The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  “Anyway, I can’t thank you enough.” Dana looks up at him, and he sees that same familiar thing in her eyes. “I guess you saw my signs?”

  Jack nods. “He was in the Steinhausers’ yard the other day, and I thought he was a stray. I had him at my place while you were—”

  “It wasn’t there,” Dana says. “I was wrong about the picture. It didn’t actually exist.”

  Jack sits back down. “Then why’d you say it did?”

  She shrugs. Her arms are like sticks. The sleeveless shirt she’s wearing hangs on her, the armholes gap around the tops of her arms. “I was wrong. I found it. I looked in it again—Celia’s cell—and it wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe it was deleted.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Unless Ronald was lying.”

  “Could Celia have deleted it?”

  “No. That’s the last thing she’d want to do. No. It was probably never there.” Dana bites at her cuticle. “It’s me,” she says. “I haven’t been quite . . . I haven’t felt really . . .” Her voice wanders off, her eyes shift back and forth, her fingers drum against her knees. She is so familiar. There is something just at the edge of his—

  “What did Ronald say?”

  “Like I told you. He said there wasn’t . . . that the picture wasn’t in the phone.”

  “But what exactly did he say? Try to remember.”

  “I asked him if everything was still there, and he said, ‘In the phone?’ And I said yes, and he said, ‘Unless we have a grainy-photo thief.’” She turns her hands over on her knees, palms up. He sees the scar that winds along her wrist, and then he knows.

  “He used those words?”

  “Yeah. I know he did, because I remember thinking it was bad. It was a terrible picture. Who’d want it? Not that you can actually steal a—”

  “Were the other pictures like that? Unclear like that?”

  “No. That one was bad because she took it from way across the restaurant. At least I—”

  Dana stares out the window. Spot leaps into her lap and bats at her hair. He steps into the top of her blouse, and it sags down, showing most of her breast, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Jack glances at her wrist again and sees a young girl in the ER, her arm stitched badly by an intern, her eyes wild as she looked up from an ugly metal bed, her gown untied and open in the back. Over twenty years ago, when he was a rookie. They got the call. Suicide attempt. Bellevue, but there were so many people; so many crazy; so many spinning, stitched, and shattered; so many going to the psych ward. She looked so lost sitting there, so beautiful, her feet tapping against the air, her fingers drumming on the table, her eyes large, distracted. What’s wrong with her? he’d asked his partner. What happened to her? Where’ll they take her? His partner was an older guy, two years from retirement. She’s nuts, he’d said. They’ll take her up to psych. Who knows what happened to her? She happened to her. Jeez. It’s this fuckin’ city, kid. It’s New York. He wonders now if the girl in the ER all those years ago was Dana or only someone like her, someone lost and beautiful like her.

  “I have these notes,” she says, forcing him back to the present. “Threatening notes. I don’t know who wrote them. Actually, Peter thinks I did.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “No. Not at all. That’s why I— Maybe you’ll see something I can’t.” She disappears for a minute and comes back with a folded scrap of paper. “Here’s one of them,” she says, handing it to him. His cell phone buzzes. Rob. “Hey,” he tells him. “Can this wait? I’m—”

  “Not really,” Rob says. “It’s the prosecutor’s office. Lenora. She’s on her way down here.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. Says she needs to see us. You mainly. It’s about the Steinhauser case.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Jack says. Damn. He sticks his phone in his pocket and turns to Dana. “Listen,” he says. “I’ve got to head back to the office. How about if you come in tomorrow sometime?”

  “Why?”

  “Just to finish our talk,” he says. “Bring both the notes. Ten-thirty okay? Get it over with?” He stands for a minute at the edge of the living room, in the entryway with the Oriental runner, the desk in the corner, the little antique lamp.

  “Sure.” She looks at him.

  “You remember how to find me?” he says, but Dana only nods. At least he thinks so. She barely moves her head.

  When he gets to the stop sign at the end of Ashby Lane, he sits for a minute, collecting his thoughts. So he was right about Ronald. “A grainy-photo thief,” he’d said—but he wouldn’t have known that the picture was bad unless he actually saw it. He deleted the damn thing. Jack takes out his pad and thumbs through the Steinhauser case contacts until he finds Ronald’s number. He closes his eyes, calls up the note in his nearly flawless memory. He’d barely had a chance to glance at the thing before his cell phone rang, but even so—even that second or two looking at it—he’s pretty sure it was written with a fountain pen, the tiny globs at the ends of the words. Peacock blue at that. Noticeable, to say the least. More than a little off the grid. No one uses fountain pens these days. Rare enough to see anything at all in script; everything’s computerized. He shakes his head. Odds are the note was written by the Sheaffer he’d spotted beside a couple ballpoints on the desk in Dana’s entryway.

  Lenora White doesn’t look happy when Jack arrives at his office. She’s clearly been here longer than she’d planned to be. She walks across the room with her hand outstretched. Her legs are long. Her face is flawless, white as a porcelain plate. “Hello, Jack,” she says. “Sorry to drag you away from . . . whatever you were doing. But I was down here anyway, and I thought I’d touch base—have you and Rob bring me up to speed.”

  “No problem.” He shakes her hand. “I was out in the field,” he says.

  “Working on the Steinhauser case?”

  He nods. “You’ve changed your hair again.”

  “I’m impressed,” Lenora says. “Most men wouldn’t notice. Do you like it?” She tosses her head.

  “Love it,” he says, and she takes a seat on the other side of his desk.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What? Steinhauser?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We need to get this wrapped up. It’s getting way too much publicity. Makes us look bad. Makes me look bad.”

  “Dancing as fast as I can,” Jack tells her.

  “Narrowed in on any of your suspects?”

  “A few people at the moment.”

  “Who?”

  “The husband, for one,” Jack says. “Ronald.”

  Lenora nods. “Who else?”

  “We’re looking at a couple of the neighbors,” he says. “Following up with forensics.”

  “Okay, Jack. Stay on it.” She smiles, stands up to go. “Walk me down the hall?”

  “Sure,” he says. The phone rings on his desk. Shit.

  “Go ahead,” Lenora says. “Get that. Rain check on the walk.” She takes a few steps down the hall in her sexy heels, and then she turns around. I’ll be in touch, she mouths, forming the words with her perfectly heart-shaped lips. Her fingers flutter in the air as she clip-clips toward the lobby. Jeez. Women.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jack hesitates before he hits the SEND button to complete his call to Kyle. Once they talk, he knows there’ll be no turning back. It will all be out there. He swivels in his chair, listening to the creak of the aging springs. He watches Rob collect his lunch and move toward the break room before he touches the green arrow, sends his voice over to the cheap rental in downtown Paterson that Kyle shares with Maryanne, the room that grips the two of them in its flimsy, peeling walls, its scratched wood floor.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah,” Jack says. He rolls the chair in toward his desk, bends over the phone. He wishes he could just toss the piece of green glass in the river and walk away from the case, let Rob take over. Jack’s kept him in the loop on everything except Kyle’s
role, whatever the hell that is. But he can’t. He can’t let it go. He thinks about Dana, about the scar along her veins, about Spot standing beside him on her front porch, his ears wide as parachutes. He thinks about Peter in his classy jacket, his leather briefcase next to the chair in the interrogation room, the way he kept glancing down at it, as if he had far more important things to do. More appealing things. More exciting things. Like screwing his wife’s friends. “We need to talk,” Jack says.

  “I can’t talk now, Jack. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “It’s about the case.” Jack toys with the glass elephant, sticks it in his pants pocket. “Half an hour,” he says. “The place on Getty.”

  “Wait! It’s my girlfriend,” Kyle says. “She’s not feeling well. She’s—”

  “This can’t wait.” Jack opens the door to the hall. “This isn’t a request, son,” he says, and before he clicks off his phone, he’s already in the parking lot, opening the door to the Crown Vic and dying for a cigarette.

  When he gets to the restaurant, he walks straight to the back and finds a table where the sun slanting through the windows won’t throw them into the spotlight, where the shadows will cushion them, where he hopes to find out whether or not his son is a killer.

  Kyle looks distracted; he looks disheveled and crazed. His hair is wild and way too long, his eyes are bloodshot, his shirt rumpled as if he hasn’t changed it in days, as if he’s slept in it. But then again it’s clear he hasn’t slept at all. Jack watches him slump across the restaurant, studies him through his sunglasses, checks the kid’s pupils.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He doesn’t bother to stand up. He makes the smallest, slightest forward movement and settles back in his chair. “You look like hell.”

  “I didn’t get much sleep,” Kyle says. “My girlfriend—like I told you on the phone—Maryanne—” His eyes are glazed, darting around the room, and Jack thinks maybe the girlfriend really is pregnant. Maybe there’s a problem with the baby.

  “What’s wrong with her, then?” he says, but Kyle doesn’t answer, and Jack pulls out the glass elephant, stands it up on the table between them. Light from the table lamp bounces off the tiny prisms, casting emerald patterns on the wall behind his chair. Kyle’s face goes white.

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “Where do you think?” Jack pushes back from the table; he rests his forearms on the place mat as the same waitress from last time rushes over, pad in hand. MINDY, her nameplate informs them, an etching on a brassy square. “Two burgers,” he says before she can speak, before she can twist a lock of hair around a finger, before she can look up at Kyle from under her long lashes, sizing him up, his thin frame, his large dark eyes, his scruffy hair. Handsome in a rugged, rebel way, he looks younger than his twenty-four years—the type of guy women want to mother. “Two fries. Two coffees. Black.”

  She glances across the table, but Kyle only nods, and Mindy sighs a nearly imperceptible sigh, a small puff of disappointment, deposited with the silverware and napkins.

  “I don’t know,” Kyle says when Mindy’s whisked away their unused menus, when she’s scribbled down their orders, when she’s taking languid steps toward the kitchen. “Suppose you tell me.”

  “Really?” Jack leans forward over the table; he looms like a pro. It’s a sudden move, a surprise. Kyle’s eyes are saucers in his thin face. “Under Celia Steinhauser’s living-room window.”

  “No kidding.” Kyle slouches in his chair, but he doesn’t look at his father. He gazes around the restaurant. He glances at his watch. He takes out a cheap go-phone, scans his messages. He shrugs. His lips are pale, his hands shaking. “I can’t do this now. I have to get back to Maryanne.”

  “I can’t pretend this isn’t happening, Kyle. I have your charm. It was at the crime scene!”

  Kyle’s phone vibrates. He glances at the screen. His face, when he looks up from the phone, is ashy white. “Like I told you,” he says, “I can’t do this now. Arrest me tomorrow. I’ll even come down to the station if you want. Here!” He sticks his hand in his pocket, pulls out a stack of bills. He tosses the money on the table, knocking over the sugar canister and the salt and pepper shakers. “Sorry,” he says, and he sets them back up. His hands shake as he grabs the small pile of cash and gives it to Jack. It’s clipped together with an address he’s printed on a piece of paper, along with a phone number and a woman’s name. Lucy Bancroft.

  “What’s this?”

  “Listen,” he says. “In all these years, I never asked you for anything.”

  “What is this?”

  “It’s first month’s rent and the deposit,” Kyle says. “All you have to do is drop it by the office and give it to that woman, the one on the paper there. Lucy something, and pick up the apartment key.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I want them to have a place to go if I can’t . . . if something happens to . . .” Kyle gets up, bumps into Mindy as she arrives at their table with a tray of food. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, Mindy,” and he takes the tray, sets it down on the table.

  Jack starts to get up, too. “Where the hell are you . . . ?”

  “Just do this one thing for me,” he says, this son he doesn’t know, this boy he’s never really known at all. “I have to get to the hospital.”

  “The hospital? Is Maryanne okay? Your mother told me she’s—”

  “I’ll call you later about picking up the key to the apartment. Oh, and Jack.” He stops. He stands at the table, and his face is sickly pale. His eyes are round and dark; they dart here and there, brown with gold flecks. His pants are too big, held up by a tattered leather belt. “I didn’t kill Mrs. S.”

  “Where’d you get this?” Jack holds up the wad of bills, the hundreds, folded neatly into a small yellow chip clip. “Whose is this?”

  “Mine,” he says, but he’s already halfway to the door. “Well, theirs now. And by the way,” he says, when he’s almost out of earshot, “I passed the GED!”

  “Hey!” Jack yells. “Great! You need a ride? Wait! Kyle!” He’s on his feet. Mindy looks confused. The two burgers sit untouched on the table. “Could you wrap ’em up?” Jack says, and he tosses a twenty and a five on the table. He jostles through the crowd, but Kyle is gone, vanished, somewhere on the street, streaking toward the hospital, the girlfriend, his baby, for all Jack knows. He’s almost through the door before he realizes he’s forgotten the elephant; he makes his way back through the restaurant, through the aisle, clogged now with dawdlers, midday shoppers, bustling with diners from nearby businesses, with friends meeting for coffee, mothers and daughters taking a break from shopping. He pushes past.

  “Excuse me,” he says, and his voice is gruffer than he intended, hoarse. No, the couple says, an older couple, already at the table, already sipping water without ice, their faces pink from the blustery wind outside, the sun—no, they haven’t seen the charm. He gives them his card, tells them it’s important. Police business, he says. Call him if they find it. Yes, they assure him, yes, of course they will. They’ll keep their eyes open. He looks around, fumbles under the table, between their feet. He feels like an ass. A clod. But he keeps looking, even though he knows that Kyle outsmarted him and grabbed the charm on his way out. He leaves his card with the cashier anyway, explains his dilemma to Mindy, hands her another card. “Please! It’s really important.”

  “Of course,” she says. “It’s the elephant in the room.”

  CHAPTER 27

  When Peter comes home, Dana can tell he isn’t happy to see her. She can feel his anger, his unease, across the room. He pulls the door shut hard behind him.

  “What?” she says, watching him from where she sits on the couch. Beside her, Spot snores on a corduroy pillow.

  “You’re home.” He says this with a faint sneer that in the blurring of things she doesn’t recognize. She only hears his words, the black and white of them.

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you?”


  “At a hotel,” she says. “I was trying to get some sleep. Where were you?”

  “At work.” Peter just stands there. His hands are clenched into fists. “In my office. I was working late, so I slept on the couch the last couple— Did you see Dr. Sing?”

  “Well,” she says, “not exactly. I made an appointment. And we spoke on the phone.”

  “Did she call in anything? A prescription to calm you the fuck dow—”

  “No,” she says. “Not yet. She wants to see me first.”

  “So did you sleep?” He doesn’t move toward the couch. He doesn’t take the smallest step toward his wife. He grabs the newspaper from the coffee table where Jack Moss placed it earlier that day, when he brought it in with him. He doesn’t look at her. He walks straight to the kitchen. A moment later Dana hears the burble of the coffeemaker, the closing of a cupboard door, the thwacking of the lid being lifted off a new bottle of cream.

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t, actually.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” He calls this from the kitchen. She watches him as he moves between appliances.

  She shrugs. “It was Manhattan. So many people.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe that was why. There was so much noise.”

  “Dana.” He comes back to the living room and stands for a minute with his coffee. “It’s you,” he says, and she thinks of the old song, the oldie goldie.

  “Baby, it’s youuu,” she sings, and she gets up, dances toward Peter in the quiet dark of evening. Peter shifts away.

  “Careful,” he says. “The coffee.”

  “Fuck the coffee.” She dances up to where he stands. She takes the cup out of his hand and sets it on an end table, rests one hand on his shoulder, the other in his palm, still hot and moist from the coffee cup. “Baby it’s youuu,” she sings again, taking long strides across the room, her husband rigid and weighty beside her. “You should hear what they say about youuuuuuu,” she croons. “They say you’ve never, never, ever been truuuuuuuuue.”