Just One Look (8 page)

Okay, Charlaine thought, mind your own business.

She drew the curtains and changed back into her jeans and sweater. She put the babydoll back in the bottom of her drawer, taking her time, folding it very carefully for some reason. As if Freddy would notice if it was wrinkled. Right.

She took a bottle of seltzer water and mixed in a little of her son’s fruit punch Twister. Charlaine sat on a stool at the marble kitchen block. She stared at the glass. Her finger traced loops in the condensation. She glanced at the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the new 690 model with the stainless steel front. There was nothing on it-no kid pictures, no family photographs, no finger smears, not even magnets. When they had the old yellow Westinghouse, the front had been blanketed with that stuff. There had been vitality and color. The remodeled kitchen, the one she had wanted so much, was sterile, lifeless.

Who was the Asian man driving Freddy’s car?

Not that she kept tabs on him, but Freddy had very few visitors. She could, in fact, recall none. That didn’t mean he didn’t have any, of course. She did not spend her entire day watching his house. Still a neighborhood has a routine of its own. A vibe, if you will. A neighborhood is an entity, a body, and you can feel when something is out of place.

The ice in her drink was melting. Charlaine had not yet taken a sip. There was food shopping to be done. Mike’s shirts would be ready at the cleaner. She was having lunch with her friend Myrna at Baumgart’s on Franklin Avenue. Clay had karate with Master Kim after school.

She mentally ran through the rest of her to-do list and tried to come up with an order. Mindless stuff. Would there be time before lunch to do the food shopping and get back to the house? Probably not. The frozen goods would melt in the car. That errand would have to wait.

She stopped. To hell with this.

Freddy should be at work now.

That was how it’d always worked. Their perverted little dance lasted from around ten to ten-thirty. By ten-forty-five, Charlaine always heard that garage door open. She’d watch his Honda Accord pull out. Freddy worked, she knew, for H amp;R Block. It was in the same strip mall as the Blockbuster where she rented the DVDs. His desk was near the window. She avoided walking past it, but some days, when she parked, she would look over and see Freddy staring out the window, pencil resting against his lips, lost.

Charlaine found the yellow pages and looked up the number. A man identifying himself as a supervisor said that Mr. Sykes was not in but was expected at any moment. She pretended to be put out. “He told me he’d be in by now. Doesn’t he normally get in at eleven?”

The supervisor admitted that he did.

“So where is he? I really need those figures.”

The supervisor apologized and assured her that Mr. Sykes would call the moment he arrived at his desk. She hung up.

Now what?

Something still felt very wrong here.

But so what? Who was Freddy Sykes to her anyway? Nothing. In a way, less than nothing. He was a reminder of her failures. He was a symptom of how pathetic she had become. She owed him nothing. More than that, imagine, just imagine, if poking around got her caught. Imagine if somehow the truth came out.

Charlaine looked over at Freddy’s place. The truth coming out.

Somehow that no longer bothered her all that much.

She grabbed her coat and headed toward Freddy’s house.

Eric Wu had seen the lingerie-clad woman in the window. The previous night had been a long one for Wu. He had not anticipated any interference, and while the large man-his wallet said his name was Rocky Conwell-had presented no threat, Wu now had to get rid of a body and another car. That meant an extra trip back up to Central Valley, New York.

First things first. He packed Rocky Conwell into the trunk of his Toyota Celica. He moved Jack Lawson, whom he had originally jammed into the Honda Accord’s trunk, to the back of the Ford Windstar. Once the bodies were out of sight, Wu changed license plates, got rid of the E-ZPass, and drove the Ford Windstar back to Ho-Ho-Kus. He parked the minivan in Freddy Sykes’s garage. There was still enough time to catch a bus back up to Central Valley. Wu searched Conwell’s car. Satisfied that it was cleared out, he took it to the Park-n-Ride on Route 17. He found a remote spot near the fence. A car being left there for days, even weeks, was not unusual. The smell would eventually bring attention, but that would not be anytime soon.

The Park-n-Ride was only three miles from Sykes’s house in Ho-Ho-Kus. Wu walked. Early the next morning, he rose and caught the bus back to Central Valley. He picked up Sykes’s Honda Accord. On the way back, he took a brief detour past the Lawson residence.

A patrol car was in the driveway.

Wu considered that. It did not cause him great concern, but perhaps he should nip any police involvement in the bud. He knew just how.

Wu drove back to Freddy’s residence and turned on the television. Wu liked daytime TV. He enjoyed watching shows like
Springer
and
Ricki
Lake
. Most people poo-pooed them. Wu did not. Only a truly great society, a free one, could allow such nonsense to air. But more than that, stupidity made Wu happy. People were sheep. The weaker they are, the stronger you are. What could be more comforting or entertaining?

During a commercial-the theme of the show, according to a graphic on the bottom: “Mommy Won’t Let Me Get a Nipple Ring!”-Wu rose. It was time to take care of the potential police problem.

Wu didn’t need to touch Jack Lawson. All he had to say was one sentence: “I know that you have two children.”

Lawson cooperated. He made the call to his wife’s cell phone and told her he needed space.

At ten-forty-five-with Wu watching a mother and daughter wrestle across a stage while a crowd chanted “Jerry!”-a call came in from a prison acquaintance.

“All okay?”

Wu said yes.

He pulled the Honda Accord out of the garage. As he did, he noticed the woman who lived next door standing in the window. She was wearing lingerie. Wu might not have thought much about the scene-a woman still in her unmentionables after ten in the morning-but something about the way she suddenly ducked away…

That might have been a natural reaction. You parade around in lingerie, forgetting to pull down your shade, and then you spot a stranger. Many people, perhaps most people, would move away or cover up. So it could be nothing.

But the woman had moved very fast, as if in a panic. More than that, she had not moved when the car first pulled out-only when she’d spotted Wu. If she had been afraid of being seen, wouldn’t she have pulled the shade or ducked down when she first heard or saw the car?

Wu pondered that. He had, in fact, been pondering it all day.

He picked up his cell phone and hit the button to dial the last incoming number.

A voice said, “Problem?”

“I don’t think so.” Wu turned the car around and started back toward the Sykes house. “But I may be late.”

Grace didn’t want to make the phone call.

She was still in New York City. There was a law against using a cell phone while driving unless it was hands-free, though that had nothing to do with her hesitation. With one hand on the steering wheel, she felt around on the floor of the car. She located the ear attachment, managed to untangle the cord, and jammed the earpiece deep into the canal.

This was supposed to be safer than using a handheld?

She turned on the cell phone. Though Grace hadn’t called the number in years, she still had it programmed into the cell. For emergencies, she supposed. Like this one.

The phone was answered on the first ring.

“Yes?”

No name. No hello. No company greeting.

“This is Grace Lawson.”

“Hold.”

The wait was not long. First Grace heard the static and then, “Grace?”

“Hello, Mr. Vespa.”

“Please call me Carl.”

“Carl, right.”

“You got my message?” he asked.

“Yes.” She did not tell Carl Vespa that it had nothing to do with why she was calling now. There was feedback on the line. “Where are you?” she asked.

“My jet. We’re about an hour outside of Stewart.”

Stewart was an air force base and airport about an hour and a half from her house.

Silence.

“Is something wrong, Grace?”

“You said to call if I ever needed anything.”

“And now, fifteen years later, you do?”

“I think so.”

“Good. And your timing couldn’t be better. There’s something I want to show you.”

“What’s that?”

“Listen, are you home?”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll pick you up in two, two and a half, hours. We can talk then, okay? Do you have someone to watch the kids?”

“I should be able to find someone.”

“If you can’t, I’ll leave my assistant at your house. See you then.”

Carl Vespa hung up. Grace kept driving. She wondered what he wanted from her now. She wondered about the wisdom of calling him in the first place. She hit the first number on her speed-dial again-Jack’s cell phone-but there was still no answer.

Grace had another idea. She called her friend of the no-ménage, Cora.

“Didn’t you used to date a guy who worked in e-mail spam?” Grace asked.

“Yep,” Cora said. “Obsessive creep named-get this-Gus. Hard to get rid of. I had to use my own version of a bunker buster on him.”

“What did you do?”

“I told Gus he had a small wee-wee.”

“Ouch.”

“Like I said, the bunker buster. Works every time, but there’s often, uh, collateral damage.”

“I might need his help.”

“How?”

Grace was not sure how to put this. She decided to concentrate on the blonde with the X across her face, the one she was sure she’d seen before. “I found this photograph…,” she began.

“Right.”

“And there’s this woman in it. She’s probably late teens, early twenties.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s an old picture. I’d say fifteen, twenty years old. Anyway, I need to find out who the girl is. I was thinking maybe I could send it out via spam mail. It could ask if anyone can identify the girl for a research project, something like that. I know most people erase those e-mails, but if a few looked, I don’t know, maybe I could get a response.”

“Long shot.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And wow, talk about creeps coming out of the woodwork. Imagine the replies.”

“Got a better idea?”

“Not really, no. It could work, I guess. By the way, you notice I’m not asking you why you need to find the identity of a woman in a picture from fifteen, twenty years ago?”

“I do.”

“I just wanted it noted for the record.”

“So noted. It’s a long story.”

“You need someone to tell?”

“I might. I might also need someone to watch the kids for a few hours.”

“I’m available and alone.” Pause. “Sheesh, I have to stop saying that.”

“Where’s Vickie?” Vickie was Cora’s daughter.

“She’s spending the night at the McMansion with my ex and his horse-faced wife. Or as I prefer to put it, she’s spending the night in the bunker with Adolf and Eva.”

Grace managed a smile.

“My car is in the shop,” Cora said. “Can you pick me up on the way?”

“I’ll be there right after I grab Max.”

Grace swung by the Montessori Enrichment program and grabbed her son. Max had that near-tears thing going on, having lost several of his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to a classmate in some dumb game. Grace tried to humor him, but he wasn’t in the mood. She gave up. She helped him get his jacket on. His hat was missing. So was one of his gloves. Another mother smiled and whistled while bundling up her little bundle in color-coordinated knit (hand-knit, no doubt) hat, scarf, and yes, matching gloves. She looked over at Grace and faked a sympathetic smile. Grace did not know this woman, but she disliked her intensely.

Being a mother, Grace thought, was a lot like being an artist-you are always insecure, you always feel like a phony, you know that everybody else is better at it than you. The mothers who doted obsessively on their offspring, the ones who performed their numbing tasks with that Stepford-ready smile and supernatural patience-you know, those mothers who always,
always,
have the right supplies for the ideal after-school craft… Grace suspected that these women were profoundly disturbed.

Cora was waiting in the driveway of her bubble-gum-pink house. Everybody on the block hated the color. For a while, one neighbor, a prissy thing properly named Missy, had started up a petition demanding that Cora repaint it. Grace had seen Prissy Missy passing around the petition at a first-grade soccer game. Grace had asked to see it, ripped it up, and walked away.

The color was hardly to Grace’s taste, but memo to the Missys of the world: Get over yourselves.

Cora teetered toward them in her stiletto heels. She was dressed slightly more demurely-a sweatshirt over the leotard-but it really didn’t matter. Some women oozed sex, even if dressed in a burlap sack. Cora was one of them. When she moved, new curves were formed even as old ones disappeared. Every line from her husky voice, no matter how innocuous, came out as a double entendre. Every tilt of the head was a come-on.

Cora slid in and looked back at Max. “Hey, handsome.”

Max grunted and didn’t look up.

“Just like my ex.” Cora spun back around. “You got that photo?”

“I do.”

“I called Gus. He’ll do it.”

“Did you promise anything in return?”

“Remember what I said about fifth-date syndrome? Well, are you free Saturday night?”

Grace looked at her.

“Kidding.”

“I knew that.”

“Good. Anyway, Gus said to scan the photo and e-mail it to him. He can set up an anonymous e-mail address for you to receive replies. No one will know who you are. We’ll keep the text to a minimum, just say that a journalist is doing a story and needs to know the origin of the photograph. That sound okay?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

They arrived at the house. Max stomped upstairs and then shouted down, “Can I watch
SpongeBob
?”

Grace acquiesced. Like every parent, Grace had strict rules about no TV during the day. Like every parent, she knew that rules were made to be broken. Cora headed straight for the cupboard and made coffee. Grace thought about which photograph to send and decided to use a blowup of the right side, the blonde with the X on her face and the redhead on her left. She left Jack’s image-again, assuming that
was
Jack-out. She didn’t yet want him involved. She decided that having two people increased chances of getting an identity hit and made the solicitation look less like the work of a crazed stalker.

Cora looked at the original photograph. “May I make an observation?”

“Yes.”

“This is pretty weird.”

“The guy over here”-Grace pointed-“the one with the beard. Who does that look like to you?”

Cora squinted. “I guess it could be Jack.”

“Could be or is?”

“You tell me.”

“Jack’s missing.”

“Come again?”

She told Cora the story. Cora listened, tapping a too-long fingernail painted up in Chanel’s Rouge Noir, a color not unlike blood, on the tabletop. When Grace finished, Cora said, “You know, of course, that I have a low opinion of men.”

“I know.”

“I believe that, for the most part, they are two floors below dog turd.”

“I know that too.”

“So the obvious answer is that, yes, this is a picture of Jack. That, yes, this little blondie, the one gazing up at him like he’s the messiah, is an old flame. That yes, Jack and Mary Magdalene here are having an affair. That someone, maybe her current husband, wanted you to find out about it, so he sent you that picture. That everything came to a head when Jack realized that you were onto him.”

“And that’s why he ran away?”

“Correct.”

“That doesn’t add up, Cora.”

“You have a better theory?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Good,” Cora said, “because I don’t buy it either. I’m just talking. The rule is thus: Men are scum. Jack, however, has always hit me as the exception that proves the rule.”

“I love you, you know.”

Cora nodded. “Everybody does.”

Grace heard a sound and glanced out the window. A stretch limousine of glistening black slid up the driveway with the smoothness of a Motown background singer. The chauffeur, a rat-faced man with the build of a whippet, hurried to open the car’s back door.

Carl Vespa had arrived.

Despite his rumored vocation, Carl Vespa did not dress in Sopranos-style velour or shiny, sealant-coated suits. He preferred khakis, Joseph Abboud sports coats, and loafers
sans
socks. He was mid-sixties but looked a solid decade younger. His hair was tickling-the-shoulders long, the color a distinguished shade of blond-gone-to-gray. His face was tanned and had the sort of waxy smoothness that suggests Botox. His teeth were aggressively capped, as if the front cuspids had taken growth hormones.

He nodded an order at the whippetlike driver and approached the house on his own. Grace opened the door to greet him. Carl Vespa gave her the toothy dazzler. She smiled back, glad to see him. He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. No words were exchanged. They didn’t need them. He held both her hands and looked at her. She could see his eyes start to well up.

Max moved to his mother’s right. Vespa let go and took a step back.

“Max,” Grace began, “this is Mr. Vespa.”

“Hello, Max.”

“That your car?” Max asked.

“Yes.”

Max looked at the car, then at Vespa. “Got a TV inside?”

“It does.”

“Whoa.”

Cora cleared her throat.

“Oh, and this is my friend, Cora.”

“Charmed,” Vespa said.

Cora looked at the car, then at Vespa. “You single?”

“I am.”

“Whoa.”

Grace repeated the baby-sitting instructions for the sixth time. Cora pretended to listen. Grace gave her twenty dollars to order pizza and that cheesy bread Max had become enamored with of late. A classmate’s mom would bring Emma home in an hour.

Grace and Vespa headed toward the limousine. The rat-faced driver had the door opened and at the ready. Vespa said, “This is Cram,” gesturing to the driver. When Cram shook her hand, Grace had to bite back a scream.

“A pleasure,” Cram said. His smile brought on visions of a Discovery Channel documentary on sea predators. She slid in first and Carl Vespa followed.

There were Waterford glasses and a matching decanter half-filled with a liquid that appeared both caramel and luxurious. There was, as noted, a television set. Above her seat was a DVD player, multiple CD player, climate controls, and enough buttons to confuse an airline pilot. The whole thing-the crystal, the decanter, the electronics-was overstated, but maybe that was what you wanted in a stretch limousine.

“Where are we going?” Grace asked.

“It’s a little hard to explain.” They were sitting next to each other, both facing forward. “I’d rather just show it to you, if that’s okay.”

Carl Vespa had been the first lost parent to loom over her hospital bed. When Grace first came out of the coma, his was the first face she saw. She had no idea who he was, where she was, what day it was. More than a week was gone from her memory banks. Carl Vespa ended up sitting in her hospital room for days on end, sleeping in the chair next to her. He made sure that plenty of flowers surrounded her. He made sure that she had a good view, soothing music, enough pain medication, private nursing. He made sure that once Grace was able to eat, the hospital staff didn’t give her the standard slop.

He never asked her for details of that night because, in truth, she really could not provide any. Over the next few months they talked for countless hours. He told her stories, mostly about his failures as a father. He had used his connections to get into her hospital room that first night. He had paid off security-interestingly enough, the security firm at the hospital was actually controlled by organized crime-and then he had simply sat with her.

Eventually other parents followed his lead. It was weird. They wanted to be around her. That was all. They found comfort in it. Their child had died in Grace’s presence and it was as if maybe a small part of their souls, their forever-lost son or daughter, somehow still lived inside of her. It made no sense and yet Grace thought that maybe she understood.

These heartbroken parents came to talk about their dead children, and Grace listened. She figured that she owed them at least that much. She knew that these relationships were probably unhealthy, but there was no way she could turn them away. The truth was, Grace had no family of her own. She’d thrived, for a little while at least, on the attention. They needed a child; she needed a parent. It wasn’t that simple-this malaise of cross-projection-but Grace wasn’t sure she could explain it any better.

The limo headed south on the Garden State Parkway now. Cram flipped on the radio. Classical music, a violin concerto from the sound of it, came through the speakers.