by Lois Greiman
Mr. Hunt stared at me with a mixture of irritation and absolute stupefaction. I turned toward Kathy, hoping for a bit more acumen.
“What is your main purpose for coming here, Mrs. Hunt?”
“I just . . .” She scowled and shrugged. I got the feeling she might have had quite a bit of practice at both. “I thought it couldn’t hurt.”
A ringing endorsement. Some day I’d have to have that embroidered and framed above my desk.
“So you’re not entirely content with your current relationship?” I guessed.
“Well . . .” She throttled the strap of her beige handbag. It was the approximate size of my front door. “No one’s completely happy, I suppose.”
I gave her an encouraging smile and turned to her husband. “And what about you, Mr. Hunt? Is there anything you’d like to see changed in your marriage?”
“Things are okay,” he said, but he was still glaring at me.
I gave him my “aha” smile, as if I knew things he didn’t. Maybe I did, but chances were he didn’t care where my house key was hidden or how to wax his bikini line without screaming out four-letter expletives.
“So you’re here just to make your wife happy,” I said. It was a charitable way of saying I knew she’d dragged him in kicking and screaming. Nine times out of ten, that’s how it works. Men tend to think everything’s hunky-dory so long as the little woman hasn’t put a slug between his eyes within the past seventy-two hours. So apparently, Mrs. Hunt’s Glock was still in the gun cabinet. But judging by her tight-lipped expression, Larry might want to sleep with one eye open. “It was very considerate of you to agree to come. Is he always so considerate, Kathy?” I asked and turned toward the little woman.
Her lips pursed into an almost indiscernible line and her eyes narrowed. For a second I wondered if she’d brought her Glock with her. God knows, her purse was big enough to house a cannon and the man o’ war that carried it.
“He leaves used Kleenexes in the living room,” she snarled. Her tone was suddenly terse—as if she’d caught Larry sans pants with the woman in charge of weed whacker rentals.
I realize that for the uninitiated her statement might seem like a strange opening gambit, but I’d been in the game long enough to realize it’s not the sordid affairs that most often end a marriage. It’s the toothpaste left in the sink. Psychology Today says the human psyche is a complex and fragile thing. Personally, I think people are just funky as hell.
“I have a sinus problem,” he said, by way of defense.
“So you can’t put your Kleenex in the waste basket?” Her tone was becoming more shrill by the moment.
“You leave your wet towel on my side of the sink every morning. You don’t see me making a federal case of it.”
“That’s because you don’t care.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said, his voice rising. “I bring home a paycheck every other week to buy the groceries you don’t even bother to cook. You think I’d do that if I didn’t care? You think I give a damn how many floor grinders Mann’s rents out per week?”
“Yeah, I do,” she said, her cheeks red and her eyes popping. “I think you care more about floor grinders than you do about me.”
The room went abruptly silent. I refrained from grinning like a euphoric monkey.
The first half hour had been the conversational equivalent of pabulum. But this . . . this was something I could sink my teeth into.
Twenty minutes later I was ushering the Hunts out the front door. They still looked less than ecstatic, so apparently I had failed to work my usual therapeutic magic, but they had agreed to try a couple of my suggestions. He would pick up after himself and she would make him breakfast on Tuesday and Thursday.
I waved congenially, then turned with a sigh and slumped into one of the two chairs that faced the receptionist desk. My receptionist was behind it. Her name is Elaine Butterfield. We’d bonded in fifth grade, agreeing that boys were stupid and stinky. In general terms, I still think they’re stupid. But sometimes they smell pretty good.
“Want to pick up some Chinese?” I asked.
Elaine stuffed a file in the cabinet and didn’t turn toward me. “Can’t,” she said. “I have an audition tomorrow morning.”
Elaine is an actress. Unfortunately, she can’t act.
“So you’re not going to eat?”
“Chinese makes my face puffy.”
Elaine’s face has never been puffy in her life. At ten she’d been gangly and buck-toothed; at thirty-two she was gorgeous enough to make me hate my parents and every fat-thighed antecedent who had ever peed in my gene pool.
“What are you auditioning for?” I hadn’t heard a single hideous line in several days, which wasn’t like my Laney. Usually she spewed them about the office like pot smoke at a Mick Jagger concert.
“It’s just a little part in a soap.”
“A soap opera?” I asked, managing to shuffle straighter in my chair. “You love soap operas. They’re steady work.”
“Yeah, well . . .” She shrugged and stuffed another file. “I probably won’t get the part.”
“Laney?” I tried to see her face, but she kept it turned away. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” She was fiddling through the V’s. The only file left out was Angela Grapier’s. Elaine had an IQ that would make Einstein look like a shaken infant victim. I was pretty sure she knew Angie’s name came before Vigoren.
I stood up. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“You don’t get tired.”
“Do, too.”
“Laney,” I said, and rounding her desk, touched her shoulder. She turned toward me like a scolded puppy.
“It’s Jeen.”
I blinked, unable to believe my eyes. Her face was puffy. And her nose, flawlessly shaped and perfectly pored, was red. “What?” I said.
“It’s . . .” She shook her head. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. I just—”
“Jeen?” I repeated dumbly, but then the truth dawned. For nearly two months now, she’d been dating a myopic little geek to whom I’d had the bad manners of introducing her. It had been patently cruel on my part, but I’d been in a bit of a bind. In fact, I’d been accused of murder and he had helped me out by doing a little “creative investigating” on the Internet. His name was J.D. Solberg. I could only assume his real name was Jeen, since Elaine wasn’t vindictive enough to think of such a nomenclature on her own. Unfortunately, the same obviously couldn’t be said of his parents. “What’d he do?” I asked, imagining the worst. “He didn’t touch you, did he?”
She didn’t answer.
Anger flared up like fireworks. Some people think I have a little bit of a temper. “Damn that nerdy little troll! I warned him not to—”
“No.” She glanced at the floor and cleared her throat. “That’s not the problem.”
Oh dear God, did that mean he had touched her? Did that mean she’d liked it? Did that mean the world was crumbling beneath my very . . . but then another thought struck me. “Dammit, Laney, he didn’t hit you, did he?”
“Of course not.” Her gaze rose to mine. Her gigantic eyes were filled with puppy dog dejection. If I wasn’t a raging heterosexual I would have begged her to marry me on the spot.
I relaxed a little. “Then what’s the problem?”
“He just . . . he hasn’t called me, that’s all.”
I waited for the bad news. She wasn’t forthcoming. “And?”
She gave me a disapproving glance as she shoved Grapier’s file somewhere in the XYZ group. I refrained from comment. “I haven’t heard from him since he left for Las Vegas.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. I remembered her telling me about NeoTech’s esteemed presence at some big-ass technology convention. J.D. was supposed to be some kind geek master there. I probably should have been paying attention when she first told me about it, but I’d been trying to deal with a few issues of my ow
n. My septic system, for instance. It had been installed sometime before the Miocene Epoch and kept threatening to spill its venom down the hall and into my antiquated kitchen.
Then there was my love life. Well, actually, there wasn’t.
“He’s probably just busy,” I said.
“He left almost three weeks ago.”
“Well . . .” I began, then, “Three weeks?” It hadn’t seemed like nearly that long since I’d seen the little Woody Allen look-alike. “Really?”
“Seventeen and a half days,” she said.
I winced. She’d been counting the days. A girl has to be pretty loopy to count the days. I tried not to gag. Solberg had rubbed me the wrong way since the first time I’d met him—more than ten years ago at the Warthog where I used to serve drinks. His come-on line had had something to do with his hard drive getting it on with my mother board. The man was lucky he wasn’t singing soprano and drinking his meals through a straw after that little witticism.
“You said it was a really big deal,” I reminded her. “He’s probably just tying up loose ends. That sort of thing.”
“He said he’d call me every day.”
“And you haven’t heard from him?”
“I did at first. He phoned all the time. And e-mailed. Sometimes he’d fax me.” She gave me a watery smile. “Left text messages with little hearts.”
Yuck. “Uh-huh,” I said.
“And then . . . nothing.” She shrugged, then glanced at the desk and shuffled a few papers around. “I think he met someone else.”
I blinked. “Solberg?”
“He was in Las Vegas,” she said, as if that were explanation enough. It wasn’t. She continued as if she were lecturing a retarded Dachshund. “There are more beautiful women per capita in Vegas than in any other city in the world.”
“Uh-huh.”
She scowled a little. Somehow it didn’t manage to create a single wrinkle in her rice-paper complexion. I would hate her if I didn’t love her to distraction. “It’s tough to compete with a hundred topless girls juggling armadillos and breathing fire.”
“Armadillos?” I asked, impressed.
“He’s got a lot going for him, Mac,” she said.
I kept my face perfectly expressionless, waiting for the punch line. It didn’t come. “Have you heard him laugh?” I asked.
She grinned a little, but the expression was pale. “He sounds like a donkey on speed.”
“Whew,” I said. “We are talking about the same guy.”
“I’ve dated a lot since moving out here.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Laney got marriage proposals from guys who hadn’t yet exited the womb.
“But Jeen . . .” She paused. I didn’t like the dreamy look in her eye. “He never once bragged about how many push-ups he could do or how fast he can run the mile.”
“Well, that’s probably because he can’t do—”
She stopped me with a glance. “I don’t even know his astronomical sign.”
“He’s a Scorpio.”
“You know?”
Sadly, yes. He’d told me when he was drunk off his ass, just minutes after the mother board come on, in fact.
“Laney,” I said, taking her hand and trying to think of a nice way to inform her that her boyfriend was a doofus. “I know you like him and everything. But really . . .”
“He’s never tried to get me into bed.”
My mouth opened. Solberg had propositioned me approximately two and a half seconds after I’d served him his first drink. I would like to think that’s because I’m sexier than Elaine, but apparently I wasn’t brain-dead yet, no matter how long it had been since my last cigarette.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No.”
“Does he call you babe-a-buns?”
“No.”
“Stare at your chest till his eyes water?”
“No.”
“Pretend he stumbled and grab your boobs.”
“No!”
“Wow.”
She nodded. “I thought he really cared about me. But . . .” She laughed a little, seemingly at her own foolishness. “I guess he just wasn’t interested. You know . . . that way.”
I raised a brow. Just one. I reserved two for purple extraterrestrials with wildly groping appendages. “We’re still talking about Solberg, right?”
She scowled.
“Geeky little guy? Has a nose like an albatross?”
Now she just looked sad, which made me kind of ashamed of myself, but really, the whole situation was ridiculous. Solberg would sell his soul for a quick glimpse of an anemic flasher. He’d probably auction off his personal computer to hold hands with a woman of Elaine’s caliber. And she actually liked him. What were the odds?
“Listen, Laney, I’m sorry. But really, you don’t have to worry. Just call him up. Tell him you . . .” I took a deep breath and tried to be brave. “Tell him you miss him.”
“I did call him.”
It was my turn to scowl. Laney generally doesn’t call guys. All she has to do is sing the eeney meany miny mo song and snatch a suitor off her roof. Sometimes literally. “No answer?” I asked.
“No.”
“You leave a message?”
“On his cell and his home phone.” She glanced at the desktop again. “A couple of times.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m afraid the answer is obvious.” She raised her gaze to mine. “Our dear little geek friend is dead.”
“Mac!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Listen, Laney,” I said, squeezing her hand. “You’re being ridiculous. Solberg is wild about you. He probably just got delayed in Vegas.”
“He probably got laid in Vegas.”
I stared. Elaine Butterfield didn’t usually use such trashy language.
“Maybe I should have . . .” She paused. “Do you think I should have slept with him before he left?”
I refrained from telling her that would be a sin of Biblical proportions. There’s a little thing called bestiality. I was sure it would make even Jerry Falwell agree it made homosexuality look like petty theft by comparison.
“Elaine. Relax. I’m sure he’ll be back in a couple days. He’ll bring you tulips and call you snuggle bumpkins and sugar socks and all those other disgusting names he comes up with.”
“Angel eyes,” she said.
“What?”
“He calls me ‘Angel Eyes.’ Because I saved him.”
“From what?” I hated to ask.
“From being a jerk.”
Holy crap. If I had never met this guy I might actually like him. “He’ll be back, Laney.”
She drew a careful breath. “I don’t think so, Mac. I really don’t.”
I laughed. “You’re Brainy Laney Butterfield.”
“I’m trying to be practical about this.”
She gave me a look.
“Butterfeel?” I suggested. “Nutterbutter?”
“I hated the last one most,” she said.
“Yeah.” Middle school had been a challenge. “Simons was a creep of major proportions.”
She nodded distractedly. “He could rhyme though. Which is about all you can ask of—”
“A WASP whose brain is bigger than his balls,” I finished for her. It was a direct quote from my brother, Michael. I’ve always been afraid he meant it as an insult.
Elaine only managed a weak smile.
“Listen, Laney.” I sighed. Twelve years at Holy Name Catholic School had taught me a lot of things. Mostly how to sneak boys into the rectory for a little uninterrupted heavy breathing. But I hadn’t known until that moment that I’d learned to be a martyr. “I’m going to find Solberg for you.”
She shook her head, but I hurried on.
“Because I know . . . I’m positive he’s just been delayed.”
“Mac, I appreciate your faith in my appeal. Really.” She squeezed my hand. “But not every man thinks I’m God’s answer—”<
br />
“Don’t say it,” I warned and backed away. “I don’t want to hear any self-effacing crap coming out of your mouth.”
“I’m not—”
“Quit it,” I warned. “If you say one negative thing about yourself, I’m going to blame it on Solberg. And then . . .” I dipped into my office, grabbed my purse from out of the big bottom drawer and headed for the door. “When I find him, I’m going to kick his skinny little ass into the next solar system.”
“Mac, you can’t blame him just because he doesn’t find me attractive.”
“You shut your dirty little mouth,” I warned her.
“He dumped me.”
I turned toward her with a snap. “He did not dump you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen.” I pulled open the front door. “He might be a stunted little wart, but there’s no reason to think he’s gone totally insane. Well . . .” I corrected myself. “There’s no conclusive evidence that he’s gone totally insane.”
“Chrissy—”
“I’m going to go find him,” I said.
And when I did, I was either going to give him a good sound whack upside the head . . . or a nice Irish wake.
UNZIPPED
A Dell Book / June 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Lois Greiman
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN 0-440-33555-8
www.bantamdell.com
v1.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1