Sunburn: A Novel(24)
Unnatural.
He tells his client to get out of his head. The husband, too. Didn’t he use those same words or something similar? Shut up, everybody. She’s the most natural woman he’s ever met. She’s all the elements. Fire, water, earth, air.
“I feel safe with you,” she says. “With you, I wanted to feel the movement of the bridge. I know you won’t let me go over the edge.”
And he feels awful because his job, in a sense, is to push her over the edge.
14
Irving curses silently when he sees the latest invoice from Adam. His curses are Yiddish—behema, putz, schmuck. No one who works for him—the plump, gap-toothed black woman who sits at the desk by the front door, Susie, or the young handyman, Johnny, who does a little of this, a little of that—would understand these words if he spoke them aloud, but he still will not speak them outside his head. He has never liked crude language and he has no respect for those who use it.
But Adam Bosk! Adam Bosk, who came so highly recommended. Behema, putz, schmuck. Look at these bills. Mileage to and from Baltimore, yet also a $75 cab receipt for the same trip, plus parking. Irving isn’t blindsided by these charges. Adam, dutiful man that he is, explained what happened before he sent the monthly invoice on Friday. He played it well, Irving has to give him that. And thank God he didn’t follow her up Rogers Avenue, because Irving knows where she was headed even if Adam doesn’t. If Adam had seen her destination, he might have asked some questions, and while Irving is quick on his feet, he hasn’t figured out how to make a few pesky facts go away. It’s not as if Adam needs to know everything. The basic outline of what Irving has told him is correct. This nafkeh ripped him off. Now he has a chance to make her pay him back, but he needs leverage first. That’s Adam’s job, even if he doesn’t quite know it. Find what she fears losing.
The trip to Baltimore, her little game with the cab, is also proof that she’s keeping Adam in the dark—and not just about her real name. That pleases Irving, because if she’s bothering to keep such little secrets, it means he must be right about the big secret. But how much more money can he expend when he’s not 100 percent sure of any return? Maybe he should cut his losses, admit that this whole quest is as much about pride as unfinished business.
He doesn’t usually let emotion dictate his business moves. But it seemed so simple at first. Gather some intel on her current situation, then blackmail her. He wasn’t greedy, but a 10 percent finder’s fee seemed about right. Twenty, to make up for what she did ten years ago. Only who could anticipate that she would walk out on her family? That husband better watch his back, Irving thinks, and maybe the kid, too. Ditmars once suggested to him that the issues with the other kid, those were her fault.
Eight weeks ago, the plan had seemed foolproof. Buddy up with the husband, then blackmail her with the threat of exposure. When the family took off for the beach all of a sudden, Irving had agreed with Adam that such a friendship would be easier to jump-start at the shore. Easier for strangers to come into your life on vacation. Then they would return to Baltimore and Adam would insinuate himself into the family’s routines, maybe start double-dating with them, whatever people do. The husband, even if he knew about her current scam, was the best way in. She was a sharp cookie and her life as a stay-at-home mom didn’t offer her much exposure to new friends, male or female. That’s another reason Irving thinks he’s right about her. The very lack of friends, the way she keeps to herself. She has secrets. And now that she’s left the new husband, she has to be on the verge of leading Irving—finally, finally—to an almost literal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
So why hasn’t she? Is he throwing good money after bad? What does that phrase even mean? If you’ve spent bad money, you continue to spend bad money, right? The money doesn’t become good once you realize how foolish you’ve been.
He walks to the front of his office, peers out the window at Route 40. This strip of commercial highway was never nice, but it had been respectable in his childhood. There had been a Korvette’s across the street—whatever happened to Korvette’s? Also a reliable place for steamed crabs, back in the day. Then that soft ice cream place closer to Ingleside. Gino’s, Hot Shoppes Jr. Now everything’s just a little sleazier, a little trashier. Through the 1970s, there was a girls’ school, looked like a castle to him, near the city-county line. But that closed long ago. Why do things have to change? And why is it always for the worse? Yes, he gets that the world has to keep moving, but movement is not necessarily progress. They put a man on the moon, so what? They still can’t cure cancer. If they could cure cancer, he wouldn’t be a widower at age sixty-three.
He turns to Susie, typing away.
“You know what never changes, Susie?”
“What, Mr. L?” she asks, still typing. Such a good girl, industrious, capable, never idle. Is it okay to call her girl? You can’t call a black man boy, he knows that. This world makes his head hurt.
“People. What they wear changes. How they talk, maybe. But people never change and that has made me a rich man by most people’s measure.”
Although not, he thinks, as rich as he should be and that’s on her. She stole his money, he can’t help seeing it that way, even if no cop would agree. Would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that chance encounter last fall. Then she surfaced, hiding inside a suburban mom, and he saw that she was playing a very long game. Maybe waiting for him to die? She was going to be disappointed then. He’s only sixty-three, which might seem old to her, but his people are long-lived, their memories sharp to the end. Now and then, especially when he’s paying Adam Bosk’s invoices, he starts to forget why he wants to get her back, why it matters so much, then he reminds himself: It’s the principle. Even if no one else knows or remembers what she did to him, he does—and he’s going to get what was his. That’s the thing about being rich. You can afford a few principles.