She didn't remember anything that Frankie told her, except that Frankie talked about killing her husband and then killing his wife and then the two of them going away to Hong Kong where they would live happily ever after.
She thought that it was just idle talk after one of their simultaneous orgasms.
Then Frankie did it. He went one day to the fourth floor of the parking garage of their condominium, waited until her husband had opened the trunk to put in his briefcase – which was what he did every day without fail on the hour – then stabbed his neck once, then his back, then when her husband managed to turn around, his chest, repeatedly, surgically, unhesitatingly, coldly.
Frankie left the parking garage as quietly as when he had walked through the fire exit from the second floor, where he had parked his own car. The guards thought that he had come to pick her up again as he usually did on Saturdays or on days the husband was away on a business trip. As the car exited the parking garage, they did not peer through the heavy tint to see Frankie's hands all covered with blood. Her husband's blood.
The driver of another car came upon the bloodied body of her husband. Miraculously, her husband was alive when he was brought to the emergency room. Alive, of course, was a figure of speech. He was in some sort of coma. He was kept alive by a multitude of tubes and drugs. The doctors argued about his being clinically dead, but Julie was too distracted to make the decision to pull the plug. She had to attend to a number of other serious matters.
She gave the guards a couple of hundred thousand each to keep quiet. She said that she did not want a scandal. Not the scandal of a murder, but the scandal of a prim and proper school principal having an affair with a married man.
She asked her two maids to give large envelopes of money to cops if – when – they came around to ask about the murder.
The case was not even reported in the newspapers. The police reporters got their share of the cash given to the cops.
Even the reporters stationed at the emergency room received gift certificates redeemable in appliance stores.
Only the doctors and nurses could not be bribed, but they were too busy with too many patients to worry about one stabbing victim.
Eventually, the line on the electrocardiogram went flat and her husband was pronounced dead, really dead.
The coroner erased the cause of death written by the doctors ("internal bleeding secondary to multiple stab wounds") and simply wrote "cardiac arrest" as the cause of death. A month later, he and his entire staff went on a Mediterranean cruise.
The funeral parlor received a huge grant for its satellite building.
Everybody had been hushed up. Nobody else found out about the murder.
But today, after going to confession, she felt strangely peaceful. There was something about the voice of that priest. She couldn't see him well through the perforations in the confessional box, but she heard his voice. It was a soothing voice. Almost familiar.
YOU ARE READING
Love After Heaven
RomanceA murder victim gets a chance to return to earth to meet his wife and her lover. He still loves his wife, despite her complicity in his murder. But he returns to earth not as himself but as a priest! How can he and his wife come together again? What...
