The Black Widow (22 page)

Then she tells you she blames
you
for the loss of a child you loved with every ounce of your being?

Ben leans forward abruptly and taps on the plastic partition separating the backseat from the driver. “Excuse me? Can you make a right here, please, onto Central Park South?”

“What? That’s not the way to—”

“No, I know. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to East 77th and Third Avenue instead.”

The driver grumbles something and flicks on the turn signal, trying to switch from a middle to a right lane amid honking horns.

Ben leans back again, resting his head against the back of the seat, fed up not just with the driver’s cranky disposition but with Gaby—not to mention with himself.

All this time, he’d been moving in the right direction, away from the heartache of the past. Now he almost managed to undo all that progress.

Almost.

Feeling like a would-be suicide who’s had a second thought and grabbed a tree branch at the brink of a waterfall, he promises himself that he’ll never let himself get swept away again.

It’s high school all over again for Ivy, perched on the outskirts of the bar crowd at Tequila Sam’s.

High school, only worse.

In high school, she could—and did—hover on the fringes of the social scene and basically be invisible.

Here, she couldn’t be more conspicuous. She leans against the end of the bar, trying to stay out of the way, but people keep jostling her, especially the waiters who come to fill their drink trays. “Excuse me!” they bark, or “Coming through!” and when she tries to move out of the way, she bumps into someone else. Meanwhile, the bartenders don’t seem thrilled that she’s taking up space without ordering anything but iced tap water.

But she doesn’t like liquor—she tried whiskey sours a few times at company functions because it seemed sophisticated and everyone said the taste would grow on her. It didn’t. And even if the non-alcoholic drinks weren’t so expensive here, there’s still too much sugar in juice and soda, and too many chemicals in diet soda.

Anyway, she’s not here to quench her thirst. She’s here to find out what happened to Carlos.

All she knows—courtesy of having snooped through his personal computer files last month—is that he had a blind date set up for that last Friday night. Using the pseudonym Nick Santana, he was meeting a woman named Sofia at Tequila Sam’s.

Not only has Carlos’s Nick Santana profile vanished from the InTune site, but so has Sofia’s. That, Ivy thinks, is suspicious. Too bad she didn’t dare tell the police detectives this afternoon.

Telling them what she knows about Carlos’s last known activities—and why she knows—would have put her job on the line. She’s better off sniffing around on her own. If she finds out something important, she’ll get the information to the proper authorities anonymously. Maybe they have a tip line or something.

Unfortunately, the bartender who served her the water said he didn’t have time to look at the picture she wanted to show him. She’s been trying to catch the attention of the others, but they seem to be ignoring her.

Maybe they’d pay more attention if she were wearing something more provocative than her best gabardine slacks and a blouse. She wishes she’d unbuttoned the top button, but she doesn’t want to do it here, in front of everyone.

Finally, a pair of pretty brunettes in short skirts vacate their nearby bar stools. Ivy slips onto one of them, directly in front of an older male bartender filling a glass at the beer tap. They make eye contact.

“Hi,” Ivy says.

“What can I get you, sweetheart?”

Sweetheart. Wow, he seems nice. He kind of reminds her of her grandfather, Pop-Pop Al, who died when she was a little girl.

She shouldn’t splurge on a cocktail, but maybe the bartender will be willing to talk to her if she orders something other than free water.

“I’ll have a margarita,” she hears herself say. She’s never had one before, but it seems to be the specialty of the house, and as her father used to tell her, you don’t go into a Chinese restaurant and order the eggplant parm.

“Frozen, rocks, or up?”

She blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want it frozen or—”

“Yes. Frozen.”

“Salt?”

“Salt?”

“Rim. Salt?”

It’s as if he’s speaking a foreign language. But not Mexican, because she took three years of high school Spanish and she has no idea what the heck he’s saying.

She just shakes her head.

“It’s okay, I got it,” the nice bartender says, and walks away with the full beers.

He’s back a few minutes later with a frozen lime-colored cocktail.

“One margarita.”

“Thank you.” She puts down a twenty-dollar bill. The drink was less, but maybe he’ll think she’s leaving the entire difference for him. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“A friend of mine went missing a few weeks ago and this is the last place he was seen. Can I show you a picture of him?”

“You can,” the bartender says, “but I’ve only been working here for a few days.”

Deflated, she pulls the picture out of her pocket anyway. She printed it out from an online file. It’s Carlos’s mug shot, as they call it at the office: the photo all new employees have taken on their first day, to live on forever on their ID cards.

“This is him. Do you recognize him?”

“Nope. Is he your boyfriend?”

“My brother,” she says impulsively. Something tells her that she’ll find more sympathy if she’s looking for a missing family member than an AWOL boyfriend. Not that Carlos was her boyfriend.

She just wanted him to be.

And now she’s going to do whatever it takes to save him.

Without sticking her neck on the line at work anyway.

“He had a date and he was meeting the woman here. No one has seen him since. It was May—”

“I wasn’t working here then. Let me ask the others, though.” The bartender takes the printout and walks away with it.

Ivy sips her drink. She wants to like it, but she doesn’t.

A few minutes later the bartender is back with the photo. “No one knows him,” he says with a shrug. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Thanks for checking.” She slides the twenty toward him. “That’s for my drink.”

“You need change?”

She nods.

When he brings her back a five and a couple of singles, she leaves a dollar on the bar and slides off the stool.

“Thank you,” she calls.

He waves at her, already busy filling someone else’s drink.

Out on the street, Ivy ponders her next move.

A neon sign catches her eye:
PARK.

When she snooped into Carlos’s private messages back in May, Sofia—the woman he was meeting at Tequila Sam’s—mentioned she’d be driving into the city from the suburbs. She had to park her car somewhere.

Maybe someone at the garage will know something. It’s a long shot, but it’s all she’s got.

The vase of yellow roses greets Gaby like a forgotten houseguest of dubious welcome.

She almost bursts into tears at the sight of them, remembering how promising everything seemed when she opened the door to find Ben standing on her threshold earlier.

She should have known the past would rear its ugly head and ruin everything.

Then again . . . whose fault is that?

She’s the one who brought up the past. She’s the one who couldn’t let it go.

Was it really because she was trying to clear the air so they could build a future together? Or was she subconsciously trying to keep that very thing from happening?

Maybe she was so afraid of the risk—so terrified of letting him in and then losing him again—that she deliberately sabotaged their relationship. Her actions tonight were the equivalent of water dousing a wick, just to be sure the flame was good and extinguished, and now . . .

Now she is, quite literally, alone in the dark.

What have I done?

She has to call him, right now, and . . .

And what?

Apologize?

Ask him for another chance?

Tell him she made it all up; that she really doesn’t feel that way and never did?

Too late for that. He’ll never believe it, and anyway, shouldn’t she own her role in destroying their marriage?

Maybe they can work through it.

Remembering the steely look in his eyes, she pulls her phone from her pocket, knowing she has to reach out now, before she loses her nerve.

She clicks into the home screen and notices that she has a text. That’s right—her phone was vibrating when she was about to get on the subway. She’d thought it was him, even thought he might have come after her.

Now she’s pretty sure that’s just wishful thinking. There’s no way, after the things she said to him, that he’s going to want to talk to her or see her again tonight.

Opening her text message in-box, she sees that the text isn’t from Ben, it’s from . . .

Peter?

Ben’s friend Peter? How is Peter texting her? He wouldn’t have this phone number, and—

Why
is Peter texting her?

Did something happen to Ben?

Her heart stops. In the seconds it takes for her to open the message, her mind goes to a terrible, dark place. What if Ben was running after her when she left the bar and he was mowed down in the street? It’s a Saturday night. People drive drunk. What if—

How was last hurrah—take 2?

What, Gaby wonders, is he talking about?

Last hurrah—what last hurrah?

There’s another text, sent later:

At SI – get your ass down here son.

And then another:
Someone wants to meet u.

Below that there’s a little video clip, obviously taken in a bar, of a blond bombshell type. “Is it on?” she asks, slurring a little. “It is? You’re really taping me? Okay—” She smiles and waves at the camera. “Hi, Ben, I’m Laney. Your friend Pete tells me you’ve been hooking up with the ex-wife. Bad idea! Come on down and hook up with me instead!” She lifts a stemmed glass and toasts, and the scene cuts out on her giggle.

Gaby feels as though she’s been slammed by a wrecking ball.

Hi, Ben . . .

This is Ben’s phone.

She fumbles in her purse, coming up with her own—same exact phone in an identical case.

Great minds think alike . . .

She realizes now that Ben must have been the one who left his phone behind when they walked out of the restaurant after dinner. She was on her way to the ladies’ room when the waiter spotted her and hurried over with it in his hand.

“I’m glad I caught you! You left this on the table.”

She thanked him, shoved it into her pocket and forgot about it. It never occurred to her that it might be Ben’s phone and not her own.

Now, as she stares at the text Peter sent—with the accompanying video—her confusion quickly gives way to dismay, with fury right on its heels.

Last hurrah—take 2.

The meaning wasn’t immediately clear. But now that she’s heard the drunk bimbo’s reference to “hooking up with the ex-wife . . .”

Is that what Ben calls it? Hooking up? Was the other night supposed to be a last hurrah? And tonight he was back for more?

She shakes her head in disgust. It’s all she can do not to fling the phone against the exposed brick wall across the room.

Instead she shoves the phone into a drawer and slams it shut hard.

Maybe when she calms down, she’ll decide to tell Ben that she has it.

Maybe she’ll decide to keep that to herself and toss the phone into the trash incinerator in the basement.

Right now, as she recalls
hooking up with the ex-wife
, she’s betting on the latter.

Feeling utterly violated, she strips off her clothes, gets into the shower, and lets the hot water wash away the tears.

“Yeah.” The kid working at the parking garage nods at the printout photograph of Carlos’s mug shot. “I saw that dude.”

Ivy’s heart skips a beat. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

She looks at him, head tilted, wondering if he’s telling the truth.

“Was he with someone?” she asks, and at his nod, asks, “Who was it?”

“Some lady.”

That sounds right, but . . . could be a lucky guess.

“What did she look like?”

The kid shifts his weight from one overpriced basketball sneaker to the other and uses splayed finger and thumb to thoughtfully rub furry sideburns that remind Ivy of the mutton chops on portraits of mid-nineteenth-century presidents.

“Yo, I should be working,” he tells her. “Time is money.”

Money. Right.

Feeling like a character on a detective show, Ivy reaches into her pocket, glad she didn’t tip anything more to the bartender, who, though he reminded her of Pop-Pop Al, couldn’t tell her anything about Carlos. She might have better luck with this guy.

She pulls out a wad of money. It looks like more than it is. Lots of ones. She peels off a five-dollar bill to hand to the kid.

He looks at it. Hesitates. Shrugs and puts it into his pocket. “She had dark hair.”

Ivy waits. “That’s it?” She knew that from the profile photo she saw on the InTune page.

“She was tall.”

Yes. Five-foot-ten. That, too, was on the profile.

“What else?” Ivy asks.

“She was older.”

“Older . . . than me?”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty,” Ivy lies.

“Yeah. A lot older than you.”

“This isn’t really helping me. Look, my brother has been missing since that night. This is life and death.”

“Then why aren’t the cops involved?”

“They . . . are. But they’re—you know how it is. They have other things going on. I’m—this is all I have. He’s all I have. Just tell me . . .” She reaches into her pocket again, pulls out the wad of money. “Tell me what you remember about them.”

He eyes the cash. Waits.

She puts a few more bills into his hand. Ones.

“He was effed up,” the kid says, stuffing them into his pocket. “Drank way too much.”