Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  Chapter 5

  Rannie turned the key to the front door of her apartment. Bursts of staccato gunshot pops and the boom of explosions signaled Nate was playing a video game. What accounted for him being up already? On weekends, any hour with an A.M. after it counted as dawn patrol. When she walked past the den, formerly known as Alice’s bedroom, she put her head in to say hi.

  Nate sat on the sofa in front of the TV with Olivia Werner on his lap, their thumbs working away manically at separate video controls.

  “Didn’t hear you come in, Ma.” Nate’s eyes remained glued to the screen where one muscle-bound guy, riddled with gunshot wounds, dripping blood, was attempting to behead another with a chain saw.

  “Hey, Ms. Bookman.” Olivia took a nanosecond to look up and offer an appealing off-kilter smile. The greeting evidently cost her, because Nate was suddenly screaming, “Yesssss! You are so dead, O!”

  Rannie liked Olivia. For a rich girl who was also beautiful, she had a touching vulnerability. Her nails were badly bitten and she had a nervous way of clearing her throat before speaking. And while nervousness wasn’t usually an endearing quality, somehow in Olivia’s case it was.

  In the kitchen, Rannie made herself a PB&J. Almost eighteen, Nate never confided in her, barely communicated at all, in fact. Oh, yes, for a few days following the rooftop attack, Nate would hug her for no reason and gaze at her in the loving, “I’m so glad you’re my mommy” way he used to when he was a little boy. But just as Rannie had plummeted from her glad-to-be-alive high, so had Nate swiftly reverted to his characteristic avoidance/contempt mode. Still, Rannie could tell he was going through the throes of whatever was the current word for ceaseless longing, sweet obsession, aching lust, total bewitchment.

  “Ma? You got a sec?”

  Suddenly, Nate, all six feet, two inches of him, stood before her, shirtless and in cargo pants. He fiddled with one of the refrigerator magnets.

  “So listen. Um . . . Is it okay if she stays?”

  “Of course. I’ll make brunch!” The notion of making pancakes, frying bacon, and putting out nice plates and cloth napkins was immensely cheering.

  “Uh, I wasn’t talking about now. . . . I meant tonight.”

  “Oh!”

  “Otherwise, uh, she has to stay home alone and it kind of spooks her.”

  Olivia’s home, Rannie knew, was a beautiful town house in the East Seventies.

  In the next second, Olivia appeared, did that throat-clearing thing, and explained that her parents were in the country; Carlotta, the housekeeper, was off; and Olivia’s grandmother was on a cruise.

  “And I’m not speaking to either of my so-called best friends.” Then she raised her eyes, amber and fringed with incredibly thick lashes. “It’ll only be for one night. Carlotta’s back tomorrow.”

  Rannie smiled and blinked repeatedly.

  Ugh! In the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t category, this one was a doozy. Was saying yes moronically permissive? Was saying no hypocritical? After all, as a teenager Rannie had been 110 percent in favor of teenage sex. And she didn’t even know for sure what Olivia and Nate had or hadn’t done. Rannie wanted to blow a whistle and cry, “Time out!” Then she’d whisk Olivia aside to ask a subtle question or two, along the lines of, “Do you now or have you ever had an STD?,” after which she’d grab Nate and blitz through “the joy of safe sex” lecture she’d delivered awhile back.

  Instead, Rannie ended up waffling. “Why don’t we see what your mom has to say about this? Okay?” she said, turning to Olivia, who provided a number that began with an 860, northern Connecticut area code.

  Surprisingly, Carole Werner, a skinny fashionista with a year-round tan and a toothy smile, signed off on the sleepover right away. “Great. Now I don’t have to rush back to the city. . . . Olivia and I need a break from each other. Lately, the further apart we are, the better we get along.”

  You’re referring to distance, so it’s farther apart, chided the picky grammar cop lodged in Rannie’s brain. “Further” was for abstract mulling. But clearly Olivia’s mother didn’t need to think any further.

  “I just won’t tell her father she’s staying over at a boy’s.”

  Carole Werner’s sole hesitation was over the location of the roof under which Olivia would be sleeping. “Wh-where exactly on the West Side do you live?” she asked with hesitancy. The correct answer, Rannie knew, would be one of the grand Central Park West palazzos—the Beresford or El Dorado. There was an audible gulp when Rannie supplied her address, a street with a triple-digit number off Broadway.

  “Our building has a name,” Rannie almost volunteered as proof of some residential cachet, although DOLORES COURT chiseled in stone above the entrance sounded so silly, like the title of a noir-ish Joan Crawford movie.

  Half an hour later, Olivia and Nate were dressed and on their way to collect Olivia’s belongings. So no time like the present to rack up some freelance billing. Rannie retrieved the brushed aluminum briefcase from her closet, eventually vanquished its lock, and removed the manuscript. Then armed with her weapon of choice, her faithful Col-Erase blue copyediting pencil, she settled down on the living room sofa, overjoyed at not being able to do the job electronically.

  Copyediting was an unglamorous job in publishing. Acquiring editors on the prowl for future Pulitzers and National Book Awards dismissed Rannie and her stickler ilk as the Grammar Gestapo, nothing more than human spell-checkers.

  Nevertheless, twenty years ago, fresh out of Yale and brand-new to New York City, she’d accepted an entry-level copyediting job with an eye toward moving into editorial. That never happened. However, over the years she’d come to take considerable pride in her career. Maybe nobody dreamed of copyediting the Great American Novel; still, the communication of thoughts in clean, clear sentences free of dangling participles and garbled syntax was important.

  Then, too, there were all the wonderfully arcane marks and symbols of copyediting. Insertion carets, transposition squiggles, underlining for italics, triple underlining for capitalization. It was like knowing a secret code.

  Portrait of a Lady was the innocuous title of the manuscript. The dedication was “To Sister Dorothy Cusack, whose strength has carried me through dark times.” Okay, proof of what Ellen had told her earlier about Ret and Catholicism. And it made Rannie glad to know Ret found solace through religion.

  The acknowledgments began with “I must express eternal gratitude to Ellen Donahoe, my editor par excellence.” Dutifully, Rannie ran a pencil line ending with a deletion curl through the sentence. There were only two other “thankees.” “For Audeo, who was my ears and without whom I never could have written this book.” Here was the first boo-boo. While Rannie corrected the misspelling—changing “Audeo” to “Audio”—she remembered Tim’s hunch about paid information. Was Ret keeping the person’s identity secret so her snoop remained exclusively hers or was it for Audio’s sake because snooping might prove dangerous? The final acknowledgment was “For Gery Antioch. I have come to appreciate how artful you are.” The guy in custody was a Gerald, perhaps known as Gery. But his last name was Steele.

  None of this mulling should be on S&S’s dime, Rannie reminded herself, and sitting up a little straighter, blue pencil poised, she began Chapter One, which recounted the night in late 1945 when Charlotte’s second husband, financier Silas Cummings, proposed.

  Charlotte was divorced, with a daughter in college, and working at Vogue. (Her column on society events, originally called “Doings,” was rechristened “Cummings and Goings” after her marriage to Silas.) Charlotte’s beauty was fading. Nevertheless for Silas, a boy from the Bronx whose last name had morphed from Cominsky to Cummings, Charlotte was New York Unattainable, a blond Wasp with a pedigree.

  What Charlotte no longer had was money. Her first husband had managed to squander both his inheritance and hers.

  Then enter Silas Cummings, richer than Croesus.

  When he presented Charlotte with a ten
-carat square-cut Tiffany diamond ring, she accepted it.

  Rannie read on. The book was a breezy no-brainer, best enjoyed in bed with a box of bonbons or, at the very least, a bar of Hershey’s finest.

  When she next checked a clock, Rannie was pleased to see how many pages she’d copyedited. She rotated her shoulders to relieve the crick in her neck, then laid down her pencil. It probably was time to take a break. The ringing of her cell sealed the deal.

  It was Tim. “Hold on a sec,” she said, dutifully relocking the manuscript in its aluminum home before sliding the bracelet with the key back on.

  “So Ret Sullivan was taking cheap shots at Charlotte Cummings,” he said, not bothering to disguise the crow in his voice.

  “How’d you find out?” Rannie yelped and then, remembering Ret’s own copy of the manuscript had been taken by the police, supplied the answer herself. “I swear, Tim, the New York City cops are as gossipy as a bunch of teenage girls. Well, here’s something I bet you don’t know. My friend Ellen had a copy of the manuscript so guess who is copyediting it furiously?”

  “Okay, good for you. Does this mean your life’s on hold till the job’s done? Or can we meet up in Riverside Park?”

  “I’ll be at the usual spot. But run fast. It’s nippy out.”

  Huddled in a duffle coat and wool cap, Rannie sat finishing off another PB&J sandwich on one of the wooden benches by the community garden at Ninety-First Street. Now that it was November, neighborhood people were no longer patiently toiling inside the black iron fence that bordered the garden—a riot of daffodils and tulips in early spring, clusters of hydrangea, phlox, and daylilies in summer, followed by autumnal asters and mums.

  The garden, the shape of which from an aerial view would look like a giant exclamation point, was Rannie’s favorite place in the park, and while waiting for Tim to show up, she took pleasure in watching the parade of bicyclists, young families with strollers, and dogs playing off leash.

  Rannie waved at the small dot of a figure that grew steadily larger as it ran toward her on the promenade. She could spot Tim just from the movement of his body, the easy rhythm of legs pounding up and down, the abbreviated sway of arms held close to his sides. She felt a swell of happiness—or at least something close to that—just seeing him. He was so graceful in a purely masculine, unstudied way.

  Once he reached the far end of the flower garden, he slowed to a trot, removed a Red Sox baseball cap, and shook drops of sweat from his forehead. He wasn’t tall—five nine tops—and his nose and chin were cut a little too sharply. But the prematurely silver hair, almost punk in its spikiness, and the intense brown of his eyes, hidden now behind a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses, added up to something better than classically handsome. And then there was his smile, one front tooth just overlapping the other. He was not a man with a sunny disposition, but when he smiled, as he was now—an all-out grin, in fact—it melted her every time.

  Tim sat on the bench, careful to stay a couple of feet from Rannie. “I’m drenched.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said and moved closer.

  “You got anything to drink?”

  Rannie produced a Diet Lemon Snapple, which Tim began to swig. She watched his breathing go from ragged to slow and even, and while he finished off the Snapple Rannie filled him in on how she came to possess a copy of Ret’s manuscript. “Ellen said to charge whatever I want.”

  Tim tossed the empty Snapple bottle, swish, into a garbage can on the other side of Rannie. Then he stood. “Listen. This boy needs a shower.” He cast a questioning look over the top of his sunglasses. “Your place?” he was asking.

  “Sorry. Nate’ll be home soon, if he’s not already.” Rannie’s eyes suddenly widened. “Oh, my God! I forgot to tell you!”

  But Tim’s only response to the news of Rannie’s houseguest was “What I wouldn’t have given for a mom like you. So? Want to come home with me, little girl?” Tim rubbed his hands together lasciviously and waggled his eyebrows, so that his sunglasses bobbed up and down comically.

  “Jerk,” she said with affection and followed him up the hill that led out of Riverside Park.

  She made Tim spring for a cab to the brownstone he owned on Eighty-First Street off Columbus, purchased for a song way back when he first moved to New York from Massachusetts. He and Chris lived on two floors directly above the bar and grill, with tenants in four apartments providing income for the part of the Chapel School tuition that scholarship money didn’t cover.

  Her friend Joan, a Chapel School mom and currently acting head, had remarked, only half in jest, “Of all the unmarried fathers at Chaps—guys who could buy up a small third world country if they felt like playing dictator—you find a guy with credit card debt and no secondary residence.”

  Very true but who could possibly have a cuter butt than Tim? she asked herself while he opened the door to what he had promised in the cab would be a kid-free apartment. Rannie headed immediately for Tim’s bedroom. Although the apartment hadn’t come fully furnished, it had the anonymous look of one—just a collection of beige-y bland furniture with no real feel of home; right now, however, decor was not on her mind. Even before Tim had a chance to turn on the shower, Rannie was out of her coat, jeans, and turtleneck and in his bed.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, envisioning the hefty manuscript waiting at home.

  “I bet you’ve been saying that since you were sixteen.” Then he stripped off his running clothes. A second later, she heard the thrum of water and Tim singing, “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful and You’re Mine.”

  “Very funny. I should be home working, so make it snappy.” Nooners were not something financially strapped freelancers should be indulging in.

  “Come on in,” he called out. “We can get a head start.”

  So Rannie did.

  As soon as she pulled the glass shower door shut, Tim cupped her face in both hands and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck. It was a wonderful kiss, one that lasted to the point where Rannie was no longer aware of the water rushing down on them. “You taste delicious,” he murmured after pulling away from her embrace. He stood a foot away staring at her.

  “What?” She was breathing hard.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of looking at you.”

  How many men would say that to a forty-three-year-old woman?

  She threw her arms around him again, kissed him, and then began to gently soap his back, his chest, slowly moving down the line of hair that whorled around his navel and then led farther down to his cock. She could feel herself starting to throb. “Maybe we should—” She was going to say “get in bed,” but Tim was already lifting her up. As he pressed her against the tile wall, her legs encircling his waist, he entered her.

  “Still in a rush?”

  Rannie didn’t answer. Her mind snapped off. She gave in to her body, to the rhythm of his body inside hers, to pure sensation. That terrible, wonderful, demanding pressure, unlike no other, was building inside her rapidly; she clutched Tim tighter so that each thrust reached the very core of her. She started to come a second before he did and only when she found herself standing again, wobbly-legged, orgasm over, water streaming down and plastering her hair all over her face, did she realize they were still in the shower stall.

  After they dried off, Rannie nixed snuggling in bed. She dressed quickly, and the guilt trip—put on hold for the duration of the shower—resumed. Well, she told herself, there would be no further distractions the entire afternoon; she’d remain closeted in her room working.

  Tim was sitting on his bed, almost fully dressed himself, lacing up sneakers. Well-mannered, former parochial schoolboy that he was, he always insisted on escorting Rannie to a cab.

  “Just let me check to see if Charlie made it in,” he said once they were downstairs, and he ducked into the bar. “Only’ll take a sec.” Charlie, one of the many retired cops Tim employed, was someone known for partying too hard on Saturday ni
ghts.

  “Hey, boss,” Charlie called, a cell phone cradled in his neck as he maneuvered around a table setting out silverware. “Gotta go,” he told whoever was at the other end of the line. Snapping shut his cell, he gave Rannie a wink then shook his head ruefully. “This is when I really miss the force. You hear what happened in the Thirty-Eighth? Those bozos botched a homicide case.”

  “The Thirty-Eighth? Where’s that?” Rannie asked.

  “Upper East Side.”

  For some reason, the hairs on Rannie’s arms began to tingle. “Does this have anything to do with Ret Sullivan?” Rannie inquired.

  Charlie nodded. “The guy they picked up? Not him.”

  “What?” Rannie half croaked, half screeched.

  Charlie continued. “The cops pulled the phone log; a call came in to Ret Sullivan yesterday at 3:50. She was alive then; they got in touch with the person she spoke to.”

  That had to be Ellen, Rannie realized. Ellen had called Ret Sullivan about Rannie coming to pick up the manuscript.

  “And the guy,” Charlie continued, “he was already with his next customer by then—surveillance cams in the lobby of a high-rise on East Sixty-Seventh Street back him up.”

  So much for Tim’s theory of accidental murder. This was murder murder. “Are there any leads? Any tips from the guy who was in custody? Maybe Ret Sullivan said something to him? Maybe—”

  Tim cut her off. “Come on, Rannie. Don’t start grilling Charlie. Please.” And before she knew it, he was steering her by the elbow—a little too forcefully—out of the bar. Rannie managed a furtive backward glance at Charlie, who had both hands spread, one still clutching a bunch of forks, in a classic “Sorry, I got nothing” pose.

  Tim whistled for a cab, which swerved suddenly from the middle lane on Columbus and pulled to the curb.