Liars in Love

by Ian Bull

  Kath opens her eyes and glances at her watch. It's 9 a.m. She sees him asleep, and eases off the couch and into the bedroom. She closes the door behind her, locks it, and then finds his wet jacket at the bottom of the wooden waterbed frame. She manages to slide out his wallet without touching the gun, then sets the jacket back down.

  Inside the wallet, she finds an expired driver's license, a parolee card, cash, and then a photo of a beautiful young woman with red hair and green eyes. On the back of the photo is a woman’s handwriting: Your gypsy for life. Love, Rose. In another slot, she finds a photo of a younger Sam posing outside with a red-haired boy in a baseball uniform, and both wear baseball gloves. On the back is written: Carl’s 5th Birthday. There’s one more photo of the three of them together wearing red sweaters, the kind of photo you get done for Christmas. They look happy.

  Back in the living room, Sam opens one eye and sees that Kath is in the bedroom. He touches his shirt as if hoping to find his jacket, and he knows immediately what Kath is doing, and decides to do the same thing. He darts over to a chest of drawers and a bookcase against the wall. She has a lot of late 20th Century self-help books: I’m Okay, You’re Okay, The Games People Play, The Prophet, and The Road Less Traveled. He opens a drawer and finds a pile of stickers and decals from all 50 states, plus famous U.S. landmarks, like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Mt. Rushmore. Under that pile is another pile of roadmaps from different regions in the United States.

  He closes that drawer and opens the one below it and finds a much neater pile of old photos of a girl. Sam picks one up. The girl is Kath, he realizes, and she's about eleven. She wears bell bottom jeans, platform shoes, and a purple tube top, and she's posing in front a green AMC Gremlin parked on the rugged Oregon Coast. He turns the card over and there's a girl's handwriting on the back – 1972 AMC Gremlin, Cannon Beach.

  In another photo, she's posing with an older woman with the same wavy dark hair and the same smile as Kath. It must be her mother. They are wearing matching yellow summer dresses with black sunglasses in front of a Ford conversion van in Death Valley, next to a big outdoor thermometer that reads 110 degrees. There's a tall man with them, with dark hair and a big thick mustache. He's wearing a camouflage t-shirt and looks mean. Sam turns the photo over and reads the back. 1973 Chevy Van, Death Valley with Jim the Jackass.

  In another photo, Kath and her mother pose in front of a gunmetal grey Cadillac in the parking lot of Disneyland. They are dressed in blue jeans and white button-down shirts tied in the middle, and they both have red bandanas in their hair. The man with them this time is older and has thin greying hair, with a pot belly hanging over blue polyester slacks. Sam turns the photo over and reads the back. 1970 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, Disneyland, with Pete the Perv.

  Sam leafs through the dozens of photos, all of them showing Kath and her mom on different road trips in different cars at different American destinations, all with different men, and young Kath cataloging the cars while despising the men who owned them.

  He hears rustling from the bedroom, closes the drawer and eases back into the weird round futon chair, just as Kath exits the ruined bedroom with his jacket on her arm.

  “Careful, there’s a loaded gun inside,” she says as she hands it to him.

  He takes the wet jacket and puts his finger through the bullet hole in the breast pocket. He slides it on and moves his shoulders. The damp leather smells like sour milk.

  “I had a good time last night,” he says.

  “It was just the champagne talking,” Kath says. “I shouldn’t have had any.”

  “I’m sorry about your bed. And your place.”

  “I’m glad, actually. It’s good that things didn’t go any farther.”

  “You can take whatever you need from my cut to pay for the mess I made,” Sam says, then walks out the front door, leaving Kath to survey her ruined home.

  Sam crosses steep 29th Street and sees a familiar Lincoln Town Car parked behind the ugly blue Ford Fiesta. The driver’s window lowers and Dozer sticks his head out. Cliff sits in the passenger seat. Both men still wear their 49er jerseys.

  “Did you score?” Dozer asks him. “You look like you slept in the tub.”

  Sam doesn’t answer him. He gets in the Fiesta, releases the parking brake, backs his wheels off the curb and coasts down the hill.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  S am swings open the door to Room 222 in the beautiful Taj Mahal Hotel on Turk Street, and finds Hal Weinstein sitting on his sagging bed with the fraying pink bedspread. Hal wears the same brown slacks, white short-sleeved shirt, and brown tie. His brown yarmulke is still pinned to the thinning brown hair he combed over his bald dome. Hal stares at the Magic Massage unit bolted to the wall, then looks up at Sam.

  “Does this thing work?” Hal asks.

  “Not really. You drop a quarter in and the mattress shakes for less than a minute. My neighbor threatens to kill me whenever I turn it on,” Sam says.

  Hal pushes the glasses back up on his nose and moves around the room. He checks under the mattress, opens the drawers of the tiny desk and bureau, and opens the closet door. Sam’s old clothes hang inside.

  “Finding everything you need?” Sam asks.

  “Not yet,” Hal answers.

  Sam goes to the windowsill where he keeps a bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses. He pours two drinks and hands one to Hal, who shakes his head.

  “It’s ten in the morning. The day just started.”

  “Mine just ended. I was working all night cleaning up water damage in a warehouse down in the China Basin Building. Their fire alarms went off.”

  Hal stops and looks up at him. “What’s the name of the company?” he asks, pulling out a pen and a tiny pad of paper from his breast pocket.

  “Bayside Remediation. I worked there three days this week. Call them."

  “I will,” Hal says, and writes it down on a pad and slips the pad back in his breast pocket, along with his pen.

  Sam sips his bourbon. “You like snooping in people’s closets?”

  “I’m always trying to establish an accurate picture of the parolee,” Hal says. He walks close and examines the clothes Sam is wearing. He runs his hand down the jacket’s front lapel. “Your jacket is wet.”

  “Like I said, water damage clean-up. I dropped my jacket in it by accident.”

  Hal runs his hands down the lapel and sees the bullet hole in the breast pocket. He touches the hole and raises his eyebrows at Sam.

  “Cigarette burn. I bought it second hand.”

  Hal takes a step back, crosses his arms and eyes him top to bottom. This diminutive brown and white parole officer can make Sam’s heart race with one sideways look.

  “You stagger in here at 9 a.m., looking like an ekidik balagan. You’re up to something.”

  “Make your calls, Hal,” Sam says, and then opens a drawer and pulls out a business card and hands it to him with the name of the company on it. “Ask for Dwight. He hires me.”

  Sam is smart enough to prepare an alibi before every burglary. He bribed Dwight at Bayside Remediation to say he’d been working there, and even coached him on how to answer the phone in case Hal or anyone called. What is pure luck, however, enough for Sam to think his lucky streak is still going, is that he’d picked someone at a remediation company to bribe, which is the perfect excuse for his overall dampness.

  Hal takes the card and snaps the white edge with his thumbnail. “How did you get the job?” Hal asks.

  “I went through every want ad and found nothing. Then I just started walking. I saw these guys drying wet rugs out on Pier 32, and I walked out and asked if they needed help. They said to call every day, and when they had a job that needed an extra guy, they'd hire me. That's how I met Dwight," Sam says, then holds up his drink. "Do you mind? I just got off work, I've had my cocktail and now I need to sleep."

  “Do I need to check the bathroom?” Hal asks.

  “Check it if you want,” Sam says
and collapses on his bed.

  Hal stares at him, then narrows his eyes and walks out. “See you in a few days!” Hal shouts as he slams the door.

  Sam jumps off the bed and goes into the bathroom. He pulls open the plastic curtain across the tub and reveals the sharkskin suit he bought, along with his nice silk patterned shirts and slacks, all hanging on the rod. He then checks behind the toilet and pulls out a wad of money that he had taped behind the bowl.

  He sits on the edge of the tub and sighs. He slides back into the tub and closes his eyes, relieved that he’s safe and the long day is finally over – so relieved that he falls asleep within seconds with his head against the hard porcelain and the wad of money against his chest.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  K ath pulls her jean jacket tight and lifts an old brown suitcase up the stairs and through the glass doors into the Mission Bay Health Club. The Grand Opening banner hangs up high in the tall atrium. The windows are clean, and there's a new carpet and new paint smell. Dozer sits behind the high, white counter.

  “Hey, Kath! We're open, what do you think?"

  Kath looks around. There’s a dance exercise room with hardwood floors and mirrors, and inside there’s a Jane Fonda workout happening with a dozen men and women dressed in tight shiny spandex with colored bandanas tied around their foreheads.

  “I don’t get it,” she says.

  “Neither do I, but look at them,” Dozer says, and gestures at the people on the workout machines and stationary bikes and in the exercise room. “Paul is a smart guy and he can spot a trend a long time before anyone else does. Maybe he’s right about this one.”

  “Is he around?” Kath asks.

  “Yeah, but Inge’s giving him a treatment. I wouldn’t risk going back there,” he says, and nods at the long white hallway that leads to his office.

  Kath heads down the hall anyway. When she gets close to Paul's office, she can hear muffled cries and moaning. She leans close and listens. Are they having sex? Is he whipping her? Is she whipping him? She then realizes she doesn't give a damn and knocks as loud as she can.

  Inge yanks the door open and stands in the door frame, panting, with beads of sweat running down her face. She’s wearing her Mr. Clean white t-shirt and white jeans, but all the perspiration is making her clothes a little too see-through for Kath, and she tilts her head back so she can keep eye-to-eye contact instead of nipple-to-eye contact with the Norwegian Amazon.

  “Is Paul here?” she asks.

  Inge allows Kath to enter the room with her suitcase. In the middle of the room is a flat piece of wood with wooden slats and leather straps that looks like a cross between a massage table and a medieval torture rack. Paul is strapped down in the middle of it, wearing just navy-blue bikini underwear, and he's drenched in sweat too. Inge kisses him long and hard on the mouth, and then undoes the straps holding down his waist, ankles, and wrists.

  “Inge was just working on my spine.” Paul steps off his torture rack and grabs the towel that Inge offers him. “Thank you, Inge, that will be all for now.”

  Inge growls at Kath as she leaves the room. Kath smiles and waves as she goes.

  “I can see the hair on her back through her t-shirt, she’s sweating so much,” Kath says.

  “Don’t be mean,” Paul says.

  “You make a cute couple. You suit each other.”

  “Of course, she loves me to death,” Paul says. “But something’s missing.”

  “Like the ability to speak?"

  “If I want snide conversation, I can always talk to you.” Paul takes his time putting on a terrycloth robe, making sure to show off his only somewhat defined muscles and abs.

  He thinks he looks better than he does, which is why he lingers as he slides on his robe like a narcissistic idiot., Kath thinks to herself. He’s still short, and Sam has a much better body, Kath starts to think – she then drives that thought from her mind.

  She puts the suitcase on the floor in front of Paul, then backs away, like a supplicant delivering an offering to the king. Paul grins, unzips it and pulls out sixty thin boxes of the LCD monitors.

  “Where are the rest? They were supposed to leave two cases for you,” he says.

  “We encountered some problems. No one left any cases out.”

  “I’m not impressed,” Paul says, and motions for her to follow him. They leave his torture room and walk back down the white hallway.

  “Neither am I. You didn’t hold up your end of the bargain at all. You said the alarm system would be off, but it wasn’t. You said the goods would be left out, but they weren’t. You said no guards would show up, but they did,” Kath says, following close behind.

  They get to the main workout area and another male employee in a white t-shirt and white jeans hands him a mango protein smoothie, then pushes open the glass doors for him. Paul and Kath step out onto the balcony overlooking the rusting red rail cars and the blue San Francisco Bay in the distance.

  “It was supposed to be a sham, and it wasn’t.”

  “Relax. They were in on it too. It added realism, for Sam’s sake,” Paul says, and sips.

  “They shot at us. I almost bit one guy’s fingers off,” Kath says. “This is too dangerous, we have to call it quits.”

  She also wants to scream that he’s a lying sack of shit, but she knows that he’s enough of a psychopath that she’d regret it. Most of all, she just wants out of the agreement they made, and the best way to do that is to use all her verbal skills to push him right to the edge.

  “The bullets didn’t hit you, did they? I ‘m telling you, they were in on it,” Paul says, and glares at her with an eyeball stare that insists that she not dare contradict him again. “What I’m more concerned about is the rest of the case of display monitors I already paid for on this ‘inside’ job.”

  “So now I owe you for your mistake? Fine, take it out of my cut, I don't care," Kath says. "You're going to deny your fuck-up no matter what I say, so it's safer for me just to walk away."

  Paul starts to micro-shake. His face and hands tremble almost imperceptibly, but enough for Kath to know she’s getting to him. She loves it.

  “Don’t blow up, Napoleon. People can see you through your big glass windows. You’ll look bad in front of your slaves.”

  Paul grins a big fake smile. “Take it out of your cut? You did such a bad job, I may not pay either of you anything,” Paul says. He sips his smoothie and puts it down on the metal railing of the balcony.

  “Fine. I’ll tell Sam that you decided to short us. That you don’t measure up…”

  “Leave, before I throw you over this railing.”

  Kath turns to go. “Fine. The deal is off.”

  Paul grabs her wrist. She can see from his crazed eyes that he’s fighting to control his rage. They stand frozen, staring at each other, until the cold breeze from the Bay raises goosebumps on her skin. With his free hand, Paul reaches into the pocket of his robe and pulls out an envelope, and then turns her wrist hard and slaps the thick envelope into her palm. It’s full of cash. “That’s all of it, paid in full,” Paul says. “You can’t use your sour tongue to get out of arrangement. Not this time.”

  Kath wants to rub her sore wrist, but she sniffs back a tear and counts the money instead.

  “Thank you,” she says, suddenly realizing she needs the money.

  “You’re welcome. And the money is not the real issue. What’s more important is what happened between you and Sam.”

  Kath puts the money in her jacket and shrugs. “I tried everything. Clingy lingerie, perfume, dancing, champagne. Nothing worked.”

  “What’s his problem? Is he gay?” Paul asks.

  “I don’t know, but I have an idea.”

  “Yeah? What is it?” Paul asks, with true curiosity. Kath realizes he has already forgotten about his strange cruelty to her just a moment before, which makes her despise him more.

  “He’s still in love with Rose,” Kath says.

  “So? H
e’s a guy, he still needs to get his rocks off,” Paul says, gesturing at Kath’s body like it’s the most convenient receptacle for that male requirement.

  “Not all men are like you, Paul.” She means it as an insult but Paul nods, taking it both as truth and a compliment.

  “Did he tell you he was in love with her?” Paul asks.

  “No, but he keeps a picture of her in his wallet. And when a woman gets rejected, she hopes it’s because there’s another woman, and it’s not because of her.”

  Paul grins. “You like him a little. I knew it. Keep trying. Trust me, he likes you.”

  She bites her lip. Now it's Paul who has Kath on edge, and he’s pushing her, which she doesn’t like. “I’m the one with him, not you. I can tell, nothing is going to happen.”

  Paul moves close. The wind blows Kath’s hair across her eyes and Paul pulls it away, then he smiles and touches the breast pocket of her jean jacket and feels the envelope in the pocket underneath. “Then make something happen.”

  “I don’t want to go through another heist with him. It’s too much,” Kath says.

  “Then don’t. These heists are just an excuse to force you two together. Just make him love you and find out what he did with the $500,000 and your job is done, no risk necessary. It’s all up to you, sweetheart,” Paul says.

  He picks up his smoothie off the railing and gestures that Kath can go. She does.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  T he next day, Kath puts on a yellow dress and a straw hat and hops on a Caltrans commuter train going south and visits Bella at the Meadow Song Retirement Community. After a slice of cinnamon toast, Bella gets dressed up in her best pink polyester pantsuit, puts on a floppy hat, and they borrow a golf cart from the gardener and zip across the street to watch the afternoon horses at the Bay Meadows race track. Both women wear dark sunglasses and carry purses full of cold hard cash.