Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  “He thought it was funny to hear a little kid slurring.” His father, a plumber, was a disappointed, bitter man who limped from polio contracted in the very last outbreak before the Salk vaccine. “Polio, according to my dad, was the reason for everything wrong with his life. Bum leg, bum luck, that’s all I heard. The only way we ‘bonded’ ”—Tim put air quotes around the word—“was over booze. And I loved to drink. Loved the taste. Loved holding a glass or bottle. Loved waiting for the buzz to kick in.”

  Lots of nodding from everybody in the audience. It was then that Rannie happened to notice a well-coiffed blond woman in black, sitting a couple of rows ahead, doing needlepoint. Even from the back, there was something familiar about her, the perfect ruler-straight posture.

  “I don’t even remember losing my virginity,” Tim went on as he rubbed his cheek and smiled ruefully. “Totally missed out on that. The girl filled me in. At least I was smart enough to stay sober the second time.”

  More laughs, then Tim cut to the chase—the car accident that killed his wife, cop friends who covered for him, his stint in rehab, and the postrehab move to New York, where “I started piecing together a life for me and my son, Chris, who was three.” He looked around the room for a moment. “This program saved my life, sitting in rooms like this, listening to people’s stories and not being too stubborn to ask for help.” A moment later, he ended with a shrug. “There’s no magic; for anyone new in the program, I’m staying sober the same way you are, one day at a time.”

  Right after that, everyone joined hands and recited the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  As she unclasped the hands of her neighbors, Rannie once again took notice of the blond woman who’d been needlepointing. Rannie watched her turn to gather up a tote bag and black wool jacket, then rise and walk toward the exit.

  It was Bibi Gaines.

  Seeing her here was surreal. Rannie blinked; it was almost as if a life-size image of Bibi had been cut out and manipulated into the wrong background with Photoshop. Bibi didn’t belong in this dingy gray basement. Then Rannie stopped to remember what she’d been thinking just minutes ago about the democratic spirit of AA. Everybody here belonged here.

  Encountering Bibi would be awkward, so Rannie ducked down and pretended to be fishing around for something in her bag and didn’t budge until she figured Bibi was safely beyond the exit door.

  The room emptied slowly. Rannie waited in her seat while several people thronged around Tim, men shaking his hand, women offering hugs.

  Of all the uncanny coincidences. Charlotte Cummings’s granddaughter exuded an air of “I’m in charge” confidence, something that to Rannie often seemed the birthright of tall, blond women with silly nicknames. Yet obviously there were demons lurking, and somehow knowing this about Bibi made Rannie like her better; it humanized her. Rannie’s gaze turned to Tim again. She watched him wrap an arm around a teary-eyed young woman. AA was a big part of his life. For all she knew, Bibi was one of Tim’s AA friends.

  Tim strode toward her and together they walked up the stairs and out a side door of the church. The brisk night air underscored how stuffy, smoky, and overheated it had been in the basement. Rannie took in a couple of deep head-clearing breaths.

  “Charlotte Cummings’s granddaughter was at the meeting,” Rannie said as they walked to his car. “She took me around the mansion, acted like we were old chums from boarding school. Do you know her? Her name is Bibi.”

  Predictably, Tim said, “If I do, I’m not saying. And remember, whatever you heard—or saw—in there stays in there. Understood?”

  “I know that, Tim. You don’t have to lecture me.”

  He put a hand on the back of her neck and they continued down the street.

  “So now you know all my secrets,” Tim said. As he unlocked the car door for her, Rannie decided that no, she was pretty sure she did not.

  Tim dropped her off with a quick kiss. There had been no offer to take her back to his apartment nor any request to come upstairs to hers. Now, lying alone in bed, she felt deprived . . . or to put it more bluntly, horny. Being around Tim primed her body for sex, sometimes without her mind even being consciously aware of it.

  And what were Nate and Olivia doing behind the closed door to the den? “Studying” had been their chimed, pat-sounding response to her “I’m back” announcement.

  Rannie briefly considered putting in another hour of freelance work. But even sharpening her blue pencils seemed too strenuous a task. She simply didn’t have the mental acuity right now for copyediting. Instead she got under the covers and skimmed through Tattletale, the bio of Ret Sullivan that she’d purchased at Barnes & Noble that morning. It turned out to be a complete hoot.

  The author, someone named Lina Struvel, had turned Ret’s life into an over-the-top rags-to-riches story. The adjectives most frequently used to describe Ret were “raven-haired,” “sultry,” “curvaceous,” and “luscious-lipped.”

  As for the facts: Ret (born Kathleen Margaret) Sullivan had been orphaned at a young age and grew up in a Westchester convent, where Sister Dorothy Cusack had taken the girl under her wing.

  Ah, thought Rannie, the nun to whom Ret had dedicated Portrait of a Lady.

  After high school, Ret worked for U.S. Enquirer dreaming up weird UFO stories, including ones about an alien stalking Elizabeth Taylor. “Ret Sullivan had a real gift,” a former boss was quoted as saying. “She never underestimated the stupidity of our readers.”

  A stint at Entertainment Weekly led to appearances on Fox Network gossip shows, which in turn led to her first book contract. In the past twenty years she’d cranked out twelve celebrity bios. A workaholic who never married “despite countless offers” and had no close friends, she enjoyed “a dream life attending movie premieres, press parties, and glamorous charity galas almost every night.”

  There were a couple of howlers: Ret was described as “a consummate journalist” and a “crusader who spoke truth to power.”

  Silly as the book was, the more she read of Tattletale, the sorrier Rannie felt for Ret. Okay, in reality the stuff that “the consummate journalist” wrote was scuzz but she worked so hard at it. And until she crossed paths with Mike Bellettra, she had carved out exactly the high-profile life she had longed for. How many people could say that?

  At eleven, Rannie channel surfed but none of the stations had anything newsworthy about the murder. Every channel replayed the same archival footage of Mike Bellettra’s arrest after the lye incident, the same shots of Ret’s apartment building, and old photos of Ret herself in her heyday.

  Rannie lay in bed, thoughts free floating, zigzagging from the horrifying sight of Ret Sullivan dead in bed to the slightly less horrifying sight of Charlotte Cummings nearly dead in bed. Rannie’s gut, which she usually trusted, judged it unlikely that the manuscript about Charlotte Cummings had anything to do with Ret’s murder. Yet somebody out there, somebody who might be asleep in his or her bed right this very minute, hated Ret enough to end her life brutally and sordidly. Tim, she knew, would argue whether hatred was the motive behind most premeditated murders. She couldn’t remember his exact words; however, he’d once said that murder was at bottom a selfish act. He didn’t believe most killers hated their victims; for whatever reason, they simply wanted them out of the way, permanently gone.

  As she was about to turn off the light, the spine of Tattletale caught her eye. Dusk Books. That was the publishing house where Larry Katz worked now. As executive editor, no less.

  Rannie hadn’t thought about Larry in eons, not until Ellen mentioned him earlier in the day. Maybe she should give him a call. Who knew? Dusk might be another source for freelance. Or maybe Larry had some idea what leads the cops were following.

  Chapter 9

  The thrum of heavy rain woke Rannie. When she peered bleary eyed at the clock on her night table, she was startled
to see it was eight fifteen. She sprang from bed. Olivia and Nate had departed for school long ago, so she was free to check out both Nate’s bedroom and the den.

  No telltale signs anywhere. The Vuitton suitcase was gone. Nate’s bed was unmade, with the covers balled up frenetically into what looked almost like a makeshift punching bag. In the den it was impossible to tell whether the convertible couch had ever been pulled out to bed mode or not.

  By eight thirty, Rannie’s workday began. She stationed herself at her desk. An hour and a half of coffee and copyediting brought Rannie well past the halfway mark in the manuscript. Still no eye-popping disclosures about Charlotte Cummings. Yet it interested Rannie to learn that Charlotte and her first husband had adopted Madeline through the Gladney Home in Texas, legendary for its “crops” of blond, blue-eyed babies, the go-to place for all barren rich Wasps. That meant that Bibi, sole offspring of Madeline, was not actually a blood relative of Charlotte Cummings’s.

  During a break for an open-faced PB&J, Rannie reconsidered her plan to get in touch with Larry Katz at Dusk Books. In the light of day it still didn’t seem like a bad idea.

  She called the general number at Dusk, was redirected to Larry’s extension, and ended up leaving a message. “Larry, it’s Rannie Bookman. I know this is out of the blue. I’m a freelancer now and hoping you might need a good copy editor. . . . And of course it’d be fun to see you and catch up.”

  Hearing Larry Katz’s voice on the prompt with its nasal Long Island accent made Rannie smile. “I’m either away from my desk or out of the office,” it said. Rannie looked at her watch. Ten thirty. If he still kept to the same hours as in his Simon & Schuster days, Larry probably hadn’t yet made it into the office.

  Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Larry’s assistant asking if Rannie could come into Dusk at eleven o’clock.

  Yes, ma’am! She certainly could.

  Rannie arrived at Dusk with yet another cheapie black umbrella blown inside out. Dependably, the heavy rain and winds let up just before she entered a nondescript office building on Fifty-Ninth Street. Though it was after eleven, Rannie had made it in before Larry and waited in the reception area. Copies of Dusk books stood behind a wall of glass-fronted shelves—Tattletale as well as many celebrity confessionals, sex manuals for all persuasions, and self-help titles.

  At eleven fifteen Larry came bursting in.

  “Rannie! Sorry I’m late. I—I had a meeting outside the office.” Words undoubtedly uttered for the benefit of the receptionist. “With the rain it was impossible to find a cab.”

  Larry looked pretty much the same, with wild Brillo hair, shorter now and only nominally grayer since the last time she’d seen him. He had to be in his midfifties by now but didn’t look it. Tall and rumpled, he was a big bearish guy. His raincoat was dirty; so were his shoes. That was Larry, a mess but an appealing mess.

  Larry placed his hands on her shoulders, kissed her lightly on the cheek. “You still look like a grad student. I always think of you with glasses perched on your head and a pencil stuck behind one ear.”

  Behind one of his ears, the right one, Rannie was now startled to notice a hearing aid, almost imperceptibly tiny, the expensive kind marketed to boomers. Fallout from too many rock concerts, probably. Rannie remembered that Larry once showed her a photo from his college days at Columbia. Back then he’d sported a full-blown “Jewfro” and a Fu Manchu mustache, and he looked stoned out of his gourd.

  Larry led her down a cubicle-lined hallway to his office. As for decor, bare essentials summed it up. Gray walls, a metal credenza and filing cabinets, a desk and a wall of shelves displaying many of the same titles as in the reception area.

  “Welcome to the glamorous world of Dusk Books.”

  Rannie sat down in the chair facing Larry’s desk. She produced one of her business cards—“Have Pencil, Will Travel,” it said at the top—and handed it to him, their fingers briefly touching.

  He looked at the card. “I remember hearing you left S&S.”

  “You’re nice to be so tactful.” The entire publishing world had been privy to the reason for her abrupt, involuntary leave-taking, thanks to an article in Publishers Weekly about the Nancy Drew recall.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Larry replied, “I know of worse bloopers . . . or ones that are just as bad.”

  “By now I’ve heard them all.” In attempts to console her, industry pals kept e-mailing “contenders”; her favorites thus far were a literary first novel about Mozart that landed on bookshelves entitled Rectals for the Emperor, an indictment of the educational system called Why Pubic Schools Don’t Work, and a children’s picture book called Whales: Gentile Giants of the Sea.

  He leaned back, arms folded across his chest, smiling at her. He had a dimple in his chin to rival Kirk Douglas’s. Rannie had forgotten that.

  They played catch-up; Larry had returned to New York about a year ago from California, single again after a brief marriage. “My first and last. It lasted a minute and somehow I’m paying alimony.” He lived in the Meatpacking District now.

  Then he said, “I caught you on one of the morning shows, right after you killed that psycho. Amazing what you did. I remember thinking, ‘This is the same Rannie I knew?’ ”

  “I had no choice. I don’t even remember doing it.”

  “The stuff about the blue pencil, that was all true?”

  Rannie nodded.

  “Must have been damn sharp.”

  This was not the conversational avenue Rannie wanted to stroll down. She cleared her throat and Larry seemed to pick up on her discomfort. He put his feet up on his desk and leaned back farther. The soles of his shoes were caked with mud.

  “I almost called,” he said. “I was surprised to hear you say you were a single mother. So you never remarried? I thought for sure somebody would snap you up right away.”

  “Nope.” Rannie was not sure what to say next. Larry was looking at her so intently, she had to resist the urge to squirm. “Funny but just yesterday your name came up. I didn’t know you were executive editor here. Congratulations.”

  Larry shrugged. “The pay ain’t bad—in fact much better than at one of the big houses—but there’s absolutely no cachet when I present my business card.”

  “I’m curious. . . . Did you edit the book about Ret Sullivan? Tattletale? I saw it in the reception area.”

  “Yup, I confess. Want a copy? There are ten sitting on the shelf behind you.”

  “Actually I already bought one.”

  Larry dipped his head in thanks. “It’s horrible to say, but Ret getting murdered was the best thing that could’ve happened for the book. Last time I looked, Tattletale was 77 on Amazon,” he continued. “We’re going back to press for another fifty thousand copies.”

  “So you’re the ‘Dusk spokesperson’ quoted in the Times! The one talking about Ret Sullivan’s ‘demise’?”

  He nodded. “I thought ‘demise’ had a nice respectful sound. And wherever Ret Sullivan is now, I guarantee you she’s having a good laugh over the whole thing—the cops looked at me like I was crazy when I told them that.”

  “Cops!” Rannie feigned surprise and hoped she seemed convincing. “The cops talked to you?” Rannie paused. “I read how she died and, I gotta say, Larry, it didn’t strike me as riotously funny either.”

  Larry acknowledged her point with a shrug. “Poor choice of words. What I told the police was that Ret would be digging all the headlines.”

  “Were you two friends?” she asked.

  “Nah. Years ago I used to run into her at author parties, restaurants, conventions. She once told me, ‘I started out in tabloids and I bet that’s where I end up.’ She was right. She was a true believer in the power of publicity—good or bad.” Larry paused for a moment. “If an autopsy discovers Ret had terminal cancer, I wouldn’t put it past her to have staged her own death.”

  “Get out! Paying someone to strangle her? Some sort of perverted euthanasia?”
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  “Not seriously. But I bet what drove her nuts about being disfigured, maybe more than anything, was being off the radar screen. And you have to admit her death is a Rupert Murdoch wet dream. She would get perverse pleasure in that.”

  Rannie refrained from commenting that Larry seemed to know Ret awfully well for someone claiming to be simply a long-ago acquaintance. “So listen, Larry. I came down here in pouring rain. And while it’s great to see you, please don’t send me away empty-handed.”

  “No, no. Of course not.” He removed his feet from the desk, swiveled around to the credenza, and, sifting through a pile of manuscripts, rattled off the titles of three projects. “Take your pick.” He swiveled back and looked at her with concern. “So? You managing to get by freelancing?”

  “Squeaking by is probably more accurate. Ellen Donahoe’s been great about giving me work. You remember Ellen.”

  “Yeah. Brunette, looks a little like you. How’s she doing?”

  “Fine, and she’ll be even finer in a couple of hours when her plane lands in Martinique.”

  Soon after, Rannie left Dusk with the company’s backlist catalog and a manuscript entitled Cutthroat: Do Psychopaths Make Successful CEOs? Larry hugged her good-bye; the embrace felt so familiar. A great big enveloping hug.

  “You happy now?” Larry wasn’t talking about the freelance job.

  She shrugged. “I’m not the basket case I was when you knew me.”

  On the way home, Rannie debated whether she’d felt any rekindling of the attraction she used to feel. Her first reaction on seeing Larry was to tell him to comb his hair and send his raincoat to the cleaners. But then, part of Larry’s charm was that he needed mothering. He also never expected more or less of himself than he delivered. That probably explained why he had such a forgiving nature. A trait that Tim Butler sorely lacked.