by Paula Cox
“I don’t follow.”
“He’s made more trouble for me than I’d care to have to deal with. If he’d gone ahead and blown his brains out in the greenhouse, we might all have dismissed him as a tragic lunatic beyond help. Now I have to be the bad guy.” He drained the second scotch as easy as the first.
“Where is he now?”
“At Mattias’s estate. He’s one of his men after all. You know, we don’t trespass on each other’s ground. Not even when the men we’re dealing with are straight criminals.”
“That sounds very noble.”
“No, not noble. It keeps things easy. The simple fact of the matter, Mr. Tolliver, is that I’m a bad man who is about to do a very bad thing to a man with a serious chemical deficiency in his brain. And because it is business, I mustn’t feel any remorse about doing it because I know the alternative will put not just my life, but also my daughter and my associates’ lives in jeopardy. That’s the position I’ve been put in.”
“Has Maya seen any of this?” I ask.
“No. Thank God. She loved those birds, and she cared deeply for Mr. Holcomb. It would destroy her having to see all of this, which is why you’ll be taking her out of town for a few days.”
He reaches into his crumpled suit pocket and takes out a sheet of paper with a phone number written on it.
“I’ve called an old friend at the Four Seasons near Westtown. You’ll have two rooms for the week. Do whatever you want—galleries, film. Drive to New York if you want and take her to a show. Just make sure she doesn’t come back here. A week should be plenty for us to take care of this whole matter. Maya will be out by the car to wait for you.”
“Okay.” I slip the paper into my pocket.
“Good man. Trust me when I say, Mr. Tolliver, I wish it wasn’t the case. I was really beginning to sympathize with poor Mr. Holcomb. But you see these are the duties required of a man in my position. And a damned shame it is.”
“I understand.”
“Yes,” Theo sighs. For a moment he doesn’t look like the proud mob boss and single most powerful figure in town. He looks like a very old, very sad man facing a duty he would do anything in the world to avoid.
I wait for something more, but there is none. Theo lapses into contemplating whatever unpleasant thoughts he’s contemplating, and I leave the room quietly, crumpling and uncrumpling the paper in my pocket.
Chapter 10
Maya is waiting inside the Mercedes when I get there. She looks like a vet suffering from PTSD. Her eyes are wide with shock, but her lips are tight and focused. She also looks extravagantly dressed up, like someone about to go to the opera rather than a hotel room. Just from what she’s told me, and from the time we spent going through shopping malls, I know her black dress alone is probably worth my days’ salary. I don’t factor in the diamonds around the throat or on her fingers or in her ears.
She stares hard at me when I get inside the car. It suddenly seems to me that after everything that has happened, and after being forced to spend the whole day alone in her room while her father negotiated the killing of another man, she’s probably got a lot she needs to get off her chest. When I look at her, though, the tight purse of her mouth shows absolutely no signs of opening. I’ll need to do the talking, and so I start by saying the first thing that comes into my mind. “Maya. You are absolutely beautiful.”
I don’t know why I choose now to say this. Over the past two months, there have been hundreds of opportunities to tell her that she was beautiful. But all of those times she must have known it herself because it just seems like the kind of thing girls recognize. Except now I don’t know. I don’t know how she thinks or if she’s even thinking of herself. She has this icy, faraway separate thing about her, almost martyr-like. Her hands are shaking.
“Thanks,” she says, clipped and sharp like she’s cutting and throwing away an old nail.
I start the car and blast the heater and wait for the defroster to defog the window. Maya is rigid as a statue, and she’s got her purse clasped like a baby on her lap.
“You can put that on the ground,” I say gently. She rounds on me like I’ve just suggested she jump out of a moving car. “Why?”
“You don’t need it right now. Everything’s fine.”
She holds on to the purse, frowns, and then drops it onto the floor. Her wallet, phone, and makeup utensils all spill out, but she doesn’t see them. She’s looking at the nails of her left hand, which are shaking and trying to tear off the tip of her forefinger.
“Are you cold?” I whisper.
“I’m fine.”
“Give me your hand.”
She drops it into my lap like a dead animal. The fingers are even colder than last time. They feel like tiny, frozen sticks, like the kind I’d seen before on the cold, dry days in winter at the parks on the… whaddya call them… Persimmon trees, which had these thin knobby branches that would freeze all the way through and click against each other when the wind blew. Sort of like wind chimes but without any tones or notes, just that dry sound of frozen wood that was like the muffled clack of a woman walking on floor tiles.
“Your fingers are frozen.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she says without any emotion.
“Sure you did.” I’ve got big, boxing hands. Maya’s fingers against my palm come up just at the point where my fingers begin. So I sandwich her hand in between mine and just rub a little back and forth without applying much pressure at all, and I’m hoping that my callouses aren’t too rough because she’s got the softest hands I’ve ever felt. Especially given how scared and upset and weak she is, I’m worried that just by touching her I’ll damage her in some way and the last thing I want to do, right now sandwiching her hand in mine and trying to work some heat back in, is hurt her.
“There you go.” I give her hand back, trading her for the left one, and repeat the process. By now there are big, clear splotches in the windshield and I can see the street. I warm her hand quickly and put the car into action and drive. Drive and drive until we’re out of the city and going along the same highway route we took to reach Sunrise Apartments.
Westtown is Portsmouth’s business sector, but it’s not much. A few semi-tall skyscrapers and some decent restaurants, all of them closed by now, and some overpriced bars and our hotel. That’s it.
I ask Maya if she wants to get a drink or a bite to eat and get silence. Stone cold, angry, hurt, weird silence. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced with her before. I knew she could be moody, but I’ve never known her to be a robot. Whatever’s happened with Kit Holcomb, whatever she knows, has got her riled up.
So instead of going anywhere, I pull us into the valet of the Four Seasons and open her door and get her bag from the trunk. The driver takes my keys and hands me a number.
“Sleeping it off will be the best thing for you,” I say.
She doesn’t respond.
It’s around one thirty in the morning, and there’s some perky blonde at the desk. She confirms our reservation with smiles so big they take up half her face and even some of her upper body. They don’t go at all with the late hour or how both Maya and I are feeling. After a few curt answers, she stops smiling and runs through the reservation information as blandly and quickly as possible.
“Two fourth floor suites with views?” she says.
“Actually,” Maya interjects, her eyes sliding to the receptionist’s nametag, “Sara, we were actually hoping to upgrade to a single grande if possible,” Maya interjects. “Even if it’s not possible. Maybe you could just kick somebody out.”
Sara laughs, but Maya doesn’t. I’m not convinced that she said it as a joke.
What are you doing? I mouth at her.
Protection, I’m pretty sure she mouths back. That makes sense, but only in a scared and paranoid “they-are-gonna-get-me-in-my-sleep” kind of way. From what I’ve learned of Maya, she’s not the kind of girl to get scared easily. What the hell has happened?
> “Sure is.” Sara clicks away at the keyboard and pulls up the results for vacant rooms. “Seventh floor okay?”
“Sure. What room?”
“Seven…twenty…three”
“Okay.”
Another two minutes. Sara prints our room cards and directs us to the elevator where a tired lift operator wearing a red uniform presses the button for us.
It’s not until we actually get to our floor that we have a chance to talk to each other in private. Maya’s behavior, the shared suite, and the situation with Kit—all of it has made me just as nervous as her. My heart’s going a mile a minute. My fingers trail along the barrel of my glock as I work my keycard out of my pocket. When the lift goes back down, I tell Maya to wait by the lifts. She obeys without any questions. It would have made me a lot more comfortable if she’d had objections.
My fingers trail the barrel of my glock, and I get my keycard out of my pocket and press it into the lock, but instead of opening the door I put my ear against the wood and listen. If anyone were hiding out inside, there would have been movement from the sound. Nothing so far. My heart eases but only for a second as I swing the door open.
The light is dim and golden, with the suite bright and sumptuous, which puts me more at ease but not by much. Sure you worry more if the place you’re going into is as dark as the Godfather’s office, but the light is unsettling. You don’t expect as much in the light.
I take out the glock and flip off the safety and hold it stretched out and comb through the rooms three times before I’m satisfied.
“Can I come in now?” Maya asks after ten minutes.
“Yeah.” I set the gun down on the bedside table and put my coat over it, making sure it looks natural so that she won’t suspect anything.
“Force of habit,” I say. I’m really hoping the whole inspection hasn’t frightened her. From the looks of things, she seems about the same as before. Maybe even a little calmer. She takes off her fur and sets it on the zebra-skin sectional sofa and sits down as straight as a razor.
“Look,” she says like she’s beginning a speech. Her bottom lip starts to shake, but she holds herself steady. “I’m exhausted. I feel like someone’s gone through me with a fucking leaf blower and now there’s nothing left inside of me. And I think I’ve never hated Daddy more than I do today, and that it’s my fault he’s going to kill Kit Holcomb even though everyone has already told me it’s not but what the hell do they know anyway? And now part of my brain is terrified—just morbidly fucking terrified—that I’m going to walk into a room, and Kit’s just going to be sitting there waiting for me. He might even say something creepy like, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Maya,’ like horror movie bullshit because I was the one who was always nice to him and never called him Kitty or any of that bullshit like Andrei and Ikov or fucking Michelangelo. You can say all the rational stuff you want, but it’s just how I feel—like my brain is just gone, just rooted out because I’m done thinking, and I’m just tired tired tired. And it has just been the longest day in the world, and when we got to this hotel I started asking myself how was there any way in hell that I was going to sleep in my own bed tonight? So if you’re wondering why you’re here, that’s the reason, and you can sleep on the sectional or wherever you want, but I just need you in the same room with me, for God’s sake. Just tonight, Quinn. Just until things are better.”
There are tears on her cheeks, little black tears from her mascara spidering down to her lips and neck. Her hands are on her lap making her dress into a little ball. Her eyes look like they could burn someone.
I get up from the bed and sit down next to her on the sectional and put my arms around her and say, “Okay, okay” just like that. For five minutes, ten maybe. And the whole time I’m looking for something nice to tell her but I know that after her whole spiel there’s probably nothing she wants to hear except what I’m telling her, so I keep on saying it even when the bellhop comes up with her giant, pink bag and lays it on the floor and tiptoes out fast as he can go. Even then, just her and me.
Chapter 11
Maya tells me to order something nice from the bar while she’s unpacking. It’s slightly a problem because I know exactly nothing about wine except that some are red and some are white and all of them are overpriced.
There I am anyway, flipping through the menu with one hand and turning over the credit card with the other. The barman’s name is Donnie, and he has a white beard but is bald and says he comes from a place in the north of Spain, which he says with a lisp. When I ask him for his three recommendations, he names three wines in a foreign language I forget the second after he says them.
“Right, okay,” I say and order the three most expensive bottles they have, which are all red because my boy Palmer told me once that only queers and old writers drink white wine. The total comes to just under a thousand dollars. That is, what, toilet paper to a guy like Theo.
Maya’s in the shower by the time I come back.
“Quinn?” she shouts frantically. The water turns off. “Quinn!”
“Yes?”
“That’s you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Okay. Kirill’t know why I’m so excited. Did you get something?”
“Three bottles,” I say. “Kab-ergnon Sofignon—one of those. And two pinnots.”
She giggles over the sound of the water.
“What is it? Is something wrong?”
“No—no not at all. That’s perfect. You’re a cultured man of the world, Quinn.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Sure am. Pour me a glass, won’t you?”
It’s probably the best thing for her to loosen up. There’s a small kitchen connected to the living room and some fancy crystal wine glasses in the cupboard along with a brand new corkscrew that even comes with instructions. I get one of the corks off and dump about a quarter of the bottle between the two glasses and set hers down in the bathroom outside the closed door of the showers and return to the sofa with mine and put it on the end table next to the remote.
Maya sticks an arm of the shower for her glass and closes the door back up again.
I flip through the TV, but there’s nothing on at two in the morning except for dating shows and old reruns of Cheers and M*A*S*H, which I never even watched even when there weren’t any reruns.
“What is that?” Maya calls from the shower.
“M*A*S*H. Can you hear that from in there?”
“Sure can. There are speakers right above my head. It’s really cool.”
“You want me to put on something?”
“Is there a music channel?”
I flip through and find the local classical radio station. There’s this Hungarian guy, and he’s sixteen, and he’s playing Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto, the DJ says all quietly like she’s trying not to wake up a sleeping cat.
“Like that?’
“Perfect. Not a bad choice on the wine by the way. Did you get any white?”
“No. I can if you’d like,” I say, thinking something bad about Palmer Glass and his recommendation.
“No need. This works fine. How many bottles?”
“Three.”
“Par-fait. That leaves two and a half for you. I’m a feather if you hadn’t already guessed.”
“A lightweight?”
“The lightest weight. Two more sips of this and I’ll be reciting you my grade school Shakespeare. You’d best be prepared, Mr. Tolliver.”
The water shuts off. I leave the classical station on and finish the glass I’ve been working on and get up to pour myself more.
Maya’s on the sectional when I get back, wearing a bath towel and nothing else. Her little breasts push up against the towel like the halves of two globes. Her legs are the color of bronze and look like some kind of rich liquid, like she was made out of straight champagne.
She twirls her glass around and makes a tornado out of her wine. It looks like she hasn’t even touched it,
but from the flush in her cheeks, that’s definitely not true.
“Something is wrong with the speakers.” She looks at me with an expression between a smile and a pout. “I’m too short to reach them. Can you take a look?”
“No problem.” I leave the wine in the kitchen and try not to trip over my feet getting into the bathroom. The boss’s daughter is sitting there naked in your living room. The boss’s daughter is sitting there naked in your living room, a little drunk, and scared for her life, and she’s utterly naked and has legs like syrup and smells like flowers, like the nicest thing you’ve ever smelt before. I slip off my socks and get into the still-warm shower and get up on my toes to have a look at the speakers. They’re playing fine, far as I can tell.