Sunburn: A Novel(29)
“No, she’s not spending any money. That’s different. You watch me for—how long has it been since she hit Belleville? Nine weeks? You watch me nine weeks and you’ll think I have no money, either. I dress like crap, I drive a ten-year-old Cadillac, I eat ready-made egg salad sandwiches from the deli, with a cream soda. But I’m rich, Adam. Rich enough to pay you for weeks on a job that shouldn’t take anywhere near this long.”
“We’ve been over this. No one could have foreseen her picking up stakes and starting a new life somewhere other than Baltimore.”
“Fair enough. I didn’t hire you for your psychic abilities. Although maybe I should have gone to that fortune-teller, the one at the corner of Northern Parkway and Park Heights. Everything in that neighborhood changes, but she’s been there forever, so she must know something. A scam artist, but I bet her customers don’t know it. They’re happy. Me, I am not a happy customer. But then, I don’t enjoy being scammed.”
Adam takes offense, despite the fact that Irving is right to doubt him. But how could he help falling in love with her? It’s not his fault that he thought he could enjoy the sex for what it was, get the info he had been hired to find, and then move on. It wasn’t the sex that made him fall for her. It was something in her eyes, when they went for lunch in Baltimore that day. She needed him. Needed someone, and why not him? He could take care of her—if she would only let him. He is taking care of her, even if she doesn’t realize it. Irving promised to keep things clean, no violence. Adam never would have taken this job if he thought someone could be hurt. What if Irving hires someone who’s willing to be a little rougher? Adam will be here to protect her.
“You can’t prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove someone doesn’t have money stashed away. But I’ve gotten close enough to her to feel confident on this score.”
“How close, sonny boy?”
Irving speaks in the rhythms of a grandfather, which he is. But Irving never sounds more dangerous than when he’s trying to sound affectionate, paternal.
“We work together. At the bar. I told you that.”
“What else you do together? Am I going to have to hire a PI to follow the PI?”
“Look, I’m trying to be responsible about your money. It may be time for you to terminate this job.”
“And if I do, I guess you’ll come back to Baltimore?”
What does Irving know? Nothing. Yet Adam is getting nervous. “I usually take a big trip after a long job. New Zealand, maybe. Or I’ll join the peepers in New England, come fall. I want to go to Egypt.”
“I hear Belleville is beautiful in autumn.”
“Irving, you got something to say to me?”
“No, but I got some info for you. Maybe I should have shared it from the start. But in my own way, I thought I was being fair to her, that it would color your interactions if you knew too much. You like movies? I’ll send you a movie.”
“I don’t have a VHS—”
“I’ll send one of those, too. You really need to see this movie.”
“Irving—”
“Watch,” he says. “Listen. Then we’ll talk. Fast-forward to the thirty-seven-minute mark or you’ll cry from boredom.”
*
A package arrives at the motel the next day, Adam’s day off. “Heavy,” says the guy at the front desk, who’s always into everyone’s business. It’s a bitch, figuring out how to connect it to the old-fashioned television and Adam has to drive to the Radio Shack in Salisbury twice to get the right cords. It’s almost nine o’clock when he pops the unmarked black cassette into the slot and sees a not-very-professional title card. “In the Name of Love.”
“What the—?” He remembers Irving’s advice, fast-forwards. Goes too far, but he recognizes her, jumbled as she is, her brilliant red hair covered with a scarf. The name on the screen, though, isn’t one he remembers. Pauline Ditmars. Who’s Ditmars? He realizes then that Irving never told him the name of her first husband. He said it wasn’t important.
Irving also said he had run a LexisNexis on Pauline Hansen and given Adam the full results. Adam believed him. Why wouldn’t you believe a client who ran an insurance brokerage, had access to all kinds of info, especially a tightfisted one like Irving, who wouldn’t want to waste money paying Adam to do things he could do for himself? He said she had cheated the stepdaughter from her first marriage out of a life insurance settlement and that she was probably working another scam now. Irving had it on good authority that she had swindled someone out of millions. Irving said.
Polly’s voice in the movie is toneless, almost robotic. He can barely believe it’s the same woman. She’s beaten down, joyless.
“By the end, he was hitting me almost every day. No, I didn’t tell the truth to the cops. He was a cop, no one was going to believe me. So I said there was an intruder. Well, they saw through that right away. Then when I tried to tell the truth, I had no credibility. They thought if I would lie about one thing, I’d lie about the other. He was a cop. I guess no one gets to kill a cop, not even his own wife.”
A narrator’s voice takes over: “Pauline now freely admits that she stabbed her husband while he slept. But she is a classic case of ‘battered women’s syndrome,’ driven to kill Burton Ditmars because she could not imagine any way to end the cycle of abuse, especially after he threatened to kill their disabled daughter.”