I walked slowly, woodenly, back into Max Luhrmann’s basement office. He looked up from his desk, saw my face, and stood up. He fell in line behind me, let me lead him back to the car and the small body curled on the passenger seat.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s possible.” Max leaned over and touched the dog, leaned down, smelled the dog’s fur. He turned to me. “A woman’s perfume. Your sister’s?”
“Is it Chanel No. 5?” I leaned over and breathed in. Lilly’s perfume. “How did you know to smell the dog?”
“It’s something that he’d do.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s just the way we are. Sometimes I can get in his head; he can get in mine. Doing this with the dog in front of my office, I suspect Ricky’s saying a little something to me as well as to you.”
“Like what?”
“That he’s watching me as well as you. He doesn’t like me talking with anyone about him and he knows that’s the only reason you’d be here. He’s telling me he doesn’t like it.”
“What would happen if you talked to anyone about him?”
“They might know him better.”
Suddenly I thought of Lilly standing before me on her wedding day all wrapped up in a Champagne haze and sixty pounds of couture silk. I don’t know … there was a little sister … Some kind of accident … the start of all the bad feeling. “Max, you had a sister? What happened to her?”
“She died.”
“How?”
His voice flattened and the words came out like beads he’d been fingering for years and years. “She drowned.”
“Lilly told me that was the beginning of the bad feelings between you and Ricky. Is that true? What happened?”
He turned and took a step away, said, “I’ll get a box. Take the dog away.”
“Don’t touch the dog yet. I’m calling the police and I want them to see this exactly the way it is now.”
Max shrugged, a gesture showing just how helpful he thought the police would be, and he was right. He waited with me for a cop to arrive. It was Officer Petzoldt, who actually rolled his eyes when he saw me.
“So somebody put this dog in your car? Is it your dog, Miss Terhune? Was anything taken from the car?”
We established that the dog was not mine, that no one took anything from the car, and that I firmly believed that Ricky Luhrmann killed the dog and put it there as a threat.
“People are funny, Miss Terhune. Have you found the mutt’s owner?”
No we hadn’t, though we’d walked around the immediate area while we’d waited for him to get here, asking anyone passing by if they’d heard of a missing dog. No one had.
“Well, Miss Terhune, I’m not exactly sure what crime you’re reporting,” he said with a sigh. “But as to the perfume smell, the dog is in your car and you wear perfume. We’re probably just smelling your perfume.”
“I don’t wear that perfume.”
The policeman turned to Max. “This guy she’s talking about is your brother?” Max nodded. “So you didn’t see him do this either? Nobody saw anything?” Max said he had not. “And can you give me an address or place of employment for your brother?” Max said he could not. Officer Petzoldt shrugged. “It’s a dog, lady. And honestly, I don’t smell much of anything. Maybe somebody didn’t like the dog, or didn’t like you, or maybe both, but there’s no witnesses and you can’t even get anybody on this block to claim the dog. It’s not gonna go to the Supreme Court, even if we found the guy you think may have done it.”
Max stood beside me on the sidewalk as we watched Officer Petzoldt drive off. He’d found a cardboard box and gently lifted the body from my car, set it in the box. “I’ll take care of this.” He started walking away from me, holding his box of dog gingerly to one side.
“Max?” I called after him. He turned around.
“You know him. What’s he going to do next? What should I do?”
He turned his back again and took a few steps, stopped, and turned to face me again. “I think you should stay with a friend for a while.”
“I don’t have any friends.” This was true, and it was the first time it struck me as odd. I had Lilly, and work, and Jane and Snyder. I didn’t want Ricky Luhrmann sitting outside either of their homes, trailing me to either of their doors.
Did I have Charles? No. Charles would say he could not compromise my reputation by taking me in; Charles would tell me there was nothing, really, to worry about. If Ricky showed up at his door, Charles Helbrun would have no more idea what to do than Snyder would. I didn’t want to see that. Nor did I want to even think of Ricky Luhrmann on my sister Janey’s front steps.
That left no place. Before this moment my small circle had been enough, and now I saw that it wasn’t.
“Well.” Max stood and considered for another moment or two. “My department research vessel has a cabin that’s pretty comfortable and nobody expects anybody to be sleeping in it. Slip four at the Charlestown docks: the Rubber Duck. You could use it nights. Stay there irregularly so you were hard to predict.”
“I’m not afraid of Ricky Luhrmann.”
“I know that. It’s why I offered you the Rubber Duck.”
“I’m not hiding on your boat, Max.”
When I was no more than a block away I had to brace myself so I wouldn’t look behind me in the rearview mirror. I looked anyhow, and was rewarded with the sight of him still standing there watching me, perfectly still with a box of dead dog in his arms.
I told Lilly about the dog, certain that it would end any connection that bound her to Ricky. I could see her withdraw inside herself someplace far from me. “Lilly, you aren’t still in touch with him, are you?” I know I sounded alarmed when I said it, even though I was struggling to sound like a rational bystander.
“No.” Then she added, “But he gets in touch with me. His old number’s disconnected. He calls me from pay phones.”
“He can find you, but you can’t find him. Listen to yourself.”
“I can handle him, Neave.”
Were her eyes shining? Was it possible that the thing inside Ricky Luhrmann that had left that dog on my car seat lit something up in her? “Lilly. He put your perfume on a dead dog. Please.”
She actually patted me on the knee. “It’s going to be all right.”
Then she smiled, not at me. It was a private smile and I knew it was for him, or for something that she was when she was with him. It was an in-turning thing, and as I watched it I knew I could have burst into flame right there in front of her and not caught her eye.
We were in the worst kind of trouble.
LILLY AND BOPPIT
How He Hates Her
“He hates her in this weird, unreasonable way,” Boppit observed.
“Well, I know that. It was like he had some raw spot inside him and every time they came together, she’d run a blowtorch over it. If she missed the raw spot he’d turn around so she could reach it better. Right from the start it was like that. Take the dinner I set up with her and Ricky to cultivate peace and harmony, me still thinking that was a possibility. Ricky brings up the subject of company ownership. Well, he says, of course as the husband I’m a legal owner of Be Your Best. Me, I would have let that just slide by. Who cares what he thought, because legally I knew that Neave and I had changed the paperwork after my first experience with a disappointing husband and locked every asset in the company into our names. Ricky didn’t have any legal access at all. But Neave has always had this dumb idea that it’s best to have everything right out on the table. She makes it clear to Ricky then and there: he’s got no say in the company at all and the profits are his wife’s. Not his. Bam.”
“Very bad,” Boppit agreed.
“Oh, it gets worse. She asks him if I’d ever actually spelled out the controlling parties in the business. Just try it and see what happens, Mister: that was her tone. He says he’s sure he can legally arrange for ownership to include
him. She says she doesn’t think so. She doesn’t hear his tone or else she just ignores it and she plows straight on. She says even if he got me to go along with that idea that it couldn’t happen without her cooperating, and she was perfectly happy with the company ownership only including her and me.”
“Ricky was always just the littlest bit scared of her,” Boppit said to me. “That was coloring the conversation too.”
“He didn’t look scared at that moment.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t,” Bop says.
“If only she knew how to flirt, put guys at ease. Not Neave. She wants somebody’s attention, she waves a red cape. So she does this to Ricky, he snorts and paws and charges around, and when he’s stomped out of the room I tell her maybe she could have been more diplomatic. And who does she get mad at? Me. She wants to know how I ever let Ricky Luhrmann think he’d ever have a say in anything to do with Be Your Best. I just hadn’t seen the need to talk about it, I say. Easier to step over some subjects than go stubbing your toe on them. Why couldn’t she do the same? Now I had to deal with foul-mood Ricky, and sure enough, we’re getting ready for bed that night and I don’t even have my stockings unsnapped from my garters when he starts in. You’re going to a lawyer and change things so I’m a legal owner of Be Your Best like any husband in America would be. I rolled the stockings down real slow and I said Neave meant what she said. She wasn’t giving that kind of control to somebody outside our partnership—somebody, I added, who shouldn’t be burdened by all the work, the decisions, the responsibility. Just enjoy the profits, I said. Let me and Neavie do the work.”
“Which didn’t quiet him down,” Boppit said with a sigh.
“Of course not. He said Neave was a controlling bitch who hated men. He said she needed a strong hand.”
“He scared you,” Boppit said, which was true but I hadn’t wanted to admit that to myself at the time, so I hadn’t. The kindness in Bop’s voice made the taste of salt start in my mouth, made my throat feel like it was closing. He said, “That was something that had never happened to you before with Ricky Luhrmann, but it was going to happen sooner or later, Lilly.”
This was true and I’d known it then, all the way back then when I was refusing to know what I knew.
Bop talked like he was in my head. “You weren’t the only one afraid of Ricky. Max is afraid of him.”
“No he isn’t. I’ve met Max.”
“Just because Max would stand up to him doesn’t mean that Max isn’t scared of him. It only means Max has nerve.”
“Since when are you in Max’s head?”
He shrugged. “We don’t get to pick every place we end up.” Boppit sighed again. “You of all people should know that, sweetheart.”
LILLY
What I Saw in Him
You want to know what I saw in him, right?
The first time I laid eyes on Luhrmann he had his hand on another man’s neck. It wasn’t a fight—just a kind of tap to let everybody know who was in charge. Then he pulled a wad of cash out of a pocket and peeled off a Ulysses S. Grant and said the drinks were on him, real casual. The combination of the hand on the neck and the big drink gesture put me off. It’s the kind of Big Man horseshit you see all over. He looked my way when he did it. Just a piece of meathead theatre.
I was at the Ritz Bar with some present and future salesgirls, the kind of girls Neave thought were silly just because it mattered to them that their shoes and purses matched. Which of course they have to. Neavie was back at the grinding wheel with her nose pressed real hard on some problem about the cash flow. She’s happier with that kind of thing. I’m happier fishing for sales staff with a martini in my hand and a nice view of Newbury Street. The girls saw Mr. Grandstander focus in on me and smile from where he was sitting on the other side of the room.
“Take a gander at the table closest to the bar,” one of them said to me. “That guy’s looking you over.”
“Let him look,” I said. “That’s all he’s gonna get to do. I’m going to the ladies’.”
Somehow I knew he’d do exactly what he did, which was find a way to get himself in my path on my way back, out of sight of his gang and my girlfriends. I wasn’t drunk, so I don’t know why I let him talk me into giving him my number, but he had it before I sat down with the girls again. Let him call, I thought. Doesn’t mean I’m going out with him. Doesn’t mean anything.
At first I gave him the bum’s rush. He’d call. Leave messages. I’d ignore them. He kept it up for a full month before I said I’d have a drink with him. He said if I’d go for one drink he’d be satisfied and that would be the end of it, just one drink, which we both knew wasn’t the real deal. How did we know so soon how to play each other’s game, but still be able to surprise each other? It was magic, the way he made me resist him just enough to get a little friction going, and then find a way to make me feel like whatever he wanted was exactly what I wanted in the end.
* * *
I’m kind of shocked at myself. I mean, here’s Boppit shaking his head saying, “So blind. So blind, and yet you saw…” Okay. I could see it from the start, but I didn’t want to see it, so I didn’t. I made fun of it at the Ritz Bar and then I let it make me say yes when he asked me for my number. I told the girlfriends he was a showy meathead and they said they thought he was sexy as hell, which he was. It was right smack in the center of him, whatever it was that made women say he was sexy as hell.
I was so confident. I could have any man who caught my eye and I could walk away from any of them too. Neave and I weren’t Jell-O-cup-for-dessert women. We were the owners and directors of a fast-growing cosmetics company. I was the best-dressed woman in the room, and I paid for the Chanel suit myself, thank you very much.
I like men, really like them, even apart from the whole mating-dance thing. The truth is that most women like men. Ricky Luhrmann was not what most women would call likeable, though. He was something else. He moved like a big animal with lots of nerve. He could walk down any street and other men moved aside. He came at me like that, full of himself right up to the minute he was humble, treating me like I was the source spring of all good things, some kind of goddess he needed near him just to survive. If you’ve never been treated like a goddess, I’ll tell you, it messes with your judgment. You forget, if you ever knew it to begin with, that lots of goddesses end up sacrificed on some altar or other.
NEAVE
What Does He Have to Do?
In the end I didn’t find Ricky. He found me. Ricky Luhrmann showed up at my door acting like a bag of gasoline-soaked rags that had just met a match. It was about ten on a Friday night and Lilly had left Annie with me for the evening while she went out for a drink with some of the younger salesgirls. Any social life that didn’t include Ricky Luhrmann looked like a good idea to me. Annie and I had sat on her bed and advised her on jewelry while she ignored us and picked out what she wanted. We’d waved her off and then driven to the apartment above the Be Your Best offices, played Monopoly until eight thirty, eaten large bowls of ice cream, then sat in bed reading stories until Annie had drifted off to sleep. I’d wandered into the kitchen and fallen back on my old friends: flour and chocolate. I’d imagined Annie and me eating pies for breakfast and the idea had made me cheerful. When I heard a knock I thought it was Lilly home early, knocking because she’d lost her key. I opened the door.
“Hello, bitch.” The quietness of the words rattled me more than the words themselves. He threw his shoulder against the door as I tried to slam it shut. I scrabbled with one hand for the chain while the other pushed for all it was worth. He said, “You hated me from the get-go, which is fine with me because I can’t stand you either. You go whining to my brother Max, you say things to him that aren’t true.…”
I pulled in a deep breath to make my body puff up like an animal that fills its neck and chest with air to look larger. I imagined Annie sprawled out like a starfish in the bedroom behind me, probably drooling onto the pillow with her h
air fanned around her. “Go away, Luhrmann. Lilly isn’t here.”
“I didn’t come to deal with Lilly. I want to deal with you. Why are you talking with Max? What gives you the right to talk about me to my brother?” He jammed a foot quickly into the narrow opening I hadn’t been able to close when he’d pushed against me with his shoulder.
“What is it with you and sticking your nose in my business? You think I don’t know that you told Lilly I was trash? What do you know about what Lilly and I have? What would a dried-up old maid like you know? I’ve seen what you call a boyfriend. He’s a busy boy, but he’s clearly got no working equipment where it counts. Your sister and me, we’ve got what everybody on the fucking planet wants.”
I looked at Ricky Luhrmann’s blotchy face while he worked his knee into the doorway and tried to get it wide enough to pass through. I didn’t smell any alcohol on his breath, which unnerved me. I had no explanation for what he looked like right now. I kicked the knee, hard.
“Son of a bitch!”
He reached down to touch the knee and I kicked his hand. He startled away and I got the door almost shut before he threw his whole body against it. I said, “I’m only a foot from the telephone and I can have cops here in five minutes. They want to talk to you about a piece of meat nailed to my door. They want to know about a dead dog somebody left in my car.”
“Call ’em.” His voice was unnaturally calm, like what was going on was exactly what he wanted to have going on. “I’ll say you asked me over to talk about how sad you were about Lilly and me breaking up and how you hoped I’d come visit and in the generosity of my heart I agreed. Because you sounded a little unbalanced … a little crazy.” He took a deep breath and smelled the pie for the first time. “How sweet. Were you baking me something as a surprise, hoping I’d be here soon? That’s the picture I’ll paint for the cops. Here you are baking me something nice. A lonely, jealous woman making advances on her sister’s ex-husband and getting violent when he rejects her, so in self-defense I had to subdue you. A nut case. What a whore. I only came over because I thought you might be a danger to yourself. I’ll look so sad about it all.”
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