At some point, our conversation passed over Caroline Kelly, and how I’d inherited Rochester from her. “Good for you,” Tor said. “You need a dog. Man’s best friend. Give you someone to take care of.”
“I can barely take care of myself.”
“Exactly,” Tor said. “That’s why you need a dog.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with his logic, and I wanted to change the subject. “Hey, you know anything about identity theft?” I asked.
“What you want to know?” Tor wiped his mouth with his napkin and laid it down next to his plate. He sighed. “Good food.”
I told him about Edith Passis, that I thought someone had stolen her identity in order to cash checks made out to her.
“So someone has access to her mail,” he said. “This person either stole the checks from her mailbox or changed her address so the checks would go elsewhere.”
“Sounds right.”
“It’s classic case of identity theft,” he said, dropping his articles as he often did. “Someone uses your personal information without permission to commit fraud or other crimes. This person uses your friend’s information to cash checks in her name—steal from her.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” I said.
“Identity theft is fastest-growing crime in this country,” Tor said. “Your friend must request credit report right away. These people may have new credit cards in her name, too, and ring up big bills without her knowing.”
I shook my head. Edith was in a world of trouble.
When the check came, Tor wouldn’t even let me leave the tip. “We come to Pennsylvania, you can treat us,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number, requesting a car to meet him at the restaurant. “I can drop you somewhere?”
I shook my head. “I have to walk off this dinner.”
He gave me another bear hug before he got into the town car, and I watched it head east for a block or so, until I lost it in the welter of traffic. I crossed over to Fifth Avenue and headed south, enjoying the crisp night, the lit shop windows, the noise and vitality of the city. Soon enough, I would have to go back to Stewart’s Crossing, work on my business plan and tell Edith Passis someone was stealing from her. But for a moment, I was a free man in a great city.
When I lived in Manhattan, I was fearless. I took the subway home from friends in Washington Heights at three a.m. I walked through dark corners of the Village, withdrew cash from ATMs on deserted streets. It was the hubris of youth.
That night, though, when I turned a corner onto a dark street near the Hudson, I felt scared. Caroline had been shot to death in just such a deserted place, though she’d had much more reason to feel safe in Stewart’s Crossing. Two guys approached me, swaying and talking loudly, and I hunched down into my jacket and quickened my step.
“Hey, buddy, spare a couple of bucks?” one of the guys said, and I didn’t hesitate; I took off at a sprint down the street, and didn’t stop until I’d reached a brightly-lit avenue. Nobody followed me and nobody shot at me, but I was reminded that the world was a dangerous place.
The next day, I was waiting for Chris McCutcheon at a Starbucks on Broadway in the West 90s when he pulled up on a Colnago CF4 Ferrari carbon-frame bicycle, which I recognized by the signature yellow and black stallion logo on the top tube. I’m no biker; I only knew about the Colnago because Rick Stemper had been raving about it to me. It was one of the best bikes in the world, if not the best, and Rick had said they went for over $8,000.
Chris was wearing black compression shorts and a tight black T-shirt. No helmet; that would have messed up his perfectly uncombed blonde hair. I admit it; he reminded me of all those guys in high school who were faster, stronger or more coordinated than I was, and I disliked him on sight.
I was sitting at a table on the street, shivering in my lightweight windbreaker, as he dismounted and locked his bike to a parking meter. “I don’t have much time,” he said, coming over to shake my hand, as he was pulling off his black bike gloves. “I’m meeting a friend in half an hour for a ride over to Brooklyn and back.”
I didn’t know where to start—how to get into such a complicated subject in a matter of minutes—but Chris McCutcheon saved me the trouble when he returned to the table after a minute with a bottle of water. My grande raspberry mocha seemed wasteful and decadent in the face of his asceticism—at least to me. “You wanted to talk about Caroline?” he asked, as he sat down across from me.
I tried to remember if I’d ever noticed him when that black SUV had been parked in Caroline’s driveway, but I drew a blank. “I found her body,” I finally said, and the words spilled out. “It’s just really freaked me out, you know? And I realized that I hardly knew her, but we didn’t have any friends in common, we were just neighbors, you know? And there was nobody I could talk to about her, to, I don’t know, get to know her a little better.”
If only to stop my blathering, Chris McCutcheon jumped in. “We lived on the same base in Korea when we were teenagers,” he said. “I was, I think thirteen or fourteen, and she was a year younger.”
He unscrewed the top of the water bottle and took a long drink. “She used to tag along behind me. There wasn’t much for kids to do on the base, but they’d have movies now and then, and once in a while they’d have some kind of dumb social event—a Korean food tasting, for example.” He made a face. “So, I don’t know, we just hung out. There weren’t a lot of other kids our age.”
“What was she like then?” I asked, just to keep him talking.
“A lot skinnier,” he said. “Smart. She was always reading. She had this lousy little dog, too, used to follow her everywhere. When it ran away she was bummed.”
I could see the beginnings of the Caroline I had known—smart, bookish, loved dogs. “When did you two meet up again?” I asked.
He used the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead. “About five, six years ago,” he said. “She was living in the city then, and we ran into each other on the Upper West Side. She was with this other chick we knew in Korea—Karina.”
“I’m having brunch with her tomorrow.”
“She’ll give you all the details, I’m sure.” He frowned. “Caroline and I went out a couple of times, but then we just ended up friends.” He drank some more water. “Military brats—we don’t attach to people real well. Sometimes the only ones we get to know are other people like us.”
“You came to visit her in Stewart’s Crossing, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Tried to get her to go biking with me. There’s some great trails there, down along the river, by the canal. She wasn’t interested. Truth is, we didn’t have that much in common, besides Korea.”
He looked at his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. He reached over to shake my hand. “Listen, don’t let yourself get too freaked out. People come and go in life.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“Sure.” He unlocked the bike and hopped back on, and in a moment he was lost in traffic.
Chapter 16 – Karina Warr
After I left Chris McCutcheon, I was didn’t have anything else to do until my brunch the next day with Karina Warr. I started walking down Broadway, figuring I’d meander back to the hotel.
I’d almost forgotten how many beautiful women there were in New York, too. Living in Stewart’s Crossing, most of the women I saw were either harried young mothers, or blue hairs like Edith and Irene. But in the city! I’ve always been a sucker for a professional woman. A tailored suit, a silk blouse, and stiletto heels draw me in right away. Manhattan was full of women like that, blondes and brunettes and raven-haired beauties shouldering their expensive handbags, talking on their cell phones, clutching their designer coffee cups.
Since it was Saturday, there were plenty of casually-dressed women as well. Mary’s favorite weekend look was jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers, and I saw that style was still in fashion on upper Broadway. She liked to pull her blonde hair into
a ponytail, then pull it through the back of a ball cap. She’d appropriated my favorite, a soft, faded denim one with the logo of a Fortune 500 company whose meeting I had covered for the magazine where I worked.
We spent our Saturdays running errands. Mary loved to cook, and she was always dragging me down to Chinatown for exotic spices, to Little Italy for handmade sausage, to the Greenmarket in Union Square for fresh produce. I was her beast of burden, tagging along behind her carrying the bags while she picked through bunches of Swiss chard or examined the freshness of salmon fillets. We’d laugh and talk, share apple fritters from a stand in the Greenmarket, and just enjoy each others’ company.
Broadway seemed to be conspiring to remind me of Mary and our life together. I passed the store where we’d bought our mattress, the office building where she’d been working when we met, a favorite Italian restaurant. I saw young couples holding hands, as we’d done long ago, before the move to California, the miscarriages and the ugly divorce.
At Columbus Circle I looked into the park and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a woman about Mary’s size, a blonde ponytail pulled through a denim ball cap. She walked into the park and I couldn’t help it. I followed her.
I knew it wasn’t Mary. She’d cut her hair short after we moved to Silicon Valley, and the ball cap was in one of the boxes of stuff she had shipped to Stewart’s Crossing while I was in prison. But the past was drawing me back.
The night of our first anniversary, we went to one of the free concerts in the park. Mary had taken the afternoon off, packing a picnic basket at Balducci’s, including a chilled bottle of champagne with plastic flutes. I met her right there at Columbus Circle, kissed her in front of the statue of old Chris, and then we walked into the Sheep Meadow, where we staked out a piece of lawn.
“I’ll spread the cloth, while you open the champagne,” Mary said. While I wrestled with the wire and cork, laid out a colorful Indian throw she’d had since college, anchoring the corners with books and take-out containers.
We fed each other grapes and slathered Brie on Swedish flatbread. “I can’t believe we’ve been married a whole year,” she said.
“I can.”
She turned on her side to look at me. There was a little bit of Brie on her lip and I picked it off with a napkin. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means we’ve packed a lot into the last year, and I remember it all.”
“Speaking of packing,” she said. She reached over and picked a clover from the grass, then discarded it when she realized it had only three lobes instead of four.
“Packing for a vacation?” I asked. We’d gone to France for our honeymoon, spending a week in Paris and then another traveling to the chateaux of the Loire Valley, but we hadn’t been away since then.
I was munching on a croissant filled with chicken salad when she said, “Maybe a different kind of trip.” She sat up.
I looked up at her. “What kind?”
“I’ve been offered a promotion,” she said. “Manager of public relations and publicity for the west coast region.”
She reached over to brush a stray hair from my forehead. “The job is based in Palo Alto. Silicon Valley.” The high-tech industry had just begun to boom, and we’d talked a bit before about the possibility of relocating to California. But it had never been more than idle speculation.
“When did this happen?”
“Yesterday. I didn’t want to tell you until I had a chance to think about it.”
I finished my croissant and picked up the champagne bottle. Both our glasses were empty, and I filled them both.
I’d accepted a long time before that Mary was more ambitious than I was, and that happiness in our life together lay in going along with what she wanted. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. I thought I would do just about anything to make that happen.
It turns out I did a lot more than agree to move to California to try and make Mary happy. I remember the concert, which finished with “The William Tell Overture,” complete with cannons and fireworks. How it felt to lie there under the stars with Mary, my arm around her shoulders, her head nestled into me, the music and the light show celebrating the commitment we had made to each other the year before, the new commitment we were making.
Our life in Silicon Valley was full of fireworks, too, though not the good kind we’d experienced in Central Park. I taught as adjunct for two semesters, making pocket change and complaining about student papers, before I found the gig at Mastodon, and Mary wasn’t happy with her new job, either. But we’d made that big move, and we had to make the best of it. Eventually she got a job she liked, and my temp job at Mastodon turned permanent, and we started trying to make babies.
Looking back, it seemed like our lives had been on a trajectory, one that began in Central Park that night, and which ended right back there—only this time I was on my own. I followed the blonde in the ball cap for a little while, thinking, and then realized that I’d lost her when I wasn’t paying attention.
I looked around. I was surrounded by trees, dappling the ground around me with sparkles of daylight. I sighed, and started to find my way out of the woods.
The next morning I woke early—but had no dog to walk. Instead, I went down to the hotel’s business center and checked my email. There were three responses to my bids for work—all no. Had they discovered my background? Had someone else been just better for the job? What would Santiago Santos say? Why was I wasting my time, and money, spending a weekend in New York when I needed to be back in Stewart’s Crossing, job-hunting and watching my pennies?
Back up in my room, I put on my sneakers, my sweat pants and a sweatshirt, and headed out for a brisk walk around Manhattan. I went south on Fifth Avenue all the way to 14th Street, then headed east to the river. The area seemed a lot safer in the daylight, but I still shivered when I remembered the drunken guys I’d run from on Friday night.
As I walked, I was reminded of how expensive it was to live in Manhattan—doorman buildings, high-performance cars on the street, expensive clothes and other merchandise in shop windows. Where did people get the money? What would I do if my plans for a technical writing business fell apart?
My bank balance kept shrinking; the twice-monthly paycheck from Eastern wasn’t quite enough to pay my bills, so I continued to dip into the little money my father had left me. What if I got sick? What if Rochester got sick? I’d seen how fast the bills piled up when my mother was hospitalized. What would I do in May, when the Eastern paychecks stopped coming in?
I worried my way back up First Avenue, crossing over to the hotel just in time to take a quick shower and head out to brunch with Karina Warr.
We’d agreed to meet at a little café on the Upper East Side, just around the corner from her apartment. “Fabulous breakfasts,” she had emailed. “Their Eggs Benedict are just to die for.” It was a charming place, decorated like an Italian country inn, with rough stone walls, tendrils of flowers dangling over the bar, and waiters in white shirts, black pants and spotless white aprons.
There was no single woman in the dining room when I arrived, so I waited on the curb for her. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty. I was just starting to worry that I’d been stood up when a cab pulled up and a breathless blonde jumped out.
“Steve?”
“Karina?”
She embraced me in a big hug, kissing my cheek. “I’m just so devastated about Caroline,” she said.
She looked anything but devastated. Her wavy blonde hair was carefully styled, and her skin glowed as if she’d just stepped out of a beauty ad. She wore a pink strapless dress with a flouncy skirt, and a black linen jacket over her shoulders. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, pulling back. “It was a bear getting a cab.”
“I thought you lived in the neighborhood,” I said.
“I do. But it’s six blocks. Can you imagine six blocks in these shoes?”
I looked down at her
feet, and realized she was quite a bit shorter than I’d thought. The strappy black sandals she wore had at least a two-inch heel. “I can’t imagine walking from here to the restaurant in those shoes,” I said.
“You men,” she said, playfully slapping my shoulder. “Come on, I’m ravenous.”
I’d known women like Karina Warr when I lived in New York. Hell, I’d married a woman like her. She had Mary’s taste in footwear, and I remembered that when we were dating Mary had the same flirtatious tone. Of course, after we married we said little more to each other than, “Can you stop and buy toilet paper on your way home from work?” But that’s the way true romance turns out.
Despite her obvious familiarity with the restaurant and each and every waiter, Karina agonized over her menu selection. I’d already decided to go with her recommendation on the Eggs Benedict, but she was worried about her cholesterol, and the French toast was loaded with sugar, and pancakes just laid in her stomach all day.
She settled on an egg-white omelet with mushrooms and green peppers and just the merest hint of cheese. “I mean it,” she said to the waiter. “You tell the chef just to wave the cheese over the top—just to let the aroma float into the omelet.”
“Certainly, Signora,” the waiter said, in an Italian accent that had detoured through Croatia.
“Signorina,” she corrected him as he collected the menus.
“Certainly, Signorina,” he said, as he beat a grateful retreat.
“Now, Caroline,” Karina said as he left, grasping my hand. It felt nice, though she was as much of a drama queen, if not more, than Reynaldo the law firm proofreader. “You must just be devastated. I know I am.”
I nodded. I realized that I hadn’t held hands with a woman for a long time, and I liked it. Some long-dormant part of me started to wake up and take notice of the little blush on Karina’s cheeks, the scent of her perfume, the way her foot nestled against my leg.
In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) Page 13