Maybe I misread his state of mind when I came in. “Not at all. Here you go.” I take my iPhone from my pocket and hand it to him. “My password is 052772.”
“Your birthday.”
“Yep.”
He enters it, then starts scrolling through my recent calls. “You ought to use a tougher one than that.”
“Nothing to hide.”
Another wretched chuckle. “We’ve all got things to hide, bro. Mind if I look at a few texts?”
Shit. “Knock yourself out.”
As he scans several text threads, I wonder if he’s armed. Of course he is, I think, seeing how his Levi’s ride above his left shoe. He’s probably carrying a small automatic in that ankle holster, just like his father. Not that Paul would need that to kill me. He’s quite capable of doing it with his hands. After about a minute of studying my phone, he straightens up and hands it back to me. “This your only cell phone?”
“Paul, what is this? You in the CIA now?”
He looks at the floor for a couple of seconds, then takes out his iPhone, presses a button, and holds it out so that I can see a photograph displayed on its screen. The image has the pixelated graininess that results from being zoomed to the maximum, but I can clearly see Jet hugging me on the edge of my patio. This is the image Max shot yesterday from the trees behind my house. Jet’s back is to the camera. One of my arms is wrapped around the small of her back, while my other hand cradles the base of her neck. It doesn’t look very platonic. If I weren’t several inches taller than she, the pose would have looked like a kiss.
“What the hell?” I say. “Where’d you get this?”
I asked the question before I realized the risk. For all I know, Max has given him the whole history of the shot and told Paul that I already know it exists.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Do you have private detectives following her or something?”
“Should I?”
“Are you serious?”
He smiles strangely. “It’s not like we haven’t been here before, man. You two were fucking all y’all’s senior year. Why shouldn’t you be now? Right of re-entry and all that?”
“What?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Paul, what the hell? What do you want to know?”
He takes a deep breath and holds it like a man about to throw a punch. “Are you fucking my wife?”
There’s only one acceptable answer to this question—at least when you’re standing face-to-face with the husband. “I’m not.”
“Then who are you fucking?”
“Nobody.”
The strange smile returns, and he shakes his head. “Okay, now I’m suspicious. Come on. You’re not doing Nadine Sullivan?”
Naturally he would think that. And right now, I’m grateful that Nadine’s there to divert attention. “If I was, would that be your business?”
“You are.” He nods as though confirming his instinct. “Can’t say I haven’t watched her walk across that café a time or three. She’s got a tight ass, in a good way. Some people say she’s gay, though.”
The thrumming in my chest has slipped down a gear, but I’m wondering if Paul is distracting me in order to hit me with an unexpected jab. “She’s not gay.”
“Huh. So, how about you tell me about the picture? That’s your house, right?”
“You know it is.”
“So what the hell’s Jet doing out there?”
I shrug as if the answer should be obvious, almost inconsequential. “She came to talk to me about some stories. She works a lot of cases involving local corruption, and she knew I suspected the Poker Club might have something to do with Buck. I told her that at the groundbreaking—just like I told you.”
Paul stares at me without speaking. His wordless gaze is disconcerting, but it doesn’t compare with the primal X-ray of his father’s stare.
“That’s what Jet said,” he says at length.
I turn up my palms. “There you go. Two sources.” Glib, I know, but I’m riffing. Guilty men don’t make light chatter, or, at least, that’s what I’m thinking. Maybe that’s exactly what they do—like Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder.
Paul takes two steps closer to me, into my personal space. It’s a tense thing, standing close to another male when a woman’s fidelity is being discussed. I feel the energy crackling between us.
“But you love her,” he says in a leading tone.
Whoa. “Of course I love her. I always have.”
He nods. “And you want her to leave me. To come to you. Go back to Washington with you.”
It’s hard to lie about this with a straight face. “Paul, what the fuck, man? What’s gotten into you?”
After a couple of seconds, he looks away, then walks to the small refrigerator in the corner of my office and looks down at it with contempt. “How come you don’t keep beer in this thing?”
“Sorry. There’s probably some in the break room fridge.”
He waves his hand and sits in one of the two chairs that face my desk. Rather than look at me, he bends at the waist and puts his head in his hands, then begins pushing his fingers through his hair with quite a bit of force. He looks like a man suffering from intractable head pain.
“Paul . . . ? Is your head hurting, man?”
“Just give me a minute.”
“Sure.”
I walk back behind my desk and sit, wondering if the worst has passed. Last night Jet told me his temper has been worsening, giving me the idea he could go off at any moment, like old dynamite. But Paul is more like a man being eaten alive from the inside. And though he does not know it, there can be no doubt that I have played a part in triggering that process.
Does he really not know? asks the cold voice from within. How could he not?
As he sits there, massaging his scalp and neck like a man in the corner of an asylum, I ask myself something I’ve asked a hundred times before. Why do so many people being deceived by their spouses go to absurd lengths to deny what they see? What they sense with their intuition? Even what, in the end, they hear whispered by their friends?
I used to think it was to avoid the pain of betrayal, of facing inadequacy, of confronting a train of mistakes and admitting that their lives are an illusion and that they didn’t measure up to their partner’s image of them. But that’s not the marrow of it. Once a wife or husband begins a love affair, the marriage becomes a brittle, carefully maintained façade, beneath which lies a horror that most humans lack the courage to face. And the horror is this: when your wife or husband truly gives themselves to another person, they haven’t done it to hurt you. In fact, they’ve probably taken great care to avoid hurting you. No, the unspeakable truth is that you no longer matter to them. Except as the mother or father of their children, you do not exist. That is why people refuse to see. To do so, they’d have to crack the door on a limitless darkness in which they have come to mean nothing to the person who knows them better than anyone else in the world. They must face, probably for the first time, being utterly alone. And that way lies madness.