Puppet

by Joy Fielding

  At what point does a half-truth become a lie? she wonders, thinking of the oath all witnesses are obliged to take in court. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth …?

  Does anyone ever tell the whole truth?

  I came here on a holiday eight years ago (to escape my first husband), liked what I saw (saw my second), decided to stay.

  “So you went to law school here?”

  “Went to law school.” Got married again. “Got my citizenship.” Got divorced again. “Practiced for a year with this small firm in Jupiter before being asked to join Beatty and Rowe.”

  “And your family? Where are they?”

  “My mother’s up in Toronto. My dad died eleven years ago.”

  “I lost my mother last year.” Carter says this as if he merely misplaced her and that if he looks hard enough, she may just turn up again. “Cancer.”

  Amanda nods sympathetically. “It’s hard.…”

  “Not for my father. He got married again two months later. The girl next door,” Carter adds bitterly, a sneer tugging at the sides of his full lips.

  Amanda finds the combination of sneer and bitterness almost unbearably attractive. They add character to an otherwise bland voice and generically handsome features. She’s sorry now she ordered dessert. The sooner they get away from all these unwanted relatives the better. “You know I have a cappuccino maker at my condo,” she says seductively.

  Carter Reese is instantly on his feet. “Waiter,” he barks at the darkness, either unmindful or uncaring that he is now the center of everyone’s attention. “Check, please.”

  Amanda meets up with Carter Reese outside the elegant marble and glass lobby of her condominium on North Ocean Boulevard. They have parked their cars—she in her designated spot underground, he in guest parking out front. “Good evening, Joe,” she greets the elderly doorman, ushering Carter toward the elevators at the back of the lobby.

  Carter rarely lifts his eyes from his black, tassled loafers as they wait for an elevator to arrive. Clearly he is uncomfortable with the lobby’s harsh lights, with the image of himself as eager adulterer that reflects endlessly back at him from the mirrors lining the walls. “Slow elevators,” he comments under his breath, although they haven’t been waiting long.

  A few more seconds and the elevator finally arrives, the door opening to disgorge an attractive middle-aged woman whose large white poodle is straining against his leash. The dog barks when he sees Carter, lunges toward him. “Pussycat!” the woman admonishes, tugging on the dog’s rhinestone collar. “Sorry. He doesn’t like strangers.”

  “This one’s safe,” Amanda assures both the woman and her dog, following Carter into the empty elevator, and pressing the button for the fifteenth floor. “Or maybe not,” she says with a laugh, as his hands reach out to encircle her waist even before the elevator doors are fully closed. He pulls her to him, their lips barely an inch apart when the doors suddenly lurch to a stop and then reopen.

  “Oh,” says the woman who steps inside.

  Carter’s hands drop instantly to his sides. His eyes return to the floor.

  “Janet,” Amanda says as the woman pointedly looks toward the front of the elevator. Guess now isn’t the best time to ask her what those two phone calls to my office were about, Amanda decides, as an attractive man in his midthirties, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a deep scowl, enters the elevator. “Victor,” she acknowledges, as Janet glares toward her husband. Amanda quickly scans the woman’s face for signs of her rumored brow lift.

  No one says another word until the couple disembark on the fourteenth floor.

  “Friendly people,” Carter says, slipping his arms back around her, nuzzling the side of her neck.

  The phone is ringing as they approach the door to her apartment.

  “Don’t answer it,” Carter says as they step inside.

  “I have no intention of answering it.” She throws her purse on the white tile floor, burrows in against him as the phone continues its insistent ring.

  He kisses her neck, his tongue playing with the folds of her ear.

  She takes his hand, leads him past the moonlit-bathed, all-white living room toward the all-white master bedroom, the phone’s shrill ring pursuing them.

  It stops after four rings, signaling that voice mail has picked it up. “So, what do you think of my view?”

  “Spectacular,” he says, ignoring the impressive panorama of surf and sky visible from the bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows to plant a row of kisses on the side of her face.

  She laughs as he reaches underneath her sweater and swallows her bare breasts in the palms of his hands. “Full moon,” she remarks.

  “Brings out the beast.” He brings her hands to the front of his pants, kisses her hard on the mouth.

  The phone rings.

  “Persistent little devil,” Carter says, glancing toward the phone on the bedside table.

  “Ignore it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Amanda’s response is to pull her sweater up over her head, toss it to the floor.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” Carter whispers as the phone stops ringing.

  She tugs at the buckle of his belt, slides his pants down over his hips, stumbles with him toward the bed in the center of the room. Within seconds, they are on top of the white duvet and fumbling with the remainder of their clothes. A few more seconds and they are both naked, his hands roughly caressing her body, his tongue seeking hers. Just what the doctor ordered, she thinks as he raises himself to his knees and enters her sharply, his body pounding into hers, blocking out the sound of the ocean waves, the hum of the air-conditioning unit, the renewed ringing of the telephone.

  Carter’s head turns toward the sound. “Look, maybe it’s an emergency.”

  In response, Amanda grabs his buttocks, pushes him deeper inside her. She reaches between his legs, silently directing him to pick up the speed of his thrusts. Luckily, he requires no further encouragement, and the next twenty minutes pass pleasantly in a variety of frenzied positions.

  “Wow,” he enthuses afterward. “That was something else.”

  Amanda is tempted to ask, What else? Instead she says, “You up for an encore?” She is reaching for him just as the phone resumes its painful ring.

  “Why don’t you just answer the damn thing? Whoever it is obviously isn’t going away.”

  Amanda nods, knowing Carter Reese is right. She’s only postponing the inevitable, prolonging the torture, by refusing to answer the phone. She grabs it off the night table, pulls the cord across Carter’s chest. “Hello?” she snaps into the receiver.

  “Finally wore you down, did I?” says the once-familiar voice.

  Amanda takes a deep breath, trying to still the angry pounding of her heart. “This better be good.”

  “It’s about your mother,” Ben Myers says.

  Amanda tries picturing her former husband, but it’s hard to imagine him as anything other than the dangerously handsome young rebel in the scruffy black leather jacket he was at the time of their first encounter. She wonders if the years since she last saw him have added any weight to his skinny frame, if his dark hair has thinned, if time has hardened the soft brown of his eyes. His cheeks probably still crinkle when he smiles, she thinks, although the smile was always wary, slow in coming. Amanda pushes her hair roughly away from her face and leans back against the headboard. “My mother,” she repeats dully. “Is she dead?”

  “No.”

  “Sick?”

  “No. Mandy—”

  “Don’t call me that. Was she in some kind of accident?”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  “Really? Who’d she kill?”

  Carter Reese’s forehead disappears into a series of deep furrows. Who’d she kill? the furrows repeat.

  “Ben?”

  The silence that follows lasts perhaps a beat too long. “A man by the name of John Mallins.”

  “What!”

  “Ring an
y bells?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Yesterday at around four o’clock in the afternoon, your mother shot and killed a man by the name of John Mallins in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel.”

  Amanda feels her whole body flush hot with rage. “What kind of sick joke is this?”

  “Trust me. It’s no joke.”

  “You’re seriously trying to tell me that yesterday afternoon my mother shot and killed someone in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel?”

  “Your mother shot someone?” asks Carter Reese.

  “A man named John Mallins,” Ben tells Amanda.

  “Who the hell is John Mallins?”

  “You have no idea?”

  “How would I know? I haven’t spoken to my mother since before our divorce.”

  Carter’s eyes narrow. You told me you’d never been married, the eyes accuse.

  “What does my mother say?”

  “She’s not saying anything.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “You need to come home, Amanda.”

  “What? No way.”

  “Your mother’s in jail. She’s been arrested for murder.”

  “My mother’s in jail. She’s been arrested for murder,” Amanda repeats, thinking she must be in the middle of some postcoital nightmare.

  Carter begins inching out of the bed, searching through the folds of the duvet for his pants.

  “Look, there’s obviously been some mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake, Puppet. I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother shot a man three times in front of at least twenty witnesses. She’s already confessed.”

  “You have no right to call me that.”

  “Look, I don’t think you’re hearing me.”

  “Oh, I heard you. Believe me, I heard you.”

  “Then you understand you have to come home as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m in the middle of an important case. I can’t just walk out.”

  “You can get a postponement.”

  “Impossible. I’m sure you can handle things there.”

  “Impossible,” he says, throwing the word back at her.

  “I can’t come home, Ben.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “Tell her that.” Amanda hangs up the phone, then angrily pulls the cord from the wall before racing into the kitchen and disabling the phone there. Then she marches into the living room and pulls open the sliding glass doors, stepping onto her large wraparound patio, and gulping in the cool ocean air, trying to draw moisture into her parched lungs.

  Puppet, the waves beckon from below. Puppet. Puppet.

  Amanda quickly retreats inside her apartment. “Carter,” she calls out, pulling the doors closed, desperately trying to block out the unwanted voice. She looks anxiously toward the bedroom. “Carter, get that gorgeous ass of yours in here. The night is young.”

  But the moon illuminates an empty apartment, and the silence tells her Carter Reese is gone.

  FOUR

  DO you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” the clerk intones solemnly as Derek Clemens lays his left hand across the Bible and raises his right.

  “I do.”

  Amanda studies her client as he states and spells his name, then gives the court his address. Although he is wearing a clean white shirt and pressed black pants, as per Amanda’s instructions, his appearance is vaguely slovenly. His open collar rests too loosely around his neck; the suede belt at his waist is scratched and frayed; his blond hair, parted down the middle and pulled into a ponytail, looks stringy and unwashed.

  (“I washed it this morning,” he assured her testily.)

  Amanda rises to her feet, unbuttoning the buttons of her black jacket, the same jacket she was wearing yesterday, as well as the same black skirt, and the same black shoes that are still pinching her toes. Only her white blouse is different, although it is a duplicate of the one she was wearing yesterday. She goes over the basic facts of the defendant’s former relationship with Caroline Fletcher, their prior living arrangement, their frequent squabbles, their habit of fierce fighting and making up. “Suppose you give us your version of what happened on the morning of August sixteenth,” she says, her eyes scanning the jury to make sure everyone is paying proper attention, gratified to find all eyes open and fixed upon the witness. No one nodding off just yet.

  Of course they probably all had a good night’s sleep, she thinks enviously, recalling the frustrating hours between midnight and 6 a.m. that she spent tossing and turning and cursing all things Canadian. How dare Ben call her after all these years. How dare he make such outrageous demands. How dare he call her Puppet.

  She is nobody’s puppet anymore.

  You have to come home as soon as possible.

  I can’t do that.

  What do you mean, you can’t do that?

  I’m in the middle of an important case.

  “I mean, I work all night,” Derek Clemens is saying, and Amanda wonders how much of his testimony she has missed. “I don’t think it’s asking too much for her to at least make sure there’s some milk in the apartment, so I can have a bowl of cereal when I come home.”

  “So, you’d been working all night, and you were tired and hungry.”

  “I work from eleven o’clock at night until seven in the morning …”

  Roughly the same hours she spent tossing and turning in her bed, Amanda thinks, nodding in genuine sympathy.

  “… so, yeah, I was tired and hungry. The apartment’s a pigsty. And there she is getting ready to go out. Putting on perfume. Not so much as a ‘Hi, how are you?’ So I go into the kitchen and I pour myself a bowl of Special K, which I’m not crazy about anyway, but that’s all we ever have, ’cause Caroline’s always on a diet. And we’re out of milk. I mean, what kind of mother is she, she doesn’t make sure there’s milk for the baby?”

  She’s your mother.

  Tell her that.

  “And that made you angry?” Amanda asks, shaking the intrusive voices away with a toss of her head.

  “Damn right it made me angry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told her that since she was sticking me with the kid all day, the least she could do was pick up a quart of milk and bring it home before she went to work. And she says she doesn’t have time. I said, what do you mean you don’t have time? It’s not even eight o’clock, the salon doesn’t open for another hour. She says she wants to get there early because Jessica promised to cut her hair before everybody arrives. Then Tiffany wakes up and starts screaming, and I’m exhausted, man, I just want to get some sleep. So I ask her to take the baby with her. She says, absolutely not. And then she tries to push me out of the way, ’cause I’m standing in front of the door. So I grab her arm, and that’s when she slaps me.”

  “She slapped you?”

  “Yeah. Caroline’s got a mean temper. It doesn’t take much to set her off.”

  “Objection.” Tyrone King rises partway to his feet as the judge sustains his objection.

  “Just answer the question, Mr. Clemens,” the judge directs.

  “Sorry, Your Honor.”

  “What happened after she slapped you?” Amanda asks.

  “I don’t remember the exact sequence of events.” Derek’s careful choice of words sounds like a foreign language on his tongue. “But I do remember trying to shield my face. I wait tables on weekends and it doesn’t look good for me to come in looking all beat up.”

  “So you’re saying she hit you more than once?”

  “Oh, yeah. She got in at least three or four shots before I had enough.”

  Your mother shot a man three times in front of at least twenty witnesses.

  “And what did you do then?” Amanda asks, her voice louder than she intends.

  “I grabbed her, pushed her out of the way, told her to get the hell out, that I’d
had enough of her crap, and I was going to bed.”

  “And what did she do?”

  “She followed me into the bedroom, screaming and pounding on my back. I warned her to leave me alone, but she was like a crazy woman.”

  “You didn’t demand oral sex?”

  “Are you kidding? The last thing I was gonna do was trust my dick in her mouth. Sorry, Your Honor,” Derek Clemens says over the muffled laughter of some of the jurors.

  “Perhaps you could be a little less colorful in your descriptions,” the judge says, although the bemused twinkle in his eyes tells Amanda he rather enjoyed the outburst.

  “And yet you did end up having sex with her,” Amanda reminds the witness.

  “Yeah.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “That was pretty much our pattern. One minute we’re trading punches, the next minute we’re naked and going at it like rabbits.”

  “Did you rip her dress?”

  He shakes his head. “Those seams rip every time you look at them. Caroline was always complaining about it.”

  “Did you force her to have sex?”

  “No way.”

  You need to come home, Amanda.

  What? No way.

  Amanda takes a deep breath. “How do you explain the bite marks, Mr. Clemens?”

  Derek Clemens has the good sense to look genuinely embarrassed. He too takes a deep breath, then turns to face the jury, tells his story directly to them. “After we finished having sex, Caroline started getting all upset again. She said I made her late, and now Jessica wouldn’t have time to cut her hair, and it was all my fault. I told her to shut up and let me get some sleep, and she starts pounding me again. I managed to get out of bed and get behind her, and I’m reaching around her for her hands, trying to keep them from swinging at me, when suddenly, she grabs my hair. My hair’s pretty long.” He shakes his ponytail from side to side by way of illustration. “And she gets a pretty good grip on it and starts tugging at it. I swear I thought she was gonna pull it right out of my head, and I’m yelling at her to let go. So, of course, what does she do? She pulls harder, that’s what. It hurt like hell, and I didn’t know how to get her to stop. So, I bit her. She still wouldn’t let go. So I bit her again. Harder the second time. That’s when she let go of my hair.”