Of course she wasn’t aware of the irony of her words—how could she have been?
“You’re right,” I agreed, picking at the sautéed eggplant.
Maybe Monica wasn’t quite buying my line of bullshit, but I had to stick to my story.
I was a wreck, but I forced myself to try and keep cool. I asked Diane about school, and fabricated a few details of all the fascinating stuff I’d been up to at Oriole when I wasn’t busy bashing my head in. My work, thankfully, was so boring in the retelling that the two of them didn’t even pay attention.
“I’ve got some business to take care of in my study tonight,” I announced, getting up and clearing my plates and silverware.
“All right, dear . . .”
As usual, Diane said nothing.
I could feel their eyes on me as I disappeared into the kitchen. Could they tell that every word I’d uttered was a lie?
I grabbed a bottle of Heineken from the fridge, walked down the hall, ducked into my private zone, and locked the door, which was normally what I did when I was trying to concentrate. I flicked on the portable TV that sat atop the long desk, adjusted the volume to a burble, and surfed from channel two to ninety-nine, stopping at every newscast along the way.
Then I did it all over again. The last thing I wanted was to catch a report on what happened earlier that day at the Soho Grand, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
What a joke! When will I ever be able to stop thinking about it? Never. So wouldn’t it be better to have it out in the open right now? It was just a matter of time anyway, wasn’t it?
After an hour or so of feeling a little like my old self, I was going off the deep end again. I was about to lose it. Being in the presence of my wife and daughter had brought me back to another, more tolerable reality, but now that I was alone—
There was nothing of interest on any of the ten o’clock news programs. Ditto for the eleven o’clock version. What the hell was going on? Why hadn’t someone rented room 708 and made what’s always termed a “gruesome discovery”? Maybe, for some reason, Wellington had rented the room for tonight and no one aside from him was supposed to enter until tomorrow. Or the day after. Or whatever. Maybe Gretchen was planning on coming to the hotel and servicing the little shit after he shook me down. In all likelihood, hotel security hadn’t revisited the suite and searched through it after I left, because if they had, they would have found Wellington folded up in the closet like an extra blanket and the story would have broken. Apparently that guard had believed what I told him.
I went back to the kitchen, popped a cold bottle of Riesling, and swilled glass after glass until long after both Monica and Diane turned in. Neither stopped by to say good night, which was par for the course. It wasn’t that my wife and daughter didn’t love me, I knew, but rather that familiarity had bred laziness over the years. It was okay—I didn’t really feel like saying good night anyway. It wasn’t such a great night for me.
Sitting there by myself, I went back to thinking about Gretchen. I wondered where she was, if she had any idea what had happened to her little pal Wellington. The problem of course was that I didn’t know if she was in regular contact with the sleazeball. She sure as hell had never mentioned him to me. Maybe Wellington hadn’t blabbed his plan to try and blackmail me to her. Maybe she was utterly clueless about what had gone down. But it was all speculation—I was a blind man in a black tunnel trying to guess which way to go. I didn’t know a fucking thing.
Before I realized it, it was three in the morning. I hadn’t been awake this late into the night in years. Cheating on my wife hadn’t cost me nearly as much shut-eye as killing Wellington had.
The bottle of Willm was drained. I went out into the briskness and dropped it into the recycle bin near the back door. The two flaming orange eyes flashing at me out of the darkness nearly made me jump out of my bones.
A goddamned raccoon.
“Beat it! Get the fuck out of here!” I cursed, and the beast scampered off into the shadows.
That little pest had my heart doing backflips. Despite all the alcohol, I was completely wired all over again. I might have been good at compartmentalizing my life when it came to playing around on my wife, but the facility deserted me when the subject was murder.
I buzzed through all the TV stations a few more times. Between passes I checked my e-mail to see if Gretchen had tried to make contact, something I’d never done from my home computer before.
Nothing. It was like Wellington didn’t happen.
Maybe I was truly insane and it didn’t.
I decided to try to sleep. I went into my private bathroom just off the study, opened the medicine cabinet, shook two Ambiens out of the vial, and swallowed them with a handful of water from the spigot. Then I went upstairs and crawled into bed next to Monica. Hearing her even, untroubled snoring made me jealous.
19.
The next day was Thursday.
I must have gotten only two, maybe three hours of sleep—at least that’s how it felt. The Ambien hadn’t done much to help. Lying in bed with my eyes shut, I could already feel the dull pulse of an angry hangover from that bottle of wine I’d sloshed down just a few hours earlier. Since I could never function well without a full budget of sleep, I knew I was in for a rough day. Worse, I had the nagging sensation that I’d forgotten something having to do with Wellington, but I was so groggy and addled I didn’t know what it could be.
When my eyes finally opened, Monica was already up and gone, which meant I must have slept even if I didn’t feel rested. My wife’s one of those chirpy types who likes to work out in the morning, which I hate. I preferred hitting the gym, when I did hit it at all anymore, in the afternoon or evening hours, when I was fully awake. No doubt Monica was on her way to the health club in West Caldwell for her advanced Pilates class and would drop Diane off at school en route. Too bad the exercise routine wasn’t helping—at least I didn’t notice any difference.
I was glad that she was out of the house. Since I didn’t have to be in the office first thing, I could take my time and check all the morning news programs. If what was left of Wellington was going to be discovered, it would have happened by now.
There was a plasma TV in the bedroom, a smaller version of what we had downstairs in the TV room. I rolled over, picked up the remote from the night table, and tuned into NBC, then jumped to ABC, then to CBS, but there was still no news of the slaying. Then I punched in MSNBC and Fox—again, nothing.
I was confused. This didn’t make sense. Could the maid service have somehow missed the corpse? Sure, the maids aren’t typically the brightest bulbs, but this was ridiculous. And didn’t the current guests in room 708 open the closet door?
It seemed impossible that Wellington hadn’t been found. At the very least an odor must have developed, or maybe blood had seeped out from under the closet door.
But maybe there was a plausible explanation: maybe occupancy at the Soho Grand had been thin last night and room 708 wasn’t rented. Still, it was New York. New York was busy. Things were always happening. Hotel rooms were tight. And the maid service would have gone in there anyway.
Whatever the explanation for why Wellington hadn’t been found, there was nothing to do—maybe nothing to be concerned about—at least for the time being. Life was still normal. I didn’t feel any better, though. Not one damned bit. If anything, I felt even more uneasy. The not knowing—that was already starting to get to me. Not that I wanted anyone to find Wellington—that’s why I’d jammed him into the closet—but somehow it seemed that if I was in the dark about what was going on, I could be caught off-guard. By who? Well, by the cops, for one. And as a person who has to be in control, I didn’t like that possibility, to say the least.
I forced myself out of bed, took a lukewarm shower—that I switched to ice-cold at the end to try and blast out the hangover—shuffled downstairs in my bat
hrobe, and popped a whole-grain waffle into the toaster. Then I laid two strips of uncured turkey bacon on a paper towel and slid the plate into the microwave. While I was waiting for the appliances to complete their cycles, I took the container of fresh strawberries out of the crisper, dumped five into a strainer, and ran cold water over them. I don’t think I was even fully aware of what I was doing—I was operating on the fuel of habit. And why was I even going to eat? My life as I knew it could be over in a matter of days, even hours.
As I was carrying the food to the kitchen table, the telephone rang.
I halted in midstep. I could let the call go to the answering machine, but decided, like a kid trying to convince himself that he’s not really afraid of walking through the graveyard at night, that I could answer it just as well.
I can’t avoid living. If I wasn’t going down for killing Wellington, I couldn’t avoid life.
Go on, Marzten. Be a tough guy. Pick it up. I dare you.
While I stood there trying to decide, the fucking instrument went on ringing. Finally I sucked it up and reached out and picked up the kitchen extension.
“Hey there, Mr. Marzten. This is Vance!”
Vance. Who the hell is Vance?
My heart did a clumsy catapult into my mouth.
“Uh—”
“Vance Anderson, Mr. Marzten.”
The self-employed handyman who did some of the repairs around our property. Hell, yes. I nearly burst into euphoric laughter.
“What’s up, Vance?”
He was stopping by this morning to pick up the moisture-rotted wooden gate that was hanging off the fence on the rear border of the property, behind the carriage house. It must have been something Monica arranged for, because it was all news to me.
“No problem, Vance. You know where it is. Feel free to do what you need to do.”
My jitterbugging fingers replaced the receiver. The few chunks of strawberry I’d swallowed were stuck in my throat. If I was this messed-up basket case now, what kind of shape would I be in when they finally found Wellington and the heat got really turned up?
I shook my head. If I didn’t get myself together I might just as well drive over to the Essex Fells police station and spill my guts to the first guy in blue I saw.
Somehow I was able to dress, get into the Beemer, and report to the office, where I made a valiant attempt to concentrate on the new series of ads Carole Mills had brought me in to redesign. This time it was the launch of a new antiseizure medication for severe epilepsy, and the campaign was already in trouble. Some of the trials hadn’t gone all that well, and there was talk that the manufacturer might pull the plug on the whole thing. Normally a snafu of this sort would have irritated me no end because I took pride in my work and wouldn’t have wanted my efforts to go to waste, but that morning I didn’t give a damn. My work was halfhearted and slipshod. I could hardly see straight and my temples were pounding. I’d already swallowed a handful of Tylenols and they hadn’t made a dent in the pain. I still felt a little woozy—drunk, even—and wondered whether anyone in the office noticed.
Tony Verducci, the proofreader who looked over my revisions, twice had to stop by my cubicle to clarify some detail I’d botched.
“Damn, Tony. Don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“One of those days, huh, Rich?”
Did I detect a snigger? Verducci was one of those company drones (with his rimless spectacles and Eddie Bauer duds, he even dressed the part) who resented the fact that I was able to come and go without supervision, without having to strictly account to management for my time, and who felt that he should be in charge of the editorial process instead of some outsider, despite my years of experience. I could see that it gave him great satisfaction today to be able to nail me for my blunders—it was like saying, “See, you incompetent fool? You should be reporting to me instead of vice versa!”
“Hey, it happens,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”
What I didn’t add, naturally, was that I’d had to strangle a man the day before, and that it rendered me negligent about whether I’d stuck a single space between sentences instead of two or left an orphan dangling at the end of a paragraph.
I should have hung around and tried to clean up the mess, but I could hardly focus on what was in front of me, and since if the ads were junked more effort from me might not even matter, I tossed in the towel at five like the account executives. I packed a few pieces into my briefcase; maybe I’d try and log some time at home.
It was only a twenty-five- or thirty-minute drive from the Oriole complex back to Essex Fells, and traffic on Route 46 around the Willowbrook Mall wasn’t too bad. When I got in, the house was still quiet. On the kitchen table was a scrawled message on a purple Post-it that Monica and Diane had gone clothes shopping at Short Hills, and that I should go ahead and fend for myself as far as dinner was concerned. By the way, there were leftovers from last night’s dinner and lots of frozen stuff in the fridge . . .
Instead of sitting down and trying to eat, though, I went straight to the TV in my study and monitored the evening news.
Again, nothing. Nothing but bullshit I wasn’t interested in: Hit-and-run deaths on Staten Island. House fires in Queens. Drug shootings in Brooklyn.
My head was a welter of warring voices.
Figure it out already.
No—don’t.
I can’t take it anymore.
You can. You have to. You’ve got no choice.
The circuits of my brain were doubling back on themselves, like a skipping record on a turntable that was playing the same note over and over again. If I hadn’t lost my mind yet, it was coming.
And then I thought: What does it matter anyway? They can’t pin a goddamned thing on me.
By the time Monica and Diane rolled in, it was going on ten o’clock. I could hear Diane’s footfalls on their way up the stairs to her room. A few moments later, there was a light knock on my office door. Monica’s knock. I switched off the TV.
“Still burning the midnight oil?”
She glanced around the dimly lit room, a room she rarely visited since she liked to give me space when I was working.
Tonight, her face, lined with middle age and framed by hair that had turned predominantly iron-gray, was still pretty. And so maddeningly serene. Without a care in the world. That’s what maddened me most.
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m a little behind.”
I pretended nonchalance. To make it look like I was really doing something, I’d spread some of the Oriole ads over my desk just in case she or Diane popped in.
Her brow knitted together. “How’s that nasty boo-boo on your forehead?” She came closer and peered at the injury.
When she reached out to touch it, I felt like a kid who’d done something naughty and was about to be found out.
I nearly melted then, nearly came apart at the seams like a child, almost went to my knees and confessed everything, every last thing—how I’d ruined my life, and hers, and Diane’s, all for the sake of a piece of ass. A very, very expensive piece of ass, that in the end turned out to be as lethal as the deadliest cobra.
But I didn’t.
I felt my eyes tearing up. I wanted to pull away, but I didn’t do that, either, because the last thing I needed was to arouse a new round of suspicion in my wife. Especially my wife. Ironic—it was so fucking ironic . . .
She ran her finger over the length of the wound as I leaned back in my chair.
“Poor baby.”
Then her brow creased more deeply.
“My God, Richard—what is this?”
Her fingers parted the hair in my scalp.
I pulled my head back. “I—”
“Richard—what happened to you yesterday? What really happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. It was that goddamned door, like I told y
ou.”
“Door? I’d hate to run into a door like that. It looks to me like somebody dragged a garden rake through your head. It’s all caked with blood and purple and—”
“All right, Monica! All right! What the fuck did I just tell you? It’s from where the door clocked me! What more do you want from me?”
She blinked and took a step backward, as if I’d just slapped her hard across the face.
“What is the matter with you? My God—I only wanted to make sure you were okay. Don’t bite my head off because I care!”
She turned and bolted for the door.
I hated when my wife got all histrionic on me, which wasn’t often. But this time I’d probably deserved it.
“Wait.”
She stopped, but didn’t turn around. I got up and slipped between her and the door.
“Hey . . . I’m sorry. Long day, I guess. And a vicious migraine. Not to mention that I didn’t get any sleep last night. I didn’t mean to overreact.”
There was a hangdog look in Monica’s eyes. “I’ll leave you alone altogether if that’s what you want.”
“Oh, come on, don’t start with something like that. I was just—”
“I can give you all the privacy you want, Richard.”
Like all married couples, we had our code words. Privacy meant that I could get out of the marriage if I wanted to.
“What else do you want me to say? I’ve already apologized, haven’t I?”
I had no desire to squabble. All I wanted was to think without being disturbed.
Monica sidestepped me and reached for the door handle.
“You should have your head looked at by a doctor. That thing doesn’t look right.”
“I’ll be okay.”
She probed my eyes.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong—really. What could be wrong? Don’t worry.”
It was the first flicker of doubt I’d seen in my wife’s eyes since she questioned me about that nonexistent extramarital affair several months earlier.
No Strings Page 10