Vanessa held her forefinger and thumb a hair’s width apart. “So, so, close.”
“Eaten any more of your shoes?”
She shook her head. “I keep them on a high shelf. Besides, he’s more into underwear these days. Last week he puked up a bra I’d been missing.”
“Least he gave it back.”
She smiled, speared another chunk of fruit. “Remember that morning in Bermuda we woke to the rain?”
I nodded.
“Sheets of it, like walls really, vibrating off the windows and you couldn’t even see the sea from our room.”
I nodded again, tried to hurry her through it. “And we stayed in bed all day and drank wine and messed up the sheets.”
“Burned the sheets,” she said. “Broke that armchair.”
“I got the credit card bill,” I said. “I remember, Vanessa.”
She cut off a small piece of her watermelon wedge, slid it between her lips. “It’s raining now.”
I looked out at the small puddles on the sidewalk. Barely teardrops, their surfaces streaked gold with sun.
“It’ll pass,” I said.
Another dry chuckle and she sipped some more mineral water and stood. “I’ll use the powder room. Take the time to refresh your memory, Patrick. Remember the bottle of Chardonnay. I have a few more at home.”
She walked into the restaurant and I tried not to watch her because a glimpse of her exposed skin and I could all too easily conjure up what hid under her clothes, could see the rivulets of white wine that had splashed over her torso in Bermuda when she’d lain back on the white sheets and poured half the bottle over her body, asked if I was a bit parched.
I watched anyway, as she knew I would, but then my vision was blocked by a man’s body as he stepped from the restuarant out onto the patio and put his hand on the back of Vanessa’s chair.
He was tall and slim, with sandy brown hair, and he gave me a distant smile as he pulled back on Vanessa’s chair and seemed about to drag it back into the restaurant with him.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I need this seat,” he said.
I looked around at the dozen or so other chairs on the patio, the twenty more inside that weren’t occupied.
“It’s taken,” I said.
The man looked down at it. “Is it taken? Is this seat taken?”
“It’s taken,” I repeated.
He was very well dressed in off-white linen trousers and Gucci loafers, a cashmere black vest over a white T-shirt. His watch was a Movado, and his hands looked like they’d never touched a piece of dirt or work in his life.
“You’re sure?” he asked, still talking down to the chair. “I heard this seat was unoccupied.”
“It’s not. You see the plate of food in front of it? It’s occupied. Trust me.”
He looked over at me and there was something loose and afire in his ice blue eyes. “So I can take it? It’s okay?”
I stood. “No, you can’t take it. It’s taken.”
The man swept his hands out at the patio. “There are plenty of other ones. You get one of those. I’ll take this. She’ll never know the difference.”
“You get one of those,” I said.
“I want this one.” He spoke reasonably, carefully, as if discussing something with a child that was beyond the child’s grasp. “I’ll just take it. Okay?”
I took a step toward him. “No. You won’t. It’s spoken for.”
“I’d heard it wasn’t,” he said gently.
“You heard wrong.”
He looked down at the chair again, then nodded. “So you say, so you say.”
He held up an apologetic hand that matched his smile and walked back into the restaurant as Vanessa stepped past him onto the patio.
She looked back over her shoulder. “Friend of yours?”
“No.”
She noticed a small splatter of rain on her chair. “How’d my chair get wet?”
“Long story.”
She gave me a curious frown and pushed the chair aside, pulled another one out from the closest table and settled back into her original place.
Through the small crowd of patrons, I saw the guy take a seat at the bar and smile at me as Vanessa pulled her replacement chair over to our table. The smile seemed to say, I guess it wasn’t taken after all, and then he turned his back to us.
The interior of the restaurant filled as the rain picked up, and I lost sight of the guy at the bar. The next time I had a clear view, he was gone.
Vanessa and I stayed out in the rain, drinking mineral water as she picked at her fruit and the rain found the back of my shirt and neck.
We’d reverted to harmless small talk when she returned from the bathroom—Tony T’s fear, the Middlesex ADA with the ferret’s head who was rumored to keep mothballs and carefully folded women’s underwear at the bottom of his attaché case, how pathetic it felt to live in an alleged sports town that couldn’t hold on to either Mo Vaughn or Curtis Martin.
But underneath the small talk was the constant hum of our shared want, the echoes of surf and sheets of rain in Bermuda, the hoarse sounds of our voices in that room, the smell of grapes on skin.
“So,” Vanessa said after a particularly pregnant lull in the chitchat, “Chardonnay and me, or what?”
I could have wept from lust, but then I forced myself to conjure up the aftermath, the sterile walk down her stairs and back to my car, the empty reverberations of our approximated passion ringing in my head.
“Not today,” I said.
“It might not be an open-ended offer.”
“I understand that.”
She sighed and handed her credit card over her shoulder as the waitress stepped out onto the patio.
“Find a girl, Patrick?” she asked as the waitress went back inside.
I said nothing.
“A good, low-maintenance woman of hardy stock who won’t give you any trouble? Cook for you, clean for you, laugh at your jokes, and never look at another man?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s it.”
“Ah.” Vanessa nodded and the waitress came back with her credit card and bill. Vanessa signed and handed the receipt copy to the waitress with a flick of the wrist that was, in itself, dismissal. “But, Patrick, I’m curious.”
I resisted the urge to lean back from the carnal force of her. “Pray tell.”
“Does your new woman do the real wicked things? You know, those things we’ve done with—”
“Vanessa.”
“Hmm?”
“There is no new woman. I’m just not interested.”
She placed a hand to her breast. “In me?”
I nodded.
“Really?” She held her hand out to the rain, caught a few drops, and wiped them on her throat as she arched her head back. “Let me hear you say it.”
“I just did.”
“The whole sentence.” She lowered her chin, caught me in the full impact of her gaze.
I shifted in my chair, tried to wish my way out of this situation. When that didn’t work, I just said it, flat and cold.
“I’m not interested in you, Vanessa.”
The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
A dire abandonment broke Vanessa’s features into pieces, and I could feel the hollow chill of her beautiful apartment, the ache of her sitting alone at 3 A.M., lover gone, law books and yellow legal pads spread before her at her dining room table, pen in hand, the pictures of a much younger Vanessa that adorned her mantel staring down at her like ghosts of a life unlived. I could see a tiny flicker of hungry light in her chest, and not the hunger of her sexual appetite, but the conflicted hunger of her other selves.
In that moment, her features went skeletal, and her beauty vanished, and she looked like she’d fallen to scraped knees under the weight of the rain.
“Fuck you too, Patrick.” She smiled as she said it. Smiled with lips that twitched at the cor
ners. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Just…” She stood, a fist clenched around her bag strap. “Just…fuck you.”
She left the restuarant, and I stayed where I was, turned my chair and watched her walk up the street through the drizzle, bag swinging back and forth against her hip, her steps stripped of grace.
Why, I wondered, does it all have to be so messy?
My cell phone rang, and I pulled it from my shirt pocket, wiped the condensation from its surface as I lost Vanessa in a crowd.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” the man’s voice said. “Can I assume that chair’s free now?”
21
I turned in my chair, looked into the restaurant for the sandy-haired man. He wasn’t at a table. He wasn’t at the bar as far as I could see.
“Who is this?” I said.
“What a tearful breakup scene, Pat. For a minute, I was pretty sure she’d toss a drink in your face.”
He knew my name.
I turned again in the chair, looked along the sidewalk for him, for anyone with a cellular phone.
“You’re right,” I said. “The chair’s free. Come on back and get it.”
His voice was the same gentle monotone I’d heard on the patio when he’d tried to take the chair. “She has incredible lips, that attorney. Incredible. I don’t think they’re implants either. Do you?”
“Yeah,” I said, scanning the other side of the street, “they’re nice lips. Come on back for the chair.”
“And she’s asking you, Pat—she’s asking you—to come slide your dick through those lips and you say no? What’re you, gay?”
“You bet,” I said. “Come on back and fag-bash me. Use the chair.”
I peered through the rain at the windows on the other side of the street.
“And she picked up the check,” he said, his soft monotone like a whisper in a dark room. “She picked up the check, wanted to blow you, looks like six or seven million bucks—fake tits, true, but nice fake tits, and hey, no one’s perfect—and you still say no. Hats off to you, buddy. You’re a stronger man than me.”
A man with a baseball cap on his head and an umbrella raised above him walked through the mist toward me, a cellular pressed to his ear, his strides loose and confident.
“Me,” the voice said, “I’d figure her for a screamer. Lots of ‘Oh, Gods’ and ‘Harder, harders.’”
I said nothing. The man with the baseball cap was still too far away for me to see his face, but he was getting closer.
“Can I be frank with you, Pat? A piece of ass like that comes along so seldom that if I were in your place—and I’m not, I know that, but if I were—I’d just feel compelled to go back with her to that apartment on Exeter, and I gotta be honest with you, Pat, I’d hump her till the blood ran down her thighs.”
I felt cold moisture that didn’t come from the rain seep down behind my ear.
“Really?” I said.
The man with the baseball cap was close enough for me to see his mouth, and his lips moved as he approached.
The guy on the other end of the line was silent, but somewhere on his end, I could hear a truck grind its gears, the patter of rain off a car hood.
“…and I can’t do that, Melvin, if you’ve got half my shit tied up offshore.” The man in the baseball cap passed me, and I could see he was at least twice the age of the guy from the patio.
I stood, looked as far up and down the street as I could.
“Pat,” the guy on the phone said.
“Yeah?”
“Your life is about to get…” He paused and I could hear him breathing.
“My life’s about to get what?” I said.
He smacked his lips. “Interesting.”
And he hung up.
I swung my body over the wrought-iron fence that separated the patio from the sidewalk, and the rain found my head and chest as I stood on the sidewalk for a while with people walking around me and occasionally jostling a shoulder. Eventually, I realized standing there did no good. The guy could be anywhere. He could have called from the next county. The truck that had ground its gears in the background hadn’t been in my immediate vicinity or I would have heard it on my end.
But he’d been close enough to know when Vanessa left and to call within a minute of her abrupt departure.
So, no, he wasn’t in another county. He was here in Back Bay. But even so, that was a lot of ground to cover.
I started walking again, my eyes searching the streets for a glimpse of him. I dialed Vanessa’s number and when she answered, I said, “Don’t hang up.”
“Okay.”
She hung up.
I gritted my teeth and pressed redial.
“Vanessa, please listen a sec. Someone just threatened you.”
“What?”
“That guy you thought was a friend of mine on the patio?”
“Yes…” she said slowly, and I heard Clarence yip in the background.
“He called me when you left. He’s a total stranger, Vanessa, but he knew my name, and your occupation, and he made it clear to me that he knew where you lived.”
She gave me that martini chuckle of hers. “And let me see, you need to come over here to protect me? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t need these games. You want to fuck me, you should have said yes on the patio.”
“Vanessa, no. I want you to go to a hotel for a while. Now. Send my office the bill.”
The chuckle was replaced by a mean laugh. “Because some weirdo knows where I live?”
“This guy’s not your average weirdo.”
I turned on Hereford, walked toward Commonwealth Avenue. The rain had lessened, but the mist had thickened around it, turned the air to warm onion soup.
“Patrick, I’m a defense attorney. Hang on—Clarence, down! Down, now! Sorry,” she said to me. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Do you know how many gangbangers and petty sociopaths and freaks in general have threatened my life when I’ve failed to get them Get Out of Jail Free cards? Are you serious?”
“This may be a little different.”
“According to a screw I know at Cedar Junction, Karl Kroft—whom I unsuccessfully defended on murder one and ag rape—drew up a shit list—and I’m being quite literal here—in his cell. And before—”
“Vanessa.”
“And before they wiped it off, Patrick, and put dear Karl under twenty-four-hour watch, my friend the guard said he saw the list. He said my name was number one. Above Karl’s ex-wife, who he’d already tried to kill once with a saw.”
I wiped thick condensation from my eyes, wished I’d worn a hat. “Vanessa, just listen a second. I think this—”
“I live in a building with twenty-four-hour security and two doormen, Patrick. You’ve seen how hard it is to get in. I have six locks on my front door, and even if you could reach my windows on the fourteenth floor, they’re impenetrable. I have Mace, Patrick. I have a stun gun. And if that doesn’t work, I have a real gun, fully loaded, and always within reach.”
“Listen. That guy they found in the cranberry bog last week with his tongue and hands cut off. He was—”
Her voice rose. “And if anyone can get past all that, then, Patrick, fuck it, they can have me. Hell, they certainly put in the effort.”
“I understand, but—”
“Ta, sweetie. Good luck with your latest weirdo.”
She hung up, and I clenched the phone in my hand as I crossed into the Commonwealth Avenue mall, a mile-long stretch of green grass and ebony trees, small benches and tall statues, that cuts up the center of the avenue between the east- and westbound lanes.
Warren Martens had said that Miles Lovell’s friend dressed shabby-rich. That he had an air about him that suggested power or at least a power complex.
That pretty much described the guy on the patio.
Wesley Dawe, I wondered. Could this be Wesley? Wesley was blond, but the height and build were right, and hair dye is cheap and easily obtaine
d.
My car was parked four blocks down Commonwealth, and while the rain was light, it was steady, and the mist was threatening to turn into a fog. Whoever the guy was, I decided, he’d either chosen or been sent to rattle my cage, to let me know that he knew me, and I didn’t know him, and that made me vulnerable and gave him a semblance of omnipotence.
I’ve had my cage rattled by pros, though—wiseguys, cops, gangbangers, and in one case a pair of bona fide serial killers—so the days when a disembodied voice on the other end of a phone line could give me the shakes and a dry mouth were gone. Still, it did have me guessing, which may have been the point.
My cell phone rang. I stopped under the canopy of a tree, and it rang a second time. No shakes or dry mouth. Just a small quickening of the pulse. Midway through the third ring, I answered.
“Hello.”
“Hey, pal. Where you at?”
Angie. My pulse slowed.
“Comm Ave., heading to my car. You?”
“Outside an office in the Jeweler’s Exchange.”
“Fun with your diamond merchant?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s aces. When he isn’t hitting on me, he’s telling racist jokes to his male bodyguards.”
“Some girls have all the luck.”
“Yeah. Well, just thought I’d check in. I meant to tell you something, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“That’s helpful.”
“No, it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but…Well, whatever, he’s coming out again. I’ll call you back when I think of it.”
“Cool.”
“Okay. McGarrett out.” She hung up.
I stepped out from under the tree and had taken all of four steps when Angie remembered what she’d forgotten and called back.
“You remember?” I said.
“Hi, Pat,” the sandy-haired guy said. “Enjoying the rain?”
An extra heart appeared in the center of my chest and began to thump. “Loving it. You?”
“I’ve always liked rain, myself. Let me ask you—was that your partner you were talking to?”
I’d been under a large tree on the southern side of the mall. No way he could have seen me from the north. That left east, west, and south.
“Don’t have a partner, Wesley.” I looked south. The sidewalk across from me was empty except for a young woman being pulled across the slick concrete by three large dogs.