She took a moment to wipe the surfaces she might have touched. And at the last minute she remembered to go through his wallet. He had just over three hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and tens, and something made her look in the compartment behind his State of Washington driver’s license, where he’d tucked away two fifties and a hundred for an emergency.
Well, this was an emergency, all right. The Nuits-Saint-Georges had left her alarmingly close to broke.
She locked the car on her way out, unlocked her bike, and left.
Now what? Back to Rita’s house?
For pizza and French wine and another session in the living room? This one, she knew, would go further than the last. Their hands wouldn’t be limited to their own flesh, and she could see how the evening might well end with one or both of them getting eaten out.
It wasn’t really a lesbian experience, Kimmie, because we’re not lesbians.
What would it be like, having another woman do that?
Or doing it herself?
She was getting hot thinking about it. But it wasn’t going to happen, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen by skipping the pizza, skipping the wine, and skipping Rita’s house altogether. If she went there, what could possibly happen afterward? Either she’d want to stay with Rita and try to make some kind of a life together, or she’d feel the need to kill her before moving on. She didn’t want to kill Rita, not now, not in the least, and she couldn’t stay with her in a town where she’d just murdered a man. She wanted at a minimum to be on the other side of a state line, and ideally clear across the country.
And she’d looked ahead enough to tuck what she could into her handbag. Not all she’d have liked to take, the bag was really no more than an overgrown purse, but enough to hold her until she had a chance to buy something new.
More to the point, nothing she’d left in Rita’s spare bedroom could be traced back to her. Sooner or later she’d call Rita, and by then she’d have a story ready to explain her abrupt departure. But for now all she could do was disappear.
A pity she couldn’t return the bike. Park it someplace, tell Rita where to find it? No, keep it simple.
She left it unlocked a block from the bus station, propped it against a lamp post and walked away from it. Someone was sure to adopt it — before her bus left, and before anyone could begin to wonder who stuck a knife into Graham Weider.
FOURTEEN
When she first laid eyes on him, he’d looked preppy. That was in a bar in Riverdale, within walking distance of the last stop on the Bronx-bound 1 train, and she knew that much because she knew she’d walked there. She was drinking a Cosmopolitan when their eyes met. He bought her the next Cosmo, and the next thing she’d been able to remember was waking up in his bed.
He had looked a little less generic in the morning. In daylight she’d noted the vivid blue eyes, the once-broken nose, the pouting sensuous mouth. He was a Wall Street guy, she’d learned, and she could see him in that role, aiming to take his place as one of the self-styled masters of the universe.
That had been a while ago, and the years had taken their toll. Online, she’d learned that he’d come by the preppy look honestly. He’d been at Choate first, then Yale, then the B school at Columbia. Destiny had clearly meant him to wear suits from J. Press, khakis and polos from J. Crew.
Was it any wonder that he looked a little older and less prepossessing in a burnt-orange jumpsuit?
That would add years, all right. And it wasn’t a simple matter of costume. Just being incarcerated — that would tend to age a man, wouldn’t it?
The prison was in an upstate New York town she’d never heard of, a good deal closer to the Canadian border than to the city of New York. You had to take two buses to get there, an express to Albany and a local the rest of the way. She was one of a dozen women who migrated from the express to the local, and she figured they were all on similar errands, visiting their incarcerated mates.
An interesting word, incarcerated. As far as she could tell, it was used exclusively by persons to whom it applied — and, to be sure, by the women who loved them. The five syllables served to take the sting out; I am presently incarcerated didn’t hit as hard as The fuckers locked me up and swallowed the key.
She’d noticed one woman in particular on the Albany express, a dishwater blonde with sharp facial features and a feral look to her. Not long ago she’d watched a cable documentary on crystal meth, and every woman in it looked like this one. So did half the women on any episode of Cops.
They’d exchanged glances, and she wasn’t surprised when the blonde took the seat next to her on the local bus. “I’m Barb,” she announced.
“Audrey.”
“I guess we’re going to the same place, huh?”
“I guess.”
“I’m on this bus every week. You see a lot of the same people, and then you stop seein’ some of ’em and instead you start to see different ones.”
“Like life itself.”
Barb had to think about that. Then she nodded. “Got that right,” she said. “I don’t think I seen you before.”
“First visit.”
“Yeah? Your man, right?”
And I’m standing by him. Just like Tammy Wynette wants me to do.
“Well, sort of,” she said. “But I haven’t seen him in years. We more or less lost track of each other. I’m not sure he’ll remember me.”
Barb gave her a look. “How’s anybody gonna forget you? Only question’s are you on the list. ’Cause if you’re not an approved visitor, no way they gonna let you in.”
“His lawyer said I’m approved, I won’t have any trouble.”
“Well, you’re okay, then. You figure on using the truck?”
“The truck?”
“You know, Audrey. The truck.” A sigh. “The fuck truck. Pardon the expression, but that’s what everybody calls it. What it is, it’s a trailer more’n a truck, and you get an hour in there. Like, private time.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “See, in a way I hardly know him. He’s been, uh, incarcerated for almost three years, and I didn’t even find out about it until a month ago. I’m not even sure why I’m here visiting him. Would I want private time with him? Maybe, but how do I know he’d want to go in the truck with me?”
Barb gave her a look. She said, “Three years?”
“Plus a couple of months.”
“Honey,” Barb said, “that man’d settle for private time with a nanny goat. Will he go in the truck with you? You’re kidding, right?”
But when they brought her in to see Peter Fuhrmann, it wasn’t in the designated trailer, and you couldn’t call it private time. After she’d passed through a scanner and been strip-searched by a matron, she wound up sitting in front of a long window. There were women on either side of her, talking to men in orange jumpsuits on the other side of the window. There was an empty chair across from her, but it didn’t remain empty for long. A man appeared, wearing the orange jumpsuit that seemed to be standard here, walked to the empty chair, and looked at her for a long moment before sitting down.
Would she have recognized him?
She knew him right away, saw the man she’d spent a night with in the man who sat across from her now. But she’d been expecting him. If she’d encountered him across the aisle in a subway car, or at adjacent tables in a diner, would any mental bells have rung?