I had no idea that thinking I could shoot at my ex-husband would elicit this sort of a response, but my brain shut down as I felt his mouth on me.
Suddenly, he reached underneath me, yanking me closer to the edge of the chair. My head fell back as the chair rocked forward, slamming it against the rails, but I barely felt it. The wood was smooth under my ass. His hands slipped up under my shirt and unhooked my bra; my legs straddled his hips, grinding against the stiff cloth. His tongue teased my neck before his face shadowed mine, his eyes dark and smoky, a question in them.
He kissed me long and deep, stopping abruptly. I lifted my head slightly to meet his lips again, but he put a hand on my cheek, forcing me back. When he finally spoke, after a long moment, his eyes locked with mine, he said huskily, "Tell me you didn’t shoot at him."
I shook my head, uncertain if I could even speak—it was as if my body had completely taken over and there was no room for words anymore.
"Tell me," he said, not willing to let me out of it. "Why did you have your gun?"
I didn’t want to tell him. I sorted through the chaos in my head and finally said, "I’ve been getting phone calls."
Talk about killing a mood. He sat up—when did he have time to take off his shirt?—and I realized our moment was over, hooked my bra, and pulled my shirt back down. My skirt was still hitched up over my thighs, and I left it that way. Wishful thinking. Maybe this wouldn’t take too long.
"Phone calls from whom?" Vinny asked.
I shook my head. "I don’t know. The phone rings in the middle of the night, I answer, but no one’s there. Whoever it is hangs up."
Vinny frowned. "Not when I’m here."
"You’re not always here."
We’d tried to keep our nights together to four a week. We had to sleep sometimes.
"So it’s deliberately when I’m not here?"
I nodded, grabbing my underpants and shimmying back into them. Moment was most definitely over. Damn.
"Why didn’t you tell me?"
"It was only once in a while until about two weeks ago. Now it’s every night you’re not here."
"Why didn’t you tell me?"
"I didn’t think much about it until recently," I said.
Vinny’s eyes narrowed. "Do you have any idea who it might be?"
I frowned. "Why the twenty questions?"
"So you don’t? Have you tried calling star 69 to find out?"
I snorted. "Every time I try it, I can’t get shit. Some recording says the number I’m trying is blocked."
"Did you tell Tom about this?"
He wasn’t going to let up.
I shook my head. "No."
"But you’ve been carrying your gun around because of it?"
"Not so much because of it—"
"Jesus, Annie." Vinny stood up and started pacing around my living room. "Why couldn’t you just tell me? Why do I have to see you putting a gun in your car?"
I went over to the refrigerator. Two more beers left. I pulled them both out and handed him one. He took it, his eyes looking everywhere but at my face. Okay, so I fucked this one up good.
I walked around the island that divides my galley kitchen from my living room and put my hand on his arm, forcing him to turn so he’d have to look at me.
"I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d get all crazy about it. I’ve gotten this sort of stuff before. It’s what I do. I piss people off, and they try to get back at me."
"But you have an unlisted number."
"Some of the people I work with are idiots and sometimes they give numbers out. You know that." I leaned in toward him, ran my finger along his jawbone, felt him tense up. I dropped my hand. "Okay. If it’s like that, then maybe you should leave."
He stared at me a second, nodded. "And did you really think that the only way to get the truth out of me was to seduce me?" I asked his back as he opened the door.
He turned. "I played it wrong." And after a pause, "But you did, too."
After he left, I finished my last beer and what was left of his, too. I channel surfed awhile, finding Ice Castles on Encore. One of the best worst movies ever made. And when the blind skater tripped over those roses on the ice, giving up her secret, and Robby Benson came to her rescue, I cried.
It’s a hormone thing.
I climbed into bed at midnight, staying up longer than I wanted, hoping that Vinny would change his mind, that our fight—well, it hadn’t seemed like a fight, really, but what else could I call it?—would be forgotten and he could get past what he perceived as my distrustfulness.
I thought again about that note stuck on the fridge this morning. Maybe the word "love" had fucked with my head too much. Maybe that’s why I’d been so cryptic with him.
No, it was everything else that had happened. I’d fix it tomorrow. Vinny and I had had to find our way back to each other once before because of my stupidity and stubbornness.
I settled into bed and immediately started tossing and turning.
The phone rang at two a.m.
I sat up and listened to the machine pick up.
I heard my own voice give its command. "You know what to do."
Silence for a few seconds, then dial tone.
As I sat in bed, the glow of the streetlamp slicing across the bed and up the wall, I wiped the sweat from the back of my neck and glanced reflexively toward the window, covered most of the way with the miniblinds. I tugged at the sweat-soaked T-shirt; I wasn’t used to wearing clothes in bed—I’d started the practice when the phone calls became more regular.
But I had thought now that Ralph was dead they would stop.
Chapter 15
The buzzer woke me up. I glanced at the clock. I didn’t know when I’d finally dropped off, but it was nine a.m. I jumped out of bed and bounded into the living room. Vinny was back.
When I looked out the window, down at the landing below, I saw it wasn’t Vinny. I pushed the button to unlock the door.
Tom dropped a box of Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins on my counter and handed me a large iced latte when I let him in. He took a sip from his own hot coffee, a more reasonable-sized cup, before saying, "Good morning. You look like hell."
I started to run a hand through my hair and it got stuck. I might actually have to try to brush it or something. "Thanks," I muttered, taking a drink of my latte, which was ice-cold and immediately gave me brain freeze. I set the cup back on the counter. "Why are you here?"
Tom’s eyes were skirting around the room.
I knew what he was looking for. "Vinny’s not here. We had a fight."
I don’t know why I said that last part. Tom looked at me thoughtfully before chuckling. "We had fights every other day. Why would you be different with anyone else?"
I made a face at him and opened the Munchkin box. They were all chocolate frosteds. My favorite. I picked one out and held it up. "Why the bribe? What do you want?"
"I wanted to see how you were doing."
I shook my head. "No, what’s up?"
Tom cocked his head at me and took another sip of coffee. He was taking his goddamn time, that was for sure, and he knew it was driving me nuts. A small smile played at the corners of his mouth, and I remembered how kissable that mouth could be.
Down, girl. Just because Vinny and I had a fight didn’t mean I could be looking backward at Tom again.
The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he didn’t know exactly what I was thinking. I picked up my iced coffee again, put my lips around the straw, and sucked, bringing back the cold headache, but it made me forget that I was blushing.
"You told me you hadn’t seen Ralph Seymour in fifteen years," Tom said, settling in on one of the tall chairs at my kitchen island, his feet firmly on the rung, his hands surrounding his cup as he stared first at it and then back up at me. "Have you talked to him before the other night? I mean, in the past fifteen years."
I slurped my coffee through the straw, my eyes trained on his. "My friend Priscilla ha
s been in touch with him. And Ned Winters, over at Southern, he said he had Ralph come talk to one of his classes this spring. But I really didn’t want to hear from Ralph, and he knew that."
"I talked to Winters." And from the way he said it, I knew Ned had told Tom about me and Ralph way back when. "Why don’t you tell me your version of what happened with your ex-husband?"
I took a deep breath and another Munchkin, chewing thoughtfully before speaking. How to summarize the collapse of a relationship? "When I found out Ralph had been fabricating stories for the paper we were working for in New York, I knew I couldn’t stay with him. He got caught because a copy editor actually tried to get in touch with a charity that Ralph had quoted in a story about a kid who supposedly had some awful disease; I don’t even remember what it was. But the charity didn’t exist. And the PO box where all the money was going, well, I do know it wasn’t in Ralph’s name." I sighed. "He claimed his source lied to him, that the family lied to him. But of course the family couldn’t be found, either, once the editor started looking into it. Ralph said they’d called him, said they had to leave town because of the publicity, but it was his word against everyone else’s at that point." I paused, taking a deep breath.
"He made all of it up. And that wasn’t the only story, either. He was fired. I left him—I couldn’t live with someone who’d done that."
Tom reached across the island and took my hand. "I wouldn’t expect you to."
I looked at his face, searching for a sign that he was playing around with me, but he wasn’t. He was totally serious. He knew me, and he knew my ethics. I shrugged, trying to make light of it. "The paper covered it up. I was working there, too, but ended up getting a job right away at the Herald." And I hadn’t updated my résumé since.
I was as bad as Ned Winters. Seeking solace in my hometown, never leaving, never even thinking about it. Maybe I should cut Ned more of a break.
"How is Priscilla involved?" Tom asked.
I told him how we’d all hung out together in school. How we were all going to get jobs at the New York Times, what we considered our Holy Grail, and change the world, take down presidents like Woodward and Bernstein did. I didn’t tell him that after seeing The Killing Fields with Sam Waterston, I gave up my ideas about being a foreign correspondent. There was just so much I could do.
Instead I ended up covering planning and zoning and school board meetings. I thought about my interview with Shaw yesterday and realized just how little I’d advanced in my career.
Ralph hadn’t gone back to journalism. He didn’t even try to rectify anything, salvage what had been his dream. Priscilla told me he floated awhile, tried to freelance for magazines, but word spread, so he gave up writing altogether. When he was arrested on the drug charges, he’d already started working in clubs, strip clubs. How he got the job managing the Rouge Lounge, I didn’t know; it seemed like it was on the up-and-up. Maybe he’d gotten on track a little. But then, of course: "So how long has this grand jury investigation into Ralph been going on?" I asked.
Tom pulled his hand away in surprise, his eyes wide.
"Christ, Tom, Ned told me about it. Ralph told him." I waited a half beat. "And my mother’s got a little ’splainin’ to do," I added in my best Ricky Ricardo accent. "Guess she’s been representing Ralph."
The look on Tom’s face told me he didn’t have a clue about that. We’d both been duped.
"You didn’t know this the other night, when we had you in for questioning?" he asked.
I shook my head and held up three fingers. "Scout’s honor," I said.
"She never said anything," Tom muttered.
I chuckled, taking another Munchkin. "She didn’t tell me, either, and I was married to the guy. But grand jury investigations are secret anyway, and it must be a federal thing, since he’d been buying the guns out of state and bringing them here."
If his eyes were any wider, he’d look like that lemur from Madagascar.
"Did she tell you about that?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I haven’t even talked to her yet."
He was quiet a minute; he knew Vinny had told me.
"How involved is your department?" I asked.
Tom shook his head. "Our department isn’t involved at all. It’s all the feds."
Immediately I thought of my friend Paula Conrad, special agent with the local FBI office. And from the look on Tom’s face, he was on to me.
"Paula won’t tell you shit. If you’re going to poke around, it would probably be easier to get something out of Vinny or your mother," Tom said.
I wasn’t so sure about that.
"What did you fight about?" Tom asked.
I frowned. "What?"
"You and Vinny. What was your fight about? Was it about Ralph?"
"Sort of, I guess." I thought about Vinny seeing me with my gun. And then I thought about the phone calls. Should I tell Tom? I debated this for a second, but he spoke before I could make a decision.
"You know, we searched Ralph Seymour’s apartment. Before we knew how he died." So that’s where he’d been while Ronald Berger had been interrogating me.
"I thought you said Ralph’s case was federal," I said.
"We knew about the straw purchases." "Straw purchases" was what they called illegal gun sales for drugs or money.
They’d gone in looking for guns, looking for clues as to who would want to see Ralph dead. The feds were probably pissed, but Tom wanted to get there first. He was always an overachiever.
"We were pretty thorough in the search," he said then, his voice changing into his "official" one, the one I’ve heard when he’s interrogating witnesses at crime scenes.
Or me, when I’m a "person of interest."
Uh-oh.
I thought about the implication of what he was saying, and the way he was saying it.
"You dusted for prints, didn’t you?" I asked, like I didn’t know now what this visit was really all about.
Tom’s eyes were dark, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He nodded.
I’d have to come clean.
"Then you probably found mine."
Chapter 16
I knew it had been a mistake to do that story last year about how a suspect is processed. Marty was all gung ho about a first-person account of being handcuffed, Mirandized, fingerprinted, the whole kit and caboodle. At the time I was apprehensive, but Tom and Ronald Berger had made it into a sort of game and we all went out for beers afterward. Tom and I were still dating then, and when we went back to my place afterward, we had a little cop-and-robber fantasy thing going on that now made me blush.
From the look on Tom’s face, he wasn’t thinking about that. I struggled to push my memories out of the way.
"We put your prints into the system and never took them out after you did that story. Forgot," Tom said simply. "When we went to look for a match for the print, yours came up."
Behind his words, I could hear the question. If I hadn’t seen Ralph in fifteen years like I’d claimed, why would he find my fingerprint at his apartment? But he didn’t give me a chance to answer. There was more.
"We also found some photographs."
I swallowed hard. "What sort of photographs?"
By asking that, he had his answer, so he continued.
"There are photographs of you."
I took a deep breath. "What sort of photographs?" I asked again.
Tom’s eyes were a light blue, and I caught a flash of cobalt as the sun winked through the windows. "Pictures of you getting into your car, coming up the steps here, going into the newspaper, at that fire last week over in Dixwell."
I could feel my heart pounding inside my chest so hard I was surprised it didn’t pop out of my chest like that thing in Alien. Tom didn’t seem to notice as I took another sip of my iced coffee. It was almost gone.
"So you didn’t know about this?" Tom asked.
It was a good question. It would give me a motive to shoot at Ralph. How to explain that it would
just be one of many?
"No."
"You didn’t notice anyone following you or anything?" Tom asked.
It was time to tell Tom about the phone calls. "I’ve been getting a lot of hang-up calls. Middle of the night."
Tom’s eyes changed slightly, his mouth set into a thin, tight line as he digested this information. "Middle of the night?"
"I never got them when anyone else was here," I said, remembering that Vinny had pointed this out the night before. But I’d been half dressed and sexually frustrated at the time, so I’d been distracted and it hadn’t struck me then like it did now.
Whoever was watching me knew when I was alone. It wasn’t a random thing.
Tom finished his coffee, got up, and threw the cup away in the trash can under my sink. He turned back around to me. The island was between us, and he ran a hand through his hair. When he raised his arm, I could see the sweat marks on his shirt. It was hot in here, not that I’d noticed at all during this conversation.
"When was the last call?"
"Last night. Around two a.m."
Tom crossed his arms against his chest. "Last night?" His voice was calm, but I knew what he was thinking.
"Yeah, I thought it was Ralph, too."
Those blue eyes settled on mine, and he didn’t blink. "Why? If you didn’t know he’d been watching you, why would you think it was him?"
Caught. What should I say? Should I tell him the truth?
Might as well.
"Ralph stalked me after I left him," I said flatly. "Lots of hang-up calls, lots of late-night visits. I caught him in his car across the street from my apartment one night when I got home from a night meeting." I shuddered involuntarily as I told him; I’d changed my phone number five times and still he managed to get it somehow.
"How long?"
"Six months. Then it was all over. I didn’t hear anything from him again."
"Why do you think he stopped?"
"I don’t know," I said, too quickly.
From the look on his face, Tom knew something was up, but he took a different tack. "Why would you think he’d start up again? After all these years."
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