No Strings

by Mark SaFranko

  He could have a hundred grand for all I cared, so long as he shut up and let me the hell by.

  I was rattled, but tried not to show it.

  “And if you need anything else taken care of, just let me know . . .”

  “Can’t think of anything right offhand, but I sure will when I do . . . Good seeing you, Vance.”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Marzten. You have a good one now . . .”

  The van eased on by and rounded the carriage house until it was out of sight.

  I heard myself let out a weary, panicky sigh. But the last thing I could do now was turn into a coward.

  “Come on, man,” I commanded myself, “move! Move!”

  I pulled out onto Rensselaer and drove toward Hillside Lane. From there I made a left-right-left and took the ramp that put me on I-280 heading east. The midafternoon traffic was nothing more than a trickle. Taking my time and staying within the speed limit, I was in Newark in ten minutes.

  I took the Harrison Street exit, then navigated the twists and turns until I was close by the train station. I knew the neighborhood—a tough one, like most Newark hoods—because back in the old days Monica would sometimes take me on Sunday morning tours of the properties her father owned.

  On Delmar Place I spotted what I was looking for—a parking space—and hooked a quick right.

  It was amazing—there was nobody around, aside from a woman crossing the street with her mutt at the other end of the block. After jimmying the Maxima between a midnight-blue Ford Explorer and a rusted-out orange Datsun, I jumped out, leaving the car with the keys hanging out of the ignition. It was a can’t resist invitation to a car thief—and this city topped the entire nation in that category of crime.

  I turned the corner onto Vermont Avenue and halfway up the block passed two kids wearing do-rags, Miami Heat and LA Lakers jerseys, and expensive b-ball shoes. They both shot me hostile glances, and it wasn’t hard to crack what they meant—What the fuck is Whitey doing here?

  I kept my head down and hustled along until I made it to the Broad Street train station. I climbed the steps to the platform and located the schedule on the wall of the unoccupied ticket office. The next train to Montclair was due at a few minutes after twelve.

  I pulled my cap down tighter over my eyes and took my time moving to the far end of the platform. There were only two or three other commuters waiting to travel west. It was that time of day—nice and quiet.

  I thought about those two homeboys who saw me around the corner from where I ditched George’s car. If the body was eventually discovered right there, then those punks could say they saw someone who looked like me in the vicinity. Being a white dude, I had to stand out, for sure. But would they really go straight to the cops if that happened? Unlikely. Hell, they might be wanted for something themselves.

  Nah, I decided—not worth sweating over.

  The silver monster pulled in. I boarded and paid my fare in cash. The conductor was an enormously overweight black woman who didn’t appear to notice me, even when she took my money and punched my ticket. My luck was holding. In a million years she’d never remember that I’d been on that train.

  There were only two other passengers in the car, a guy in a pair of filthy jeans and sweathshirt who looked like he’d just gotten off his trash-collecting shift, and a schoolkid with a backpack. Neither so much as glanced at me.

  I slumped down in my seat and pretended to sleep. In exactly thirteen minutes I arrived at the Bay Street station in Montclair. I walked a block south to Bloomfield Avenue, then west, and waited at the first bus stop for the New Jersey Transit bus to Caldwell.

  By the time I got off at Roseland Avenue, it had finally begun to drizzle. I could have waited for another bus to take me all the way into Essex Fells, but since it wasn’t that far, I decided to walk, which I sometimes did anyway for exercise when I needed to stop at the magazine stand on Bloomfield and Roseland. If someone who knew Richard Marzten happened to catch a glimpse of me strolling along, so what? What did it prove? Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. I was out for a stretch, that was all.

  After a few minutes, I actually began to enjoy the fresh air, rain and all.

  23.

  I hadn’t taken my cell phone along when I went to Newark to ditch George and his car. I knew that the location of an incoming call could be traced, and I didn’t want to pick up if Monica rang me in any case. If she wanted to know where I’d been, I’d cooked up something to tell her: I was feeling better and decided to go out for a long walk in the autumn air, something I occasionally did anyway.

  It turned out that it didn’t matter. She wasn’t at home when I got there. Her lunch with Lynn, just as I’d suspected, must have run overtime. Diane had a lacrosse game after school. There was no one to make any explanations to.

  I was in the clear. Altogether in the clear.

  If I cared, I would have realized then how little I’d been involved with my family over the past few months, ever since I’d started banging Gretchen. The three of us used to do things together—go to the movies, take Sunday drives, visit museums and galleries in the city, and so on—but we hadn’t done much of anything together in a long time.

  But I didn’t—care, that is. All I cared about was myself. I felt like I was alone in the world, for the first time in my life. Maybe, once the smoke cleared and I got myself together, we’d go back to being the family we’d once been . . .

  Suddenly I remembered the stack of mail I’d been checking out when George appeared in the carriage house. Before going back out there I grabbed the box of long stick matches I used when lighting the old-fashioned charcoal grill we sometimes fired up when we had the taste for the real thing.

  I gathered up the photos and letters and went around to the rear of the building. With my bare hands I tore the pile into small bits and pieces, then dropped them into an aluminum canister Monica used to transport plants from one area of the property to another when she was in a gardening mood.

  I doused the shreds with lighter fluid, dropped a match in, and watched the stuff explode into a pretty, miniature bonfire. And I actually felt a twinge of regret, thinking that I wasn’t ever going to meet a couple of those babes.

  It was just as well. Before George surprised me, I’d been thinking of trying to set up a date or two. Too messy now, way too dangerous. Given the trouble I was already flirting with, the last thing I needed was more.

  I dumped the ashes over the back fence, not far from where Vance Anderson had taken down the decomposing gate a few hours earlier. The heavy rain we were expecting tonight would drive what evidence remained—and there wasn’t much except for gray-and-white soot—straight into the soil.

  Standing at the kitchen counter chugging a bottle of Evian a few minutes earlier, I’d caught a whiff of myself. I smelled bad—really bad. Like a homeless guy who hadn’t even seen soap and water in weeks, let alone used it. Between the struggle with George’s corpse and my jangled nerves, I must have sweated out a gallon of liquid.

  I stripped off my clothes again, and, naked, took them into the basement to the washing machine. I removed the socks and sweats and tossed them into the dryer a couple of feet away, then put my gamy duds into the hot regular cycle. Then I walked straight up the stairs to the master bathroom and into a hot shower.

  After toweling off I got into my bathrobe and wandered into one of the unused bedrooms, reserved for overnight guests, and flopped onto the mattress. After all the ganglia-jangling events of the past few days, I was thoroughly whipped.

  Lying there on my back, I realized that I was damned near paralyzed and could hardly move my limbs. I closed my eyes . . . for a few seconds or so, that’s all . . .

  “Richard.”

  A voice in the distance. It sounded like it belonged to a female but I couldn’t be sure at first. It was mellifluous, a voice that seduced whatever it was aimed at.
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br />   She was coming closer. Then I realized she was calling me.

  “Richard . . . Richard . . .”

  I knew who it was now.

  “Gretchen . . .”

  She looked more tantalizing than ever. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, the most beautiful woman who’d ever lived.

  I missed her. Worse—I ached for her. I was about to start bawling for her like a baby because I couldn’t go on living without her.

  “Gretchen!”

  I let go with a wail that was nothing less than a desperate cry for help.

  “Richard?”

  I opened my eyes. Slowly, Monica came into focus. There was an alarmed look on her face.

  “Dear? Are you all right? Who in the world were you calling to?”

  I got up on my elbows and waited for my head to clear.

  “Was I talking?”

  “You certainly were. I couldn’t make out who you were crying for, but you sounded positively heartbroken.”

  I don’t know where the hell we were in that dream—a hotel room, maybe—but Gretchen was there, she was real, and I’d been this close to getting my hands on her again. It was the most vivid hallucination I’d ever had in my life.

  “Jesus—I can’t remember a thing,” I lied.

  “What are you doing in here? Since when do you sleep in the guest rooms?”

  “I was just feeling really beat, I laid down, and I must have conked out.”

  Monica stood there and looked at me a few seconds longer. I had the feeling she didn’t quite know what to make of it.

  “As soon as Diane gets home, we’ll have dinner, okay? Do you have an appetite?”

  “I think so . . . Then I have to get some work done . . .”

  “If you want my two cents, you’re working too hard. Much too hard. You don’t have to take all this responsibility on. I thought we talked about this.”

  “We did, but you know how it is—when you’re not watching, you get sucked into doing more and more.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”

  Then she disappeared, and I closed my eyes again and tried to recapture my dreamy vision of Gretchen. My wife was right about one thing: my heart was shattered.

  Everything else—Wellington, George—came back to me in a flood. I forced Gretchen out of my mind, got up, went into the bedroom, and dressed.

  Dinner was a seafood salad. I put on a show of enjoying it, but what I really wanted was to be alone in my office watching the evening news.

  “How was your game?” I asked Diane.

  “Won. That’s three in a row. We’re in first place in the county.”

  Then she announced that she had a heavy homework load, and as soon as she laid down her fork, she was gone.

  “Sorry I can’t hang out with you, hon, but I’m in the same boat. Mind clearing the table?”

  When we’d bought the place on Rensselaer, Monica wanted a full-time housekeeper. I’d argued against it, claiming that it would compromise our privacy, and I persuaded her to settle for a cleaning team that came in once a week, on Friday mornings. I’d won that one, and now I was glad that I had. The problem was that not having a housekeeper created household chores, mostly dirty dishes, to deal with, and that explained the number of premade meals we consumed. Despite her protests to the contrary, Monica was a bit of a prima donna and didn’t like to get her hands dirty, especially the older she got.

  I brewed a cup of decaffeinated Colombian and took it with me into the study. Switching on the TV, I settled into my swivel chair, and used the remote to travel back and forth between channels two, four, and seven. I hadn’t been surfing for more than a couple of minutes when I caught the familiar facade of the Soho Grand.

  “Police today arrested a bellhop in the slaying of a still unidentified man at the chic Soho Grand in downtown Manhattan. Christian Chibi, twenty-eight, a father of four, and a Nigerian national living in this country for the past two years, was apprehended when he arrived for his work shift this morning. He is scheduled to be arraigned within the next forty-eight hours on charges of first-degree murder. Police believe the motive for the crime was robbery . . .”

  I had to remember to swallow the coffee I’d just slurped. I could hardly believe what I was seeing and hearing. When the segment wrapped, I immediately jumped over to channel two and caught a rehash of the same story.

  By now I was out of my chair and doing an insane, silent jig around the room, punching my fists at the ceiling, mouthing “YES! YES! YES!” to whoever was up there watching out for me. My unintentional frame-job had worked to perfection—the cops had jumped straight to the conclusion that Wellington had been robbed, and they looked no further than the hotel’s own employees for a suspect. And it made highly logical sense. You nearly always found your perpetrators right in your own backyard.

  I felt pretty damned good about myself. At the same time, I felt a little bad for poor Mr. Chibi and his four kids, who would be left fatherless when he got sent to Sing Sing. But what could I do about it? With luck maybe the man would land himself a decent lawyer and one day get sprung out of the can.

  I didn’t think of myself as a heartless guy, but the truth was the truth: Christian Chibi had less to lose than I did. Better him than me.

  When my celebration was over, I realized that there was something about this latest development that bothered me a little: Wellington’s name hadn’t yet been attached to his lifeless body.

  Maybe the rat had no family, which in his case would be completely understandable.

  Or maybe the cops weren’t releasing it for a reason.

  Or maybe Norman Wellington isn’t his real name.

  If only there was some way to find out, to know for sure. Because if I could—

  The point was that a loop wasn’t completely closed, and maybe it was something I should be concerned about.

  It seemed to me that I should have been able to find out who I’d killed, that I should have called the front desk at the hotel and asked for Wellington like I’d originally wanted to, maybe even gone down there and asked, and now the opportunity had passed forever.

  So I’d fucked up. But if I never got caught, it wouldn’t matter.

  And there was another thing, something that was like a dagger in the gut—I didn’t have to kill George. Because, it turned out, I didn’t need his alibi.

  But what good was second-guessing myself now? What was done was done. A person couldn’t fret over every single thing. If there was one lesson I’d learned in life, it was that you had to move on. Like with that shitty coal-mining town out in no-man’s-land Pennsylvania—I’d never looked back.

  Right now there was no point in staring a gift horse in the mouth. Someone else had been nailed for the murder of Norman Wellington, or whatever his name was, and that was the most important thing. That was the only important thing.

  I remembered my coffee. It was good, organic, high-grown stuff that cost sixteen bucks a pound. I savored its taste. For the first time in days I felt halfway normal again, like I had my old life back—at least part of it, anyway. And part of Richard Marzten’s life was better than nothing.

  Except that I still had the nagging sensation that somewhere along the line I’d forgotten something. That had to be expected, I supposed, after what I’d done. I was never going to rest 100 percent easy again.

  For the first time in a long while I was in the mood to accomplish something. I switched off the TV and pulled out the Oriole epilepsy drug ads and spread them over my desk. Then I picked up my red pen and went to work.

  24.

  Monica had just been putting her book down on the nightstand when I walked into the bedroom. She always looked better in the dim light—I couldn’t see her age as blatantly then—and suddenly the mood hit me.

  I shook off my robe.

>   “Whoa—what is that?” she joked, staring at my erect cock. “I can’t remember the last time I saw that thing standing up . . .”

  I liked that Monica had a sense of humor. Next to her money, that was my favorite thing about my wife.

  I sat on the bed and she nestled into me. It’s true that I hadn’t made love to her in weeks. “I was beginning to think you didn’t like me anymore . . .”

  “Preoccupied,” I whispered, sticking my tongue into her ear.

  She seemed satisfied with my explanation. I shimmied her shift up and pulled it over her head. As always, I was a little turned off by the flour-white, matronly slackness of her flesh. But when she went down on me I closed my eyes and pretended it was Gretchen, and then it didn’t matter. Maybe, I thought, I should have just kept my eyes closed from the beginning . . .

  Within moments I was moving up and down on top of her. If I didn’t have Gretchen, I’d always have Monica. And all of her money. There was a lot to Monica.

  The next day at Oriole was a good one. Carole was happy to see me in the flesh, and even happier when at about eleven in the morning I dropped the entire stack of epilepsy ads on her desk.

  “I was so worried that you weren’t going to make it, Richard.”

  “And here I am beating the deadline,” I shot back with a grin. “I told you not to worry, didn’t I?”

  “So you did.”

  I had Carole in my hip pocket again. After lunch we sat down and yakked about another launch project that was scheduled to kick off in a few weeks or so. This time it was acne dope, and there was a need for completely fresh copy. She wanted me on board for that one, too, and I told her that if I could fit it in, I’d definitely join the team. It’s best to never seem too eager. But with my novel a dead issue, I was going to need something to do with my time. I might as well make a few quid while I was at it. Besides, having steady employment made me look like a solid citizen and not a sponger on my wife.

  “I hope whatever happened didn’t hurt too much,” she said, nodding in the direction of my forehead.