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After putting on the thin gardening gloves, he hoisted himself onto the flat top of the fence and dropped to the other side, landing with a thud, immediately thinking of all those detective novels his mom had given him to read in which the major clue was someone’s footprint under a window. He bent and looked at the place where he’d landed, but it was a strip of pebble stone that he doubted would produce a print. Still, he smoothed it out a little with his gloved hand before retreating to the back of the shed. He crouched in its long shadow, with a view of the pool-house entrance. There was a hanging bench under the house’s awning, but Wendy had told him that when Bryce came out to smoke his cigar, he always paced along the edge of the pool as he smoked it.
“He surveys his domain,” she’d said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Something like that.”
“He doesn’t smoke the cigar in the house?”
“God, no. I won’t let him. It’s foul.”
“But you won’t be there.”
“He knows that I would know. Besides, he likes going out to smoke, I think.”
“And he’ll be drunk?”
“Yes. He always is at the end of the night.”
“And he’ll be alone.”
She’d hesitated. “I think so. We got in a fight a while ago and I made sure to tell him that I didn’t care what he did with other girls but not to bring them to our house.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he denied being with other girls at all, but I think I got my point across. I really think he’ll be alone. If for whatever reason he isn’t, or if he doesn’t come out for his end-of-night stogie, then it wasn’t supposed to happen. Just call it off.”
Still crouching, eyes on the house, Thom wondered if Bryce waseven in the pool house. All the lights were on, but he hadn’t seen any movement in any of the windows. He scanned the eaves of the house, finally spotting the camera that was secured just below the gutter. Wendy had told him that there’d be a camera there, pointed toward the pool, but that it was just there for show. “There are fake security measures all over the property,” she had said. “More fake cameras at the front of the house. One of those signs that says the property is monitored. A sign about a guard dog. You’d think with their money they’d be able to pay for the security, but maybe that’s why they have so much. They’re cheap.” Thom studied the camera, its blank eye visible in the watery light emanating from the pool. He hoped Wendy was telling the truth about it being fake.
Thom listened to the distant cries of the coyotes. The house remained still. Maybe Bryce was out at a bar somewhere or sleeping at someone else’s place. That thought caused a brief sensation of relief in Thom’s tensed-up body. How would he feel if Bryce never showed up, if he never got his chance? Right now, he thought he might feel okay about it. Wendy would get divorced. They’d still be together. But they’d be poor. Well, not poor exactly, but they wouldn’t be rich. According to Wendy, Bryce had received $10 million from his grandfather’s estate when he’d turned twenty-one. When she’d told him about it, he’d seen how much the money would mean to her.
Not to mention that Cooper Bryce Barrington was not worth the space he took up in the world. Thom didn’t know this personally, but Wendy had convinced him. She’d never said that he deserved to die, exactly, but she did say that his death would not exactly be a tragedy. “Even his parents don’t like him,” she’d said.
Waiting now for Bryce to emerge, Thom told himself he was here for one reason, to kill Bryce and make it look like an accident. He was doing it for the money and he was doing it for Wendy. It wasn’t the right thing to do. He would never try to convince himself of that. They were simply taking advantage of an opportunity that the worldhad offered up. Murder one douchebag and collect $10 million. And there was something else about what they were doing, something that Thom had thought a lot about, that plotting this act together, getting away with it, made them somehow special. Made them rarefied people, the way that characters from books and from movies were rarefied. He’d always felt that way, ever since that first kiss in Georgetown all those years ago, that he was the protagonist of a special story.
Thom heard a sound from the house and watched as Bryce opened the sliding glass doors and stepped outside. He was wearing shorts and a crewneck sweatshirt. He appeared to be barefoot and there was a long cigar clenched between his teeth. He slid the door closed behind him, then lowered his head. Thom heard the snick of a lighter, then the sound of Bryce pulling on his cigar to get it lit. Then he stood for a moment, shoulders back, puffing away wetly. Thom had seen a picture of Bryce that Wendy had shown him, but somehow, he wasn’t prepared for his size. He looked like a college linebacker who hadn’t played for a while, which was essentially what he was. He had thick thighs and an emerging beer gut and a large, shaggy head. Once he got the cigar going properly, he did exactly what Wendy had said he’d do, and began to pace, first along the far side of the pool, facing out through the fence toward the dark expanse of land. Then he circled around the deep end, looking down into the illuminated water. Thom could smell the cigar smoke in the air, mixing with the dense waft of chlorine. Bryce stopped for a moment, his legs spread apart, maybe to keep his balance, and stared across the pool into the distance again.
Thom stood up, aware that one of his knees made a popping sound, but Bryce didn’t move. He was swaying a little, Thom now realized, and also muttering something under his breath. This was the moment. Bryce was two feet from the edge of the pool. Thom could simply rush him and shove him into the water, then make surehe didn’t clamber out. He bent at the knees slightly, like a runner getting ready to sprint. There was another option as well: Do nothing. Stand in the shadows and wait for Bryce to finish his cigar and go back inside. Thom would drive back to Austin, return his rental car, then fly back to Connecticut. He’d meet up with Wendy in two months and tell her he couldn’t go through with it. She would tell him that she loved him, and who needs $10 million anyway. These thoughts filled him and then just as suddenly left him. He’d already been through it in his mind, a hundred times at least. He was here because doing nothing was a choice he’d already discarded.
1992
June
i
Wendy had registered in advance for the Tinhook Literary Festival, being held in the Berkshires at a dilapidated inn, but Thom was simply staying in the next town over at a motel that accepted cash payments. It was probably not entirely necessary, this subterfuge, but the plan to murder Wendy’s husband was more real now than unreal. Why not be careful?
“Can you tell me where the nearest bar is?” Wendy asked the festival volunteer who was shutting down the registration table.
“To here?” the woman said, startled somehow that she was being asked a question.
“Here in Tinhook. Walking distance, I guess.”
“Oh, there’s lots,” she said. She had heavy glasses and a Louise Brooks haircut. Poet, Wendy thought to herself. “But there will be beer and wine at the reception here.”
“Right, when’s that?”
“Six o’clock. In the Allingham Room.”