The Pocket Wife (6 page)

It was Peter, always Peter, who took her to the doctor and drove her home again with a set of new prescriptions tucked inside her bag. It was Peter waiting, watching, times when the days came and went, screeching like an accordion folding shut and opening, in-out, in-out, scraping by, until she was herself again. She has always been thankful to him for this, for these sacrifices he's made. She will always feel a tiny bit of love for him because of them. Even now, with his duplicity hanging like a drape between them.

She sighs, standing up without using her hands or arms to get out of the chair. In the kitchen the phone rings, and she moves
toward the sound, stiff, like Jamie's toy soldiers lying somewhere at the back of his closet. “Hello?” She presses the phone tight against her ear, turning her back to the living room with its raucous football game. “Did you run into rain,” she says, “going back? Did you find the cookies?”

By the time Dana hangs up, Peter's fallen asleep on the sofa and the eleven-o'clock news has replaced the ball game. The lead story is an interview with a ballplayer who's limping toward the camera with a pulled hamstring. Dana reaches for the remote in Peter's hand, sticks it on the coffee table, carries his glass back to the kitchen as on TV the first assistant prosecutor is introduced in a follow-up story from Friday. The Steinhauser murder case is top priority, she assures her interviewer; they will leave no stone unturned. She's working hand in hand with Detective Jack Moss, she says; they're very close to making an arrest. Dana sets the empty glass in the sink, listening. She grabs the counter; her head buzzes and spins. Her insides lurch painfully, and it crosses her mind that maybe the fish Peter grilled for dinner was bad—maybe Ronald tampered with it somehow when he was bending over her cart. She closes her eyes and counts slowly to ten, trying to regain her balance as on TV the interview ends.

F
irst Assistant Prosecutor Lenora White is standing in the office when Jack gets to work, and he's a good twenty minutes early. She is such an A-type personality. He watches her from the hallway. She really is attractive, especially this morning, silhouetted in the light drifting through the grimy window, and for a minute he forgets how angry he was, watching her on TV. She stands across the room from Jack's desk, staring out at the gray of the buildings, the ominous clouds, the reluctant sun as it struggles up behind the hustle-bustle of traffic.

“What can I do for you, Lenora?”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to be intrusive, but I told Rob I'd meet him here before work. I've got something on the Mancini case.”

“The missing girl?”

She nods. “Some family issues have turned up. Just wanted to fill him in.”

“Coffee?” Jack can hear the machine coming to life across the hall. “It's bad, but it's caffeine.”

“Sure,” she says. “Mind if I sit?”

“Hey.” Jack gestures to a cruddy swivel chair beside his desk. “Make yourself at home.”

“How's the homicide coming along?” She takes the coffee cup gingerly from Jack when he comes back, blows on it as he sets down his own cup, dropping several creams and sugars on his desk.

He shrugs. “It's coming.”

“Such a push for us to— They run that damn picture 24/7, the photograph of Ms. Steinhauser—Cynthia, is it?”

“Celia.”

“Right. Celia. Anything turn up yet?”

“Not really. Strange goings-on the night she died. Looks like someone was inside the house. We've got some tests being run by forensics, but nothing's back yet. I'll keep you in the loop.”

“Put a rush on it?”

“Done,” Jack says.

“Great. This coffee
is
a little strong,” she says, and she adds another three creamers, stirs it with her index finger. “You guys need a woman's touch around here.”

“That an offer?”

She looks up. “It all depends,” she says. “You'd have to make it worth my while.”

Jack smiles. Down the hall the outer door thunders back into place. “Must be Rob,” he says.

“Right on time.” Lenora glances at her watch—simple, Jack notes. Cheap, even, not the glitzy type he'd imagine her wearing. No bling.

“He's a good cop,” Jack says, and Lenora takes a sip of muddy coffee.

“I know he is.” She looks up through a thick batch of lashes. “Rob's a great guy. Still . . . he doesn't have the whole James Dean thing going for him.”

“Who does?” Jack grabs his briefcase, starts to head out. He'll let Rob have the office for his meeting with Lenora.

“You do,” she says, and she takes another sip of coffee.

She's pushing hard for both these cases to be wrapped up, the homicide and the missing teen, but Jack knows better than to rush things. He's got to get this right even if it means reining in the assistant prosecutor. It's a big case, complicated. He flips through his notes. He sent a patrolman back to the Steinhausers' the morning after the cop thought he saw a light on inside, just in case they missed something in the dark the night before, and he found a few footprints around the back door, maybe new, maybe not so new. The cop photographed them and delivered them to Jack's office sometime last night. They're not the best photos. About the only thing he can tell is that they're small—either a woman's or a small man's. Again, the neighbor with the key seems the likely one. Even if what Ronald's told him about drinking all night at the hotel turns out to be a lie, he's a fair-size guy and Lon Nguyen is very small, but he didn't have a key. Almost certainly the footprints belong to Dana Catrell, the neighbor four doors down.

Rob ran the priors on the suspects, but not much came up. Nothing at all on Dana. There was an old drug arrest on her husband—cocaine possession in college—but the charges were dropped. Lon Nguyen was clean as a whistle. Ronald's first wife died in a car crash shortly after they were married, but nothing looked suspicious there. The real shocker was Celia herself. She had one arrest when she was a kid in West Virginia for aiding and abetting, the apparent getaway driver for her boyfriend, who served three years for holding up a gas station with a fake gun. Celia was released after she cooperated with the police. Mother Teresa takes a tumble.

Jack gets up and pours himself another cup of coffee. The footprints, the lying husband, the Bonnie-and-Clyde teacher bleeding out in her foyer, Ann putt-putting out of his life, and pressure from the prosecutor's office to wrap things up quick. He can already tell this case will be like herding cats and that Rob will have his hands full tracking down the missing teen. What Lenora said in the TV interview rankles him, but he didn't mention it when she was in his office. He tells himself he was just about to, but then Rob came in.
Jeesh,
he thinks.
Man fucking up.

D
ana rolls over, staring at the wall, listening as Peter showers and dresses, sitting up as he turns on the coffeemaker in the kitchen. His voice on the phone is muted. “Noon,” she hears him say, and then the coffeemaker snaps and percolates, and she lies back down until she hears the front door close behind him. His Lexus purrs toward the street.

She glances outside the living-room window, where clouds are fluffy and white, and then she closes the blinds. The daylight makes her anxious. Nights are bad enough, with her sleeplessness, with her constant prowling and reading, but the brightness of morning is worse.
Noon,
he'd said on the phone, presumably to the Tart. She'll drive to Manhattan. She'll go to Peter's office at noon—a little earlier, so she can watch him, see who it is he meets, get a look at the Tart in broad daylight.

At a little after ten, she heads for the city, driving slowly toward the offices of Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell in the staid brick building only blocks from Central Park. She creeps along the streets, pulling in to a pricey garage and grabbing the receipt.

It's nearly noon when she reaches the street and takes a few steps in the direction of Peter's office. She remembers a tiny park in the midst of a collection of buildings catty-corner to the law firm—two wooden benches in a makeshift garden, a nod to greenery in the smog and clutter of the city. She steps off the curb; there's something just at the edge of her vision. A car turns onto the street and slows down for a second as if it's watching her, as if the car itself is alive and trolling for prey—as if it is surprised to see her standing there, unexpected and enticing. It speeds toward her, and for a second she's paralyzed with fear. She screams. She turns and runs back to the curb, and then she flies backward, her feet barely touching the asphalt. The car speeds past, and Dana disappears behind a clot of parked cars, ducks down beside a large truck. “Five-two, five-two,” she says aloud, struggling to concentrate, to keep at bay the terror threatening to engulf her. A five and a two, all she managed to remember of the numbers on the license plate.

She unfastens her hair clip, lets her hair fall down across her face. She sticks on her large sunglasses and takes off the shirt she's thrown on over a tank top. Her arms are sickly pale in the sunny summer day. She crumples her shirt inside her purse and picks her way across the street, on the lookout for a nondescript sedan, a dark car hurtling down the street or squealing around a corner.

She reaches the small bench at three minutes to twelve and sits, staring across the street toward the door of Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell. It opens only seconds later, and Peter steps out onto the sidewalk. He walks quickly to the curb, his hand a visor over his eyes as he stares first to the right and then the left, up and down the street as if he's looking for a taxi, but he makes no move to approach the two or three cabs that lumber by him through the noon traffic. Dana watches from behind her hand, pulling her hair across her face. She watches as a dark sedan pulls to a stop alongside her husband. She watches as Peter rushes to duck inside. The
traffic shifts and snarls in the wake of this unwelcome interruption, the stopping of this car in the middle of a midday rush. Dana stands up, walking to the curb at the edge of the small green space, her hair blowing away from her face, leaving her exposed and unprotected as she squints across the street at the back of the sedan, at the five and the two on the license plate.

She stumbles toward the garage, gulping polluted summer air. She trips over a crack in the sidewalk, glances at the trees strewn in among the buildings, blossoming and green, brighter, newer than the lost Dutch elms. The traffic snarls. Horns honk. The city is a sneer. A smirk. Peter's city now, no longer hers. Once she's safely back inside her car, she doesn't want to move; she feels reluctant to leave the dark garage, afraid she'll be spotted pulling out to the street, but after what seems an eternity, she starts the car. “Here goes,” she whispers to St. Christopher, lurches up to pay, and speeds toward Paterson, her eyes riveted on the road ahead.

Once home, she drinks a glass of wine, and for several minutes she sits on her sofa, the blinds closed tight against the day. Finally she picks up the phone to call Peter, even though she isn't sure how much to tell him of the morning's strange events. For all she knows, he wants her dead. Or mad. Or are his lame attempts at hiding his affairs making him look guiltier than he actually is?

“Hello,” she says when he answers. “Are you back?”

“I'm here at the office,” Peter says. He sounds puzzled. “Why?”

“I tried to call you around noon,” she lies. “They said you were out.”

“Who said I was—”

“So where were you?”

“At lunch, I guess. With Josh. Josh Reinhardt? He's one of my clients, wanted to talk about his trial coming up.”

“Murder?”

“Tax evasion,” Peter says, and he laughs.

Dana hangs up. A light blinks in the hallway, on the desk in the foyer—a tiny flicker, a lightning-bug wink, but when she turns her head to look, the defunct lamp is dull and dark beneath its opaque shade, and Dana knows that time is running out. She feels the madness knocking at her brain.

T
he idea of a brunch was at first merely a last-minute attempt to get Jamie home for the second time in a few days, but after giving it some thought, Dana decides it's a good plan in spite of its iffy origins. She doesn't think any of the neighbors were particularly close to Celia, but even so it has to be distressing to know that someone on their block was bludgeoned to death in her own living room, a shock to the entire street to lose one of its residents in such a brutal, baffling way. The funeral is on hold for the time being, due to the investigation and presumably the autopsy, and since there's no memorial service planned as yet, for the neighbors who actually knew Celia, the brunch will serve a dual purpose.

Dana will have an open house so they can talk about what's happened, so they can drift from room to room, nibbling on croissants and marmalade, and not feel cornered the way they would at a dining-room table. They'll speak more openly about their dealings with Celia. They'll let things slip, so Dana can reconstruct the day her neighbor died, understand the wheres and whos of things, and ultimately put the pieces together.

She still has Ronald's number. She has many numbers, written down on scraps of paper lying flat against the bottom of her purse. They belong to people she found comical or brilliant, people she thought she'd like to see again, to meet for coffee in town. In the sparkly period at the onset of her madness, she is magnetic, sensual, alluring. People are drawn to her. Before she drowns inside it, she rides the wave of effervescence; she is gregarious, fun, the clever friend, the unfettered lover, the ideal companion. For a brief, bright clot of time, she shines, making deep but fleeting connections with people she meets in line at the post office or waiting for a tune-up in town. When days later she finds these papers, these cell-phone numbers and e-mail addresses, she often doesn't even remember the faces connected to them.

She assumes that not all the invitees will come. Twelve, she figures. Fourteen tops. She isn't even sure she wants the neighbors chatting with one another, possibly mentioning that Peter's never home or that they'd seen him sneaking through the back door of the victim's house. Still, she invites them all; she'll cast the deck and let the cards fall as they may.

She polishes the dustless wooden bottoms of her chairs and thumbs through
Brunches for Bunches,
a cookbook she discovered on a yard-sale jaunt with Celia several months before. On the way to the grocery store, she stops at a bakery and picks up some croissants and cinnamon rolls and then, on impulse, a few raspberry crullers. She'll make scrambled eggs, she decides, and maybe fry some bacon. Do her neighbors eat bacon? She opts for veggie sausage and turkey-bacon strips, orange juice and the pastries she's brought from the bakery. It's not, after all, about the food. It's about transparency. Clarity.

Ronald is the first to arrive. Peter shakes his hand and settles him on the living-room sofa while Dana putters in the kitchen, scrambling
eggs and popping croissants into the toaster oven. Orange juice sits ready in a cut-glass pitcher on the dining table beside a large bouquet of daisies.

“Hi, Ronald!” She stands in the kitchen doorway. Sweat sticks tiny curls of hair to her forehead; the air conditioner drones gamely.

“Dana,” he says, but he seems reluctant to take his eyes off Peter.

“So you two meet at last,” she says.

“What's that?” Peter cups his hand around his ear as if he hasn't heard a thing, and the gesture is an unpleasant reminder of their trip from Boston, of his white hand locked around his phone. Around the Tart. Around the lilting voice that titillates and lures.

“Ronald asked about you the other day at the Root Seller. I thought I told you. Anyway, he's been very anxious to meet you.”

“And now it seems you have,” Peter says in a jovial, neighborly voice, but even from the kitchen Dana notices the slight tremor in his hand as he bends to line up the pillows on the sofa.

“Yes.” Ronald draws himself up straighter. He stares at Peter's face, his eyes small and dark, like raisins stuck in dough. “I've seen you before,” he says. His voice is low and tight, a bit menacing.

“Oh,” Peter says. “Probably in the hood.” Again he uses this strangely jolly voice that Dana doesn't recognize.

“I don't think so.” Ronald squints at Peter. “No. It was somewhere else,” he says as Peter walks over to the door where Wanda and her two boys are visible through the screen.

“Hey,” he says, a little of the jolliness gone from his voice. “Good to see you, Wendy.”

“Wanda,” she says. She slides past him and waves at Dana in the kitchen doorway.

Lon Nguyen is the next to arrive, with his wife, who speaks no English, and the two of them debate at length in Vietnamese before Lon takes one of the cinnamon buns and sticks it on a plate. He's wearing flip-flops as usual. Dana hasn't seen these
before, and she wonders if he has a pair for whatever occasion may arise—if so, these would be the brunching flip-flops, a tad festive with a sky blue thong. She scrambles another batch of eggs and pours them into the frying pan as the front door opens again.

“Hello,” she calls. People bubble through the front door, and Peter stands back. He bows, makes a sweeping, welcoming gesture with his arm as the Steinhausers' across-the-street neighbors swarm over the threshold. Clearly Dana has underestimated. There are at least twenty-five people milling through her house, oozing into the kitchen, where she stands dishing up plates of scrambled eggs and dying for a Bloody Mary. She hasn't given a brunch in years, and after today, she promises herself, she never will again.

She glances up from the skillet to see Peter standing in the doorway, his hair sticking up on top. She thinks fleetingly of a rooster. “What?”

“Oh,” he says, “nothing, really. The office sent a clerk over with a discovery for a trial we're working on.”

“Where is he? Or she?”

Peter backs up, takes a quick look at the living room. “She. And she's on the couch,” he says, “talking to Wanda. Can you manage for a few minutes while I look it over—make sure it's all there?”

“
What
trial?” Dana snaps, but the eggs are sputtering and crinkling at their edges, so she turns back to the stove. By the time she takes them out to the table, Peter has disappeared and Wanda is alone on the couch. Lon Nguyen makes his way through the crowds, and Dana remembers the signs he posted on telephone poles and stuck on the outsides of mailboxes several months before.
LON NGUYEN, BLOCK CAPTAIN
, they said, and there was a phone number, presumably his, that she'd not bothered to jot down before she tossed the thing into the recycling bin. He isn't exactly a walking advertisement for Neighborhood Watch groups today—not
at this makeshift wake for the bludgeoned, dead component of his block.

She picks up a fake sausage. “Sorta sausage,” Jamie calls it, and she chews on the rubbery morsel, swallows it down with a thimbleful of orange juice, all that's left after the sudden gush of guests. She spots Ronald by the bookcase in the hall and makes her way over to where he thumbs through a book. He's inches from the bedroom, and his eyes aren't really on the book. They're scanning again, as if he's looking for something.

“Did you have enough to eat?” She stares down at where he's squatting on the floor.

“Yes.” He nods. “Good sausage.”

“Did you try the eggs?”

“I'm vegan,” he says. “You have some interesting books.”

“I do.” Dana glances at the title in his hand. “But
Bugs in Your Backyard
isn't really one of them. Would you like a Bloody Mary?”

“Yes,” he says, turning back to the book, “I'd love one.”

Dana finds some slightly aging tomato juice in the refrigerator and adds quite a bit of vodka, along with horseradish and various herbs and spices she finds in a cabinet. It's getting noisy in the dining room. She swishes everything around inside the two glasses with her index finger, making her way slowly through the crowds in the three rooms between her and Ronald, who now seems focused on the bookshelf for something more illuminating.

“Thanks.” He sips at his drink. “Do you know all these people?”

“No. In fact . . .” Dana surveys the living room from where she leans against the wall. “I know Wanda and her boys and Lon Nguyen, and that's about it.”

“I've seen the guy in the Dockers,” Ronald says. “He lives across the street from us. From me. And Nguyen, of course. He's the one who started our Neighborhood Watch.”

Dana nods. “Which really needs to be more . . . um, watchful.”

“Yes.”

“By the way,” Dana says. She leans over so she's nearly whispering in Ronald's ear. “Do you have Celia's phone with you?”

“No,” he says, back at the book. “Why? What is it with you and Celia's fucking phone?” Dana sees he's suddenly stopped reading. His eyes are frozen on the page. His jaw twitches. His ears are red, and a little rash begins to zigzag upward from his throat. Still he doesn't look at her.

“Nothing.” Dana takes several steps backward. “Really,” she mumbles. She trips on the edge of the rug. “God. I was just— Actually . . .” She clears her throat and speaks in what she hopes is a commanding tone, despite Ronald's sudden and alarming mood shift. “I was wondering if she still had the photos of the two of us. There were several,” she lies, “of us hamming it up for the camera. We were
friends,
you know. It would be nice to flip through and reminisce.”

Ronald shrugs. On the other side of the living room, Peter is escorting someone out onto the porch—the clerk, she supposes. Is he screwing her, too? Dana moves forward for a better look, brushing past a snag of neighbors as the door opens. She inches through the crowd as Peter steps outside with his visitor, and Dana studies the back of the departing head as best she can through all the people between her and the doorway—tallish brunette.

Lon Nguyen touches her sleeve with the tips of his fingers. “We are leave now,” he announces. His wife stands waving and smiling at the front door. Wanda, too, is waving. She's mouthing
Thank you
and making an
I'll call you
gesture with her thumb and pinkie as her boys spill loudly into the yard.

“Thank you all for coming,” Dana says. She taps a crystal glass with the edge of a teaspoon, and a twinkly sound fills the suddenly quiet house. A couple of minutes later Ronald walks briskly toward his car, neighbors crowd the street in their brightly colored summer clothes, and Dana closes the door, heads for the sinkful of soapy water.

“I'm taking a nap!” Peter yells from the living room. “What a freak show
that
was,” he calls out after a few minutes. How about that Donald character!”

“Ronald?”

“Right. Celia's husband. Did you see the way he was looking at me? Like I ran over his dog!” Peter's voice lags on the last few words, and when she peers around the counter, she sees he's already asleep, his shoes lined up toe to toe beside the couch. Dana gives the glasses a cursory rinse and sticks them in the dishwasher. Clearly Peter noticed Ronald's weird behavior, too, even taking the cell-phone picture out of the equation, which Ronald certainly has. If she intends to see the thing again, she's obviously on her own, and by the time she starts the dishwasher, she's decided to take a trip into Manhattan to find the phone herself.