Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  What do I have to lose?, Gerry thought.

  What do we have to lose?, he thought, two hours later, when he allowed his wife first crack at those magnificent tits, the three of them giggling in the fussy canopy bed at the hotel. Maybe this is how a marriage lasts. Maybe Lucy is onto something. What do I have to lose?

  “Just remember,” Lucy said, lifting her lipstick-smeared mouth to his, “I always have to be in the room.”

  “Of course,” Gerry promised, “of course.” He bent down so his head was next to hers and they suckled at the juror’s breasts like two hungry kittens.

  April 2

  “I SUPPOSE,” Aileen says the next day, when Gerry has finally admitted to himself that he will be denied the solace of sleep no matter how many drugs are in his system, “you want to know what’s going on.”

  Does he?

  “If you must.”

  “I’m going to tell it in chronological order. I’m sure you won’t respect that as an artistic choice—”

  “No, I think that’s fine, under the circumstances.”

  He’s not sure of the time, only that he has not slept. Early morning, he judges by the light. He can hear traffic, the sounds of a city coming to life, but it’s not yet rush hour.

  She takes her usual seat. “Tory and I have been friends for years and roommates since we left Goucher. When she applied for the job as your assistant, she was gutted that you had no memory of her. It tore her up. We talked about what kind of man forgets someone he taught only seven years ago and we realized—the only students you cared about in that workshop were the boys and that one girl, Mona, because she was gorgeous.”

  And the best writer in the class. Also, not all of the boys, only the two who were good. But he’s in no position to argue. He’s literally in no position to argue. He’s in his bed, incapable of walking, barely capable of holding a seated posture for more than a few minutes, and his “caretaker” has bashed in the head of his assistant, who is also her friend and roommate.

  “We realized you don’t see women unless you’re attracted to them, that it was such a joke that you had gotten all this praise about some ‘dream girl’ who changed a man’s life, that there was no way Aubrey was really your creation because she was too real, and you didn’t know anything about real women. There’s always been this rumor that you stole some woman’s life, maybe even stole her literal story. We decided to gaslight you.”

  “But—how could you know I would have an accident?”

  She sighs, hitches her chair closer to his bed. He can’t help himself, he flinches.

  “That was never the plan. It was going to be all letters and phone calls. But then you fell.”

  There was a letter! Then he realizes how silly it is to feel triumphant about being right about the letter.

  “So we improvised.”

  “Are you a nurse in real life?”

  “No, I was working as a barista at the Fort Avenue Starbucks. But you’d be surprised what you can learn on the Internet. There’s a lot of information for people who have to be caretakers because someone in their family has had a fall. Most people can’t afford private nurses, you know.”

  Is she actually resentful of the fact that he’s been paying her a good wage for a job she’s not certified to do? Is this some kind of boomer-millennial warfare?

  “But—why—what happened tonight?”

  “Victoria found Margot’s phone in your office when she arrived yesterday morning. I had left it out by mistake.”

  “Why would Victoria call me on Margot’s phone, then? It was Victoria, right?” He is hearing the voice now, pitched lower than Victoria’s mousy squeak, capable of declarative sentences. How easily he had been fooled. Maybe the problem was that he didn’t hear women.

  “No—I mean, yes, Victoria was the one who usually called you, but I was the one who called the last time. I guess I left that part out. Margot’s phone was in her bag. I had wiped it, it was safe, I was going to sell it to Gazelle for a little money. I don’t know why I played that trick on you that night. I guess I wanted to see where your head was at. Anyway, I left Margot’s phone out in the spare bedroom where I sit at night because I didn’t think Tory went in there. Yesterday morning, she did.”

  “Yet the phone was”—what was the word she had used?—“wiped. Why would Tory even notice it?”

  “It has a fancy case, a Louis Vuitton, something called the Eye Trunk. It costs almost fifteen hundred dollars new. I guess she got suspicious. At any rate, while I was here last night, she searched my room back at our apartment and she found Margot’s purse. Victoria came here to talk to me and she got kind of hysterical. She couldn’t be reasoned with.”

  Reasoned with. Yes, it’s so frustrating to argue with someone who can’t be reasonable about the fact that you’re covering up a murder.

  “You told me you threw the purse in the harbor.”

  A shrug. “Again, I thought it was a harmless lie. I had hoped to sell it online.”

  His head hurts so much, he has all the fogginess of the drugs without the benefit of sleep. He feels as if he is diving, diving, diving, going so deep he no longer remembers what he’s looking for.

  “Aileen, did I kill Margot?”

  “Yes, so you should understand how accidents can happen.”

  An accident. How does one accidentally hit someone with a large, heavy piece of bric-a-brac until she’s dead? It’s not as if Victoria could have run into the Hartwell Prize or tripped and fallen on it. Aileen notices that he is staring at the statuette, still on his bedside table. She takes it to the kitchen sink, begins washing it. He considers asking her if she knows the proper way to clean an object made of brass and marble. He decides to stay silent.

  “Maybe we should get married,” says his not–Lady Macbeth as she scrubs busily.

  “What?”

  “If we marry, neither one can testify against the other. I mean, it would be in name only. I’m simply being practical. Not that different from people marrying each other so one can have a green card.”

  He wants to scream. Only who would hear him and, if anyone did, what would happen? He is a killer and now a co-conspirator in a second homicide. He let a woman clean up his mess and things have only gotten messier.

  “I once had to research spousal privilege, for a book. It’s a little more complex than most people believe.” This is not true. He is basing his knowledge of spousal privilege on an episode of The Sopranos, which he has been watching in bowdlerized reruns on some cable channel.

  “Hmmm,” she says, drying the prize. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Because no one’s asking anything.”

  For now.

  “Aileen—or should I call you Leenie?”

  “Either is fine.”

  “Can I have my pills?”

  “Yes. And at some point, I’ll drive Tory’s car to long-term parking at the airport, then take the light rail back into the city, paying cash.”

  This, too, had featured in a Sopranos episode, Gerry realizes. And in the local story he had researched, hoping to use it as a springboard to a novel. The man’s ex-wife’s car had been found in long-term parking, but at Reagan National. The supposition was that he had driven there, then taken the subway to Washington’s Union Station and paid cash for a ticket on the regional train, thereby avoiding any kind of electronic trail.

  Isn’t it amazing the things one can learn on YouTube? Isn’t it amazing the things one can learn from art?

  1999

  GRETCHEN’S MATCHING SUITCASES—no wheeled luggage for her, not when she had a set of beautiful leather bags that had been presented to her over a series of birthdays and Christmases, from ages fourteen to eighteen—were lined up in the hall outside their apartment from smallest to tallest, almost like the von Trapp children getting ready to sing.

  “I’m going back to New York, Gerry,” she said, “and I am divorcing you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have been offered a very go
od job at Lehman Brothers. And because I don’t like Baltimore and because you don’t belong in New York.”

  It was the third part that hurt. What did she mean, Gerry didn’t belong in New York? What was she saying about him? That he was second-rate, a regional writer. It was true, his novels, three so far, had all been based here. And books two and three had been a bit of a misfire. Not bad books, but not the books that people expected to follow his first book. Had Gretchen forgotten that they had met in New York, that she was the one who insisted on the move to Baltimore when she got the offer from T. Rowe Price? He had not dragged her here, quite the other way.

  That said, he had liked their life in Baltimore. The enormous apartment, which cost a pittance relative to New York, teaching a single class per semester at Hopkins, plenty of time to write, while Gretchen’s salary paid the major bills.

  “I’d be happy to go back to New York, all you had to do was ask.”

  “I don’t want you to come with me. Good lord, Gerry—you don’t even like me.”

  She wasn’t wrong. He didn’t like her. She was humorless and pedantic. The only fiction she read was his, and then only grudgingly, in that way more traditional wives fraternize with a traditional husband’s coworkers. The only thing they had in common was sex and even that had a kind of grudging aspect to it, almost as if she resented how much she liked it.

  And yet—the idea of her leaving him was something he could not bear.

  “Maybe if we went to counseling—”

  “I’m not your mother, Gerry.”

  “You’re nothing like my mother.” Actually their stature was similar, although his mother didn’t have such thick calves.

  “I mean—I know you don’t want to be your father all over again, disappointing woman after woman.”

  “Woman after woman—I didn’t realize I had disappointed any women!” Okay, Lucy, but who was to blame for that?

  “I can’t stay in this marriage so you can prove to the world how good you are, Gerry. We’re wrong for each other. It’s not a crime. We have no children. Divorce is not a big deal.”

  Some part of Gerry’s brain was arguing that it was a big deal when one spouse outearned the other ten to one and owned an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. Gretchen owed him. Could he bear to collect? Could he afford to collect? Even simple divorces had costs, as he had learned when he and Lucy ended their marriage.

  “I love you.” He sounded tentative, even to his own ears.

  “You did. And I loved you. But we’re wrong together, Gerry, and it’s been clear for a long time.”

  “There’s someone else. You wouldn’t do this if there wasn’t someone else.” Gretchen had been going to New York a lot. For work, she claimed, but now it was clear to Gerry what all those trips had been about.

  “Goodbye, Gerry. I’ll be in touch about the legal end of things.”

  The elevator arrived, carrying only a wheeled cart that someone downstairs had clearly sent up to Gretchen at her request. She piled the von Trapp children on the cart in a neat pyramid. Good night, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu. She shook his hand and refused his help in pushing the cart back onto the elevator.

  He ran down eight flights of stairs, but she was gone by the time he reached the lobby. There was nothing to do but to walk. It was a fine autumn night, smoky and cool. He had forgotten his jacket, but his wallet was in his back pocket. He would walk until he was too exhausted to think or feel.

  April 5

  SO A SECOND FREEZER ARRIVES, the whine of the cordless saw resumes, and Gerry wonders if a different soup kitchen will be receiving a side of beef or if that ruse was required only when Victoria was lurking about. He lives by the motto Don’t ask, don’t be told.

  At Aileen’s urging, he leaves a message for Victoria the first day she fails to show up for work. It is spooky to speak to Victoria’s truly disembodied voice, on a phone now in her car’s glove compartment, but he tries to sound as normal as possible.

  Meanwhile, Leenie has sent Margot’s phone to a company that buys old electronics, using Victoria’s name, address, and email for that transaction. It strikes Gerry as too clever by half.

  “What if there are incriminating emails or texts or calls—”

  “I’m telling you, Margot’s phone is wiped clean. As for Tory and me, we were very disciplined, we never communicated by text or email when we were, um, making our plans. But remember, now you have to know we were roommates. If someone comes around. You didn’t know, but after Victoria went missing, I had to tell you. We hid it from you because we didn’t think you would approve of an untrained person being your nurse.”

  This, at least, has the advantage of being sort of factual. He should have known, from dealing with nursing agencies for his mother, that Aileen’s rates were too good to be true. Gerry’s thrift has often been his undoing.

  Aileen—Leenie—says: “I’m going to report her missing after forty-eight hours.”

  “You know you don’t have to wait that long to report a missing person. That’s a television conceit.”

  “Right. But ‘Aileen’ would believe that. I’m playing a character. Haven’t you gotten that by now?”

  Oh, he has gotten it. Aileen is stolid and doesn’t read and doesn’t get jokes. Leenie is quicker, in thought and movement. Rash, one might say. But she reads.

  She also writes, as it turns out.

  She says she’s going to bring him her work, that she wants him to see how her writing has matured over the past seven years. He is not looking forward to it. He thinks about Roth’s alter ego, Zuckerman, trapped against a mailbox by Alvin Pepler, the Jewish marine and quiz show contestant, who demanded that the writer read his critique—of Zuckerman! Roth described it as the lion approaching Hemingway, keen to provide his thoughts on “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

  But Aileen/Leenie is not Gerry’s character. She is very much her own character. This story, her story, is much more interesting than anything she ever put on a page when she was a student. Gerry is a secondary character, as long as he stays in bed.

  And as long as he stays in bed, how can he be suspected of anything? He uses his phone to read, something he thought he would never do, but he has an urgent impulse to read Hiaasen and Leonard and Westlake, writers who could probably construct a story in which a man in Gerry’s (prone) position could somehow jettison the Inconvenient Nurse while making her the singular culprit. On his SmartHub, he watches films reputed to have airtight stories; he rereads Christie, whom he adored in early adolescence, then later rejected. The number three best-selling writer in history, according to Google, and given that number one is the Bible and Shakespeare is number two, doesn’t that really make her number one? The Bible has no single author and Shakespeare has no estate. What would Shakespeare do with this story and would it be a comedy or a tragedy? Some wild coincidence involving twins and eavesdropping. If only Gerry had a twin.

  No, Gerry simply cannot plot his way out of this. Two women have been killed in his apartment, one by him, and he has sat here, doing nothing, while a woman carves up their bodies and takes them God knows where, possibly the very incinerator his mother used after crab feasts. He saw online that the city will be closing the facility soon and then how will people dispose of their crab shells and dead bodies?

  1990

  “ARE YOU GOING to make it to New York?”

  “I don’t see how I can, Tara—it’s the end of semester, grades are due, I have so much to read—”

  “Jesus, Gerry, all you have to do is get on a train. Three hours up, three hours back, fifteen minutes in his room.”

  The cord on the wall phone in the kitchen is a long one and Gerry can pace while he talks to Tara. It drives Gretchen crazy, the way he paces when he speaks on the phone, but Gretchen isn’t here tonight. She has joined a book club in the building, although it seems like more of a drinking club to Gerry. Gretchen always waits to read the book until the last minute, then complains about the sele
ction. Her club’s choices are pretty middlebrow, in Gerry’s unvoiced opinion, and he imagines the discussions are not of a particularly high caliber. The real emphasis seems to be on the themed refreshments. The current book is The Remains of the Day, which Gerry admires almost in spite of himself. Ishiguro is only four years older than he is and his third book has won the Booker! Gerry is reworking his third novel after Thiru’s careful notes. He has high hopes for it, but he had high hopes for his second novel, whose reception was basically “not like his first novel.” That was the point, of course.

  “Will he even know I’m there, Tara?”

  A long pause. “I don’t know, Gerry. I thought he registered my presence, but maybe it was wishful thinking. Still, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I got to say goodbye. I think you’ll feel the same way.”

  Easy for Tara, living in Greenwich, to say. She hadn’t required an entire day to make her visit. And she didn’t have a job, just a baby. Tara was probably happy for the melodrama of a deathbed visit. It relieved the tedium of her day-to-day existence, whatever that was.

  “Is it—difficult? To see him, I mean.”

  “Extremely. I worry it will blot out the memories I have of that gorgeous, gorgeous boy. But maybe it should, Gerry. Maybe if more people lose people they love, things will change.”

  “Okay, Tara. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  He hung up the phone, called Amtrak to check the schedules. There was a seven thirty train. He could reasonably expect to arrive at the hospice by eleven, be back in the apartment by four. He could do this.

  I can do this, he said to himself the next morning, waiting in the line at Penn Station to buy his ticket. He had never realized what an active commuting culture Baltimore had. The station was bustling and full and he began to worry that the ticket line would not move swiftly enough for him to catch the seven thirty train.