He shook his head some more, looking at me earnestly all the while. “They don’t think that at all. Harrelson says Gerald had a heart attack which may have been precipitated by sexual excitement, and the State Police accept that because John Harrelson is about the best in the business. At most there may be a few cynics who think you played Salome and led him on deliberately.” “Do you?” I asked.
I thought I might shock him with such directness, and part of me was curious as to what a shocked Brandon Milheron might look like, but I should have known better. He only smiled. “Do I think you’d have imagination enough to see a chance of blowing Gerald’s thermostat but not enough to see you might end up dying in handcuff s yourself as a result? No. For whatever it’s worth, Jess, I think it went down just the way you told me it did. Can I be honest?”
It was my turn to smile. “I wouldn’t want you to be anything else.”
“All right. I worked with Gerald, and I got along with him, but there were plenty of people in the firm who didn’t. He was the world’s biggest control-freak. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that the idea of having sex with a woman handcuffed to the bed lit up all his dials.”
I took a quick look at him when he said that. It was night, only the light at the head of my bed was on, and he was sitting in shadow from the shoulders up, but I’m pretty sure that Brandon Milheron, Young Legal Shark About Town, was blushing.
“If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding unexpectedly awkward.
I almost laughed. It would have been unkind, but just then he sounded about eighteen years old and fresh out of prep school. “You haven’t offended me, Brandon,” I said.
“Good. That takes care of me. But it’s still the job of the police to at least entertain the possibility of foul play-to consider the idea that you could have gone a step further than just hoping your husband might have what is known in the trade as “a horny coronary."”
“I didn’t have the slightest idea he had a heart problem!” I said. “Apparently the insurance companies didn’t, either. If they’d known, they never would have written those policies, would they?”
“Insurance companies will insure anyone who’s willing to pay enough freight,” he said, “and Gerald’s insurance agents didn’t see him chainsmoking and belting back the booze. You did. All protests aside, you must have known he was a heart attack looking for a place to happen. The cops know it, too. So they say, “Suppose she invited a friend down to the lake house and didn’t tell her husband? And suppose this friend just happened to jump out of the closet and yell Booga-Booga at exactly the right time for her and exactly the wrong one for her old man?” If the cops had any evidence that something like that might have happened, you’d be in deep shit, Jessie. Because under certain select circumstances, a hearty cry of Booga-Booga can be seen as an act of first-degree murder. The fact that you spent going on two days in handcuffs and had to half-skin yourself to get free militates strongly against the idea of an accomplice, but in another way, the very fact of the handcuffs makes an accomplice seem plausible to… well, to a certain type of police mind, let us say.”
I started at him, fascinated. I felt like a woman who’s just realized she has been square-dancing on the edge of an abyss. Up until then, looking at the shadowy planes and curves of Brandon’s face beyond the circle of light thrown by the bedlamp, the idea of the police thinking I might have murdered Gerald had only crossed my mind a couple of times, as a kind of grisly joke. Thank God I never joked about it with the cops, Ruth!
Brandon said, “Do you understand why it might be wiser not to mention this idea of an intruder in the house?”
“Yes,” I said. “Better to let sleeping dogs lie, right?”
As soon as I said it, I had an image of that goddamned mutt dragging Gerald across the floor by his upper arm-I could see the flap of skin that had come free and was lying across the dog’s snout. They ran the poor, damned thing down a couple of days later, by the way-it had made a little den for itself under the Laglans” boathouse, about half a mile up the shore. It had taken a pretty good piece of Gerald there, so it must have come back at least one more time after I scared it away with the Mercedes’s lights and horn. They shot it. It was wearing a bronze tag-not a regulation dog-tag so that Animal Control could trace the owner and give him hell, more’s the pity-with the name Prince on it. Prince, can you imagine? When Constable Teagarden came and told me they’d killed it, I was glad. I didn’t blame it for what it did-it wasn’t in much better shape than I was, Ruth-but I was glad then and I’m still glad.
All that’s off the subject, though-I was telling you about the conversation I had with Brandon after I’d told him there might have been a stranger in the house, He agreed, and most emphatically, that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie. I guessed I could live with that-it was a great relief just to have told one person-but I still wasn’t quite ready to let it go.
“The convincer was the phone,” I told him. “When I got out of the handcuffs and tried it, it was as dead as Abe Lincoln. As soon as I realized that, I became sure I was right-there had been a guy, and at some point he’d cut the telephone line coming in from the road. That’s what really got my ass out the door and into the Mercedes. You don’t know what scared is, Brandon, until you suddenly realize you might be out in the middle of the woods with an uninvited houseguest.”
He was smiling, but it was a less winning smile that time, I’m afraid. It was the kind of smile men always seem to get on their faces when they’re thinking about how silly women are, and how it should really be against the law to let them out without keepers. “You came to the conclusion that the line was cut after checking one phone-the one in the bedroom-and finding it dead. Right?”
That wasn’t exactly what happened and it wasn’t exactly what I’d thought, but I nodded-partly because it seemed easier, but mostly because it doesn’t do much good to talk to a man when he gets that particular expression on his face. It’s the one that says, “Women! Can’t live with “em, can’t shoot “em!” Unless you’ve changed completely, Ruth, I’m sure you know the one I’m talking about, and I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that all I really wanted at that point was for the entire conversation to be over.
“It was unplugged, that’s all,” Brandon said. By then he was sounding like Mister Rogers, explaining that sometimes it surely does seem like there’s a monster under the bed, by golly, but there’s really not. “Gerald pulled the t-connector out of the wall. He probably didn’t want his afternoon off-not to mention his little bondage fantasy-interrupted by calls from the office. He’d also pulled the plug on the one in the front hall, but the one in the kitchen was plugged in and working just fine. I have all this from the police reports.”
The light dawned, then, Ruth. I suddenly understood that all of them, all the men investigating what had happened out at the lake-had made certain assumptions about how I’d handled the situation and why I’d done the things I’d done. Most of them worked in my favor, and that certainly simplified things, but there was still something both infuriating and a little spooky in the realization that they drew most of their conclusions not from what I’d said or from any evidence they’d found in the house, but only from the fact that I’m a woman, and women can be expected to behave in certain predictable ways.
When you look at it that way, there’s no difference at all between Brandon Milheron in his natty three-piece suits and old Constable Teagarden in his satchel-seat bluejeans and red firehouse suspenders. Men still think the same things about us they have always thought, Ruth-I’m sure of it. A lot of them have learned to say the right things at the right times, but as my mother used to say, “Even a cannibal can learn to recite the Apostles” Creed.”