The Movie-Town Murders (The Art of Murder 5)
Page 18
What did anyone want?
Funny to think he’d been a flick of an airplane’s wing from death this evening, and he’d never seen it coming. Maybe funny wasn’t the word. The problem with death was it never happened at a convenient time. There was always, always going to be too much left unfinished, unsaid.
Aside from everything else, what a weird way that would have been for things to end between himself and Sam.
But they weren’t unique in that. That’s how it was for everyone. How it had been for Ono and her many complicated relationships, surely? Was it possible she had ended both relationships deliberately, knowing she was going to take her life? Were the arguments an attempt to give closure to Bardolf and Lois? Or to punish them?
Or just an awful coincidence that Ono happened to die while on the outs with two people who should have been closest to her?
He shook off the morbid thought. But he was in a morbid business, and a new and grimmer thought took its place.
Maybe there was no accomplice. Maybe Berkle had acted alone. Double acts made up slightly less than a quarter of all serial killings. Maybe Ethan could stay safely buried—if not forgotten—in Sam’s psyche.
One wrong move. That’s all it took.
Maybe Professor Ono had everything she wanted.
Maybe she had not given up or climbed, metaphorically speaking, onto a cracked rung. Maybe she had simply miscalculated, lost her footing.
And so…lights out.
Jason sighed, turned from the window, and climbed into the double bed. There was no art in this room either, but a black-framed poster of a poem by D.H. Lawrence hung across from the bed.
When I Went to the Film
When I went to the film and saw all the black-and-white feelings that nobody felt,
And heard the audience sighing and sobbing with all the emotions they none of them felt,
And saw them cuddling with rising passions they none of them for a moment felt,
And caught them moaning from close-up kisses, black-and-white kisses that could not be felt,
It was like being in heaven, which I am sure has a white atmosphere
Upon which shadows of people, pure personalities
Are cast in black and white, and move
In flat ecstasy, supremely unfelt
And heavenly.