Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  “According to Amtrak, she bought a round-trip ticket here on March 12. Was that the last time you saw her?”

  “That sounds right. Dates, days—they mean less to me now. When you’re in my condition, the days run together.”

  “But she was here?”

  He is aware of Victoria, bustling around in the kitchen, taking an inordinate amount of time to make tea. A nosy parker, his mother would have called her. Gerry realizes he has no idea what a nosy parker is. His mother’s speech had been full of mysterious anachronisms, a by-product of her voracious, indiscriminate reading.

  “Yes, she was. My assistant was there that day. Victoria, do you remember the date?”

  “It was the day before you sent me to Princeton—yes, the twelfth.” Victoria takes her tea and goes downstairs. Eavesdropping is one thing, but she apparently has no desire to be pulled into the conversation. Good. Gerry wouldn’t want her to share what she saw that afternoon. But if the detective asks to talk to her, he supposes he will probably have to let him.

  “That train ticket is the last thing we can tie to her. She hasn’t answered her phone or used her credit cards.”

  “Oh my God, are you suggesting—” Gerry catches himself. Because he does not know she’s dead, he would be distraught, this news is unexpected. He is a character in a novel. He knows how to do this, how to inhabit a character’s POV without authorial omniscience.

  “She never returned to New York.”

  “Oh.” He feigns relief. Because a normal person, an innocent person, would default to optimism, right? “Margot is a … an impulsive woman. She could be in St. Barts. Or anywhere warm. She hates New York in the winter.”

  “Winter’s pretty much over, though.”

  “You live there, Detective. You know how the cold weather creeps along into April, and then it goes straight to summer by late May.”

  “Her mother is worried.”

  Margot has a mother? The news is not only surprising, it is infuriating. How dare Margot have a mother when Gerry has none? She never mentioned having a mother. Margot does not deserve a mother.

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” True enough.

  “The thing is—she bought a round-trip ticket. Amtrak confirmed her ticket was scanned for the trip down. But her ticket for the trip back was never used.”

  Gerry thought about Columbo, another show he and his mother had watched together. The hubristic rich villains always fell into the trap of trying to explain inconsistencies. But if you’re not the killer and you’re not the detective, why would you bother?

  He said: “How do they know?”

  “Everything’s computerized now. She bought the ticket online. There’s a, whatchamacallit. A little square that the conductor scans. Anyway, she was in the reservation system, scheduled to travel back the next day.”

  Gerry yearns to tell the detective that it’s possible to be overlooked on Amtrak, that he has made the trip between New York and Baltimore more than once without anyone asking for his ticket. Or he could say Margot, dismayed by the quality of the food on the trip down, might have chosen another way to return to New York, which, come to think of it, would be pure Margot. But, no, that’s what the big-name guest stars always made the mistake of doing, trying to help Columbo with his case. Again, it’s not on him to figure out why Margot didn’t use her return ticket.

  “Interesting that she booked her return for the next day. The first time she visited me, she expected to spend the night here. I made it clear that she was not welcome and had Victoria put her on the next train.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Which time?”

  “The last time.”

  The truth, or at least a portion of it, seems the best gambit. “She had no place to live. She was distraught. She could not accept that I had sold my place in New York, that she had to find her own apartment.”

  “Why did she expect you to help her out when you had already told her you wouldn’t?”

  Gerry sighs. Strangely, he has almost forgotten the body on his floor, the blood, the disturbing noises in the night, the buzz of the cordless handsaw, the freezer that has come and gone. He feels fatherly toward this younger man and wants to warn him about women, what the worst ones can do.

  “Margot was—is, I hope, I hope she’s alive, I wish her well—Margot is a woman who makes a habit of taking things for granted. Last year, I moved down here to care for my mother, having been told that she had a very short time to live. I expected to be here a month or two, but it stretched out for much of 2018 and it became apparent that I needed to sell my apartment, where Margot was ensconced. My mother’s decline, her death—it exposed the—I wouldn’t call it superficiality, but the lack of seriousness in our relationship. It’s easy to fall into arrangements as one ages. To re-create patterns that look like things we call ‘relationships’ or ‘marriages.’ But it was, for want of a better phrase, a passing fancy. When I relocated to Baltimore, I assumed Margot would move on to another man. She never went long without the company of a man. I’d bet almost anything she’s found someone else to support her.”

  “If that’s so, it’s news to her mother.”

  “Well, the fact that she even has a living mother is news to me.”

  “She lives on Long Island. Gertrude Chessler. Appears Ms. Chasseur changed her name legally when she was in her twenties.”

  Gerry tries to remember what Margot had told him of her past. Very little, he realizes. She had always presented herself as an Aphrodite, rising on her clamshell in New York circa 1995, young and lovely and feral. He had not known her then—he was back in Baltimore, living with Gretchen, teaching at Hopkins—but Margot had shown him the photographs taken of her in her heyday, the little society squibs in which she made appearances. He had pretended to care.

  He repeats, stuck on the fact: “I never even knew she had a mother.”

  “Why would Ms. Chasseur come see you if she knew she couldn’t stay here?”

  “Because she wanted money.” He allows himself another sigh. “It’s all she ever wanted from me.”

  It’s depressing, this accidental truth. He was a meal ticket; she was a gold digger. He never saw it this way before now. Their relationship was completely transactional. All Margot’s relationships were transactional.

  “Did you give it to her?”

  “No. She’s an adult woman in her fifties. I feel no obligation to support her. Truthfully, I never officially asked her to live with me. She just moved in, bit by bit. If I hadn’t sold my New York apartment, I’m not sure how I would have gotten her out of it.”

  “Her mother says that her daughter was saying she knew something about you.”

  There it was again, the vague threat. To what could she possibly be alluding? Gerry’s conscience was clear. Except for the part about Margot dying.

  “She knew a lot about me. We were together for several years.”

  “Her mother said she said she had a secret about you. That she was going to confront you.”

  “Yes, and she did, but it was nothing more than an empty threat.” His gaze is level and cool. He is a man immobilized by injury. He cannot be a suspect in anything. “The sad truth is that Margot was—is—a hysteric. She’d say anything to get what she wants. She was very angry at me. She attacked me in my bed. Victoria, my assistant—she was here, she’ll tell you what happened. Margot hit me, she scratched my face, I managed to push her off with this walker I can’t yet use.” He indicates his walker, his trusty sentry. “I could have filed a police complaint. I let it be, because—well, she was a delightful companion once. I preferred to remember the good times. My scratches are no longer visible, but the night nurse saw them. She bought me some Mederma to help them heal.”

  Detective Jones smiles ruefully. “Women.” Then: “I’d like to talk to your assistant. And maybe your nurse?”

  Shit, shit, shit. As competent as Aileen has proven herself to be, Gerry does not think this is a go
od idea. Why had they not anticipated this, agreed on a mutual version?

  “She wasn’t here when it happened. Only Victoria. It was the afternoon and my nurse is here at night. You can check that with the front desk.”

  “Yes, I asked the young woman if she remembered Ms. Chasseur. She did. She says she arrived here that afternoon, then ran out about fifteen minutes later.”

  Then how did she get back in, in the middle of the night, without being heard or observed by anyone? Gerry has to stop himself from asking the detective that question.

  “It is baffling,” he says instead. “Did she get a cab, take an Uber?”

  “No one knows. She vanished into thin air.”

  Gerry turns the cliché over in his mind, wondering why it’s always thin air. It’s not as if people disappear only at high altitudes. He also wonders where Margot spent the hours before she returned, how she got into the building. The front desk was unmanned—unwomanned? unPEOPLED?—after nine P.M. Another resident could buzz one in, but otherwise, someone would have to have a key card to enter the lobby, and a key for the twenty-fifth floor. It was also possible to take the elevator from the garage straight to the apartment. But, even then, one would need the elevator key.

  Oh my God—he knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. He sees Margot, picking herself up from the floor, then taking his wallet and eliciting several bills, saying the least he could do was pay her cab fare. His security card for the building was in his wallet. Obviously he had no use for it, wouldn’t notice it missing. And his keys, they hung by a hook next to the front door, under the mirror where she had stopped and fussed with her hair. Margot would have been able to identify his key ring, a sterling silver loop from Tiffany’s. She had given it to him. He would bet anything it’s not there now.

  “It’s a dangerous city,” Gerry says. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  “But not a city where a fifty-one-year-old white woman disappears without a trace.”

  “I guess you’ve never heard about Susan Harrison.” Gerry decides to distract the detective with his knowledge of the 1994 case, which he had researched for a novel he ended up abandoning. A woman and a man in a folie à deux, although that term was considered politically incorrect now, he supposed, given that the man had almost certainly killed the woman, and where was the “folie” in that? Gerry had been drawn to the fact that a drunk, an unsubtle man with little intellect, seemed to have committed the perfect crime almost by accident. But as he burrowed into the material, he could find nothing more to say about it. The story almost begged to be written as a dark comedy, a nasty Candide or another riff on Being There, and even Gerry realized that was not going to fly in the twenty-first century.

  The detective listens politely, but he is clearly bored. Good, that’s what Gerry intends. He plays the part of the garrulous old man shut-in, rambling and desperate for company. It is discomfiting how easily this persona comes to him, how readily this younger man accepts this version of him. He is sixty-one, not eighty-one! Two months ago he was in vigorous health, a person who required no medications beyond a daily vitamin.

  He wonders if the detective is indulging Gerry’s wandering narrative, in part, because he hopes Gerry is going to offer up some inconsistency on which he can pounce. But one of Gerry’s great strengths as a writer is POV. The man in his bed is not him. The man in his bed is “Gerry Andersen,” an injured writer who has no idea what has happened to his former lover, Margot. Where did Margot go, he wonders. How did Aileen dispose of her?

  He thinks about the incinerator where he and his mother used to drive their crab feast refuse. She was particular about this; they must never allow the shells and cartilage to stay on their property overnight. She believed they would lead to terrible odors that could never be eradicated if left inside the house. But in a trash can outside, they would attract raccoons, who would scatter them across the backyard. So they would wrap up the newspapers littered with crab carcasses and put them inside garbage bags and drive them all the way into town, to that terrible hulking furnace.

  It was one of the favorite moments of his youth. His father had done this task before he disappeared, but always with reluctance and complaint, and refusing to let Gerry accompany him. Once he was gone, Gerry joined his mother in the front seat—remember when kids could ride in the front seat?—and he had felt powerful, grown-up. There was a sense of mission about the journey.

  If it wasn’t too late, they stopped at Windy Valley for soft-serve and he patted the ponies that were penned there.

  He is aware of his brain working on all these levels—Gerry the writer, telling the story that will bore/beguile the detective; Gerry the twelve-year-old riding in that old Ford station wagon with his mother. He sees himself as Duncan in The World According to Garp, reaching for his brother’s hand as they descend into the hellmouth of their driveway, toward the literal and figurative collision of their parents’ failings, failings that will take one child’s eye and another child’s life.

  “Well,” the detective says as Gerry finally winds down, “you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  Of course, no one says that unless they mean the opposite, so Gerry is pleased. He has bored the detective into submission.

  “Happy to help.”

  “Okay if I talk to your assistant?”

  “Sure. She’s downstairs.”

  The detective gone, Gerry pulls his smartphone out from under his blanket. He turned on the audio recorder when Victoria opened the door to the detective. He has fallen in love with his phone, for its capabilities and potential. It is a smart phone. It is smarter than anyone who works for him, that’s for sure. And generally silent, bless its heart. He will listen to the recording later, commit his own words to memory.

  2012

  “SO I WON’T be able to speak in class tomorrow, but I don’t think that should affect my grade.”

  Without his class roster in front of him, Gerry could never remember this student’s name, only that she kept reminding him that it rhymed with the name of a character in a Judy Blume book, as if that would be helpful to him. He thought of her as Wizard Girl because she submitted fantasy stories about wizards and warlocks and vampires. Never had fantasy been less fantastic.

  “Just so I understand, tomorrow is a day of solidarity for gay people—”

  “LGBT.”

  “And by not speaking, you are somehow helping them. As an ally.” That had been her word, ally, and she had seemed keen for Gerry to know she was not, in fact, described by one of the letters for which she was willing to be silent.

  “It’s a symbolic gesture, but it’s my right to participate.”

  Gerry wondered from where, exactly, such a “right” would be derived. He supposed the freedom of expression had a corollary, the freedom not to express oneself. He loathed this idea on principle, saw it as a cheap way to slack on the participation requirement, but why argue? Nothing could affect Wizard Girl’s grade. She was a B-minus student at best. Bad as she was at writing, she was even worse at workshopping her classmates’ stories, overly prescriptive. It would be a relief to be spared Wizard Girl’s “ideas.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “As long as you bring your copies of the other students’ manuscripts, marked up and annotated. In fact, maybe put a little more work into your written comments, which will make up for your decision not to participate. But, please, don’t tell the other students what to do, only what you think.”

  She glowered, then nodded. Having won what she came for, she made no move to gather her books and the enormous fountain drink she was never without, which was now sweating all over Gerry’s desk.

  “Professor Andersen—”

  “I’m not a professor, merely a writer. MFA, no Ph.D.” In his heart, he secretly believed novelists superior to professors.

  “Do I have potential?”

  “Everyone has potential. By definition. It would be rare to be without potential.”

  “But do you think I c
ould be a novelist?”

  What was the right thing to say? He warred with himself, wanting to be true to art, yet not unkind to this young woman, who seemed unusually sensitive. But, hey, Jacqueline Susann was a novelist. Anyone could be a novelist. She hadn’t asked if she could be a good one.

  “With hard work, disciplined habits, and an ambitious reading life, yes. My hunch is that you don’t have a lot of life experience. That will change. Believe me, that will change.”

  “But you told us the first day that life experience was overrated. You talked about Philip Roth, how relatively eventless his life had been. You quoted Eudora Welty, the thing about having led a sheltered life, but also a daring one, because all serious daring comes from within.”

  Shit, he had.

  “There’s a big difference between eighteen and twenty-five, which was Roth’s age when he published Goodbye, Columbus. Also, it’s Roth. He’s only one of our greatest living writers.”

  “I’m twenty-two.” Such a pedant, always fixating on the wrong details.

  “Yes—still, I’d love to see a piece of writing from you that wasn’t full of wizards.”

  “I showed you what I hoped could be the beginning of a novel the first week of class, but you said I had to work on short stories this semester.”

  Ah, yes, her “novel,” that wisp of a scene about a girl who was sad, contemplated suicide, but then saw the sun come up and felt hope. If he had to choose, he’d take the wizards.

  “A novel is impossible to complete in a semester, that’s why I discourage them. I think finishing something is important. People can get lost in novels, wander in and not come out for years.”

  “Do you ever get lost in one of yours?”

  The question startled him with its acuity. He thought of the abandoned books, about which he felt guilty, as if they were his children. Or, worse, wives. But he knew no other way to work. In order to find the book he was meant to write, he had to keep moving. At least he had settled down as far as women were concerned. Three was proving to be his lucky number.