by C I Dennis
“Does this hurt?” she asked.
“The opposite,” I said.
She brought up her legs and wrapped them gently around my waist, under the water. “How about now?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“I missed you,” she said, and she leaned her face into mine and gave me a long, wet kiss.
*
I had been out in the sun for too long, and by the time I got home I was ready to roll into my bed even though the evening news hadn’t started yet. I changed out of my bathing trunks and put on a favorite pair of red sweatpants and a T-shirt. No one on the planet looks good in red sweatpants, but in my present condition I didn’t give a damn. My phone buzzed.
OK 2 cme ovr? It was Roberto.
Sure, where are you? I sent back.
Rdng my bke. B thr in 2 mnts.
I’m going to buy you some vowels, I texted.
Roberto opened the door and let himself in. He set his backpack down and went straight to the fridge for a Coke. He opened the can and drank deeply like he’d just crossed a desert with an empty canteen.
“Do your folks know you’re here?”
“Yeah,” he said. Apparently the war I’d anticipated was over before it had begun. I wondered why.
“Were you able to find out anything on Empex?”
“Yes, there were some things in the public records. They own some properties in Lake Wales: a citrus grove, a juice processing plant, a self-storage place and an office in the downtown part. But check this out.” He took Glory’s MacBook out of his bag and booted it up on the kitchen table. I watched his fingers fly over the keyboard as he navigated through programs until he got to a list of figures and accounts. “This is what I saw the other day, before you cut off their phone line. Except now it’s different.”
“What is different?”
“You remember I told you some of the money was in their name, but most of it was in the name of that company? Take a look.”
I squinted at the screen. There was an entry that said “Empex Import/Export LLC,” and to the right of it was a zero.
“That was almost thirty million dollars on Saturday,” he said.
“Can you tell where it went?”
“No, I already tried, but that account is too heavily encrypted. I can get into the other accounts, and I didn’t see any money coming in. I have the PIN for their joint account in case you need any cash; it still has over a million in it.” He smiled.
I knew he was just trying to be funny, but it worried me. I put aside my curiosity about where the Empex money had gone and opened myself a Coke. It was time for a discussion with my young friend.
“Roberto,” I started, “When I was fourteen, I was obsessed with a guy named Houdini. I had books about him, and he was like a magical guy, he could open any lock and escape from anything.”
“Yeah, I know about him.”
“I tried to be like him,” I said, “And I taught myself to pick locks. There was a locksmith in my hometown who showed me some tricks, and I got very good at it. My dad was out a lot and my mom went to bed early, and I began sneaking out of the house at night. I broke into people’s homes. I don’t remember how it got started exactly, but I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Did you take stuff?”
“Yes. I only took cash, and not a lot, but I was the kid in school who always had money and could treat the others to movies and so on.”
“Did you ever get caught?” he said.
“Yes. Twice. The second time was the day after my eighteenth birthday, and so I wasn’t a juvenile anymore. The judge gave me a break and said if I went to college after high school he would throw it out and purge my record. I lasted a year and dropped out to become a cop.”
“You still do it though, right? You let yourself into people’s houses?”
“Yes, and it’s still illegal. I rationalize it by thinking that it’s a part of my work, but it’s a fine line, and if I got caught, it wouldn’t be a fine line at all. It would be a felony.”
“Kind of like hacking,” he said. He knew where I was going.
“Exactly,” I said. We didn’t say anything for a while.
“Vince,” he said, and then he was very quiet. He couldn’t look at me. I thought he was going to cry. “There’s something I have to show you. I talked to my parents about it, and they said I should show it to you. By the way, they’re not mad at you, they really like you, even my mom. They told me to come over here.”
“OK,” I said.
He closed the program that was open on Glory’s computer and opened up the Internet browser. He navigated to AOL, which is what Glory always used for her home page and email. He signed in, using a different name from what her account name had been; this one was hulahoop9864. September 8th, 1964, was her birthdate, but I had no idea where the “hulahoop” part came from.
He opened the email program. There were emails from various senders, some obviously spam, and then he re-grouped the messages to “from” instead of “date received,” and I saw a whole page of messages from someone named Pacobell6969. He scrolled down, and there were several pages of them from the same sender. They were arranged chronologically, beginning about three years ago. The last one was received at two in the afternoon on the day Glory died.
“Roberto, what is this?”
“It’s a lot of emails from a guy, to her,” he said. His voice was quivering. “There are some others under “sent” that go from her to him, but not a lot. She pretty much stopped answering his emails after a year. I’m sorry, Vince. I’m really sorry.” He started sobbing.
“When did you find this?” I said, but he couldn’t talk, and I let him be. I suddenly realized that this was what had prompted him to ask me about his friend a few days ago, shortly after I’d given him the Mac. It had probably eaten the poor kid up. I wondered what I was going to find in the emails, but I knew from Roberto’s reaction that whatever was there would be bad. I felt dizzy, like I was sitting on the edge of a precipice, and someone was about to push me off.
I could wait; Roberto needed me right now. I put my arms around him and held him until he stopped sobbing. It took a while, and I felt terrible for him, but he had finally gotten it off his chest.
“You did the right thing, Roberto,” I said. “I know that wasn’t easy.”
“I have to go home now,” he said. “I’ll leave the computer. I don’t want it anymore.”
“You want a ride? We can put the top down, and the bike can go in the back seat.”
“No thanks,” he said, “I need the exercise.” He was getting his composure back. He left and I was alone, with a thirteen-inch window into a part of my wife’s life that probably should have died with her.
*
I went through the emails chronologically. It was all sickeningly familiar—I had read this story so many times before. Sometimes I could take on a husband-and-wife case and lay it bare after five minutes on their computer. People who were fooling around were often remarkably lax about hiding it, and my theory was that they wanted to get caught, for whatever reason. It was a shitty way to end a marriage, though there wasn’t any good way that I’d ever heard about.
Glory wasn’t the angel, and the guy wasn’t the devil. The emails told a tale of mutual passion, and I guessed from the dates of the earliest ones that their first encounter happened when I was on a case that took me down to the Keys for two weeks. Ironically, the case had been about an errant husband, and it ended in a divorce settlement in the many millions. So while I was out catching one bad guy, another bad guy caught my wife.
Reading their exchanges was an entirely different feeling from reading the emails of people I didn’t know. There was nothing in them that was directly negative about me, no specific complaints, but my failures as a husband and a lover were implied. I’ve never, ever felt like that before, she wrote, early on. I should have stopped reading right there, but she hadn’t stopped writing, and I wished more than ever that she would just
walk into my kitchen, alive, and I could throw myself at her feet and apologize for being so inadequate. I read every single one of her emails and most of his, although I hated every word he wrote. The guy was such a slimebag—he went on and on about how hot she was, how wonderful, how beautiful—and I gagged. I wished I’d said some of those things to Glory, but I’m not that type. I thought I’d shown my love for her in other ways, but any fool knows that a woman wants to hear it out loud sometimes, and a man does too.
It appeared that they had been lovers for about six months, and then she changed her mind. There was no explanation in the emails; she just kept putting him off. It drove him crazy, and although his messages were polite there was an undercurrent of hurt and anger. I didn’t blame him; he’d lost hold of an amazing woman, just as I had. From then on, right up until she died, the emails were one-sided. He tried everything he could to get her interest, and on the rare occasions that she wrote back she was distant.
There wasn’t a single giveaway as to who the guy was. Probably some dildo at her gym—that’s where she spent a lot of time, and you could shower up afterward and hide your traces. I’d never suspected a thing. I felt like Barbara this afternoon at the beach when she’d raised her beer to toast all the women whose husbands left them in the dark—that equation could certainly work both ways.
I had the computer open on my lap while the television news blared in the background. A tropical storm was over the Virgin Islands and had turned toward Florida. It was supposed to gain hurricane strength overnight and could make landfall in two days. The program cut to a Cialis ad and showed a greying couple snuggling on the couch, giving each other knowing looks. I flung the laptop across the room at the TV. It bounced off the screen, leaving a scratch in the glass as the couple kissed and the disclaimers started.
My chest pain was intensifying, and I drew rapid, shallow breaths, not able to get enough oxygen. It was time for two more of the pills, and I considered washing a handful of them down with a beer—or several. The numbness and guilt I’d felt while reading the emails were morphing into a black cloud of anger. This changed everything. Glory was somebody’s dirty little secret. I was a cuckold and a loser, and all those candles I’d lit at her shrine for the last year were for the wrong saint. Nothing meant anything anymore, and if anyone tried to tell me I’d get over it—that this too shall pass—I would throw them in a dumpster and slam the lid on their fucking face.
*
I drove across the 17th Street Bridge with the convertible top down. There were only a few cars on the bridge so I didn’t bother anyone when I pulled over at the highest point and tossed Glory’s shiny little Mac over the rail, seventy feet down into the Indian River. It had done enough damage, and it belonged at the bottom of the channel where the barnacles could claim it. I got back in the BMW and drove the rest of the way to the barrier island and straight across A-1-A to South Beach. The wind was coming up, and I could hear the surf from the parking lot; it was louder than it had been in the afternoon, and I figured the storm in the islands was already having an effect. The drugs had kicked in and my chest had stopped hurting, but everything else about me was in agony.
This is where Glory and I had sat and read our books in the sun’s heat, and I’d never told her how beautiful she looked and how amazing she was. Someone had stolen her from me, someone had jimmied the lock and entered the most intimate part of my life and had gotten away with the goods. I had the rest of the OxyContin pills in my pocket and a bottle of vodka on the passenger seat. I could just down it all and walk into the warm Atlantic and be shark bait. It sounded like a good idea—a lot better than going back to a dark house and a cold bed. It went against my grain, but after enough of the pills and the vodka there wouldn’t be any grain to go against. My cell phone rang.
“Vince, where are you? I tried your house.” It was Barbara.
“I’m at the beach.”
“I need to see you, right now. I’m scared.”
“I’ll be in your driveway in five minutes,” I said and started the BMW. I could get there in three if I hurried.
*
Barbara was watching out the window and she rushed outside and got into the BMW as soon as I pulled in to her driveway.
“Where’s C.J.?” I said.
“He went out an hour ago, he didn’t say where. We had one hell of a conversation after you and I left the beach.”
“Is that what scared you?”
“No,” she said. “It was the Lexus. It passed by the house and slowed down, twice. C.J. was gone, and I panicked.”
“The red Lexus? You mean C.J.’s?”
“Yes.”
I realized I’d forgotten completely about tracking the cars. My own laptop was at home, with my gun and everything else I owned except for a bottle of vodka and some painkillers.
“Maybe you should stay somewhere else,” I said.
“No, I’m OK. I’m calming down some, now that you’re here. If we could just wait until he gets back, I’ll go in and I’ll be fine.”
“What if it was C.J. in the Lexus?”
“Not possible. I think you’re right; it’s the boy, not C.J. Besides, we really had it out, and he told me a lot of things I never knew before.”
“Like what?”
“It started when I asked him about the money. I confessed that I’d overheard him. I also told him I’d seen the phone numbers, and I’d called the one in Switzerland. He didn’t react at all...I think he already knew. And then he kind of broke down.”
“How so?”
“He told me he was obsessed about money. He didn’t feel safe unless he had plenty of it. He said it had gotten out of control, but the upshot was that we’d never have to worry about money for the rest of our lives.”
“Keep going.”
“I asked him where he got it, and if he’d inherited it. He said no, he couldn’t tell me, it was too dangerous, but he hadn’t inherited anything. He said his mother and father were dead and left him nothing. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard him say a word about them. He said they hated him while they were alive. His father was a colonel in the Army, and had insisted he go to Vietnam instead of college. He got into some kind of battle in the jungle, and he ended up deserting from the Army and was smuggled out through Cambodia, to Canada. They knew he was alive, and his father tried to hunt him down, and he’s been hiding ever since.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It explains a lot.”
“Did you ask him about his so-called brother, and the other wife?”
“Yes,” she said, “but it was like his tongue was cut out. He looked like he wanted to talk about it, but he couldn’t. I never saw so much pain in his eyes. He finally got in his van and took off.”
“How long ago?”
“About an hour. I was looking out the window, worrying about him, when I saw the Lexus pass. Then it passed again, and that’s when I called you.”
The garage door opened in front of us and headlights illuminated the driveway. It was C.J., coming home in the van.
“Go in with him,” I said. “Do you have your phone on you?”
“Yes, in my pocket.”
“Keep it with you and call me if anything strange is going on. I won’t be far away.” She got out of the car, and I drove out of the driveway and down their road to a spot under a moss-draped oak where I could park and see the house. I wished I had my gun, and I remembered I had the Lupo in the trunk. I brought it inside the car and lay it across my lap. I also wished I had my toothbrush and a good novel, as I was planning on spending the night right there in the BMW. Once again Barbara Butler had crashed my pity-party, and I was quietly grateful. At the same time, I was still seething with anger over the emails, and if a red Lexus crossed my path, I was thinking I might just pepper it with buckshot and ask questions afterward.
TUESDAY
I was able to stay awake until dawn by listening to the radio and keeping the car windows open. I
wondered whether I was also keeping the neighborhood awake, but nobody sleeps with the windows open anymore; everyone has the air conditioning running. They are missing out—the sound of palm fronds rustling in the night breeze is a powerful soporific, and I had to fight hard against my drug-enhanced drowsiness to keep a proper lookout on the Butler house. Nobody came or went, and no red Lexuses passed by. At six AM I decided to go home and get some rest.
Before I went to bed, I opened my laptop to see where the Lexus was. Once again, there was no signal from it. Either I’d misdiagnosed the problem and it wasn’t the batteries after all, or someone had discovered the unit. The next chance I had I would pick up a brand new box and hard-wire it in.
I took another dose of the drug; just one pill rather than two this time. Sitting in the car all night had taken its toll, but I didn’t want to have any problems weaning myself from it and end up in rehab. As tired as I was it was impossible to drift off while my mind digested all the data I’d gathered from the previous day. According to Dr. Doug, C.J. had multiple personalities, neatly paired to two families. Then C.J. is on the phone moving money around, lots of it, and Barbara finds out and calls me and I’m hired again. Not only that, but she also semi-jumps my broken bones while we’re swimming. That was definitely the high point of the day. Then Roberto comes over, and I find out about Glory. That was the low point.
And then Barbara, who has just re-employed me to find out about the money, can’t wait and confronts C.J., and his secrets start spilling out. Meanwhile somebody is driving a luxury car back and forth in front of their house like a predatory animal. And my chest feels like a cement truck just rolled over it. I got up and took the second pill—I badly needed some sleep, and they say the food is great at the Betty Ford clinic anyway.
*
My phone rang just before ten, and I emerged from a dream where I was underwater, swimming among a cloud of fish, looking for a computer at the bottom of the sea. I must have been holding my breath; because, as soon as the phone woke me, I gasped for air. The caller ID said “Butler,C.”.
“Mr. Tanzi?”
