Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  “No way. It’s the only chance we have against him.”

  “Hardly seems fair. I mean, the man is outnumbered with you and Ms. Chicago Thomas tag-teaming him. I have to say, I like her.”

  Ash pulled a Twinkie out of his bottom desk drawer, offered half to Jonah and then ate it himself when Jonah made a face. “Yes,” he said, chewing, “I think she’ll work out okay.”

  “Sure,” Jonah agreed. “She seems competent. And sweet.”

  “Competent? You should have seen her in the interrogation room. She wasn’t competent, she was brilliant. And I wouldn’t exactly call her sweet.”

  Jonah made a pretend gun of his right hand, closed one eye, aimed at Ash and said, “Gotcha. I just wanted to make sure you still had a pulse. When the most you can say about a woman like that—one who can do loop-de-loops around the mayor and looks the way Windy Thomas looks—is ‘she’s okay,’ it makes me want to call medical and have them check your vital signs.”

  “There are people who would like your job.”

  “None you could tolerate. And none who could whip your ass at racquetball without breaking a sweat.”

  “I was playing left-handed.”

  “You were slow.”

  “For a man who does yoga five times a week you’re not very Zen.”

  “For a man who just got back from his vacation, you have no sense of humor,” Jonah shot back. “Or did you forget to pack it when you came home four days early? Can’t even take a vacation like a normal person. And Zen has nothing to do with yoga.”

  “It wasn’t a vacation. I was visiting my mother.”

  “In Bermuda.”

  “Best way to ruin a tropical island is let my mother live there.”

  “So it was bad?”

  “Yep.” Ash inhaled the last of his Twinkie. “I’d rather talk about something else. Like what you know about Windy, for example.”

  “Hey, look who dropped in. Its Mr. Subtle, long time no see, man.”

  “Are you done?”

  “Yeah, I’ll catch up with him later. All right, dossier on Chicago ‘Windy’ Thomas. Her last job was as acting sheriff in Larks County, Virginia, for three years. It was supposed to be temporary until they found a real sheriff, but she did such a good job they stopped looking.”

  “Why did she decide to come here?”

  “No information available. I do know she didn’t apply but was recruited when they decided to give the job to a civilian instead of a commissioned officer.”

  “And before Virginia?”

  “Before that she was with the FBI in their crime lab for six years. She left when her husband died.”

  “She’s a widow?” Ash sat forward, interested now. “Then who was she talking to on the phone?”

  “She was a widow. She’s engaged now.”

  “Ah. Know anything about him?”

  Jonah kept the smile off his face. “Nope. I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.”

  “There’s no rush. Its not important.”

  “Oh, no. Of course not.” Jonah stood up. “Listen, Shandra and I have reservations at Nobu tonight. Why don’t you come with us? That way you can eat something that was cooked rather than manufactured and enjoy our charming company at the same time.”

  “Twinkies are not manufactured, they are extruded,” Ash corrected. “And thanks for the offer, but I can’t. I have a date tonight.”

  “Bring her.”

  Ash’s eyes went to the top of his desk. “I can’t.”

  “I thought you were all done with that. Spending your nights sneaking into cheap motels with married women who are only interested in you for the sex.”

  “Why, when you make it sound so exciting?”

  Jonah got to the door and paused. “I’m glad you’re back. Even if you are a pain in the ass.”

  “Ditto.”

  Ash watched Jonah walk past his window toward his parking place, guessed how long it would take him to get to his car, added ten minutes, then left his office. Instead of driving to the Wrong Way Inn, the establishment that Cissily Longstrap enjoyed frequenting when her husband was out of town, he drove home and called her cell phone to cancel. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve got too much work. Yes, maybe another time. I’d like that.”

  Shut up, he warned the voice in his head asking why he was lying.

  He stripped down to his jockey shorts, put a CD in the player on his stereo and turned it up as he mixed his paints. Golden brown, soft pink, deep gray. Pale, jade green. Ash had been painting since he was in his teens, entirely self taught, and, he was the first to admit, entirely without talent. It was the activity, watching the colors spread across the canvas, sometimes forming images, usually only blobs, that he liked, not the product. He never displayed any of his paintings, never hung one. They were just for him, something selfish but therapeutic.

  He’d been painting intensively for two hours when he realized the CD he’d picked was Chicago’s Greatest Hits. First canceling—without regret—a date with a perfectly lovely woman who would never demand anything of him aside from pleasure and discretion, and now this. Oh brother, are you in trouble, Ash told himself.

  But he didn’t turn the music off.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I’m telling you, all those contestants, every last one of them, is what you would call an Alien Life Form.”

  “No way, Gregory. The Miss America pageant is not some E. T. plot to infiltrate Earth. You’re out of your mind on this one.”

  “You sure? Then tell me, where on this planet have you ever seen women who look and act that way for real? And they’ve got that crazy look in back of their eyes.”

  “Look, if aliens are smart enough to get here all the way from space, you really think they’d try to take over wearing high heels? You know women complain how hard those are to walk in.”

  The two men lounged against the barred windows of Cash Flow Pawn-It Open 24 Hours like they’d been there forever. It was almost midnight. One of the streetlights was broken and the other was fifteen feet away, so they were mostly in shadow. They weren’t paying attention to the woman in the green car parked alongside them.

  Across the street, on the second story landing of the Sun-Crest Apartments, a light came on outside the door of number five, filling the hallway with a lemonade yellow glow. It was immediately ringed by bugs. A door closed quietly, and a few moments later a tall man appeared, head bouncing as he jogged down the stairs.

  Gregory waved at him. “Hey, Maximillian, how’re you doing?”

  The man paused, keys out, at the door of a clean Dodge with a dent in the rear fender. “Fine, Gregory. And you?”

  “Doing great out here. You off to the hospital?”

  Door of the Dodge open now, the man nodded, held up an Elmo lunch pail. “You know it. Got my provisions. Time to get my nose to the grindstone.”

  “His wife and kids pack him a snack every night,” Gregory explained to his companion as the red Dodge farted away. “Car needs a new muffler, but they’re saving every penny. Boy is going to be a doctor one day. He told me one time, his girls, they fight about who gets to choose the lunch box daddy gets to take to work with him. Like it’s a prize for them, whoever gets to do it. Man with a family like that is lucky.”

  The woman in the green car parked at the curb with the windows cracked took that in. That was interesting about the lunch pails. She would bet the man felt stupid walking into work with an Elmo lunch box but did it anyway because he loved his daughters. Or maybe he left it in the car, emptied it out before he went home, lying to keep them happy. Maybe he ate hot dogs from the cafeteria during his shift.

  Hot dogs. The woman pressed a button and the car window shut, silencing the men outside and closing out the smell of hot dogs from the all-night convenience store on the corner which had been making her stomach rumble. She was not hungry, she told herself, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel to cover up the sound of the clock.

  How long had she
been sitting there outside the Sun-Crest, the building still with its sixties style facade? She didn’t even know, but she had covered six pages with drawings. She put aside her sketch pad now to watch as the light outside of apartment five went out, like someone inside was waiting to be sure Maximillian Waters had gotten off okay. Next the light in the front room went off, and after a beat, a fainter light in the window beside it came on. A bedside lamp, the woman thought, pretty sure that’s the master bedroom.

  The Waters family was careful about electricity, careful not to waste it, not like the Johnsons, lighting up their whole huge house as if it were a Christmas decoration. Electricity was expensive and the Waterses were trying to keep costs down, four of them living in that small apartment in the old building while Mr. Waters did his residency at Sunrise Medical, saving what they could to pay off his student loans. It was a grind, but he had always dreamed of being a doctor, and the dream was close now. He just wished it didn’t keep him away from his family all night.

  That was okay with the woman in the car, though. She liked watching them best when he wasn’t there to interfere with her thinking. When it was just Mrs. Waters—Claudia—and the twin six-year-old girls, Minette and Martine, no father. Sometimes she imagined the three of them—the girls—snuggled up together in the parents’ bed, watching television or maybe playing a game. Life. She remembered playing it with her dad when she was little, entertaining him by drawing pictures of what she thought all her children would look like. Then, when she was older, getting stoned and playing the game with Trish. They would sit around, get a really good buzz on, and make themselves hysterical building families in the little plastic cars that were the game pieces, hers always the green one, Trish’s always red, Trish getting the munchies when they were halfway through, eating chocolate chips and peanut butter off a spoon. Trish always tried to get her to eat some but she knew better. All those empty calories.

  The way the game was played, everyone got a car, and you filled it with these tiny plastic people, who looked like pegs, that were supposed to be your family. Carried them around like baggage. That part was cool, but what the woman hadn’t liked was that the winner was the one who at the end had the most money. Was that really what Life was about? Yes, Trish had said, ruthlessly jettisoning husbands and children in pursuit of money, so at the end she was alone in her red car, flush with cash, on her way to Europe to paint and screw men with sexy accents. The green car was filled with happy kids and a perfect husband. Trish usually won, by the rules of the game, but the woman had always felt like she was the one who really understood life.

  She thought about Trish now, living in a modest house in L.A., raising her two kids, supporting her husband, happy. Thought about herself alone in her green car. Not alone, exactly—there were always the knives.

  Thought about what it would be like to go in and join the Waterses. She pictured herself walking into their apartment, going through the front room, through the bead curtain that goes shush shhhush shhhush, into the master bedroom. Pictured the twins scooching up the bed to make a place for her, letting her choose the game piece first. Pictured their mother coming in and saying, I’m sorry, there’s no room for you, you’re not wanted here. You are a worthless tramp. A bad girl. You deserve to be punished.

  She was so tired of feeling bad.

  The put put put of the red Dodge coming back jarred her out of her thoughts. Sweaty, palms clammy, she watched as it pulled up outside of the apartment and Maximillian got out, running. He must have forgotten something. It was that simple. He was back fast, a stethoscope swinging from his hand, in the Dodge, gone, less than three minutes passed total.

  But to the woman in the car, it was a sign. Like her daddy, she was superstitious. Her mood was ruined. She unclenched one hand from the steering wheel to start the engine, and drove off.

  She would have to come back another time. A time when she could be sure that Maximillian wouldn’t be around to get in the way.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sometimes when Windy woke up in the morning she thought she could hear Evan moving around in the bathroom. Humming to himself under his breath. The drawers opening one after another as he looked for the toothpaste, never able to remember where it was although it had been in the same drawer for four years.

  She’d put it in the same place in the new house too, out of habit, even though Evan would never look there. Never be there.

  Bill had scolded her, reminding her that the toothpaste belonged in the second drawer. Bill always knew exactly where everything he wanted was.

  Windy did too, it was part of her job to notice things. She had stayed up late the night before, looking at the crime scene photos from the Johnsons’ house, reading the lab reports, noticing. Feeling that she was missing something. But really there was only one thing in the world whose location she cared about and at that moment it came bouncing through the door of her bedroom in orange and blue pajamas.

  “Mommy!” Cate sang as she leaped across the bed and into Windy’s arms. “Guess what?”

  Windy hugged her daughter, giving herself one self-indulgent moment to take in the scent of newly awakened six-year-old girl and think there was nothing better on earth.

  Windy loved her daughter more than was healthy, she knew, and couldn’t stop. Cate was magical to her. Not just because she reminded her of Evan. She reminded her of why it was good to breathe.

  She looked like her father, had his same huge blue innocent-looking eyes, with the same sparkle of mischief lurking back inside of them. The same desire to try everything. Windy’s hardest task as a mother was not to keep Cate too close, smother her. When Cate said, “Don’t worry, I’ve done it a million times before,” like an echo of her dad, Windy had to clench her hands at her sides to keep from holding her back, bite her tongue to keep from shouting, “Don’t say that. Don’t ever ever say that.”

  She was determined not to share her fears with Cate. She knew how easy it was to learn from your parents because she had learned it from hers, fear born of too much love. Windy had grown up as the only daughter of two immigrants who escaped from Chile with their shoes and their lives. They would never talk about what they had left behind, would not even allow their daughter to grow up speaking Spanish. They worked hard so that she would have everything she needed to be a real American girl. And they were careful, careful of everything, because they loved her so much and wanted to keep her safe.

  She remembered one afternoon when she was eight and the family had gone for a drive, stopping on the way home at a Buick dealership. They went because her parents had just opened their fourth dry cleaning store and her dad decided it was time for her mother to have her own car. It was an open secret that Magda Thomas didn’t want one, that she never went anywhere without her husband, and that Bertino was really buying it for himself, but everyone played along because it made him happy. While her parents looked, Windy wandered over to the edge of the dealership where they’d set up a little fair, bales of hay, blond women wearing braids and cowboy hats. For a dollar you could ride on the back of a fat old workhorse that they led around a fenced area, one of the blond ladies holding him by a rope, never going faster than a walk. Windy turned around to ask her mom for a dollar but she didn’t have to. Her mother’s eyes made it clear that the horse was Something to Stay Away From. Other things on that list included:

  Public swimming pools

  Empty lot behind Karen’s house

  Press in the back room of the dry cleaning shop

  Convenience store two blocks down

  Fast cars

  Boys

  Strangers

  Other people’s business

  Ouija boards

  Water fountains

  Beef jerky (you didn’t know what was in there)

  Windy let Cate ride a horse the first time she asked, and when she got off and said, “It was kind of boring, next time I want to go faster,” Windy vowed she would let her. She was not going to pass her fear on to he
r daughter like a congenital blood disease. Not going to pass on lessons about how to be a “good girl,” never drawing attention to yourself, never getting angry, never disagreeing, always giving in to every argument, even if it hurt. Her mother pointing to the sign that hung over the counter in each of their now ten dry cleaning shops, reminding employees THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. An adage to be remembered in all parts of life: for good girls, someone else is always right.

  At work, Windy could get caught up in the infallibility of the evidence and forget those lessons. She wondered if that was part of the attraction. They were a lot harder to shed in her personal life, some part of her still believing that no one would love her if she spoke her mind. The Customer Is Always Right.

  She had sworn that while she might have live with rules like that, Cate would not. She was going to share with Cate all the lessons she’d learned from Evan. About the pleasure of laughing without stopping, of making a fool of yourself, the thrill of taking risks. Evan had made her hum inside. His life was like a pageant, always in motion. And she was the audience, applauding, admiring, cheering, exhilarated merely by proximity.

  She could see Evan smiling down at her and Cate lying under the umbrella on that perfect Hawaiian beach, glistening like a rare fish in his wet suit. “Don’t worry, honey, I’ve done it a million times,” he’d assured her. The clouds are way out, he went on, charming, there’s nothing to worry about. What kind of day for windsurfing would it be without wind?

  Windy and windsurfing, his two passions. Ha ha ha.

  Windy and Cate, dozing on the beach all afternoon, waiting for him. Waking up when the wind got bad. Sitting up, Windy all night, with the Coast Guard.

  Evan’s body washing up three days later, thirty miles south. The Coast Guard officer saying, “I swear, ma’am, he was smiling. What more could you want?”

  I want my life back! she had wanted to shout. I want my life back the way it was.

  For six months that went around and around her head like the chorus of a bad love song as she drowned in a whirlpool of grief. And then one day she realized it wasn’t right. She did, she wanted her life back, she missed Evan like she was missing half of herself. But she also wanted more. She saw other ways the love song could go, other refrains. She could follow the story line to a place with someone who shared being a grown-up with her. Someone she could count on. Someone whose idea of an appointment did not involve a four-hour window in either direction. Someone solid. Someone who would never ever make Cate ask, “Did Daddy go away because I did something wrong?”