The Dark Room(61)

“I’ll be careful—I’m always careful with you.”

“I know you are.”

—and then his fingers were tracing down her ribs to her stomach, finding the curve that was just beginning to swell from beneath her navel. It was too small to see, this bump. But with his hands, he’d know her body blindfolded. He didn’t need to see it to know the ways she’d grown. She put her hands on his and pressed them gently to her skin.

“Do you remember how we got here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you do that again?”

“Of course I can.”



Cain was back in the office by four a.m. He’d stopped at a café on the drive down and picked up two large coffees, and now the paper cups were scalding his hands. He set them on the desk, then picked up the folder on his chair. It was two inches thick and had a routing memo stapled to the outside from the SFPD printing shop—the photos from Castelli’s house.

He took the lid off the first of the coffees and sat down to study the photographs. After a while, he got out a notebook and started writing, wanting to record the things that weren’t in the pictures but were still in his memory. The way the room had smelled when he walked into it—a mixture of spent cordite and drying blood. Closer to Castelli, there’d been an almost visible haze of bourbon fumes, the angel’s share rising from his pores.

If he’d put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, what had he been thinking in that last second? The girl, clawing at the coffin lid in the dark? Or maybe he’d only been thinking of himself. He’d seen the second set of photographs; he must have known he couldn’t escape what was coming for him. He would have kept tabs on her grave, would have known about the exhumation order.

Everything pointed in one direction, and the Examiner’s headline had it right. Suicide. But there’d been two shots, and he still didn’t know what to make of the note Castelli left in Melissa Montgomery’s inbox: Get Cain. He needs to know. Why would he leave a note like that if he’d planned to shoot himself? If he knew he’d die that night, and he wanted Cain to see the second set of photographs, he could have just left them on his desk.

Cain pulled out the photo of the mayor’s medicine cabinet. Half the Ambien and tramadol were missing, but the Viagra was unopened. In the next photo, of Castelli’s desk, there was the bourbon, nine-tenths empty. Castelli might have been able to drink most men into their graves, but he’d gone through nearly an entire bottle between ten thirty and midnight. He would have been reeling. Blackout drunk. With that much bourbon, he might not have known what he was doing. Instead of a suicide, they could be looking at an accident. Mona said he wasn’t a gun person, but that didn’t make it true. Castelli might have pursued any number of fascinations behind his locked door.

Picturing it was easy enough.

He comes home, finds his wife gone. He’s alone, finally. All day, he’s been holding everything back. His rage at the blackmailer, at Cain. He’s thinking about the photographs, he’s remembering the way Cain dumped his drink and pushed him into his chair. He goes into his study and locks the door. He gets a bottle of bourbon and his gun.

He drinks. One glass, two glasses. He pours more.

He wipes his mouth on his shirtsleeve and coughs into his elbow. He sits in the chair and he holds the gun, and sometimes he points it at his black reflection in the window and imagines the blackmailer standing there. He spins around in his chair and somehow the gun goes off. It blows out the M section of his dictionary, but he hardly notices.

He pours one more glass.

The bottle tips over when he sets it down, but he’s drunk so much of it now that the bourbon can’t spill from the raised neck. He drinks. He sets the glass down and uses both hands to hold the gun. As it comes up toward his face he sees three barrels, six barrels. Then just black. He closes his eyes. He’s so drunk now his thoughts aren’t conscious. They’re more like the shadows that sometimes float behind his closed eyelids after too many flashbulbs go off at once. Unbidden, unconscious.

He’s passing out in his chair, but he could be anywhere. He’s an undergraduate, walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Nothing in front of him but the future. He sees a sweep of blond hair from the corner of his eye.

There’s an easier way out, the blackmailer had said. An unmoored thought, something drifting in a current. It goes by and he hardly notices it, but his fingers must have heard.

Bang.



Cain put the photographs back into the folder and looked at his watch. Five a.m. and still dark outside. He took out his cell phone and dialed. It was early, but that was okay. He wanted to keep Melissa Montgomery on her toes.

“Good morning, Miss Montgomery,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

“What do you want?”

“How often did Castelli drink?”

“Every day.”

“That’s not what I mean—how often did he drink himself stupid? A bottle, two bottles in a sitting.”

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“You never saw it?”

“I saw it, but I don’t know how often he did it.”

“When’s the last time you know about?”

“Over a year ago. We were in Beijing—the China-Pacific trade conference. I’d just broken it off with him, and then in the hotel he rang down and had bottles delivered to his room. I had to sign the bill.”