Authors: Katia Lief
Rich smiled a smile that lifted his whole face. “You should do their commercial.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.
Courtney’s glance was sharp but to the point: if I was going to be jealous of her natural charms, then we couldn’t be friends. This new level of understanding came fast, like a drop down a well. Femininity came easily to her, she couldn’t help herself, and she had been despised all her life by girls and women who couldn’t stand what appeared to be a form of sexual deceit. I saw that very clearly now. Being that she was my only available friend (not counting Rich), I couldn’t afford to lose her, nor did I want to.
“On second thought –” I smiled at her “– maybe Yahoo should hire you to do their whole campaign. You’d give them the best promotional boost they ever saw.”
“Good girl.” Courtney winked at me and me alone, leaving Rich out of the wordless conversation that had just sealed our friendship. “I’ll check out firearms courses, so you’ll have the info when you make up your mind. And I’ll start shopping for guns – like I said, something pretty.”
“Thanks, Courtney. I appreciate all of it.”
“You better.” She stood and gathered her purse to her shoulder. “I’ve got some things to do and later on I’m meeting someone.” One side of her mouth crooked naughtily. The truth was, I was dying to know if she planned to meet Jed Stevens tonight but would have to reserve that question for another time, when we were alone.
I followed her to the front door. “I never asked you how it’s working out with Stan. How the story’s coming.”
“Great. We’ve worked together before. He’s a crime trooper like me so it’s like an old dance.”
“Any ID on the bones?”
“Darcy, I would have told you! But I’ll make a prediction: they’re from nineteen seventy-eight.”
“I agree. But out of curiosity, what makes you think so?”
“A hunch. No, maybe it’s more than that, if you take intuition seriously.”
“I do.”
“This morning, in the newsroom, we were talking about the Tony T trial and we all agreed the prosecutor’s suddenly taking a lighter touch. Stan called it ‘a set of nuances’, you know, something in the ether, gestures, innuendoes of tone, stuff like that. Nothing concrete but everyone’s aware it’s happening. I mentioned it in tomorrow’s piece: ‘Abe Starkman’s murder may have made the District Attorney’s office nervous, which could account for a detectible laxity in yesterday’s questioning of Sal Corarro on the witness stand,’ which is pretty much what I wrote.”
“That’ll go over big with the powers that be.”
“Elliot approved it and he even got Overly’s OK, so …” She shrugged her shoulders with the mock innocence she was so good at, the glint never failing her eyes. “Our job is to keep our ears open and our pencils sharp, right?”
“Right. Except no one uses pencils anymore.”
“Hal does.” The newsroom politico who sat among us in his Lego sanctuary.
“Maybe
he
can give me some tips about how to hide from invading forces.”
“Nah, he’s just an eccentric. I’d stick with good old common sense if I were you.”
Courtney and I kissed cheeks and she vanished
into
the waning afternoon to pursue bones and killers and sex; a long-legged, fair-haired, elegant example of a workable contradiction.
Through the open door I felt that the air had grown sharply chilly as evening neared. It was the season’s first hint that the darkness and cold of early winter would soon make its inevitable approach. I stood there for a minute, alone, drinking in an easy solitude – grateful for the reassurance of friendship the afternoon had brought – and, then, for a split second, I was certain I saw Joe across the street.
I stepped out in front of the house to get a better look. It was a man who looked like Joe: early twenties, pale skin, dark hair, red baseball cap, walking quickly with intense energy. And then I had the strangest thought: had the mask of outrage Joe wore last time I saw him up close replaced an accurate recollection of how his face looked? Had I forgotten what normal Joe (if he even existed) looked like? Would every man who resembled him seem to
be
him? It would be impossible to hold so many Joes in my mind.
I rubbed my arms to warm them against the chill and told myself not to be ridiculous because
of course
I would recognize Joe and
of course
there was only one of him. Then I went back inside the house to shoo Rich out on his safety-making errands so I could get started on mine.
But first, alone in the dark part of the hallway between the kitchen and the foot of the staircase, deep in that shadow of privacy, we kissed. Pings and ekes and bubbly tunes from Nat’s video game whooshed down the stairs, reminding our hands not to wander too far under clothes. Still, for a minute, I found his skin and felt the tautness of his back, spreading my fingers across the long muscles that braced his spine. His fingertips followed the contours of my breasts, his mouth found my neck – and then footsteps above stopped us at the height of the moment when you might not be able to stop. When your body was charged, priming itself, preparing.
“Mr Stuart’s on his way out,” I told Nat as he came lumbering down the stairs and into the front hallway.
“See you, kid.”
“Bye, Mr Stuart.”
Nat stood and watched me walk his teacher to the front door. I kept my expression as placid as I could, bidding him goodbye with my friendly mom wave as he opened the iron gate and walked away down the sidewalk.
“He’s cool, Mom.” Nat was grinning.
“Don’t you have homework or something?”
“It’s Friday. What’s for dinner?”
“Good question.”
The fridge was basically empty. I discovered that
the
local butcher delivered and ordered a variety of meats to stock the freezer. Fresh Direct could handle the rest of our weekly groceries from now on. The fact was, I could order in just about everything we needed, from food to clothes to you-name-it. With Rich bodyguarding Nat back and forth to school, and me now a work-at-home mom, I could redefine the meaning of reclusiveness. I could embody it, once all my systems were in place.
But when I was secure inside my home, cut off and lit up and alarmed to the hilt, what then? I would not be able to function indefinitely as a reporter or a mother, shut inside my house. I wondered if it was a better option to allow Joe to get to me, to prompt him to do whatever it would take for the police to lock him up for a long time. If he did something
really
bad … but that thought alone triggered a return to the pragmatic plan my advisers had cooked up for me: lay low and keep safe. After that, I really had no idea.
Friday night, as Nat and I sat together in the living room watching a movie, the phone started up, ringing and ringing and ringing. We tried to ignore it, putting the TV’s volume as loud as we could stand. Even Mitzi and Ahab had grown used to the noise, no longer hiding under furniture or running around nervously but lounging right out in the open where we could hold them on our laps or tickle them with our feet.
Nat’s threshold for the incessant noise proved lower than mine or the cats’. He paused the movie and one by one figured out how to turn off the ringers of all three phones. It took some time as each was different and none had a simple switch. One required removal of its back with a Phillips head screwdriver, for which I searched before finding it in one of our unpacked boxes in my bedroom. Finally, in the calm of silence, we finished our movie and our night.
Turning off the ringing phones did a lot to turn off the ringing in our minds, too. In the morning, without consciousness of whether or not Joe was strugging to get through, it was almost as if he wasn’t trying. It freed us to go about our business. We had a quiet breakfast together, sharing the early half of the weekend
Times
. I read Stan and Courtney’s story with great interest, of course; she had quoted herself verbatim yesterday and the article was much as she’d described: implication without accusation. They had also, for the first time, made reference to the conflicting land sale documents. In the three days since we’d obtained them – the days I’d been out of the office – Courtney and Stan must have vetted those documents, otherwise Elliot would not have allowed their mention in print. It didn’t take a genius to predict that this would prompt the city to step up its defensiveness against the idea that it may
have
made a kind of devil’s deal in their brokering of the developer’s land purchase. It was already well known that the city’s current administration was over-friendly with real estate developers and it didn’t need to be pointed out that the mob played ball for a price, but there was friendly and there was
friendly
– effectively it was the difference between a handshake and extramarital sex. Perhaps this time the city had gone too far in its flirtation with power. If Abe Starkman hadn’t called me, or some other reporter, the bones would still be hidden in the wrong place in the Pearson warehouse, buried in a different grave, and the corruption would have died another death right along with them.
Whenever I thought of Abe – realizing again and again that the man was actually dead – my heart sank, inevitably returning me to a parallel resonance: the deeper, colder, rougher ocean of Hugo’s death. And whenever I thought of Hugo’s death, my body brimmed with misery. Nat must have noticed my eyes watering because he had his usual reaction, rising suddenly from the breakfast table and leaving the room, leaving me alone in the kitchen of the home we had still not fully inhabited. The quiet kitchen. Outside, birds sang, a child shouted, an electric saw buzzed; and thus, after days of ringing phones, I was reminded that the quiet was not actually
quiet
, after all.
Later that morning, Nat had a few schoolmates – Henry, whom I knew, along with two new faces, Charlie and Maura – over to rehearse for a play they were in at school, while I continued down my To Do list. I scheduled an electrician to come on Monday to wire a video camera above the front door and floodlights in the back yard. The soonest the alarm company could come was Wednesday. Meanwhile I checked my email to see if Courtney had sent me any of the promised information about a firearms course – an idea I continued to resist and yet did not fully reject – but she hadn’t sent anything. Probably still in bed with Jed Stevens, a thought I found both amusing and revolting.
It was a little awkward when Rich showed up later that afternoon in full view of three of his eighth-graders, who were gathered at the kitchen table devouring a pizza, but we managed to act as if it was nothing unusual. He had brought with him three large bags from Home Depot and Radio Shack, and one adorable little girl, his five-year-old daughter Clara who wore a pink princess costume fully equipped with a faux tiara and magic wand. It was all I could do not to scoop her up in my arms.
Rich cut up some pizza into little squares and set her on a kitchen chair, elevated on a phone book. She sat erect so her tiara wouldn’t fall off. Nat and the other boys seemed to think nothing of it but Maura
doted
on Clara, asking her questions about kindergarten and whether or not her art-teacher dad did art projects with her at home.
“Watch out, Maura,” Rich said, “or I might enlist you as a babysitter.”
“Oh, I would
love
to babysit her, Mr Stuart! I started babysitting last year. I’m really good at it.”
“I can see that.” Rich smiled, watching Clara and Maura beam at each other. “You can start right now, if you want. I’ve got a few things to do to help out Mrs Mayhew around the house.”
“OK, Mr Stuart.” Maura inched her chair closer to Clara’s and proceeded to help the princess sever a too-long strand of pizza cheese.
As we left the kitchen we overheard one of the boys saying, “Whoa, Mr Stuart moonlights. My mom said lots of teachers can’t live on what they earn.”
I listened for Nat to add something –
moon-lighting’s one word for it! heh heh
– but fortunately my son was discreet enough to not to turn it into a joke. He wouldn’t have wanted to be embarrassed, either, by the impropriety of his mother dating one of his teachers. Instead, he changed the subject.
“Hey, anyone want to go see the new Spiderman movie tomorrow?”
“Saw it,” Charlie said. “It’s great.”
“Can’t, I still have that lab report to finish,” Maura said with an unmistakable note of frustration.
“I’ll go.” Henry. “But not until late afternoon, OK? My parents have some people coming for lunch and they said I have to be there. Maybe after the movie you could hang out at my house for a while. My mom won’t let me have sleepovers on a school night but she’d probably be cool with dinner.”
“I’ll ask my mom,” Nat said.
Rich and I looked at each other. I leaned toward his ear and whispered, “When does Clara go back to her mom’s?”
“Tomorrow at five.”
“Dinner?”
“I’ll come over here and cook.”
“No. I’ve got to get out of this house. Let’s eat at your place.”
“OK,” he whispered.
Their conversation faded to distant voices as we got settled in the living room. Rich handed me two mailbox keys for a post box at the UPS store on Court Street along with the receipt showing the box number. Then he emptied the bags and showed me the purchases he’d made. It was everything we’d discussed: floodlights and bulbs, surveillance camera and tape deck, and an analog answering machine that could store messages on a small, removable tape. I wrote him a check to reimburse him for the cost, whispering, “So you won’t have to moonlight,” and furtively kissed the edge of his ear.
On the front page of Sunday’s
Times
, a weekend Metro reporter I didn’t know announced that a minor league Mafia soldier from the Tarentino family had been arrested late Saturday night at a social club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Specifically, he was charged with participating in grand felony theft for stealing a cache of guns in New Jersey and moving them into New York, the crossing of state lines making it a federal charge. More significantly, he was also charged with the murder of Abe Starkman with one of those guns. And the district attorney had real evidence with which to prosecute: fingerprints, bullet grooves matching the interior of the gun – and an eyewitness. Apparently the FBI had agreed to pass along a prized informant, a Tarentino minion who was willing to come forward to testify against his colleague. That handily sealed the deal. The killer would go to jail for Abe’s murder and the city would look tough on racketeering.