It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  Virginia began to nibble on the roll.

  “Have you read the new Lydia Bunting?”

  Virginia shook her head.

  “It’s not bad,” said Pat. “A little too much about the forensics.”

  “How much time does she have left?” asked Virginia. Bunting had declared in print several years ago that she would kill herself at the age of seventy-five, since the world had no use for old women.

  “You don’t really think she’s going to do it, do you?” said Pat.

  “Why not?”

  “Well!” said Pat. “I don’t know!” Something in her tone made Virginia glance up. She’d made Pat nervous. Just a little.

  “You must come back with me,” said Pat, anxiously.

  Virginia stared.

  “I have some people to see. People who lost money. I get the feeling I’m supposed to help them out. You know, with a small check.”

  “People like me?” asked Virginia quietly.

  “Not like you, exactly,” said Pat.

  Virginia put her head in her hands. It was impossible to explain that losing money was bad, but not as bad as having been tricked—not as bad as having been so stupid she probably deserved it.

  “Well, they’re sort of like you,” said Pat uncertainly. She evidently assumed that she could have both a big heart and a big appetite—to be, in effect, both generous and greedy. The rich thought they could buy anything. Or should be able to.

  “Don’t worry,” said Pat. “Frank and I have a lot of money. Besides which, if worse comes to worse, the house is mine. I got it for my birthday, and I can do what I want with it.”

  “You got it for your birthday,” Virginia repeated.

  “Well…yes.”

  “Frank was protecting his assets,” said Virginia.

  Pat didn’t seem to take this in. “Oh, Ginny,” she said. “No one’s around. My mother’s in Florida, my brother’s in Vancouver, and Frank’s parents are both dead….”

  Could she be serious? Did she really need the company?

  “Come with me,” said Pat. “Please.” She sounded as if she were still sixteen. Virginia felt her brain loosen and start to float.

  In the Damariscotta library she’d discovered the mysteries of L. P. Davis, which were long out of print. Although not all of them worked, their ambition took Virginia’s breath away. The main character in each thought he was someone else, and—here’s the clincher—he was right. Moreover, he was right in a literal, not just a moral sense. The convolutions necessary to achieve this, the feints and sleights of hand, the serums and syringes, were wonderful to witness. But the audacity of the goal was even more delicious. Davis triumphed over the severest restriction on the self, i.e., its very singleness, and although dissolution was occasionally threatened, or courted, it was always avoided. Virginia found the high-wire act exhilarating. The allure of being another person while remaining herself dazzled her brain.

  That is what Virginia thought about when she first considered going back to Hart Ridge with Pat. Slipping out of one life and into another possessed a horrible attraction. She could have tried to talk sense to Pat about handing out money, because, after all, the idea was nonsense. Any distribution, however insignificant, was bound to be unfair. It was impossible to tell who was really in need. Whenever anyone tried to give away money, it ended up in the wrong pockets. But why should Virginia try to argue any of this? She didn’t have the strength.

  She knew that Molly’s father, who owned the restaurant, would be happy if she claimed a family emergency, sham or not. She’d been taken on at the Dock for the summer, when it was busy. Now it was overstaffed. Her two and a half days a week would disappear until the tourists came back in June. She was going to find herself with no work at all. It was as if she were being given the opportunity to walk off a cliff and remain suspended in midair. Let the eventual crash take care of itself.

  Virginia finished all the appetizers except the nachos, she drank a second cup of coffee, she tried the eggs, she ate one of Pat’s oysters. By the time the check arrived, she’d agreed to go pack a suitcase for New Jersey.

  “Can I follow you in my car?” said Pat.

  It would have been a little slow. “I walked here,” said Virginia.

  “How wonderful,” said Pat. “You feel so good after you exercise.”

  Pat didn’t stop talking as they shot south in her new VW Touareg, an SUV Virginia had never heard of. It seemed more like a club room, with deep brown leather seats and a skylight in the roof exposed by a sliding roof and a sound system that made you think the music was in your head.

  “A cop stopped me for speeding on the way up, and really it was ridiculous,” Pat was saying as she outraced a tractor trailer.

  Virginia tried to catch a covert glimpse of the speedometer, then simply closed her eyes. She wanted to have a regular conversation, but she had found herself through the years increasingly incapable of holding one. She wasn’t even sure people had them anymore. Or ever did.

  “I should have been mad,” said Pat, “but the cop was a woman, and she had on this type of round-toothed plastic headband that I’ve always wondered about. Do you know which one I mean? It clamps down and separates the strands of hair. It’s almost scary. It looks as if it’s cutting the hair, sort of ejecting it, like a pasta maker. So finally I interrupted her and asked whether it hurt. The trouble is, she had no idea what I was talking about. I don’t think it’s a great sign if cops can’t feel pain.”

  Virginia kept her eyes closed, pretending to doze, and some of the pretense must have become real. She lost track of when they left Maine and how long they’d been traveling. She became aware of the road again only later, when a voice from the dashboard said, “Check your route, take your first legal U-turn.” She was surprised at how big the cars had gotten and how dense the traffic. Maine had SUVs, of course, even the huge new ones that didn’t look like passenger vehicles so much as armored trucks carrying sacks of cash. It was the telecommuters who drove them. But there weren’t many, and because of the backcountry you could say that they had some faint justification. None of the SUVs on these highways, however, had ever been driven off road. It was like being stuck on a conveyor belt in an SUV showroom.

  “Are you all right?” asked Pat.

  “Yes,” said Virginia.

  “You looked sort of, I don’t know, pale in that nice restaurant of yours.”

  They zipped past a moving van. Maybe Virginia would simply die on the road.

  “Frank sat on the subway once next to a person reading a mystery,” said Pat, “while all over the car you could hear a woman telling a guy that she was going to cut him if he ever touched her again. Frank wanted to know why someone would ignore a real crime to read about a pretend one. He’d remind me of it every time I picked up a book.”

  “Maybe he wanted you to find him out,” said Virginia. “I mean, you know, wanted you to ferret out his accounting…mmm, irregularities.”

  “That’s so clever!” cried Pat. “I never would have thought of it. But Frank claims I knew all along.”

  A pause. “Did you?” asked Virginia.

  Pat shrugged. “How was I supposed to know all that silly stuff was illegal?”

  An interesting defense.

  “You wouldn’t believe who I saw. Lemuel Samuel. He said some really mean things about LinkAge, which I’m sure were true, so I went looking for him, but when I found him, he was in the hospital, near death. Oh, can you get that?” A thin tune trickled out of her doctor’s bag, or rather, the beginning of a tune, repeated over and over. It was familiar, but Virginia could not place it.

  The bag was bigger than it looked from the outside, and the four-note refrain repeated several times before Virginia identified the trim compact as a cellphone. She handed it to Pat, who opened it with a flick of the wrist.

  “Why, yes, sweetheart, of course. Whatever you say. Are you having a good time?” Pat closed up the phone and handed it back. “Ruby. She’s
having a good time in Washington, thank God. I was a little worried. She’s been having some trouble adjusting.”

  “Lemuel Samuel?” said Virginia. Pat must have toyed with the idea of taking up with him while her husband was in prison. “Is he dead?” How could she take it all in? It was too ridiculous! Just like Pat.

  Suddenly a black car door was inches from the glass by Virginia’s right shoulder, becoming her whole field of vision, like a “Kapow!” panel in a cartoon. An instant later Pat’s car was in the left lane, and a black Lexus was sashaying off over the horizon. “Well!” said Pat in her pleasant soprano. “That was unexpected. We must have crossed the border into New Jersey.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Virginia had met her ex-husband, Alain, on the street in Providence. He was French-Canadian, and ostensibly the marriage was one of convenience, so he could get a green card. She had looked forward to the refuge of a paper marriage. She was surprised and disappointed when Alain took it as seriously as any of his many other hard-to-define plans and projects. Their relationship was half sham and half real, and the strands became harder and harder to disentangle.

  Because Alain was older and had a lot of still older friends, he and Virginia started going to dinner parties together, a mind-numbing practice. Why file off in pairs to other people’s apartments just to eat? It was hard enough to find one human being worth talking to, let alone two who were married to each other. The table settings, the boy-girl seating arrangements, and the stiff parade of courses were a grotesque parody of the upper-middle-class life found in a Golden Age mystery; movement seemed constricted to keep down the number of suspects. Virginia found it impossible to sit still. She was afraid that if she listened to one more interesting opinion or funny anecdote she would scream. Instead she jumped up. No one would question her; everyone would figure she was off to the bathroom, which was where she’d start. Then she would wander. Out to the back porch, maybe, or into the couple’s bedroom, which they would have tried to make look normal.

  A terrible and heavy black cloud could engulf her for weeks. After Argosy bought “The Red Door,” the cloud refused to leave. She drank herself to sleep every night. In desperation she seized upon Alain’s nervous evocation of “the dark woods” where he spent his enchanted childhood. She longed for countless black conifers, a wildness beyond fear, and a blanket of oblivion. Leaving her marriage behind, she got in her old Chevy Caprice, drove up the coast of Maine, and read in a pine-paneled motel room for days, living off grilled-cheese sandwiches she took out from a diner. It was amazing to think now of the money she’d wasted on prepared food. She read The Cuckoo Line Affair because the facts that had to be overturned for a happy ending were simple, and she could shut her mind down to a crack, which filtered out more powerful emotions. Around her, she sensed, the world was caught in a dizzying spiral, but by limiting her own vision, she could stay fairly steady.

  All these years later, pausing in the center of Pat Foy’s guest room, Virginia felt similarly unmoored. She wound her arms around her waist as her eyes swung here and there. The room was decorated in pale violet and cream. On one wall were nine framed noir paperback covers, all with brightly colored mats that picked up the lurid forties hues. On the wainscoting was a cunning collection of souvenir matches, pins, postcards, coasters, rubber stamps, and shot glasses. On the bedside table was an oversize encyclopedia of crime fiction. On the floor was a Roman funeral urn and an early-sixties-era rug with huge orange dots.

  In her twenties Virginia would have admired this décor. Now, though, she saw it through plainer New England hardscrabble eyes. It was a perfect example of the irony of plenty. Anyone can go slumming or indulge in reverse snobbery. Virginia did it all the time (although probably no one else realized it). But it took an immense amount of time and money to be this hip about icons of passion and intrigue.

  She had no sense of the physical placement of the Foy home. Evening had fallen by the time Pat had driven up the short but surprisingly steep driveway. Confusing lights shone every which way from the garage and the path and the garden as well as the house, the sudden hulking presence of which was like an ocean liner moving out of the fog, its horn replaced by the full-ranged barking of Pat’s dogs.

  The layout of the house was also unclear. Virginia could not remember which way she’d come from the first floor, although she was just supposed to be depositing her “suitcase”—a black canvas tote bag that Pamela had gotten free with Estée Lauder cosmetics. It looked preposterous beside the Roman funeral urn. When she crept down an unfamiliar set of stairs, the dogs found her. They were still yipping and weaving and lifting themselves off their front legs. There were three of them, one big and black and short-haired, not very peppy, but his bumping and obstructing was the most annoying because of his sheer weight. The others were younger and friskier and louder, but kept their distance.

  The noise attracted Pat’s attention; she called from behind a closed door somewhere down the hall. Virginia opened a door to reveal a bathroom with a Kiss Me Deadly poster, soaps shaped like roses, and what looked like a jewel-encrusted drinking cup. It was the most heartlessly ironic drinking vessel Virginia had ever seen. Forget jelly glasses or mugs with cartoon characters. This brought the Borgias’ poison cup to mind.

  The next door opened onto a fully enclosed windowless space, where the walls were lined with shelves and bins. Here Pat stood on a painted wide-planked floor and turned whiskey bottles so she could read the labels. They were almost out of her reach. “Single malts,” said Pat. “Frank loved them. Do any of them catch your eye? I know you used to drink Scotch.” To the dogs, who had burst in behind Virginia, their claws clattering on the bare wood floor, she said, “Down, down.”

  Virginia suddenly realized they were in a storeroom, a pantry, that was bigger—much bigger—than her bedroom in Maine. She gazed around at the open shelves. One held just cereal. Two held pasta.

  “Or do you want a martini?” asked Pat. “I’ve already started.” She pointed to a glass on the ledge that separated the higher, narrower shelves from the larger cabinets below. “I’m exhausted. We’ll eat, drink, and hop into bed.” She sounded a little hysterical, actually.

  Virginia tried to push the biggest dog away from her. “You drove both ways today,” she said, conscious for the first time of how exceptional that was.

  “Oh, well,” said Pat, grabbing a bottle of Dalwhinnie. “You know me. Down, Foster! Down!”

  The sight of so much Scotch made Virginia nervous, but she figured she might as well go ahead and have a drink. Although she hadn’t had one since she’d ended up calling the Christmas tree farmer in the middle of the night, there was little chance of repeating herself.

  “You know what I can’t stand?” said Pat. “Prison break movies. Steel files and cracks in the cement and tiny pieces of string. Carefully hiding the dirt from the tunnel. All those close-ups! The housekeeping reminds me too much of my own life.”

  Much of the far wall in the living room was a Cinemascope-like black window in which a vast and curious collection of lights sparkled. After a moment Virginia picked out the familiar Manhattan skyline in the center. But it was dwarfed by endless points of light scattered into the inky darkness to the north and to the south.

  Pat lowered herself into a huge green sofa, sighed, and said, “Ah, that’s better. There’s nothing like a drink.”

  “Yes,” said Virginia, perching opposite her on a similarly oversize green couch. Pat had always used her enthusiasm as a shield, which Virginia respected. They’d never pried into each other’s lives.

  “And I love the idea of being a great philanthropist!” added Pat. “We’re going to have terrific fun.”

  Virginia looked into her glass. She should be grateful to a philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie, who built thousands of libraries across the country, many of which carried her books. But maybe he shouldn’t have destroyed his steelworkers to make the money in the first place. Sucking wealth upward an
d then letting it dribble back down was notoriously inefficient.

  “I intend to have just as much fun at the age of seventy-five,” said Pat. “That’s why I don’t believe Lydia Bunting will go through with it.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” said Virginia cautiously. She hadn’t sat in a house having a drink with a girlfriend for so long that she couldn’t remember how it was done. Where were you supposed to direct your eyes when you talked to her? If you kept looking straight at her, that was staring, and even if Virginia had been able to keep it up, which she probably couldn’t, no one liked to be stared at; she surely didn’t. But you shouldn’t just gaze out the window, either, even if that’s what you wanted to do, because then it looked like you weren’t paying attention.

  “Do you mind if I read this letter from Frank?” asked Pat. She ripped open an envelope Virginia hadn’t noticed her carrying. Then she perked up. “Did you hear that?”

  “No,” said Virginia. At least now she had something to do with her eyes, i.e., look around the room—uselessly, because the source of any unfamiliar sound would not be found here. “It must be strange not to have Frank around,” she said. This struck her as an appropriate remark.

  “Yes,” said Pat. “He doesn’t like jail. It’s made him sort of…peculiar.”

  “How so?”

  Pat shrugged. “He writes letters all the time.”

  Half of Pat’s drink was gone already, so Virginia took a few hurried sips of her own as Pat began to read. Drinking faster than Pat had obvious pitfalls, but drinking slower seemed to have drawbacks, too, though subtler ones. It could look purse-lipped and spinsterish. Virginia didn’t want to appear to be too old for life. Nor did she want to appear to be afraid to drink, as if she had problems with alcohol.

  “Listen to this.” Pat began to read aloud. “‘Dominic and I identified so closely with Riley Gibbs and Neil Culp that we thought we were top dogs, too. It’s pathetic. You’d never have a real pack of dogs like that, with every single dog deluded into thinking he’s indistinguishable from the alpha male. Animals have more sense—’ Will!” Pat jumped up.