The Last Word (23 page)

“I don’t want you holding this over my head,” said David.

“Dad didn’t come home last night. I saw him this morning. He looked like he’d been
on a bender or something. Mom’s not talking. Something is going on with the two of
them. Since I am currently their least-favorite child, maybe you could sit them down
and see what’s going on.”

“Izzy, I really think you have bigger things to worry about,” David said.

“Are you talking about the FBI business? Edward says it’s fine. There’s no way the
embezzlement charges will stick.”

“I need to come here more often,” Max said.

David shook his head in exasperation and pressed the play button on the remote and
continued watching the game. I could have sworn Max took me more seriously than David
did. Since I couldn’t be sure that my brother would take action, I phoned Rae on my
way to my hair appointment.

“Listen, there’s something wrong with Mom and Dad. There’s this tension between them.
Dad didn’t come home last night and I’ve overheard some really strange conversations.
I think their marriage is on the rocks. David doesn’t believe me, but something isn’t
right.”

“I know,” Rae said. “I’m looking into it.”

“You see it too?”

“I saw it a long time ago.”

“So what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I find out.”

•  •  •

I should have considered a wardrobe change before I turned up for my appointment at
Rodrigo’s salon that Wednesday. I couldn’t afford Rodrigo, so I settled for a junior
stylist named Rainbow. Even the junior stylist seemed disappointed when her low-rent
client arrived. One look at me and she knew that I didn’t have a BlackBerry full of
Nob Hill referrals in my Birkin bag. It might have been the bike messenger bag with
reflective strips that I use that tipped her off. Still, Rainbow was a professional.

“You need highlights and lowlights and layers. And maybe bangs. It will make you look
younger. Hide the creases on your forehead.”

“Then why am I paying for Botox?”

That stumped Rainbow until she gave me the card of her dermatologist and suggested
I switch. Rainbow had to be under twenty-nine and yet she had the set face of a woman
at war with time. It seemed particularly tragic
to me to be under thirty, already terrified of losing your looks, and yet unable to
physically register that emotion.

“So what are we going to do?” Rainbow asked.

“Just a wash and dry,” I said. “I have a dinner tonight.”

Rainbow circled me, like someone at a used-car lot trying to assess whether the 1972
Oldsmobile could be salvaged.

“Maybe if we put it up,” she said.

As Rainbow washed my hair, she told me in excruciating detail about her breakup with
her last boyfriend, Gavin. He wasn’t a talker, which Rainbow had no beef with since
she could pick up the slack, but he also wasn’t a listener. He was a head-nodder,
which led Rainbow to believe that Gavin was actually listening and had heard her when
she said that they needed more milk, or a lightbulb changed, or that she wasn’t okay
with his having naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend on his cell phone. In fact, even
when Rainbow was finally worn down enough to end the relationship, Gavin didn’t hear
her and continued to show up at the apartment until she sent him a text message and
changed the locks.

“Good riddance, girlfriend,” I said. “You have to love yourself first or no one can
love you back.” Yes. I felt totally yucky saying something so cheesy, but the next
thing you know Rainbow and I were besties and she was spilling what little dirt she
had on Margaret Slayter, the ex–Mrs. Slayter.

I showed her a picture.

“Hey, do you know this woman?”

“Haven’t seen her in ages. I heard she got a divorce and the prenup was airtight.
Rumor is she’s living in a trailer park in San Jose.”
¹

I held up both pictures.

“Do you know if these two women were friends?”

“I know I’ve seen them talking. They were both regulars for a quite a while. Couldn’t
tell you if they were friends.”

“But they were acquaintances.”

“Definitely,” Rainbow said.

I left the salon before Rainbow could use the flat iron on my hair. I pretended to
get an urgent text, paid for the wash and dry, and drove straight to Margaret’s apartment,
just off Lincoln and Twenty-ninth Avenue.

The ex–Mrs. Slayter got enough in the divorce settlement to live a lower-middle-class
lifestyle for a few years. She would use that time wisely and find another wealthy
husband. I caught her just as she returned home from what was tantamount to her day
job—going to the gym. Since I was single-handedly responsible for the demise of her
sham marriage, she couldn’t even muster a sluggish hello. She merely opened the door
and greeted me with an icy gaze.

“This will be quick. I promise,” I said.

No response. I showed her the photo of Lenore. Margaret’s eyes clicked in recognition.

“I take it you know her,” I said.

Still nothing.

“Did you know she is dating your ex-husband?”

Margaret audibly gasped and her nostrils flared like a dragon’s. She most definitely
did not know that. My fears that the two women had some play against Slayter were
unfounded. Under any other circumstance I couldn’t have expected Margaret to be a
cooperative informant, but seeing her old friend with her ex-husband might spark some
truth-telling jealousy.

“Is she dating him because she likes him or because he has money?” I asked.

“Probably both,” Margaret said. “He’s not going to find a woman who likes him just
for him. His money will always be part of his appeal. If he’s hoping to find a woman
who doesn’t care about it, then he’s a fool doomed to spend the rest of his life alone,
or maybe he’ll just settle for his sloppy PI sidekick.”

“Did you love him?” I asked, pretending I didn’t hear the last thing she said.

“Of course,” Margaret replied.

“Would you have loved him if he didn’t have the money?”

“I don’t know, maybe. But I wouldn’t have married him.”

•  •  •

Despite Edward’s direct imperative, I returned to the trenches of the Divine Strategies
file room to torture myself some more with grunt work, because something was clawing
at the back of my brain telling me that I was missing something. When I arrived I
noticed that Steve Grant’s office was vacated. I inquired about his absence on a carefully
timed bathroom break. Amy Cohen told me that he had quit. Something about needing
more money. Whatever hold Maureen Stevens had over the lot, I wasn’t going to learn
it trapped in that file room. I was at the end of the massive filing pileup, counting
the seconds until I could venture out into the cold office and begin my real undercover
work, when Brad casually entered the file room with another giant heap of paperwork.

“I was doing some spring cleaning and found this in my office.”

I didn’t mention that it was close to fall. It’s possible that tears were welling
up in my eyes because the next thing Brad said was, “Why don’t you take a break for
today and you can get back to it later.”

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I loathed being in the confines
of Divine Strategies, their weekly Bible study, personal-space office politics, and
prison file room. And I had no idea how much I was looking forward to filing away
that last sheet of paper. I sat down in the corner of the file room and called D.

“I think your God is punishing me,” I said to D.

“For what?” D asked.

“For that filing memo I sent around.”

“If we’re going to entertain this line of thinking,” D said, “let’s impose some logic
here. You’ve been arrested, say, half a dozen times in your youth; you did some things
we probably don’t want to revisit. You were a known vandal, occasional car thief,
all-around menace to society, and
my God
decides to punish you for sending out a memo that suggested other employees do the
filing, when, I should point out, no one actually followed the directives in the memo.”

“All I’ve done at Divine Strategies is file. I don’t think I can work here another
day.”

“So what are you going to do?” D asked.

“I need to get sexually harassed.”

•  •  •

I told Maureen I had a family emergency and asked if I could come back later in the
afternoon and finish my shift. She didn’t have a problem with that. I went home, took
a nap, changed into the most Evelyn outfit I had, and grabbed a bottle of midlevel
bourbon from David’s house before I left.

I arrived at Divine Strategies at four o’clock and hunkered down in the file room,
waiting for the support staff to leave, hoping that one or two of the male partners
would work late. Maureen left at five to pick up her daughter at school. The rest
of the female staff was out of the office by five fifteen. It was down to Brad and
Bryan. I’ll be honest, I was hoping it would be Bryan who stayed late, because I’d
rather be groped by a semiattractive male than an unattractive one. As it was, fate
decided. Bryan left before Brad and it was Brad who got the pleasure of my company.
I took two buttons down on my blouse and tiptoed over to his office.

“Long day?” I said, leaning against Brad’s doorway with a bottle of Knob Creek dangling
from my right hand and two shot glasses clutched in the other.

I must have startled Brad because he yelped and bounced a little in his chair.

“Isabel. What are you doing here?”

“The filing. It never ends, does it?” I said as seductively as one can say those words.

“No. I guess not,” Brad said.

“I could use a drink. How about you?”

I put two shot glasses down on Brad’s desk and poured.

“Oh, I’m good. I have to drive.”

“Really? You’re going to make me drink alone, after I did all that nasty filing for
you?”

I have never tried to seduce anyone before and instead of taking a nap, maybe I should
have Googled it or something.

“I guess one drink wouldn’t hurt,” Brad said, taking a sip from his shot glass.

I circled his desk and leaned against the edge, trying to nonchalantly hike my skirt
up. Then I got an unattractive look at my flattened-out thigh and pulled my skirt
down again. I took another shot to erase the memory of my thigh.

“So, Brad, tell me about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know
everything
. What do you like? What don’t you like? Any hobbies?”

“I go bowling every Sunday.”

“Bowling. Are you any good?”

“I scored a two eighty once.”

“Wow. That’s amazing. What pound ball do you use?”

“Fourteen.”

“You must have some very strong fingers.”
²

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Can I top you off?” I asked.

“What?” Brad said, looking frightened. Apparently he was unfamiliar with the phrase
and didn’t notice the bottle of bourbon hovering above his glass. I added another
drop anyway.

I kicked off my heels, thinking that disrobing of some sort would seem suggestive
and the only other thing I could imagine taking off was my watch.

I took another shot, crossed one leg over the other, and tapped Brad’s thigh suggestively
with my toe.

“So, what’s a girl got to do to get a raise around here?”

Fifteen minutes later, D was giving me a ride home.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I’m drunk,” I said. “And I think I just got fired for sexually harassing my boss.”

D pretended he didn’t hear that last statement and relayed the day’s messages: “Rae
called to suggest you take an accounting class or repeat fifth-grade math. Your father
is putting in for a three-week vacation and Agent Bledsoe called again. This time
he said it was urgent.”

I didn’t call Bledsoe back. That might have been a mistake.

•  •  •

I granted myself the morning to sleep in after the previous evening’s humiliation.
I took a cab to Divine Strategies, picked up my car, and drove to the Spellman office,
arriving shortly after ten. When I saw that both of my parents’ cars were in the driveway,
I had a brief moment of clarity and I thought,
why not just ask my parents directly what was going on?
So I climbed the stairs to their bedroom. My fist was poised to knock on the door
and then I overheard this snippet of conversation.

MOM:
Don’t come home tonight.

DAD:
Olivia, be reasonable.

MOM:
I’m not talking about it anymore. You lied to me.

DAD:
It wasn’t exactly a lie.

MOM:
I’d pack a bag if I were you.

I could hear my mother’s footsteps marching toward the door. Instead of facing the
conflict head-on, I made a run for it down the stairs and bolted into the Spellman
offices, where Rae was working on payroll and billing.

“Mom and Dad are upstairs fighting,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“What should we do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Should we have an intervention?”

“They’re not on meth.”

“Clearly something is wrong with their marriage.”

“I don’t think they’re headed for divorce, Izzy.”

“How do you know?”

Rae stared distractedly at the computer screen. “Shit. Not again.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Looks like we just embezzled another ten grand.”

1
. She was in a one-bedroom in the Outer Sunset.

2
. It was the only plausible compliment I could offer.

A
nother ten grand from GLD Inc. has been transferred into the Spellman Investigations
checking account and I deny everything,” I said to Edward as we jogged past Spreckels
Lake.

“Over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars has been transferred into the Cayman Islands
account. And yet, you’ve only siphoned twenty thousand for yourself,” Edward said.