The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page B

to know what you needed. He reached into the back pocket of his pants for his wallet, uncharacteristically bloated with bills, and pulled out the fifties and hundreds he had withdrawn from the bank that day for…for whatever…and gave her all that was left. Nine hundred dollars, he thought. She thanked him and joked that she really had no place to put it.
    “When you get dressed, you will,” he said.
    As they were walking down the stairs, her arm hooked in his as if they were promenading along some nineteenth-century boardwalk, she said, “You can tell everyone we fucked. They’ll think we did anyway.”
    He stopped on the landing and looked at her. How had he managed to miss the fact that her eyes were a velvet brown and the most impeccably shaped almonds he’d ever seen? Her nose was the tiniest ski jump. He decided that she had the most genuinely heart-shaped face in the world, a face that was angelic despite what she did for a living, and he told himself he would believe this even when he was sober. He tried to ameliorate his guilt by reminding himself that, in the end, he had resisted her. He had resisted this naked young thing beside him now on the landing on the stairs of his home, despite the way she had happily yielded herself to him.
    He shook his head. Happily? She was a hooker, he told himself, trying (and failing) to be dismissive. She was getting paid to make him feel this way. He had just given her nearly a grand on top of whatever Spencer had spent to line this up. But, the truth was, he was under her spell. She was smart, that was clear. She was kind; that was clear, too. He flashed back to the moment in the living room when she had followed the blonde onto his lap, and she had been grinding her crotch against him. She had brought her face close to his, her lips resting within a millimeter of his; he would have kissed her then, but he still assumed there was a line he was not to cross or the bodyguards would whisk her off of him. He remembered how he had kept his hands on the cushions of the couch, afraid even to run his fingers along the tow-colored down of her arms.
    How much had he given her then? A fifty? A hundred? He honestly couldn’t recall.
    He realized now that she was saying something to him, and he tried to swim up to the surface from the swamplike morass of alcohol and desire and (in the end) self-loathing that were muffling the sounds all around him. She was reiterating that he could say whatever he wanted about what had occurred in the guest room upstairs.
    They’ll think we did anyway.
For a split second he thought he was going to vomit.
    …
    As Richard was walking through his front door, one of the police investigators was making a production of properly swabbing the blood on the tile in the front hallway, while another was methodically dusting for fingerprints and daubing for DNA. They had powder blue surgical booties over their shoes. He saw a third investigator dropping one of the spent shell casings into a clear plastic evidence bag. The fellow had found it—one of two—near the coat rack. “Probably from a Makarov,”
he’d mumbled when he’d seen that Richard was watching him. “Nine millimeter.”
    Now he wandered into his living room. The family cat, a five-year-old torty they’d gotten from the shelter as a kitten and christened Cassandra, was sitting atop the breakfront, surveying the activity. She seemed relieved he wasn’t another stranger. One of the investigators, a decorous, skull-faced little fellow with receding yellow hair, saw Richard and put down his scissors. He was about to snip a small piece of the bloodstained fabric from one of the arm covers that went with the couch, as well as a piece of the fabric from the back.
    “Who are you?” he asked Richard, his tone quizzical.
    “I live here. I’m Richard Chapman.” He started to extend his hand, but the technician wanted no part of it.
    “How did you get in?”
    “The front door,” Richard told him,