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He straightened up and walked over to the file cabinet and took something out of a drawer. Metal flashed and jangled in his hand. “Look at this,” he said, dangling a pair of handcuffs toward me, holding them with his thumb and finger, the way someone might hold a dead mouse by the tail. “Did you ever see a pair of these before? Do you want to try them on?”
“No!” I pulled back.
He laughed. “They’re not so scary. I’ve put them on some bad people in my time, though. Some real bad characters. Remember that guy who shot up the motel a couple of years ago?” I shook my head. “I collared him. A real bad guy. Look.” Sergeant Tony took the key out of the lock on the handcuffs and then clipped the cuffs over his left wrist and his right. He dropped the key in the right-front pocket of his shorts. Holding his hands out, he strained against the metal. “See? The real thing.” He thrust his hands at me. “Feel it. Go on, feel it.”
I guessed he was talking about the chain between the handcuffs, so I touched it lightly.
“Tough, huh? Nobody’s gonna break out of these. That metal’s so strong you can’t even saw through it. You see all these things in the movies where they take an ax and chop through handcuffs, but that stuff’s a bunch of bull.”
He came over and stood close to me. “Now, give me a hand here. Reach in this pocket and get out the key.” He pushed his hip toward me, indicating the right-front pocket of his shorts. I didn’t really think he meant it, so I smiled.
“Come on, come on,” he said impatiently. “Help me get out of these. Reach in and get it.” He pushed his hip closer, until he was almost leaning over me. My face was just at the level of his stomach; his gray, knit shirt gave off a strong, sharp odor. I turned my head away and put my hands behind the chair.
“Come on,” he snapped. “What’s the matter? Get me out of here. Nothin’s gonna happen.”
I buried my face in my shoulder. He wasn’t touching me, but he was standing so close that I felt crushed by the weight of him. For a few seconds, he stayed there without saying anything, and then he walked back behind his desk.
“I don’t know what you’re scared of,” he said. “It’s just a toy.” He held up his hands again and pushed a rivet on the left cuff. The clamp popped open, freeing his hand. “Trick, see,” he said. Then he did the same thing with the other cuff. “Nothin’ to be scared of.”
I stood up quickly. All the energy had drained out of me, but I stepped to the door and started fiddling with the lock. I couldn’t get it to work.
“I thought you wanted to talk,” he said.
I kept working on the lock and pulling on the metal door, which banged in its frame. “Stop!” he barked. He walked over to me slowly. I turned, and my back was against the door. It was hot in the room and the door felt hot. He stopped right in front of me. Just below his flattop, his forehead bristled with fresh beads of sweat. “I feel sorry for you, Martha,” he said evenly. “You don’t know what you want.”
He reached past me and flicked the lock, then pulled the door open an inch or two. “Go on,” he said. For a moment, I hesitated. Was it possible I’d misunderstood? Then I hurried out the door and down the hall.
TWENTY-THREE
Bunny came in the middle of the afternoon, parking the Pontiac at the curb and honking until I ran out. She told me she refused to go in the Vernons’ house again, so I climbed into the front seat beside her. Her uniform was rumpled and stained in spots, as if she’d got two or three days’ work out of it. When I told her about my call to the lawyer, she didn’t say anything. She stared out through the streaky windshield and picked at the plastic covering on the steering wheel. Over the years, she’d dug a small hole there, and the nail on her right index finger had a permanent black crown to show for it, a tiny marring of her natural beauty.
“Beach is undependable,” she murmured after a while, as if it were just another unimportant fact about the lawyer, a detail that she’d known all along but hadn’t bothered to mention.
I didn’t tell her about my visit to Sergeant Tony.
Though the car was parked in the shade of an oak, and the windows were open, the front seat was suffocatingly hot. I slouched down, my knees pushing against the dashboard. Occasionally, someone walked along the sidewalk and looked down at us in mild curiosity.
Bunny rambled on about the country club, about the bickering between Beatrice and Millie, the other two waitresses, about how someone had stolen $42 from the pro shop, about Shorty’s latest unhappiness. But it was imitation conversation. She was just following the routine, and there was no spirit in it for either of us.
Finally, I sat up and said, “Can we talk about Eddie for a minute?”
“Now?”
“Time’s running out.”
“I’m so tired,” Bunny said. “I’m bone tired.”
“I know.”
“I can’t sleep. I just can’t fall asleep.”
“Me, too.”
“So tired.”
“But Eddie—”
“I sleep when I’m with
