The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  “Did you hear what I—”

  “You didn’t,” Glenda says.

  “You don’t understand,” Dana says. “I was there. I was— I can’t remember half the afternoon.”

  Glenda opens a creamer and stirs it into her coffee. “Honey.” She takes a slug of coffee; she leans forward so their noses nearly meet across the faded sparkles of the Formica. “A couple years ago, you thought you were Mary Magdalene.”

  Dana considers. “That was different. I was feeling . . . guilty or something.”

  “As opposed to now.” Glenda takes another swig of coffee. Dana fiddles with her cup.

  “You also thought you were Judas Iscariot come back in female form. There’s a theme here.”

  “But this time—”

  “Listen.” Glenda stands up. She takes one last slug of coffee and straightens her hair, reties her apron. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s people. And you’re no killer.”

  “Thanks,” Dana says. “Really. I think I’ll just sit here for a while, jot down a few more notes.” She takes a small sip of decaf. Thank God for Glenda. She doesn’t judge. She never judges, but she’s always here—so much more real than all Dana’s other friends, times like this when her brain whirls and snaps, when her girlfriends seem nearly drugged, fiddling and fussing and slugging through their lives. Glenda says only what Dana needs to hear.

  She writes down on a second napkin whatever comes to her, things she didn’t think she remembered. She writes in a tiny, slanted, barely legible scrawl, very different from her usual neat and careful writing with its closed o’s and carefully crossed t’s. She must be channeling, she thinks, accessing some buried part of her subconscious, where things like Celia’s heavy makeup wait to be pulled up from the murk of the day she died—the bright gash of crimson lipstick drunkenly applied, making Celia’s mouth a large, bright, crooked oblong. There was an odor, too, something vaguely familiar that Dana can’t quite place; she jots that down as well. And the vase—a heavy, thick-sided piece. She’d touched it idly, picked it up to see, and even empty it was heavy. A lovely blue, a cobalt blue like the sky deepening into night, and then a memory bulldozes through, disturbing and intense. She stops writing. She drops the pen as if it’s on fire. She stares at her hands, folds them on her lap beneath the table as two policemen sit down at the counter and look at her across the diner, a lingering, appraising glance. She hums a vapid, tuneless sound to drown the memory dredged up from the muck of her subconscious.

  She carefully folds the napkins and sticks them in her bag, avoiding eye contact with the cops, who have swiveled on their stools to face her. She leaves five dollars on the table and hurries past the officers, waving in the general direction of Glenda at the register. She hums again, more loudly, sliding into the front seat and turning the key. St. Christopher gleams in the light from the broken sign as Dana struggles to forget how she’d stared at the yard-sale vase just before the drinks kicked in. The memories are there, though, clear and cruel, and she thinks of the moths singeing their wings in the yard lights, recalls the moment she stared at the blue vase, the moment it was crystal clear to her exactly why Celia was upset and why she’d captured Peter and the Tart inside her phone. It comes back, too, the anger that encompassed her before the alcohol kicked in, before it fogged her thoughts and made bald spots inside her mind, how she’d wanted to pick up Celia’s lovely hand-thrown vase and bash her over the head.

  She tries to tamp down this totally unwelcome memory. She concentrates on the traffic, on counting the bricks in the building. She thinks about the note, the strange writing—a cruel joke, maybe, a nasty neighbor. “Glenda the Good,” she says, and she repeats it. “Glenda the Good, Glenda the Good,” like a mantra. She says it all the way home.

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time the doors close behind her at the station, Dana is already halfway down the hall. Reaction formation, she thinks she remembers from one of her countless psychiatric sessions, this rush toward the detective’s office, when what she wants to do is turn around and run in the other direction or flatten herself under a desk. She’s terrified of this meeting, but she wants to put it behind her.

  She hikes up her skirt, too loose and slipping down around her hips; her lack of interest in food has taken a toll. She finds the ladies’ room and ducks inside, rooting around in her purse for a safety pin, tucking the waistband together and snapping the pin in place. She glances at her face in the mirror, and then she looks away, afraid that if she looks too closely, she’ll see a murderer lurking there in the glass. She pulls out a modest, humdrum shade of lipstick, leaning over the sink to apply it, careful to look only at her lips. Satisfied, she blots them on a tissue and steps back from the mirror, concentrating on breathing until she’s in the hall.

  The walls are gray and formidable, and she tries not to look at them. Instead she looks down at the floor, and the linoleum squares frighten her. “Detective Moss?” She stands just inside a large room in front of a bare-bones desk that reminds her of grade school. His name is inscribed on a wooden rectangle.

  “Yes.” He gets up, leaning over the desk to shake her hand, and she pulls her sweaty fingers quickly over his palm, like a crab scuttling, she thinks.

  “Thanks for coming in,” he says, and Dana smiles. “This shouldn’t take long. We can stay here if you’d feel more comfortable,” he says, glancing around the empty room, and Dana nods.

  Jack Moss shuffles through some papers and looks up at her over the tops of his glasses. Drugstore glasses, she guesses, and she thinks of Peter spending hundreds of dollars on his, of his prescription sunglasses sitting in an understated, overpriced leather case, of her own large, plaid Foster Grants from Walmart.

  “I spoke with your neighbor. Lon Nguyen. He said you were with Mrs. Steinhauser on the day of her—”

  “Of her demise. Yes, I was.”

  “Could you tell me about that afternoon?”

  “It was—let me think—it was hot. It was really hot. Very foggy, though.”

  The detective leans back in his seat. He holds a pencil between his thumbs, stretching it out like a little log in the air. “I’m not so much interested in the weather as—”

  “I know. I’m just trying to bring back the whole—you know—ambience of the afternoon.”

  He presses the pencil more tightly between his thumbs. “So your neighbor? Mrs. Steinhauser?”

  “I was just getting home from picking up some books from the library. I’d put a couple on hold, and they’d— Anyway, she called me over. Celia. She was teetering on those stupid wedges out in her yard. ‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ she said. So I went over to see what she wanted. I guess Mr. Nguyen told you.”

  “Yes.”

  Dana stops talking. She can feel herself speeding up. She looks at Moss across the desk, at the furrow in his forehead, the black down along his arm, his brown eyes, his hair that was probably almost black before it started turning gray. There’s something about him that soothes her in spite of the reason for their meeting. He reminds her in his dark, mysterious way of the Poet. He leans over his desk toward her, and she feels the heat coming off his body in the sweltering office. She wants to reach out and touch him with the tips of her fingers. She crosses her legs, and her foot bobs up and down. She can feel sweat starting under her arms. “It’s so hot,” she says.

  He nods. “Nothing like Jersey in the summertime. So what’d she want?”

  “She wanted to show me something.” For the first time since Celia’s death, Dana feels visible, transparent. She feels that Moss really sees her, her imperfections, her raw and jagged edges, her sharp, incessant thoughts.

  “What did she want to show you?”

  Dana takes a breath and holds it in. Her heart speeds up, beating so fast it’s like one long beat. Like contractions right before a baby comes. Did Ronald show him the picture? Does he know about Peter and the Tart?

  “She had some pictures of her . . . of her boys,” Dan
a tells him. “Of herself and her boys. One of them just had a graduation recently. Tommy,” she says, “from junior high, and she . . . um, she took some pictures of that. And then there was one of two people sitting at a table, a man and a woman. The guy looked like Peter—like my husband. ‘Look at this!’ she said.”

  “This was in her phone?”

  “Her cell phone. Yes. Did you see it?”

  “Did I see what?”

  “The picture. If so, you’d know—well, sort of know—what my husband looks like. He’s very handsome. He’s blond. He has very expensive hair. Like John Edwards,” she adds, realizing the irony. It crosses her mind that Peter and the Tart could have a small blond child stashed somewhere.

  “No,” he says. “I didn’t. So what was life-and-death?” Jack chews on the end of the pencil.

  Dana shrugs. “She was—Celia was—a little tipsy. More than a little.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Who knows?” Dana inches back a tad on her chair. “She’d had quite a bit of sangria.”

  “Was it some sort of occasion?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s always an occasion if you want one, isn’t there? I mean, there’s always a reason for sangria if you teach Hispanics,” Dana says, and Detective Moss looks up. “Wait. That didn’t sound right,” she says, but she has no idea how to fix it. She focuses on the wall directly behind his desk. She wants to tell him all she knows about her neighbor’s death, to spread the moments of that day like cards across a table, to hand over the guilt hanging like an albatross around her neck. She wants to tell him that together—with his knowledge of the case and her energy they could surely solve—

  “Did you two argue?”

  “We . . . I had some sangria, too. I actually had quite a bit, too. I can’t really remember what we talked about. Mostly about the pictures. Particularly the one picture. Whether it was Peter or not.”

  “And did you argue?”

  “People do all sorts of things when they’re drunk,” Dana says. “But I don’t specifically remember arguing. I mean, we weren’t exactly on the same page that day. . . .”

  “How’s that?”

  “She’d had quite a head start,” Dana says. “She was a good half bottle in when I arrived.”

  Jack Moss sits forward as if he’s suddenly realized he’s late for a meeting. “Was she alive when you left?” he says, and Dana nods.

  “I was completely shocked,” she says, and she reminds herself that this, at least, is untainted truth. If Moss insists on a lie-detector test, she’ll be fine on this particular question. “I was completely shocked,” she says again, “when I saw her lying on the floor. Absolutely blown away.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to add?” Detective Moss takes his glasses off and taps them against the palm of his hand. “Anything that might shed some light on your friend’s death?” His eyes are far more sensual without the glasses—softer, even in the harsh glare beaming down from the ceiling.

  “We weren’t all that close, really,” Dana says. “We went to yard sales together, that sort of thing.”

  “Noted. Did you happen to go back to the Steinhausers’ the night Celia was killed?”

  “No.” Dana leans over to pick up her purse that’s fallen on its side on the dirty linoleum floor. “Why?”

  “You had a key? Have a key?”

  “Umm . . .” Dana looks above her right eyebrow as if this is the toughest question yet. “I did. Yes. From watching the—”

  “But you weren’t in their house the night of the killing?”

  “No. And I gave it back to Ronald. I ran into him at the market the other day and I gave him the key.”

  “Did anyone else have access to the key when you had it? Your husband? Any family members? Friends?”

  “Well,” Dana says. “Not that I can . . . Peter—my husband—actually had access, but he didn’t . . . actually go anywhere that night. He got home late and went straight to bed.”

  Jack Moss nods, looks back at his notes. “Anything you’d like to add?”

  “No,” Dana says, and again she can say this with all honesty. She looks Jack straight in the eye and says it again. “No. Nothing.” He jots down something she can’t see and stands up. Dana gets up, too, extending her now slightly trembling hand.

  “If you remember anything,” he says, “even if it doesn’t seem important . . .” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small white card with straight-up-and-down lettering. Black. Simple. The kind of card Dana thinks she would have if she had cards. “Anything at all, you give me a call,” he says, handing it to her. “And thanks for coming in.”

  “Thanks for having me,” she says. “I mean. God.” She feels her cheeks grow hot. She shakes his hand in what she hopes is a no-nonsense, earthy, androgynous sort of shake.

  “Anytime,” he says, and he smiles.

  “Oh.” She’s halfway to the hall when she remembers. It’s a tiny thing. A tidbit. “There was an odor,” she says, “in Celia’s house.”

  “When?”

  “When I came back. When the paramedics were working on her, when she was bleeding there on the— I was pretty focused on her, so it wasn’t until later I remembered, but it was very distinctive—very familiar, actually.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know—almost like perfume, but really bad perfume. And another smell, like rubbing alcohol.”

  Moss jots something down in his notebook. “That’s what I need,” he says. “That kind of thing. So if you remember anything else . . .”

  She nods, trails her hand behind her in a small wave. She concentrates on walking slowly until she’s out of his office and down the hall, and then she nearly runs to the heavy door, jogging across the parking lot to her car. When she is safely on the highway, when she has completed her impossible mission, she doesn’t feel what she thought she would. To her surprise, she doesn’t feel at all like celebrating after clearing this hurdle with the seasoned detective, that they even managed a little joke at the end of the meeting, her sweaty fingers cold inside his warm ones, his brown eyes lingering on her face. Instead she feels deflated. She feels as if she’s robbed a bank and managed to get away and that she’s holed up in a Caribbean hotel, stacking bills in piles of thousands, but that all she can see is the teller’s face behind the glass, shocked, frightened, while a blue-haired patron clutches her heart.

  The Toyota plows through traffic and speeds along the highway. For a second, Dana thinks of her father, just a flash before she shuts him out—his skinny body always in motion, always rushing. Even in his car, he was always in a hurry, always speeding until that last night, his angular face thrust toward the windshield, his boot holding firm on the brake, the rumble of the train, his frenzied energy contained, stopped. Ended.

  One strappy sandal eases off the gas. She drifts into the rightmost lane, allowing other cars to whiz past, allowing herself to unclench her toes, to wonder why she wanted Detective Moss to discover all her secrets, this man who talked with her and didn’t see the darkness, like thick, black ink, hiding in her veins, behind her eyes, coiled and waiting to swallow her whole.

  She sees Peter walking quickly along the driveway to the house, and he’s already talking by the time he reaches the dining room, by the time he tosses his briefcase on the couch. He’s still wearing his hat, and he looks comical, standing there ranting with his little beret bobbing on his perfect hair. It goes with the Lexus, he said when he bought it from a hat store near his office, but it doesn’t at all. It goes with the convertible he’d planned to buy, opting, in the end, for the more sedate, conservative sedan. Dana sets down a potato and wipes her hands on the sides of her shorts. “Sorry? I didn’t really hear what you—”

  “I got a call today!” he bellows from a space of bare wood between the living room and the dining room, “from that detective. Jack something.”

  “Moss,” she says, but she nearly whispers the name. “His name is Moss
.”

  “Moss. That’s it. He wants to question me about Celia’s death.”

  Dana feels her stomach lurch. “Maybe you should get an ascot,” she says from the kitchen doorway. She takes a deep breath and slices a potato.

  “Why?”

  “To go with the beret.”

  “I tell you I’m a possible person of interest in a murder investigation and you tell me to buy an ascot?”

  Dana shrugs. She drops the potatoes into boiling water and stares at the bubbles in the pot. “It’s not such a big deal,” she says. “They’re interviewing everybody. All the neighbors. I talked to Moss this afternoon.”

  “And you didn’t think to mention it?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.” She grabs a bottle of vodka and pours several shots into a glass. “Drink?” she says, and Peter nods.

  “What’d he want?”

  She takes a tiny sip and hands her husband the glass. “Nothing, really. He wanted to know if I’d seen anything odd that afternoon—you know, anything out of the ordinary.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Well. I said no. Not really. I told him I was over at the Steinhausers’ that day.” Her hands tremble at her sides, and she balls them into fists as he wanders toward the bathroom. She wishes now she hadn’t mentioned the picture in the phone, but how was she to know which information had been shared and which had not? Peter will be furious. She thinks he might be mad enough to leave, to pack his bags and take off to a hotel in Manhattan, where he can be with the Tart every single night, where he can turn to her in the light of a TV screen filled with baseball and tell her how his wife betrayed him, giving out his name the way she did, exposing their affair the way she has. She feels a chill go up her arms, making goose bumps, even though it feels like 105 degrees and puddles sizzle on the sidewalks. It scares her, the thought of Peter leaving. She wonders vaguely if she’ll fall apart without the glue of her husband, without his body there inside the house, later—in a few days or hours or weeks—when her mind begins to splinter as it has before, when her madness gets a toehold on her life.