Tips for Living

by Shafransky, Renee

  Here’s a big tip, kiddo. A tip for living. This world is rough. It’s going to keep throwing things at you.

  I should have done this a long time ago. I reached into the box and began hurling the wedding mementos over the high brown wall. Then I tossed in the pictures from our summer vacations to Maine and Nova Scotia, winter escapes to Mustique, art jaunts to Europe for Hugh’s exhibitions. I crumpled a paper napkin from Harry’s Bar in Venice and lobbed it in along with a book of matches from our Valentine’s dinner at Les Halles. I was ruthless, scrapping the tinfoil ring Hugh made me that summer in the Pequod barn. If the police saw me doing this, they’d think I was acting out of anger. But that wasn’t the case. The past was just too painful to hold on to any longer.

  Don’t let them break your heart.

  I picked up the final item: an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven spiral notebook. On its cover was a photo of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia wearing her bikini slave outfit. It was the kind of notebook an adolescent boy might buy from a Walgreens drugstore stationery section.

  Hugh occasionally used cheap books like this to sketch out ideas when he began a series. He said their tackiness helped him feel free to play around. Some covers featured pop music figures: The Jackson Five, Madonna, Ringo. He also had a Ronald McDonald and an Indiana Jones. All in all, I’d say Hugh filled about ten of them, and he never showed the notebooks to anyone. Except me. “They’re a little like diaries,” he said. Carrie Fisher contained sketches for a series he called Loving Nora.

  I wondered if Hugh had shown the books to Helene? Had he made one for the series he painted of her?

  The sketchbook I gave you on your twenty-eighth birthday is by far the best.

  I remembered the price Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar fetched, and I slipped the notebook into my shoulder bag. I couldn’t bring myself to trash it.

  From the Pequod Courier

  Letters to the Editor

  Dear Editor,

  This paper’s push to reduce the Pequod Police Department’s budget and earmark those funds for bike paths and solar street lighting is nothing but a politicized press pandering to liberals and jeopardizing public safety. The double homicide committed at Pequod Point this week is proof positive that our citizens need more protection, not less. Unless you want to start seeing vigilante groups patrolling the streets of Pequod, I strongly suggest that the Courier change its position.

  Sincerely,

  Mona Slattery

  Pequod Citizens Oversight Committee

  Chapter Twelve

  “Pow!”

  For a second, he looked stunned. Then he jerked violently backward. Struggling to stay upright, he lost the fight and fell at my feet. After a few whimpers, he closed his brown, almond-shaped eyes, went limp and lay still as a stuffed toy. One dead dog.

  “Attennn . . . shun!”

  The spunky Jack Russell snapped to life and sat up on his haunches. Lifting his left paw to his spotted white muzzle, he gave a snappy salute.

  “At ease, Serpico.”

  Tail in full wag, Serpico jumped up and bounded toward the Barcalounger for a pat from his master before prancing back to me on the couch.

  “I’m so impressed with you, Serpico!” I said, scratching behind his perky, triangular ears.

  I was also impressed with the robust, sandy-haired young man sitting in front of me, glowing like a proud papa. Eric Warschuk had changed radically since I’d come to interview him six months ago, the day his pup arrived.

  “He’s pretty great, huh?” he said, grinning.

  Back then, the twenty-four-year-old former marine lance corporal was dangerously underweight and couldn’t look me in the eye. Afghanistan’s goodbye present to him the month before his tour of duty ended was an IED that blew his left leg off below the knee. Since coming home, he’d moved in with his mother, a school bus driver and single mom. He’d been depressed, unemployed and in counseling for PTSD. Melanie Warschuk had learned about the Canines for Heroes program and encouraged Eric to adopt one of their rescues—dogs that had been mistreated and needed a loving home. A Jack Russell was an unusual candidate for a vet service dog. Typically, they were larger breeds like German shepherds and Labs, but this one had excelled in his training. He had the heart of a Saint Bernard.

  During those first hours with the adorable new pooch, Eric had seemed lethargic. He’d answered me in monosyllables. But he’d transformed since then and become positively chatty. Before aiming his pistol finger at Serpico, triggering the dramatic death scene I’d just witnessed, he’d made me coffee and talked my ear off about the great girl he just asked on a date and about his new dog-training business. He said Serpico was responsible for it all. I wrote down his quote in my black-and-white composition book—I always bring it along for notes when I’m on a story: “There are triggers: a noise, a smell or the way the light looks. They blast me back to that road outside Kandahar. Serpico knows what’s going on. He comes over and licks my face. He snaps me out of it, fast. I named him Serpico because he’s got my back. The little guy saves my life every day.”

  I moved from scratching Serpico’s ears to rubbing his tummy. Maybe I needed to adopt a Serpico to bring me out of my black moods? We could take care of each other. Instead of searching for my life’s meaning, I could create meaning by loving a dog.

  “You seem like a nice lady,” Eric said.

  I looked up at him, perplexed.

  “I saw you on the news.” He shook his head. “It must be tough for you. Man, the killers are everywhere. You don’t have to go to Kabul.”

  I sensed the interviewee was about to become the interviewer. I stopped rubbing Serpico, stood up and extended a hand.

  “Thanks for your time today, Eric. I’ll let you know when we’re going to run the story.”

  Serpico rolled onto his back and started singing high notes. He was begging me for another belly scratch. I bent over and gave him a few parting strokes.

  “She didn’t like dogs,” Eric said.

  “Who?”

  “Helene Walker. She was mean to him.” He nodded toward Serpico.

  I hesitated, and then sat back down.

  “You knew her?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I still have a tough time sleeping some nights, so I hang out at the Thunder Bar and watch the bowlers. I used to get loaded before I found Serpico. Now I bring him along and nurse a few Cokes. He’s like my AA sponsor.”

  The dog pawed me for more tummy action. I pulled him onto my lap and obliged.

  “Anyway, it was late—the place was empty. This was back in early September, around Labor Day, I think. Stokes was closing out the register. I’d just paid my check and was about to go home when Helene Walker showed up. She told Stokes she thought she’d left her favorite scarf there a few days before, when she’d come in for a drink. She asked if he remembered her, if he’d found it. Funny time to look for your scarf, I thought. While Stokes went to check the lost and found, Serpico trotted over and gave her leg a sniff. She kicked him off.”

  “That’s despicable.”

  “I told her that if she were a man, she’d be eating my fist. She apologized, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. She was only saying she was sorry because she didn’t want a scene in front of Stokes.”

  I held Serpico closer and kept stroking his belly to make up for the meanness done to him.

  “You know something? After a tour in Afghanistan, you get pretty good at reading when people are hiding things.”

  “You’re saying what?”

  “I saw her at the Thunder Bar a couple of times after that. She was always alone and dressed pretty hot. I usually went home before she did. I don’t know how long she stayed, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean you think Helene . . . and Stokes?”

  “I was there last week when she came in again—this time to bowl with your ex for his birthday. They were with another couple. Arty types. The four of them go
t pretty smashed and were doing stuff like bowling on one leg, bowling backward. Real ass clowns. Some major vibes went down between her and Stokes then, too.”

  “You’re sure it was Hugh Walker?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Hugh Walker would not be having a bowling party on his birthday.”

  I’d always organized Hugh’s birthday dinners at chic restaurants in New York like Odeon or Orso—his favorites. Or catered parties at the loft. We spent weeks fussing over the guest list. But in fact, the timing was right—Hugh’s birthday was November tenth. Had Hugh changed that much? Or maybe this is what he’d always preferred and I never knew it? Or him.

  “You sound upset. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Eric said.

  “No. No. Go ahead.”

  “Trust me, it was definitely the Walkers. Serpico and I were sitting at a table in the corner. About a half hour into the party, Helene came up to the bar. She told Stokes they wanted more peanuts. Stokes was filling the bowl, but he kept looking at her while she leaned on the bar and took her index finger and kind of . . . kind of sucked on it. When he gave her the peanuts, she kind of angled herself so her people couldn’t see. She leaned across even more and moved his hand to touch her, you know . . . there.” Eric pointed to my right breast. “Your ex definitely knew something was up. He kept looking over. She giggled and went back to the bowling party and sat in his lap.”

  Helene’s affair with Stokes could explain why she’d started staying out here during the week in the off-season: more playtimes for her if Hugh was working at his studio in New York. I wondered what she did with Callie on those nights. She must’ve hired a babysitter.

  “Her husband, I mean your ex, kept calling out to Stokes after that: ‘Hey, kid! We need some more beer!’ ‘What about another pizza over here, buddy!’ ‘The pizza’s cold! How about you heat it up?’ Whenever Stokes showed up with the goods, Mr. Walker made it a point to grab his wife’s ass or make out with her. Humiliation, man. It’s the thing men fear most. Really fucks them up. Look at the Afghans.”

  “Serves him right,” I muttered as Serpico rolled out from under my hand, sat up and began to study me with his head tilted to one side. Suddenly he jumped up on my chest and began licking my face.

  “Okay, okay!”

  “See? Serpico knows. He knows when you’re in a bad place.”

  As I walked into the dark evening outside the Warschuks’ house and hugged myself in the nippy air, my foot sank into the mushy remains of the smashed, rotting Halloween pumpkin in the driveway.

  “Shit.”

  I wiped off my shoe on the frosty lawn. Helene and Hugh’s behavior at the bowling alley seemed just as slimy. The incident Eric Warschuk described was completely at odds with the perfect couple in those press photos, and with the affection they showed when I spied on them. It contradicted Sue Mickelson’s TV comments about Hugh and Helene being so in love. Given the story I’d just heard, could it be that the Walkers’ marriage was rife with betrayal and contempt? Along with a pinch of sadomasochism?

  On the drive home, I reviewed Stokes’s behavior on the morning of the murders. He’d hesitated before entering the crime scene, and ultimately avoided it completely by leaving with me. He’d sat right there in the passenger seat of my car, cold-eyed and angry, describing the corpses of his in-laws. What was it he’d said about Helene and Hugh? “I’d want anyone who screwed me over like that to be fucking dead.” He must’ve been enraged at how they used him to spice up their marriage. How they played him in their sick little game. But was he capable of murder? And clever enough to set me up to take the blame in his place? He’d pretended he didn’t even know that I’d been married to Hugh. But I felt sure Helene would certainly have told him, if they were seeing each other.

  If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in these thoughts, the bright, UFO-like glow coming from the vicinity of the Coop would have registered sooner. I might have figured out what was causing it and had more time to prepare. But I was only a few hundred feet from my driveway when I saw that the place was lit up like a movie set with half a dozen blazing spotlights aimed at both the Coop and lawn. It looked like every light inside had been turned on. A cop with a flashlight stood on a ladder checking the gutters. Two cops with rakes combed the grounds. The Coop’s front door was wide open.

  This game had just changed. My jaw muscles clenched and my insides swirled. I had the impulse to turn the car around, but I knew I had to pull it together and go in there. I reached for the phone in my purse to call Gubbins as I steered into the driveway, searching with one hand while maneuvering around the county police squad cars and vans. A stocky female officer tapped my hood and signaled to stop and roll the window down.

  “Leave the keys in the ignition and step out of the vehicle, please.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, feigning indignation.

  “Just put your hands where I can see them and follow my instructions.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  I dropped the phone back into my bag, turned off the engine and opened the car door. “Can I bring my purse?”

  She eyed it and nodded.

  “Who’s in charge here?” I asked, stepping out.

  Before she could answer, I saw a cop in my living room through the open front door. He was dropping my MacBook into a heavy-gauge plastic bag.

  “Hey! They can’t take my computer! My whole life is on there.”

  Instinctively, I tried to duck the female officer’s outstretched arm and run toward the house. But she put a firm hand on my chest.

  “Let’s go in together calmly, shall we?”

  I took a big swallow of air, nodded and straightened up as another officer aimed a spotlight at my car. I stood in its glare, momentarily paralyzed, until my chaperone ushered me along. When we reached the doorway, I hesitated again, disoriented by what I saw. The officer nudged me forward.

  “Step inside, please.”

  I wobbled and held on to the doorframe as I stared.

  My living room looked like it was being organized for a moving-day tag sale. The kilim lay rolled up against a wall. The furniture had been pushed to the room’s center and the cushions removed from the couch and chairs. Their blue-and-white mattress ticking covers sat in a pile on the rocker. Bookshelves stood empty, hardcovers and paperbacks stacked on the floor. The holiday cards sent by charities I intended to make small donations to had been removed from my desk drawer and laid out on the coffee table along with my bank statements, notepads, old postcards and an assemblage of miscellaneous writing instruments and keys. My father remained upright in his frame on my desktop, surveying the goods.

  The cop who’d bagged the computer knelt at the woodstove, sifting through the dead ashes with a poker. What the hell was he looking for in there? I glanced down and spied Moby Dick on top of a book pile just as my own personal Ahab came out of the kitchen. He was wearing another one of his tweedy jackets along with blue plastic gloves.

  “I’ll take the purse over here,” Roche said.

  The female officer began to lift the shoulder bag off my arm. I started to grab it.

  “Hey!”

  “You’re not going to be trouble now,” she warned.

  I released the bag, took a breath and gathered my wits. It was best to stay cool and address Roche as a professional doing his job.

  “I assume you have a warrant,” I said.

  “Right here.”

  Roche pulled some folded papers out of his jacket pocket as the officer delivered the purse. “Permission to search your premises and personal property, including your electronic equipment and car.”

  “You’re wasting time and taxpayer money. You won’t find anything, because I didn’t kill anyone,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  “Then you have nothing to worry about,” he said, and walked back into the kitchen with the leather bag slung over his arm.

  Making my way around the displaced furniture, I followed. I saw him
set my purse down on the kitchen table. Then he reached inside, pulled out my cell and began to bag it. My cool demeanor collapsed.

  “No, please,” I pleaded. “You can’t take that. I don’t have a landline. I won’t have a phone.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s unfortunate.”

  “I’m entitled to call my lawyer.”

  “You’ll be able to do that very soon.”

  He lifted out the composition notebook next. Had I written anything incriminating? I couldn’t think fast enough.

  “You shouldn’t look in there.”

  He paused and studied my face. “Really? And why not?”

  “Those are story notes for an article I’m writing. They’re confidential. If you read them, you’ll be violating the journalist shield laws.”

  “Sounds juicy.”

  He thumbed through the comp book while I glanced anxiously around the kitchen. The cabinet doors were ajar. Cereal and pasta boxes lined up on the counter next to the mail, which was laid out for inspection. Envelopes had been ripped open, their contents obviously read.

  “Enjoy messing with cops?” Roche asked as he closed the comp book.

  “What?”

  “Vive la Resistance. The speed traps.”

  I swallowed nervously. “It was a joke.”

  “Huh.”

  Seemingly satisfied that there was nothing of interest to him in the notes, Roche set the book down on the kitchen table. He reached into the purse again and found the Princess Leia sketchbook. My pulse rate spiked. How would carrying around Hugh’s naked sketches of me look to the police? I had to think of something . . .

  “More notes. For an article on women’s changing hairstyles,” I said.

  He seemed intrigued and was about to look further when Sgt. Klish walked in. Klish carried a pair of my black jeans in one of his gloved hands. In the other he held up a faded, wrinkled slip of paper.