PALINDROME (5 page)

So Gabi eats when she feels angst, and angst
she did after my abduction from the Suds Shack while on her watch.
She was keeping up with the six plump gals and was wolfing down egg
rolls and cheese-fried wontons as if they were M&M’s. So great
was her guilt that the waiter asked if we were ready for the check
three separate times.

“Why would you feel guilty, Gabi? I was
drunk. I put myself in harm’s way. The only thing you’re guilty of
is coming down with a bad case of cramps at an inopportune
time.”

“This always happens to me: I overeat, I
drink, and I get sick.” Chomp, chomp. “I’m going back for more
Philadelphia roll. I love cream cheese.”

I watched Gabi shimmy out of the booth and
make her way over to the land of sneeze guards and high-sodium
treats. The tray of king crab legs was empty. The pachyderm-sized
babes had to keep themselves busy eating other delicacies while
they waited for the kitchen to steam up the next batch. As such,
there was a big line for the spare ribs. Gabi wouldn’t be back for
quite a while.

I checked the time. I—rather, Allie—was due
at the Legal Aid attorney’s office later that afternoon, and there
was no way that she could go dressed as I was now. I could change
my appearance, but I had the same earthbound limitation as everyone
else when it came to wardrobe. The laundry had been piling up for
weeks, and I was down to the bottom of my drawer. I was wearing a
threadbare white camisole and red terrycloth shorts. I’ve owned
them both since I was an early teen. A pair of well-worn cowboy
boots pulled the entire look together. It was my best white-trash,
come-hither outfit. The two guys planning the convenience-store
takedown were getting all worked up. I wanted to mess with them by
sprouting some facial hair, but I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t have
turned them on. Anyway, Allie couldn’t show up at the Legal Aid
office looking like a trollop. She had to be refined and demure,
and she would be. All it would take was a wardrobe change and a
little molecular rearrangement, no sweat.

I checked on Gabi; she had given up on the
spare ribs and made a move on the dessert. The six
chubbies
were hours away from their final course—it gave Gabi free reign
over the warm apple pie and soft-serve ice cream. She came back
with a mound of chocolate and vanilla swirl. “Are you finished
already?” she asked. “You’ve hardly touched anything.”

“Got to watch my weight; I barely squeezed
this rear end of mine into these shorts. There’s butt showing
everywhere.”

“I noticed that you look a little sluttier
than usual,” she smirked, “but those are old, aren’t they?”

“Totally old. I only wear these when there’s
absolutely nothing left in the closet, or I need to persuade a
handyman to fix my plumbing . . . literally.”

Gabi giggled. “I wish I had a toosh like
yours. They haven’t invented a pair of jeans you don’t look good
in.”

Gabi was one of the few people who actually
knew what my real butt looked like. I’ve refined the art of
rear-end replication down to a fine art. Now you may be thinking
that a butt is a butt and it didn’t need to be fiddled with, but if
you really want to sell the makeover (to a guy, anyway), you’ve got
to have the rear end down cold—some men can pick a butt out of a
lineup quicker than if they were looking at your face.

“Tell me again,” Gabi said, “How did you get
away from that creep?”

“I told you, he was sloshed. I got lucky and
hip-checked him into the wall. He smacked his head, and I got the
hell out of there.”

“You are so totally bitchin’,” Gabi said as
she scraped the last bit of ice cream out of her dish. She didn’t
need to know that Ax followed me to Vincent’s place and laid the
aikido whoop ass on him. Our secret was
our
secret, one we
would take with us to the grave. The actual situation had been much
more dangerous than the highly adulterated version I relayed to
Gabi. I only told her what she needed to know—that I was completely
wasted and had gotten into a car with Vincent, a guy I shouldn’t
have gone with. It was a mistake I would never again repeat. I told
Gabi that he had treated me without respect and that I laid him
out. She didn’t need to know that Vincent was growing colder and
colder with each passing second and that he would never again have
the opportunity to drug another unsuspecting girl. Okay, I may not
be the most innocent girl in the world, but I only mess with the
creeps who are up to no good and need to be stopped. Yes, my
methods are completely unconventional, and the
brother-and-sister-switching-form tag team even creeps
me
out sometimes. God had given us these talents for a reason—so think
of us as the yin and yang of a superhero team, a superhero team
with a strong sense of irony.

Okay, so the guy with the bloody bandana
totally winked at me. I tapped Gabi on the hand and began sliding
out of the booth. “Chow time’s over, friend of mine; this girl’s
got laundry to do.” Gabi didn’t look happy about the abrupt exit,
but as they say, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure.”

“But I’m not—” Gabi said sadly.

“Grab a fortune cookie; this meal is
over.”

~~~

Shawn Riley was able to access Vincent’s home
with very little difficulty. The landscapers were performing the
weekly lawn maintenance. There were at least twenty landscapers
attending to the two hundred homes in the community. They all wore
red tee shirts with the landscaper’s logo printed on the front in
white letters. A quick trip over to TJ Maxx and Riley had a red PCH
tee shirt with a logo so close to the landscaper’s tee that you had
to look twice to tell them apart. Sporting the telltale red tee,
Riley was able to roam the property freely. He was tall and wiry,
an all-state soccer star who had gotten booted from Hofstra for
steroid abuse. Had he found an open window, he could literally have
jumped through it with a short running start. His athleticism was
not needed. On a whim, he tried Vincent’s car, which was still
sitting in the driveway. The door was unlocked. One tap on the
HomeLink button, and the garage door was open.

Startling cold produced goose bumps on his
arms. Save for the sound of the air rushing through the vents, the
condo was silent. The air was permeated with a stale odor that
Riley had not encountered before. The unit wasn’t big, fifteen
hundred square feet at most. There weren’t many places to look. The
garage led into the kitchen; from there he could see Vincent lying
on the floor in the main room. The television was still on. He
recognized Dr. Phil immediately. The good Dr. Phil was on common
ground, performing an intervention on a teenage boy as the boy’s
bewildered parents looked on. He was talking some manner of
God-awful gibberish scripted to hook weak-minded viewers.

The odor grew stronger as Riley approached
Vincent’s motionless body. There were pieces of cracked plaster on
the floor around him, and the entertainment unit was smashed.

Riley had a sense of what to expect: the gray
skin, the blood, and the urine stain on the crotch. It took just a
moment for it to sink in.

Riley’s downward spiral from soccer phenom to
adolescent aberrant had come about quite quickly. The bust for
substance abuse was followed by dismissal from school and the loss
of his scholarship. It was a perfect storm of unfortunate events
that crushed him and sent him searching for a new path that would
suck him further and further into a dark hole. Heroin is a very
common addiction in Suffolk County these days. It’s an expensive
high with a price tag that can’t be measured in dollars.

Riley thought for a moment of the places he
would have to wipe down before leaving the deceased’s home. He knew
enough not to leave fingerprints. He dialed Thomas Sparks on his
cell phone and relayed the situation as he had found it. The
conversation lasted less than a minute.

Sparks ended it with just a few words, “Make
it disappear.”

Seven: Hoochie Coochie Man

I
had been Allie before. She was a
go-to, a face and body I had long ago committed to memory. She was
a person whose identity I could assume at will. She was not from
New York, so I wasn’t worried about bumping into her anywhere on
Long Island. She had that rich girl look I figured Keith would go
for in a second.

Oh dear Lord, there ought to be a law. I was
Allie to a tee. I had the hair and the eyes down perfectly, most
importantly the eyes. I often became lost in the color and
configuration of her iris, in details so complex that it was like
staring up and getting lost in the cosmos. Then, the size and
roundness of her eye sockets—expanding from there, the bridge of
her nose, the placement of her cheekbones, and finally the length
and taper of her chin. Allie’s body was the easiest of all. Those
dimensions were easy to approximate, and if I was off by a
centimeter or so . . . well, who would know? If I was copying a
female form like Allie’s, I would err on the slight side and no one
would complain. For men, a little extra beefcake never hurt
anyone.

I had a huge wardrobe to choose from, a
veritable actors costume chest from which Ax and I selected the
proper accoutrements, the final touches that meant the difference
between make or break. It was mostly used stuff from secondhand
shops, which were in vogue on Long Island and in the city. The
secondhand thing had become a bit of a scam; wealthy North Shore
and prominent Manhattan women would peddle their one-season-old
Gucci and Prada at the secondhand store, score the extra cash, and
then use hubby’s credit card to buy a new wardrobe. They would use
the extra cash to cover those indulgent items their husbands didn’t
like them spending their hard-earned money for. To gild the lily,
they would then take credit for being thrifty. It’s no way to
maintain a healthy relationship, but I knew it was going on all
over. “I’ve given up lunch with the girls at Nobu; it was too
extravagant.” Pure BS: the charges were just not showing up on the
credit-card statement anymore.

Ax and I had planned the evening down to the
smallest detail, and because Ax was such a neurotic, we had
rehearsed each segment of the evening until there was no chance for
error. For our date, I met Keith outside an office building where I
told him I was doing some part-time work. As such I did not have to
give him Allie’s actual home address. I told him that she lived in
Muttontown. The high-rent address was enough to sell the rich-girl
mystique Keith seemed to like so much. The address, like the rest
of the backstory Ax and I had created, was pure fiction. So Allie
was me, and I was Allie. Ax had posed as Dana, the clumsy but
gorgeous waitress at Prime. Knocking over the glass of water was no
accident, nor were the Jessica Rabbit boobs we knew Keith would be
unable to resist.

Back to the here and now, I was Allie once
again and I—I mean,
we
—were wearing a freshly laundered,
classic, pink blouse with ruffles and lots of fabric to belie the
impact of her youthful body. Tailored black slacks and simple low
wedge sandals rounded out the presentation. Our very appearance
spoke to our innocence. Now, if I could just turn my old,
rust-bucket car into the BMW I knew the real Allie drove . . . but
that would mandate grand larceny auto, and I had no intention of
ending up behind bars. So, I parked the old clunker a few blocks
away and hoofed it over to the Legal Aid attorney’s office.

Louis Gelfman came free of charge, and to be
honest, that was the only form of counsel I could afford. The real
Allie would have had her parent’s financial strength behind her and
would have anted up plenty for a swanky Garden City attorney, but
for me, guile had to go a long way.

Ax and I are pretty hard up for money. We
share a two-bedroom condo that we’ve inherited from our Aunt Sue.
The place is very dated. Okay it’s a disaster area. It needs a ton
of work, but it’s mortgage-free. What can I say? It’s better than
living on the street, and I know what that feels like.

Louis Gelfman may not have worked for a
hotshot law firm, but he had a sincere face. Pictures of his family
covered every inch of his credenza. I could see that he had a young
daughter, so I knew without asking just what he thought about sex
offenders and how he would treat an attempted rapist. BTW, Gelfman
had a JD Diploma from Columbia Law School, so he was obviously not
a dope.

“Thanks so much for coming in,” Gelfman
began. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”

Allie smiled. “Where else would I be? I mean
this guy—” Allie started to choke up. No tears, not yet, just
enough emotion to sell the story. I took a pack of tissues out of
my purse and held onto them for effect.

Gelfman seized an empty water glass and
filled it from a carafe. “We’ll take it slow,” he said. “Here,
drink some water.”

Allie took a moment to gain composure. The
emotion she displayed on her face appeared sincere and accurate to
Gelfman’s eye. “So, why am I here? You said something about an
offer? Are we talking about one of those plea-bargain things? . . .
because I’m not afraid to face this guy in court,” Allie shook her
head woefully. “I can’t believe he was planning to drug me.”

“Actually,” Gelfman said, “possession does
not necessarily prove intent, but based on the circumstances and
the specific nature of the illegal substance that the police found
in his home . . .”

Allie looked into his eyes and waited for him
to continue. She pulled a tissue out of the pack and held it near
her face. “So tell me, what’s going on? My parents are on vacation
in Europe. I haven’t called to tell them anything yet, but I will
need to bring them up-to-date, and if they need to fly home . . .
damn, it’s their twenty-fifth anniversary. I’ll totally ruin their
vacation.”