Certain Prey

dead-letter file.
    “You heard about Barbara’s parents?” Allen asked.
    “Just rumors.”
    “They were going to sue me—for wrongful death, claiming I was involved in killing Barbara, like that O.J. lawsuit,” Allen said indignantly. “They were gonna try to keep me from inheriting, so they’d get her money. Then it turned out that ninety percent of the money goes to the foundation, not to me. If they sued me, and won, a hundred percent would go to the foundation. They wouldn’t get a dime.”
    “Ho,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. They said screw that, we aren’t suing if there isn’t any payoff. They dropped the whole thing.”
    “Hum,” said Lucas.
    “Exactly.”
    Allen was indignant, but his eyes kept wandering away from Lucas. Lucas had seen it before in somebody who felt guilty about something and was about to confess. Allen, Lucas thought, wasn’t here to talk about his in-laws.
    “So what else is going on?” Lucas asked, leaning back, trying to sound kindly. He wished Sloan were back. Sloan was a master at this. “How are you doing? Are you okay? We were pretty rough on you for a while.”
    “Well . . .” Allen smiled, and Lucas thought, Here it comes. “I came to see you because you know about the case, and you seemed like a pretty good guy, and everybody says you’re pretty smart and you’ve been around . . .”
    “Okay . . .” Keep him rolling.
    “I’ve been feeling kind of weird about something. About the case.”
    “You mean, psychologically troubled? I . . .”
    “Not exactly,” Allen said. He leaned forward, intent now. “You know, I really did love Barbara. She was fun, in a quiet way. But we were different, and this affair—you know that I had an affair?”
    “Yes,” Lucas said. He gestured with one hand, as if to say, So what? Haven’t we all?
    The tentative smile flickered over Allen’s face again. “When Barbara got killed, I felt terrible about it. Your guys found out about the affair, and I hadn’t told Carmel. When she found out, she hit the roof. She went and talked to Louise, and now everybody’s in an uproar . . .”
    Lucas nodded: “I can see why Carmel would be unhappy. Facing the possibility of defending you in court.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Allen said, brushing the comment away. So that wasn’t where he was going, Lucas thought. “The day you told her that you weren’t so interested in me anymore . . .”
    Lucas glanced at a wall calendar. “A week ago today . . .”
    “Exactly a week ago,” Allen said, “Carmel came over to my house to give me the news. And we had a drink, yadaya-dayada, and then she comes on to me.”
    “Yeah?” Lucas’s eyebrows went up.
    “Yeah. Really hard. Really hard. And you know Carmel. She gets what she wants.”
    Lucas allowed a faint man-to-man smile to slip onto his face: “The next thing you knew, you were working closely with your attorney.”
    “What she did was fuck my brains loose. And she’s been back three more times since then. Does that sound bad? Does that sound crazy? I can’t sleep thinking about it, but I really can’t talk to any of my friends, either. They’d go bat-shit if I told them. Most of them are Barbara’s friends, too, out at the club.”
    Lucas shook his head: “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I’ve seen all kinds of reactions to spousal deaths, and believe me, you’re not the first guy to fall in bed with another woman after his wife’s been killed. Maybe there’s a drive for intimacy.”
    “You think so?” Allen said. He seemed to brighten momentarily. Relief? Lucas wasn’t sure.
    “It’s something like that,” Lucas said. “Listen, as long as you’ve told me all this . . . why Carmel? She doesn’t seem like your type. Detective Sherrill told me that you were a pretty relaxed guy. Carmel, on the other hand . . .”
    “Detective Sherrill, she’s the one . . .” He made a figure with his hands.
    “Yeah.”
    “She seemed nice.” His eyes wandered away again, and he hunched forward in his chair: “Carmel . . . pillow talks. She told me that she’s been in love with me for two years, and hid it, because she thought it was hopeless, because I was married to a rich woman. She told me that Louise— that’s the woman I was having an affair with—was a miserable gold-digger and a loser. She gets really violent about it.”
    “Really?” Keep him rolling. “I’m serious. Once she grabbed me by the dick and said she’d cut it off if I ever put it back in