“Darling of you to remember, Victor. You told the police, of course, who the unidentified figure was.”
“No, I didn’t,” I lied.
“My Galahad.”
“I just want to know what happened,” I said.
“You just want to know if my taste for beefcake had something to do with the beefcake’s murder, is that it? You want to know if my husband killed him, is that it? Because if it is my husband, then your grubby little politico client might just get off, is that it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“Once again, Victor, the girl from Bryn Mawr is going to disappoint you. Pour me some wine, please.”
I poured her the wine from a new bottle the waiter had brought. She drank it quickly, too quickly for its price. She was still drinking it when the salad and ravioli arrived. My ravioli were light and radiant. I sopped up the dregs of the cream sauce with thickly buttered bread. I could feel my arteries clench. Lauren merely picked at her greens between deep drafts from her wineglass.
“How much do you want to know?”
“As much as you want to tell me.”
“Wonderful. We won’t discuss it at all.”
I shook my head and she reached out a hand and cupped my chin.
“All right then, I’ll tell you everything. It was at that vile little club he put his name on. We went there now and then. Guthrie had run off to the bathroom. He was always running off to the bathroom. They don’t make men with bladders anymore, Victor. It’s true. All the good bladders are gone. While he was away Zack came over and asked if everything was satisfactory. He asked it with a smile that I recognized from my own mirror. So I told him no. Which was the truth, Victor. I had married Sam with the best intentions. My little piece of rebellion. I mean, he wasn’t a Biddle or a Pepper, but then he wasn’t anything scandalous either.”
“Like a Jew,” I said.
“Maybe you should go to the men’s room and straighten yourself, Victor. Your chip is showing.” She smiled at me, a broad, cold smile. “My intentions with Sam were always honorable, but things simply weren’t working out. I had thought him insouciant at first. But that was an act. Underneath he is very earnest. I don’t like earnest, do you?”
“That’s not how I think of Guthrie.”
“Marry him and find out. A very perspirable, very earnest young man. We should have lived together first. I would never have made such a mistake. But Mother wouldn’t have it. So instead I married him and found myself sadly disappointed. I began to dally. Discreetly, while he was at the office. Just minor bits of fun here and there. Decidedly dry, decidedly unearnest fun. So when this very handsome, very well-built man asked me if I was satisfied, I said no. He had the most marvelous apartment, a real bachelor pad. All kinds of wonderful toys.”
“I saw them.”
“Yes, I suppose you did. We had a wonderful few afternoons together.” She laughed in spite of herself.
“How did Sam find out?”
“Oh, so you know that too. A detective, hired by my earnest husband to discover if I was cheating on him.”
“And when he found out he went apeshit,” I said.
“What a pleasant term. Yes, he went apeshit. He hit me in the face with the back of his hand, knocked me clear over the bed. I had a perfectly beautiful bruise. I must tell you, Victor, it was the most passionate I had ever seen him. What a night we had.”
“And then he went off to find Bissonette.”
“No, Victor, I’m sorry.”
“Yes, he did. You’re protecting him now.”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“By the time Sam got the report I was already through with Zack. He had broken it off, actually. Some foolishness about being in love. No, after Zack there was my personal trainer and then a heating contractor, working on our pipes, and then a florist, a sweet Englishwoman named Fiona, and they were all listed in the report too. And they’re still very much alive. By the time Zack was beaten we were in the middle of an earnest but ultimately futile reconciliation. So you see, Victor, it wasn’t Sam after all.”
I didn’t respond. Instead I sort of grunted with disappointment. The waiters whisked away our appetizer plates and brought our main courses. My steak, thick filets in a deep brown pepper sauce, seemed too much to eat just then.
“Suddenly,” I said, “I’m not hungry.”
“Doggie bags are such bad form, Victor. Eat. You look a little peaked. But I must say it is charming that you think me worth a homicide.”
She smiled at me, her impossibly wide, sexy smile, but then it withered into something arctic.
“But it wasn’t me you thought he would kill for, was it, Victor? It was the name, it was the money, it was the slot at the family firm. You’re a monster, do you know that? Both of you bastards. You belong together. At least poor dead Zack was honest. All he wanted from me was my body.”
I dropped my gaze down and saw my steak sitting there, charred and thick in its sauce, malignant with peppercorns. I cut into the meat. It was blood-red inside and I realized I was more than not hungry. I was nauseous, lost. I was adrift without a clue.
Someone was lying about killing Bissonette: Enrico Raffaello lying to throw us off the scent, or Jimmy Moore lying to save his political career, or Lauren lying in one last gallant gesture to her soon-to-be-former husband. Or maybe no one was lying. Maybe the murderer was someone else, a jealous husband I hadn’t yet stumbled upon. Or Norvel Goodwin, threatening me off the case to try to keep his drug-related murder of Zack Bissonette a secret. It could be anyone or no one, as far as I was concerned, because all my hunches had been all wrong and I had no more hunches to follow. Prescott would have his way with his cabana boy after all and there was nothing I could do about it.
“Excuse me,” I said to Lauren as she sadly separated the flakes of her trout with her fork and I rose to go to the men’s room. But once I reached the glass-enclosed bar, instead of turning right and heading into the hotel lobby, where the lounges were, I turned left, out the door, down the ramp, out and across the side street to the parking lot and into my car. I could see Lauren’s back through that bay window. So what if I stuck her with the check, she could afford it. I had someplace I had to be. Lancaster Avenue to City Line Avenue to the Schuylkill Expressway to I-676 to Race Street into Olde City and the converted sugar refinery and the loft bed where something golden awaited me and where, like a convict leaping the fence, I could escape from my life.
40
VERONICA IS WAITING FOR ME, naked, languid in her bed, legs slung carelessly about a twisted sheet, arms resting on a pillow above her head, breasts leaning on either side of her narrow chest. Her hair is wild, tangled, the room smells of her, it smells of deer in suburban forests, of raccoons. She doesn’t turn her head to look at me as I stand over her bed, staring at her, overcome.
“You took so long to get here,” she says.
“You shouldn’t leave your door unlocked.”
“How did you get in the building?”
“An old lady with grocery bags.”
“You took so long to get here I started without you.”
“It looks like you finished, too.”
“It is never finished.”
I undress hurriedly, like a schoolboy at the pool while others are already splashing. I yank off my shoes without untying them, my pants end in a pile. A sock lies limply against the leg of her bed. A button pops as I fumble with my shirt. With her I feel young and clumsy, competent only as long as she tells me what to do. I want her to watch me undress, but her head is turned away, she is lost somewhere. Wherever she is is where I want to be.