Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  “And what's with those outfits of hers?” Marianna sniped. “Her skirts are so tight you can see her thong outline when she bends over.”

  “And who,” I added, “wears thongs anymore? I mean, the point of them is what?”

  “Truthfully,” Marianna said, “I think men find thongs more enticing than no underwear at all. They get off on the sadism of sexy clothes.”

  “Masochism,” Laurie corrected. “Men don't force women to walk around all day with a glob of fabric in their asses.”

  “Then why do we do it?” Beth asked.

  All eyes spun to Beth.

  “Are you shitting me?” I said to her. Laurie and Marianna looked at her in silent accusation. Beth's mouth fell open, the deceit of denial caught in her throat.

  “We don't,” Mari answered. “And if we do, then we shall, forthwith, gather all such garments up in a Goodwill box and drop them at Brooke Stanford's office first thing in the morning. Okay, Beth?”

  Marianna's gut reaction to Brooke Stanford was nothing more than her normal paranoia hiked up a notch by some healthy old-fashioned competitive jealousy. (You don't get ahead by cutting the new guy slack.) And since Marianna was our resident beauty—Italian in all the right places—she saw Brooke Stanford as a threat. And yeah, I guess Brooke was pretty if you like that finely-toned-racehorse look. I only know that our receptionist, Andrew (don't-frigging-ask-me-how-to-pronounce-it) Lavigne, had to wear a neck brace for a week every time Brooke blew past him. And Andy was a born-again, dyed-in-the-wool homosexual. He'd come so far out of the closet that I'd carved his name on the last stall in the girls' room.

  My lack of trust in Mayflower-inspired Brooke was based on more substantial things like the fact that she was Beth without a soul. Beth understood the privileges she'd been born into and the flimsiness of their shelf life in a rotting society. Brooke, on the other hand, seemed pissed that she actually had to work for a living. Suck it up, Brooke baby. Life is no oak barrel of laughs and eventually we all get a taste of those bottom dregs.

  Beth's excitement over her law school acceptance having been damned to the hereafter, we all returned to our drinks until the oppressively sweet whiff of “Miss Dior Chérie” came wafting our way. I raised my nose to the air like a vulture sensing fresh kill. Sneaking a look over my left shoulder, I watched none other than Brooke flip-flop into the room wearing gold sandals (Jack Rogers flats, signifying a summered Southampton pedigree, so Beth informed us). Brooke paused at the entrance, looked around, and registered her own scent of danger— the phalanx we'd set up at the bar.

  Since she hadn't been invited to our celebratory soiree, I wondered just how the hell Brooke happened to find us.

  Marianna began lamenting her existential fate. “Oh, just shoot me,” she said. “Here's the bane of my waning existence. Why does that broad feel the need to torment us with her glaring presence? As if I need to see the light of my fading youth reflected in the glow of her twenty-five-year-old complexion.”

  Beth rolled her periwinkle eyes to the ceiling. “Mari, thirty-five years hardly constitutes a waning life.”

  Beth tirelessly fell for Marianna's depression act. Laurie, however, was Jewish. She knew all about mental health or the lack thereof, but she figured that if her great-grandmother could survive Auschwitz, she could manage a cushy life in twenty-first-century America with a few off-color jokes and a Dewar's on the rocks. Laurie and Beth had remained sentries to the cause of hoisting Marianna's soul out of the dump, but I was ready to start lacing her vodka with powdered Prozac.

  “Hey, Mari,” Laurie snapped. “What's your alternative to old age? Huh? Tell me! What is it?”

  “Here comes the bride,” Marianna muttered.

  As if Maudlin Mari didn't have enough on her already bleak plate, Brooke Stanford was inching toward us along the bar—slowly, proudly, like a Clydesdale horse getting ready for a ringside prance, except this horse had giraffe-length legs. Her flaming red hair was pulled back in a low bun, sloppy but insouciantly sexy, with just the right amount of tendril escaping into her palm-frond green eyes. I regarded her curvaceous lips that seemed to be always puckered, yet invitingly open for business-ready for the next blow job—lips through which one was blindly drawn to a dazzling display of naturally pearlescent teeth that captured the overhead pendant lights and reflected them back at higher voltage.

  The crystal gears of Brooke's transparent brain working away, she was smartly wondering whether we'd acknowledge her as she watched the four of us stare at her without so much as a nod. I hoped she wasn't expecting a high five, because I was lifting my middle finger to her when Beth rolled off her bar stool and blocked me. Of course at five-four, Beth's halo hovered somewhere beneath my chin.

  “Hello, Brooke,” Beth said sweetly. “Would you like to join—”

  “Private party,” I snapped over Beth's head. “Six years together at the AG's. But hey, Brooke, since you're already here, I've been wondering. Why did you want to work at the crappy AG's office? I hear Edwards & Angell is always looking for class acts like you. Air-conditioned offices. Lots of available young associates to hook up with. And unlike Vince, your boss at E&A won't throw a chair at you when he's pissed.”

  She tilted her head, too unsure of me to laugh. Of course, there was always the possibility she didn't think I was funny. More likely she was scared shitless that I'd bite her tongue out if she laughed with an open mouth.

  “Many great politicians begin their careers as prosecutors,” she recited rote like a schoolgirl. “Hillary Clinton is my hero—”

  I heard Laurie gag in the background.

  “—and actually Mr. Piganno was very persuasive,” Brooke continued unabated. She looked at Beth and smiled. “He said Beth was the only real female in the office and he wanted to replace her with someone… well… likewise feminine.”

  Well, that's all 36C Mari had to hear. Not that she ever showed off her fatty milk glands. She harnessed her boobs into high-buttoned oxford shirts, always trying to hide her Mediterranean heritage, afraid that no one would take her seriously if they suspected a gene pool that included Carmela Soprano.

  She hopped off her stool and into the fray. “Did Vince really say that, Miss Brooke?”

  Brooke stepped back. I think she feared a rumble. An actual fistfight. Was she too stupid to realize the implications of what she'd said, or was she so smart that she'd auto-blasted the three of us in one sentence? Shit if I knew or even cared. But I watched in jaded amusement as Laurie twirled around to face Brooke, who was paling to the color of skim milk.

  “Miss Stanford,” she said, “do you know how tough it is to deal with hardened criminals every day?” Laurie turned her cheek, giving Brooke a clear view of the scar she wore thanks to a defendant who'd managed to smuggle a knife into court. “This was carved by one of the fine young men I prosecuted a few years ago. He thought I was a little too feminine looking, so wasn't he surprised when I judo-chopped him in the balls as my face spattered blood all over his polyester shirt.”

  I loved Laurie when she was mad. Religiously cool under pressure, she was a zealot on ice.

  “So, Brooke,” Laurie continued, “let me sum up: I don't know what swill the Pig fed you at your interview, but femininity is best left at the office doorstep and he knows that better than anyone.”

  I had begun a slide off my bar stool when Laurie started her tirade. I had implicit faith in her ability to finish Brooke off and leave her for dead, so I smiled at Laurie's salvo and headed for the unisex bathroom off the hall outside the bar. I was pushing on the door when it abruptly opened and I fell through the threshold into the all-encompassing arms of a tall, suited gentleman. Bleary-eyed and teetering on shaky legs, he wrapped his arms around me and for a moment we held each other, neither of us sure who was supporting who, but neither of us letting go either.

  It was love at first sight.

  DRAWING BLANKS

  “HEY, PARTNER,” I SAID. “ROUGH DAY AT THE office?”
<
br />   His head fell into my chest and he gasped for a lungful of air. He raised his head and looked at me with the hollowed-out eyes of a preteen rape victim who was learning about sex with a filthy hand clamped over her mouth.

  “My God… so sorry,” he stuttered, still holding on to my forearms. “It's hot in here, no?” His forehead was beaded with sweat.

  With my heel, I kicked the door closed behind me. “What's up, buddy? You in trouble?”

  I expected him to stumble past me, out the door, back into the bar, but he dropped his arms to his side and fell back against the wall, looking down at his hands as if wondering why they were still attached.

  He was late forties; his hair, gray-flecked, was the color of beach sand and shorn short in one of those metrosexual styles that improved when mussed. A broad face and strong jaw were set in a slightly anemic pallor begging for a tropical vacation. His suit was sweat-wrinkled and his tie missing. He seemed the quintessential gentleman after a bit of bad news (a dip in the stock market lightening the load on his investment portfolio?), but definitely not the kind of guy in any real trouble—the kind of trouble the girls and I were used to seeing at the AG's office every day—murder, armed robbery, and the occasional aforementioned child rape.

  With watery gray eyes just ready to overflow, he said, “One too many martinis.”

  “No shit,” I said calmly. “We've all had those days.”

  I eyed him a bit closer as I waited for another few words, but he remained mute—shaking like a sweaty kid who'd been looking for his lost dog all day and hadn't found him. He didn't seem drunk; his words weren't slurred and his eyes were keenly focused on mine—actually too keenly focused, like he was asking me for an explanation. But melodrama aside, it was, after all, still hovering around 100 degrees outside, so maybe he was just hot. I nodded my head a few times to keep him calm in case he was having a little heart attack in addition to a seasonal hot flash.

  “Maybe I should call 911?” I asked. “You here with anyone?”

  He shook his head and started to say something, but before he could push the first syllable out, he frigging fainted—fell into my arms—all roughly 230 muscular pounds of him—dragging us both down to the black and white tile floor.

  And that's where Brooke Stanford found us seconds later—his head, cheek to the floor, burrowed between my thighs, his legs splayed out on the floor in front of me.

  Her glance went from me to him. She walked slowly around to see his face, recognition widening her eyes. “Scott? Is that you?”

  “Shut up, Stanford,” I said, “and splash some water on his face.”

  She didn't move. “Is it a heart attack? How disgusting! What were you doing in here?”

  I forgot I wasn't talking to one of the girls, my buddies still outside at the bar, any one of whom would have ripped a toilet from the floor at my request because we had an act-first-ask-later kind of trust. Brooke Stanford, on the other hand, reacted to my command like a typical broad when another female barks an order at her: She bristled and then joyously ignored me with a smirk on her puss.

  “Get the fuck out of my way,” I said, pushing myself away from the still-unconscious deadweight and standing up.

  In fear (I hoped) she backed up a few steps against the bathroom door and watched as I cupped water in my hands from the sink and threw it down on the guy's face. Within seconds his eyes fluttered open.

  Brooke came forward and knelt by him, suddenly his guardian angel. “Scott, omigod, Scott! Are you okay?”

  I stood back, waiting for Scott's reaction. “Get out of here, Brooke. Get out now,” he moaned.

  Satisfied that she wasn't his long-lost daughter or someone equally precious, I yanked her up by the shoulders and twirled her toward the door. “You heard the man. And if you breathe a word of this anywhere but in the priest's confessional, I'll rip your tongue out.”

  “I'm not Catholic,” she sneered. “But I would never say anything. Scott and I are… old friends.”

  “Yeah, well, your old friend is toasted.”

  “Scott doesn't drink,” she said proprietarily.

  He tried to sit up, apparently tired of hearing us talk about him as if he were a helpless six-year-old. “Brooke, please leave us alone,” he said.

  I cracked a smile, or what I thought was a smile, and because I didn't do it often, I tried to make it look sincere. Showing my teeth was probably a mistake.

  Brooke did her version of a toothy smile back and curtsied out the door.

  “Get up,” I said to the hulk on the floor. “People are going to start needing to pee in here, so you've got about another minute to pull yourself together—or I'm out of here.”

  He began pulling himself up by the sink. It was time for him to do some of the work, so I let him grapple by himself.

  “I'm meeting my… a business associate here. I've got to get outside to the bar.”

  “Your girlfriend said you don't drink.”

  He looked at me, possibly too jaded by now to even dispute the Brooke-as-girlfriend remark. “Tonight I do. Tonight's a whole new ball game for me.”

  “Yeah. I can see how drinking yourself into oblivion and then fainting in a public bathroom could topple one's value system.”

  He stumbled to the sink and splashed more water on his face, then began scrubbing his hands like Lady Macbeth. Few of my male friends even washed their hands, so a germophobe did not augur well for a long-term relationship with someone like me, who lived and died by the five-second rule. He was drying up with a paper towel when Marianna walked in.

  She looked at him, then at me. “You've been in here fifteen minutes, Shannon. Long date for you, no?” She looked at him hard. “Hey, you look familiar.”

  “Wrong guy,” he said ruefully, and stumbled by her out the door.

  I slapped Mari on the back. “I'm leaving. I think I'm in love.”

  “You know you're a lunatic, Shannon, so I won't bother saying it, but—”

  “He seems to need a shoulder to cry on. A bad day at work, I think. Sweet Jesus, he's wearing a Brioni suit! How the fuck dangerous can he be?”

  “‘A shoulder to cry on’? He's using the oldest pick-up ploy in the book. That guy is pulling your leg so hard you're going to be walking with a limp.”

  “Maybe so, pal, but he's giving me heart flutters, so I want to finish what we started in here before his wife incarnates.”

  “He's fucking married?”

  “Married? Who knows? Fucking her? Probably not or he wouldn't be so quick to fall for my charms—as difficult as they are to resist. Anyway, Mar, I just met him. I don't have the particulars yet but I don't need his Social Security number to get laid.”

  I walked out and Marianna followed. We found my inamorato at the bar with a virile-looking scotch rocks already pressed to his hot lips. I typically fell for bad boys. Falling for a stranger who'd collapsed in a bathroom was definitely stretching the limit, but there was something about this alcoholic that wasn't ringing true. I eased in next to him and ordered my heart to stop pounding— along with another Glenlivet.

  “Forgive me for sounding like a wife, but are you married?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Okay, good… whatever… but should you be having another drink?”

  He turned to me, looking a bit more relaxed now that some ninety-proof was coursing through his veins. He rubbed his already bloodshot eyes until they flamed even brighter. “I started drinking again tonight. For me it's poison.”

  “Is he still drinking?” whispered Marianna, who was to my left, on the edge of her bar stool, almost in my lap.

  To Marianna's left was Laurie, leaning forward over the bar to get a better glimpse of my rumored bluebeard. Beth just figuratively said, What the fuck, and came over to stand behind us, eavesdropping on our conversation while sucking on some prissy pink drink sporting an umbrella swizzle stick.

  Brooke Stanford, thank Christ, had left the immediate premises.

  I tried
to ignore the girls as they hovered over me like flies to garbage. Leaning close to the Scott-man, I said, “Either you drop your plum Amex card on the bar and pay your tab or I'm taking my marbles and going home. I've had enough of your self-indulgence.”

  Secure enough, he cracked a half-assed smile at my assumption of control over him. He saluted me like a damned prisoner of war and shoved his hands in his pants pocket, extracting a wad of bills. Wrapped around a hundred-dollar bill, the roughened cuticles of his fingers were caked in a reddish dirt, despite the hand-washing. He graciously offered to pay for my drink, but I gave the bartender a no-can-do sign and then nodded toward Marianna. He blinked once in understanding, and when I beamed back to Scotty, he was sneaking down the last of his scotch.

  He shrugged and I said, “Let's go.”

  Marianna's head popped up. “Where you going?” she hissed.

  “Cancel my reservation. I've got a date.”

  As I turned to leave, she pulled me back by the arm. “Don't you take him home. You're going to get yourself killed one of these days.”

  Marianna would be the first to admit that when she fell in love she morphed into an airhead. She became an emotional wimp with men she was falling for, whereas I just pulled down the sheets for them. Something about my towering stature fooled me into thinking I was more a man's equal—a champ in the same weight category. But unlike Marianna, who kept her gun stored in the top shelf of her closet, I kept mine handily in my bag 24/7.

  Scott, whose last name was still a mystery, followed me through the steamy night in a white Chrysler Sebring. His car choice was already making me think we might never get to surname familiarity. I drove to the underground garage of my Downcity loft and motioned him into the guest spot next to mine. He exited his car and followed me to the elevator, in which we zoomed up to my fifth-floor aerie with nary a word. Once inside he walked straight over to my floor-to-ceiling windows through which Providence at night was lit up like a Christmas miniature of the big city it was trying to be. The Independent Man statue, once triumphant atop the State House, now stood emasculated by the new glassy skyscrapers that had been popping up around him like the new kids on the block.