The Grift

by Debra Ginsberg

  The sun had gone down on a Saturday evening and the roads were still as packed as a Monday morning. As Marina inched toward Rancho Santa Fe, she had plenty of time to think about what she was doing and all the rational arguments for why she shouldn’t be doing it. She was a pregnant woman, alone, about to go to a place where, at the very best, she would be unwelcome. Several people at this party had reason to avoid her, to fear what she knew. She knew about their lies and infidelities, the small and large cruelties they’d inflicted on the people they claimed to love. But Marina wasn’t crashing this party to release skeletons from closets. She was looking for Gideon’s ring. What happened once she found it was for fate to decide. This, Marina realized, could not really be called a reasonable plan.

  The reasonable thing would be to call Detective Franks, whose card she’d stuffed into her purse as some sort of talisman, and tell him what she was doing. He’d called and left a message for her yesterday, telling her “we have a few more questions we’d like to ask you, so if you could give us a call back…” Marina’s initial surge of alarm over that message had given way to dull anxiety when she realized that if he’d wanted to—if he had enough evidence—Detective Franks could have just shown up at her door as he had before and taken her to the police station. That he’d chosen to leave a cordial voice-mail message meant that her cooperation was still voluntary. But it wouldn’t be for long, Marina sensed. They were closing in on her.

  But how could she call the detective now and tell him that she knew Gideon’s ring was on Kiki’s finger? That Kiki had been a client of hers? That Max, who had given it to her, couldn’t possibly have been the person who had ripped it from Gideon’s neck because Max was gay and hiding so much already that he’d never flaunt the evidence of a crime in plain sight—that it just wasn’t his way? That someone had killed Gideon and had taken the ring and if she could just touch it she’d know who it was? That she’d promised Gideon’s mother she’d wear it until the danger was past? No, Marina thought, none of that would seem reasonable and all of it would make her seem guiltier than she already did.

  But it was all moot anyway, because reason no longer guided Marina’s decisions. If the police were going to arrest her, reasoning out a plan would do nothing to stop it. She could only keep moving ahead in the direction she was being pushed and hope that she wasn’t halted before she could get there. Fate had become Marina’s primary driving force, perhaps the most powerful change in the series of cataclysmic upheavals that had begun the night she met Gideon.

  Of the myriad categories that people could be broken into, Marina thought the most basic was the one that separated the believers in probability from the fatalists, a difference more elemental than gender. The only thing that allowed the two types to coexist was that they both accounted for a measure of free will. Those who figured they could beat the odds lined up to buy lottery tickets right next to those who were reaching for their destinies. Marina had always been so far on the side of odds that she couldn’t even see the view from where the fatalists were standing. But now she believed the very concept of randomness was something created to stave off the crush of inevitability. Marina’s old sense of reason was like a phantom limb. She could try to use it, but it was no longer there, and she found herself being pushed forward by a different hand. This was exactly how she’d come to be on this road, headed to Madeline’s house, a crawling sense of danger growing with each mile.

  It troubled Marina that Cooper’s observation and not her own vision had provided the first place to search. That he’d gotten a good enough look at her ring to recognize it on another woman’s hand made her wonder how much else she’d missed. Marina had always been so intent on studying others that she hadn’t realized how carefully they were looking at her. Poor Cooper didn’t have any idea how twisted a story he was part of, but he knew that there was something very wrong about where that ring had ended up. “You can see for yourself,” he’d told Marina as she led him inside her house. “They’re having a ‘coming out’—ha!—at a party in Rancho tomorrow night. It’s at—well, you know Madeline, don’t you? Of course you do, that’s where I met you.” Then he’d started babbling, so relieved that she wasn’t angry at him, he’d said, because he’d done some things, some things that weren’t at all what he was about, but if she only knew how hard it had been and…And then he’d passed out; he’d literally listed to the side and then down into the soft folds of her couch. By the time the paramedics had arrived he was conscious enough to smile at her and attempt a weak joke about the extremes some people would go to to get attention.

  “You’re going to the hospital,” she told him, “but you’re going to be fine, Cooper.”

  “You said,” he mumbled. “A gardener, right?” By the time she’d made sure Cooper was settled and resting royally in the hospital, which had a wing named after his father, Marina had already decided to crash Madeline’s party.

  Memories descended thick and fast as she got closer to Madeline’s house. Passing the San Elijo Lagoon, she remembered her ride with Gideon, how quiet and full of mystery he’d been on the way to the hotel. She searched for his face in her mind’s eye, but it remained frustratingly out of view. So she tried to focus on the details she could see: the big white bed full of promise, the way the dawn light had muted and softened the colors in the room, and the roses. The roses. Marina could smell their sweetness again mixed with the tang of smoke.

  “Gideon, where are you?” she said out loud. I’m sorry, she added silently. I should have gone home. I should have listened. I should have been there. And then there was more, the slow leak of useless regret. She’d promised the old woman that she’d wear the ring and keep him safe. If she’d kept it hidden, if she’d never let him see it—take it…

  The line of traffic finally thinned as Marina left the main road and started maneuvering through the dark plush interior of Rancho Santa Fe. She knew the way by heart from here, the muscle memory of all those visits to Madeline coming back to her. Madeline in repose on the red chaise longue, her pale hands resting on the swell of her belly. Madeline twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger. Andrew, dark and glowering, hovering at the edges of doorways, watching and disapproving. His hand clutching a cut-crystal glass.

  Marina’s heart started beating fast, pushing adrenaline through her veins. She smelled it first, strong and harsh, and then she tasted the bitter burn of scotch whiskey on her tongue. Her stomach turned in revolt. More came down, filling her nose and mouth as if she were swallowing great gulps of liquor. Marina coughed, her throat closing up, and felt as if she was going to vomit. Her head swimming, she pulled over on a soft shoulder and opened her window to let in some air.

  Not drunk enough. Not even close.

  It was that head again, and this time it had invaded hers. Her vision wavered and she gagged. She opened the car door and leaned out, spitting the vile taste in her mouth onto the road.

  Where are you going?

  I’ll be back in a minute.

  Marina closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, trying to slow her breathing. Behind her closed lids she saw a swirl of color come slowly into focus. Palm trees and a blue-and-white-striped hammock. A man in a Hawaiian shirt drinking out of a coconut and talking to a woman wearing a grass skirt. The vision swung a hard right onto a dark patio where several people were sitting around a fire pit, their bare feet buried in a pile of sand. Another dizzying spin and she was looking into the maw of a huge punch bowl filled with something red. There were bursts of loud noise: laughter, the crash of a glass breaking, several people talking at once. It became a deafening, blinding din and Marina opened her eyes.

  Shut up—just shut the fuck up.

  Then there was nothing except for the nauseating taste of scotch and the smell of roses. Marina opened her eyes. Five minutes of slow, steady breathing later, she was still shaking from the violence of the attack—the only word she could think to describe what had just happened to her. She started h
er car and pulled back onto the road. As she drove unsteadily toward Madeline’s house, her vision seemed to tunnel and shrink as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. For the first time since she’d left her house, she felt the baby kick, bringing her back into her own body. If this were a movie, Marina thought, the violins would be screeching to a foreshadowing crescendo right about now, and the audience would be thinking, Don’t go there; turn around! But, of course, the character would keep going, oblivious, even though any idiot could see the danger she was heading into. And this was exactly what Marina did.

  Marina found a fleet of Jaguars, Mercedes, BMWs and Hummers clogging not only Madeline’s driveway but a good portion of the street in front of her house. She was forced to park much farther away from the house than she wanted, and as she wove her way between the cars in the dark, she remembered the crowd at Madeline’s last party: the people thronging around their human sushi platter and her own carnival tent at the other end of the room. Madeline had hired a valet service for that one—an “LA thing,” Marina remembered someone telling her. Only at the really chichi LA events, the valets gave you roses when they brought around your car.

  Marina caught her heel on a loose piece of gravel and stumbled. She felt a thump and couldn’t tell if it was coming from inside her or if the ground beneath her was shaking. The smell and taste of scotch was burning her throat again. She could hear ukulele island music coming from the house now, the sound of a party in full sway, and she realized that what she’d seen in the car a few minutes before was what was going on inside the house now. Once again, she felt the frustration of always being simultaneously one step ahead and two steps behind herself. It made trying to figure out what was going on in the present an almost impossible task. But there was something else she was hearing now.

  Marina? Marina, it’s Gideon. Are you there?

  She was there again, in the heart of that night, hiding in the back of her office as she saw Gideon approaching. He’d come to tell her he loved her, to apologize for leaving her, to try to work things out. He wanted to listen to her story, to understand. And she would never be able to tell him, because she raised the arm that wasn’t hers and brought the gun down hard across his skull, hearing the crack of it, watching him fall.

  Must get rid of the evidence. Can’t leave anything behind. Take his wallet and his keys. What’s that around his neck? What kind of pansy wears a ring like this on a chain? A piece like this is worth…take it. Must take it. Have to burn this place down. Fire burns everything clean.

  Marina’s lungs were thick with smoke. She coughed and gasped for breath. It was hot: burning, agonizing heat. No, no! Marina’s tears scalded her cheeks. He was still alive when her office went up in flames. The blow to his head had knocked him out, but the fire had killed him. If she’d gotten there just minutes earlier…Just minutes would have made the difference between his life and his horrible death.

  Marina kept walking as the remnants of her vision fell away from her. She could feel the presence now—that cruel mind she’d shared—and she could tell it was very close. The sound of her racing blood sang in her ears and her face was wet with tears. She was almost there. Finally, at the top of the long driveway, Marina veered off to the side of the house and the entrance she’d always used when she’d come here before. It didn’t occur to her until she was past the garage that she probably shouldn’t be using what she’d always thought of as the service entrance. No matter; if the door here was open it would be easier to slide in undetected.

  But Marina didn’t even get as far as the door. Just as she reached Madeline’s blooming rosebushes, a man smelling strongly of alcohol stepped in front of her and blocked her path. Andrew.

  “Witch,” he said, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  Marina’s senses sharpened to a razor’s edge. She saw the anger inside Andrew as a roiling mass, barely contained and pushing to get out. Her own head pounded. Panic thickened her throat and she couldn’t speak.

  “I mean, you must have some kind of balls to show up at my house.” He was drunk, but steady on his feet, and there was no slur in his words, just cold dark hatred. “Either that or you’re even stupider than my stupid bitch wife.”

  Marina saw it then—the scene unfolding like a film clip in her mind. Gideon approaching her office and peering into the darkness, where he’d seen the flashlight flicker. There in the back, Andrew waiting with his hand on his gun. He’d left the door unlocked and Gideon had just walked in. Andrew, consumed with hatred and bitterness over a life that hadn’t produced what he wanted from it. And all of that dark loathing spilling out of him. There at her desk, over her tarot cards and candles, Andrew’s hate met Gideon’s love and the two exploded in flames. It was she who should have been in the center of that vortex, not Gideon.

  “It was you,” Marina said.

  “You’re like a bad penny,” Andrew said, moving closer to her. “Like a black cat. And you won’t go away. I knew you were fucking trouble the minute I saw you.” He was practically on top of her now. She could feel his liquored breath on her face. “You should have quit while you were ahead,” he hissed.

  Marina tried to back away, but he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her still closer. His face was so contorted with anger that it was starting to look like a Halloween mask. Her vision telescoped again, Andrew’s face seeming to tunnel backward, and now she saw him through Gideon’s eyes. He was leaning over, his hands pulling, grabbing, taking wallet, keys and now the ring—yanking it, snapping the chain.

  “No!” she shouted. Everything went black; she couldn’t see. She struggled to move, to open her eyes, but she was dead weight. Smoke filled her lungs. She couldn’t breathe; she was burning, choking—

  —Andrew’s hands were on her throat, her mouth, shaking her. “Shut up, shut up!” The words came through his gritted teeth.

  “You killed him,” she gasped. Her voice was dying in her throat and he was squeezing harder, his fingers locked around her windpipe. She grabbed at his hands, her fingernails piercing his flesh but unable to loosen his grip. He was too strong and she was choking. He was going to kill her. She was going to die. Bright spots danced in front of her eyes and time slowed. It was not her life flashing in pieces through her mind now but the last seconds of Gideon’s. She saw herself, soft and smiling, a version she’d never seen with her own eyes. She felt his love and hope as he reached for her. She heard his heart calling out her name. I’m sorry, Marina. I understand now. He didn’t want to let go, wasn’t ready to leave. There was so much unfinished.

  There was no more breath. The light went out. Her body went limp.

  Marina fell.

  There was a rush of blood to her head, the sharp scrape of thorns and the sweet smell of roses. With a crash of broken branches, a body fell and landed heavily next to her. Soft petals rained down on her face. She coughed and sucked in air, turned her head and saw Andrew’s dead eyes staring into hers. She felt the scream, but no sound came from her damaged throat.

  “Marina! Are you all right?”

  She turned to the voice and saw Eddie leaning over her, reaching out with his hands to lift her. “Can you speak? Are you all right?”

  Marina clung to him, trying to get to her feet. “What happened?” The words scraped out raspy and wounded.

  “Goddamn insane bastard. He would have killed you.” Eddie put his arms around her, supporting her full weight with his body, and carry-dragged her away from the rosebushes. “He would have killed you,” he repeated, his voice wavering. “I had to…” He turned his head and Marina followed his anxious eyes to where Andrew lay half buried in the roses, his legs splayed and twisted. Something that looked like a length of pipe was resting on the ground next to him. “I didn’t hit him that hard,” Eddie said. “Fuck, we need an ambulance. You need to go to a hospital.” Marina felt his muscles tensing. He wanted to run. She tried to let go of him, but her weak knees wouldn’t hold her up. “It’s okay, it’s oka
y,” he said. “I won’t leave you.”

  “Eddie…it’s all right. You saved my life.”

  As soon as she got the words out, everything around them exploded into a mad whirl of color and sound. A door opened, spilling light and music, and Madeline walked out, a small group of partiers trailing her.

  “I don’t know where he’s gotten to. Andrew! Andrew, we have guests here!”

  “Yeah, you don’t want to miss the limbo, Andrew!” someone added. Marimbas blared from inside.

  “—hope he didn’t run away from home, Maddie.”

  “—went to get some ice for—”

  “—seen their rosebushes? They’re ama—”

  “—that was Don Ho, stupid—”

  “Andrew! Where are you? What—”

  It was Madeline who reached them first, her face blanching the shade of her diaphanous white gown as she registered first Eddie, then Marina.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!”

  “What is—”

  A woman shrieked, the sound of it knifing through the air.

  “Somebody call nine-one-one!”

  Madeline turned and saw her husband’s body. It took no more than a second, but Marina saw it. Madeline flicked her eyes back to Eddie, her face registering not shock or grief, but indecision. She was trying to come up with the best, most genuine reaction so that her witnesses could attest to it later. Instantly, the look was gone. Madeline opened her mouth wide and screamed.

  “It’s all right,” Marina whispered to Eddie. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Chapter 37

  Cooper ran his fingers through his freshly cut hair and surveyed the effect in the long salon mirror in front of him.

  “You want to see the back?” Cassie said. “It looks awesome.” She handed him a round hand mirror and swiveled his chair so that he could get a look at the back of his head. She wasn’t wrong, he thought, checking her work. The short, ultra-professional style suited him perfectly. Of course, it would have looked like crap a few months ago when his face was fat and sallow. The triumph of this haircut owed as much to the rest of Cooper’s new look as it did to Cassie’s talent as a stylist. Nevertheless, he had to give credit where credit was due.