Third Degree

by Maggie Barbieri

  “A husband and a dog?” I asked. “Then why are you staying here?” I realized before the words were out of my mouth that that was a question that didn’t need to be asked. If she could have stayed with her husband (and her dog), she would have. She had to get out of her home for some reason, and I guessed that if she felt that she had to get out, the reason must have been pretty darn good. Kevin shot me a look that instructed me to shut up. I did so by forking some more linguine into my mouth. Trixie settled at my feet hoping for more pasta to fly from my mouth directly into hers.

  Queen looked down, tracing the pattern on my everyday dishes with the point of her knife. “Things weren’t so good there.” She looked at Kevin. “But I talked to Father McManus and I decided that I need to go back.”

  I put my fork down. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?” When she didn’t answer, I looked at Kevin. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?”

  “That’s for Queen to discuss with you. I can’t say,” Kevin said. Sometimes it really sucks having a priest for a friend; his vow of confidentiality usually gets in the way of providing necessary information.

  Queen took a long drink from her wineglass. “Sometimes Jake wasn’t very nice to me …” she started.

  Kevin threw a glance toward Queen’s upper arm, and I noticed the blue-black marks of a handprint that stood out in bas relief against her cocoa-colored skin, which somehow I had missed before. Even if I had noticed, I probably would have attributed her bruises to her strenuous and dangerous work as a private investigator charged with kicking cheater ass. The long-sleeved sweatshirt she had worn on the hot August night earlier should have been a dead giveaway, but as we’ve established, sometimes I’m dense. Without saying a word, Kevin told me exactly what I needed to know: this young woman was a victim of abuse and needed a place to stay. Max could have been more descriptive in her explanation of why she was leaving Queen here, but had chosen to remain mute on the topic. I hadn’t needed to know everything, but just an idea of why she was homeless would have been helpful. Plus, how was I to know that the abuser wasn’t out there looking for her and following her nightly to my humble abode? Just another thing to talk to Max about once I got through wringing her neck.

  “Then you’re not going back there,” I interjected. “You’ll stay here until you can get on your feet.”

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “I’ve overstayed my welcome already. And Jake’s a really nice guy. He’s just under a lot of stress.”

  Kevin was nervously tapping his knife against his plate and I reached across the table to silence him. Queen hadn’t really revealed anything with her description of Jake but I had been around the block a few times; she didn’t have to. She was living with an abuser and couldn’t go back. That much was clear. “Listen, Queen,” I said. “If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that men who don’t handle stress well act out in a bunch of different ways. And they don’t change. You need to move out until Jake gets some help.”

  “I have nowhere to go,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. Trixie whimpered in sympathy.

  It only took me a minute to arrive at the decision. “Then you’ll stay here.”

  She shook her head sadly. “You know I can’t. You live by yourself. You don’t need me here. It was already getting tight with just me, and now you have one more person,” she said and looked at Kevin. “Sorry, Father,” she whispered. “There’s no way we can make this work. Father needs the room more than I do.”

  She was right. I didn’t know how long Kevin was going to stay and my allegiance was to him. And I wasn’t in a position to put an addition on my house for displaced Hooters waitresses and AWOL priests. But I also knew that I wasn’t letting her go back to stressed-out Jake and whatever he was capable of. There was just no way that was going to happen. I stared at the white wine swirling around in my glass and contemplated the situation. It only took me a second to figure out what I was going to do.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, and pushed my chair away from the table. I stopped in the front hallway and pulled the big telephone book from the shelf in the closet, flipping until I found the number I was looking for. I recited the last four digits to myself as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, the other digits being consistent for all local numbers. Once in my room, I dialed the number and settled back on my pillows while waiting for Lydia Wilmott to answer.

  She was surprised to hear from me. “And I’m surprised to be calling you. But I need your help. Were you serious about the things that WIMP can do to help women in need of assistance in leaving abusers?”

  “Of course I was,” she said, sounding indignant. Apparently, my not accepting her help had been a slight and a blemish on our nonexistent relationship.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, and I outlined the situation with Queen. At the end of my recitation of the facts, Lydia was quiet, which led me to believe that perhaps she wasn’t on board with what I had outlined. I knew she had a lot of money, so even if Queen didn’t go through the whole WIMP thing, I figured I could blackmail Lydia into paying for her new apartment for at least a few months until she got on her feet. “Listen, you’ve two choices. One, you help me, no questions asked. Or two, I go to the police and finger Clark for assault and battery. Oh, and kidnapping,” I added. “Don’t forget the kidnapping.”

  That got her attention. “Of course I want to help your friend, Alison. I was just formulating a plan in my head,” she said. Liar.

  “And don’t think this is a veiled request to help me, Lydia. I am not now, nor was I ever, an abused woman. This is for a friend who is young and really at a loss as to how to disengage from her situation.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. Where do you want to meet?”

  You could have blown me over with a feather when Lydia suggested Beans, Beans. She explained her choice. “Nobody will expect to see me there and anybody who does see me there will probably leave once I get there. I’m getting tired of the staring, Alison.”

  I hadn’t been there in a few days and I was feeling guilty. I didn’t think Lydia would ever want to go back there, but who was I to question her judgment? I thought of Greg and his doughy “guns” and decided that it was as good a place as any, as long as Lydia was comfortable with it. I went back downstairs and sat at the table. Kevin and Queen were still picking at their food. “We’ve got a plan,” I said to Queen, and told her that come hell or high water, we were going to Beans, Beans tomorrow at five, her shift at Hooters or her filming of Dicks with Tits be damned.

  She gave it a moment’s thought. “Fortunately, I’m free,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll get together tomorrow and work this whole thing out.” I pointed my fork at her to get her full attention. “But listen to me. Executing this plan requires that you follow my directions. Do that and everything will be just fine.” She blanched, knowing that that meant leaving her old life behind. “I’m not kidding, Queen. If Jake is as ‘stressed out’ as you claim, he’s not going to be happy that you’ve left. But you need to get out. And get up again,” I said, reciting WIMP’s credo. Kevin looked at me as if I were crazy and I guess I was. “Now, who wants some more wine?”

  Thirty

  I had reminded Queen about our meeting before I left for work in the morning just to be clear that this was an appointment she shouldn’t miss. I also instructed her to leave the drag queen look at home but I wasn’t sure she was going to follow my instructions. So I was pleasantly surprised when she walked through the door of Beans, Beans dressed in a denim skirt and a peasant top, small gold hoops in her ears. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had the freshly scrubbed look of a college coed rather than the slutty appearance of a waitress who exposed her cleavage for money. Apparently, some of her Hooters colleagues had gone to her apartment when Jake wasn’t home and packed a few things for her, knowing that she wasn’t returning there any time soon. Greg was happy to see us both, whispering to me that business had not been great sin
ce the incident of more than a week before, a fact that came as no surprise to me. He gave me a huge hug and offered me anything I wanted, on the house.

  “That’s not necessary, Greg,” I said, pulling out a wrought-iron café chair and taking a seat across from Greg. I gave him our order: a black coffee for me and a café au lait for Queen. “And two muffins,” I said. I was not immune to the siren song of predinner hunger pangs.

  “Haven’t seen you in a couple of days,” Greg said, giving me a mirthless smile. He wiped his hands repeatedly on the long apron that was tied at his waist.

  “I know. I’ve been busy with school. We’re working seven days a week to get ready for the first day of classes,” I explained. I looked around the store and saw that Queen and I were the only customers, an interesting fact given that Beans, Beans was the go-to place in town for the after-school crowd. I knew that Greg was right; business was down and Carter’s death had everything to do with that. I introduced Queen to Greg. “Hey, did you hear the latest?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Depends what ‘latest’ you’re talking about.”

  I lowered my voice even though there was nobody else in the coffee shop. “Carter Wilmott. Poisoned.”

  He didn’t look surprised. “Yeah, I read that in the paper. What a shame.”

  “It was,” I said. “But between that, and the exploding car, and the fight with George Miller, I’m starting to wonder exactly how many ways that guy was supposed to die.”

  “Good point.” Greg shifted from one foot to the other. “Sounds like he was going to go that day one way or another.”

  “Heard anything new about the explosion or who might have caused it?” I asked.

  Greg looked away quickly. “Not a word. You’re right, though. He was destined to die that day.”

  I nodded. I kept the information about the ALS to myself. That was for public consumption when Mac and his cohorts decided that it was.

  “I should warn you that the other person we’re meeting is Lydia Wilmott,” I said. I held my hands up. “Not my fault. She wanted to meet here.”

  Greg walked back to the counter area and prepared our drinks. After he came back and served me my coffee, he turned and gingerly placed Queen’s café au lait in front of her. “Anything else?” he asked.

  Queen reached out and grabbed Greg’s arm and turned the wrist toward her. I leaned over and saw what she was looking at: a tattoo that said “USMC” and had a ring of stars surrounding what looked like a bird carrying an anchor. I didn’t know where he had had it done, but I thought that the artist must have been loaded when he took the tattoo needle to the inside of Greg’s wrist. It was possibly the worst tattoo I had ever seen, and working on a college campus, I see a lot of ink. “Are you in the marines, sir?”

  Greg smiled. “I was.”

  “My dad, too,” Queen said. “He’s doing another eighteen months in the Middle East right now.”

  “God bless him,” Greg said. “May he come home safe.” He closed his eyes and offered a silent prayer, presumably to his homeboy, Jesus.

  “Thank you.” She blew on her coffee. “My mother ships out from Camp LeJeune in another week, too.”

  Greg looked chagrined. “That’s a lot for a young girl like you to handle.”

  Queen shrugged. “It’s okay. I grew up in the military so I’m used to it. They’ll be back,” she said brightly.

  There was a lot more to Queen’s story than met the eye. I looked toward the front door to see if I could spot Lydia, but the sidewalk in front of the store was empty. Queen and Greg were still talking about the “Corps” and the lives they had led, he as a member and she as a child of marines. Before Greg walked back to the counter, Queen asked him what his favorite thing about the Corps was.

  “Blowing things up,” he said, laughing as he sauntered back to the counter to wait on the sole customer who had walked through the doors since we had arrived.

  I froze in my chair, staring down into my coffee cup. But I didn’t have time to work through all of the possibilities in my mind, now that I knew Greg was a marine in addition to a guy who liked to blow things up, before Lydia strolled in, the scent of some overpowering perfume announcing her arrival. She threw herself into a chair at our table as if she had lost control of her legs prior to her sitting down; she placed her giant, suitcaselike handbag on top of the table. I pushed the patent leather bag aside to make room for our muffins, which Greg deposited while giving Lydia a polite nod.

  Lydia didn’t take off her sunglasses, even after I made the introductions, so I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, if anything. However, if I had to guess, Lydia knew exactly what I wanted and when, and my presence at this conversation wasn’t needed. I had given her just enough information on the phone to make clear what her role in this process was. I decided that I was on a “need to know” basis with Queen so I excused myself and went over to the counter to talk to Greg while the two women made plans to start Queen on a new path of self-sufficiency.

  Greg had his head in the muffin case, assessing the freshness of what was in there. “The banana are still good,” I said, taking a piece off the muffin I had bought and tasting it.

  “Yeah, they’re moist. They stay for a while.” He pulled out a tray with lemon-poppy-seed muffins on it. “These always go first,” he said, wrapping them in plastic. His day was almost over and it was time to begin closing down the shop. He handed me some plastic-wrapped corn muffins. “These are almost done. Want to take them home? You can toast them for breakfast and they’ll still be good.”

  I was feeding two additional people now so I accepted the muffins. “Thanks.”

  He handed me a few more muffins in a paper bag. “Here. I hate to see food go to waste.”

  “I hope we’re not keeping you,” I said, accepting the bag.

  “Nah,” he said, pulling a large piece of Saran Wrap from the roll on the counter and placing it over the muffins he was going to try to sell the following day. “You take all the time you need.”

  I leaned on the counter and read the various advertisements and postcards that patrons had placed under the glass. “So you blew up things in the marines, huh?”

  Greg stopped wiping the inside of the muffin case and looked at me through the glass. “Sometimes.”

  “Huh,” I said, picking off pieces of my muffin.

  Greg came out from behind the muffin case and stood up, looking down at me. His round chubby face, usually exhibiting a serene calm, looked just a wee bit tense. “Why do you find that interesting?” he asked.

  “Oh, no reason,” I said, the tone of my voice completely unconvincing, if I had to admit it.

  Greg rested his forearms on the counter and leaned toward me. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re way off,” he said, a small smile on his lips.

  “What am I thinking?” I asked.

  He smiled wider. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that Carter’s car blowing up had something to do with me?”

  I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender and started laughing. “Okay, you got me,” I said. The exchange between the two of us had a modicum of tension to it so I tried to diffuse it a little with some humor. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said, laughing harder.

  Greg joined in with some loud guffaws, causing Lydia and Queen to turn our way to find out what was so funny. “That’s rich!” he said.

  “I know!” I said, still going along with the idea that this was just a preposterous conclusion to come to, even though everything pointed in the same direction. The nasty blog posts, the animosity between the two men, the vociferous “Coffee Lover” who commented on Carter’s post and who may or may not have been Greg, the exploding car that certainly would have killed Carter had he not met his untimely demise right where I was currently standing. It was alternately completely plausible and completely ridiculous, considering who Greg was and what he stood for: peace, love, and understanding. I grabbed my midsection and laughed harder until I couldn’t
breathe. Was this what I had become? A suspicious meddler who saw everyone as a suspect, despite my history with them? I looked up at Greg and he was still chuckling a little bit while he was cleaning out his large coffee urn, muttering to himself about how “you people are crazy.”

  I finished my muffin and threw the wrapper in the silver bullet-shaped trash bin and walked back over to the table, where Lydia and Queen were finishing up their conversation. Lydia looked at me, her eyes still hidden behind the big black sunglasses.

  “We’re all set here, Alison,” she said and stood. She took Queen’s hand and promised her that the whole thing would be worked out within twenty-four hours.

  I walked ahead with Lydia while Queen cleaned up the table. “Thank you, Lydia.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “I’m glad you called me.”

  “You didn’t sound glad when you heard it was me.”

  She fingered the diamond necklace around her neck. “That’s water under the bridge. I’m sorry that we misinterpreted your situation. My apologies on behalf of the group.”

  “Apology accepted.” I held the door open for her. “I’m just glad that something good has come from this whole mess.”

  Although I couldn’t see her eyes, I suspected that Lydia was crying. “Me, too,” she said, and walked down the street toward the river.

  Thirty-One

  I sent Queen back to the house armed with the big bag of muffins that Greg had given me. She and Lydia had a plan whereby she would stay in Lydia’s guesthouse on the magnificent acreage of the Wilmott estate until they could find a suitable apartment for her. Hooters was in White Plains and John Jay was in the city, so Queen residing on Lydia’s property was the perfect in-between point.

  I took a spot on the opposite side of the street from Beans, Beans and waited for Greg to finish closing up. I had watched Lydia walk all the way to the river, and suspected that she had gone to the boat; her house was in the opposite direction, and I could still see her car, a silver Volvo station wagon, parked a few spots up from Greg’s shop. Although the sun had begun its descent over the Palisades across the river, it was still muggy enough to cause my blouse to stick to my back, quite uncomfortably. I was under the awning of a boutique and, hopefully, not in sight of Greg from his vantage point in Beans, Beans.