He went on, “Want to know the truth? It makes me wonder what really happened to his wife.”
I swallowed hard and said, “There was nothing suspicious about the physical findings. She had powder residues on her right hand-”
He cut me off. “Oh, sure. She pulled the trigger. I don’t doubt that, but maybe we know why now, huh? Maybe he’s been doing this for years. Maybe she found out.”
Cranking the engine, he turned on his lights. Momentarily, we were rocking between houses and emerging on the street.
“Look.” He wasn’t going to give it a rest. “I don’t mean to pry. Better put, it ain’t my idea of a good time, okay? But you know him, Doc. You been seeing him, right?”
A transvestite was sashaying along a sidewalk, his yellow skirt swishing around his shapely legs, his false breasts firm and high, the false nipples erect beneath a tight white shell. Glassy eyes glanced our way.
“You been seeing him, right?” he asked again.
“Yes.”
My voice was almost inaudible.
“What about last Friday night?”
I couldn’t remember at first. I couldn’t think. The transvestite languidly turned around and went the other way.
“I took my niece to dinner and a movie.”
“He with you?”
“No.”
“You know where he was last Friday night?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t call or nothing?”
“No.”
Silence.
“Shit,” he muttered in frustration. “If only I’d known about it then, known what I know about him now. I would’ve driven past his crib. You know, checked to see where the hell he was. Shit.”
Silence.
He tossed the cigarette butt out the window and lit up again. He was smoking one right after another. “So, how long you been seeing him?”
“Several months. Since April.”
“He seeing any other ladies, or just you?”
“I don’t think he’s been seeing anybody else. I don’t know. Obviously there’s a lot about him I don’t know.”
He went on with the relentlessness of a threshing machine, “You ever pick up on anything? Anything off about him, I’m saying?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
My tongue was getting thick. I was almost slurring my words as if I were falling asleep.
“Off,” he repeated. “Sex-wise.”
I said nothing.
“He ever rough with you? Force anything?”
A pause. “What’s he like? He the animal Abby Turnbull described? Can you see him doing something like that, like what he done to her?”
I was hearing him and not hearing him. My thoughts were ebbing and flowing as if I were slipping in and out of consciousness.
“. . . like aggression, I’m saying. Was he aggressive? You notice anything strange . . . ?”
The images. Bill. His hands crushing me, tearing at my clothes, pushing me down hard into the couch.
“. . . guys like that, they have a pattern. It ain’t sex they’re really after. They have to take it. You know, a conquest . . .”
He was so rough. He was hurting me. He thrust his tongue into my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t he. It was as if he’d become somebody else.
“Don’t matter a damn he’s good-looking, could have it when he wants it. You see that? People like that, they’re off. OFF . . .” Like Tony used to do when he was drunk and angry with me.
“. . . I mean, he’s a friggin’ rapist, Doc. I know you don’t want to hear it. But, goddam it, it’s true. Seems like you might have picked up on something . .”
He drank too much, Bill did. He was worse when he had too much to drink.
“. . . happens all the time. You wouldn’t believe the reports I get, these young ladies calling me to their cribs two months after the fact. They finally get around to telling someone. Maybe a friend convinces them to come forward with the info. Bankers, businessmen, politicians. They meet some babe in a bar, buy her a drink and slip in a little chloral hydrate. Boom. Next thing, she’s waking up with this animal in her bed, feels like a friggin’ truck’s been run through her . . .”