Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (33 page)

“But Peter—”

“Will never look at you at all.” She expelled another mouthful of smoke. “Forget him.” She tapped the cigarette into the ashtray. “And find some friends.”

W
HEN
N
ATALIE AND
Jennifer returned to the office, Bettina said, “Mr. Hood called
twice
for you. He says to call him back.” Natalie thanked her and continued to her desk.

“That him?” Jennifer whispered.

Natalie shook her head. “Someone else.”

“Good,” she said, before disappearing behind her private door.

Five minutes later, Natalie’s extension rang. She lifted the receiver and said, “Natalie Stathis.”

“It’s Lloyd.”

“Oh, hi,” she said, her voice high-pitched and reedy. “What news?”

“I’m so glad you ask,” he said. “I’m so glad you ask what news. Let me tell you what news.”

Lloyd Hood, being sarcastic? She had a bad feeling about this.

“The news is,” he continued, “I managed to get a call through to your good friend Luigi Gianelli this morning.”

Oh God,
she thought,
I’m sunk.

“And do you know what I did?” he asked.

“No, what?”

“I lied to him. I told him I was your attorney.”

“You
what?”

“I told him I was your legal counsel, Natalie.”

Her face burned scarlet. “I can sue you for that.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you will. Anyway, I told him my client, Ms. Natalie Stathis, didn’t want to compromise herself by calling him personally, but that she naturally wanted some kind of assurance from him that she needn’t worry about her reputation in the coming months.”

Natalie was silent; her heart was sheathed in ice. She stared at the blotter on her desk, the little ink blotches and coffee-cup stains that smudged its surface. She put her hand on the blotter and felt the weave of the paper.

“Nothing to say?” Lloyd asked. “Well, anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that Officer Gianelli says he has no intention of implicating anyone else during the investigations into his misconduct. Especially not a lady who’s done as much for him as Natalie Stathis.”

She shut her eyes and ran her hand across the length of the blotter. At the very tips of her fingers, she could feel where the texture of the paper had been distorted by saturation with water or coffee, or where it had been scratched or torn.

“I was encouraged by that, Natalie, so I ventured a little further. I said I particularly wanted Officer Gianelli’s assurance that my client’s name would not in any way be connected with any incident involving Peter Leland. And do you know what Officer Gianelli said to that?”

She reached over and felt the smooth, fake-leather borders of the blotter. They were cool to the touch.

“He said, and I quote, ‘What other incident is there?’”

She slammed down the receiver.

Not a minute later, her line rang again. She refused to pick it up until Bettina looked over her shoulder and said, “Natalie, your
phone.”

She picked up the receiver. “Natalie Stathis.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“I don’t have to listen to vicious allegations any—”

“I also called Art Weymouth. Do you recall the name, Natalie?”

“Art—Weymouth…” It did sound familiar. Where had she heard it before…?

Oh, God. She remembered.

“He was the previous owner of your house. I called him, and guess what I did?”

“You lied to him,” she said, her voice low.

“Very good! You’re catching on. I told him I was your fiancé. I said I wanted to saw off the padlock on the closet by the laundry room, but if he had a key I’d be glad to pick it up from him, open the lock, and return it to him. And do you know what he said?”

“Lloyd, I don’t have time for this stupid nonsense. I have work to do.”

“He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, that there was no closet near the laundry room, and that he never owned a padlock in his life.”

There was a long silence. Natalie looked around the office and could tell that Bettina and Sally were pretending to be busy while actually hanging on every word she said. Jennifer’s door was still closed.

“I think it’s time we talked, Natalie.”

“We’re talking now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I haven’t known what you mean since I met you.” She hung up the phone—quietly this time—then grabbed her coat. “Bettina, I feel sick. I’m taking the afternoon off.”

Bettina and Sally looked at her as though they were ice-cream junkies and she was the Flavor of the Month. She knew she’d no sooner be out the door than they’d be gossiping about her. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

She had to leave. It was her first duty. She had to go and board the sinking ship.

She was almost out the door when her extension rang again. “I’m not in,” she called out, slipping on her coat and sailing out into the hall.

But forty seconds later, Bettina came running out to catch her where she stood waiting for the elevator. “I know you’re not in,” she said, “but I thought you’d want to know—it’s not the same guy as before.” She wore a breathless, wide-eyed look, clearly thrilled beyond measure by all this intrigue.

Natalie decided it would be melodramatic to refuse the call; she wanted to preserve at least the fiction of normalcy. So, her heart pounding, she went back into the office and picked up the receiver. “Natalie Stathis,” she said, standing at her desk as if she would dismiss this annoying call in a moment. But she sounded like a parody of her former cool, unflappable self.

“Natalie, it’s Luigi Gianelli.”

She shut her eyes in fury. “Well, well—old loose-lips! How are you?” Her voice was dripping with venom.

“Fine, thanks,” he said, oblivious to her tone. “Actually, better than ever. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen the papers lately.”

“Oh, I never miss
Doonesbury,”
she sneered.

He had the audacity to laugh. “Don’t try to cheer me up,” he said. Natalie held the phone a few inches from her face and stared at it in disbelief. “Listen,” he continued, “I’ve done a lot of terrible things, and I’m gonna pay for them—but what’s more important is, I
want
to pay for them. My parish priest, Father Alcotta, is helping me turn my life around and atone for my sins. He’s told me to ask forgiveness of all the people I’ve wronged over the past few years—”

“Whatever, fine,
I forgive you,”
she whispered savagely, not wanting Bettina and Sally to overhear. She’d say anything to get him off the phone. All she wanted was to get home as soon as humanly possible.

“Well…thanks,” he said. “But, uh, there’s more to it than just that, Natalie.” A brief silence. “See, I’ve been embezzling money from you. And I intend to pay every penny of it back, with God’s help. But with the legal fees I’ll be racking up, that may not be for a while yet.”

She shook her head impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

“What can I say? That bugging equipment I supposedly ‘borrowed’ from the evidence room for you? That you had to keep paying me to hold onto?...I bought it. For a couple hundred bucks.
Anyone
can get that stuff on the open market.”

She thought she might explode. It was difficult even to speak. “You mean—it was never being held for a trial—it never—”

“Nah. I mean, there
is
a law against devices whose primary function is the invasion of privacy; but the key word there is ‘primary.’ Manufacturers just invent other ‘primary’ uses for them and sell the same shit perfectly legally. Anyway, the point is, you ended up lining my pocket with a couple grand for something you could’ve picked up at the Sharper Image for pocket change. I can’t believe you never twigged to that. I kept thinking, Fuck, am I lucky she’s so dense!”

“But…Curtis said—”

“Curtis is a waiter, for God’s sake. What does he know? He likes to flatter himself that he’s an old hand at this cloak and dagger stuff; I think that’s what attracted him to me in the first place—I was willing to play along. So when he came to me and told me what you wanted, I invented a story to make you both happy.”

She sat down and swiveled her chair so that her back was to Bettina and Sally. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed.

“Worse than that, Natalie; I deserve worse than that.” There was a small break in his voice; he seemed truly ashamed of himself.

She put her hand to her forehead and shut her eyes. “Wait—I don’t understand. If you really owned that equipment, why did you suddenly want it back? Curtis said a hearing was coming up.” She massaged her temples in an attempt to prevent the headache she knew was coming.

“Well,” he began, in the enthusiastic cadences of someone baring a long-shrouded soul, “by that time Curtis had left me, and I was grasping at anything that might get him to agree to see me again. I told him I needed the equipment back because I thought he’d bring it to me himself. And once I got him alone, I could convince him to take me back.”

Her shoulders slumped in astonished despair.
“That’s
why you were so weird on the phone when I called you about returning it myself.
That’s
why, when we met at Roscoe’s, you didn’t give a damn about the missing bug, just about getting me to help you win Curtis back.”

“Uh-huh.” He voice was almost inaudible. “I’m really sorry, Natalie. I’ve been cruel, manipulative—I mean it, I’ll pay back every dollar.”

“So in other words,” she blurted, no longer caring whether anyone heard her, “I never had to get involved with you in the first place. But because I did, now my worst enemy is sniffing like a bloodhound around my affairs.”

“I don’t know anything about that, but if I was the cause of it, then I want you to know how sincerely I regret—”

She hung up on him.

It was all coming down; chunks of it, plummeting everywhere at once. The structure of her life—falling, crumbling, collapsing under its own bloated weight.

She grabbed her purse again and raced from the office, her eyes out of focus. She hit her shoulder against the door jamb on the way out. Behind her, Bettina and Sally’s silence was more mocking than the most derisive laughter.

The elevator opened as soon as she pressed the DOWN button. She got in and began her descent.

T
HE ROAD HOME
was barely visible in the pouring rain. While squinting through back-and-forth arcs of her windshield wipers, she thought,
Maybe I can drug Peter again. Maybe I can haul him to the van, and then just drive somewhere, away from Lloyd. Take him somewhere far away where he doesn’t know anyone or have any bearings, and just keep him tied up until he comes to his senses…

But no, no. He’d escape. He’d get away and run, run, run, run…

This was it. It was over.

Suddenly a pair of nuns huddled beneath a single black umbrella tried to cross the street in front of her. She almost didn’t see them in time—as it was, she swerved to avoid hitting them, and in the process sent a sheet of water over them, unquestionably drenching them head to toe.

The whole incident was so laden with ridiculous symbolism that she found herself cackling.

Well, maybe it’s not
completely
over,
she thought, her spirits restored. She wasn’t just going to open her doors and say,
Come in, Lloyd, let me take you to him.

No, he was going to have a fight on his hands. He’d have to scrape her flesh and blood off that basement door before he opened it. And God help him if she got him
first.

It was petty, it was demeaning…it was
evil.
It was what she wanted more than anything.

B
Y THE TIME
Natalie got home, the sky was dark and the rain even steadier. She dashed from the garage to the house, getting soaked in the process.

In the kitchen, she slipped out of her wet skirt and jacket and shook her hair. “Brynocki,” she called, “here, boy!”

The dog didn’t appear.

Suddenly she envisioned a horrible scenario in which Peter had escaped the basement, confronted Brynocki, and been torn to pieces. In her blouse and slip, she rushed to the corridor and saw that the padlock was still in place.

She heaved a sigh of relief. “Bry-
nock
-i,” she called.

The dog slithered down the stairs, his tail between his legs and his head hung low. He crawled over to Natalie, then lay with his snout at her feet. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, looking down at him. “Did you shit on the carpet again, or wh—”

A clap of thunder shook the house, and he scurried over to the couch and hid his head beneath it.

Natalie was astonished. Her guard dog—her vicious, man-eating home-protection system—was afraid of the weather.

She thought of calling the breeder and complaining, but it was far too late now. Lloyd would undoubtedly be here soon. She went over to Brynocki and gave him a little kick.

He yelped in fear, and tried to cram himself all the way beneath the sofa.

“Oh, for
God’s
sake,” she cried. “I don’t
fucking
believe this.”

She checked her watch; it was two-thirty. What might Peter be doing? She was afraid to face him—and she dreaded confronting again the mess he had made of his room.

She went to the intercom and pressed the LISTEN button; she could hear nothing, not even the sound of his breathing.

I really should go and check on him,
she thought;
he’s been without water all day.

But instead she went up to her bedroom, sat on her mattress, and didn’t move. She was absolutely paralyzed, unable to take any action at all. She couldn’t face Peter; yet she also couldn’t
not
face Peter. So she put her head on her pillow and let her mind swing crazily back and forth, to and fro, like a porch swing in a gale.

Inevitably, she fell asleep. She had a dream in which she was driving down an unfamiliar expressway, with Peter in the passenger seat doing lines of cocaine. Where are we going? He asked, and she said, I don’t know. She looked out the window and saw Lloyd running beside the van, keeping pace with it. He said, Bet I can beat you there! and ran even faster. Where? Where? she cried. She floored the accelerator, but the van only seemed to slow down. Peter said, Bet I can beat you there too, and he opened the passenger door and got out while the van was still moving. In a split second he was gone from sight. She couldn’t see what happened to him and she screamed his name, then decided to turn the van around and look for him. But as she whipped the steering wheel to the right she hit something. What was it? She was afraid to look. She got out and headed toward the front of the van; blood was streaming from under the carriage, staining her shoes. When she reached the front she looked under the bumper and saw—