LITMIR.BIZ

      1

      Florida, February, 1944

      Phyllis slowly pulled herself free from the same damp sheets she had passed out on a few hours before. Her head was heavy, her mouth like sand but the time had arrived. She took a long breath and dropped her hand over the black receiver, anticipating the ring. This whole ordeal had taken long enough.

      But her nightmare had been exact, and now was the time.

      For several nights running she’d been overwhelmed by visions of the crash. Blood red and violent with the sounds of snapping, cracking bones. She had heard the hollow reverberating thunder of high-speed metal striking metal. She could smell the explosion from the motorcycle’s gasoline and see how the smoke hung heavy in the air, illuminated by flames flickering like snakes’ tongues searing the acrid paint and exploding the tires. She could also taste the chemical cinders, the very soot and its biting sting.

      “Are you certain it’s Russell?” she asked.

      “We have notified his wife. She gave us your number.” Dispassionate voice.

      “Wife?” Phyllis’ bile rose.

      “She agreed to allow you to identify the body.”

      “The divorce is almost final,” Phyllis protested, knowing all concern was absurd now. The time for divorce was past.

      Phyllis replaced the receiver on the hook. She had forgotten to ask where the collision had taken place. It did not matter. If she took her time he would have been scrupulously gathered up (if not reassembled) before she steered the Lincoln Zephyr down the winding road along the bluff toward Lake Worth. No doubt he had been hurled free of the flames, unconscious and beyond suffering. Still, it was hideous; she needed to be spared the small details.

      It was a shame that Russell’s lame-duck wife Anissa had been brought into it. She was clinically crazy—coo-coo. She lived with a cult in New Mexico where they truly believed that a ten-foot tall Saint Germain was close to ending this war with Germany simply by brandishing his blazing purple sword. It was altogether too apparent that, in spite of her militant certainty, the War expanded to cover both hemispheres, annihilating everything in its wake. No power on earth had been able to end it.

      Anissa should have been locked up years ago.

      Had she been as calm as she appeared, Phyllis would have been able to return to her dreaming-sleep for more information. But more than information, she’d dream of leave-taking and farewells, of his final torn embrace, where she in turn would promise to cherish his memory and ask him if he had suffered very much. She would have smothered his face with kisses, allowing him one more chance to tell her how he adored her before he faded to black, a movie trick announcing an important scene shift.

      Instead, because she knew he expected her to, she rose and peeled off the wrinkled sheets and the clothes she’d slept in last night, to dress herself for the role of the bereaved. As she checked her face in the bathroom mirror, she took pleasure from her green eyes and thick Rita Hayworth shoulder-length red hair; steadying herself now, she labored a deep breath for the dance ahead, beginning with the police questioning.

      Fumbling, she spit on the mascara brush in its mirrored box and applied coal black to her lashes, purposely smudging under both eyes for effect. Next, she dabbed pancake makeup over her freckles, while the realization flitted over her that this death brought both grief and a giddy income.

      She applied lipstick to mask her thin-ish lips. Grasping that she was an heiress jerked her heart alive. She was both confused and gratified when Russell’s crash was confirmed. Death’s croupier had now pushed the chips to her corner. Forget that women were always whispering about her, heaping nouns on her: whore, a piece of baggage, chippy, trollop, slut, doxie.

      Now they’d have to add, “residual beneficiary.”

      On stage without a script, she contemplated how she wanted to be seen. Repeated nights of bloody dreams had prepared her role, put her beyond shock. Except for a small tremble in her right hand, she was composed.

      She was the main attraction and he could not be legally dead without her witnessing signature. So said his wife; so said the officer. Everyone would have to wait patiently. So flipping on another light in the bathroom, she peered into the mirror taking her time. There was no rush, either at the precinct or at the morgue.

      The force of his death would come to pound her a day or so after she had returned home from the morgue. And in the disorientation that is either caused by or is—in fact—mourning, Phyllis would make a bewildering choice.

      Afterward. Not before.

      Now, in the early dawn of his death-day, she took her time, conscious that Russell’s spirit stalked the house, watching her, proud of the only woman he’d ever loved, proud of her youth. She moved through the new sun’s pink light to his favorite chair in the library and there she took repeated deep breaths with her eyes closed in order to see him more clearly. When she saw him, he seemed upset.

      “Why?” she asked him.

      Silence and a grim dissatisfaction on his fading face was his last decipherable response to her.

      Later, she gave up and let him rest.

      Aware of her newsy appeal, she returned and concentrated on the mirror and made her face up for interviews. For the past hour, she alone owned title to the house. She owned the art and paintings, the 1939 Lincoln Zephyr and the Cadillac convertible on blocks to preserve the tires. Everything was hers except the lumber operation in Dawson Creek and the motorcycle which was unsalvageable. She smiled as she combed through her thick hair and she studied her face. There would be a stringer for the Palm Beach Times slumped somewhere at the precinct primed and ready to jump up, popping a barrage of blinding shots at her. So she studied her face again, never hurrying.

      Murine, she thought, then changed her mind. Red eyes were essential. By the time she entered the white lights of the precinct, her hand was again steady.

      “Well, yes, he had been drinking.” She had intended to admit only that much, hoping the officer was not slyly accusing her of matching him jigger for jigger, night after night, or—the thought struck her suddenly— that she had sent him out to fetch her some more rum.

      “So, he drank a lot normally?”

      “I asked him not to, but you know how it is with men in wartime. I can’t get his attention these days. Not a kiss, if you understand what I mean.” So saying, she emphasized the wrong thing.

      “It’s the war and all this waiting for D-Day,” she added. “Not me.”

      “Lady, how much had he been drinking?”

      “Enough to run dry, to go out for some more.” She straightened her spine, ran her red fingernails nervously through her hair and took a deep breath. She needed him to note in writing that she, Phyllis MacAndrew, was not tipsy. Not this time.

      She caught herself

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