A Dangerous Fiction (29 page)

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 mind 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.”

“Eight
months
?”

“We got married because she was pregnant. After she miscarried, there wasn't much point for either of us.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I was real sorry about the baby. Always wanted kids; still do. But the divorce, that part was OK. She's a nice girl, but it wasn't fair on either of us. She wasn't what I wanted.”

Shouts rose from the back room, followed by a crash and a sharp crack like a cue stick breaking. I didn't look away, and neither did Tommy.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I think you know.”

Billiard balls came flying out of the back room, and the bartender ran past us, flourishing a baseball bat. Hope flowered inside me; I felt it unfolding, petal by petal.

“Why didn't you call?” I asked.

“Couldn't. Any personal contact between the victim and the investigators could have jeopardized the prosecution.” This came out in one breath, with a fluency that sounded rehearsed. It was my turn to wait in silence. Even in the dimly lit booth, I could see the color rising in Tommy's face. He took a long pull on his beer.

“That,” he said, “and the other thing. How I felt about you. That hasn't changed. So I stayed away.”

“Bit of a non sequitur, that last bit.”

“It's not like before, when we were kids together in the big city. I'm not blind. I see the life you've made for yourself, the world you live in.”

“Maybe my world could use expanding,” I said.

Tommy caught his breath and stared. I'd have stared too. Brazen wasn't my usual style, but there's nothing like having nothing to lose.

“Are you flirting with me, Jo?”

“I think it's way past flirting.”

The back-room fight spilled into the aisle beside us. One man punched another, and that one lost his balance and would have fallen on me if Tommy hadn't jumped up and straight-armed him away. Instead of sitting back down, Tommy came around to my side of the booth and held out his hand.

Outside, a blast of exhaust enveloped us. Taxis blared their horns and jostled for position on the street while pedestrians played the same game on the sidewalk. Tommy led me toward the brick façade of the bar, out of the stream. He took me in his arms and we kissed for a long time. It felt as if someone had poured gasoline on me and lit it on fire, except that it didn't hurt. His body felt strange against mine, yet deeply and dearly familiar. All the world flowed by us, yet we were alone together; for there is no place more private than the center of a crowd.

Or almost no place. “Come home with me,” I said.

But Tommy didn't move. “I feel compelled to ask your intentions.”

“My intentions?” I said. “Kind of old-school, isn't it?”

“I'm an old-school kind of guy.”

“At the moment I'd say my intentions are highly dishonorable. Is that normally a sticking point?” I pressed against him, and he held me close, strong hands splayed against the small of my back. Unless that was a gun in his pocket, I was fairly sure he wasn't going anywhere; yet I sensed hesitation.

“Not normally, no,” he said. “Just tell me this isn't some incredibly generous sort of thank-you.”

“They have cards for that. This is about you and me and nothing else.”

“You say that now, but what happens when the next Nobel Prize–winning bastard comes along?”

“Depends,” I said, straight-faced. “Is he hot?”

Tommy laughed. “You are a wicked woman, Jo.”

“No, I'm not. I know you have no reason to trust me. But Tommy, do I look like I'm playing?”

I held his eyes, and after a moment he smiled that slow, country-boy smile of his. “My place is closer,” he said.

“Closer's good.” We looked toward the street. West Broadway was teeming with rush-hour traffic. What were the odds of snagging a cab at this hour? I wondered. Maybe Tommy could hail a patrol car. It felt like an emergency. We tacked across the pavement. Just as we reached the curb, a taxi pulled over and discharged two women. Tommy grabbed the door and held it for me. It's a sign, I thought, climbing in. Not that I believed in signs and portents. I was trying, these days, to keep a solid yellow line between fiction and reality, fairy tales and life. Fictional romance may end in “happily ever after,” but “till death do us part” is the best mortal lovers can hope for.

On the upside, real people have bodies. We
are
bodies. Tommy's, warm and solid, slid in beside mine. “Where to?” the cabby asked, looking in his mirror.

“Home,” Tommy said.