Somebody Else's Music(107)

“Attack, whatever. You said yourself he was asking about where you were. And you know you were here, in full view of everybody, for the whole time. And you know that means that you’re going to be off the hook, probably sooner rather than later. So if you’ll just—”

“If they don’t arrest somebody for this crime,” Liz said carefully, “the tabloids will pin it on me, forever, and it won’t matter at all that I couldn’t have committed the attack on Emma Kenyon. The legitimate press will pin it on me, too, they’ll just be more polite about it. You know all that as well as I do.”

“The police usually do catch murderers,” Jimmy said.

“I know. On the other hand, I also know that the police in this town consist of exactly two men, one of whom I have known since birth. And he was nobody’s Einstein even then.”

“They have the state police in on this as well. And Demarkian.”

“I know. I know.” Liz walked over to Jimmy’s window and looked out. There was more parking lot on this side of the building. The hotel seemed to have been set down in a vast sea of parking lots. “Take me seriously, for a moment. I have to get out of here for a little while. I’m really beginning to lose control. And that won’t be any good for any of us.”

“You won’t lose control, Liz. You never do.”

“You know,” Liz said, “that’s not true. I did when Jay died. I didn’t lie down on the floor and roll around and kick and scream. I looked all right. But I didn’t work at all for nearly two years, and that in spite of the fact that my financial world was collapsing and we lost the house and had to live in that god-awful cabin and one Christmas there wasn’t a Christmas. And none of that picked me up and got me moving again.”

“Something did.”

“Yes. Something did. But it was mostly time. I do lose control of myself. I do. And I do make an idiot of myself. I do handle things badly. I do. I just want to get out and ride around in the air for a little while. Is that really too much to ask?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Ask the guys who are trailing you. What is it exactly that you want to do?”

“I thought I’d run downstairs and see if Bennis Hannaford would give me a ride into town. Either that, or let me borrow her car, but I wouldn’t let anybody borrow a car like that from me. Tangerine-orange. She must have had it custom-painted.”

“I think it’s really odd that you and Bennis Hannaford get along so well.”

“Why? You fell in love with both of us.”

“I fell in love with Julie and you can’t be in the same room with her without spitting nails. You going to tell the boys you’re going?”

“No. You tell them. I don’t want them asking to come with me. They’re probably as stir-crazy as I am. And relax. She may turn me down.”

“Lately, I don’t have that kind of luck.”

He came over to her and kissed her, seriously, the way he did when he couldn’t wait for them to get into bed. Then he leaned back and smiled at her, as if it had been a joke.

“No harm in trying,” he suggested.

She pecked him on the cheek and went out of the room. She saw Mark and Geoff sitting on the floor of one of the rooms in front of a television set, blasting away on another video game. She went to the end of the corridor and out onto the landing and down the stairs.

As soon as she was moving in the stairwell, she knew she had made the right decision. She already felt a million times less tense than she had. Her muscles were already beginning to unkink. She went through the fire doors at the second floor and out onto Bennis’s corridor.

She watched the door numbers pass by and stopped at 223. She knocked on the door and waited, patiently, while somebody came up close and probably looked through the spy hole. Then the door locks turned over and the door opened on Bennis Hannaford, looking disheveled and just out of the shower in a clean green robe.

“You want to borrow the car,” she said, holding up a set of keys on a plastic key ring. It was one of those fish with feet with the word “evolve” printed inside it.

“Do you always give the keys to your car to strangers?” Liz said. “And how did you know I wanted to borrow the car?”

“I knew because you asked me thirty questions about it when you were down here before. Besides, I’ve been claustrophobic in my life. I know the signs. And no. I don’t loan the car to strangers. I don’t loan it to anybody. I figure, at the moment, that I’m loaning it to Jimmy, and I owe him a little.”

“Well, I’d like to hear about that.”