Femme Fatale and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  She fished a wallet out of her bag, and while I’m not strong on these kinds of details, it looked like an expensive purse to me, and the billfold was thick with cash. Most of the time, I don’t angst over money—I’m just twenty-three, getting started in the world, I’ll make my bundle soon enough—but it was hard, looking at all those bills and thinking about the gap between us. Why shouldn’t I take fifty dollars? She clearly wouldn’t feel it.

  But for some reason I couldn’t. “Naw. Because I’d never repay you. I mean, I could, I’ve got a job. But I know myself. I’ll lose your address or something, never get it back to you.”

  She smiled, which transformed her features. Definitely between thirty and forty, but closer to the thirty end now that I studied her. Her eyes were gray, her mouth big and curvy, fuller on top than on the bottom, so her teeth poked out just a little. I go for that overbite thing. And the suit was a kind of camouflage, I realized, in a good way. Most women dress to hide their flaws, but a few use clothes to cover up their virtues. She was trying to hide her best qualities, but I could see the swells beneath her outfit—both on top and in the back, where her ass rose up almost in defiance of the tailored jacket and straight skirt. You can’t keep a good ass down.

  “Don’t be so gallant,” she said. “I’m not offering a loan. I’m doing a good deed. I like to do good deeds.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right.” I don’t know why I was so firm on this, but I think it was because she was basically sweet. I couldn’t help thinking we’d meet again, and I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who took fifty dollars from her.

  “Well …” That smile again, bigger this time. “We have a stand-off.”

  “Guess so. But you better get down to that taxi stand if you want to get home tonight. The line’s twenty deep.” We glanced out the windows, down to the level below, which was just chaos. Up here, however, it was quiet and private, the man with the vacuum cleaner having finally moved on, the counters all closed.

  “I’m lucky. I have my own car.”

  “I think the lucky person is the man who’s waiting at home for you.”

  “Oh.” She was flustered, which just made her sexier. “There’s no one—I mean—well, I’m single.”

  “That’s hard to believe.” The automatic bullshit thing to say, yet I was sincere. How could someone like that ticket-clerk crone have a ring on her finger, while this woman was running around loose?

  “It’s a chicken-or-egg problem.”

  “Huh?”

  “Am I single because I’m a workaholic, or am I a workaholic because I’m single?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. It’s the first one. No contest.”

  Her faced seemed to light up and I swear I saw her eyes go filmy, as if she were about to cry. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “You need to hang out with better people, then.”

  “Look—” She put her hand on mine, and it was cool and soft, the kind of hand that gets slathered in cream on a regular basis, the hand of a woman who’s taking care of every part of herself. I knew she’d be waxed to a fine finish beneath that conservative little suit, with painted toenails and nothing but good smells. “I have a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of the city, just a few blocks from the big hotels. You can spend the night in my guest room, catch the first airport shuttle from the Hyatt at five. It’s only fifteen dollars, and you’ll get where you’re going rested and unkinked.”

  Funny, but I felt protective of her. It was almost as if I were two people—a guy who wanted to keep her from a guy like me, and the guy who wanted to get inside her apartment and rip that suit off, see what she was keeping from the rest of the world.

  “I couldn’t do that. That’s an even bigger favor than giving me fifty dollars for a hotel room.”

  “I don’t know. It seems to me there are ways you could pay me back, if you put your mind to it.”

  She didn’t smile, or arch an eyebrow, or do a single thing with her face to acknowledge what she had just offered. She simply turned and began pulling her bag toward the sliding glass doors. But I was never more certain in my life that a woman wanted me. I got up, grabbed my own suitcase, and followed her, our wheels thrumming in unison. She led me to a black BMW in the short-term lot. Neither one of us said a word, we could barely look at each other, but I had her skirt halfway up her thigh even as she handed the parking lot attendant two bucks. He never even bothered to look down, just handed her the change, bored with his life. It’s amazing what people don’t see, but after all, people didn’t see her, this amazing woman. Because she was small and modest, she passed through the world without acknowledgment. I was glad I hadn’t made the mistake of not seeing what was there.

  Her apartment was only twenty minutes away, and if it had been twenty-five, I think I would have made her pull over to the side of the road or risked bursting. I had her skirt above her waist now, yet she kept control of the car and leveled her eyes straight ahead, which just made me wilder for her. Once she parked, she didn’t bother to pop the trunk, and by that time I wasn’t too worried about my suitcase. I wasn’t going to need any clothes until the morning. She ran up the stairs and I followed.

  The apartment building was a little shabby, and in an iffier neighborhood than I expected, but those warehouse lofts usually are in odd parts of town. She pulled me into the dark living room and locked the door behind me, throwing on the deadbolt as if I might change my mind, but there was no risk of that. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to take in my surroundings, although I did notice that the room was sparsely furnished—nothing more than a sofa, a desk with an open laptop, and this huge credenza of jars with gleaming gold tops, which looked sort of like those big things of peppers you see at some delis, although not quite the same. I couldn’t help thinking it was a project of hers, that maybe they were vases distorted by the moonlight.

  “You an artist?” I asked as she backed away and began pulling her clothes off, revealing a body that was even better than I had hoped.

  “I’m in business.”

  “I mean, as a hobby?” I inclined my head toward the credenza, as I was trying to get my trousers off without tripping.

  “I’m a pickler.”

  “What?” Not that I really cared about the answer, as I had my hands on her now. She let me kiss and touch what I could reach, then sank to her knees, as if all she cared about was pleasing me. Well, she had said she was into good deeds, and I had done pretty well by her in the car.

  “A pickler,” she said, her breath warm and moist. “I put up fruits and vegetables and other things as well, so I can enjoy them all winter long.” And then she stopped talking because she had—

  MAUREEN STOPS, FROWNING at what she has written. Has she mastered the genre? This is her sixth letter, and while the pickups are getting easier, the prose is becoming harder. Part of the problem is that the men bring so little variation to their end of the bargain, forcing her to be ever more inventive about their lives and their missions. Even when they do tell her little pieces of their backstories, like this one, Andy, it’s so boring, so banal. Late to the airport, a missed connection, not enough money to do anything but sleep on a bench, blah, blah, blah. Ah, but she doesn’t have the luxury of picking them for material. She has to find the raw stuff and mold it to her needs.

  So far, the editors of Penthouse haven’t printed any of her letters—too much buildup, she supposes, which is like too much foreplay as far as she’s concerned. Ah, but that’s the difference between men and women, the unbridgeable gap. One wants seduction, the other wants action. It’s why her scripts never sell, either. Too much buildup, too much narrative. And, frankly, she knows her sex scenes suck. Part of the problem is that in real life Maureen almost never completes the act she’s trying to describe in her fiction; she’s too eager to get to her favorite part. So, yes, she has her own foreplay issues.

  No, there are definitely voice problems in this piece. Would a
young man remember that whistling sound that braces make, or is she simply giving too much away about her own awkward years? Would a twenty-three-year-old man recognize an expensive purse? Or use the word “preternaturally”? Also, she probably should be careful about being too factual. The $2 parking fee—a more astute person, someone who didn’t have his hand up a woman’s skirt, fumbling around as if he’s looking for spare change beneath a sofa cushion, might wonder why someone returning from a business trip paid for only an hour of parking. She should recast her apartment as well, make it more glamorous, the same way she upgraded her Nissan Sentra to a gleaming black BMW. Speaking of which, she needs to get the car to Wax Works, just in case, and change Andy’s name in the subsequent drafts. She doesn’t worry that homicide detectives read Penthouse Forum for clues to open cases, but they almost certainly read it. Meanwhile, his suitcase is gone, tossed in a Dumpster behind the Sleep Inn near the airport, and Andy’s long gone, too.

  Well—she looks up at the row of gleaming jars, which she needs to lock away again behind the credenza’s cupboards, but they’re so pretty in the moonlight, almost like homemade lava lamps. Well, she reminds herself. Most of Andy is long gone.

  THE BABYSITTER’S CODE

  The rules, the real ones, have seldom been written down, yet every girl knows them. (The boys who babysit don’t, by the way. They eat too much, they leave messes, they break vases while roughhousing with the kids, but the children adore the boys who babysit, so they still get invited back.) The rules are intuitive, as are most things governing the behavior of teenage girls. Your boyfriend may visit unless it’s explicitly forbidden, but the master bedroom is always off-limits, just as it would be in your own house. Eat what you like, but never break the seal on any bag or box. Whatever you do, try to erase any evidence of your presence in the house by evening’s end. The only visible proof of your existence should be a small dent on a sofa cushion, preferably at the far end, as if you were too polite to stretch across its entire length. Finally, be careful about how much food you consume. No parent should come home and peer into the Pringles can—or the Snackwell’s box or the glass jar of the children’s rationed Halloween candy—and marvel at your capacity. There is nothing ruder than a few crumbs of chips at the bottom of a bag, rolled and fastened with one of those plastic clips, or a single Mint Milano resting in the last paper cup.

  Terri Snyder, perhaps the most in-demand babysitter in all of River Run, knew and followed all these rules. Once when she was at the Morrows’ house, she discovered a four-pound can of pistachio nuts and got a little carried away. And while the canister was so large that it provided cover for her gluttony, the shells in the trash can left no doubt as to how much she had eaten. To conceal the grossness of her appetite, she packed those shells in her knapsack and the pockets of her ski jacket. Riding home in the front seat of Ed Morrow’s Jeep Cherokee, she realized she was rattling softly, but Mr. Morrow seemed to think it was the car’s heater. The next time she babysat for the Morrows, she found another canister of pistachios, a sure sign of trust.

  But then, the Morrows were among the most generous clients in Terri’s circle. Most families, even the rich ones, hid what they considered precious—not just liquor, which interested Terri not at all, but also expensive chocolates and macadamia nuts and the asiago cheese dip from Cross Street Wine & Cheese in Baltimore. The last was especially dear, a souvenir from the parents’ hip, carefree lives, when they lived where they wanted, with no worries about school districts, much less backyards and soccer leagues. The asiago dip was like the tiny little treasures that pioneer families kept in their sod houses—a single silver spoon, a pair of diamond earrings, a china-head doll. Almost laughable, yet touching somehow, a symbol of a foreign land from which they had chosen to exile themselves for some vague dream of betterment.

  Terri always found these forbidden snacks but left them undisturbed, obeying another unwritten rule: you may snoop all you like, but you must not move or in any way tamper with the secrets of the houses left in your care. Read the dirty books and magazines by all means, catalog the couple’s birth control (or lack thereof), poke through medicine cabinets and those mother lodes known as nightstands, but make sure everything and everyone is tucked in its respective bed before the parents return home.

  The fathers’ cluelessness is understandable, but why would mothers, most of them former babysitters, leave so many embarrassments to be discovered? Yet Terri never stopped to wonder about this. Like most teenagers, she assumed her generation had invented depravity—and she was not entirely off the mark. Her clients remembered their pasts as one might remember a dream—hazy, incoherent, yet vaguely satisfying. Indulged in their youth, they had little need for rebellion in adulthood, and even less energy for it. Those who know the gin-soaked suburbs described in Cheever and Updike would be disappointed in River Run, where there was so much money and so little imagination. Sure, there was a sex toy here, a prescription for Viagra there, but Terri’s systematic sleuthing did not uncover anything truly shocking—not until the day she found the beautiful little handgun, no bigger than a toy, nestled in Mrs. Delafield’s lingerie drawer.

  Now the Delafields had been considered odd from their arrival in the community two years ago. Mrs. Delafield (“Call me Jakkie, it’s short for Jakarta, can you believe it? My mom was nuts”) was very young, so young that even an incurious teenager such as Terri could see she did not belong in this overdone, overlarge, grown-up house in River Run’s Phase V development. Local gossip put her at no more than twenty-five, which was worth gossiping about because Mr. Delafield was fifty-two. He was divorced, of course, with children in college, and now he had Mrs. Delafield and the baby, a shockingly large child of sixteen months, a child so big that he was having trouble walking. Hugo’s short, chubby legs simply could not propel his mass forward, and he continued to crawl, when he deigned to move at all. It was hard, looking at Mrs. Delafield, to figure out how such a huge child had come out of this lanky size 2, with hips narrower than most of the boys in the River Run freshmen class. No one knew what Mrs. Delafield had been before she was Mrs. Delafield. The one time Terri had dared to ask, Mrs. Delafield must not have understood the question because she said: “Oh, I was at my height when I met Mr. Delafield. You have no idea. I can’t bear to look at the photographs because I’m such a mess now.” Her hands shook, she chewed her nails when she thought no one was looking, and her hair was an odd shade of yellow. She was the most beautiful woman Terri had ever seen outside a magazine.

  No one knew why the Delafields had chosen River Run, not at first. For while River Run was an extremely desirable place to live—great school district, beautiful countryside, and convenient to I-83, that was the locals’ litany—not even its biggest boosters expected billionaires in their midst. The grandest house in Phase V could not compete with the waterfront estates outside Annapolis, or even the rambling mansions on Baltimore’s north side. Plus, Hugo was so young, and the Delafields so very rich, they didn’t have to worry about public schools.

  The mystery was explained when Mr. Delafield’s corporate helicopter landed with a great, ear-shattering roar in a clearing behind his property, acreage dedicated as permanent open space according to the master plan for River Run. The community and the River Run board fought the helicopter, of course. Mr. Delafield insisted he had been promised use of the land, that he would not have purchased the house otherwise. Yet the Delafields decided to stay in the house even after a zoning judge decided Mr. Delafield could not use the land. The corporate headquarters for his pharmaceutical company were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, no more than an hour’s drive away. His chauffeur-driven Town Car pulled out of the quarter-mile driveway promptly at seven every weekday morning and returned thirteen hours later. Mrs. Delafield, who did not work, was left at home with Hugo and a live-in housekeeper, who apparently terrified her. She hired Terri to come on Tuesdays, the housekeeper’s day off, and spell her for exactly four hours, from three to seven, for $5 an ho
ur. Finding something to do with those four hours was a terrible chore for Mrs. Delafield. She tried tennis, but she wasn’t coordinated. She tried shopping, but she found the nearest stores disappointing, preferring to purchase her clothes on seasonal excursions to New York. She signed up for ceramics class, but she didn’t like what it did to her acrylic nails. Still, she was strict with herself, throwing herself into her Porsche SUV every Tuesday as if it were a grim duty.

  She always returned promptly at seven, sometimes stepping out of her clothes as she crossed the threshold—whatever she had been in her past life, it had left her without modesty. She then handed Terri $25 and fixed a drink. Terri wasn’t sure if the extra five dollars was a tip or a math error, and she didn’t ask Mrs. Delafield for fear of embarrassing her. Mrs. Delafield was shy about her lack of education, to which she made vague, sinister references. “When I had to leave school …,” or “I wish I could have stayed for prom, but there was just no way.” Sometimes she examined Terri’s armload of textbooks, as if just touching them might convey the knowledge she had failed to acquire. “Is algebra hard? When they say European history, do they mean all the countries, even the little-bitty ones? Why would they want to you to study psychics?” The last was a misreading of “physics,” but Terri didn’t have the heart to correct her. Instead, she told Mrs. Delafield that River Run High School had been founded at a time when there were a lot of alternative theories about education—perfectly true—and that it still retained a certain touchy-feely quality. Also true, although parents such as Terri’s, who had known the original River Run, were always complaining it had become a ruthless college factory.

  Given that the Delafields’ house, like the Delafields’ baby, was so huge, it had taken Terri a while to inventory its contents. Still, the wonders of Mrs. Delafield’s underwear drawer were well known to her long before she found the gun. Drawers, really, because Mrs. Delafield had an entire bureau just for underwear and nightgowns. The bureau was built into the wall of a walk-in closet, one of two off the master bedroom, both almost as big as Terri’s bedroom, but her family lived in a Phase II house. Terri had been through those drawers several times, so she was certain that the elegant little handgun she found there one March afternoon was a new addition, along with the rather nasty-looking tap pants of transparent blue gauze, with a slit where the crotch should be. Terri did not try on the tap pants, which she considered gross, but she did ease an emerald-green nightgown over her bra and panties. Small and compact, with thin legs and rather large breasts, Terri could not have looked less like Mrs. Delafield. Still, she rather liked the effect.