by Rich Horton
After that we trade a couple pleasantries and she sets up a meeting with her friend Patrina right there while I'm waiting on the phone, and then we promise to talk to each other soon, and that's that.
I'm totally over Diane, okay. But like she said, she owes me and maybe finally I'll get to collect. If I can get even at the same time with Beckett for cheating me, even better.
* * * *
Get this: Beckett wanted to meet at Starbuck's; his ex takes me out to lunch at Eleni's. Eleni's is the best restaurant in town, a place where you have to book reservations a month in advance. I meet Patrina there the next day.
When I arrive, the maître d’ looks me over like I'm a bum off the street, until I tell him who I'm having lunch with, and then the whole staff suddenly treats me like I'm the guest of royalty, which tells me Patrina's a big spender, because in this part of the city, money is king.
They take me over to the table where she's already sitting and I can see why Beckett was willing to give up his testicles.
Not that she's my type. But she's the kind of almost-anorexic brunette that a lot of guys go for, looks like she lives on a diet of coffee, cigarettes, and pills. And that's fine, because she's built like a Jaguar convertible, all muscle and lean curves, everything waxed to a high gloss. She's wearing rainforest-green lip gloss, leaf-pattern eyeshadow, and a dark dress with a sheen on it like dew. Her mouth is a bit too wide for her face, which makes it just wide enough.
“Please sit down, I'm so glad to see you,” she says, waving me into the seat and launching into a nervous account of the restaurant's specials, more like she waited tables than sat at them. We get interrupted once by a call to her cell phone and a second time when she remembers she needs to make a quick call. When we finally get waited on, I order the tofu curry, just because I think meat will upset her, and I smile a lot while she sips her wine and gives the preternaturally androgynous waitperson three sets of conflicting instructions.
When she finally settles down, I say, “So you're a friend of Diane's?”
She shrugs it off and then shoots right into a story about how they met at this party on one of the riverboats, and it turns out her best friend knew Diane's boss, and they started talking and became best friends, after which she adds a couple anecdotes about seeing Diane at a wedding and calling her another time for help with the police—a complete misunderstanding, but Diane knows how to talk to people so they do stuff, plus she's discreet, and anyway, that was all water burning the bridge, and then she laughs and says or whatever that phrase is, that's what I mean, and don't you and Diane go way back too?
“We've known each other a few years,” I admit. “So what's your problem, exactly?”
“Didn't she tell you?” At this point I notice that her makeup is covering some possibly bad surgery around her mouth. She's playing with it the same way Beckett played with his chin, only there's a tiny bump of a scar in the divot under her nose. Maybe it's a mole. Either way, she flicks her finger over and over it when she gets nervous.
“Yes, she did,” I say. “But professionally, I figure it's better to hear the whole story from you so I have all the facts straight.”
“Well, there's not too much to say,” she says, leaning forward across the table to whisper to me, giving me a good look at the cylinders in her engine when she does it. “I had my ovaries removed, you know, for safekeeping, so they wouldn't be exposed to anything that might damage them. It's really the best birth control there is, you know. I had them stored in some replica Fabergé eggs, the kind made by Seibert's—have you ever seen any of them?”
I have, in fact, just recently. But I give a shake of my head for a no, and she goes into a long description that doesn't really do them justice, adding that I ought to see her friend Christiana's, gorgeous, a real work of art, ought to be in a museum, although Jazmin has hers in a Betty Boop doll, which is kind of cute too, and Sigourney keeps hers in a golf ball—they can store them in something that small but it costs a lot more—even though they kicked her off the LPGA for cheating. She tells me a lot about how the storage process works, and how they can be ruined without regular maintenance, but I don't care much, so I don't listen.
She's as impatient as she is talkative, and she stops the waitperson several times to check on the status of our meal.
During one of these interruptions, I get impatient too and ask her what happened to her eggs.
“Cas stole them—he told me he would.”
“Who's Cas?” I ask, even though I can safely guess that Cas is Casto Beckett, my previous employer. She tells me his full name and I feel glad to have gotten one thing right.
“It's kind of embarrassing,” she goes on saying and there's a flinch in her eyes, and at that point I can see her more as my type. For all her polished exterior, she's vulnerable. “I did some crazy things,” she says. “I got engaged to him, even drew up the prenups. That's when I promised him my eggs—before I knew what he wanted to do with them! This was back when I was still running with the oddbod addicts.”
She says the last with a bit of a blush, and while I want to know what he wanted her eggs for, I don't know anything about oddbod addicts and I say so.
“It's a subculture thing, mostly about sex. You go into a spa at the beginning of the week and they give you any mod you want. End of the week, they turn you back to normal, whatever normal is for you. Anyway, the one we met at was just outside Naples—”
“Italy?” I ask, getting a quick vision of tracking this down across the ocean like a real jewel thief. I ought to be eating in restaurants like this every day, traveling to places like Italy too.
But she says, “No—Naples, Florida. There's a scene there—it's too many drugs for me, all supposedly painkillers ‘for the surgery.'” She makes the little quote-marks gesture with her fingers, and I wait for a jab of her nail to signal the period but it's not coming.
“Help me out a little more, paint a picture for me,” I say, licking my lips, and leaning forward on my elbows just as the waitthing arrives with our plates. There's a bit of a delay while the three of us talk about the food and the waitperson grates a dusting of parmesan over Patrina's dry greens.
“Cas liked to have an extra"—she lifts her eyebrows, glances around, and mimes a penis with her hands: modesty incarnate, that's this girl—"attached to his chin.”
I try not to spit out my mouthful of tofu. I suddenly have a whole different memory of that patchy spot on his chin and him rubbing it. And I'm automatically thinking about the little bump on her upper lip too.
“It was kind of fun,” she says. “You can imagine what he did with it. You know, not all the stuff the mod addicts do is wrong. It can be okay if you're not obsessed with it. So, yeah, I wanted to experiment with that kind of thing, but then I got sucked into the scene for a while. Cas is a total addict though! He blew through his whole fortune for weekend after weekend of it. I saw pictures,” she says, and then she describes graphically some of the modifications he had and I lose most of my appetite. Meanwhile I'm wondering what kinds of oddmod she had done at the spas. I must be staring at her too intently because she stops talking suddenly and starts rubbing that little bump above her lip until she relaxes again.
“We all make mistakes,” I say, trying not to make one here myself. “So let's assume Beckett has your eggs now. Why not go after them with cops and lawyers?”
“It'll take too long,” she says. “He was totally in love with me, obsessed. He always said one of me would never be enough. I think he has a plan to clone a whole bunch of me to be like his sex slaves. He kept talking about having a harem of love, a harem of Solove, crap like that.” She shudders, her wide mouth pressed into a tight green line. “He wanted to have, like, massive oddbod done and then have a harem of me please all of him at once. It creeps me out just thinking about it.”
I mumble something sympathetic. I think about telling her that she can't be cloned with just her eggs, but if she doesn't know that, why should I correct
her?
She's still talking. “Plus the whole thing's too embarrassing. You can imagine the effect on my grandmother if this got out in public. She'd have another heart attack. Diane told me you'd solved a problem for her once, not the same, but close enough. She said you'd take care of it quietly.”
That's my cue to give her the sales pitch, with the price list, which I do. To her credit, she doesn't flinch at all, and she opens her wallet right there at the table and does a transfer to my account for the deposit. Normally, I prefer cash because it can't be traced to clients, but after my recent experience, I'm happy to take the transfer and let's face it, I need any cash I can get. And, money aside, the best part of this job will be getting back at Beckett for ripping me off.
“I'll need some help,” I say, and I describe what I need—addresses, keycards, passcodes—the sort of work that makes my job easy. She says no problem and then gets distracted and sends off a text message on her phone, and we talk to the waitthing about the dessert menu and she can't possibly have a dessert but do I get to Eleni's often, and I don't, so she insists I try the raspberry custard, which is not really my thing at all, but I let her talk me into it.
Eventually she gets back on topic. “Cas called me to gloat, so I know he has the eggs, and I know where he has them. But we need to act fast before he flies out of town to one of the spas. There's dozens of them, and since I dropped out of the scene, I don't know them all anymore and I have no idea which one he's going to now.” While I'm trying to find out more details about the spas, she stands and, smoothing her dress over her impossibly tight tummy, says, “Can you excuse me for a moment?”
Before I can give her an answer, she walks off toward the restrooms in back, pausing a moment to chat with one of the head servers, and I'm watching her, daydreaming about my good luck, about all the stuff I'm going to take from his apartment besides the eggs, when I feel a hand on my shoulder.
I look up and it's JoJo the dogfaced houseboy. He's a bit flushed, has got a faint smell of fight-sweat on him, like he's just been in one, or more like he's ready to start one.
“Hey, I recognize you,” he says.
I admit my heart stops for a moment. The last guy I wanted to run into here is JoJo.
But then JoJo says, “So you're not doing the meter thing anymore? Good. That seems like a hell of a job.”
I'm thinking can he be that stupid? But then I look at his face, and with the evidence of how stupid he really is staring back at me, I decide to play it straight. “Yeah, I do this other stuff on the side, for an old friend, happens to be a friend of Patrina too. Weird how that works out, huh?”
He says, “No kidding.”
I notice his sweat again, and figure maybe it's heavy exercise for him to put two thoughts together, and he must be just about worn out by now. “So is there something—?”
“Patrina asked me to bring you these,” he says, and he starts shoving things into my jacket pocket. “Here's the address for her ex-fiancé's place, a keycard to his building that she didn't give back when they broke up, and here's the passcode to his place.”
I'm jumpy because I didn't expect to see JoJo here and also because I don't like doing certain kinds of business in public. But JoJo knows his stuff, because he's using his body to block the view from nearby tables, and I tell myself the rules are different when you move up to the big leagues. When I don't get this kind of stuff from my clients, the jobs are so much harder. This one is going to be easy and I can concentrate on ripping off Beckett for everything he's worth.
I make some small talk with JoJo, but it ends with me telling him thanks, and he says no problem. While I'm looking around, wondering where Patrina's gone, he excuses himself and leaves. About that same moment, our androgynous waitperson brings the bill and asks how I'd like to pay it.
Pisses me off. Typical Have attitude, probably how they get to be Haves. But since I've got Patrina's money in my account and I've got Beckett's counterfeit cash at home and I've got Diane waiting to see me when all this is done, I'm in a good mood overall, so I pay it. Although I leave a shitty tip.
* * * *
Beckett lives in an older apartment complex downtown, with minimal security. I've got nowhere else to go after lunch, so I sit outside for a while watching people come and go from the building until I decide to do a quick reconnoiter. His cardkey gets me in, and I go up to his landing and knock on his door, saying “Pizza! Hey, your pizza's here!” I stand away from the peephole and figure I can duck down the stairwell before he gets out the door if I hear it open.
When there's no answer, I try his passcode, just to see if it works. I slip on some latex gloves first, because I'm working, and it's just in case.
The door swings open and I see his dead body face down on the floor. He's naked like he just got out of the shower, and there's blood all around his head, and the back of his skull is smashed in like JoJo was hiding there waiting for him. The main thing I notice, and it freezes me in fascination for a moment, are all the faint scars on his body, odd shapes in odd places, for who knows what.
There's more to it though. I'm looking at the abuse his body has taken, self-inflicted and otherwise, and I realize that the rich aren't like the rest of us at all. They do whatever they want and get away with it.
The chime of the elevator out in the hallway scares me and I shut the door. While I hear the voices out in the hall, I do a quick look-around for the eggs, just out of habit. They're not here. Neither is anything else of value. He's got a third-rate home theater and fourth-rate furniture. It looks like anything he could pawn has already been pawned. Stepping over to his desk, I don't even see a laptop, just a stack of unopened bills, none more than a couple months old.
I know Patrina's played me too, but most lies contain a peppering of truth. I find myself standing next to Beckett's dead body, thinking that since there were two eggs, maybe the one with the dancing boys was his testicles and the one with the nymphs was her ovaries. Like it matters.
I'm shaking like I've had nothing but coffee for three days. Then a door shuts somewhere out in the hall, and the voices are gone, and I'm in a hurry to leave. Might be the first job I don't take anything with me on the way out. I'd wanted to get even with Beckett, but that seems kind of pointless now.
* * * *
I should be getting rid of his counterfeit money first thing when I get home, but I find the funds that Patrina transferred to my account have been frozen. I haven't made any real cash in over a month and I've got bills of my own to pay so I hold onto the bad cash because I'm going to need to pass it.
Then I take a drink to calm my shakes, and a second drink when that doesn't work, and pretty soon I'm getting blind drunk so I can forget the sight of Beckett's body. I try to pack, because I know I need to go away for a while. There comes a point where I can barely stand up and I go hunting for the globe, the one that looks like Beckett's eggs. There's a thought in my head, that maybe it's the same kind of thing after all. I can't find it, but then I'm so gone I can't find my ass with both hands either and I pass out drunk soon after.
The cops come to pick me up around ten the next day.
I'm still sleeping when they start banging on the door and knock it open ‘cause I'm too slow to answer. One of them has a nose like a Collie, makes me think of JoJo, and he starts sniffing around while I try to shake off the hangover fog and get them the hell out of my place.
They're polite about everything, but it's clear they've got warrants and probable cause and somebody who paid them enough money to make searching my place a priority. I'm hoping it's about some simple burglary, but when they start asking questions about Beckett and how long I've known him and what my business with him was, I know I'm screwed.
They turn up the counterfeit money. And blood on my shoe.
About that time they put the handcuffs on me and read me my rights. We all know it's a joke. The truth is we only have a right to the justice we can afford. And I'm bust.
* * * *<
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I call Diane from jail, ask her for her help, and, thinking it will give her a reason to get involved, blurt out that I still have the world pendant she gave Joe.
She says, “It's too late for that.”
That's when I realize, for the first time, what she kept in that necklace. I mean, no wonder she was angry, right. But I didn't know, and before I can say anything to her, tell her I'm sorry, I didn't know what it was, she hangs up.
Like I said, cold-hearted.
* * * *
That's how I ended up here in this cell on death row. You know the story the prosecutor told in court. They said I'm a petty thief who went into partnership with Casto Beckett, who got himself in financial trouble and wanted to move some counterfeit money to get out. I killed him and took the money. Then I used his stolen credit card to make a huge transfer to my own account from the restaurant, where I was trying to blackmail Patrina Solove before her bodyguard rescued her.
I'm telling you the real story, the whole thing, even the stuff I did wrong, because you're here to help me. Right? They talk about taking an eye for an eye, that's justice. Well, I know I did some wrong things, and I'm sorry for them. But I didn't do the murder they're going to kill me for.
Listen, talk to Diane for me—she's got to be behind all this. There was just no way to know her ovaries were in that globe. Tell her how sorry I am, tell her I didn't mean to ruin them. She can't blame me for that, you have to tell her.
Dude! Don't laugh—I could end up dying!
Yeah, what do you mean I didn't need an eyeball in my ass to see that coming?
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* * *
ALWAYS
Karen Joy Fowler
How I Got Here:
I was seventeen years old when I heard the good news from Wilt Loomis who had it straight from Brother Porter himself. Wilt was so excited he was ready to drive to the city of Always that very night. Back then I just wanted to be anywhere Wilt was. So we packed up.
