Dream Girl(61)

“But—how could you know I would have an accident?”

She sighs, hitches her chair closer to his bed. He can’t help himself, he flinches.

“That was never the plan. It was going to be all letters and phone calls. But then you fell.”

There was a letter! Then he realizes how silly it is to feel triumphant about being right about the letter.

“So we improvised.”

“Are you a nurse in real life?”

“No, I was working as a barista at the Fort Avenue Starbucks. But you’d be surprised what you can learn on the Internet. There’s a lot of information for people who have to be caretakers because someone in their family has had a fall. Most people can’t afford private nurses, you know.”

Is she actually resentful of the fact that he’s been paying her a good wage for a job she’s not certified to do? Is this some kind of boomer-millennial warfare?

“But—why—what happened tonight?”

“Victoria found Margot’s phone in your office when she arrived yesterday morning. I had left it out by mistake.”

“Why would Victoria call me on Margot’s phone, then? It was Victoria, right?” He is hearing the voice now, pitched lower than Victoria’s mousy squeak, capable of declarative sentences. How easily he had been fooled. Maybe the problem was that he didn’t hear women.

“No—I mean, yes, Victoria was the one who usually called you, but I was the one who called the last time. I guess I left that part out. Margot’s phone was in her bag. I had wiped it, it was safe, I was going to sell it to Gazelle for a little money. I don’t know why I played that trick on you that night. I guess I wanted to see where your head was at. Anyway, I left Margot’s phone out in the spare bedroom where I sit at night because I didn’t think Tory went in there. Yesterday morning, she did.”

“Yet the phone was”—what was the word she had used?—“wiped. Why would Tory even notice it?”

“It has a fancy case, a Louis Vuitton, something called the Eye Trunk. It costs almost fifteen hundred dollars new. I guess she got suspicious. At any rate, while I was here last night, she searched my room back at our apartment and she found Margot’s purse. Victoria came here to talk to me and she got kind of hysterical. She couldn’t be reasoned with.”

Reasoned with. Yes, it’s so frustrating to argue with someone who can’t be reasonable about the fact that you’re covering up a murder.

“You told me you threw the purse in the harbor.”

A shrug. “Again, I thought it was a harmless lie. I had hoped to sell it online.”

His head hurts so much, he has all the fogginess of the drugs without the benefit of sleep. He feels as if he is diving, diving, diving, going so deep he no longer remembers what he’s looking for.

“Aileen, did I kill Margot?”

“Yes, so you should understand how accidents can happen.”

An accident. How does one accidentally hit someone with a large, heavy piece of bric-a-brac until she’s dead? It’s not as if Victoria could have run into the Hartwell Prize or tripped and fallen on it. Aileen notices that he is staring at the statuette, still on his bedside table. She takes it to the kitchen sink, begins washing it. He considers asking her if she knows the proper way to clean an object made of brass and marble. He decides to stay silent.

“Maybe we should get married,” says his not–Lady Macbeth as she scrubs busily.

“What?”

“If we marry, neither one can testify against the other. I mean, it would be in name only. I’m simply being practical. Not that different from people marrying each other so one can have a green card.”

He wants to scream. Only who would hear him and, if anyone did, what would happen? He is a killer and now a co-conspirator in a second homicide. He let a woman clean up his mess and things have only gotten messier.

“I once had to research spousal privilege, for a book. It’s a little more complex than most people believe.” This is not true. He is basing his knowledge of spousal privilege on an episode of The Sopranos, which he has been watching in bowdlerized reruns on some cable channel.

“Hmmm,” she says, drying the prize. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Because no one’s asking anything.”

For now.

“Aileen—or should I call you Leenie?”

“Either is fine.”

“Can I have my pills?”

“Yes. And at some point, I’ll drive Tory’s car to long-term parking at the airport, then take the light rail back into the city, paying cash.”

This, too, had featured in a Sopranos episode, Gerry realizes. And in the local story he had researched, hoping to use it as a springboard to a novel. The man’s ex-wife’s car had been found in long-term parking, but at Reagan National. The supposition was that he had driven there, then taken the subway to Washington’s Union Station and paid cash for a ticket on the regional train, thereby avoiding any kind of electronic trail.

Isn’t it amazing the things one can learn on YouTube? Isn’t it amazing the things one can learn from art?





1999




GRETCHEN’S MATCHING SUITCASES—no wheeled luggage for her, not when she had a set of beautiful leather bags that had been presented to her over a series of birthdays and Christmases, from ages fourteen to eighteen—were lined up in the hall outside their apartment from smallest to tallest, almost like the von Trapp children getting ready to sing.