“I could take you shopping,” Anya exclaims from beside me, startling me again. She really was more poised in the church earlier today. I get the impression her son makes her nervous. Hell, he makes me nervous.
“We could go tomorrow, after Mass,” Anya says.
Shit, another early morning. I hope I don’t have to go to confession again.
“Sure,” I say, picturing me and Anya Scarpello in a store sorting through form-fitting little black dresses. Maybe I can convince her to let me wear a suit like Alex’s. Something I can still drop kick a guy in if he tries to pull a card from up his sleeve. But I sense she’s itching to pimp a more feminine ride on my rough trade carriage, her chance to play dress-up with the daughter she never had.
The waiter returns, this time with a chopping board and a meat cleaver, which he places in front of Alex on the table. This seems strange, since he’s a vegetarian. He hands Alex a red-and-black smoking jacket. Alex stands up and slips it on, doing up the belt around his lean waist. The waiter retreats to the back of the room, a towel draped over his arm. I hear a commotion in the hallway, some grunting and scuffling, before the two goons I saw in the church earlier come in with a skinny guy by the arms. He’s got a gag in his mouth, and his eyes bulge wildly like a horse I saw in a parade once when a Shriner car backfired.
“As I said, Candace, appearances are everything. For instance, this gentleman here thought he could steal from me, skimming a little off the top of one of my casino’s nightly draws. Not a lot, but it doesn’t make for a good impression.”
The goons hold the skinny guy’s forearm down on the cutting board.
“Perhaps we should leave the men to their business,” Anya says, getting ready to stand.
“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Alex shoots her a look that speaks louder than the muffled screams coming from the gagged man’s mouth. “Candace is family, after all. Besides, I wouldn’t want either of you to miss out on dessert.” Anya settles reluctantly back into her seat.
When Alex Scarpello brings the meat cleaver down, it makes surprisingly little mess. He only takes the one hand. The goons slam the bloody stump onto the trolley hot plate to cauterize it, so it doesn’t have time to bleed much. As the guy’s wrist sizzles, the stench of burned flesh fills the oversized dining room, which smells much like singed hair, if you’ve ever got too zealous with your flat iron. A lot of people don’t know that. But this isn’t my first barbecue.
“Threats and intimidation, Candace. I’m afraid that for appearance’s sake, sometimes one or the other must be carried out.”
The waiter runs up and throws his towel over the oozing hand on the cutting board. He carries it out of the room like a dead rat. The goons follow, dragging the gagged guy, who appears to have passed out.
“You’ll stay overnight with us here this evening,” Alex says as the woman in charge of cleaning up clears away our dinner plates. He hands her his smoking jacket, darkened by a fine spray of blood on the lapels. I guess he hadn’t wanted to spoil his suit. “You can get an early start with my mother for your shopping expedition tomorrow.”
Anya nods obediently. Underneath the table, I can see her smoothing her linen napkin over and over again with her delicate hands, as if to reassure herself that she’s still got two of them.
The penguin brings in dessert. It’s crème brûlée. But I’ve sort of lost my appetite.
After dinner, Alex says he has work to do in his study. Once he’s left the dining room, Anya claims to have a headache and goes up to bed. The security guy shows me to my room, but doesn’t lock me in, which means he doesn’t know much about being secure.
I figure if they were going to kill me, they would have done it at dinner. I’m even a bit hopeful that Angela’s still alive at this point. Maybe they did send her to that retreat. They could be holding her there while they figure out what to do with her. Alex asking me where I thought she was seems odd, but it might have been just another one of his tests.
The bed in my room is a king size. A treat for a person of my height. My feet always hang over the mattress on the floor of my apartment. I drop down on the puffy duvet and grab the remote for the wide-screen TV mounted on the wall, flipping through a bunch of reality shows about sex. Don’t people get enough of that every day? Reality, that is, not sex. You can never get enough of that. I finally settle on a channel with an unlimited number of episodes of Friends shown back to back. Propping myself up on the bed, I watch the antics of a group of far-too-good-looking people living way too cushy lives. I let that unreal crap flow over me like waves of false nostalgia. It helps to wash away the shit I’ve just seen, along with other unpleasant memories. The whisky I swiped from the liquor cabinet downstairs doesn’t hurt in this regard, either. That security goon really should have locked me in. I’m into the sixth episode, where Monica and Chandler are screwing but pretending they’re not, when I remember my phone.
I pull the phone out of my jacket and power it up. There are no messages from Deep, which I feel a bit disappointed by. But then again, I’d told him not to try and contact me while I was here.
I tap out a quick text.
I’m in.
And then add, You two okay? I’m not usually one to inquire after other people’s well-being. Perhaps it is an effect of the Friends’ ensemble.
Still playing Risk, Deep texts back quickly. R u ok?
I’m thinking about how I might respond to this when I hear a stirring in the hallway. I wait, trying to listen over the canned laugh track. Then I hear it again, just outside my bedroom door. I delete the texts, and turn off the phone, slipping it under the king size mattress.
I don’t have much to arm myself with here, not even a hand vacuum. I grab the half-empty whisky bottle in my hand and open the door a crack, listen for a while, then open it wider.
Anya Scarpello stands at the end of the hall in front of an upstairs window, looking out into the night. I can see some light snow has started to fall. It swirls in the floodlights from the backyard. I’m about to close the door and leave her to her private moment when she turns around and startles a bit at the sight of me. Which isn’t surprising when you catch a six-foot-three woman brandishing a whisky bottle.
“Oh, Candace, I did not know you were still awake,” she says. “I was only getting some Aspirin for my headache.”
She says this, but she doesn’t move to go get the pills, still casting a half glance out the window.
“I think we will forgo early Mass tomorrow,” she says. “After breakfast, we will go to the shops.” She looks at me again and smiles weakly, which is the only way to smile a few hours after you’ve seen a man’s severed wrist fried on a hot plate.
“Okay,” I say.
Anya returns her gaze out the window. I take that our conversation is over.
“And Candace,” she calls out to me, just as I’m about to close the bedroom door.
“Yeah.”
“Your mother will come back for you,” she says, touching her fingers to the glass. “Mothers always do.”
CHAPTER 14
WALKING INTO NORDSTROM with Anya Scarpello feels more surreal to me than walking into one of those Salvador Dalí paintings. Except, instead of melting clocks, it drips with bloated consumerism. Not unlike the Gun Superstore, but with more dog strollers and classier Christmas carols on the PA. A store employee tries to douse me with Calvin Klein’s latest scent as we walk through the cosmetics department. But I manage to elbow the atomizer out of her hand before she has a chance. Anya makes some comment about me having to work on my manners, but I think this is kind of rich coming from a woman whose son performs dismemberments between dinner courses.
It’s not true that mothers always come back for you, no matter what Anya says. But I suppose a woman like her can’t conceive of that. She’d sent breakfast to my room this morning on a tray with a single red carnation stuck in a white vase. A buttercup-embossed notecard was propped up against it, where she’d written what time I had
to be ready for our shopping trip. I tried to work the coffee press, but screwed it up and got the grounds all mixed in. After downing a couple of gritty cups that I spiked with what was left of the fine whisky, I dug into the avocado on toast. It was tasty but couldn’t hold a candle to Deep’s bacon fry-up, as he called it. Vegetarians are supposed to live longer, but I think it just feels that way to them because their life sucks so much without meat.
Anya helps me pick out some dresses to try on, handing each one to a salesgirl with hair slicked back in a bun so tight it threatens to cut off the circulation to her face. Anya chats to me about fabric and hemlines. Each time I try to steer her toward the men’s suit section, she heads me off at the pass like a Louis Vuitton linebacker. Since she’s buying, I can’t really argue. I’m only tolerating all of this fussing in hopes that Anya will tell me more about where Angela is or shed some light on her violent creep of a son’s parentage.
I go to the ladies’ change rooms, followed by the salesgirl with the bloodless face. Each stall has an upholstered door that opens out onto a private viewing area with an overstuffed round couch. Anya sits on it and waits. I feel like a life-sized Barbie doll. She coos over every outfit I try on, insisting I model each one for her. Even the black-sequined pencil dress that binds me at the knees so badly I have to walk in baby steps to keep from falling over. I look in the three-way mirror, overwhelmed by the effect of myself in shimmering triplicate. I look like an angry backup trio for Cher.
“I don’t know if it’s my style,” I say.
“Nonsense,” Anya says, circling me. “It only needs the right shoes. What size are you?”
I look down at my black cowboy boots, worn down at the heels.
“Thirteen,” I tell her. The salesgirl takes in a rush of air, which brings a momentary blush of colour to her blood-starved cheeks. My dad always told me as a kid that I’d grow into my feet, like a puppy does, and I suppose he was right. But it still makes it tough to find women’s shoes in my size outside of fiercequeen.com.
“I don’t think we have any heels in that size in the store,” she says.
But Anya is undaunted. “I’ll have a look myself, shall I?” She shoots the salesgirl a disapproving look. Then turns to me, “Wait here, dear, I’ll be back in a moment.”
I shuffle over to the salesgirl once Anya’s gone. “Do you have anything a person can actually move in? Like maybe a dress with some Lycra or something?” She gasps again, no doubt appalled by the mention of a synthetic fibre, but reluctantly goes in search of a dress not designed to keep a woman captive.
Finally left alone, I grab my leather jacket with the phone in the pocket and lock myself in the far change room to call Deep. I never did text him back last night, too spooked after my run-in with Anya in the hall. When I power up my phone, there are multiple missed calls from him and one from Malone. She’ll have to wait.
“Candace?” Deep answers the phone sounding breathless.
“Hi,” I say. “What’d I take you from?”
“I was shaving,” he says. I’m reminded of the smell of his Paco Rabanne, and surprise myself with a sigh that almost pops the zipper running down my back.
“I’ve been worried sick. What happened last night? Are you still at the Scarpellos’?
“Nope.”
“Where the hell are you, then?”
“At Nordstrom, trying on clothes.”
“You’re shopping?” Deep shouts down the phone, so loudly I have to pull it away from my ear. I unleash the zipper and start to shimmy my way out of the sequined strait jacket of a dress.
“Anya Scarpello made me,” I say.
“Like at gunpoint?” he says.
“That’s just hysterical,” I say, stepping free of the dress. I kick it to the other end of the fitting room with one of my cowboy boots. “Listen, I think I have a line on Angela. They say she got all unstable, so they sent her to that retreat you were telling me about. The one run by the doctor who signed off on my birth cert.”
“Dr. Razinski?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“And you believe them?”
“Maybe, but I think she may still be alive. Alex Scarpello was keen on whether I’d heard from her or not, and Anya seems to think she’ll turn up. I don’t think either of them know for sure where she is. Or else they’re just being cautious, trying to figure out what I know. But don’t tell Janet that. Just say that they sent her for some R&R. She’ll just freak out otherwise.”
“Okay,” Deep says. But I can tell he feels reluctant about keeping things from Janet. Lying is something that doesn’t come naturally to him.
“You better work on figuring out where that retreat is just in case, though.” After all, even the Scarpellos could tell the truth sometimes.
“I’ll try. But they’re serious about protecting the privacy of their patients. Although the good doctor is not so careful when it comes to his personal life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve found him in a few chat rooms. Online sex stuff. Live feeds. That kind of rubbish. His financials show quite a few charges for escort services.”
“What a charmer.” Looks like the doctor who specializes in hormones doesn’t have too much trouble with his own. “Any luck hacking into those Russian birth records? Or have you been too distracted by the smut sites?”
“I’ve been working on it. It’s not like they publish them on Wikipedia, you know. These things take time, Candace.”
“So does playing an unending game of Risk.”
Deep sighs. “I was trying to take Janet’s mind off of the situation. The poor kid needs some normalcy in her life, Candace.” I guess Deep is a better judge of what constitutes a normal childhood than I am. Waterboarding was the closest I ever got to board games as a kid. Learning how to dry drown a reluctant source cuffed to a drainpipe was a skill Mike Starr felt no young lady should be without.
There’s a bit of a scuffle, and then Janet comes on the line.
“You’re shopping?” I have to pull the phone away from my ear again.
“Hey, Janet.”
“I thought you were looking for Mom.”
“I am.”
“And you thought you’d find her at the mall?”
“The Scarpellos say she’s at a retreat.”
“The one Deep and you were talking about run by that doctor?” Looks like she heard more through those earbuds than I gave her credit.
“That’s it.”
“It doesn’t sound like something Mom would do.”
“It’s the best I have for now, Janet. Can you put Deep back on the line? I don’t have much time here.”
She lets out an angry huff before Deep takes back the phone.
“Are you coming back here tonight?” he asks me.
“No. I’ve got a job, working security at a high-stakes card game for Alex Scarpello.”
“Do you think that’s safe?”
“At this point the most dangerous thing seems to be the wardrobe required for it.”
“I don’t know, Candace. Why don’t you just stick around the house. Look for some information there.”
“I know what I’m doing, Deep. You just keep working on those Russki birth records and let me figure out the rest, okay?”
“Your sister’s getting stroppy,” he says, rather than debating the matter further.
“Tell her we’ll all go out for dinner tomorrow. The kid loves to eat.” I can hear Anya talking to the salesgirl outside the entrance to the change room area. “I have to go.” I turn off the phone and slip it into my leather jacket.
I step out into the viewing area just as Anya and the salesgirl return to stand by the round couch. I’m wearing nothing but a bra held together with a safety pin and a men’s pair of tighty-whities that I stole from Deep. My bright-silver star tattoo peeks out from above the elastic waistband, winking in the harsh change room lights. The two eye me appraisingly.
“I think we may need a visit t
o lingerie, as well,” Anya says. The salesgirl nods before she runs away in search of silky underthings, or maybe just to get away from my deadpan stare.
Unbelievably, Anya is able to locate a pair of shoes that fit me. She got them off of a seven-foot Mrs. Claus strutting it up in one of the store-window displays. The shoes are ruby-red patent leather with six-inch metallic stiletto heels that taper to a sharp point. If you took the rubber lifts off the bottom, you could use them to pick up trash off the interstate.
For a dress, we finally settle on a Lycra-blend cocktail number that clings to my curves like crêpe wallpaper but still has enough give to allow for a drop kick if the need presents itself. Anya insists on topping it with a satin blazer, which I intend to ditch for my leather jacket tonight as soon as I leave the house.
After Nordstrom, Anya’s driver drops us off at St. Clare’s Catholic Church. She wants Father Randolph to give us a private Mass to make up for missing the early morning one. We’re waiting for him to finish in the confessional. There’s a bit of a line-up. It must be a busy week for sinners. There’s a petite ash-blonde with an eyebrow piercing waiting her turn. I would probably try to get her number under different circumstances. But something tells me that snaring a hookup in a confessional queue might be frowned upon.
I’m a little nervous about doing the Holy Communion thing. If I screw up, the priest might figure out I’m not a real Catholic and give me the bum’s rush. I’m not really concerned with any higher authority than that. I figure God has to be thoroughly pissed with me already, given the life I’ve led up until now. When it comes to endangering my mortal soul, that ship has definitely sailed, thrown anchor, and possibly sunk. One more act of blasphemy is not going to change that. Maybe I should try to pick up that girl in the confessional line-up after all.
Anya and I sit down in one of the pews up front, out of earshot of the people waiting on the priest in the booth at the back. In front of us, a collection of white stubby candles flicker in an angled tray, giving off a scent of cheap wax. Anya stares up at a statue of Mary in blue-and-white robes. Mary’s hands are outstretched as she looks down at her bare feet. She’s way too white for a chick from the Middle East, but who am I to judge. Mary’s much easier on the eyes than her son, who hangs crucified not far away, blood dripping from His hands and feet in high-gloss red paint. No wonder she’s looking down.
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