The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (23 page)

“That was his one smart move, hiring her.” I vamped an explanation about how Plowright specialized in dim bulbs like Vic, closely controlling her clients’ money to keep it, and them, out of harm’s way. As such, she held investment authority over portfolios that aggregated to millions. “He likes to come off as a high roller, but he’s not. She won’t let him be. It’s not in their interest. But they know you can’t sell flamboyant rock star from the ten-cent keno lounge, so tonight was his big show. After this, he won’t gamble high at all.”

“So Mirplo’s no whale.” She said this smugly, just delighted to be right in her guess.

“Hell, he doesn’t even like to gamble.”

“Then why is he here?”

“I told you: self-promotion.”

“That’s stupid.”

“He’s stupid. But also, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

So here’s what I figured would happen next. Louise would kill at least a quarter hour getting someplace she could check out Miriam Plowright online. She wouldn’t expect to find much, for I’d painted Plowright as ultradiscreet. Meanwhile, within that narrowest of windows, I’d have to whip up a digital history fast and full enough to fool her inspection. In my mind, I already had my laptop open, plucking what I needed from the Web. Preexisting templates, fake financials; I’d have to pull Miriam’s résumé and backstory out of my ass. It was going to be tight. After that, more improv and …

Whack!
Something hard and cold slammed into my hairline. The brass knuckles had staged their second act. As the carpet rushed up to meet my nose, I thought to myself,
This is going to play hell with my schedule
. Then I didn’t think anything at all.

The turndown service in this hotel rocks.

I woke to the cool, soothing relief of a wet washcloth on my forehead. Clearly, some housekeeper had turned Florence Nightingale. Then I heard an angel’s voice saying, “Take it easy, Radar, everything’s going to be okay,” and my world spun upside down again.

Because the angel was Allie.

Allie stroking my brow. Allie feeding me calm assurances. Allie bending over me, the curve of her breast visible down her blouse. Then Allie raining little kisses along my jawline. Allie lying down on top of me, splayed comfortably along my length. Allie, my angel, where did you come from?

Allie, my angel, are you really here?

Mmm … muscle memory took over. I wrapped my arms around her, stroking her skin through her shirt. My fingers traced the familiar bumps of her spine like tiny skiers jumping moguls along the ridgeline of Mount Back. Our mouths met. Her lips were dry, a little chapped—desert air will do that to you—but they opened to mine, and our tongues slid against each other, an avid pink reunion. To
muscle memory add chemical confirmation—this was the mouth I was meant to kiss.

Allie sat up and languidly unbuttoned her blouse, taking her time, as if each button were a tiny personal challenge to be cherished, met, and mastered. She smiled at the task, and I engaged in a brief game of compare-and-contrast, measuring Allie’s easy ecdysiasm against the desperate carnality of a Martybeth. Then I shoved the image aside. I had Allie, and if that underscored any point at all, it’s that the last thing I wanted was a Martybeth.

I reached up and twirled my fingers in Allie’s hair, soft and fine to the touch. My hand dropped to her shoulder, then her breast, and I felt the comfortable fit of it in the cup of my palm. Her stiffening nipple nudged between my second and third fingers. I saw a familiar flush spread from her chest to her collarbone, felt the heat of it almost, and knew that her body remembered mine as mine remembered hers. I could see into the near future, with the two of us naked, melded, rocking together to the silent rhythm of an unsung song. I saluted that song; stood to attention to it. Allie must have felt this, for she placed her hand in the space between our jeans, its warm and solid bulk transmitting delicious pressure back and forth between our goods.

I ached to surrender to the moment, but part of me held back, the damned self-interested and self-protective part which just couldn’t trust that what was happening was happening. Like I said before, it’s tricky when grifters make love. And it’s not like Allie was some sort of blushing flower. After all the times we’d made love, what would one more intimate iteration matter to her, if doing me was something that had to be done for reasons unknown? Part of me said
Don’t care
, just take cookies when cookies are passed. But I knew I had to know, and risked destroying the moment by asking the question that had to be asked.

“Allie, are you here?”

“Right here, lover.”

“I mean
here
here.”

“
Here
here,” she assented. She pushed my shirt up to my neck and settled her weight upon me. “I’ve been here all along.”

“That’s not how it looks.”

“Forget how it looks. Think how it feels.”

I knew she wasn’t speaking of the limbic stuff. She was telling me to go deep inside myself, inside our history, the totality of it, what Mirplo called the g-salt, review everything that had ever passed between us, and decide if it added up.

I did the math as best as I could—difficult, given the frictive distraction of Allie’s breasts against my chest. Two equally plausible narratives emerged. In one, she’d been trapdoor spider from the start, just as we’d planned (though with a few more distressing wrinkles than I’d liked), and was now coming in from the cold. The other had Allie just dragging me around by my dick, a possibility so heartbreaking, so miserably cruel that I decided it couldn’t be true. It’s ridiculous to speak of a grifter’s code. There’s no such thing, and we only ever invoke its fiction if it serves some devious end. Nevertheless, I knew Allie, knew her as well as one human can know another across the infinite gulf that separates soul from soul. I knew her bedrock integrity. She wouldn’t come back to screw me just to screw with me. She would have just stayed away.

But she was here.

Which meant she was
here
here.

But how? “How did you get into my room?”

“ ‘Mrs. Hoverlander’ locked herself out. A maid let her in.”

“I have a lot of other questions,” I said.

“And I have a bunch, too, but they can wait. Sweetie, I have
missed
you.” She underscored the point by undressing us both with the kind of urgency you see in porn. Entering her was bottled bliss, a bliss made more poignant by my dashed fear that we’d never be together again. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets—

“Boy,” I said. “Who’s looking after Boy?”

Allie laughed out loud. “Are you really asking me that now?”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “It crossed my mind.”

“If you have room in your mind for Boy,” she said, salaciously grinding her pelvis against mine, “I fear I’ve lost my touch.”

“Trust me,” I said, “your touch is … Wow!” And now I think I was just being bratty. “But where’s Boy?”

“He’s with Zoe’s dad. He’s fine.” She caressed my head. “But what about you? You’ve got a couple of pretty big lumps here.”

It was nothing to the one in my throat. Allie was back, and the only thing that mattered was that she never go away again. Consequently, I blurted these words: “You should marry me.”

She kissed me so gently. “That’s not just the lumps talking?”

“You should,” I repeated, more forcefully. “Make an honest man of me.”

“That’s funny on so many levels,” said Allie.

“Is that a yes?”

“Of course it’s a yes.” Again she ground her groin against mine. “But no Elvis.”

“What?”

“Just because we’re in Vegas doesn’t mean you get away with a cartoon wedding. We’ll do it right and proper. Someplace splendid.”

“Anywhere in the world, honey. You name the spot.”

“I will.”

Then we made love. Honeymoon love. It didn’t last long. That was okay. Considering how long the foreplay had been—weeks and weeks—it all evened out in the end. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering what Allie meant when she said she had a bunch of questions, too.

“H
e shoots, he scores!”

Uncle Joe cried out in the dark. I sat up and looked around for Vic, caught in that first moment of wakefulness when things don’t make sense. Then the phrase repeated, tinny and distant, and I shook away enough sleep to recognize my ringtone. Crawling out of bed, I found my jeans on the floor and groped for my phone. A glance back over my shoulder revealed Allie likewise shrugging off sleep and watching in attentive silence as I connected the call.

It was Red Louise. “Your story checks out,” she said. “You’ll get a text later where to meet. Bring Plowright. If we close, you’re off the hook.”

“What about Woody?” I asked.

“He’s off the meat hook,” she said. “For now. Just make sure Plowright understands that it’s a seller’s market.” The call dropped, and my phone went dark in my hand.

Allie sat up in the bed, eying me with a questioning look, a look that reminded me of Santa Fe and quieter times. Wherever Allie had been, she was back. I knew it to the core of my being, and I knew that I trusted her with my life, by the simple math of: If a trust so firm could be so wrong, then who would even want to live, anyhow? Of course, there remained the questions of why she’d checked out and why she had now checked back in. And the rather more pressing question of what online insights had mollified Red Louise.

“I’m off the hook,” I told Allie. “My story passed muster.”

“Which story?”

“Yours, actually. Miriam Plowright’s.”

“Of course it did. Why wouldn’t it?”

Well, let’s see.… There was the distracting matter of getting whacked upside my pudding head, and then the equally distracting, though much more pleasant, matter of making love to you, my love
. “No support,” I said. I told Allie how I’d improvised Miriam’s involvement with Vic, hoping to find a moment to pastcast her Internet essentials. Not having had that time, I could only assume that when Louise searched for Plowright, she’d come up empty, and angry.

I shared this assumption with Allie.

Who just laughed.

Really, now?

“Of course she didn’t come up empty, Radar. Miriam Plowright is platinum. I built her myself.”

“Wait, what?”

“Fake website, client lists, celebrity endorsements, the works.” Her face flushed with pride. “You’re not the only one around here who can wield a mouse, pretty boy.”

I felt a little punch-drunk. “So when Louise left here last night to check out Miriam …”

“Out she checked.”

“Still doesn’t add up,” I said. I told Allie how Louise had tabbed Mirplo as a flake and a fake and how I’d thrown her the emergency bone of Miriam Plowright. “But that was just improv,” I said. “Spur of the desperate moment.”

“Then why did you have me invent her in the first place?”

“
I
did?”

“Of course. Through Woody. You said you were deep undercover and couldn’t get to the Web. Told me I had to pinch-hit.”

“I said that?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Through Woody?”

“Well, didn’t you? He said you did.”

The light dawned. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we started exchanging information and comparing notes. Soon one thing was clear: No matter how devious we thought Woody Hoverlander was, he was a thousand times slyer than that. He wasn’t just a world-class snuke; he was king of this world.

It began right after Allie moved out. Woody reached out to her, first through Mirplo, then directly himself, by phone. Naturally, she’d been reluctant to talk to him—her pose was still that of active antagonism—“But he wouldn’t take no for an answer,” said Allie.

“He’s like that,” I agreed. “But you don’t usually get that dewy.”

“Nor did I this time. But understand, Radar, he didn’t convince me;
you
did.”

“How so?”

“He knew it all, everything we’d talked about. Our fake fight, the trapdoor spider, the rebranding of Vic as Mirplo, all of it. I figured he couldn’t have all that information without your blessing.”

“Or a few deft guesses.”

“Yeah, I see that now. He’s a clever old jackalope. But look, it seemed like you’d decided to trust him, so I had to decide whether to trust him, too. I talked it over with Vic. He said you probably knew what you were doing and we should just play it as it lays.”

“And you?”

“Honestly? I was afraid you might be breaking up with me for real.”

“On the back of your own trapdoor spider?”

“Well,” said Allie, “you did tell me to date other people.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“No, I know that now. I mean then. Through Woody. He said you said Wolfredian had eyes on you, and we needed to reinforce how really broken up we were.”

“Hence …” My heart was in my throat. “Hence that fling with Greg?”

“Fake fling, yes.” Allie’s eyes became moist. “Radar, I
hated
that.”

“I was no fan myself.”

“But I thought it’s what you wanted. I thought you needed a scene, some theater for whoever’d followed you to the bar that night.”

“And Vic thought so, too? That’s why he brought me there?”

“I guess.” Allie shook her head to clear it. “You know,” she said, “looking at it now, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how could Vic and I have been so snowed? We were both sure you were back there somewhere, pulling Woody’s strings.”

“Credit the master,” I said ruefully.

Then it struck me that the master had made a mistake, for if a Wolfredian operative witnessed the fight that night, what would keep that same operative from later pegging Miriam Plowright as Radar Hoverlander’s explosive ex-girlfriend? But Woody doesn’t make mistakes like that. Therefore … “Wolfredian never had eyes on us. Woody just had us stage that scene so we’d look broken up for sure—not in the bad guys’ eyes, but in our own.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Keep us off balance. Keep us from making a separate peace. Maybe that’s what he was most afraid of: that if we compared notes too closely, we’d realize we weren’t as messily enmeshed as he wanted us to believe.”