Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  “I was just on my way out,” he said.

  “Where do you have to go?”

  “Golf,” he said.

  “Oh, I see.” Her laugh was brittle. “So you have someone new already. Your current assistant? I guess your principles have fallen a notch.”

  “No, I really play golf now.”

  “Charlie, I’m not your wife. Your stupid lie won’t work on me. It’s not even your lie, remember?”

  “No, no, there’s no one else. I’ve, well, reformed! It’s like a penance to me. I’ve chosen my loveless marriage and golf over the great passion of my life. It’s the right thing to do.”

  He thought she would find this suitably romantic, but it only seemed to enrage her more.

  “I’m going to go over to your house and tell Marla that you’re cheating.”

  “Don’t do that, Sylvia. It’s not even true.”

  “You cheated with me, didn’t you? And a tiger doesn’t change his stripes.”

  Charlie wanted to say that he was not so much a tiger as a house cat who had been captured by a petulant child. True, it had been hard to break with Sylvia once things had started. She was very good at a lot of things that Marla seldom did and never conducted with enthusiasm. But it had not been his idea. And, confronted with an ultimatum, he had honored her condition. He hadn’t tried to have it both ways. He was beginning to think Sylvia was unreliable.

  “Meet me at my apartment right now, or I’ll call Marla.”

  He did, and it was a dreary time, all tears and screaming and no attentions paid to him whatsoever, not even after he held her and stroked her hair and said he did love her.

  “You should be getting back to work,” he said at last, hoping to find any excuse to stop holding her.

  She shook her head. “My position was eliminated two weeks ago. I’m out of work.”

  “Is that why you’re so desperate to get married?”

  She wailed like a banshee, not that he really knew what a banshee sounded like. Something scary and shrill. “No. I love you, Charlie. I want to be your wife for that reason alone. But the last month, with all this going on, I haven’t been at my best, and they had a bad quarter, so I was a sitting duck. In a sense, I’ve lost my job because of you, Charlie. I’m unemployed and I’m alone. I’ve hit rock bottom.”

  “You could always come back to the company. You left on good terms and I’d give you a strong reference.”

  “But then we couldn’t be together.”

  “Yes.” He was not so clever that he had thought of this in advance, but now he saw it would solve everything.

  “And that’s the one thing I could never bear.”

  Charlie, his hand on her hair, looked out the window. It was such a beautiful day, a little cooler than usual, but still sunny. If he left now—but, no, he would have to go back to the office. He wouldn’t get to play golf at all today.

  “Who is she, Charlie?”

  “Who?”

  “The other woman.”

  “There is no other woman.”

  “Stop lying, or I really will go to Marla. I’ll drive over there right now, while you’re at work. After all, I don’t have a job to go to.”

  She was crazy, she was bluffing. She was so crazy that even if she wasn’t bluffing, he could probably persuade Marla that she was a lunatic. After all, what proof did she have? He had never allowed the use of any camera, digital or video, although Sylvia had suggested it from time to time. There were no e-mails. He never called her. And he was careful to leave his DNA, as he thought of it, only in the appropriate places, although this included some places that Marla believed inappropriate. He had learned much from the former president and the various television shows on crime scene investigations.

  “Look, if it’s money you need—”

  “I don’t want money! I want you!”

  And so it began all over again, the crying and the wailing, only this time there was no calming her. She was obsessed with the identity of his new mistress, adamant that he tell her everything, enraged by his insistence that he really did play golf in his spare time. Finally, he thought to take her down to the garage beneath her apartment and show her the clubs in the trunk of his car.

  “So what?” she said. “You always carried your clubs.”

  “But I know what they are now,” he said, removing a driver. “See this one, it’s—”

  “I know what’s going on and I’m done, I tell you. The minute you leave here, I’m going to go upstairs and call Marla. It’s her or me. Stop fucking with me, Charlie.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t use that word, Sylvia. It’s coarse.”

  “Oh, you don’t like hearing it, but you sure like doing it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking!”

  She stood in front of him, hands on her hips. Over the course of their two-year affair she had not become particularly more attractive, although she had learned to use a depilatory on her upper lip. What would happen if she went to Marla? She would probably stay with him, but it would be dreary, with counseling and recriminations. And they really were happier than ever, united by their love of golf, comfortable in their routines. He couldn’t bear to see it end.

  “I can’t have that, Sylvia. I just can’t.”

  “Then choose.”

  “I already have.”

  No, he didn’t hit her with the driver. He wouldn’t have risked it for one thing, having learned that it was rare to have a club that felt so right in one’s grip and also having absorbed a little superstition about the game. Also, there would have been blood, and it was impossible to clean every trace of blood from one’s trunk, according to those television shows. Instead, he pushed her, gently but firmly, and she fell back into the trunk, which he closed and latched. He then drove back to the office, parking in a remote place where Sylvia’s thumping, which was growing fainter, would not draw any attention. At home that night, he ate dinner with Marla, marveling over the Greg Norman shiraz that she served with the salmon. “Do you hear something out in the garage?” she asked at one point. “A knocking noise?”

  “No,” he said.

  It was Marla’s book club night and after she left, he went out to the garage and circled his car for a few minutes, thinking. Ultimately, he figured out how to attach a garden hose from the exhaust through a cracked window and into the backseat, where he pressed it into the crevice of the seat, which could be released to create a larger carrying space, like a hatchback, but only from within the car proper. Sylvia’s voice was weaker, but still edged with fury. He ignored her. Marla was always gone for at least three hours on book club night and he figured that would be long enough.

  IT WOULD BE SEVERAL WEEKS before Sylvia Nichols’s body was found in a patch of wilderness near a state park. While clearly a murder, it was considered a baffling case from the beginning. How had a woman been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, then dumped at so remote a site? Why had she been killed? Homicide police, noting the large volume of calls from her home phone to Charlie’s work number, questioned him, of course, but he was able to say with complete sincerity that she was a former employee who was keen to get a job back since being let go, and he hadn’t been able to help her despite her increasing hysteria. DNA evidence indicated she had not had sex of any sort in the hours before her death. Credit card slips bore out the fact that Charlie was a regular at the local country club, and his other hours were accounted for. Even Marla laughed at the idea of her husband having an affair, saying he was far too busy with golf to have time for another woman.

  “Although I’m the one who broke ninety first,” she said. “Which is funny, given that Charlie has a two-year head start on me.”

  “It’s a terrible mistress, golf,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t play, but they say it’s the worst you can have,” the homicide detective said.

  “Just about,” Charlie said.

  PART III

  MY BABY WALKS THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE

  EASY AS A-B-Cr />
  Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef, or carve master bath suites in the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate—boom. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

  It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, seeing what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books—anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake, because it could kill people, literally. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time. Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging on how handy he was.

  The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill, before my time, flattened out for a while in the nineties, and now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill, and into Riverside Park and all the way down Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away the various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. She was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.

  My mother sold the house for $75,000. That was a dozen years ago and boy, did we think we had put one over on the buyers. Seventy-five thousand! For a house on Decatur Street in Locust Point. And all cash for my mom, because it had been paid off forever. We went to Hausner’s the night of the closing, toasted our good fortune. The old German restaurant was still open then, crammed with all that art and junk. We had veal and strawberry pie and top-shelf liquor and toasted Grandfather for leaving us such a windfall.

  So imagine how I felt when I got a referral for a complete redo at my grandparents’ old address and the real estate guy tells me: “She got it for only $225,000, so she’s willing to put another $100,000 in it and I bet she won’t bat an eyelash if the work goes up to $150,000.”

  “Huh” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.

  “The first thing I want to do is get a parking pad back here,” my client said, sweeping a hand over what was an overgrown patch of weeds, the chain-link fence sagging around it. “I’ve been told that will increase the value of the property by $10,000, $20,000.”

  “You a flipper?” I asked. More and more amateurs were getting into real estate, feeling that the stock market wasn’t for them. They were the worst of all possible worlds, panicking at every penny over the original estimate, riding my ass. You want to flip property for profit, you need to be able to do the work yourself. Or buy and hold. This woman didn’t look like the patient type.

  “No, I plan to live here. In fact, I hope to move in as quickly as possible, so time is more important to me than money. I was told you’re fast.”

  “I don’t waste time, but I don’t cut corners,” I said. “Mainly, I just try to make my customers happy.”

  She tilted her head up. It was the practiced look of a woman who had been looking at men from under her eyelashes for much of her life, sure they would be charmed. And, okay, I was. Dark hair, cut in one of those casual, disarrayed styles, darker eyes that made me think of kalamata olives, which isn’t particularly romantic, I guess. But I really like kalamata olives. With her fair skin, it was a terrific contrast.

  “I’m sure you’ll make me very happy” was all she said.

  I GUESS HERE IS WHERE I should mention that I’m married going on eighteen years, and pretty happily, too. I realize it’s a hard concept to grasp, especially for a lot of women, but you can be perfectly happy, still in love with your wife, maybe more in love with your wife than you’ve ever been, but it’s eighteen years and a young, firm-fleshed woman looks up at you through her eyelashes and it’s not a crime to think: I like that. Not: I’d like to hit that, which I hear the young guys on my crews say. Just: I like that, that’s nice, if life were different, I’d make time for that. But I was married, with two kids and a sweet wife, Angeline, who’d only put on a few pounds and still kept her hair blond and long, and was pretty appreciative of the life my work had built for the two of us. So I had no agenda. I was just weak.

  But part of Deirdre’s allure was how much she professed to love the very things whose destruction she was presiding over, even before I told her that the house had belonged to my grandparents. She exclaimed over the wallpaper in their bedroom, a pattern of yellow roses, even as it was steamed off the walls. She ran a hand lovingly over the banister, worn smooth by my younger hands, not to mention my butt a time or two. The next day it was gone, yanked from its moorings by my workers. She all but composed an ode to the black-and-white tile in the single full bath, but that didn’t stop her from meeting with Charles Tile Co. and choosing a Tuscany-themed medley for what was to become the master bath suite. (“Medley” was their word, not mine.)

  She had said she wanted it fast, which made me ache a little, because the faster it went, the sooner I would be out of her world. But it turned out she didn’t care about speed so much once we got the house to the point where she could live among the ongoing work—and once her end-of-the-day inspections culminated with the two of us in her raw, unfinished bedroom. She was wilder than I had expected, pushing to do things that Angeline would never have tolerated, much less asked for. In some part of my mind, I knew her abandon came from the fact that she never lost sight of the endpoint. The work would be concluded and this would conclude, too. Which was what I wanted as well, I guess. I had no desire to leave Angeline or cause my kids any grief. Deirdre and I were scrupulous about keeping our secret, and not even my longtime guys, the ones who knew me best, guessed anything was up. To them, I bitched about her as much as I did any client, maybe a little more. “Moldings?” my carpenter would ask. “Now she wants moldings?” And I would roll my eyes and shrug, say: “Women.”

  “Moldings?” Deirdre asked.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “No ch
arge. But I saw you look at them.”

  And so it was with the appliances, the countertops, the triple-pane windows. I bought what she wanted, billed for what she could afford. Somehow, in my mind, it was as if I had sold the house for $225,000, as if all that profit had gone to me, instead of the speculator who had bought the house from my mother and then just left it alone to ripen. Over time, I probably put $10,000 of my own money into those improvements, even accounting for my discounts on material. Some men give women roses and jewelry. I gave Deirdre a marble bathroom and a beautiful old mantel for the living room fireplace, which I restored to the wood-burning hearth it had never been. My grandparents had had one of those old gas-fired logs, but Deirdre said they were tacky and I suppose she was right.

  Go figure—I’ve never had a job with fewer complications. The weather held, there were no surprises buried within the old house. “A deck,” I said. “You’ll want a rooftop deck to watch the fireworks.” And not just any deck, of course. I built it myself, using teak and copper accents, helped her shop for the proper furniture, outdoor hardy but still feminine, with curvy lines and that verdigris patina she loved so much. I showed her how to cultivate herbs and perennials in pots, but not the usual wooden casks. No, these were iron, to match the décor. If I had to put a name to her style, I guess I’d say Nouvelle New Orleans—flowery, but not overly so, with genuine nineteenth-century pieces balanced by contemporary ones. I guess her taste was good. She certainly thought so and told me often enough. “If only I had the pocketbook to keep up with my taste,” she would say with a sigh and another one of those sidelong glances, and the next thing I knew I’d be installing some wall sconce she simply had to have.

  One twilight—we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home—she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry. A brick foundry, a place where men like my dad had once earned decent wages, and now it housed this chichi restaurant, a gallery, a health club, and a spa. The old P&G plant became something called Tide Point, which was supposed to be some high-tech mecca, and they’re building condos on the grain piers. The only real jobs left in Locust Point are at Domino Sugar and Phillips, where the red neon crab still clambers up and down the smokestack.