Before She Knew Him(79)
The chair was under the window, and Mira was halfway into the room before she noticed the body on the floor. She screamed out loud, more like a sharp bark of panic that she cut off instantly. It was definitely a body, lying diagonally, its feet just under her sewing table. There was no way to know who it was since the body had been entirely wrapped in duct tape, from the feet all the way to the head, so that it looked like a silver mummy.
Trembling, Mira took two quick steps to the body, lowered herself onto a knee, and pressed the palm of her hand against the chest of the body. It was a man—she could tell that much by his size and the flatness of his chest—and there was no movement in his body and no heartbeat. Close up, she could see that blood had seeped out between the folds of duct tape around the head. Call 911, she told herself, thinking of her phone back on the bed. But she had to know who was under the tape. She had to know if it was Matthew.
Her fingers found the sticky edge of the end of a piece of duct tape plastered across the center of the dead man’s face. And she began to pull the tape away.
Chapter 37
Richard Dolamore pulled into the liquor store parking lot. It was almost dusk, the air cold in his nostrils as he walked across the lot and through the automatic doors. He loved this liquor store, as big as a warehouse, full of suburban boomers filling carts with gallons of trendy gin and cases of wine with names like “Mommy’s Best Friend.” Before it became a liquor store it had been a movie theater, years ago, a cheap independently run place with one screen that had been converted to two by putting up a shabbily constructed wall. Richard had come here as a teenager, mostly alone, but sometimes with dates, and he remembered that during quiet moments of whatever movie you were watching, you could hear what was happening on the other screen.
But the theater had been gutted, and now it was filled with row after row of colorful bottles. Richard wandered up and down the aisles looking at all the labels, designed to sell you a little something more than the alcohol inside. Dad had been a liquor rep, selling mostly down-market brands—vodkas with names like Romanov, and whiskey called Old Scotsman or Gold Rush—at bulk discount to chain restaurants and hotel bars. These types of brands still existed, always on the bottom shelf. You could stand in an aisle at the liquor store and run your eyes from the top to the bottom shelf, and you’d see bottles trying to attract a whole spectrum of customers—from the asshole who bought barrel-aged rum for a hundred dollars a bottle to the alcoholic on disability whose rum came in a gallon bottle made from plastic.
“They’re all the same,” Porter Dolamore used to say to him. “People are fools. Put rotgut in a pretty bottle, and everyone thinks they’re living like kings.”
Richard went to the Scotch aisle. A woman about his age studied the bottles, looking like she was trying to read a menu in a language she didn’t understand.
“That’s a good one,” Richard said, tilting his head toward the bottle of single malt she’d just picked up off the shelf.
“Oh, yeah?” she said. She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was too big and her eyes were too close together, but it was clear that she worked out and took care of herself. She had long brown hair with blond highlights, and she wore a pumpkin-colored sweater with a plunging neckline. Richard let his eyes scan the exposed tops of her breasts, nicely tanned. Dark brown nipples, he thought.
“Super smooth,” he said. “Like silk. Is it for you or for . . . ?”
She’d caught him looking down her sweater, and Richard thought she hadn’t decided yet how she felt about it. But she bit her lower lip and said, “It’s for a new friend in my life. He loves Scotch, and I don’t know anything about it.” Then she laughed, as though she’d said something funny.
“Does he like peaty Scotch?”
She grimaced, said, “I don’t even know what that means.”
Richard explained the difference between peated and unpeated Scotch, asked her if she could remember any particular brand he’d ordered at a restaurant. “Macallan, I think.”
“Right, Macallan,” Richard said, and grabbed a Scotch at random off the top shelf and handed it to her. “Get him this. He’ll love it. Just like Macallan but a little bit better.”
“You sure?” she said.
“Trust me,” Richard said, then thought, I could do this for a living. Easy peasy. The bottle he’d handed to the woman came inside a very tasteful box, and he could tell that she was impressed.
“All right,” she said. “Sold.”
“And if it doesn’t work out with your new friend, I’d be happy to take his place.”
The woman frowned. “You’re married,” she said, looking down at his hand.
“I wear a ring,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I’m married.”
“It usually does,” she said, and headed toward the front of the store.
Richard whispered, “Cunt,” and wondered if she heard him. He thought he saw a twitch in her upper back.
From the second shelf up from the bottom he grabbed a bottle of J&B for himself, then waited a couple of minutes to give the woman a chance to buy her overpriced swill and get away from the big bad wolf. When he got to the checkout himself, he almost told the teller—an old guy with a mustache stained yellow from cigarettes—that he should get a commission for talking the previous customer into a hundred-dollar bottle, but decided against it.