As I jogged down the steps to my apartment building’s lobby, I checked my phone for messages. Surprisingly, there hadn’t been any contact from Rabbit or Motley.
This was starting to look like a day off.
In the three years I had worked for Motley, I savored days like this. Days when I felt free, like something of a normal life. I did some quick shopping at the drugstore that was two buildings down from my flat. I prowled the aisles with my gold aviator sunglasses over my eyes, always on alert for being recognized by some past foe. The wound on my arm was pretty much healed, so I could get away with buying normal bandages and vitamin e cream. It had been Ben’s suggestion, muttered at some point during the incredible back rub the night before. I grabbed lunch at the drugstore too, a bag of Swedish fish and a diet Coke. No wonder I was all bones. I had to resist the urge to buy a box of hair coloring. There was a shade of red called Machine Gun Magenta that seemed to call my name in at least three languages. But the way Rabbit always ragged on my mop, and with reporter Skip Hask nosing around, I figured I’d cool it on the color for a while.
By early afternoon, all my errands were complete. My flat was stocked with toilet paper, cereal, and skim milk. After dumping off my groceries, I went into the bathroom to apply a fresh coat of lipstick and tussle my hair. I put on a pair of gypsy earrings that shook like coins when I walked. I was about to do something I had never done before. I had played a lot of roles in my three years of working for Motley, but loyal girlfriend was a first. The debut of Alice Fix, domesticated sweetheart, was long overdue. I had decided that I was going to do something unexpected and surprise Ben at work. Eat your heart out, Cupid, Alice Fix was sharpening her bow and target practice was on.
I stopped in Pigalle to buy flowers from Queenie Reds on the way. I still felt guilty about the time Ben showed up at my place with flowers and left totally dejected. But I would make up for it today. The metro stop at Montmartre was deserted when I arrived in the doldrums of the afternoon. During the day, the handful of streets that made up Pigalle were usually empty, save for a few curious tourists who lacked the daring to shine their faces alongside the red glow of the windmill after sunset, but who were curious about the mystique-filled neighborhood. A few touristy places offered lunch, and there were some shops, but mostly everyone who lived in the neighborhood stayed inside and prepared for the festivities of the impending night. And then there was Queenie Reds, the caked makeup on her face looking like powdered millet in the unforgiving sunlight, and the wheels on her flower cart squeaking like gears of a jubilant war.
“Hey, Alice,” Queenie called out. She planted a kiss on my cheek.
“Hello,” I said to Queenie, smudging away the lipstick from my cheek. “I need flowers, something romantic.”
“Hmmm,” Queenie buzzed, “does Miss Alice have herself a man?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say I have a boyfriend. Mega cute too.” I dug in my bag for my cigarettes and banged one out of the pack. Queenie had an assortment of prim red roses and baby’s breath sitting inside buckets filled with water to keep them fresh.
“Hey, Queenie, how come they call them baby’s breath?” I took a long, slow drag of my cigarette like I always do when I’m pondering something deeply philosophical.
“Only ‘cause they are sweet-smelling like a baby’s sweet, angel breath.”
“You know, I’ve never actually smelled a real baby’s breath. I always just assumed it would smell like mush peas.”
Queenie shot me a curious look, but whatever sassy diatribe she was about to embark on was shattered by the sound of someone shouting, “Hey, Alice,” from the window two stories up above our heads. Our eyes parachuted up.
I spotted Sara Cinnamon poking her head out of her apartment. “What are you doing back here, now? Treating yourself to flowers?”
“Actually,” I called up to Sara, “they aren’t for me. The petals are for a guy I’m seeing.”
Sara dizzied her head back and forth in disbelief. “No way. Get out of here! Alice Fix, of all the girls in the world, with a boyfriend? What’s with the Disney princess shtick all of the sudden? What happened to your tough girl, I don’t-need-no-man, independent woman attitude?”
“Sara, you can still be an independent woman and have a boyfriend. You just have to play it right. I mean, look, I’m buying my man flowers. A healthy relationship needs to be give and take, a coming together of equals.”
“Yeah, the last guy I dated, it was more like a coming together of his fist with my left eye.”
“I remember that night, Sara,” I said.
“We all remember that night,” added Queenie. “Sara, you’re too pretty to let some man be busting up all over your face. Listen to Alice here, she knows what she’s talking about. Alice doesn’t take no shenanigans from no man, ain’t that right, Alice?” I made a self-righteous nod and she continued. “A true man treats a woman like a rose.” Queenie pulled one of her roses from the bucket. “See this rose here, Miss Sara? A man’s got to start at the bottom and climb his way up through the thorns, and only then does he get to enjoy the bloom on the rose. Miss Sara, you’ve got to make your next man prove himself on the thorns before he goes shoving his nose all up inside your bloom.” Queenie threw the rose up into the air at Sara, who held her arms out of the window to catch it.
“Anyways, ladies, I should probably wrap this up soon,” I told them. “I really want to make sure I see my boyfriend today. And with my luck, my boss will call any minute and hijack my day with some lame job, so I better be snappy with it.”
“Did you make your mind up about which stems you want?” Queenie asked.
“How about a dozen of those red roses you’ve got there.” I fussed for cash in my wallet. “Keep the thorns on when you wrap them.”
Queenie smiled and tilted her finger up at Sara. “See that, Miss Sara? Alice is listening.”
I thumped the cash into her hand. “But don’t mix in any of that baby’s breath.”
* * *
The sliding glass doors bumped open and a stream of hot air from inside the building hit my skin. I suckled one last puff of the cigarette that was between my thumb and pointer finger and then dashed it into the metal ash tray guarding the doors. It was hard to believe I was standing in front of the same ER doors I had walked through the night I got shot out of the Eiffel Tower and met Ben for the first time.
On this particular afternoon, it looked as though activity inside the ER was slow, and there were lots of doctors standing around in green scrubs, chatting with clipboards at their hips. It only took a minute for me to spot Ben, even though he had his back to me. His crown, brimming with thick brown tassels of hair, always made him recognizable.
Ben was leaning against the wall with a clipboard down by his side and he was talking to somebody. A hot, curvy, golden-haired somebody. I couldn’t see her face, the way the arch to Intensive Care concealed all but a sliver of her back. It didn’t matter who she was. It wouldn’t matter if she was wearing a black habit and a crucifix, she was standing way too close to my boyfriend. Now she was hugging Ben. My fingers choked the rose stems in my hand. I walked towards them, but once the hug was over, she disappeared into the hallway. Ben turned around, and upon spotting me, he froze.
He smiled uncomfortably. “Alice.”
“Who was that?”
“Who was who?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Who?” I repeated. “Try the bottle blonde I just caught pawing at my boyfriend.”
“Oh, Alice, that was nothing. It was an innocent hug. She is the daughter of one of my elderly patients. Her mom had an adverse reaction to a new medicine, and she simply came to the hospital to thank me for making a house call the other night.”
“Exactly what kind of house call did you make?”
Ben steadied his hand over my shoulder, as if to calm a wild, out of control mare. “Alice. Please. You know how I feel about you. You’re the only girl for me. We need to be able to trust each other. Frankly, coming to
my work and throwing a jealous fit is a little immature.”
I sunk a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Ben, you’re right.” I stood on my tiptoes and popped a kiss onto his cheek. He looked around the ER lobby, almost as if he was embarrassed to be seen with me. “Are you okay, Ben?” I asked, feeling him pull away more quickly than I liked.
“I’m fine. It’s just that I’m working right now.” His voice was so cold. “I know you like to keep your business and personal lives separate, and maybe I do too.” I put the roses in his hand and pulled back as a surge of rejected tears welled up inside me. “Why are you looking at me that way, Alice?”
“I’m not -,” I stuttered.
“I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
“Tonight.” My reply was vacant. At that moment Ben felt so far away, like a stranger. I wanted the whole hospital to disappear, the whole city, everything. I wanted the only thing in the world to be me and Ben, sitting on my couch in the dark, laughing and cuddling. But this was the real world. And in the real world Ben was a respectable doctor, and I was just a lying, trashy girl with pink hair.
Ben’s name was paged over the intercom and his eyes perked past the lobby, down the hall, where a patient was being rolled in on a gurney.
“I really have to go. My shift ends at nine, so come to my flat then.”
“I don’t know where you live.”
He pulled a prescription pad out from his pocket and scribbled an address. “Nine o’clock, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, scanning the address quickly and shoving it into my pocket.
I climbed into a taxi outside the hospital. The driver asked me what address he was taking me to. I hesitated for a moment, beginning to prattle off the address to my flat, but instead I gave him the address for Motley’s house. It was almost making me nervous not to have heard from Motley or Rabbit all day.
Chapter Twenty-six: Eavesdropping
THE HOUSE WAS silent when I let myself inside. Since there was nothing to do, I used the computer in Motley’s kitchen to log online. I checked my personal email, which is usually quick since I have virtually no contact with the world at large. The only items in there were an invitation to World of Warcraft from Rabbit, and an email from Wally that was addressed to me and three-hundred other people, bragging about untapped money in a Nigerian bank account, which he would share with me, if only I would provide my ATM pin number for him. I deleted the email and pulled up Google and typed a name.
The name that haunted my dreams. My awake. My every second. The name that was the reason I ran away from home. The name I carried everywhere with me inside a note pushed into my shoe. Heather Gilmore.
Click.
But nothing. No news story. No obituary. No investigation. The same as it was every time I checked.
“Who’s Heather Gilmore?”
My knees bucked the underside of the desk. “Geez, Rabbit,” I moaned. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” I clicked off the window on the computer screen and swiveled my chair to face him.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Who’s Heather Gilmore?”
“Just someone from the past.”
“The past?” he repeated, with one of his eyebrows scaled into an inquisitive arch. “Somebody sounds homesick.”
“What are you doing creeping up behind me? Is personal space out of style or something?”
“Come on, be honest, don’t you ever want to go back, Alice?”
“Back?”
“You know, back to how it was before all this, before all the lies?”
I stood up from the chair and jammed it snuggly under the desk. “There’s no going back, Rabbit.” At least not for me. Especially not for Heather Gilmore, I told myself. “Motley has the dynamite stick now. The past is grass and Motley is the turbo-charged nuclear atomic mower.” I glided towards the kitchen counter and Rabbit took over my seat and loaded World of Warcraft onto the screen.
“Sometimes I miss it,” he said, vacantly maneuvering his avatar on the screen. “I miss Yale. Being a golden child, having a future. A real future. If only I hadn’t messed it up with that poker racket.”
“It was stupid for them to have expelled you just because people were using your dorm room to bet on stupid card games.”
“You know what bugs me the most about it, Alice? It’s that somebody I knew turned me in, somebody in my inner circle, and I will probably never know who it was.”
“Well, once the dynamite stick is destroyed, you don’t have to think about Lenny Rabitz or some stupid dean at Yale ever again. How long do you think we have left before Motley goes ahead and destroys it?”
“Time will tell. He’s in his office right now bribing some four-star general who lied his way into the Pentagon using an ID he bought from a dealer in Chinatown.”
“So that’s the plan, right? Extort as many people as we can and make as much money as we can, before destroying the thing once and for all.”
“That’s the plan. Well, anyways, I only stopped in to talk to Motley, but he’s busy on the phone now, so I’m heading back to my place.”
I listened to Rabbit drive away and I flipped my purse upside down onto the kitchen counter to sift for a cigarette. Skip Hask’s business card fell to the top of the pile and I picked it up. I looked back over at the black computer screen that hadn’t yielded me any luck with Heather Gilmore’s name. I tapped my fingers on the marble counter as an idea developed in my head. Before I knew what I was doing, I had already pulled out my cell phone and was dialing the phone number on the card.
Skip picked up on the last ring before I got blasted to voicemail. “Skip, here.”
“Skip. It’s Alice, from last night. Remember me?”
“You’re a hard girl to forget.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“Plus, I’ve got a little forget-me-not from you, a bruise on my temple from where you shoved a gun into my face.”
“Sorry about that.”
“I just hope youe’re not calling because you’re pissed at me for something. Frankly, you seem a little unstable. I’m kind of scared of you, but you turn me on in a strange kind of way. The senses are all screwed up, ya know?”
“Don’t get any ideas, Skip.”
“I guess that rules out my hopes that you were calling to ask me on a date. If not that, what are you calling for? You change your mind and decide you want to collaborate on a riveting news story with me?”
“Sorry to dash your hopes, but no. I’m calling because I would like to outsource some of your journalistic expertise.”
“Oh?” Shifting from romance to business made his voice butter. Journalism was his true love, even above femme fatales met in bar bathrooms, it was obvious.
“Well, what I’m trying to say is, I bet you make a good snoop, and I need a little snooping done.”
“What makes you so convinced I would agree to do any snooping on your behalf?”
“What if I proposed a trade? One piece of legit info on the dynamite stick in exchange for your astute services.”
“I’m listening. What type of information do you need dug up?”
“There’s a girl. Well, there was a girl. She got killed three years back. The date will be easy to remember because it’s the same day as the November Hit. Now, from what I can tell, information on her isn’t’ prominent because the news of her death probably got buried beneath all the headlines from the attack. But the thing is, I would like to know the details. The gritty, horrific details. Plus, I want the low down on the investigation and any leads on the case. I need to know if any suspects were named.”
“This sounds pretty hardcore. This girl, was she someone to you?”
“Maybe.”
“I get it, you don’t give up info that quick. So, do you have a name for the dead girl? How about a city? Or you want me to just open the phone book to a random page and throw a dart at a map of the United States?”
“The name is Heather Gilmore, a
nd your search should be narrowed to Connecticut.”
I could hear a pen scribbling over paper in the background. “Alright, Alice, I’ll use my channels of information to see if I can dig anything up on this Heather Gilmore.”
“I appreciate it, Skip.”
“Now for you to make good on your end of the bargain. It’s not payable on delivery, you’ve gotta give it up now.”
“Fair enough. You know that theory one of the geeks had on the whole Russian encoding thing?”
“Yup.”
“Totally off.”
“I’ll make note of that.” I could hear Skip scribbling the information down frantically on the other end of the line.
“I expect to hear from you when you find something worthwhile on Heather.”
I thought I heard Motley’s office door creak open. I dropped the phone and slid down from the stool. I stepped out of the kitchen and padded down the airy marble hallway towards Motley’s office. From the hallway, I saw that the door was open a crack. The reverberation of Motley’s voice throughout the hallway made it obvious that he was still talking to someone. As I crept to the door, I rationalized that it wasn’t eavesdropping if the door was cracked. A paid liar’s situational ethics are dodgy.
My ear was plastered to the door. I was hearing Motley agree along to something. He was being quite enthusiastic to whatever was being said on the other end of the line as he hummed out affirmative growls. “I’m glad to hear that the president is so open to the negotiation.” His voice seemed to muffle after that, and I strained my ear against the door just in time to hear him say in a confirming voice, “As I said, Mr. Secretary, I will happily turn over the disk, for full exoneration and remission of my prison sentence.” There was another pause while the person on the other end got in some words. “And I will have full immunity, correct? And a new Social Security number, of course?”
My dry lips opened and my jaw dropped into a horrified silent scream. I cupped my hand to my mouth to stop the awful hiss from escaping. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Motley was negotiating handing over the dynamite stick in exchange for a clean slate.
Generation of Liars Page 22
