The Misfortune Cookie: An Esther Diamond Novel

by Resnick, Laura

  “So if you’re hungry,” he said, following me in that direction, “how about I buy you dinner when we get out of here?”

  I stopped so abruptly that he bumped into me. I staggered a little, and he caught me by the shoulders. I jerked away from him, saying, “Don’t touch me!”

  His removed his hands immediately and backed away. “Sorry, sorry.”

  “You’ve lost touching privileges,” I snapped.

  “Am I supposed to just let you fall down?”

  “Oh, like that would be the worst thing you’ve done to me!”

  “I told you why I arrested you,” he said. “Why I had to be the one who arrested—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about!”

  He blinked. “Oh. You mean that.”

  “Yes, that,” I said. “How could you think I’d go out for dinner with you tonight after you—”

  “Had sex with you and then didn’t call,” he said wearily.

  “Yes!”

  There was a long, tense silence between us.

  “Okay. Here it is,” he said. “And you won’t like it.”

  “I really, really believe that.”

  “I didn’t know it was a week. I wasn’t thinking about time. I was . . . preoccupied.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “No . . .” He ran a hand over his face, then sat down on a chair that probably cost more than he earned in a year.

  “Don’t sit there,” I said in alarm. “You might—”

  “A chair that costs that much should be able to support a person for a few minutes,” he said irritably. “And I’m kind of tired. No, really tired. I can’t even remember the last time I wasn’t exhausted.”

  “Fatigue is not going to get you out of—”

  “I know. I’m just saying.” He blew out his breath, a weary gesture that made the dark hair hanging over his forehead flutter a little. “It’s been . . . a bad few weeks. Right now, I can’t think of a single person in my life who isn’t mad at me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve given some of us really good reasons to be mad at you.”

  “True enough.”

  He did sound exhausted. But I didn’t care.

  “Do you have any idea how humiliated I’ve felt? And how . . . how . . .” Okay, if we were going to have an honest talk, I might as well say it. “How hurt?”

  He looked at me, his expression softening. I realized his blue eyes were bloodshot again. “I was mostly getting angry from you. But now that you mention it . . . Yeah, I can guess. It must have hurt.” Holding my gaze, he said, “I’m sorry, Esther. I’m really sorry. I screwed up.”

  Just like that.

  They were the words I’d been waiting weeks to hear. Not eloquent and flowery, as I’d imagined his apology on a few occasions. But stark and sincere. And, as apologies go, sufficient.

  It kind of took the fight out of me.

  I sat down on a chair that definitely cost more than I made in a year.

  After a long moment of absorbing his apology in silence, and realizing that hearing it had helped, I nonetheless knew that I still needed an explanation.

  I said, “I don’t suppose . . .”

  “What?” he asked.

  “. . . that you were abducted by space aliens?”

  He gave a puff of laughter. “No. Sorry. Is that what you were hoping?”

  “It would have been an acceptable explanation. That, or being dismembered by marauding bandits. Or maybe having your tongue cut out by—”

  “I get the picture,” he said. “Ouch.”

  “I just kept trying to think of . . . why.”

  “My reason’s not as good as any of your theories,” he said. “Or as colorful.”

  “Well?” I prodded.

  “It’s so complicated, I don’t even remember where it . . .” He gave himself a shake. “Yeah. Wait. I do. When I got to work that morning. Christmas Day. After I left your apartment. I was still floating on cloud nine. Didn’t even mind when Napoli gave me a hard time for being late. All I could think about was . . . well, you. Us. That night. I was sleep-deprived and flooded with good hormones and really relaxed, and I thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “That it would be smooth sailing for us from now on. You and me. Because, of course, one night of great sex completely fixes everything between two people.” He shook his head. “God, I’m an idiot.”

  “You know, it helps a lot of if you use a telephone at some point after the sex,” I pointed out.

  He decided to ignore that and press on. “Anyhow, then reality intruded. The way it does. I was supposed to be writing up my report about Fenster’s. That’s why I’d gone to your place that night. To find out what the hell you were doing in the middle of that mess, in the middle of the night, with Max, his neurotic dog, a Gambello capo, and a bunch of really confused elves and reindeer.” He paused, maybe hoping I’d jump in and explain—or maybe just bemused all over again by that image. “So that morning, I still didn’t know what to say in my report, and I didn’t really want to think about it. Not right after we’d . . . I just didn’t want to think about you and a police report in the same space that morning. You know?”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “So I set it aside. And since it was Christmas Day, there wasn’t much else to do besides paperwork. So I decided to start sifting through the mountain of stuff we’d been collecting on the Gambellos during the Fenster investigation. Someone had to do it, after all, and it was a good way to avoid worrying about out how to keep you out of a police report—again.”

  And that was when he found it. While sleepily leafing through scattered pieces of evidence that had been collected in the past week or two because OCCB was looking in the wrong place for the Fenster hijackers, he found solid evidence that Bella Stella was laundering money—and he could connect various members of the Gambello crew to it, as well as Stella herself.

  “I was jazzed at first. Barely awake,” he said, “but pretty excited. OCCB had known—or had assumed—for years that Stella’s place was a laundry for the Gambellos. But we’d never had any proof. And suddenly, there it was. Right in front of me. Before lunch on Christmas Day, when I’d only been poking around in that pile because I didn’t want to write a report that was going to mess with my love life.”

  Speaking of which . . . Then he remembered that I worked for Stella—and that I considered her a friend. Above all, he recalled that I was broke, down on my luck, out of work after Christmas Eve, feeling low, and counting on working at Bella Stella after the holidays.

  “And that’s when I really lost the plot.” Lopez’s voice was heavy with self-recrimination. “I knew what I should do—what I was supposed to do . . . But I stalled. And then . . .” I could see that this was hard for him to say to me. Hard for him to remember or admit—even to himself. “I buried the evidence.”

  “You did what?” I blurted.

  “I still can’t believe I did it. All I could think about was . . . Look, I’m not putting this on you, Esther. I’m not. It’s all on me. No one else. But all I could think about was what it would mean to you. How upset you’d be. Stella in jail, your job gone, no income . . . And so I did the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Lopez . . .” I shook my head, having no idea what to say.

  Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t this. I knew he had fudged some reports here and there to protect me, to keep my name out of things—and that his conscience troubled him over that. Troubled him a lot, in fact.

  So if anyone else had told me that Lopez had deliberately buried evidence against the Gambellos . . . I just wouldn’t believe it. No way.

  I stared at him in stunned amazement.

  I knew it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t kn
own about it, and I certainly hoped I wouldn’t have asked him to do it . . . But when I recalled how angry and upset I had indeed been when he shut down Stella’s that night, I couldn’t pretend that this really was all on him. I knew he’d concealed that evidence for me. And I knew he must have despised himself for it—and must have been wrestling with some pretty complicated feeling about me, too, as a result of that.

  He continued, “I was so wrapped up in that . . . that whole thing all day, I didn’t even check my phone for the first time until I was on my way out to Nyack that night to see my family.”

  By then, I recalled, Max’s festive Christmas gathering at the bookstore was winding down, and I was starting to wonder why Lopez hadn’t called me yet. It was the beginning of my long, steep slide into tail-chasing craziness.

  “That’s when I got your message,” he said. “The one you left me after you woke up. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t want to. You know? I didn’t want to tell you what I had done. I didn’t want to lie to you. And I couldn’t think about anything else. So I figured I’d call you later, when I wasn’t such a basket case.”

  By the time he got to his parents’ house that night for a late Christmas dinner, his exhaustion, his tension, and—above all—his shame had put him in such a rotten mood that he had quarreled badly with his mother, his father, and both of his brothers.

  “None of whom are speaking to me yet,” he said. “Though my mom still calls regularly to tell me she’s not talking to me.”

  Lopez went straight back to the city early the next morning, leaving his family fuming. He returned to work, though he was supposed to be on leave, because he had to fix what he had done. He couldn’t live with it. So he retrieved the evidence he’d hidden. Then he did the next stupid thing, he said, in an impressive line-up of idiotic moves. He shifted the evidence so that someone else at OCCB would find it.

  “I figured we’d still get the right result,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be my fault that you lost your job and your friend went to prison.”

  However, no one else spotted the evidence he tried to slide subtly under their noses. This made him so exasperated and guilt-ridden that he quarreled with a number of his colleagues, none of whom knew why he was being such a temperamental ass.

  So Lopez finally realized he had to man up, “find” the evidence, and bring it to light.

  “There was no other way. I couldn’t face myself, you, my family, my colleagues, my priest—anyone—until I did what I should have done from the start. My sworn duty. My goddamn job. What I’m supposed to do.”

  He was still worried about how I’d react, though. So he decided the best way to handle the problem would be to raid Bella Stella immediately, since I had told him that I wouldn’t be working there until after the holidays. That was why he started pushing and prodding impatiently for a quick bust, which further irritated all his colleagues and his boss.

  “Everyone was ready to kill me by then. I don’t why they didn’t just drop me off a cliff one night and cover their tracks,” he said. “And New Year’s Eve was an idiotic night to run a big operation, of course. But we couldn’t do it before that, because of the way I’d messed around with the evidence for days. And I wouldn’t let them wait until after that, because I didn’t want you involved in the bust—and I knew you’d be working after the holidays.”

  Now, as if finding someone else to blame for his woes, he glared at me. “How was I to know that a shift had opened up and you’d be working there that night? Not just working, but dancing on tabletops—”

  “Oh, would you let that go, already?”

  “—while I was going through hell because of you. Because of the way I felt about . . . because I didn’t want you to . . .” He made a disgusted sound. “Well, no, mostly because I’m an idiot.”

  “At least that’s one thing we can agree on,” I said mildly.

  “So I was caught totally flatfooted when you started saying, in front of all of Bella Stella, Esther—”

  “Oh, how did you think I would react to seeing you in those circumstances, after you hadn’t even—”

  “I know, I know. Never mind. But when you said that I’d gone a whole week without calling you . . . It was news to me. I was so squirrelly, I hadn’t clocked that at all. I had no idea it had been a week since we’d . . .” He shrugged. “I was thinking about you constantly and worrying about all kinds of stuff. But not about that—about how long since the last time we’d talked.”

  “We didn’t talk that night,” I said. “You had your way with me and then left.”

  “We talked a little.” After a moment, he said, “Anyhow, that’s it, Esther. Everything. All of it. Well, until I arrested you.”

  “You did get me out of jail, though.” I wasn’t angry anymore. I was stunned, sad, amazed, sympathetic, and worried, but not angry. I was still a little irritated, though. “Not to harp on this, Lopez, but you should have called. Everything that was going on, all the stuff you’ve described . . . It didn’t occur you to that you should tell me at some point?”

  “I was going to tell you,” he said defensively. “I was going to get it all sorted out and taken care, clear the decks, shut down Stella’s . . . and then call you.”

  “Then?” I repeated. “After—”

  “Yeah. After. I was going to explain everything to you calmly, as a done deal, when it was all over. And that’s also when I’d break the news that you’d have to find a new job.”

  “That was your plan?”

  “It was.”

  “That was a bad plan.”

  “Yes, I have since figured that out,” he said sourly. “But by the time I found you working at Stella’s that night—where you weren’t supposed to be—I’d been so busy torturing myself and everyone around me, I had no idea that a whole week had passed since we’d slept together. So is there any possibility you could let go of that particular grievance now?”

  After my stony silence had filled the cavernous interior of Yee & Sons Trading Company for a few long, awkward moments, Lopez muttered, “I just said the wrong thing again, didn’t I?”

  “There are times,” I said, “when I really cannot believe what a guy you can be.”

  “Yeah, well, if it gives you any satisfaction,” he said morosely, “you’ve got a lot of company right now.”

  I looked at him for a long moment. Then I rose to my feet, walked over to him, took his face in my hands, and kissed him.

  He was so startled he froze for a moment—then relaxed and started kissing me back. And it was exactly the way I remembered his kisses—dark and sweet, seductive and dizzying . . . I sank into him, into the dark heat of his mouth, the strength of his arms, the flutter of his breath on my cheek, and the tickle of his hair brushing my skin as we shifted to get closer to each other.

  I had been starving for him since the moment I woke up in am empty bed on Christmas Day. And now I feasted.

  After a few minutes of making up this way—because sometimes we really were just so much better at this than at talking to each other—we paused to breathe. I gulped in air, resting my forehead against his as I leaned on his shoulders, my legs shaky and my heart pounding joyfully. His arms were tight around me and his legs straddled me as he leaned back a little in his extravagantly expensive chair to meet my gaze. He looked dazed, inquisitive, aroused—and a little wary, as if not sure we were done arguing.

  “Men.” I looked down into his wide-eyed gaze and shook my head. “Honestly.”

  “This isn’t a trick question,” he whispered, pulling me closer again. “Are you speaking to me now?”

  “Maybe,” I murmured against his mouth. “If you buy me dinner.”

  He smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “Not Chinese food, though,” I whispered, our arms still around each other as we nuzzled and teased a little. “It’s all I’ve eaten lately.”
>
  “Hmm. Well, um . . . I know a good Cuban place that’s not far from here. In the East Village.”

  “That sounds good.” Then I remembered where we were and laughed. “But first we have to escape from Yee’s Madhouse.”

  “Oh, right.” He let me untangle myself from him, then he looked around as he rose to his feet. “Maybe if we—”

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice called. “Detective? Are you still here?”

  “Lily!” I cried, recognizing her voice. “Yes, he’s here! So am I. We’re having trouble finding the way out.”

  “Ah! I think I know where you are. Don’t move, please.” When she appeared about half a minute later, she said, “I didn’t know you were still here, Esther. But when I was getting ready to close the store, I realized I had not seen the detective leave yet. Here, let me show you out.”

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling disinclined ever to come back here again. Not without a compass and a big ball of twine, anyhow.

  Once back down on the main floor, we said goodnight to Lily, who seemed to be alone in the store, and went out the front exit. As soon as the icy air enveloped me, I remembered that I was in Alicia’s skimpy costume and huddled deeper inside my coat, shivering a little.

  Lopez put his arm around me and pulled me close, trying to keep me warm. “I drove a police car here—one with a heater that actually works, go figure. Come on.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “But are you supposed to use a police car on a date?”

  “No, so I’m counting on you not to rat on me.” He guided me to his car, then halted a couple of feet away from it when his phone rang.

  As he reached into his pocket for his cell, I said, “That’s not your mother, is it?” The ringtone was different.

  “No, it’s Andy—Detective Quinn. He’s not even supposed to be on duty right now, so I don’t know why he’d be calling.”

  “And you have to take his call,” I said with resignation.

  “Sorry.” He held the phone up to his ear. “Lopez.”

  As a gust of wind blew down the street and crept under my coat, I stepped away from him and went around to the passenger side of the car, waiting to be let in.