Urge to Kill

The built-in refrigerator door had so much weight and heft it felt like a well-balanced vault door when he opened it. There wasn’t much in the fridge in the way of food—a small bowl of apples, something shadowy in the cheese compartment, an unopened carton of orange juice, six bottles of white wine, and half a dozen bottles of Heineken beer. Like the refrigerator of a supermodel, Quinn thought, though he didn’t know one supermodel. He withdrew one of the green Heineken bottles and closed the refrigerator door. He used a bottle opener he’d noticed in one of the drawers rather than risk that the cap wasn’t a twist-off, and then carried the bottle into the bedroom.

Zoe didn’t appear to have moved. The warmth and scent of their afternoon sex was still in the air, not yet dissipated by the slowly rotating ceiling fan above the acre-sized bed.

Quinn touched the cold bottle to Zoe’s damp forehead, and she smiled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, facing half away from her.

Before she got a chance to ask him what he was thinking, he said, “Why do you have so many damned pillows?” He was staring at the stacks of throw pillows from the bed that towered on the carpet.

“They’re for show,” she said.

“Ah. I know about that.” He took another sip of cold beer. “I visited your doctor friend this morning.”

Tick, tick, tick, went the fan.

Zoe was silent.

“He won’t bother you again,” Quinn said.

“He hadn’t bothered me lately,” Zoe said. “It was you he might have bothered.”

“Yeah, with his anger issues.”

“Do you think he was the one who broke into your office and assaulted you?”

“I still don’t know what to think.”

“So you talked to him mostly about me.”

“I had to, Zoe.”

“Because he might have attacked you, you were afraid for me.”

“Anger issues are anger issues,” Quinn said.

“Did you terrorize him?”

Quinn smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Whatever Beeker’s faults, he doesn’t seem easy to terrorize.” He looked over at her. “You want a sip of beer?”

“No, thanks. Did you threaten him?”

“He threatened me. Us, actually. Said he had some very personal photographs of you and if we harassed him he’d post them on the Internet. He said you’d know where.”

“I believe he might,” Zoe said. “Those photos—”

“I don’t care about them, Zoe. He won’t post them.”

“You said he didn’t scare.”

“But he knows what will happen to him if he posts those kinds of photos of you, if he ever bothers you again. He didn’t have to be scared to understand.”

“How can you know that?”

“I was emphatic.”

He still didn’t look at her, but he heard the sheets rustle as she moved closer on the wide bed. He felt her kiss his bare side, play her tongue over him. It was only slightly warmer than his flesh.

Tick, tick, tick…

“What did he say when you brought up the subject of the office break-in?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring it up directly, but he doesn’t have an alibi for its time frame. Says he was home in bed alone.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I told him I didn’t believe anyone about everything.”

“Is that true?”

“It is except for you,” Quinn said, twisting his torso so he could look into her eyes. “You’re different.”

52

Pearl dropped the mail all over the floor but didn’t give a damn. She was too tired.

She closed and locked her door, then stepped over the clutter on the floor.

After another hot and unproductive day on the job, she’d finally found refuge in her apartment. She’d left the window-unit air conditioner on low so the place wouldn’t preheat like an oven, but it still felt almost as hot as outside. Sometimes when she left the unit on like that it would freeze up and put out only brief wafts of neutral air while spitting occasional flecks of ice.

Like this time.

She switched off the struggling unit and turned away from it in disgust.

The bedroom was even warmer than the living room. She turned on that window unit, then went into the kitchen and switched on its smaller and almost useless air conditioner. The apartment’s air conditioners looked about twenty years old. Where did the landlord buy this crap? If it kept up like this, she’d have to curl up in the refrigerator to find any relief from the heat.

She returned to the living room, slipped off her shoes and blouse, and slumped down on the sofa wearing only slacks and her bra, waiting for the bedroom and kitchen to cool down a few degrees. She’d have a snack and a cold beer, then go into the bedroom and stretch out wearing only her panties and try to read the latest New Yorker. For some reason she enjoyed reading about the Broadway plays she couldn’t afford to see.

When she’d lived with Quinn they’d often gone to the theater. He was a Broadway buff and had turned her into one before they’d split up, leaving her with a habit she couldn’t afford. He’d enjoyed Pinter and Stoppard, she The Lion King.

Quinn.

Pearl wasn’t sure if it was the heat or lack of progress on the investigation that was keeping her in such a state of irritation, or if it was the knowledge of Quinn’s affair with the psychoanalyst Zoe.