Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  “Gerry,” she says, sweeping in, “you are going to have to find me a place to stay.”

  She is wearing a voluminous cape. No—a coat with a cape-like attachment. Dark and velvety. Not unlike what the woman in the window wore that night, but if at night all cats are gray, then all coats are black.

  “Why?”

  “Because you sold the apartment, silly.”

  “Months ago, yes. Besides, what about your place? Don’t you still have that studio in Chelsea?”

  “The tenant, the subletter, is refusing to leave. Can you believe it?”

  Yes, he can. He also can believe that there is no tenant, that Margot no longer has her studio apartment in Chelsea, that she was, in fact, the subletter.

  “Surely you have some legal standing?”

  “Thiru thinks it will be okay when the lease is up—that’s what I get for doing things according to Hoyle.”

  The quaint old saying, something that has no meaning in today’s world, reminds Gerry of why he was charmed by Margot once upon a time. Ditzy as she can be, she is clever and well-read; he never had to explain his references. It had not been a mistake to take up with her. His only mistake was thinking that he would have any more luck than his predecessors when it came time to leave her. Clearly, foisting her off on Thiru isn’t working, not yet. Thiru is much smarter about women than Gerry. Despite or maybe because of having logged one more marriage.

  “Margot, I’m going to have to tell you a hard truth. I cannot provide for you and, furthermore, I am under no obligation to provide for you. What we had was lovely. But it’s over. It’s been over for quite some time, as we both know. I thought you understood that when I came down to Baltimore and put my apartment on the market six months ago.”

  “I assumed you would be moving back.”

  “So did I.” He still does, just not for a year or two. New York is a much better place to grow old than Baltimore, he is sure of that now. Oh why had he sold the apartment up there? He is never going to be able to buy anything as nice as he had. New York seems determined to shed itself of everything but billionaires and those old-timers who had the good luck to buy and hold property when it was cheap.

  “What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?”

  He has the strangest feeling of déjà vu or, as dreamy Dr. Bevington described it, a sequencing error. He realizes that she’s basically playing the final scene of Gone with the Wind. She swept in here like Scarlett visiting Rhett in jail, and now she’s jumped to the end of the story. He can’t say he doesn’t give a damn; he’s not that cold.

  But he doesn’t give a damn.

  “Margot, I’m sure there’s someone who can help you. Right now, I’m not that person. Obviously, I’m not in the position to help anyone.”

  Her eyes narrow. “You always were a selfish bastard. Everyone thinks you’re so good. You think you’re good. But you’re a terrible person, Gerry. Nothing’s worse than a bad person who thinks he’s good.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, but then—all the better that we cease contact.”

  “I know things about you. Things you wouldn’t want me to tell people.” Her voice is rising. There’s no doubt that Victoria, at work in his office downstairs, can hear the tone, if not the actual words. “You think your secrets won’t catch up with you, but some have. I could make life very difficult for you, Gerry.”

  This threat of exposure, the penny-ante blackmail essence of it all—hollow as it is, Gerry is enraged, which is probably what Margot is counting on. Gerry has always had a horror of being talked about. He has been lucky to have the kind of career in which his biography is of little interest, despite the three marriages. He never lied about himself, but he downplayed the more extreme aspects. Only child of a salesman and a housewife, parents divorced when he was young, father remarried and had a second family. No one needed to know that the two families had overlapped for almost ten years. He’s lucky that no one ever tried to find Gerald Andersen Sr. when he was alive. Gerald Senior would have been happy to talk, talk, talk to anyone who expressed interest.

  “If you have stories to tell, Margot, tell them. Better yet, write them down for that memoir you’re always threatening to write. Oh, wait, that’s the one thing you can’t do, create. You’ve had to settle for fucking the men who can.”

  He knows his words are cruel, that he has used his intimate knowledge of Margot to locate her single greatest insecurity and press hard on it. Still, he is not prepared when she slaps him and then, for good measure, scrapes her fingernails across his cheek, drawing blood.

  He yelps, more in shock than pain. No one has ever touched him in this way, no one. And he has never longed to put his hands on a woman, but he does now. He pushes her, hard, and when she comes back at him, he instinctively reaches for the heretofore useless walker by his bed and deploys it as a combination shield–jousting pole. Some ludicrous part of his mind triumphantly dredges up a fact: Jousting is the official sport of Maryland! Not lacrosse, as many people assume, but jousting.

  On his third thrust, he connects and sends Margot flying. She lands hard on the floor; her purse flies open, the contents scatter. She still carries a healthy supply of condoms, Gerry sees. It’s a paradox worth noting that the spontaneous courtesan has to be prepared.

  Victoria comes running up the steps, only to freeze at the tableau before her. Margot rises to her knees, makes a great show of rubbing her backside, but Gerry knows what a fractured tailbone feels like and he is confident she would be screaming in pain if she had injured herself seriously. She begins crawling across the cement floor, gathering her things.

  “Call the police.” But it’s Margot who says this to Victoria, not Gerry. He has no desire at all to bring police into this ugly scene, to have it recorded officially. Victoria, her back pressed against the wall in horror, would seem to be in accord with him.

  “I don’t think that’s what you want,” he says, pointing to his face. “You drew first blood.”

  “I’m surprised you have blood, you amphibian.”

  “Just go, Margot,” he says. “And don’t come back. The front desk will be informed to have security escort you out if you show up here again. I’ll get a restraining order, if that’s what it takes. Stay away from me—”

  “Or?” she says with a sneer, still daring to question his manhood despite the fact that she’s just been bested by him. She takes her things to the kitchen counter, puts her purse back together, in no hurry at all.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  “No, you’ll be sorry. I know things, Gerry. Things you don’t know I know, things you wouldn’t want anyone to learn.”

  He has no idea what she’s talking about.

  She sees his wallet on the counter, where it has sat for weeks now, used primarily by Victoria when she orders food deliveries, but always with some cash. Gerry feels insecure without cash. Margot picks it up, rifles it, takes out several bills. “The least you can do is pay for my fucking cab,” she says.

  At the front door, she stops by a little mirror that hangs next to it, an organizer with hooks for keys, a shelf for mail. She checks her hair, touches up her lipstick, taking her sweet time.

  “Could you just leave, Margot?”

  “This isn’t over,” she says.

  “No, I’m pretty sure it is.” He feels an enormous burden lifted when she goes, slamming the door behind her. He has survived the curse of Margot Chasseur.

  *

  HE IS WORRIED, as he drifts off to sleep that night, that the delusions will return. It was after Margot’s last visit that he received—or thought he received—the first call. He swallows his Ambien and calcium pill and, for the first time in a while, enjoys an almost dreamless sleep, one in which there is an overall feeling of wellbeing. The phone doesn’t ring; no terrifying apparitions interrupt. When he opens his eyes it is past seven o’clock and light has begun seeping into the room. Daylight saving time arrived only a few days before, so the dawn�
�s early light isn’t quite as early as it was a week ago. In the gray, gauzy gloom, he looks at the ceiling and wonders at his sense of contentment. He feels warm this morning and, strangely, loved, although the one person who loved him reliably is gone. He doesn’t remember dreaming, but he feels the way a child might after being comforted for a nightmare.

  He finds the remote that raises the blinds. The sky to the east is shot through with streaks of orange-red. When he bought the apartment, he had pretended to be disdainful of this high-tech touch, but the blinds were essential, given the eastern exposure. And the remote secretly gave him a thrill. In his childhood, villains and playboys always had lairs with remotes that closed screens, turned on music, lowered desks, raised beds. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

  He thinks of Francis Scott Key watching Baltimore hold its own against the British in the War of 1812. His mind is lively this morning, his mind is itself again, hopscotching from cultural reference to cultural reference. When he visited St. Paul’s Cathedral in London as a cheeky twentysomething, how he had delighted in reminding his tour guide that the illustrious Major General Ross, honored there with a plaque near Wellington’s tomb, had not been victorious at the Battle of North Point. The rockets’ red glare! Bombs bursting in air! Gave proof through the night. Oh, say can you see? Or, if you’re at an Orioles game, OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, say can you see?

  Francis Scott Key was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ancestors, Gerry thinks, enjoying the free association. Gerry used to take women to Fitzgerald’s grave site in that little cemetery smack-dab in the middle of Rockville. He had ambivalent feelings about Gatsby, but he almost always got laid after that maneuver. God, he misses sex.

  What is the dark heap on the floor? It looks like a pile of clothes. Except—is that an arm?

  Wake up, he says to himself. Wake up, wake up, wake up. But he is awake.

  He struggles to a sitting position. The pile of clothes—or maybe it’s a pile of sheets and Aileen, prone to distraction, left them here, she can be quite messy—is fairly close to his bedside and while he cannot move his bad leg, he has the core strength to lean out of the bed for a better look.

  The pile of clothes is Margot, her black cape surrounding her like a velvety puddle. Did he dream the second part of their encounter? Did he push her hard enough to harm her? Didn’t she leave? Wasn’t Victoria here when everything happened?

  Margot’s face is turned away from him. He takes the walker, the one he used in his own defense, and prods the body until her head lolls toward him. A happy little salesman appears to be dancing on Margot’s face.

  It’s the handle of his father’s old letter opener, Acme School Furniture, and it’s been plunged into Margot’s left eye up to the hilt.

  Light fills the room; the crimson sunrise has yielded quickly to a blue sky with cumulus clouds skittering by like sailboats. It’s going to be a gorgeous day. Oh, say can you see? Oh, say can you see? Oh, say can you see?

  PART II

  GIRLS

  March 13

  THUD, THUD, THUD. Thud, thud, thud.

  It’s a familiar sound, but Gerry can’t identify it, not with the blood pounding in his ears and his mind darting around, trying to make sense of the tableau before him.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  Maybe it’s the telltale heart, although how would one bury a body beneath a floor of poured concrete? If only. If only there were a heart still beating inside that black puddle of cloth, if only a brain were still humming inside Margot’s damaged skull.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  It’s Aileen’s heavy tread on the stairs. Shit. She always comes up to say goodbye in the mornings, although Gerry usually feigns sleep to avoid conversation with her. Maybe he should do that now, play possum. Maybe he is asleep. A dream would be dreamy. This is a dream, it has to be a dream, and when he awakes, the shape will be gone, in the same way the apparition disappeared that one night. Opioid-fueled delusions, dementia, who cares? All that matters is an explanation for what he thinks he sees on the floor. He closes his eyes. Maybe his eyes were always closed.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  Then—nothing. The moment of silence stretches out. He keeps thinking she will scream and when she doesn’t, it gives him hope. Her breathing is regular, in and out, a little huffy as always after she climbs the stairs, but normal, measured.

  “Oh my,” she says. “What happened here?”

  He opens his eyes. There stands Aileen in her puffy coat, arms akimbo, the not-so-little teapot, tall and stout. Her knitting bag dangles from the crook of her elbow.

  “I don’t know, I honestly don’t know,” Gerry says. “She showed up yesterday, but I sent her away. She attacked me, she scratched me, and I fended her off, but I didn’t—I wouldn’t. And that was earlier, when Victoria was here. I didn’t—I couldn’t—I don’t know how—”

  “She sneaked back in,” Aileen says. Or asks. Her calmness is surreal, but she is a nurse, she has seen things that others have not.

  “She must have. I don’t know how. She knows I have to leave the front door unlocked, maybe she hid in the stairwell between the floors—”

  He sounds ludicrous. Could he have done this? That sounds ludicrous, too, the idea of Margot spending hours in a stairwell. But Victoria was here until five and there was no body on the floor when Aileen arrived at seven. This has happened overnight. He is proud that he can pinpoint this, then appalled. Margot is dead, in his apartment, and not even she is drama queen enough to plunge a letter opener into her own eye.

  “This is bad, Mr. Andersen.” For once, he is grateful for Aileen’s flat aspect, her gift for understatement.

  “I guess we need to call the police,” he says.

  “Sure,” Aileen says, although she doesn’t move. “Obviously, it was self-defense.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I mean, I think. I don’t remember anything.” He wonders if sleep-murdering is another potential side effect of Ambien. “Any statement I give would be inherently false.”

  “You need time,” she says. “The worst thing to do in an emergency is go off half-cocked without a plan.”

  “Yes,” he agrees fervently. “Maybe call a lawyer or—”

  “No, not a lawyer. Trust me,” she says. “I can take care of this.”

  “How?”

  “Trust me,” she repeats. She takes off her coat, drapes it over a chair. He does not remonstrate with her for this. “Put yourself into my hands.”

  Not the image he would have chosen, but he will do exactly that. He has to. He literally cannot imagine what it would be like to follow any other course of action. To call the police or a lawyer. To tell Thiru. No, he will trust Aileen.

  She continues with appealing confidence, energized by this new task: “Cancel Claude. Then call Victoria and tell her not to come in today.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “You’re the writer. Make something up.”

  He does. He calls Victoria and tells her that he needs her to drive up to Princeton and inspect its special collections. “I want to find out what the experience of accessing my papers will be like for future researchers,” he says. “Tell them that you are interested in seeing the collections of Toni Morrison and, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  “Do you think those are the best, um, comps?”

  An impertinent question, but he doesn’t have the luxury of challenging Victoria’s assessment of his place in American literature. Although, he can’t help noting to himself that his body of work is larger than Fitzgerald’s.

  “My thinking is that those will be two of the most in-demand, that library staff should be used to scholars asking to see their papers. If they can’t handle this request, then I can’t expect them to do well by those who might want to examine my papers.”

  “The drive alone—”

  “I know. It is a lot. You could take the train, but it wouldn’t save much time in the end. And it will be a long day no matter how efficient you are. Why don�
��t you stay in a hotel—I can recommend a nice inn, near campus—and spend the night, break the work up over two days and then take Friday off to make up for all the extra hours.”

  Aileen, who is scrubbing the floor, gives him a rubber-gloved thumbs-up.

  Aileen’s efficiency today surprises him. Aileen, so slow and dull when going about her normal job of caring for him, has rallied admirably in the matter of removing a corpse and cleaning up after it. It’s like a reality television show in his own living room. He had watched from his bed as she wrapped Margot’s body in a fitted white sheet, presumably one of the ones he keeps for the never-used sofa bed in his study, then dragged it down the stairs like a toboggan.

  “Good thing you like the skinny ones,” Aileen had said, huffing and puffing.

  “Where will you—”

  “The fewer questions you ask,” she told him, “the better. Not knowing anything, not remembering anything—that’s an asset.”

  So the body has been removed, the floor is scrubbed. She has washed the letter opener, a cheerful Lady Macbeth, humming as she works, and placed it back on the end table he uses as a nightstand. Gerry asks the Google app on his phone a question: “How do police find blood evidence on objects?” This takes him down a rabbit hole of luminol stories. The letter opener is far from their only problem. Maybe they should just get rid of it? But they can’t get rid of the poured concrete floor, which potentially could hold on to its trace memories of Margot’s death forever.

  “Aileen, do you think that—?”

  “You have to let me do the thinking.”

  Terrifying, but he accedes.

  She asks for his credit card and makes a series of mysterious phone calls. He catches references to cubic feet and expedited delivery. Aileen gets testy at one point. “Tomorrow is not expedited,” she says. “Today is expedited. Don’t you know what words mean?” She hangs up on that person, dials another number. This conversation is odder still. “Yes, I am aware that deer season is over, but I hit one with my car.”