by Thomas Perry
“Nothing. What could I say?”
“And Eric?”
“Now we’re getting close to the sad part. It makes me sad to remember it, anyway. Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because my life is a mess.”
“I can make your life better if you can just give me some hard information about the men who are after you or the girl who was killed. Anything might help. Even her name could do it.”
“I’m getting to it. Today I’m finding that I can talk about it only by talking around it first. And only after I’ve stamped down all the weeds around it can I go to the center. The next thing that happened was Olivia.”
“Oh, yes. Olivia.”
“Yes. Olivia Kent was where I started, so I’ve completed the circle, walked all around the truth.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Eric cheated on me with Olivia.”
“I’m sorry. It must have hurt.” He had to be careful to keep the response simple and sympathetic. If she detected a false tone, it might make her see him as a manipulator and shut down.
“It was pretty much what I said earlier. He was in an atmosphere that was like a slow-motion orgy, where people changed partners over a period of months, making the rounds of the place in a couple of years. But there was always looking and flirting, always an undercurrent. Olivia Kent was the only one, at first, who knew that Eric and I had just decided to get married, and understood that the period leading up to it was an opportunity for her.”
Till decided to follow the story she wanted to tell him, and hope that it led to what he wanted to know. “An opportunity to have a fling with Eric, or take your place permanently?”
“It’s hard for me to say what she was thinking. She had been with us for a long time, and she liked Eric. Maybe all that time she had been developing a hopeless crush on him, and unexpectedly learned that the crush wasn’t hopeless—was only getting hopeless, and that she had to make a move right then. It could have been more than a crush. But there are also women who get a thrill out of seducing men just before their weddings, and she may have been one of them. I had been her boss for almost four years, and maybe she had been building up resentment. I suppose it could have been all of those feelings in some proportion, because people are too complicated to do things for one reason.”
“So she used her opportunity.”
“Right. Eric proposed, I said yes, and we set the date for six months later. We said it was so we could do it during our least busy season, after New Year’s. That gave Olivia plenty of time to work, but she started the affair right away. She made a move and Eric didn’t hesitate.”
“How did you find out he was seeing Olivia?”
“I figured out that something was going on. A lot of women say that a woman always knows, but it’s not true. We don’t. Eric was just about the same. Olivia wasn’t.”
“How was she different?”
“She started being sort of cold and snippy to me. I recognized the attitude. Sometimes when somebody is doing something to hurt you, she has to convince herself that you already deserved it. That was the way it was with Olivia and me, and pretty soon I began to suspect what the reason might be. One night when I left work, I just drove to Olivia’s apartment, parked, and waited. It wasn’t more than a few minutes before they showed up in Eric’s car. They both went in, and an hour or so later, Eric came out. The prosecution rests.”
“Did you tell him you knew?”
“I turned my car around so I wouldn’t have to drive past him in the street, and then drove as fast as I dared to beat him home. I needed to think about the whole thing. At first I was horribly hurt and angry. Then I noticed that my own impulse wasn’t to break up with him. I didn’t hate him. In an odd sort of way, I understood him and felt sympathy for him.”
“So you did nothing at all?”
“Olivia had a sort of on-again, off-again boyfriend. His name was David.”
“Oh. Revenge sex.”
“Well, not quite. I got him alone one night and kissed him, and I thought I was prepared to go through with it. But when he kissed me back, I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I said, ‘I’m sorry, David, but I just realized why I was doing this, and it’s not a good reason, or a good idea.’ He was very nice and understanding about it. But then, he didn’t keep his mouth shut. That was part of the claustrophobic atmosphere around there, too: Everybody was always telling each other secrets, leaving out no intimate details. He had a confessional relationship with Olivia’s best friend, Kit, so he told her.”
“Kit as in Katherine?”
“Maybe. Or Kathleen, or Katerina, or a hundred other names. She was just called Kit.”
“Was she one of the other waitresses?”
“She waited sometimes. Primarily she was Olivia’s friend. When Olivia had been with us for a few months, Kit just showed up. She was very striking, with bright red hair that was helped along only a little bit by the stylist’s dye, to tone it darker and make it shinier, and big green eyes. She had freckles, but she was really good with makeup, so her skin looked clear and white, except for a blush under the cheekbones. She would come in and sit at the bar, sometimes with another girl or two, just drinking and waiting for Olivia. When she was with a man, she might have dinner. At some point, she started acting as Olivia’s substitute. Olivia came to me and asked if I could arrange it when she had to go home to Ohio for some family thing. I was a little skeptical the first time, but after that I wasn’t. She clearly had worked in a formal restaurant before, and learned to be professional. She was fast and hardworking and knowledgeable. She knew the Banque menu by heart and could discuss it with customers. Then Olivia would come back from wherever she had been this time, and Kit would go back to being a bar ornament. When she wasn’t filling in for Olivia, she acted like a rich girl who could barely bring herself to work hard enough to get drunk. And maybe she was. The arrangement was that we would pay Olivia for the time. I don’t know what arrangement they made about Kit’s tips, but at Banque those were bigger than salaries.” Wendy glanced at Jack Till, and he could tell she was trying to see whether he knew.
He said, “She’s the one?”
“She’s the one.”
“You’re sure she never made it onto your payroll?”
“Positive.”
“Too bad. A Social Security number would have given us a leg up. Even a full name.” He needed to coax her, but he didn’t want to distract her from her recollections. He had to keep her talking. “So Kit told her best friend Olivia that you had flirted with David.”
“More than that. I was emotional about the whole situation right then. When I was with David, I was crying and saying far too much. I told him that Eric was fooling around with Olivia, and that it was making me crazy, and that was why I had made a fool of myself with him.”
“And he told Kit, and Kit told Olivia.”
“Kit told Olivia that I knew she was sleeping with my fiancé, that I was going mad with jealousy, and that I had slept with her boyfriend David.”
“Really?”
“Yes. She had decided to give me a little revenge that I hadn’t actually earned.”
“Did it make you angry?”
“Not exactly. It was funny, really, because only David and I knew for sure what had gone on. I was denying everything, which people assumed I would do no matter what. He was denying it, too, but of course, Olivia would never believe him.” She looked happy, wistful, but only for a second. “Kit and I became friends after that.” She seemed to remember something and corrected herself. “Sort of. She was still primarily Olivia’s friend, and so was I, but we had a secret that Olivia didn’t know.”
“Wait. You were still friends with Olivia?”
“Not right away. I still hated her then. The first thing was that Olivia told Eric that I knew all about it. I left the restaurant as usual one night and found Eric had followed me home. I had seen him getting ready to leave, but I had assumed he was going to Olivia’s. Instead he pulled into the driveway right
after I did. We sat in the living room of our new house that we had bought and furnished together, and talked about why we shouldn’t marry each other, and what we should do about our predicament.”
“Was it a fight, or were you both too sad for that?” He couldn’t help remembering the breakup with his wife, Rose, when he had simply come home and found the note telling him that she was going away for a while, and which friend had agreed to watch Holly until he got home from work.
“We talked for a long time, and we both cried and held each other, then opened a bottle of really good cognac that we were saving for some big occasion, and got drunk and cried and hugged some more. I don’t think we made any decisions except to announce to each other that we weren’t in love. We still had Banque. Either of us could have walked away from the restaurant if it had been a failure, but it was a roaring, screaming success. We had named it Banque because it was in an old bank building, but after four years, it might as well have been a real bank. The place had become so valuable that neither of us could have bought the other out, and everything was leveraged. We had bought the building, so it had a mortgage. We had bought our new house, and that had a mortgage. There wasn’t a way that Eric could leave, because he was the big attraction. We had never separated our interests in any legal way, just agreed that everything was ours together. So everything had changed, but nothing looked different.”
“You mean because you stayed in the house and the restaurant.” She was getting close to the part she had kept secret, so Till only prompted her.
“Yes. Eric moved into the second big bedroom. And half the time he didn’t come home anyway, or came home when it was just about morning and I was ready to get up. We still worked at the restaurant, of course, but not together. A lot of the work I did was daytime stuff—taking deliveries, balancing the books, doing bills, payroll and taxes, and supervising the daytime crew. When Eric came in, he went straight to the kitchen. Sometimes he even entered through the delivery door in back near the pantry. It’s possible we were even better workers than we had been—I was, certainly, because I had nothing else anymore. Then the drama kind of seeped away. It’s amazing what you can get used to if you’re busy enough to keep your mind turned outward all the time. The restaurant kept thriving, the money came in, and the days went by. Before long, Eric and I grew close again. We were still business partners and best friends.”
“Eric had Olivia to occupy him. What was your social life like?”
“I went out after work with Kit, and after Olivia and Eric broke up, we took Olivia back, too. We went to late-night clubs, danced, drank, had fun. I had a few dates with men I shouldn’t have, but most of the time I went out with the girls. I told you what the two of them looked like. It was great to be out with them. We walked into a club, and men just began to move toward them, as though they couldn’t help it. Every night was New Year’s Eve for about five months. And I was the one who didn’t want to go home, the one who would slip the DJ a couple hundred bucks to keep the music going a little longer. Then Kit met a man and stopped hanging out with us.”
“Did that stop you?”
“No. I went out, sometimes with Olivia, and sometimes with other women we knew. I went to parties. The whole period is kind of a blur, partly because I was drinking a lot for the first time in my life, and partly because I was moving fast, trying to jump back a few years and live the time that I had wasted on Eric. I wanted to be where the loud music was.”
“Did you have some kind of plan for the future? What were you thinking at that time?”
“From the time when Eric and I had gotten together, I had begun to make plans, killing myself to reach certain goals and set our lives up in the best, most solid and predictable ways. When I was twenty-one, I could have told you what I was going to be doing at forty-one or sixty-one. I realized that I had been insane, so I was trying to develop a new strategy. I remember the day when I had planned to marry Eric, I was out with Olivia, and we ran into Kit.”
“Where?”
“It was Darkest Peru, off Sunset. It was Olivia and me, and there might have been one of the other girls from Banque. We hadn’t seen Kit for at least a month. We walked into the ladies’ room and there she was, in front of the mirror fixing her makeup. As soon as I walked in, I spotted her. Who else could it be with that hair? She seemed really happy to see us. She said she was with her boyfriend. They were just getting ready to leave, and he was waiting for her, but she wanted us to meet him. We went out of the ladies’ room and she took us to a table. There were five chairs, but just one young guy sitting there with a glass of cola. He was big, wearing a dark sport coat that looked tight because it was thin summer-weight cloth, and you could see arm muscles. He saw us coming, and stood up. I thought he was good looking, except for his thick neck. And I wasn’t wild about the knit shirt with the coat. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, and she didn’t introduce us. She just said to him, ‘Where is he?’ She said it kind of angrily, because she seemed to be embarrassed in front of us. I realized the guy was a bodyguard. He said, ‘He went out to the car. He needed to make some calls. Come on.’ If that wasn’t exactly what he said, it was close. I could tell the bodyguard had been assigned to wait for Kit and bring her along when she came out of the ladies’ room. Kit hesitated, kind of putting one hand on her hip and frowning. Then she decided, for whatever reason, that she wasn’t going to push it. She said to us, ‘Well, I guess he’s in a big hurry now. I’ll have to arrange a get-together when he’s not feeling so fucking important.’ She went with the bodyguard, though.”
Till knew she was on the edge of telling him the things he wanted to know. “What did you make of the bodyguard? Were you afraid of him?”
“No. We had a lot of show-business customers at Banque, so I was used to them. Bodyguards had been the accessory for Hollywood types since silent films. And people were even more likely to bring bodyguards to the late-night clubs. There was a kind of badboy ambience to those places, and it fit.”
“What happened after that night?”
“I kind of forgot about it. After all, it was a nonevent, a meeting that never happened. I got distracted, and didn’t think about it for a while.”
“Distracted by what?”
“A big mistake. I got into a relationship with one of the owners of an art gallery. It was the gallery that hung paintings on the walls in Banque. His name was Matthew. At the moment I was looking for something to turn everything upside down, so the excitement seemed to be just what I needed. It wasn’t.”
“How did the relationship end?” Till was sensing that there was something about this period that she considered the cause of her problems. There was the language of excuses: heavy drinking, distraction, bad relationships.
“I know it’s not exactly a surprise to anyone to say it, but there’s just a hint of fraudulence about everything having to do with art.”
Till studied her. “What exactly was the fraudulence in Matthew? Was it something to do with your being Moss Harper’s daughter?”
“Wow. Did somebody tell you that, or did you figure it out?”
“Just a guess.”
“I went to an opening at his gallery. Matthew was working the crowd, trying to make some sales. The crowd included a few artists who were there because Matthew was powerful and could help them, but mostly they were a bunch of rich people who had figured out that buying art was a chance to be part of a scene without having talent or personality or being attractive. I found myself standing there beside a very tall, chubby guy who was drinking and eating while he talked, and he looked like the spoiled son of a Roman emperor. He kept staring down at me as though he knew some guilty secret about me. Finally, he leaned uncomfortably close and said, practically in my ear, “Matthew tells me you’re Moss Harper’s daughter. Are you?” It was one of those moments when a dozen things that had all seemed just slightly off clicked into place at once. I had never told Matthew who my father was. It had never come up. Matthew had b
een using me for status. I was a curiosity.”
“What did you do?”
“I dropped him and worked harder. For me, the restaurant had soured the night I caught Eric fooling around, but I didn’t have anything else to do. Restaurants were the only business I knew. Eric was the only one I could really talk to. Everything I had was tied up in Banque. So I stayed. The only big changes were the ones I had made when Eric and I broke the engagement. I had split the long-term bank accounts into thirds—his, mine, and the restaurant’s—and stopped putting any new money into the restaurant. I paid us each one-half of the net profits at the end of each week. So by this time, I had a growing backlog of money, most of which was still in cash in the safe in the basement of our house. It wasn’t happiness, but it was a way to live. Then one night at the beginning of August, I saw him for the first time, and everything started to change.”
“Do you mean Kit’s boyfriend?”
She nodded.
Till waited, but she didn’t go on. He said, “You’re right to be scared. But the only way to end this is to remember and tell everything, and keep searching for things you didn’t recall until now.”
She was silent for a few steps as they walked together along the gravel path. The gulls from the rock were circling above them. “The restaurant had been packed all evening. Eric liked to close the kitchen at ten-thirty or eleven, but that night he didn’t stop cooking until one. I went by the bar a while later, and there was Kit, in her favorite seat, talking to all the men, as she always did. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I might have seen her once after the night in Darkest Peru, but if so we didn’t actually speak—just hugged and hurried off in different directions. But this time I joined her and we chatted for a minute or two. I remember she said that she hadn’t been out much because her boyfriend had taken a summer place at the beach, so coming in to Banque had seemed like too much work. I might have said, ‘You should make him bring you here more often.’ But then she told me that she had come by herself while he was out, and she had called him after she had arrived, so he might come by later. That was it. I got called away because somebody else wanted to talk to me, so I moved on.”
