“There’s that, too. I’ve been married, I’ve had my child and I enjoy my freedom. There isn’t a single thing that being married could do for me that I can’t do anyway. Then there’s you: You’ve been following your cock around since you were fifteen, and you’re not going to stop now.”
“You don’t think I could be faithful?”
“I’d give you three months, tops,” she said, laughing. “Then you’d meet some girl at Elaine’s, and you’d be in the sack in the blink of an eye. Look, I don’t mind that about you, at least not in our present relationship, but if we were married, it would piss me off royally, and we’d be divorced in no time.”
“I think we could make it work,” Stone said.
Arrington sighed. “There’s something else,” she said.
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to bring this up, at least not on this trip, but it would have come up eventually, so we’d better face it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re still not sure that I didn’t kill Vance.” Arrington’s husband had been shot dead in their home; Arrington had been suspected, but Stone had gotten her cleared. Another woman had been tried for the crime, but acquitted. The murder was still unsolved.
Stone knew he had to choose his words carefully. “Arrington, is there something you want to tell me?”
“That’s just the point, I don’t want to tell you anything, but maybe I should. It’s just that you are a very moral person, and if you thought I had killed Vance you’d never look at me the same way again.”
“You’re starting to worry me, Arrington.”
“I don’t want you to worry. Let’s just say that, if I had killed Vance, I would have done it for very good reasons and to protect myself and Peter. Could you believe that of me?”
“I believe that you would not murder your husband, but that if you did, there would have been some justifiable reason, yes.”
“More than justifiable,” she said. “Imperative. And if I had done that and the facts had been presented in court, I would very likely have been acquitted, but it would have destroyed Peter’s life. So my decision would have been between that and keeping quiet and risking conviction. That would have been an impossible situation.”
“What are you saying, Arrington?”
“I’m not saying anything, Stone. This is all hypothetical, don’t you see?”
“All right.”
“Then let’s leave it at that,” Arrington said. “It would not improve our relationship to go any further, and I don’t want anything to change.”
Stone thought about that. “As you wish,” he said finally. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Arrington crawled under the covers, snuggled close to Stone
and rested her head on his shoulder. “Then let’s never speak of it again,” she said, fondling him.
The phone rang.
“Shit,” Stone said.
“Who could that be at this hour?”
Stone reached over her and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Ed Rawls. They found Janey.”
“Is she all right?”
“She was floating face down in Dark Harbor.”
“Oh, God,” Stone breathed.