“Run this by me again,” Angie said. “The half-naked part.”
“She was wearing a bikini,” I said.
“In a dark room. With you in it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you felt how?”
“Nervous,” I said.
“Whoo,” she said. “Wrong, wrong answer.”
“Wait,” I said, but I knew I’d signed my death warrant.
“We made love for six hours, and you still felt tempted by this little bimbo in a bikini?” She leaned forward in her seat, turned, and looked at me.
“I didn’t say tempted,” I said. “I said ‘nervous.’”
“Same thing.” She smiled, shook her head. “Guys, I swear.”
“Right,” I said. “Guys. Don’t you get it?”
“No,” she said. She raised her fist to her chin, squinted so I’d know she was concentrating. “Please. Elucidate.”
“All right. Desiree is a siren. She sucks men in. She has an aura, and it’s half innocence, half pure carnality.”
“An aura.”
“Right. Guys love auras.”
“Okeydoke.”
“Any guy gets around her, she turns this aura on. Or maybe it’s on all the time, I don’t know. But in either case, it’s pretty strong. And a guy looks at her face, her body, he hears her voice and smells her scent, he’s a goner.”
“All guys?”
“Most, I’d bet.”
“You?”
“No,” I said. “Not me.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
That stopped her. The smile left her face and her skin paled to eggshell, and her mouth lay open as if it had forgotten how to use words.
“What did you just say?” she managed eventually.
“You heard me.”
“Yeah, but…” She turned in her seat, looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she turned to the middle-aged black woman sitting in the seat beside her who’d been following our conversation since we got on the plane without any pretense to be doing otherwise.
“I heard him, honey,” the woman said, knitting what appeared to be a small beaver with lethal-looking needles. “Loud and clear. Don’t know about all this aura bullshit, but I heard that part just fine, thank you.”
“Wow,” Angie said to her. “You know?”
“Aww, he ain’t that good-looking,” the woman said. “He maybe rate a ‘gee’ but he don’t rate no ‘wow,’ seem to me.”
Angie turned back to me. “Gee,” she said.
“Go on,” the woman said to me, “get back to telling us about this slut made you coffee.”
“Anyway,” I said to Angie.
She blinked, closed her mouth by placing the heel of her hand to her jaw and pushing up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to that.”
“If I wasn’t, you know—”
“In love,” the lady said.
I glared at her. “—with you, Ange, yeah, I would’ve been a dead man in there. She’s a viper. She picks guys—almost any guy—and she gets them to do her bidding, whatever that may be.”
“I want to meet this girl,” the woman said. “See if she can get my Leroy to mow the lawn.”
“But that’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Guys are that stupid?”
“Yes.”
“What he said,” the woman said, concentrating on her knitting.
“Women and men are different,” I said. “Most of them anyway. Particularly when it comes to their reactions to the opposite sex.” I took her hand in mine. “Desiree passes a hundred guys in the street, at least half of them will think about her for days. And when she passes, they won’t just go, ‘Nice face, nice ass, pretty smile,’ whatever. They’ll ache. They’ll want to possess her on the spot, melt into her, inhale her.”
“Inhale her?” she said.
“Yes. Men have a completely different reaction to beautiful women than women do to beautiful men.”
“So Desiree again is…?” She ran the backs of her fingers up the inside of my arm.
“The flame, and we’re the moths.”
“You ain’t half bad,” the woman said, leaning forward and looking past Angie at me. “If my Leroy could talk that sort of sweet bullshit you talk, he’d have gotten away with a lot more than he did these last twenty years.”
Poor Leroy, I thought.
Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Angie said, “Jesus.”
My head came off her shoulder. “What?”
“The possibilities,” she said.
“What possibilities?”
“Don’t you see? If we invert everything we thought, if we look at things from the perspective of Desiree being not just a little screwed up or slightly corrupt, but a black widow, a machine of relentless self-interest—then, my God.”
I sat forward. “Run with it,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. We know she put Price up to the robbery. Right? Right. And then she gets Jay thinking about getting that money back from Price. She plays the opposite. You know, ‘Oh, Jay, can’t we be happy without the money?’ but of course, inside, she’s thinking, ‘Take the bait, take the bait, you fool.’ And Jay does. But he can’t find the money. And then she realizes where it is. And she goes there, but she doesn’t get caught like she said. She gets the money. But now she’s got a problem.”
“Jay.”
“Exactly. She knows he’ll never stop trying to find her if she disappears. And he’s good at his job. And she has to get Price out of the way, too. She can’t just disappear. She has to get dead. So…”
“She killed Illiana Rios,” I said.
We looked at each other, my eyes as wide as hers, I’m sure.
“Shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun,” Angie said.
“Could she have?” I said.
“Why not?”
I sat there thinking about it, letting it sink in. Why not, indeed?
“If we accept this premise,” I said, “then we’re accepting that she’s—”
“Totally without conscience or morality or empathy or anything which makes us humane.” She nodded.
“And if she is,” I said, “then she didn’t just become that way overnight. She’s been that way for a long time.”