Down Here

by Andrew Vachss

  “I guess in some cases they did. Like when you see their names as ‘co-writers,’ you can probably bet on it. Some, maybe not—they might have just wanted to get their stories told.”

  “But they never have control, do they?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, I read about one man, Jeffrey MacDonald, I think his name was. He was accused of murdering his wife and children. Didn’t he . . . cooperate with a journalist? And it backfired on him?”

  “MacDonald played his own hand,” I said. “And, anyway, there’s no similarity. Your brother’s already free. And he’s not charged with any crimes. The book you’re talking about, it was the investigation of a crime. My book is an investigation of the system.”

  “But you said yourself, John is the centerpiece.”

  “I said I’d like him to be.”

  “All right, you’d like him to be. But it comes down to the same question.”

  “What’s in it for him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound so cold-blooded. This doesn’t have—doesn’t have to have—anything to do with you and me. But I have to view all deals the same way. The interests of the parties.”

  “If it doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, maybe we should just split it up,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she said, spots of color in her cheeks.

  “You’re not your brother’s . . . agent, I guess is the word I’m looking for. Let’s put them all face-up, okay?

  “One, I would rather have simply approached your brother, made my pitch, and either started working with him, incorporating him into my project, or moved on. Quick and easy, yes or no.

  “But, in his current situation, he’s not only less accessible—I don’t have a clue where he even is, never mind how to reach him—he’s more attractive. Because of the whole prosecutor-on-trial angle.

  “Two, I . . . like you. I guess that’s obvious. I don’t want one thing to screw up the other. I don’t want to put you in a position of making choices you shouldn’t have to make.”

  “You mean . . . ? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I want to meet your brother,” I said. “Talk to him. And leave you out of it. And, regardless of how that works out, I want to keep seeing you.”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t say anything, just went back to my food. At least the Dr. Brown’s cream soda was the same as you could buy on Second Avenue.

  “You wouldn’t still want my . . . recollections?” she asked. “The family history, things like that?”

  “Sure I would,” I said. “The truth is, your brother’s story—the factual part of his story—pretty much tells itself. There’s court documents—indictments, trial transcripts, appeals—all over the place. I was looking for more. Deep background. What I told you was one hundred percent true. The impact on the family is a microcosm of the impact on all society.

  “It wasn’t until we . . . it wasn’t until I realized I had feelings for you that I decided I didn’t want to risk one thing for the other.”

  “We went to bed,” she said, scanning my face. “I don’t know a lot about men, but I know enough to know that doesn’t take a lot of ‘feelings’ on their part.”

  “I didn’t expect it to happen,” I said. “Any of it. Sure, you’re a gorgeous girl, and I’m not pretending I wouldn’t want to get next to you even if I had never spent ten minutes talking to you. You don’t know a lot about men; I don’t know a lot about women. But I know some things. I know you’re not the kind of girl who makes love to a man unless you’ve got feelings of your own.”

  “You know that . . . how?”

  “I couldn’t tell you if you gave me a shot of truth serum,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. It’s just something I . . . sense, maybe. I don’t know.”

  She toyed with her salad, not looking up.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, and that’ll do it,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me you don’t have feelings for me, and we’ll drop the whole thing.”

  “You’re confusing me.”

  “Look at me, Laura. You don’t have to be a map reader to know I’ve been around for a while. I’m not too old to play, but I’m too old not to play for keeps. If you just like sex, and figured I might be fun, I hope I didn’t disappoint you. But it would sure disappoint me.”

  “And if I said that . . . that I was just horny?”

  “No hard feelings,” I said. “You’re a big girl, you get to make your own decisions.”

  “You’d still want to do the book? With my brother, I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just . . . what, then?”

  “Just nothing. I thought, if I told you I could just meet your brother, leave you out of it, maybe you and I, we could try being together, see how it worked.”

  She pushed her plate away from her, said, “You can’t meet my brother. I don’t even know where he is. I hear from him, once in a while. But they’re keeping him safe. Until the trial, anyway.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wish you could smoke here,” she said.

  “I can fix that,” I said, catching the attention of our waitress with a check-signing gesture.

  She made a sound of pleasure, exhaling a stream of smoke into the warm, soft night, leaning against the side of her Audi in the parking lot.

  “I like to know where everything is before I do anything,” she said. “Going to bed with you—taking you to bed—that’s not me, you’re right. But I did it before I thought about it. And now you’re making me think about it.”

  “I don’t know money talk,” I said. “But isn’t there some terminology you guys use for long-term investments?”

  “Lots of them. Why?”

  “That’s what I’m looking for.”

  “With your book?”

  “Stop dancing around, Laura. You don’t need to do that. I’m not pressuring you. That’s why I said what I did, to take the pressure off.”

  “I . . . checked you out,” she said, quietly, looking down.

  “And?”

  “And . . . are you married?”

  “Divorced,” I said.

  “Do you have children?”

  How deep did she look? I knew Hauser kept his private life rigidly segregated from his work, but, still . . .

  I gambled. “No,” I told her. “I had a vasectomy, in fact.”

  “You don’t like kids?”

  “I don’t dislike them. Just never wanted any.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “I wouldn’t have invited you to my house if I didn’t know you were a legitimate person. Some of those books, the ones I read after we first talked, they were just . . . terrifying. Like . . . I don’t know, pornography.”

  I shifted my body slightly, so my chest was against her shoulder.

  “I don’t mean that I think there’s anything wrong with . . . sex,” she said, hastily. “That isn’t what I meant by pornography. Those books—are they all about sex murderers or rapists?”

  “I guess they could seem like that, especially if you were looking at the paperback originals. The real pros, though, they’re journalists, and crime happens to be the topic of a particular book. Look at Jack Olsen. He was the dean of so-called true-crime writing, and he wrote about sex killers, sure. But he also wrote about Gypsy con games. And about an innocent man spending most of his life in prison.”

  “Oh. Is that where you—?”

  “I think so,” I said, as if I was considering the idea for the first time. “I met Jack Olsen once,” I told her. “He was a great truth-seeker. Any reporter would want to follow in his footsteps.”

  She turned to face me. “So what happens now?”

  “You make some decisions,” I said. “In order of importance: Do you want to give me a chance with you? Do you want to talk to me about the impact the wrongful imprisonment of a loved one has on a family? Do you want to ask
your brother if he’d be interested in doing an interview?”

  “But I—”

  “You don’t have to decide any of it tonight, Laura,” I said, holding her eyes in the reflected glow of the diner’s windows.

  It was almost one in the morning when we pulled into her garage. She killed the engine. Turned to look at me. “I want you to come back up with me,” she said.

  “Because you decided . . . ?”

  “On all of it, yes.”

  She leaned over, kissed me under my bad eye.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “You have a lot of scars,” she whispered, later.

  “I’ve had a lot of surgery,” I said. “Different things.”

  “Where did the doctor who did this one get his license, in a school for the blind?” she said, licking the chopped-off top of my right ear.

  “Sometimes, it’s not neatness that counts.”

  “What, then?”

  “Speed.”

  “Oh. Were you wounded?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In Vietnam?”

  “No. Africa.”

  “Africa? You were a . . . like a mercenary?”

  “No,” I said. “I was there covering a story.”

  “What story?” she asked.

  So I told her a story. About the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, the rape of the Congo, the “blood diamonds” of Sierra Leone, and how they got that name.

  Everything I told her was true, except for the part about me being there. I filled in the blanks—right down to how it feels to get malaria—from my Biafra days. But I didn’t say a word about those experiences. J. P. Hauser wouldn’t have been old enough to have them.

  “You’ve really led a life,” she said.

  “Not me, personally,” I told her. “Reporters aren’t supposed to lead lives, they’re supposed to lead people to lives . . . other people’s lives. I didn’t have to be in Africa. The story wasn’t me, it was those people who did have to be there, see?”

  “Yes. But, still, it must be exciting. There’s a woman I watch on CNN all the time. It seems, every time something major happens, anywhere in the world, she’s there. You can’t tell me that’s not . . . I don’t know, glamorous.”

  “I don’t have the face for TV,” I said.

  “No, you don’t,” she agreed. “But at least you could be in the profession you wanted.”

  “Are you saying you couldn’t?”

  “You know why there’s such a shortage of nurses and teachers now?” she said.

  “No,” I admitted. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

  “It’s because, years ago, those were about the only real opportunities for an educated woman. Maybe there were others, like being a social worker, but all in the ‘helping’ professions. When things started to change, started to open up, a lot of women took other roads.”

  “And you’re one of the them, right?”

  “Yes. I didn’t get an M.B.A. to teach home economics. It wasn’t just the money—although that was a factor—it’s the . . . freedom, I guess.”

  “I thought money was tightly regulated. I mean, with the SEC and all. . . .”

  “You’re talking about interest rates, and things like that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if the government regulates money, so long as it doesn’t regulate making money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is, if you get good enough at putting together deals, you get to call the shots. Be your own boss. I don’t mean self-employed; I mean a real boss. With people under you.

  “There’s women who manage major mutual funds now, head up corporations, all kinds of opportunities. But what I want isn’t anything like that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to put things together,” she said. “Not working for anyone, working for me. I want to sit back and analyze situations. Then I’d approach all the different parties with a proposal to solve their problems—by using what they already have but don’t understand.”

  “Like what? What could they have and not understand, for example?”

  “Capabilities in concert,” she said, licking the words like they were rich cream. “Sometimes, assets and liabilities of one company fit those of another one—like a jigsaw puzzle. And if you look at them from an objective distance, you can see how, if they did things together, they could both benefit.”

  “You mean, like a merger?”

  “Like that, but not exactly that,” she said. “Mergers are usually about controlling markets. Or a company looking to expand. I want to specialize in rescue operations. Like leveraged buyouts and third-party ventures from unrealized asset pools and—”

  “You know you’ve already lost me, don’t you?” I said.

  “I guess,” she giggled. “Don’t mind me. I get so . . . enthusiastic sometimes. I don’t show that side of me at work. They expect women to be more emotional than men. Women in my profession, they have to come across as . . . well, not cold, exactly. Objective, I guess. That’s the right word.”

  “That’s why you dress the way you do? For work, I mean.”

  “What’s wrong with the way I dress?”

  “Wrong? Nothing. It’s very, uh, tasteful. I just meant, you couldn’t walk in there in a micro-skirt and fishnet stockings and spike heels, right?”

  “I don’t guess,” she said, chuckling. “Why? Do you like those kind of outfits?”

  “On some girls.”

  “What kind of girls?”

  “Girls who can bring it off.”

  “And you think I could?”

  “Guaranteed.”

  “You’re an angel,” she said. “But I know my flaws. It’s part of . . . objectivity. Looking at things as they really are. My legs aren’t thin enough to show off.”

  “You’re nuts,” I told her. “They’re . . . flashy.”

  “Stop it!”

  “I especially like these,” I said, running the back of my fingernails down her thighs.

  “I’m fat there,” she said, reaching over to light another cigarette.

  “That’s a class thing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not . . . objective,” I said, using her language. “Middle-class men have a different image of what a good-looking woman is than working-class men have. And girls pick up on that, real early. Maybe even from their parents.”

  “You really think that social class determines what’s physically attractive?” she asked, sounding truly interested.

  “Not a doubt in my mind,” I told her. “I’ve been all over, and it never seems to fail. Marketing plays a role, too. Women who were all the rage decades ago would be dismissed as overweight today.”

  “Like who?”

  “Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Barbara Eden . . .”

  “You’re quite the connoisseur, are you?”

  “Just an observant reporter.”

  “Uh-huh. And what social class do you come from?”

  “My family didn’t have much money when I was small,” I told her, weaving the lie. “My dad had to work like an animal. But later he became pretty successful. Good enough to get us a nice home, send me to college. So I guess I ended up middle-class,” I said, then switched to the truth, “but my roots, my earliest experiences and conditioning, that’s what set my standards.”

  “And you like what you see?”

  “I’d like it even better if . . .” I said, turning her over onto her stomach.

  “I told you I was no cook,” she said the next morning, offering me a choice of half a dozen different cold cereals, none of which I’d ever heard of. “There’s plenty of juice, though.”

  “We could go out,” I offered.

  “If you’re not starving, could we do that later?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you want to know?” she said suddenly.

  “About . . . ?”

  “For your book.”

  “Oh. All right, just sit there, I’ll get my notebo
ok.”

  My cell phone made its sound.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “This could be important.”

  I pulled the phone loose, opened it up, said, “Hauser.”

  “We’ve got her.” Pepper’s voice.

  “Really? Can you be more specific?”

  “Not alone, huh, chief?”

  “Not even close.”

  “The missing woman.”

  “The friend of the—?”

  “No. The one who went to Iowa.”

  “Okay. When you say ‘got’ . . . ?”

  “Address, current employment, license number . . . Nobody’s approached her. Yet. But we figured we’d go along with you on this one.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Mick’s from around there,” she said. “He might be able to help you with the directions.”

  “Okay,” I said, not believing a word.

  “When can we book it for?”

  “I can’t do anything until Monday,” I told her.

  “Call me tomorrow,” Pepper told me. And hung up.

  “Lucky that didn’t ring last night,” Laura said, as I returned to the table in the kitchen with my notebook.

  “Oh, I turned it off,” I lied. “I didn’t want anything to . . . disturb us. I turned it back on while you were in the shower, earlier.”

  “That was sweet of you.”

  I ducked my head, busied myself with lining up a trio of felt-tipped pens.

  “Was John a typical big brother?” I asked when I looked up.

  “What do you mean, typical?”

  “Well, did he resent you tagging along when he went places, stuff like that?”

  “I never went anyplace with him.”

  “Yes, I guess that makes sense. Too much difference in your ages. Well, what about—?”

  “How far apart do you think we were?” she said, tilting up her chin.

  “Well, I know your brother’s age, from the court records. He was born in 1964, so he’d be almost forty now. You’re, what, thirty? Ten years, between kids, that’s a million miles.”

  “I’m only four years younger than him,” she said. “I’m going to be thirty-six.”

  I made a noise in my throat.

  “What?” she said, quickly.

  “I . . . just thought you were a lot younger. I only made it thirty, when I guessed, because I thought you might be insulted if I thought you were too young to have the kind of job you do. Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m not exactly an expert at dealing with women.”