The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  He stops at a drive-through and picks up two burgers—half of one he’ll give to Molly. He never goes home for lunch, but this day is different. He wants to study the labs, and anyway, it’s a red-letter day of sorts. This afternoon he’ll wind up the case, at least his part of it. What happens next is up to the prosecutor’s office and the courts.

  He takes his time unwrapping the greasy burgers, acutely aware of Molly drooling beside the kitchen table. He takes his time eating, instead of bolting everything down the way he does on the rare occasions he even bothers with lunch. He pores over every detail in the paperwork from the lab. He wants to be dead sure before he makes his next move. He fixes himself a cup of coffee and takes his time with that as well, stalling.

  When he’s finished his lunch and has nearly memorized the labs, when he’s let Molly out and back in again, when there is nothing more to keep him home, he gets into his car, where he sits for a moment in the driveway, tapping his thumbs against the steering wheel. When he’s listened to three songs and a traffic update, he scrolls to Lenora’s cell-phone number and pushes the little green SEND arrow, infinitely relieved to hear it go to voice mail. “Hey,” he says. “It’s Jack Moss. Meet me at Harry’s Diner at”—he glances at his watch—“at two-fifteen,” he says. “It’s important.” He sits in his driveway through three more songs, and then he backs out to the street and heads for the diner.

  Lenora isn’t wearing the sexy lace top from their breakfast at E.Claire’s. She isn’t wearing a suede suit with glasses and heels. She’s wearing a simple black skirt, a white blouse. She looks almost demure, coming through the door of the diner with her bangs dipping over one eye.

  “Hey, Jack.” She sits down. He’s found a little table in back, near the kitchen. It’s not that big a place, only eight or nine tables and a counter. It’s always full, but never really crowded. Harry’s is the kind of place where people come in off the street to grab a cup of coffee, and it’s the best around, but Jack doesn’t remember ever having to wait to get a seat.

  “Hey, Lenora.” He sets down his cup. He looks beyond her left shoulder at the wall; he doesn’t meet her eyes.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I was in a meeting when you called.”

  “Right. Not a problem.”

  “I’m glad we’re finally here,” she says, and Jack nods.

  He was acting on impulse, picking up her napkin at E.Claire’s the day they met for breakfast. At first glance her signature on the bill bore no great resemblance to the tiny script in Dana’s threatening notes. It was the slight exaggeration of the loops in her e’s and t’s that caught Jack’s eye. Even that would almost certainly have gone unnoticed had he not been poring over the notes from Dana’s purse only moments before he left to meet Lenora. He looks at her finally, setting the bare-bones coffee mug down on the scarred tabletop. “Why’d you kill Celia Steinhauser?”

  Lenora picks up the small, square menu and sticks on a pair of glasses. “That’s not my kind of humor, Jack. Why in the name of God would you say something like that? This is crazy. You’re crazy. I’m leaving now, Jack. I’m going to stand up and walk right out the door and pretend I never heard you say what you just said.”

  “It won’t work, Lenora. We’ve got the forensics to prove it.”

  She looks away from him. She sets the menu down on the table and stares at it as if she isn’t certain what it is. Her face crumples. She looks frightened. She looks as if she might cry. “Off the record?”

  “I guess nothing’s really off the record,” he says. “Not now.”

  “Coffee,” she says to the waiter. “Cream. No sugar.” She watches as he walks back to the kitchen. “I suppose there isn’t really any reason not to tell you,” she says, and her face is composed once more, tranquil, smooth as silk. “It isn’t like I had a choice, really. The woman was a lunatic. Just ask Peter Catrell. He knows all about lunatics—between Celia and his crazy wife.”

  “I wouldn’t ask Catrell the time of day.”

  Lenora sets her glasses on the table beside her menu. She glances into space, into the shadows of the room, and she looks very young without her prosecutor’s face, like a college student wearing grown-up clothes. “I made a mistake,” she says. “I worked my butt off to be where I am—to have the job I have.” Her southern accent is more noticeable suddenly; her roots peep through. “It was a terrible mistake, getting involved with Peter.”

  Jack nods. On this at least they can agree. The waiter sets down Lenora’s coffee and disappears.

  “She caught us together. Celia. She seemed really crazy to me, tailing Peter the way she did, sneaking around, following him, snapping that picture of us in Gatsby’s that day. Kissing, maybe. I couldn’t remember. I only wanted that stupid photo out of her phone before she put it all over the Internet, the six-o’clock news, before she called my office and ruined any possibility of my—”

  “Why would she?”

  “Revenge? Jealousy? She was clearly literally nuts about Peter, and it would have made a tasty little news story: the first assistant prosecutor from East Jesus, Alabama, sleeping with a prominent married lawyer? Why wouldn’t she? I would have lost everything I’d worked for. I’d lose my chance to—”

  “Take over Frank’s position.”

  She nods. “He was such a pushover. That’s what people thought of him, of the whole department. I wanted to make us a force to be reckoned with. I wanted to—”

  The waiter comes back with more coffee, and Jack covers his cup with his hand, shakes his head.

  “She told me the day she . . . she told me at her house that she planned to run away with him. With Peter. Can you imagine? She thought he loved her. Even after she saw him with me. Even after she took that stupid photo, she still thought—”

  “Does he know?”

  “That she was a bunny boiler? A nutcase? I guess so. I mean, unless he’s a total idiot, he must have known.”

  “About you, I mean. Does he know what you did?”

  “No.” She looks up. Her eyes graze Jack’s and drift away, landing on the table next to theirs where three men hunch together. They talk excitedly, their words overlapping. Lenora yawns. “He thought his wife did it,” she says. “He didn’t think I even noticed her that day. Celia. In the restaurant snapping our picture with her phone. He’s such an egomaniac, I guess he thought I was too focused on him to see anything else, that I somehow managed to miss his crazy neighbor darting around like the paparazzi in those stupid shoes.”

  Jack leans back from the table. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t think you should say any more.”

  “Why not? It was self-defense.” She stirs her coffee even though the cream is already mixed in, even though there isn’t any need. She looks up, raises her eyebrows. “She came at me with a butcher knife, weaving in those ridiculous heels. Drunk. Teetering. Totally out of her— She must have thought I was Peter at first. ‘You!’ she said when she saw me. She seemed really surprised. ‘You?’” She takes a sip of coffee. “This is really good,” she says.

  “You were in her house, Lenora.”

  She takes another sip of coffee and sets her cup down carefully on the table. “I only wanted the phone. I told her that. All she had to do was give me the—”

  “How’d you even know where she lived?”

  “I followed her. She was hanging around outside the restaurant that day she took the picture. Stalking him. Stalking us. I drove around the block when Peter thought I’d gone back to my office, and I spotted her with him out in the parking lot—the two of them yelling, Celia waving her phone around. They were so busy arguing they didn’t notice me. Peter was half drunk, and she was so furious I don’t think she even realized that all the people in the parking lot were watching them. I was sure someone would call the cops. She totally lost it out there. He left, finally. Peter. He just got in his car and took off. Celia sat there for a while, and when she pulled out, I followed her. I followed her all the way back to her safe, p
retentious little suburban life on Ashby Lane.” She smiles. “So I knew where she lived. I went back a few days later.”

  The sun slants in and touches them even in this back corner that Jack picked for privacy, for obscurity. He sighs. He glances at her nails, the pearly polish. “You struggled in the kitchen?”

  She nods. “I tried to get the knife. She was totally—”

  “And you broke a nail.”

  “I guess so. I was leaving; I was headed for the front door. I thought I’d talk to Peter, get him to calm Celia down and make her see how crazy she was acting—but she followed me out to the living room, teetering on these impossible shoes. She had the knife. She was coming right at me with this . . . with this knife, and I just grabbed the nearest thing and—”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t say any more.”

  “It was over that fast. In the blink of—” She snaps her fingers. “I never meant . . .”

  “What time was this?”

  Lenora shrugs. “I wasn’t wearing a watch,” she says. “I had this cheap one. You get what you pay for, I guess. The strap broke.”

  He feels his stomach plunge. He feels a giant letdown, wonders if he should have put the pieces together sooner, if Lenora threw him off his game with her . . . allure. In any case it’s a waste. Brains. Beauty. She’s got it all. Had it all. Even if she can pull off self-defense, her career is toast. And that was what Lenora lived for. He stands up, but he doesn’t look her in the eyes; he looks slightly to the left of them. “We really need to go. Rob’s waiting for us down at booking.”

  Lenora nods. Her hands are pressed against the coffee cup, as if she’s warming them. She fiddles with her silverware, looks around the room for a minute and then she finishes her coffee and stands up to go, straightens her skirt, pulls her hands through her hair, but Jack still has an unsettled feeling. The vagueness nags at him. He’s a perfectionist, meticulous. He wishes the timeline were tighter, that he knew exactly how much time elapsed between Lenora’s departure and the arrival of the ambulance. Did Ronald waste precious minutes? Did he hesitate to call the EMTs out of anger or fear or, hell, revenge? Did he look at his dying wife and amble out to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? Pour himself a drink? Jack sighs. He’ll never know for sure. In the end, though, it was Lenora who struck the fatal blow, and if Ronald’s got secrets, maybe they don’t have anything to do with the case.

  “So where is Celia’s phone now?” she says once they’re on the road, once he’s Mirandized her. He doesn’t bother cuffing her; she isn’t even sitting in the backseat. She knows the system. She knows not to make things worse by putting up a fight. The kicker is she was damn good at her job.

  “Deleted. Destroyed,” he says, “both the photo and the phone, as far as I know.”

  “Good.” Her face is pale but slightly gray, like a soiled sheet or snow in the city.

  “Did you go back afterward,” he says, “to Ashby Lane? Mess with Dana?”

  “It was my case. Would have been my case. I went back a few times, did a little undercover work. Peter was pressuring me. ‘See what you can find out,’ he kept saying. ‘The woman lived right down the street from us.’ I was doing my job.” She shrugs. “When Dana had that stupid brunch, I walked in with some of the neighbors, strolled around their living room, chatted with some British woman—stuck a few things here and there while Peter was in the kitchen brownnosing his wife, convincing her I was there to drop off some papers.”

  “Stuck things here and there?”

  Lenora tosses her head as if she’s forgotten she’s cut her hair short. “My hand wipes under the sofa, a note in her book, a pen in the desk drawer, that sort of thing. I went to their street, their yard once or twice.”

  “Anybody see you?”

  “She did. Dana did. At least I think she did. Once. In their backyard. And then another time their neighbor saw me from his window. He came out after me one night in the middle of a storm—short guy in a raincoat. And then there was the time Dana drove herself into a ditch.”

  “You run her off the road?”

  “No! I was . . . I admit I was following her, and I did get a little. . . well, actually, a lot too close, but what happened was all her. That was all Dana. She totally freaked and lost control of the wheel, zigzagged off the road. Someone pulled over to help her, or I would have called it in. Anonymously, but I would’ve called it in.”

  “Peter ever . . . ?”

  “He never saw me.” She laughs a bitter little half laugh like a twig snapping. “Even when we were together, he never really saw me.”

  They ride in silence for a block or two. Outside gloom settles across the sky and trickles down to the street. Rain again, but today Jack will be glad for it, will welcome it; today it suits his mood. He glances across the front seat at the side of Lenora’s perfect, unlined face. “So why the notes?”

  “Since when is writing notes a crime?” she says. “A lost art, maybe. Not a crime. Gum?” She pulls out a pack of Dentyne Ice and extends it toward him. He shakes his head. Her eyes are blank and hard, like chunks of coal. She reaches over and turns on the radio, finds a rock station. Music surges through the car. “Is this okay?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  She turns away. She looks out the window, where raindrops splatter on the glass and land in puddles on the road. She moves back and forth in time to the music. It’s a new song, something Jack has never heard before, something Kyle would listen to. She taps her fingers against the clasp of her bag. When she moves her head again, he sees that her eyes are closed. He watches her out of the corner of his eye—watches the ice begin to crack, the fissures forming, brittle and thin as a membrane, the porcelain princess splintering across an ice-cream skirt.

  He reaches for his phone, picks up the message he’d been too preoccupied to notice before, a message left while he was with George that morning, when he stood in the airless closet of a lab with no phone signal. He listens to it now, as Lenora bobs to grating techno rock, her bangs across one eye. “Hey,” Kyle’s voice says, and Jack manages a smile in spite of the madness of the afternoon, in spite of the racket from the radio and the unraveling of the self-contained and beautiful assistant prosecutor. “I’m working at the lumberyard this weekend,” the message says, “but I’ve got this Sunday off. If you can come by for dinner, there’s a couple people here I’d like for you to meet.” And with his phone pressed tightly up against his ear, Jack can just barely hear a baby crying in the distance; somewhere a woman sings. Maryanne, he thinks, or Margie. Across the seat Lenora begins to shake her head more wildly, knocking it against the window, harder and harder. He pulls the Crown Vic over to the side of the road and radios for help, for the EMTs, gives them a location as he pins Lenora’s arms against her sides and thinks of Dana bolting from her car and trying to fly.

  CHAPTER 42

  Dana sets down the gallon can of pale gold paint she bought at Home Depot the day before. Parts of one dining-room wall are filled with swatches, and two lopsided peach squares from a discarded Martha Stewart sample tin dapple another. She eyes the dining room, the bland paint, so faded it’s difficult to say exactly what color it once was. Autumn Wheat, she thinks, but she isn’t sure.

  She ties her hair in a bandanna, closes Spot onto the back porch, and tugs a sweatshirt over a tank top and a pair of jeans. It’s an old pair, and they nearly fit her again. They no longer fall down past her hips as they did weeks before. Newspapers sit in a thin pile on the coffee table, and she grabs the top few, spreads them out along the baseboards of the dining room, where she will soon paint. She walks back into the living room and turns on a CD. The strains of Modest Mouse float through the rooms.

  Peter used to hate the way she painted. “You have to tape,” he’d say, edging past the stacked furniture and paintbrushes, newspapers scattered slapdash on the floor, but she rarely did. She preferred moving the folded newspaper page along with her foot to catch the dripping paint. Hi
s way—the methodical taping, the infuriating papering of the floor—took far too long. By the time he’d finished with the preparation, she was bored with the whole project.

  The room is cold with autumn settling in. A chilly fall, they’re predicting on TV, but Dana likes the cold. She likes frigid mornings, frost on browning leaves, the scent of firewood up the street, the sky clear and heavy, a wall of blue. She walks across the living room, pirouetting on the Persian rug as Spot paces, looking trapped and dismal on the other side of a closed French door.

  Peter hasn’t been back to the house for weeks. She knows he will eventually appear to pick up what he’s left there, to sort through what few things of his remain—these traces of a husband he no longer is. She knows he’ll choose a random, problematic time, sliding his key into the front door and slinking inside. He’s no longer welcome here. She doesn’t miss him. If in the cold of late night the bed seems large and empty with only Dana there—if she wishes there were someone else beside her, it isn’t Peter. The Poet sometimes or, most recently and most recurrently, Jack Moss. But if waking in the night she sighs and runs her hand along the pillows, shivering in the sudden drape of fall, it is never Peter she imagines there.

  It was like a movie, Dana would say later, when she was able to talk about it all, when the turning of a doorknob, or the sound of footsteps on the porch, or seeing scraps of white paper didn’t send a shiver up her spine. The story that spilled out across the front page of the paper and dominated every news spot on TV had everything from pathos to pathology. Colorful and large, the cast of characters floated nightly into Jersey living rooms—the gorgeous yet tragically unhinged young first assistant prosecutor banging her head against the window of a cop car; the tiny, fragile foreign-language teacher dead in her foyer; the married lawyer who manipulated both women at the expense of his poor, demented wife, whose suicide attempt, the papers raged, was a matter of public record, the amazing fact she’d not ended up at the bottom of the Hudson nothing more than fate. “DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES” MEETS “LAW & ORDER,” one of the headlines read.