The Starter Wife (40 page)

And then he would take care of business.

W
ORD WAS,
not even an hour after the accident the kid had already gotten himself one of those world-class attorneys—the kind that rich people hire when they know they’re guilty—shit, when the whole world knows they’re guilty, but when they’re planning on getting off, anyway, fuck the rest of you.

After the sheriff cleared out, Sam was hanging out at the guard shack, picking up bits and pieces of information. J.D. laid out the story for him: Lavender had been on nights, to accommodate her full load of morning classes. She was out in the truck, making the rounds. Nothing of note. Then Tariq had noticed, a little after four o’clock, that Range Rover come in, speeding through the gate as usual—from what he could tell, two, maybe three kids in the car. The usual suspect driving—the one with the black hair, sunglasses on, even at the blackest hour, skinny like a junkie. Laughing at the way people jumped when they saw him coming. J.D. couldn’t tell, since the only TV he watched was the kind that told him what to invest in, but he heard the kid was dating some kind of TV actress. He’d also heard the kid had been in trouble through the years—rehab, brushes with the law. Nothing major.

Nothing like attempted murder.

“It was an accident,” J.D. said to Sam. Sam had a place in his heart for J.D.—the Zen master of security. J.D. had been a Marine. They shared their stories. “The sheriff took down all the information.”

“Then why did the kid get a lawyer?” Sam asked.

J.D. just looked at him. “I’m retiring in a year. That’s all the information I’ve got for you. You want to ask me that question in twelve months plus twenty-four hours, I might have a different answer.”

“She’s going to miss her graduation,” Sam said. He couldn’t
meet the man’s eyes. Every time he thought of that graduation—the day she’d worked so hard for—

“Son, she’s lucky she’s alive,” J.D. said. He waved in a convertible Mercedes.

Sam was turning to leave, having been properly reprimanded, when J.D. called out to him.

“Cops got a bone to pick with you?” he asked. His tone was casual. Sam could tell he was concerned.

He looked at J.D.

“They came around here this morning. I told them nothing,” he continued. “But a danger foreseen is half avoided.”

S
AM KNEW BETTER
than to write the plan down. This kind of thing, you relegated to the recesses of your brain. You think. You dream. You prepare. You leave no evidence. No pieces of paper, no half-legible scrawls. No leading conversations (although he’d already had one or two with J.D., the only man on the planet who would never finger him). This would be easy for him. A piece of cake.

Sam was, in a way, happy to have the distraction. He was released from his obsession with Gracie, his obsession with possessing her—that womanly body, that throaty laugh. He was released from his obsession with sex. He was now only interested in one thing: revenge.

His plan was simple. He knew from experience that the best ones are—the more complicated the plan, the more likely failure would ensue.

In his mind, all was in order:

1. He would kidnap the boy.
   
2. He would force a confession out of him; he would tape it.
   
3. He would confront the boy’s father with the confession.
   
4. He would extract enough money out of them to last Lavender a lifetime.
   

It was a simple plan. But not simple enough.

For one thing, he didn’t have a tape recorder. Sometimes being possessionless had its downside. He developed a different plan:

1. Find the boy.
   
2. Beat the living shit out of him.
   

G
RACIE HAD FORGOTTEN
all about Kenny. She’d forgotten that he’d spent the night. She awakened a little late, given the events of the night before, and padded down to the kitchen to make coffee.

She was shocked into an alert state by sensory overload—the smell of eggs, the sizzle of bacon. The sound of toast popping up out of the toaster. Kenny was standing in the kitchen with an apron on, humming to himself.

After a moment, he felt her presence and turned to look at her—

“Coffee?” he asked.

“What are you doing?” Gracie asked, although she accepted the coffee. She took a sip. Damn, it was good. Who was this man and when did he learn to make coffee?

“I was hungry, I didn’t feel like going to Marmalade,” Kenny replied. “You know, I’ve had the paparazzi—”

“Chasing you,” Gracie said, “I know.”

Kenny sighed. “It’s so hard for her, you have no idea,” he said, shaking his head.

Despite the taste of the coffee, the smell of bacon and eggs, Gracie was suddenly losing her appetite. Her brain was fighting her senses.

“You’re going to have some, of course?” Kenny asked.

“Of course,” Gracie acquiesced. She had to think of her health, after all. She was a mother. She could not live on caffeine and candy corn alone. Though she had made a valiant attempt to.

She sat down and put a napkin on her lap and waited as Kenny served her.

He watched her as she ate. Gracie suddenly grew self-conscious.

“What?” she asked.

“You look good” was all he said.

Gracie’s hand went automatically to her hair. “Oh, no,” she said, “my hair, it’s too—and I’ve gained weight, you know, and—”

The doorbell rang.

“You’re not great at taking compliments, you know that?” Kenny said, motioning for her to stay seated.

S
AM WAS
so relieved at being relieved of his obsession with having sex with Gracie that he actually found himself at her house, ringing the doorbell, wishing to apologize for his weird behavior the night before. And he knew she probably hadn’t heard about Lavender. He felt strangely possessive that he should be the one to tell her. He had been deliberating for several moments on how to best express himself that he didn’t notice that the door had opened and that there was a man standing in front of him.

“Hey,” the man said. He was tall, with a wide, loopy grin, clean-cut except for the wire earring. Sam had witnessed the
earring stage on middle-aged men—the look ranked right up there with stringy, gray ponytails on men, as far as he was concerned. But the grin was engaging—the guy seemed nice enough.

A small girl with sleepy eyes, a mess of blond curls and a pink Cinderella nightgown suddenly poked her head under the man’s arm. The man curved his arm around the girl and absentmindedly kissed the top of her head.

“Help you?” the man asked, looking up at Sam. Sam realized he hadn’t spoken yet. People skills were not his strongest attribute. “Hey,” Sam tried. Saying “hey” was about as foreign to him, with its implied ease of communication, as Ukrainian. “Hey,” he repeated, as stilted as the first time. “Hey,” the man said back to him. Sam took note of the spatula in his hand and wondered what kind of domestic scene he had interrupted.

“Is Gracie home?” Sam asked, realizing he didn’t know her last name.

“Why do you have hair all over your face?” The little girl looked up at him. “Are you cold?”

“Gracie? Sure,” the man replied to Sam, after a pause and a look Sam caught (because he was as sensitive as a fly to such looks), that said “Who is this guy and why is he asking for Gracie.” Then there was another moment—and at these times Sam really thought he might have superhero powers—the glimmer of an expression that could not be read as anything other than self-interest.

“I’m Kenny,” Kenny said, “Kenny Pollock.” He said the last part with just a little more weight than the words warranted, as far as Sam was concerned. Then he reached out and shook Sam’s hand. Judging by the crush of the handshake and the particular enthusiasm with which it was unleashed, Sam knew
he hadn’t misread anything. Spider-Man had nothing on Sam Knight.

But he wondered as he stepped inside, guided by Kenny with the earring and spatula, what on earth a frat boy like Kenny could find interesting about him. The little girl, still hovering under her father’s arm, steadily eyed Sam and his beard. “Can I touch it?” she finally asked after what Sam could feel was much deliberation.

“Are your hands clean?” Sam asked the girl, who nodded and then paused to examine her tiny hands.

“Gracie!” Kenny yelled. “Got a young man here for ya.” Kenny turned and winked at Sam, a choice so shocking to Sam he almost jumped.

The three rounded the corner into the kitchen. Gracie was finishing off the last of the three pieces of bacon Kenny had placed on her plate. The eggs were already a memory. Jaden ran to her mother, who hugged and kissed her and then looked up guiltily. “I guess I was really hungry,” she almost said. Instead she blurted out, “Oh,my God.”

“Hey, Gracie,” Kenny bubbled, “your friend—” Kenny turned to him. “Sorry, buddy, your name again?”

“Sam,” Sam said, his eyes only on Gracie. She was wearing a robe. She had probably changed her nightgown. Her toes were poking out of her slippers. Her hair was half in her face.

She was blushing furiously. She looked like a teenager. God, I want to kiss her, Sam thought. His further thoughts were more advanced, along the lines of disrobing her with his teeth, slowly licking her entire body, and politely screwing her brains out. The image of Gracie’s lush, welcoming naked body stayed with Sam until Kenny had the nerve to break his trance by actually speaking.
Why do people need to talk so much?
Sam asked himself.

“So, Sam,” Kenny said to him, then turned to Gracie. “This is the guy, right, Gracie? This is the one?”

Gracie was looking into Sam’s eyes, sinking into his gaze. Did he ever blink? She’d read something about Scientologists not blinking; so when she and Kenny attended a Christmas party at the giant Church of Scientology in Hollywood (Kenny was wooing John Travolta to play the role of Madame Curie’s husband, Mr. Curie) Gracie made a point of not blinking the whole night.

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s the one.”
Oh, screw it,
Gracie thought,
so I’m in love with a homeless man. There are worse tragedies.

“Do you like to play?” Jaden asked Sam.

He looked down at her, sitting in her mother’s lap, and smiled. “My sister used to make me play with dolls,” he said, wincing at the memory, “for hours and hours and hours. Days!”

Jaden burst out in giggles at her vision of his memory and burrowed deeper into her mother’s robe.

“Great, listen.” Kenny turned to Sam. “Gracie told me all about you, and, you know, your background, and I’d love to talk to you sometime. In fact I made a little breakfast here, as you can see. Why don’t you join us?”

“I’m going to get dressed,” Jaden said. “I’m not proper.” She didn’t take her eyes off Sam as she slid from her mother’s embrace and breezed sideways past him. And then, finally, she turned on her tippy toes and ran up the stairs.

“Kenny and I …” Gracie wanted to explain to Sam. She pointed at Kenny, then to herself, then back and forth again.

“What she’s trying to tell you is that we’re married,” Kenny said. “But not for much longer. I’ve got a serious, serious girlfriend, who’s incidentally an international superstar, but that’s
not why I love her, not even a little bit, and well, look at you and Gracie, this is great. Really great.”

Gracie realized that Kenny still thought Sam was the “rubber man”—the man who made hundreds of millions in rubber, the man who owned his own G-5.

Gracie burst out laughing.

“What?” Kenny asked, befuddled, looking at her with a slightly wounded expression.

Gracie just shook her head. She couldn’t answer him and laugh and swallow the rest of her food at the same time.

The two men watched her laugh, her hands flat on the counter, her head shaking from side to side.

And then Sam started to smile.

“Sam,” Gracie said, looking at him. Her eyes were red, rimmed with tears. “Kenny wanted to talk to you, you know, about business. Your business.”

“My business,” Sam said rather than asked.

Gracie smiled. He was game.

“Yes, you know, rubber,” she said.

“Oh, the rubber business,” Sam said. “Oh, I couldn’t. It’s far too dull.”

“Not at all,” Kenny said. “I, personally, would be fascinated. I’m interested in all kinds of … rubber … things.”

“Kenny would be fascinated,” Gracie promised.

“Not many people are.” Sam shrugged. “But I’d be happy to bring you up to speed. You know, we’re having a little problem on the manufacturing side. The Indonesians, you know.”

Kenny put his arm around him. “This is gonna be great,” he said. “You ever think about the film business?”

“All the time,” Sam said.

“Are you kidding?” Gracie asked. “He doesn’t stop talking about the film business.”

Kenny rubbed his hands together. “This is great,” he repeated.

Sam put his hand on Kenny’s shoulder. “Listen, Kenster,” he said, not knowing where the moniker had come from. “You think I could talk to Gracie here for a minute?”

Kenny nodded eagerly. And stood there.

“Alone?” Sam asked. Kenny put his hands up (including the one still holding the spatula).

“Right, right, no problem, take your time.” He scooted out of the kitchen and onto the deck, where Gracie could see him pretending to find the Pacific Ocean interesting.