Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  “What was that?” Bill asked, interrupted.

  “Sorry. Cate just kicked three perfect goals in a row. Outside in the yard.”

  “That’s wonderful—” she thought Bill said but the rest was drowned out by Cate, riding on Ash’s shoulders, reentering the kitchen triumphant.

  “Did you see, Mommy?” she squealed.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Is that Bill? Can I tell him?” Ash dipped down so Cate could reach the phone, then winced as she shouted, “Bill, guess what! Oh, she told you. But did she tell you I scored a million zillion points? Yes a million zillion. What? You are right, in a real game it would only have been three points. But we were playing with different rules. And Ash says I am going to blow them out of the water at the game on Saturday. Ash? He’s my friend. And Mom’s friend from work. Okay, bye.”

  For a split second after Windy hung up the phone, Ash caught himself hoping that Bill was jealous as hell knowing he was there. Then he reminded himself that there was no reason for Bill to feel jealous. Bill belonged here. This was his family. His house. His life. His ideal domestic scene.

  It was time to go.

  Ash looked down and saw that Cate had slipped her hand into his. She said, “What are we having for dinner, Mom?”

  “I thought we could have spaghetti and meatballs. But only if you shape the meatballs the way you like them, since I did them wrong the last time.”

  “You put smiles on them. That’s gross.”

  “It turns out I’m sort of out of touch with what is gross,” Windy confided to him.

  “How about if Ash helps me?” Cate asked.

  Windy was looking at him now. “What do you say? Would you join us for dinner? Cate is a perfectionist about her meatballs but I bet she could teach you.”

  The temptation to stay, to have dinner with this happy family, tugged on Ash like the centrifugal force on a roller coaster and made his stomach feel the same way. He could picture them eating spaghetti here in the kitchen with the yellow-and-white striped cabinets with purple jewel handles, the calendar on the refrigerator with sparkly pony stickers on the Saturdays and Tuesdays that Cate had games, could see them sitting at the light blue table and chairs with the placemats like big pink flowers, could picture it almost too clearly. But there was no place for him here. He made himself shake his head apologetically. Made himself say: “I can’t stay. Sorry.” It was true. He could not stay.

  Cate let go of his hand and gazed at him, showing signs of disappointment no adult would allow herself. “You can’t? For real?”

  He reminded himself that he was opposed to family dinners on principal. Wouldn’t even know how to act. “Unfortunately, I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  Cate’s expression changed then, her eyes widening, head nodding. “Are you taming someone?”

  “Taming?”

  “We are reading The Little Prince,” Windy explained. “To tame—”

  “Means to establish ties,” Cate quoted. “It is like making friends with someone. So that, when you see something that reminds you of them, like a golden wheat field reminding you that their hair is gold, or the sky reminding you of their eyes being blue, that makes you happy.”

  “I see.”

  “And the way you tame people,” Cate went on, “is by coming to see them every day and sitting a little closer to them, so they can look forward to it. That is called observing proper rites.”

  “Observing proper rites,” Ash repeated. “What happens next?”

  “I don’t know. That is as far as we’ve gotten. I could read it by myself but this way we can talk about it. Mommy promised we would read more last night but—”

  “You fell asleep,” Windy put in.

  “I was just pretending,” Cate protested, rolling her eyes at Windy’s gullibility. Then she looked at Ash, putting her hands on her hips. “But if you are taming someone you should go. Mom says it’s always important to be on time and extra important when you are taming someone. They prefer it.”

  “Yes,” Ash agreed, “I think they do.”

  “I hope you can come back for dinner another time.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We can’t promise such fancy literary conversation every time,” Windy said, “but Cate’s friends are always welcome.”

  “He was your friend first,” Cate pointed out.

  “So he was.”

  At the door, Ash bent for a hug from Cate and wished her luck in her game on Saturday, then said to Windy, “You did great work today.”

  “You too.”

  He sensed her hesitating. “What is it?”

  “If you find anything on the tapes from the pawn shop—”

  “Of course. You’re my first call.”

  “What’s a pawn shop?” Cate interjected.

  Windy said, “It’s a place where people sell things they don’t want any more.”

  “Can I sell my toothbrush?”

  “No.”

  “Can I sell—”

  “Why don’t we talk about this while we make the meatballs, honey? Ash needs to go.” She was resting her hand on Cate’s head, and he watched her look down, brushing the hair back with a gesture that was at once tender and fierce. Maternal. She said to him, “You’d better escape while you have the chance.”

  Having no idea how true that was. It took all his willpower to walk to the curb and get in his car. He let himself take one last glimpse of them standing in the open doorway of their house, waving good-bye. Windy barefoot now, smiling at him, then turning to Cate, who was making a face up at her. Windy sticking her fingers in her mouth and goggling out her eyes to make a face back. The two of them, mother and daughter, erupting into peals of laughter.

  Go, he told himself. Before you are truly lost.

  Still, he had to floor it to make himself leave.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sitting on his couch in his house staring at a white wall and feeling more out of place than he had at Windy’s, Ash reached into his pocket to see what was poking him. He came out with his toothpick and the other package of Pop Rocks. He’d just poured the whole thing into his mouth, thinking that Windy was right, the cherry ones were better, when the phone rang.

  “Ash Laughton.”

  “Are you okay?” Jonah’s voice was unsure. “You sound weird.”

  Gulping Pop Rocks, Ash learned, didn’t feel that great. “I’m fine. What’s going on?”

  “I was wondering if you’d had a chance to look at the tapes from the pawn shop.”

  “Not yet, why?”

  “I just got a call from the guys doing the nighttime canvass in the Waterses’ neighborhood. They got another sighting of a green car, like at the Johnson house? This time parked outside the Waterses’ house. Two days before the killing.”

  “Is there any reason to think it was not just a random person parking his car there?”

  “It sat there for more than an hour. And one of them thinks he’d seen it the week before. But that’s not all.”

  “They got the license number? They can identify the car?”

  “It’s a hatchback was about all they could offer. They were a bit distracted, apparently. These two, Gregory and Ed, they are philosophers, spend their nights hanging out outside the pawn shop. When our man talked to them this evening he was interrupting a conversation about how America faked the moon landing.”

  “Ah. Do we have enough to put out an APB on the car? Can they describe it at all?”

  “Foreign looking. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to. Because we have a leak.”

  Ash leaned forward on the couch. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just got a call from channel three asking for confirmation that we are looking for a green car in the Home Wrecker decapitation murders.”

  “The Home Wrecker? They gave the killer a name?”

  “Can’t sell news without a catchy headline.”

  “What did you say?”

  “No comment
, but that’s not going to stop them. They want to ‘help’ us by mentioning it on the air, to generate calls. It’s all over the radio too.”

  “That’ll be a huge help. To the murderer, in case he wasn’t sure we were looking for him. This will put his mind at rest. He’s probably making rental car plans right now. Damn.” Ash stared at the wall for a moment, thinking. “Do you have any idea where they got the information?”

  “No. Channel three made it sound like it came from the mayor’s office, but I talked to them and they are denying it. More convincingly than usual. Gerald pointed out that having a named serial killer always reduces tourism by at least 3 percent.”

  “Well, it’s nice to know the mayor’s heart is in the right place. The Home Wrecker. Great name, too. I wonder how the killer likes it.”

  “You think we’re dealing with a publicity hound?” Jonah asked.

  “Given the way he stages the crime scenes, the kind of control he exerts there, it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t enjoy feeling in control of the media too. I only hope he doesn’t perform for them.”

  “Are you still going to go over the pawn shop tapes? Now that the green car probably won’t lead anywhere?”

  “It beats whatever is on TV.”

  “Need help?”

  “No, I’ve got it covered.”

  Ash had made it through three of the tapes from the pawn shop and eaten his way through four of the six leftover take-out containers in his refrigerator when he spotted something interesting. He rewound past it and watched it in slow motion.

  He said, “Oh yes,” aloud without realizing it, and knew his pulse rate had jumped. He didn’t know which excited him more, the discovery or the thought of what he was going to get to spend the rest of the night doing.

  He checked his wallet to make sure he had a wad of cash, then flipped open the yellow pages. He found what he wanted right away: Charlene’s Massage Parlor and Internet Café, Open 24 Hours.

  CHAPTER 21

  When she’d stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on her coffee table and decided to go for a drive, Eve Sebastian had only planned to be gone for a little while. But once the car started it kept on going, like it was driving itself, until it ended up here. Four hours earlier, the car—not her—had eased to a stop across the street from the house she had been avoiding. The one house she didn’t think she was ready to face yet. The next house on the list.

  As evening turned to night she’d watched the shadows on the house grow longer and longer until they were darkness. The streetlights flickered on, the street got busier, people came home from work, a girl Rollerbladed behind a German shepherd, and she sat there. At one point the parking spaces in front and in back of her began filling up with SUVs and imported sedans driven by women about her age. They slid out of their cars, some in trim business suits and scarves, others in pants and pearls and sweater sets, but even in their different clothes, they all looked the same to her. Confident. Sure of themselves. Sure of their lives. They had thumbnail-sized diamonds on their engagement rings and wallets bursting with photos of smiling children. They waved at one another and hugged, right outside her window, and then marched smugly up the front stairs of the house next to the one she was watching, shiny shopping bags with cartoon animals and premade bows in one hand, foil covered plates in the other. She noticed that there were pink and blue balloons tied to the doorknob and it all clicked into place. A baby shower.

  She lit another cigarette.

  She had always thought that one day she would have a baby shower. More than one. She’d wanted a house filled with kids, a husband who came home and yelled, “Honey, it’s me.” Family dinners with everyone together. Occasional nights out on the town, just her and her husband, talking about how the children were doing in school, not really having much to say to one another, but comfortable, happy. She used to love to baby-sit when she was younger, first to play with the kids, then, when they were asleep, to explore the lives of grown-ups. She went through drawers and cabinets, stared forever at their family photos, the ones in frames, the ones in albums, the ones that were shoved in the back of the pen drawer, trying to guess what made some worthy of display and not others. Were the photos really there for strangers, or for the family to reaffirm that it belonged together? She would try to imagine what it was like when they were all gathered around the breakfast table in the morning, what they said, where everyone sat. Trying on the lives of all the families by herself, in the strange, quiet houses.

  On the radio, the Hits from High School Hour started up on the eighties station and Madonna’s voice came on singing “Like a Virgin,” making Eve remember Victor Early. Victor, the reason she stopped baby-sitting, stopped playing “happy family.” Victor with his wide chest covered in curly hair, the thick gold chain he wore around his neck, the diamond horse’s head on his pointer finger.

  Madonna had been playing on the tape deck in her bedroom that afternoon when the doorbell rang and she opened it to see a middle-aged friend of her father’s. She had been not quite fifteen at the time, so it was twenty years ago, but she still remembered what he was wearing, a burgundy silk shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, black pants.

  He smiled at her and held out a hand. “Hi, I’m Victor. A friend of your father’s? I saw you when you came with your mom to the casino to pick him up last week.”

  She hadn’t known what to say. The experience had been mortifying. Her mother storming across the floor to the blackjack tables, then screaming at her father. “Where have you been? You have got to come home. I am so tired of being left alone like this.”

  Eve had stood off to the side, pretending not to be with them, chin up, looking around. Trying to seem like one of the models from a fashion magazine, the kind that could be standing in the middle of a Chinese fish market but look untouched in whatever white linen outfit they were modeling.

  “My father’s not home,” she’d told Victor.

  “I know. I just saw him at the tables. That’s why I thought I’d stop by. Can I come in?”

  She had shrugged and opened the door. As she led him into the living room she tugged her cutoffs down and let her hips go side to side. She’d known right away what he’d come to say, even though it took him ten minutes to get around to it. Knowing allowed her to have power. She sat down on the sofa and stretched her legs out, letting the strap of her tank top fall down. “What did you want, Victor?”

  He looked at her in a way no one ever had, a way she’d longed for. Like she made him hungry. “Well, it’s about your dad. He’s having problems with money. A bunch of the guys and I offered to lend it to him, but you know how he is.”

  She did. She loved how proud her father was. She tried to sound mature. “Go on.”

  “Well, I was thinking, maybe you’d want to help out. How would you like to earn some money on the side?”

  He started off saying a hundred dollars for a blow job, but she knew she could get more. In the end they settled on five hundred dollars for the works, ten times what she’d make baby-sitting in a week. They did it right in her room, on her twin mattress with the princess canopy. She liked Victor, liked his bald head and the grayish hair that curled on his back. The cologne he wore was the same as her father’s. And it only took him five minutes to come.

  “I’ll call you,” he said, still with admiration in his eyes afterward, and she believed him. Hoped so when she saw the look on her father’s face as she handed him the cash.

  “Where did you get this?” her father had asked, beaming. Not suspicious.

  “I got a new job.”

  “For me? You did this for me? Oh baby, you are the best daughter in the world. My Eve is such a good girl.”

  She never forgot how tight he hugged her that night, how he kissed her on the top of her head before he left, looking at the money clutched in his hand and smiling. Never wondering how a baby-sitter could make fifteen hundred dollars a week. She knew he’d think about her the whole time he was gone.
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  In the car Eve lit a cigarette and Madonna promised to give all her love, because only love lasts.

  Victor liked to listen to the Madonna song while they did it, turning it up loud, calling her his little virgin. She remembered one night when he told her to leave her school uniform on, especially her lace-trimmed anklets. Just looking at them could make him hard, he said. And then he’d said he loved her. Wished he could be with her, not his wife. She had let him do it without a condom on that night. It was only a little after seven, light outside, warm, and they had the window open. Victor with sweat sliding down his chest, his face ridged in profile, eyes closed, crushing her tiny breasts underneath him. He grunted into her, one two three, hard, like always, then, not like always, shouted out her name.

  They hadn’t heard the car pull into the driveway, her mother coming home from a lesson early, but they heard the footsteps and then the pounding on the door. Her mother screaming now, “What the hell is going on in there? Open this door, you little slut, before I break it down.”

  Victor dancing around, out of breath, trying to pull up his pants, pull on his undershirt, grab his silk button-down, throw his Italian loafers out the window, throw himself after them. Finally her mother banged so hard the door slammed open, just as Victor disappeared over the ledge. Thinking of him running down the street holding his pants up made her laugh, even as her mother stormed in, screaming at her, “You slut, you stupid bitch having boys in your room.”

  Boys. That made Eve laugh harder. Who needed boys? She had men who loved her.

  Then her mother’s hand went for that box. The special music box her father had given her. The one where she kept all her money.

  She’d flown across the room and gotten her hand around her mother’s wrist. “I hate you. Let go right now or I’ll tell Daddy.”

  It had worked, her mother backing off, closing the door and locking it from the outside. She had waited all night with her school uniform on thinking Victor might come back, elbows resting on the windowsill, taking a drag of one of Victor’s menthol cigarettes and blowing it out slowly. Bringing the lit tip to her forearm and holding it. She had to strain to hear the sound of her skin burning over the sound of Madonna’s voice singing “Like a Virgin” from the tape player. Staring at herself in the mirror, flat chested, flat hair, wishing her daddy would come home, wishing Victor would come back for her in his big Cadillac with the burgundy velour seats. Finally picking up the jewelry box her father had given her for her seventh birthday, given it to her with the #1 DAUGHTER necklace inside. Her most prized possession. Throwing the box at the mirror, right at the center, watching it crack.