He looked at his daughter, taking in that noble, slightly long face, inherited from him, and those flowing brown locks, tinted with streaks of gold. Then there were those eyes, blazing lamps which could narrow into focused slits of hate; they came straight from her mother’s arsenal. It was always so hard not to see Jenny in the girl. Right now those eyes were set on neutral, which suited Mick; he generally avoided asking Lindy about her personal life.
But she wouldn’t have changed. She would be the same hardcore, demented, dyed-in-the-wool slut of old. That was such a terrible thing for a man to admit about his daughter. But the stone-cold truth was that since puberty Lindy had seemed unable to resist the attention of just about any suitor; male or female, she wasn’t picky. Worse, she actively pursued the bulk of them in the most wanton, predatory manner.
He recalled with his customary shudder the trauma of that horrific day, now so long ago but burned into his psyche so as to cast it up as vivid and stark as if it were yesterday. Taking a run through the parking lot behind the strip mall, he turned the corner, coming across a crowd of youths tightly gathered round at the mouth of a narrow L-shaped alley. This was a popular spot for kids to hang out, and Mick reckoned by the jeers and the charge in the air, it would be two boys having a fight. As a conscientious Boston Police Department Officer, he went over to break it up. But it had been Lindy, just in ninth grade, lying there, getting fucked by a kid who barely looked old enough to have a set of balls in his sack! Mick had stood for a second, uttering a disbelieving curse as the kids around them scattered, then his next shout echoed across the park, as he pulled the copulating pair apart like two dogs. The terrified boy fled, yanking his pants up, while Lindy did the same with her underwear, then tugged down her skirt, Mick turning away till his daughter had completed this mortifying task. Then he dragged her to her feet and out of the park. The thing that struck him on his tense, shameful walk home was that Lindy seemed totally unrepentant, unconcerned, and barely even embarrassed once she’d gotten over the first flush of shock. — We were just making out at first and things kinda got outta hand, she said with that shrug that seemed only slightly affected.
Mick Doherty had been about to react, when he’d looked at his daughter’s profile. It was the same one she was displaying to him now; glassy and vacant, her arms folded across her chest. Back then it was still the chest of a child, he considered, now swamped by a vision of Lindy in her communion dress. How could this be his little girl? How could this have happened?
Now she was sitting there, watching the infomercial, and Mick felt as shut out from her life, her thoughts, as ever. Her behavior was rendered all the more incomprehensible, given the parental framework he and Jenny—for all her faults had provided their offspring. And her sister, his younger daughter Joanne, was now working in the war and famine zone of Darfur, trying to help imperiled children.
One kid attempting to save the world, the other seemingly determined to fuck it to death.
Mick had long faced up to the disturbing facts. Despite the discipline of the sporting background he’d provided for her, Lindy was a demanding, insatiable borderline nymphomanic with psychopathic tendencies. And Mick sometimes blamed himself for instilling that competitive drive, that will-to-win-at-all-costs attitude within her.
But was she also a killer? Arthur Rose was as dead as he was ever going to be, his back weeping with multiple wounds, in the very alley where he’d discovered his daughter’s grim copulations all those years ago. Lindy had gotten into town a couple of days before the body was discovered. She had publicly threatened Rose once, over another dark chapter in her troubled life. And she would be in the frame; the Boston homicide tecs hadn’t come calling yet, but that would happen as sure as night followed day.
Lindy looked up, only cursorily acknowledging Mick’s presence, her face set in that expression of mild disdain she hadn’t been able to shake off since those teen years. His casual overture, when he asked if she’d had a good run, produced little more than a brief, contemptuous raising of her shoulders. Yet, for all their estrangement, Michael Patrick Doherty couldn’t believe that his older daughter was capable of cold-blooded murder. But he knew one person who could find out for sure, an old colleague of his in the BPD.
It was time to call Matt Flynn.
I’M SEETHING IN
silent rage at that fucking rancid old pig, feeling his words hit me like shattering blows. I see Mona glance at me in my peripheral vision, as I grip the hard edge of the seat.
FUCKING ASSHOLE!
I need to get him alone and ask him what that fucking public humiliation was all about, and in front of a bitch I work beside! The gig ends in polite ovation, the old bastard smugly declaring during the audience questions, — I think every writer uses their own experience. That’s inevitable.
What is inevitable is that I’m going to give this asshole a piece of my mind. He has no fucking business using me like that! He doesn’t even know the real story! But as he finishes up, Mona follows me to the side of the signing table where a huge line has formed. — He was
sooo
good!
My prick of a father sees me, flashing a grinning apology at a woman in the front of the line, before turning back to me. — Honey! Great to see you! Then he fixes Mona with a wolfish gaze. — And who is this treasure?
I’m sucking down my blazing anger, trying to remember that revenge really is a dish best served cold. — This is Mona, she works with me.
— Another trainer! I thought as much. You kinda radiate it, that health and vitality.
— Thank you. Mona pseudo-blushes and touches her hair, as my guts flip over.
— The restaurant options here in the hotel are very good, but I booked us into a place over in Miami Beach, he lowers his voice and cups a hand over his mouth, — so I can get away from my adoring public. So please excuse me for a while, ladies, but, Mona, I do hope you’ll be joining us for dinner?
Before I can react, she says, — I’d love to!
So there we are, sitting at the bar, waiting on that reptilian old bastard getting through the signing line. It’s as crass as you can imagine as the bartender asks Mona for her ID. — Always happens to me, she says, her smile lupine, caused by a new Botox strain stronger than liquid nitrogen. She produces a state driver’s license, the image stamped on it less laminated than her actual face.
The bartender raises his brows. — Well, you had me fooled, he smiles, turning away.
Mona touches her hair again but it’s because she thinks she sees a guy on the Miami Heat roster. I follow her line of vision but as it isn’t LeBron, Dwyane Wade, or Bosh, there’s no point whatsoever in even checking them out. My brain is in a riot, and I’m thinking, in spite of what she said, what if Mom and Lieb stop off at the apartment and discover Sorenson? I’m besieged by the memory of that horrible time in the park . . . I’m fucking over that now . . . can’t let the weak and sick rule your life . . . and that old bastard knows fucking nothing! And Mona is chattering some more fucking nonsense in my ear, — . . . I’m not sleeping with Trent again. He thinks he can just call me like that, she snaps her fingers, — and I’ll come running. It’s okay saying “it’s just sex,” and she makes the quotation marks sign, — but it gnaws away at your self-esteem when you constantly find yourself going back to a thirty-year-old child, who can’t commit to anything . . .
It takes about the longest fucking hour of my life for my father to finish and dispense with the hangers-on. Then we’re outside and Dad, shaking off a stalking, dotty housewife who is asking him all sorts of jackass shit about Matt Flynn, says to me, — Let’s just get into your car, he points at the Cadillac DeVille in the lot, it looks like a sorry drunk who’s gatecrashed a society bash, — or we’ll never get out of here.
So the three of us pile into the Caddy, heading over to SoBe. It’s a silent drive for me and a chatty one for them: Dad craning around to Mona in the back seat, full of cheerful tittle-tattle about the tour. As the inanity spills from their mouths, ricocheting around the car, my wrath incubates. I pick up speed and think of ripping off his seat belt and shoving the treacherous old fuck out onto the asphalt. I’m relieved when we’re back over in SoBe and into this French joint on Collins. As the waiter seats us and brings cocktails, Mona is looking so intensely at Dad that her bulging eyes suggest a rabbit being fucked by a fox. — I just love the way that Matt Flynn is never vulnerable. He’s always in control. A real man. I mean, one who’d just like,
take
a woman.
— I think they call that rape, I hear my words hissing out from between my tight jaws as if they were being spoken by somebody else. A low buzz plays in my head and the lights in this restaurant seem suddenly overpowering. I can’t stop my jaw clicking.
Sort yourself out.
— Are you okay, Lucy? The words emerge thinly from Mona’s paralyzed face as if from the grille of a car stereo speaker.
I sit back in my seat, forcing some air into my lungs. — I’m good, I spit out, feeling like some teenage goth chick who’s been taken out to meet her dad’s girlfriend—no, her future fucking
mother-in-law
—this tanned strip of beef jerky, pumped strategically with silicone, who is
eight years
younger than me.
— Mona’s right, pickle, there’s a crisis of masculinity in contemporary America, and us guys, instead of blaming society and the economy for this emasculation, should just man up, pansy down, and have the balls to admit we’ve done it to ourselves. He raises his cocktail to his lips.
— That is
sooo
on the money, Tom, she says, with a big smile, as I realize I’m pretty much invisible here.
I wait for the irritating waiter to get out of our faces, then turn on Dad. — What the fuck was all that shit about? The nympho daughter!
— What?
— It was about me! That time in the park!
As Mona’s eyes widen further and she edges forward in her seat, Dad protests, — It was nothing to do with that! Those are fictional characters! This happened in a parking lot, not in a public park—
— Every other detail is pretty much the same! Except, I — I wasn’t — it was . . . I try to clamp my mouth shut cause only shit is coming out. Why can’t I say RAPE, why can’t I look him in the eye and say the fucking word?
— You know what it was, Dad says, and he’s angry, the liver spots flaring on his neck, now making me feel like a kid again, — don’t act like it was just making out, you know what it was, and you were just a damned child—
— Yes, I do know, because it was—
— Let’s not go there, he shouts, and raises his palms to the side of his head, as Mona looks on intently. He takes a long, deep breath and twists his features into a puppet smile. His voice is low and measured. — Anyway, it’s beside the point. It’s fiction, honey, and you’re being
waaay
too sensitive. Writers make shit up, that’s what we do.
I also take a deep breath and a slug of my martini. My hand is shaking, as I lower it to the table. I focus on that glass—anything other than his grave, sandpaper-skinned face, or that frozen Botoxed ornament.
— You do it so well, Tom, Mona purrs, and she drops her hand onto his wrist, as his teeth flash in a crocodile grin.
— I’ve been lucky, I guess.
— I don’t think luck comes into it, Tom . . .
The hovering waiter returns to take our order as I get control of myself. I can’t be weak and allow a frightened little prick like Austin a seat at this table. I go for a nearly raw steak, with a mixed salad, and order a bottle of red wine. Mona preens and fusses, finally opting for linguine with scallops, shrimps, and clams. Dad, surprisingly, bypasses the steak; he goes instead for some sea bass. — Too much goddamn red meat on this tour, he says, in response to my arched brow. — You see, I do listen to you!
I decide to take the tendered peace offering. I tersely clear my throat. — So how is the Biltmore?
Dad hesitantly turns a weather-beaten smile my way. — The absolute last word in luxury, pickle. I got me one of them poolside cabana suites. It’s surrounded by palms, bougainvillea, and hibiscus. Don’t get me wrong, he swivels back to Mona with a deep grin, — the hotel’s rooms are unbeatable, but when I’m in the tropics I like to
feel
as if I’m in the tropics, if you catch my drift.
— Oh, totally, Mona almost pants. — Is there a spa?
— Not just
a
spa,
the
spa, he says, his eyes twinkling. — You should check it out. If you’re a spa aficionado, it’s pretty much essential.
I’ve had enough. It suddenly dawns on me how easily that bitch left her fucking wheels over at the Biltmore parking. Could she make any more of a play if she tried? I slam back my martini and pull myself to my feet. — This is
waaay
too gross for me, and it’s fucking well creeping me out. You, thanks for the drink, I say to Dad, pointing at the empty glass, — and you, I turn to Mona, — thanks for nothing! Fucking fake!
I spin on my heel and head to the exit, announcing to the other diners as I point back at her, — Bitch is fucking fake! Ain’t never seen a fuckin faker bitch!
As the waiter approaches with the wine, I can hear Mona pleading in a sorry little voice, — What did I do?
— Nothing whatsoever, the lying pig says. — She’s been under a little pressure . . . let’s just let her go and blow off some steam . . .
I stop and take a step back toward the table. — Bitch is fake, I again announce to the crowd, — fake ass, fake tits, fake lips, fake hair, fake eyes, fake teeth, fake nose, fake voice . . . she’s a fuckin impostor! My Barbie dolls bled more than that bitch!
— Lucy! Please! Dad snaps, on his feet, as diners gasp in horror, and cluck in outrage.
A maître d’ surges forward: — Miss! You really have to leave!
— Don’t worry, I’m going! Bitch’s fake, and I again jab a finger at the crying Mona. — You fake, bitch. You fuckin fake!