A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  “I’ll pass, if you don’t mind,” Tommy said with his old, easy smile. “You folks are tough on saviors. Saw you in the courtroom. Guess I’ll be reading all about the case in your next book.”

  “I don’t think so,” Max said. “Fiction’s easier on the heart.”

  “Too bad. I already had the movie cast.”

  “Yeah? Who plays you?”

  “That would be Matt Damon.”

  They laughed, but I thought Matt Damon wasn’t a bad choice. Same all-American type, though Tommy was even better-looking. He turned to me, and a scrim of wariness fell over his face. “How are you?”

  “OK,” I said. “Better than the last time we met.” In the ambulance, that had been. The sound of his voice calling my name had roused me; I’d opened my eyes to an ashen version of his face, bending over mine. That stricken look had given me hope; I didn’t see how it could come from an indifferent heart. But he hadn’t come to the hospital, where other detectives took my statement. I thought he would call after I got out, but months stretched into a year and Tommy never sought me out.

  Not that I sat home waiting. In my free time I tended the garden of hardy friendships that had sprung from the soil of my devastation. Though Rowena and Molly were irreplaceable, friendship itself turned out to be fungible. In my free time I saw Gordon, Keyshawn, and my legacy friend, Leigh Pfeffer. Max and Barry were family; I was with them in L.A. when baby Molly took her first steps.

  There wasn’t much free time, though, because despite three new hires to supplement Jean-Paul and Chloe, I was busier than ever. Sikha Mehruta had delivered an exquisite novel, as good as her first two but more accessible. I thought it could be her breakthrough book. Her publisher agreed, and with just a little prodding doubled her advance and offered a three-book contract. Chloe sold Katie Vigne’s book, I Luv U Baby, but WTF?, to a new imprint at Penguin. Keyshawn’s novel had come out to respectful reviews and sufficient sales to pave the way for a second book, which he was busy writing. Despite Harriet’s decampment, the agency was thriving.

  Other things had changed in my life. I’d given Rowena’s bequest to her charities and ended up on the board of one of them, a fund that supports rural libraries. Most of Molly’s money went to endow a college scholarship fund for students from Hoyer’s Creek. I acted anonymously, for I had a horror of ever going back there; but like Rowena, I had opened a door for others.

  And yet I yearned for more. The fierce hunger for life that had gripped me in the face of death didn’t dissipate once the threat was removed but grew stronger as the shock wore off. Appetites had wakened that were not easily satisfied. I thought a lot about Tommy Cullen. Fantasized about him. Thought of calling him, but resisted every time. If he’d wanted to see me, there was nothing to stop him. I figured he had his reasons. He didn’t owe me a second chance; and anyway, what were the odds that a straight, good-looking man like Tommy would be unattached in a city full of hungry women?

  “How’s the head?” he asked now, sitting beside me on the bench.

  I pushed back my hair to show him the scar on my left temple. The bullet, skimming past, had torn off a swath of flesh and bruised the bone, but left the skull intact. One inch to my right, the doctors said, and the story would have had a different ending. As it was, I got away with a concussion and a scar. A plastic surgeon could have fixed the scar, but that didn’t feel right. I hadn’t emerged unscathed, and shouldn’t look as if I had.

  “Max is right,” I said. “You sent in the cavalry and saved my life; then you rode off into the sunset, before I even had a chance to thank you.”

  “Like the Lone Ranger,” Max said.

  “Like Shane,” I said. The first movie that ever made me cry. Come back, Shane! Shane, come back! He hadn’t, though.

  “You’ve got nothing to thank me for,” Tommy said. “You were smart and gutsy enough to make that phone call right under her nose.” He nodded toward the courthouse. “Were you satisfied with the outcome?”

  “It doesn’t bring Molly and Rowena back,” I said. “But the sentence was just. She deserves it.”

  “She deserves worse,” Max said darkly, “but New York doesn’t have the death penalty. What bothers me is not knowing the whole story. I’d have liked to know how Drucklehoff fit into the scheme. Was he part of it? Did Lorna deploy him, or just take advantage of his appearance?”

  “We wondered that, too,” Tommy said. “We kept searching for a connection, but we never found any. I think she was biding her time, collecting intelligence and making plans. When that nutcase came along, she seized the opportunity to use him for cover.”

  “Lucky break for her,” Max said.

  “Yeah, she got a lot of mileage out of him.”

  “So you never suspected her?”

  “We suspected everyone,” Tommy said reprovingly. “But she wasn’t a focus of the investigation till we caught Drucklehoff. Then we started wondering why he hadn’t been on our radar before. I went back and checked the printout of submissions that Lorna had given us. Drucklehoff wasn’t on it, and neither was his novel. She kept those records; so either she just happened to miss that particular one, or she’d purged it from the list to impede our investigation. We already knew from background checks that she’d changed her surname, but we didn’t know why. We were about to bring her in when she made her move on you.”

  Poor Sam Spade, I thought. They’d dropped all charges against him after Lorna’s arrest, and let him go with a warning to stay away from me. All he ever did was write a really bad book and try to get me to read it. And I said such vicious things to him.

  “I keep thinking I should write him a note,” I said.

  “Hell, no!” both men replied as one. They looked at each other, and Max gave a go-ahead wave.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Tommy said earnestly. “This is still a guy with a major obsession, and you don’t want to feed it.”

  No, I did not. As it was, I kept looking over my shoulder. The ordeal I’d been through had left scars less visible than the one on my temple. I’d become hypervigilant about my surroundings and the people near me, looking outward with the same critical eye I’d honed on the interior world of fiction. This change was, perhaps, not so surprising, but others were unexpected, like the feeling that cataracts had been removed, not just from my eyes, but from all my senses. Color flooded the world; details emerged. My appetite returned, and I’d put back all the weight I’d lost. Even my sense of smell seemed more acute, and strangely infused with emotion. Tommy’s odor, for example, a blend of Ivory soap, pine-scented aftershave, and sweat, brought back a time when I’d known it well.

  An ambulance shouldered its way through rush-hour traffic, siren blaring. Tommy glanced at his watch. This is it, I thought. In a minute he’s going to say good-bye and walk away, and we could share this city for the rest of our lives and never meet again. I didn’t have to ask myself how I felt about that.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” I said, before he could speak, “but I could use a drink.”

  “Sounds about right,” Tommy said at once.

  Max grimaced. “Wish I could, but I’m afraid I have a plane to catch. In fact”—he glanced at his watch and stood—“I’ve got to run.”

  I stared at him. His flight wasn’t until late that night, and we’d planned to have dinner together.

  The men shook hands; Max kissed my cheek. “See ya, Jo. Remember what I said.” As he stepped toward the street, raising his arm, an empty taxi glided to the curb. He climbed in and waved good-bye.

  “Impressive,” Tommy said.

  “He leads a charmed life.” I felt embarrassed being alone with him, like a schoolgirl on a blind date, which was ridiculous. “Where should we go? I don’t know the neighborhood.”

  “I do. There’s a place just across the square.” He hesitated. “Kind of a cop hangout, though. You’d prob
ably want something nicer.”

  “They got scotch?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we fell into step as if we’d been doing it every day for a lifetime. It was four thirty, and lawyers in dark suits streamed from the courthouse like ants from a colony. When Tommy’s arm brushed mine, I felt a heat that spread inward. On West Broadway we passed a bookstore with a full window display of Teddy Pendragon’s An Audacious Life. Eighteen months from contract to publication: Teddy and Random House had pulled out all the stops to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Lorna’s trial. It would have been impossible if Teddy hadn’t done so much of the work in advance for Vanity Fair; even so, I feared the haste had taken a toll on the work. On the front cover was a photo of Hugo in his midforties, with a wild shock of prematurely gray hair and a penetrating stare. I kept walking and would have averted my eyes if I weren’t trying to quit that habit.

  “Did you read it?” Tommy asked.

  “Not yet.” My copy, fulsomely signed by the author, lay untouched on a shelf in my study. It was strange to remember how obsessively I’d worried about this book, dreading the exposure of secrets I never even acknowledged to myself. Someday I’d read it and finish the job of sorting the marriage I’d thought I had from the marriage I actually had. For now, I was focused on the present, not the past.

  “I did,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Really?”

  “I do read, you know. And the subject interested me.”

  “What’d you think?”

  He didn’t answer for half a block, long enough for me to regret a question that left me wide open. Finally, with an air of restraint, he said, “I think your husband was a better writer than he was a man. Here we are.” He opened the door of a little bar and grill I would never have noticed on my own. New York was like that, not one city but a series of concentric cities that rarely overlap. Inside it was dark and cool and noisy. There was sawdust on the floor, and the Knicks were playing on a flatscreen TV mounted above the bar. Tommy took my elbow and led me toward a booth in the back, nodding at the bartender as we passed. We sat facing each other across a pitted wooden table, and right away a waitress came over. She had spiky platinum hair and a skirt short enough to display the butterfly tat on her thigh. “Hey, Tommy,” she said, laying a red-tipped hand on his arm. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Hey, Crystal, how’s it going?”

  “Getting fat on takeout. The stove’s busted at my place, and my cheapskate landlord won’t do nothing about it. Maybe you could come around and talk to him, Tommy?”

  “Sure thing. How about I shoot him for you?”

  She tee-heed and punched his shoulder lightly. “What’ll it be, big guy? The usual?”

  “That’ll work. Jo?”

  “Let me guess,” the waitress said, sizing me up. “Strawberry daiquiri.”

  I gave her a gunslinger’s slit-eyed smile. “Johnnie Walker Black, straight up.”

  She switched away, and we watched her go.

  “Sweet kid,” Tommy said.

  “I could tell.”

  He smiled down at the table.

  “Matt Damon, huh?” I said.

  He laughed. “So much for dreams of glory.”

  “You never know. Max says he won’t write this story, but that’s what writers do. It’ll pop out one way or another.”

  “He’s a good guy, your Max.”

  “He likes you, too, now.”

  Tommy raised his eyebrows. “Now?”

  “You were high on his list of suspects for a while.”

  “Not yours, though?”

  “I always trusted you,” I said, and it was almost true. The waitress shimmied back with our drinks and Tommy paid, ignoring my protests. She served his draft with a smile, my scotch with a frosty glare. Jealous, I thought, which oddly enough evoked the same emotion in me.

  I’d thought that if I could just meet him once and thank him properly, his hold on me would be broken. I hadn’t figured on how good it would feel to walk down the street with him, or to look into his face, which was everything a man’s face should be, or to be looked at and really seen by him. Maybe it was because he came from the same world I did, but I felt he knew me from the inside out.

  The exorcism hadn’t worked. I had feelings for Tommy Cullen, useless as they were, sad as they made me. I knew where he stood, kiss notwithstanding. Rejection leaves scars. Once bitten, twice shy.

  We drank in silence for a while. There was a pool table in the small back room behind us, and a couple of guys were playing while others kibitzed. Between each click of cue against ball, a chorus of profane commentary arose, rich in the ethnic slurs that are New York’s vernacular. I felt a surge of affection for my adopted city.

  “What brought you down here today?” I asked. “Did you come for the sentencing?”

  “Sort of,” Tommy said. “I figured you’d be there. Wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. He ignored that automatic response and waited. “The trial was tough. Living through it again stirred up a lot of emotions. But basically I’m doing OK. Life is good, despite everything.”

  He nodded. “Lorna should have picked her fights better. You’re a hard woman to knock down.”

  “One of my worse traits, according to her.” I held my glass in both hands and stared into the amber liquid. “She said she wouldn’t have killed Molly if I’d quit the agency after Rowena died.”

  “She would say that. Fits her MO perfectly.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “You do?” Tommy sounded incredulous.

  I looked up at him and shrugged. Until that moment, I’d never doubted it.

  “She was just twisting the knife, Jo. Molly was always on the agenda, the final blow before she finished you off.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She never talked to us; she lawyered up in the squad car.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “It just fits. The whole thing was carefully, obsessively planned as an escalating series of blows. First the e-mail to your clients, then that targeted press release, which made it all public, and then the two murders. She meant to cut the legs out from under you, bring you to your knees.”

  I wanted to believe him. The thought that I could have saved Molly’s life by quitting the agency was one agony time had not allayed. “Are you sure, Tommy?”

  “I’m sure about that,” he said firmly. “What I wonder about is the message she left at the crime scenes, ‘Can you hear me now?’ Did she ever tell you what that meant?”

  Heat flooded my face. Of all the questions he could have asked, this was the most painful; but he deserved the truth. “Back when I first moved in with Hugo, Lorna called the apartment. There were plenty of women in his life who weren’t shy about calling. My orders were to keep them off his back. I told myself she was one of them, a woman with a girlish voice. She asked to talk to Hugo. I never let her. I told her to stop calling. I pretended I couldn’t hear her. Finally I changed our number.”

  Then I had to stop talking and turn away. Another residual effect of the ordeal: inappropriate fits of weeping.

  “Hey,” Tommy said. “Hey, now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, blotting my eyes with a paper napkin. “You asked me so many times. You told me to wake up and remember, but I didn’t, not until the very end. I had the key all along. And look what it cost.”

  “Jo, look at me.” His green eyes drew me in until I felt like I was swimming underwater. “None of this is your fault. Those calls meant nothing to you. Why would you remember?”

  “Oh, but I didn’t want to remember, any more than I wanted to know in the first place. I had my perfect marriage to protect. Never mind that Hugo was living with someone when we met; never min
d that I was with you. I made up a fairy tale, just like Lorna did.”

  “Everyone does that. People have to, to make sense of their lives. You see it all the time on the job. Every confession comes wrapped in a story.”

  “But stories have consequences. Wouldn’t you think I of all people would know that? For good or for bad, stories have consequences.”

  He leaned back and studied me critically. “You know what your problem is?”

  Survivor’s guilt, I thought he’d say: everyone’s diagnosis du jour, which is why I’d pretty much given up talking about it. People don’t understand that just as paranoids can have real enemies, so can survivors have cause for guilt. I’d turned a deaf ear to the child and a blind eye to the woman. There were signs, but I misread them all. The Queen of Denial, Lorna had called me, and she nailed it. I was an expert at other people’s stories, but when it came to my own, I’d heard only what I wanted to hear, seen only what I expected to see.

  “Your problem,” Tommy said, “is you’ve been snake-bit. I recognize the signs. Still got the venom in you.”

  “You’re not going to cut me and suck it out, are you?”

  He laughed the way he used to when there were no barriers between us. Emboldened, I asked, “What’s your story, then, since you say everyone has one?”

  The laughter went away. Tommy studied me for a long time. Finally he said, “You know my story. Oldest one there is. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl.”

  “That’s it? No third act?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you married?”

  A pause, then: “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Why ask now, Jo? You never did before.”

  “Just trying out life with my eyes open for a change.”

  His mouth twitched. “How’s that working for you?”

  “Bit disconcerting, but I’m getting the hang of it. Right now, for example, I see you avoiding the question.”

  “I’m single now. I was married once, for a little while. Eight months.”