Strangers

to erotic pursuits, though it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable. He had used sick leave and vacation time to spend long - often frantic - hours in bed with Pepper or others whose "careers" he managed, and there was no variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess. The hooker chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious substances, devices, appliances, and clothing - dildos, penis rings, spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment handcuffs…
        Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew queasy. "Please stop. What's the point? He's dead, for God's sake."
        Pepper shrugged. "I thought you'd want to know. He threw away a lot of his money on this… this sex thing. Since you're the executor of the estate, I thought you'd want to know."
        

    ***
        
        The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of the type obtainable at any business supply store.
        Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech, burnished-steel, cone-shaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.
        Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall of windows. "I don't figure it's much of an estate. He spent money pretty freely. But there's his car, some jewelry."
        Jorja noticed that Alan's will had been notarized just four days ago, and she shivered. "He must've been considering suicide when he had this notarized; otherwise, he wouldn't have felt the need for it."
        Pepper shrugged. "I guess."
        "But didn't you see the danger? Didn't you see he was troubled?"
        "Like I told you, honey, he'd been weird for a couple months."
        "Yes, but there must've been a noticeable change in him during the last few days, something different from that other strangeness. When he told you he'd made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of yours, didn't you wonder? Wasn't there anything about him - his manner, his look, his state of mind - that worried you?"
        Pepper stood up impatiently. "I'm no psychologist, honey. His stuff's in the bedroom. If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I'll call them. But his other stuff - jewelry, personal things - you can get them out of here right now. I'll show you where everything is."
        Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done something to save him? By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate, it touched Jorja. She tried to remember how he had sounded on the telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him. She remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.
        Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bed room. She loathed this task, pawing through Alan's things, but it had to be done.
        Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward. "Oh, shit. I can't believe the damned cops left it like this."
        Jorja looked in the open door before she realized that this was the bathroom in which Alan had killed himself. Blood was all over the beige tile floor. More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet. The wall behind the toilet was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach blot, as if Alan's psychological condition and the meaning of his death were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.
        "Shot himself twice," Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want to hear. "First in the crotch. Is that queer or what? Then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger."
        Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.
        "The damned cops should've cleaned up the worst of it," Pepper said, as if she thought policemen ought to be armed