Full dark,no stars

“It wasn’t me,” he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. “I’m no adulterer. It was BD. It’s always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spelling, because I sometimes called him BD back when I first told you about him. You might not remember that, but I did.”

She was impressed by the obsessive lengths he’d gone to. No wonder he hadn’t been caught. If she hadn’t stubbed her toe on that damned carton “None of them had any relation to me or my business. Either of my businesses. That would be very bad. Very dangerous. But I travel a lot, and I keep my eyes open. BD-the BD inside-he does, too. We watch out for the snooty ones. You can always tell. They wear their skirts too high and show their bra straps on purpose. They entice men. That Stacey Moore, for instance. You read about her, I’m sure. Married, but that didn’t keep her from brushing her titties against me. She worked as a waitress in a coffee shop-the Sunnyside in Waterville. I used to go up there to Mickleson’s Coins, remember? You even went with me a couple of times, when Pets was at Colby. This was before George Mickleson died and his son sold off all the stock so he could go to New Zealand or somewhere. That woman was all over me, Darce! Always asking me if I wanted a warm-up on my coffee and saying stuff like how ’bout those Red Sox, bending over, rubbing her titties on my shoulder, trying her best to get me hard. Which she did, I admit it, I’m a man with a man’s needs, and although you never turned me away or said no… well, rarely… I’m a man with a man’s needs and I’ve always been highly sexed. Some women sense that and like to play on it. It gets them off.”

He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.

“Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Well, I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. ‘Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smell it on you, but this little rub’s all you’re going to get, so deal with it.’ I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him.”

He shook his head slowly.

“There are lots of women like that. It’s easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There’s a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I’ve done that… oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could call it a hobby, I guess. You could say I collect information as well as coins. Usually it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD will say, ‘She’s the one you want to follow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We’ll make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.’ And that’s what I do.”

He took her hand, and folded her limp and chilly fingers into his.

“You think I’m crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I’m not, honey. It’s BD who’s crazy… or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I’ll always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb-illiterate, anyway-and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”

He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men. It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.

“You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it-at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that-but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual… well… acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of… I don’t know… go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing.”

Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.

“And now… everything’s in Darcellen’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built… modest as it would look to some people, I guess… I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”

“You stopped,” she said.

He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”