Genuine Fraud(58)

“How great that you appreciate Gershwin,” said Patti. “In my teens I was all punk rock, and in my twenties it was Madonna and whoever. Where are you in college?”

A beat. A choice. Jule threw her Band-Aid wrappers in the trash.

“Stanford,” she answered. “But I’m not sure I’m going back in the fall.” She rolled her eyes comically. “I’m in a war with the financial aid office.” Everything she told Patti felt delicious in her mouth, like melting caramel.

“That’s unpleasant,” said Patti. “I thought they had great financial aid there.”

“They do, generally,” said Jule. “But not for me.”

Patti looked at Jule seriously. “I think it will work out. Looking at you, I can tell you’re not going to let any doors shut in your face. Listen, do you have a summer job, an internship, something like that?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I have an idea I want to talk to you about. Just a crazy thought I’m having, but you might like it.” She took a cream-colored card out of her handbag and handed it to Jule. It had a Fifth Avenue address. “I have to get home to my husband now. He’s not well. But why don’t you come to dinner at our place tomorrow night? I know Gil will be thrilled to meet one of Immie’s old friends.”

“Thanks, I’d love to.”

“Seven o’clock?”

“I’ll be there,” said Jule. “Now, do we dare put our shoes on?”

“Oh, I guess we have to,” said Patti. “It’s very hard to be a woman sometimes.”





FIRST WEEK OF JUNE, 2016

NEW YORK CITY

Sixteen hours earlier, at eight p.m., Jule got out of the subway in a dodgy Brooklyn neighborhood. She’d spent the day looking for work. It was the fourth time in a row she’d worn her best dress.

No luck.

Her apartment was a flight up from a bodega with a dingy yellow awning: the Joyful Food Mart. It was a Friday night, and guys clustered on the street corner, talking loudly. The trash cans on the sidewalks overflowed.

Jule had only lived here for four weeks. She shared the place with a roommate, Lita Kruschala. Today the rent was due and she had no way to pay it.

She wasn’t close with Lita. They had met when Jule answered a listing she’d found online. Before that she had been staying at a youth hostel. She’d used the public library Internet to look for apartment shares.

When she went to see the rental, Lita was offering the living room of an apartment as a bedroom. It was sectioned off from the kitchen with a curtain. Lita told Jule her sister had recently moved back home to Poland. Lita preferred to stay on in America. She cleaned apartments and worked for a catering company, both for cash. She wasn’t legal to work in the US. She took English classes at the YMCA.

Jule told Lita she had a job as a personal trainer. That was what she’d done back in Florida, and Lita believed her. Jule had paid a month’s rent, cash, in advance. Lita didn’t ask for ID. Jule never spoke the name Julietta.

Some evenings, Lita’s friends were over, speaking Polish and smoking cigarettes. They made stewed meats and boiled potatoes in the kitchen. Those nights, Jule put on headphones and curled up on her bed, practicing her accents from tutorials online. Sometimes Lita stepped into Jule’s room with a bowl of stew and gave it over without saying anything.

Jule had arrived in New York by bus. After the boy and the blue slush, after the strappy heeled shoe and the blood on the sidewalk, after that boy had fallen, Julietta West Williams had disappeared from the state of Alabama. She’d left school, too. She was seventeen and didn’t have to finish her education. No law said she had to.

She might have been okay staying put. That boy did live, and he never said a word. But then, if she’d stayed in town, he might have spoken up. Or he might have retaliated.

Pensacola, Florida, was only a couple hundred miles away. Jule got hired to work for cash at a storefront gym in a strip mall. The owners didn’t ask their staff to be certified trainers. They jacked their boys up on steroids, and everything was less than legit.

Julietta put guys through workouts every day. Bouncers, thugs, bodyguards, even a few cops. She worked there six months and put on muscle. The boss owned a martial arts place a mile away, and he let her take classes there for free. Julietta rented a week-by-week motel room with a kitchenette. She bought a laptop and a phone, but other than that, she saved her money.

Lunch hours, she often walked a ways down the road to the shopping mall. It was a high-end place with fountains and flagship stores. Julietta read in the airy bookshop, window-shopped thousand-dollar dresses, and tried on makeup in the department store. She learned the names of the classiest brands. She reinvented herself with powders, creams, and glosses. Her face looked one way one day, another way another. She never spent a cent.

That was how she’d met Neil. Neil was a slim guy in a butter-colored leather jacket. Now and then he spent an afternoon hanging around the makeup counters, talking to girls. He wore custom Nikes and spoke with a Southern accent. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he had a white baby face with ruddy cheeks, sideburns, and a gold cross around his neck. The type of guy who was too loud in the movie theater and always bought a big popcorn.

“Neil what?” Julietta had asked.

“I don’t use my last name,” he answered. “It isn’t as pretty as me.”