“To the sheriff’s office?” Roger’s laugh was ugly, and he sounded genuinely insulted. “You really are a dumb bitch, aren’t you?” He shook his head in disgust, and the seat belt sliced at my skin as we took a hard left onto County Road, which led onto Route 319, which led to the Apalachicola National Forest, where last year a student’s body was found one week after he wandered off the trail. “You sure get off on telling people what to do, Pamela. Denise was so sick of you. You know that? So goddamn sick of you.”
I knew she was. I saw it in the petulant set of her jaw every time I asked her to turn down Fleetwood Mac on a school night, or reprimanded her for touching the thermostat because inflation was through the roof and I was trying to keep the electricity bill down. What happened to you? she muttered just a week before she died, when I caught her adding more than the allotted two tablespoons of milk to her coffee. Denise had made no secret of being sick of me, but still, it hurt to hear it from someone who had treated her so poorly.
“I loved her,” Roger said in a broken voice. “I never would have done it to her. That? That?” He looked over at me, eyes webbed with burst blood vessels. “A hair spray bottle? A hair spray bottle…” He put his forehead on the wheel and let out an agonized wail. We crossed the solid line into the lane of oncoming traffic, their headlights picking out pellets of rain in the sooty afternoon.
“Roger,” I begged, “please!”
He jerked the wheel and the Slumberline crushed my hand against the door. I bit down on my lip so I wouldn’t cry out. I had to think. Think.
“There’s someone you need to meet,” I said. Then, with urgency, because I’d figured it out: I had to make him feel a part of the solution to this unfortunate misunderstanding. “I really need you to meet this woman. She has proof that you didn’t do it. She’s staying at the new Days Inn. She has a lot of proof, Roger. We need to look at it. Together.”
Roger didn’t say anything. Just kept driving, strangely at the speed limit, like we had someplace to be and we’d left on time. “Don’t trick me,” he warned quietly. I was nodding, but I realized I should be shaking my head. No, no. I would never.
“It is outrageous,” I said, trying to muster up some authentic-sounding indignity, “that no one will listen to me. I need your help. We need to get all our facts straight and then go and talk to Sheriff Cruso together. Show him that we’re friends. That you never would have hurt Denise. I need you and you need me. We have to set our differences aside.”
In profile, I caught one side of Roger’s odious smile. At the notion that we were friends. That he would never hurt Denise.
* * *
We parked in the lot of the new Days Inn and engaged in a blackly comic struggle trying to free me from the Slumberline. I weighed 115 pounds back then, and Roger had the motor functions of a toddler doped with cough syrup. In the end he wrapped his arms around the unit and pulled it off my lap with gritted teeth, scraping skin from my thighs and stepping back to let the air conditioner splash in a scummy puddle. I’d have bruises for days, but all I could think was: Eighty dollars, down the fucking drain.
The Days Inn was one of those exterior-corridor motels, no lobby, no front-desk attendant to whom I could slip a note: “Call the police. This man is dangerous.” Room 203 was right next to the sign for the heated pool, taped over with another sign apologizing for its closure for the season. This was the reason my mother always gave for never coming to visit—Tallahassee’s dearth of five-star accommodations.
The door opened mid-rap, like Tina had been standing there, waiting for me since the moment she got back from Denise’s funeral. She was wearing a silk turban and I could smell that she’d just washed and set her hair. She glanced at Roger and snorted. “This your bodyguard?”
“This is my friend Roger Yul,” I said pleasantly. Before knocking, Roger had wrapped his fingers around my elbow, right at the funny bone joint, and pinched hard while he reminded me of how much he didn’t like me. My arm was numb above the wrist and I was terrified of doing anything that might set him off. “I wanted to show him the mug shot you gave me, but I think I misplaced it.”
I was hoping the name Roger Yul might mean something to Tina, that she had heard Denise’s ex-boyfriend was a person of interest in the investigation, but I saw no sign of recognition on her face. She opened the door wider and invited us inside.
There were two queen beds, one made, one slept in, and a standing television in the corner, on but the volume low. The room stank of stale smoke and chlorine. “I’m surprised Tallahassee doesn’t have nicer hotels,” Tina said, responding to the wrinkle in my nose. She gestured to the two chairs at the small round table, where a dirty glass acted like a paperweight for the headlines of the day. Sit. Roger landed only one ass cheek and made a wild grab for the edges of the table before he went over.