“So we’ve got the date and place,” said Charles. “My mom already verified the content and the handwriting. That’ll do for her.”
“Then where’s my money?”
“It’s ready now.” Charles glanced at Cheryl. He wished he could have told her what was coming.
6.
On the way home, Charles drove alone in the front, flicking glances at the mismatched couple in the back like a prurient chauffeur. To do all this for money seemed absurd, but to do it for Cheryl seemed reasonable. As a teaching assistant, he used to laugh at the besotted girls in class, but why did he belittle their obsessions, even their lusts? They were just aspects of human love, the only goal worth scheming for. Yes, if only Jane Austen had married her mysterious lover, as his mother had wished! Physical love might have inspired her as risk was inspiring him. What novels would she have written afterwards? What books would he go on to write?
He had stashed two suitcases in the back of the walk-in coat closet. His mother, of course, was in a distant room for the sake of plausible deniability. Charles pulled one suitcase out. “Here’s your money. Where’s the letter?”
Alex placed it in on the table, still within his reach, and opened the case. “That’s not a million.” He grabbed a fist full of the back of Cheryl’s shirt.
“No. It’s $10,000. That’s what the letter’s worth.”
Cheryl gasped. “Charles?”
He had to ignore her. “My mother was ready to pay a million for the real thing. This, however, is a fake. It’s a very good fake, so it’s worth something as a curiosity. It may even fool her friends. Ten thousand is what we’ll pay.”
“You lying prick.” Alex shoved Cheryl forward, her body billowing like a sail. She collapsed over a side table and grabbed on to a china lamp like a saving piece of flotsam. Alex pulled out his gun. But he was holding it, not aiming it.
Charles felt like he was floating above the hardwood, watching himself perform his role perfectly. He had practiced before a mirror. “We know the letter—the real letter—contains lines Austen borrowed for Persuasion, so the letter has to predate the novel. But Persuasion was published in 1798, and the paper and ink from this document, according to Professor Timothy, date from after 1800. That means the letter came after the novel. But that doesn’t make sense. It must be a fake. Somebody took some genuine old ink and old paper and forged a Jane Austen letter. It’s not your fault. The science has improved immensely in recent years. Maybe the Morgan had a fake. Maybe the guys who sold it to you faked it themselves. I don’t care. But I’m not paying full price.”
Cheryl studied Alex’s face. Charles tried to catch her eye.
“$10,000 is better than nothing,” Charles said.
“I’ll take the letter and sell it to someone else.”
“You won’t do any better. Any decent Austen scholar will figure this out immediately.”
Alex picked up the letter. This was not in Charles’s plan.
“I told you,” said Charles. “It won’t do you any good. It’s a fake. The publication date—”
Alex laughed. “You thought you could rip me off.”
As he raised the gun, Charles stood frozen in astonishment—how unlucky that his adversary was so stupid, so ignorant, so unimaginative, that he couldn’t even be properly fooled. Charles supposed he should be leaping for the man’s throat, hoping to get winged and not killed and to fight back with remaining limbs. But he was overwhelmed by the unfairness of the situation.
Cheryl lunged forward and brought the china lamp down on Alex’s wrist. The gun clattered to the floor, following by the hunk of porcelain. Charles, liberated, sprang for the gun, while Alex whirled in confusion.
Charles lifted the gun and aimed at Alex’s sloping belly until he quieted. “The offer still stands. Take the $10,000 for the letter. I’m not ripping anyone off.”
“Do it,” advised Cheryl, and offered him the suitcase. “You heard him. It’s not real anyway. Any buyer is going to check the same way we did.”
Alex glanced at Cheryl, then at Charles, then at the gun. He took the briefcase. Charles waited for a hard-bitten declaration of vengeance, but instead Alex slunk silently through the front door. Charles locked the door behind him and unloaded the gun over the side table.
Cheryl watched a bullet roll circles on the mahogany. “When was Persuasion published?”
“Weren’t you listening in class? 1817.”
“I thought so. You were lying. The letter is real?”
“We know the content of the letter matches the one stolen from the Morgan. And Timothy’s analysis confirms that the paper and ink came from Austen’s home county and date from what we know—even if Alex doesn’t—is the right time period, during her life but before she published Persuasion. Timothy’s lab doesn’t make mistakes. This is the stolen letter.”
“So what about your mother’s million? Do we still get our cut?”
“We keep the whole thing. My mother’s getting what she paid for. We’re getting a bonus for our boldness and ingenuity. The only one who’s ripped off is Alex. If he knew more about Jane Austen he wouldn’t have screwed himself.” He pulled out of the closet the other, hidden suitcase and showed Cheryl what $990,000 looked like.
“Won’t he find out the truth?”
“I don’t care. I’m quitting as of now. Where do you want to go first?” He hammered down his grin. “You know, you earned half the money. More than half. You can take it. You don’t have to come with me.”
“You know I will. What would have happened if I hadn’t knocked away his gun?”
“He would have gotten the letter and the $10,000. He might have gotten me, too. My little trick didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I guess I was too smart for my own good. You saved me. I’m the one who keeps going on about the glory of action, but I was helpless when you needed me. All I can hope is that it doesn’t matter to you.”
“It doesn’t. Hemingway and Tolstoy can go to hell. We’re not horse cavalry or bullfighters. After this I plan to spend the rest of my life in a Jane Austen novel.”
“I hope not. You’d be wasted there. I think we’ve got a much weirder future, and I’m looking forward to it. But we can start by uniting our fortunes in marriage, if you want.” He shut the suitcase.
“Of course that’s what I want. Why do you think I did all of this? Is that your mom?”
“You’d better leave.”
Charles opened the closet door and fought his way though winter coats of yesterday to hide the gun. When he returned, Cheryl was already gone. So was the suitcase. Good, he thought. She’ll keep the money safer than I can.
His mother burst into the room. “Nelson Timothy just called to express regret for my disappointment," she announced. “I want my money back. Now!”
7.
“That was complicated,” said Alex, whose real name was William and whose eyes both worked fine. “I thought we’d just make the sale and leave. Guy rips off his own mother! You think he’ll figure out you passed him a fake report? I was afraid he’d turn around and see you when I had him shoved up against the wall.” He handed her a cigarette lighter.
Cheryl, whose name was also quite different, pulled out Professor Timothy’s real report, the one that she had switched for a fake while Charles was getting arm-barred in his office. She read from it: “The paper and ink of this supposedly 200-year-old letter are clearly modern. The forgery is clever but amateurish.” She lit Timothy’s report on fire and dropped it in the ice bucket. “The expert called our Austen letter amateurish.”
“I thought it was okay.”
“The truth will come out next time Timothy talks to them. Then Charles will realize the report we read in his office was actually written by someone else. Me.” She unzipped her own suitcase—not the one with the million dollars, which was under the bed—and began hunting through it.
“Will they look for us?”
“Not here. And not where we’re going.”
“Poor guy.”
“Poor guy! He slept with his undergrad student. Or so he thought.” She found her book.
“I hate that,” he said. “I still hate that.”
“He’ll suffer enough for it. His career is over. My letter last week told the dean everything.” She kissed Alex, first on the check and then on his swollen wrist. “Besides, you’re the one I’m going to marry—now that we have money.”
“You sure? He’s smarter than I’ll ever be.”
“Smarter than me, too.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I guess not. For a lit professor, he had no taste in books.”
She sat back and got started on Emma.
JEFF SOLOWAY’s first novel, The Travel Writer, will be published in January, 2014 by Alibi, Random House’s new digital imprint for crime fiction.
The Barnacle
by Hilary Davidson
Jess was washing bloodstains out of her husband’s shirt when the police came knocking at her door. She cleaned her hands at the pitted porcelain sink while they beat an aggressive tattoo. Not again, she thought, avoiding her own eyes in the scratched cabinet mirror. Twenty-seven and pregnant by a man who couldn’t hold down a straight job, that was the truth of her life.
“Bobby Torres?” called out one of the cops. Jess went to the door and unlocked it.
“Good afternoon, officers. Can I help you?” In her words she heard the echo of her grandmother’s voice, the lady-of-the-manor routine that was dusted off whenever the Belfast police came looking for Jess’s father.
“Jessamine Murphy? Detective Hayden. My partner, Detective Roop. Can we come in?” the taller one asked. His craggy face was stretched funhouse-long. The squat man beside him could have escaped from the same circus, with a square head atop a round torso. His rubbery lips twisted from a sneer to a leer as he noticed Jess’s cleavage. She pulled her silky robe closed.
“This isn’t a good time,” she said, her voice hinting at an Irish accent. Her roots always showed when she got nervous. “Bobby isn’t here.”
“When did you last see him?”
Jess paused before answering. It was never a good idea to give the police a straight answer; who knew how that might screw up an alibi later?
“Just a little while ago,” Jess said. “But why would you be asking that?”
“What does ‘a little while’ mean?” the cop prodded.
“Really, officer, I think it’s time you explained what you’re doing at my door.”
Roop chimed in. “Bobby Torres’s car was found early this morning under the Williamsburg Bridge and the FDR. Someone set it on fire.”
“Someone … what?” Jess was stunned and she didn’t try to hide it.
“It’s worse than that. There was a body inside.” Hayden paused for that to register. “Male. Shot in the head.”
Jess’s mouth fell open. Please, God, don’t let it be Bobby, she prayed. “Do you know who…?”
“He’s missing his face as well as his fingers and teeth, so we’re having trouble ID’ing him.” Hayden’s voice was taut.
Jess’s knees went wobbly at that. “What a terrible thing,” she said. With her accent, it came out Whut uh terrbel ting.
“You can see why we need to know when you last saw your boyfriend. If it was this morning, we can rule out the possibility that the body is his.”
“Husband,” Jess corrected him.
Hayden’s beady eyes blinked. “When did you last see him?”
I’m not sure,” she hedged. “Bobby came home last night, but he was gone before I woke this morning.”
“We’d like to come in, wait for your common-law husband,” Roop said, larding the last few words with sarcasm. “Given Bobby Torres’s history, I doubt that he was the man we found. More like the guy who’d chop off the fingers and…”
“That’s enough,” Hayden interrupted his partner, but the damage was done. Roop’s implication couldn’t be more clear. Bobby had once been arrested for murder, but the case had never made it to court.
“You’re welcome to wait in the hallway,” Jess answered. She shut the door and turned all three locks before running back to the bathroom and throwing up. Bobby Torres’s car was found early this morning.… But Bobby had been in the apartment early that morning. Jess had been sleeping heavily with the pregnancy, but she was certain he’d tiptoed around the place and locked the door behind him a little before six a.m. But what did early mean to the cops? She cursed herself for not asking. Six? Seven? An hour could make all the difference in the world.
Pulling herself together, Jess brushed her teeth and splashed water on her face. It’s not Bobby, she repeated to herself, and she decided that she was going to believe that. She picked up the shirt and noted that the border of the bloodstain was still visible. Damn it, blood was hard to get out. She went to the window that overlooked First Avenue. Four stories down was a parked police car with two uniformed cops standing on the pavement. They were talking with the taller detective. There was no doubt they believed Bobby had killed that man. The police believed he was alive, too. That was bad, yet reassuring at the same time to Jess.
Jess went back into the bathroom, untied her belt and hung the robe up on the back of the door. She was wearing a lacy black bra and panties and she pulled the shirt over her. It fit in the arms but billowed around her narrow waist. She was three months along and her body had yet to make visible accommodations for the baby, though her breasts were already swelling. At this point, she could land a stripper job at Scores, she thought. She wrapped the damp shirt around her shivering body. In the main room she sat on the unmade bed to pull on a pair of black tights before stepping into Bobby’s trousers. He was five-ten, a couple of inches taller than Jess, and from a fashion perspective it was horrible. But from a get-the-evidence-out-of-the-apartment perspective, it wasn’t bad at all. She sat down to put on her wedge-heeled black boots, then pulled a black wrap dress over the ensemble and tied it at the waist. The dress-over-trousers look was something she’d seen on a makeover show on television, and maybe it worked for stick figures. On Jess’s hourglass shape, it looked ridiculous. A bag of rags, her grandmother would have scolded. Still, under her winter coat, no one would be able to tell the difference.
The hardest thing to get rid of would be the gun. She was certain she’d find one. The handguns Bobby kept in cereal boxes and the hamper were gone, as was the sheaf of old photos he hoarded in his dresser drawer. That was a little odd, she thought, wondering what else was missing. When she opened up the toilet tank, she found a revolver taped under the cover. She pushed away an image of a charred, mutilated husk of a man in Bobby’s car as she got her dishwashing gloves from the kitchen sink and a clear plastic bag from the cupboard and went back to the gun. She freed it from the tape and slid it into the bag. The she grabbed her handbag, dumped it on the bed, and lifted its false bottom. This bag was her companion on shoplifting trips, but Jess hadn’t used it to smuggle anything out of the apartment before. In went the gun and the balled-up wad of grey tape. She didn’t think that the cops would be able to keep her from walking out of the apartment with the bag. Just try to take a woman’s purse away from her, coppers.
She called Bobby’s cell and got his voice mail. “Darling, the police are here at the apartment, they want to talk to you about a shooting, a man who was found in your car. I love you.”
She went through the apartment quickly, intending to collect her small cache of real jewelry, keys to safety deposit boxes, a modest roll of cash, and a collection of ready-to-be-issued counterfeit passports. That was all she had for a life, she thought, a few trinkets to be dropped into a bag; everything else had been left behind years ago. But those things were already gone. Bobby must’ve taken them when he’d gone out; it could only have been him. What was going on? A chill ran through her as she considered the possibility of a debt she hadn’t been told about, or a job that had gone sideways somehow. It wasn’t impossible that
the body found in the car was.…
No. She couldn’t let herself think that, not for a second. She had to survive, and the only way to do that was to keep swimming forward, away from the cops and other predators who would try to bring her and Bobby down. From under the sink she grabbed several bottles of extra-strength drain cleanser. She poured one down the kitchen drain, then equal measures down the shower and the cracked sink.
As she pulled on her black wool coat, she had a thought. She got a blue shirt of Bobby’s out of the hamper and put it in a plastic shopping bag. Pleased with herself, she opened the door to the hallway and locked it behind her. She took the stairs down, because the rickety elevator rarely worked, and even when it did Jess was terrified of getting stuck in it. She went out the back way, and there was Detective Roop, waiting for her, the sneaky thick bastard.
“Going somewhere, Miss Murphy?” he sneered.
“Doctor’s appointment.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Just a shirt for the dry cleaner’s.”
“Let me see,” he said. Jess made a show of reluctance, and then handed it over. He looked inside and cocked his head. “Was this what your husband was wearing last night?”
“No,” said Jess. “It’s been in the laundry bin for ages.”
He looked at her, and she knew he’d swallowed the bait. With every bit of dignity she could muster, she turned and walked down the alleyway, shivering as the chill January wind hit her face.
She circled the Goodwill on East Twenty-Third Street a couple of times to make sure no one was following her. Then, in a curtained cubicle, she discreetly shed Bobby’s shirt and pants onto hangers, which she tucked onto the appropriate racks. The bloodstain on the shirt was so muted now, it could have been a coffee spill. The pants didn’t show a mark at all. No other man would look as fine in those clothes as Bobby did, she was sure. Her husband was thirty-five and strikingly handsome, a wall of muscle sharply defined by long hours in gyms both in and out of prison.
The Malfeasance Occasional Page 5