical joke.” Glen wadded the Xerox up in a tight ball. “Hell, for all I know, you’re behind this.”
“Not me, Bubba. I might embarrass you with a strip-o-gram or hire a hooker to get your mind off Peg, but—”
“Excuse me.” A redhead who’d come up behind Jeremy placed her hand on his shoulder. Her nails were painted a sparkling metallic gold, each one adorned with an icon. Glen spotted a star, a heart, a moon, and what looked like an erection before she withdrew the hand to toss her hair back over her shoulder. The hair action was meant to draw attention to her ample breasts, restrained by spandex and nothing else. “I think I met you here three weeks ago,” the redhead told Jeremy.
Jeremy showed her every one of his hundred or so teeth. “I remember you,” he crooned.
She returned his smile with one that was equally sharklike. There was lipstick on her teeth. Makeup did a fair job of covering the lines on her face, but Glen could tell that she was not as young as the spandex implied. “You’re Jeremy, right? I’m Melanie. My friends and I are over there.” She gestured with one of those golden claws at a table occupied by two other middle-aged females.
Jeremy was on his feet now. He took her hand possessively. For a moment, Glen thought he was going to kiss her hand and had to restrain a chuckle. “This is my friend, Glen Matthews.”
Glen gave her a weak smile. Melanie positively beamed. Her eyes were a desperate, dirty green. “Would the two of you like to join us?” she asked.
Jeremy snatched up his beer. “You lead. We’ll follow.”
Melanie pursed her lips. “No, you go first, baby. I want to check out your ass.”
Glen felt his face go red.
Jeremy guffawed. “You got it, darling.” He made a show of strutting toward the table.
“Uh, Jere? I think I’ll call it a night.”
Jeremy did an about-face. “What?”
“Thanks for the beer, but I’m going to head home. It’s been a really tough week, you know?”
Three big steps put Jeremy in Glen’s face. He leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “You’ve got to be kidding me, pal. I know they look thirty seconds removed from the nearest trailer park, but I guarantee it’ll be a whole lot better than jacking off to something on HBO.”
Glen swallowed a shudder. “I gotta go, Jere.” And he did. As fast as he could, leaving Jeremy standing there with his hands on his hips.
There was a trash can beside the exit. He dropped in the wadded-up photocopy.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: Hello, Kitten. Remember me? M/38/Chicago.
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: Hey, you’re learning, gmatthews!
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: Just goes to show that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: LOL!
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: This is still pretty weird, though... my being here.
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: Why’s that, gmatthews?
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: My wife ran away with someone she met on this thing.
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: Oh. Happens all the time.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: Yeah? I don’t understand how... or why.
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: Simple. Romance.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: Romance?
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: It’s a fantasy, gmatthews. On the Internet, you’re free to show only those pieces of yourself that you’re proud of. The holes are filled in by sheer imagination on the part of your audience. Virtual relationships are one part truth and ninety-nine parts fantasy.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: You’re saying that my wife fell in love with an imposter?
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: I’m saying that your wife fell in love with exactly what she’d been wanting all her life. There’s just one problem. Whoever this man is, he’ll never be able to measure up to that. She’ll be back, gmatthews. You just have to decide if you still want her.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: I don’t know whether I do or not...
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: You need to think about one other thing, too.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: Yeah?
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: If you do still want her, you need to figure out what it’s going to take to keep her.
gmatthews [to Sex_Kitten]: What do you mean?
Sex_Kitten [to gmatthews]: The fantasy, silly. You’ve got to decide how to fulfill her fantasy. What pieces of you do you need to replace with make-believe?
Monday’s photocopy was a spread of thick, luxurious hair, blonde or a very soft brunette; again, it was difficult to tell from the copy machine. Glen tried to imagine his mystery woman crouched with her back against the copier, her hair clamped beneath the document tray, reaching back over her shoulder to press the START button. Awkward. Incredibly awkward. He wondered if she had an accomplice. He wondered if she did it after hours when there was no one around.
