Usuality

by Thomas Mueller

  There was still crime scene tape up around the elevator and blood on the rug, but otherwise all evidence of the police investigation into Bill Silverman’s murder had vanished. Uniformed officers had questioned Lyon and the residents of the other three penthouses, but it had been brief. From what she’d been able to gather, somebody had brought pressure to bear from city hall, and that somebody, if the officer’s grumbling was to be believed, was the Councilman who lived catty-corner to her. Rumor had it his new wife snorted coke like some people drank soda and probably didn’t appreciate the police presence. Nothing as intrusive as an actual search through any of the penthouses had been conducted. The investigation for physical evidence had been expedited, allowing minimal disruption to the lives of the residents.

  Which was how it should be when you had the money to make the top of Century Tower your home, thought Lyon. When you’d carved out your own little secluded corner in a world where peace and quiet were at a premium. She didn’t care who’d killed that annoyingly bearded man, but she hoped the police did find them so she could send whoever it was a box of chocolates and an anonymous thank-you card. She only put up with the Bill Silvermans of the world out of necessity. The less there were of them, the better.

  Char was sleeping soundly, so when the phone she’d taken off Silverman had beeped insistently Michelle took it to the other room to read the message. She couldn’t say exactly why she felt the compulsion to read whatever it was somebody was sending the deceased screenwriter at three in the morning, just like she couldn’t say why she’d kept the phone as a souvenir instead of destroying it after they’d dragged Silverman out to the elevator. But she had, and what she’d seen in the message had stoked her white-hot with anger. A photo and two words: Cafferty Wade. And the worst part was that she didn’t even know who’d sent it.

  The Bill Silvermans of the world she could deal with. Laughable people with laughable ambitions, whose desires made them vulnerable. Everybody who got into the movie business got into it because of desire, be it for fame, fortune, or some mixture of the two that they liked to call Art. Consequently, people in the screen trade were some of the easiest to manipulate.

  This was something else altogether.

  From what she could tell, there were two possibilities: either Silverman had managed to send the photos to somebody before she and Char had confronted him (although he’d denied it), or the singing douchebag who’d been with him, the actor who, it turned out, was her downstairs neighbor, had somehow managed to swipe the photos without any of them knowing. Given the impression she’d gotten of the man, she highly doubted he could mastermind tying his own shoes in the morning, much less anything as devious as this. He sang show-tunes in the shower, for Chrissakes.

  So all of her fury had focused on the only part of it she could do anything about: the man in the cowboy hat. Seeing him in the background of the photograph jerking off had brought back all the feelings of filthiness and embarrassment, anger and guilt, everything she’d sworn to herself she would never feel again. It took her back to the day she’d turned sixteen, the day her world had been ripped away from her in one brutal instant of disastrous honesty, when she’d revealed the truth about herself to Rachel and had been punished for her carelessness in the worst way imaginable.

  And now here was this man with his binoculars and his ridiculous hat, his erect penis that was laughing at her, taunting her, telling her she had again become careless and complacent in her aerie, high above the city, behind the walls of her castle. Telling her she’d let down her guard down and would once again be punished for it. Whatever the person texting her was planning to do, it would be the form that punishment took, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  But she could confront the man in the next penthouse. She pressed the buzzer again, her hands itching to form fists at her sides.

  The door opened.

  The man standing before her wore a dark red smoking jacket and a sheepish smile. He looked like a chubby-cheeked, rotund Hugh Hefner. Michelle fought the urge to puke as she pushed past him into the front hallway of his penthouse.

  The walls were lined with art, a bawdy, eclectic mixture of framed theatrical posters, original oil paintings, and huge enlargements of famous photographs. She found his lack of taste appalling, doubly so given the fact that so many of the feature films represented were schlock money-makers that she herself had produced.

  Wade closed the door and stood staring at her, unsure of what to do with his hands. He tried putting them in his pockets only to take them out again and fiddle with one sleeve, then clasped them briefly behind his back before simply letting them hang at his sides.

  My God, thought Michelle, he has a thing for me.

  “I’m sorry,” Wade finally managed to say. “I admit this is something of a surprise. Not in a bad way, mind you.” He laughed nervously. “Please, come in, come in. Do you...do you know who I am?”

  Michelle shook her head.

  “That’s okay,” he said reassuringly, although she hadn’t apologized. “It’s just that most people recognize me from my commercials.” He stuck out his hand. “Cafferty Wade.”

  She stared at the hand, knowing full well where it had been, until he lowered it. The text message had been right, she thought, useless anger burning in her throat.

  “Can I get you a drink? Please, I insist.”

  His sudden hospitality caught Michelle off balance. “Um, coffee,” she said.

  “Milk, sugar? I’d offer creamer, but I seem to be out of the good kind.”

  “Creamer is for cunts,” she replied automatically.

  Wade balked. “Certainly, certainly. I, ah, try to keep it in for guests. I was hoping to talk to you, actually,” he said, leading her to an office that smelled of espresso, oiled leather, and some kind of terrible cologne. “I was planning to introduce myself later this morning. I wouldn’t have imagined you would still be up this late or I would have come over tonight—”

  Michelle held out Silverman’s phone like a missionary brandishing a cross. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?”

  Wade froze in the act of pouring coffee from an insulated silver carafe. His lip twitched briefly downward before he recovered, but it was enough to provide Michelle with some small degree of petty satisfaction. With the taste came the overpowering hunger for more.

  Wade cleared his throat. “This wasn’t how I wanted you to find out. I was hoping to be able to shield you from any unpleasantness, but I can see how some explanation might be required.”

  He held out the cup. She accepted it, but didn’t drink from it. She could feel him squirm under her gaze, and it made her feel powerful.

  “I know this might be hard,” he continued, “but please believe me when I say that I’m on your side. I’m your protector, Michelle, your white knight.”

  “How dare you.”

  Wade floundered.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” she demanded.

  Wade looked wounded. “I told you.”

  “Yes, you’re my Secret Santa. So what? I don’t need protecting, and certainly not from the likes of you.”

  “But I know your secret,” said Wade, trying desperately to explain. “I know about the girl, Rachel. There are people out there, people who are a threat to you, but I can keep you safe.”

  Michelle wasn’t listening. With the mention of Rachel’s name, a numb kind of disbelief came over her. It wasn’t possible. There was no way anybody could know about Rachel, much less this fat slob who she’d never met before, who didn’t know her, didn’t know anything about her. There was no way he could know Rachel’s name. No fucking way. It wasn’t possible. She’d never told a soul. He had no right to know, no right to speak Rachel’s name. She didn’t even speak Rachel’s name, and she had loved Rachel with all her heart.

  Suddenly the satisfaction at watching him squirm wasn’t enough. She felt herself losing control. Before she even knew what she was doing she had flung the steaming
contents of her cup into Wade’s smooth, piggish face.

  He screamed, and Michelle screamed right along with him. Her vision clouded and she kicked out. Her boot caught him squarely in the chest and he stumbled away from her, just as Rachel had done so many years ago, when they were both so young and fragile, just as she continued to do over and over again in Michelle’s nightmares.

  Wade’s feet got tangled. He tripped and fell, and when he fell it was backwards into the sharp metal corner of his oversized aviator desk. There was a sickening crunch as his head hit, a crash as the glass carafe he’d been holding shattered on the ground, and then he was laying on the floor, flopping uselessly like a fish on the docks.

  His eyes were open and aware, and, along with the awareness, there was awful terror at his own mortality. Or maybe it simply a trick of the light. Either way, it seemed like forever before he finally stopped moving. Michelle recognized it when it happened; it was a stillness she had seen before. She took a careful breath, and then another, burying the emotional outburst that had briefly taken hold of her. After a third breath she was once more back in control.

  She blinked.

  All things considered, it hadn’t worked out too terribly at all. Wade had had a freak accident while making a late-night batch of coffee. He’d fumbled, scalding his face, and it had caused him to fall backwards and hit his head against his desk. Nobody had been there to help, and he had died from the blow to his head.

  After all, she reflected, the most common cause of death was household accidents. She’d read that somewhere, so it must be true.

  Before she even knew what she was doing, she had taken the empty coffee cup and left the room. Distantly, she registered the nauseating finality of what she had just done, but this time around she was more practiced at ignoring it. Careful not to touch anything, she opened the front door with the cuff of her blouse so she wouldn’t leave any prints. She yearned to go back through the hallway, systematically knocking every single one of Wade’s garish frames off the walls, smashing them over the same desk corner that had taken his life, but it was a petty urge. She resisted and was proud of herself for doing so.

  As soon as she was inside her own penthouse again she shed her boots and her clothes, leaving everything she had been wearing in a pile in the entranceway. The cool air felt exhilarating against her bare skin. She set the empty cup down on a table by the door, put Silverman’s phone beside it but then frowned, changed her mind and carried it with her back to the bedroom. She would be up for a while still. Another message wouldn’t wake her.

  In the morning she would deal with whoever it was who had sent her the photograph and then everything would go back to the way it had been before. Char would last, or she wouldn’t. Michelle would make the late Bill Silverman’s picture, and many more after it. Women would share her bed, nobody would be the wiser, and nobody would ever breathe Rachel’s name again.

  XXXV: SECRET DECODER RING

  “You what?”

  “I said we’d be there.”

  Garrett was sitting upright in bed, shirtless. Faint light from the overcast morning filtered in through the clouded glass blocks of the wall. Johnson’s spare bed had felt like heaven after the one at Pickle’s motel, and the desire to lay back down and slip again into blissful oblivion was overpowering.

  He yawned. “You get a text from Nick saying to meet him and Marin this morning—him and Marin—at his garage across town, and your first instinct is to trust him?”

  “Of course she doesn’t trust him,” said Johnson. The big man was leaning against the door jam, still in the same clothes he’d been wearing the previous night, a cup of coffee in one hand. He was, thought Garrett, entirely too alert for only having gotten three hours of sleep, same as the rest of them.

  “Then why agree to meet them? We’re safe here, you said it yourself.”

  Johnson shrugged. “Nick was probably the one who picked up Marin outside the diner. If they’re so ready and willing to patch up their differences, it means they’re up to something. Ergo, the garage is a setup.”

  “So you don’t think we should go,” said Garrett, confused.

  “If it’s a setup, and we know that, it might be something we could turn to our advantage.”

  “Right,” said Garrett. “So either you’re crazy, or I’m missing something, or both. I need coffee.”

  “Downstairs,” said Johnson. He indicated the way with his mug and stepped back so that he no longer blocked the doorway. Garrett yawned again, climbed out of bed and, wearing only his boxers despite the cold, headed downstairs.

  When he was gone, Johnson studied Reagan. “Do you love him?” he asked.

  “Garrett?”

  The big man nodded.

  “Why do you care?”

  Johnson shrugged. “I’m curious what you see in him, is all. Besides the fact that he has a great ass.”

  “And you’re a good judge of these things? I thought you said you were married, once. Now you’re saying you’re gay?”

  “Yes, you found me out. I’m all about men, I just forgot to put on my Secret Gay Decoder Ring this morning.” Johnson gave her a disappointed look. “All guys look at other guys’ asses, most are just too homophobic to admit it. Women look at other women’s breasts, hair, thighs. It’s the same thing. Everybody compares themselves to everybody else, it’s the way we’re wired. I’m honest about doing it, is all. Sometimes comparison inspires us to better ourselves, other times it inspires envy. Only one of those things is actually useful, by the way.”

  Reagan plucked at a loose thread in the bed sheet absently. “I don’t know what I see in Garrett. Potential, I suppose. I’ve known him forever. He’s like an external part of me, part of my growing up. It’s like he’s a walking, talking memory. But it’s more than that, like he could never be just a memory because he’s a part of my future, too. I guess, deep down, I’ve always known it was going to be him.”

  “So, true love.”

  “If you’re going to make fun of me I’m not going to talk about it.”

  Johnson smiled.

  Reagan groaned and lay back. “Am I making a complete fool out of myself?”

  “Not possible,” said Garrett, returning with two mugs of coffee. Sitting on top of the covers next to Reagan, he handed one to her. “How do you feel this morning?”

  She breathed in the deep, thick smell of the coffee. Johnson made the good stuff, not like that crap at the motel. She knew she shouldn’t drink much, but a sip or two wouldn’t be too terribly unkind to the tiny life growing in her belly. More than coffee, she wanted Garrett to put his arms around her. She wanted the lie of being held tight and feeling safe, but they weren’t safe, not yet, and she knew if Garrett held her she might never find the strength to face whatever was coming next.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Garrett studied her, unconvinced. “What were you talking about?”

  Johnson folded his arms. “We were talking about how women think it’s sexy when a man’s willing to take risks, and how you’re not. Willing to take risks.”

  “Then tell me what we hope to gain from waltzing right into the middle of whatever Nick has in store for us. It sounds less like a risk and more like suicide.”

  “You make it sound like he’s planning to feed us to the wolves,” said Reagan. “He’s no monster.”

  “We need information,” said Johnson, “especially the kind of information Polito might not realize he has.”

  “You can’t put her in harm’s way,” said Garrett. “She’s pregnant.”

  “You want to try convincing her to stay here,” said Johnson, “be my guest. I’ll be downstairs,” and with that, he left them alone in the bedroom.

  “Garrett, it’s only Nick. He likes to pretend he’s a tough guy, but it’s all show.”

  “The asshole part isn’t show.”

  “I’m not staying here.”

  “Okay, you’re not staying here. Why not?”

  “
You don’t need me to tell you what happens in the movies when the hero and heroine split up.”

  “You think we’re the hero and heroine?”

  “I think if we aren’t, we’d better hope whoever is is on our side.”

  “If there’s even a chance Nick would let harm come to you—”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Let me finish,” said Garrett. “If there’s even a chance he would let harm come to you or the baby—”

  “Our baby,” interrupted Reagan.

  Garrett stared at her. “But...you and Nick.”

  Reagan took his hand and placed it on her belly. “She’s not his.”

  “Not his,” repeated Garrett.

  Reagan smiled nervously. “Haven’t you always said how you wanted your life to be more like a soap opera?”

  “I’ve never said that.” Garrett was staring at his hand like maybe it belonged to somebody else. “I said there had to be more to life than starring in a soap opera.”

  “Oh, Garrett,” said Reagan sadly, “you were never the star.”

  “I know that.”

  “You were good, though. It should have been you.”

  “I know that, too. She’s really ours, yours and mine?”

  “She is.”

  Reagan didn’t know how she expected him to respond. She didn’t know what he could say to something like that. And she didn’t know why she expected whatever he said to make it all okay when she’d been the one to drop the bombshell on him in the first place. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t rational, and yet she needed it more deeply than she had needed anything in her life. She waited, not daring to breathe.

  In the end Garrett didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached out and found her other hand, squeezed it. He met her gaze without a trace of hesitation. Relief flooded through her.