"It wasn't just a woman you wanted, was it? It's me. It had to be me. Why Jackie?"
Jackie Weir raised her eyes from the bottle and looked at Tess helplessly, as if she could no longer speak. Then she shifted her gaze to the wall, to that photo. The crying girl on the flying rabbit.
"I knew you," she said at last. "When we were younger."
"Were we at Western together?" Jackie could have been a senior when she was a freshman.
"No, at the drugstore," she said, pointing her beer bottle at the photo. "Not that one, the big one, the one on Bond Street."
"The Weinstein flagship on Bond and Shakespeare? That's my Aunt Kitty's bookstore."
"It wasn't then. Not when I was eighteen. Not when you were fifteen. Not when you used to come in after school and drink chocolate malteds, and talk to your grandfather about your day. Your hair was usually in a long, shiny plait down your back and you were so thin, then, almost scrawny. That must have been when you were running all the time."
"It was. But I don't-" She stopped, embarrassed.
"Don't remember me? There's no reason you would. I was just the girl in the back, flipping burgers. I wore an apron, and a hairnet, and those big glasses. But I could hear you. You told your grandfather about the good grades you were getting and the parties you were going to and what this boy or that boy had said to you. It was like watching a rerun of those old Patty Duke shows, listening to your life."
"Funny, my adolescence seemed more like a sitcom based on Kafka to me."
Jackie heard her, but she wasn't having any of it, any more than she had let Tess see herself as some poor frail female about to plunge through the tattered safety net. "Then last March, I read about you in the paper. Your picture was there, with that dog. Like I said, you look just the same. Later, when I saw you had opened up a private detective agency, I knew I had to hire you. I knew when it became difficult, or rough, you couldn't drop me, like the first detective did, or spend my money without getting results, like the second one did. You had to help me. You had to."
"Just because you once worked for my grandfather, because I was out front sipping sodas while you were in the back, making burgers?"
Jackie looked frightened, as if the words she were about to utter were so forbidden, so long unspoken, that she wasn't quite sure what they might do once let loose in the world.
"You have to help me because Samuel Weinstein was my baby's father."
Chapter 19
As many times as she had been there, Tess always needed the marker of the wheelchair ramp to find Tyner's house in Tuxedo Park. It was so dark in his neighborhood on a summer night-darkness being the perogative of truly safe places as well as the really dangerous ones-and the shingled houses were virtually indistinguishable. Hard enough to find the street, St. John's, much less the house itself. Once she did, she waited on his front porch, drinking from the international six-pack she had assembled at Alonso's Tavern, where they allowed you to mix-and-match the beers. A Red Stripe, a Bohemia, a Royal Oak, a Tsing-Tao, a Molson, and an Anchor Steam. Around the World in eighty beers.
It was past eleven. The velvety voices of television anchors drifted from open windows, filling the night with authoritative sounds. So emphatic, so sure. You didn't even have to hear the words to know how a story was supposed to make you feel. The pitch told you everything you needed to know. Bad thing had happened. Important thing had happened. Funny thing had happened. Weather had happened.
Shit happened. Where was Tyner, anyway? Tess drained the Red Stripe. She was halfway through Mexico by the time his van pulled up out front. She called to him as he came up the ramp, so he wouldn't be startled to find her on his shadowy front porch. But nothing ever really surprised Tyner. Lucky him.
"Not a very good training regimen," he observed, looking at the glass bottles at her feet.
"Depends on what you're training for. Where have you been, burning the midnight oil on Luther Beale's case?" She couldn't help sounding a little petulant, as if Tyner should know she would be waiting on his front porch.
"Luther Beale is safe at home, where I expect him to stay unless the police come up with something significantly more substantial than the circumstantial bullshit they threw at us all day. I had a date."
"A date?" She had known women found Tyner attractive, but she hadn't known he actually did anything about it. "Who is she?"
"Another lawyer. No one you know."
"How old is she? Or should I ask, how young is she? Young enough to be your daughter? Young enough to be your granddaughter?"
"What an odd thing to say."
"Not so very odd."
And she told him everything. She began with her conversation with Jackie, veering off into wild digressions about Willa Mott and Adoption Rights and the leather seats in Jackie's Lexus. Somewhere in the middle of her rambling story, Tyner reached for the Anchor Steam and the bottle opener, but he never spoke. By the time Tess's voice wore down, the street was silent, the televisions long turned off, all the windows dark.
"So I'm looking for my aunt, I figured out," she said. "What's that stupid West Virginia joke, the one about the song. ‘I'm My Own Grandpa?' I'm looking for my thirteen-year-old aunt."
"Lots of people have aunts and uncles younger than they are. Given the imperatives of biology, it's not that unusual."
"Jesus, Tyner, there was a fifty-year age difference."
"So?"
"So that's sick."
"It was legal, though. She was of age to give consent."
"He was her boss, which makes it sexual harrassment. And adultery. Which isn't legal in the state of Maryland, no matter how old you are."
"Does Jackie think she was sexually harrassed, or is that your take on it?"
Shrewd Tyner. He always did have a way of knowing what truly bothered her. She was the angry one, not Jackie. The man Jackie remembered-a man she called Samuel, in an affectionate voice that made Tess's skin crawl-had been kind to her. If it hadn't been love between them, it had been a genuine fondness, two lonely, unhappy people finding solace in one another's company. He had given her gifts, encouraged her to think about life beyond the grill at Weinstein's Drugs. When she told him she was pregnant, he had given her money for an abortion, which she had pocketed, knowing she was too far gone for the procedure. He had even offered to help her with college, but his business troubles had kept him from honoring that pledge. Still, Jackie had nothing unkind to say about him. He had never promised to leave his wife for her, she had told Tess. He had never promised anything, except to provide her a corner of warmth and regard in a world that had given her so little of either.
"She's crazy," Tess muttered.
"That's a possibility. Or she could be lying. Remember, she lied the first time you met her."
Tess had not thought of this and it was a tempting out. Would Jackie tell such an outlandish story to keep Tess working for her? True, she had known much about Weinstein Drugs, but it was possible she had worked there without being bedded there. Perhaps she had hated her employer and waited all these years to punish his descendants. Tess allowed herself the fleeting pleasure of embracing this theory, then just as quickly discarded it. Not even Gramma Weinstein could have provoked someone into seeking such a convoluted revenge. Besides, there was definitely a daughter out there somewhere, Jackie had convinced her of that much. It suddenly occurred to her that the strange detail Willa Mott had remembered about the father of Jackie's baby was not his race, but his advanced age.
"I'd give anything if I could prove this was all some sick lie, but I can't."