by Linda Sands
I glanced at a bottle of Jack, but went to the fridge instead and found a Belgium beer that I poured into a glass bearing the same name. “What can I make you?”
“Surprise me,” Barbara said, lying back in her chaise, crossing her legs, and allowing the slit in her skirt to spread another inch.
I let myself think for a minute that she was my wife, that this was our house, that I had a regular job and was staring retirement down, that we had plans for the rest of our lives and they weren’t the normal ones. Me and Buffy, we were going to travel to places where no one else went. We were going to spend every dime, leave our ten kids penniless, and to hell with nursing homes. When the time came, we’d know it and we’d go out in style, forget to surface on a deep dive in Belize, drive off a snowy turn in Montana, hang glide into the cliffs of Brazil. Our terms, baby.
I made her a vodka martini using the good stuff. I measured it into the silver shaker, added vermouth and ice, hummed a Bon Jovi tune as I shook it. They had been her favorite band, once. When she started singing I joined in, harmonizing with her smooth soprano. We sounded good together.
I could have done this all day. Maybe for the rest of my life, because I was still good-time Willy from the old days. This was the big game and I had the playbook memorized, but I was ready to throw it away and come up with a new play—the swing play, the take-it-the-long-way-around-while-the-husband’s-away play—where I got the touchdown and the cheerleader too.
I brought the drink to her as we closed the song “You Give Love a Bad Name.” She laughed and reached for the glass, and I knew I could have her if I wanted. That really, she’d been mine all along.
Until she said, “Mick hates that song.”
I blinked myself back into reality. I had been unhappily married—a few times—with nothing to show for it but having disappointed yet another woman. And Buffy was Barbara now, a rich wife with monogrammed linens, a social calendar, and a condo in Boca. I pushed our past back where it belonged and concentrated on why I was here.
I had to tell her what I knew about her daughter’s death.
I told her about the tape and how James Smith might not be exactly who we thought he was, that we were still working on that part. I didn’t say anything about what Tommy and I had found at the dry cleaners.
“It might be nothing,” I said.
“But it might be something.”
“Yes. Did Chamonix ever go on a trip with James?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I know the cops have been through it, but, I’d like to check out Chamonix’s apartment. Would that be okay?”
“Whatever you need, Bill.” She twirled the tooth-picked olive in her mouth, then bit it tenderly.
I glanced at the family portrait on the wall behind her.
Time to go.
At the door, Barbara gave me a door key and an address. I pecked her on the cheek, took a minute to inhale the familiar Buffy scent, reminded myself she was my employer and nothing else—for now.
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand the appeal of loft living. I guess it would be great if you needed a warehouse for storing antiques or housing an artist’s studio. But I wasn’t a decorator or an artist. To me it just looked like wasted space.
I had just started going through Chamonix’s kitchen cabinets when someone knocked on the door.
The guy in the peephole looked harmless enough and I definitely wanted to talk to anyone who knew Chamonix, so I opened the door and tried to look like I belonged.
“Hi. I’m Tedesco.”
He shook my hand. “Adam,” he said, looking over my shoulder into the loft.
Barbara hadn’t mentioned any friends or boyfriends. Though she was the first to admit she wasn’t as close to her daughter as she would have liked. I backed up, still holding his hand, “Want to come in?” I asked, pulling him forward.
“Uh, no. I mean—”
“How did you know Chamonix?”
He pulled his hand back like he’d been stung. “Who are you?”
“I’m Tedesco,” I repeated. “A friend of the family.” I circled around him, closed the door, and used some body language to move him into the kitchen.
The kid seemed nervous. I needed to find out if that was just an uncomfortable thing or a guilty thing.
“Where do you live, Adam?”
“Here. I mean, upstairs. I didn’t know Chamonix. Well, not really. I mean, not for long. I used to see her coming in from bike rides. One night we ran into each other.” He blushed, touching the scar on his chin. “Literally.”
The kid was an open book.
I opened the fridge. It was surprisingly clean. Most of the time in these situations—sudden deaths, disappearances—a refrigerator would be stocked with spoiling food, sometimes bought the very day the victim had died. A rotting meal no one would eat. I grabbed a light beer and a girly wine cooler and motioned to the stool at the counter. He sat, glanced at the colorful bottle then twisted off the top expertly and straightened up a bit.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a guitarist and a meteorology intern at the radio station.”
“Is that right?”
“It’s the only job where you’re allowed to be wrong half the time. What’s not to love about that?” He smiled and raised his fruity concoction.
I said, “Well, when you put it that way.”
He shrugged. “My dad always had low expectations for me.”
There wasn’t anything I could say, other than I knew how he felt. All sons did.
“But it must be cool sometimes, right?” I tried. “People talk about weather all the time.”
“Yeah. When they run out of real conversation.”
He took another slug, burped softly in his hand, like a balloon deflating.
“I thought going into it, it would be exciting. Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, hail storms, extremes of cold and heat, life-and-death situations. But really it’s just telling people what they already know and sometimes stuff they don’t want to hear.”
“I like the girl who does the weather report on the Naked News Channel,” I said.
He nodded. “Well, there’s always that.”
We raised our bottles in a toast and reflected on the effects of weather in a whole new way.
After a bit, he said, “Chamonix was always trying to get me to see the best part of my job. I do love the research, and math was always a strong subject for me. There’s this cool thing I’ve been working on, it’s a Doppler radar algorithm called CVT, a text-based analysis tool that can be used to interrogate the radar algorithm output—”
“Hold on there, pal,” I said. “I was just fine with the partly cloudy, partly sunny, bare-assed weather girl.”
“Right.” He finished his drink, then glanced at the open cabinets behind me, the stuff I’d pulled from the drawers and left on the counter. “So, Tedesco. What are you really doing here?”
I smiled. Kid wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. “Chamonix’s mother asked me to look into her death, wanted to see if I could go a little deeper than the cops had. I was thinking maybe I’d find something here, something they missed. Best to see everything as she left it, before they pack it all up.”
“Are her parents taking everything?”
“I guess. Why?”
“It’s just that she said she was painting something for me, and I never . . . you know.”
“Never what?”
He looked toward the studio space.
“I never got the chance to see it.”
We both stared at the easel in the corner. A paint-splattered sheet draped the canvas. There weren’t any other pieces in the room. Everything I’d ever read about artists said they were messy and impulsive, usually had bizarre routines, odd lifestyles, as if by being artistic they had to give up a conventional life. But from the looks of Chamonix’s place, she was organized, neat, almost impeccably so. And that got me wondering.
“I don’t
think anyone would mind, now,” I said, moving from the kitchen toward the easel. I heard the squeak of Adam’s chair as he rose.
It felt like we should say something—an incantation or eulogy, a prayer or a blessing, something before we unveiled the canvas. I also didn’t want to be the guy who did it, the unveiling. It felt creepy, like a horror movie scene where the brave one dies first, the hero figure, the one who always has the right answers. Maybe he just got so annoying the writer had to bump him off.
“Go ahead,” I said, elbowing Adam.
He stepped forward and grabbed a corner of the sheet, slid the fabric off, and let it pool on the floor.
The painting was of a man in a fishbowl. It was only the back of him, a shadow figure. It could have been the back of Adam. The man’s arms were outstretched, touching the sides of the bowl, and his face was lifted to the sky. The fishbowl floated on a raft of matchsticks. Their red tips flared against the blue, blue water. The sky was full of storm clouds, deep and menacing. Yet behind one there was a glimpse of sun, a piercing ray of light forcing a path through, aiming straight for the man.
I felt the fishbowl man’s anguish, his hope, his desire, and his inadequacy.
And beside me, Adam must have felt it too.
Chapter 28
YOU DON’T KNOW ME FROM ADAM
His fingers ached from hours of tremolo picking, but when he was like this, all lost in the sounds coming from his guitar, there was no stopping. His mother used to yell at him when he spent hours in his room creating music. She called him a fool, a dreamer, said he was someone who would never amount to anything.
The idea of that—the amounting part—bothered Adam for years. What was someone’s worth? If you had to look at it mathematically, to tabulate it, would you add for every good deed, subtract the times you didn’t return a call or loan money to a friend, multiply by two for your kindnesses, three if they were given unwillingly, then divide the whole by ten, if you’d ever committed a mortal sin?
If so, Adam figured he amounted to about $647.18. The odd change was his contribution to music. Fool. Dreamer. He might have been inclined to agree with his mother. Until Chamonix. She called him brave, said he was an artist—like her.
“The world doesn’t get us,” she’d said. “And that’s okay. It’s not supposed to. See, if we were as normal and predictable as the rest of them? We wouldn’t be as desirable. Being odd ups your value. Trust me on that.”
And when she had touched his back and leaned in to kiss him, Adam felt his worth increase.
It wasn’t perfect, him and Chamonix. But what relationship is? He needed the passion. The awakening. Even when it got uncomfortable. Him wanting more than she could give. Him, acting selfish, controlling.
But she was also selfish and they were both stubborn and emotional, and would probably kill each other if they stayed together. Maybe he really needed someone to mother him and she needed a daddy and they were mismatched and the cruel reality was they had love but it wasn’t enough. They had the one thing people all over the world seek, and still it was not enough to make everything work out okay.
Adam thought someone must be laughing now. Someone who wrote a love song. Someone who directed a love story. Someone who put those poems in those books that he’d read, believed, and memorized. They were all laughing now at our gullibility, at the private joke on humanity.
Love ain’t it, people. It’s agreement, it’s appeasement. It’s giving up what you want in order to make a peaceful existence and it’s never, ever, wanting more than you deserve. Because you know what? You don’t deserve shit.
Or so he thought, until Chamonix. She changed that idea in him. She made him feel important, special, lucky.
And how? By letting him know love.
They had been taking things slow, with quiet nights in—at his place, always—and the occasional dinner-and-movie date. Chamonix told Adam that she needed her space, she was a loner by nature. He didn’t mind. It took a lot of pressure off him. Besides, the sex was good and the way she could share the couch and be with him, but not suffocate him like other girls he’d been with—in that way, it was better than good. It was almost perfect.
They’d been seeing each other for a few weeks when Chamonix asked Adam to make a promise. He thought it was one of those moments men dread, until she said, “If something happens to me and I can’t come back to the loft, I need to do something for me. Would you promise me, Adam?”
She sounded so serious, so mature, that he sounded like a child when he said, “It depends. Do what?”
“Promise me first.”
“I don’t know if I can, if I don’t know what it is,” he said.
“You can,” she said. “And you will. Because you’re brave. And because you love me.”
Adam said nothing. They were lying naked on their backs on his bed. An oscillating fan blew fake breezes. Through the window, moonlight splayed across his thighs, her chest. He could see Chamonix’s nipples stiffen. The Man in the Moon was a Peeping Tom.
“I promise,” he said.
She sighed. “Thank you.”
He didn’t understand why it was so important to her, the task she’d given him.
But when she didn’t come back one night, or the next day, and when his calls went unanswered, even before he read in the paper that her body had been found, he knew what he had to do.
He climbed down his fire escape and slid open the window Chamonix never locked. He erased the phone messages on her machine, took back his clothes and toothbrush, and grabbed a garbage bag from under the sink. He found the towel in a baggie in the freezer and the plastic container exactly where she’d said it would be—on the lowest shelf of the refrigerator behind the Chinese takeout box.
He put it all in a trash bag, then drove fifteen miles to Hidden Acres Campground. He parked on the side of road, avoiding the main entrance, and hiked back to an abandoned campsite. He dug a trench in the circular fire pit for the bag and built a stick pyramid over it, doused everything with lighter fluid, then tossed in the can. Within minutes, the fire was blazing. The garbage bag and its contents melted and smoked a little, but in the end, it all turned to ash and glass. Adam used some bark and cardboard to scoop dirt over the remains, then covered the whole thing with branches and kindling, leaving a perfect setup for the next camper.
Back at the road, he slipped behind the wheel and started up the car. There was no one around. He sat for a moment as the local radio news announced weather, mortgage rates, and the deaths of three women in a local Irish bar. He plugged his iPod into the stereo, hit the shuffle button, then sped off. The whine of the engine was rivaled only by the angry, sexy sounds of flamenco guitarist El Rubio and the bellowing of single-again Adam.
Chapter 29
WHEN MOMMY STILL MANAGES TO FUCK UP YOUR LIFE
Sandy Wykowski-Smith would have been proud of her son, Jimbo Five, now Mr. James John Smith, entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Jimbo felt a certain accountability to his new persona, as if he’d walked into a masked ball dressed as Zorro and was expected to wield a sword with expertise, slash a Z into his enemy's shirt, sweep a damsel off her feet, then ride off on a black stallion. He did his best to be the new James. In time, he figured this would be all he knew. Anyway, there was no question of going back. He began to think of his transformation like puberty—permanent changes that yielded a better man.
One thing Jimbo couldn’t change was his taste in women. He couldn’t help that he was attracted to the stupid ones. God simply made them sexier, or maybe it was due to their lack of intelligence that they became sexy. They never thought about how they looked to others. They had no knowledge of mathematics, so they didn’t realize their pants were too tight for their mass or that their breasts were largely disproportionate to the rest of their body or their chosen hair color never occurred in nature. He couldn’t blame them for being dumb. That would be discrimination.
Instead, he loved them. He accepted them only fo
r what they were and he took them home to his apartment through the back door and tried not to tell them that he was the owner of Flannigan’s. He made sure they were drunk enough to be as stupid as possible and he always drove them home, dropped them at their door, inserted the key in the lock, and bowed as he backed away.
Except that one time.
Sylvia Ponce had no idea she was about to be seduced.
It had happened before Flannigan’s reopened under Jimbo’s management, before he hired the girls or fixed the rickety kitchen. He found himself in a college bar on the hill, checking out the competition, and, from habit, the women.
She was too old to be a college student. He thought she must be traveling on business. A woman as pretty as that would never be alone in a bar by choice. He waited until it looked like she was getting ready to leave, then sent her another glass of wine and waited for the bartender to point in his direction. She smiled, tipped her head in thanks, and when he walked toward her she turned to face him with body language that said, “Welcome home, stranger.”
After the usual introductions, Sylvia and James drank their wine, and then had more wine until James suggested they head over to his place for something else—a nightcap, perhaps?
“Maybe some Sambuca?” he suggested.
She put her hand on his thigh. “I can think of a nightcap that also begins with s and ends in a.” She mouthed her name, then reached for her purse.
Jimbo grinned, thinking he’d like having both.
He parked in the lot behind Flannigan’s, kissed her in the alleyway and on the landing, each time working his tongue like a beckoning, swiveling finger. In the apartment, he turned on the stereo, selected a playlist labeled “S.E.X.” Sounds of a sultry saxophone filled the room. Jimbo served the Sambuca, and when Enigma began to play—music guaranteed to turn any halfway-decent slut into a more-than-adequate stripper—drunk Sylvia complied.
After the impromptu, pole-less routine, when she was naked and Jimbo was hard, sitting on the couch, stroking himself, Sylvia suggested they move into the bedroom for nightcap number two.