Dream Girl(64)

7:21. 7:22. 7:23. It was about to be his turn at the window.

No one really knew how this disease worked. They said it couldn’t be caught through casual contact, but how could they be sure? Would he be expected to take Luke’s hand? What would he say? Could Luke even hear?

7:24.

He stepped out of line and left the station just as the announcement for the New York–bound train began. He waited two days before he checked in with Tara and described his visit with the dying Luke.

“Was it hard,” Tara asked, “seeing the lesions on his face?”

“Yes,” Gerry said. “Very tough.”

“Gerry, there are no lesions on his face.”

Luke died a week later. Tara and Gerry never spoke again.





April




WITH VICTORIA GONE and, along with her, the framework of her Monday-through-Friday schedule, Gerry no longer knows what day of the week it is. He’s fine with that.

“Gerry?”

“Yes?” He still doesn’t like the sound of his name in Aileen—Leenie’s—mouth.

“We need to talk.”

Not about marriage, he hopes.

“Okay,” he says, not looking away from his downloaded copy of The Daughter of Time.

“Wouldn’t it make sense for you to give me Victoria’s money? Without her kicking in, it’s going to be hard for me to make rent and we pay rent on the fifteenth.”

“How do I give you Victoria’s money?” he says. “I don’t have access to it.”

“Her paycheck, I mean. If you’re not paying her, why not pay me double?”

He almost says yes. That’s how weak he is, how feeble he has become. He’s not thinking things through clearly. Luckily, he sees the flaw before he agrees.

“Aileen—”

“Leenie.”

God, this is exhausting. “Leenie, if anyone ever did a forensic accounting”—he thinks that’s the term—“and saw this huge increase in your salary, it would be very suspicious, don’t you think?”

As “Aileen,” Leenie had thought physically, like Rodin’s Thinker, all furrowed brow and bent body. Leenie stands stock-still, her chin on her hand.

“I can’t make rent,” she says.

“You could find another roommate, couldn’t you?”

“No, Victoria’s the only one on the lease. I had some credit problems a few years ago and we thought it better that way. Legally, I don’t have standing. I could get in trouble if I brought another tenant in.”

So she’s comfortable carving up bodies and disposing of them, but worries about being hauled into rent court.

“That is a tough situation,” he says, trying to sound sympathetic, “but I’m not sure how this is my problem.”

“If you hadn’t killed Margot, I wouldn’t have had to kill Victoria.”

Gerry is pretty sure there’s a fallacy lurking in that reasoning, but he can’t be bothered to find it. Instead he asks what he has asked before, hoping for a different answer.

“Did I kill Margot, Leenie? Did I? What really happened that night?”

She stomps downstairs, offended. She has bashed in the head of her friend, but she apparently takes great exception to the suggestion that she might have plunged a letter opener into Margot’s eye.

Not that even Gerry can persuade himself she did it. Why would she have killed Margot? Did Margot, of all people, figure out what was going on and return to the apartment to confront Aileen? No, that makes no sense whatsoever.

The landline rings. Thiru.

“I’ve received your royalties and gone over the accounting. Any chance you’ll ever surrender your love for paper checks and let me use ACH to deposit these things?”

“No—” he begins. Then he remembers that Victoria was the one who deposited his checks. He does not want to entrust this task to Aileen, does not want her to see what Dream Girl puts back into his coffers every six months. “Yes. Yes, I think I will change. How does one go about that?”

“I just need some basic information. Routing number, account number. Your assistant can—”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“Victoria is gone. Stopped coming to work, with zero notice. But I can give you that information now. I keep a checkbook in the drawer of my nightstand.”

Gerry realizes that lying, once it has begun, never stops. He has lied to the detective about Margot and now he has lied to Thiru about Victoria. In their long partnership, he has never before lied to Thiru, although he was sometimes obscure about the infidelity that ended his first marriage. Thiru would have been scandalized, not by Gerry’s adultery, but by his ability to screw up what most men would have considered a dream scenario.

Thiru assumed men were unfaithful, he called it the nature of the beast. But all Gerry had ever wanted was to be good, not his father. For much of his life, he had been able to achieve this not inconsiderable goal. He considered the two episodes of adultery—the stupid fling with Shannon Little, the one-night stand when he was married to Sarah—to be forced errors. The enormous guilt he still felt about both was proof that he was not a sociopath.

“Gerry Andersen, giving up paper checks. It’s almost like that Internet meme that goes around from time to time.”