You Don't Love This Man (6 page)

It's strange, the power of saying something aloud. It wasn't until I heard myself say, “I'm looking for you” that I realized that was what I was doing. And if I was looking for her, then at some level I believed she was missing. Sandra didn't know where she was; Catherine had asked about the police. Her absence was beginning to feel real.

When I reached the corner of the building, I paused to look back toward the overpass. The man with the ball cap had pushed his rattling cart out of the shade and was headed, tortoiselike, in the direction of the branch. Someone with longer hair—a woman?—trailed languidly behind him. I stepped around the corner of the building to where the high, unbroken brick wall that formed the bank's north side threw the sidewalk into shade. A chill rattled through me. Had I eaten yet? I couldn't remember. I dialed Grant as I walked toward the front of the building. The call went straight to voice mail, and I hung up without leaving a message. I couldn't ask him if he'd seen Miranda, because of course he hadn't, it was verboten on the wedding day. Unless they weren't observing that tradition—I hadn't thought to ask. I leaned against the wall, and was so startled when the phone began to buzz in my hand that I answered without even looking at who it was.

“So how is your bank?” Sandra said.

“It's fine,” I said. “It wasn't that much money.”

“Have you heard from Miranda?”

“I just called, but there was no answer.”

“I've done that, too,” she said. “More than once. What about Grant?”

“No answer.”

I heard the sound of an exhalation from her end of the line, but couldn't tell if it signaled distress or was just regular breathing amplified by the device. “What if they eloped?” she said.

“We've made deposits we can't get back,” I said. “He wouldn't waste our money that way. And you said you talked to him this morning.”

“Maybe he was lying about where he was, so they could get away. He could pay the money back to us without any problem—it wouldn't be that much to him. They could be anywhere, wherever they wanted.”

“They don't want to elope. And he wouldn't embarrass us in front of the guests.”

“No?”

“Did she say anything to you last night? Anything that might give us a hint?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“You were there,” she said. “We had the dinner. We went to that loud bar and had drinks. When I left, she said she would see me in the morning. That's it. Why don't you get ahold of your friend and ask him?”

“Who? Grant?”

“Prove to me they haven't run off somewhere together.”

“They haven't run off, Sandra.”

“Prove it, dear,” she said, and hung up.

The field of bricks that formed the broad, windowless side of the bank yawned overhead. Looking up, I felt momentarily dizzy and considered sitting down. The sidewalk was dirty, though, so I just leaned there and closed my eyes as the wall tilted on me, the bricks cold and damp against my hair. Keep moving, I thought,
and bracing myself against the wall, I did, until I made my way to the front of the building and stepped into the sunlight. Approaching the front door, I saw Mr. Fingerprints still crouched behind it as he examined the lower pane, almost entirely covered in his dark dust. Looking at him there in the doorframe was like studying a photo whose surface had corroded with age. But he shifted, he moved—it was no photo, and struck by the effect, it took me a moment to realize that he was no longer examining the window, but instead looking through it at me. I raised my hand in acknowledgment.

“Could I talk to you?” he said, his voice flattened by the glass between us.

“Here?” I asked, though I mouthed the word rather than saying it.

He tipped his head toward the side of the building. “Come back in around the back.”

So I headed back the way I'd come, walking briskly now that I'd been given a directive. I would talk to Fingerprints, check the photos, sign the police report, and move on, I thought. Then I turned the corner at the back of the building and nearly collided with the plastic grille of a shopping cart.

“Somethin' happen?” the man with the ball cap asked. Thinly bearded, he wore a flannel shirt and ragged jeans, and though at close range I could see he was older than I had expected, his gaze was not unintelligent.

“Yes. A little robbery,” I said.

I looked past the man's shoulder to the long-haired person three steps behind him. It was not a woman, but a man, gazing resolutely down as if absorbed by the sidewalk. Then, without lifting his face, he peered at me through his eyebrows, and even with the
hair hanging before him I could see the red, scabbed crater where his nose should have been.

“We saw the cops pull up, and then they didn't leave, so we figured,” the man with the cart said.

“It was nothing major,” I said, stepping around his cart. “I'm sorry, I have to get back inside.”

“We didn't see anything,” the second man said.

I stopped. “No?”

He shook his head slowly, his hair swaying. From the side, I couldn't see his wound—it had probably become second nature for him to orient himself to others at an oblique angle. But he said nothing more.

“You have a good day, sir,” the man with the cart said, dismissing me.

He was protecting his friend from my scrutiny, it seemed, so I told them to do the same. Post-robbery procedure required that I lock the doors behind me after I reentered the branch. I did my best to lock them quietly.

 

A
T THE TIME OF
the Mooncalf robbery I had been dating Sandra for only six weeks, but she spent large parts of the following three days in my hospital room. She worked at her parents' small paint and wallpaper business and was able to take time off to stay with me while varying degrees of pain medication bounced my utterances from vaguely lucid to completely incoherent. Seventeen stitches sutured the wound on the top of my scalp, and eight more closed the gash where the back of my head had hit the floor. One or both of the blows had given me a concussion, and I floated in and out of shallow sleep from which I awoke muzzy, disoriented,
and surrounded by an increasing number of flower arrangements: oversized yellow daffodils stood in one corner, spotted pink lilies gaped from another, and an ivy attempted to strangle a spherical wire frame on the bedside table. Sandra moved around the room at one point, reading the cards. “From Grant,” she announced, “from the bank, from your coworkers, from Grant and Gina, from me”—she flashed a coquettish smile there—“from the bank again, from your grateful customers, from me again…” I can't recall her reaching the end of the list, probably because the memory is mixed with a dream I had that same day, in which Sandra circled the room again and again, intoning the same litany of names. Or was Sandra's reading of the cards only ever a dream, an entirely fraudulent item I've inserted into my memories? What I know for certain is that when I awoke Saturday afternoon from another uncomfortable doze, it was to discover a flock of irises clustered right next to the bed, not more than eighteen inches from my head. “Aren't they pretty?” Sandra asked when she saw I was awake. “And they smell wonderful.”

The green stalks and purple flowers defied my attempts to resolve them into sensible focus—they were too close, or there were too many. And I couldn't smell a thing.

“Even the nurses have been admiring them,” Sandra said. “You should find out where they got them.”

“The nurses?” I said.

“Your friends Grant and Gina,” she said. “They told me they knew you from college. Grant said he's a customer, too?”

Everything from the day of the robbery carried the quality of a fever dream for me, so I struggled to make sense of what Sandra was telling me. In the images I was able to conjure, Grant and Gina floated across the bank lobby in the manner of movie
ghosts, I had a fevered and private conversation with Gina regarding the urgent necessity of our having sex, I began to demonstrate the utility of the suggestion, and then a man in a monster shirt hit me on the head with a gun. Not only did I believe the images belonged to dreams rather than waking life, but I was thankful they were dreams. To actually run into Gina with a new boyfriend would have been awkward, and nearly as unpleasant as being pistol-whipped and robbed. And yet it seemed clear that I
had
been robbed. And now Sandra claimed my encounter with Gina and Grant had also been real. Had the sex with Gina occurred, too, then? Had I been robbed
in flagrante delicto
? With a mixture of regret and relief, I decided it was unlikely.

Sandra seemed amused by my confusion. “You spent twenty minutes talking to them about Bristol's,” she said. “How you wanted to take them there and buy them scotch and sit in leather chairs. You said you would buy them the leather chairs, too, if they were for sale, and you would introduce them to movie stars, because you weren't afraid of famous people. You said you would go right up to celebrities and talk to them, because you just have to treat them like normal people and bring them down off their pedestals. You said the pedestals thing at least seven or eight times—
Down off their pedestals, down off their pedestals!
And then you offered Grant your IV, and he said thank you, and you seemed really happy about it.”

“So I completely embarrassed myself?” I said. “Wonderful.”

“Oh, they knew you were on medication,” she said. “But you were so chatty. Normally you're so self-consciously cool and reserved. It made watching you babble and offer to buy things for people and make crazy promises so much funnier. I think I like you better now. Even better than before, I mean.”

Her appraisal irritated me. How could I be self-consciously cool when I wasn't conscious of being self-consciously anything, much less cool? How, therefore, could one be unconsciously self-conscious? And checkmate. I was too tired to press the issue, though, and resigned myself to asking how the visit had ended.

“Grant said we should all get together when you're better,” she said. “He said he wants to make sure we go to Bristol's now that you've made all these promises.”

“I won't be able to look him in the eye.”

“There's nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “And there's nothing wrong with being nice to your friends, especially when you're on narcotics. And anyway, Grant has already sent three different flower arrangements. You really can't smell them?”

I could not.

 

A
T THE FRONT DOORS
to the branch, Mr. Fingerprints twisted the bristles of his brush over a grooved metal hand bar—a cloud of dust rose and then settled like ash upon the glass. “You're the boss?” he said without turning to look at me.

“The manager, yes.”

“Your janitorial service, is it nightly?”

“Except Sundays.”

“Well they're doing a good job,” he said. “Because the customer side of the teller counter is clean. No new prints, no old prints.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Oh, there are prints all over the girl's side of the counter,” he said. “But I'm willing to bet those belong to her, so we'll have no problem tying
her
to the scene. The fella who visited, though, remains at this point what we call anecdotal.”

“That's disappointing,” I said.

“But not unusual. The largest part of planning a crime is planning covering up the crime. Smart guys cover up before, during, and after. Look at this door.”

I bent to examine the glass, and saw in the dusted surface a tremendous number of egg-shaped reticulations, the whorls and lines of which interrupted or overlapped each other, or broke off as if they had reached some unseen border. A horror movie I'd seen as a boy came to mind, in which a mound of cockroaches had scurried wildly across and over one another's backs in a flesh-eating frenzy.

“It's good glass and there are plenty of prints,” he said. “But do you think someone careful enough not to touch the counter would use his hands to open the glass door? And these prints are smaller and lower, probably women's. But look at this.” He pointed to a spot higher on the door, where I could just make out a faint crescent in the dust. “Stand next to the door, but don't touch, please. You see how it's just below your shoulder? Someone roughly your height leaned into this door and pushed it open with his shoulder. Did you open this door with your shoulder when you got here?”

“No. I used my foot.”

“Because you didn't want to leave any prints, either. Smart man. Good manager. And of course neither did I when I came in. We were being careful, just like this guy was being careful.” He smiled. “We could rob a bank together someday, you and I. And if we invited the fella who visited earlier, we could all work as a team.”

“We would just need to choose the right bank,” I said.

“Oh, I think we should rob this one,” he said, laughing. “It's pretty easy.”

He seemed content to have shown me that there was nothing to see. I turned toward Catherine, who was at her desk, speaking to someone on her cell phone. She caught my eye and shook her head contemptuously while waving at her monitor, which I understood to mean the computer had still produced no images. “It hasn't been that long, really,” she was saying into the phone. “I'm sure it will all get cleared up soon.”

Charlotte, Tina, and Officer O'Brien weren't visible, but I could hear their voices in my office. Were they all in there with Amber? It seemed an odd place for people to congregate. Martinez paced a solitary circle a few yards off, hunched at the shoulders and speaking loudly in police jargon to no one. There was a microphone of some kind threaded into the lapel of his uniform, I assumed, though deranged people on the street argue with their invisible tormentors from the same posture. It seemed likely that at least some of Martinez's discussion was about our branch, but he spoke in an impenetrable code. At one point I heard him say the word
niner
, which struck me as ridiculous, and then I overheard something that made me pause.