Tell Me No Secrets (27 page)

Her adrenaline immediately in overdrive, Jess pulled back, trying to steady her feet against the wood floor, to gain some traction. She was no pushover, she decided, feeling the tugging at her arm, the pain shooting its way to her elbow. She pulled back harder, her breathing becoming shallow.

In the next instant, she was on the floor and Dominic was looming over her.

“What happened?” she panted, not sure how she had gone from two feet on the floor to flat on her back in less than a second.

Dominic helped her to her feet. “Now, let’s try it the other way. Don’t fight me. Don’t put up any resistance. Let
my force pull you close to me. Then use that momentum to push me away.”

Again Jess braced herself. Again Dominic’s hand encircled her wrist. But this time, instead of resisting, instead of struggling, she allowed herself to be pulled toward him. Only when she felt their bodies connect did she suddenly use the full force of her weight to push into him, throwing him off-balance and sending him upended to the floor.

“Way to go, Jess!” Vas cheered.

“That’s it, girl, you did it,” chimed in Maryellen.

“Awesome,” Ayisha agreed.

Catarina nodded shyly.

Dominic slowly rose to his feet. “I think you understand now,” he said, dusting himself off.

Jess smiled. “
Hohh!”
she said.

“Hohh, hohh, hohh!” Jess whispered to herself, emerging from the subway near the Magnificent Mile. She felt stronger than she had in weeks, maybe months. Empowered. Good about herself. “Hohh!” she laughed, drawing her coat tight around her, walking toward Michigan Avenue.

Who said she had to wait for Adam to phone her? This was the nineties, after all. Women didn’t sit around waiting for guys to call. They picked up the phone and did the dialing themselves. Besides, it was Saturday, she had no plans for the evening, and Adam would probably be delighted to see her take the initiative. “Hohh!” she said, more loudly than she had intended, catching the nervous attention of a passerby.

The woman picked up her speed. That’s right, lady, Jess told her silently. Your instincts tell you danger, get away
fast. “Hohh!” she said again, almost singing, approaching the front window of Shoe-Inn and peering inside.

“Is Adam Stohn here today?” she asked the salesman in the ill-fitting toupee who ran to greet her as soon as she stepped through the front door.

The salesman’s eyes narrowed until they all but disappeared. Did he remember her from their last encounter?

“He’s with a customer.” His chin directed Jess to the rear of the store.

Adam was standing beside a young woman, his hands full of shoes, her face full of laughter. Jess approached quietly, not wanting to disturb him in the middle of a sale.

“So, you don’t like any of these shoes. Well, let me see. Can I interest you in a glass of water instead?” Adam was saying.

The young woman laughed, her long blond hair falling across her carefully rouged cheek as she shook her head.

“How about a candy?”

Jess watched Adam reach into his jacket pocket for a red-and-white-striped mint, saw the young woman consider it before refusing the offer.

“How about a joke? You look like a woman who appreciates a good joke.”

Jess felt tears sting her eyes and quickly backed away, deciding not to hang around for the punch line. She was the joke, after all.

“Did you find him?” the salesman with the ill-fitting toupee asked as she strode toward the front of the store.

“I’ll speak to him later. Thank you,” Jess said, wondering what she was thanking him for. Women were so quick to say thank-you, to be grateful. “I’m sorry,” she said,
stepping out of another woman’s way, the other woman also apologizing. And what are we all so sorry about?

Damnit, she thought, feeling embarrassed and confused. What had possessed her to come here? Why did she think that just because she was feeling good and wanted to share that feeling with somebody that Adam would be interested in fulfilling that role? So what if she felt empowered? So what if she’d learned to turn her fist into an eagle’s claw? Who cared whether she could execute a zipper punch to the nose? Why would he be interested in
kiyi?
He was interested in selling shoes, in earning his commission. Why had she thought she was any different from any of the other hundreds of women whose feet he fondled in any given week? And why was she so disappointed?

“Hohh!” she said, standing alone in front of the store. But her heart wasn’t in it, and the word fell to the sidewalk, to be trampled on by a parade of passing feet.

“Well, hi, stranger,” Don was saying, his voice an oasis, even over the phone. “This is a pleasant surprise. I was beginning to think you were still mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?” Jess pulled the door of the public phone booth closed.

“You tell me. All I know is you’ve barely said two words to me since our little disagreement at the police station.”

“Sure I have.”

“All right, maybe two words, both of them no: when I asked you over for Thanksgiving and another time when I invited you out for a steak dinner.”

“Which is exactly why I’m calling,” Jess began, grateful to have been handed such a convenient segue. “I’m downtown,
and I haven’t had a good steak in ages, and I thought maybe if you weren’t doing anything tonight …” Her voice trailed off, leaving only silence. “You’re busy,” Jess said quickly.

“God, Jess,” Don said, his voice an apology, “any other time, you know I’d jump at the chance, but …”

“But it’s Saturday night and Mother Teresa is waiting.”

Another silence. “Actually Trish is out of town this weekend,” Don said easily. “So I accepted an offer to have dinner over at John McMaster’s. You remember John.”

“Of course.” John McMaster was one of Don’s partners. “Say hello for me.”

“I’d invite you …”

“I wouldn’t go.”

“But you wouldn’t go.”

Jess laughed, finding it suddenly hard to catch her breath. Why had she called? Did she really expect her ex-husband to be waiting by the phone every time she felt lonely or depressed and in need of a little friendly support?

“I have a great idea,” he was saying.

“What’s your great idea?” Jess felt she was choking, that no air was reaching her lungs. She pulled at the folding door of the phone booth, but it refused to open.

“Why don’t I drop over tomorrow morning with some bagels and cream cheese, and you can make me some coffee and tell me who died.”

Jess struggled with the door to the phone booth, numbness teasing at her fingers. She couldn’t breathe. If she didn’t get out of the damn phone booth soon, she would faint, possibly suffocate. She had to get out. She had to get some air.

“Jess? Jess, are you there? That was a joke. Don’t you read the obituaries anymore?”

“I really have to go now, Don.” Jess pounded against the door with her fist.

“How does ten a.m. sound?”

“Fine. Sounds great.”

“See you tomorrow morning.”

Jess dropped the phone, letting it dangle from its long cord, watching it sway back and forth as if the victim of a lynching, all the while pushing and pulling at the door of the phone booth in a desperate effort to free herself. “Goddamnit, let me out of here!” she screamed.

Suddenly the door opened. A gray-haired old lady, not more than five feet tall, stood on the other side, her deeply veined hands clutching the side of the door. “These things can be tricky sometimes,” she said with an indulgent smile before shuffling on down the street.

Jess shot out of the phone booth, sweat streaming down her face, despite the near freezing temperatures. “How could I do that?” she whispered into her numbed hands. “I forgot everything I learned today. How am I going to defend myself against anybody when I can’t even get out of a goddamn phone booth?”

It was several minutes before the numbness left her hands, and she was able to hail a cab to take her home.

D
inner consisted of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, two pieces of Pepperidge Farm frozen vanilla cake with strawberry icing, and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. “Nothing like a good dinner,” Jess muttered to her canary as she returned her empty plates to the kitchen, depositing them in the sink, too tired to stack them in the dishwasher.

She shuffled back into the living room, her slippered feet too weary to lift themselves off the floor, reminding Jess of the old woman who had freed her from the phone booth that afternoon. “She’d probably do better against an attacker than I would,” Jess said, debating whether to continue with the self-defense course for the rest of its two-week duration. “I might as well. I paid for it,” she conceded, turning off her stereo and covering the bird’s cage for the night. She turned off the light and shuffled toward her bedroom, pulling off her gray sweatshirt as she walked, and discarding it and her sweatpants in the laundry hamper,
although she had no idea when she’d actually get around to washing them. She made it a habit lately to buy only clothes whose labels instructed
DRY CLEAN ONLY
. More expensive, maybe, but much less time-consuming.

She pulled a long, pink-and-white-flowered flannelette nightgown over her head, then carefully laid out her clothes for the following day: a pair of blue jeans, a red turtleneck sweater, heavy red socks, and fresh underwear. Just waiting for her to climb inside. Her sneakers sat on the floor by the chair, ready for her to step into. All was right with the world, she thought, slouching toward the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She couldn’t wait to get into bed.

It was barely nine o’clock, she realized with some surprise as she turned off the bedroom lamp and crawled in between the covers. She probably should be doing some work in preparation for the resumption of the Terry Wales trial on Monday, but her eyes were already closing. It had been a long day, and an exhausting one. She’d been disappointed by two men in one afternoon. She’d found power, only to lose it. That was enough to wear anybody out.

“Good night, Moon,” she whispered, recalling the children’s book of that name she’d bought for her nephew, listening to vague noises from the apartment downstairs. Walter must be having another party, Jess thought, as she drifted off to sleep.

In her dream, she was facing a jury wearing only her pink-and-white flannelette nightgown and her tatty pink slippers.

“We love your pajamas,” one of the female jurors told her, reaching across the jury box to stroke the soft arm of
Jess’s nightgown. But her hand was an eagle’s claw and it ripped through the material as easily as sharp scissors through paper, drawing blood.

“Let me take care of that,” Don offered, vaulting over the defense table, and reaching for her bleeding arm.

Jess allowed him to draw her close, feeling their bodies connect, then suddenly pushed her full weight against him, throwing him off-balance and to the floor.

Judge Harris banged his displeasure with his gavel. “Order in the court,” he demanded in Adam Stohn’s voice. “Order in the court.” Then, “Jess, are you there? Jess? Jess?”

Jess sat up in bed, not fully awake, foolishly grateful to find herself in her bedroom and not in court. Trust me, she thought, clutching at pieces of her dream even as the dream rushed to evaporate, to rebuff the one person trying to help.

“Jess,” the voice from her dream continued, “Jess, are you there?”

The banging of the gavel continued. Only not a gavel, but someone knocking on the door to her apartment, Jess realized, coming fully awake and reaching across her bed to the night table. She pulled open the drawer and reached inside for her gun, alarmed, even as she lifted the gun into her hands, at how easily she did so.

“Who’s there?” she called back, sliding into her slippers and steadying the gun as she walked to the door, the floor vibrating beneath her feet from the loud music below.

“It’s Adam,” came the response from the other side.

“What are you doing here?” Jess asked without opening the door.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the telephone?”

“I’ve seen enough telephones,” he said, and laughed. “I wanted to see you. It was an impulse thing.”

“How did you get in the house?”

“The front door was open. There’s quite a party going on downstairs. Look, I really hate yelling through the door this way. Are you going to let me in?”

“It’s late.”

“Jess, if you’ve got someone else there …”

She opened the door. “There’s no one else here.” Jess motioned him inside with a wave of her gun.

“Jesus Christ, is that thing real?”

Jess nodded, thinking he looked wonderful, wondering if she looked as ridiculous as she felt in her pink-and-white-flowered flannelette nightgown, fuzzy pink slippers, and Smith & Wesson revolver. “I’m wary of late-night visitors,” she told him.

“Late? Jess, it’s ten-thirty.”

“Ten-thirty?”

“You could get a peephole for that door, you know. Or a chain.” He stared nervously at the gun. “Think you could put that away now?” He took off his jacket, threw it over the arm of the sofa, as if, now that he was here, he intended to stay, and stood before her in a rumpled white sweater and pressed black jeans. It was only then she noticed the bottle of red wine in his hands. “Tell you what,” he continued, “you get rid of the gun; I’ll open the wine.”

Jess nodded, not sure what else to do. She moved, as if on automatic pilot, back to her bedroom, returned the gun to its drawer in the night table, and retrieved a pink quilted bathrobe from her closet. By the time she returned to the
living room, Adam had opened the wine and poured them each a glass.

“Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” he said, depositing a glass in her right hand and guiding her toward the sofa. “What shall we drink to?” he asked as they sat down, their knees touching briefly before Jess pulled away, tucking her legs beneath her.

Jess recalled her brother-in-law’s favorite toast. “Health and wealth?” she offered.

“How about to good times?”

“I’m all for good times.”

They clicked glasses, inhaled the aroma, then raised their glasses to their lips, though neither drank.