“Wait. Wait. Why would someone try to hide blood but then mess up the living room—”
“We’ll figure that out, don’t worry, Nick,” Rhonda said quietly.
“I don’t get it, I just don’t—”
“Let’s sit down,” Boney said. She pointed me toward a dining room chair. “You eat anything yet? Want a sandwich, something?”
I shook my head. Boney was taking turns playing different female characters: powerful woman, doting caregiver, to see what got the best results.
“How’s your marriage, Nick?” Rhonda asked. “I mean, five years, that’s not far from the seven-year itch.”
“The marriage was fine,” I repeated. “It’s fine. Not perfect, but good, good.”
She wrinkled her nose: You lie.
“You think she might have run off?” I asked, too hopefully. “Made this look like a crime scene and took off? Runaway-wife thing?”
Boney began ticking off reasons no: “She hasn’t used her cell, she hasn’t used her credit cards, ATM cards. She made no major cash withdrawals in the weeks before.”
“And there’s the blood,” Gilpin added. “I mean, again, I don’t want to sound harsh, but the amount of blood spilled? That would take some serious … I mean, I couldn’t have done it to myself. I’m talking some deep wounds there. Your wife got nerves of steel?”
“Yes. She does.” She also had a deep phobia of blood, but I’d wait and let the brilliant detectives figure that out.
“It seems extremely unlikely,” Gilpin said. “If she were to wound herself that seriously, why would she mop it up?”
“So really, let’s be honest, Nick,” Boney said, leaning over on her knees so she could make eye contact with me as I stared at the floor. “How was your marriage currently? We’re on your side, but we need the truth. The only thing that makes you look bad is you holding out on us.”
“We’ve had bumps.” I saw Amy in the bedroom that last night, her face mottled with the red hivey splotches she got when she was angry. She was spitting out the words—mean, wild words—and I was listening to her, trying to accept the words because they were true, they were technically true, everything she said.
“Describe the bumps for us,” Boney said.
“Nothing specific, just disagreements. I mean, Amy is a blow-stack. She bottles up a bunch of little stuff and—whoom!—but then it’s over. We never went to bed angry.”
“Not Wednesday night?” Boney asked.
“Never,” I lied.
“Is it money, what you mostly argue about?”
“I can’t even think what we’d argue about. Just stuff.”
“What stuff was it the night she went missing?” Gilpin said it with a sideways grin, like he’d uttered the most unbelievable gotcha.
“Like I told you, there was the lobster.”
“What else? I’m sure you didn’t scream about the lobster for a whole hour.”
At that point Bleecker waddled partway down the stairs and peered through the railings.
“Other household stuff too. Married-couple stuff. The cat box,” I said. “Who would clean the cat box.”
“You were in a screaming argument about a cat box,” Boney said.
“You know, the principle of the thing. I work a lot of hours, and Amy doesn’t, and I think it would be good for her if she did some basic home maintenance. Just basic upkeep.”
Gilpin jolted like an invalid woken from an afternoon nap. “You’re an old-fashioned guy, right? I’m the same way. I tell my wife all the time, ‘I don’t know how to iron, I don’t know how to do the dishes. I can’t cook. So, sweetheart, I’ll catch the bad guys, that I can do, and you throw some clothes in the washer now and then.’ Rhonda, you were married, did you do the domestic stuff at home?”
Boney looked believably annoyed. “I catch bad guys too, idiot.”
Gilpin rolled his eyes toward me; I almost expected him to make a joke—sounds like someone’s on the rag—the guy was laying it on so thick.
Gilpin rubbed his vulpine jaw. “So you just wanted a housewife,” he said to me, making the proposition seem reasonable.
“I wanted—I wanted whatever Amy wanted. I really didn’t care.” I appealed to Boney now, Detective Rhonda Boney with the sympathetic air that seemed at least partly authentic. (It’s not, I reminded myself.) “Amy couldn’t decide what to do here. She couldn’t find a job, and she wasn’t interested in The Bar. Which is fine, if you want to stay home, that’s fine, I said. But when she stayed home, she was unhappy too. And she’d wait for me to fix it. It was like I was in charge of her happiness.”