He inspects the left leg closely through the sheer stocking that veils it. An absolutely perfect leg. Pristine.
She goes on, “If a break heals cleanly, there’s nothing to see.”
His hands come up to her knee as if of their own accord, and he runs them both down the sides of her calf. It is warm and smooth. Oranges, she smells like oranges. He exhales and feels her body stiffen under his touch.
Her voice even more tense, she says, “You should know that, and I suspect you do.”
Suddenly he realizes what’s making her nervous. Him. He immediately lets the heavy beaded hem of her dress drop back into place, covering her legs, and settles back on his heels. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. Not that way. I am married.”
She shrugs her shoulders as much as she can, given her restraints. “That wouldn’t stop a lot of men.”
“It stops me.”
“Your wife is lucky she has you.”
“Your experience with marriage isn’t as good, it seems.”
“No. I’ve never been happily married. What’s your lovely wife’s name, Virgil?”
“Does it matter?”
“I’m telling you everything about me. I told you where I came from and the name I was born with. I told you everything that happened to me, even the worst things. I told you—” Her voice catches but she plunges ahead. “I told you what Ray did. Tried to do. Every detail of my life, no matter how small, is open to you. I think you can tell me your wife’s name.”
He swallows hard and says, “Her name is Iris.”
“Thank you.”
He doesn’t know what to say after that. He knows he’s given something up, but he doesn’t see how it could do her any good to know it. His wife’s name isn’t a pass code. It isn’t going to get her anywhere.
“Now, let’s discuss the night of the crime,” he says. “If you didn’t commit the murder, where were you? You cut the man in the box in half with an ax, you finished out the show, and then—what?”
She gapes at him.
He explains, “What came after is what I mean. Tell me that.”
In a voice of wonder, she says, “I don’t believe it. You were there.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I use a saw. Always. I only used an ax once, and that was last night, in Waterloo.”
He’s in trouble now. “Maybe I misspoke. Or misremembered. It was something sharp is all.”
“No. No, I don’t think so.” She leans forward in her seat as far as she can, visibly excited. Life comes back to her face, color to her cheeks. “You were in Waterloo, to see my show, and you were heading north from there the same as I was, and that’s what brought you to that restaurant. It’s all so clear.”
Her air of triumph is irritating. It shouldn’t matter that he was there, but he feels like it gives her some kind of power over him, to know that he’s seen her in her element. Even now, she seems less a prisoner than before.
“I didn’t go there to see your ridiculous show,” he spits.
“So why were you there?”
“Visiting a doctor.”
“Why? Because you were shot?”
Shock washes over him, through him. “How—how did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” she says with a hint of a smile. “The stiffness I asked you about. It’s partly in your legs, but not entirely. You carry it in your whole body—it has something to do with your back. Lower back, I think. Like you’re protecting it. And you’re a police officer, so guns are your business.”
She’s gotten close enough to the truth on her own that he doesn’t see the point of hiding the rest of it. “And so it was.”
“Who shot you?”
“I interrupted a robbery at the bank. Three months back.” He doesn’t want to relive it. He tells the story as if it happened to someone else. “Got the man to lay down his weapon and the money. Didn’t see his accomplice, who shot me from behind. Twice.”
“But you survived. That’s close to a miracle.”
He lets himself sit, lowering his body onto the desk facing her, leaning forward. “Is it? They got the one in my leg but the one in my back is still there. Next to the spine. The doctor in Waterloo is the best for miles around. I wanted him to take it out. He said it was too risky. Too close to the nerve. If he goes after it, there’s a good chance of paralyzing me, so he won’t operate. Flat out refused.”
“It still seems like a happy ending. Isn’t it? Aren’t you better off alive with a bullet in your back than dead, with or without one?”
“You’d think so, but no,” he says grimly. “The human body isn’t like a block of ice or wood, holding steady. Over days or weeks or years, the bullet could move. If it moves too far toward my spine, I’ll lose the use of my legs. Or if it migrates—that’s the word he used—toward a major organ, I could bleed to death from the inside.”
“Oh,” she breathes.
She sounds sincere. She sounds like she pities him. It brings him up short for a moment. Her pity for him is wrong, so wrong, when he is the one with the gun and the cuffs and the power to put her on the gallows, and she is alone and weak and handcuffed, still, to a chair. He doesn’t want to be pitied. He wants to be whole.
“That’s my story,” he says. “Now tell me yours. Tell me what comes next. How did you turn from a girl who liked to dance into a living scandal onstage every night, cutting grown men in pieces?”
“I’m getting to that,” she says.
He says, “I’m listening.”
It’s only after she begins her story again, her voice as smooth and warm as a pillow, that his eyes come to rest on her throat. And he notices, with some surprise, that the bruise that piqued his curiosity earlier is gone, as if it had never been there at all.