by Jane Haddam
“Frannie?” somebody said from behind her.
Frannie jumped nearly a half foot in the air—and then instantly felt guilty about it. She realized that she was trembling in every part of her body, and had been for quite some time. She forced herself to turn slowly in the direction of the voice and to keep her face perfectly blank. Nick Bannerman was coming down the hall to her from the direction of the main staircase.
“Oh,” Frannie said.
“I frightened you.” Nick was already out of his exercise clothes. He was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck and a big oversize black cotton sweater. With his dark skin, set in a shadowed room or on an unlit street corner, he would just have disappeared.
“You didn’t frighten me,” Frannie told him. “I’m jumpy.”
“Everybody’s jumpy.” Nick stopped at the door. “I just got finished talking to the world’s greatest detective and I’m absolutely wrung out. I thought if you hadn’t eaten yet, you might want to come out with me for some food.”
“I haven’t eaten yet.” Frannie thought of the way she had talked to this man just hours ago at the beginning of the day and blushed a little. She had been having one of her moods. She had been behaving as strangely as hell. She looked into her room and was glad to see she had made the bed this morning. “By the world’s greatest detective, did you mean Gregor Demarkian?”
“No, I didn’t mean Demarkian. I meant our own personal cop, Tony frigging Bandero. Excuse me. He talked to me for forty-five minutes and then he marched straight out onto the front lawn and told a crowd of reporters that he had a serious suspect in the case, but he couldn’t name him before he had more evidence. Meaning me. Which is, quite frankly, bullshit. I’m just the one Tony Bandero wants to be guilty.”
“Why?” Frannie was totally bewildered.
“Well,” Nick said drily, “I am the only African-American male in the group. And we all know how violent African-American males can be.”
“Oh. Does he say it like that? Does he say African-American like that, I mean.”
“He just says it. I don’t think the switch in nomenclature is working out too well. Jesse made a mistake with this one.”
“Jesse?”
“Jackson.”
“Oh,” Frannie said again. This was hopeless. She had heard of Jesse Jackson, sort of, but she couldn’t really pin him down. Some kind of Afri—black politician, she thought. Or maybe Negro? What was the right thing to say these days? Frannie didn’t know any black people really well. The ones she knew casually—the head teller at her bank in California; the preschool teacher who had the house next to hers on the beach—she wasn’t in a position to talk about race with. Or “nomenclature.” Frannie’s mother didn’t know any black people either, but she talked about them enough. “Those people” was how she put it. Frannie knew that was the wrong thing to say.
She looked back over her shoulder into her room. “Well,” she said. “I’d love to get something to eat. I just need to get changed.”
“Wear black and wrap your hair up in a hat,” Nick told her. “We’ll sneak out the back way.”
“Is that necessary, sneaking out the back way?”
“It is if you don’t want to end up on Channel eight.”
Frannie desperately didn’t want to end up on Channel 8. “Well,” she said. “I—um—I have to take a quick shower and then, well, I can’t ask you in while I’m getting dressed because—um—”
“Oh, no. I understand.”
“Well, I’ll only be a few minutes. If you could just, uh—”
“I’ll wait down on the second-floor balcony,” Nick said quickly. “I’ve got some reading I have to do anyway.”
“I’ll be about twenty minutes.”
“Good.”
“Good,” Frannie repeated. Then she blushed again.
Good heavens, she thought. How many years have I been dating? How many times have I said yes to an offer to go out? Doesn’t it ever get any easier?
The answer, as far as Frannie could tell, was no.
2
WHEN VIRGINIA HANLEY WALKED into the New Temple Bar, the television in the back was turned to WTNH Action News and Detective Tony Bandero was talking about the important suspect he had and how close he was to closing the case. Virginia took this with a grain of salt. It was all dope and them, that’s what it was. “Them” was Virginia’s currently favored term for Hispanics from South America. That was where all the dope came from, South America, but Virginia didn’t really blame the South Americans. The South Americans were just trying to get rich. It was the North Americans Virginia had absolutely no respect for. There was no way to tell what the North Americans were getting out of their part in the drug trade, except poorer by the minute and dead too soon. Or maybe not soon enough. Virginia hadn’t really thought this through. It was not on her agenda. She was just tired of listening to the sound of Detective Tony Bandero’s voice, and she didn’t believe him when he said he knew what he was doing. Virginia didn’t believe any man when he said he knew what he was doing.
The New Temple Bar had streamers wrapped around the decorative wood posts that were supposed to look like they were holding up the ceiling. It was one of those places that had been heavily antiqued when it was built, to make it fit what the owners thought Yale had been like back in the 1920s and 1930s. Virginia didn’t believe the vision was accurate. She wasn’t old enough to have known Yale in the 1920s and 1930s, but she had known it in the 1950s, when it was still supposed to have had its cachet intact—all-male senior societies; no multiculturalism; no gay and lesbian studies or shanty-town protests in the quads. Yale in the 1950s had been nothing at all like the New Temple Bar.
Virginia sat down at the bar and ordered a martini with an olive. Steve and Linda Bonnard were sitting with their knees together at a little round table all the way back in the corner near the rest rooms. Steve had a martini with an olive, too, but Linda had only a glass of white wine. Linda Bonnard did things like that. She bought ecologically sensitive notepaper. She knew which cosmetic products had and which had not been tested on animals. She put her savings in an investment fund that promised not to do business with South Africa. Next to her on the table now, she had a thick paperback book that Virginia knew—because Virginia knew that Steve had loaned it to her—was Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said. Virginia’s martini came and she took a sip of it, swinging her legs above the floor as she did. Bar stools were always too tall for her.
Steve was hunched over the table, far forward in his chair, talking earnestly. Linda had her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands in her lap. They looked—sweet, Virginia decided. Like a hyperintellectual college couple trying to convince each other that the only thing that mattered in a love affair was a lover’s mind.
Virginia hopped off her stool, picked up her martini, and walked across the room to the back. She put her glass down on the small round table Steve and Linda were sharing and pulled a chair away from the empty table next to it. She was very, very aware of looking very, very good. Linda was wearing a dull-colored jersey thing that made her legs look heavy and shapeless. Virginia was wearing her best green silk dress and full makeup. Besides, Linda’s legs were heavy and shapeless. Virginia’s had always been very, very good.
“Oh, Christ,” Steve said, watching Virginia sit down.
Linda sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Hello, Virginia,” she said carefully. “I didn’t know the New Temple was one of the places you customarily came to.”
“It has been lately,” Virginia said.
Steve finished the rest of his martini in a gulp. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s go eat somewhere. Let’s go back to your place.”
“I don’t think we have to go to extremes,” Linda said.
Linda never went to extremes. Virginia took her olive out of her drink and ate it.
“I was just trying to tell you something important,” she said dreamily, “something I thought you’d rea
lly want to know.”
“What I want to know from you, I can hear from your lawyers,” Steve said.
“But there wasn’t time to go through the lawyers. There’s a certain element of time involved. And I didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”
“I’m embarrassed by your being here,” Steve said. “I’m embarrassed now.”
“Shh,” Linda said. “She could have gotten some mail for you. There could have been a phone call to the Orange house. You don’t know what’s going on here.”
“All your credit cards have been canceled,” Virginia said.
Steve Hanley was usually a very expressive man. His eyebrows twitched. His mouth twisted into grimaces and grins. The creases on his forehead rose and fell. Now, Virginia was tickled to see, he was completely blank. It was as if a magic genie had popped up in the middle of the table and turned him into a doll. Virginia nearly laughed out loud.
“What do you mean, all my credit cards have been canceled? Why would they have been canceled?”
“Because I canceled them.”
“You couldn’t have canceled them. They don’t let anyone cancel credit cards. They insist on talking to the cardholder.”
“They would talk to Sharon Abruzzi about your credit cards. They do it all the time.”
“Sharon Abruzzi is my secretary.”
“Well,” Virginia said, “they don’t have a voice print on her, do they? Any woman could call up and say she was Sharon Abruzzi, if she knew enough about Sharon Abruzzi.”
“I don’t understand this,” Linda said. “Why would you want to do this? What are you going to get out of this?”
“I told them that your wallet had been stolen and all your cards were in it. That was really all they needed to hear.”
“Virginia, for God’s sake,” Linda said. “What good does it do to try to hold onto a man who doesn’t want you?”
“I don’t think wanting has anything to do with it,” Virginia said. “I don’t care a fart in hell for what he wants.”
“What good does it do to try to get revenge?” Linda asked. “What do you get out of that except more miserable?”
“I’m not more miserable,” Virginia said. “It’s this son of a bitch who’s more miserable.”
“I’ve got to check this out.” Steve stood up abruptly and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ll be right back.”
Virginia had only half her martini left, so she decided to nurse it. She had deliberately not taken a tranquilizer before she came out here—tranquilizers took too much of the edge off—so she had nothing but the liquor to keep her steady in the face of all this pressure. Linda was steady without anything at all, but that was Linda. Steady. Reliable. Even-tempered. Calm. Virginia wondered if she managed to work up the energy to get excited during sex. Or to fake it.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Linda said. “I really can’t believe it.”
Steve was coming back from the phone booths in the vestibule. His face was white.
“You really did it,” he said, as soon as he was within earshot of the table. “You really did.”
“You can’t have checked all those cards that fast,” Linda said.
“I didn’t. I checked my Visa card. I wasn’t going to stand out there all night arguing with clerks in South Dakota about whether my cards had been stolen or not.”
“But maybe she just got one of them canceled,” Linda said. “Maybe she just got lucky and you picked the only one.”
“I got all of them canceled,” Virginia said.
“I’ve got an automatic debit on my Visa card,” Steve said. “My car insurance goes on my Visa card.”
“It won’t,” Virginia said.
“I’m going to sue you,” Steve said. “I’m going to get a court order to get rid of you. Like hell I’m going to let you have the house.”
“I don’t want the house.”
“Steve,” Linda said.
Virginia stood up. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the New Temple Bar was heavily decorated in anticipation of New Year’s Eve. They didn’t call it New Year’s Eve, though. They called it Auld Lang Syne and left little business card-size pieces of cardboard on all the tables inviting their patrons to “Drink the Wassail Bowl in Good Company.” There was multiculturalism for you, Virginia thought. The people who owned this bar had studied so many cultures, they didn’t know the difference between Scotland and Scandinavia.
“Well,” Virginia said, “I think I’ll be going along. I have a lot to do tonight.”
She started to move away from the table and caught her high heel in a crack in the floorboards. She fell heavily into Steve’s side and felt him push her away from him, onto the floor. She got up and dusted herself off.
“If you’re going to try to cripple me, you’re going to have to do better than that,” she said.
“Of course Steve isn’t trying to cripple you,” Linda said.
Of course he is, Virginia thought. Steve is a lot more like me than he is like her.
“Bye, bye,” she said.
She walked back up to the bar and stopped to look at the television set one more time. There was a new news program on, but it was still WTNH and it was still all about the new murder at Fountain of Youth. Right now there was a picture of Tim Bradbury up on the screen behind Diane Smith’s left shoulder. Virginia made a face at it. That police detective was just trying to make himself famous. He had to be. There were no deep dark murder plots in real life and especially not when the victim was someone like Tim Bradbury. Virginia had run into Tim once or twice. She’d recognized him as soon as she’d seen his picture in the paper right after he died. The Hollingfields next door had used him as their yard boy. Virginia thought at the time that he was some kind of mental defective.
Now she left a dollar tip on the bar and went back outside. She walked to the corner of the block, turned left, walked to the corner of the block again and turned left again. She was on a street lined with small stores, all of them open and all of them heavily protected by security equipment. There were liquor stores and convenience stores and newsstands that also sold Connecticut State lottery tickets. Every one of them had hinged metal gates across their plate-glass windows and doors that opened only when somebody buzzed the lock from inside. Virginia was glad she didn’t actually want to buy anything.
The street was mostly deserted except for the people already in the stores. Virginia stood under one of the street-lamps and turned just a little sideways, so that she couldn’t be seen inside the SuperHour Grocery. Then she reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out Steve’s wallet.
Very nice, Virginia thought. Clumsily done, but adequate for a first try.
She opened the wallet and looked through it. Credit cards—useless now. Business cards. Driver’s license. Picture of Linda. Cash. She counted the cash and came up with three hundred and thirty-six dollars. She looked through the business cards and decided they were much too innocuous for her purposes. A dry cleaner. A dentist. A carpentry service. A plumbing supply house. A Chinese restaurant. She shoved the cards back into the wallet and pocketed the cash. Then, at the last moment, she decided to keep the picture of Linda.
Well, why not? Virginia asked herself, going on up the street, throwing the wallet into the next reasonably full garbage can she passed. Why not? She had at least as much use for it as Steve did. She could stick pins in it. She could burn it in effigy. And Steve could always get another one from Linda.
Virginia reached the corner and turned left yet again. She walked up the street for half a block until she saw a cruising cab. She stepped out past the parked cars and raised her hand.
Steve was upset now, but he’d be more upset later. She just knew it.
After all, when it came to doing what she had to do to get things going her way, she hadn’t even started yet.
3
EVER SINCE GRETA BELLAMY had started going to classes at Fountain of Youth, she had been going home al
one, and watching television alone, and waking up alone, so that it felt as if her entire life was lived in leotards. The part of her life that was not lived in leotards was not real, because it was so silent. It had gotten to the point that she hated the sound of her own breathing. When she woke up in the night and heard her legs rubbing against the rough surface of her new polyester sheets, she wanted to cry. It was ridiculous, really. It had only been two days. Had she always been this dependent on other people? Greta thought back over her life and was surprised to realize that she had never spent any significant amount of time alone. Even after she moved out of her parents’ house to “be independent” and “be by herself,” she had spent most of her time with Chick. It was worse than that. When she was not with Chick and not at work and not with company of any kind—she had the television on. Always. She lived her life in a sea of white noise, the incessant, demanding chatter of other people’s ideas driving any ideas of her own she might have had right out of her head. She didn’t think, ever. She didn’t read, except for romance novels and magazines. She didn’t go out to theaters or museums or lectures or any of the other things that were available in New Haven. She didn’t do anything. It was a shock to admit it, but nice job or not, promotion or not, her life could have served as an illustration in The White Trash Cook Book.
Still, it was because of the silence she knew she would find at home that Greta decided to stop at the library. It was one thing to decide that your life needed changing. It was another to go ahead and change it. The parking lot of the little branch library was mostly deserted. Greta parked directly under a security lamp directly in front of the glass main doors and got out into the cold air. The library was brightly lit inside as well as out, but almost as deserted as its parking lot. Greta went inside and unbuttoned her coat. The heat was on full blast in here. She was roasting.
All the other times Greta had been to this library, she had gone straight to the fiction shelves and found what she was looking for without help. Now she went the other way, to the reference librarian’s desk, and waited while the young woman there helped a very frail old man find where copies of The Armchair Detective were kept. It took forever, but the young woman was infinitely patient. The very frail old man seemed to have forgotten how to tell his right from his left.
