An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  My former life.

  When I’d had a man to kiss at night and a daughter to hug before she left for school, someone to eat with and shop with, with whom I could confide and vent and share . . . everything.

  Now when I think of people inside my house, my fear of Simon takes over, and I see a big man in a bulky jogging suit slapping a rubber truncheon as he comes toward me. I turn back toward the door, desperate to escape, but a second man is standing in front of it, blocking my way, a spool of black duct tape dangling like a bracelet from his thick wrist.

  Even though I know these thugs are only imaginary, I look through my front window before going inside. If Mr. Cohen sees me doing this, it will alarm him, but I am compelled to do it anyway.

  Once in the house, I methodically check the doors and windows.

  Nothing is amiss. Everything is secure.

  I walk down the corridor and into my bedroom.

  In the adjoining bath, I remove my makeup, wash my face, brush my teeth, then undress and climb into my bed.

  According to the evening news, there have been the usual number of accidents, traffic snarls, fires, city council resolutions. There is no mention of the girl.

  I turn off the television and reach for my bedside book. It is about the dancing girls of Mumbai. Each night men go by the hundreds to the bars along Mira Road. Usually they simply wave folded wads of money at the girls, but sometimes they take garlands made of rupees and place them around the necks of their favorite performers. “The men think I dance for them,” one of the girls says, “but it is the men who dance for me.” There is no indication that this dancer is aware of the danger that resides in the weapon she wields, despite the fact that the bodies of bar dancers are regularly pulled from the excremental sludge of the Mithi River.

  I read for half an hour, then close the book and turn out the light. Eventually I drift off to sleep, awaken, drift off again.

  After a while I give up, go to my computer, and check my emails.

  There’s one from Mehdi. It’s long, and somewhat rambling. He’s talking about the wife who betrayed him.

  He has often described her as a “seductress,” though she hardly looks the part. He has to convince himself of her beauty, because if he does not have a beautiful wife, he is less of a man. Truth is truth, however, and in the pictures of her that he has shown me, she has sharp features and eyes that look almost hostilely at the camera, with a sour expression, as if she is irritated by its prying lens.

  In present-day Iran, Mehdi writes, such a “harlot” would be stoned to death. He’s quick to add that he is a “modern man” who doesn’t approve of this: Ha-ha . . . just saying.

  Just saying, yes.

  And yet I sometimes imagine him in a crowd of men, hurling stones at the wife who betrayed him, her arms tied to her sides and her body buried waist-deep in the ground. Would he cheer ecstatically when a rock bloodied her face or cracked a bone?

  Toward the end of his email, Mehdi switches his attention to me.

  He has bought some Iranian pistachios and dates.

  He will have these for your pleasure at our next class.

  He wants to help me get more clients by designing a better flyer.

  He wants to “succor” me.

  Mehdi’s suggestion is that I’m weak, in need of his guidance and instruction.

  I find this insinuation both intrusive and insulting.

  As a mental antidote, I switch on the television again. They’re showing that old chestnut Double Indemnity. Barbara Stanwyck is pure seduction. Those dark glasses and loose-fitting clothes. The way she floats down the stairs. You can almost feel the hot breeze that wafts toward Fred MacMurray as she passes. Even without touching, they seem caught in a dark, erotic dance of lust and murder.

  The phone rings.

  I tell myself that there’s nothing to fear. It’s a client with a last-minute cancellation.

  Or Ava, who seems hardly ever to sleep.

  It isn’t Simon, I assure myself as I answer it.

  But it is.

  “Don’t hang up, Claire. I want to apologize. I overreacted.”

  Manipulation is all he knows. He’ll try this, then that. Put on one mask. Exchange it for another. It’s the kind of deception that has worked for him all his life.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “That’s why I’m calling. To tell you that I’m sorry about our last conversation. It ended on the wrong foot.”

  He means that it ended with him not being able to convince me to vanish from his life.

  When I don’t respond, he makes another effort.

  “Can we meet? It’s as much for you as it is for me.”

  This is a lie, and I know it. He wants to convince me that nothing I believe is true, or ever was.

  I know what’s coming, a spew of phony pity. I act to stop it.

  “Is someone following me?” I blurt.

  “Following you?”

  He genuinely sounds surprised by the question.

  I know better.

  “Have you hired someone to watch me, Simon?”

  His surprise becomes amazement.

  “What are you talking about, Claire? Why would I—?”

  “Yes or no?”

  “No!”

  Now he’ll feign being wounded by such a charge. He is once more the blameless object of a false accusation.

  “My God, Claire, have you completely . . .”

  He stops and abruptly changes his tone. Now he is all sweetness and concern.

  “Claire, do you really believe that I would—”

  “Do you think I’m hallucinating, Simon?”

  He releases a long, weary breath.

  “No one is following you, Claire,” he tells me. “Okay? No one is following you.”

  There is a pause before he adds in a calm, reasoning tone, “But if you . . . think you’re being followed, I could help with that.”

  “Help?” I snap. “You mean help me get rid of my paranoid visions?”

  “I mean I could find you a . . . quiet place.”

  He is talking about a sanatorium of some kind. Rehab for my shattered mind. A nice little mountain retreat where I can regain my senses.

  “And Claire, don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Keep your money,” I tell him fiercely. “I’m not crazy, Simon. I know what you did.”

  “Claire, please, I want you to—”

  “I have nothing more to say to you.”

  “All right,” Simon says like a man tired of arguing a case he can’t win. “Then I’ll let you go.”

  He sounds like an executioner apologizing for the ax. This is the real reason for his call. He can say to himself, Okay, I gave you one last chance. You didn’t take it. Whatever happens now, you brought it on yourself.

  “Goodbye, Claire.”

  Is it only my fear of him that makes this farewell sound so final?

  I put down my phone and walk into the living room.

  I have hung a selection of reproductions. Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child. Marc Chagall’s Le Visage Bleu. Tonight I am drawn to Van Gogh’s portrait of his little room in Arles. There is anguish in every brushstroke, and yet he made something beautiful out of his life. If we could all do that, masterpieces would hang from every wall.

  The blinking light of my answering machine tells me that I have a message. It’s from my father, his voice dry and cracked with age.

  “Hi, Claire. Any chance you might pick up some doughnuts on the way over tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow.

  Tuesday.

  My once-a-week nod to his fatherhood.

  I delete his message and head for my bedroom.

  I keep two photographs of Melody on the table beside my bed.

  In one of them, she is five years old, smiling, happy, cradled in her father’s loving arms.

  The second photograph is of Melody at fourteen. A scrim of trouble veils her features. She seems oddly distant and ill at ease, as if burdened
with a dread she’s afraid to share.

  These two pictures rest side by side.

  They divide my life into its twin phases.

  Before and after Simon.

  I pick up the more recent photograph of Melody. It was taken a year before that trip to Catalina.

  Before the night I found her standing in the rain on the deck of the boat.

  Before she told me about Simon.

  Before I didn’t believe her.

  I peer at the picture silently but hear the promise I’ve made to myself:

  I won’t let him do it again.

  PART II

  Sloan

  WHEN I BECAME a sin eater, I looked up the derivation of the term. It turned out that a sin eater was a kind of magical figure who went to the house of a deceased human being and ate a ritual meal. The servings might be no more than a crust of bread along with some of the local beer to wash it down with. The important part was that this food and drink had absorbed the dead man’s sins, and as it was eaten, all his evil deeds were absolved. He could go on to the afterlife completely free of his crimes.

  The present-day Los Angeles version of a sin eater is also called a fixer or a cleaner. And of course sin eating isn’t about food anymore. Most of the time it’s about power, money, or the need to get even. Less often, it has to do with something more abstract, like getting back your self-respect. More rarely, it’s a question of regaining trust after someone you’d deeply believed in proved to be other than what you thought he was.

  After I left the LAPD, sin eating seemed a natural fit for me. I’d learned how to investigate crimes, how the courts work, how lawyers talk, how pleas are bargained. I knew how to mollify volatile people, negotiate without anger, deal with individuals who had inflated ideas of their own importance. I was cool under pressure, persuasive even to people who were initially disinclined to be reasonable. I was tough when I needed to be but always eager to compromise. Just as important, sin eating was a business that didn’t require a license or any further training, academic or otherwise. It was ready to hand. All I had to do was hang a sign.

  As far as I can see, there’s only one thing about the profession of sin eating that hasn’t changed since it began: a sin eater doesn’t require much space.

  Or much furniture, either. In my office on Venice Boulevard, there is a desk, a computer, a filing cabinet, and a closet where I store the tools of my trade. Articles of disguise: mostly wigs and an assortment of eyeglasses. Stationery with phony letterheads. Recording devices. Surveillance cameras and GPS tracking equipment. A safe that usually contains a few thousand dollars in cash, along with a fully licensed 9mm automatic.

  The job is as uncomplicated as the tools it requires. Simply put, I clean up the messes made by people who have big names and a lot of money. I make sure they don’t suffer the consequences of the reckless things they do. I calm down irate wives or lovers. I work to keep my clients’ names off the police blotter or a courtroom docket. That way I ensure that the painful results of bad behavior are either modified or disappear entirely. It’s usually a matter of cash, the only question being how much. Sin eaters bring down the price, convince the troublesome party that their client is not a money tree whose greenback leaves can endlessly be plucked. In that sense, I’m a broker between two extremes. Fifty percent of my time, I try to get one side to be reasonable. The other fifty percent I spend doing the same for the opposite party.

  “Good morning,” Jake said when I stepped out of the elevator.

  Jake is a retired LAPD homicide detective who now works as a private investigator. He rents the office next to mine, rarely closes his door, and so is always aware of when I come and go. He’s a friendly, talkative man, but since my father’s death, I’ve lost the gift for idle conversation.

  As for Jake, he’s tall without being gangly and says he once had movie-star looks. He means this as a joke, but I can see that he was probably quite good-looking in his younger days. His face reminds me of Charles, the one long relationship I’ve had.

  I caught Charles’s eye at a New Year’s Eve party at the law firm where he worked. He couldn’t believe a cop could be so “fly.” Three months later I moved into his apartment in Westwood. For a long time we were happy. We thought about getting married, having kids. But my being a cop made trouble for us. He couldn’t handle how tense and driven the job made me. He wanted me to quit, but I kept at it, always with the idea of becoming commissioner one day. He said I was only trying to achieve that high office because my father had failed to reach it. He was probably right. That didn’t matter. We argued. Everything went south. I moved out.

  Being without him made things worse.

  The job wore me down.

  Two years later I left the LAPD and switched to sin eating.

  For the first year it was hard going. I was an unknown commodity, new to the business. There weren’t many clients. Over time more showed up at my door. Within three years I’d gotten a reputation for handling problems in a “nice” way, using more brains than brawn. If you needed a bone-breaker, you’d go to someone else. But if you wanted a sin eater who would carefully scope out the situation, then get it solved with as little messiness as possible, the word was, Get Sloan Wilson.

  The one thing I hadn’t expected when I began this new work was how much I’d later come to like it. There was good to be done in this profession. There was a place for calm understanding and wise restraint. I didn’t have to be a bully or threaten people with bodily harm. I didn’t have to shout in their faces. I could simply listen to their tales of woe. How they’d been used, betrayed, cheated, misled. After that I could figure out what they really wanted in the wake of this mistreatment and go from there.

  What I brought to sin eating, as a client once said to me, was “the female touch.”

  By the time I was five years into the job, I no longer thought of returning to the LAPD. I had found my calling. It was good. I was close—really close—to being happy.

  My father noticed how much I’d changed and never talked about my leaving the force. “You’re going to be okay,” he told me not long before he died.

  I thought he was right, and was pleased that as he’d approached his end, he’d felt that my life was on a steady course.

  In fact, the only unfortunate thing I saw in my future was that I wouldn’t be able to share its little victories with my father anymore. This was the thought that was still lingering in my mind when I got to my office that morning.

  “Get a good night’s sleep?” Jake asked cheerfully as I swept by his open door.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Which wasn’t true.

  “Only sweet dreams, right?” Jake added with a broad wink.

  “Always.” Also not true.

  In fact, I’d once again woken at daybreak, already tired from having gotten no sleep, my morning mood battered by a very bad dream. The same one I’d had off and on since my father died.

  I’m in a city that’s falling apart. There are rioters everywhere, smashing windows, overturning cars, setting buildings on fire. To make it worse, a hard rain is falling, cold and oily, slithering down windows, leaving a black stain. I somehow have to get my father through all this. He is dying, but somewhere in this maze of buildings there is a machine that can save him.

  I keep trying to find it. But I never do.

  I’d still been drifting in the aftermath of that nightmare when I reached my office. To pull myself out of it, I got right down to my clients’ troubles. A midlevel Hollywood actor with a paternity problem. A movie director with an unflattering tabloid story he wanted me to squelch. A business executive whose blackmailer I must convince to find another means of livelihood.

  I was still working on these affairs when Jake popped his head into my office and said I should break for lunch. I wasn’t hungry, but he didn’t like to eat alone.

  At the diner Jake talked about his family, his grandchildren, a joke his wife had told him. While he talked, I wa
tched kids playing in the schoolyard across the street. They looked happy and full of energy.

  “You keeping radio silence?” Jake asked.

  I faked a smile, as if I were returning to the old, less somber version of myself.

  “No, just thinking,” I answered.

  Jake didn’t press the issue. He switched the conversation to a case he was working on. Viola Walker had been found dead in her garage in Brentwood. She’d been shot execution style, in the back of the head. No sign of sexual assault. According to the crime-scene inventory, she’d had a Hermès Bleu alligator bag that clocked in at a whopping $68,000. The wallet tucked inside was gray leather, Gucci. It bulged with $4,000 in bills of different sizes, but mostly hundreds. Clearly robbery had not been the motive. It was the husband who’d hired Jake to look into his wife’s murder, as well as to keep tabs on the official investigation, which Jake could easily do through his contacts in the department.

  “I figure it’s probably meant to send a message to the husband,” Jake said. “Maybe he stiffed someone he shouldn’t have.”

  “Then why not kill the husband?”

  “Because the killer wants the money, and the wife isn’t good for that. She probably didn’t know a thing about any of it.” He took a sip of coffee. “Death must have come as a complete surprise to her.”

  To die that fast struck me as a very good thing. My father’s death had taken eight months. There’d been times, when he slept and I’d known he’d awaken only to pain, when a bullet to the head had seemed the right thing to do.

  “Anyway, the husband is convinced the cops have pegged him for the murder. I’m supposed to find a better suspect.”

  I glanced out toward a building that had once been a movie theater but was now a bank. My mother had taken me to a movie there. She’d been in her midthirties then, and very beautiful. People turned to watch her pass. When they did, she enjoyed it. But that day she’d been nervous, always glancing around, checking her watch. I’d known something was up. I might even have asked her what the problem was if he hadn’t shown up before I got the chance.