The Guest Room(13)

How much had he given her then? A fifty? A hundred? He honestly couldn’t recall.

He realized now that she was saying something to him, and he tried to swim up to the surface from the swamplike morass of alcohol and desire and (in the end) self-loathing that were muffling the sounds all around him. She was reiterating that he could say whatever he wanted about what had occurred in the guest room upstairs.

They’ll think we did anyway. For a split second he thought he was going to vomit.

…

As Richard was walking through his front door, one of the police investigators was making a production of properly swabbing the blood on the tile in the front hallway, while another was methodically dusting for fingerprints and daubing for DNA. They had powder blue surgical booties over their shoes. He saw a third investigator dropping one of the spent shell casings into a clear plastic evidence bag. The fellow had found it—one of two—near the coat rack. “Probably from a Makarov,” he’d mumbled when he’d seen that Richard was watching him. “Nine millimeter.”

Now he wandered into his living room. The family cat, a five-year-old torty they’d gotten from the shelter as a kitten and christened Cassandra, was sitting atop the breakfront, surveying the activity. She seemed relieved he wasn’t another stranger. One of the investigators, a decorous, skull-faced little fellow with receding yellow hair, saw Richard and put down his scissors. He was about to snip a small piece of the bloodstained fabric from one of the arm covers that went with the couch, as well as a piece of the fabric from the back.

“Who are you?” he asked Richard, his tone quizzical.

“I live here. I’m Richard Chapman.” He started to extend his hand, but the technician wanted no part of it.

“How did you get in?”

“The front door,” Richard told him, measuring his tone.

“Okay, then,” the technician said, and he picked up the scissors. “Fine. Let’s just allow people to traipse all over the crime scene. What the hell do I know? Must be a new policy. I assume you don’t mind that I’m gathering evidence,” he said sarcastically, and gave him a pair of booties to wear.

“No, of course not,” Richard told him. How could he possibly mind? Besides, at this point he really didn’t care about the couch. Good Lord, they were going to have reupholster the whole damn thing. No: they were going to have to get rid of the whole damn thing. They were going to have to buy a new one. Richard told him again that it was fine to cut apart the fabric. They could shred it for all he cared.

The detective who seemed to be supervising the crime scene saw he was talking to the technician and came over to him.

“Not quite the party you were planning,” she said to him, her tone more sympathetic than judgmental. She was tall and scholarly looking, her afro cut short, her eyes masked by a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses. She was dressed, he decided, like a bank teller. Not a detective. But then, he really wasn’t sure how detectives dressed. All he knew about detectives was what he saw on cop dramas on TV. But she was wearing dark slacks, a turtleneck, and a navy blue cardigan sweater. Other than him, she was the only person in the house whose hands weren’t hidden beneath a pair of thin rubber gloves the color of a condom. He noticed that her fingers were long and slender. A pianist’s hands.

“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. He gazed at the debris in the room. She could have sounded considerably more disapproving. She should have sounded more disapproving. The room looked ruined: beer bottles, some overturned, littered the floor, their contents dribbling onto the Oriental carpet and the long, solid planks of dark maple. There were broken wineglasses, three that he could see, one shattered and two with the stems merely snapped off from the goblets. It was like they had been beheaded. He saw the bottles, some empty and some merely half empty, of red wine and white wine and vodka and tequila and scotch crowded onto the credenza: smokestacks, he thought, an industrial wasteland. There was a plastic jug of orange juice because Chuck Alcott had been drinking screwdrivers. One of the side tables was so ringed with the marks from glasses and beer cans that it would need to be refinished. Or, perhaps, burned. He should just take an ax to it. Throw the pieces into the fireplace that winter.

“May I ask your name?” he asked the woman.

“Of course. I’m Patricia Bryant.”

“I’m Richard.”

“I know.” Then: “Can I help you with something?”

“No. Probably not.”

“Then I think you need to leave.”

“I live here.”

She nodded ever so slightly. “No one told you, did they? They should have. I’m sorry, but this is a crime scene. You can’t be here. I can show you the search warrant if you want. I have no idea how you even got inside: someone should have stopped you.”

He wanted to argue, but he knew it would be fruitless. So he calmed himself and asked, “Can I get a few things—for my family? A few shirts, maybe?”

“No. Again, I’m sorry. This is an open investigation. I’m sure you have friends you can stay with. It will just be for a few days.”

“My wife is on her way back here from the city.”

“I suggest you stop her.” Then she gave him a friendly, almost conspiratorial smile. “I mean, you’re probably in enough trouble with her as it is.”