Sunburn: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “Charles Coupay,” he said.

  “Like the car?”

  “Like what you get on your medical insurance, only with a ‘u.’” He smiled. “I’m talking your language, huh? I find that’s important, to speak to a man in terms he understands.”

  Irving nodded. He had no idea what Coupé—Coupay—was talking about.

  “That fire in your rental in Dundalk. I lost an employee.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. He wasn’t much good. But now he’s gone, taking with him all the time and energy I put into him, and I can’t be compensated for that. Ditmars, though, he told me you get a check. Because you owned the building. You owned this shitty row house with bum smoke alarms—”

  “I put the alarms in. I can’t help it if they don’t replace the batteries. You know what those people do? They hear the beeping and they disconnect them.”

  Coupay grinned and repeated: “Those people.”

  “Tenants like that, I mean.”

  “How much was the place insured for?”

  “Fifty thousand,” Irving said. “But I lose the income, don’t forget. Nothing left but walls. I have to rebuild if I want to get the monthly income back. Frankly, I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

  “Fifty thousand for a row house that you rented for three twenty-five a month, without utilities. And you bought it, for what—eighteen thousand, twenty thousand?”

  Coupay’s numbers were eerily on point.

  “Man, I’d buy all the row houses I could if I could get money back when they burned down.”

  Interesting conversation to be having in front of an arson investigator, Irving thought, but said nothing.

  “That young man who worked for me, he had children, living with their grandmom, thank goodness. Two kids. Daddy’s gone, Mama’s gone. Who’s going to provide for them?”

  “Maybe you could start a fund or ask the church—”

  “But they won’t get fifty thousand dollars, will they? I was thinking maybe the men who work for me should have life insurance. As a—what’s the word—a perquisite. I’d like to start offering life insurance policies to my workers. They’re young men, in their twenties. Couldn’t cost much. Do you understand what I want?”

  Irving understood. Ditmars knew he had set the fire, Ditmars had sold him out to Coupay. Could Ditmars prove anything? Probably not. But even an investigation would be disastrous for Irving, an insurance broker suspected of setting a fire in a building he owned. He could lose his license and what would he be then? A full-time slumlord.

  “It can’t always be a fire,” he said.

  “It won’t be,” Coupay assured him. “Mine is a dangerous business. Employee turnover is very high.”

  Irving found himself warming to the idea. These young men, trapped in a life from which they couldn’t escape—why shouldn’t someone benefit?

  “You could change it up in other ways. You know what a viatical is?”

  “It’s where the pope lives.” That was Ditmars. Coupay wasn’t the kind of man to lean into ignorance, to give answers when he wasn’t sure if he was right.

  “Why don’t you explain the finer points?”

  * * *

  Charles Coupay, who, on paper, was a landlord not unlike Irving Lowenstein, became one of his best customers. He encouraged the young men who worked for him to get life insurance, with Coupay paying the initial premiums. Then, when they had trouble making the monthly payments, Coupay agreed to buy them back at fifty cents on the dollar. Half the time, he didn’t even have to arrange for the young men to die; the streets did it for him. And if the young men had the misfortune to suffer crippling injuries, he quietly canceled the policy. When he cashed in, he paid Irving 10 percent of whatever he made, in cash, which Irving collected at Ditmars’s house, usually on Friday nights when his wife thought he was at shul.

  Ditmars got 40 percent. Irving made a point of not asking him what he was paid for, but Ditmars liked to talk. He would sit at his kitchen table, his big voice booming about the fires he set, the lives he took. Irving told himself it couldn’t be true, that he was just a braggart. But it was a relief when Pauline killed him—a relief until Irving realized that she had played him, getting that big insurance policy on a man she planned to kill, but making her kid the beneficiary so the payout couldn’t be denied. That sparked the insurance commission investigation he had always feared and he sweated three months, wondering if anyone would spot the pattern, all the claims collected by one Baltimore drug dealer.

  Then Coupay got sick, colon cancer, and was dead within four months. Ironic, because he was a disciplined man, ate healthily, never smoked, certainly never dabbled in the wares that his people sold. Ironic, too, because he never took out a life insurance policy for himself. Irving almost missed him. But, mainly, he was glad to be out from under the sword of Damocles. The two people who knew his darkest secret were gone and he was home free. The only person who knew they were in business together was Pauline, and she wasn’t going to talk.

  In fact, Pauline, who was so quiet that a man could forget she was there, took a trick or two out of his book and wrote some new chapters. Somewhere, she has a jackpot waiting. And if she has money, he deserves some of it. She can give a little bit to him or all of it to the state. Either way, she loses, and isn’t that a way for him to win?

  * * *

  It takes twenty-five minutes to get to his office and that’s despite knowing all the shortcuts. The strip center is his last commercial property. Twelve stores, a parking lot, a wedge of Route 40 that gets a little seedier every year. His office is modest, as are his clothes, his car. But he paid cash to send his children to college and he’ll help to send his grandchildren to college, too. A widower for almost a year now, he’s a catch, make no doubt about it. The single women at his synagogue, when he deigns to go, make eyes at him. But there was only one woman for him and she’s gone.

  And, yes, one afternoon, for about fifteen minutes, he thought a young shiksa fancied him. He thought he was going to be her savior.

  He’ll settle for being her ruination.

  25

  “What are you thinking about?” Polly asks Adam.

  They are in bed, looking at the ceiling. She is probably hurt because he doesn’t feel like spooning tonight. But Polly would never say anything as needy as that. Polly doesn’t push when a man retreats. She pulls back even further. She, too, is lying on her back, hands folded across her chest. Until she spoke, he assumed she was asleep. Her breath, since he rolled off her, has been steady and soft. She won’t ask the question again if he doesn’t answer. Polly seldom repeats herself. It’s odd enough for her to ask what he’s thinking.

  Adam is thinking about rice. More specifically, he is thinking about risotto. It’s a tricky dish in a place as thinly staffed as the High-Ho, but there’s a variation that’s particularly nice in the fall, with mushrooms and squash, lots of cheese and butter. But risotto requires too much attention in a kitchen where he has only one helper, Jorge, who also has to run the dishwasher, bus the tables. No, he doesn’t want to add risotto to the menu at the High-Ho. But he would like to make it for Polly one night. Only when? The restaurant is closed Mondays, but the bar is open and Polly has to work every day but Tuesday. Mr. C has brought in a new girl to help on Fridays and Saturdays, which continue to be semibusy, but he’s trying to get by without another full-time waitress until next summer. He doesn’t believe the business will stay strong through the off-season. Adam doesn’t, either.

  Yet Polly has persuaded Mr. C to make subtle changes to the dining room. Nothing fancy. She’s too smart to put lipstick on a pig. If anything, she’s putting more pig on the pig, leaning into the jointness of the joint, playing up its retro features. The jukebox, long broken, has been refurbished, but Polly kept the tunes that were in there, so it’s a nice little time warp, 1965–1985.

  She also got Mr. C to replace the tables and chairs, but with what appears to be an eclectic jumble of
wooden and Formica and one, just one, metal-top table, practically the twin of the one she lost in the fire. Things are cleaner, brighter, but not too bright. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but the High-Ho is now a place where people might like to linger. She has worked with the liquor supplier to find a few small, affordable wines to offer by the glass, three reds and three whites, all Italian, very drinkable, good with food. “How did you know about vermentino?” he asked her.

  “You don’t have to go to Italy to have tasted Italian wine,” she says, a little affronted.

  “I know, but—” He stops himself from saying what he’s thinking. But you’re just a Dundalk girl. The farthest you’ve ever been from home is the beach. The beach, or that women’s prison in Frostburg. But she never told him where she served time. She never tells him anything about her past, not since the last day in August, the day before the fire, when she presumably told him everything.

  Adam has been trying to assemble her life story on his own. He can’t ask her because he’s scared of screwing up, revealing that he knows things she’s never told him. He doesn’t want to ask Irving if there are other secrets he withheld when he hired Adam because then Irving might figure out the extent of Adam’s betrayal. But an old journalist friend has managed to pull together a pretty complete dossier on Polly Costello Ditmars Smith Hansen, whose current legal name is Pauline Smith Hansen. Married at seventeen, a mom at twenty-one. The state has custody of that girl—inevitable, given that her mother was in prison and the father was dead. Adam knows firsthand that she had another kid and abandoned her. She never speaks of her children, never. Sometimes, he catches her with a sad, faraway look on her face, but who knows what that’s about.

  She’s mentioned that they could stop using condoms, but he keeps using them. She’s insulted, suspicious. “I can go on the Pill, it’s 99 percent.” He says only, “I don’t think birth control pills are good for women. I won’t tell you what to do with your body, but you should rethink all those hormones.” God, he sounds like his own mother, but the world finally caught up with her, didn’t it? A free spirit who may or may not have had a fling with Neal Cassady, Lillian Bosk would now blend in comfortably with most suburban moms. Adam grew up eating good food, admiring his mother’s painting, listening to his father play tenor sax. Work to live, don’t live to work, that was his parents’ motto.

  And yet their son has somehow ended up putting in fourteen-hour days in a roadside Delaware restaurant, whose main distinction is that it’s too good for most of the people who eat there, but not good enough to get people to drive up from Salisbury or down from Wilmington. What’s he going to do, get a Michelin star in Belleville, Delaware? There was a reason he left cooking behind after that season on the yacht. PI work also has its fourteen-hour days, but it pays much better. Then there are the long fallow seasons when he travels. He should be in New Zealand or Argentina right now, watching the world edge into spring instead of fall.

  He should be alone. Except he can no longer imagine being any place without Polly and this seems to be where she wants to be.

  He argues in his head: There’s no money, Irving. There can’t possibly be any money. No one with money would be here, in Belleville, in this garage apartment she found a week ago.

  She seems to love it.

  But would someone kill to keep this life? Did she kill Cath?

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, he says to his own thoughts, then reaches for her hand.

  “Did you say something?” he asks. He’s not even sure if she’s still awake.

  When she replies, her voice is clear and measured, not the least bit sleepy. But also without the edge that most women use when asked to repeat themselves. She is capable of a stillness he has never found in another woman. Stillness. He thinks about hunting. Deer season will be starting soon. Do they have deer in Delaware? Is there a place for him to go and sit in a tree with his bow and arrow? Is there time? Tonight at work, doodling on a pad, he found himself sketching a stick figure being pulled underwater by an anchor. The anchor is the High-Ho. The anchor is this town, this life. But not Polly, unless—

  “I asked what you were thinking about.”

  “Rice,” he says.

  26

  Polly asks Adam to borrow his truck. Doesn’t say why, doesn’t offer to tell him where she’s going. Let him show some curiosity, she has answers ready if he wants them. But he doesn’t ask. He’s terrified to ask her anything, she realizes. He can barely ask her, How are you? or, when they’re eating breakfast, Could you pass the butter?

  He thinks she straight-up murdered Cath. Fine. Yet he alibied her, agreed she had been at his door by midnight—which she was, give or take. She didn’t ask him to. Didn’t need him to. That’s his problem. She has her own problems. Which is why she needs his truck.

  She’s working six days a week, but her pocketbook would be hurting if she and Adam weren’t splitting expenses on the garage apartment. Adam never seems to worry about money, though. That must be nice. Polly wonders if people who don’t worry about money can ever understand what it’s like, fretting over every dollar that leaves your hands. Even if they used to know those circumstances, they forget so quickly. It’s like being hungry. You can’t really remember it when you have enough food, you can’t will yourself to feel it. You’re hungry or you’re not. You’re poor or you’re not. Today, for example, Polly has to think about how much gas his truck has, if she can afford to fill it, or at least buy a few gallons of gas after the trip.

  Adam being Adam, he gives her the truck with a full tank, kisses her, and remembers to ask, “You going to be okay, going across the bridge?”

  “I’m going up to Dover.”

  He doesn’t ask why. She has a lie ready if he does. She’s going to say she’s taking her driver’s exam, that she still has a birth certificate that identifies her as Polly Costello, so she should be able to do it pretty simply. A lie on so many levels, one he’ll see through—where’d she get her birth certificate if she lost everything in the fire?—and, again, one she has an answer for. Oh, you can write to the State of Maryland and request a copy. Of course, she can’t become Polly Costello again until she divorces Gregg. Even then, it’s not automatic. She’s going to have to go through the Social Security Administration to get her own name back. But Adam doesn’t know all that.

  Adam, true to form, isn’t asking her any questions.

  He does say, “You’re getting an awfully early start.”

  It’s only six, barely light at this time of year.

  “The early bird gets the worm. Place opens at eight, but I want to stop for breakfast.”

  * * *

  She’s in Baltimore by 8:15 waiting near the corner of Harford Road, hoping that Gregg won’t notice the big pickup at the curb. Gregg doesn’t notice much. He’s the kind of guy who can’t tell when a woman has an orgasm. And not because the woman’s faking it, all When Harry Met Sally style. Gregg assumes it’s happening and, if it’s not, then it’s not his problem. He thought their sex life was great. It was. For him.

  She can see the edge of her house on Kentucky Avenue from where she’s parked, but she can barely remember the woman who used to live there. That woman had been pretending to be so many things she wasn’t, had disavowed her past. She is finally herself, Polly Costello. The old nickname, the surname she was born with—they were like some beautiful architectural feature in an old house, hidden by years of “improvements.”

  She has timed it right. Gregg, who has to be at work at 9:30, pulls out at 8:55. She’s pretty sure where he’s going, so she hangs back as he drives north, then west. Yep, he’s still parking Jani with his mother all day. Savannah Hansen must love that. She’s the kind of grandmother who prides herself on how young she looks, used to say things like, There was this man at the Bel-Loc Diner who thought Pauline and I were sisters, isn’t that hilarious? The guy was legit legally blind and just making polite small talk. Yet if Polly said that, she would be
petty. She was expected to ignore Savannah’s silly pride, her bizarre competitiveness.

  She doesn’t risk getting too close to Savannah’s house, so all she can see of Jani is her profile. Brave girl. Polly’s not sure why that word, brave, pops into her head, but there’s something so upright about this daughter, a little soldier marching on. She always knew Jani would be okay. Gregg lifts her from her car seat and she walks up the sidewalk, her grandmother waiting in the open door. Savannah Hansen is wearing a sundress, way too short, tight and bright.

  From there, Polly goes to see Joy. It’s unclear how much Joy understands, what she knows, but Polly never doubts that her daughter recognizes her. The staff lets them have thirty minutes alone. Joy’s fourteen, and she won’t be allowed to stay past her eighteenth birthday, at which point the state will have to find another placement for her. Soon, sweetheart, soon. But what is soon to Joy? How does Joy experience time? People thought time in prison moved slowly, and it did. Yet those days were no slower than Polly’s days with Ditmars, and much easier to pass. No fear, no lows. No highs, either, but that was okay. What is time like for Joy? Polly spells out “M-a-m-a” on Joy’s board, and Joy spells it back. But what does it mean to her? The woman who’s never there, who could never be there?

  Polly’s final errand, the real business of the day, is to an office in midtown Baltimore. It’s a self-consciously hip place, especially for Baltimore, a converted firehouse. Of course this guy kept the pole, which is at the center of the reception area. He probably makes jokes about it.

  Sure enough, when Barry Forshaw ushers her into his office, he says, “How do you like the new digs? I kept the pole for dancing late at night. Want to give it a try?”

  She can’t even be bothered to show him how offensive that is. “Look, I know you don’t do marital law, but Gregg is really dragging his feet now that we’re separated. Is there any way I can make him file?”