of spittle flying from his mouth as he raged, I want my life, my Paige .
. . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
“You understand, Vic?”
“Not to you?”
“Only if Paige is with me. Only then.”
“What–”
“I’ll explain later,” Marty interrupted. “Everybody’s waiting for me.”
He turned and hurried along the front walk toward the street, looking
back once to say, “Only Paige.”
. . . my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
At home, in the kitchen, while recounting the assault to the officer who
had caught the call and been first on the scene, Marty allowed a police
technician to ink his fingers and roll them on a record sheet.
They needed to be able to differentiate between his prints and those of
the intruder. He wondered if he and The Other would prove to be as
identical in that regard as they seemed in every other.
Paige also submitted to the process. It was the first time in their
lives that either of them had been fingerprinted. Though Marty
understood the need for it, the whole process seemed invasive.
After he got what he required, the technician moistened a paper towel
with a glycerol cleanser and said that it would remove all the ink. It
didn’t. No matter how hard he rubbed, dark stains remained in the
whorls of his skin.
Before sitting down to make a more complete statement to the officer in
charge, Marty went upstairs to change into dry clothes.
He also took four Anacin.
He turned up the thermostat, and the house quickly overheated.
But periodic shivers still plagued him–largely because of the unnerving
presence of so many police officers.
They were everywhere in the house. Some were in uniforms, others were
not, and all of them were strangers whose presence made Marty feel
further violated.
He hadn’t anticipated how utterly a victim’s privacy was peeled away
beginning the moment he reported a serious crime. Policemen and
technicians were in his office to photograph the room where the violent
confrontation had begun, dig a couple of bullets out of the wall, dust
for fingerprints, and take blood samples from the carpet.
They were also photographing the upstairs hall, stairs, and foyer.
In their search for evidence that the intruder might have left behind,
they assumed they had an invitation to poke into any room or closet.
Of course they were in his house to help him, and Marty was grateful for
their efforts. Yet it was embarrassing to think that strangers might be
noting the admittedly obsessive way he organized the clothes in his
closet according to color-he and Emily both–the fact that he collected
pennies and nickels in a half-gallon jar as might a boy saving for his
first bicycle, and other unimportant yet highly personal details of his
life.
And he was more unsettled by the plainclothes detective in charge than
by the rest of them combined. The guy’s name was Cyrus Lowbock, and he
elicited a complex response that went beyond mere embarrassment.
The detective could have made a good living as a male model posing for
magazine advertisements for Rolls-Royce, tuxedoes, caviar, and
stock-brokerage services. He was about fifty, trim, with salt-and
pepper hair, a tan even in November, an aquiline nose, fine cheekbones,
a dark-blue cable-knit sweater, and white shirt–he had taken off a
windbreaker–Lowbock managed to appear both distinguished and athletic,
although the sports one would associate with him were not football and
baseball but tennis, sailing, powerboat racing, and other pursuits of
the upper classes. He looked less like any popular image of a cop than
like a man who had been born to wealth and knew how to manage and
preserve it.
Lowbock sat across the dining-room table from Marty, listening intently
to his account of the assault, asking questions largely to clarify the
details, and writing in a spiral-bound notebook with an expensive
black-and-gold Montblanc pen. Paige sat beside Marty, offering
emotional support. They were the only three people in the room,
although unifor Lowbock, and twice the detective excused himself to
examine evidence that had been deemed relevant to the case.
Sipping Pepsi from a ceramic mug, soothing his throat while recounting