Authors: Howard McEwen
I tried to put it out of my mind, but Mr. Carmichael’s absence left me little to do at the office and that didn’t help. I wanted something to occupy my noodle.
There was a knock at the door.
“Hold on,” I yelled and grabbed the Chinese and a plastic fork out of the cupboard to stow it in the car for later.
The car rental guy was at the door. I followed him down to the Ford and signed off on his paperwork.
I put the Chinese in the car then beeped it locked and headed upstairs and took a nap on my couch. My alarm went off at five thirty in the p.m. I cleaned myself off and smoothed myself up. I heard my phone bing and checked it. There was an email from Mr. Weston. I pulled up the pic of Mrs. Weston. You can’t tell by pics all the time, but I’d say she wasn’t a head turner. It was a candid pic taken at a party of some kind. I was looking at a fifty-five year old
hausfrau
. Short cropped hair. A bit too much weight. No sexual vibe. An affair? I’d put the odds of yes at ten percent. I ambled down to my rental.
I got out of downtown and headed east on U.S. 50 to Mariemont. It wasn’t my kind of suburb but which kind is? The car had a navigator so it wasn’t hard finding Weston’s house. I parked down the street. It was six in the p.m. I opened up the box of Chinese and dug in. I’d better eat. Who knew where Kathleen Weston would take me tonight?
The clock told me I’d been twiddling my thumbs for twenty-five minutes when I saw a woman leave the house. I looked at the pic on my phone. It was our suspected adulteress. However, the exercise and trips to the spa Mr. Weston mentioned had paid off. I’d say she was down fifteen pounds from when the photo was taken. The hairstyle was longer, more modern but appropriate for her. As was the dress she wore. The frock wasn’t for a night on the town, but it wasn’t for spinning a potter’s wheel either. She walked with a bounce that tweaked my sexual curiosity. I upped the odds of her getting a bit on the side to twenty-five percent.
She pulled her Mercedes SL out of the driveway and speed off a bit too fast. I could tell she wasn’t looking where she was going. I’m sure that’s standard for this neighborhood. It’s all about them out in these type of suburbs. Everyone else is just an obstacle in the way of their id. I cranked my engine and played catch up.
I didn’t worry too much about being noticed. I couldn’t imagine she’d be suspicious or that she was even paying attention. We zig-zagged it north for a few miles, crossed under I-71 then popped up in Kenwood. There was a bit of round and round where I thought she might be lost, but she finally nosed her coupe into the parking lot of a mid-level chain hotel.
It was one of those places with enough rooms to handle out-of-town family during the holidays and enough conference rooms to handle small conventions and various ‘off-sites’ for local firms whose H.R. department convinced themselves it was incentivizing to get the office drones out of the cubicle hive every so often.
I’ll be damned, I thought. Within a half hour the odds of her out getting a bit of something-something went from ten to fifty percent. Still could be nothing. I parked my rental a few rows back from her and watched her get out. She stood and before shutting the door scanned the parking lot carefully like a meerkat scoping the landscape for a jackal or a chatty-Cathy neighbor or a suspicious husband even. Okay. Seventy-five percent, I thought.
She seemed satisfied nothing was going to swoop in and grab her, so she closed the Mercedes door and walked in the front door of the hotel. I counted thirty Mississippis after the doors closed behind her before heading for them myself. My thinking was she was probably already down the mouse maze hallways of the hotel to a room or she was at the front desk checking in. If at the desk, I’d walk with feigned purpose past her, try to pick up a little conversation or just see what I could learn.
I strutted in and heard my Doc Marten heels click off the tiles of the hotel foyer then quiet down as I hit the carpet of the lobby. The desk clerk didn’t look up. Mrs. Weston was nowhere in sight. I made for the rooms, but when I got there the halls split off into three wings. I looked down each. Except for a five-foot tall Mexican lady bumping her five-foot tall cleaning cart into the wall, I didn’t see anyone. I gave thought to excavating my high school Spanish and trying it out on the maid to get some intel, but saw nothing but all kinds of bad in digging up that.
I heard a chorus of obnoxious laughs come from the bar. Thinking there was a chance Mrs. Weston had ducked in there, I turned on my heels and headed for the noise. The laughter came from a chorus of five early to middle, middle-aged dudes. Either some kind of salesmen or lawyers on their third round of a cheap draft tanking themselves up after a hard day of working under fluorescent lights before they headed home. Surrounding them were duets and solos at tables and the bar. The hotel had the place too dark, but I made it to the end stool and signaled the bartender.
I glanced around the room. About half the tables were full. Not bad for a hotel at seven fifteen in the p.m. on a weeknight.
The bartender came up.
“Margarita?” he asked. “It’s our Margarita fiesta tonight.”
“Margarita fiesta? Is that your line?”
“No. Corporate makes me say it.”
“What do you put in a Margarita that’s being fiesta’d.”
He stumbled then stammered. “Ahh, some tequila, this triple sec and some of their mix.”
I wasn’t sure if I should worry more that he pronounced it triple
sex
or the use of sour mix.
“Mix?”
“Yeah,” he held up a bottle of some neon colored slosh.
“Could you make me one with a lime instead of the sour mix?”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
I rolled my eyes.
“They just showed me how to make this. It all comes down from corporate.”
“You got a lime back there?”
He nodded.
“Bring it here,” I said. “And the tequila and the triple sec.” I landed hard on that last ‘c’ hoping he’d hear it.
He did.
“I have a hard time remembering recipes,” he said.
“Then you’re in the wrong business, my friend. But here’s how you remember how to make a Margarita. A real Margarita.”
“It was named for a dancer called Marjorie who liked to drink but could only stomach tequila. Bourbon, rye, gin all made her sick. Something about the agave made the tequila A-Okay in her tummy. She’d picked up the habit in Tijuana, but back then in NYC no one knew what to do with the stuff.
One day her lover, a bartender at the club she was working at, saw her on the stage dancing and she looked parched. Her beauty and thirst inspired him. He poured a jigger of her favorite Tequila in a shaker. He loved the green
puebla
dress she was wearing so he added green to the shaker by squeezing in half a lime. He thought of her sweet kisses and poured in a pony of almost as sweet triple sec. He then shook the concoction like she was shaking her body on the stage.”
I popped the top on the Boston shaker and gave the concoction a good turn.
“Finally,” I said. “Since she was his angel, he rimmed a glass with a halo of salt.”
The hotel bartender did the final bit for me and I poured the mixture into the glass
“Go ahead and taste it,” I said.
He did. “Good,” he said with a smile.
“Now start making those.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Corporate would have my head. I think they own part of the sour mix company.”
“Is that the way you want to live.”
“I’m just here to pay the bills.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Mix me a gin and tonic, then. You can handle that, right? It’s gin followed by tonic.”
This time his eyes rolled at me.
I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Weston floating into the bar. I followed her in the bar’s mirror as she made herself over to the far corner. She sat down with a guy I hadn’t noticed before. He was about my age. There was a reason I hadn’t noticed him. He was a bit of a frump. A jock chops twelve dollar haircut and wrinkled dockers with a golf shirt with a corporate logo over the left breast. His gut wasn’t as big as her husband’s, but showed more in the off-the-rack clothes. I guess, depending on your standards, he’d be called good looking.
The talk in the bar kept me from hearing, but within a few minutes her hand was on his. She leaned in to laugh at something funny he said, the way women lean in to laugh at something funny men say when it’s not as funny as the men think, but the women want to make the man feel good.
Looks like Mr. Weston wasn’t being paranoid, I thought. Bing, bing, bing. Odds are now at one-hundred percent.
They talked for about an hour while I nursed my G&T that was too much T for the amount of G poured. The ratio probably came down from corporate. I was waiting for the vow breaker to move the show upstairs so I could head home. This guy didn’t look like much, but if he got an older, monied, married woman into a hotel bar, he should have the skills to get her into a hotel room.
They finally got up and I saw Mrs. Weston lay down a twenty on the table. I saw them clear the bar door, but instead of heading up to the rooms they headed toward the lobby. I laid down a tenner and followed them out. I put on a bit of a slouch as if my liver was processing three G&Ts and not half of the watered down one I’d sipped at.
As I looked out of the corner of my eyes I saw them kiss lightly on the lips, he palmed her ass softly as they made it through the double doors, then they each went separate ways in the parking lot. I stood at the big window in the lobby and saw her climb into her Mercedes and drive away. I saw him do the same a few minutes later. He was driving a mid-sized Chevy.
What had I really seen? Not much. An affair? Maybe. If a married woman giving a fella a kiss and playing a bit of grab ass was an affair, then I’d played the third part in plenty of affairs. It gave married chicks an innocent thrill that wasn’t actionable in divorce court.
Home I went.
Kendra had only taken up residence for a couple of months but my place already felt empty without her in it. I tossed off my clothes, draping my suit across the bedroom chair and clicked on my TV then I flipped it off. I didn’t feel like going out. I didn’t feel like mixing a drink. I didn’t feel like watching TV. My brain decided for me. I slept.
I woke at eight in the a.m. and sometime during the night Mr. Weston had texted me his missus’ schedule. She said she was doing lunch at the country club today then running errands and heading to a new exhibit opening at a hole-in-the-wall gallery in their neighborhood. Such is the life of a Mariemont matron. I figured she wasn’t tom-catting around her home base, so I claimed my night for myself and planned on heading back out to stalk her on the way to lunch at her club.
I called the office and told Mrs. Johnson I wouldn’t be in. ‘Client service,’ I said and she understood. I pocketed a hunk of Silverglades brie and stopped by Shadeau for a fresh loaf. That’d be my lunch in case I got stuck somewhere. I parked outside the Weston manse again and followed her Mercedes again and we headed right back to the city. No country clubs today. She parked in the lot under Fountain Square and I did the same, keeping my distance. I thought I was doing okay at playing detective.
I saw her slip into a sports bar and I did my thirty Mississippi count and followed her in. I spotted her against the far corner and took a seat at the bar. TVs were blaring everywhere. Every possible sport was flickering off the fifty vodka bottles behind the bar. I’m not a religious man, but I do hold one article of faith: Vodka is swill. It’s good as a cleaner—to get sticky labels off of things, for example, but as a beverage it’s the worst spirit possible. A good vodka has no color, no taste and no flavor. It’s an inert chemical compound. A few ounces of plain C
2
H
6
O. It doesn’t make a drink taste better, smell nicer or look prettier. It only offers the buzz, the drunk. It’s the preferred spirit of twinkie twentysomething girls and men who turned the odometer to twenty-one in the early 1990s when the vodka distillers were really pouring on the advertising budgets. After that marketing splurge wore off, the makers had to flavor the stuff with everything from kiwi to bubblegum to keep people interested. The only acceptable infused vodka flavor is juniper and that’s called gin.
I ordered a beer. Nothing fancy. One of the St. Louis national, mega-brand, sex-in-a-canoe American standbys that’s at every football game. I don’t drink beer usually, but I don’t trust bars with that many vodkas. It shows a dimwittedness.
They were an odd pair reflected back at me in the bar mirror again. Mrs. Weston’s scarf cost more than everything her paramour was wearing. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman, but she could do better than this chump. I nursed my beer and watch the Reds rally against the Cards and caught glances backward through the looking glass. After an inning, they’d moved closer together. I watched his head lift up then pause, he scanned the bar then gave her left breast a squeeze. She slapped his hand away but giggled and leaned the breast in closer to him.
Maybe he was more charming than he appeared, I thought.
They chatted and flirted and he didn’t get much grabbier than that. They were definitely into each other. By the seventh inning stretch, he had three empties lined up and was working on his fourth. She was still nursing the original highball that she’d ordered. I’d matched him beer for beer, so headed to the bathroom before the Reds came up to bat.