Perfect on Paper (15 page)

“What—this?” Hank said.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Aw, heck, this here book’s the greatest. The wiring system in this place is so out of date, I needed an old diagram to get to the bottom of the problem.” He opened the volume to reveal a drawing so basic that the plate screws had little arrows pointing to them with the words “plate screw” printed at the other end.

“I guess.…”

He rose to his feet and put his arms around me. “Forgot to say good morning.” I kissed him, and he kissed me back; after a few minutes, I managed to lose sufficient interest in the home repair manual to relegate it to the file cabinet in my mind earmarked for nagging doubts. There it took up residence with folders labeled
MYSTERIOUS HANG-UP CALLS
;
PROPRIETY OF FLIRTING WITH YOUTHFUL CROSSWORD CONSTRUCTORS
;
LEGALITY OF POSING AS AN OCTOGENARIAN PAINTER FROM MAINE
, and others far too numerous to mention.

“Told you he was a con man,” Elinor Ann said, once I’d arrived home from a late brunch with Hank at Fred and Ethyl’s and told her what I’d seen.

“Well, it’s
possible
he needed to refer to a vintage diagram,” I replied, in a tone so dubious, a toddler would have questioned my sincerity.

“Tell you what. Cal’s pretty handy—let me ask him if he’d ever have to consult a book like that to replace a light switch.” She covered the phone while she called down to the basement, where he was no doubt rebuilding a carburetor or repairing wrought iron with a blowtorch.

“What’s he saying?” I asked after a few seconds.

“Nothing—yet. He’s laughing too hard to answer the question. Dana? I hate to ask you this, but… are you absolutely certain Hank Wheeler is who he says he is?”

I sighed and flopped on the only corner of my bed not covered with sections of the Sunday
Times
. “I’m not sure about anything anymore, but I hope he is. Especially after last night. And I felt so comfortable at brunch just now, and he’s always so attentive, and—”

“Dana, can you hang on a sec? Just while I get Eddie some glue for a school project.”

“Sure.” I reached for the magazine to see who’d constructed this week’s puzzle—not Billy Moody—then turned to the Styles section. An article about the resurgence of bourbon on the first page… animal-print bracelets on three… Christmas windows in Midtown… a vast slew of people younger than me getting married or engaged…

“Okay, I’m back!” Elinor Ann announced.

I didn’t respond. I’d become transfixed by a photograph of two men. They’d exchanged vows at a ceremony in Great Neck the previous weekend.

“Dana?”

The groom on the right was Bert Sugarman.

I was never, ever going to unearth the identity of my mystery caller.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

“O
h my god.” Vivian was pacing back and forth in front of the portrait I’d just brought down to the shop—the first Hannah to feature a live subject.

“Oh my
god
.” I couldn’t tell if she was horrified or struck nearly dumb by genius. Her expression was inscrutable, much like Dinner’s in the painting.

“Oh. My. God.” Finally she turned to face me. “We are going to make
so much fucking money
!”

As happy as I was to hear it, I was a little annoyed by her use of the word “we.” I was the one doing all the work—especially now that the blowsy woman with the Galerie Naifs business card was doing all the buying. If I could just learn her identity, I could pose as a dealer based in Maine.…

“How many more do you think you can bang out by the weekend?” Vivian wanted to know. “If I call Graciela and tell her Hannah’s struck out in a bold new direction, she’ll probably come running over here on Saturday.”

I decided to play dumb. “Graciela who?” All I needed was a last name to cut out the middleman.

“You know—the Comme des Garçons addict.”

Crap.

She shrugged. “I don’t know where the fuck she’s putting them all.”

I had a pretty good idea where she was putting them all: into the homes of clients, at double or triple or octuple what Vivian was charging her. Unfortunately, I’d already thought to google the phrase “Galerie Naifs” and been confronted with a mind-boggling 779,000 results—779,129, to be precise.

“Why are you still here?” Vivian said. “That pig isn’t going to paint himself, is he? Oh—and be sure to put that faux-sapphire necklace in the next one.”

“Not so fast,” I said. “You know those cocktail dresses that came in a couple of weeks back?”

“What about them?”

“Do you still have the blue satin Jean Desses?”

“Are you kidding? That dress is so fucking tiny,
I
can’t even fit into the damn thing. Thank god it only set me back a hundred—the guy running the estate sale had no idea how to price couture. And it does class up the inventory to have a museum-quality piece like that.…” She frowned. “Why do you ask?”

As if on cue, the bell over the front door jingled and Lark walked in. “Here I am!”

“So
that’s
why. I’ll go get it,” Vivian said, adding in a low voice, “Don’t forget—I have a key to your apartment. If you tell your friend over there what I paid for the dress, I’ll kill your cat.”

But not even Vivian could hide her admiration once a beaming Lark emerged from the dressing room. “Holy shit. I
hate
you, bitch.”

Lark giggled and spun around, causing the chiffon underskirt to billow, cloudlike, around her waist. The sleeveless bodice, a masterpiece of overstitched pleating, hugged her torso perfectly. “Sandro will love this!”

Sandro will hate that,
I thought, smiling in satisfaction.
Forget my
Twenty-Men-in-New-York theory—there’ll be three times that many guys in the gallery Friday night, and they’ll all be lined up to meet her. Let’s hope one of them manages to make a favorable impression while Sandro sits fuming on the sidelines with his wife.

Lark went off to inspect herself in the three-way mirror, and I turned to Vivian.
How much?
I mouthed.

In response, she held up ten fingers, then made fists before flashing two more. I raised my eyebrows in disbelief, but she just shrugged.

Sighing, I tilted my head in the direction of Dinner’s portrait, which got her down to seven fingers. “Are you
kidding
?” I telegraphed with my expression. Vivian folded her arms and met my eyes, defiant.

“I feel like a princess!” Lark called from the back of the store.

She looked like one.
What the hell,
I thought, gesturing again at the portrait and holding up two fingers of my own.

Vivian’s eyes narrowed as she leaned across her desk to whisper in my ear. “Who the hell is this chick—your long-lost daughter or something?”

More like my long-lost self,
I silently responded. And if it was going to take two Hannahs to get Sandro out of Lark’s life, well, that would be cheap compared to what the alternative would cost her. “Do we have a deal?” I whispered back, just before Lark rejoined us.

“You know, that dress looks so good on you, I’m only going to charge you a hundred bucks for it,” Vivian told her. Lark erupted into shrieks and skipped off to the dressing room while Vivian and I glared at each other behind her back.

The message light on the answering machine was blinking when I returned to the apartment.

“Hey—it’s Ray, uh, noon on Tuesday. I’m in your neighborhood—had an idea about buying you lunch. Oh well. Maybe next time. Take care of yourself, Dana.”

“Well, that was quick,” Elinor Ann said, approximately three seconds after I’d replayed the message for the dozenth time. “Just under forty-eight hours. Still think he’s not your hang-up caller?”

“It’s
possible
he was in the area.”

“Oh, sure. Refresh my memory. How many stops did you tell me it was between your subway station and his in Brooklyn?”

“Nineteen.”

“So it isn’t exactly like the guy wandered a few blocks out of his way, is it?”

“Good point.” Was one phone call really all it took to summon Ray Devine to the East Village? More important, would he try it again, and what would I do—wear—say—if he did? “Where are you, anyway?” I asked my friend.

“In the car, on my way home from work. It’s the first Tuesday of the month.”

Of course—it was smelting day. The plant took advantage of reduced energy rates by starting the process at three in the morning.

Perfect timing,
I thought. This was the opportunity I’d been waiting for ever since researching Elinor Ann’s condition the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

“Are you on Route 22?” I said.

“Just coming up on Krumsville.”

“Then do me a favor. Get off at the exit.”

“Are you nuts? What makes you think I can do that?”

“It’ll just be for a second. Then you can get right back onto the on-ramp.”

“Oh, I get it. Force the patient to confront her phobia in small, manageable doses.”

It was called exposure therapy, and it was the only treatment I’d found on the Web that seemed logical. It was also the only treatment that
didn’t want to sell me a series of self-actualization tapes at breathtaking prices. “Are you getting off?”

She didn’t answer, but I could hear the
ding-ding
of the turn signal on her car’s dashboard. I held my breath and listened to what seemed like an hour of silence before I heard the signal ding again. We exhaled in unison.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

“Terrified.” She was breathing heavily, but at least she was breathing. “Which is why I’ve never had the guts to try this on my own before.”

“You know about exposure therapy?”

“You’re not the only person with an Internet connection, you know. Don’t you think I’ve googled agoraphobia by now?”

“Is that the only word you googled?”

“What are you talking about? That’s what’s wrong with me, isn’t it?”

“I’m not so sure. According to my findings, you’ve got panic disorder.”

“Well, that’s a load off my mind. Tell me—what the hell’s the difference?”

The difference was, Elinor Ann was lucky. Her condition was more easily treatable. All she had to do was keep making herself panic until she got used to it—or sick of it—and learned how to control it. At least, that was how easy the article I’d read made it sound.

“This isn’t nearly as serious as agoraphobia,” I told her. “Something triggered it. And if you ask me, it’s Angus. As soon as he got his learner’s permit, you got panic disorder.”

“How come?”

“Because he doesn’t need you as much as he used to.”

“That’s what
you
think. If it weren’t for me, he’d starve to death under a mountain of dirty laundry.” She paused. “But I guess that’s… plausible.”

“I know it is.”

She sighed. “I suppose this means I have to get off at the Krumsville exit again tomorrow, doesn’t it?”

“I think that would be a good idea.”

“For how long?”

“Until you get better.”

“Terrific.” I heard her turn signal again; she was just a few miles from home now. “Dana?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks. But… Dana?”

“Yes?”

“If you were trying to get me off the subject of Ray Devine, you could have just asked me about the weather.”

I replayed Ray’s message once more before retrieving Vivian’s costume jewelry from a box at the foot of my bed. The necklace she’d requested for the next Hannah had become hopelessly enmeshed with a drop earring as long as an earthworm, and far less attractive.

But the faux sapphires were actually quite pretty—teardrop-shaped and arranged to cascade down to a single, much larger stone that would end cunningly in cleavage range.
Dinner will look fetching in these,
I thought,
especially if I set the painting up like a formal portrait.… Maybe use that oval canvas I picked up at Utrecht last week…

The phone rang.

I jumped, and the necklace went flying, hitting the wall and disappearing behind the headboard. I looked at my watch: a quarter to two. Had Ray been hanging around all this time?

“Hello?”