There must be some mista.., p.7
There Must Be Some Mistake, page 7
“Let me Google him,” I said, clicking randomly on the keyboard in front of me.
“Stop it,” she said. “We get some odd people up here, you know, tourists and guys passing through, but he was a straight shooter.” Diane didn’t pause there, went right on with her story, telling me that she took Dan home and slept with him.
“Thrilled to hear it,” I said.
“I mean, he wasn’t Michael-damn-Douglas, but he paid attention. We had dinner at my house and after that we drove through Woonsocket. He showed me some places I’d never seen before, showed me around. He’d been up here since college.”
“How much of this do I really want to know?” I said. “You met your boyfriend in a pet store, went to a bar, took him home and screwed, then took the Woonsocket tour.”
“Pay attention,” she said. “I’m getting to it. So he showed me his place. This gorgeous little cottage nestled back in the woods.”
“Whoops,” I said. “Getting scary.”
“Not at all. It was lovely. We stayed there awhile, a few days, and I was, like, perfectly content. I was happy for the first time in a long while. It was, like, out of my hands. Do you get that, Wallace? I can’t really tell you how relieved I was. I was hanging with Dan, and I started seeing the future. I mean, how the future could be. I was on cloud nine. It was sort of like the old days,” she said. “You and me in the old days.”
I remembered that, those days, that feeling, that comfort, the sense of everything in its place, the rightness of it all, when the winter is loved and the summer is all the sun there is. When you want that specific moment, that time, that place, that situation, forever. You can’t force it or wish it, and praying doesn’t help. You wait, you keep going, you hope maybe it’ll come around again. That flawless equilibrium.
“I get that,” I said. “That way of things.”
“I was comfortable for the first time since the divorce,” she said. “I had something that worked for me, that made everything balance. And it was strange but amazing and satisfying—I mean, I figured I was in for the duration, know what I’m saying? Dan was going to be it for me. I was one hundred percent with the program. Do you know that feeling, Wallace? Do you remember it? Everything slipping into place?”
“I do,” I said.
“And then bam! He’s gone. The whole thing’s gone. Like that. Snapped away.” She paused for a minute, as if that was the end of what she had to tell me, that was the reason for the five o’clock call. “I did all the stuff after that. Talked to the people, arranged stuff. Dan didn’t have anybody else, so I took care of it. I was kind of in shock. I walked through it.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “Really.”
“I know you are,” she said. “But now I really miss him. I miss everything about him.”
I could hear her voice break on the phone, like I’d heard it break scores of times before in calls since the divorce. It didn’t always happen, but I’d heard it often enough. It made me feel dreadful, like I’d destroyed her life, and nothing could be done. I hated hearing it but couldn’t bear to say anything.
“See, I had this whole new world, I was finally home again in that tiny cottage with a man who needed me. It was us, day after day, fooling around more than seemed healthy. He was striking in that dark way. He was a little bit sullen, theatrically, as if life had disappointed him. We were like children together.”
I raised some eyebrows she couldn’t see, and said, “I got nothing. I’m on empty here.”
“I know that, Wallace,” she said. “Of course I know that. But this is what’s happening with me, and that’s why I’m reassessing everything, feeling everything again—a richness that I have not felt in a while, and I wanted to tell you. The world is fresh again, it’s all bits and pieces of a thing I had forgotten, that had all but disappeared, something I rediscovered. And I thought you would want to know about it, I thought it was something you should know. This thing is possible, this new thing—”
I made some guttural noise and held on to the phone there at my desk, stayed silent and heard Diane crying, and after a while, after a few minutes, I heard her place the receiver softly back in its cradle.
11
iPhone
THE NEIGHBORHOOD settled down some. The police were always around, and so it seemed things were safer than ever. People figured the cops would leave, so that’s what they were worried about. Parker kept sending e-mails to the residents “updating” us on the developments, of which there were none, apparently. Chantal had recovered completely from her “incident,” and we were all “sorry” to learn of the departure of Forest Ng’s family following on his “tragic” accident. The rest of the Ngs, it turned out, were going back to Florida and California, whence they had come, and their home had been purchased by the Changs, a local family who already owned one house in Forgetful Bay and needed another, apparently for their relatives who were about to join the family business, a po’boy sandwich shop they ran in town. A new location was to be opened, staffed by this new wing of the family.
Morgan came to visit, and I reported the whole of the conversation with Diane, the life and death of true love, which I did not report in a skeptical light, rather the contrary. Morgan scolded me anyway for making light of her stepmother’s love affair. “It’s easy for you,” she said. “Not so easy for women at her age.”
“I’m not making light,” I said. “And it’s not easy for me, either. What are you talking about?”
“Jilly,” she said.
I handed her the box of pretzels we were both eating out of. “That’s something else. It’s not like I’m making a move on her,” I said. “You guys, for heaven’s sake.”
“A move?”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “Gimme one.” I pushed a broken half pretzel back at her and waited for her to fish a full-grown pretzel from the box. “Besides, Jilly’s been there one way or another for years.”
Morgan leaned into me, close, playfully getting up in my face. “Yeah, and what is the deal with you two, anyway?”
“You don’t know? You’re around, like, all the time when she’s here, you see everything, and you have to ask? For years now, since the divorce, maybe before the divorce, you’ve watched us, and you never once asked.”
“I know,” Morgan said. “Aren’t I strange?”
“You are a strange daughter,” I said.
“She’s old enough to be my mother.”
“If she had you at thirteen, maybe.”
“Happens,” Morgan said.
“Are you taking me out to dinner or somewhere?” I said. “To the store? You want to go to the store? I have to go to Best Buy and get a new iPhone case.” This was a little bit of a sore point with Morgan, since I already had two dozen iPhone cases.
“Great,” she said. “You’ve spent more on cases than the phone.”
“Free country,” I said. “It’s my fortune and I’ll et cetera.”
“Quit that,” she said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.” She shouldered her purse, which was gigantic, and headed for the door. “We’ll get dinner. I’ll let you buy me some new running shoes.”
So we went out. It was near sundown, and the wind was up, cool. I watched her go down the stairs in front of me and thought how lovely she was, how graceful. Seeing her made me happy.
At dinner we talked about her classes, about Diane’s troubles, my meds, the TV shows we were watching, the crap on the news—all the usual, all worn out, of course, but we could eat and nod at each other about these subjects.
She asked, as she often did, about my father, who had practiced architecture in Houston for years. Morgan had not known him when he was alive but knew him through things I’d kept—renderings, models, drawing equipment, articles in Texas Architect and other magazines. So she started toying with architecture early, way before she was old enough to think about what she wanted to do as an adult. She liked playing with the tools of the trade, the drawing tools, and as a kid she would go into my office and make drawings using his old equipment. I showed her how to use a T square and triangle, how to use French curves, the different kinds of pencils for different kinds of drawings. I taught her to print like an architect, those precise, boxy letters, striking and evocative, which she still used all these years later, for everything from checks to grocery lists. I had learned lettering from my father, but mine had long since gone to seed. I envied her hand. I was proud and envious in equal measures. I suppose that’s common with fathers and daughters.
“There haven’t been any more rude events out here?” she asked.
“Not that I’ve heard of,” I said. “Chantal is the strangest. The dancing woman was a Parker misadventure. No one ever said anything else about it, but the whispers are that he and the wife are duking it out these days.”
“Where did the security people take that woman?”
“Nobody knows. He knows, of course. They work for him, so sweeping her away is an indication of something.”
“So what about Chantal?”
“I like her. She’s nice, funny. Easy to be with. I never got the whole story about the break-in and all. I’m guessing it was a one-nighter gone wrong, but she’s not talking.”
“Bad romance,” Morgan said.
“If I were a betting man,” I said.
We were eating at a gas-station-turned-Mexican-restaurant. The conversion was well done. All those big windows in the interior, the wall opened up into the two automobile bays, those, too, having new all-glass overhead doors that could be opened up onto a patio. The food was nicely grimy, too, which was a break from the usual franchise stuff. This was Tex-Mex, but made by a hearty crew not afraid to push the envelope greasewise, even though they went easy on the name—it was called Old Mexico, which I remembered was a restaurant in Houston when I was growing up.
“I love this place,” Morgan said. “They ought to call it Pulque Mi Dedo.”
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“Look it up,” she said, and went on eating. “The thing with Chantal could be scary. I mean, even if it was a lover it’s not a good thing in the neighborhood. Mr. What’s’isname wouldn’t approve.”
“Mr. Green Jeans? Mr. Who?”
“I forget his name. Lovely day in the neighborhood,” she said.
“Rogers,” I said. “And it’s a beautiful day.”
“That’s a mistake. Anyway, you ought to ask around, you know? Interview the folks? Give you something new to do. You can be like a PI, like Mangum.”
“Magnum, I think,” I said.
“What I meant,” Morgan said, waving a heavily laden tortilla chip at me. “You could do that, yes? Wheedle around and get the lowdown?”
“You figure that’s a good use of my time, do you?”
“Well, it’s something. You could do worse. I’m not criticizing—”
“Of course not.”
“Jilly could be your sidekick. Something you guys could do together while you’re not doing other things that you aren’t doing anyway.”
“Are you staying at the house tonight, or are you returning to your high-class university?”
“I’m with you for the duration,” she said. “I need to stop at Target on the way home, though, pick up a few necessities.”
“Maybe I can find a bumper case there,” I said. “I’m thinking of changing the color of my phone from black to white with this .4-millimeter 9H bulletproof-glass screen protector I found, but I need a case that wraps a little over the front edge so that the edge of the glass isn’t exposed.”
“You are a sick lizard,” she said. “Why not buy a white phone?”
“Well, what color is yours? Maybe we could swap. I can’t tell what color yours is in that monster case you use, what’s that called?”
“OtterBox,” she said. “Defender.”
“Can’t even tell what color your phone is in that full enclosure.”
“White,” she said. “It’s pearly white.”
“Fancy that,” I said.
12
Cops
CHANTAL AND I were up in the apartment over the restaurant. It was nearly two in the afternoon, and she’d been working on whatever she worked on for the restaurant while I slept. She looked fresh and clean, bright eyed. I didn’t. We were at the table, sitting on opposite sides of the table, which was Knoll—Saarinen, maybe. Or maybe that sculptor whose name I never could remember—Bertoia. Harry Bertoia. No, it was the tulip table. I was right the first time.
Two police cars turned into the drive and pulled to a stop. Four cops emerged, two in suits, two in uniforms. We could see them from the kitchen windows. The cars were marked. We watched the four men rearrange themselves. They were leaning back into their cars to get things, one fellow twisting into his jacket, the uniformed guys spitting and adjusting their gun belts, straightening out their too-tight policemen’s trousers.
“What do you figure they’re here for?” I said.
“Never can tell,” Chantal said. She went down the hall to the little space she used as an upstairs office, then came back. “I don’t want you to be surprised,” she said. “You should know that my name isn’t really Chantal.”
I was surprised. Plenty. But I said, “Your name is not Chantal.”
“It is now, but it wasn’t always,” she said. “I changed it. I’ve lived here awhile, in Texas, but before that I was in Mississippi. Biloxi, there along the coast.”
“You’re from Mississippi,” I repeated.
“Not from there, but I lived there.”
“So what do the police want?” I said. “Is there something I should know?”
“Always,” she said. She seemed a little rattled. I hadn’t seen her like that before. “I used to live louder, I guess you’d say, but now it’s slow and easy, and being quiet, stick to the shadows. Suits me best these days. I gotta change these clothes.”
She left the kitchen and went to her bedroom and I buttoned my shirt and thought about getting my shoes but decided to do without and went into the front hall where I could get a better look outside. A minute later she came out of the bedroom straightening her hair. She looked thin, coming toward me, real thin, even gaunt. She reached my side and looked out the window at the four men below. One of the suits was finishing a smoke and shot the butt into the air toward the coast road. The four of them exchanged a look and some remarks, and three headed for the door. The fourth, one of the uniforms, went under the house.
“This looks like no fun,” I said, which was the truth. Unvarnished. I was not a fan of the police, or, more accurately, I was a fan of them out doing their duty but not visiting me and mine.
“They look businesslike,” Chantal said. “Don’t they look businesslike?”
“Maybe they’re just here to go over the attack again,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I had some trouble in Mississippi years ago. Whenever they show up like this it takes me back.”
“So, what was the trouble?” I was rebuttoning my shirt because I’d gotten it wrong the first time. It was a striped shirt from Ralph Lauren, blue. Heavily wrinkled at that moment.
She put her arm around my shoulder, pulled me to her. “Tell you later,” she said. “It’s a long story.” She had that Chantal smell in her hair, her skin, that scent I’d become attached to. We stood together at the edge of the window until the knock hit the door.
We welcomed the police inside, and they were very polite. They wanted to talk to Chantal about the “gangland style” murder of her late husband, Bo Del Mar. Chantal made coffee, and we sat with them in the living room of the apartment over the Velodrome. We were forthcoming, at least Chantal was. I was quiet and scattered, sat there fiddling with my hands.
She’d married an army guy named Bo Del Mar, who, it turned out, accused her of endless infidelities, which, according to her, were imagined, but that, apparently, made no difference to him when he was beating her. She would flee the house in the middle of the night and he would follow, catch her, bring her home, and beat her more. One night he pressed a steam iron into her back, leaving a scar still visible all these years later. I’d seen it. She’d said it was an accident. She went over all this with the officers. What they knew was that her second husband had been killed in his sleep in their bedroom. Chantal, who was then Greta Del Mar, was a suspect, as spouses are when the mate is killed, and after an investigation she was arrested and charged. Then, once the trial started, the DA suddenly withdrew the charges and asked that the case be dismissed with prejudice, meaning she could not be charged again. So much time had passed by now that she hoped she’d heard the last of it, but here they were again.
What she told me later, but did not discuss with the cops, was that she had eventually decided she needed to defend herself. It made sense that she would do that, but for me it was frightening. She told me she got a twenty-two-caliber pistol from a guy who worked odd jobs for her, a Gulf War vet named Dave Roberts, and she shot her husband in the temple while he slept, drunk and passed out, in their bed. With good reason, she thought. Self-defense. After years of beatings, drunken rages, hiding from him in and under neighbors’ houses, of trying to divorce him and being threatened with everything from strangulation to being washed in gas and set on fire—a method Bo Del Mar said was a common punishment for bad women in the Middle East—she had done the unthinkable. “I shot him,” she said. “I put him to sleep for good.”
Her lawyer, she told me, was an ex-prosecutor who was so successful in that job that the street in front of the courthouse was named for him, and he was every bit as good as his reputation. He was later implicated in a Dixie Mafia multiple-murder case but was eventually absolved of any connection to the scandal that ensued.
As Chantal told the story, after her charges were dropped she changed her name and worked as a low-level executive for one of the Biloxi casinos when the casinos there were still relatively new, dodging the hangers-on and fourth-tier TV personalities who seemed to drift through the neon-lit gambling palaces and weather-vulnerable condos that dotted the beach. It was after one of the big storms that hit Biloxi every few years, so it was a whole new coast, empty by day, fog ridden by night, splashed with blistered light, silly white limos endlessly trailing up and down the beach highway, a place overgrown with and much in love with any new Gulf Coast celebrity, among which Chantal was often counted most notorious because of the publicity of her case. After the arrest there had been support parties in penthouse condominiums, gambling binges in which Chantal and her friends hit the blackjack tables with more money than seemed reasonable; there had been boating parties and too many mornings seen from dark to light. TV people called, networks wanting interviews for the likes of 20/20 and Dateline. And the case became stupidly famous, so that some nights Chantal remained hidden in her place and watched herself on program after program. The discussions of the case on television were wildly off, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone, and all skated on, the case on television looking nothing like the case in the court, the crime nothing like the crime that occurred, the horror more inane and less complicated than a woman pushed to extremes taking a pistol and standing over her husband in their barely lit bedroom late one night, squeezing the trigger.
