Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  “Far Side of the Moon.”

  “Yeah, that one. He was there at the party after. I had no clue Ret was writing a book about him. But I remember her going to me, ‘He’s not the good-hearted All-American guy everybody loves.’ I figured it was just Ret talking, she had shit to say about everybody. Then her book comes out and—” He made an explosion sound. “I figured that was it, I’d never hear from Ret again. It was rotten what happened to her.”

  “But she got in touch with you?”

  “Yeah. About a year ago. She called here, saying she was going nuts stuck in the apartment. It was like being in prison. She wanted to know if I’d give her personal training sessions—” He looked up at Rannie as if expecting to see a smirk. “And that’s all it was for a long time. I’d get there. She’d have this mask thing on and she’d work out in the living room.”

  “Did she ever talk about the new book she was writing?”

  “A little. She made it sound different from the others. She goes, ‘I’m writing about somebody I like. I’m through trashing people.’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, well, too bad you didn’t decide that sooner. You’d still have a face.’ ”

  Rannie nodded. “Okay. Look. I swear to you, I’m not interested in what went on between you two, but I need to know if you were ever in her bedroom.”

  “Only a few times. It’s not like how the papers said. That whole boy-toy crap, which nearly got my ass booted here by the way. Yeah, I fucked Ret a few times because I felt sorry for her. Okay? I didn’t get a cent. In my mind, it was kind of like a mitzvah—you know what a mitzvah is?”

  Rannie didn’t believe him but nodded. “Yes. A blessing.” She watched him drain his smoothie. A disgusting foamy yellow-green ring remained around the top of the glass. And the mini soul patch, it had managed to catch a globule. “When you were in Ret’s bedroom, did you happen to notice artwork over her bed?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know about anything in there. She could have had Elvis on black velvet for all I know.”

  “You didn’t notice a painting? A religious painting.”

  “I just told you. I didn’t see anything, as in nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.” Oh. Suddenly Rannie did. “You were blindfolded?”

  He nodded. “Ret didn’t want her mask on during sex. But she didn’t want me to see her face and that was fine by me. She had this sleep mask, the kind airplanes give out. She made me put it on and then she’d lead me into the bedroom. She definitely got off being in control. And I couldn’t take the thing off until we were done and I was back in the living room. In there she had a whole wall full of crosses.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Rannie slumped in her chair. Bummer.

  He glanced at his watch. “So we done?”

  “Almost.” She’d bombed out on the painting angle, but she wasn’t about to kiss a hundred bucks good-bye without getting her full sixty minutes. “Did Ret ever mention somebody named Larry? Larry Katz?”

  “I met the guy. Several times. They were always doing work when I came. Ret had a thing for him. I could tell.”

  “You mean she was in love with him?”

  “Love? Ret? I don’t know if I’d go that far. But maybe. One thing I know is body language. Take shoulders. Everything I need to know about a person I can tell from the way their shoulders move. Most people look at faces to see what somebody else is feeling. With Ret, whatever was left of hers was all covered up by that mask. But it was obvious, just the way she moved when he was around, that she dug the guy. Then after he left, she’d act all pissed off. Tell me he was overcharging her. Cheating her. She’d go, ‘Nobody cheats me and gets away with it. Nobody.’ How many times did I have to listen to that? Then she’d peer at me through the little holes in the mask like she was giving me a warning.”

  His words tallied with what Sister Dorothy had said regarding Ret’s veiled allusions to getting even with somebody.

  Gerald Steele was drumming his fingers on the Formica table. Gerald. Gery. The other thank-you in the acknowledgments in Portrait of a Lady was “For Gery Antioch.” “Steele” sounded made up, a buff, muscle-y name that a gym instructor would pick. “Is Steele your real last name?”

  “No. It’s Steiner. Why are you asking?”

  “Ret knew a Gery Antioch.”

  “The name means nothing to me.” He pushed the clipboard toward Rannie and stood. He was done playing “Twenty Questions.” “Just sign at the bottom to verify you had your training session. And look. For your sake I hope you’re wrong about being in danger. I mean, how can fixing a few commas get anybody murdered?”

  “Thanks for your time. I really do appreciate it.” Rannie signed the form while he returned the empty glass to the counter.

  “One last thing,” Rannie said.

  His head swiveled back in her direction. He looked irritated.

  She brushed her lower lip. “There’s smoothie on your soul patch.”

  Chapter 24

  The Broadway bus was approaching 106th Street. The next stop was hers. Rannie didn’t want to budge. She wanted to stay seated right where she was until she reached the final stop at the George Washington Bridge. She felt totally wiped. Not that signing a couple of gym forms counted as a punishing workout. But she was mentally exhausted. Too many facts were bombarding her brain, caroming off in different directions before any sense could be made of them.

  Larry had visited Ret’s apartment the morning of the murder. Tim had told her that. But why had Larry gone there? In all likelihood, Ret’s accusations about Larry bilking her stemmed from nothing more than typical Ret paranoia. Nevertheless, if Ret was convinced she’d been cheated, it wasn’t that hard to imagine her threatening Larry, saying that she was going to go blab to Dusk about his role as Audeo. After all, Tattletale was the title she’d chosen for her autobiography. Or—here was another possibility: perhaps Ret wanted to punish Larry for spurning her sexual advances. Hell-hath-no-fury payback. Larry was forking out alimony; he’d told Rannie that. He couldn’t afford to get fired from a job with a good salary. So maybe he’d gone to see Ret that morning hoping to calm her down but had had no success. So he went to Plan B. Murdering Ret ensured that he wouldn’t be ratted out at Dusk.

  But how could Larry have carried out the crime? Motive needed opportunity. Unfortunately, figuring out logistics was not Rannie’s strong suit. It seemed a left brain ability, like understanding architectural designs or solving KenKen puzzles, talents totally alien to her. So she tried to imagine how Tim, a man blessed with a sharp practical mind, might approach the question. And that helped. She could almost hear Tim saying that murdering Ret wouldn’t be all that complicated. In the many times Larry had been at Ret’s apartment, he must have seen keys laying around. Maybe he’d pocketed a set last Saturday morning, and later that afternoon, while visiting the demented mother in Long Island, drove back to East Sixty-Ninth Street. Slipping past the concierge desk—first into the building and then out again—would be the highest hurdle to clear. No, wait. Tim would point out, “That’s forgetting about security cameras.” The cameras obviously had shown Larry in the building that morning. If there was any evidence linking him to the crime scene much later in the day, Larry would already be in custody.

  So where did that leave Rannie?

  On 116th Street and Broadway, unfortunately. Eight blocks past her stop. Hastily she exited from the back door of the bus.

  When she arrived home, the apartment was still empty. She flopped on her bed and tried—unsuccessfully—to ignore the message light blinking on her phone.

  Peter, her ex-husband, had called. “Ran, hi. Give a call. We need to discuss Thanksgiving.” Rannie stared at the phone. It wasn’t fair that he had such an appealing speaking voice—low, relaxed, unhurried—when almost nothing out of his mouth was stuff she wanted to hear. He was canceling plans to come to New York. Rannie was sure of it. Alice had been predicting he’d bail for weeks. “Thanksgiving with the whole family at Uncle Will’
s? Dad can’t stand being around his brothers.” Yet Nate, far less cynical than Alice and far more invested in keeping up a relationship with his father, had gone online and ordered tickets for the two of them to see Steely Dan at the Beacon and to attend an exhibition tennis match at the Garden.

  Schlepping to Will and Beth Lorimer’s house in Chappaqua wasn’t Rannie’s idea of a jolly time either. Will, the eldest brother, had married late in life. He was a trusts and estates lawyer at a white shoe firm, whose disdain for ninety-nine percent of the world was masked by a bullying joviality that fooled no one, including his six-year-old twin daughters.

  Harry, the middle son, taught statistics at Middlebury. Statistically, Harry was the most reserved—Rannie felt mean saying “boring”—person on the planet. A lifelong bachelor, Harry was sweet, unfailingly polite, yet after a twenty-year-long association with the Lorimers, Rannie knew Harry no better than she had after first shaking hands with him on the receiving line at her wedding reception.

  During the early years of their marriage, Peter and Rannie would spend hours inventing unlikely talents and passions for Harry: Harry won prizes dancing the Macarena, Harry’s vast collection of Beanie Babies was now worth a fortune, Harry had seen every episode of The Cosby Show and was president of the Rudy Huxtable fan club.

  Peter had a terrific silly streak but no gravitas whatsoever. He was unreliable and, without meaning to be, often cruelly thoughtless. He had quick bursts of enthusiasm, which were all-consuming while they lasted. But they never lasted long. At forty-five he was still floundering. And it embarrassed him. In all likelihood, in Chappaqua, Will would make sure to rub it in, clapping Peter on the back, and, all smiles, would inquire, “So, baby bro, what’s the latest venture?”

  But this Thanksgiving wasn’t about Peter. Mary, who never made demands on her sons (hmmm, maybe that was part of Peter’s problem), had requested that everybody celebrate the holiday together. “Won’t that be fun!” Mary insisted cheerily nearly every time Rannie saw her.

  A mile-long e-mail chain, mostly between Will’s wife, Beth, and Rannie, finally determined that Will and Beth would host the dinner with everyone spending the night at their Greek revival house where the heat was kept so low that Rannie always pictured her young nieces with gooseflesh, chattering teeth, and slightly blue lips.

  Rannie braced herself for the conversation with Peter. She knew exactly what she’d say. “There is no wiggle room. Not this time. You are coming.” She punched in the number.

  “Hey, Peter. I got your message. Listen. There is no wiggle room. None. You are coming for Thanksgiving and that’s that.”

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Who said anything about not coming?’

  “You did on your message. . . . Didn’t you?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I didn’t.” Rather than taking offense, he seemed amused. “But now that I’ve been unjustly accused, I think you owe me. I called because I’m hoping you’ll let me crash at the apartment.”

  “Nope. Sorry. It sends a wrong message to the kids.”

  “Come on. It’d just be for Wednesday and Friday night. I’m having a helluva time booking a hotel.”

  “You waited till now?” That was another irritating thing about Peter: he had amazing luck; without any effort on his part, plans almost always fell into place for him. But evidently not this time. She wanted to dig it in. She felt like saying, “Well, why would you have thought to make a reservation earlier? I mean, who ever wants to visit New York City at holiday time?” Instead, she said, “You can stay at Mary’s.” All three brothers’ rooms had remained untouched since their boyhood. “You can commune with your tennis trophies.”

  “What put you in such a good mood?”

  “Oh, let’s see. A long day that began with yours truly escorting Daisy Satterthwaite to a funeral. She blacked out during the reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm. I thought she was dead.”

  Peter chuckled. “Charlotte Cummings’s funeral?”

  “Yes. How’d you know?” But of course Peter would know, and suddenly it dawned on Rannie that her former husband might be able to provide something other than child support payments. Namely information. “Peter, did you know the granddaughter? Barbara. Bibi . . . she’s Bibi Gaines now, but that’s her married name.”

  “Yeah. Of course. Since forever. One summer we hung out together. I’d take her sailing. Her mother had died pretty recently; the dad was long out of the picture. She was already living with her grandmother.”

  “What was she like? Bibi, I mean, not her grandmother.”

  “We used to get stoned together. Bibi always had epic dope. To look at her, you’d write her off as just another ‘Polly Prepster’ in a sundress. We’d show up at dinnertime in the clubhouse, and I’d be giggling and red-eyed, while Bibi, who was just as shit-faced as I was, would sit at the bar, sipping a wine spritzer and charming all the oldsters. I never understood how she did it. It was an amazing act. Fooled everybody.”

  “Daisy was making veiled comments about serious drug problems; I mean like crack or heroin, not just typical stupid teen stuff.”

  “That’s exactly right. But I’d lost touch with her by then. She was at one of those junior colleges for rich girls. She sold a piece of pretty valuable jewelry to a friend, then reported it lost and collected from the insurance company.”

  “Double dipping?”

  “Yeah. I forget how she got caught but that’s when the shit hit, about the drug problem.”

  Not a word of this had appeared in Portrait of a Lady. “I’ve met Bibi a couple of times recently and to look at her, you’d never know. As your mother would say, she’s ‘a very attractive gal,’ somebody who’d still look great in tennis whites. She seems fine, yet Daisy was hinting otherwise.”

  “All I know is she spent a lot of time at Silver Hill. Married a guy she met there. Another crackhead, or should I say ‘recovering crackhead’? Isn’t that how all serious twelve-steppers refer to themselves?”

  Rannie winced at Peter’s making light of addiction; Tim always called himself a recovering, not former, alcoholic. Tim would write Peter off as a total lightweight. “Him? Really?” she could hear him saying.

  “So tell me. Why the sudden fascination with Bibi Gaines?”

  “Morbid curiosity? You meet somebody. Chat a bit. She seems to have it so totally together . . . when of course nobody does.”

  “Listen. I grew up with lots of people who tarnished their families’ good names. Let me stay at the apartment and you can hear all the stories. It’ll be like Scheherazade.”

  “Nice try. The answer is still no.”

  I am flummoxed, Rannie told herself after hanging up with Peter. Only an hour earlier, when she was leaving the Equinox gym, Rannie’s money was on Larry as “most likely” murder suspect. Now Bibi Gaines was . . . ooh, bad pun in the vicinity! . . . gaining on him.

  Ret must have found out all about Bibi’s past. Daisy hadn’t had any compunction about bad-mouthing Silas Cummings to the quote/unquote Times obit writer, so why would she hold back about Bibi, whom Daisy didn’t like any better? And without a doubt, Larry would have reported everything he’d heard to Ret. That’s what Ret was paying him for. What if Ret had threatened to include Bibi’s youthful transgressions in Portrait of a Lady? It was one thing for the tight-knit circle of your friends and family to know about your crackhead/scam artist days, quite another to have the whole world read about it in a blockbuster bestseller.

  Then in the next instant Rannie recalled that this was just wheel spinning: she’d already discounted extortion as a murder motive. Before now she hadn’t any clue what particular items of dirty laundry Ret might get the chance to air. Now that she did, it didn’t mean murdering Ret made any more sense than before. . . . How would a conversation have gone?

  Ret: Pay me off or else you’ll get your own chapter in the book about Grammy.

  Bibi: Okay, but you swear up and down that if I give you gobs of money, you’ll only write nice things
about me?

  Ret: It’s a promise. We can pinkie lock on it.

  No, it didn’t matter how much money Bibi coughed up, she’d have no guarantee of what made it into print until she had a copy of the book in hand.

  Also, Ret didn’t need money. What she needed was a new face and that she couldn’t get. Furthermore, Ret relished outing people like Mike Bellettra who were poisonous fakes, doing real harm while passing themselves off as upstanding and decent. That’s what kept Ret shoveling for dirt. Smearing somebody like Bibi Gaines, a troubled social twit, was not Ret’s M.O. And the proof was the manuscript itself. Bibi appeared on the printed page as a dutiful granddaughter.

  In many ways, Ret must have envied Bibi. Bibi had essentially been adopted by her grandmother, exactly what little Ret had fantasized happening to her after meeting Charlotte Cummings all those years ago at the convent. So once again Larry was the front-runner. But why, even if he murdered Ret, did he have to go and murder Ellen?

  Unless he hadn’t. Was it possible that Ellen’s death was unrelated? Though the timing was eerily coincidental, was it just an awful instance of random violence?

  As if tuned directly into Station WRANNIE, Larry called that very instant. “I’m parked in front your building.”

  “What! Why?”

  “I’ve got a scarf of yours. You left it at the deli.”

  “I—I—I can’t come down,” Rannie phumphered. “Just leave it in the vestibule. I’ll get it later.”

  “Look. I need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  “My phone’s almost out of juice.”

  “Then talk fast.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Rannie, I wo—” On cue, cellular screeches and blips obliterated half of Larry’s next sentence.

  Rannie heaved a sigh that she hoped carried through to Larry’s dying cell. “I’m coming down but only for a second. Larry? Larry? You hear me?” She pulled on a fleece hoodie over her head. Was it nutty to grab the blue metallic wand of Mace? Even if the answer was yes, she rummaged through a drawer and pocketed it in her fleece.