Rubbed Out (5 page)

G
eorge and I had dinner at a small Mexican restaurant on Westcott Street. For once the place wasn't crowded. I had salmon with fried sweet potatoes, George had swordfish, and we both had a couple of glasses of Belgium-style wheat beer. It was the first decent meal—no, scratch that; it was the first real meal I'd had in weeks. I'd been living on candy bars, coffee, and vitamin pills, with an occasional yogurt thrown in.

Whenever I get tense I have trouble eating, and I'd been tense a lot lately. Maybe it was the place with its copper bar and peach walls and tiny bouquets on tables, maybe it was the beer I was nursing, maybe it was being with George, but I finally began to relax a little.

George flagged the waitress and ordered two coffees and asked for the dessert menu.

“I ran into Paul the other day,” he said to me after she'd gone. “He said you were working for him again.”

I told him about Janet Wilcox.

“She's probably on the beach in Cancun shacked up with a Mexican beachboy.”

“Sounds good to me. Sun. Sand. Sex. Margaritas. Maybe I should try it too.” Though I couldn't picture Janet Wilcox doing something like that from what her husband had told me.

George leaned across the table and punched me lightly on the arm. “After me, everyone is a letdown.”

“My, what a big ego you have.”

“Deservedly.” George grunted. “I hope that prick is paying you well.”

“I wouldn't be doing it otherwise. We're doing a fifty-fifty split. Finding her should be simple enough. Then I call the aggrieved husband and tell him where she is. Whatever happens after that is up to them.”

George paused while the waitress placed the coffees in front of us and handed us the menu. We conferred and decided to split a pear apple crisp with whipped cream.

“Nothing is ever simple with you,” he said when the waitress went off to get our dessert.

“You either.”

“True.” George picked up his cup and sipped his coffee. The cup disappeared in his hand. “Robin,” he said.

“Yes?”

He shook his head. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

“Getting old?”

“Guess so. I'm sure it'll come to me later.” And he smiled and drained his coffee cup.

We chatted some more about Janet Wilcox. Finally the waitress brought our dessert. We ate every last bit of it and went back to my house.

“Manuel here?” George asked as we went inside.

“He's staying over at a friend's tonight.”

“Good,” George said.

And we went upstairs and made love.

Hours later I woke up to find George was already dressed.

“Robin,” he said. He looked grave.

“Yes.” My heart started fluttering.

He studied the window blinds for a few seconds.

“I wanted to tell you at the store yesterday. And then at dinner. But I couldn't.”

His eyes moved to the wall. He was looking at everything but me.

“Tell me what?” I wrapped the sheet more tightly around me.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

“About what?”

“Natalie.”

“Natalie?”

“The blonde.”

“The one you said you weren't having a relationship with?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been seeing her?”

“Six months.”

“Six months?”

“I never meant for this to get out of hand.”

“Meaning?”

George rubbed the stubble on his chin with his hand, then took a deep breath and let it out. The sound filled the room. “I guess the best thing to do is just say it. Natalie's pregnant. It's my baby. We're going to get married. I don't know what else to do.” He reached over and patted my shoulder. “I can't tell you how badly I feel. You have to believe that.”

I didn't say anything. I couldn't find the words. I felt as if all the air had been squeezed out of me. I watched a squirrel run along the telephone line.

“I'm sorry,” George repeated.

Then he was gone. I heard him close the downstairs door. I heard him drive off. So it was over. All those years. Just like that.

Zsa Zsa whimpered and nosed at my hand. I patted her head mechanically. “It'll be fine,” I told her. But the way she was looking at me, I could tell that she knew it wasn't.

I threw the covers off me, got up, and took a shower. The bottle of shampoo I was using slipped out of my hands and fell on the floor. Rivulets of yellow ran toward the drain. I left the bottle, got out of the stall, dried myself, and got dressed. I knew I should cry or scream or do something. But I couldn't. I felt as if my guts had been ripped out, and there was a pain in my chest that wouldn't go away.

 

 

The phone was ringing when I walked into the store. I picked it up. It was George.

“I'm calling to see if you're okay.”

“Don't call.”

“Robin, I feel terrible.”

I hung up. The phone started ringing again. After five rings the answering machine came on. I listened to George while I took a cigarette out of the pack I'd just purchased and lit up. When he was done, I erased his message and gave Zsa Zsa a treat. Then I got to work. Sweeping the floor comforted me.

Half an hour later, Walter Wilcox came by. As I watched him slowly walk across the floor, it occurred to me that we had something in common. We'd both had people we loved walk out on us. That should have made me more sympathetic. But it didn't. It made me not want to look at his face.

“So,” he said, shoving the shoebox with the items I'd requested from him yesterday across the counter.

A faint odor of unwashed clothes and alcohol came off him. I wondered how much he'd been drinking last night. Certainly he didn't look as if he'd gotten a good night's sleep. His eyes were sunk back in his head, and the circles under them looked as if they'd been painted on skin that was pasty white from lack of sun.

“How long do you think it's going to take?”

“To find your wife?”

He scrunched his eyes against the light. “Who else are we talking about?”

“It was a rhetorical question.”

“Sorry. I don't feel very well. I think I might be coming down with something.”

Like a hangover.

“Did you speak to my daughter?”

I nodded.

“She wasn't much help, was she?”

“No, she wasn't. You were right about that.”

“Janet and she never got along. It was tough. I felt bad for Stephanie.” Wilcox stared into the shoebox as if it contained the past. “One day Janet would say it was okay for Stephanie to walk to her friend's house, the next day she'd throw a fit and insist she hadn't said anything like that.” He gave a deprecatory shrug. “I tried to smooth things over, but I had to work.”

“Stephanie told me she was adopted.”

Wilcox nodded and unbuttoned his coat. It was standard lawyer's issue. Gray. Mohair. Conservative. Only there was a stain on the lapel, as well as a stain on his blue-and-white striped tie.

“She was. Janet really wanted a child. And sometimes she was a good mother . . .” His voice drifted off. “I don't know. I never figured out what the problem was.”

“Why don't you just let me go through this stuff, and then we'll talk.” I told him.

“Fine.” His eyes never left my hands as I took the top off the box and laid it aside. “The photo's a couple of years old,” he said as I lifted the picture of his wife out of the box. “She's gained weight since then. Maybe thirty pounds or so. That's why she went to that charlatan. But I told you that.”

“Yes, you did.”

Janet Wilcox was her husband's opposite. Neat to a fault. In the picture her hair had been teased and shellacked into something that resembled a blond helmet. I didn't know women wore their hair that way anymore. It reminded me of photos I'd seen from the fifties.

Her face was perfectly made up, but that couldn't hide the nondescriptness of her features. She wasn't pretty. She wasn't ugly. She was plain. The frilly white blouse with ruffles around the neck that she was wearing belonged on someone younger and cuter.

I reflected that her daughter couldn't have been more different from her.

As I studied the photo, I thought about the comment George had made last night about Janet Wilcox running off to Cancun. He was one hundred percent wrong, I decided. Janet Wilcox did not look like the type of person who would ever shack up with a beachboy. Or anyone else for that matter. She looked like someone who wouldn't even buy a brand of toilet paper she wasn't familiar with, let alone go in for a romantic fling.

“I couldn't find another photograph. Janet didn't like having her picture taken.”

“This will be fine.” I laid the picture aside and looked at Wilcox. “Does your wife have an e-mail account?”

“She doesn't even know how to turn on a computer. We don't have one in the house.”

“I notice you didn't include a list of her friends in here.”

“I already told you. She doesn't have any”

I raised an eyebrow. “None?”

Wilcox relented. “Well, there are the women in her book group, but I don't know their names. She was a stay-at-home kind of person,” Wilcox added. “I know that's unusual today, but it's true.” He sounded defensive.

“What did she do at home?”

“Cleaned house, cooked. She watched a lot of TV Especially those women's shows in the afternoon, the ones where everyone always has something wrong with themselves.” That jibed with what the daughter said. “I was trying to encourage her to get her real estate license. At least it would get her out of the house.”

I picked up Janet Wilcox's appointment calendar and leafed through it. Apparently Wilcox spoke the truth. It was mostly bare.

“Do you know where the book group met?”

“At Barnes & Noble on Thursday nights. But she stopped going a month ago. She said she didn't like the books they were choosing now. Too violent.”

It wasn't much, but it was something. I made a note, then went back to rummaging through the box.

“How long is locating her going to take?” Wilcox asked.

“I don't know.”

“You have to have some idea.” Wilcox's tone was querulous.

“Not really.” Zsa Zsa leaned against my leg. I bent down and scratched her rump. “Depending on what I come up with, it could take me two days, a couple of weeks, or six months.”

“Six months?” he yelped “That's ridiculous. Paul said you'd do this fast.”

Or maybe I'll never find her, I wanted to say as I picked a piece of packing tape off the fur on Zsa Zsa's leg. Sometimes people don't want to be found. Sometimes they just disappear into the ether. Sometimes they start a new life. Sometimes they die on the road and are buried in pauper's graves. Sometimes they're killed and buried in forests and bogs.

But mostly they come back. They go away and decide it was a mistake. The new lover turns out to be like the old husband or wife, or the freedom to do what they want turns into boredom and loneliness. Only their pride won't let them call home, so they start doing things like using their old credit cards, signaling to the people they left behind to come and get them. Sometimes the people they've left behind do. Other times they don't because they've discovered they're better off without them. But I wasn't being paid to say those things to Wilcox. I was just being paid to find his wife.

“I'll do the best I can,” I told him.

Wilcox looked around the store. “You're going to be working on this full-time, aren't you?”

“Yes. My associate will be taking over my retail duties.” Associate indeed. Good thing he couldn't see Manuel.

“Why six months?” he continued. “This is a simple job.”

“Then you do it.”

“You're right. You're right. I'm sorry. I apologize.” He took off his hat and unbuttoned his jacket. “Since Janet's gone, I haven't been sleeping well. I'm just worried that she's done something stupid.”

“I know you are. I'll try and wrap this up fast—mostly cases like this are fairly simple—but I can't promise anything until I see what I have.”

That seemed to satisfy him because he said, “I'll call you first thing tomorrow morning for an update,” as he wiped his brow with the back of his forearm.

“By all means.” I gave him a big, insincere smile. “I look forward to it.”

I began to understand why Paul had given me this job.

After Wilcox left, I made myself a large pot of French roast and drank it down while I went through the papers Wilcox had given me. On a first, casual pass, none of it yielded much in the way of information, but I pulled the phone bills out to take a more detailed look at them. Then I called Paul and asked him to run a check on Janet Wilcox's license and credit cards and see what turned up.

“Sure, I can do that for you,” he told me. “So what did you do last night?”

“Nothing,” I lied. I wasn't talking about George with him. “I went to bed early. What can you tell me about Wilcox?”

“Good old Walter?” I heard a creak as Paul turned his chair around. “Not too much to tell.”

“He's a friend of yours? You didn't tell me that.”

“More of an acquaintance really.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, and then I hung up and phoned the psychologist Janet had been seeing. He must not have been very busy because he picked up on the second ring.