Dream Girl(51)

“Anyway, that’s how she got back in. And that means if anyone ever pulls the security footage from that night, they will see her returning in the middle of the night, but there will be no footage of her leaving a second time.”

Aileen’s eyes widen. “Then we have to do something about that security footage.”

“No. NO. That’s a fatal error. There are hours of footage and, as of now, there’s no one saying she came back at all, so no one’s looking at the tape. We do nothing.”

“I don’t know, maybe there’s a way to erase the footage. I saw this TV show recently where someone used a magnet—”

“We do nothing,” he says sternly. “Every action carries a risk. Inaction has far less. If it were to be discovered, we would both say, plausibly, that we have no memory of her returning to the apartment, that we heard nothing and saw nothing. It’s not on us to explain why she’s on the footage, coming back later that night. Real life is filled with things that don’t make sense.”

“Right,” she says. Yet she still seems angry and affronted. “I was only trying to help. I’m in this up to my neck, you know.”

Not an appealing image, Aileen in something up to her neck.

“I don’t mean to sound bossy,” he says, even as he thinks: I am your boss. “But I was interviewed first; my version has to be the official one. I was here, the detective visited, I’ve started the story. Certain things are set in stone and cannot be revised. It’s like a serial novel. We can’t pull anything back. Now, what was it that you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh, not tell,” she says. “Ask.”

He waits, but she is suddenly tongue-tied, shy.

“Yes?” he prods.

“You know, I really hate parking on the street when I come here. If you were to get a parking place in the building, I could use it.”

“I have a space, the one that is deeded to the apartment. But my mother’s car is in it and I can’t do anything with it until her estate clears probate.” His mother’s car is a 2010 Mercedes-Benz that needs body work and repairs to the engine. He had it towed to the garage to get it out of the elements up in North Baltimore.

“Can’t you get a second space?”

“I could, but it’s expensive.”

“How much?”

“I don’t recall the exact figure. I know only that each unit here comes with one deeded spot, but the second one is dear—they were trying to discourage two-vehicle households, which is funny, given how unwalkable this neighborhood is.”

“Hmmmm. I just thought—I’m so scared at night, when I walk those three or four blocks. Scared and cold.”

“Spring is coming. And it’s staying light later.”

“Gerry.”

She has never used his first name before. Now that she has, he realizes what is happening—the bill has come due. She cleaned up his mess, and she expects to be compensated. No such thing as a free lunch. No such thing as a free accomplice. Everyone always has an agenda. He stares at the cats frolicking on Aileen’s tablet cover, which is peeking out of her knitting bag. One, a black one with round eyes, seems to be staring back at him, taunting him, stopping just short of sticking its tongue out at him. I know you, he thinks. I have seen you before.

“Is the parking space all you require, Aileen?”

“For now,” she says.





2014




“YOU’RE NOT FROM HERE, ARE YOU?”

Gerry was in the hotel bar. He didn’t really want a drink—if it were alcohol he had required, he could have remained at the reception held in his honor after his talk that night at the university. But Gerry’s standing joke was that his fee for speaking doubled if he was expected to make small talk.

Still, he had dutifully made the rounds, put in a respectable forty-five minutes at the reception and then retreated to his hotel, driven by a student. He asked the student if he knew the story of David Halberstam’s death in a car accident, while being driven by a student. The student did and they had made the twenty-minute trip in silence, which was what Gerry wanted.

He had been to Columbus several times before, visiting the Thurber House, once even staying in the no-frills apartment on the top floor, the very place where the bed had fallen. He had loved Thurber when he was young. He even liked the television show that used Thurber’s drawings, My World and Welcome to It. He would have preferred to be in the Thurber House right now. It was quiet at night, near downtown yet removed. Hotels made him feel lonely. So he sat at the bar and drank Bushmills, which he had taken up years ago because his father disdained it. “Protestant whiskey,” said his father, a Jameson man. Gerry didn’t even like it that much.

The woman who had spoken to him had come in after he did, chosen a stool three seats down, ordered a white wine, and taken out a book. She looked familiar at first, then he decided she just had one of those faces. Pretty, but not shockingly so. Light eyes, blond hair worn in a ragged bob. But the brows and lashes were dark. Eyes put in with a dirty finger, his mother would have said. An Irish expression, more meaningful before all women, everywhere, began darkening their eyelashes, outlining their eyes as if they were Cleopatra, wearing false eyelashes. Women were increasingly fake these days. Gerry liked real women—slender, small-breasted, with their natural hair color.