Generation of Liars (29 page)

“Yeah, I guess you could say I have
a boyfriend. Mega cute too.” I dug in my bag for my cigarettes and banged one
out of the pack. Queenie had an assortment of prim red roses and baby’s breath
sitting inside buckets filled with water to keep them fresh.

“Hey, Queenie, how come they call
them baby’s breath?” I took a long, slow drag of my cigarette like I always do
when I’m pondering something deeply philosophical.

“Only ‘cause they are
sweet-smelling like a baby’s sweet, angel breath.”

“You know, I’ve never actually smelled
a real baby’s breath. I always just assumed it would smell like mush peas.”

Queenie shot me a curious look, but
whatever sassy diatribe she was about to embark on was shattered by the sound
of someone shouting, “Hey, Alice,” from the window two stories up above our
heads. Our eyes parachuted up.

I spotted Sara Cinnamon poking her
head out of her apartment. “What are you doing back here, now? Treating
yourself to flowers?”

“Actually,” I called up to Sara,
“they aren’t for me. The petals are for a guy I’m seeing.”

Sara dizzied her head back and
forth in disbelief. “No way. Get out of here! Alice Fix, of all the girls in
the world, with a boyfriend? What’s with the Disney princess shtick all of the
sudden? What happened to your tough girl
,
I don’t-need-no-man
,
independent woman attitude?”

“Sara, you can still be an
independent woman and have a boyfriend. You just have to play it right. I mean,
look, I’m buying my man flowers. A healthy relationship needs to be give and
take, a coming together of equals.”

“Yeah, the last guy I dated, it was
more like a coming together of his fist with my left eye.”

“I remember that night, Sara,” I
said.

“We
all
remember that
night,” added Queenie. “Sara, you’re too pretty to let some man be busting up
all over your face. Listen to Alice here, she knows what she’s talking about.
Alice doesn’t take no shenanigans from no man, ain’t that right, Alice?” I made
a self-righteous nod and she continued. “A true man treats a woman like a
rose.” Queenie pulled one of her roses from the bucket. “See this rose here,
Miss Sara? A man’s got to start at the bottom and climb his way up through the
thorns, and only then does he get to enjoy the bloom on the rose. Miss Sara,
you’ve got to make your next man prove himself on the thorns before he goes
shoving his nose all up inside your bloom.” Queenie threw the rose up into the
air at Sara, who held her arms out of the window to catch it.

“Anyways, ladies, I should probably
wrap this up soon,” I told them. “I really want to make sure I see my boyfriend
today. And with my luck, my boss will call any minute and hijack my day with
some lame job, so I better be snappy with it.”

“Did you make your mind up about
which stems you want?” Queenie asked.

“How about a dozen of those red
roses you’ve got there.” I fussed for cash in my wallet. “Keep the thorns on
when you wrap them.”

Queenie smiled and tilted her
finger up at Sara. “See that, Miss Sara? Alice is listening.”

I thumped the cash into her hand.
“But don’t mix in any of that baby’s breath.”

*   
*    *

The sliding glass doors bumped open
and a stream of hot air from inside the building hit my skin. I suckled one
last puff of the cigarette that was between my thumb and pointer finger and
then dashed it into the metal ash tray guarding the doors. It was hard to
believe I was standing in front of the same ER doors I had walked through the
night I got shot out of the Eiffel Tower and met Ben for the first time.

On this particular afternoon, it
looked as though activity inside the ER was slow, and there were lots of
doctors standing around in green scrubs, chatting with clipboards at their
hips. It only took a minute for me to spot Ben, even though he had his back to
me. His crown, brimming with thick brown tassels of hair, always made him
recognizable.

Ben was leaning against the wall
with a clipboard down by his side and he was talking to somebody.
A hot,
curvy, golden-haired somebody
. I couldn’t see her face, the way the arch to
Intensive Care concealed all but a sliver of her back. It didn’t matter who she
was. It wouldn’t matter if she was wearing a black habit and a crucifix, she
was standing way too close to my boyfriend. Now she was hugging Ben. My fingers
choked the rose stems in my hand. I walked towards them, but once the hug was
over, she disappeared into the hallway. Ben turned around, and upon spotting
me, he froze.

He smiled uncomfortably. “Alice.”

“Who was that?”

“Who was who?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Who?” I
repeated. “Try the bottle blonde I just caught pawing at my boyfriend.”

“Oh, Alice, that was nothing. It
was an innocent hug. She is the daughter of one of my elderly patients. Her mom
had an adverse reaction to a new medicine, and she simply came to the hospital
to thank me for making a house call the other night.”

“Exactly what kind of house call
did you make?”

Ben steadied his hand over my
shoulder, as if to calm a wild, out of control mare. “Alice. Please. You know
how I feel about you. You’re the only girl for me. We need to be able to trust
each other. Frankly, coming to my work and throwing a jealous fit is a little
immature.”

I sunk a deep breath. “I’m sorry,
Ben, you’re right.” I stood on my tiptoes and popped a kiss onto his cheek. He
looked around the ER lobby, almost as if he was embarrassed to be seen with me.
“Are you okay, Ben?” I asked, feeling him pull away more quickly than I liked.

“I’m fine. It’s just that I’m
working right now.” His voice was so cold. “I know you like to keep your
business and personal lives separate, and maybe I do too.” I put the roses in
his hand and pulled back as a surge of rejected tears welled up inside me. “Why
are you looking at me that way, Alice?”

“I’m not -,” I stuttered.

“I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

 “Tonight.” My reply was
vacant. At that moment Ben felt so far away, like a stranger. I wanted the
whole hospital to disappear, the whole city, everything. I wanted the only
thing in the world to be me and Ben, sitting on my couch in the dark, laughing
and cuddling. But this was the real world. And in the real world Ben was a
respectable doctor, and I was just a lying, trashy girl with pink hair.

Ben’s name was paged over the
intercom and his eyes perked past the lobby, down the hall, where a patient was
being rolled in on a gurney.

“I really have to go. My shift ends
at nine, so come to my flat then.”

“I don’t know where you live.”

He pulled a prescription pad out
from his pocket and scribbled an address. “Nine o’clock, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, scanning the
address quickly and shoving it into my pocket.

I climbed into a taxi outside the
hospital. The driver asked me what address he was taking me to. I hesitated for
a moment, beginning to prattle off the address to my flat, but instead I gave
him the address for Motley’s house. It was almost making me nervous not to have
heard from Motley or Rabbit all day.

Chapter Twenty-six: Eavesdropping

T
HE
HOUSE WAS silent when I let myself inside. Since there was nothing to do, I
used the computer in Motley’s kitchen to log online. I checked my personal
email, which is usually quick since I have virtually no contact with the world
at large. The only items in there were an invitation to World of Warcraft from
Rabbit, and an email from Wally that was addressed to me and three-hundred
other people, bragging about untapped money in a Nigerian bank account, which
he would share with me, if only I would provide my ATM pin number for him. I
deleted the email and pulled up Google and typed a name.

The name that haunted my dreams. My
awake. My every second. The name that was the reason I ran away from home. The
name I carried everywhere with me inside a note pushed into my shoe. Heather
Gilmore.

Click.

But nothing. No news story. No
obituary. No investigation. The same as it was every time I checked.

“Who’s Heather Gilmore?”

My knees bucked the underside of
the desk. “Geez, Rabbit,” I moaned. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” I clicked
off the window on the computer screen and swiveled my chair to face him.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Who’s Heather Gilmore?”

“Just someone from the past.”

“The past?” he repeated, with one
of his eyebrows scaled into an inquisitive arch. “Somebody sounds homesick.”

“What are you doing creeping up
behind me? Is personal space out of style or something?”

“Come on, be honest, don’t you ever
want to go back, Alice?”

“Back?”

“You know, back to how it was
before all this, before all the lies?”

I stood up from the chair and
jammed it snuggly under the desk. “There’s no going back, Rabbit.” At least not
for me.
Especially not for Heather Gilmore,
I told myself. “Motley has
the dynamite stick now. The past is grass and Motley is the turbo-charged
nuclear atomic mower.” I glided towards the kitchen counter and Rabbit took
over my seat and loaded World of Warcraft onto the screen.

“Sometimes I miss it,” he said,
vacantly maneuvering his avatar on the screen. “I miss Yale. Being a golden
child, having a future. A real future. If only I hadn’t messed it up with that
poker racket.”

“It was stupid for them to have
expelled you just because people were using your dorm room to bet on stupid
card games.”

“You know what bugs me the most
about it, Alice? It’s that somebody I knew turned me in, somebody in my inner
circle, and I will probably never know who it was.”

“Well, once the dynamite stick is
destroyed, you don’t have to think about Lenny Rabitz or some stupid dean at
Yale ever again. How long do you think we have left before Motley goes ahead
and destroys it?”

“Time will tell. He’s in his office
right now bribing some four-star general who lied his way into the Pentagon
using an ID he bought from a dealer in Chinatown.”

“So that’s the plan, right? Extort
as many people as we can and make as much money as we can, before destroying
the thing once and for all.”

“That’s the plan. Well, anyways, I
only stopped in to talk to Motley, but he’s busy on the phone now, so I’m
heading back to my place.”

I listened to Rabbit drive away and
I flipped my purse upside down onto the kitchen counter to sift for a
cigarette. Skip Hask’s business card fell to the top of the pile and I picked
it up. I looked back over at the black computer screen that hadn’t yielded me
any luck with Heather Gilmore’s name. I tapped my fingers on the marble counter
as an idea developed in my head. Before I knew what I was doing, I had already
pulled out my cell phone and was dialing the phone number on the card.

Skip picked up on the last ring
before I got blasted to voicemail. “Skip, here.”

“Skip. It’s Alice, from last night.
Remember me?”

“You’re a hard girl to forget.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Plus, I’ve got a little
forget-me-not from you, a bruise on my temple from where you shoved a gun into
my face.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I just hope youe’re not calling
because you’re pissed at me for something. Frankly, you seem a little unstable.
I’m kind of scared of you, but you turn me on in a strange kind of way. The
senses are all screwed up, ya know?”

“Don’t get any ideas, Skip.”

“I guess that rules out my hopes that
you were calling to ask me on a date. If not that, what are you calling for?
You change your mind and decide you want to collaborate on a riveting news
story with me?”

“Sorry to dash your hopes, but no.
I’m calling because I would like to outsource some of your journalistic
expertise.”

“Oh?” Shifting from romance to
business made his voice butter. Journalism was his true love, even above femme
fatales met in bar bathrooms, it was obvious.

“Well, what I’m trying to say is, I
bet you make a good snoop, and I need a little snooping done.”

“What makes you so convinced I
would agree to do any snooping on your behalf?”

“What if I proposed a trade? One
piece of legit info on the dynamite stick in exchange for your astute
services.”

“I’m listening. What type of
information do you need dug up?”

“There’s a girl. Well, there
was
a girl. She got killed three years back. The date will be easy to remember
because it’s the same day as the November Hit. Now, from what I can tell,
information on her isn’t’ prominent because the news of her death probably got
buried beneath all the headlines from the attack. But the thing is, I would
like to know the details. The gritty, horrific details. Plus, I want the low
down on the investigation and any leads on the case. I need to know if any
suspects were named.”

“This sounds pretty hardcore. This
girl, was she someone to you?”

“Maybe.”

“I get it, you don’t give up info
that quick. So, do you have a name for the dead girl? How about a city? Or you
want me to just open the phone book to a random page and throw a dart at a map
of the United States?”

“The name is Heather Gilmore, and
your search should be narrowed to Connecticut.”

I could hear a pen scribbling over
paper in the background. “Alright, Alice, I’ll use my channels of information
to see if I can dig anything up on this Heather Gilmore.”

“I appreciate it, Skip.”

“Now for you to make good on your
end of the bargain. It’s not payable on delivery, you’ve gotta give it up now.”

“Fair enough. You know that theory one
of the geeks had on the whole Russian encoding thing?”

“Yup.”

“Totally off.”