Except for that one time at the Bellevue.
This was years after the Eleanor Chase murder. Annie had been sitting on a dark leather seat at the poorly lit bar on the nineteenth floor, sitting under a marble archway, drinking a Cosmopolitan because the red of the drink matched her heels, waiting for Brad. Brad was from legal at the insurance company she was accounting for at the time. She should have known better than to hook up with a guy named Brad, really now, but he was old enough to prick her fancy and his suits were well made and, more than anything, he was persistent. Annie didn’t admire persistence—she thought it showed a bullheaded obliviousness to the facts of the world—but that didn’t mean it didn’t work with her. Sometimes it was easier just to say yes. Oh, all right, if you insist. And so here she was, on the nineteenth floor of the Bellevue drinking a blur of vodka mixed with all manner of extraneous stuff, waiting for the oh-so-persistent Brad. There were to be more and ever more drinks, there was to be a picked-over dinner, there was a waiting hotel room.
That’s what she liked about the Bellevue, one-stop shopping for adultery.
She was halfway through the drink, it didn’t take long actually, when an older woman lifted herself onto the seat next to hers. She was pretty and coiffed, her shoes were sling-backs, her fragrance was expensive, and she was wearing a sharply tailored suit that showed off her waist, like she was dressed for a wedding or some other sort of an affair. Annie figured that made two of them. The woman ordered a glass of wine from the bartender. Annie rolled her finger over her own half-empty Martini glass to signal her readiness for another. They sat side by side in quiet for a number of minutes, drinking.
“Waiting for someone?” said the woman, finally breaking the silence.
“He’s late,” said Annie, nodding sadly at the sad character flaw the lack of punctuality signaled.
“He’s going to be later than you think,” said the woman.
“How prescient of you,” said Annie. “Maybe I should shake your head and ask about my investments?”
“Oh, he’ll come to the bar.” The woman scanned Annie up and down. “He’ll show up for sure. He’s a tabby who likes his catnip, and you are all of that. But he’s a coward at heart, trust me. He abhors scenes, and when he sees me sitting here with you, he’ll back out on tiptoes like a frightened little boy.”
“You know who I am,” said Annie, the tingling in her neck making her suddenly aware of exactly who this formidable woman might actually be.
“Oh, dear, I know you better than you know yourself. Here, let me show you something. You have time for a picture show while you’re waiting, don’t you?”
“I think I’m going to need another drink.”
The woman gestured to the barkeep for another round before pulling a wallet out of her bag and snapping it open.
“This is our son James,” she said. “He’s in high school now. He’s in the school play, West Side Story. He didn’t think he’d get a part, but he’s so excited, even if he’s a Shark, not a Jet. And this is Janice. She’s in middle school. She’s a foot taller than all the boys and takes it personally. And this is Ryan. Ryan has issues. I had to quit my job to take care of Ryan. He’s very sweet, he’s an angel, truly, but, well, he has issues.”
“It’s all very touching,” said Annie, draining her second Cosmo. “I’m about to burst into tears.”
“I just thought it would be nice if for once you saw all the people you were actually fucking.”
“You’re swearing at the wrong person here. I’m just an innocent girl in the big bad city.”
“You are anything but, dear heart.”
“Shouldn’t you be showing the pictures to him?”
“He knows already who they are. And who I am. And I guess he’s going to learn who you are too, deep down, because you can have him.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s yours, dear. Not his money, of course, whatever there is, his children and I will get that. Along with the house. And half his future earnings, which are not as much as you would think, considering my parents are still paying half the mortgage. But you can have him. All of him. With my blessings.”
“What if I don’t want him?”
“Well, we don’t always get what we want, do we? And fair warning, that thing he does in the middle, when his face gets all red and his eyes bulge and his pudgy little body goes into that grotesque spasm, like he’s Joe Cocker? It’s not a heart attack, you’ll just wish it was.”
When the woman slipped off the chair, she took a few bills out of her wallet and dropped them on the bar. “For the drinks,” she said. “If you see him, please tell him not to come home.”
“Where should I tell him to go?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Who’s Joe Cocker?”
The woman stopped fussing with her bag and looked straight at Annie for a moment before snapping it shut. “He always did like them young,” she said.
That, of course, was the end of Brad. It wasn’t the sob story about poor little Ryan with his issues, or even the moxie of the wife that killed the evening for him. It was the heart-attack image. There were many things in this world that Annie could stomach—way too much alcohol, a plate full of snails, even dentures in a glass—but Brad’s paroxysmal orgasm was not to be one of them.
Still, even as Annie went about the familiar process of forgetting Brad, the wife stuck. It was the way she had dressed for their confrontation—that suit, those shoes—and the sense of occasion that she gave it. Their tête-à-tête in the bar was a big moment in her life, a declaration of independence from being merely the cuckolded spouse, and in that bar she had given voice to all the silent specters haunting the edges of what had become of Annie’s sad, spoiled existence, the ghosts of those cheated-on wives, each manifesting a singular face. But the face on each was not the face of Brad’s soon-to-be ex-wife, no, instead it was the face of Eleanor Chase.
Which was why Annie was standing in the parking lot of an Applebee’s on some trite suburban boulevard, the restaurant flanking the one road leading into a subdivision with bright, tasteless houses all lined up in a row. The kind of dreary subdivision she had always expected she’d end up in, married to some charmless stiff like Brad, with kids pulling at her hem and calling for her attention as she drank herself into a regular afternoon stupor. Sometimes the sad fact that her dreams were no less mind-numbing than her reality was all that kept her going. She was standing there, waiting for Justin Chase to arrive, so they could both meet this Austin Moss, who had taken her tiresome suburban dream and made it his own.
For Austin Moss, Eleanor Chase’s apparent lover, was not just Annie’s mirror image, but possibly the instrument of her exorcism. In her own bitter way, that woman at the bar at the Bellevue had made it clear to Annie exactly who she had been betraying with every adulterous kiss. And the woman on the receiving end of each of these betrayals, in Annie’s mind, had always been Mackenzie Chase’s wife. That was why the murder of Eleanor Chase had haunted her so: it was the physical manifestation of each of her betrayals. But if Mackenzie and Eleanor truly did have an arrangement—a line he had given Annie but which she had never quite believed—and if Eleanor was finding love and solace outside her marriage, then there was no betrayal there. And maybe, God, maybe, all those silent specters would just fade away, leaving her with the possibility of a future free of ghosts.
“Where have you been?” she said to Justin when he climbed down off his motorbike. “I’ve been standing here like a streetwalker for half an hour.”
“You make any money?”
She was about to take his head off for that crack, but his smile was so good-natured that she just shrugged into it. “Enough for an Applebee’s lunch,” she said, “so long as I don’t order a drink.”
“How could you bear an Applebee’s lunch without one?”
“Good question.”
“I had an unexpected visitor,” said Justin.
“Anything interest
ing?”
He looked at her for a moment and she could see him thinking about something. The way he was thinking and looking at her at the same time made her feel strange. What was she doing, blushing? Christ, she was. Where the hell did that come from?
“How would you feel if I could prove that my father didn’t kill my mom?”
“Relieved. Thrilled, actually.”
“It would wipe out all remnants of the guilt, I suppose.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“But how would you feel about him getting out of prison? Coming back into your life?”
“I hadn’t even thought of that. I don’t know. I think we’ve both moved on.”
“But he’s still sending you letters.”
“What’s going on, Justin?”
“I don’t know. It was a strange morning. Are you ready?”
“Are you?”
“Sure, I think,” he said. “The last address I had was 1350 Mantis Drive.”
“It will be that way,” said Annie, pointing up the street. “When you told me to meet here, I figured it had to be that development. I scouted it out. Just a loop and a cul-de-sac, with no connecting streets. There’s only one way in. And as far as I can tell, one way out, too.”
“Inside a coffin?”
“It is the suburbs.”
“The address is a couple years old, but nothing else came up on the Internet. He’s probably not there.”
“Probably not. But you never know.”
“No, you never do,” said Justin, looking at her more closely than she was comfortable with. “Come on then. Let’s see what my mother’s lover has to say.”
36.
RUSTY NAIL
The houses on Mantis Drive were all alike, two-level tract homes built to sell when tract homes were still selling. The driveways were wide, the lawns green, the trees remarkably uniform, as if they were all planted at exactly the same moment in time, which they were, about a decade and a half before. The house at 1350 was like the others, only better tended. The trim was freshly painted, the lawn freshly mowed. A battered white van was parked in the driveway, and a thin man in ragged jeans was high on a ladder set by the front door, laying a fresh coat of beige on a window frame.
“Can I help you two?” he said from the ladder after Justin and Annie had made their way down the driveway and then along the path that led to the front door. The man kept on working as he spoke, and from the angle, Justin could only make out an unshaven jaw.
“We’re looking for Austin Moss,” said Justin.
“Good luck with that,” said the man as he smoothed on a swath of paint. “Seeing as he’s been dead for about three years.”
“That’s too bad,” said Justin. “How’d he die, do you know?”
“He got hisself run over. Right on the street. Which happens sometimes when you’re walking around drunk as a skunk. I always thought if you got to be drunk, it’s better to be it behind the wheel than out in the open without no protection.”
“An accident, was it?”
“Some say.”
“What do the others say?”
“Oh, folks are always saying.”
“Does Mrs. Moss still live here?”
“That she does,” he said as he leaned forward and worked on a corner of the sill. “What kind of business you got with the missus?”
“Are you her painter or her social secretary?” said Annie.
“I do more than just painting around here,” said the man, without stopping his work. “I cut the lawn, do the plumbing, clean them gutters, keep the weeds in check. I guess you could say I’m Mrs. Moss’s handyman.”
“I can’t imagine a place like this,” said Justin, “with a house this new, provides much work for you.”
“You’d be surprised at that, you would,” said the man as he carefully dipped his brush in the paint can hanging from a hook on the ladder. “They put these things up in a hurry, and that’s the way they seem to want to come down. The name’s Eddie, Eddie Nicosia of Nicosia Home Repairs. Like on the side of the van. You got any drains need unplugging or a tilting deck, I’m your man.”
“We’ll let you know if anything comes up, Eddie. Is Mrs. Moss in?”
“She expecting you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Fair warning then,” said Eddie from up high. “Janet don’t like no unexpected visitors.”
“I guess we’ll just have to take our chances,” said Justin. He looked at Annie, who curled the edge of her lip in amusement at the nosy handyman and then knocked on the door.
Rap rap. Rap.
As they waited, Justin glanced up at the man on the ladder in time to see him carefully place his paintbrush on the edge of the can and start climbing unhurriedly down the ladder. There was something disconcerting about him, the way he slowly yet menacingly descended the ladder, the note in his voice that was sure of way too much. When he reached the ground, he pulled a rag out of his pocket and started wiping his hands, all the while watching as the door opened.
“Well, well, what have we here?” said the woman who answered the door.
“Mrs. Moss?”
“Oh Christ, and I thought the election was over,” she said, her voice slightly slurry. “No, I’m not going to vote, I never vote. On principle.”
“And what principle is that?”
“I don’t give a fuck. How’s that?”
“Pretty good, actually,” said Justin.
The woman in front of him was tall and thin and seriously unsteady, standing in the doorway with one hand braced against the doorframe, the other holding a cigarette. She had a weathered face that had once been quite pretty and a voice as leathery as her skin. She swayed slightly as she stood before them in a loose sweater over a pair of jeans.
“Don’t tell me you’re selling magazines for college. You two are a little old to be undergraduates.”
“Do you have a moment?”
“Not really,” she said before pausing to suck the half-life out of her cigarette. “It’s Saturday, which means I’m scrapbooking.”
“You’re into scrapbooking?” said Annie, with a false enthusiasm.
“No,” said Mrs. Moss. She slowly turned her attention to Annie and stared for a bit, as if it took a moment for her lidded eyes to focus. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Moss.”
“Yes, I do, and call me Janet. Mrs. Moss was my mother-in-law. If I ever grew into her, I’d slit my throat. No, I know you, I just don’t remember yet from where. But it will come to me, it always does, only usually too late to do any good. So what do you two trespassers want?”
“We were actually looking for your husband.”
“You’re a little late. Did he owe you money?”
“No.”
“Good, because I don’t have any. Who are you again?”
“My name is Justin Chase.”
“Chase, huh?” she said, tilting her head and staring at him for a long moment while her mouth slowly turned down, as if she were slipping back through the turbid currents of her life into bitter memory. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the son. The one that found her. And now I recognize you,” Mrs. Moss said as she slowly wagged her cigarette at Annie. “From the newspapers. Don’t you two make just the cutest couple? I mean, considering. Is she, like, your mom now?”
“Can we come in, Janet?”
“I suppose you two got something on your minds.”
“That we do.”
She slowly lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes until they were almost closed. “What exactly?”
“I’d like to talk to you about my mother.”
“It was a long time ago, and a lot of water has rushed through the basement since then.”
“And your husband.”
“Also dead.”
“But still. And I have something you might want to see.”
“What could you possibly have that would interest me?”
“Can we come in?”
She stared at the two of them for a moment more, passing her gaze from Justin to Annie and back again.
“Why’s she here?” she said, pointing her cigarette at Annie.
“Solace,” said Justin.
The woman stared at him for a moment longer without an ounce of amusement on her weathered face. “That’s a good one,” she said, almost collapsing backward as she stepped away from the doorway, inviting them into the house.
37.
CAN OF BUD
If Annie Overmeyer knew anything in this world it was that men lied. They lied about their wives, their money, their emotions, the size and dependability of their cocks. The outright inevitability of their lies was one of the things she liked most about being with men, besides the sex and the drinking. Who doesn’t like having her vision of the world confirmed night after night, in one bar after the other, one bed after another?
But still, she couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed when she caught Justin Chase in his first lie. She was sitting with Justin and that drugged-out Janet Moss in the horrid living room of her horrid little tract house. You could tell the room once had looked okay, in a Seaman’s-discount-furniture sort of way, but over the years a cancerous clutter had taken hold. When you live in a place, things dropped here or there cease to register and, after a while, take on an air of permanence. Little knickknacks, piles of magazines, a broom in the corner, a jacket tossed on a table. The clutter in the Moss house had metastasized. And it smelled like bird poop.
“I like your home, Janet,” said Justin, which, considering the size and simplicity of his own house, could not possibly be the truth.
“We bought it when it was still spiffy and new,” said Janet, sitting deep in a greasy old easy chair. “As was our marriage at the time. Would you like something to drink, the two of you?”
The Barkeep Page 19
