He laughed, but there was little humor in it. Stella thought she saw a glimpse of the lonely, awkward man he’d been. Well, more than a glimpse, really—more like a full-on life-sized slightly older version, just with a makeover and a support garment.
“I can’t even believe that,” she lied.
“Yeah, I know, but it’s true. Me and Benton, know how we met?”
“You worked together, right? That’s what our records show…”
“Yeah, but more specifically—it was my first week on the job, and Benton had been off at some conference. I’d moved into my cubicle and I was trying to get to know the ropes, and there was this one secretary—really cute, a tight little redhead with big … a big personality. She was being really friendly, showing me around, all that. She was flirting with me, saying we should have drinks, making all these suggestive jokes, and I was—well, I couldn’t believe my luck, I was falling for it. Hell, I told myself it was because I’d landed this great job—I was successful, I had as much of a chance as the next guy, know what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” Stella said.
“Then Benton gets back from his trip and sees what’s going on and asks me to have a cup of coffee, and that’s when he tells me. This woman, she’s playing with me. She does it to all the new guys. Her and her friends, they get guys all riled up, convinced they’re gonna get lucky. And then they wait until everyone goes out to happy hour, when they’ve had a few drinks—lead them on and then drop them flat. Cut ’em off at the balls, right in front of everyone. They think it’s fucking hilarious.”
The mask had slipped, Manetta’s light tone giving way to the fury that was simmering underneath. His mouth twitched at the corner and he squeezed his hands into fists.
“That’s terrible,” Stella said.
“Yeah. Tell me about it. Benton said we had to stick together, that he wouldn’t let that happen to me. He told me to just be polite but keep my distance, and that’s what I did. After a while we started going out after work sometimes, places where the girls aren’t as snobby. Or as attractive, but that was before I really started taking care of myself, so I couldn’t be as picky.”
“So let me get this straight,” Stella said. “You were okay with hitting on plain, ugly girls because they were the only ones who’d have you?”
“Well, like I said, I hadn’t done my personal work yet. Now, a fine-looking woman like you, you’ve never had to deal with that, I imagine, so maybe you can’t understand what it’s like. But Benton did. He was just like me. Average-looking guy, not much experience with the women. So we stuck together. We were each other’s wing man. And when we came up with the idea for ManTees, we were the very first to wear them. We were the first success stories.”
“You mean they really helped you?”
“Well, yeah. We started talking to women. We started getting dates. Like … on our own.”
Stella didn’t figure they’d taken each other along when one of them snagged an unsuspecting woman, but she let it go. “How’d it happen that only Benton’s name ended up on the patent?”
“That was no big deal. He said he’d take care of it, I said fine. Benton is more of a detail guy, I’m big picture.”
“But when Benton sold to LockeCorp—”
“That wasn’t anything more than a paperwork hassle. I mean, we had to pay the wiring fees and so on to split the funds into both our accounts—”
“What do you men, both your accounts?”
“Don’t you have that in your paperwork?” Manetta gestured at her sheaf of papers. “We had to sign like a hundred different forms. It was kind of a hassle to figure out for taxes, but it worked out, and we both got half. I mean, within a few bucks one way or another.”
There went his entire motivation. “So you’re saying you benefited equally from the sale of the patent.”
“Yeah. Which I guess means I need to make sure he gets half of whatever you-all have from the state.”
Stella recovered from her disappointment. “Oh, oh yeah, sure, I’ll make sure he does. Uh, if I can find him.”
“Look, Stella,” Manetta said, reaching over and squeezing her shoulder. “You can see I’m set up nice here. The money from ManTees let me do a few things. Got new furniture, clothes, some speakers would blow your mind. Sure, I’ve got all the bells and whistles. But some things don’t change, you know? What’s between a woman and a man, for instance … especially if they respect each other enough to always put their best self forward … well, I can just tell that you and I are cut from the same cloth. And if you’d ever like to explore that further, I know a place we can go where the waiters still wear ties and treat you with respect. Have you got a card on you?”
“Uh … well, I just moved offices and I’m having some new ones printed up.”
“Okay, well, I’m easy to find. I’m ManTeeMan on Facebook. Friend me, okay?”
Stella promised to do so, and endured a linger-y suggestive handshake before she made her escape, wondering what it was about a man who tried too hard—they were even easier to resist than the ones who didn’t try at all.
Chapter Eighteen
Stella could barely keep her eyes open on the way home. She was exhausted, and tomorrow when she woke up she’d be a whole extra year older and she wasn’t sure how she was planning to feel about that, and she wasn’t any closer to figuring out who’d left a dead guy in her nephew’s kitchen than she was when she arrived in Wisconsin, and all she wanted right now was a tumbler of Johnnie and a good long night’s sleep, though she’d settle for just the sleep. Now that they’d gotten the boys shipped off toward safety—or at least temporary storage, in Luke’s case—she figured she could just hit the hay and deal with everything else in the morning.
When she got to the house, however, Natalya had the place lit up like blazes. Every lamp, every overhead light was turned on, and she was sitting on the living room couch with a tangled pile of yarn in her lap. She had the news blaring on the television. A plate bearing a few neat slices of cheese sat nearby, untouched, along with a neatly folded napkin and a glass of milk.
Stella, who’d used the key Chip gave her to get into the house, cleared her throat when she saw that Natalya was crying, great glistening tears sliding down her cheeks, streaking them with mascara. She was staring in the general direction of the television, but her eyes were unfocused.
“Uh … honey?” Stella said after a moment, not knowing what else to do. She was plenty accustomed to crying ladies and had entertained any number of them in her living room, usually while trying to pry and suss and untangle and coax their stories from them, stories of beatings and cruel words and slaps and punches and falls down stairs and teeth knocked loose. Natalya, as far as she knew, had been the victim only of general oafishness and jealousy on the part of her husband, but emotions were bound to be running high with all the murdering and so forth, plus discovering one’s son was a drug dealer probably didn’t do much for one’s spirits.
“Natalya?” Stella said a little louder, making a move to put a comforting hand on the woman’s shoulder. Instead, Natalya leapt from her chair with a shriek, tugging off the glasses that had been perched on the end of her nose and nearly knocking over the milk, and then both of them went for the yarn, which had fallen under the couch, and there was general confusion as the mess was cleared and the television turned down and tissues fetched and tears wiped away.
Then, not knowing what else to do, Stella guided Natalya back to the sofa and suggested she have a sip of her milk. Ordinarily Stella was quick with a hug in tearful situations, but Natalya’s high-strung jumpiness made her cautious. Not to mention her own nerves, which were wound up tight from exhaustion.
“Look here, Natalya, you got anything stronger than milk around here? And also you got any more of them snacks?”
Natalya waved weakly in the direction of the kitchen. “You are helping yourself.”
Stella took her at her word. She found a few dusty bottles in the cabi
net above the fridge: the dregs of a bottle of peppermint schnapps, a few inches of gin, and a bottle of Scotch that still had a red plastic bow attached to the top. She squinted at the label: LAPHROAIG, it read. SINGLE ISLAY MALT SCOTCH WHISKY.
It was a dilemma of the sort she didn’t run into every day. “Y’all aren’t drinkers, are you?” she called into the living room.
“No, is ruin of many men of my family. I tell Chip we are totalers.”
“Huh. Teetotalers, I expect you mean. Well, see here, I’m wondering if I can do you a favor and take some of this off your hands.”
Another limp wave was all the encouragement Stella needed, and she opened the Laphroaig. Not her brand, but she figured she could make an exception this once. She poured a healthy couple of inches into a juice glass and held it up to the light, then took a cautious sniff.
Damn. She wrinkled her nose at the scent, which was redolent with notes of tar and WD-40 and paint thinner and practically singed the hairs on the inside of her nose. You had to wonder what they were thinking over there on the British Isles. Stella had no idea whether corn could be made to grow along the soggy moors of Scotland, or whatever they called their fields over there, but surely they could have called up the folks in Kentucky and asked for a few pointers. After all these centuries, Stella couldn’t imagine it hadn’t occurred to them to stop roasting their whisky over patches of sod they dug up from the ground, which apparently burned like a pile of Goodyears and imparted its nasty taint to every ounce along the way.
Still, it probably beat gin all to hell, and Stella was not about to dig into the schnapps, seeing as she’d gotten drunk as a skunk on the stuff one memorable evening during her senior year in high school and couldn’t even sniff it without wanting to run to the bathroom to throw up.
She took a deep breath and a healthy bolt of the whisky and shuddered as it went down.
And felt a little better, after she got her breath back.
“Okay,” she said, wiping her mouth on a paper napkin. She settled into a love seat near Natalya. “What gives?”
“Promise me you will not tell Chip about glasses.”
Stella blinked. Not what she was expecting. “Uh … what?”
“About reading glasses. He must not know.”
“Fill me in here, sister—you’re shacking up with the guy, you left your husband for him and all, and you’re afraid he’ll see you in your specs?”
“Is not just any glasses, you are not understanding. Is uh … how are you saying.” She took the glasses and handed them to Stella, who examined them closely, peering through the lenses.
“These are cheaters,” she said in surprise. “Magnifiers.” They weren’t as strong as Stella’s—she’d made her way steadily through the numbers at the drugstore and was now a solid +2—but they were, nonetheless, the sort of spectacles one didn’t generally need until one reached middle age. “Just how old are you, anyway?”
“I tell Benton I am thirty-six,” Natalya said miserably. “Chip, I am telling I am thirty-four.”
“And…”
“And I am forty-four years.”
At that, the leaking started up again, but this time Stella was a little too dumbfounded to react immediately. “Damn,” she finally said.
Natalya nodded. “My grandmother is having very good skin, still very little wrinkle on face. I am thinking I can trick Chip, but soon my eyes are beginning to get bad. What if he finds out? Handsome man like Chip, he is twenty-eight, he can have any lady is attracting to him!”
Natalya’s fears were so real, her trepidation so consuming, that Stella didn’t have the heart to point out that Chip was perhaps not every woman’s ideal, with his doughy middle and prominent Adam’s apple and rounded shoulders and awkward posture. “But he loves you, Natalya. I mean, look at everything he’s done for you. Giving you a home, taking Luke under his wing…”
Slicing up bodies and extorting money from his family, she considered adding, but thought better of it.
“He loves the woman I am pretending him. But men get very angry about age lie. When Benton is finding out, he is calling me terrible name.”
“Wait. Benton knew…”
“Only when Luke is coming to America few months ago, when papers are coming with numbers on them. Benton is signing papers and finds out.”
A cold unease started in Stella’s gut and eddied out in growing circles. Benton found out Natalya’s true age. Benton, perhaps, threatened to tell her new lover when he discovered the pair carrying on. How far would Natalya go to keep that secret?
“Surely you haven’t been, you know, losing sleep over this,” she said. “I mean, with everything else the two of you have to worry about…”
Natalya shook her head vigorously. “Oh no, I am very worry, trying hard to trick Chip. I am exercise two hours with TV when he is going to work. I am putting on the makeup and doing diet.” She patted her flat stomach miserably, and Stella remembered how little Natalya had consumed since her arrival.
Oh, vanity—it was the undoing of many an otherwise smart and competent woman. Stella saw the starved and skeletal gals they had on the talk shows, the frail actresses stumbling hollow-eyed and pale through their roles, the singers whose ribs stuck out of their hoochie outfits as they strutted around in the music videos. Not to mention all the plastic surgery—
“Wait a minute,” she said. “The Botox—that wasn’t Benton’s idea at all, was it?”
Natalya’s mouth wobbled and fresh tears welled. “No, you are wrong. Is Benton who is saying I am looking too old with the wrinkles.”
“Well—I mean, other than the thing with your lips, you’re very … smooth.” Stella was not reassured by Natalya’s claim. If she’d been desperate enough to stay in this country—having traded on her looks, using a currency of lies—it suddenly seemed more than a little likely that Natalya might have taken drastic steps … especially now that Stella knew she kept secrets from Chip.
For a long time the two women sat in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. Fatigue and the steadily draining whisky—which Stella had to admit lost its burning punch after the first few sips and became, in its own way, almost pleasant—were conspiring to make her pass out. Chip wouldn’t be home until the wee hours, BJ was about to deliver the boys into safety, and there was nothing further she could do for now.
“Look here,” she said, figuring she had all the next day to decide if Natalya was a killer or not, “I think I need to head to bed.”
Natalya sniffed. “Before you are going, can I ask question, Stella?”
“Uh, sure.”
“You are knowing how to knit?”
Stella blinked. She did indeed know how to knit—she’d learned from her mother at the age of seven, and had knitted a couple dozen sweaters and scarves and mittens and hats before being bit by the quilting bug and putting her needles away. Since her widowhood, and reinvention as a purveyor of justice, Stella’d had no time for any of the needle arts, but she was pretty sure she could still kick crochet or cross-stich or needlepoint or, yes, knitting ass all over town.
“What have you got?”
There followed a sleepily pleasant half hour of sorting through the mess Natalya had made of eight skeins of Lion Wool-Ease Chunky yarn and a pattern printed from their Web site for a pair of cable-knit sweater vests, one large in Indigo for Luke, and one medium in Redwood for Chip. Natalya explained that she hoped to finish them by Christmas, which Stella figured was a reasonable goal if she could teach her how to cast on properly and straighten out her gauge.
She tried to harden herself against the woman sitting next to her with yarn looped around her wrists, who was almost definitely a cold-blooded killer, but in the end the pleasant clicking of the needles and tug of the yarn was impossible to resist, and they got a few nearly perfect rows of k2p2 ribbing done before Stella staggered to bed and slept like a baby until the ringing of her cell phone catapulted her out of a pleasant dream in which she was wrapped in a baby-soft
sweater that the sheriff was slowly unraveling.
Chapter Nineteen
Stella grabbed the phone off the bedside table and was immediately deafened by the cacophonous racket of half a dozen voices doing an off-key approximation of “Happy Birthday.”
By the time it was finished, she was nearly vertical and, despite her irritation at being woken up, and her even greater irritation that she was another year older, grinning.
“Who the hell you got there with you?”
“Just me and Tucker, and Mom and Dad and Danyelle and the twins. Y’all run along now,” Stella heard Chrissy say away from the phone. “That’s all you’re needed for. Now git.”
“Well, I suppose that was kind of nice. Thank you, Chrissy.”
“That’s just the start. Soon’s you get back here where you belong, we’ll celebrate for real.”
“I’m trying. Believe me, I’m trying.”
“Really? ’Cause it sounds to me like you’re laying about in bed at nine thirty in the morning, when most decent folk are up and productive, like maybe running businesses for their lazy-ass bosses who are out of town on boondoggles.”
“Ain’t you just a little bit cranky.”
“Well, I didn’t get in last night until practically two and it was too late to bring Tucker home from my folks’, which meant I had to help Mom fix breakfast for the kids ’cause Danyelle’s fightin’ with Ed again, and then I got an e-mail saying I won’t get the Glue Baste-It I ordered until a week from Tuesday, which is exactly one fuckin’ week later than I need it for the appliqué class, not to mention I just found out Hoffman discontinued that tractor print what I promised Harriet Fofana for the backing on her husband’s birthday quilt and I’m tryin’ to find it on eBay but it’s got bid up to eighteen bucks a yard.”
A Bad Day for Mercy Page 17