harmony through thick and thin, and now this— “I don’t need a hobby. I don’t need to keep busy. I need to find out why the fuck I just got accused of murder.”
“I didn’t, Toby, I never said—” I’d picked my angle well: the air went out of her and she slumped back against the wardrobe door. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I know. Me too. I want us to be happy. That’s exactly why I’m doing this.” The look of defeat on her face—I would have given anything to show her what I was seeing, how this could transform everything— “Baby, please, just trust me. I can do this. I’m not going to make a balls of it.”
“I know you’re not. That’s not—” She shook her head, eyes squeezed tight. “Just don’t do things that’ll make everything worse. Please.”
“I won’t,” I said, going to her. “I wasn’t planning on cornering gangsters in dark laneways with my Colt forty-five. I’m just going to talk to people, and see if they say anything interesting. That’s all.” And when she didn’t answer, or lean into me: “I promise. OK?”
Melissa took a deep breath and put a hand up to my cheek. “I suppose,” she said. And, moving away when I bent to kiss her: “Let’s go to bed. I’m exhausted.”
“Sure,” I said. “Me too.” Which I should have been, after the day I had had. But long after Melissa’s breathing had slowed into the familiar rhythm of sleep, I was wide awake. Not twitching at random noises and adding up the hours since my last Xanax, this time; just watching the subtle gradations of darkness shift across the ceiling, and thinking, and planning.
Nine
And so, once Melissa was off to work the next morning, I rang Susanna and Leon and invited them over for dinner and a few drinks—stressed out by all this crap, need to blow off some steam, yada yada. None of us mentioned garrotes or hoodies or detectives, which strengthened all my suspicions another notch: Rafferty had made it clear that he’d talked to both of them about that fucking hoodie, and I felt like that was something they should have told me more or less the moment he left, if they were anything like on my side.
Even over the phone their voices sounded different to me that day; they had a glittery, fractured quality that reminded me of the couple of times I’d tried acid. It took me a while to put my finger on what it was: danger. I had always thought of Leon and Susanna as fundamentally harmless. Not in a bad way—mostly it was out of love, we might bicker and bitch but deep down I knew they were good stuff; and also, if I was honest, it had always been hard to take them seriously enough for anything as weighty as danger. With what I knew now, every word and breath hummed with undercurrents and subtexts I couldn’t catch. They could be anything; they could be lethal, and I had never noticed.
I had a good feeling about that night, though. It sparkled tantalizingly in front of me like a fourth date, a final interview, the big one with the prize waiting at the end and I was all pumped up and ready to ace it. It wasn’t that I was expecting Leon to break down and spill out some lurid confession—although never say never, I could get lucky, who was to say? But if he was holding some grudge against me, I couldn’t wait to hear all about it. A couple of drinks and a bit of needling, and I was positive I could get him there; maybe, if I played my cards just right, get him to the break-in.
The big question, of course, was what I was going to do with all that if I got it. It was Leon, for God’s sake. One of my first memories was of the two of us sitting in a puddle in this garden, pouring mud on each other’s head. I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would get him thrown in jail, even if he had been trying to do exactly that to me.
Unless: if he really had been behind the break-in, then all bets were off. I could give him a pass on murder, and on trying to frame me, but the thought of him deliberately or even semi-deliberately turning me into this hit me like a Taser every time. I knew that was probably